2010-8-4
As for the ten percent who are elites and the ninety percent who are workers, which I have written about repeatedly, it goes without saying that

these are not fixed categories…
They are the very opposite of the outrageous state of affairs we see today… in which people speak of passing down politics, the most important thing for a country, through their families.

Year after year, the people are not the same. I mean a society like the United States, where people constantly move from the working class into the elite and from the elite into the working class.
That is only natural… Outstanding people in every field always appear as if by a sudden mutation.

Among overseas Chinese, they say that success lasts only three generations. Japan, too, has the expression “the pampered eldest son,” and second-generation successors are usually no good.

Japan has ended up in its present sorry state because these positions have become fixed. Far from bearing no responsibility for this, the media have done much to bring it about… through their fondness for prominent names.

History shows that any country is in real danger when political office, in particular, becomes hereditary.

Hereditary succession is about as far as one can get from human freedom and intellect. It is utterly contemptible.

It is fair to call it a farce.
For the media, which did more than anyone to help people from that world hold their heads high and behave like aristocrats, to call today’s Japan a fully developed democracy is completely beside the point.