AS IF the mood were not already gloomy enough among Japan’s leftwingers, on September 11th the Asahi, the best-selling liberal newspaper, was obliged to publish a second embarrassing retraction of one of its past articles. The group’s president and chief executive, Tadakazu Kimura, fired its executive editor and promised an inquiry. The right-wing press joyfully splashed the news across front pages.

The Asahi has now been proven wrong on two of the most politically fraught subjects in Japan. The first retraction had come in August, and concerned the so-called “comfort women”: thousands of Asian women, mainly from Korea, herded into brothels by Japan’s army during the second world war. The Asahi admitted that Seiji Yoshida, a key source for its reporting on the subject in the early 1990s, had faked his horrifying accounts of hunting down women in the Korean countryside in 1943-44. Right-wingers had long questioned his veracity. The retraction represents a triumph for politicians who seek to revise the record of Japan’s wartime atrocities.

This week the Asahi also doubled back on a claim it made earlier this year that panicking workers at the crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant disobeyed orders and fled the damaged reactors during the crisis in March 2011. The story, published in May, challenged former accounts of more orderly decisions made by staff of Tokyo Electric Power, the plant’s operator. Yet in reality the evidence did not show that workers went so far as to flout orders in leaving the stricken plant, the Asahi admitted. The truth emerged when the government this week published in full the testimony of Masao Yoshida, the former and deceased manager of the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant.

The admission is a victory for TEPCO, and for Japan’s beleaguered nuclear-power industry as a whole. The Asahi’s reporting came in the context of its attacks on the government’s plans to switch back on some of the country’s currently shuttered nuclear fleet. Yet in the end it was the Sankei newspaper, a right-wing publication which backs nuclear power, which was proven accurate.

Nonetheless, the Asahi’s errors on comfort women are likely to have the most import, for they are likely further to strain relations with South Korea. Mr Yoshida first cast doubt on his own testimony as far back as 1996. But the Asahi only admitted that its reporting was false once most of the journalists and editors involved had departed. It initially stopped short of apologising, but this week, along with the Fukushima retraction, Mr Kimura offered full contrition for its reliance on Mr Yoshida’s accounts (by a strange coincidence, the Fukushima plant manager and the fabricating ex-soldier bear the same surname).

Mr Yoshida’s descriptions form only a tiny part of the overwhelming evidence for Japan’s crimes against the comfort women. Yet before being unmasked, they were a valuable piece of detailed testimony from a perpetrator. Revisionists now argue that past apologies, notably the 1993 Kono Statement, in which Japan accepted responsibility for forcibly recruiting the women, rely on his false evidence. The affair is thus a public-relations victory for an ongoing right-wing campaign to undermine the statement. Shinzo Abe, Japan’s nationalist prime minister, pronounced that false reporting on comfort women had “caused agony to many people and damaged Japan’s international reputation”.

Soon after the news, Sanae Takaichi, a revisionist politician who recently joined the cabinet, demanded anew a changed version of the Kono apology. The government refused, yet it continues to chip away at the statement’s standing. An official inquiry earlier this year emphasised that South Korean diplomats played a major role in drafting it. For many ordinary Japanese, the Asahi’s errors are likely further to cloud reality about wartime history, and about the truth of the aftermath of the nuclear catastrophe of 2011—the opposite of what the paper, and Japan’s left, would welcome.