This dialogue between Masayuki Takayama, Tsutomu Saito, and Makiko Takita exposes how Japan’s decline stems not mainly from politics but from a media establishment driven by ideology rather than truth.
From Fukushima reporting and anti-nuclear dogma to Stalin-era Western misinformation, the textbook controversy, and the origins of Seiron, the conversation reveals decades of distorted narratives that misled the public.
A crucial examination of how mass media has shaped—and damaged—modern Japan.

Even so, it was not only politics that brought Japan this low.
The media, which drives public opinion, bears more than half of the responsibility.

October 20, 2019

The following is from a special dialogue included in the Bessatsu Seiron issues “The Fallen Media” and “Why the Media Has Fallen,” which a well-read friend recommended, saying they were filled with truly substantial essays and conversations.
This particular dialogue, titled “Because They Do Not Write the Truth,” features Masayuki Takayama × Tsutomu Saito, interviewer Makiko Takita.
Emphasis in the text other than headings is mine.

Takita:
I would like you both—who have long reported on domestic and international affairs as reporters for the Sankei Shimbun—to speak about the state of the media.
The theme is “the fallen media,” but why do you think the media has become so harshly criticized?

Takayama:
When people ask what is wrong with a Japan that is now constricted and stagnating, they say the opposition is useless, or the LDP has grown stale.
But it is not politics alone that dragged Japan down this far.
More than half of the responsibility lies with the mass media that shapes public opinion.
For example, after TEPCO’s Fukushima plant caused problems in the great earthquake, nuclear energy has been disappearing from Japan.
While the world increasingly relies on nuclear power and is building more plants, Japan goes in the opposite direction and curses TEPCO as if it were utterly evil.
But that is absurd.
The truth is that the Fukushima accident was caused by defects in the U.S. GE plant design.
However, the media hides the name GE and conveys none of the facts.
Even concerning radiation, the annual 1-millisievert exposure limit is an American-made joke, yet they hide that as well.
They have no intention of reporting accurately.

Saito:
There is reporting driven by hatred toward TEPCO, but little that digs into the technical issues.

Takayama:
Picking on TEPCO alone is just an example, but newspapers do not publish the “facts” that should be published and instead report from an anti-nuclear ideological perspective.
Their standard of judgment is “siding with the weak,” and in this case TEPCO is the evil, while evacuees are made into absolute victims.
Any politician or commentator who sees things differently is immediately crushed—that is what newspapers believe to be their mission.

Saito:
It is all newspaper ideology.
And it is not only a Japanese phenomenon.
During the heyday of Stalin, Walter Duranty of The New York Times, who admired him, hid the starvation of millions in Ukraine and praised Stalin, even winning the Pulitzer Prize.
Recently, Ukrainians held demonstrations in New York demanding the revocation of that Pulitzer.

Takayama:
The ideology always comes first.

Takita:
When you were both active as field reporters, was there media criticism like today?

Saito:
There was a time when only Sankei was attacked.

Takayama:
But even looking at the old Sankei, it praised Chiang Kai-shek as a hero of anti-communism even though he massacred Taiwanese intellectuals, while publishing stories from the Chukiren claiming “the Japanese burned Chinese people in furnaces.”
There were quite a few articles similar to those of Asahi’s Katsuichi Honda.

Saito:
Seiron was founded in 1973, the year after I joined the company.

Takayama:
Even Seiron had things it failed to see.
Newspapers inevitably hop onto ideologies too easily.
There are aspects in which they continued through the postwar era without reflection.

Takita:
In 1982, there was the textbook controversy.
Newspapers reported unanimously that the Ministry of Education had changed “invasion of North China” to “advance” during screening.

Takayama:
At that time, Shoichi Watanabe contributed “The Textbook Problem of a Thousand Dogs Barking into the Void” in the October issue of Chokun!, revealing the facts.
Newspapers pretended not to hear it, but only Sankei reviewed and apologized.
What followed soon after was Asahi’s poison-gas reporting (details on page 35).
Even then, many in Sankei’s social-affairs desk hesitated.
Partly because they feared confronting the mighty Asahi, and partly because there remained the abstract notion that “even the Japanese military may have done terrible things—we can’t be sure.”
Thus, manuscripts were submitted but returned by Mizuho Ishikawa.
I was a new desk editor then and lacked that kind of abstract thinking, so I said, “It’s interesting,” and ran it boldly on the front page of the social section.

Saito:
Even Seiron did not fully penetrate the company for a while.
But in 1967, during the Cultural Revolution, Beijing bureau chief Minoru Shibata was expelled by the Chinese government.
That incident essentially marked the beginning of the Seiron line.

Takayama:
Yes, exactly.

Saito:
When Shibata returned, he wrote an article titled “I Was Expelled” and ran it on the front page about a hundred times.
By exposing the true nature of the Cultural Revolution—China’s internal power struggle—and the essence of Chinese communism, that series became the origin of Seiron.
At that time, neither ordinary readers nor even newspaper reporters truly understood what the Chinese and Soviet communist systems were.
Gradually that understanding spread, and we have finally reached the point where people understand.

Takayama:
It truly took a long time.
Even at the time of the Tiananmen Incident, many claimed “stability in China is a good thing.”
Japan’s neighboring country should remain unstable.
In fact, during Mao’s era, when mass killings continued over there, Sino–Japanese relations were at their best.
Once China stabilized, Japan’s politics, finances, and public order were disturbed and violated.
Stability next door is the worst thing.
South Korea is the same.

Saito:
Three years after Tiananmen, the Emperor (the current Emeritus) visited China.
This was the responsibility of the entire media.
Sankei strongly opposed it.
At the time, people still did not understand the true danger of communism.

Takayama:
That is why, as you wrote (“Seiron,” April 2019 issue), “Never forgive Russia.”
Responding to the lies of that fraudulent Russian ambassador (Mikhail Galuzin) is exactly what is needed.

(To be continued.)