欺瞞と独善だらけの朝日新聞を検証しよう！

My wife Keiko and I host a weekly talk show on local radio in Western Tokyo that tries to take a jaundiced, opinionated approach to the clash of East versus West. Just before Christmas 2000 we talked briefly about a trip we had made a year earlier to Nanjing[i] in China, the site of a notorious massacre by the Japanese imperial army at the end of 1937. Walking through the museum in Nanjing that commemorates the incident, reading the testimony of hundreds of Chinese and non-Chinese survivors, looking at countless photographs of corpses and indeed their bones, some of which lie beneath the museum site, it's impossible to deny what happened. And we said so, adding that those who do should pay a visit there themselves.

Thirty minutes after the show was broadcast, three members of a local "political group" arrived at the studio and asked to see the management. The station director, Sato-san, said he spoke for the station and, after exchanging name cards, everyone sat down.[ii] The only member of the group who spoke was the sempai (senior member) who softly and politely explained his displeasure. The Nanjing Massacre had not been "officially announced" (koshiki happyo) by the government, so we shouldn't have mentioned it, he said. If we were going to use the radio to talk about communist countries, why didn't we tell our listeners that Japan had exported thousands of tons of rice to help famine-stricken North Korea, he asked. Why, he wanted to know, were we going on about China? Was our radio station communist? Sato-san carefully noted these points, including the last, on a writing pad before escorting the visitors to the elevator, bowing and thanking them for their visit.

Two days later the senior station manager called a meeting. He apologized for taking our time and explained that from now on he would be very grateful if we would not discuss political issues on the radio. If someone sent a fax or email in giving their opinions, it was fine to read it out over the air but not to give our own opinions. He said we would need to apologize over the air for the Nanjing comment. If we didn't, the men and their friends would drive their gaisensha, or black sound trucks, outside our sponsors (two ramen, or Chinese noodle, restaurants, a bar, and a couple of real estate agents) and harass them until they withdrew their support. Violence was unlikely, but he couldn't rule it out. He apologized again for asking us to apologize. He handed us a sheet of paper the station had prepared for us to read on the next show. It said that we humbly apologized for the "inappropriate comments" (futekisetsu na hyogen ) we had made the previous week.


http://www.japanesestudies.org.uk/discussionpapers/McNeill.html