As the completion of Festival Tower overlapped with the North Yard project, this chapter reveals the hidden orchestration by a major media company, mobilizing political, economic, and cultural elites. It exposes the unseen casting behind Osaka’s redevelopment struggle.

2015-12-31

The completion of Festival Tower and the completion of the North Yard project were perfectly synchronized in timing.
In Nakanoshima, whose location—compared with Umeda—could be said without exaggeration to be overwhelmingly inferior in value, the Asahi Shimbun staked its corporate fate.
Using its power as a shaper of public opinion and its extensive network reaching into government agencies, it raised the floor-area ratio from 1,000 percent to 1,600 percent, transforming the project into a super high-rise.
That fact proves everything.
Meanwhile, I had already made clear that in Japan there are only two truly prime locations of the highest order: Ginza and Umeda.
It was on the finest site in Umeda that the first and second phases of Grand Front Osaka would be built.
Under these circumstances, attracting tenants to the Nakanoshima Festival Tower, on which the Asahi Shimbun had staked its fate, would be extremely difficult if things continued as they were.
Therefore, the Asahi Shimbun hid in the shadows as the director—though entirely behind the scenes—and cast as the leading figure a woman who had been involved in the Festival Tower project through Takenaka Corporation and who, as an executive secretary of the Kansai Association of Corporate Executives, stood at the center of the North Yard development plan.
Supporting roles were played by the former president of Orix, who had served as chair of a private advisory body to the cabinet at the time, and the chairman of the Kansai Economic Federation, who, perhaps captivated by her charm, was described by a Takenaka department head I knew in business as “a kind of elder charmer.”
On the sidelines stood influential supporters among the so-called cultural figures sympathetic to Asahi, including architects Tadao Ando and Kengo Kuma.
The greatest leading actor was, needless to say, the mayor of Osaka at the time—Hiramatsu—who had previously been an announcer for Mainichi Broadcasting.
Until I revealed it here and now, no one could have known this casting.
Even Hashimoto, perceptive as he was, like myself knew nothing of it, and simply believed at first that attracting the World Cup might help revive Osaka, and thus initially supported the idea.
Seeing that he did not even understand that the North Yard was the very key to Osaka’s revival, I gave up on him.
It would not be an exaggeration to say that I gave up on Osaka as well.