The following is from an editorial by Hiroshi Yuasa that appeared in today's Sankei Shimbun.
It is a must-read not only for the people of Japan but also for people around the world.
The beginning of the year 2022 began with a strange first dream.
It was when I was writing a newspaper column on my computer as usual.
Suddenly, a strange-looking man who called himself "Big Brother" appeared and pointed at me, saying, "I'm watching everything you do.
I'm not sure if this was a dream or an illusion because I was sleepily thinking about what I should write about in my next column.
Big Brother refers to the dictator of the gloomy world in the novel "1984" by the well-known British writer George Orwell.
All citizens are under the watchful eye of the party, and sound-gathering microphones block all anti-government speech in the streets.
When I left my bed and looked at the Washington Post (electronic version) that day, it reported that China was "searching Facebook and other social networking sites around the world to create a database of foreign journalists and scholars.
If so, Big Brother's threat may be close to a true dream.
It is said that it is a system that the alarm system is activated immediately to the report and the analysis that damage Beijing's interest.
With digital surveillance equipment and vast amounts of big data, critics who are inconvenient for the Communist Party, both inside and outside, will be tracked forever.
The articles and columns I write for this paper are written assuming that China will check them.
I have experienced many times that my articles and columns are under constant surveillance.
As far back as the mid-1990s, when I was posted in Washington, D.C., I was invited to lunch by someone from the Chinese Embassy in the United States.
I had met this person while attending a Japan-U.S.-China symposium held in Shanghai and Beijing under the auspices of the Atlantic Council; a U.S. think tank.
I had obtained a 1974 Congressional report on the Senkaku Islands, which reported that the United States had declared early on that it had a responsibility under the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty to defend against a third country's military attack on the Senkakus.
I politely declined this offer and urged him to get it directly from the Congressional Research Service.
As the other party was a Chinese diplomat, we did not want to be taken advantage of.
In recent years of surveillance and censorship, then-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe went on his year-end vacation on December 29, 2018, with a photo he posted on Facebook.
The photo showed my book "Eijiro Kawai, the Man Who Fought Totalitarianism" alongside author Naoki Hyakuta's "The Chronicles of Japan" and Ryosuke Kakine's "The Principles of Nobunaga" as the three books he would read during his vacation.
The People's Daily, the official newspaper of the Communist Party of China, introduced my book as "a criticism of Japan's leftist groups through the story of an economist who believed in liberalism.
The author is a veteran reporter of the right-wing media," so I wondered if the criticism was aimed at my daily tone.
So, in my column at the beginning of the year, with the headline, "Rebuttal to the Huanghua Times," I fired back, "People are angrier with words than with logic, but they are furious with the propaganda-oriented Communist Party.
It is always the case that the CCP assumes that critics it does not like are right-wing, and if that means "critics of totalitarianism," I am delighted.
And so it was when the Xinhua website on January 22, 2020, found itself using the English expression for the "Wuhan virus," which is revolting when pointed out by other countries.
While the Chinese leadership wanted to blur the origin of the new virus, the state news agency used the term "Wuhan virus" in a general news article.
The Chinese leadership wanted to blur the origin of the new virus, but the state news agency used the term "Wuhan virus" in a general news article.
As I pointed out in my column on April 3, they removed the "Wuhan virus" headline from the Xinhua website.
Incidentally, a Chinese professor who became a close friend of mine when I was studying in the U.S. advised me to "moderate" my criticism of China because the more I criticized China, the more I provoked it.
However, facts cannot be bent.
Thus, I became convinced that Big Brother's threats were not a dream or a phantom but that they were buzzing in the realm of reality.
