2010-8-1
From time to time, I remember a close friend from my youth… He went from the law faculty of T University to a career as a banker… A close friend from those years remains exactly that, even if we have not seen each other for decades, as you, my readers, will know… This is also the real reason why the media in our country publish articles that merely pass along official information, and the real reason why they have distorted our country’s democracy.

When he entered T University, the first thing thrown at him was the question, “Does being a T University student not mean that you will join the side that exploits the people?” It came out of nowhere for him… This was the so-called Zenkyōtō generation… He sent me postcards many times while I had abandoned the entire life that had been laid out for me and disappeared from contact… In genuine anguish, he wrote, “Joining the struggle is hell; ignoring it is hell, too.”

“If only you were here, with your gift for expressing so perfectly the two opposing sides of a matter…”
I still feel truly sorry about this…
In the end, his life became very different from the one he had imagined…

“Does being a T University student not mean that you will join the side that exploits the people?”
I would simply have said this:
“Don’t be a fool. Having entered the highest institution of learning, your duty is to pursue scholarship. That is not something for a person still living off his parents to say or even think about. The question is how you will live once you enter society. Is that a question for someone still dependent on his parents and only just beginning his studies? How you will live your own life after you become independent—that is the question for later…”

Of course, there was a measure of truth in the argument young people made at the time, and that was why they all suffered over it.

Now I want to say this to young people who earn less than two million yen a year, have no steady job, and cannot marry.
“We do not need an annual income of ten million yen. We would be content to work all our lives and earn five million. You elites, give us places to work. Give us the happiness of families of four or five. We want to work. We want a modest measure of happiness.” Raise your voices in protest at the Diet.

They should gather before the television stations and major newspapers that now wield more power than the three branches of government and have created a remarkable centralized state concentrated in Tokyo, and say:
“As elites, you have a duty to think and find solutions, to help us. You have a responsibility.”

I want to tell them that it is not the true calling of young people to gather in crowds as “supporters,” following the script of the Japan Football Association, which wants to make its sport a major one and make money, or likewise to crowd into baseball stadiums to feel a sense of solidarity.

Young people are solitary by nature.
At twenty, everyone is poor.

What does it mean to spend your precious time on online games?
While watching the stock market, I have been astonished
by the enormous profits of companies sustained by young people like these.
Sales of fifty billion yen and net profit of twenty-five billion yen!
Of course, not even the major corporations that have led Japan have profit margins like that.

That is time you should be spending honing your skills, working even while others sleep, earning money, and becoming prosperous…
Elite or not, when you are young, it comes down to stamina.
The person who works twice as hard wins.
“A caterpillar works without rest and becomes a splendid butterfly.”
You should realize that everyone who takes the time you need in order to become prosperous makes an enormous profit from it.
The more you lose yourself in games, the more immense the profits they make…
They take all your time, your money, and your precious wealth…
Surely it is time you noticed.

“Even if I work all my life, I will still be just a worker”… No. In return for a lifetime of work and an income of five million yen, you can have peace of mind and a carefree life and time that a true elite can never possess.
Seen from another angle, I think that is the greatest happiness.
For a true elite has no peace of mind.
An elite must always go on thinking about the world and the country.
Do you want to become that kind of elite?
You must not live only for yourself, or even only for your family.
Do you truly want to become that kind of elite?
Or do you have the exceptional ability needed to keep the country from going astray?

Life is not long enough to spend it on games. It is over in an instant: one truly short life, and the only one you have.

When I was eighteen, I wrote, “Young people are fools.”
They really are fools insofar as they think life will go on forever.

In today’s Japan, where people are fussed over merely for being young and cute, even when they are still elementary school children, what part of this is a fully developed democratic society?
That is what I want to ask the Asahi Shimbun’s editorial writer this morning.