As a continuation of the previous chapter, this essay discusses the decline of Bungeishunju after the discontinuation of Shokun! and re-evaluates the role of opinion journals such as Shokun!, Seiron, Voice, and WiLL, which resisted the rigid ideology of Asahi Shimbun and NHK.
It critically portrays how Bungeishunju, by continuously fleeing pressure from both left and right, created a spiritual vacuum within the company, into which a particular historical view flowed.

2019-03-27
The resistance of Shokun!, Seiron, Voice, WiLL, and others against the power within the media, that is, the Left, which dominates Asahi and NHK.
Bungeishunju kept trying desperately to flee from the wall of pressure coming from both the left and the right.

What follows is a continuation of the previous chapter.
The third-rate actor of fallen Bungeishunju.
Before long, All Dialogues Between Shoichi Watanabe and Kanji Nishio will be published by Business-sha, collecting nine conversations into one volume.
At the beginning of that volume appears a dialogue the two men exchanged in WiLL (May 2009 issue), prompted by the discontinuation of Shokun!, in which they expressed concern over the future of Bungeishunju.
Rather than saying they were concerned about its future, it may be more accurate to say that it was a dialogue predicting the self-destruction of Bungeishunju as we see it today.
It is probably well known that in the first half of 2018 Bungeishunju exposed an unprecedented disgrace through internal conflict over the appointment of its president.
However, it can also be said that the decline approaching self-destruction that we see today had already been foreseeable from the very moment it abandoned Shokun!, the opinion journal that had served as its backbone.
Bungeishunju had been a company whose charm lay in the expansive freedom of an independent spirit that jabbed at the public opinions of Asahi and NHK, but it entered an era in which maintaining balance became difficult.
Asahi and NHK turned into rigid ideological groups, and Shokun! showed a posture of fighting them.
The company tried to flee from both sides.
Thus it became unable to produce anything but magazines that seemed deferential to something, timid, genderless, hygienically harmless, and as a result lost circulation.
In that dialogue, when I said things such as, “At this rate Bungeishunju is in danger,” and, “Bungeishunju has been absorbed into the Asahi Shimbun,” Mr. Watanabe responded that even if the anti-communist task had ended, ideological enemies should still have remained, and that anything obstructing the goal of making the Japanese state independent was an enemy.
He then raised question after question, repeatedly saying “It is strange” and “It is a mystery,” with remarks such as, “Perhaps those who could no longer see that structure of confrontation became the mainstream within Bungeishunju,” “It is certainly true that present-day Bungeishunju strongly bears the color of Kazutoshi Hando. Why does Mr. Hando have more influence over Bungeishunju after retiring. It is strange,” and, “Mr. Hando was not even an editor-in-chief who especially increased circulation, so why does he now have influence over Bungeishunju. That is a mystery.”
Bungeishunju, faced with the resistance of Shokun!, Seiron, Voice, WiLL, and others against the power within the media, that is, the Left, which dominates Asahi and NHK, kept trying desperately to flee from the wall of pressure on both sides, and in doing so created an empty spiritual space within the company.
Into that space there was sent from the Left the perfectly suited devil’s messenger named Kazutoshi Hando.
Yes, Hando was a third-rate actor who suddenly appeared as a substitute for the collective will of forces such as Article 9 Association and Shukan Kinyobi, which had already reached the limit of what they could fight, especially after witnessing the failure of the theory of the forcible wartime roundup of comfort women.
The two men mentioned earlier, Kenzo Nakajima and Shuichi Kato, at least wore the mask of cultural figures advocating progressivism and Westernism.
At least on the surface, they were men of letters and thinkers.
Kazutoshi Hando is none of those things.
He is an expert in nothing.
Let me say one final word about Hando’s view of history.
Although war is always something involving an opposing side, he treats only what Japan did as the issue and has no intention of viewing matters from an international perspective.
He almost always ignores what other countries did.
Nor does he attempt to view history on a long scale transcending modern and contemporary history.
No matter how reflectively one may enumerate the defects of one’s own national history, this gives the impression that one is being made to read a self-centered national historical view.
Someone once said that Hando’s history is merely the reverse side of the imperial-national historical view, but this biting irony will probably never reach his intelligence.