Originally published on October 20, 2019.
This article discusses how Japanese media failed to criticize China thoroughly after the Tiananmen Incident, thereby allowing China’s expansion through the Emperor’s visit to China and Japan’s ODA.
Through a dialogue involving Takayama Masayuki and others, it examines how WGIP, communist ideology, and excessive postwar guilt were embraced by left-leaning media such as the Asahi Shimbun and Mainichi Shimbun, distorting Japanese public opinion.

October 20, 2019.
The media allowed China’s expansion… to return to the time of the Tiananmen Incident, if, after that, they had criticized China thoroughly, taken the line that the Emperor’s visit to China must absolutely not be allowed, and held China by the scruff of the neck.
The following is a continuation of the previous chapter.
The media allowed China’s expansion.
Saito:
To return to the time of the Tiananmen Incident, if, after that, we had criticized China thoroughly, taken the line that the Emperor’s visit to China must absolutely not be allowed, and held China by the scruff of the neck….
That was the greatest chance.
Over these thirty years, that became the stepping-stone by which China turned into a country that has grown outrageously arrogant.
Japan allowed it.
You could say the mass media allowed it.
China should have been brought down from its very foundations.
Takayama:
It would have been good if we had realized it then.
China was actually happiest in the periods when it was ruled and enslaved by Mongols, Xianbei, or Manchus.
History teaches us that when the same Han people rule, as under the Ming or today’s Chinese Communist regime, the people can never become happy, you know.
[Laughter.]
Saito:
Internationally as well, I think both America and Japan were too soft.
The Tiananmen Incident brilliantly exposed to the world the very true nature of the Communist Party regime, but at that time the Soviet Union was about to collapse.
Eastern Europe collapsed with a rattling sound.
Two years later, the Soviet Union also collapsed.
So people came to understand communism as something that might become an ordinary country if it were given some things and treated more loosely economically and diplomatically.
Takayama:
That it could be tamed.
Saito:
They thought that if they tamed it, it would become an ordinary country, and even in America, Pillsbury, the longtime China watcher, reflected on that in China 2049, didn’t he?
Takayama:
They were earnestly getting deeply involved with China, weren’t they?
Saito:
Japan, too, knew that China was a country that did terrible things, yet over many years it gave China more than three trillion yen in official development assistance, or ODA.
It did so with the idea that China would eventually become a decent country, but together with the United States, Japan allowed China to become this arrogant.
We ourselves gave it nourishment.
Takita:
The media also bear part of the responsibility….
Takayama:
Whether or not the Emperor’s visit to China would be realized in the Heisei era, I do not think the general trend would have changed even if the Japanese media had awakened and opposed it.
The United States was also inclined that way.
In the end, Japan was used as others pleased and gave China both wisdom and money.
Saito:
In reality, China at that time was poor.
And then there was the sense of guilt that Japan had “bullied” China during the war.
Takayama:
They created that kind of lie.
Saito:
Looking at the major flow, first, after the war there was the War Guilt Information Program, WGIP, through which MacArthur thoroughly hollowed out the culture and traditions of the Japanese people.
Second was communist ideology.
It had existed since before the war, but before the war it was subject to control.
And third was an excessive sense of guilt.
Left-wing newspaper media such as the Asahi and Mainichi rode on these three, and they did so splendidly.
Commercially as well, they prospered greatly.
Amid that, the Sound Argument line was created as a way of saying, wait a minute.
But society, as before, continued drowning in Asahi-style assertions.
That the Sound Argument line must be firm now is a great proposition.
Takita:
Even if you praise the Sound Argument line that much….
Saito:
I’m not praising it.
Sound Argument also has some slightly biased parts.
For example, it is too soft in criticizing Russia.
Takita:
…Mr. Takayama, you have long taken positions different from the majority, but how do you feel about the fact that voices like yours did not become mainstream?
Takayama:
I was still a young newspaper reporter then.
From around that time, I went to the Middle East and Asia, and gradually came to understand the vastness and dark-heartedness of the world.
They say three years on a stone, but a reporter only begins to see the perspective of things after thirty years.
At that time, I was still in about my twenty-ninth year.
Saito:
Mr. Takayama was my successor in Iran.
Takayama:
That’s right.
Saito:
This is just small talk, but I went to the airport to meet him, since he was my great senior.
Then he was carrying a huge rucksack, and he said, “It’s my golf equipment.”
[Laughter.]
When I told him there were no golf courses in Iran in the middle of the Iran-Iraq War, he said,
“You don’t know, do you? There is one. It’s called the Shahanshah Golf Club.”
There really was.
He had properly checked it in advance.
[Laughter.]
Takayama:
Iran was the best place to study religion, from Zoroaster to Islam.
And being able to see war with my own eyes was truly a good experience.
Takita:
Recent reporters have no opportunity to experience war reporting as reporters once did.
Takayama:
I was in Iran during the war for more than two years.
I also came to know the abnormality of religious rule.
Once, I wrote an article that slightly mocked Khomeini.
Then I underwent a preliminary hearing in a religious court and had my passport confiscated.
I was threatened with either deportation or imprisonment.
In the end, I was forgiven on condition that I go to the front line to cover the Battle of Basra.
That was quite something.
I remember running around the battlefield saying “mitarsam,” meaning “I’m scared.”
Saito:
Going to a battlefield requires resolve.
Takayama:
My successor, after Iran, went to cover the disintegration of Romania and was deliberately shot at.
Fortunately, the bullet merely gouged the sole of his shoe.
Battlefields had always been dangerous in their own way, but around the time of the Bosnia-Herzegovina conflict, reporting journalists began to be deliberately targeted.
They might be made into villains by a reporter’s article.
That is infuriating too, but if a BBC or American newspaper reporter is killed, that alone becomes a major international story.
Killing one newspaper reporter became bigger news than killing a hundred residents.
So they began targeting newspaper reporters excessively.
Since then, I think the form of battlefield reporting has changed considerably.
That may be why war reporting has become nothing more than watching from a hotel window where the gunsmoke can be seen far away.
Saito:
War, and turning points in history, right?
Like the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Unlike academics who think only inside their heads and read only texts, when you go to the scene, you can see with your feet on the ground.
You can sense with your skin whether you should push forward in reporting or perhaps pull back a little.
Takayama:
A newspaper reporter is supposed to want to see everything, but recently there are too many reporters who know not only nothing of battlefields, but nothing of real society either.
Takita:
They are called “mass garbage.”
Saito:
That is because their true nature has become understood.
As I said earlier, I think the three elements that poison society combined to poison Japan’s mass media.
But it is only in the last few years that the true nature of these three has begun to be understood.
In such circumstances, I know people called internet rightists, the so-called netto-uyo, and they have something like a simple patriotism.
They say, I am Japanese.
Though I was born in Japan, why are we allowing China, North Korea, and South Korea, with their strange systems, to act so arrogantly?
Why?
I am sometimes asked such things.
Takayama:
That is normal.
This essay continues.