Written when the COVID-19 pandemic had deprived stadiums, concert halls, and theaters of their audiences, this essay considers why the free and spontaneous atmosphere surrounding sports and the arts is indispensable to human society. Through the author’s contemporary examination of American society, Black Lives Matter, media moralism, Chinese Communist Party rule, and the Obama and Trump administrations, it asks what values a free society must protect.

September 1, 2020
This essay was written on September 1, 2020, when the spread of COVID-19 had deprived stadiums, concert halls, and theaters throughout the world of their audiences and cheers.
At that time, Japanese professional baseball limited attendance to 5,000 people at each stadium, with spectators refraining from loud cheering and expressing their support mainly through applause.
Major League Baseball in the United States, meanwhile, continued to play without spectators and used artificial crowd noise as a sound effect.
Taking these contrasting scenes as its point of departure, this essay considers what it means for people to gather in stadiums, concert halls, and theaters and freely share their enjoyment.
It also refers to Toshiyuki Hayakawa’s article, “The Movement Toward a Communist Revolution Stirring in the United States,” published on pages 100–105 of the October 2020 issue of the monthly magazine WiLL, and discusses the contemporary situation in American society surrounding Black Lives Matter, the conduct of the media, the one-party dictatorship of the Chinese Communist Party, and the Obama and Trump administrations.
The following is the text published on September 1, 2020.
I am convinced that the existence in Japan of no fewer than four monthly magazines that should be essential reading not only for the Japanese people but for people throughout the world is evidence of Japan’s true strength.
For example, Toshiyuki Hayakawa’s article entitled “The Movement Toward a Communist Revolution Stirring in the United States,” published in three-column format on pages 100–105 of this month’s issue of WiLL, should be read not only by the Japanese people but especially by the American people.
Anyone who reads it will realize that what he describes in his painstaking work is occurring in the United States today.
I have no unfavorable impression whatsoever of Naomi Osaka, but I do believe that political declarations should not be made lightly.
If people judge an incident solely by its outward appearance without investigating the truth, and if the movement so clearly revealed by Hayakawa’s work were actually to materialize into an extraordinary situation, there is a strong possibility that later generations would conclude that the actions taken by her and others at that time had ended up playing directly into the hands of those behind the agitation.
To begin with, if Black people were truly being discriminated against in the United States today, it would be difficult to explain the prominence of so many Black people in every field, particularly the reality that countless Black people have become millionaires in sports and music.
Above all, how could a Black president have been elected and served two terms?
America, the American mass media—indeed, the mass media throughout the world—should finally put an end to this false moralism.
The people who welcome your false moralism are people such as Xi Jinping.
Is it not time to recognize that those with the greatest appetite for the false moralism and political correctness spreading throughout the liberal democratic world are communists and totalitarians?
In the first place, this is hardly the time to be doing such things.
I am convinced that one of the finest aspects of American society is the atmosphere created by the spectators in Major League Baseball stadiums.
Those stadiums embody baseball’s status as the national pastime.
That appeal has now been destroyed.
For a fan like me, the current atmosphere in Japanese stadiums is very welcome, and I now look forward to televised professional baseball games more eagerly than ever.
I can hardly wait for six o’clock, when the night games begin.
I never liked the organized cheering groups that dominated Japanese baseball stadiums.
Their tremendous noise was an intolerable distraction.
After Ichiro went to the United States, I therefore came to enjoy watching Major League Baseball far more than Japanese baseball.
This year, however, the situation has been completely reversed.
With attendance limited to 5,000 at each stadium, no shouting, and applause alone, an atmosphere resembling that of Major League Baseball has emerged in Japan.
For the first time, we can hear the sound of a pitcher’s fastball striking the catcher’s mitt and the sound of the batter connecting with the ball: a world in which a clean hit refreshes the spirit and powerful batting and pitching inspire admiration.
The situation in the United States, by contrast, is the complete opposite.
The stands remain empty because games are played without spectators, yet sounds resembling those of a real crowd are played as effects.
They are unpleasant to hear and make the absence of the openhearted, quintessentially American atmosphere once created by the national pastime even more painfully apparent.
The atmosphere of the national pastime, the atmosphere created by capacity crowds at all kinds of sporting events, the atmosphere of concerts, and the atmosphere of theaters—
All these things are completely unnecessary and useless to totalitarians and dictators, including the rulers of China’s one-party Communist dictatorship and anti-Japanese ideologues in South Korea.
Because of the Wuhan virus that China spread throughout the world, the many pleasures that had been taken for granted in the liberal democratic world outside countries such as China have been taken away.
Who took them away?
Ironically, they were taken away by Xi Jinping, the ruler of China—a country that does not recognize our pleasures, and the values absolutely essential to us, as values at all.
Yet foolish people in the United States, acting exactly as Xi Jinping’s schemes would have them act, repeatedly create disturbances in America, the very country in which they enjoy freedom.
They continue their attacks on the Trump administration.
They should stop and seriously consider whose interests they are serving.
One of your weaknesses is that, in the first place, you do not even understand the geographical relationship between Beijing and Tokyo.
You do not understand the difference between China and Japan.
Without understanding the realities of China or South Korea, you go so far as to condemn Japan.
That kind of excessive generalization, in the worst sense of the term, is your weakness.
Has this Black Lives Matter movement not gone too far?
Is it not simply too foolish?
Are Black people not overwhelmingly represented among the millionaires of America’s sports and music industries?
Before joining the movement, have you investigated the sources of funding behind the organizations leading Black Lives Matter or the true nature of the activists involved?
A fool who knows nothing and merely joins a disturbance will never become a person of substance, whether white or Black.
Nor will such a person become a highly paid professional.
To use your own terminology, it is only natural that such a person should be a loser.
Judgments must be based upon knowledge of the truth.
That is the proper conduct of anyone with intelligence and anyone living in the twenty-first century.
Was it President Trump who deprived us of our pleasures?
Surely not.
Is it not self-evident that China did so?
Or is the United States, like Japan’s Asahi Shimbun, NHK, and other television media, concealing the history of the Wuhan virus out of deference to China while arousing fear solely about the threat posed by the virus?
Surely not.
Has President Trump not explicitly called it the China virus?
No one other than Obama allowed China to grow so emboldened and to militarize the South China Sea.
He was, in truth, unfit to serve as President of the United States.
The present distress of the world is the result of allowing Xi Jinping to become increasingly emboldened.
At a time when he should have confronted China, Obama instead used the privileges of the presidency to invite some of the greatest figures in rock music to perform at the White House and took satisfaction in doing so.
On one occasion it was Paul McCartney; on another it was Bruce Springsteen.
By inviting such figures, he projected the image of a man with a deep appreciation of music.
Obama is Black.
Who discriminated against him?
It goes without saying that holding a rock concert at the White House is not a crime, and therefore he was not arrested.
Because he was not a criminal, he was neither arrested nor restrained by police officers.
Does the United States today call the enforcement of the law against criminals discrimination?