This essay criticizes a February 16, 2017 Asahi Shimbun editorial by political editor Hirotoshi Sako, exposing the newspaper’s distorted hostility toward Prime Minister Abe and President Trump, its pseudo-moralism, and its long-standing role in undermining Japan’s honor, sovereignty, and global standing for over seventy years after the war.

The time has long passed for the Japanese people and people around the world to recognize what is truly happening.
2017-02-16.
On February 12, an editorial by Asahi Shimbun political editor Hirotoshi Sako appeared on page seven of the newspaper.
Any Japanese person with a sound mind who read it would not only have been stunned, but would have felt genuine anger.
From the very opening, the piece was abnormal and grotesque.
It was an editorial dripping with naked hostility toward Shinzo Abe, written in a tone as if the author were an omniscient god, utterly unaware of how distorted his own thinking had become.
A newspaper that should have ceased publication back in August three years earlier, when it finally admitted that its comfort women reporting and Fukushima nuclear coverage were fabrications and offered an official apology, now allowed a single political editor,
a man who, as repeatedly noted, was never among Japan’s finest minds,
to pass judgment on a president who had been chosen over two years by the United States, the true leader of the world, without whom it is no exaggeration to say that the world would descend into chaos and humanity itself might perish.
With their warped intellect, they made outrageous assumptions about that president.
Emphasis in the quoted passage is mine.
Even in alliance relations, “For U.S. President Trump, who seeks to thoroughly pursue ‘America First,’ the standard for evaluating the Japan–U.S. relationship lies solely in whether it benefits the American economy. The world may be watching the apparent closeness between President Trump and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe during Abe’s visit to the United States, but it gives the impression of something entirely different from the Japan–U.S. relationship that has contributed to multilateral cooperation in the past.
Should Japan distance itself from Trump, who threatens universal values such as freedom and human rights and the global order, or draw closer to him. The prime minister has gambled on the latter.
Before the new administration’s foreign policy toward China and Russia becomes fixed, he likely judged it necessary to embed Japan’s position.”
Omitted hereafter.
The world itself must surely be appalled by the intellectual poverty of Asahi Shimbun’s editorial writers.
Third-rate minds are presuming to look down upon the president of the world’s leading nation,
judging him through their warped ideology, pseudo-moralism, and pseudo-socialism.
This man is no different from Hotsumi Ozaki.
Indeed, with an intellect of this level, he could never comprehend that Prime Minister Abe is one of the rare realists of modern politics, and a genuine democrat.
This is not merely atrocious; this childishness and maliciousness are extremely dangerous not only for Japan, but for the world.
Such people rummage for scandals among cabinet members, attack and weaken governments, and indulge endlessly in fabricated reporting.
Because their minds are those of pseudo-moralists and pseudo-Marxists,
they are easily subjected to ideological manipulation by one-party communist dictatorships and states that are, in reality, forms of Nazism.
They have continued to belittle Japan,
to trample upon the honor and credibility of Japan and its people,
and even seventy years after the war, to keep Japan politically imprisoned within the international community.
In the century of war that was the result of Western colonialism,
Japan was forced into choosing the losing side in the final conflict,
had nearly all its cities indiscriminately bombed,
lost over three million non-combatants,
and ultimately suffered the unprecedented horror of two atomic bombs, which in an instant killed more than half a million civilians in flashes of hellish light.
Despite all this, despite Japan having lost only once in its entire history,
these newspapers and so-called intellectuals have continued for seventy years after the war to define Japan itself as the villain.
They have aligned themselves with the evil of one-party communist dictatorships and the evil of states that are, in reality, Nazism.
The time has long since passed for the Japanese people and the people of the world to awaken to this fact.