Published on January 19, 2020.
Continuing from the previous chapter and drawing from the late Susumu Nishibe’s Mass Media Ruins the Nation, this article examines the reactions of the mass media and the public to the Recruit scandal. It criticizes the jealousy, voyeurism, self-justification through democracy and egalitarianism, collective psychology created by real-name reporting, and the pathology of an information society degraded into money, sex, and peeping.

January 19, 2020
Needless to say, the act of peeping over a fence and making a great commotion is more vulgar than the actions of peasants who rose in revolt against the misrule of a wicked magistrate.
The following is a continuation of the previous chapter.
Democracy and Egalitarianism Mobilized to Justify Voyeuristic Taste
Let us next consider what is meant by “making easy money without effort.”
The incomes of politicians and business executives have continued to be persistently criticized with this phrase.
If people were in a state of barely being able to eat, then an emotional argument such as “if only we had had that millet, we would not have had to sell our daughter off as a prostitute” would possess a certain urgency.
However, in an “age of overabundance,” “making easy money without effort” can hardly be thought to be something true.
No, its truth is rooted in the jealousy of the masses.
Or perhaps it is not even jealousy.
With regard to the Recruit scandal, no strong emotion like jealousy was visible. Rather, was it not merely curiosity toward the possible dubiousness of others?
One cannot possibly have a strong emotion such as jealousy toward the destination of shares that were never going to come to oneself in the first place.
Probably, behind this Recruit uproar, there was at work the motive of self-justification among the masses, who mobilized egalitarianism and democracy in order to justify their own Peeping Tom tendency, that is, their voyeuristic taste.
Needless to say, the act of peeping over a fence and making a great commotion is more vulgar than the actions of peasants who rose in revolt against the misrule of a wicked magistrate.
What cannot be overlooked is that, amid this foolish uproar, a grotesque situation progressed that testified to the degeneration of the information society.
That was the issue of publicizing real names.
The mass media continued a campaign of naming those connected with Recruit and denouncing them as dirty.
The public reacted like parrots and loudly repeated those real names.
As the Nazis once did, a collective psychology was formed by “repeating loudly.”
And, as was also the case with Lockheed, once the uproar had more or less subsided, the matter was then brought up again on occasions such as the opening of trials or the handing down of judgments, and the campaign of denunciation was repeated.
Each time, the public went along with the campaign.
This is now such a standardized process that it may almost be called the mechanism of the information society.
In fact, as soon as the Recruit trial began at the end of the first year of Heisei, massive reporting began.
The meaning and substance of that reporting were extremely thin, but the mechanism by which the public went along with the massive reporting marched firmly on by itself.
It is widely known that what is called the mass-oriented line of the mass media consists of nothing but money, sex, and peeping.
That is nothing other than the spread of mental pollution, and the pollution is falling to ever lower levels.
Money in the Recruit uproar, women in the scandals involving politicians, and the mass media proudly publicizing the results of its Peeping Tom behavior while naming real names—if one sums up the uproar of these two years, that is essentially what it amounted to.