This essay criticizes foreign correspondents in Japan who enjoy unparalleled freedom while remaining silent about censorship and repression in China and South Korea, exposing a deeper structural hypocrisy in international journalism.

2017-05-07
Even so, the level of humanity—or rather, the level of intelligence—of foreign correspondents based in Japan is appallingly low.
Think about it carefully.
In China or South Korea, there is no way they could enjoy complete freedom and write whatever they please, as they do while living in Japan.
In China, it goes without saying that they constantly face the risk of arrest, bureau closures, or expulsion from the country.
In South Korea, if they were to openly criticize the government or the state, they would undoubtedly face arrest, detention, and prosecution, as was the case with Kuroda, a genuine journalist from the genuine newspaper Sankei Shimbun.
If that were all, it would still be bad enough, but especially in China, when as many as two hundred lawyers were arrested all at once, they did absolutely nothing.
Instead, they were enjoying life in Japan, a country that, in terms of freedom and intellect—having neither a CIA nor an FBI—surpasses even the United States and stands as the freest nation in the world.
They took no action whatsoever in response to the suppression of free speech faced by their colleagues in Hong Kong and mainland China,
and while Japan is not only the world’s foremost country in freedom and intellect,
it is also a country with the finest international cuisine in the world, and they were fully indulging in that life.
And yet, when a figure such as David Kaye—an opportunist, meaning a despicable individual who obediently acts at the behest of the CIA of human-rights–abusing states—
displayed a chart asserting that Japan’s press freedom ranks below that of South Korea,
they offered not a single word of rebuttal.
They are truly contemptible people.
I would go so far as to say that it is reasonable to conclude that they receive money, gifts, and lavish hospitality from the governments of China or South Korea, from the CIA, or from organizations such as the Asahi Shimbun.
However, it is precisely their attitude that proves the correctness of what I consider a Nobel Prize–level insight of my own:
that Japan has been, for seventy years since the war—and remains so even today—a “political prisoner” within the international community.
The foreign correspondents stationed in Japan themselves serve as living proof of this argument.