2024/03/13

Repost! The Fool Who Imagines Journalists to Be Aristocrats Who Monitor the People
The Crimes and Punishments of the Mass Media by Masayuki Takayama and Rui Abiru, first published on February 10, 2019, is essential reading for every Japanese citizen who can read the printed word.
Masayuki Takayama is the one and only journalist in the postwar world, and Rui Abiru is the finest journalist of our time, a journalist who gets things right.
Through this translation, people throughout the world must come to know Japan’s leading intellects and contribute to progress alongside the “Turntable of Civilization,” for world peace, human development, and ultimately the happiness of humanity.
The Fool Who Imagines Journalists to Be Aristocrats Who Monitor the People
Takayama
At least in prewar newspapers, there was no such notion as opposition to authority.
There was not even a term for it, nor did that way of thinking exist.
Its origin lies in the preamble to the MacArthur Constitution, notorious for its poor prose.
It says that the people must monitor the government to prevent the horrors of war from happening again, and that this is their duty.
It places the people and the state in an adversarial relationship.
The state, left to its own devices, will want to wage war, so the people must keep watch over it.
They instill the idea that newspapers have the role of doing that monitoring.
Abiru
The facts are the other way around, aren’t they?
For example, Hideki Tojo’s cabinet began the war against the United States, but Tojo himself was not particularly eager for war with America.
I have heard accounts of large numbers of letters arriving from people stirred up by the Asahi Shimbun and other newspapers, demanding that he get on with it.
Rather, it was the newspapers that whipped up enthusiasm for war.
Takayama
After the war, what the Asahi Shimbun, having ingratiated itself with GHQ, began saying was that it was the fourth estate.
In 2007, when Yoichi Funabashi became its editor-in-chief, it issued another “Declaration of Journalism.”
Those in power, possessing the apparatus of violence, are arbitrarily reaching into the people’s pockets and trying to start another war.
Therefore, we oppose authority, and opposing authority is our mission—that was what they proclaimed on the front page of the Asahi Shimbun.
Abiru
The media need to understand why they are called the fourth estate.
The fourth estate may sometimes be the most powerful of all.
Who, then, monitors that power?
If they call themselves the fourth estate and say that they must oppose authority and monitor power, then there needs to be an organization that opposes and monitors the mass media.
Yoichi Funabashi does not want anything of the kind.
Rather, he considers it extremely harmful that the Internet is now trying to fulfill that role.
He is intensely hostile toward the Internet.
In effect, they are saying that they are a privileged class that monitors the people while never being monitored themselves.
I think they are an emperor with no clothes.
The constitutional preamble you mentioned earlier, Mr. Takayama, is a geocentric theory.
The world revolves around Japan.
Therefore, as long as Japan does nothing wrong, the world will be peaceful—that is the argument.
Takayama
What is worse is that it treats the Japanese people as madmen.
Give a madman a knife, and there is no knowing what he will do.
Since there is a madman possessing the apparatus of violence, he must be watched thoroughly.
The underlying argument is not merely geocentric; it is that the Japanese are madmen and therefore must not be allowed to possess weapons.
Whenever Japanese rearmament or the Self-Defense Forces’ procurement of equipment comes up, the argument simply becomes that, if the Japanese have weapons, they will invade again.
Abiru
Although it has fallen out of fashion recently, there was a time when the term “UN-centered diplomacy” was frequently used in the Diet.
Ichiro Ozawa and Hirohisa Fujii, who was then secretary-general of the Liberal Party, often used it.
Fujii also said that the United Nations was more trustworthy than Japan.
It is a deeply ingrained way of thinking among people of a certain generation.
They have an utter distrust of Japan, and when asked what to do about practical problems, their answer is to trust the United Nations.
This is nothing short of a perversion.
Yet there certainly are people who have thought that way.
Soichiro Tahara used to say things like that too, didn’t he?
To be continued.