2010-7-21
After work, I took the subway to the Hanshin Department Store on an errand.
As mentioned earlier, Umeda, one of Japan’s largest terminal commercial districts, was as extraordinarily crowded as ever.
Everyone walked with carefree expressions, presumably because of the sense of release that came with the end of the working day.
What on earth am I writing all of this for?
Ninety percent of the countless people filling Umeda are people who will work throughout their lives for an annual income of five million yen.
I left, as though it were inevitable, a career path that guaranteed an annual income of more than ten million yen, chose the business of brokering real-estate transactions, completed more than 5,500 brokerage transactions, and paid more than 17 billion yen in taxes in various forms; ninety-nine percent of the more than ten thousand households I encountered during that time consisted of people employed by small and medium-sized companies, with an average annual income of five million yen.
With the exception of Shimozuma, the people I am fighting on this occasion can hardly be described as elites in terms of their qualities and abilities, but in terms of their incomes and lifestyles, they clearly belong to the elite class.
As described earlier, two years ago, the parties that had acquired the first-phase land in the North Yard requested an eighteen-month “wait” before the start of the project—it should not be wrong to say that ORIX bears full responsibility—and I read an article reporting that the mayor of financially distressed Osaka City, a fact known to everyone, had replied, “Yes. I understand.”
What I constantly thought at the time was that the incomes of the elites depended upon the existence of the remaining ninety percent…
The same is true of the wealth of even the richest person.
The faces of the people filling Umeda’s underground shopping streets possess a carefree quality that does not come only from having finished work.
A person who works throughout his life for an annual income of five million yen has absolutely no need to think about the future of the city, the prefecture, or the nation.
That is because, in exchange for an annual income of five million yen, such a person chooses the happiness of an average family of four.
“To accept, as the destiny of an intellectual, that every day is a crossroads in life…” —Kazumi Takahashi.
The role and mission of an elite are exacting, and it is completely unacceptable for elites to clown around like entertainers or to place bratty young celebrities beside themselves and make merry.
Why?
Because the mistakes of elites lead a country astray.
Before television existed, there was an educator who told teenage students—all young people who would have to assume responsibility for the core of this country—“You must not read newspapers, magazines, or anything of that kind.”
There is not enough time to master the path of learning… Youth ages easily, while learning is difficult to achieve…
When I watch television today, I have recently found myself repeatedly remembering this teacher…
I find myself thinking that television in the present age is precisely what he would most want to keep away from the students who bear the heavy responsibility of supporting Japan.
To the television news anchors: recently, you have repeatedly graded politicians, represented by the prime minister, by accusing them of wavering in their statements, and you have launched attacks capable of taking their lives; but do you realise how much your own statements and opinions have wavered over the past twenty years?
When the mass media, which seem to make a profession of attaching labels, named everything simply “the bubble” and made its collapse irredeemable, bureaucrats—who were skilled at analysis but weak at prediction, understandably so because they spent most of their lives in Kasumigaseki and therefore possessed none of the daily, physical sense of reality found at the front line of the economy—introduced restrictions on the total volume of lending that came too late and were excessively drastic.
Your great chorus of “Why must hard-earned tax money be injected?” made the resulting collapse decisive and limited the injection to 850 billion yen when at least ten trillion yen was required—while ignoring the matter as though the taxes involved then were somehow different from the thirty-trillion-yen deficit of Japanese National Railways…
Does your sense of justice instantly disappear whenever there is a story over which you can make merry and gain television ratings?
During the recent financial upheaval, which produced losses incomparably greater than those of twenty years earlier and extended across Europe and the United States, Paulson, who had gone from being CEO of Goldman Sachs to Treasury Secretary, was confronted by a reporter thrusting a microphone at him and asking, “Could you not have understood what was happening much earlier? Are you not doing this now to rescue the major financial institutions?”
Paulson replied:
“Let me tell you just one thing. Your line of reasoning is of no use whatsoever in solving this problem.”
In the United States alone, more than 170 trillion yen was injected almost instantaneously; when the tax money injected by Britain and the other European countries is added, the figure must be astronomical.
The result of your brandishing a misguided sense of justice was the creation of “Japan’s lost twenty years.”
There is a difference as great as heaven and earth between a country in which every individual is the protagonist, the king, His Majesty the Emperor, and the president, and a country of ignorant peasants whose minds belong to someone else.
