Makieda Motofumi, who was chairman of the Japan Teachers' Union for 12 years from 1971 and was known as Mr. JTU, was someone I also interviewed, and he made it clear that his role model was Kim Il-sung.
April 8, 2019
The Asahi Shimbun praised North Korea, and other newspapers did the same to a certain extent. And the Japan Teachers' Union was no different. Re-transmitting the chapter sent on 2019-02-16 titled"
This book is a dialogue between Masayuki Takayama, the one and only journalist in the postwar world, and Rui Abiru, the best active newspaper reporter, a senior and junior reporter at Sankei Shimbun.
It is also friendly to people with presbyopia.
The following is an excerpt from page 162.
●Marxism-Leninism, the Asahi Shimbun, and the Japan Teachers' Union
Abiru:
In an article, former Asahi Shimbun editor Hiroshi Hasegawa wrote that the Asahi Shimbun was divided into rival factions, the Soviet faction and the Chinese faction.
Both the Soviet faction and the Chinese faction are no good.
First of all, they are people who cannot see reality.
Takayama:
North Korea's Kim Il-sung is a perfect example of this structure.
The Soviet faction or the Chinese faction?
They kill each other and purge the other side.
Abiru:
According to Hasegawa, Marxism-Leninism was quite strong.
The Asahi Shimbun praised North Korea, but other newspapers were similar to a certain extent.
And the same can be said of the Japan Teachers' Union.
I interviewed Motofumi Makieda, who was chairman for 12 years from 1971 and was known as Mr. Japan Teachers' Union.
He clearly stated that Kim Il-sung was the person he respected.
Makieda met Kim Il-sung and praised him, saying, "There are no thieves in this country. "
He then received a medal from North Korea.
The Chosun Shinbo, the newspaper of the General Association of Korean Residents in Japan (Chongryon), introduced Makieda's speech at the Chongryon Central Conference in its October 15, 2007 edition: "Japan, which was the perpetrator against Korea, raised the abduction issue without apologizing or providing compensation after the war, and neglected to settle its past colonial rule. It led to an abnormal relationship. First and foremost, we must start with the settlement of colonial rule. Koreans in Japan are still subject to sanctions, oppression, and terrible human violations. If Japanese people work together to eliminate discrimination against Koreans in Japan, lift sanctions, and work to provide flood relief to Korea, we can achieve normalization of diplomatic relations."
It is precisely what North Korea says.
Furthermore, the JTU's prefectural labor unions have various interactions with North Korea and donate money to it.
Until very recently, neither the Asahi Shimbun nor the Mainichi Shimbun had written any criticism of the JTU.
In recent years, the Sankei Shimbun has written about the JTU's political activities, and they have started to cover them to some extent, but up until then, they were taboo.
Right now, the Japan Teachers' Union is not very much in the news, so it's not noticeable.
One reason is that they are ideological allies.
Another reason is that the JTU gets advertising.
The JTU places advertisements in the Asahi Shimbun's children's newspaper and other places.
There was a stereotypical view that labor unions were good guys.
Takayama:
That still hasn't died down.
In March 2018, there was a lot of talk about the shocking sex education being provided at a Tokyo ward junior high school.
The Asahi Shimbun reported extensively that the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly members of the Liberal Democratic Party were making a problem of it and that the Tokyo Metropolitan Board of Education had decided to take action. Still, the ward boards of education were objecting.
Soon after, the Asahi Shimbun published an article on March 30 with the headline "32 cases of pregnant and giving birth high school students "voluntarily withdrawing" at the school's recommendation."
The article said, "A survey by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology found that in 2015-2016, there were 32 cases in which students were encouraged to withdraw from school due to pregnancy or childbirth at public high schools nationwide, and as a result, they withdrew from school."
A closer look at the article reveals 371 cases of "voluntary withdrawal based on the student's or guardian's wishes" in full-time and 271 instances in part-time schools.
It was a total of 674 cases of high school dropouts.
I was surprised at how many there were, but when I considered it, the denominator was about 2.3 million people.
In percentage terms, it's about 0.0003%.
It is a complete exception to the rule, and it is not something that can be generalized.
In fact, there were fewer than 700 of them in Japan.
That shows a strong sense of social morality, which should be praised.
However, the Asahi Shimbun did not see it that way, and based on the JTU's point of view, they argued that it was necessary to provide increasingly explicit sex education from junior high school so that students would not get pregnant.
To be continued.
