Published on January 30, 2020. Citing Takayama Masayuki’s column “China Is Number One” in Shukan Shincho, this article criticizes the Asahi Shimbun’s reporting stance toward China through its wording in coverage of the novel coronavirus from Wuhan, the Japan-China press agreement, Honda Katsuichi’s “Journey to China,” reports on alleged Japanese military poison gas, and the poisoned dumpling incident. It also refers to the history of infectious diseases originating in China and discusses the problem of Japanese media distorting facts to protect China.

January 30, 2020
The next president, Watanabe Seiki, reported Japanese military smoke screens as “poison gas,” and Nakae Toshitada fabricated the lie that “the Japanese military had abandoned poison-gas shells,” making the Japanese government offer one trillion yen in disposal costs to China.
The following is from Takayama Masayuki’s serialized column, published in today’s Shukan Shincho under the title “China Is Number One.”
This article, too, proves that he is the one and only journalist in the postwar world, but readers will also notice my own greatness.
I feel relieved that I truly did well to stop subscribing to the Asahi Shimbun, but even so, the Asahi is terrible.
The first article the Asahi Shimbun reported about the pandemic that had broken out in China was about “a man in his thirties infected after returning from Wuhan after the New Year holidays.”
It continued, “He had close contact with a patient during travel.”
When one reads “returning” and “during travel,” anyone would think the patient was an unfortunate Japanese traveler.
But according to social media on the same day, the patient was clearly a Chinese person living in Kanagawa Prefecture.
At Narita, he entered Japan with a Chinese passport.
It was neither “returning” nor “during travel.”
Moreover, this Chinese man’s behavior was extremely malicious.
The beginning was December 8 of the previous year, when pneumonia patients began appearing one after another at a seafood market in Wuhan, and the number of patients kept increasing.
On New Year’s Eve, the city announced that the cause was a novel coronavirus.
It was the same kind of virus as SARS, which killed 774 people around Hong Kong two decades earlier.
Around that time, the Chinese man in question returned to his family home in Wuhan.
The market was closed, and the city was in an uproar.
Moreover, his father at home was coughing badly, and he himself soon developed a high fever.
But in China, hospitals will not see you without money and do not provide decent treatment.
So he returned to Japan.
Here, even a foreigner can receive high-quality treatment under health insurance.
He did not report anything at quarantine in Narita.
He deceived the thermal detector with fever-reducing medicine.
Once he had entered the country, he could no longer be expelled.
He went to the hospital, reported his infection, was hospitalized, and then was discharged in good health.
Professor Okada Harue of Hakuoh University said on a TV Asahi program, “Don’t be ridiculous.”
In a certain sense, he was a “walking biological weapon.”
A man like this should, at the very least, be deported.
The Asahi defends such a wrongdoer.
Even after the number of dead reached double digits and even nurses had become infected, it continued to write that “there is no human-to-human transmission.”
A month and a half after the outbreak, Beijing finally sealed off Wuhan, a city of ten million people.
It is somehow strikingly similar to Raccoon City in “Biohazard.”
The story continues in a way that resembles the plot exactly, with infected people escaping from the city and developing symptoms in Tokyo.
And yet the Asahi praises China, saying that this time the “leadership took decisive measures” because it had the “trauma of having concealed the SARS outbreak for three months and expanded the damage.”
Three months and one and a half months.
In what way was that decisive?
It distorts the facts to this extent in order to protect China’s honor.
Where does such consideration come from?
Long ago, a Japan-China press agreement was concluded, stipulating that “nothing inconvenient to China shall be written.”
Immediately afterward, the Cultural Revolution occurred, in which thirty million Chinese people died.
When Japanese reporters reported that fact, China expelled everyone except the Asahi, saying that they had “written something inconvenient.”
That is strange, so the agreement must be revised, and Okazaki Kaheita appeared from the Japanese side.
In reality, Okazaki was a man who was almost like an agent of Midoro Masakazu, president of the Asahi Shimbun and an advocate of Japan-China friendship.
Having been indoctrinated by Midoro, he sincerely believed that “Japan did the same thing to the Chinese that the Nazis did.”
The revised version was actually made worse, and reporting became a matter of “lies are acceptable; China’s convenience must simply be given the highest priority.”
To celebrate the revision, China arrested a Nikkei reporter, and Hirooka Tomoo, Midoro’s successor, had Honda Katsuichi serialize “Journey to China.”
It was a rare series in which the only facts were the dates.
The next president, Watanabe Seiki, reported Japanese military smoke screens as “poison gas,” and Nakae Toshitada fabricated the lie that “the Japanese military had abandoned poison-gas shells,” making the Japanese government offer one trillion yen in disposal costs to China.
On the other hand, when Japanese people nearly died from poisonous dumplings from China, the Asahi wrote “food poisoning.”
The dumplings were treated as if they were relatives of pufferfish.
The reason the Asahi lines up lies to such an extent is that it has convinced itself that China has no redeeming qualities, but that is wrong.
China has creativity that no other country can imitate.
It forgets that most lethal epidemics, including Wuhan pneumonia, were produced by China.
Even the Black Death, which in ancient times halved the population of Europe, leads back to China if one traces the source of infection.
In the mid-twentieth century, one million people died from the Asian flu from Yunnan, and sixty thousand people died from the Hong Kong flu.
SARS at the beginning of this century was born in Guangdong.
In all cases, it is said that the soil from which they arose was the world’s greatest filth, something that cannot be reproduced in a laboratory.
If the Asahi wrote about that excellence, China would surely be pleased.
I think.