Published on September 18, 2019.
This chapter discusses the Asahi Shimbun’s prewar and postwar reporting stance, its coverage of the comfort women issue and the Nanjing Massacre, and introduces Masayuki Takayama’s critique in Henken Jizai concerning the Korean War, the Suita Incident, Iwo Jima, and the dismantling policy imposed on Japan’s industrial power.

September 18, 2019.
The exception was the thirty-six years of Japanese imperial rule, during which the yield of the fields increased, slavery was abolished, and people lived days filled with smiles they had long forgotten.
The following is a chapter I published on this very day last year.
Since August four years ago, I stopped subscribing to the Asahi Shimbun.
At first, I had continued to subscribe while only half-watching it, in the sense of monitoring its biased reporting.
But I came to think that this was not my role, but the work of people in the world of commentary.
So I stopped subscribing to it once and for all.
For that reason, I now know nothing at all about what kind of reporting the Asahi is doing.
Before and during the war, the Asahi was one of those chiefly responsible for driving Japan toward the opening of war with the United States.
Ozaki Hotsumi, a heavyweight of the Asahi who also took part in the Konoe Cabinet, was a Soviet spy.
In order to prevent Japan from starting a war against the Soviet Union, he not only drove Japan toward the Sino-Japanese War, but also crushed arguments for stopping that war, continued it, and brought Japan to the opening of war with the United States.
After Japan’s defeat, that same Asahi was not content merely to become the faithful servant of GHQ, turn itself into a mass of masochistic historical views, and continue writing anti-Japanese editorials.
In order to contribute to the Korean Peninsula and China, countries whose principle is anti-Japanese propaganda, it churned out countless fabricated articles, including reports on the so-called comfort women and the Nanjing Massacre.
Even now, although it has brought disaster upon Japan, it has not told the international community even one thing: that those were its own fabricated articles and not facts.
It is no exaggeration to say that there is no role for Japanese commentators other than to harshly criticize such outrageous articles by the Asahi Shimbun.
In this respect, there is probably no one superior to Masayuki Takayama.
In his serialized column Henken Jizai, published in last week’s issue of Shukan Shincho, he also informs us of an absurd editorial by an Asahi Shimbun editorial writer.
This essay, too, proves one hundred percent that he is the one and only journalist in the postwar world.
The emphases in the text, other than the headline, are mine.
A Korean-Marked Heaven-Sent Blessing.
The Korean Peninsula has either been in disorder or in stagnation.
It seems there were not many good times.
The exception was the thirty-six years of Japanese imperial rule, during which the yield of the fields increased, slavery was abolished, and people lived days filled with smiles they had long forgotten.
But the moment that ended, they started a war among themselves.
The Japanese used to think it was a troublesome habit, but a certain Nakano, an editorial writer of the Asahi Shimbun, introduced a strange view in a recent column, saying, “That is a completely mistaken idea. Japan bears great responsibility for that war.”
The column first criticizes the way newspapers at the time wrote, “Keijō Falls.”
It is not Keijō.
It is Seoul, is it not?
Why report it so insensitively using a colonial-era name?
One tilts one’s head, wondering whether this is really a matter worthy of such anger, but in any case, Keijō fell.
In response to this North Korean invasion, the dispatch of United Nations forces was decided.
MacArthur became their head, and “the U.S. occupation forces stationed in Japan” went out.
The weapons and ammunition of the U.S. military were “unloaded at Kobe Port and transported by Japanese people by freight car to Maizuru.”
He blames Japan for being so deeply involved, but then what should Japan have done?
Yes.
Nakano holds up the Suita Incident as an example of what should have been done.
In that incident, “Koreans residing in Japan and others” attacked the Suita rail yard, the base for ammunition transport trains, threw Molotov cocktails, and set Japanese National Railways employees ablaze.
The column quotes the words of a Korean resident in Japan who took part in the disturbance: “If we delay the military train by one hour, the lives of a thousand compatriots will be saved.”
In short, he seems to be saying that one should carry out an antiwar movement like Beheiren, but the compatriots who would be saved if ammunition did not reach the United Nations forces were the North Korean army.
Why should Japanese people under occupation have had to oppose the United Nations forces?
That point does not become visible at all.
Nakano simply praises the actions of the Koreans residing in Japan who resorted to sabotage.
It is hard to understand, but let that pass.
The words of the Korean resident in Japan, “If we delay it by one hour, our compatriots will be saved,” catch in my mind.
A few years before this Suita Incident, the U.S. military had attacked Iwo Jima, one thousand kilometers south of Tokyo.
Eleven battleships and cruisers poured such fierce bombardment onto the island for three days that the shape of the island changed, and a first wave of thirty thousand U.S. soldiers landed.
They worried, “Are there any Japanese soldiers left for us to kill?”
But the twenty thousand defenders under Lieutenant General Kuribayashi stayed in underground caves and fought well to the very last man.
The U.S. military’s plan to annihilate them in five days was not achieved even after thirty days.
Why did Lieutenant General Kuribayashi’s defenders fight so hard?
If Iwo Jima fell, the B-29s could attach direct-cover fighters and ravage any place in Japan as they pleased.
The words of Lieutenant General Kuribayashi remain: “If our children can live in peace even for one more day, then one day on this island that we are defending has meaning.”
The Koreans residing in Japan are merely imitating those words.
If they had such resolve, they should have gone back to the peninsula, even by stowing away, and fought for North Korea.
They could have charged into a U.S. military base.
What meaning is there in rampaging against Japanese people in safe Japan?
Nakano shows no interest in that discourtesy.
Instead, he continues by saying that during the Korean War, Japan “recovered its sovereignty, and its economy also breathed again. One even heard the word heaven-sent.”
What heaven-sent blessing?
Japan was deeply involved as a perpetrator in the Korean War, which devastated the peninsula.
He concludes by saying that Japan should not forget this and should aid North Korea.
It is a conclusion whose narrowness of vision makes one weep, but the Korean War can indeed be called heaven-sent.
That is because at that time, Japan was being subjected, steadily and methodically, to the dismantling policy on the charge of having brought white imperialism to an end.
It was the work of dismantling Japan’s industrial power and reducing it to a level at which it could produce only pots and pans.
At just such a time, they started a war right next door.
As Korean history shows, when they start a war, they invariably have the habit of pushing it onto another country, in this case the United States and China.
The United States, onto which it was pushed, needed Japan’s high industrial capacity as a rear support base, and as a result, that capacity survived.
Nothing decent ever came of Japan’s involvement with Korea.
But once in a while, something decent does come of it.
I would like to rejoice in that honestly.