Behind The Asahi Shimbun’s self-image as “Japan’s New York Times” in its reporting on China and world affairs lies a journalistic posture marked by embellishment and deception.
Drawing on a sharp essay by Masayuki Takayama, this piece critiques the falsehoods of The New York Times, the dubious prestige of the Pulitzer Prize, and the Asahi’s own Beijing bureau reporting that praised Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution.
It questions how precarious and misleading the Asahi’s self-presentation is when it seeks to appear as Japan’s representative newspaper.

2019-03-07
The poor judgment of an Asahi editorial writer reminiscent of Katsuichi Honda.
He praises the AIIB in his column and criticizes the Abe administration.
Shintarō Ryūzō boasts of “Japan’s NYT.”

“If we write it, that becomes the news.”
After that, they simply copied The New York Times outright.
The man cast in the role of Duranty was Akioka Ieshige of the Beijing bureau.
A chapter I posted on 2019-01-10 under that title has now entered goo’s top ten search rankings.

When I reread the chapter I had posted on 2018-07-12 under the title,
“But the prize was never revoked.
Because the article had been written exactly as Pulitzer wanted, in a thoroughly plausible way,”
I laughed out loud several times.
It is a magnificent essay proving that Masayuki Takayama is the one and only journalist in the postwar world.

What follows is a continuation from the latest book by Masayuki Takayama, the one and only journalist in the postwar world.
Readers must at once go to the nearest bookstore and buy it.
People all over the world must read my English translation and learn the real truth.
Above all, they must know that it is a tremendous misunderstanding to think that The Asahi Shimbun is in any sense a newspaper representing Japan.

The poor judgment of an Asahi editorial writer reminiscent of Katsuichi Honda.
He praises the AIIB in his column and criticizes the Abe administration.
Shintarō Ryūzō boasts of “Japan’s NYT.”

From the days of the Sulzbergers, The New York Times has arrogantly said, “If we write it, that becomes the news.”
Because, after all, it has already won some twenty Pulitzer Prizes.

But Pulitzer was the owner of the New York World, a leading yellow paper that churned out endless lies such as “I was abducted by a UFO” and “the Japanese army massacred fifty thousand people at Port Arthur.”
It was even said that the criterion for selecting this prize was how plausibly one could write a lie.

And in fact, The New York Times wrote mountains of lies.
When the first report arrived that “the Japanese fleet had sunk twelve Russian armored battleships” in the Battle of Tsushima, they thought yellow people could never defeat white people.
Declaring the first report false, they printed the lie that “the sailors of the Russian fleet had mutinied and pulled out the kingpin.”

Many of the paper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning articles were also false.
Walter Duranty, who won the prize by lavishly praising Stalin, was later sued by Ukrainian immigrants for having written lies.
When Columbia University investigated, it found that Stalin’s rule had been hell itself.
In Ukraine, just as the immigrants claimed, millions had died through starvation and massacre.
Columbia University concluded that there was not a shred of credibility in Duranty’s articles.

But the prize was never revoked.
Because the article had been written exactly as Pulitzer wanted, in a thoroughly plausible way.

Whether Shintarō Ryūzō knew that reality or not, he began saying, “The Asahi Shimbun is Japan’s New York Times.”
“If we write it, that becomes the news.”
After that, they simply copied The New York Times outright.

The one cast in the role of Duranty was Akioka Ieshige of the Beijing bureau.
He fashioned Mao Zedong, who killed thirty million people, into a leader overflowing with benevolence, and praised the bloody Cultural Revolution unfolding before his very eyes as something very good.

To be continued.