This essay condemns the Foreign Correspondents’ Club for honoring Asahi Shimbun’s Moritomo Gakuen coverage, exposing political orchestration involving Kiyomi Tsujimoto, manipulation of public land issues, massive economic damage, and a history of fabricated reporting on Nanjing and comfort women. Through comparison with European colonialism, it rebukes those who demean Japan.

2017-08-30

Journalists belonging to the Foreign Correspondents’ Club,
it is a thousand years too early for you to demean Japan.
Strangely enough, this morning I happened, for once, to glance through the Asahi Shimbun.
Perhaps because of that, I encountered a truly strange article.
It was tucked away, in small print, on page 30 of the social affairs section.
Even Asahi Shimbun, whose malice rivals the “bottomless evil” and “plausible lies” of China and the Korean Peninsula, must have felt some shame about prominently advertising that it had received an award for fake reporting aimed at bringing down the Abe administration.
Yet I could not help wondering what kind of intellectually deficient group the Foreign Correspondents’ Club must be to have granted a press freedom promotion award to an Asahi Shimbun reporter for what they called the “scoop” of the Moritomo Gakuen affair.
They must all be journalists in Asahi Shimbun’s service.
They are not merely ignorant and poorly informed; they are a set of people who grossly underestimate Japan and behave outrageously.
I will explain it to them briefly: the Moritomo Gakuen uproar was initiated by a Toyonaka city councilor of Korean nationality, formerly a secretary to former Democratic Party lawmaker Kiyomi Tsujimoto—whose own background is highly dubious—
in other words, it was an uproar concocted in collusion with Asahi Shimbun.
It has long been common knowledge among subscribers that Asahi Shimbun began showing a peculiar favoritism toward Tsujimoto several years ago.
Why was Tsujimoto so well acquainted with that piece of land in Toyonaka, which was not only worth next to nothing but lay directly beneath the flight path of landing aircraft?
It was because Tsujimoto was the one who had Toyonaka City purchase the neighboring state-owned land acquired by Moritomo at an even cheaper price than Moritomo had paid.
But anyone who has engaged in real estate business in Osaka would recognize such nonsense, and I will stop here.
It is too foolish even to write about.
In the style of Minoru Kida, this affair also laid bare the reality that the people of the so-called “mad hamlet,” including Asahi Shimbun and Tsujimoto, live by clinging to taxpayers’ money.
Asahi Shimbun not only acquired state-owned land cheaply for its headquarters but also managed, in the Festival Tower project on which it staked the company’s fortunes, to secure an unbelievable increase in the floor-area ratio from 1,000 percent to 1,600 percent.
Moreover, citing an overlap with the tenant recruitment period for the Umeda North Yard, it delayed the start of the first phase of construction and then, through repeated sensational features on the “confusion of the North Yard,” tore apart the former JNR site redevelopment—an outstanding urban plan completed over more than twenty years by the combined wisdom of public and private sectors—
thereby calmly inflicting damages amounting to trillions of yen upon the Japanese people.
Not content with having written numerous fabricated articles, typified by the Nanjing Massacre, that caused over 30 trillion yen of Japanese tax money to be poured into China and South Korea,
Asahi Shimbun also fabricated reporting on military comfort women and, together with figures such as Mizuho Fukushima, attempted to have an outrageous one trillion yen of Japanese taxpayers’ money allocated by the government to prostitutes gathered through “plausible lies.”
And it is said that the Foreign Correspondents’ Club awarded Asahi Shimbun a press freedom prize for this.
Needless to say about the Nazis, immediately after the war Europe carried out merciless lynchings across the entire continent,
Europe colonized South America and Southeast Asia and exploited them thoroughly,
Europe calmly bought and sold black people from Africa as slaves through the slave trade.
Without being saved by the United States’ Marshall Plan, all of Europe would have become Easternized,
that is, ruled by Stalin under a communist one-party dictatorship, and turned into countries like China or Russia.
Japan treated both Taiwan and the Korean Peninsula as fellow nations,
and during the 35 years of annexation invested an enormous amount exceeding 20 percent of the national budget into the Korean Peninsula,
rapidly modernizing the Korean Peninsula, which had been one of the poorest regions in the world at the time,
and at the same time decisively abolishing one of the world’s worst caste discrimination systems.
Going back to the era of Oda Nobunaga, a black man presented as a slave by European missionaries was not treated as a slave by Nobunaga—
because Japan had no philosophy of treating human beings as slaves—but was instead treated as a respectable retainer.
Journalists belonging to the Foreign Correspondents’ Club,
it is a thousand years too early for you to demean Japan.
To be continued.