An Open Letter to Süddeutsche Zeitung — Double Standards in Reporting on Japan
This open letter challenges Süddeutsche Zeitung’s cooperation with Asahi Shimbun in anti-Japanese narratives.
It exposes the contradiction between harsh criticism of Japan and the absence of similar attacks on long-standing German leadership.
This open letter challenges Süddeutsche Zeitung’s collaboration with Japan’s Asahi Shimbun in producing anti-Japanese narratives, exposing clear double standards between how Japan and Germany are reported and calling for journalistic accountability in shaping international opinion.
This open letter highlights a stark double standard in international journalism.
While Japanese leaders are scrutinized with insinuations framed as moral failings, comparable standards are not applied to German leadership.
The text argues that such imbalance distorts global perceptions and undermines journalistic credibility.

2017-06-20 10:39:19
Dear Editors of Süddeutsche Zeitung.
Yesterday’s front page of the Asahi Shimbun was so appalling that it defies description.
The newspaper treated the fact that the prime minister has a friend of more than forty years as if it were something inherently evil.
One can only wonder what kind of mindset prevails within this newspaper company.
Your newspaper is influential in Germany, to the extent that your Tokyo correspondents, working together with the Asahi Shimbun to continuously publish anti-Japanese propaganda, have contributed to opinion polls showing that nearly half of the German public now harbors negative feelings toward Japan.
Before addressing the main issue, I would like to say one thing to your journalists.
Not a single Japanese citizen had ever felt hostility toward the distant nation of Germany or its people.
At least until now, although due to the actions of your correspondents, I myself feel anger today.
To add one more point, Japan as a nation and the Japanese people have never in recorded history engaged in denigrating other countries or hating other peoples.
On the contrary, when the Korean Peninsula last appeared in world history during the Three Kingdoms period of Baekje, Goguryeo, and Silla, Japan welcomed the Baekje royal family fleeing defeat into what is now part of Shiga Prefecture, and accepted the Goguryeo royal family into the northwestern Kanto region.
Japan has always been such a country.
It is also fair to say that Japan is virtually the only nation in the world that never maintained a system of slavery.
The Japanese people do not harbor hatred toward others.
Now then, the Asahi Shimbun has labeled the Abe administration, which has merely maintained power for a few years, as a “dominant regime,” and in order to bring it down, has mobilized NHK and other media outlets to launch successive scandals following the Moritomo Gakuen affair in an attempt to weaken the Liberal Democratic Party.
For some reason, the timing of these actions coincides suspiciously with the dates on which North Korea launches missiles.
China is also repeatedly violating Japanese territory on an almost daily basis.
Amid such an international situation, the media have launched vicious attacks on the Abe administration, targeting Shinzo Abe, the most outstanding statesman in the world today.
This was a symbolic article representing media that, in accordance with the indoctrination policies imposed by GHQ after the war, have continuously attacked Japanese leadership, sought to divide the nation, and weakened Japan’s national strength.
However, your newspaper has never carried articles labeling Germany’s politics under sixteen years of Chancellor Kohl and sixteen years of Chancellor Merkel, totaling thirty-two years of CDU governance, as “Kohl dominance,” “Merkel dominance,” or “CDU dominance,” nor attempted to weaken them in such a manner.
By denigrating distant Japan and portraying it as an evil nation akin to Nazi Germany, your newspaper has cleverly diluted the historical wrongs of its own country.
Yet unlike the Asahi Shimbun, you have never fabricated reports on comfort women, the Nanjing Massacre, the so-called hundred-man killing contest, or forced mass suicides in Okinawa in order to permanently confine Germany as a political prisoner in the international community.
Nevertheless, the Asahi Shimbun continues such actions even today.
Has your newspaper ever run a front-page article portraying the existence of a forty-year friendship between Chancellor Kohl or Chancellor Merkel and their associates as something inherently wrong?
You may publish articles that demean Japan, but you have never published such childish articles, inferior even to those written by kindergarten children, to demean your own nation or its leaders.