This chapter follows the uproar over columnist Takayama Masayuki’s piece on Ushio Fukasawa that led to the suspension of his long-running “Henken Jizai” column in Shukan Shincho, and traces his long and bitter history with Asahi Shimbun.
Takayama argues that Asahi’s choice to label him as a “former Sankei reporter” after 24 years as a freelance columnist is a calculated act of revenge rooted in earlier clashes over Asahi’s fabricated “poison gas” photo, the coral graffiti scandal, and its reporting on the Nanjing Incident.
He further criticizes Asahi for long concealing the Zainichi background of writers like Fukasawa while using them to attack “Japanese discrimination,” for distorting the history of sōshi-kaimei and Korea under Japanese rule as “colonial oppression,” and for ignoring the extraordinary leniency shown to Zainichi Koreans in welfare and special permanent residency—contrary to normal legal treatment of foreigners.
The essay concludes that growing support for “Japan-first” politics reflects a belated awakening from decades of GHQ-aligned narratives spread by Asahi and allied media, and calls on readers to use this controversy as a chance to recognize and change the postwar system that has “taken Japan for granted.”

This is a continuation of the previous chapter.
A long and deep entanglement with Asahi
In this column, in addition to the issue of foreign naturalization, I pointed out, for example, that there are people like Asuka Jusen who use a Japanese alias to make a mockery of Japan, and that Asahi abets such behavior, and I admonished Asahi to recover a sense of pride befitting a newspaper.
Then I ended up being hit by what you could call Asahi’s signature “pouncing on a turn of phrase” tactic.
However, when you read Asahi’s article and editorial very carefully, there is a part that makes you think, “So this is Asahi’s obsession.”
That is the passage that reads, “The column is ‘Henken Jizai’, a serialized piece by former Sankei Shimbun reporter Takayama Masayuki, published in the July 31 issue of Shukan Shincho.”
I left Sankei Shimbun in March 2001.
That was already more than twenty-four years ago.
Since then, while teaching at a certain private university, I have been serializing columns in the monthly opinion magazines Themis and Voice, and a year later I began writing “Henken Jizai” for Shukan Shincho.
In other words, I have been writing as a columnist for a quarter of a century, so I naturally assumed my title was “columnist.”
Yet they go back twenty-four years and call me a “former Sankei reporter.”
It makes no sense.
For the record, papers like the Mainichi describe me as a “journalist,” and Sankei introduces me as a “writer” (laughs).
That is correct.
I have written a non-fiction history of Japanese aviation, 25,000 Hours of Flight (Bungeishunju), a mystery novel The Cherenkov Inferno (also Bungeishunju), and The Black Trap Set by the White Man (WAC), which recounts the battlefields of the last war.
I could even be admitted to the Japan PEN Club.
Ignoring all that, why does Asahi dig back a quarter of a century to drag out such an old job description?
When I think about it, my entanglement with Asahi is long and deep.
Perhaps this is a revenge play packed with that grudge.
Skipping the minor episodes and coming straight to the one that made our dispute widely known, there was the piece on the front page of Asahi’s October 31, 1984 edition, with a photo, under the headline “This is the Poison Gas Operation.”
In the photo, more than a dozen gray plumes of smoke are billowing up into the sky.
Even a layman can see it is not poison gas, but looks like a smoke screen.
Then a roving reporter, Ishikawa Mizuho, submitted a verification article on the poison gas photo, saying, “That article and that photo are fakes.”
At the time I was the city news desk editor.
In fact, Ishikawa’s article had already been left sitting for two days.
The desk in charge had hesitated at the prospect of “picking a fight with Asahi Shimbun.”
Back then, the understanding among newspapers was a “gentleman’s agreement” not to criticize even when another paper had clearly blundered, and leading that ethos was Asahi Shimbun.
During the first Anpo (security treaty) struggle, Asahi Journal had whipped up the students, the demonstrators stormed the Diet, and people were killed.
Then Asa­hi’s senior editor Kasa Nobutaro summoned the news editors of the Tokyo papers and made them all run an Asahi-drafted joint statement opposing violent demonstrations.
