2014-12-11
The following is a continuation of the previous chapter.
The following is a continuation of the previous chapter.
Ryusho Kadota
Nonfiction writer.
Born in Kochi Prefecture in 1958.
Graduated from the Faculty of Law at Chuo University.
Working primarily in magazine journalism, he has covered a broad range of fields, including politics, economics, the judiciary, major incidents, history, and sports.
His books include The Reporters Went to the Sea: The Tsunami, Radiation, and the Fukushima Minyu Shimbun (Kadokawa Shoten) and The Man Who Stood at the Brink of Death: Masao Yoshida and the 500 Days of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (PHP Institute).
For I Dedicate This Life to Justice: The Miracle of Lieutenant General Hiroshi Nemoto, Who Saved the Larger Cause (Shueisha), he received the 19th Shichihei Yamamoto Prize.
His latest book is The Strait of Lamentation (Kadokawa Shoten), a work of nonfiction about the tragedy of the Bashi Channel during the war.
The introductory section is omitted.
A Major Campaign Coordinated with the People’s Daily
—It has increasingly been pointed out in recent years that various problems were caused by reporting in the Asahi Shimbun.
Kadota
I believe that one of the areas in which the practice of deliberately shaping articles brought about great misfortune was Japan-China relations.
In fact, I had been traveling to China every year beginning in 1982.
Basically, the Chinese people I met were good-natured and kind, and in those days I rarely had unpleasant experiences there.
However, things began to change dramatically around 1985.
At that time, Prime Minister Nakasone was promoting a variety of policies under the slogan of a “final settlement of postwar politics.”
The Asahi Shimbun was seeking to bring down his administration.
One of the tools used for that purpose was an attempt to prevent the prime minister from making an official visit to Yasukuni Shrine.
In August 1985, the Asahi published a special feature entitled “The Yasukuni Issue: The View from Asian Countries,” reporting on how people in various parts of Asia viewed an official visit to Yasukuni Shrine.
It goes without saying that people in Asia did not even know that there was such a thing as a “Yasukuni visit issue” in the first place.
The Asahi, which somehow wanted to turn the matter into an issue, had its correspondents throughout Asia write articles describing how people in their respective countries supposedly viewed the matter.
But no matter how much one read those reports, they hardly matched the Asahi’s own sense of the issue.
That was only natural.
People there simply had no particular interest in it.
The one thing that became clear was how desperately the Asahi wanted to prevent a visit to Yasukuni Shrine.
But that same month, the People’s Daily finally moved.
For the first time, it wrote in connection with a Yasukuni visit that it was “closely watching Japan’s moves.”
Then, on August 14, a Chinese government spokesman declared that “Prime Minister Nakasone’s visit to Yasukuni Shrine would hurt the feelings of Japan’s Asian neighbors.”
I thought, “Ah, they have done something that should never have been done.”
In China, where freedom of speech is restricted, the influence of the People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Communist Party, is far greater than Japanese people can imagine.
There have been Asahi Shimbun correspondents who, after retirement, became representatives in Japan for the People’s Daily or People’s China, or served as editorial advisers.
That is how close the relationship between these media organizations has been.
Even during the Cultural Revolution, when Japanese media organizations that reported critically on China were expelled one after another, the Asahi alone was permitted to maintain a correspondent in Beijing.
In this and other ways, it consistently maintained a close relationship with the Chinese Communist Party.
That was why I thought that, however strongly the Asahi might have wished to bring down the Nakasone administration for its own purposes, getting the People’s Daily involved was something it should not have done.
In the postwar period, Japanese prime ministers had visited Yasukuni Shrine more than sixty times.
Even during the six years from 1978, when the Class-A war criminals were enshrined there, through 1984, prime ministers visited the shrine nineteen times.
Yet not once had China treated visits to Yasukuni Shrine as an issue.
Then, in 1985, through the combination of the Asahi’s major campaign to block the Nakasone administration’s “final settlement of postwar politics” and the response of the People’s Daily, the matter suddenly became an international issue.
Yasukuni visits thereby became a diplomatic card for China.
—Until then, the Chinese Communist Party had maintained the position that “Japanese militarism was bad, but the ordinary Japanese people of today are different from Japanese militarism,” had it not?
To be continued.