After reading Kenichi Ara’s critique of a Nippon TV program on the Nanjing Incident in Monthly Hanada, the author exposes how Japanese media go beyond fake news into deeply self-demeaning propaganda, easily manipulated by Chinese and South Korean anti-Japan narratives.

Since I had happened to watch the program in question, I was able to read it through at once. February 28, 2017. On a train bound for Kyoto, a friend who had just purchased the newly released monthly magazine Hanada (840 yen) told me that on page 284 there was a fine article by Kenichi Ara, a senior alumnus of my alma mater, titled “So Many Questions About NTV’s ‘Nanjing Incident,’” and handed it to me. Since I had happened to watch the program in question, I read it through at once. The impression I had when I watched the program was simply, what on earth is this, and who made such a program and for what purpose. President Trump has called the New York Times and CNN media outlets that have broadcast fake news and even expelled them from press conferences. Whether due to the extreme rudeness, ignorance, and incompetence with which the New York Times has slandered and insulted Japan over the years, or whether as a result of pseudo-moralism and pseudo-communism that easily allowed it to be manipulated by the anti-Japan propaganda of the Chinese government ruled by a one-party dictatorship of the Communist Party, and by the anti-Japan propaganda of South Korea, which in reality is a Nazi-like state, the reporting it has carried out on Japan is fake reporting exactly as President Trump criticizes. However, once one reads the paper by Mr. Ara, who is worthy of being called my senior, it becomes clear that not only fake reporting but that the Japanese media, including the Asahi Shimbun, are unbelievable in that there exists in Japan a self-abusive, thoroughly self-denigrating media that has no equal anywhere in the world, that feels no shame whatsoever in degrading its own country. And until three years ago in August, these media were regarded by you as representative news organizations of Japan. Anyone who learns the true reality of that will surely be left stunned.