It was the very model of a match-pump, yet the other papers followed suit.
Asahi strutted around with that much swagger, which is why Ishikawa’s article was held back.
But I knew all too well how lacking in judgment Asahi was, so I would not bow before its authority.
Without hesitation I splashed the story across the top of the city news page.
Poison gas creeps along the ground.
That is common sense.
I even mocked them, writing, “If it’s rising into the sky, it can only kill crows.”
The next morning, Asahi’s culture editor, Satake Akimi, stormed into the Sankei newsroom shouting.
From the editor-in-chief and deputy editors down to the city news chief—none of whom realized that Asahi was a naked king—everyone ran away.
As the person responsible for the copy, I was the only one who faced him.
Satake ranted like a madman.
When he barked, “You’ve got some nerve standing up to Asahi,” I answered, “Thank you,” which only made him all the more furious; he went so far as to say, “How dare you call it a fake article. We’ll crush Sankei.”

The crumbling of Asahi’s prestige
He was genuinely shocked to discover that there was someone in this world who would make fun of Asahi.
He hurled abuse at length, but even from the Mainichi, which behaves like Asahi’s right-hand man, information came in saying, “That’s a fake photo.”
In the end, indisputable photographic evidence and eyewitnesses appeared, Asahi admitted it was a major false report, and Sankei was spared from being crushed (laughs).
My exchange with Satake is something I have described in many places, so by now it has spread all over Japan.
At the time, Asahi was also pushing the line that “the Nanjing Massacre happened, and the Miyakonojo Regiment was involved,” but that too was exposed as false, and President Watanabe Seiki lost his head.
Asahi’s aura of prestige began to crumble.
A little later, in the coral graffiti incident, all the papers—including the Mainichi, which had betrayed Asahi—laid into it mercilessly as a lying newspaper.
Since then, newspapers have stopped forgiving the disgraceful scandals committed by their rivals.
The critical tone has sharpened, starting with “North Korea is a paradise on earth,” and moving on to “All their articles are lies” and “The only thing you can trust in Asahi is the ads.”
In fact, in the coral graffiti case, President Ichiyanagi Toichiro lost his job, and his successor Nakae Toshitada was also sacked when it came out that he had pressured Recruit to lavish entertainment on him.
After that, presidents kept losing their heads over false or fabricated stories.
I too have kept writing in “Henken Jizai” that “Asahi doesn’t do reporting; it just makes things up.”
Reporting comes first.
That is what I wrote.
Given that history, it is hardly surprising if Asahi ignores all of my current professional titles and drags out a job I held a quarter of a century ago.
Perhaps they feel that in doing so they have finally avenged Watanabe Seiki and Satake Akimi.
One very much senses Asahi’s nasty intent, a kind of vindictive payback.

Too much leniency toward the Zainichi
In passing, Asahi wrote in its August 11 editorial that “there was also a factual error in claiming that Ms. Fukasawa’s roots had been concealed,” but as I have already explained, it was Asahi that concealed them.
Fukasawa’s father is a first-generation Zainichi, her mother a second-generation Zainichi, and Fukasawa herself naturalized as Japanese in 1994.
She spoke about her experience as a Zainichi in a talk event in May 2023, describing how, when she noticed at kindergarten or elementary school lunch that a spoon had not been placed on her tray, she said to those around her, “Sukkara” (Korean for spoon), and no one reacted.
When she went home and asked her mother about it, she was told, “You mustn’t use that word at school. You say ‘spoon’.”
Even when she received the women’s literature prize mentioned earlier in 2012, she said not a single word about her Zainichi past.
Nor did she say anything about being a first-generation naturalized citizen.
In 2019, when the September 13 issue of Shukan Post, with a special feature titled “We Don’t Need Korea,” went on sale, a huge backlash ensued.
At the time, Fukasawa was serializing a column in the Post, but angered by the special feature, she protested and withdrew from the series.
Yet even at that point, she did not reveal her own origins.
Only very recently did she finally disclose her past and begin to trade on it.
