Drawing on an excerpt from The Crimes and Punishments of the Mass Media by Masayuki Takayama and Rui Abiru, this chapter examines the relationship between the Asahi Shimbun and GHQ, the spread of anti-Japan sentiment in postwar society, and the process by which the image of Japan as an aggressor became deeply rooted in public consciousness.

2019-04-17
This chapter makes clear just how base and malicious the Korean Peninsula, China, and those who sympathize with their anti-Japan propaganda truly are.

This is a chapter I published on 2019-02-18 under the title, “The Asahi Shimbun moved exactly as GHQ wished in order to preserve the newspaper’s prestige and avoid being dismantled by GHQ.
There was no one inside the Asahi Shimbun who criticized it.”

This chapter makes clear just how base and malicious the Korean Peninsula, China, and those who sympathize with their anti-Japan propaganda truly are.

First published on February 10, 2019, The Crimes and Punishments of the Mass Media, by Masayuki Takayama and Rui Abiru, is a book that every Japanese citizen capable of reading print ought to read.

Masayuki Takayama, the one and only journalist in the postwar world, and Rui Abiru, the finest active newspaper reporter of our time, appear here in dialogue as senior and junior colleagues from the Sankei Shimbun.

One should not only go at once to the nearest bookstore and buy this book.
Elderly people, above all, tend to be the most vulnerable in terms of information, and many of them subscribe to newspapers such as Asahi, Mainichi, Tokyo, and Chunichi, while also watching NHK.
Readers must recommend this book to the elderly around them, and also to women who rely on television as their source of information.

This book is also kind to those with presbyopia.

The following is an excerpt from page 65.

●Anti-Japanese Tendencies Spread Throughout Society.

Takayama.
What was instilled into the Asahi Shimbun and NHK was Cordell Hull’s view that Japan must never be seen as a hero that liberated Asian nations suffering under colonial rule, and that no one must be allowed to think that Japan sacrificed itself and was defeated for the sake of Asia’s liberation.
They were required to rewrite history so that it was not the white powers but Japan, the aggressor, that had bullied and exploited Asia.

Abiru.
Since they kept broadcasting Shinsō wa Kōda after merely changing the signboard to Shinsō Bako, and since they serialized History of the Pacific War in their own newspaper, they could not survive unless they kept insisting that it had all been correct.

Takayama.
NHK still hasn’t corrected that, has it.
（笑）。

Abiru.
The Moritomo and Kake issues are the same.
Once they have gone on saying that Mr. Abe was in the wrong, they have to keep saying it.
At this point they can no longer say, “Actually, he had nothing to do with it.”

Takayama.
The Asahi Shimbun moved exactly as GHQ wished in order to preserve the newspaper’s prestige and avoid being dismantled by GHQ.
There was no one inside the Asahi Shimbun who criticized it.
GHQ, for its part, used the Asahi, which it had tamed, to carry out ideological control.
Japan did nothing but evil in the nations of Southeast Asia.
It killed 100,000 people in Manila.
In Thailand and Burma, it abused Allied prisoners of war, drove local residents into forced labor, and killed 200,000 people.
It reported whatever GHQ told it to report, including claims that there was a corpse for every railroad sleeper.
Meanwhile, Americans were portrayed as noble.
Langdon Warner, a Harvard professor, was said to have told the U.S. military to protect Japan’s cultural properties, and the Asahi Shimbun presented this as an exclusive scoop, saying that he had saved Kyoto from wartime destruction.
In reality, documents later revealed that the first selected target for the atomic bomb was a point 500 meters above the Umekōji rail yard west of Kyoto Station, where the first uranium-type atomic bomb had been scheduled to explode.
They were prepared to destroy cultural properties together with the entire city.
They seriously intended to burn 500,000 civilians, and to reduce Tō-ji, the stage of Kiyomizu, Kinkaku-ji, and Ginkaku-ji alike to ashes.
The Asahi Shimbun helped such barbarians disguise themselves as good people who had protected cultural treasures.
By doing so, the Asahi Shimbun was guaranteed its position as one of Japan’s representative great newspapers.
That line passed from Kasashin Tarō to Yōichi Funabashi, and now editorial chief Kiyoki Nemoto has emerged, and there is a sense that they continue to preserve that posture as though it were a secret tradition handed down from one successor to another.
There is no one within the company who says, “Isn’t this a little strange.”
And as this continued, the framework defining Japan as an aggressor was fixed in place and became company doctrine.

