2010-7-17
What can be seen through Hiramatsu is the state of this country’s mass media… One could immediately construct an entire argument about the mass media, especially television.
Loving events and seemingly existing solely to make merry—truly a mental age of twelve.
The essence of America’s strength is that every individual is the protagonist, the king, His Majesty the Emperor, the president, and the head of state; the tragedy is that Japan failed to learn from the America that respects the extraordinary intelligence of every individual and instead learned from the America represented by television and other media, which so often descend into commercialism.
Even so, to put it in a way that will not be discourteous to that country, in Europe and America it is taken for granted that broadcasts of sporting events and the like will be entrusted to people who mastered that particular field and then retired.
Japan is the only country that assigns completely unrelated bratty young celebrities or people from entirely different sports.
Even someone who, unlike me, did not choose Kansai and make Osaka the stage for his business activities for forty years should be able to understand, merely by reading the history on Wikipedia, how many people, across the national government, Osaka City, Suita City, and elsewhere, resolved numerous problems, brought together the wisdom of Kansai, and finally arrived at that outline—one of the finest postwar urban plans, comprising its first and second phases—that is the North Yard Project.
As I have already written, this is land for which we, the people of Japan, are still bearing a burden of as much as 30 trillion yen, and it could be sold for a price equal to or greater than that of Shiodome in Tokyo and could reduce our burden more than any other land; yet instead of reducing that burden by nearly one trillion yen, he is proposing to reduce the proceeds recovered through its sale to zero and then saying that he will ask the national government to bear construction costs approaching 100 billion yen.
If the Democratic Party’s project-screening process, which helped put this man in office, leaves this matter untouched, then it is the work of fools.
He is attempting to throw away forever land that would permanently bring enormous fixed-asset-tax revenues to Osaka City, which is on the verge of financial collapse, thereby inflicting an irreparable and enormous loss upon the city.
I genuinely believe that this man’s head is completely empty… I would even say that I have never encountered anyone so stupid.
The stupidity of believing that naming it an “Eco-Stadium” will somehow win people’s sympathy is indeed fitting for a former television announcer.
Television merrily joins forces with a person who is prepared, without hesitation, to inflict tax losses totalling far more than one trillion yen, while declaring that the 400 million yen Ichiro Ozawa spent to purchase approximately 200 tsubo of land in Setagaya is an enormous sum of money and therefore unforgivable.
Just how are their minds structured?
While paying annual salaries of hundreds of millions of yen to television anchors who do nothing more than deliver comments that are merely momentary performances, they pompously proclaim that 400 million yen is an enormous sum of money.
On the Internet, a person who said that he was born in Osaka and now lived in another region harshly ridiculed how idiotic the face of Osaka Mayor Hiramatsu looked, but I no longer think that his words went too far at all.
Shimozuma
The problem is this man.
He was originally my senior, but although the mass media persistently attack Ichiro Ozawa by describing him as having the face of an evil magistrate, I believe that this man has even more of the face of an evil magistrate.
In the first place, the reason I resolved to put my thoughts before the world in the form of a blog was probably the outcome of the lives lived by him, a famous man who was chairman of the Kansai Economic Federation, and me, an unknown man.
I gave a written opinion to an employee of my company and sent him to the Kansai Economic Federation to deliver it to Shimozuma, but I knew that it would probably never be read and that no reply would ever come—and, naturally, nothing actually happened—and I keenly realised that the result would be the same even if I asked this country’s mass media to publish it in their pages.
Far from believing even in the slightest that I could lose to this man in intellectual ability, there is absolutely no possibility that I could lose.
God merely began giving me trials at the stage of the family, which for a child is what a roost is to a bird and what the period inside a pupa is to an insect, and made me follow a path completely opposite to that followed by an insider like him, who charged ahead along an elite course and ultimately completed his board-game life with an honorary position.
I will explain the reason for that when I eventually retire and enter a life devoted to writing.
What this incident paradoxically teaches society is that being famous or being a prominent person does not mean that someone speaks the truth or has lived a life devoted to pursuing the truth.
Come to think of it, it was also he who suddenly began saying in January two years ago that the land for the second phase should perhaps be turned into a park.
Note: See “What Is the North Yard Project?” in the middle section.
To put it crudely, who on earth does this man think he is?
Moreover, he does not represent the Kansai business community.
When I learned what was happening on television at the end of June and was left speechless, I finally telephoned the Association of Corporate Executives, although I feared that the same thing might be happening there…
Two years earlier, its members, led by a female executive, had supported his sudden proposal.
“No, we oppose it…”
I felt truly relieved.
Osaka is not dead, it is not to be written off, and it will still be all right.
Later, an employee of my company also informed me that comments from the majority of the presidents and chairmen of Kansai’s major corporations opposing this ridiculous proposal had been posted on the Internet.
Onitake
There is no need to devote space to this person, whose head is presumably made of muscle.
If I were merely to describe him, I would say that, representing football—a sport whose players are constantly running around, train their bodies to an extraordinary degree, and are presumably full of energy—he has suddenly done something that I feel is equivalent to attempting to seize precious property from the citizens of Osaka—no, from the people of Japan.
What he is doing is so unforgivable that he probably has no understanding of its gravity whatsoever, and in that sense I can only describe his head as being made of muscle as well.