A Public Betrayed is an amazing story of what is described as Japanese media atrocities.  Everything you’ve heard that’s bad about the American press is a day-to-day occurence in Japan where two print media outlets co-exist.

One is the daily newspaper, generally national in scope rather than dominant in a city as in the US. Of first importance is market share and the newspapers do all they can to maintain that by offending no one. Their content consists of material from press releases and press conferences, reported by journalists who have their own little set-up that keeps nonmembers out of what we regard as public events. MacArthur is partly responsible because in his efforts to extensively reorder Japanese society during the Occupation, this system initially established and streamlined by the Japanese militarists was preserved.

The second outlet, dubbed “shukanshi,” operates in the vaccuum created by this dry source of news. It is the widely speculative weekly magazine format that combines the qualities of Time, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, Playboy, and the National Enquirer. The mind boggles. This magazine format is hugely popular for anyone who wants to get past the government handouts. Guided by a profit motive, a pandering to feelings of Japanese superioriority, a viewpoint that tends to mirror the ruling government’s conservative views, and a lack of journalistic responsibility…which is totally lacking in shukanshi journalism…the magazines commit wholesale slash-and-burn libel published alongside celebrity news and even high quality investigative journalism.

The result, according to the author of this chilling book, is a country where these lightly regarded but influential magazines consistently claim the heavily documented Rape of Nanking is only theory, where the stories of comfort women kidnapped into sex slavery by the Japanese Army are labeled as lies, where anti-semitism exists in a country which has no Jews, and where innocent people are hounded by an accusing press even after they are cleared of wrongdoing.

One can almost understand how the Japanese people can regard themselves as victims of World War Two, understandably haunted by the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, while lied to on Himmleresque scale by a minority of neonationalists aided and abetted by these omnipresent, amoral publications about what the Japanese military machine perpetrated in occupied countries overseas.

A further issue explored by the author is that posters promoting the magazines which are absolutely everywhere. The most inflammatory claims of the articles within the magazines are encompassed in brief poster headlines that everyone is exposed to in the subways, the streets, and elsewhere, even though the story may be much tamer than the exploitative headline.

One wonders where this could lead.

This is a fascinating book and will give you a lot of perspective on some of the things you hear out of Japan.