I had planned to photograph the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, this summer as a continuation of a concert journey, but a chain of searches revealed the human networks and ideological structure behind it, leaving me utterly disgusted.
The unease I had long felt, as the result of my own “view from afar,” proved to be correct, and I decided to cancel the trip.
In this essay, I write about Meruro Washida, Daisuke Tsuda, Kozo Nagata, the NHK program alteration controversy, and the broader network surrounding NHK and contemporary art.

This summer, I had been thinking of going to Kanazawa to photograph the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art as a continuation of the concert journey.
Yet for some time, I had already felt a vague but unmistakable discomfort, the result of what I can only call my own “viewing from a distance.”
Tonight, while searching for something else, I came upon one fact after another in an almost linked chain.
I was disgusted beyond words.
Naturally, the plan to photograph the museum is now canceled.
It would not be an exaggeration to say that I may never go there again.
What I had sensed instinctively turned out to be exactly right.
Once again, I was forced to realize that NHK has become a hopeless organization, a breeding ground for masochistic views of history, anti-Japanese ideology, pseudo-moralism, and an infantile leftist mentality, all sustained by precisely this kind of human network.
The feeling it left in me was one of sheer revulsion.

As I looked into the museum, I learned more about the career of Meruro Washida.
He completed a master’s course in art history at the Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology of the University of Tokyo, became a curator in the Curatorial Division of the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, in October 2004, served as curator of the Japan Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2017, and left the Kanazawa museum in March 2018.
After that, he served as a curator of Aichi Triennale 2019, was Director of the Towada Art Center from April 2020 to March 2025, and since April 2023 has also been an Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Global Arts, Tokyo University of the Arts.
And at present, the official website of the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, carries a “Director’s Statement” under the name Meruro Washida, positioning him as the museum’s current director.
When I saw that career and his present standing, my immediate reaction was: what on earth is this.
I felt that the unease I had long held toward the Kanazawa museum had not been misplaced at all.

Then I saw the name Kozo Nagata, and I was stunned.
The very fact that he still carries influence struck me with deep disgust.
To me, it is no exaggeration at all to say that today’s NHK is Kozo Nagata itself.
If I search my own blog for his name, countless related entries appear.
Among them, the most emblematic are the chapters dealing with what I regard as the false reporting surrounding the NHK program alteration controversy.
Those writings discuss the 2001 NHK program on the so-called Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal and the 2005 Asahi Shimbun reports on alleged political intervention, along with the roles of VAWW-NET Japan, ties to North Korea, the falsity of internal accusations, and the broader move to bring down Shinzo Abe and Shoichi Nakagawa.
What I felt again, very strongly, is that this was not merely the problem of a single television program.
It was a problem of ideological bias and entrenched human networks that had taken root deep inside NHK itself.

The program broadcast in 2001 reportedly staged Emperor Showa and others as defendants in a one-sided people’s tribunal without defense counsel.
Even though repeated internal objections and demands for revision were made because of its extreme bias, it was still aired in a form that remained heavily slanted.
Then, in 2005, Asahi Shimbun reported that Shinzo Abe and Shoichi Nakagawa had intervened in the content of the program.
However, NHK’s internal investigation made it clear that those accusations and testimonies were outright fabrications.
Even so, Asahi Shimbun and figures inside NHK appeared, in my view, to move in tandem in an attempt to steer public opinion.
What I see there is not journalism, but activism.
And the more one learns that the people at the center of it were deeply tied to VAWW-NET Japan, the stronger the sense of revulsion becomes.
If a public broadcaster was being used to advance a specific political movement or anti-Japanese propaganda, then it no longer deserves to be called broadcasting.
And if the same atmosphere and the same networks extend into the spheres of contemporary art and cultural administration, then the instinctive resistance I had long felt toward the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, was indeed not mistaken.

I had intended to go there this summer and photograph it.
Now I do not feel that way at all.
The plan is canceled.
More than that, I can even say that I may never return.
To photograph a place is not merely to record it.
It is also, in some measure, to accept the architecture, the space, and the spirit standing behind it.
That is why I can no longer do it.
What I learned tonight made that unmistakably clear to me.
The vague discomfort I had felt was right.
My “view from afar,” after all, had not failed me.
To be continued.