The sudden death in Beijing of Asahi Shimbun columnist Wakamiya Yoshibumi raises questions that cannot be dismissed as coincidence. Examining China’s information control and its historical relationship with Japanese media reveals why this news resists a straightforward reading.

May 1, 2016

News broke that a man who had once appeared on Hōdō Station, and whose abnormality at the time had been written about before, had suddenly died in Beijing.

He was Wakamiya Yoshibumi, one of the most abnormal reporters in the history of the Asahi Shimbun.

The report said he had been found dead in the bathroom of his hotel room in Beijing and that it appeared to have been a death from illness. I could not accept that news at face value.

As my friends and readers well know, I am not a contrarian by nature.

There must have been many people, like myself, who thought that he might have been eliminated.

The first person to embolden China so thoroughly, or to grant immunity to its lies, was Mainichi Shimbun reporter Asami Kazuo.

When it was becoming clear that the articles he had written were fabrications, he lost his place within his company and could no longer remain comfortably in Japan. At that point, the Chinese government relocated his entire family to Beijing, provided them with a life lacking nothing, admitted his beloved daughter to Peking University, and after her graduation, arranged government-backed business opportunities that allowed her to enjoy a prosperous life. This was done to ensure that he would never declare his reporting to have been fabricated.

Since August of the year before last, the Asahi Shimbun had continued its stance of virtually never criticizing South Korea. However, its tone toward China had begun to change. It started, however mildly, to include criticism.

At the same time, Xi Jinping was strengthening controls over speech.

It is possible that Wakamiya knew some decisive fact about the relationship between the Chinese government and the Asahi Shimbun, or that he himself was involved in it. It may have been essential to prevent him from making any confession, or from writing a book, even by accident. For the Chinese government, such an outcome would have been fatal.

Or perhaps Chinese intelligence agencies had already detected that Wakamiya had begun to speak about something.

Or perhaps, in response to Asahi beginning to publish criticism of China, a threat was delivered—one that Asahi’s editorial writers would instantly understand.

I could only read this news in that way—by turning it upside down.