What is more, Asahi had let her appear in its pages as “Japanese writer Ushio Fukasawa,” talking about women’s issues and so on, until she herself came out about her background.
If they had her speak about Japan’s problems openly as someone of that background, readers could at least take her comments in a more objective light.
In my column I pointed out exactly this distorted attitude and method on Asahi’s part, but Asahi ignored that problem and instead attacked me as exclusionary.
It is nothing but nit-picking, yet that kind of tactic is precisely what I have been warning about in “Henken Jizai.”
In any case, behind this uproar lies, at its root, the overly tolerant attitude of Japanese society toward the Zainichi.
The comedian Miyazon has said that when he went to the Samezu Driver’s License Center in high school to get his license, an employee pointed out that he needed to present an alien registration certificate, and that was how he first learned of his origins.
It is astonishing.
As for Fukasawa, she writes that although she was a foreigner, she was able to attend school, and only several years later did she come to realize that she was an outsider.
The fact that someone can speak so leisurely in such terms is something you only see in Japan.
In other countries, you have to renew your passport almost every year, and you are required to give fingerprints as well.

Taking Japan for granted
In postwar Japan, there were throngs of people who had lost everything in the air raids and in repatriation from former overseas territories.
The Ministry of Health and Welfare decided to give livelihood protection (welfare payments) to Japanese who were struggling to live.
Then illegal-entry Zainichi Koreans started clamoring, “Give it to us too.”
They used violence to do whatever they liked.
They covered rivers in the middle of town and built pachinko parlors on top.
They illegally occupied areas in front of Shimbashi and Shinjuku stations and turned them into entertainment districts.
The culmination of this selfishness was the demand, “Give us welfare.”
Their first target was the Nagata Ward Office in Kobe.
Several hundred Zainichi Koreans repeatedly stormed the building, held the ward mayor hostage, and assaulted the staff.
They even attacked the Prime Minister’s Office.
If this had been left unchecked, people might well have been killed.
The Ministry of Health and Welfare capitulated and, in the form of a bureau-chief’s notice, decided to grant welfare benefits to the Zainichi.
The law was bent under threat.
The Supreme Court has acknowledged this fact.
In a case involving a Chinese national applying for livelihood protection, it ruled that “there is no legal basis for granting welfare benefits to foreigners.”
That is only natural.
The same approach should be applied to Zainichi Koreans as well.
There is another thing that is unacceptable: the interpretation of permanent residency settled under the Kaifu Toshiki administration (when Roh Tae-woo was president in South Korea).
The special permanent residency granted to the Zainichi is extraordinarily lax.
Even foreigners with ordinary permanent residency are deported if they commit a crime carrying a prison term of one year.
But the special permanent residency for the Zainichi is not revoked for ordinary crimes.
The law provides that only when they commit a serious offense carrying a prison term of seven years or more—that is, murder—will they finally be deported.
However, around the time Kaifu met Roh Tae-woo, there were several dozen convicted murderers serving fixed sentences, many of whom had been released and were living freely in Japan.
Japan, in accordance with the law, sought to deport them to South Korea.
That is only natural.
When Kaifu told Roh Tae-woo this, Roh replied, “They can’t read Hangul and they can’t speak Korean. If you send them back, it will be pitiful for them.”
And Kaifu, without a second thought, accepted the South Korean side’s position, and Zainichi Koreans stopped being deported.
Since then, even murderers can continue living in Japan.
Such blatantly law-defying arrangements are allowed to stand without question.
Even the basis for special permanent residency rests on the lie of “forced conscription.”
They are taking Japan absolutely for granted.
The reason the Sanseitō (Japan First party) surged in the recent House of Councillors election also lies there.
Media outlets led by Asahi all joined in criticizing the phrase “Japan First,” but given the result, it is clear that it resonated with many Japanese.
In that sense as well, Japanese people are no longer being fooled by the narratives of Asahi, which has for decades obediently echoed GHQ’s demands.
Eighty years after the war, perhaps the spell is finally breaking.
I hope people will use this uproar as a stepping stone to noticing Asahi’s methods, even a little.
If that happens, Japan may be able to change, at least a little.