This essay questions how far the Asahi Shimbun and one of its reporters were tilted toward bringing down the Abe administration, through their defense of Kihei Maekawa, criticism of the Ministry of Education, and commentary on the North Korean situation.
By comparing Twitter posts with editorials, it sharply probes a line of argument that seems to benefit North Korea, the loss of fairness expected of a news organization, and the deep pathology of Japan’s postwar media.

2019-07-12
“Asahi” Showing Deference to North Korea.
The following is a chapter I published on 2018/5/2.
What follows is a continuation of the previous chapter.
The emphasis in the text apart from the heading, and the passages between * * , are mine.
“Asahi” Showing Deference to North Korea.
Meanwhile, Mr. Samejima praises former Vice Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Kihei Maekawa, who is said to have provided information to Asahi in the Kakei issue.
“What ought to be questioned is precisely the attitude of the Ministry of Education, which presumes it improper and gives guidance on the grounds that, at ‘a school where moral education is conducted,’ a ‘person who was deemed deserving of suspension’ and a ‘person who used dating bars’ should lecture there.” (March 17)
“Mr. Maekawa resisted the Prime Minister’s Office and spoke the truth on the Kakei issue, and he was made to resign as administrative vice minister and treated as deserving of suspension over the amakudari issue, which exists in every ministry. Even his lectures after resignation are subjected to state pressure.” (same day)
“It is probably not unrelated to the fact that the Abe Cabinet is always power-oriented and underhanded that it appointed Mr. Sugita, a former police official, as deputy chief cabinet secretary at the top of the bureaucratic apparatus. Whether it be the leak about the dating bar or the cover-up of the rape case, the methods of this cabinet are generally public-security-police-like and dark.” (March 18)
What is public-security-police-like and dark, Samejima, is your very appearance itself, and the nature of the Asahi Shimbun, though you are completely unaware of it.
The reason is that you are not merely a person possessed of a warped mind, but that to any decent Japanese person, you already appear as nothing other than someone caught in the honey traps or money traps of China or the Korean Peninsula… in other words, one of their agents.
The only people unaware of this are you yourselves, who make your living inside the totalitarian company called the Asahi Shimbun, and you yourselves will never notice or know it.
You alone also do not know that there is no one left in Japan who agrees with you except the likes of Kiyomi Tsujimoto, Tetsuro Fukuyama, Mizuho Fukushima, and Akira Koike.
This was a tweet criticizing the Ministry of Education for sending an email to the Nagoya City Board of Education asking about the purpose of the class and other matters after Mr. Maekawa had been invited as a lecturer to a municipal junior high school in Nagoya and had spoken during integrated studies class time.
At the same time, Asahi too, in an editorial, strongly criticized the Ministry’s response, writing, “The wording of the email reveals an intention to denounce Mr. Maekawa’s character. The Ministry stresses that it was merely ‘confirming facts,’ but it can by no means be called anything so mild,” and, “It is tantamount to declaring that this lecture itself was inappropriate. It is only natural to take it as pressure from the Ministry upon the educational field.”
(March 17 editorial, “The Inquiry Is a Clear Intervention.”)
Regarding the establishment of Kakei Gakuen’s veterinary school, Mr. Maekawa repeatedly criticized the Abe administration in Diet testimony and in the media, saying that “the administration was distorted.”
He may have been a convenient figure for Asahi, but he is a former senior bureaucrat with a questionable history, having resigned during his time as vice minister because he arranged prohibited amakudari placements.
His visits to dating bars are, regardless of whether they were leaked by Mr. Sugita or not, a fact that he himself has admitted.
As the head of a ministry overseeing education, it was not desirable conduct.
The Twitter post also referred to the North Korean Rodong Sinmun’s description of the Abe administration as being “in a स्थिति just before resignation,” and wrote, “For the Abe administration, what is more painful than the criticism of being a ‘lying cabinet’ is the analysis that it is ‘on the verge of resignation.’ It is not regarded as a negotiating partner able to sit down and negotiate steadily with an eye to normalization of diplomatic relations. The current governments of the United States, China, Russia, and South Korea will not fall for some time. If Japan alone has such a cabinet, it will fall further and further behind in the rapidly changing diplomacy of East Asia.” (March 31)
Asahi too, in its April 12 editorial, wrote, “The only neighboring country left out of the flow toward dialogue is Japan. This is also the result of clinging only to pressure, and the sense of having fallen behind cannot be denied.”
(“Japan Should Flexibly Seek Its Opportunity.”)
Both the Twitter posts and the editorial are the sort of content that North Korea would be pleased to read.
To be continued.