This essay sharply questions what happened to Japan’s mass media after GHQ’s large-scale purge of public officials, while severely criticizing the reporting posture of NHK and the Asahi Shimbun.
At the same time, through Hiroshi Yuasa’s article in Sound Argument, it examines the danger of China’s “Iron Curtain” design in the South China Sea and its attempt to enclose ASEAN, presenting postwar Japan and the current Asian crisis as parts of one continuous problem.

2019-07-11
Taking advantage of the gap created by the purge of as many as 200,000 of the most capable Japanese citizens from public office, people connected to Chongryon and others from the Korean Peninsula entered the mass media.
I am reposting a chapter I published on September 7, 2018.
It is from an article by Hiroshi Yuasa published in the monthly magazine Sound Argument (840 yen) under the title, “An Iron Curtain Is Being Lowered over the South China Sea.”
The more I read essays like these, the more strongly I feel this.
The subscription fee for the Asahi Shimbun is more than about 5,000 yen a month.
Many subscribers to the Asahi Shimbun are probably also viewers of NHK news programs, and here too they are paying reception fees.
And what you get in return is… the dreadful editing of last night’s Close-up Gendai…
Making its anti-Abe, pro-Ishiba line unmistakable… while those who keep repeating the phrase “public broadcasting” arbitrarily use that public broadcasting for their own purposes,
causing any decent person to feel sick at heart… and making one want to vomit at its childish malice…
That is precisely the sort of measure GHQ pursued immediately after the war for the permanent weakening of Japan…
Not only through the enactment of what cheerful fools call the pacifist Constitution of Japan…
but also by taking advantage of the gap created by purging as many as 200,000 of the most capable Japanese citizens from public office,
people connected to Chongryon and others from the Korean Peninsula entered the mass media,
and this must be clear evidence that the greatest site of that infiltration was NHK.
All we are made to do is read and watch astonishingly biased reporting.
And yet in the monthly magazine Sound Argument, which costs only 840 yen…
in the twenty-first century…
there are packed essays that are essential reading for those who wish to live as truly intelligent people.
Even so, that man with a face like a childish doodle…
strutting about as if he were the representative face of NHK news,
appearing as though he himself were a ruler of Japan…
what on earth does that doodle-faced man think he is?
A man who is nothing more than an NHK announcer enjoying the security of the very highest salary,
repeatedly criticizing the government while wearing the face of a statesman of Japan, is an unbelievable spectacle.
Why?
Because NHK is in effect Japan’s state broadcaster.
For that NHK now to be called traitorous and an enemy of the nation would not be any exaggeration at all…
Keeping step with the Asahi Shimbun, which likewise can be called without exaggeration an agent of China and the Korean Peninsula…
firmly believing that “the state is bad” and “the mass media are right”…
and continuing to attack Prime Minister Abe, who can now be called without exaggeration one of the saviors of both Japan and the world,
is a spectacle more bizarre than anything else.
Except for the headings, the emphasis in the text is mine.
The Crimeanization of the South China Sea.
Is Chinese President Xi Jinping intending to lower an “Iron Curtain” along the outer rim of the South China Sea?
This summer, just as the former Soviet Union once drew Eastern European countries into its orbit, China proposed to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) that they carry out joint military exercises in the South China Sea.
On top of that, on the premise that it already occupies 80 percent of the South China Sea, it has also driven in a wedge to keep the ten ASEAN countries from conducting exercises with “outside powers.”
By excluding the United States, which falls outside the region, China aims to secure a sphere of influence in the Western Pacific.
What Chinese military leaders once arrogantly suggested to the commander of the U.S. Pacific Command—“Leave the western half of the Pacific to us”—is gradually becoming a reality.
It was in 1946 that Britain’s Churchill announced the coming of the U.S.-Soviet Cold War by saying that “an Iron Curtain has descended across the European continent.”
More than seventy years have passed since then, and even though the Cold War structure in Europe has disappeared, remnants of the Cold War in the form of communist regimes still survive on the Asian continent. Xi Jinping’s envelopment of ASEAN seems almost to imitate, in reverse-running fashion, the old Soviet dictator Stalin.
What makes Xi’s method slightly different from that of the Soviet era is that he is lowering the Iron Curtain slowly, over time.
Although the United States is said to be in decline, its military and economic power remain the strongest in the world.
Mr. Yuasa is a splendid man, but the opening of this passage shows that even he has been poisoned by stereotyped ways of speaking. He ought to read the article published in the same magazine by Musha Ryōji.
Without rushing, and with its eye on the predicted reversal of U.S. and Chinese gross domestic product around 2030, this is likely a strategy to complete its design while using time to its advantage.
China and the ten ASEAN countries are now in the midst of drafting a code of conduct aimed at avoiding disputes in the South China Sea.
But the draft China proposed had embedded within it a dangerous “trap of encirclement.”
The aim of the code of conduct envisioned by the ASEAN side was supposed to be to create rules that would prevent China, which disputes sovereignty over the islands, from seizing them by brute force.
But China turned that demand to its own advantage and began to treat it almost as if it were a framework for its own security arrangements against the United States.
Not only did it write into the proposal regular joint military exercises with ASEAN, it also tried to ensure that “outside powers” could not participate in those exercises unless they satisfied the condition of prior notification to the parties concerned and the absence of objections.
In other words, China had secretly inserted a veto so that the United States would be unable to enter.
China’s weakness lies in the fact that it suffered a crushing defeat in the ruling on the South China Sea issue brought by the Philippines before the Permanent Court of Arbitration.
Ignoring the black-letter ruling that “China will not be allowed to monopolize the South China Sea” as mere “waste paper,” it fortified its artificial islands.
Their high-handedness resembles the action by Russia, successor state to the Soviet Union, when it broke international agreements and memoranda and seized the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine.
It is precisely China’s “Crimeanization” of the South China Sea.
If the ASEAN countries, which may be called the victim states, agree to joint exercises, it would be little different from admitting China’s high-handed behavior.
For China, it would be a golden opportunity to complete its self-justification and make ASEAN its sphere of influence just as it is.
To be continued.