This essay exposes how Japanese wide shows elevate the statements of a suspected fraudster as truth, suppress inconvenient facts, and rely on hollow commentators—revealing a profound collapse of journalistic ethics and public responsibility.

2017-06-03
The following continues from the previous chapter.
The centerpiece of wide shows remains Ryuchi of the Moritomo Gakuen case.
Investigative authorities are already moving in due to his malicious fraudulent conduct.
Do they feel no shame at all in elevating the statements of such a man as if they were the truth?
“Mr. Sunday” took up Ryuchi’s claim that “Akie Abe pressured the Ministry of Finance to discount state-owned land by 800 million yen,” and broadcast, without alteration, a secretly recorded tape that Ryuchi had concealed.
Would a decent person secretly record someone?
Does no one feel a twinge of conscience in airing such material without hesitation?
They say an 800 million yen discount is suspicious, but the Toyonaka Park site immediately north of Ryuchi’s land, nearly the same size, was sold off with a 1.4 billion yen discount.
The school lunch center to the south was also discounted by 900 million yen, yet neither television nor Asahi mentions this.
Regarding the sale of Toyonaka Park, Ryuchi’s wife even mentioned in an email that Kiyomi Tsujimoto was well informed, but her name never appears on the program.
On “Mr. Sunday,” Taro Kimura, who gained recognition for correctly predicting Trump’s election, appears as a commentator, yet he did not say a single word about the abnormality of trusting a fraudster’s words, nor about the connection to the Toyonaka Park sale.
Even he would likely be fired if he spoke the truth.
Reconstruction Minister Masahiro Imamura was provoked by activists and, as a result, lost his position.
If one thinks sensibly, it is far more dangerous that anti-government activists are given free access to ministerial press conferences, yet no wide show points this out.
Instead, amid criticism of Imamura, Shiro Tazaki said, “A minister must not rise to provocation. Journalists anger ministers in order to judge their caliber.”
From the perspective of a former journalist, that is a lie.
A journalist’s job is to obtain news; one can understand a person’s caliber without testing it.
Provoking someone to extract their true feelings is a vulgar tactic used by American courtroom lawyers.
It is astonishing that he was once a political reporter for Jiji Press.
A commentator, in this context, is someone who can fluently say, “Constitutional revision is bad. Nuclear power is bad. Abe is bad. Xi Jinping, South Korea, and globalism are good.”