Through Masayuki Takayama’s essay, this piece exposes Asahi Shimbun’s defense of the pachinko industry, Naoto Kan’s foreign donation scandal, and the structural distortions that Japanese society has long left untouched.
Against the background of pachinko being banned in South Korea while remaining protected in Japan as a source of profit for Korean communities and both Koreas, this essay questions the collusion between politics and the media that was laid bare in the aftermath of 3/11.

2019-05-30
Asahi Shimbun, without missing a beat, even gave a full page to a trade-paper reporter and had him lie that “pachinko parlors in South Korea were shut down because of corruption.”

This is a chapter I posted on 2018-09-25 under the title:
Asahi Shimbun Defends Pachinko… At a Moment Like This, Shintarō Ishihara Said We Should Crush Pachinko.

Readers who, following my recommendation, bought Masayuki Takayama’s book Masayuki Takayama Cuts Through: How to See Through the Designs of Asahi Shimbun at their nearest bookstore are no doubt offering the deepest gratitude to the author, while perhaps also feeling a measure of gratitude toward me, who recommended it.
All emphasis in the text other than the headline is mine.

Arrest Naoto Kan for Bribery for Defending “Pachinko Parlors”

Asahi Shimbun Swapped Out the Foreign Donations Scandal That Had Been Exposed Just Before 3/11

Mahjong Tables and Hanafuda in the Press Club

For some reason, hanafuda cards tend to carry a negative image, but in fact they possess a rather elegant charm.
The pictures of pine for January and plum for February have deep associations behind them.
Take April, for example.
It depicts irises and a bridge crossing a pond.
This refers to the iris pond at Yatsuhashi in Chiryu City, Aichi Prefecture, where a princess who had pursued Ariwara no Narihira is said to have thrown herself in, and where kakitsubata irises that preserve her beauty bloom magnificently in spring.
“Karakoromo / kitsutsu narenishi / tsuma shi areba…”
Narihira also composed a poem weaving in the word kakitsubata.
September is chrysanthemum and a sake cup.
It derives from the Chōyō banquet on the ninth day of the ninth month, when chrysanthemum blossoms were floated in sake cups in hopes of long life.
October is maple leaves and a deer.
It illustrates Sarumaru Dayū’s poem, “Deep in the mountains / trampling through crimson leaves / cries the deer…,” but because the deer in the picture turns its head away, the term shikato, “October’s deer,” became even more famous.
November shows a willow in the rain, a frog, and Ono no Michikaze.
When Ono no Michikaze, later counted among the Three Great Calligraphers, was young, he nearly gave up in despair.
At that moment, seeing a frog strive single-mindedly to leap onto a willow branch inspired him anew.
As with shikato, many words are linked to hanafuda.
Calling venison momiji is one example, and calling horsemeat sakura is said to derive from the dodoitsu verse, “Why tie your horse beneath blooming cherry blossoms? / If the horse stirs, the blossoms will scatter.”
Based on such motifs, one enjoys koi-koi by collecting red poetry slips, blue slips, boar-deer-butterfly, and bright cards such as pine, cherry, pampas grass, and paulownia.
It has fallen out of fashion now, but in old press clubs it was taken for granted that mahjong tables, hanafuda cards, and bowls would always be on hand.
If only one person was idle, he would read the newspaper; if two were idle, they would place a cushion between them and scatter the hanafuda cards.
That was the scenery of the press club.

Nintendo’s Hanafuda Became a Hit in South Korea

It must have been two decades ago that I first learned those hanafuda cards had an international dimension.
When Nintendo’s Wii became a worldwide hit, a South Korean newspaper wrote that “we Koreans raised Nintendo into what it is today.”
At first I thought this was another boast like “We Koreans made the Japanese sword,” but that was not the case.
In its early years, Nintendo exported hanafuda to South Korea, where they became an explosive hit.
They call it hwatu, and now they have arbitrarily changed the red poetry-slip phrase “aka yoroshi” into Hangul, replaced the nightingale on the plum card with a magpie, and dressed Ono no Michikaze in some ridiculous local outfit.
In other words, the point of the article was that hanafuda spread widely through South Korean homes and workplaces and made Nintendo wealthy.
And that thanks to those sales, the basis was laid for today’s Nintendo as a global game-software company.
The tone is self-important, but apparently it is not entirely exaggerated.
Once they start a game, they wear a pack of cards to pieces in a single night, and unable to wait until morning, they go buy more at a 24-hour convenience store.
Apparently this still generates quite respectable sales.

