This article introduces and comments on Masayuki Takayama’s October 4, 2018 “Henken Jizai” column in Shukan Shincho, where he dissects the mentality of former Asahi Shimbun star reporters.
Takayama first exposes ex-Asahi journalist Kenichi Furihata, who nostalgically writes about the Aum Shinrikyo affair while reflexively linking everything to “prewar militarism,” and identifies him as the true author behind the infamous “KY coral” story: a staged photograph in which an Asahi photographer carved “KY” into precious coral and then used it to lecture “barbaric” Japanese about their supposed national habit of vandalism. Furihata, Takayama notes, never apologized for this malicious fake that smeared the Japanese people.
The piece then turns to anti-nuclear crusader Keiji Takeuchi, who blamed TEPCO for design flaws actually rooted in GE’s reactors and now denounces Japan’s plutonium stockpile as “47 tons of weapons material,” despite the fact that most of it cannot realistically be used for nuclear weapons. By inflaming nuclear allergy and helping to destroy Japan’s nuclear energy policy, Asahi’s narratives, Takayama argues, have long undermined national interests.
He concludes that if “lying was the company line” in their active years and they still cannot shake that habit in retirement, it reveals the tragic, deeply ingrained culture of fabrication at the heart of postwar Asahi journalism.

After the death sentence of Guru Shoko Asahara was carried out, the Asahi Shimbun ran a column with the headline “The Darkness of Rampage—Are We Truly Unrelated to It?” written by a now-retired former reporter living in seclusion.

In it, he reflects on “the disciples who worshiped an arrogant ruler as a god, played the role of his vanguard, were condemned for their crimes, and were dragged to death along with him.”

He continues, “At that time, within a narrow and oppressive group reminiscent of the prewar militarist state, the disciples stopped all independent thought, believed the words of their god absolutely, and ceased to doubt.”

It is like the saying “the soul of a child of three,” for even after quitting as a reporter, he is still bound by the spell of the prewar-dark-age view of history.
It evokes sadness, yet he goes on to say that “the spiritual decay of trying to crush those one dislikes by force, the retreat of democracy, the fading of wartime memory…”—using a three-tiered stack of descriptive phrases—to describe the disciples’ inner desolation.

The style felt familiar.

When I looked again at the name of the retired reporter, it said Kenichi Furihata.

Yes. It must be nearly thirty years ago now. There was a time when the Asahi Shimbun loved nothing more than lecturing foolish Japanese people from on high.

It resembled Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, but unlike Jesus, nothing they preached had any truth.

“The Japanese army killed 300,000 people in Nanjing. No fragment of bone has ever been found, but confront your own brutality,” and so on.

There was also the parable of the “Iriomote coral.”

An Asahi photographer had dived underwater and discovered that an enormous, precious specimen of azami coral had the letters KY carved into it.

Today, Japan’s mountains and seas are overrun with Chinese and Korean tourists.
The frost-covered trees of Zao and the bamboo groves of Sagano in Kyoto are disfigured everywhere with ugly graffiti in Hangul and simplified Chinese.

But when the coral graffiti was found, the Asahi did not hesitate to declare, “The culprit is Japanese.”

Because the person who carved it was the photographer himself, Yoshirō Honda, pretending to be the discoverer.

On top of that, they attached to the photo a moralizing sermon directed at the Japanese people:

“Japanese may be the most distinguished people in the world when it comes to graffiti.”
“They damage in an instant what has taken a hundred years to grow, without shame—proof of a poverty of spirit, a desolate heart…”
A perfect triple-layered phrasing of mockery.

A writer’s habits appear in his articles.
It is like a fingerprint.

That was how I realized Furihata was the author.
But in the end, this malicious fabricated report only cost the photographer Honda and company president Toichirō Ichiyanagi their jobs.

Furihata, who had insulted the Japanese people using a false story, escaped without apologizing.

Before proudly displaying his triple-stacked writing technique as a retired elder, he should first apologize for the lies of the past.

Then, right on his heels, another lying OB appeared.

It was Keiji Takeuchi, who has long positioned himself as an anti-nuclear activist.

After 3/11, he wrote that the gas-vent valve of the reactor “was not installed in Japan because a core meltdown would never occur here. Pressured by global trends, the valve was eventually introduced and has now become a lifeline.”

He writes as if the reactors were made in Japan, but in fact they were manufactured by U.S. company GE.
“Vents are unnecessary” was GE’s line, and the Japanese side installed them later.

Takeuchi worships white people and the white-owned GE, ignores their responsibility, and dumps all the blame on TEPCO.

This time, he targeted the plutonium (Pu) Japan has accumulated.
He scolded Japan, asking why it possesses “47 tons of nuclear weapons material,” and suggested that Japan should pay money to have someone take it away.

Japan has suffered national crises many times due to energy shortages.
Therefore, it developed a nuclear fuel cycle using Pu to secure stable energy supplies.

The Asahi dislikes this.
It seeks to implant nuclear allergy in the populace and even destroy nuclear power itself.
Naturally, it cannot tolerate the large stockpile of what it calls “nuclear weapons material.”

But here, too, Takeuchi writes lies.

The current Pu stockpile comes from spent fuel of light-water reactors, and most of it cannot undergo nuclear fission.
The truth is that it cannot be used as nuclear weapons material.

To make nuclear weapons, as North Korea is doing, fuel must be burned in a graphite-moderated reactor, not a light-water reactor.

When he was active, writing lies was company policy.
If he still cannot shake that habit even as an OB, what a pitiful thing it is.