The author explains why he stopped watching NHK’s Close-Up Gendai after realizing the political distortions behind its casting and commentary. From the appearance of Gang Sang-jung to the postwar infiltration of media by residents from the Korean Peninsula under GHQ policies, this essay argues that it is naïve to believe no foreign intelligence influence exists within Japanese media.

2016-01-10
Until last August, I had a favorable impression of Ms. Hiroko Kunitani, who served as the anchor of NHK’s Close-Up Gendai.
Learning that her grandfather was the founder of the hospital in which I myself had been hospitalized for seven months with a serious illness probably strengthened that impression.
However, not consciously at all, I have scarcely watched that program since last August.

Upon waking up this morning and immediately reading the following chapter of Masayuki Takayama’s Distorted Reporting, I finally understood why I had stopped watching the program, and also why I had felt such dismay a few days earlier when I saw Kang Sang-jung appear as a commentator.

With regard to the content at that time, anyone with sound intelligence could easily see that he was completely unqualified to comment on it.

Despite the fact that Japan has no shortage of truly qualified experts on such matters, NHK nevertheless selected Kang Sang-jung—a man who holds Japanese nationality yet continues to use his Korean name.

For example, it would be inconceivable in the United States for a person who had naturalized as an American to appear on television under the name of his former country, which actively promotes anti-American views, and then comment on American politics.

Japan’s media, and NHK in particular, are making a grave mistake.

As for one part of the cause, Masayuki Takayama explains in another of his works that after Japan’s defeat, taking advantage of GHQ policies, large numbers of resident Koreans entered the media, with NHK at the forefront.

Since then, under the guise of superficial moralism, those who chose not to return to the Korean Peninsula after the war but instead remained in Japan—because Japan was incomparably a better country than the pre-annexation Korean Peninsula—have existed in numbers grotesquely disproportionate to their ratio of about 600,000 to Japan’s population of 120 million.
It is natural to assume that many of them are found especially within NHK and other major media organizations.

There are surely resident Chinese as well.
To believe that among them there are not individuals influenced by the intelligence agencies of the Korean Peninsula or China is something that only Japanese media professionals, of all people in the world, would seriously think.