An analysis of how Japanese Korea correspondents abandoned journalistic integrity to sympathize with Korean resentment, despite mounting evidence of systemic failure.

2017-05-04
This is a continuation of the previous chapter.
Becoming flounders of hatred…
As for Mr. 清田治史, after the Asahi Shimbun acknowledged its core errors in the “comfort women” reporting in August 2014, he was exposed as the individual who first spread the false testimony of Seiji Yoshida regarding the so-called “comfort women hunts,” including claims such as “hunting down two hundred young Korean women in a single week on Jeju Island.”
The beginning was an article he wrote under the headline “Korean Women: I Too Was Taken Away,” published in the Osaka morning edition of the Asahi Shimbun on September 2, 1982.
After leaving the Asahi Shimbun, he resigned from his post as a professor at Tezukayama Gakuin University.
Without my knowing it, he must have gradually abandoned the role of a field-reporting journalist, fading away in subtle gradations.
His writing was not strong, and in the end, only the flounder-type remained.
He followed in the footsteps of Mr. 若宮啓文, aligning himself with the company culture of atonement toward East Asia.
During this time, South Korea was steadily walking the path toward the failure of a modern state, guided by its own markers.
By 2012, the hatred generated through that failure process began to be directed openly at Japan.
In 2012, following former President 李明博’s illegal landing on Takeshima in Shimane Prefecture on August 10, he further declared on the 14th that unless the Emperor of Japan offered a “heartfelt apology to independence activists,” there was no need for a visit, adding that “mere words of regret” were insufficient—an outrageous statement trampling on the dignity of the Emperor and the feelings of the Japanese people.
In 2014, President 朴槿恵 began a diplomacy of estrangement.
This then led to her impeachment this year.
Although it should be obvious to anyone that this had become an abnormal state, Korea correspondents from the Asahi Shimbun and the Mainichi Shimbun chose instead to stand in Korea’s shoes and attempt to do something together.
They seem eager to become flounder-types who snuggle up to Korean hatred, but the journalist who was truly upright was, in fact, Mr. Kiyota—the man being beaten on the dirt floor by Mr. Wakamiya on that night in Seoul.