This essay examines the enduring legacy of Marxist-Leninist thinking and pro-North Korean sentiment embedded in the Asahi Shimbun, the Japan Teachers’ Union, and the wider left-wing discourse of postwar Japan.
Through Motofumi Makieda’s admiration for Kim Il-sung, ties to Chongryon, the relationship between Nikkyoso and major newspapers, and even reporting on sex education, it reveals the ideological continuity that has shaped Japanese education and media.

2019-04-08
Motofumi Makieda, who served as chairman for twelve years from 1971 and was called Mr. Nikkyoso, once told me plainly in an interview that the person he respected was Kim Il-sung.
This is a repost of the chapter I published on 2019-02-16 under the title, The Asahi Shimbun praised North Korea, but other newspapers were similar to some extent.
And Nikkyoso was exactly the same.
Masayuki Takayama × Rui Abiru, The Crimes and Punishments of the Mass Media, first published on February 10, 2019, is essential reading for every Japanese citizen who can read print.
This book, structured as a dialogue between Masayuki Takayama, the one and only journalist in the postwar world, and Rui Abiru, the finest active newspaper reporter, senior and junior colleagues at the Sankei Shimbun, is also kind to those with presbyopia.
The following is an excerpt from page 162.

●Marxism-Leninism, the Asahi Shimbun, and Nikkyoso.

Abiru.
When one reads the writings of Hiroshi Hasegawa, formerly of the Asahi Shimbun, one finds that inside the Asahi there were rival factions, one pro-Soviet and one pro-China.
Both the pro-Soviet faction and the pro-China faction were equally worthless.
First of all, they were people who could not see reality.

Takayama.
Kim Il-sung of North Korea was exactly that structure.
Pro-Soviet or pro-China.
They fought and killed each other, and one side purged the other entirely.

Abiru.
According to Hasegawa, Marxism-Leninism was deeply rooted.
The Asahi Shimbun praised North Korea, but other newspapers were similar to some extent.
And Nikkyoso was exactly the same.
Motofumi Makieda, who served as chairman for twelve years from 1971 and was called Mr. Nikkyoso, once told me plainly in an interview that the person he respected was Kim Il-sung.
Makieda himself even went to meet Kim Il-sung and praised him by saying things like, “There are no thieves in this country,” and he also received a medal from North Korea.
The Choson Sinbo, the organ paper of Chongryon, introduced Makieda’s greeting at the Chongryon central convention in its October 15, 2007 issue in the following way.
“Japan, which was the aggressor against Korea, after the war neither apologized nor paid compensation, but instead raised the abduction issue while leaving unaddressed the reckoning for its colonial rule.
This has led to an abnormal relationship.
More than anything else, the starting point must be a reckoning with colonial rule.
Koreans in Japan are still today sanctioned, oppressed, and subjected to terrible human rights violations.
If Japanese people work together to eliminate discrimination against Koreans in Japan, lift sanctions, and push for flood-relief assistance to Korea, normalization of diplomatic relations can surely be achieved.”
This is absolutely nothing other than North Korea’s own line.
Moreover, Nikkyoso’s prefectural labor unions have maintained various exchanges with North Korea and have donated money as well.
And until very recently, the Asahi Shimbun and the Mainichi Shimbun did not write a single word criticizing Nikkyoso.
In the last few years, because the Sankei Shimbun wrote about Nikkyoso’s political activities, they have begun to mention it to some extent, but until then it was taboo.
At present, Nikkyoso does not stand out simply because it happens not to be much talked about.
One reason is that they are ideological comrades.
Another is that they can get advertising from Nikkyoso.
Nikkyoso places advertisements in things like Asahi’s newspapers for children.
There also seems to have been a stereotyped view that labor unions equal the good side.

Takayama.
That connection still has not been severed.
In March 2018, it became an issue that extreme sex education was being conducted at a ward-run junior high school in Tokyo.
A Liberal Democratic Party metropolitan assembly member raised it as a problem, and while the Tokyo Metropolitan Board of Education decided to give guidance, the ward’s board of education pushed back, and the Asahi Shimbun reported this prominently.
Immediately afterward, on March 30, the Asahi Shimbun ran an article under the headline, “Pregnant or Childbearing High School Students, 32 Cases of ‘Voluntary Withdrawal’ Recommended by Schools.”
The content stated that, “A Ministry of Education survey found that in public high schools across the country, there were 32 cases in fiscal 2015–16 in which schools recommended withdrawal due to pregnancy or childbirth, and as a result the students left school.”
But if one reads carefully, one finds that “voluntary withdrawal based on the wishes of the student or parent” amounted to 371 cases in full-time schools and 271 in part-time schools.
That means the total number who left high school was 674.
For a moment I was startled and thought, “That many?”
But when one thinks carefully, the denominator is about 2.3 million.
As a percentage, that is around 0.0003 percent.
It is an exception among exceptions and not something that can be generalized.
Rather, there were fewer than 700 such cases in all of Japan.
That seems to me a figure that should rather be praised, showing that social moral awareness is solid.
But the Asahi Shimbun does not take that view.
Instead, standing on a Nikkyoso-like judgment, it argues that more and more extreme sex education is necessary from junior high school onward so that girls do not become pregnant.
To be continued.