The June 2017 issue of Japanese monthly journals exposes the sophistry and intellectual collapse of academics who relied on Asahi Shimbun. Essential essays reveal how falsehoods were constructed and sustained.

2017-06-01
The monthly journals I have repeatedly referred to are, in this month’s issue as well, filled with essays that must be read by all Japanese citizens and people around the world.
Today is the release date of Sound Argument.
Masayuki Takayama, the one and only journalist in the postwar world, opens the issue with his serialized column “Reflections at the Turning Points of History,” spanning five pages in a three-column format.
Readers will realize that it is no exaggeration to say that Takayama and I share exactly the same way of thinking.
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In the past, foolish scholars believed that appearing in Asahi Shimbun made them first-rate academics.
Professor Akira Fujiwara of Hitotsubashi University was one of them, and one day Asahi approached him saying, “We can let you write,” and demanded that a photograph showing smoke rising beyond rice fields be described as “Japanese Army poison gas.”
Fujiwara was still a scholar.
Poison gas was first used in trench warfare during World War I.
It was heavier than air, crawled along the ground, flowed into trenches, and killed.
Smoke rising into the sky made no sense at all, but he could not afford to offend Asahi.
So, according to Fujiwara himself, he declared, “Yes, this is poison gas.”
Thinking that no one would dare oppose Asahi, they were mistaken, as Mizuho Ishikawa, who also writes in this magazine, exposed the lie.
Fujiwara was denounced as a lying professor and disappeared.
Yet the supply of foolish scholars never runs out.
Kenichi Goto of Waseda University wrote the lie that the Japanese army killed 50,000 people in East Timor, pleasing Asahi but alienating his neighbors.
Kotaro Asuka of Tohoku University arrogantly wrote in Asahi that “China is a model student in exhaust-gas regulation; Japan should learn from it.”
Soon the PM2.5 crisis erupted, his lies were exposed, and it was revealed that he was a Chinese national who had even changed his name to a Japanese-style one.
Now complaints are flooding the Ministry of Education asking why such a lying foreigner was made a university professor.
Still, there are scholars who want to write for Asahi, and now Eiji Oguma appears to have taken Akira Fujiwara’s former seat.
He collects and comments on the words of scholars who have never even heard serious arguments against constitutional revision, in his article “Why It Was Never Revised” (Asahi Shimbun, April 27).
Regarding why the constitution was not revised for seventy years, Kenneth McElwain says, “The flexibility of ‘stipulating this by law’ made it unnecessary to revise it.”
What nonsense.
The constitution was not revised because there was not even a national referendum law to entrust the judgment to the people.
Abe created it, and it only came into force seven years ago.
The Japanese dislike the constitution that MacArthur arbitrarily drafted while impersonating the Emperor, proclaiming, “I am deeply pleased.”
To this, Kimura Sota’s claim is introduced: “There is no problem with the content of the current constitution; coercion is the only criticism.”
Is that what you call a constitution that tells people to live by clinging to other countries like beggars?
This sophist is said to be a graduate of Yasuo Hasebe’s seminar.
Like teacher, like deceiver.
Somehow, it all makes sense.
Then Oguma brings up constitutionalism.
Asahi Shimbun’s favorite argument is to return to the original meaning of the character ken in constitution as “a law that corrects law.”
However, the Japanese have never obsessed over such original meanings of Chinese characters.
For example, the character min in democracy.
Its original form depicts blinding an eye, meaning a foolish, sightless mass.
The Japanese ignored that and created the word democracy thinking of ordinary people.
The Chinese reportedly read it as “rule by the ignorant masses,” but eventually adapted to Japanese-style Sino-Japanese terms.
Today, 75 percent of the words used by the Chinese are Japanese in origin, and Junko Miyawaki says, “China now belongs to the Japanese cultural sphere.”
In such an era, claiming that ken in constitution means correcting law is absurd.
Who would say such nonsense other than Asahi Shimbun, one would think, yet it turns out to be the aforementioned Kenneth of Irish descent.
If you live in the Japanese cultural sphere, you should properly learn that culture.
Oguma too, if he keeps flattering Asahi and saying irresponsible things, will end up following in Akira Fujiwara’s footsteps.