2024/04/28

The following is from Masayuki Takayama’s regular column in Themis, a subscription-only monthly magazine that arrived at my home today.
This essay, too, proves that he is the one and only journalist of his kind in the postwar world.
The Asahi Talked Up a Two-Party System and Sponged Off Business Tycoon Hiromasa Ezoe
The Big Lie in Tensei Jingo: “Multimember Districts Lead to ‘Politics and Money’ Scandals”
The Morihiro Hosokawa Administration Did Nothing
Perhaps it is part of the Asahi Shimbun’s corporate culture, but Tensei Jingo prints lies without batting an eye.
Years ago, it wrote that “the Japanese have so little moral sense that they put pebbles in cans of fish and exported them.”
The Japanese canning industry immediately protested, telling the paper to stop printing lies, but the Asahi did not publish a correction.
A few days later, in the same Tensei Jingo column, it claimed to have misunderstood the story and brushed the matter aside with an excuse that was no excuse at all.
Then there was the Asahi’s coral graffiti incident.
One of its own people dived into the waters off Iriomote and used the handle of a strobe to scratch “KY” into a thistle coral.
The paper then went all out in disparaging the Japanese: “When it comes to graffiti, the Japanese are probably now second to none in the world.
They feel no shame in damaging in an instant what took a century or more to grow.
What poverty of spirit, what coarseness of heart…”
That same condescending attitude, the insistence that the Japanese have no morals, comes through in the column about pebbles in cans of fish.
That sort of baseless arrogance is common among Asahi reporters, and there is ignorance on top of it.
The same goes for Tensei Jingo, where ignorance and arrogance are on display almost every time.
Both are hard to miss in the column that opens by recalling how Morihiro Hosokawa became prime minister 30 years earlier.
Who would believe that Hosokawa “ushered in a new kind of politics”?
The only thing he did was introduce public subsidies for political parties.
They could stop raising their own campaign funds and simply take 30 billion yen from taxpayers.
Then they said they would work hard to deliver good government.
The public had high hopes, but Hosokawa did nothing.
In the end, nothing moved in Japanese politics until Abe came along.
Hosokawa was a teller of tall tales posing as a politician.
There was one thing Hosokawa’s politics did accomplish: it exposed the grasping lawmakers who wanted still more money even after taking plenty from the public purse.
Take Kiyomi Tsujimoto, who entered the Diet as a member of the Social Democratic Party.
As soon as she became a lawmaker, she put a fictitious publicly funded secretary on the payroll and fraudulently obtained 18.7 million yen in public funds.
She was caught, convicted, and given a suspended sentence, but by then she knew how lucrative a seat in the Diet could be.
As soon as the suspension period ended, she returned to the Diet.
The left does not mind criminals.
Hosokawa corrupted Japanese politics.
Even so, Tensei Jingo gives him great credit for introducing single-member districts.
With single-member districts, it is all or nothing.
When the Asahi trumpets that “the age of two major parties has arrived,” the public falls for it.
Throw in a slogan like “It does the Liberal Democratic Party good to get a dressing-down once in a while,” and people with neither the standing nor the ability to govern may end up in power.
I think we all remember the nightmare of the Democratic Party of Japan actually taking office.
That the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan and the Japanese Communist Party still manage to win seats like everyone else is another trick of the single-member district system.
Asahi President Toshitada Nakae Sought Favors Too
Even Tensei Jingo knows that much, so this is where it slips in a lie.
It claims that “multimember districts make scandals involving politics and money, such as the Recruit scandal, more likely.”
Apparently, that is supposed to make the case for single-member districts.
It is a whopper on the scale of the pebbles-in-cans story.
The Recruit scandal did not arise from “politics and money.”
It arose because people who fancied themselves important came looking for favors and expected Ezoe to show them the deference they thought they deserved.
There are hints of this in Hiromasa Ezoe’s autobiography, The Day the Seagull Took Flight (Kamome ga Tonda Hi).
He grew up in a gloomy household and struggled to get into the University of Tokyo.
His outlook did not brighten after that.
Keeping to himself, he quietly started a publication listing part-time jobs, and that venture grew into Recruit, a 13-trillion-yen company that would rank among Japan’s five largest.
Yet for all his stature as an entrepreneur and the head of a major company, Ezoe belonged to none of Japan’s four major business organizations.
That is something of a mystery, but it was also one reason he contributed to society by serving on bodies such as impartial government advisory councils.
Still, he headed a major company.
Bureaucrats and politicians flocked to him.
You could call it freeloading.
Newly issued shares in Recruit Cosmos were among the things they were after.
Ezoe let them take advantage of him, and eventually the prosecutors moved in.
He turned for help to Yanosuke Narazaki, a Socialist Party politician who had been a close associate of Jiichiro Matsumoto of the Buraku Liberation League.
But Narazaki secretly filmed his exchanges with the emissary Ezoe had sent to seek his help and handed the footage over to the authorities.
There is another point.
As evidence that this was about more than “politics and money,” consider that Toshitada Nakae, president of the Asahi Shimbun, was among those who sought favors from Ezoe.
Nakae resigned before anyone caught on.
And he was not the only bad actor at the Asahi.
Two men flew by helicopter to Ezoe’s ski resort at Appi Kogen in Hachimantai, Iwate Prefecture, and enjoyed themselves there.
One was Katsuichi Honda, who wrote Travels in China, a book with, in my view, not a shred of truth in it.
The other was Keiichiro Hikita, who wrote Tensei Jingo in the early 1970s.
What did they think entitled them to seek favors from Ezoe?
Ezoe was a newcomer.
He paid his respects to prominent people by inviting them to Appi Kogen or giving them shares in Recruit Cosmos.
In the newspaper world, he gave the president of the Nikkei shares as a goodwill gesture.
But he made no such gesture to Nakae.
The reaction was, “Doesn’t he know who Nakae is?”
A Victim Rather Than a Criminal
It was the same with Honda and Hikita.
“I’m the foremost writer of fine prose.
Honda is the foremost anti-Japanese writer.
Let’s see that he pays us the proper respect.”
People descended on the inexperienced Ezoe as if to say, “I’ll teach you how the world works.”
The same could be said of the bureaucrats and members of the Diet.
The sheer number of people looking for favors makes the point.
In that sense, the Recruit scandal was about something other than the “politics and money” described in the column.
It would be closer to say that people who saw themselves as leading figures in politics, government, and the media made Ezoe, who knew nothing of their ways, pay his dues.
After all those people had taken advantage of him, Hiromasa Ezoe was arrested on bribery charges.
However you look at it, Ezoe was a victim rather than a criminal.
What makes this column ring false, above all, is its sheer ignorance.
And a newspaper that was itself among those seeking favors has no business writing a column like this.