On June 15, 2016, Nikkei’s front page underscored Brexit fears and market contraction, making clear that global economic fragility had already surfaced less than a month after the G7. This piece argues that Asahi Shimbun alone failed to grasp this reality, while Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s call for fiscal action was misrepresented by ideologically driven commentary.

June 15, 2016
The large headline on the front page of this morning’s Nikkei read:
“Brexit Fears, Shrinking Money Flows, Heightened Awareness of Terror and Political Risks
Global Stock Declines and Yen Appreciation Accelerate.”
Less than one month after the G7 summit, the global economy has already laid bare its fragility.
Yet this is a reality of the world economy that even a kindergarten child can understand.
What yesterday’s Nikkei clearly demonstrated was that the only one who had failed to understand it was Asahi Shimbun.
At the G7, Shinzo Abe declared that, in light of such fragility in the global economy, the G7 countries should not hesitate to engage in fiscal stimulus.
On that very day, however, TV Asahi, a subsidiary of Asahi Shimbun, featured on its program Hōdō Station an individual whose understanding of economics was inferior even to that of a kindergarten child, and this morning’s Nikkei newspaper proved the correctness of my commentary expressing astonishment that such a man was the chief editorial writer in charge of economics.
In other words, Asahi’s understanding of economics is nothing more than an argument spoken for its own convenience, formed within a thoroughly miserable state of tangled leftist ideology, pseudo-moralism, and manipulation by China and South Korea.
As a perfect representative of Asahi Shimbun and the so-called cultural elites, Katsuya Okada, then leader of the Democratic Party, who reads this newspaper and turns it into policy, criticized Prime Minister Abe with the utmost baseness, foolishness, and malice, accusing him of exploiting the successfully concluded G7 for his own purposes.
All Japanese citizens must never forget that it was precisely such people who, until Prime Minister Abe’s return to power, replaced governments one after another to a degree that astonished the world, thereby gravely damaging Japan’s national strength, credibility, and international voice.
Because that was the result of having been manipulated by foolish and malicious media epitomized by Asahi Shimbun.