It is the difference between a country built upon genuine intelligence and a country built upon self-serving, excitable revellers with a mental age of twelve.
Their annual incomes of more than ten million yen are guaranteed; for some reason, they also surround themselves with a multitude of beautiful women; despite being broadcasting-station employees, they market themselves through entertainer-like behaviour; and they create the most foolish phrase of the entire postwar period, “Thank you for moving us.”
What I cannot forgive is that ninety percent of the people—who accept working throughout their lives for an annual income of five million yen and, in exchange, gain their freedom from worry—are made to suffer by these excitable revellers, who still fail to realise that their mental age is twelve.
The ninety percent will never lead the country astray…
They will finish their lives in peace without ever needing to think about such matters.
Those who are disconnected from the labour performed by the ninety percent—those whose work consists of commentary and criticism and stands at the opposite extreme from manual labour—must continue to deepen their thinking more than anyone else for as long as they remain in that profession, and must point the way toward genuine freedom and profound intelligence.
It is the same as devoting one’s life to mastering the path of learning.
They must frequently read books related to their field, verify matters, think, and continue refining themselves every day.
That is what people who earn their living with a pen or their voice must do.
Those who fail to perform that work and merely clown around must not call themselves commentators.
They must not discuss politics, upon which the destiny of the nation depends.
Without reflecting upon your own foolishness, you pursue politicians around the clock without a second’s rest because you believe that you must not fall behind the other five companies and must fill the time allotted to today’s news; is this not why this country’s politicians have become almost unable even to read books?
Without engaging in deep and silent contemplation, they appear on television in pursuit of votes and become adept at delivering fragmented, abruptly truncated remarks…
There is no possibility that such people can become politicians capable of dealing with the world—the genuine adult world in which parties seek the most delicate possible compromises.
In other words, it is you who are ruining this country’s politicians.
Political operators whose only apparent talent is their skill at currying favour with fools like you cannot possibly avoid making mistakes.
Because this is how you conduct yourselves, not a single television station or newspaper admonished the kindergarten-level rhetoric of “Postal privatisation: YES or NO?”
Nor did you criticise the outrageous idea of making the leadership of the nation hereditary, as though the nation were some small or medium-sized private company.
Because the son resembled his father, spoke in short and neatly contained sentences, and was not unattractive, you treated him as though he were already a rising star.
Meanwhile, you pursued as though he were a criminal the politician whom you had previously defined as having an evil face, even as far as the Ogasawara Islands, where he had gone fishing on a holiday.
These twenty years are the result of such conduct.
Leaving the matter of the first phase aside for now, by offering no criticism whatsoever of the idiotic proposal to construct a football stadium on the second-phase land, you said YES to a tax burden approaching one trillion yen.
Even if Ichiro Ozawa’s land in Setagaya cost 400 million yen, or even if there were something behind it that you suspect on the basis of hearsay, it would not remotely approach the amount of the tax burden involved in this affair, and you assisted in the theft of nearly one trillion yen in tax money.
You must realise that people such as yourselves have not the slightest qualification to criticise capable politicians while wearing expressions suggesting that you are the infallible judges of everything.
To the Asahi Shimbun, which eighteen years ago held the injection of tax money down to 850 billion yen and then began talking about “the philosophy of honourable poverty”:
Do not do something as foolish as photographing and publishing the homes of founders and presidents of listed companies.
Why should it matter whether another person’s home is large or small?
All that matters is that the home within your own heart is spacious.
I believe that this is the true essence of the philosophy of honourable poverty that you once advocated.
A thinker or journalist should have no interest whatsoever in another person’s house.
Compared with the vast ocean of knowledge and a world overflowing with a free spirit, a house is no more significant than a fart.
What do you hope to achieve by behaving like foolish commercial television stations or magazines that can be read in ten minutes?
That is not the role of an elite.
Cities, the national government, and public officials are taking the wrong path and using tax money for their own purposes, and even now they are actually doing something idiotic in Umeda.
Three parties are attempting to inflict enormous and irreparable losses upon the nation, the city, and us, yet you say nothing.
This is not the time to photograph the ephemeral homes of private-company owners who risk becoming penniless in an instant, risk their lives, and nevertheless pay large amounts of tax before they die.