A dialogue by Masayuki Takayama and Kaori Fukushima examining postwar media control, cultural strategy, and ideological influence through historical and contemporary examples.

This section analyzes postwar media governance in Japan by tracing cultural influence mechanisms such as overseas scholarship programs and cultural institutes.
It argues that contemporary discourse reproduces historical patterns of ideological alignment mediated through journalism.

2017-04-17
This is a book that should be read by all Japanese citizens and by people throughout the world.
Masayuki Takayama, the one and only journalist in the postwar world, and Kaori Fukushima, one of the foremost experts on China of our time, held an outstanding dialogue on the United States and China, published by Tokuma Shoten on January 31, 2017, under the title America and China Are Destroying the World, priced at 1,300 yen, and it is a must-read for all Japanese citizens and for people around the world.
Emphasis in the text and the portions marked with asterisks are mine.
Takayama.
Earlier text omitted.
In Japan’s case, who has controlled the Japanese media.
Since the GHQ period, it has consistently been the United States.
Even after U.S. forces withdrew in 1952 and the seven-year GHQ occupation ended, this remained the case.
I believe that what the United States did to preserve this tradition was what I have repeatedly referred to as the Fulbright scholarship system.
This idea also has a precedent in Carthaginian rule, where Carthage sent its youth to Rome to study, transformed them into pro-Roman figures, and returned them to their homeland.
The United States imitated this.
Beginning with former Mainichi Shimbun reporter Takao Tokuoka, many newspaper journalists studied abroad through the Fulbright program.
All of them became correspondents in the United States.
They stopped conveying anything to Japan except narratives favorable to America.
China has imitated this by establishing Confucius Institutes all over the world.
Germany’s Goethe-Institut, created to promote the German language and culture, follows the same model.
Until I read this book, I was completely unaware of this fact.
Figures such as Kang Sang-jung, who have continued to spout the truly laughable claim that Japan should learn from Germany, along with so-called cultural figures and the media led by the Asahi Shimbun, not a single one of them ever said that Japan should learn from Germany in this sense.
In other words, the time has come for all Japanese citizens and people around the world to know that everyone who has insisted that Japan should learn from Germany is, in fact, an Ozaki Hotsumi of the present day.
Prime Minister Abe appears to be considering such a cultural strategy project, but he says public opinion does not follow.
That is because the media create public opinion.
The media have not given even the slightest thought to such matters.
As long as the media remain America’s obedient lapdog, a gap will inevitably arise.
To be continued.