Starting from a friend’s switch to Sankei, this essay argues that substance matters far more than paper quality.
It criticizes the reworking of Umeda’s North Yard Phase Two into a “green park” as pseudo-moralism, contrasting it with the living history and spirit embodied by Osaka Castle Park.

2016-08-24.
Osaka Castle Park is a place where Japan’s history, the age of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and its spirit are alive, but.
In August the year before last, a close friend who had stopped subscribing to the Asahi Shimbun, which he had read for a long time, and switched to the Sankei Shimbun had an opportunity to meet a Sankei employee, and when he told him that, he was immediately told the following.
“If you subscribed to Asahi Shimbun for that long, isn’t Sankei hard to read. Because Asahi’s paper quality and printing are better.”
My friend apparently laughed and said.
“No matter how good the paper quality is, the content is far too terrible…”
When I heard this, I said that Sankei, which can answer immediately even about its own inferior points, is indeed the most decent newspaper company at present.
But it goes without saying that there is no such thing as one hundred percent in any matter.
The other day, Sankei Shimbun, without any doubt at all regarding Umeda’s North Yard, which was the trigger for my appearance on the internet, and without examining at all the process by which the Phase Two sales plan, created by gathering the wisdom of both the public and private sectors over more than twenty years, was nullified,
seems to report that they are now soliciting plans from several corporate groups that adopt green parks as a theme, even though water and greenery were originally themes, and that completely alter the original project plan, meaning that the recovery of the enormous deficit of the former Japanese National Railways, borne by the Japanese people, is greatly reduced.
Sankei also applied to this, and proudly published on a large page a plan by a person said to be a world-famous landscape architect, whom I did not know at all.
They even described a park that would be created in only that small space as “large-scale.”
Has the reporter who wrote this article never seen the gardens that exist everywhere in Kyoto.
To begin with, perhaps this reporter has never written about Osaka Castle Park or the former Sumitomo garden in Tennoji.
I can state with certainty that this pseudo-moralism of turning a limited portion of North Yard Phase Two from commercial use into a park could never surpass, even if one stood on one’s head, the gardens throughout Kyoto that I visit many times every year.
And they do not even know that such a thing will never make Osaka into Osaka of the world.
Osaka Castle Park is of course a must-see place for foreign visitors, but the park that seems to be created by altering North Yard Phase Two will not become a must-see place for foreign visitors.
The reason goes without saying.
Osaka Castle Park is a place where Japan’s history, the age of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and its spirit are alive, but.
A park created by altering North Yard Phase Two,
a park produced by the Asahi Shimbun’s crafty, or rather vicious scheme, the very pseudo-moralism of a so-called green park that nullifies the relief of the Japanese people’s tax burden, cannot possibly become something that represents Japan.
Even so, while the viciousness of the Asahi Shimbun is impressive, and while Sankei’s editorials today are thoroughly factual, that does not mean everything about Sankei Shimbun is one hundred percent perfect.
Never, simply because they are both media, should they admonish themselves so as not to align their steps with the Asahi Shimbun.