This essay critiques the glaring double standards of major Japanese newspapers, particularly Asahi Shimbun and Mainichi Shimbun, which downplayed North Korea’s missile threat while obsessively attacking the Abe administration over trivial political controversies. Drawing on a column by Sankei journalist Abiru Rui, it exposes how selective outrage, ideological bias, and tolerance of political indoctrination in schools have accelerated public distrust in the media.

March 9, 2017

The following is taken from a serialized column in the Sankei Shimbun by reporter Abiru Rui, one of the key figures who spent many years verifying that the so-called “comfort women” reports were fabrications and who ultimately compelled the Asahi Shimbun to issue an official apology.
He is one of the very few genuine journalists left in Japan today, and his work is so significant that it deserves the highest recognition from the Japanese nation.

All emphasis within the text, except for the headline, is mine.

Double Standards That Invite Distrust in the Media

The media, long derided as “mass garbage media,” seem destined to be increasingly seen through by readers and treated with contempt.
This thought fills me with sadness as I observe recent newspaper and television news coverage.

I was stunned when I read the Asahi Shimbun’s editorials dated the 7th, the day after North Korea launched four ballistic missiles in a simulated attack on U.S. bases in Japan.

Of the two editorials, the missile issue was relegated to the second, lower-priority one.
The primary editorial instead focused on a debate over whether Akie Abe, the wife of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, should be considered a public or private figure.

That editorial criticized the fact that government officials accompanied Mrs. Abe when she gave a lecture at Moritomo Gakuen, concluding that she had a responsibility to offer an explanation acceptable to the public.

A newspaper is free to write whatever it wishes.

However, this was a moment when the possibility of a U.S. preemptive strike against North Korea was becoming increasingly real, and when Japan faced the urgent need to rebuild its missile defense system in response to the North’s increasingly accurate missiles.

A Fruitless Debate Over Public Status

Was the intention simply to exploit the Moritomo Gakuen issue as a convenient pretext to undermine the Abe administration, regardless of priorities or gravity?

Do they truly believe that a sterile debate over whether someone is a public or private figure is more important than a situation that directly affects the lives and property of the nation’s citizens?

I found myself equally perplexed by a Mainichi Shimbun editorial dated the 3rd regarding Moritomo Gakuen.

The editorial criticized the kindergarten operated by the school for having children declare “Go Prime Minister Abe!” at a sports day and for having them recite the Imperial Rescript on Education, warning as follows:

“The Fundamental Law of Education demands political neutrality in education so that it does not become ideologically biased.”

While I personally believe that the Imperial Rescript on Education contains nothing problematic and is largely common sense, I do feel that having children say “It was good that the security legislation passed the Diet” was, frankly, excessive.

Even so, it feels deeply wrong for Mainichi to go so far as to argue that a private elementary school should not be approved simply because of its ideology, despite the freedom of thought and conscience.

Shielding Korean Schools

After all, in an editorial dated March 31 of last year, Mainichi criticized the Ministry of Education’s request for greater “transparency” in subsidies to Korean schools, arguing as follows:

“There is a possibility that local governments will interpret this as de facto pressure to halt subsidies, leading to a general trend of ‘self-restraint’ in providing them.”

“We want to place children at the center of our thinking. Severe sanctions and diplomatic pressure on North Korea are natural, but tightening controls on places of education for children is another matter.”

Implicitly, the paper was urging that subsidies to Korean schools continue.
Yet it is impossible to claim that Korean schools maintain political neutrality.

According to an investigative report issued by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government in 2013, high-school history textbooks used at these schools contain phrases such as “Dearly beloved President Kim Il-sung” and “Dearly beloved General Kim Jong-il” a total of 353 times across 409 pages.

Middle-school textbooks also include demonstrably false statements such as:
“The Japanese Empire took Korean women, from their teens to twenties, along in its war of aggression as ‘comfort women’ of the Japanese military and abused them as sexual slaves.”

To denounce Moritomo Gakuen’s educational policy while shielding Korean schools is contradictory and represents a textbook example of double standards.

Asahi and Mainichi do not make a major issue of nursery schools displaying posters opposing so-called “war legislation,” nor of staff members posting flyers in elementary schools stating “We will not forgive Abe’s politics.”

Such convenient selectivity only accelerates readers’ distrust of the media.

(Editorial Writer and Political Desk Editor)