Drawing on Masayuki Takayama’s essay published in Sound Argument, this piece exposes the intellectual emptiness of Japanese TV commentators, the distortion of North Korea and China coverage, and the ethical collapse of Japan’s media, exemplified by the Moritomo scandal and sensationalist wide shows.
These are facts that the United Nations and the so-called Special Rapporteurs must read.
2017-06-03
In the current issue of the monthly magazine Sound Argument, Masayuki Takayama has contributed a genuine essay to a special feature titled “Wide Shows in Praise of Foolish Gods,” and it is a body of facts that must be read by all Japanese citizens and people around the world, especially by the United Nations, now virtually dominated by China, the world’s largest and worst human-rights-violating state under a one-party communist dictatorship, which brazenly occupies a permanent seat on the Security Council despite the fact that the original permanent member was the Republic of China, as well as by the Special Rapporteurs concerned.
What follows continues from the previous chapter.
A former partner, Nobuo Asai, said of the infamous Chinese poisoned dumpling incident that “it must have been Japanese who wanted to destroy Japan-China friendship and poisoned them in Japan.”
The organization praised that remark.
In that sense, there is no easier business than being a commentator.
Picking up some of their recent carefree remarks.
On the Sunday when North Korea launched a high-altitude missile, on TBS’s Sunday Morning.
A missile that successfully cleared atmospheric re-entry was a grave threat to Japan.
One might have expected a real-time discussion of what was literally “a madman with a knife,” but there were only three minutes of live news.
Hiroshi Sekiguchi concluded with, “They really do unnecessary things.”
Unnecessary in what way?
Using the North Korean threat as a pretext, Abe has steadily strengthened military forces and deepened military cooperation with the United States.
The program had probably prepared to harshly criticize this as “Abe’s reckless delusions.”
That plan was ruined because North Korea did something “extra,” and that must be what he meant.
Perhaps because of that, the program dragged on sluggishly.
The now-painful, incomprehensible talk by Jitsuro Terashima, always prefaced with “In the United States,” was torture.
Akira Aoki, who loves South Korea more than Koreans themselves, repeated his one refrain: “Dialogue with the North.”
Even the United States, which had provided three hundred million dollars in aid through dialogue to a country that freely committed abductions, terrorism, and nuclear development, has now said it can no longer negotiate.
How, then, can one negotiate with such a criminal state?
This is a perfect example of the hollowness of commentators.
The centerpiece of wide shows remains Moritomo Gakuen’s Kagoike.
Investigators are already closing in on his vicious fraud.
Do they feel no shame at all in elevating such a man’s statements as if they were truth?
Mr. Sunday took up Kagoike’s claim that “Akie Abe pressured the Ministry of Finance to discount state-owned land by 800 million yen” and broadcast without resistance the secretly recorded audio that Kagoike had hidden away.
Would a decent person secretly record someone?
Does their conscience not ache at airing such material without hesitation?
They say the 800-million-yen discount is suspicious, but the Toyonaka Park land just north of Kagoike’s property, nearly the same size, was sold with a 1.4-billion-yen discount.
The school lunch center to the south received a 900-million-yen discount, yet television and Asahi never mention this.
Kagoike’s wife even mentioned in an email that Kiyomi Tsujimoto knows the details of the Toyonaka park sale, yet her name never appears on the programs.
Taro Kimura, who gained fame for correctly predicting Trump’s election, appears on Mr. Sunday, yet he said not a word about the strangeness of trusting a con man’s words or about the Toyonaka park connection.
Even he would probably be fired if he spoke the truth.
Reconstruction Minister Masahiro Imamura lost his post after snapping at provocations from activists.
If one thinks sensibly, it is far more dangerous that anti-government activists have free passes 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 provocations; reporters anger them to test their capacity.”
From the standpoint of a former reporter, that is a lie.
A reporter’s job is to gather news, and one can tell a person’s capacity without testing it.
Provoking someone to draw out their true feelings is a crude tactic of American courtroom lawyers.
It is astonishing that he was once a political reporter.
A commentator is someone who can fluently say, “Constitutional revision is bad, nuclear power is bad, Abe is bad, while Xi Jinping, South Korea, and globalism are good.”