Originally published on October 20, 2019.
This article examines the Japanese media’s response to the abduction issue, the repatriation campaign to North Korea, the Korean Air bombing, Kim Hyon-hui, and the deportation of Kim Jong-nam.
Through a dialogue involving Takayama Masayuki and others, it discusses the Asahi Shimbun’s praise of North Korea, WGIP, communist ideology, excessive guilt consciousness, and the structure of postwar control over Japan.

October 20, 2019.
Until just before the abduction issue was exposed, the Asahi had been conducting a long campaign saying that North Korea was a paradise, and that people should return to the people’s country.
The following is a continuation of the previous chapter.
Saito:
I do not think all of them are like that, but such young people have grown up.
What this means is that the Japanese mass media may have been wrong.
After all, why have all the abductees still not returned?
Takayama:
And why do they write North Korea at such length as “the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea”?
Saito:
Its reality is the “Korean Totalitarian Repressive Republic,” isn’t it?
Until just before the abduction issue was exposed, the Asahi had been conducting a long campaign saying that North Korea was a paradise, and that people should return to the people’s country.
Takayama:
That was the only campaign in which the Asahi Shimbun ever did something good for Japan.
Since the time of Yoshida Shigeru, it had been possible to send back as many as 100,000 Korean residents in Japan, who had been a burden, without difficulty.
Saito:
They rushed to go back before others, joyfully and proudly, didn’t they?
And now this has finally become widely known, but even with the abduction issue, when my contemporary, reporter Abe Masami, reported the first scoop, the mass media effectively ignored it.
The media’s response to the abductions also led Japan astray.
Takayama:
The trigger that led to the revelation of Yokota Megumi’s abduction was the 1987 Korean Air bombing.
The perpetrator, Kim Hyon-hui, alias Hachiya Mayumi, was taken into custody thanks to the quick thinking of a Japanese diplomat.
And yet Japan handed her over because it was advantageous to Roh Tae-woo in the presidential election.
Through the investigation over there, it became clear that the person who had taught Kim Hyon-hui language was Japanese, but for South Korea, the abduction of Japanese nationals was someone else’s affair.
If Japan had directly interrogated Kim Hyon-hui at that time, it should have reached Megumi much more quickly.
Newspapers should have had a sense of crisis and driven a wedge into the political judgment.
Saito:
It is the same as when Tanaka Makiko, who was later foreign minister, so easily let Kim Jong-nam leave the country.
Even though he had come right into Japan, she immediately sent him back—a major blunder.
The mass media, which did not strongly resist that, were also at fault.
At key moments, the mass media were weak-kneed, and the government was weak-kneed as well.
As a result, China, the boss of communism that continued to grow arrogant, expanded to this extent.
Takayama:
After all, WGIP, communism, and guilt consciousness are linked.
Saito:
They are all linked.
Takayama:
The spokesman for them is actually the Asahi Shimbun.
However, when it comes to communism, it is strange to decide everything by saying Comintern.
Russians do not have that kind of ability.
One gets the impression that the Comintern manipulated China, manipulated Japan, manipulated Roosevelt as well, and moved the world.
But in reality, within America’s postwar policy, America shifted all the evil schemes it had carried out onto the Comintern.
It made it appear as though America was a country of goodwill and could not have set up something like the Hull Note.
That Stalin was incompetent can be seen from the fact that he completely believed the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact.
Saito:
That is not right.
It is not that the Comintern unilaterally did this or that to America.
Takayama:
If you say the Comintern suddenly intervened out of nowhere, the whole story collapses.
Saito:
It is a fact that it had infiltrated.
However, conversely, America may have used it skillfully.
Takayama:
The Asahi Shimbun speaks as if it were Marxism, but that too is different.
What they are doing is faithfully preserving the WGIP line laid down by GHQ, and, at any rate, implanting a sense of guilt in Japan.
It is a long propaganda war to justify America’s inhumane killing of noncombatants by targeting the home front, and the dropping of the atomic bombs.
The Asahi’s role is to repeat, at every opportunity, the stories created by GHQ so that they do not fade away.
As an expression of loyalty to the United States, the Asahi also created its own self-abasing stories, including the comfort women.
Because it was a false rumor in which the United States was not involved, its flaws also came out.
Yoshida Seiji’s lies have been exposed, and South Korea, which rode on them, is now in a dangerous situation.
Even so, America is shrewd, and in order to move Japanese journalism as it wishes, it still continues the Fulbright scholarship program for journalists.
Thus, pro-American and anti-Japanese reporters appear one after another.
Saito:
There are Fulbright scholars even at the Sankei.
Takayama:
Newspaper reporters should be neutral.
The United States has a large program not only for newspaper reporters, but also for scholars and senior bureaucrats, inviting them over and drawing them in—not only WGIP, but in the sense of postwar control over Japan.
Takita:
It is the continuation of the postwar order.
This essay continues.
The Turntable of Civilization (id:TTOCJapan), six years ago, Follow.