An essay dated June 11, 2019.
Drawing on The Crimes and Punishments of the Mass Media by Masayuki Takayama and Rui Abiru, this piece sharply criticizes NHK’s poll reporting, its treatment of party support ratings, the Asahi-style historical narrative, WGIP, and the anti-Japan media environment of postwar Japan.
It forcefully exposes the structure of impression manipulation against the Abe administration and the media’s “freedom not to report” when it comes to the opposition.

2019-06-11
Last night, at last, they did not broadcast the party support ratings at all… a splendid act of “deference” toward the opposition parties… in other words, the fact that their support rate was so low that one hesitates even to utter it… that itself is the real truth.

I am now adding to and reissuing the chapter I published on 2019-03-29 under the title, Even Today They Included an Item Such as “Prime Minister Abe’s Character Cannot Be Trusted” in a Survey of Fewer Than 2,000 People.
The Crimes and Punishments of the Mass Media, first published on February 10, 2019, by Masayuki Takayama and Rui Abiru, is required reading for every Japanese citizen who can read print.
This book, taking the form of a dialogue between Masayuki Takayama, the one and only journalist in the postwar world, and Rui Abiru, the greatest active newspaper reporter, senior and junior colleagues at the Sankei Shimbun, is also easy on the eyes of elderly people.
Readers should not only head at once to the nearest bookstore to purchase it, but should also recommend this book to the elderly around them and to women who rely on television as their source of information, because older people in particular are information weaklings, and most of them subscribe to papers such as Asahi, Mainichi, Tokyo, and Chunichi and watch NHK.
— marks my own words.
— marks additions made as of today.
Introduction.
This happened in 2017, but the Asahi Shimbun’s reporting on the series of suspicions surrounding Moritomo Gakuen and Kake Gakuen received the “JCJ (Japan Congress of Journalists) Prize.”
The JCJ Prize is supposed to be an award given to excellent journalistic activity.
It must be either some sort of mistake or a bad joke.
By now, Japanese journalism as an entire industry has gone astray.
Media outlets have even appeared that shamelessly insist they possess a “freedom not to report.”
The Asahi Shimbun in particular in recent years, having lost its senses, has degenerated into nothing more than a demagogue newspaper that bears a grudge and hurls words of curse toward the Abe administration and the Japanese people.
And JCJ says that it seriously awarded such a newspaper a prize.
The name of journalist weeps, and I am even more astonished by the response of the mass media, who do not regard this as strange.
Has Japan’s mainstream media already died?
When was it that such childish values came into being—that the mission of the mass media lies in anti-power speech, that liberalism alone is absolute justice, and that for the sake of anti-power and liberal ideology any amount of lying is permissible?
This is a perfect definition of the concept I noticed, “left-wing մանկ児病.”
The Asahi Shimbun openly declared exactly that in 2007, in its morning edition front-page lead article entitled “Revival of Journalism.”
That was not so very long ago.
But the roots are deep.
Japan defeated Qing.
It also defeated Russia, the strongest power of that time.
Both were wars fought out of the desire for self-defense, yet before it knew it, Japan had become the “enemy that must be defeated” by America, which brandished white supremacism.
Japan responded calmly to the war that had been thrust upon it, and even so fought as best it could.
Though it lost the war, Japan liberated all the colonies that had formed the foundation of white imperialism, and gave birth to a new era in which not only white peoples but Asians and Africans too could each stand on their own and govern independent nations.
“War is the continuation of politics by other means,” says Clausewitz.
In the sense that it quickly brought to an end white imperialism, which did not even regard people as people, one might say that Japan carried out splendid international politics, but for that very reason Japan took upon itself all the jealousy and resentment of white people, and under the name of postwar policy the form of the nation, its history, and even the ethnic consciousness of the Japanese people were physically and psychologically dismantled.
In their place there was implanted a masochistic historical view that Japan had been a cruel aggressor state that oppressed and slaughtered the peoples of Asia.
It was the falsification of history by what they called the War Guilt Information Program, WGIP.
The Asahi Shimbun and NHK stood at that very scene, knew it was false, and yet accepted Japan’s dismantlement and the masochistic historical view in order to ensure their own survival.
One might call it an emergency measure, but even after Japan regained independence they continued to preserve and still continue to spread those counterfeit values and historical views in order to justify themselves.
The Japanese themselves have begun to notice the distortion.
Shinzō Abe is one of the few politicians striving to restore correct history.
Just before launching his second administration, when he specifically named the Asahi Shimbun, which still clings to WGIP, and pointed to it as fake news, it may rightly be understood as a declaration of war for the sake of recovering correct history.
For the mass media, which believed themselves to be in an absolutely safe zone and felt no shame in reporting falsehoods, it must have been a world-shaking event.
And on top of that, it led to the great defeat of the Asahi Shimbun’s complete retraction of its Seiji Yoshida articles.
