A reflection on NHK’s March 11 coverage that revealed the realities of Sanriku oyster farming, redefining journalism as the transmission of facts rather than ideological persuasion.

2016-03-13

Among Japan’s television networks, it is only natural that NHK alone properly conveys what truly needs to be conveyed.

This year’s March 11 special taught us many realities that Japanese citizens had never known at all—such as the state of oyster farming along the Sanriku coast and, as a result of its excellence, oysters packed densely with plump, delicious-looking flesh. That is journalism. Journalism is absolutely not something to be used by people who, having fallen into leftist extremism—whose defining traits are persistence and maliciousness to the point that calling them yakuza would not be an exaggeration—to indoctrinate the public with their ideology and shape public opinion in the direction they desire.

The Japan Federation of Bar Associations and so-called civic groups should instead bring charges against their own representative, the Asahi Shimbun, before the United Nations. This is because what they are doing is nothing other than totalitarianism and fascism itself.

To be continued.