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Bruce W. Davidson
Bruce Davidson is professor of humanities at Hokusei Gakuen University in Sapporo, Japan.
In a conformist society like Japan, individuals refusing to bow to the crowd stand out. That has certainly been true during the Covid panic. With the help of independent journalists, dissident doctors in Japan have been waging a battle for sensible medical practices about Covid and alerting the public to dangers.
Their activities are essential in light of Japan’s government-controlled mainstream news media. This long-standing problem resulted from a press-club system, in which government officials feed information to reporters. Their access to those clubs and this information completely depends on pliant cooperation with officials and the narratives that the government wishes to spread.
Tatsuya Iwase, who writes about the Japanese news media, comments, “Japanese press clubs are nothing more than transfer devices. They function and will continue to function as mouthpieces for those interests that hold power in this country.” Gamble and Watanabe explore this corrupt collusion in their book A Public Betrayed. Despite this, the majority of Japanese people naively believe in the reliability of the corporate news media.
Thankfully, Japanese no longer are limited to such tightly-controlled channels of information. Utilizing the Internet and print media, outspoken doctors have come forward to challenge the mainstream, government-endorsed Covid narrative.
Maybe the most internationally famous medical dissenter in Japan is Dr. Masanori Fukushima, professor emeritus at Kyoto University. Many have enjoyed English-subtitled videos of him loudly berating Japanese bureaucrats for their inept Covid vaccine policies, stubbornly maintained in the face of clear evidence of serious harms, such as the vaccine-induced suppression of Japanese natural immunity. He has even brought a lawsuit against the government for hiding its data from the public, including the fact that Covid infections among the vaccinated in Japan outnumber those among the unvaccinated.
In the face of reports of post-Covid vaccine deaths, the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare in Japan has often insisted that in such cases “causality is unclear,” even though most deaths occurred the day after vaccination. Fukushima concludes that those officials “can only be called negligent.”
Other dissident doctors speak out in a book titled The Truth That No One Could Say about the Covid Vaccines (“Shingata Korona Wakuchin Daremo Ienakatta Shinjitsu”), published November 10, 2021. The book was edited by medical journalist Touru Toridamari, who has also published other books about the Covid debacle, such as The Great Crime of Covid Lockdowns (“Korona Jishuku no Daizai”).
The first in Toridamari’s book is Dr. Kazuhiro Nagao, who operates his own clinic. From the beginning he was sceptical of the hype around the Covid virus since during the early Diamond Princess outbreak most severe cases of Covid were among smokers, diabetics, and overweight people, while the majority of cases were mild or even symptom-free, indicating no need for a vaccine.
Furthermore, he remarks that there was not yet any good research base for recommending the Covid mRNA vaccines. However, in the Japanese medical community, a mass-mind phenomenon quickly led to vaccine-resistant doctors being treated by their compliant peers as mentally defective and threats to society. He compares the situation to that of Japanese dissidents during World War 2, who were branded hikokumin (“unpatriotic people/outcasts”) and persecuted.
During the Covid panic, Nagao recounts how some people lined up in front of his clinic all night long to receive their shots, often telling him things like “Don’t give me any difficult explanations; just hurry up and give me a shot!” Though his clinic’s home page warned against vaccinating those over 95 or in frail health, many elderly people were pressured into getting the shots by family members or even forced to get them at nursing homes, without any informed consent.
Moreover, he observed 11 cases of people who became dramatically weaker and less healthy one to two months after receiving a shot and then died. Among them was a spry, healthy 100-year-old woman, who lost her appetite and declined soon after getting her shot. He notes that such cases were not counted in official statistics of vaccine deaths in Japan, which numbered 1,233 at the time the book was published. At present the official numbers are 2,076 deaths and 36,457 adverse events, among which 8,636 are serious.
Appearing under a pseudonym, Ishi Jimpei (“Dr. John Doe”), an emergency room physician, also has little good to say about Japan’s medical establishment. He believes that the officially reported cases of vaccine-caused deaths and serious side effects in Japan are merely “the tip of the iceberg.” In addition, he recounts his own experience of reporting a case of suspected death from the Covid vaccine to the government.
