2010-9-6
Judging by the reports from the scene on the internet, it seems that Ichiro Ozawa won overwhelmingly not only today in Umeda, Osaka, but also the other day in Shinjuku, Tokyo.
In a discussion in the latest issue of Shukan Asahi, an up-and-coming journalist pointed out that Yomiuri Online and another online poll had produced results opposite to the mass media’s opinion polls, and it turns out that this was true.
I think… the reason public sentiment was so lopsided was that ordinary people had seen through the immaturity of those you relied upon, Mr. Kan… the handsome-men brigade…
It seems that the strangeness of the television media was being seen through at the same speed as the enormous expansion of the internet.
As the internet expands, the established media, which have continued to deliver mistaken pronouncements, are all beginning to find themselves in difficulty in inverse proportion to that expansion—it was a case of reaping what they had sown.
I think that the ways in which you have monopolized information until now, processed it into restricted, distorted information, and disseminated it,
are becoming your fatal wound.
Perhaps this means that God has indeed begun to judge the culpability for bringing about these 20 years.
Mr. Kan, watching Osaka today, I thought that if public sentiment has overwhelmingly abandoned you in Sapporo as it has in Osaka, you should consider stepping down as an option.
Even if you win, you should cut ties with Yoshito Sengoku… “I’ll sell someone like Ozawa out to the prosecutors”… With this single remark, he made it known to the entire world that he is a true authoritarian who has no qualification whatsoever to speak of deliberative democracy…
I think the culpability of the Asahi editorial writers who were in sync with this man is also very deep.
Although the employees on the front lines and Shukan Asahi preserve the spirit of Asahi 100 percent, which is its saving grace.
Why are workers = the great majority of ordinary citizens now eagerly awaiting Ichiro Ozawa’s emergence?
I think that the general public, too, has begun to recognize the strength of his convictions… that these two things, “self-reliance” and “true democracy,” are at his core.
＊It goes without saying that the tone of this chapter belongs to that time and is in no way that of the present… 2026-9-30, but as a “view” from the circumstances of that time, this essay hit the mark＊
I am convinced that his convictions must be in sync with what I thought I had to write as my mission when I first became aware of the world around me.
I think that this must also underlie his reticence, which cannot be explained simply by his being a man from Tohoku.
If I dare to use a literary expression that may seem forced, Kenji Miyazawa’s soul also resides within Ichiro Ozawa’s soul…
That is what I think…
I think that, for him, Giovanni’s “mother” must be postwar Japan… I am probably not mistaken. So I think.
What can I do for my mother?
To make postwar Japan, Japan reduced to a burnt-out wasteland, into a prosperous country—that, I think, is Ichiro Ozawa’s absolute and sole conviction.
It is only natural that the mass media, who regarded themselves as intellectual elites, settled comfortably into lives with annual incomes of 10 million yen, mistakenly imagined that Japan was a country rich from birth, and spent these 20 years wrapped in their own happiness alone, could never understand him.
It is the same as the major newspapers and mass media failing to understand me, who have emerged after waiting until the time was ripe.
Because “self-reliance” means not becoming a sacrifice to fictions or rituals.
Rather than simply detesting those who could not stand on their own, those whose inability to stand on their own was obvious… people who would curry favor with the mass media, he must have seen them as fools.
I think that this is probably what lies deep within the man whom the mass media have unanimously labeled a “destroyer” and thought that sufficient.