In a recent interview with Asahi Shimbun, Prof. Ritsu Yonekura, who teaches media history at Nihon University, talked about “August journalism,” a topic we’ve covered extensively since we first started writing about Japanese media in the mid-90s. August journalism refers to the preponderance of stories about World War II by Japanese publications and broadcasters that appear in August to commemorate the atomic bombings and the Emperor’s announcement to quit the war in 1945. Yonekura, who was once a director at NHK, has seen a marked change in this coverage over the years in terms of both quantity and quality. He claims that August journalism peaked in 1995, when, by his count, 294 articles and TV programs about the war appeared in major media in August. Since then the number has been steadily dropping, but, more significantly, the tone of the coverage has changed, too. After Shinzo Abe started his second stint as prime minister, the nature of the coverage has been uniform. In 2015, to mark the 70th anniversary of the end of the war, there were 45 TV programs, and none mentioned anything about Japan as an aggressor; nor did any express any sense of remorse over Japan’s role in carrying out the war. He pinpoints the beginning of this change in 2001, when NHK ran a special program about sexual violence during World War II on its educational channel that upset many people in the government. After that, NHK made a point of avoiding the so-called comfort women issue.
In the interview, Yonekura says he first became interested in the subject of August journalism when he was working for NHK in Hiroshima during the 50th anniversary of the atomic bombing in 1995. He remembers the mayor at the time, a former journalist named Takashi Hiraoka, whose memorial speech that year mentioned Japanese aggression and how what Yonekura calls the “Hiroshima ideology”—the idea that such an act should never be repeated ever again—had never really spread outside of Japan. That’s because whenever people talked about the bombing in Japan, it was always from the position of “weakness,” meaning those who died and suffered were victims of war without actually explaining what had brought about this particular war. No one connected the bombing to Japan’s status as an aggressor. Hiraoka blamed poor journalism for this dereliction, which placed the bombing in the context of “hibaku [atomic bomb casualty] nationalism,” based on the idea that only Japan has been attacked with nuclear weapons and was therefore special.
It was after the speech that Yonekura began studying in earnest how journalism explained the war in Japan, and he came to believe that future generations of Japanese will not fully appreciate the scope of the war, and thus their understanding of it will differ greatly from people in the rest of the world. Eighty-five percent of the current population was born after the war, and the cohort that remembers it firsthand has almost died out. It is the mission of journalists to preserve as much of the war’s history as possible, and the media is failing in that regard. What’s necessary is an “outsider’s viewpoint,” meaning Japanese journalists and opinion makers who have lived overseas and can see the larger picture, because the story of the war as it’s told in Japan is only how it affected Japanese people.
In particular, he sees a wide gap between U.S. and Japanese perspectives regarding the atomic bombings. Though the U.S. and Japan are now allies and have been working toward a more assertive, locked-in military relationship, there is no shared consensus about the atomic bombing, which in the U.S. is widely considered the act that ended the war (though that is debatable). In Japan, as already noted, it is more amorphously thought of as a horrible tragedy visited on the Japanese people, but the authorities are loath to blame the U.S. for using the bomb and, therefore, do not promote the abolition of nuclear weapons because of the U.S. policy of deterrence.
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