This essay criticizes NHK’s broadcast of the so-called Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal and examines the postwar infiltration of Japanese media institutions under GHQ policies, warning against ideological manipulation disguised as journalism.

March 14, 2017

NHK News is not as aggressive as TV Asahi’s Hōdō Station or TBS’s News 23 in denigrating Japan, attacking the government, weakening the Abe administration, and engineering regime change as frequently as turning a cat’s eye.
Compared to those broadcasters under the Asahi Shimbun and Mainichi Shimbun umbrellas—an outrageous group that might as well be aiming to dominate Japan—it is certainly more restrained.
But that does not mean NHK is safe.
After all, NHK enthusiastically broadcast the so-called Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal, a gathering organized by operatives—Matsui Yayori, a notorious activist from the Asahi Shimbun who in reality should have been nothing less than an agent of China, and Alexis Dudden, who is unmistakably an agent of South Korea.
And that is not all.
Masayuki Takayama, the one and only journalist of his kind in the postwar world, has explained how, taking advantage of GHQ policies, large numbers of postwar resident Chinese and Koreans flooded into Japan’s media organizations, including NHK.
It is an organization where many individuals, little more than operatives influenced by them, lurk in large numbers.
The Japanese state and the Japanese people must continue to keep a close watch to ensure that NHK, a de facto state broadcaster, does not carry out the kind of Japan-demeaning coverage practiced by the two networks mentioned at the outset.
The moment the chairman—who must have been a thorn in their side—was replaced, there are strong signs that operatives have begun trying to return NHK to its former state of covert activity, including strangely renewed anti-nuclear reporting.
Last night, the male anchor on Watch 9 made comments that epitomized pseudo-moralism and pseudo-socialism.
David Atkins has repeatedly written in monthly magazines that for Japan to become a true tourism powerhouse, it must create an environment in which ultra-wealthy individuals from Saudi Arabia or the West can stay long-term in rooms costing, for example, one million yen per night.
A country visited only by neighboring nations cannot become a genuine tourism powerhouse, he argues.
For the first time in 46 years, the King of Saudi Arabia visited Japan.
That alone should be celebrated, and his arrival with a delegation of 1,000 people was on an entirely different scale.
It is also quite welcome that they are energetically shopping in places like Ginza, contributing greatly to domestic demand.
If they become repeat visitors to Japan in the future, that would be even better.
And yet the male anchor made remarks such as, “Saudi Arabia also has issues of income disparity…” waving half-baked knowledge and adding that such “daimyō-style travel” is somewhat problematic—an extreme example of pseudo-moralism.
This essay continues.