As one can see from their current anti-Japan uproar, they do everything to the utmost.
Roughly half of them are Christians, and even their church services are pursued to the utmost.
The words of prayer eventually become screams, shaking the church like an earthquake, and ending in fainting and frenzy.
There are mountains of splinter sects such as the Unification Church, and among them are groups that literally train in the mountains.

Even Though South Korea Banned Pachinko

The believers cling to trees and pray until they lose themselves, and in the end shake down even massive trees of a size a man can barely embrace.
The fact that South Korea’s mountains, once reforested by Japan, are turning barren again is partly because of such churches.
To such a nation of obsession, pachinko, even more addictive as a gambling device than hanafuda, came in from Japan.
Even Japanese, who still possess more restraint than they do, end up causing tragedies of household collapse without end: shutting their children up at home and starving them, leaving them in scorching hot cars and roasting them to death, falling into debt hell and driving housewives into prostitution…。
There is no way a people so prone to obsession that they shake down trees would fail to become addicted to that.
For pachinko alone, people commit murder, people commit robbery, simply because they have run out of money.
Because the harm had become so enormous, in June 2008 Roh Moo-hyun issued a ban on pachinko and took the drastic step of shutting down 15,000 parlors nationwide.
This too was a fact we knew absolutely nothing about, those of us who had simply subscribed to Asahi and watched their television stations and NHK.
It was that president with the wide-eyed cosmetic surgery.
Even so, there are people who cannot forget pachinko.
“Five hundred thousand South Koreans a year come to Fukuoka for that purpose,” Asahi Shimbun reported on March 3 of last year.

Of Japan’s pachinko parlors, 90 percent are run by resident Koreans, and the remaining 10 percent by naturalized former resident Koreans.
They generate 20 trillion yen in annual sales, and some portion of that is sent through Mindan and Chongryon to Park Geun-hye and Kim Jong-un.
Pachinko is outwardly not gambling, but through prize-exchange offices it can be converted into cash.
It is open gambling, and moreover it creates addiction, destroys people’s lives, and produces crime.
It makes no sense that even haphazard South Korea banned pachinko, while Japan leaves it untouched, and moreover it enriches resident Koreans and both North and South Korea.

Then 3/11 happened.
While all of Japan was saving electricity and mourning, in front of stations there were pachinko parlors still blazing with gaudy illumination, clattering away in open gambling.

Asahi Shimbun Defends Pachinko

At such a moment, Shintarō Ishihara said we should crush pachinko.
The only ones who would suffer from that would be loafers playing on welfare payments or addicted South Koreans flying in from Seoul.
It really was a perfect opportunity to crush it once and for all.
And yet the Kan administration of the time rejected the proposal.
It had come to light just before 3/11 that Kan had received political donations from a Korean pachinko parlor operator.
Out of gratitude for that, Kan moved to defend pachinko.
That is what one calls bribery, and yet the prosecutors never even brought charges.
Asahi Shimbun, without missing a beat, even gave a full page to a trade-paper reporter and had him lie that “pachinko parlors in South Korea were shut down because of corruption.”
It further had Professor Naoko Takiguchi of Otani University say that since the industry employs 300,000 people, “it is difficult to ban it from the standpoint of employment.”
Scholars who speak to suit Asahi’s convenience are as ugly as they look.
Does Asahi defend it to this extent because its president, Kimura Iryō, received even more than Kan did?
March 2014 issue.