This essay (originally written on May 25, 2018 and dated May 25, 2024) introduces and comments on a book chapter titled “The Greatest Postwar Regime: Asahi Shimbun’s Media Despotism,” featuring a dialogue between conservative scholar Watanabe Shoichi and journalist Takayama Masayuki. The text argues that Asahi Shimbun’s postwar dominance in Japan’s opinion space was built on deep pipelines to U.S. power—via figures such as Ogata Taketora and Kasa Shintaro, portrayed as CIA-linked intermediaries for John Foster Dulles—and that this relationship shaped both the 1960 Anpo protests and Japan’s long-term division from China and Korea. The chapter highlights the 1960 “seven-company joint editorial,” coordinated by Kasa and including Kyodo News, which was syndicated to local papers and allegedly caused anti-Security Treaty demonstrations to “suddenly cool,” an example the author calls “complete media despotism.” The essay further claims that Asahi’s current editorial stance is driven less by Marxism than by a free-floating “anything as long as it is anti-Japanese” mentality, citing as evidence a 2010 “Leyte” feature about a 95-year-old man’s seventy-year-old “rifle-butt bump,” which the author dismisses as a knowingly uncorrected fabrication. Contrasting Asahi with Chunichi/Tokyo Shimbun’s admission of a faked “poverty” story, the piece concludes that Asahi lacks both self-cleansing and any real commitment to factual truth, functioning instead as a “bizarre newspaper” that publishes easily debunked tales in order to vilify Japan and the former Japanese army.

What follows is a book that I was strongly urged to read by a friend who is an avid reader.
For every Japanese citizen who can read print, there is no more essential book than this.
Readers should head at once to the nearest bookstore to purchase it.
Why have those who make a living in print media such as Asahi Shimbun, and those who live off television media that grew up reading such papers, as well as opposition Diet members and ruling-party politicians like Shinjiro Koizumi, been doing what they have done over the past year and a half?
You can understand that perfectly just from Chapter 4, “The Greatest Postwar Regime: Asahi Shimbun’s Media Despotism,” on page 146 of this book.
Emphasis in the text other than the headings is mine.
A Shadow Cast over Asahi’s Reign
Watanabe
I never fail to read what you write, Mr. Takayama, and it is truly exhilarating.
No one but you has so consistently and thoroughly continued to criticize Asahi.
In recent years, Asahi Shimbun’s magic has faded, and in Japan’s intellectual world, simply spreading stories like the Nanking Massacre or, on the comfort women issue or anything else, merely attacking Japan no longer wins you social status.
Any halfway knowledgeable person now probably feels that if he is not reading Sankei, rather than Asahi, he cannot even speak out.
Takayama
Thank you very much.
Asahi still runs nothing but articles that make you think, “This is absurd.”
If Japan is to stand up again, the media must be the first to recover.
America is a good example: the media still do not understand why Trump became president, refuse to accept reality, and continue their all-out attacks.
The same thing is happening to the Abe administration.
Watanabe
More and more people are beginning to notice that those who praise the Constitution and the Occupation policy are somehow not quite right, and that there seems to be no one among the postwar “winners” who says anything sensible.
The mass media and cultural figures who have profited by attacking Japan have passed their line down by word of mouth to their juniors, and Nikkyōso has taught schoolchildren that “Japan is always to blame.”
The harmful influence of these postwar beneficiaries is still lingering, and those who built their positions on anti-Japanese discourse cannot, for the sake of their pride, retract their pet theories even when new historical facts come to light.
Takayama
Asahi Shimbun is exactly that, I think, but in the period that marked the starting point of the postwar era, the core of Asahi was its very deep pipeline to the United States.
Takeo Ogata (former chief editor and representative director of Asahi) and Shintaro Kasa (former editorial page editor-in-chief of Asahi) were prime examples.
Ogata also entered politics, but he was a collaborator of the CIA and an agent of Dulles’s operations toward Japan.
What America feared most was the situation that Mussolini had worried about: that Japan, once again gaining strength as before the war, would bring China to heel, and that if Japan and China joined hands and cooperated, who could categorically deny that they might seize world hegemony?
This is the true nature of what they called the “Yellow Peril.”
To prevent that, the international situation in East Asia—Japan and its surroundings—had to be kept permanently unstable.
They sustained a state of confrontation among Japan, Korea, and China, and kept Japan’s domestic situation in turmoil.
When Takeo Ogata, who was connected to Dulles, a believer in this strategy, suddenly died in 1956, Shintaro Kasa, who had ties to Dulles dating back to their days together in Switzerland, took over.
As a European correspondent, Kasa had been stationed in Bern, Switzerland in 1945, where he had a connection with Dulles, then head of the OSS (Office of Strategic Services, predecessor of the CIA) station, through secret peace negotiations with the United States.
One piece of evidence that Asahi was connected to America is the seven-company joint declaration on the 1960 Security Treaty dispute.
In 1959, Asahi went so far as to launch Asahi Journal and whipped up opposition to the Security Treaty and calls to overthrow the Liberal Democratic government.
