2023-11-13
The following is from “Masayuki Takayama Takes on America, China, South Korea, and the Asahi,” published on December 10, 2013, by Themis, priced at 1,000 yen, by Masayuki Takayama, a journalist without equal in the postwar world.
Essential reading not only for the Japanese people but for people throughout the world.
Everyone must surely marvel at the sharpness of his words as he uncovers the truth and conveys it to us.
It is no exaggeration to say that this represents the pinnacle of his work in the incisiveness of its argument.
Emphasis within the text, apart from the headings, is mine.
There Is Something Wrong with Japanese Correspondents Who Please America and China
The Ulterior Motives of Major Newspapers That Only Now Make a Fuss About the Unreliability of American Credit Rating Agencies
The Consequences of the World Being Deceived by S&P
The newspapers reported that the U.S. government had filed a civil claim for $5 billion in damages against the credit rating agency Standard & Poor’s (S&P) over mortgage-backed securities—the so-called subprime mortgage issue.
Without properly investigating them, S&P continued for a long time to give subprime mortgages high ratings.
As a result, Fannie Mae faltered, citizens lost their homes, Lehman Brothers collapsed, and even Iceland went bankrupt.
The U.S. government hurriedly printed more dollars and somehow weathered the crisis.
And when the Big Three were in danger, Transportation Secretary LaHood reeled off blatant lies that “Toyota makes defective cars,” allowing GM to regain its breath as well.
That the U.S. government was forced to do such unscrupulous things was, in the first place, attributable to S&P’s irresponsibility.
The $5 billion would be punishment for that, but if this company really bore responsibility for it, even $5 trillion would seem appropriate.
The amount was set so low because the U.S. government itself had the vulnerability of having failed to regulate dubious financial products such as prime mortgages in the first place.
Indeed, precisely because S&P gave high ratings to dubious products, the whole world was taken in, and America alone was able to line its pockets.
In a sense, it had been a useful collaborator.
Then it stumbled.
Lehman collapsed.
So for the U.S. government to punish S&P seems somewhat at odds with the logic of the story.
One probable reason it nevertheless sued was that, just as financial instability had finally subsided, S&P reappeared and downgraded U.S. Treasury securities from “AAA” to “AA+,” “in view of the unsound fiscal situation.”
The Nikkei and Other Newspapers Bowed Down
America may slander other countries, but it absolutely will not tolerate anyone speaking ill of America.
Clinton, who brought a woman into the White House and engaged in oral sex, and LaHood the swindler have both been passed off as men of integrity.
However bad the public finances may be, the creditworthiness of U.S. Treasury securities must always be the highest in the world.
“America is a virtuous, powerful country—the greatest in the world.”
Yet S&P, with its own guilty conscience, ignored its own faults, started passing judgment on America’s fiscal situation, and declared, “This won’t do at all.”
Feeling that its own ugliness had been thrust before its eyes, the U.S. government went ahead with the lawsuit.
From the sidelines, it looks rather like eye crud suing nose crud, but the way our Japanese newspapers reported this dispute was interesting.
The account up to this point was pieced together from various newspaper reports about the U.S. government’s lawsuit against S&P.
They really do know the background well.
If they possessed that much knowledge, why had they not written about S&P’s unreliability beforehand?
For example, ten years earlier, S&P downgraded Japanese government bonds to a mere “A.”
At the time, the Nikkei and the other newspapers bowed down before S&P’s authority and made a tremendous fuss: “Now we’re in trouble.”
What was the result?
A downgrade of this magnitude would normally raise government bond yields, but on that occasion the yen was sold, the economy improved just as it is doing now, and government bond yields actually fell.
S&P had been unreliable all along.
The simple fact was that the newspapers had not been writing about it.
Why Go to Such Lengths to Pander to South Korea?
Then why did they write about it this time?
There is a good example that helps explain this.
Two decades ago, a bridge on Koror Island in the U.S. trust territory of Palau collapsed even though there was no wind, killing two islanders.
When shoddy construction was identified as the cause, the United States asked South Korea’s Dong-A Construction, which had built it, to carry out repairs, but was refused.
In fact, shortly before that, Seongsu Bridge over the Han River in Seoul, also built by the same company, had likewise collapsed despite the absence of wind.
A commuter bus and passenger cars plunged down, resulting in a catastrophe that killed thirty-two people.
Amid all that, their response amounted to, “We have no time to deal with the likes of Palau, sumnida.”
A newspaper reporter ought to have written that they should not go to other countries and do such shoddy work, but no condemnation of the Korean company’s outrageous conduct in Palau ever appeared.
Coverage of the Seongsu Bridge collapse was perfunctory too, while the Sankei Shimbun instead carried an incomprehensible Korean comment: “We came to carry out this kind of shoddy construction because of thirty-six years of Japanese imperial rule, sumnida.”
There are only three reasons for pandering to South Korea to this extent.
The first is when someone has a Korean wife and has already become Korean in sentiment, like Takashi Uemura of the Asahi Shimbun, who fabricated the story of military comfort women.
The second is that writing the truth would get them beaten up by Koreans in a bar.
And the biggest reason is that they would attract the hostility of government sources and others, become unable to work, and lose their livelihood.
The S&P issue is actually the same.
Even if they know the agency is a fraud, writing about it will not earn them approving looks from the Americans concerned.
They will be disliked.
Writing it would only please the Japanese; it would please neither their American wives nor the president.
This time, however, the U.S. government declared S&P’s conduct intolerable and sued.
Once that happens, writing the truth is permitted.
It amounts to a U.S. government-approved lifting of the information embargo.
In other words, newspapers do not write the truth.
Does that mean there is no point in reading them?
Even a skilled pair of hands can sometimes let water slip through.
At times, that speaks the truth to us.
Newspapers’ True Feelings Appear in the “Details”
Take the Asahi Shimbun, for example.
It has continued to write that China is a good country.
Even in the midst of anti-Japanese riots, it wrote, “Open Stores in China Nonetheless” and “Japanese Businesses Reopen and Enter the Market One After Another,” while Aera ran a feature titled “Keep Fighting in China Nonetheless—There Is No Market This Attractive.”
China is a good place, they say.
Another newspaper published a photograph of a half-naked man beating a man riding in a Japanese car half to death.
The attacker’s expression calls to mind the Chinese who gang-raped Japanese women in Tongzhou and killed them by thrusting sticks into their private parts, but the Asahi does not look in that direction.
Three months later, however, it published an editorial titled “Toward a Step to Reduce China Risk.”
Japanese companies should entrust everything, both their trade secrets and their management, to the Chinese.
Doing so would “avoid harm coming to Japanese people” and would please Beijing as well.
It had honestly acknowledged in its pages that the Chinese were in fact the same as they had been at the time of Tongzhou, and that Japanese people were in danger.
The fascination of a novel lies in its details.
The unspoken true feelings of newspapers, too, are actually to be found in details that one might easily read straight past.
(March 2013 issue)