trouble at Asahi

Telling their story
Telling their story

It’s tough times for Japan’s Asahi Shimbun newspaper, as its president has recently apologized for faulty reporting on multiple issues.

One scandal has implications for Japan’s debates over remembrance of its wartime history. The left-leaning newspaper has historically, through its reporting and editorials, been a leading voice calling for a greater reckoning with Japan’s wartime past.

For example, in the 1980s the newspaper took the lead in investigating reported changes in Japanese history textbooks, and the charge that Ministry of Education officials were discouraging and essentially censoring discussions of wartime violence. More recently, Asahi devoted extensive reporting to the tragedy of the women abused by  Japan’s Imperial Army in World War II–and as the newspaper confessed and apologized recently, some of its reporting was inaccurate.

The controversy is roiling the already choppy waters of Japan’s history debates. People in Tokyo tell me that it is empowering the right to demand that the Abe government take a more conservative stance on history, and is making it harder on Abe to refuse them. In this domestic debate, the discrediting of Asahi is a serious blow to liberals:  the paper‘s once-influential voice is, after this scandal, weaker and less credible.

Some on the Japanese right are saying that “Asahi damaged Japan’s global image.” This is unseemly and disturbing. It is true that Japan’s image has suffered, but it suffered because prominent Japanese leaders have denied a profound human rights violation and have shown no empathy for victims’ suffering. (By the way, Asahi can certainly be criticized for its handling of the scandal, but in the end it did what it what institutions in in free societies are supposed to do: be open about mistakes and strive to do better. This is a credit to Japan’s democracy.)

Some on the right are also using Asahi’s errors to discredit the position that many of the sex slaves were forcibly abducted. But of course many other kinds of evidence (other reporting, historians’ research, survivor testimony, and so on) have shown that many–not all, but many–of the women were taken by force. Asahi’s reporting constitutes but a small part of the evidence for this.

In this unfortunate fracas, it’s important to keep focused on the real victims of this tale.  The victim is not Japan, nor is it 21st century conservatives wounded by a left-leaning media. The victims were the girls and young women whose lives were stolen from them a half-century ago. The more that Tokyo acknowledges this history, and commits to empowering and protecting women in the future, the greater the credit to Japan.

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