this essay examined Black Lives Matter, Naomi Osaka’s political statements, and reporting on the George Floyd case, warning against judging an incident solely by its outward appearance. Referring to essays by Toshiyuki Hayakawa and Soju Watanabe in WiLL, it discusses pseudo-moralism, political correctness, the Chinese Communist regime, the Obama administration, and the cultural values of a free society.

September 5, 2020
I am convinced that the fact that Japan has as many as four monthly magazines that are essential reading not only for the Japanese people but also for people throughout the world represents Japan’s true strength.
For example, an essay by Toshiyuki Hayakawa entitled “The Movement Toward a Communist Revolution Stirring in the United States,” published on pages 100 to 105 in the current issue of the monthly magazine WiLL in a three-column format, is essential reading not only for the Japanese people but especially for the American people.
Anyone who reads it will realize that precisely what his painstaking work describes is now taking place in the United States.
I have no unfavorable impression whatsoever of Naomi Osaka, but I do think that she should not make political statements lightly.
If one judges an incident solely by its outward appearance without investigating the truth, and if the movement that his painstaking work so brilliantly brings to light truly becomes a reality and produces an outrageous situation, there is a strong possibility that later generations will conclude that the actions taken by her and others at that time ultimately assisted those people’s maneuvering.
When the tournament that had been suspended following demands by players represented by her resumed, television showed her appearing each day in a T-shirt bearing a different message.
At first, it showed her wearing a T-shirt printed with the name of George Floyd, whose death had become the catalyst for the present unrest.
I naturally assume that she has never read any of the four monthly magazines that I have repeatedly described as essential reading.
After all, she is now one of the world’s foremost female tennis athletes.
However, if the United States, or indeed the world, were a society defined by discrimination against Black people, she should at least recognize that the present reality—in which she earns the highest annual income of all female tennis players in the world—could not exist.
The current issue of the aforementioned monthly magazine WiLL also contains an important essay entitled “Examining the Minneapolis Riots: Was the Black Man Killed by the Police?” by Soju Watanabe, the foremost contemporary researcher of modern Japanese-American history.
I will shortly bring it to the attention of people throughout the world, particularly the people of the United States.
After graduating from the Faculty of Economics at the University of Tokyo, he spent thirty years engaged in business in the United States and Canada.
He is a researcher whose works have been highly acclaimed for extensively examining American and British historical materials and reconsidering Japan–United States relations since the opening of Japan from a new perspective.
Naomi Osaka should, at the very least, have read his painstaking work before engaging in the political conduct at issue here.
Just as you devoted yourself to tennis every day and became the world’s best, he devoted himself to the study of modern Japanese-American history and became the foremost researcher of our time.
To begin with, if Black people were truly being discriminated against in the United States today, we would not see so many Black people flourishing in every field, nor could there be the present reality in which countless Black people have become multimillionaires, particularly in the worlds of sports and music.
America, the American mass media—no, the mass media throughout the world—why do you not finally put an end to your pseudo-moralism?
The only people pleased by your pseudo-moralism are people such as Xi Jinping.
Is it not time for you to realize that the people who relish the pseudo-moralism and political correctness spreading throughout the liberal democratic camp are none other than communists and totalitarians?
In the first place, this is hardly the time to be doing such things.
I am convinced that the finest aspect of American society is the atmosphere created by the spectators in Major League Baseball stadiums.
Those stadiums embody baseball’s place as America’s national pastime.
That appeal has now been ruined.
For a fan such as myself, the present atmosphere in Japanese baseball stadiums is extremely welcome, and I now look forward to professional baseball broadcasts more than ever before.
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 loud noise was nothing but an intolerable disturbance.
For that reason, after Ichiro went to the United States, I came to prefer watching Major League Baseball by far to watching Japanese baseball.
This year, however, the situation has been completely reversed.
Japanese stadiums have admitted 5,000 spectators each, with no loud shouting and only applause.
In an atmosphere resembling that of Major League Baseball, we can hear a pitcher’s fastball striking the catcher’s mitt and the sound made by the batter.
For the first time, there has appeared a world in which a clean hit purifies the mind and a powerful pitch commands admiration.
In the United States, meanwhile, the opposite has occurred.
The games continue without spectators, leaving the stands empty, yet sounds resembling those of a live crowd are played as sound effects.
They are unpleasant to the ear and make the spectacle appear even more shabby and cheap.
The atmosphere surrounding the national pastime, the atmosphere created by capacity crowds at all kinds of sporting events, the atmosphere of concerts, and the atmosphere of theaters—none of these things has any value or necessity whatsoever for totalitarians and dictators, including the rulers of China’s one-party Communist dictatorship and South Korea’s anti-Japanese ideologues.
Because of the Wuhan virus spread throughout the world by China, the many forms of enjoyment that were once taken for granted in liberal democratic countries outside their own system have been taken away.
Who took them away?
Ironically, it was Xi Jinping, the leader of China—a country that does not recognize as valuable the enjoyment and values that are absolutely indispensable to us—who took them away.
And yet fools in the United States, acting precisely in accordance with Xi Jinping’s designs, repeatedly create disturbances within the United States, the very country in which they enjoy freedom.
They repeatedly attack the Trump administration.
For whose benefit are you doing this?
Why not stop and think carefully about that question?
One of your failings is that 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 criticize Japan.
That kind of sweeping carelessness, in the worst sense of the term, is one of your weaknesses.
Has the present Black Lives Matter movement not gone too far?
Has it not become altogether too foolish?
Are Black people not overwhelmingly represented among the multimillionaires in America’s sports and music industries?
Before expressing your support, have you even investigated the sources of funding of the organizations leading Black Lives Matter or the realities of the activists involved?
If you know nothing and are merely foolishly participating in the unrest, then, whether you are white or Black, you will never become a person of genuine distinction.
Consequently, you will not become a highly paid individual either.
In your own terminology, it is only natural that you should be a “loser.”
Judgments must be made after discovering the truth.
That is the natural conduct of a person possessed of intelligence.
Was it President Trump who took our enjoyment away from us?
It is self-evident that China did so.
It was none other than Obama who emboldened China and allowed the militarization of the South China Sea.
At a time when he should have confronted China, he invited figures such as Paul McCartney on one occasion and Bruce Springsteen on another to the White House, held musical events, and projected the image of himself as a cultivated admirer of music.
In truth, he was the one who was unfit to serve as President of the United States.
He emboldened Xi Jinping, and the result is the present plight of the world.