Based on Masayuki Takayama’s column in Shukan Shincho, this essay examines distortions by old media regarding Japanese women’s history.
It challenges postwar narratives and highlights the necessity of a truthful historical perspective.

It is widely known that I have described him as the one and only journalist in the postwar world.
2018-01-19
The following is from Masayuki Takayama’s serialized column “Henken Jizai” published in this week’s issue of Shukan Shincho.
It is widely known that I have described him as the one and only journalist in the postwar world.
In this week’s issue as well, he has proven that my evaluation of him is entirely correct.
All emphasis in the text except the headline is mine.
Beate is a racist.
For example, in the opening of her column, reporter Junko Takahashi introduces the words of Shuji Funamoto: “Clog the toilet.”
She then elaborates on how deeply meaningful this is and concludes that therefore Abe is to blame.
In truth, hardly anyone even knows who Mr. Funamoto is.
The causal relationship between a clogged toilet and Abe’s downfall is also difficult to understand from her writing.
In fact, using ① the words of an unknown figure, ② shrouding the issue in vagueness, and ③ concluding that Abe is bad and Japan is flawed is a pattern common to Asahi Shimbun columns.
The political editor Hideo Matsushita’s piece “Beate Will Surely Be Angry” is exactly the same.
He first visits the Gender Equality Research Institute.
Most sensible people do not even know such a place exists, and even if they did, they would never go.
There Matsushita introduces the words of Olympe de Gouges, who stood on the guillotine advocating women’s rights: “Women have the right to mount the scaffold; they must equally have the right to mount the rostrum.”
Her profession is playwright.
She was of common birth and therefore illiterate.
Yet because of her beauty she became a star of Parisian salons.
Her works were created through dictation.
The column does not touch upon any of this.
What matters is that a white woman spoke of women’s rights in that era, and in contrast he points out that “once in Japan women had no rights,” lamenting that wives had no property rights.
He then concludes that it was “General MacArthur” and “the Constitution of Japan” that rescued such pitiful Japanese women.
But let me say this: long before that era Japanese women could read and write.
The wives of frontier guards composed poems, and The Tale of Genji and The Pillow Book were written.
In the age of de Gouges, one in three terakoya teachers was female, and nearly half of the ceramic artisans in Arita were women.
If one speaks of property rights, there are many records of wives issuing divorce papers to their husbands.
Even the custom of husbands receiving allowance from their wives before going to work reflects the tradition that “the household finances belong to the mountain goddess.”
Matsushita himself lives under the same reality, yet ignores it and instead invokes the Jewish Beate Sirota.
To be continued.