Written on June 26, 2019, this passage, drawing on the late Susumu Nishibe’s The Media and National Ruin, sharply probes the psychology of the masses and the true nature of media coverage surrounding the Recruit scandal.
It reveals how egalitarianism and democracy were in fact mobilized to justify voyeurism, jealousy, and curiosity, and how the publication of real names and repetitive reporting turned the degradation of the information society into a fixed pattern.

2019-06-26
Was there not at work a motive of self-justification among the masses, namely, the mobilization of egalitarianism and democracy in order to justify their own peeping-Tom, that is, their taste for voyeurism?

The following is from the late Susumu Nishibe’s book Mass Media National Ruin Theory.
All Japanese citizens who can read printed text should at once head to the nearest bookstore to purchase and read it.
People all over the world, through my translation, will come to know that the mass media in your countries are the same.
The following is a continuation of the previous chapter.
It goes without saying that what Mr. Nishibe points out in this chapter applies exactly as it stands to the Moritomo and Kake scandals.
The baseness of the Asahi Shimbun, which created that uproar, and of the people represented by Kiyomi Tsujimoto and Mizuho Fukushima, had reached an extreme, and so too had the baseness of the television networks that echoed them and the citizens who followed along.
Democracy and egalitarianism mobilized to justify voyeuristic taste.
Let us now consider what is meant by “easy gain.”
The incomes of politicians and business executives continue to be persistently criticized by means of this phrase.
If people were in a state of barely managing to eat, then even an emotional argument such as, “If only we had had that millet, we would not have had to sell our daughter into prostitution,” would carry urgency.
However, in an “age of gluttony,” “easy gain” can hardly be thought to be something real.
Or rather, its truth is rooted in the jealousy of the masses.
Or perhaps it is not even jealousy.
In the Recruit scandal, no strong emotion like jealousy could be seen.
It may rather have been nothing more than curiosity toward the possible shadiness of others.
There is no way one could feel a strong emotion like jealousy over the course of stocks that were never going to come to one’s own hands.
Most likely, behind this Recruit uproar there was at work a motive of self-justification among the masses, namely, the mobilization of egalitarianism and democracy in order to justify their own peeping-Tom, that is, their taste for voyeurism.
It goes without saying that the act of peeping over a hedge and making a commotion is a baser act than that of peasants rising in revolt against the misrule of an evil magistrate.
What cannot be overlooked is that, amid such foolish uproar, a grotesque situation telling of the degradation of the information society was unfolding.
That was the problem of publishing real names.
The mass media continued a campaign of denouncing those involved in Recruit as dirty by naming them by their real names.
The public, too, reacted like parrots and loudly repeated those names.
As the Nazis once did, a group psychology was formed by “repeating loudly.”
And, just as with Lockheed, once the uproar had more or less subsided, the matter would then be dug up again on such occasions as the opening of trials or verdicts, and the campaign of denunciation would be repeated.
The public would join the campaign each time.
This is by now such a standardized process that it can almost be called a mechanism of the information society.
Indeed, when the Recruit trial began at the end of 1989, massive coverage began.
The meaning-content of that coverage was utterly thin, yet the mechanism by which the public jumps onto massive coverage has firmly taken on a life of its own.
It is well known that what is called the populist line of the mass media consists of nothing but money, sex, and voyeurism.
It is nothing other than the spread of spiritual pollution, and the pollution sinks ever further to lower levels.
Money in the Recruit uproar, women in the sexual scandals of politicians, and a mass media that proudly publishes, with real names attached, the results of its peeping-Tom behavior toward these things—if one sums up the uproars of these past two years, that was, in short, what it all amounted to.
To be continued in this section.