The reason they are now running wildly to crush Abe without caring about appearances is that if they are defeated in that, nothing remains for them but extinction.
Seventeen years ago, I too was inside the mass media.
I was just an ordinary newspaper reporter.
That is why I understand so well their hypocrisy and sense of privilege.
This book is a dialogue with Mr. Rui Abiru, a junior reporter from the Sankei Shimbun.
We are of different generations.
Our fields were different too, but even back then he was a capable reporter.
Mr. Abiru is now unquestionably a flagship reporter for the Sankei Shimbun.
He has both discernment and writing power.
We have remained in contact even after I became an OB.
He had been covering Shinzō Abe since the 1990s, and continued to deal with him through the dispiriting years after the collapse of the first Abe administration.
He is one of the few reporters who has recorded the many direct words of Abe, who has now become a key figure in the world.
As for that same Mr. Abe, NHK today as well (2019/2/12), through the fake reporting on the Moritomo and Kake issue created by NHK together with opposition politicians who are, it is no exaggeration to say, the agents of the Asahi Shimbun and anti-Japan states, again included an item such as “Prime Minister Abe’s character cannot be trusted,” and announced a survey of fewer than 2,000 people as though it were public opinion research.
Even the way Kuwako presented it on Watch9 was itself pure impression manipulation… she read it out as “against a support rate of 47%, the disapproval rate is 37%.”
If there were no intent to manipulate impressions, she would simply have said, “support rate 47%, disapproval rate 37%.”
Last night it was certainly support 47%, disapproval 32%, and the way it was broadcast was exactly as described above… by saying “against,” these agents who control the news division seek to emphasize and implant in the subconscious the idea that the disapproval rate is this high.
The Liberal Democratic Party’s support rate is always around 50%, while the Constitutional Democratic Party’s support rate is only around 5%, but on this point they make no announcement at all, and certainly have never announced anything like, “against the LDP’s 50%, the CDP’s support rate is 5%.”
Far from that, today they finally did not even announce the party support ratings… all Japanese citizens ought to infer that the support rate must have been unbelievably low.
Last night, at last, they did not broadcast the party support ratings at all… it was a splendid act of “deference” toward opposition parties such as the Constitutional Democratic Party, to which those people controlling NHK, whether genuinely Japanese or resident Koreans I cannot tell, are clearly sympathetic… in other words, the fact that the support rate was so low one hesitates even to utter it… that itself is the real truth… those who control NHK’s news division, while making their living from Japan’s state broadcaster, confronted with a fatal truth about the opposition parties they support—no exaggeration to say a pack of traitors and enemies of the nation, vulgar men and vulgar women who do nothing with the people’s taxes but carp and oppose while drawing annual incomes exceeding 42 million yen, a group beneath even petty thugs—
NHK put into practice the claim that not reporting the facts is also freedom of the press.
In order to secure the vested interests that allow them to do such things openly, they work with people such as Yūichi Kaido, the husband of Mizuho Fukushima, and Kenichi Takagi, and use the lowest sort of international vulgarian such as David Kaye, who makes his living as an agent of China and the Korean Peninsula, to complain at the United Nations that freedom of the press in Japan is being violated, against Japan, a country with the world’s highest freedom of the press and intelligence… after all, even if they continue fabricated reporting and inflict enormous damage on the nation and its people, they can still pose as great newspapers and face neither claims for damages nor abolition, such is the country with the world’s highest freedom of the press…
NHK, which is a state broadcaster, reports even a mere doze at an explanatory meeting as though it were a grave matter if it is inconvenient for the government, but does not even report the support rates of the opposition parties in the state described above… against a country that possesses the world’s highest freedom of the press, where they calmly exercise even the freedom not to report facts—
and it is precisely the children and grandchildren who must convey to the elderly, who rely only on Asahi and NHK as information sources, the reality that those who control NHK are the ones using a man lower than human refuse such as David Kaye to inform on Japan to the United Nations, because unless you tell them the facts, Japan will not be able to fulfill its role, as a country where The Turntable of Civilization turns by God’s providence, of leading the world alongside the United States for another 170 years.
Whether their puppet or their representative… on the flagship program Watch9, Arima repeatedly says that Japan is squeezed between the two great powers, America and China… unless this state of affairs, in which a state broadcaster calmly airs a cunning masochistic historical view that is itself nothing other than contempt for Japan, is corrected, we cannot avoid the danger of losing territory and the danger of becoming a vassal state of an outrageous country like China.
Abiru also possesses the vitality, amidst his busy life as a reporter, to write a blog under his real name and to keep publishing books one after another.
His columns are indeed highly popular even among the young.
His perspective is sound as well.
This book is the result of candidly discussing the proper form of Japan’s media with such a junior colleague.
I hope it may serve as even a small reference when thinking about Japan.