For the third time in recent days, there is disturbing news about the statements of one of the people hand-picked by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to lead the national broadcaster NHK.  This latest revelation is stirring up serious doubts about the integrity of the network.

Michiko Hasegawa late last year praised a high profile, extreme nationalist who committed ritual suicide in the offices of liberal Asahi newspaper in 1993 in protest at its mockery of his rightwing group.  Shusuke Nomura uttered a prayer to the emperor of Japan as he shot himself to death.

“It is only to God human beings can offer their own lives,” Hasegawa wrote, in a document that has since gone viral and was reported in Wednesday's edition of the Mainichi Shimbun.

“If it is devoted in the truly right way, there could be no better offering.  When Mr. Shusuke Nomura committed suicide at the Asahi Shimbun headquarters 20 years ago, he… offered his death to God.

“His Imperial Highness, even if momentarily, became a living God again, no matter what the ‘Humanity Declaration’ says or what the Japanese constitution says,” she wrote.

The US-written postwar constitution stipulates the emperor is a symbol of the nation with no political power – and is not a god.

Hasegawa’s fellow NHK board member Naoki Hyakuta this week said that the “Rape of Nanking”, a notorious Imperial Japanese atrocity in 1937-38, had never really happened.  This is the Asian equivalent of Holocaust Denial, if Japan wants to isolate itself from all of its neighbors, this is the way to do it. 

And last week, NHK’s new boss Katsuto Momii was forced to apologize for repeating the canard playing down Japan’s use of sex slaves – so-called “comfort women” – during World War II, and claiming all nations did it (they did not).  All three were Abe’s choices, and critics now fear for NHK’s editorial integrity.

Abe himself effectively shut the door to decent relations with South Korea, China, and Taiwan by visiting the Yasukuni Shrine, a Shinto memorial to Japan’s war dead that venerates several Class-A war criminals.