This article critically examines the links among postwar Japanese universities, political activism, and media coverage through the cases of Kyoto University’s Kumano Dormitory, the origins of activism surrounding the comfort women issue, the reporting posture of the Asahi Shimbun and NHK, and coverage related to Kiyomi Tsujimoto.
In particular, it raises sharp questions about how NHK has framed certain politicians and movements, and about the role Kyoto University is seen to have played as a base for left-leaning postwar discourse and activism.
It is a critical essay that treats Kyoto University, Kumano Dormitory, the comfort women issue, NHK coverage, and Kiyomi Tsujimoto as interconnected themes.

2019-03-15
What president of any advanced nation would openly and warmly receive a woman who had a record of being arrested, convicted, and forced to resign from the Diet over the fraudulent receipt of salary paid from the people’s taxes.
Has NHK’s news division ever even once stopped to think about that.

I am reposting the chapter I published on 2018-05-15 under the title,
“What president of any advanced nation would openly and warmly receive a woman who had a record of being arrested, convicted, and forced to resign from the Diet over the fraudulent receipt of salary paid from the people’s taxes.”

Kyoto University is a national university.
Its facilities and grounds are national assets.

From the beginning, I believe that one of the backgrounds to the wider spread of the scheme surrounding the so-called comfort women narrative lay in the activist circles around Kyoto University.
A man named Song Du-hui, who originally had no direct connection with Kyoto University, lived for many years in Kyoto University’s Kumano Dormitory on what was effectively a rent-free basis.

Ignoring the postwar order said to have been issued by GHQ that people from the Korean Peninsula should return there, he did not return and even filed lawsuits insisting that he was a Japanese national and should be treated as a Japanese.
Before long, he induced Atsuko Aoyagi, a housewife married to a physician and herself a graduate of Kyushu University, to launch a certain movement.

At the time, Song repeatedly placed advertisements, with Aoyagi as secretary-general, in Asahi Journal, which served as a kind of bible for left-wing activists who embodied the Asahi Shimbun and for readers who blindly trusted that paper.
It is not difficult now to infer where that funding may have come from.

Among those who seized upon this were Yun Mi-hyang, described as a founder of the Korean Council, Mizuho Fukushima and Kenichi Takagi, then lawyers, and also the Asahi Shimbun, especially reporters in its Osaka social affairs section.

The scheme begun by Song Du-hui caused enormous financial damage to Japan and to the Japanese people.
And even now, people shaped by anti-Japan education since the Syngman Rhee era continue around the world to promote movements such as the erection of comfort-women statues and wartime-labor statues.
These have functioned as anti-Japan propaganda, placing Japan in a chronically disadvantageous position in international society, weakening its national strength, and creating a structure aimed at extracting money from Japan whenever possible.
As a result, the honor and credibility of Japan and the Japanese people have been damaged to an extent that cannot be measured in money.
And one of the institutions that allowed Song Du-hui, one of the starting points of that scheme, to remain for years in Kumano Dormitory was Japan’s national Kyoto University.

As for the female student who said in a newspaper interview, after the childish and malicious signboards that had done nothing but continue to deface the scenery of Kyoto, the greatest city in the world, were removed, that “Kyoto University is losing what made it Kyoto University,” she ought first to read this essay of mine before calling herself a student of Kyoto University.
Kyoto is a city that was created by many great figures long before Kyoto University ever came into existence.

Just now, around an article I introduced yesterday, I saw another article saying that NHK had proudly reported that a new signboard had been put up in protest against the removal of those signboards, as though praising it as a righteous act of criticizing power.

It is precisely this kind of reporting by NHK that makes one suspect that, just as Song Du-hui slipped into Kyoto University and stirred a Kyushu University graduate housewife into action, activist networks may likewise have entered NHK during and after the postwar confusion and helped shape its editorial posture.

NHK, which became a host or supporter of the Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal.
NHK, which even now, with News Watch 9 as its main battleground, continues to report on Mori-Kake in a manner seemingly aligned with the Asahi Shimbun.
And NHK, which continued day after day to broadcast enlarged close-up images of Kiyomi Tsujimoto.

What I found most appalling of all was News Watch 9’s prominent coverage, as though it were somehow proper, of Kiyomi Tsujimoto shouting, when Prime Minister Abe and his wife departed as representatives of Japan and the Japanese people for the recent Japan-U.S. summit, “Akie Abe is going along too,” together with the foolish cries of “Ohhh” from Constitutional Democratic Party politicians reacting around her.

What president of any advanced nation would openly and warmly receive a person who stands close to movements and discourses that have inflicted grave harm on Japan and on the world.
And what president would openly and warmly receive a person who also carries a record of conviction and resignation from the Diet arising from past misconduct.
Has NHK’s news division ever even once thought about that.