This essay, dated March 9, 2019, criticizes the bias of historical documentaries produced by NHK with compulsory license-fee revenue and argues that the media itself, which claims to monitor power, must in turn be monitored.
Focusing on the demonization of the Japanese military, subservience to the victor’s view of history, the neglect of Soviet, Chinese, and Korean acts of victimization, and the anti-Japanese editing seen in programs such as Project JAPAN and JAPAN Debut, it argues that NHK’s reporting and program production have seriously damaged Japan’s national interest.

2019-03-09
As former NHK commentator Nobuo Ikeda has pointed out, since deviation from the victor’s view of history has become taboo, they can do nothing but portray defeated Japan and its military in a negative light.

This comes from the original blog text of a laborious work I discovered online the other day, and what follows is a continuation of the chapter I posted.
Monitoring the “Power of the Media.”
Japan is suffering from biased reporting by domestic and foreign media, poured out under the shield of “freedom of the press.”
I am also fed up with information manipulation through the “freedom not to report.”
If the media raises “monitoring power” as its sacred banner, then the Internet must monitor the “power of the media.”
Please refrain from ethnically discriminatory comments.

Many people are probably irritated by the bias of the historical documentaries NHK produces while lavishly spending the license fees it forcibly collects from the public.
Japanese people are serious and obedient to rules, so although many flare up and say, “I’m not paying the license fee anymore,” in the end they often keep paying almost out of inertia.
But NHK’s anti-Japan programs are provided with English, Chinese, and Korean translations and are widely viewed overseas, so this is not merely a matter of being unpleasant, but something that may seriously damage the national interest.

The defining feature of the historical documentaries produced by NHK is the thorough demonization of the Japanese military.
They have made no progress at all beyond GHQ’s propaganda program The Truth Is This, in which the military was entirely to blame for the last war while the people and the media were portrayed as victims.
As former NHK commentator Nobuo Ikeda has pointed out, since deviation from the victor’s view of history has become taboo, they can do nothing but portray defeated Japan and its military in a negative light.
And yet, even with respect to the victorious United States, NHK has in recent years repeatedly produced programs condemning the atomic bombings and the incendiary bombing of cities as war crimes.
The problem is that there are almost no programs criticizing the Soviet Army, the Kuomintang forces, or the Eighth Route Army, while Koreans are often elevated as pitiful “victims.”
When Japanese are portrayed as “victims,” it is limited to cases where either the Japanese military or the American military is cast as the “perpetrator,” and there are almost no programs depicting the Soviet Union, China, or Korea as “perpetrators.”
The preceding part has already been posted, so I omit it here.

[Series “Project JAPAN”]
2009–2012.

When NHK dramatized Ryotaro Shiba’s historical novel Clouds Above the Hill, which has many conservative admirers, the documentary faction, a nest of leftists, seems to have reacted against it and produced a lineup of anti-Japan programs as a kind of counterbalance under the pretext of “maintaining balance.”
This is, of course, an inference.
Some of the programs went too far, caused public outrage, and even ended in lawsuits.
The modern-history portions of the Japan and the Korean Peninsula series were also incorporated.

Project JAPAN Prologue
Directors: Hideya Kamakura.
Shinji Yanagisawa.
Akira Hashimoto.
Executive Producers: Hideki Masuda.
Nobuhiro Kono.
Toshihiko Wakamiya.
Hideaki Torimoto.

Note.
It was fine as long as it depicted Mineichiro Adachi, the diplomat who became the first president of the Permanent Court of International Justice, but halfway through it transformed into a brainwashing program in defense of the pacifist constitution.
It is widely known that Article 9 of the Constitution was imposed on the Japanese government by MacArthur, but NHK, borrowing the words of Kyoto University professor Shinichi Yamamuro, argues forcefully that the roots of Article 9 lie in the Hague Peace Conferences, the Kellogg-Briand Pact, and the United Nations Charter.
The American side, in order to hide its guilty conscience over imposing a war-renunciation clause on a defeated nation, may well line up all sorts of noble phrases and official pretexts, but its real intention was the weakening of defeated Japan.
As for Article 9, it was the single fiat of the war-mad MacArthur, and had absolutely nothing to do with private constitutional drafts or the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement.
Do not falsify history.

JAPAN Debut, Episode 1: Asia’s “First-Class Nation”
Directors: Kenichi Hamasaki.
Yusuke Shimada.
Executive Producers: Masayasu Tanabe.
Nobuhiro Kono.

Note.
It intentionally edited the testimony of the Taiwanese interviewees in an anti-Japan direction, leading to lawsuit-related controversy.
After that, the names of the two directors, Hamasaki and Shimada, largely disappeared from documentary programs.
Have they recently returned?