CHAPTER II RENUNCIATION OF WAR
Article 9.

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Sunday, April 5, 2009
I don't believe what NHK says

I had grown up with listening to NHK radio. When I was a baby, I was so slow to learn the language that my mom worried if I had had language disability. But somehow, I learned the language. Of course, what taught me Japanese was my mom's talking to me. But if there were the second teacher, it was NHK radio. Since I was born in the back side of Japan (#1), perhaps I might have come to speak very localized language. But NHK helped me learn standard Japanese. Whenever my mom was preparing supper and we were eating it, radio was turned on and tuned to NHK. NHK is abbreviation for Nippon Housou Kyoukai which means Japan Broadcasting Corporation.

I liked to listen to the radio all the time. I went to other city to study in a university, and then moved to another city to do a job, but all through those years, I have been listening to NHK radio. Now they are broadcasting their program all day all night, but so many years ago, NHK used to stop their broadcasting in the late night until morning. But when I was a university student, they started to air late night program "Rajio Shin'ya Bin". Recent years, the style of the program has been established, but at the beginning, they didn't know what to air in such midnight. I remember that in the early years of "Rajio Shin'ya Bin", they aired piano piece that was Franz Liszt's "Les Jeux d'Eaux a la Villa d'Este". Whenever I could not fall into asleep, I turned the radio on and hear that radio anchors who were soon going to retire had spoken softly.

But I stopped listening to NHK at a certain moment in the past. In 2001, NHK distorted their TV program about comfort women issue under the pressure by someone, probably hawkish right wings. I think I don' t have to elaborate what is comfort women here, but in short, it was a wrongdoing of Japan against human rights during world war two era. At that time, Japan was an aggressive country that functioned as war machine. Japanese Imperial Force made a huge system that exploited young women in Asia as sex slaves for soldiers.
Anyway NHK changed their program about "The Women's International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan's Military Sexual Slavery" in 2000 under the pressure from rightists. This is a huge problem in terms of independency of mass media and freedom of expression. How was the program, ETV2001 series "How to Judge War(#2)" changed and distorted? Ms. Yayori Matsui, who has already passed away, pointed them out as below;

VAWW-NET JAPAN had thoroughly cooperated NHK's shootings and recordings from the preparation and during the court because we appreciated their idea to produce a program to recorded the court. NHK aired the program on January 30th with the title "Responsibility for Sex-Violence on War" as the second night episode of the ETV2001 series "How to Judge War" from January 29th to February 1st, however, what was aired was totally different from their preliminary plan to follow the process of "The Women's International War Crimes Tribunal" and to record how the war time violence in half century ago would be judged by world class experts.
Scene of the court was extraordinary short; the full name of the court, keywords such as "Japanese Forces" and "sex slave", scene in the venue, and any comments of the organizer, all these things did not appear in the program. Not only for that, there was no mention of the judgment that was the core of the series' theme "How to Judge War". Any comments the casts said to support the court were cut.
Testimonies of victims were really short, on the other, comments of Japanese soldiers who utilized sex slavery were completely cut down. The anchor intentionally made suspicious comments to the court. And the program gave lengthy minutes to let a rightist scholar speak criticism over the court and abusive words against comfort women like they were just prostitute and there is no evidence for testimonies of the women.
It should be free to introduce criticism in the program, however, if the program had not said anything about the court which was their object of criticism and completely cut the long interview with Ms. Matsui Yayori who was the organizer of the court, it should be on-sided and unfair. Since the program did not allow any counterarguments to opinion of the rightist scholar who was saying that there was no forced slavery and they were just prostitutes, it means that NHK supports the scholar's opinion and ignores the common recognition of the United Nations and global society about comfort women system.
The program seemed to try filling up for what they had cut down with anything they could. For example, it showed the law suit case seeking compensations for damage of comfort women, which did not have anything about the court's purpose that demanded punishment onto persons who were responsible for the comfort women system. And the program also showed introduction of Asian Women's Fund and repeated many times the scenes that had been already aired in the night before. Even doing so, NHK could not full up all the 44 minutes for the program, then they just shortened four minutes. It was a quite odd falsification that had never been seen before(#3, and the end of quotation).

In retrospect, what NHK did was unforgivable. The program should have shown how badly comfort women system had devastated Asian women's human rights and how such criminal acts should been judged. I was also angry about that, but at that time, I didn't pay much attention for the issue. I had just keep on listening to general programs of "NHK Daiichi" on AM radio whose frequencies were 594khz in Tokyo and 666khz in Kansai. And my radio was a quite good one, because it was made by SONY, which could automatically turn on by itself like an alarm. Every morning at 6:50, the radio woke me up. And I heard traffic information from 6:55 to 7 o'clock that was quite useful to know if my commute train was on the schedule or not. Not only in the morning, listening to NHK Daiichi was important to me also in the night. Usually I went to bed late at night, so I listened to "Rajio Shin'ya Bin" in my futon. It was good to make me fall into asleep.

But it was in 2005 that NHK made me angry so much. And then I made up my mind that I would never tune the dial to their programs. A newspaper Asahi Shimbun scooped in 2005 about the falsification case of NHK TV program ETV2001 series "How to Judge War" dealing with "The Women's International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan's Military Sexual Slavery" in 2000 What the paper revealed was that NHK was pressured by the politicians whose names were Shinzo Abe and Shoichi Nakagawa, and then NHK changed their program quickly to compromise with the politicians' threats. It is easy to imagine that NHK worried that what Asahi Simbun wrote might be believed by people. So the conflict between two representative mass medias in Japan had soon become a quite ugly fight.
(to be continued)

#1:Uranippon, which means the region along the East Sea (Tong Hae) over the mountains from the Pacific Ocean side of Japan.
#2:"Senso wo Dou Sabakuka?" in the original Japanese title
#3:translated by me. If any mistakes were included in the translation, it is no one's but my responsibility. Original Japanese version is still avairable on the web.

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