Published on July 15, 2019.
This article republishes a chapter originally sent out to Japan and the world on June 27, 2018, analyzing The Asahi Shimbun’s reporting posture as a disease called “anti-Japan.” It discusses how fabricated and biased reporting on the comfort women issue, the Nanjing Incident, textbook issues, and Article 9 complicated Japan’s relations with neighboring countries and damaged Japan’s honor in the world.

July 15, 2019.
Reporting on the Nanjing Incident and textbook issues, too, was probably the result of excessive narcissism, but The Asahi Shimbun’s reporting damaged relations with neighboring countries.
The following is a chapter I sent out to Japan and the world on June 27, 2018, and it is surely a chapter that both Japan and the world should read again.
Emphasis in the text other than the headings is mine.
The disease called “anti-Japan.”
I worked as a reporter at The Yomiuri Shimbun for more than twenty years, but I had long held strong doubts about The Asahi Shimbun’s reporting posture, which gives priority to ideology over facts.
When I learned that the article concerning Article 9 was a fabrication by The Asahi Shimbun, a feeling close to anger welled up inside me, because this was nothing other than a desecration of journalism.
At the same time, I also thought that behind a newspaper company systematically fabricating articles, there might be a “disease of the mind.”
Why does it fabricate?
Or rather, why is it able to fabricate?
As I thought about this, I remembered “historical research through psychology,” which a German historian had once spoken about.
The thought that perhaps I could psychoanalyze Japan’s left wing, such as The Asahi Shimbun and progressive cultural figures, was the reason I took up the pen to write The Disease Called “Anti-Japan”: Unraveling the Brainwashing of the Japanese by GHQ and the Media, published by Gentosha.
From Japanese conservatives, one often hears voices criticizing The Asahi Shimbun as “masochistic.”
Certainly, although it is a Japanese media organization, its posture of consistently engaging in reporting that damages the national interest may understandably appear that way.
However, paradoxically, I thought that in fact it may have a stronger “narcissism” than any other organization.
In other words, I formed the hypothesis that The Asahi Shimbun may be driven toward fabrication by a self-defensive consciousness that says, “We are good Japanese, different from the bad Japanese who do not reflect on the past war,” and by a worldview of rewarding good and punishing evil.
＊When I read this hypothesis, I immediately thought that the mental structure of Tsujimoto Kiyomi, originally an arrested criminal whom NHK, for some reason, broadcasts to the point of disgust, makes sense if understood in this way.＊
When I asked a psychiatrist about this hypothesis, he said, “Certainly, The Asahi Shimbun has many points in common with narcissistic personality disorder.”
Its symptoms can indeed be rephrased as “the disease called anti-Japan.”
Everyone has narcissism, but when narcissism becomes excessively swollen, it eventually creates friction with those around one.
In the case of The Asahi Shimbun, excessive narcissism causes friction with Japanese society and the Japanese people.
The worst example is its comfort women reporting.
Where articles should have been written on the basis of facts obtained through reporting, The Asahi Shimbun continued for many years to write articles based on the false statements of Yoshida Seiji.
Since it began with a lie in the first place, no matter what it wrote, it could only become fiction.
Reporting on the Nanjing Incident and textbook issues, too, was probably the result of excessive narcissism, but it is a fact that The Asahi Shimbun’s reporting complicated relations with neighboring countries and greatly damaged Japan’s honor in the world.
This article continues.