This essay examines the fact that NHK’s investigation report on the alleged staging in “Close-Up Gendai” itself drew doubt and resistance from within the organization, questioning the responsibility and structural pathology of a public broadcaster.
Read alongside Masayuki Takayama’s criticism of NHK, it sharply brings into view the deterioration of program production and investigative reporting through the voices of reporters, regional staff, freelance directors, and former NHK personnel.

2019-07-12
One must read this article with it firmly engraved in one’s mind, and must reread the essay by Masayuki Takayama that I introduced yesterday to the world.
The following is a chapter I published on 20185/1.
What follows is an article I discovered online this morning.
It proves that Masayuki Takayama’s assessment of NHK is entirely correct.
At the same time…
it shows that NHK’s news division produces programs and has people within the organization call them “anchors,” making them utter comments unworthy of news reporters…
and those comments are childish and vulgar in the extreme, the sort that brandish a self-tormenting view of history and political correctness in line with the editorial tone of the Asahi Shimbun.
All Japanese people who watch these comments believing them to be correct, comments that only lower Japan’s national strength and inflict great damage upon the country…
must read this article carefully and reread the Masayuki Takayama essay that I introduced to the world yesterday.
Dissent Even from Within NHK over the Close-Up Gendai Investigation Report.
https://seedsfornews.com/2015/05/nhk_close-up-gendai/
On April 28, NHK released an investigation report regarding the allegations of staging in “Close-Up Gendai.”
The report examined the May 14, 2014 broadcast, “Close-Up Gendai: Pursuing ‘Fake Ordination Fraud’ — Religious Corporations Targeted.”
In this program, a person who had testified as a broker arranging fraud claimed that he was not in fact a broker, but that an NHK reporter had asked him to perform, in other words, had asked him to stage it.
In response, the report stated that although there had been excessive dramatization, there had been no fabrication or staging leading to fabrication.
It also said that many of the problems lay with the reporter in charge.
It is written in an extremely clear and careful manner, but doubts about its contents have also arisen from within NHK itself.
(i-Asia Editorial Department)
As could also be seen from the question raised by a reporter at the presentation of the investigation report—“Wasn’t the conclusion decided first?”—few people believe that this report reaches the heart of the matter.
The same appears to be true even among NHK employees.
A reporter in the news division of a broadcasting station who had been a colleague of the reporter at the center of the matter at NHK headquarters said, after making clear that he had been warned not to speak externally about this issue, “In the end, it reads as if the reporter just acted on his own, and as if it were only natural that the superiors and the program supervisor, that is, the editor-in-chief, failed to notice it.
If they compile a report like this, what kind of reporting direction are they supposed to have desk editors take in commanding the field from now on?” voicing his doubts.
Meanwhile, a reporter at one of NHK’s regional stations expressed anger, saying, “In the end, this report says that the people at fault were the Osaka reporter and desk editor, and that the Tokyo program producers were deceived.
But ‘Close-Up Gendai’ is unmistakably a Tokyo program, and proposals from regional stations are subjected to very strict scrutiny.
And then, when the program wins an award, it is the Tokyo producers who receive it, but when a problem occurs, the regional station that brought in the story is blamed—that is outrageous.”
From a freelance director involved in NHK program production came the view that NHK’s understanding of “staging” itself may be too lax.
“NHK defines staging as conduct that goes beyond the bounds of reenacting facts and leads to the fabrication of facts, and says that what happened this time was not staging.
But everyone on the ground is saying, ‘What happened this time was staging, wasn’t it?’” he said.
There were also indications that the very composition of the investigation committee members was strange to begin with.
A certain former NHK employee said the following.
“The man at the top, Hikaru Dōmoto, was originally a political reporter, a person who has done nothing but build relationships with politicians.
There are former social affairs reporters on the investigation committee too, but they are people who have never done the kind of investigative reporting that is at issue this time.
For such people to gather and try to uncover the truth—well, that was impossible from the very start, wasn’t it?”