This essay sharply probes how television reporting in Japan, including NHK, has long relied on newspapers and suffered from a lack of reporting ability, drifting into self-tormenting historical narratives and fashionable anti-power posturing.
From the Unit 731 coverage and the Khabarovsk trials to the Tsubaki remarks and the Moritomo-Kakei issues, Masayuki Takayama presents them as one continuous pathology and severely questions how far Japan’s media have moved away from the truth.

2019-07-12
Television, including NHK, has a shameful characteristic.
It lacks reporting ability, and its normal pattern is always to make programs by referring to newspapers.
But now and then it puts on airs and makes a program of its own.
The “Unit 731” program NHK aired last year may serve as a good example.
The following is a chapter I published on 20185/1.
In the monthly magazine Sound Argument released today, Masayuki Takayama’s serialized column “Orisetsu no Ki” opens the issue.
His essay in this month’s issue too is a splendid one that strikes the very center of the target, proving without remainder that he is the one and only journalist in the postwar world.
All Japanese who can read print must dash to the nearest bookstore and buy it.
Why?
Because otherwise, one can never understand the true nature of things.
The emphasis in the text is mine.
When I watched the wide shows on the day after the recent newspaper holiday, Station A, Station B, and Station C all spent a long time on Shohei Ohtani’s great performance from two days earlier, and then came the power-harassment uproar over Kazuhito Sakae bullying Kaori Icho.
That too was merely a rehashed version of what they had done the day before, and they did not even take up the tense Syria issue that the whole world was watching.
Why?
Television, including NHK, has a shameful characteristic.
It lacks reporting ability, and its normal pattern is always to make programs by referring to newspapers.
But now and then it puts on airs and makes a program of its own.
The “Unit 731” program NHK aired last year may serve as a good example.
In the fourth year after the war, a war-crimes tribunal was held in Khabarovsk, and Japanese soldiers confessed to human experimentation.
A tape recording of that was found.
And NHK made a great noisy celebration of it all, saying, “Just as we thought, the Japanese military was cruel.”
But NHK is nothing but arrogant, and cannot do reporting or fact-checking.
Speaking of Unit 731, in the 1990s Bill Clinton, who disliked Japan, ransacked the U.S. National Archives in search of evidence.
Chinese cooperated as well, but not even the first character of “human experimentation” appeared.
This story is one of the tales GHQ fabricated for the sake of a self-tormenting view of history.
The excuse sounds fine.
“The humane United States, which does not conduct human experimentation, pardoned Lieutenant General Ishii on condition that he provide valuable experimental data.”
But one of the experiments cited, “vacuum killing,” turned out to be an outright lie from the circumstances of the vacuum deaths that occurred on the Soviet Soyuz 11.
Likewise, the “injection of syphilis bacteria into the eyeball.”
The course of that experiment is exactly the same as the experiment a U.S. government agency conducted at the same time on prisoners in Guatemala.
This was a human experiment conducted to learn the effects of penicillin, and seventy years later Obama finally acknowledged its inhumanity and apologized.
The United States also carried out human experiments on black people, and for that Clinton apologized.
It was this great nation of human experimentation that, pretending to be virtuous, fabricated the fiction of Unit 731.
NHK does not know even that.
The Khabarovsk trials were a fabrication modeled on GHQ by the Soviet Union, which had used 600,000 Japanese soldiers as slave labor, as an excuse to say, “The Japanese military was brutal.”
NHK could not see through that either.
It takes reception fees and broadcasts such self-tormenting lies.
No matter what the Supreme Court may say, nonpayment will continue to spread.
If television stations do independent reporting, they get hurt.
That is why, on the day after a newspaper holiday, every station can do nothing but rehash the previous day.
Television, perhaps in order to conceal such incompetence, suffers from a strange disease.
It is called Tsubaki Syndrome.
In the 1990s, the traitorous pair Kiichi Miyazawa and Yohei Kono appeared, and the LDP’s momentum began to fade.
Taking advantage of that, Tadayoshi Tsubaki, director of the news bureau, talked proudly at the commercial broadcasters’ federation, saying, “In the general election, our TV Asahi systematically carried out negative reporting against the LDP.”
The other television stations also got excited and said, “Ours is the same,” but the Sankei Shimbun reported it.
Tsubaki apologized for the remark, though he denied systematic negative reporting.
That was why TV Asahi was not crushed, but even now it shows no sign of having reflected.
Not only TV Asahi, but all the stations that raised the battle cry together with Tsubaki at that time have anti-LDP feelings at root.
This is not because they thought it through.
It is because they do not have the intelligence to think things through, and simply because saying “the media opposes power” sounds somehow stylish.
If one keeps this television characteristic in mind, the essence of the Moritomo and Kakei issues comes into view.
At the root of both Moritomo and Kakei lies the Asahi Shimbun’s grudge-filled hatred of Abe.
Because of Abe, the lies about the comfort women were exposed, the president lost his job, and with declining circulation salaries were cut in half.
In the Moritomo case, it was simply a story in which the finance bureau tried to deceive the swindler Ryuchi, was seen through, and got bargained down, but there Mrs. Akie’s name happened to appear.
Asahi aimed at a “soft target.”
It persistently brought up Akie’s name.
Television repeated it, and the opposition amplified it because it wanted to appear on television.
In the Kakei issue, on no more grounds than that Abe’s friend was the head of the school, they stirred up suspicion in the classic pattern of “money politics in which politicians and ministries joined hands.”
Because it was at the level of a Tuesday suspense drama, the television people were delighted.
Only, they cannot see the money, which is what matters in such suspense dramas.
In their incompetence, they still do not notice the absurdity of it.
Asahi too seems satisfied that it was able to make fools dance and turn it into a political situation, but as journalists this is shameful.
To be continued.