At the end of 2015, the author began a solitary struggle against Kansai business organizations and Osaka City Hall.
Through this battle, the dual structure of the Asahi Shimbun—public moralism and hidden power—became visible.
This essay exposes the “match-pump” nature of its reporting and the structure that has long dominated Japan’s public discourse.

2015-12-31
However, precisely because they wear the mask of justice and the mask of guardians of democracy, they are more vicious than the rogues that infest the streets.
Having resolved to fight alone for three months against the Kansai Economic Federation, the Association of Corporate Executives, and Osaka City Hall, when I began this battle I wrote down, almost every time, the course of my discussions with them, handed them to our managing director, and had him deliver them to a reporter named Tagaya who had written the major feature on the North Yard, yet there was absolutely no response.
Originally, the Osaka headquarters of the Asahi Shimbun should have been more outraged than I was.
As readers know, for example, I even declined the earnest invitation of a Tokyo Dentsu man, affectionately called “the Lord,” with whom I was very close at the time, who suggested that I should move to Tokyo and take an office in the Imperial Hotel complex and place the de facto headquarters there, and this too was a life-defining struggle in which I remained committed to Osaka.
This reporter Tagaya was a man in whom no philosophy could be seen at all, a man who wrote chimera-like articles that made it utterly incomprehensible for what purpose he was assembling a major feature on the North Yard.
Thinking back, he was merely a messenger, or the public-facing handler of Asahi’s superficial moralism.
The great evil lay behind the scenes, throwing the North Yard into confusion and scheming by any means necessary to bury the second-phase sale.
Indeed, this was a perfect answer to the question of what the Asahi Shimbun truly is.
In other words, Asahi is a match-pump.
On the surface it displays a façade of moralism and has trivial figures write articles.
Behind the scenes, however, the real villains—armed with tangled ideologies of Marxism and the like, and wielding the absolute power of controlling Japanese discourse—successive editorial writers have ruled Japan by implying that if one did not obey them, they would manipulate public opinion and destroy you.
In short, they are no different from the rogues that dwell in the streets.
Yet precisely because they wear the mask of justice and the mask of guardians of democracy, they are more vicious than those street rogues.
To be continued.