Readers of the monthly magazine Seiron felt anew that truth cannot be grasped by relying only on mainstream outlets such as the Asahi Shimbun and NHK.
Citing an essay by Tetsuhide Yamaoka—who confronted and prevented the comfort women statue campaign in Australia—the text highlights the mechanics of South Korea’s propaganda and the nature of information warfare.
A foreign journalist’s reaction shows how the belief that “so many people support it” is treated as evidence, shaping public opinion.
The author also criticizes the “learn from Germany” narrative, anti-Japan coverage in Western media, and distortions in war-responsibility discourse, warning of a broader media-driven ideological climate.

2019-02-03
February 3, 2019
If you merely subscribe to newspapers such as the Asahi Shimbun and watch NHK and the like, you cannot understand the truth of anything at all.
Everyone who purchased the monthly magazine Seiron released yesterday must have thought so.
They must have keenly felt that if you only subscribe to newspapers such as the Asahi Shimbun and watch NHK and the like, you cannot understand the truth of anything at all.
The following concerns a person I did not know at all until August five years ago, but who lived in Australia and encountered this situation.
He boldly confronted, for the honor and credibility of Japan and the Japanese people, the comfort women statue installation campaign, an anti-Japan propaganda movement that South Korea has been spreading worldwide by taking advantage of the Asahi Shimbun’s fabricated reporting, and he prevented the installation of such a statue in Australia.
In other words, this is an excerpt from an essay published by Mr. Tetsuhide Yamaoka, truly one of Japan’s treasures, titled “We Cannot Win the Information War with South Korea Like This.”
The reason I excerpted this passage is that it served as an example proving the correctness of what I have said.
That the world is in fact ignorant, foolish, and incompetent.
Preface omitted.
South Korea’s propaganda techniques.
Here I will introduce one episode.
Last year, at someone’s request, I attended an interview in which a German female journalist, the Seoul bureau chief of The Economist, interviewed Ms. Yoshiko Sakurai.
It was an interview about the comfort women issue, but she clearly did not have much knowledge.
When we explained the facts, what did she say in response.
“So are you saying that their claims have no basis even though so many people go out every week in Seoul to demonstrate and even stay overnight beside the comfort women statue?”.
Her face plainly showed the thought, “There is no way that could be true.”
This is exactly it.
The more common sense a person has, the more easily they are deceived.
This is the propaganda technique that South Korea has mastered through its long history filled with humiliation.
What is necessary to counter it is the immediacy I have been emphasizing.
To be continued.
The leading figure among the so-called scholars who have kept saying the truly laughable phrase “Learn from Germany” would be Kang Sang-jung.
As I have already written, when I first saw this man on the program “Asa Made Nama Television,” I instantly sensed something suspicious in him.
A kind of imposture.
If Japan had organizations like the CIA or the FBI and I were their director, I would immediately have ordered an investigation of this man.
One day in July 2010, as I began writing in this way, I searched his name.
I quickly realized that my conviction had been correct.
When he was an unremarkable student at Waseda University, the Korean intelligence agency (KCIA) had already approached him as well.
And his destination for study abroad was Germany.
In the formation of anti-Japan sentiment—something imposed because roughly half of Germans are uninformed—this man must have contributed greatly.
It goes without saying that he would never say that Japan is actually a wonderful country.
Even so, the disgrace of the University of Tokyo, which welcomed such a man as a professor, is hard to overlook.
These matters will be taken up later.
Speaking of “Learn from Germany,” I believe it was in the Yomiuri Shimbun.
Masakazu Yamazaki, whom Asahi Shimbun readers were made to regard as a great playwright or critic.
When I learned that he had uttered that single phrase without the slightest doubt.
I realized that this man too was a schemer.
Merely a cultural figure patronized by the Asahi Shimbun.
One more case of left-wing infantilism.
Germany committed the great crime called Nazism, yet it used glib rhetoric to claim that it was Hitler and his group who were guilty, not the German people.
This was possible because the surrounding countries, starting with France, were all modern nation-states.
Germany succeeded in pushing talk of war responsibility into oblivion.
Japan was a country pushed onto the losing side in the century of war and defeated, and it was not only that.
The worst indiscriminate bombing in human history, and finally Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
A country driven as far as ethnic annihilation.
Japan began a war against the United States, which at the time was the world’s strongest and largest, an overwhelming military superpower that no one would have challenged.
It is not an exaggeration to say that only that was foolish.
Japan was driven into that position by Soviet spies within Japan and the United States, and it cannot be called a foolish war waged by fools.
If Japan did not fight, the state could not survive.
Because the energy essential to national survival—oil—had been cut off.
It is an undeniable fact that the Asahi Shimbun was a leading actor in fanning the flames of war and pushing even the military to a point of no return.
As for the Süddeutsche Zeitung using Asahi Shimbun reporting to continue writing anti-Japan articles.
Until August five years ago, I did not know that at all.
As a result of the truly lowest and most despicable conduct by German newspaper companies such as the Süddeutsche Zeitung.
To divert the world’s eyes from the real crimes they had committed, they took advantage of the foolish editorials of the Asahi Shimbun.
Likewise, riding on the propaganda of the Korean Peninsula and China, which are in reality anti-Japan states of a Nazi-like nature.
They proclaimed to the world that Japan had committed crimes comparable to those of the Nazis.
As for the罪 of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, the King of Hell, Enma, would have to judge it with the harshest torment.
That, in a German opinion poll a few years ago, about half held anti-Japan sentiment.
I learned it from a newspaper or from a small boxed item in Newsweek, which I subscribed to at the time.
As I have already written, I found it puzzling why about half of Germans held anti-Japan sentiment.
After I stopped subscribing to the Asahi Shimbun and began subscribing regularly to four monthly magazines, I read an essay by Mr. Kanji Nishio, and only then did I first learn of the existence of the Süddeutsche Zeitung and what kind of reporting they had continued to do about Japan.
Those who make their living in the media are not only in Japan but all over the world.
Le Monde, the New York Times, and the rest.
Their intellectual level is the height of shoddiness.
As readers know, that even made me come close to disliking France, which I love.
The viciousness of Le Monde’s Japan-bashing in the Ghosn case.
Thinking it was nothing but racial prejudice, I reached the point where I could not avoid becoming one hundred percent fed up with France.
Toward Le Clézio, whom I had long thought of as another self of mine in this world.
I even felt driven to write a declaration of separation, in the loud voice of Nobunaga, not only rebuking him but stating that I would never again hold him in esteem.
At that time.
The memory came back to me of time spent in conversation with a Frenchman with whom I had truly close relations in the real world, and with his mother, who had been born and raised in Provence.
In other words, time with true French people.
Then, as I have already written, the answer suddenly appeared.
That this is not a problem of the French people.
But a problem shared by those who make their living in the media all over the world.
And what is that problem.
It is left-wing infantilism.
So the Nobunaga living today realized.
And thus I was able to avert the danger that I would come to despise the French people forever.
As for the meaning of that, it is no exaggeration to call him the Ieyasu living today, though he may laugh loudly at that.
Professor Nobuyuki Kaji, emeritus of Kyoto University and Osaka University, sensed it instantly and published a splendid essay, as I have already mentioned.