In December 2013 the Abe government nominated five members to NHK’s twelve-member board. All the new board members were known to be very close to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in their political views, and their appointment raised questions of possible political bias. Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga responded to these concerns with the statement that it was ‘natural to ask people whom (the prime minister) puts faith in and admires to assume the posts’. The following month, Katsuto Momii, who has very strong backing from the prime minister, was appointed as the new director general of NHK.

Momii instantly sparked political controversy with comments at his inaugural press conference on 25 January on the ‘comfort women’ issue, a topic on which the prime minister too has made a number of contentious remarks. Momii stated that recruitment of the so-called comfort women (women conscripted into work in wartime military brothels) was not a problem, since similar systems ‘existed everywhere in Europe’ during the war.

On 3 February, a second Abe appointee to the NHK board, Naoki Hyakuta, added fuel to the fire by describing the postwar Tokyo War Crimes trials as designed to ‘fool people’ by concealing the US military’s ‘cruel great massacres’ of Japanese during wartime bombing raids. He went on to add that the 1937–38 Nanjing Massacre of Chinese by the Japanese Imperial Army was a fiction invented for propaganda purposes: ‘The nations of the world ignored this … because it never happened’.

In the midst of international furore, director general Momii admitted that he had been unwise to express his ‘personal views’ on the ‘comfort women’ issue on an official occasion, but the comments on the comfort women have not been retracted. Hyakuta, meanwhile, has loudly proclaimed his right to make such statements in public. The impact of their views on NHK’s broadcasting remains to be seen.

During his inaugural press conference, Momii insisted that NHK under his leadership would maintain the independence required by Japan’s broadcasting law: that promise is already being put to the test with the upcoming gubernatorial election in Tokyo.

The election, to be held on 9 February, is turning into the first real popularity test for Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s government. The two front-runners are Yoichi Masuzoe, a former minister who has the support of Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party, and former Prime Minister Morihiro Hosokawa, who is standing on an anti-nuclear power platform. They share the field with far-right candidate Toshio Tamogami (to whom Hyakuta is giving public support), and left-of-centre lawyer Kenji Utsunomiya. The Masuzoe versus Hosokawa contest reflects a wider rivalry between the policies of the Abe government and the stance of those in the liberal/conservative camp who are uneasy about the Abe regime’s economic, political and foreign policy strategy.

Read the entire article on the East Asian Forum.