This article introduces Masayuki Takayama’s Weekly Shincho column, “The Lesson of the Passenger Pigeon.” It discusses the extinction of the white rhinoceros and the passenger pigeon, the concept of Minimum Inhibitory Concentration (MIC), arguments concerning COVID-19 and the bioweapon theory, and reflections on changes in Japanese society.

June 11, 2020
The reason why the conventional MIC concept does not apply is not because of natural occurrence; the United States believes that it is a biological weapon designed so that even a single surviving organism can remain alive and multiply.
The following is taken from the serialized column by Masayuki Takayama that concludes this week’s issue of Weekly Shincho, which was released today.
Once again, he proves that he is a one-of-a-kind journalist in the postwar world.
If I were to say that he is one of the living Tadao Umesao, even Tadao Umesao would surely agree with me from beyond the grave.
All emphasis in the text except for the headline is mine.
“The Lesson of the Passenger Pigeon”
For example, the African white rhinoceros is destined to disappear tomorrow.
It is called an extinct species.
Why does it become extinct?
The Chinese became extremely wealthy and wanted rhinoceros horns, which are used as medicine in traditional Chinese remedies.
Money was no object.
Poachers happily shot rhinoceroses one after another, took their horns, and sold them to the Chinese.
In the 1980s, when the Chinese were still poor, there were as many as 1,000 white rhinoceroses, but now there are only two.
Both are female, so extinction is inevitable.
Japan also bears some responsibility for making the low-civilized Chinese wealthy, but that issue will be set aside.
Likewise, Americans with low standards of civilization committed an irreversible mistake.
They completely exterminated the passenger pigeon.
When they arrived in the New World on the Mayflower, astonishingly, 5 billion large passenger pigeons covered the skies.
These pigeons nested around the Great Lakes and descended in winter to areas around Louisiana on the Gulf Coast.
Unfortunately, both areas were within American territory.
At the beginning of the 19th century, the ornithologist J. Audubon, who lived in Ohio, wrote, “Passenger pigeons flying south covered the sky, and it continued for three days and three nights.”
Americans shot them with guns, or beat nesting flocks to death with sticks, ate the meat, and plucked the feathers to make feather bedding.
There were 5 billion of them.
Thinking that no matter how many were taken they could never decrease, people found that within less than 100 years they had disappeared.
Americans made excuses, saying, “We only captured about 3 billion; it was not enough to cause extinction.”
However, during the same period, they had a record of slaughtering the 60 million bison that once filled the land and reducing their numbers to 900.
They were criticized behind their backs as being worse than the Chinese, but recently a theory that “Americans did not capture and eat all of them” was introduced in the New York Times.
According to Professor Beth Shapiro of the University of California, Santa Cruz, passenger pigeons had lived in dense groups for 20,000 years and repeatedly migrated north and south following the same patterns.
Because they had no enemies threatening the survival of the species, they laid only one egg per year.
Then Americans appeared and continuously shot them and destroyed their nesting grounds.
As a result, a small gap appeared for the first time in their densely packed populations.
For other species it would have been only a minor gap, but the reduction in density that they had maintained for 20,000 years became a major stress, and once a certain threshold was passed, it accelerated the extinction of the species.
In academic terms, for the white rhinoceros, a population of 1,000 becomes the minimum “gene pool” required to maintain the species, while for the passenger pigeon, the minimum was around 2 billion birds; once the population fell below that level, it simply moved toward extinction.
It is a well-made excuse.
This “threshold point at which a species can continue to survive” actually exists for bacteria and viruses as well.
It is called the Minimum Inhibitory Concentration (MIC).
For example, add Avigan to Wuhan coronavirus placed in a petri dish.
Then it falls below the MIC.
Strictly speaking, even if two or three organisms are still alive in the petri dish, they cannot reproduce at that concentration.
They die out.
That is why it is considered a good medicine.
However, only in the case of Wuhan coronavirus, even the “state in which two or three remain,” which should normally result in extinction, begins to multiply again.
The reason why there are many cases in which people recover from coronavirus and finally leave the hospital, only to relapse soon afterward, is because of this.
The reason why the conventional MIC concept does not apply is not because of natural occurrence; the United States believes that it is a biological weapon designed so that even a single organism can survive and multiply.
Even if the white rhinoceros is driven to extinction, the virus is raised to become stronger.
That is something very much like Xi Jinping.
By the way, the sad fate of the passenger pigeon appears to be asking something of the Japanese people.
The Japanese people, too, have lived as a close-knit society on the Japanese islands for the same 20,000 years.
Without external enemies, they lived through compassion and tradition.
Then Americans arrived and taught the Japanese to deny their traditions and way of life, and to pursue greed, selfishness, and insulting others.
This is the view of life recommended by Seiju Nemoto, editorial chief of The Asahi Shimbun.
Doesn’t the current population decline also appear to be evidence that Japanese people who have lost their traditions have begun walking toward extinction?