2024-02-16
For example, there is not a shred of fact in Katsuichi Honda’s Travels in China.
February 16, 2024
The following is from Masayuki Takayama’s regular column in the latter part of the issue of Shukan Shincho released yesterday.
This article, too, demonstrates that he is a journalist without equal in the postwar world.
It is essential reading not only for the Japanese people but also for people around the world.
Who Do You Think You Are?
Asahi Shimbun reporters pay little attention to facts.
For example, there is not a shred of fact in Katsuichi Honda’s Travels in China.
The company was awash in lies because its president at the time, Tomoo Hirooka, had said something along the lines of “Don’t write anything that would cause trouble for China,” much like Yasuo Fukuda.
The same was true under the next president, Seiki Watanabe.
Thus, the Miyazaki bureau chief wrote a baseless article claiming that “the 23rd Infantry Regiment from Miyakonojo carried out the Nanjing Massacre.”
When people who knew the facts protested, he sent them away, saying, “How dare you challenge the mighty Asahi?”
Akiyoshi Satake, the arts and culture editor at the Tokyo headquarters, also published a photograph of rising smoke with the claim, “This is the poison gas operation in Nanchang.”
The Sankei Shimbun pointed out Asahi’s erroneous reporting: “If poison gas rises into the sky, it can only kill crows. This is a smoke screen.”
Satake flew into a rage and lashed out at Sankei, saying, “What do you think you’re doing to the mighty Asahi?”
Yet no one knew that Asahi was supposedly “the mighty Asahi.”
When the two articles were exposed as false, Watanabe was forced out.
This did not sit well with “the mighty Asahi.”
So a photographer carved “KY” into coral and took revenge by manufacturing a story declaring that “the Japanese are among the world’s foremost graffiti vandals.”
Local residents, however, suspected that Asahi had staged the incident itself.
When they questioned the newspaper, Asahi initially threatened them.
When confronted again with circumstantial evidence, it offered the plausible-sounding excuse that the photographer had “traced old graffiti with his fingers to make it clearer.”
When it was pointed out that this could not have been done with his fingers, the story was adjusted to “with the handle of a flash unit.”
Only when other newspapers began making a fuss did Asahi finally admit that its photographer had carved the coral himself.
The admission came after a succession of disgraceful evasions.
President Toichiro Ichiyanagi was forced out over the incident.
The next president, Toshitada Nakae, vowed revenge and first had Takashi Uemura write falsehoods about comfort women to disparage the Japanese people.
He then denounced political and business leaders over the Recruit scandal, but resigned when it emerged that he himself had also been sponging off Recruit.
Shinichi Hakoshima, who became president after one intervening presidency, singled out Shinzo Abe as Asahi’s enemy and had Masakazu Honda write that “Abe had NHK alter a leftist program.”
The program concerned a sham tribunal to try the emperor, orchestrated by former Asahi journalist Yayori Matsui and North Korean operatives.
Honda believed that if he wrote that “Abe intervened,” his fellow leftists at NHK would back him up and he could destroy Abe politically.
NHK, however, did not go along with this and said precisely the opposite: “Asahi is reporting falsehoods.”
Once such a malicious fabrication had been exposed, it would hardly have been surprising if the newspaper had been forced to close.
Hakoshima promptly resigned, ostensibly taking responsibility for a fabricated meeting between Yasuo Tanaka and Shizuka Kamei that had been reported around the same time as Honda’s article.
Kotaro Akiyama, entrusted with cleaning up the mess, deliberated and decided to refer the matter to an “impartial third-party committee.”
But it was not impartial in the slightest.
Its members included constitutional scholar Yasuo Hasebe, whom Asahi had championed, and Uichiro Niwa, who had ties to China.
Asahi spent money like water on honoraria and other expenses.
Nine months later, when the controversy had died down, the reporter was let off the hook as planned, on the grounds that “the article resulted from insufficient reporting.”
No apology was required.
Afterward, Asahi continued making extensive use of third-party committees that rescued it under a veneer of legitimacy.
The falsehoods about comfort women that had disparaged the Japanese people for thirty years likewise went unpunished, leaving only the Japanese people’s resentment.
A portion of fundraising-party ticket revenues had been returned to the Abe faction, which Asahi detests, and spent without being entered in political funds reports.
Asahi is now making an uproar over this as “slush funds.”
When Jun Azumi of the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan created a slush fund of 300,000 yen, Asahi described it as an “omission from the report.”
Ryusho Kato of the Abe faction was forced to resign as parliamentary vice-minister of land, infrastructure, transport and tourism after even 100,000 yen was labeled a “slush fund.”
Asahi also addressed the issue in an editorial.
Its headline read, “Stop the Piecemeal Deception.”
Wasn’t “piecemeal deception” precisely what Asahi practiced in the coral graffiti incident?
That was a serious crime involving damage to a designated natural monument.
The Abe faction’s case, by contrast, concerns how it handled its own political organizations’ money.
What is being questioned is its failure to record the funds.
Asahi, on the other hand, committed a crime and then repeatedly gave false testimony.
The editorial says, “Establishing the truth cannot simply be left to a third party.”
How could it say such a thing without shame?
What right does Asahi have to say this after concealing the truth behind the cover of “third-party investigations”?
If it wants to lecture the public, it should first reflect on its own conduct.
It is a hundred years too early for it to write with such self-importance.