This article examines the striking contrast revealed during a Diet session on July 24, 2017, between opposition lawmakers and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
It criticizes political actors and media aligned with anti-Japan narratives for undermining Japan’s international credibility, reflects on the Sendai mayoral election, documents coordinated online attacks against the author, and exposes the broader structural failures of Japan’s information environment.

2017-07-24

A moment ago, I happened to be watching a live broadcast of the Diet.
I was utterly appalled by the sheer awfulness of the lawmakers from the Democratic Party and the Communist Party.
Their childish maliciousness, identical to that of the Asahi Shimbun, or rather their demeanor, which would be no exaggeration to describe as that of agents of China or South Korea, was nothing less than appalling—actions and statements so vile that they degrade the Japanese state and the Japanese people and undermine Japan’s credibility and trust abroad.
The contrast between their minds—so contemptible that they can only be described as aligning with the Asahi Shimbun, China, and South Korea in their desire to destroy Japan—and Shinzo Abe, a man born to be a politician, raised in the finest possible environment, and who has devoted his life to observing and thinking deeply about Japan and the world,
was visible even in their facial expressions, yet few Japanese citizens seem to have noticed it.
That, too, is the reason for yesterday’s result in the Sendai mayoral election.
The first time I ever saw Shinzo Abe was before August three years ago, at the Nikko Hotel in Shinsaibashi.
As I was riding an escalator after finishing my meal, Abe Shinzo—who was not Prime Minister at the time—passed briskly by on the floor below, head slightly lowered, accompanied by only a few people.
Seeing his bearing, I was struck by how completely different he was from the image of Shinzo Abe that I had unconsciously absorbed at the time, when I was still a subscriber who carefully read the Asahi Shimbun.
A man who never cast a sideways glance, focused solely on one thing: living earnestly the life of a politician of the Japanese state.
This was no ordinary person—that was the atmosphere he exuded.
He was entirely different from the impression created by Asahi’s reporting.
He bore no resemblance whatsoever to the large, swaggering political heavyweights I had seen in Kitashinchi.
Despite dining almost nightly in Kitashinchi, I had never once encountered Shigeo Nagashima, Sadaharu Oh, Ichiro, or Matsui there.
I did, however, frequently run into players from the Seibu Lions and the Hanshin Tigers.
A friend of mine, a graduate of Osaka University, said to me indignantly:
“You are always saying how wonderful Sendai is, but aren’t there simply too many fools there who do nothing but watch variety shows? China has begun intruding into Japanese territorial waters nationwide, South Korea has resumed attacking Japan abroad by resurrecting the comfort women issue, and North Korea is pushing forward toward mounting nuclear warheads on missiles that put all of Japan within range. In such circumstances, I cannot possibly consider Sendai’s citizens wise for choosing parties as awful as the Democratic Party and the Communist Party. If it weren’t for you, I would openly despise them…”
“I, too, felt disappointed in Sendai for the first time in my life. But this is the result of what has happened since May 2011, when my blog was viciously attacked online by a Korean resident criminal living in Osaka, and through an illegal practice used by such criminals known as reverse SEO, my search rankings were driven down to an unbelievable degree. In other words, this is the evil of Osaka…,” I retorted.
Back around the time I was forced to appear online due to the sheer awfulness of the Northern Yard turmoil and stagnation in July 2010—something that, as I later realized while writing, was orchestrated by the Asahi Shimbun and Orix acting in line with their intentions—
the leaders of virtually every major corporation in Japan, professors from all prestigious universities such as the University of Tokyo, Kyoto University, Waseda, Keio, Kansai-Kan-Doshisha, Hokkaido University, Kyushu University, and Nagoya University—many of whom were my seniors, peers, or juniors—were reading my essays.
In 2011, while I was hospitalized for a long period due to a serious illness, I accepted an offer to publish and announced it here.
The publisher, myself, and even Kinokuniya Umeda Main Store were all confident that my book would sell a certain number of copies.
However, after the announcement, when my book title and original pen name were searched, pages one through ten were suddenly filled with unbelievably malicious blog posts. He created dozens of handles across various sites and attacked relentlessly.
This man is a fraud criminal who, while out on bail, appeared with two others to ask to rent office space in a building owned by my company. We were defrauded of a sum equal to the large amount he had swindled from banks. We sued him in civil court and won in full, but by exploiting the Personal Information Protection Act and fleeing with no fixed address, the court ruling has had no effect whatsoever…
At one point, I considered quitting writing online altogether, but as I have said before, when I frequently visited Toji Temple, I was chastened and encouraged by the words of Kukai…
Nevertheless, the domestic response to my essays in Japan was drastically reduced.
Among people in Sendai, those who read my work are virtually nonexistent.
That is the result of yesterday’s Sendai mayoral election.
Do not blame Sendai. If anyone is to blame, it must be the criminals living in Osaka.
Taking advantage of the fact that U.S. companies such as Twitter rarely take action on harm done to Japanese people unless in extreme cases, this man has recently resumed open slander under his real name in the search results for my former pen name.
I asked a lawyer, an alumnus of your school, to request that Twitter remove the content, but it has had no effect at all.
This is despite the lawyer clearly pointing out that it constitutes an unmistakable criminal act.
Just like the low caliber of senior officials in the Trump administration’s State Department, many Americans truly look down on Japan,
without realizing that this attitude is making the world dangerous and unstable.
As I mentioned before, when I first noticed Google’s translation software, the quality of Japanese–English translation was atrocious.
At that very moment, I realized the level of America’s understanding of Japan, as I have already explained.
I also told you how I wrote about and drew attention to Google’s slow response in deleting cached pages of violating blogs, out of sheer anger.
And as you also know, a highly capable company president even remarked on this man’s obsessively persistent malice and childish viciousness, saying, “He might be a North Korean spy…”
If my essays—this work, which is in no small measure an unpaid endeavor—
had not been subjected to such malicious attacks,
and had continued to be published one after another while retaining the impact they had when I first appeared, shaking all of Japan,
the result of this Sendai mayoral election would not have occurred.
In other words, it is not the fault of Sendai’s citizens.
They subscribe to and carefully read newspapers such as the Asahi Shimbun and the entirely similar Kahoku Shimpo, and as a result of watching Hodo Station, News 23, and the utterly outrageous NHK news since the change of chairman in January of this year,
this outcome is by no means the fault of Sendai’s citizens.
The fools are the media disseminating information from Tokyo and Osaka—that is, the people of Tokyo and Osaka—and the people of Sendai are their victims…
It was at the moment I was making this rebuttal that the Diet broadcast mentioned at the beginning was aired.