Drawing on a dialogue between Masayuki Takayama and Eitaro Ogawa in WiLL magazine, this article examines the PCR testing frenzy, television coverage, the expert panel and the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, the dissolution of the Home Ministry, GHQ, the Asahi Shimbun, and the structural defects of postwar Japan’s governing system.

June 8, 2020
That Harue Okada, who stirs up medical collapse by saying, “Just do PCR tests, no matter what,” is in great demand on television talk shows is nothing other than black humor.
The monthly magazines I refer to are must-reading not only for the Japanese people, but for people all over the world.
After all, although they are filled with genuine articles like this one, they cost only 950 yen.
The following is a continuation of a special dialogue between Masayuki Takayama and Eitaro Ogawa, published in this month’s issue of the monthly magazine WiLL under the title, “Designate China, the War-Criminal Nation of the Wuhan Virus, as a Terrorist State.”
Masayuki Takayama is the one and only journalist in the postwar world.
Eitaro Ogawa, for a book in which he criticized the Asahi Shimbun in the most natural and justified way, was, unbelievably, sued by the Asahi Shimbun, which is supposed to be an organ of speech, for a large amount of damages, in other words, subjected to a harassment lawsuit.
Even while suffering great financial loss, he has continued to write essays without flinching in the slightest.
He is one of the prides among graduates of the Faculty of Letters at Osaka University.
Creating a new “postwar.”
Ogawa
In Japan, neither SARS nor MERS spread.
After tuberculosis, epidemics have hardly entered Japan.
Fortunately or unfortunately, because Japan overcame infectious diseases, infectious-disease research has not been popular as an academic field, and human resources have not been developed.
That Harue Okada, who stirs up medical collapse by saying, “Just do PCR tests, no matter what,” is in great demand on television talk shows is nothing other than black humor.
The shortage of personnel in the expert panel is also serious.
Other than Hiroshi Nishiura of the cluster response team, I can only think that there are no scholars capable of epidemiological analysis.
After all, even when someone said reckless things such as “Tokyo will become New York” and “400,000 people will die,” they could not double-check them.
Takayama
So the expert panel is terrible too.
Ogawa
The expert panel of the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare does not produce numbers.
No matter how much the prime minister or the chief cabinet secretary urged them, the necessary data did not come up.
Takayama
Specifically, what kinds of numbers?
Ogawa
As far as I know, the number of people tested in Tokyo, an important indicator of infection trends, remained completely unreliable for one month from April 6.
The fact that the effective reproduction number, which indicates whether infections are expanding or subsiding, had fallen below 1 on April 1 reached the prime minister only on May 2.
The number of discharges from hospital also continued to be underreported by 4,000 cases.
That is 4,000 out of a total of 12,000 hospitalizations.
Takayama
Today the Ministry of Finance acts as if it is so important, but in the old days the Home Ministry was the most powerful.
It had functions worthy of its authority, and falsifying data was unthinkable.
It also produced many talented people.
Shunichi Suzuki, who fixed in one stroke the Tokyo metropolitan government that Ryokichi Minobe had ruined, was one of them, as were Matsutaro Shoriki, Masaharu Gotoda, and above all Seisuke Okuno, who upheld sound arguments.
Ogawa
For example, diplomacy can be handled by Prime Minister Abe and the small number of people in the Prime Minister’s Office who support him.
But the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare and the Ministry of Education cannot be moved by the power of the Prime Minister’s Office alone.
Even if one presses the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, which stubbornly refuses to produce numbers, if it says, “The front line is in confusion,” one has no choice but to fall silent.
Takayama
When I was in the city news department, I would hear, indirectly, about the ranking of government offices, and I also heard people mockingly call it the “Education and Welfare Nursing Home.”
It has no decent alumni, and that tradition still remains.
There was even a vice-minister like Kihei Maekawa, who frequented sex-entertainment establishments.
Before the war, the core of the bureaucracy was the Home Ministry.
GHQ knew that, and so it dismantled the Home Ministry and forced vertical sectionalism upon Japan.
If one traces the culprit that makes Japanese people panic at the word “epidemic prevention,” it ultimately comes down to GHQ.
As a result, the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, which should be the key to epidemic prevention, degenerated into a nursing home and could not respond adequately to the coronavirus.
In addition, the Asahi Shimbun, which in the past was a pawn of GHQ, has now fallen into becoming a pawn of Beijing, and interfered in every possible way with the government’s coronavirus measures.
At the very time when Japan should have been responding to the Wuhan virus, it brought up the “Cherry Blossom Viewing Party,” then brought out the suicide note of a Finance Bureau official whom the Asahi had bullied to death, and now it is using even entertainers and Twitter to hinder the government.
Ogawa
Domestic politics, diplomacy, and the political, business, and media worlds.
At every level, postwar Japan has still not escaped from its deep-rooted spell.
Taking the “corona war” as an opportunity, we must create a new “postwar regime.”