This essay exposes how NHK’s Watch 9 host Yoshio Arima exploited the death of Liu Xiaobo to criticize the Abe administration.
The pattern mirrors Genichiro Takahashi’s use of Muhammad Ali’s death for political attacks.
It reveals the profound ideological decay within NHK’s news division.

NHK, Japan’s public broadcaster, has increasingly abandoned journalistic neutrality.
In a recent Watch 9 broadcast, host Yoshio Arima invoked the words of Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo not to criticize totalitarian regimes such as China or North Korea, but to attack Japan’s Abe administration.
This tactic directly mirrors earlier cases in which public figures exploited the deaths of global icons to advance partisan agendas.
The essay argues that such behavior represents a collapse of ethical journalism and a dangerous distortion of “freedom” rhetoric.

2017-07-15
Readers should already know that nearly all of my predictions have proven correct.
Among those who watched NHK’s Watch 9 yesterday, all people of discernment must have realized that the current style of NHK reporting, and the demeanor of the program’s hosts Arima and Kuwako, clearly revealed that NHK is now an organization filled with countless figures like Erika Ikeda and Akira Nagai.
I have watched Cassius Clay, Muhammad Ali, since my childhood.
I have been a great admirer of his and remain a boxing fan to this day.
On the day Ali died, Close-Up Gendai, for some reason, invited as a guest Genichiro Takahashi, one of the most foolish representatives who now appears gleefully in the Asahi Shimbun and aligns himself with it.
What did he say?
Using Muhammad Ali’s death as a pretext, he launched an attack on the Abe administration.
I was utterly appalled.
What a despicable man, I thought.
Last night, Arima’s conduct was exactly the same.
It was even worse than Takahashi’s case.
Liu Xiaobo, who was born in a one-party communist dictatorship that is a totalitarian state devoid of freedom of speech or political liberty, the world’s largest violator of human rights, and a destroyer of the rule of law, met a tragic death.
At the end of the program, Arima, wearing a beaming smile that made it obvious this was his purpose for hosting the show, went on at length quoting Liu Xiaobo’s words.
Was it to condemn the crimes of totalitarian states like China or South Korea?
No.
Just as in the Takahashi Genichiro case, he began criticizing the Abe administration.
He concluded the program by smugly declaring, with his characteristic “self-satisfied grin,” that Liu Xiaobo’s words were directed at us Japanese, who are becoming increasingly intolerant of dissent.
I was astonished at Arima, whose very expression reveals him to be a truly deranged man, someone who wanted to be a radical but never could, a quintessential pseudo-leftist.
NHK’s current news division, like the Asahi Shimbun, has completely lost its sanity.
If Arima truly feels anger toward intolerance, he should direct it toward China and South Korea.
He should speak out against those who, while living in Japan, engage in extremely malicious anti-Japanese activities, including resident Koreans who act with impunity, and those who were raised under Nazi-like education, studied at Hitotsubashi University, and repeatedly launched unbelievably vicious and stupid attacks against a lecture by Naoki Hyakuta, forcing its cancellation, as well as groups like “Norikoe Net” involved in the News Girls incident.
You blockhead.
You must learn, as soon as possible, that it is your own minds into which Liu Xiaobo’s words should be hammered.
If you are truly Japanese and genuinely love Japan.