2023-10-31
The following is from Masayuki Takayama’s regular column in Themis, the subscription-only monthly magazine that arrived at my home today.
This article, too, demonstrates that he is a journalist without equal in the postwar world.
The Asahi Touted a “Two-Party System” and Sponged off Business Owner Hiromasa Ezoe
Tensei Jingo Told the Outrageous Lie That “Multi-Member Districts Give Rise to ‘Politics and Money’ Scandals”
The Morihiro Hosokawa Administration That Did Nothing
Perhaps reflecting the Asahi Shimbun’s corporate culture, Tensei Jingo writes lies without a qualm.
Long ago, it wrote that “the Japanese have little sense of morality and exported canned fish with stones inside.”
The Japanese canning industry immediately protested, demanding that it stop publishing such blatant lies, but the newspaper did not even publish a correction.
Several days later, in the same Tensei Jingo column, it offered an excuse that was no excuse at all—something about having been mistaken—and treated the matter as settled.
There was also the Asahi’s coral graffiti incident.
After diving into the sea off Iriomote and scratching “KY” into an Azami coral himself with the handle of an underwater flash, its photographer’s actions were followed by the newspaper’s fullest denunciation of the Japanese: “When it comes to graffiti, the Japanese are probably now the foremost people in the world.
They feel no shame about damaging in an instant something that has grown over centuries.
Such spiritual poverty, such desolate hearts…”
This condescending attitude in writing, looking down on the Japanese as lacking morality, is exactly the same as that of the “stones in canned fish” column.
Asahi reporters share this baseless arrogance, compounded by ignorance.
The Tensei Jingo column is no different: ignorance and arrogance appear almost every time.
These qualities are also unmistakable in a column that began by discussing Morihiro Hosokawa’s becoming prime minister thirty years ago.
Who, in the first place, believes that Hosokawa “began a new kind of politics”?
All he accomplished was political party subsidies.
Politicians would stop raising their own election funds and instead take the easy route of receiving thirty billion yen from taxpayers.
Then, they said, they would work hard to provide good government.
The people had high hopes, but Hosokawa did nothing.
In the end, nothing moved in politics until Mr. Abe appeared.
Hosokawa was not a politician but a con artist.
Hosokawa’s politics did, however, serve to expose those grasping legislators who wanted still more money even after obtaining plenty by sponging off the public.
Take Kiyomi Tsujimoto, who entered politics through the Social Democratic Party.
As soon as she became a legislator, she set up a fictitious publicly funded secretary arrangement and fraudulently obtained 18.7 million yen in public money.
She was caught and received a conviction with a suspended sentence, but even so, she learned that being a legislator was sufficiently lucrative.
So she returned to the Diet immediately after her suspended sentence period ended.
The left does not mind criminals.
Hosokawa degraded Japanese politics.
Yet Tensei Jingo also lavishly praises him for “introducing single-member districts.”
Single-member districts are an all-or-nothing gamble.
When the Asahi trumpets, “It is the age of a two-party system,” the public is easily taken in.
Add a catchphrase such as “It is good to teach the LDP a lesson once in a while,” and people with neither substance nor ability may well take power.
Indeed, I believe everyone remembers the birth of that nightmare Democratic Party of Japan government.
Even today, the fact that members of the Constitutional Democratic Party and the Japanese Communist Party win seats like anyone else is the magic of the single-member district system.
Asahi President Toshitada Nakae Was Also a Sponger
Even Tensei Jingo knows that much, so this is where it slips in a lie.
“Under multi-member districts, scandals mired in politics and money, such as the Recruit scandal, are more likely to occur.”
Apparently, it wants to say that single-member districts are therefore preferable.
This passage is an outrageous lie on the scale of “stones in canned fish.”
The Recruit scandal was not caused by “politics and money.”
It was a scandal in which self-important bigwigs demanded that their status be acknowledged and sponged off someone.
There are hints of this in Hiromasa Ezoe’s autobiography, The Day the Seagull Took Flight.
He grew up in a gloomy household and struggled to enter the University of Tokyo.
Even afterward, there was little brightness in his life.
Turning his back on society, he quietly launched a part-time job information publication, which would grow into Recruit, a thirteen-trillion-yen company ranking among Japan’s top five.
Yet Ezoe, a great entrepreneur and the owner of a major business, did not belong to any of the four major business organizations.
This is a great puzzle, but partly for that reason, he contributed to society through advisory bodies attached to impartial government institutions and the like.
Nevertheless, he was the owner of a major business.
Bureaucrats and politicians flocked around him.
One might well call it sponging.
New shares in Recruit Cosmos were among the things they were after.
As he continued to let them sponge off him, the prosecutors began to move.
Ezoe sought help.
The person he turned to was Yanosuke Narazaki of the Socialist Party, who had been a close associate of Jiichiro Matsumoto of the Buraku Liberation League.
But Narazaki, whom Ezoe had relied upon, secretly filmed his exchanges with Ezoe’s emissary and sold him out to the authorities.
There is another point.
As evidence that this was not a matter of “politics and money,” Asahi Shimbun president Toshitada Nakae was among those who sponged off Ezoe.
Nakae quietly resigned over it without attracting notice.
There were other bad actors at the Asahi besides Nakae.
Those who traveled by helicopter to enjoy the ski resort Ezoe owned at Appi Kogen in Hachimantai, Iwate Prefecture, were Katsuichi Honda, who wrote that Journey to China containing not a shred of truth, and Keiichiro Hikita, who wrote this very Tensei Jingo column in the early 1970s.
What were they thinking as they sponged off him?
Ezoe was a newcomer.
He paid his respects to well-known figures by inviting them to Appi Kogen or distributing Recruit Cosmos shares.
In the newspaper industry, he gave celebratory shares to the president of the Nikkei.
But he had not paid his respects to Nakae.
It became a matter of “Does he not know who Nakae is?”
A Victim Rather Than a Criminal
Honda and Hikita were no different.
“I am the foremost master of fine prose.”
Honda was the foremost practitioner of the anti-Japan trade.
“How about showing us the proper respect?”
People gathered around the worldly inexperienced Ezoe with an attitude of “I will teach you how the world works.”
The same can be said of bureaucrats and Diet members.
The breadth of the circle of spongers proves it.
In that sense, the Recruit scandal was not a matter of “politics and money,” as the column claims.
Perhaps it would be more accurate to call it a scandal in which people who regarded themselves as leading figures in politics, the bureaucracy, and the media forced the unsuspecting Ezoe to pay them their due.
After being sponged off, Hiromasa Ezoe was arrested on bribery charges.
From every perspective, Ezoe was a victim, not a criminal.
What makes this column sit so badly is, first, its excessive ignorance.
And above all, this is not a subject for a column by a newspaper that was itself among the spongers.