Written on June 30, 2019.
This essay critically examines Katsuichi Honda’s Travels in China and the China policy of then Asahi Shimbun president Tomoo Hirooka, arguing how the reporting on the “Nanjing Massacre” was formed and widely spread.
It points to the process by which testimony prepared by the Chinese Communist side was turned into newspaper articles without sufficient corroborating investigation, notes the enduring international impact of Asahi’s reporting, and calls for a thorough investigation into the “fabricated Nanjing Massacre” affair as the newspaper’s “final reckoning,” following its comfort-women reporting.

2019-06-30
What the Asahi Shimbun must undertake as its final reckoning is a thorough investigation of this “fabricated Nanjing Massacre” affair.

This is a chapter I posted on 2017-11-05 under the title: “This was a fabricated story that Tomoo Hirooka, then president of the Asahi Shimbun, had Katsuichi Honda write in obedience to the Chinese government.”
Furthermore, the following article is also posted.
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/nagatachoucafe7/e/54c2756a11c6ef1030acc1da4e9205f2
It is a laborious work entitled, “The Great Sin of Asahi Shimbun President Tomoo Hirooka. He Made Katsuichi Honda Write the ‘Nanjing Massacre.’”
In Travels in China, written by Asahi Shimbun reporter Katsuichi Honda, there is a description of the “Nanjing Massacre.”
This story was a fabrication that Tomoo Hirooka, then president of the Asahi Shimbun, had Katsuichi Honda write in obedience to the Chinese government.
Now then, let me introduce the full background in detail.
“Another postwar responsibility that the Asahi Shimbun cannot avoid.”
President Hirooka traveled to China while even skipping the shareholders’ meeting he was supposed to chair.
In 1964, China concluded the “Japan-China Journalist Exchange Agreement” with major Japanese media companies,
and under the condition that they would “not report anything unfavorable to China,” each company dispatched correspondents.
However, over reporting on matters such as the Cultural Revolution, Japanese media organizations were expelled from the country one after another,
and by 1970, the press stationed in China had successively withdrawn from the country.
Amid this, Tomoo Hirooka, then president of the Asahi Shimbun, stayed in China for a full month from March to April 1970, even neglecting the shareholders’ meeting he was supposed to chair.
While correspondents from other companies were being expelled one after another, President Hirooka received extraordinary hospitality, including a meeting with then Premier Zhou Enlai.
As a result, only the Asahi Shimbun was permitted to maintain a bureau in Beijing.
After returning from China, President Hirooka instructed reporter Katsuichi Honda to report from China.
From June of the following year, 1971, Honda spent forty days reporting in China, and the result was Travels in China.
Honda’s Travels in China began running as a serial in the Asahi Shimbun from August 1971.
However, in this series of interviews, the Chinese Communist Party Foreign Ministry’s Press Department had already prepared the “witnesses” on site, and Honda merely swallowed whole the stories of the “narrators” prepared by China and turned them into articles.
Later, when Honda received protests from readers who had read Travels in China, he gave the astonishing reply, hardly imaginable as the statement of a journalist: “I merely repeated exactly what the Chinese side said, so if you wish to protest, would you not do so directly to the Chinese side?”
Honda himself described this reporting, which required no effort even to find witnesses, as follows.
“In a sense, the reporting itself could be called easy reporting. The rails are already laid, and even if we do not look for interviewees ourselves, they are assembled for us by the other side. So the issue becomes how to draw out as much as possible from them in a short time, and moreover how to draw it out accurately. That is the issue.”
In other words, Honda published the Chinese side’s testimony as it was, without conducting any corroborating investigation whatsoever on the Japanese side, which had been cast as the perpetrator.
Travels in China is still being read today as evidence to pass on to the world the supposed brutality of the Japanese.
Moreover, with Travels in China and the series of “Nanjing Massacre” reports published by the Asahi Shimbun serving as part of the grounds, China has applied to register the “Nanjing Massacre” in UNESCO’s Memory of the World.
Now that verification of the “comfort women” issue has begun, what the Asahi Shimbun must undertake as its final reckoning is a thorough investigation of this “fabricated Nanjing Massacre” affair.
This article was posted on the Internet, the greatest library in human history, on 2015-01-23.