Originally published on July 8, 2019.
This essay harshly criticizes the way reports on allegedly abandoned Japanese gas weapons accommodated baseless claims from the Chinese side and led the Japanese government, and ultimately Japanese taxpayers, to bear enormous costs.
Using an interview article with Ochiai Keiko as another example, it also sharply questions The Asahi Shimbun’s failure to verify facts and the deeper problem of fabricated reporting that recalls the Yoshida Seiji affair.

2019-07-08
Asahi and Mainichi have pandered to these baseless claims by Chinese people and in the end have steered the Japanese government, that is to say Japanese taxpayers, into paying as much as 60 trillion yen for the disposal of allegedly abandoned poison gas weapons.

This is a chapter I posted on 2018-10-22 under the title, “The article says the reporter in charge was Takahashi Misako, but why did she not investigate it and point out the lie?”
The following continues from the previous chapter.
False Articles Seen in Reporting on Gas Weapons.
After the last war, the Japanese military surrendered, was disarmed, and handed over all weapons to the Allied forces.
The same was true on the Chinese mainland.
In documents unearthed by Mizuma Masanori in 2007 and later confirmed by the Ministry of Defense, it is written that “tear gas shells and the like were handed over in Shanghai to Chinese Army First Lieutenant Chen Yonglu,” and similarly, documents have been found at the Siberia Museum in Yamagata Prefecture showing that weapons were handed over to the Allied forces on the continent.
Nevertheless, Mainichi Shimbun runs articles along the lines of, “A lawsuit was filed in the Tokyo District Court claiming that 44 Chinese were killed or injured by poison gas weapons abandoned by the Japanese military in Qiqihar.”
They were neither poison gas nor abandoned weapons.
Asahi and Mainichi have pandered to these baseless claims by Chinese people and in the end have steered the Japanese government, that is to say Japanese taxpayers, into paying as much as 60 trillion yen for the disposal of allegedly abandoned poison gas weapons.
They report with intent, knowing that it is false.
This is not the kind of thing that can be called a mere error in reporting; it may rightly be called a malicious anti-Japan act of terror carried out in the name of journalism.
That sort of malicious poison is even embedded in columns that appear heartwarming.
One example is the interview article with Ochiai Keiko that appeared in Asahi last month.
She comes from being a Bunka Hoso radio personality known by the nickname “Lemon-chan.”
She made her cuteness her selling point, and when that began to wither, she promptly shifted to Shukan Kinyobi.
Her role, perhaps, was that of the foolish big sister of the baby-boomer generation.
And what she talks about is antiwar, peace, anti-nuclear weapons, and anti-nuclear power.
No thought was required; as long as she repeated the same things, she passed as a progressive cultural figure.
The same was true in this interview article.
She talks of love, and speaks of antiwar and peace.
For fifty years she has gone on repeating the same lines unchanged.
What an easy life.
This Also Connects to the Great False Report of Yoshida Seiji.
However, there was a passage like this in it.
“At that time, public junior high schools and high schools required the submission of a family register.”
“My mother looked for a school that did not.”
For a moment I thought she might have been an illegal entrant without a family register, or perhaps had grown up in a household that concealed its origins like Renhō, but when she put it that way I remembered that she had been what was called a child of a kept woman.
In those days, children of kept women behind elegant black fences and pines were quite common even in public schools.
It was not an issue at all.
And yet she says that “public schools required the submission of a family register.”
If that had been so, it would have exposed the fact that she had a different surname from her father and was the child of a mistress.
Then she continues by saying that her mother struggled and sent her to a private school.
But this is strange.
One can tell with just a little checking.
Both then and now, to enter a public school one only needed to submit a resident record showing one’s school district.
The reason illegally entered Chinese could calmly send their children to school was precisely because Japan had no scrutiny of such matters.
Why does she tell such a transparent lie?
The article says the reporter in charge was Takahashi Misako, but why did she not investigate it and point out the lie?
And ordinarily, the desk in charge should also think that something is odd.
If so, then the desk should have pointed it out and told her to investigate.
At Asahi, they had not done the work of verifying things ever since the days of Yoshida Seiji.
That led to their great false report, and Kimura Iryō offered up his head.
The current Watanabe Masataka said he would verify things, hand on heart before God.
But this time again, neither the reporter nor the desk did so, and they let Ochiai Keiko’s lie pass through.
To be continued.