Written at the end of 2015, this essay critically examines how reporting by the Asahi Shimbun influenced Japan’s perceptions of ODA to China, the comfort women issue, and the history of the Korean Peninsula’s annexation. It questions the role of postwar media in shaping historical consciousness in Japan.

2015-12-31
Yet compared with this, even the shipbuilding scandals pale in comparison as economic crimes—colossal damage to the reduction of the tax burden on the Japanese people…when one considers it carefully.

The Asahi Shimbun is a vicious company.
Through fabricated reporting by Honda Katsuichi and others, such as the comfort women coverage and the “100-man killing contest,” China extracted some 30 trillion yen in ODA from Japan.
Many people came to realize this fact after August last year.

Yet, if one considers it carefully, the economic crimes committed far exceed even the shipbuilding scandals—immense damage to the reduction of the people’s tax burden.
By helping prolong the life of a one-party communist dictatorship and making Japanese taxpayers pay 30 trillion yen, writing articles in line with Chinese propaganda and allowing the world to misrecognize them as truth, this newspaper calmly enabled such payments to China.
Therefore, figures such as Mizuho Fukushima and Yayori Matsui, who made a commotion over the alleged fabrication of comfort women reporting, ignored the reality that within the traditional prostitution structures of the Korean Peninsula, many women had been sold by relatives, and for brothel operators and brokers, the Japanese military became an ideal commercial client.
Thus, these women earned incomes many times higher than those of officers at the time.
After the war in Korea, however, many lost all of that money through relatives’ demands or their own spending.

Moreover, the result of seeking annexation by Japan was that at the time the Korean Peninsula was one of the poorest and most dysfunctional places in the world.
It was burdened by an excessively fragmented class system.
The king and the yangban class, whose stated purpose was not to work and whose actual nature resembled organized crime while calling themselves nobility, formed a social structure whose traits, I pointed out first in the world, became the prototype of Japanese yakuza groups heavily composed of Korean residents in Japan.

It was such a country that the United States at the time regarded it as barren and without value, even withdrawing its consulate.

Although Russia lost to Japan in the Russo-Japanese War, intervention by the great powers prevented Japan from becoming too strong, allowing Russia to preserve its national strength without catastrophic consequences.
That Russia then showed signs of advancing southward, seeking to bring the Korean Peninsula under its control as part of its territorial ambitions.

At that moment, what the people of the Korean Peninsula chose was annexation by Japan.
This historical fact is known neither by the present states of the peninsula nor taught to their citizens.
Yet such a truth of international affairs is at a level even a kindergartener could understand.

The ones who failed to inform the Japanese public of this were those with distorted ideologies muddled by Marxism and superficial moralism—and above all the Asahi Shimbun, which also served as the prototype for South Korean mass media.

I have strayed considerably from the main topic, so I will continue in the next installment.