This article is more than 6 years old

This article is more than 6 years old

A woman picked last year by the Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, for the management board of the public broadcaster NHK has praised the ritual suicide of a high-profile rightwinger, saying his self-sacrifice made Japan's emperor a living god.

The revelation comes after more than a week of controversy which has cast doubt on the editorial integrity of the broadcaster.

A fellow board member dismissed the Nanking massacre as "propaganda" and the NHK director general said Japan's wartime system of sexual slavery was commonplace.

In an essay distributed in October, a month before her appointment at NHK, Michiko Hasegawa praised Shusuke Nomura, an extreme nationalist who committed ritual suicide in the offices of the liberal Asahi newspaper in 1993 in protest at its mockery of his rightwing group.

Since at least feudal times, suicide has been seen as a way of preserving honour in Japan. Famously, the rightwing author Yukio Mishima disembowelled himself after a failed coup attempt.

"It is only to God human beings can offer their own lives," she wrote in the document, which has been posted online 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."

Because Nomura uttered a prayer that the emperor may prosper, immediately before shooting himself three times in the stomach, "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.

Japanese emperors were worshipped as demigods until Emperor Hirohito renounced his divinity in 1946, as part of the settlement demanded by allied occupiers after the second world war.

The US-written postwar constitution stipulates the emperor is a symbol of the nation with no political power.

Hasegawa, a 67-year-old academic, is one of a 12-strong board responsible for programming policy and budget-setting at the publicly funded NHK.

Her essay was distributed at a Tokyo meeting in October, a week before the government presented her name and those of three other candidates for the board, the Mainichi said. Their appointments were endorsed by parliament on 8 November.

Hasegawa's writings came to light after her fellow new board member Naoki Hyakuta claimed that the orgy of murder and rape visited on the then Chinese capital of Nanking (now Nanjing) by invading Japanese troops in 1937-38 had been fabricated.

While historians do not agree on the total death toll – figures range from tens of thousands to 300,000 people – no serious academic suggests the brutal sacking of the city did not take place, although it is a canard beloved of Japan's extreme right.

Neither board member has been called to account by the government – which officially accepts the Nanking massacre took place – and the top administration spokesman Yoshihide Suga has said members have a right to express personal opinions.

Hasegawa was picked by the government because she was "a leading philosopher and critic" well-versed in Japanese culture, Suga told reporters on Wednesday.

The recent controversies appear set to fuel fears among some commentators that NHK, one of the world's biggest broadcasters, is falling meekly into line with Abe's aggressively nationalist agenda.