ABSTRACT
On Oct. 3, 2014, Prime Minister Abe Shinzo stood in the Diet to denounce one of Japan’s most prominent media institutions. “It is a fact that its misreporting has caused numerous people to feel hurt, sorrow, suffering and outrage,” Abe told members of the budget committee of Japan’s House of Representatives. “It has caused great damage to Japan’s image” (Lower House 2014). The target of the prime minister’s ire was the Asahi Shimbun, Japan’s second-largest newspaper and long-time opponent on the left to Abe’s revisionist efforts to recast World War II-era Japan in a more positive light. (See Yamaguchi Chapter 10) Abe was pressing the attack against his old nemesis after the Asahi’s sudden retraction that August of more than a dozen articles from the 1980s and 1990s about Korean “comfort women” forced to work in Japanese wartime military brothels.
