This article examines postwar anti-Japan narratives and media influence through the dialogue in Crimes and Punishment of the Mass Media by Masayuki Takayama and Rui Abiru, exploring how historical perceptions were shaped.

2019-02-18.
Among them, a small number of people who said, “Wait, that’s not right, is it?” steadily offered rebuttals and accumulated counter-evidence, and only then have we arrived at the present situation.
This chapter reveals just how base and malicious those who sympathize with the Korean Peninsula, China, and their anti-Japan propaganda truly are.
“Crimes and Punishment of the Mass Media,” first published on February 10, 2019, by Masayuki Takayama and Rui Abiru, is a book that every Japanese citizen capable of reading printed text must read.
Masayuki Takayama, a journalist without equal in the postwar world, and Rui Abiru, one of the finest active newspaper reporters, senior and junior colleagues at Sankei Shimbun, present their discussion in dialogue form.
Readers should not only rush to their nearest bookstore to purchase it immediately, but must also recommend it to elderly people and to women who rely on television as their main source of information, because the elderly in particular are information-vulnerable and many subscribe to newspapers such as Asahi, Mainichi, Tokyo, and Chunichi while watching NHK.
This book is also friendly to readers with presbyopia.
The following is an excerpt from page 65.
Anti-Japanese tendencies permeating society as a whole.
Takayama.
What was instilled into Asahi Shimbun and NHK was the message that Japan must never be seen as a hero that liberated Asian countries suffering under colonial rule, namely Cordell Hull’s words: “Do not let them think they sacrificed themselves and were defeated for the liberation of Asia.”
They were urged to rewrite history so that it was not white people but Japan, the aggressor, that bullied and exploited Asia.
Abiru.
Once they continued broadcasting by changing the signboard from “The Truth Is This” to “Truth Box,” and serialized “History of the Pacific War” in their own paper, they had no choice but to insist that it was correct, otherwise they could not sustain themselves.
Takayama.
NHK still hasn’t corrected that, has it.
Abiru.
As for the Moritomo and Kake issues, once they declared that Abe was at fault, they had to keep saying it.
They can no longer say, “Actually, it had nothing to do with him.”
Takayama.
Asahi Shimbun acted in line with GHQ’s wishes in order to maintain the newspaper’s standing and avoid being dismantled by GHQ.
There was no one inside Asahi who criticized this.
GHQ, for its part, used the Asahi it had tamed to carry out ideological control.
They reported that Japan had done nothing but evil in Southeast Asia.
They claimed that 100,000 were killed in Manila, and that in Thailand and Burma Allied prisoners were abused and local residents were driven into forced labor, killing 200,000.
They reported whatever GHQ told them, such as that a corpse appeared beneath every railway sleeper.
Meanwhile, Americans were portrayed as noble.
Harvard professor Langdon Warner told U.S. forces to protect Japan’s cultural properties and saved Kyoto from war damage, which Asahi wrote up as an exclusive scoop.
In reality, later documents revealed that the initial target for the atomic bomb was 500 meters above the Umekoji rail yard west of Kyoto Station, where the first uranium-type atomic bomb was planned to detonate.
They intended to destroy cultural properties along with entire cities.
They were prepared to burn half a million citizens and completely incinerate To-ji, Kiyomizu-dera, Kinkaku-ji, and Ginkaku-ji.
Asahi Shimbun helped such barbarians present themselves as protectors of cultural heritage.
By doing so, Asahi secured its position as Japan’s leading newspaper.
From Nobutarō Kasa to Yoichi Funabashi and now editorial chief Kiyoki Nemoto, that line appears to have been strictly preserved as if passed down through a single lineage.
No one inside the company says, “Isn’t this a bit strange?”
Thus the framework that Japan was an aggressor became fixed and turned into company policy.
Abiru.
I know someone who worked as a weekly magazine writer but couldn’t make a living and so was rehired by Asahi Shimbun.
He was assigned to the social affairs department and once told me this.
At first, everyone is non-political.
However, writing articles along certain lines earns favor with superiors, and writing in those lines ensures prominent placement, so articles gradually tilt leftward.
Eventually, by continuing to write such articles, the writers themselves also shift leftward.
I once heard something similar from a member of the Hokkaido Teachers’ Union.
They became teachers because they wanted to be teachers and were initially neutral or non-political.
But the Hokkaido Teachers’ Union is quite red.
Some union members are present in each school.
They are loud voices.
Everyone gets pulled along.
Then one joins the union and becomes colored by it.
Nevertheless, I believe this is because anti-Japanese tendencies that began immediately after the war permeated society as a whole.
When we were children, or rather in our youth and even in university years, there was a prevailing sense that the Japanese military had committed atrocities as a matter of course.
From around 1990, when the comfort women issue began to be explosively reported, many people did not question claims that “the Japanese military forcibly recruited them.”
The indoctrination that Japan equals evil had already taken place.
Amid this, a small number of people who said, “Wait, that’s not right,” steadily offered rebuttals and accumulated counter-evidence, and only then have we reached the present situation.
Even Asahi Shimbun’s own records show this.
When they published Yoshida Seiji’s account claiming he had rounded up women in Korea as comfort women, letters and phone calls came from people who knew the period.
They said, “The Japanese military did no such thing,” or “Isn’t that a bit different?”
Yet the writer of Asahi’s front-page column “Mado” scolded them in the March 3, 1992 issue, writing, “There are things we do not wish to know or believe. But unless we struggle with those feelings, history cannot be preserved.”
How arrogant can they be.
Takayama.
America’s postwar settlement was extremely thorough in the sense that it aimed to fundamentally dismantle the Japanese as a people.
Abiru.
This propaganda also served themselves.
It was not only about defeating Japan but also about teaching their children that they themselves were righteous.
Takayama.
America dropped the atomic bomb.
Despite being an unforgivable act of mass slaughter of non-combatants, they sought to justify it.
First, Japan was portrayed as a treacherous nation that launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.
Second, Japanese were portrayed as brutal, killing thousands across Asia each day if left unchecked.
They claimed that if the U.S. had launched a land invasion of Japan, another two million Americans would have died.
In short, they rewrote history.
Thus they concluded that the atomic bombing was unavoidable to force Japan’s surrender.
Abiru.
At the Tokyo Trials beginning in 1946, whenever Japanese defense lawyers attempted to mention the atomic bomb, the stenography was halted.
Americans themselves felt guilty at first.
They feared that Japan might one day accuse them.
However, within the United States, education continued to frame the atomic bombing as a good decision that ended the war.
Americans themselves began to believe this.
Of course some say it was wrong, but the majority now hold that it was acceptable after all.
Education is indeed a frightening thing.