Makieda Motofumi, the chairman of the committee for 12 years from 1971 and was called Mr. JTU, I have also interviewed him, and he clearly stated that the person he admires is Kim Il Sung!
I am re-submitting the chapter I sent out on 04/08/2019.
The Asahi Shimbun has praised North Korea, and to some extent, so have other newspapers. And the Japan Teachers' Union is no different. It is a chapter that I sent on 2019-02-16 under the title.
Crimes and Punishments of the Mass Media," Masayuki Takayama and Rui Abiru, first published on February 10, 2019, is a must-read for all Japanese citizens who can read print.
In the form of a dialogue between Masayuki Takayama, the one and only journalist in the postwar world, and Rui Abiru, the best active newspaper journalist, senior and junior reporters of the Sankei Shimbun, this book is gentle even for those with aging eyes.
The following is an excerpt from p. 162.
Marxism-Leninism, the Asahi Shimbun, and the Japan Teachers' Union
Abiru
When I read the writings of Mr. Hiroshi Hasegawa, a former member of the Asahi Shimbun, I read that the Asahi Shimbun was divided inside into the Soviet faction and the Chinese faction and that they were competing against each other.
Neither the Soviet faction nor the Chinese faction is worth a damn.
First of all, they are people who do not see reality.
Takayama.
North Korea's Kim Il-sung is precisely like that.
Soviet or Chinese?
Kill each other and purge all of one side.
Abiru
According to Mr. Hasegawa, Marxism-Leninism was quite strong.
The Asahi Shimbun praised North Korea, and to some extent, other newspapers did as well.
And the JTU is no different.
I once interviewed Makieda Motofumi, the chairman of JTU for 12 years from 1971 and was called Mr. JTU, and he clearly stated that the person he admired was Kim Il Sung.
Makieda himself has even met Kim Il Sung and praised him, saying that "there are no thieves in this country," and he has received a medal from North Korea.
The Chosun Shimpo, the official newspaper of Chongryon, reported on October 15, 2007, that Makiji's address to the Chongryon Central Congress was as follows.
"Japan, which was the aggressor against Korea, raised the issue of abductions after the war without apology or compensation and neglected to settle the past accounts of its colonial rule. It has led to an inappropriate relationship. First and foremost, the settlement of colonial rule must be the starting point. Second, Koreans living in Japan are still being sanctioned, oppressed, and severely mistreated. Third, if the Japanese people work together to eliminate discrimination against zainichi Koreans, remove sanctions, and provide flood relief to the DPRK, normalization of diplomatic relations will surely be realized."
It is precisely what North Korea is saying.
In addition, JTU's prefectural labor unions have various contacts with North Korea and have donated money to the country.
And until recently, the Asahi and Mainichi newspapers never wrote any criticism of the JTU.
In the last few years, the Sankei Shimbun has written about the JTU's political movement and has started to cover it somewhat, but until then, it was taboo.
It just happens that JTU doesn't get a lot of attention these days, so it doesn't stand out.
One reason for this is that they are ideological friends.
Another reason is that we get advertising from JTU.
JTU advertises in the Asahi Children's newspaper, for example.
I think there was a stereotypical view that the labor union was equal to the good guys.
Takayama.
It hasn't broken yet.
In March 2018, it became a hot topic that a public junior high school in Tokyo was conducting harsh sex education.
The Asahi Shimbun reported on making the headlines that the Tokyo Metropolitan Board of Education decided to guide the LDP metropolitan assembly as an issue. Still, the ward's board of education protested.
The Asahi Shimbun followed up with an article on March 30 under the headline "Pregnant and Childbearing High School Students Voluntarily Drop Out of School at School's Advice" (32 cases of high school students who became pregnant or gave birth at public high schools nationwide).
(A survey by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology found 32 cases in the 2015-16 school year in which students dropped out of public high schools nationwide after being advised by their schools to drop out due to pregnancy or childbirth. The article goes on to say that there were 71 cases in the full-time system and 271 cases in the regular system.
The total number of students who left high school was 674.
For a moment, I was surprised that there were that many, but then I thought about it and realized that the denominator is about 2.3 million people.
In percentage terms, that's about 0.0003 percent.
It is an exception among exceptions and not something that can be generalized.
Instead, there were only less than 700 people in the whole of Japan.
That number should be praised, as it shows a strong sense of social morality.
The Asahi Shimbun, however, argues that, based on the JTU's judgment, more and more sex education is needed from junior high school onward to prevent pregnancy.
This article continues.