When Michiko Kamba, then a University of Tokyo student, was killed in a clash between demonstrators and riot police, about 130,000 demonstrators (330,000 according to organizers) as announced by the Metropolitan Police Department were enraged and the situation became explosive.
The atmosphere was almost like the eve of a revolution, and in that moment Shintaro Kasa gathered the Tokyo newspaper companies and news agencies and had them run a joint editorial titled “Reject Violence, Defend Parliamentary Democracy.”
It is said that the plan was engineered by Dentsu, but I am convinced that it was Kasa.
Watanabe
I see.
It was as if they had pulled away the ladder at the last moment.
Takayama
They forbade the outbreak of a revolution at the eleventh hour.
Up to that point, including Asahi Journal, Asahi’s line had consistently been to oppose revision of the Security Treaty and call for the resignation of the Kishi Cabinet.
They had incited people to bring down the government and even to occupy the Diet building, but if a genuine revolution broke out at that point and Japan moved beyond mere instability and truly became a socialist state, it would overshoot America’s designs.
So they hurried to take countermeasures.
Among the seven companies that Kasa, acting as an agent of the United States, gathered were Kyodo News as well, so the editorial was also distributed to local papers and ran as an editorial there.
After the death of Michiko Kamba on June 15 stirred the demonstrators into such a frenzy, those crowds, in response to the seven-company joint declaration of the 17th, fell completely silent from the 18th on.
It was total media despotism.
Watanabe
Exactly so.
They wielded enormous influence.
Takayama
How, then, should we think about Asahi’s editorial line since that time down to the present?
Asahi alumni such as Hirosi Hasegawa and Kiyoshi Nagaei say that Asahi Shimbun has been occupied by Marxism and that its view of reality is clouded by the value judgment that “Japan is in the wrong.”
I think that is mistaken.
It is not that they are infatuated with Marxist ideology, but that they have nothing but a self-indulgent intent that “anything is acceptable as long as it is anti-Japanese.”
Even so, up through the era of Shintaro Kasa, the media, under American control, were used to keep politics and society in turmoil and prevent stability.
But revolution itself was not permitted, and there remained a final line.
However, when Kasa died, there was no one left who could take over as the liaison with the United States.
That is why, like a dog whose leash has been removed, Asahi’s editorial line has been running about barking anti-Japan slogans in every direction down to the present.
I do not think it has much to do with Marxism.
There is an article that proves this.
In the September 11, 2010 evening edition, there was a serial article titled “Leyte: Aging Witnesses” which began, “Francisco Diaz, who lives in a simple thatched house in Leyte, is 95 years old.
He rubbed the small lump, about the size of a clenched fist, on the back of his neck as he searched his memory.”
It was accompanied by a photograph showing the back of the old man’s head.
“In 1943, under Japanese occupation, Mr. Diaz was drawing water from a river with several companions at the request of Japanese soldiers.
Then another group of Japanese soldiers arrived.
One of them struck him on the neck with a rifle.
The lump formed at that time.”
In other words, the story is that a lump made when he was struck with the butt of a rifle has remained swollen for seventy years.
Watanabe
You cannot get a bump like that on the back of your neck.
I could tell at a glance.
I myself recently fell and got a terribly large lump, but lumps go down again.
There is no such thing as a bump that does not go down for seventy years (laughs).
Takayama
They insisted that what was merely a lipoma was a “lump,” ran a large color photograph, and even the desk did not call a halt.
Well then, are we to believe that Kim Il-sung’s bump was caused by being beaten by the Japanese army?
Anyone can see that it is nonsense.
Just to make the point that the Japanese army was cruel, they run a ridiculous article claiming that this is living evidence of something that had been hidden for more than half a century.
What this means is that the reporter who wrote it without checking the facts and his superiors all knew one hundred percent that it was a lie.
They have no intention, as newspaper reporters, of conveying the truth.
Their sole aim is to smear the Japanese people and the Japanese army.
In order to publicize the evil of the Japanese army, they do not care if what they print is a lie.
Their editorial stance makes that perfectly clear.
In 2016, Chunichi Shimbun and Tokyo Shimbun fabricated a poor junior-high-school girl’s story in their serial “New Poverty Tales,” and five months later admitted that they had made it up, saying, “To improve the copy, I wrote what I imagined.”
It is still better that they made it public.
Asahi lacks both the self-cleansing function and the ability to admit that its false articles are false.
Watanabe
If they do not check such outrageous articles, what is the point of a news desk?
My impression is that sloppy people are putting the paper together, chanting “Hooray for anti-Japan” as they go.
Takayama
It is a bizarre newspaper that exists for no other purpose than to proclaim that “anti-Japan is no crime.”
They write articles and publish photographs that anyone can see are lies, without feeling any shame.
And the readers, for their part, read them and say, “The Japanese army really was awful,” so there is nothing to be done.
Watanabe
It is amusing, in a way—this “study of the bump that never disappears” (laughs).
Takayama
It is a natural monument.
It should be registered as a World Heritage site (laughs).