Japan and the Shackles of the Past (What Everyone Needs to Know)

by R. Taggart Murphy

Control of NHK is one of the most effective means to influence what gets covered as news and what does not. NHK is said to be Japan’s BBC, theoretically above politics, with a role in determining what constitutes news in Japan vaguely comparable to that once played by CBS in the United States in the era of Walter Cronkite. NHK’s news programming can come across as bland, but the network did attempt to maintain at least the appearance of objectivity and nonpartisanship. No more. One of Abe’s new appointees was on record denying that the Nanjing massacre had ever occurred, another had praised a Far Right terrorist who had committed ritual suicide at the offices of the Asahi Shimbun in the name of the emperor, while the new chairman, Momii Katsuo, effectively acknowledged that NHK’s raison d’être would from henceforth be to act as a propaganda arm of the government.