2010-10-22
Late last night, I watched Cool Japan on NHK Hi-Vision… One of the few programs television broadcasts today that television ought to be making; that is precisely what television should be doing… Last night’s topic was that Japanese schools are “cool”… A junior high school in Ginza, an agricultural high school somewhere, and a cultural festival at a high school somewhere… A program in which young people from various countries who live in Japan, as international students and so forth, visit these three places as reporters and decide whether they are “cool” by comparing them with the realities in their own countries. The same goes for the other subjects it covers.
Let me say this first… The people in Japanese television today, particularly those at commercial television stations, are already criminals.
Concerned only with their own high salaries, their own livelihoods, their own lives, the elegance of their own daily existence, and their own security… All five stations together have been pouring out the worst programs in history, 24 hours a day, for more than 20 years… Irreparably spoiling the Japanese people, who were originally hardworking and exceptionally capable even by world standards… Turning them into a nation of utter fools, creating the “lost 20 years,” and inflicting losses of somewhere around 900 trillion yen on the country—as the very perpetrators of that crime, every last one of them deserves to be boiled in hell’s cauldron, first class.
Who on earth… What idiot started making the sort of foolish programs we have today… Did they, as has always been the case, imitate the part of America that should not be imitated… Rushing headlong into commercialism as the very embodiment of capitalism… Like the newscaster who gets punched by the wife at the end of Die Hard?
In the past, they secretly targeted an audience with a mental age of 12… Now they do it openly… You should investigate when, and by what fool, this unbelievable idiocy was started… Promptly.
The other day, T from Kurikinton brought over a book, saying it was attracting quite a bit of attention and that they had bought it… I was astonished when I looked at it… “Thin on substance” does not begin to describe it… It was something that made me ask, “What on earth is this?”… I could read it in five minutes… Apparently, it cost around 1,500 yen.
I could not help blurting out, “Isn’t that ridiculous?”
What television is doing goes even further than this, so it is already unforgivable… What, in a program like the one I mentioned at the beginning, would keep moving forward… As is perfectly natural… They chop into pieces, showing close-ups, one by one, of the faces of the celebrities lined up on tiered seats—people who are foolish before they are even worth calling trivial—and then, on top of that, they put captions on the screen.
They drag out something utterly unremarkable endlessly, then immediately cut to commercials… When the commercials are over, they rewind this utterly inconsequential material by another few seconds and broadcast it again.
Who on earth, what fool, started making programs like this… The television stations are now so appalling as to defy description… But I imagine that at least one or two of my former classmates must be in key positions… Could you tell me?
When on earth did you start making programs like this?
I imagine that the people who work at television stations that have kept making such programs for 20 years… Drawing the highest salaries in Japan and going to the world’s famous resorts whenever they have time off, are the people who read today’s fashionable writers the most… Their core readership.
For I believe that no art can exist without confronting and correcting the fundamental problems that still exist in this country.
One could even say that all that exists there is egoism.
It is only natural that someone whose important foundation was translating trivial, pretentious detective stories should be living in a mirage.
There are always countless people all over the world who think only of their own happiness, and I do not believe that being read by countless such people makes someone worthy of a Nobel Prize.
If he were otherwise, Japan could not possibly be in the state it is in today.
For it is his readers who are making Japan what it is today…
A Japan filled to the brim with hypocrisy, deception, and foolishness.
Japan’s major newspapers and television stations all pretend not to see even the most obvious things… Facts that are plainly visible… Unless one is an extraordinary fool.
All they have done is create these naked emperors…
Because they chose a way of life devoted to their own security, their own ease… Without correcting the fundamental sickness that exists there.
I am convinced that my words will still be alive 2,000 years from now, but their words are probably suited to readers who exist only for this moment, while those writers themselves are alive… Readers who dress themselves up amid the fitting, superficial prosperity of a mirage, fly around the world as members of the affluent class… And live under the illusion that they have come to know the world, that they understand it.
That is why I do not regard them as artists.