On a clear Monday returning from Kyoto, the author read an essay by Shintaro Ishihara in Sankei Shimbun and recognized, for the first time, a statesman driven by honor and national strength.
In stark contrast, the following day’s Asahi Shimbun presented a grotesque triple feature of distorted journalism.
Articles defending Korea, degrading Japan, and rewriting history revealed a media outlet that had lost all sense of sanity.
A close friend aptly called it “a triple feature of insanity.”

May 19, 2016

It was a clear Monday, and I headed to Kyoto.
On the train home, I read Shintaro Ishihara’s essay on the front page of Sankei Shimbun.
When Ishihara was an active politician, I was a subscriber to Asahi Shimbun, and therefore I saw him only as a man of parole—spoken words.
I never regarded him as a man of écriture—of expression and transmission through writing.
In that sense, it is fair to say I knew almost nothing about him.
What remained in my memory was only his irritated, impatient, and emotionally charged manner of speaking.

Now that he has retired from politics, I feel something entirely different toward him.

In particular, the essay he wrote that day made me deeply aware that he was a man who truly embodied the spirit of na koso oshime—a man who stood there in reality and fought to make Japan larger and stronger.

By contrast, the following day’s Asahi Shimbun was a parade of truly appalling articles.
A close friend of mine, who had canceled his subscription in August the year before last and switched to Sankei, said simply upon seeing them, “They’re insane.”

Looking at the names of the reporters who wrote those articles, the reaction was hardly surprising.

One article, spanning an entire page, insisted that the claims of Korean prostitutes were unquestionably correct.
It was written by Tetsuya Hakoda, whom I introduced previously—an outrageous man who had once written articles placing the Korean president Park Geun-hye above Prime Minister Abe in terms of personal stature.

Another article, written by Kagatani, claimed—after Asahi Shimbun had spent years damaging the honor and credibility of Japan and the Japanese people—that Japan should now be better promoted to the world.
This was an article that could only be described as the worst kind of evil.
Kagatani was the man who continued to write articles in line with top management’s intentions, deliberately sowing confusion around the Umeda North Yard project because it threatened Asahi’s high-rise twin-tower project in Nakanoshima, on which the company had staked its future.

And in yet another article, Carol Gluck made an appearance.

A triple feature of evil—
my close friend said instead, “It’s a triple feature of insanity.”

To be continued.