October 11, 2011
Republished on July 25, 2026, under a revised title.
Written as one part of a trilogy that took shape in the author’s mind before dawn, this essay addresses Mr. Uchida and argues that the distinction between major newspapers and the internet—their prestige, circulation, or public recognition—is irrelevant.
The only essential question is whether an article or commentary contains the truth.
It also criticizes media figures who sided with antidemocratic forces, continued to mislead the public without reflection, and tolerated an inward-looking political fiction conducted under the banner of “politics and money.”
Perhaps because I had gone to bed extremely early the previous night, I awoke extremely early.
It was two o’clock.
By any standard, that was far too early.
I decided to go back to sleep, but when I awoke again, an idea came to me—a continuation of the concise passage I had written earlier, in which I stated, “Mr. Uchida, you have taken the wrong road.”
I do not know how commentators and scholars behave in this respect, but there are no dilettantes among genuine artists.
Nor do genuine artists make a principle of wandering without direction.
For reasons unknown to me, you are wandering.
I cannot believe that the great Umesao, whom you revere as your teacher, would approve of that.
There is no point in saying that major newspapers are correct, that major newspapers are necessary for one reason or another, or that the internet is wrong.
What I wish to say is simply that, within little more than a year of beginning to write, I became profoundly aware of the appalling condition of our mass media, including, of course, the editorial writers of the major newspapers.
One thing that must never be done, whether as a journalist or as a human being, is to side with antidemocratic forces.
Yet those who not only sided with such forces but continued to mislead the people have shown no sign of reflection whatsoever.
By accepting that state of affairs, you are effectively saying that there is nothing wrong with it.
Perhaps this is because you, too, were part of it, but that reasoning cannot be justified.
Whether words appear in a major newspaper or on the internet is irrelevant.
The only question is whether those words contain the truth and whether the writer continues to write the truth.
The fact that major newspapers possess established prestige, large circulations, and famous names, while writers on the internet may have no title and remain unknown, has nothing whatsoever to do with the truth.
The only question concerning an article or an editorial is whether the truth is there.
There can be no truth in self-serving pretense masquerading as benevolence, Mr. Uchida.
In other words, the solidarity among classmates and peers within the mass media, embodied by people such as you, can also be said to have permitted more than twenty years of what I call “mindless television” and more than thirty-five years of the inward-looking political fiction called “politics and money”—which, as I have repeatedly stated, was in reality an attack upon the Tanaka faction.
MIKIO KISARA