This essay exposes how the Asahi Shimbun abandoned factual reporting in favor of promoting its own immature and distorted ideology under the guise of moralism. Through an intellectual convergence with Shoichi Watanabe’s writings, it highlights Japan’s strategic vulnerabilities and the grave consequences of decades of media-induced self-deception.

2016-03-01

Until August two years ago, readers of newspapers such as the Asahi Shimbun had been made to believe that Mr. Shoichi Watanabe was a right-leaning polemicist. I myself believed this, so there is no room for doubt. In other words, Asahi Shimbun’s reporting was embellished with their own ideology—a mixture of ideas that oppressed Japan and the Japanese people, cloaked in a false moralism. Rather than conveying facts, they conveyed their own ideology. That was the Asahi Shimbun. When I think of what might have happened had August two years ago never come, it sends a chill down my spine. Their cruelty (their childish and vicious nature) is exactly as I have described repeatedly.

Now, Mr. Shoichi Watanabe was born in Yamagata Prefecture, which neighbors my own home prefecture. Mr. Watanabe teaches historical facts that I, as a long-time reader of the Asahi Shimbun, had never known. Stimulated by his essays, an extremely important realization flashes through my mind like a revelation. I feel as though Mr. Watanabe has been reading my own essays. The lead article in the April issue of the monthly magazine WiLL is written by Mr. Watanabe. When readers read the passage below, they will sense that Mr. Watanabe has succinctly proven in essay form the very insight that flashed through my mind. If Mr. Watanabe has not read my writings, then it must mean that we possess exactly the same intellect. Readers will surely marvel that the bolded portions are precisely identical to what I myself wrote the other day.

[Omitted introduction]

As I have already stated regarding North Korea, if one looks around Japan’s immediate surroundings, the threat from China is becoming more real with each passing day. Around the waters off the Senkaku Islands, incursions into Japan’s territorial waters continue almost daily, and armed vessels have now appeared in the surrounding seas. China is turning the reclaimed islands in the South China Sea into “armed fortresses,” but this is not because it intends to wage war against Vietnam or the Philippines. These are preparations to cut off Japan’s sea lanes and starve it into submission. China knows that resource-poor Japan was once strangled by embargoes before the war and eventually driven into war.

Proof of this lies in the fact that when Sino-Japanese relations deteriorated during the Democratic Party administration over the nationalization of the Senkaku Islands, China immediately imposed an embargo on rare earth exports. They believed, “This will bring Japan to its knees.” In other words, when the time comes, they intend to “tighten the noose around Japan.”

＊The continuation introduced in the next chapter will surely leave every Japanese citizen with a sound intellect stunned. Japan, which has continued to sustain the United Nations by paying the largest contribution alongside the United States. Simply because people subscribed to newspapers like the Asahi Shimbun, such absurdity has been allowed to persist for seventy years after the war.

There is nothing more childish or foolish than this.