Originally published on July 10, 2019.
Drawing on an interview with Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga published in the August issue of Hanada, this passage sharply condemns major Japanese media outlets such as Asahi Shimbun and NHK for obsessively attacking bureaucrats and the government while depriving the Japanese people of a proper sense of urgency regarding the threats posed by China and the Korean Peninsula.
At the same time, it highlights the visible achievements of the Abe administration in areas such as agricultural reform, tourism policy, public access to the State Guest Houses, and employment improvement, all advanced under political leadership.
It is an important piece for reconsidering both the distortions of Japan’s public discourse and the meaning of political execution.

2019-07-10
While they continue acting as ruinous media, China and the Korean Peninsula are using that opening to watch for chances to attack and invade Japan.
The following is an article by Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga published in the August issue of the monthly magazine Hanada under the title, Exclusive Interview: Japan Cannot Be Entrusted to Opposition Cooperation.
Not only all the people of Japan, but people throughout the world as well, must read it.
As I read this article, in which Chief Cabinet Secretary Suga calmly states the facts, there arose in my mind, by stark contrast, the image of Japanese media such as Asahi and NHK madly attacking bureaucrats, or seizing on a fragment of a politician’s words and subjecting them to a torrential downpour of bashing.
“They truly are ruinous media.”
The time has long since come when all Japanese citizens, too, must realize this.
While they continue acting as ruinous media, China and the Korean Peninsula are using that opening to watch for chances to attack and invade Japan.
What the intelligence agencies of countries hostile to Japan are aiming at—especially what the intelligence agencies of China, a one-party communist dictatorship, are plotting—is division of Japanese public opinion.
Their aim is to have the media attack the government and thereby alienate the hearts of the people.
Therefore, without even a moment’s delay, the Japanese people must turn away from Asahi and NHK and say NO to them.
In proportion as the number of people who, including myself, know their true nature and try to correct it increases, China mobilizes them and the human-rights lawyers and anti-Japanese activists who sympathize with them,
and uses people like David Kaye, the vilest kind of Chinese agent in this world, to report to the United Nations that freedom of the press is beginning to be violated in Japan.
As I have mentioned many times, Asahi, NHK, human-rights lawyers, and the so-called civic groups who make a living through anti-Japanese activism all fall in line with this, and their representative figures are Kenzaburo Oe and Haruki Murakami.
The time has long since come when the Japanese people should realize that these people are the basest and ugliest human beings in history.
And it is none other than China, that country with no freedom of speech whatsoever, the greatest suppressor of human rights in human history, the country that finally made Orwell’s prophesied surveillance society a reality.
South Korea, which acts in concert with it, is a totalitarian state that has continued the fascism called anti-Japanese education ever since the war.
North Korea is in reality beyond the pale—a modern cartoon state, nothing other than an ancient despotic kingdom.
And yet even such a state, merely by possessing a single nuclear bomb, is treated by the media as though it were some kind of great power.
Given the fact that they are nuclear-armed states, that they repeatedly engage in acts of attack against Japan and violations of Japanese territory, and that they are plotting the armed seizure of Taiwan,
it is no longer permissible to be misled by their reporting and statements and continue averting one’s eyes.
President Trump exploited precisely that foolishness of the Japanese people.
Unlike the media’s reporting, Trump is always speaking the truth.
The time has long since come when the Japanese people should also realize that Trump stands at the exact opposite pole from their pseudo-moralism.
What was mistaken was the pseudo-moralism that had saturated the advanced nations, not Trump.
For pseudo-moralism is among the greatest evils, something that must be destroyed.
Opening the State Guest Houses to the Public as Well
One area in which we have been working with clear goals is agricultural reform.
In his policy speech, the Prime Minister declared that “an aggressive agricultural policy is necessary,” and we carried out the first fundamental reform of the agricultural cooperatives in sixty years.
At the same time, we have also placed emphasis on the export of agricultural products, which stood at about 450 billion yen annually before this administration took office, and last year doubled to 9.068 billion yen, with a goal of surpassing the 1 trillion yen mark during 2019.
The Abe administration has pursued tourism policy and agricultural policy with the clear objective of raising local incomes and expanding local consumption.
Precisely because the results of those efforts have begun to become visible before the people, I believe we have received the support of the people and the administration has remained stable.
As a result of clearly setting forth what needed to be done and working toward economic revitalization in that direction, the effective job-offers-to-applicants ratio improved from 0.83 before this administration took office to 1.63, the highest level in forty-five years.
It was the first time since statistics began to be compiled that the job-offers ratio exceeded 1 in all forty-seven prefectures, and we were able to create an environment in which people who wanted to work could work.
I believe the employment environment has improved this much precisely because economic policy has been properly carried out.
It is the result of having promoted Abenomics across the government under political leadership.
When politics clearly indicates a direction and proceeds with determination, the bureaucracy will make further efforts in that direction.
Take, for example, the opening of the Akasaka and Kyoto State Guest Houses to the general public.
I myself had long wondered why something of such value was not being opened to the people, but for many years there was various resistance within the bureaucracy, including at the operational level, and it could not be realized.
However, under strong political judgment, we overcame the issues one by one, and at present each of the State Guest Houses is open for about 250 days a year, receiving more than 500,000 visitors annually in Akasaka and more than 100,000 in Kyoto.
In addition, at Shinjuku Gyoen the opening hours, which had previously been only until 4:30 p.m., were extended to 6:00 p.m. and to 7:00 p.m. in summer.
National art museums and museums across the country were also made to stay open until 8:00 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays.
There were many things everywhere that anyone could see were strange, and many ordinary things that had not been done, but now, one by one, they have been improved through political leadership, and we have become able to provide many foreign visitors to Japan with opportunities to experience the attractions of Japan.
To be continued.