2024-02-14
Indeed, Dentsu Is the One Helping Asahi in This Game.
January 14, 2024
The following is from Masayuki Takayama’s latest book, “Henken Jizai: Who Buried Shinzo Abe?”
This book is the latest in a series of bound collections of his celebrated columns in Shukan Shincho, with the original texts refined to make them even easier to read.
This book alone would merit the Nobel Prize in Literature.
It is essential reading not only for the Japanese people but for people throughout the world.
Who Decides Journalists’ Salaries?
The relationship among the Sankei Shimbun, the Asahi Shimbun, and Maoist China resembles “rock, paper, scissors.”
Asahi cannot stand up to China.
It has flattered China and obediently bowed before it, like a lapdog.
Its correspondent, Ieshige Akioka, wrote about the Cultural Revolution, in which 20 million people died, as though it were something perfect.
When Lin Biao, the second-ranking leader, died in a plane crash while fleeing the country, Akioka declared, “He is still alive,” and kept him alive in his reporting for more than a year, in accordance with Mao’s wishes.
Why did he continue writing such disinformation?
The reason was Tomoo Hirooka, Asahi’s president, who ordered him not to write anything unfavorable to China.
That instruction has been Asahi’s corporate policy ever since.
For example, the testimony of former Ehime Governor Moriyuki Kato in the Kake scandal completely contradicted Asahi’s allegations.
Asahi did not write a single line about it because it was inconvenient.
China appreciated Asahi’s efforts and offered Akioka the position of representative of the People’s Daily in Japan.
Other Asahi correspondents were also assigned women in China according to their work.
They were given positions as editors-in-chief of the Japanese edition of the government magazine “People’s China.”
The Sankei Shimbun did not court China.
Its correspondent, Minoru Shibata, read the wall newspapers and exposed the madness of the Cultural Revolution.
Beijing was so furious that it expelled Shibata and closed his bureau.
But this, in turn, angered Sankei.
Sankei continued uncovering China’s secrets through various channels, including Taiwan.
China gave in and asked Sankei to reopen a bureau in Beijing.
That was in 1998.
China thought this would make Sankei show it a little consideration, but Sankei reported that both Chinese minds and the waters of the Yangtze River had become even more polluted.
An enraged Yang Jiechi stopped issuing visas to Sankei correspondents and is now resorting to the crude tactic of forcing Sankei to close its bureau.
China can beat Asahi, but it cannot beat Sankei.
As for Sankei and Asahi, Sankei has exposed Asahi’s fabricated reporting on its front page and [the Italian wording concerning several newspaper presidents is unclear], yet Sankei’s circulation and salaries remain by far the lowest.
Sankei journalists are leaving the company in droves, and Sankei is growing weaker and weaker.
Asahi is paper, and Sankei is rock.
Indeed, Dentsu is the one helping Asahi in this game.
Dentsu is more than an advertising agency.
It has a Newspaper Bureau responsible for all the advertisements placed in newspapers.
For the same advertisement, Asahi gets five columns, Yomiuri gets half that, and Sankei gets half of Yomiuri’s allocation.
It is as though Dentsu decides the salaries of journalists at each company, so even Asahi, the worst newspaper in the world, will always remain in business.
Take, for example, Japan’s bid to host the football World Cup.
Dentsu, which was handling it, said, “What do you think about Japan and South Korea hosting it jointly?”
Haruyuki Takahashi and Chung Mong-joon are said to have been responsible for this proposal, but nobody wanted to co-host with such a country.
Asahi consequently published an editorial proclaiming, “Long live Japan–South Korea co-hosting,” while also telling lies about the comfort women and saying, “Co-hosting would be a good act of atonement.”
Asahi goes to such lengths because it regularly asks Dentsu to give it a little extra advertising.
It owes Dentsu so much that it cannot even sleep with its feet pointing toward it.
Even with the World Cup being jointly hosted, the burden was still too much for South Korea.
They bribed the referees, let a kick to Martini’s head go unpunished in the match against Italy, and had Totti sent off, creating a nightmare World Cup in which Korea prevailed.
In his article the other day, Tetsuya Hakoda wrote, “Twenty years ago, the morning edition of the Asahi Shimbun, published by its Tokyo headquarters, carried this on its front page: ‘Korea fails to reach the final.’”
The article was not mocking Korea by suggesting that it could not win the tournament even by cheating.
It called Korea’s fourth-place finish “a great achievement” and said, “After that, Korea gained the confidence that it could succeed if it tried.”
In reality, however, [the Italian sentence here refers unclearly to a subsequently exposed offense involving a “white nation”].
He clearly misunderstood the expression, “You can do it if you try.”
When Dentsu said so, the newspapers obeyed, whether they liked it or not, and newspapers such as Asahi are still wagging their tails twenty years later.
Haruyuki Takahashi, who was at the center of the uproar, has now fallen into the hands of the judicial authorities, and the Tokyo Olympics have come under scrutiny.
There had been an earlier uproar in which Takeda-no-miya was blamed, but some people were suspicious of Dentsu.
Unsurprisingly, the newspapers silenced them.
Before every newspaper becomes as distorted as Asahi, we would like to see the arrogance of Dentsu’s Newspaper Bureau checked and Sankei given advertisements as well.
(September 1, 2022 issue)