After watching Cleopatra on NHK BS1 with my close friend, a man even more knowledgeable about cinema than I am, he immediately said that the film had nearly brought down the company that produced it. Seeing the name 20th Century Fox in the end credits, I asked the excellent AI service I subscribe to investigate the matter. The result confirmed that Cleopatra was indeed a legendary epic that nearly drove 20th Century Fox to collapse.

Today, I watched the Dodgers versus Padres game, with Yamamoto as the starting pitcher, which had begun on NHK BS1, until the very end.
After confirming the Dodgers’ overwhelming victory, I was about to go out, but the moment the game ended, Cleopatra began to air.
I have seen this film at least two or three times.
But today was the first time in a very long while that I had watched it.
As everyone knows, with a good film, one can tell the moment it begins.
In other words, the camera angles, and whether the sets are real.
Whether real money has been spent on the work, in the best sense of the phrase.
Such things are evident from the very first moment.
I changed my plan to go out and decided to watch the film.
In those days, true epic films were sometimes so long that they even had an intermission.
In my youth, I was not only a lover of music, but also one of the great lovers of cinema, and I have seen several such films.
Now, watching this film, I felt the same emotion that I felt on June 26 in Nagoya, when I heard Rina Nakano perform.
That is to say, only genius can save genius.
Only genius can heal the anguish of genius.
Each and every line in this film is extraordinary.
It is genuine cinematic art, created by a gathering of geniuses.
This was something that did not exist in Beethoven’s time.
That is why he said that music was the supreme art among the arts.
Painting, poetry, and novels.
These do not possess the resonance that shakes the body.
The second half of this film, filled with lines like jewels, is Antony and Cleopatra.
The love between the two is real.
For that reason, Antony died.
In the scene where Antony is dying, he says, “I want to die in the embrace and kiss of the woman I love”…and in that way, he dies.
I declare that this is the death of a brave man.
In the span of a life, amid my extremely few relationships with women, for reasons my readers know, I have been with women from the ages of nineteen to twenty-five.
All of them were wonderful people.
The last one.
I am not Picasso.
I am a completely unknown man.
And yet, though I was living on a horizon far removed from the life that had once been promised to me, and though in the prime ten years of my business life alone I had paid more than 17 billion yen in taxes to the Japanese state, as a great warrior outside the system, I was trapped by the conventional idea of the superficial age difference that came to me at that time, and I could not marry her.
What I always said to that woman was precisely the same kind of words as Antony’s.
The path by which I should originally have become a billionaire worth ten billion yen was cut off by the so-called total volume restriction, the beginning of the deflation that continues to this day, the policy folly of the century that brought about the great stagnation of the Japanese economy.
The person who brought this about was Yamada Atsushi, who was nothing more than one reporter in the economic department of the Asahi Shimbun, and the Asahi Shimbun, which around that time began to advocate such ideas as “the philosophy of honest poverty.”
That this was the policy folly of the century is proven by the historical fact that, for more than thirty years, Western countries have abhorred falling into “Japanese-style long-term deflation” as if it were a poisonous snake or scorpion, and that whenever signs of it appeared, they immediately implemented policies to prevent it.
At that time, Japan’s GDP was 550 trillion yen, while America’s GDP was 750 trillion yen.
Now America’s GDP has grown more than sixfold, while Japan, though Prime Minister Abe did his utmost to restore it, returned once again to square one because of the consumption tax increase.
When Ms. Takaichi achieved the overwhelming victory that this column had pointed out she would, and began to adopt correct economic policies, the Ministry of Finance, and the old media that can fairly be called its agents, began an unbelievable campaign of attacks and defamatory reporting against her.
Reports such as those by Shukan Bunshun were so childish and poor that even Chinese operations were obvious.
Yet their maliciousness and ugliness are, in reality, nothing less than a grave crime.
Taking advantage of this, the foolish opposition parties, unbelievably, began to launch persistent attacks against Takaichi in the Diet, and NHK’s flagship news programs at seven and nine o’clock reported their conduct as if it were correct.
Their conduct is absolutely not that of true Japanese people.
NHK, which carries out such reporting, is in substance Japan’s state-run broadcasting station.
Those who carry out such reporting, and the male and female anchors who merely read it aloud.
They have never once verified for themselves the content that they read aloud.
What they are doing, taking advantage of the fact that they are among the highest-paid people in Japan and enjoy the best working conditions, is, in the case of women, nothing more than nighttime dining and social activity in order to secure famous celebrities as marriage partners, and it is no exaggeration to say so.
I feel righteous indignation from the bottom of my heart that such people earn easily more than twice the annual income of orchestra members, each of whom is a genius in their own right, and who perform at the highest level in world-class concert halls throughout Japan, night after night.
To be continued.