Soon afterwards, the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare notified the hospital employing him and accused him of making a false report of a possible vaccine-related death, since it could not be proven beyond all doubt that the patient’s death was vaccine-induced. As a result, his hospital demanded that he get permission from them before reporting any more such adverse events to the government. Basically, that amounted to a gag order, he comments.
In general, hospitals in Japan seem loath to report such incidents. As reported in the Yomiuri Shimbun Online newspaper on May 9, 2021, an employee of Asahikawa’s Red Cross hospital, a man in his 40s, died the day after Covid injection, but the doctors there did not report it officially. When the deceased man’s family demanded that they report it to the government, they finally did.
A health researcher interviewed in the book, Dr. Hiroyuki Morita, sees the campaign to vaccinate children as especially reprehensible. One justification given in Japan for injecting them has been to protect the adults around them from infection. In Dr. Morita’s view, such adults should get down on their hands and knees and beg forgiveness from children for making such a request.
In a pop culture reference, he compares Japanese doctors who promote childhood Covid vaccination and slavishly follow government decrees to the heartless, bloodthirsty demons in the popular Demon Slayer (“Kimetsu no Yaiba”) Japanese animation. Moreover, he blames the all-pervasive propaganda in Japan for creating a medical consensus that renders doctors unable to think for themselves.
Like Ishi Jimpei, he compares the current state of Japan to that of the militarism during World War 2. He also censures the assurances from officials that pregnant women have nothing to fear from the vaccines.
Besides the interviews in this book, Toridamari’s English-language interviews of other doctors (anonymously) with similar thoughts and experiences can be found in a Japanese magazine article translation. These doctors observed increases in cases of collegen disease, cancer, autoimmune disorders, and menstrual disorders that they believe are likely the result of Covid vaccination.
In a more sensational book, The Horrors of the Covid Vaccines (“Korona Wakuchin no Osoroshisa”), two doctors –-Dr. Toku Takahashi, an emeritus professor of Wisconsin University Medical School, and Dr. Atsushi Nakamura— are among the three authors. The other is a medical journalist named Shunsuke Funase. This book recounts many facts well-known outside Japan about Covid vaccine dangers and contrasts that reality with the Japanese government’s misinformation. Furthermore, the book touches on the larger powers lying behind Covid-injection promotion, such as billionaire Bill Gates, who along with others is profiting from it all.
As a result of the misguided official responses to Covid, a new dissident medical association came into being –The Volunteer Medical Association (“Zenkoku Yuushi Ishi no Kai”). The group currently has 1,535 members, including 838 medical professionals, who are mostly doctors.
They have made a special point of protesting the government’s promotion of Covid shots for young children (from 6 months of age, as in the US), as dangerous and unnecessary. On June 24, 2023 they issued a formal protest against the Japan Pediatric Association’s endorsement of the government’s recommendation of Covid injections for small children.
With videos and articles, this association is making known the adverse effects of mRNA injections, since this information is little known in Japan. Doctors often tell patients things like “It’s probably just your imagination” when they report possible Covid-vaccine symptoms to their physicians. Official dogma insists that adverse reactions to the Covid injections are “rare.” If so, then traffic accidents are also rare.
Recently, the association has held live and online events almost every month in various Japanese cities, at which some of the doctors mentioned here have spoken. At an event on October 1 this year and titled “What was that Covid Thing All about Anyway? Please know about Covid Vaccine Harms!” (“Koronaka towa Nan Datta no Ka? Korona Wakuchin no Higai o Shitte Kudasai!”), the above-mentioned journalist Toridamari and Dr. Morita were among the speakers.
At another event in November, 2022, billed as an emergency press conference, journalists and others were shown subtitled videos from Dr. Tess Lawrie of the World Council for Health and Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi pleading with Japanese parents not to vaccinate their children for Covid.
By means of an uncritical, fully cooperative mainstream mass media, Japanese officials are now promoting yet another Covid booster, aimed at the XBB.1.5 subvariant. Rather than following that advice, hopefully, this time more people in Japan will listen to the dissident medical voices among them.
