This essay examines how Asahi Shimbun’s long-standing “leave it to the market” rhetoric abruptly reversed under Prime Minister Abe.
It argues that editorial distortion of monetary and fiscal policy contributed to Japan’s prolonged economic stagnation and misled public understanding.

2016-07-05

“Leave it to the market; market matters belong to the market”—readers of the Asahi Shimbun should know that its editorial writers have been repeating this line for at least the past thirty years.
But what happened after Prime Minister Abe took office? One need only recall events from this very year.
Ahead of the second-to-last meeting of the Bank of Japan’s Policy Board, when the market was strongly calling for further monetary easing, the Asahi Shimbun continued to publish editorials denying those market demands.
By pointing out that the core leadership across all sectors of Japan consists of people who, like myself until August the year before last, were raised reading the Asahi Shimbun—meaning that this has diminished Japan, kept it in a politically captive position in the international community for seventy years after the war, and led to actions such as providing China with 30 trillion yen in mostly near-grant aid, giving South Korea assistance equivalent to three times its national budget at the time, and being the world’s largest financial contributor to the United Nations without ever suspending payments, surpassing even the United States—I believe I was the first person in Japan to make this point.
Today, there is a Tokyo-based media outlet that publishes editorials aligned with the Asahi Shimbun every day.
As the Nikkei has noted on several occasions, it often writes editorials that resemble those of a “quasi-Asahi.”
In such circumstances, even if the Bank of Japan were to make a policy error and weaken Japan’s economic strength, the Japanese people should finally and properly understand that the blame lies more with the Asahi Shimbun than with the Bank of Japan.
Kasumigaseki bureaucrats—among Japan’s finest players—say they are convinced that the policies Japan has adopted since the war were correct, and they assert that every major decision ran counter to Asahi Shimbun editorials.
All Japanese citizens, young and old, male and female, must engrave this fact firmly in their minds.
Anyone with a sound intellect who read today’s Asahi Shimbun editorial by Masato Hara alongside its article on the actions of Chinese fighter jets—written in a manner completely opposite to the Sankei Shimbun article published days earlier featuring testimony from the air force pilots involved, and resembling Chinese newspaper reporting—must have been left utterly astonished.
On the day of the G7 summit, Hara disparagingly described as “nonsensical” Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s entirely reasonable declaration, as chair, that fiscal stimulus should not be avoided in order to prepare for risks lurking in the global economy, delivering this remark with a condescending attitude on “Hōdō Station.”
It goes without saying that after the subsequent British shock, Japanese stock prices fell even more sharply than during the Lehman shock, yet he never bowed his head over this. (He does not even realize that, as an economic commentator, he ended his credibility with that single incident.)
The conclusions this man wrote across large pages of today’s Asahi Shimbun left every person with a sound intellect aghast.
But this is the true nature of the Asahi Shimbun.
Even economics is discussed through their distorted ideology—an ideology that demeans Japan.
This稿 continues.