Abiru.
An acquaintance of mine had been working as a weekly magazine writer, but because he could not make a living, he found employment again at the Asahi Shimbun.
He was assigned to the city desk, and when I spoke with him before, he said something like this.
Watching them, you see that at first everyone is nonpolitical.
But if you write articles along a certain line, your superiors think well of you.
If you write along a certain line, your article is treated prominently.
And so the articles become more and more left-leaning.
And after writing nothing but such articles, the writer himself also becomes more and more left-leaning.
I once heard something similar from a member of the Hokkaido Teachers’ Union.
A person becomes a teacher because he wants to be a teacher, and at first he is neutral, or rather nonpolitical.
But the Hokkaido Teachers’ Union is quite red.
There are several union members in the schools, though not all of them.
They are loud.
Everyone gets dragged along.
Then one ends up joining the union as well, and becomes dyed in its color.
That said, I think this is because anti-Japanese tendencies, which began immediately after the war, had already spread throughout society as a whole.
When we were children, or rather in our boyhood, and even when we were around college age, there was already a sense that it was simply taken for granted that the Japanese military had committed unspeakable atrocities.
Then, beginning around 1990, the comfort women issue began to be reported explosively, and at first many people felt no doubt at all when they were told that “the Japanese military had forcibly taken them away.”
The indoctrination that equated Japan with evil had already taken hold.
Amid that, a small number of people kept responding little by little, “What.
That’s not true, is it.”
They painstakingly accumulated rebuttals and counterevidence, and only after that did we finally arrive at the present situation.
This is found in the Asahi Shimbun’s own records as well.
When they printed such accounts as Seiji Yoshida’s claim that women had been taken away on the Korean Peninsula and turned into comfort women, letters and phone calls came from people of the generation that had known those times.
Complaints saying, “The Japanese military did no such thing,” or, “Isn’t that a little different from the truth.”
Yet the writer of the Asahi Shimbun’s front-page column “Mado” even scolded them in that column dated March 3, 1992, writing, “There are things one does not wish to know and does not wish to believe.
But unless one struggles with that feeling, history cannot remain.”
How arrogant can one be.
（笑）。

Takayama.
The postwar settlement carried out by America was extraordinarily thorough in the sense that it aimed to undermine the Japanese people as a single nation from the very foundations.

Abiru.
This propaganda also served their own purposes at the same time.
It was not only a matter of defeating Japan.
They also wanted to teach their children that they themselves were clean.

Takayama.
America dropped the atomic bomb.
It was an unforgivable act of mass murder against noncombatants, yet they somehow went on justifying it.
First, Japan was said to be a cowardly country that had launched a treacherous surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.
Second, the Japanese were said to be cruel, and that if left alone for even a single day, they would slaughter thousands each day in the countries of Asia.
There had been an obligation to force Japan to surrender quickly.
If an invasion of Japan had been carried out, another two million Americans would die, and so on.
In any case, they kept rewriting history.
And so they led people to think that the atomic bombing had been unavoidable in order to force Japan to surrender.

Abiru.
Even at the Tokyo Trial, which began in 1946, the moment Japanese defense lawyers tried to mention the atomic bomb, the stenographic record was stopped.
That is how guilty Americans themselves felt at the beginning.
They were acutely afraid that Japan might someday hold them to account.
But within America, education steadily continued to teach that dropping the atomic bomb had been a sound measure for bringing the war to an end.
Americans themselves gradually began to believe that.
Of course, there are people who say it was wrong.
But most people now take the view that, in its own way, it was justified.
Education truly is a frightening thing.