During an NHK broadcast of Close-Up Gendai, commentator Genichiro Takahashi invoked Muhammad Ali to criticize the Abe administration and contemporary Japan. This article argues that NHK’s tolerance of such remarks reveals a deep ideological decay rooted in Asahi-style thinking, while ignoring Japan’s status as one of the world’s freest, safest, and most intellectually advanced societies.

June 13, 2016
The reason is that, just as I had anticipated, she allowed Takahashi to utter the following truly unforgivable and profoundly foolish remarks.
I had not known that Close-Up Gendai on NHK, airing at 10 p.m., would feature a special on Muhammad Ali, so I welcomed it and began watching.
However, I was utterly dispirited when the commentator turned out to be Genichiro Takahashi, a rare species who now—indeed, still—serves as a compliant cultural intellectual for the Asahi Shimbun.
That a considerable number of individuals imbued with Asahi-style ideology continue to inhabit NHK only serves to diminish NHK’s value.
The time has long since come for NHK itself to recognize this fact.
I had, if anything, felt a certain degree of goodwill toward the female host, Sugiura, but over the course of this evening, much of that goodwill was blown away.
Because, just as expected, she allowed Takahashi to say something as truly unforgivable and foolish as the following.
All Japanese citizens must know that both the man who exploits Muhammad Ali to criticize the Abe administration and NHK’s posture in allowing this are truly despicable.
Takahashi, as if offering a concluding summary of the program, stated the following.
“It could even be said that things are worse now than in Muhammad Ali’s era…”
Had he been saying this about China or South Korea, it might have been understandable.
But he was clearly saying this about present-day Japan, about our Japan today, a country that has achieved the highest level of freedom and intellect in the world, and that is the safest and most peaceful nation on earth.
He was saying this about Japan, the country in which women enjoy the greatest freedom and happiness in the world.
Yet the utterly incorrigible people represented by him—
people who never raise their voices in criticism against China, a country that even elementary school children can recognize as the greatest state of speech repression of the twentieth century, a nation that has continued to trample upon human freedom and intellect and has now even begun to advance into the territorial waters and lands of other countries—
have never, to my knowledge, immediately gone to China to openly criticize the Chinese government.
The same, needless to say, applies to South Korea.
The time has long since come for all Japanese citizens to put an end to allowing Japan and its people to be continually mocked by individuals whose minds are filled with unspeakable nonsense, pseudo-moralism, a chaotic jumble of leftist ideology, and the editorials of the Asahi Shimbun.