Written on May 2, 2019, this essay argues that even after its formal apology, the Asahi Shimbun’s basic nature would not change, and examines the relationship between the currents of socialism and communism in postwar Japan and the reporting stance of newspaper companies.
It criticizes the Asahi Shimbun as having continued its attacks on conservative governments while losing its larger goal and drifting into a state of decay in which it no longer hesitates even at fabrication, sharply pointing to the deeply rooted nature of that corporate culture.

2019-05-02
The present condition of the Asahi is that, having lost its goal of turning Japan into a socialist state, it is drifting.
As a result, it has fallen into such decay that it thinks nothing even of fabrication.
That kind of corporate character cannot be changed.

For the past several years, at this season I go to see the wisteria at the Manyō Botanical Garden of Kasuga Taisha, but on the train along the way, before I could even think about which book to read, the following chapter in this book caught my eye.
This book too is one that all Japanese citizens must read.

The Asahi Shimbun Adrift After Losing Its Goal.
On September 11, 2014, the president of the Asahi Shimbun made a merely formal apology over the reporting on the Yoshida testimony and related matters.
The details have already been reported.
The following day, various comments appeared, but the one that impressed me most was the sarcasm said to have been voiced by Shigeru Ishiba, then Minister in charge of Regional Revitalization, on a BS broadcast.
According to the Sankei Shimbun of the same date, he said of the Asahi’s reporters, “How much Japanese-language ability did they actually possess.
The Furuta testimony and the like are, no matter how you look at them, impossible to misread.
I have never taken the Asahi’s employment examination, so I do not know, but would they not require a considerable level of Japanese ability before hiring someone?”
The article’s headline was “Questions Over the Japanese Ability of Asahi Reporters” — and since that same Asahi Shimbun is in the business of administering a Japanese-language test called the “Vocabulary and Reading Comprehension Test,” this is already a black joke.
If that is so, then why not offer the following question next time.
From the following items, choose the single most sinful one.
① Military comfort women.
② Military nurses.
③ Military comedians.
④ War correspondents.
The correct answer is, of course, ④.
Once, a war correspondent of the Mainichi Shimbun wrote the impossible story of a contest between two Japanese officers in China to see who could kill one hundred people first.
As a result, after the defeat, the two men were immediately executed in a proceeding that could hardly be called a trial.
As for responsibility for such an article, it was as if the wind blew it away.
After the war, that reporter is said to have lived under the protection of China.

Now then, will the character of the Asahi Shimbun change after its apology.
Let me say it plainly: it will not.
Why.
Let me explain the reason.

The story goes back some sixty years, to my university days.
At that time there existed a great ideological current aiming to turn Japan into a socialist state, or if possible a communist one.
And it carried a certain air of reality.
At the university, there were many teachers and students who believed that the purpose of scholarship and research was precisely that.
In society too, there were many such groups, existing and active in the same way.
Naturally, newspaper companies with many supporters of socialism and communism made criticism of conservative governments their first priority.
There are people who say that fairness should be the first principle of newspaper discourse, but that is absurd to the point of affectation.
First of all, they already had a certain ideological position, and their objective was for Japan to become a colony of their homeland, the Soviet Union, at that time.
Everything under the Soviet flag.
But then that Soviet Union collapsed, and so they lost their goal.
Yet the character formed over many years, such as criticism of conservative governments, is not something that can be changed so easily.
They have gone on, unchanged, resting arrogantly in that habit of criticizing conservative governments, right up to the present day.
At any rate, if one goes on speaking ill of conservative governments, one can make it look like “high-level criticism,” and that completes the job.
But the present condition of the Asahi is that, having lost its goal of turning Japan into a socialist state, it is drifting.
As a result, it has fallen into such decay that it thinks nothing even of fabrication.
That kind of corporate character cannot be changed.
In ancient China, there was a man who stole a bell and fled with it, but it was large and heavy.
So, trying to break it into pieces and gather it up, he smashed the bell, and it made a tremendous noise
(a report of a tremendous lie).
Fearing that others might hear it and come to seize the bell, as the ancients said, he covered his own ears.