Japan Broadcasting Corp. (NHK), a public broadcaster, issued a new apology on Aug. 26 after its announcer made off-script anti-Japanese comments during a live radio program in Chinese.
Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi called the incident “regrettable” on the same day and urged measures to prevent any reoccurrence.
The new statement, broadcasted nationwide, said the newscaster’s comments contradicted the official Japanese stances on the issues and violated the public broadcaster’s obligation and programming standards. It comes after NHK President Nobuo Inaba’s initial Aug. 22 apology.
Takeaki Matsumoto, Minister of Internal Affairs and Communications of Japan, told reporters on Aug. 27 that the event “violated the mission of public broadcasting.”
The Chinese newscaster made the unauthorized comments on Aug. 19 during a report on the graffiti defacement of a stone pillar at Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine. He declared that the Senkaku Islands had been Chinese territory since ancient times. The Senkaku Islands, a group of islets in the East China Sea, have been at the center of a heated territorial dispute between China and Japan for decades.
Then, in English, he urged the audience not to forget the Nanjing Massacre and “comfort women,” who were coerced to provide sex to Japanese soldiers during the Second Sino-Japanese War in the 1930s.
The off-script broadcast lasted about 20 seconds, and the contractor announcer was terminated afterward.
The incident came at the heels of a series of anti-Japanese occurrences in the past three months, including two graffiti attacks at the Yasukuni Shrine and a Chinese man who displayed a banner at the shrine against Japan’s invasion of China while shouting words insulting the Japanese people.
The shrine, established to honor the spirits of soldiers who died fighting for Japan, has been a flashpoint for Sino-Japanese tensions due to the spiritual site’s inclusion of war criminals.
According to Tsukasa Shibuya, President of the Asia-Pacific Exchange Society, this kind of sustained hostility against the Japanese is the product of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) “brainwashing,” which has been inciting anti-Japanese sentiment for decades.
Former NHK Newscaster
Two days after the off-script comments, the announcer, a Chinese national in his 40s, registered a verified account on Weibo, a Chinese microblogging site similar to X, and introduced himself as a “former NHK Chinese worker.”In his tagline, he wrote, “There are no heroes who fall from the sky, only ordinary people who stand up.” In a post on Aug. 26, he said he was back in China and mentioned two numbers: 22 years and 22 seconds, implying that his off-script broadcast was the highlight of his decades of working experience.
Several Chinese media outlets covered his return to China, and many netizens expressed support for him. In their view, he spoke out on behalf of China. Some called on state media organizations such as China Central Television and China National Radio to offer him a job. Several said he would be a successful influencer soon.
Akio Yaita, director of the Taipei branch of the Japanese newspaper Sankei Shimbun, warned that the CCP has commercialized nationalism.
“It is a commercial act of patriotism. Now, a lot of Chinese bloggers are using ‘patriotism’ to generate [social media] traffic and increase their income,” he told The Epoch Times.
He added that the CCP has long employed this tactic as a tool to consolidate power and used media, education, and official rhetoric to stoke public animosity toward Japan.
China has seen several waves of anti-Japanese protests over the past two decades, often tied to territorial disputes.
The 2012 anti-Japanese protests, sparked by the Japanese government’s purchase of a part of the disputed Senkaku Islands from a private Japanese family, were some of the largest anti-Japanese demonstrations in recent history. Amid widespread demonstrations across China, some of the protests turned violent by overturning Japanese cars and damaging a Japanese restaurant, even though the owners were mostly Chinese citizens.
Chinese authorities later detained a suspect in his 50s, described as unemployed, who is accused of stabbing the three victims.
Yatai said that because of the CCP’s practice of shifting blame abroad to divert attention from its own issues, anti-Japanese sentiment among Chinese is likely to intensify rather than dissipate in the future.
