Shoichi Watanabe once described Asahi Shimbun editorials as writings fit for an overexcited middle school student.
This article demonstrates how Asahi’s coverage of anti-terror legislation and its hostility toward Japan’s leadership precisely matches that description, exposing a long-standing pattern of ideological distortion and suppression of the public’s right to know.

2017-06-18
In his essay “Japan Made a ‘Bad Country’ Through the Occupation Forces’ Brainwashing Program,” Shoichi Watanabe wrote, “If Asahi’s editorials were written by an overexcited middle school student.”
The deplorable state of the Asahi Shimbun, which relentlessly rebrands legislation aimed at preventing terrorism as “conspiracy law” and launches abnormal attacks on the government day after day, has already become beyond remedy.
And in the midst of this, a journalist who devoted a large amount of space to an editorial wrote exactly the kind of prose that Shoichi Watanabe had pointed out.
Phrases such as “As a media organization whose mission is to report the public’s right to know” were written in a manner precisely befitting a middle school student.
Until the internet came to serve as the greatest library in human history, the Japanese people had absolutely no knowledge of who was going to the United Nations, in ways entirely unknown to them, to engage in activities to degrade Japan, to despise Japan, and to openly express hostility toward Japan’s leaders.
Regarding the public’s right to know, which was gravely damaged as the credibility and honor of the Japanese people were eroded, the Asahi Shimbun reported absolutely nothing.
How far, then, do the people of the Asahi Shimbun intend to go as shameless pseudo-moralists and pseudo-Marxists.
How far will they continue as people still brainwashed by the occupation policies of GHQ.
I was truly astonished.
It was their own reporting that deprived the public of the right to know.
They failed to convey facts and instead carried out reporting aimed at realizing their distorted ideology.
They consistently produced reporting filled with hostility toward political leaders.
For many years they kept insisting that Japan should learn from Germany, yet this amounted to a selective exploitation of the Weizsäcker speech.
It was commentary intended to support the theory that Japan is uniquely evil.
They attack the Abe administration, which lasted only a few years, by labeling it “Abe’s one-man rule,” yet Helmut Kohl governed for sixteen years, and Angela Merkel likewise governed for sixteen years.
As the CDU, Germany remained the ruling party for thirty-two consecutive years.
Despite this, no newspaper in Germany behaves as childishly and foolishly as the Asahi Shimbun by disparaging its own country.
On the contrary, while newspapers such as the Süddeutsche Zeitung collaborated with the Asahi Shimbun in continuously attacking Japan, the Asahi Shimbun never conveyed the reality that Germany itself is a country that has repeatedly attacked other nations without understanding their actual conditions.
That an editorial writer there produces prose like that of an overexcited middle school student is only to be expected.