The Press: Taking Due Credit

The fever that stirred the howling rioters last June in Japan was in large part the handiwork of the Japanese press with its sustained attacks upon Premier Nobusuke Kishi and the U.S.-Japanese security treaty. But when it was suggested that the press, conservatively owned but heavily infiltrated by leftists, had played a major part in keeping President Eisenhower out of Japan and bringing down Kishi, Japanese publishers angrily denied all. It remained, last week, for Japan’s leftist journalists themselves to take credit where credit seemed due.

In proud detail, the Journalist, house organ of the Japan Congress of Journalists (1,700 members), told exactly how pro-Communist Japanese newsmen had helped whip Japanese emotions to riotous frenzy. “Japanese journalists who participated in the great struggle,” said the Journalist, “worked through such organizations as labor unions of the press, radio and TV, holding numerous protest shop rallies, advocating petitioning of the Diet or participating directly in the demonstrations.

“At the same time, the democratic journalists fought to report the truthful picture of the people’s struggle and anger. They pointed out the dangers of the military pact [i.e., the U.S.-Japanese security treaty] and wrote many articles, editorials and commentaries pointing out the wrongdoing of the government and the government party.” When a few Japanese publishers sought to suppress such “freedom of expression,” they were soon forced to begin “reporting the truth again, largely as the result of pressure put on them by the democratic journalists and labor unions in the papers.”

Agitation in Print. Red doctrine has flowed freely, if sometimes more surreptitiously, through Japanese newsrooms since 1955. That year a group of Communist-led newsmen called the International Organization of Journalists spawned the Japan Congress of Journalists.

Rarely have a nation’s newspapers been riper for infiltration. The Japanese press, huge (103 dailies with 35 million circulation) and savagely competitive, is a vacuum sustaining no cause but a steady antagonism to all authority. It is largely owned by business-minded publishers so remote from their editorial floors that the congress flourished almost by default.

The Congress attracted young, self-styled intellectual newsmen all over Japan. They flocked to lectures to learn how to load innocent stories with the Communist line, how to flatter personalities sympathetic to the left, how to agitate in print. Their cells grew everywhere: 250 congress members on Tokyo’s biggest paper, Asahi (circ. 5,000,000); 190 in the Kyodo News Agency, notorious among Western newsmen for its leftist tinge; So on Mainichi (circ. 3,560,000), 50 on Yomiuri (circ. 3,500,000).

Blueprint for Tomorrow. Despite the congress’ continuing expansion, most newspaper publishers remain only vaguely aware of its existence and are less than deeply disturbed. “We publishers,” said Matsutaro Shoriki of Yomiuri, “recognize the need to watch this organization. But at the present stage, the activities and influence of its members are not of a nature to cause alarm.” So unalarmed, indeed, are Shoriki and other publishers that at their annual convention in Kyoto earlier this month they chose this solemn declaration as their theme: “The press is the unwavering signpost in times of stress.”

But the Congress, having helped make the Japanese press the wobbliest sort of signpost, has no intention of giving up its work. To Baden, Austria for an international Red-front conclave of journalists, this week hurried eleven Congress members led by dumpy Yuichi Kobayashi, 57, who was Yomiuri’s chief European correspondent until his retirement this year. Tucked into the luggage were copies of the Journalist’s special issue bragging about yesterday’s accomplishments and blueprinting tomorrow’s: “Japanese journalists are not finished yet. They now have the duty to expose the true nature of the policies of Prime Minister Hayato Ikeda, who has taken Kishi’s place.”