2020-1-30
The following is from Masayuki Takayama’s regular column, published in the issue of Shukan Shincho released today under the title “Shina Is Number One in the World.”
This essay, too, proves that he is a journalist without equal in the postwar world, but readers will also recognize my own extraordinary insight.
I feel relieved that I stopped subscribing to the Asahi Shimbun, but even so, the Asahi is appalling.
The first article the Asahi Shimbun published about the pandemic that broke out in Shina concerned “the infection of a man in his thirties who returned to Japan from Wuhan after the New Year.”
It continued, “Close contact with a patient while traveling abroad.”
With the words “returned to Japan” and “while traveling abroad,” anyone would assume the patient was an unfortunate Japanese tourist.
But according to social media that same day, the patient was unquestionably a Chinese national residing in Kanagawa Prefecture.
He entered Japan at Narita on a Chinese passport.
Neither “returning to his country” nor “traveling abroad” applied.
Moreover, this Chinese man’s conduct was particularly reprehensible.
It began on December 8, when cases of pneumonia appeared one after another at a seafood market in Wuhan, and the number of patients kept growing.
It was not until New Year’s Eve that the city announced that a novel coronavirus was the cause.
It was the same kind of virus as SARS, which had killed 774 people in and around Hong Kong some twenty years earlier.
The Chinese man in question returned to his family home in Wuhan around that time.
The market was closed, and the city was in an uproar.
On top of that, his father at home was coughing heavily, and he himself soon developed a high fever.
But hospitals would not examine people without money, nor would they provide decent treatment.
So he came back to Japan.
Here, even foreigners can receive high-quality treatment through health insurance.
He did not even report his condition to quarantine officials at Narita.
He fooled the thermal detector with fever-reducing medication.
Once he had entered the country, he would no longer be expelled.
He went to a hospital, reported his infection, was admitted, and was discharged in good health.
Hakuoh University Professor Harue Okada said on a TV Asahi program, “Give me a break.”
In a sense, he was a “walking biological weapon.”
At the very least, a man like this should be deported.
The Asahi shields such a villain.
Even after the death toll reached double digits and nurses became infected, it continued to write that “it does not spread from person to person.”
A month and a half after the outbreak, Beijing finally sealed off Wuhan, a city of ten million.
Somehow, it bears a striking resemblance to Raccoon City in Resident Evil.
Infected people escape from the city and develop symptoms in Tokyo, and events continue to unfold just like the storyline.
Yet the Asahi praises the leadership for taking “decisive measures” this time because of “the trauma of having concealed the SARS outbreak for three months and allowed the damage to spread.”
Three months versus a month and a half.
What, exactly, is so decisive about that?
It distorts the facts to this extent to protect Shina’s honor.
Where does that solicitude come from?
Long ago, a Japan–Shina press agreement was concluded stipulating that “nothing unfavorable to Shina shall be written.”
Immediately afterward, the Cultural Revolution broke out, in which thirty million Chinese people died.
When Japanese reporters reported those facts, Shina expelled all of them except the Asahi’s, saying that they had “written unfavorable things.”
That was strange; the agreement needed revising, and Kaheita Okazaki stepped forward on the Japanese side.
In fact, Okazaki was something of a henchman of Masakazu Midoro, the president of the Asahi Shimbun and an advocate of Japan–Shina friendship.
Having had the idea planted in his mind by Midoro, he sincerely believed that “Japan did the same things to the Chinese as the Nazis did.”
The revised version actually made matters worse, and reporting was now to follow the principle: “Lies are fine. Simply give the utmost priority to Shina’s convenience.”
To celebrate the revision, Shina arrested a Nikkei reporter, and Tomoo Hirooka, Midoro’s successor, had Katsuichi Honda serialize “Travels in China.”
It was an unusual series in which only the dates were factual.
The next president, Seiki Watanabe, reported the Japanese military’s smoke screens as “poison gas,” and Tadatoshi Nakae fabricated the lie that “the Japanese military abandoned poison-gas shells,” making the Japanese government present Shina with one trillion yen in disposal costs.
Meanwhile, when Japanese people nearly died from Shina’s poisoned dumplings, the Asahi called it “food poisoning.”
The dumplings were made into relatives of the pufferfish.
The reason the Asahi piles up lies to that extent is that it is convinced Shina has no redeeming qualities, but that is wrong.
Shina possesses a creativity that no other country can imitate.
It forgets that Shina has produced almost all deadly epidemics, including Wuhan pneumonia.
Long ago, even the Black Death, which halved Europe’s population, led back to Shina when its source of infection was traced.
In the middle of the twentieth century, the Asian flu originating in Yunnan killed one million people, while influenza originating in Hong Kong killed sixty thousand.
SARS, at the beginning of this century, was born in Guangdong.
In every case, it is said that the breeding ground was the world’s greatest filth, which cannot be reproduced in a laboratory.
If the Asahi wrote about that outstanding distinction, Shina would surely be pleased.
Or so I think.