This article analyzes the Asahi Shimbun’s distorted reporting, drawing on the insights of journalist Masayuki Takayama.
It exposes how the paper has repeatedly undermined Japan through biased narratives on history, wartime responsibility, Korea, and China, while ignoring annexation facts and echoing American viewpoints.
The essay highlights Asahi’s role in destroying Japan’s nuclear and technological achievements through fake-news campaigns, its alignment with anti-Japan intellectuals, and its collaboration with business elites such as the Keizai Doyukai.
The piece also reveals the concealed background of the Umeda North Yard redevelopment and how Asahi shifted to a real-estate-driven survival model.
Contrasting with Asahi’s pessimistic narratives, leading global experts affirm that Japan’s advanced industrial tradition, technological adaptation, and demographic resilience make it a model for the 21st century.
The conclusion: when Asahi and the Keizai Doyukai fade, Japan’s future will finally become clear.

Asahi Shimbun is, without flattery, boring.
One of its selling points, “Tensei Jingo,” is not even a proper column but a didactic explanation that cites books and people no one knows, and in most cases ends with “Japan is to blame anyway.”
Even regarding the inhumane behavior of South Korea, it diverts the discussion by saying “because Japan colonized Korea,” deliberately ignoring the fact that it was an annexation, not a colony.
It speaks of the previous war only from the American viewpoint—“It was a war of aggression,” “Japan exploited the peoples of Asia and subjected them to misery.”
Such a distorted column is advertised as “This will appear on entrance exams, so copy it out exactly.”
It is more malicious than MacArthur’s brainwashing operations.
Its political reporting is also terrible.
It mocks Sakurada, the Olympic minister, saying he “misspoke” or “is tongue-tied.”
How is that any different from jeering at a person with a speech impediment for stuttering?
Although it disparages Japan at every turn, it extends the utmost warm consideration to China and Korea.
China has stolen advanced technologies from other countries, manufactured counterfeits, and profited from them.
Its imitation of the Shinkansen is a good example.
Yet when Trump and Pence decided to take real punitive action to stop intellectual property theft, China immediately began to flail.
Moreover, there is the “72-year rule” of communist regimes.
Many communist states have existed, but all were short-lived and collapsed.
Even the longest— the Soviet Union— collapsed after 72 years.
Next year marks the 72nd year of Communist Party rule in China.
History shows this is the limit, as even Kaori Fukushima has noted.
However, Asahi editorial writer Haru Makoto says, “I went to China— everyone seemed full of energy and the Alibaba executives had not the slightest worry.”
He even claims that China’s GDP is “catching up with the declining United States and will overtake it sometime in the 2020s,” and that “the trade war launched by the U.S. looks like an act of desperation and fear.”
He predicts that heartless, coarse China—whose livelihood is intellectual property theft and which is carrying out brutal ethnic cleansing in Xinjiang and Tibet—will be the next superpower.
Just imagining such a country ruling the world is enough to make Japanese people sick, but Haru seems to consider it something to celebrate.
We would like to drive a stake into the crown of such a China, but Asahi brings out Keiko Kobayashi, representative of Keizai Doyukai, to say “that will not happen.”
According to Kobayashi, “Technological powerhouse Japan is a thing of the past.
Now technology has been taken by China, and telecommunications is Huawei’s exclusive domain, yet the Japanese remain like boiled frogs, unaware of their predicament.”
He further criticizes Japan by saying, “Degraded Japanese lack the energy to challenge new things.”
But Japan has continued challenging new frontiers.
For example, in the 1970s it independently developed a nuclear-powered vessel, following the U.S., the Soviet Union, and Germany.
It was also first in the world to achieve practical application of the dream reactor, the fast breeder reactor—yet both were destroyed by Asahi-led fake news campaigns.
Kobayashi, poorly informed, does not know this fact.
If he knew, he would not speak of “Japan the boiled frog” in Asahi.
Kobayashi also criticizes Japan’s “1,750 trillion yen debt,” lamenting that “funding next-generation technological development” is difficult.
But in reality, enormous research funds have been allocated.
They have merely been handed out to anti-Japanese leftists in the humanities, such as Jiro Yamaguchi.
Kobayashi does not know this either.
Then, does the world also view Japan pessimistically?
Michael Schuman, author of Confucius and the World He Created, asserts, “The task of the 21st century is to establish a strong industrial power capable of winning international competition, and the model—believe it or not—is Japan.”
“We have entered an era in which traditional strength, unlike China’s makeshift imitation, will determine outcomes,” he says.
Adair Turner, an authority in the British economic sphere, argues, “Aging Japan converted its elderly population into a labor force through technological innovation.”
He further states, “People say that debt exceeding twice the GDP is a burden, but if you look at the substance, government assets offset it, and with the Bank of Japan’s interest holdings, the actual burden is only about 60% of GDP”—the same view as Yoichi Takahashi.
The conclusion: “The 21st century must learn from Japan.”
Daniel Moss of Bloomberg also says, “The world, which once looked toward China, will now turn its eyes toward Japan, which has overcome aging and deflation.”
When Asahi Shimbun and Keizai Doyukai disappear, Japan will see clear skies again.
Asahi Shimbun invested its corporate fate into the Nakanoshima Twin Tower Building, but the major obstacle to tenant recruitment was the redevelopment of Umeda Kita-Yard.
Kita-Yard is the detonator for Osaka’s revitalization.
It is a commercial district with one of the best locations in Japan—left by the gods as Osaka’s trump card.
Therefore, Yodobashi Camera Umeda is the No.1 store in sales nationwide.
Using Yukiko Takenaka of the Osaka Keizai Doyukai, Asahi threw the Kita-Yard project into confusion.
Incidentally, the contractor for Asahi’s flagship tower was Takenaka Corporation.
Thanks to the scheme to hinder the Kita-Yard project and the economic boom brought by Abenomics, Asahi finally managed to secure all of its tenants.
As a result, Asahi Shimbun has become a company that earns profits from real estate, establishing a structure in which—even if the newspaper collapses—the corporation will survive.
But will God truly allow the continued existence of such the lowest and most treacherous traitors to the nation?