2020-12-31
The following is from Japan Keisei, the column serialized by Masayuki Takayama in the monthly magazine THEMIS, which arrived today.
It is an article worthy of bringing 2020 to a close.
This article also proves that he is the one and only journalist in the postwar world.
It is essential reading not only for the Japanese people but for people throughout the world.
Successive Presidents of the Asahi Shimbun Spread Cunning Lies
After “The Japanese Military Was Evil,” It Now Seeks to Attack Japan Over “Aging Nuclear Power Plants”
It Lied That a Photograph of Smoke Showed a Poison-Gas Operation
Asahi Shimbun presidents customarily change in June, when the shareholders’ meeting is held, but Seiki Watanabe resigned in December 1984.
More precisely, he made reporters write a lie and resigned to take responsibility when it was exposed.
That lie was “This Is a Poison-Gas Operation,” accompanied by a photograph of billowing smoke that appeared on the front page of the Asahi Shimbun on October 31 of the same year.
The Japanese military was this brutal.
Japan committed every conceivable evil in China.
The Asahi Shimbun had finally brought to light a “hidden truth” that appeared to illustrate perfectly its habitual claim that Japan must repent to China and repent before the world.
There was even an irrefutable evidentiary photograph.
One can almost see Seiki Watanabe leaning back arrogantly and asking, “Are you impressed?”
In fact, Watanabe had a reason for becoming so worked up.
Following the example of his predecessor, Tomoo Hirooka, he had poured out a great deal of sloppy, self-denigrating historical material, including the claim that seven thousand Koreans who worked on the construction of the underground Imperial General Headquarters in Matsushiro had been disposed of.
On September 22, shortly before the poison-gas story, the newspaper also reported, under the headline “The Nanjing Massacre Was True,” and alongside a photograph showing severed heads scattered everywhere, that the Miyakonojō Regiment of the Sixth Division, which spearheaded the entry into Nanjing, “went around brutally murdering Nanjing citizens day after day.”
Those concerned were shocked by this attempt to demean and disgrace the highly decorated Miyakonojō Regiment, which had fought in both the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars, and protested to both the Miyazaki bureau and the Asahi Shimbun’s head office.
It was subsequently established that the photograph of the severed heads had been taken when Chinese forces executed bandits in Lingyuan, Manchuria.
It was also discovered that the “private first class’s diary” on which the account was based had been fabricated after the war, but Daibetsu Nakamura, head of the Miyazaki bureau, reportedly shouted back, “How dare you speak that way to the great Asahi,” and “Get out.”
The situation, however, was turning against them.
At that point, a former military officer whose identity was firmly established brought in the photograph of the “billowing smoke” and said, “There is no doubt that this was a poison-gas battle I witnessed in central China.”
Akira Fujiwara, a Hitotsubashi University professor who had graduated from the Imperial Japanese Army Academy and had commanded troops during Operation Ichi-Go, also testified, “That is correct.
This is poison gas.”
Whether Watanabe actually said, “You see?
The Japanese military was brutal after all,” is unknown.
In any event, it was an article confidently condemning the brutal Japanese military.
Hurling Abuse While Calling Itself “The Great Asahi”
The Sankei Shimbun, however, mocked the article as a childish lie, pointing out: “Poison gas is colorless and odorless and drifts along the ground,” and “If it rose in thick black clouds like that, it would not even kill a crow.”
Newspaper companies did not report one another’s scandals.
It was an era in which criticizing another newspaper’s reporting was the greatest taboo of all.
Watanabe was stunned, and Akimi Satake, the department head responsible for filing the article, stormed into the Sankei Shimbun and cursed Masayuki Takayama, the editor in charge, saying, “How dare you pull this kind of stunt.”
He continued: “You have some nerve defying the great Asahi,” and “We will crush the Sankei Shimbun.”
“The great Asahi,” indeed.
It was the same phrase used by Nakamura, head of the Miyazaki bureau.
It is rather amusing.
Although Satake stormed in shouting, the photograph of the billowing smoke published by the Asahi was, just as the Sankei had reported, a smoke screen produced during a river-crossing operation on the Xin’an River south of Dongting Lake.
For the sake of self-denigration, a graduate of the Imperial Japanese Army Academy would discard that honor and tell a lie.
The charming background circumstances made it easy to understand how badly Akira Fujiwara wanted to join the Science Council of Japan, which was operated by the Communist Party, but for Watanabe of the Asahi, this was no laughing matter.
It was a major failure that two consecutive fabricated flagship Asahi articles asserting that “the Japanese military was evil” had been exposed.
Watanabe was therefore forced to resign for the offense of publishing “lies that could be exposed.”
His successor, Tōichirō Ichiyanagi, ordered reporters to write only lies that could never be exposed, but the instruction did not reach the photography department thoroughly enough.
A photographer therefore followed the usual practice of scratching “KY” into coral on Iriomote Island, and an article titled “Today’s Japanese Who Know No Shame” was published, costing Ichiyanagi his job as well.
Thereafter, the Asahi placed “lies that cannot be exposed” at the head of its editorial policy and warned its reporters accordingly, but Asahi reporters do not conduct reporting in the first place.
Because they do not investigate, they write from their imagination.
Regardless of what the president says, the organization is constitutionally capable of writing nothing but lies.
That is why it invented a fictional conversation between Yasuo Tanaka and Shizuka Kamei, claimed that Shinzō Abe had pressured an NHK program, and plagiarized a Yomiuri article because it could not write one of its own.
The only change from the past was the decision that, because presidents would otherwise have to be replaced daily if they resigned over false articles, “from now on, no president will ever resign over something as trivial as a false article.”
Brandishing the Nuclear Power “40-Year Rule”
It also began another method: because stating something directly would make it a lie, everything would instead be written as a “suspicion.”
Both Moritomo and Kake Gakuen were endlessly described as “suspicions,” so nothing written about them could technically become a lie.
Another method is to write articles that are only half false in order to deceive foolish readers.
For example, plutonium obtained from spent fuel in a light-water reactor does not cause a nuclear explosion.
That is why the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization, or KEDO, sought to have North Korea dismantle “the graphite-moderated reactor that produces plutonium for nuclear weapons” and provide it with two light-water reactors in exchange.
But because “foolish readers do not know this,” the newspaper continued writing in editorials and articles the lie that “Japan possesses enough plutonium for six thousand nuclear weapons.”
I pointed this out in this column.
Such influence.
The lie about “six thousand nuclear weapons” disappeared from the pages of the Asahi.
I heard that Kiyoki Nemoto, the chief editorial writer, ordered, “Do not use a lie once it has been exposed.”
Now, therefore, it has switched to a new lie.
That is the “aging nuclear power plants and the 40-year rule” in its editorial of November 26, 2020.
A “40-year retirement age” for light-water reactors was certainly the international rule.
However, the local community hosting the Takahama Nuclear Power Plant agreed to “operation beyond forty years.”
The editorial harshly condemned that decision.
Yet the world is moving not merely beyond a forty-year retirement age, but toward sixty and eighty years.
The Asahi omits this and brandishes the “40-year rule,” threatening readers that continued operation is extraordinarily dangerous.
It is an unmistakable lie.
Another point the Asahi does not mention is that, ever since Japan’s reactors were built, they have been stopped for regular inspections, stopped over even minor malfunctions after the Asahi created an uproar, and stopped after earthquakes.
Consequently, even after forty years, their actual operating time does not amount to five years.
They are like new cars.
Yet the Asahi calls them “aging nuclear power plants.”
Such cunning lies must not be tolerated.