July 20, 2018
The following is from Nobuo Ikeda BLOG, which I just found online.
< Comfort Women Issue Derailed by Feminism What is "Sex Slavery">
September 13, 2014 11:32 am
Category Media
Asahi Shimbun's "expiate view of history" is a tool for sales and career advancement.
A search of the Asahi Shimbun database yields 7,419 entries for "comfort women" and 1,046 for "comfort women were forcibly taken away."
Moreover, they are concentrated in the Osaka head office.
Since there are many zainichi in Osaka, writing articles sympathetic to them became a sales weapon.
Since many of the target readers were housewives, the "Women's Pacific War" series led by Kiyoyasu Kitabatake (editorial writer for the Osaka head office) probably contributed greatly to expanding the circulation.
The articles consisted of (unauthentic) letters from women who were children at the time of the war.
For example, the July 24, 1991 article "I Was Sold Up to Twice" goes like this.
Then I thought I would once again work for my father and brother and give them all the filial piety I could.
Hiding the tears that welled up in my eyes, I traveled to the island of Saipan with 21 other Okinawan women.
This was on April 3, 1939.
I was told that we were going to a sugar cane company, but when we got there, we found out that we were to be comfort women for the military.
The cause of this was not military coercion, but poverty.
There may have been cases where the traffickers tricked the women into becoming military comfort women, but the cause of "coercion in the broad sense" was not the military, but the debt owed to the traffickers.
Because human trafficking was illegal even back then, the government did not protect the debt owed to the traffickers.
As I discussed with Mr. Toshihide Katayama yesterday, the notion that only Class A war criminals and the military were at fault and the Japanese people were the victims is a fiction created by the Allies to legally settle the war responsibility at the Tokyo Trials.
The Asahi Shimbun has organized the story into "perpetrators and victims of the war of aggression," a scheme of good and evil, and has covered it up with beautiful slogans such as "Women's Rights" and "Reconciliation with Asia.
Behind the fact that such a campaign has continued for more than 30 years is the special situation in Osaka, where competition with the Osaka Yomiuri and other local newspapers is fierce.
In Osaka, if you create a "sellable product," you will get ahead.
It was a long time ago anyway, so even if there were some lies, it would not be known.
The Japanese military, which is absolutely evil, is the one that is defamed, so there is no need to worry about being sued.
Another factor unique to Asahi is its careerism.
The careers of Kiyoyasu Kitabatake (head of the Osaka head office's planning and news section → deputy editorial director), Harushi Kiyota (foreign affairs section chief → deputy editorial director of the Tokyo head office → representative of the Western head office), and Hayami Ichikawa (Seoul bureau chief → foreign affairs section chief → China bureau chief → news bureau chief), who were at the center of this false report, are very similar, moving between the Social Affairs Department and overseas Asian bureaus.
Another commonality is that (with the exception of Takashi Uemura) they have all risen through the ranks.
As I have written before, Asahi traditionally has a "democratic centralization" system that unifies the company's editorial opinion.
Articles on comfort women and nuclear power plants are censored by its specialized desk.
And only reporters who write articles that conform to the company's opinion can rise in the ranks.
Therefore, the fastest way to get ahead is to mass-produce articles that demonize the military and tout "women's rights.
The expiate view of history, which holds that the Japanese military must forever apologize to Asia for its crimes, was also crucial in exonerating the Asahi Shimbun, which was a perpetrator.
It was passed down as Asahi's corporate theory, which led to hysterical articles in the political section on collective self-defense and other issues, and to the comfort women hoax in the social section.
Reporters who questioned this became sidelined, and those who wrote interesting articles about good and evil, such as the radiation hoax, rose through the ranks.
In this sense, the current issue is a good opportunity to fundamentally review Asahi Shimbun's expiate view of history, which has continued since immediately after the end of the war.
Total war in the modern era cannot be waged by the military alone.
The war happened because of the cooperation of the bureaucracy, which spent the budget for the war, the economic power, which financed the war, and the mass media, which instilled the "Greater East Asia Ideal" in the soldiers who went to war.
President Kimura said he would "continue to make the same arguments as before." Still, Ichikawa, the head of the Asahi Shimbun's press bureau, stated clearly that "there was no forced rendition.
This issue will not end until the Asahi Shimbun retracts all of its more than 7,000 articles on the comfort women and admits that its coverage of the comfort women was complete and utter bunk.
2024/8/26 in Onomichi
