This is the call to action I issued before that historic election.
At that time, I appealed with all my heart and soul to the entire nation, and especially to the young.
Go to the polling station.
When you finish reading this essay, go immediately to cast your early vote.
You do not need to have your polling card in hand.
All that is needed is you yourself, as an eligible voter.
Take something that can confirm your identity, and go to the polling station.
Because if you do not go, they will go.
If you abstain, the anti-Japanese forces will go.
If you think it is troublesome and stay at home, the forces that have demeaned Japan will surely go to the polling station.
The moment you think, “One vote like mine will not matter,” that vote is, in effect, handed over to the forces that have been destroying Japan.
An election is a silent battlefield.
No gunshots are heard.
No angry shouts resound.
Yet the future of the nation is decided there.
Will Japan be protected?
Or will the path be opened once again to those who have been destroying Japan?
That decision is made at the polling station.
This election was not an election merely to make one politician win.
Whether Sanae Takaichi would win by a landslide.
That was the dividing line between whether Japan would recover the national will it had lost for so long after the war.
I saw it clearly in that way.
And I issued it in that way.
A mere victory was not enough.
Even a major victory was not enough.
What was necessary was a historic landslide victory.
It had to be a decisive landslide victory, one that would be engraved in postwar political history.
Because, with an ambiguous victory, the old media would certainly distort it.
The old media, beginning with the Asahi Shimbun and NHK, have distorted the will of the people again and again.
They have described defeat as if it were victory, reported victory as if it were a source of anxiety, and replaced the rightful will of the people with narratives convenient to themselves.
That is precisely why, this time, it had to be a landslide victory they could not distort.
A victory obvious to anyone’s eyes.
A victory the world would have no choice but to recognize.
A victory showing the entire world that the Japanese people had chosen, by their own will, the course of the nation once again.
That was what was necessary.
I wrote for that purpose.
I issued it for that purpose.
Young people.
You are the very future of Japan.
If you do not go to the polling station, Japan’s future will be decided by those who cling to the past.
If you remain silent, those who have demeaned Japan will steal your future.
While you think, “Politics has nothing to do with me,” politics will decide your life.
Taxes, education, employment, national defense, diplomacy, freedom of speech――all of them are shaped by politics.
So go.
Go now.
Go to cast your early vote.
There is no need to wait for election day.
If you can go today, go today.
If you can go tomorrow, go tomorrow.
There is no time to hesitate.
The fate of a nation is always decided not by those who hesitate, but by those who act.
This one vote is not merely one vote.
This one vote is a vote to take Japan back.
This one vote is a vote to smash the distortions of the old media.
This one vote is a vote to end the stagnation of postwar politics.
This one vote is a vote that moves the Turntable of Civilization forward once again.
I declare this.
Your one vote is not small.
Your one vote is the will of the nation.
Your one vote is the will of civilization.
If you do not go, the anti-Japanese forces will go.
If you remain silent, they will speak.
If you abstain, they will decide.
So go.
Voters across the nation.
Japanese citizens aged eighteen and older.
When you finish reading this essay, go immediately to cast your early vote.
You do not need to have your polling card.
All that is needed is you yourself, as an eligible voter.
Cast a vote to protect Japan.
Push Sanae Takaichi toward a historic landslide victory.
This is not merely an election.
It is the moment when Japan becomes a nation once again.
It is the moment when the Turntable of Civilization begins to advance once again.
At the bottom of that moment, there flows the music I received as the resonance of the 21st century.
Arcade Fire――Half Light I.
I place this song at the end of this essay.