A Public Betrayed: An Inside Look at Japanese Media Atrocities and Their Warnings to the West (2004)

Shukanshi

The book deals primarily with shukanshi, which are Japanese weekly magazines that are vaguely like our supermarket tabloids, but with more types of things in them. My own comments will be in ( ).

These shukanshi also do some investigative reporting, which is good, but on the bad side they tend to be anti-Jewish (and there are an incredibly small number of Jews in Japan), they tend to persecute some people, and they play down or deny Japanese atrocities in World War II, making them part of the historical revisionist movement.

The book questions where the line is for these magazines as far as truth or propaganda goes.

”At seemingly every turn, the Japanese public is deluged with lies, misrepresentations, and distortions of the grossest sort-a situation that has become so commonplace that it primarily passes without comment. ... banner headlines attack foreigners and minorities, rewrite history, and misrepresent current events with little regard for consequences.”

(Why is this type of thing so bad? For one thing, it's the same type of situation, but with different media, that confronted the Japanese prior to and through World War II, where the information the public received from the media was distorted, sometimes to the point of absurdity. This type of approach, a mixture of government censorship, self-censorship, and misdirected loyalty, totally misled the Japanese public about the war, what was going on, and what had been done, and it could have led to civilian casualties far higher than there already were if the US had actually invaded Japan itself.)

A survey is cited saying about 20% of US people are confident about television and press news, whereas 88% of Japanese are confident, making them much more easily misled.

These magazines may include some pornographic material, some good literary reviews, obscene cartoons and short stories, among other things, which is another way they are different from US tabloids.

Apparently the magazines tend to report rumors as news and, at times, just plain make up news reports.

The book says that Shukan Shincho and Shukan Bunshun are two of the worst magazines as far journalistic ethics goes, and they are two of the most influential magazines.

Apparently both magazines are into historical revisionism.

Military Spending

According to the book, Japan is the fourth highest in annual military expenditures, trailing only the US, Russia and France.

Nanjing Massacre

The book says that the historical truth of the massacre is still obscured in Japan today.

Comfort Women

The book says that some 200,000 young girls and women were used as comfort women for the Japanese soldiers. (This would not count those raped by “conquering” soldiers invading areas.)

Superficial vs. Real

There are two faces to the Japanese, according to the book. One is tatemae, which is the outward, formal and superficial face; the other is honne, which is the intimate and “real” face. What this means is that, just because someone is smiling at you doesn't mean they like you, for example.

Japan was a victim of WWII

The book says that many Japanese believe Japan was basically a victim of WWII (the atomic bombs, the economic “strangulation” by the US and other countries, etc).

The Weeklies vs. the Press

Apparently the press in Japan is rather fact-oriented and somewhat boring, whereas the weeklies are much, much more sensationalistic and not as oriented on facts.

TV and the news media

There are also some close ties between the newspapers and the national commercial television stations (although this is also a major problem in the US, particularly with more and more radio, tv and press outlets held by an increasingly small number of companies and people.)

Press Clubs

Apparently the Japanese Press Clubs are very exclusive, and those who want to be sort of a maverick and not toe the expected line are kept out of the clubs and away from the sources of information that are there.

US Government and Japanese publications

Apparently in the late 1950's the CIA was working with Japanese publishers to get them to print positive things about the US.

Media ijime

Ijime is another word for bullying, mainly a problem in schools, but the book says some of the media in Japan are also responsible for a form of journalistic ijime, attacking individuals and organizations.

Anti-Semitism

There are about 1,500 Jews in Japan in a population of about 128 million people. The book says that the printed media in Japan has a history of carrying advertisements for anti-Jewish articles and books. One of the magazines, Marco Polo, even ran material denying that the Holocaust ever actually happened. This was in 1995.

A different magazine, in 1999, ran an article about “The human network of Jewish capital that devours five trillion yen of our hard-earned taxes through the long-term credit bank of Japan.” The book has an entire chapter about anti-Semitism.

There's an entire chapter about the media smearing a Buddhist leader. This is followed by a chapter on the Nanjing massacre. The book points out that the Nanjing massacre attracts so much revisionist attention since it's a major, if not the major example, of the “moral bankruptcy of the Japanese militarism and emperor worship of the Second World War.”

The result of all of this is that there are many Japanese who think the Nanjing massacre is something that is debatable, especially as to how many people died during the Japanese attack. Part of the problem lies with the US which, during the occupation, concentrated on Japanese/US conflicts and didn't give a whole lot of concern to what Japan did in China.

The book says there are around 100,000 members of the far-right in Japan, belonging to over 1,000 groups. (These are the types that still drive trucks with loud-speakers and push their own political opinions. The entire argument over the Yasukuni shrine is all part of this ultra-nationalism movement.)

The next chapter in the book deals with the sex slaves of the Japanese military. It goes into the history of the program and notes that there are no national sites in Japan dealing with the comfort women, that the Diet has refused to apologize to them, and that the government refuses to pay compensation directly to the women who are still alive who were used as sexual slaves for their army's soldiers.

(That there is an effort to rewrite the past by the nationalists is something that is quite important to realize and to understand. On the other hand, much of the American past is not exactly rewritten but is sort of ignored or played down, especially when it comes to the way the white settlers and the government dealt with the Native Americans who were the legitimate inhabitants of North America.

(Something to keep in mind is that the schools are also coming under the influence of the revisionists, with textbooks downplaying Japanese atrocities and responsibility for the longer version of WWII, including the invasion of China and all the horrible things that happened there long before Pearl Harbor was attacked. )

(What this goes to show is how important the media are to the public of any country. You grow up in schools are are told things by the teachers and the books; when get out of schools, you are told things by the TV news, by books, radios, magazines, newspapers, etc. There is virtually no way that any person can check each source to see if what it is printing is accurate or not. This leads to things like the split among people in American between those who are tolerant of gays, lesbians, etc, and those who virulently hate them. You also have black/white hatreds that still exist, and hatred of foreigners, and all of these are caused by the way people are brought up. Hatred is not an in-born aspect of the human being.)

(The book does write about some very important things, and some disturbing things, that are taking place in the Japanese media, but it's important to realize that similar types of things take place in our own media, and that we must always be cautious about what we read or see and how much influence we let it have over our own minds.)

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