August 19, 2019

I now subscribe to the Sankei Shimbun, the Nikkei Shimbun, and the Yomiuri Shimbun.

I used to read the newspaper every morning without fail, but I no longer do so.

I made an effort to read the Sankei, but it would not be an exaggeration to say that I hardly read the other two papers.

This morning, however, I woke up an hour earlier than usual, so I began by reading the Nikkei.

What caught my eye was a full-page opinion advertisement by Hong Kong citizens, published at the end of the paper.

It is clear that the greatest cause of Japan’s “lost 20 years” and the deflation that continues to this day was the restriction on the total volume of lending implemented on March 27, 1990.

Around that time, the person in charge of the advertising bureau at the Nikkei Shimbun’s Osaka headquarters regularly visited my office to hear what I had to say.

He told me that, in the course of his work, he met many business leaders, but had never heard a story—or insight—like mine.

Immediately after the total lending restriction was implemented, I asked him to place a full-page opinion advertisement in the Nikkei’s national edition.

I immediately agreed to pay the 35 million yen quoted as the cost.

In the end, however, the Nikkei did not publish my advertisement.

There cannot have been anyone living in the 21st century who read the desperate opinion advertisement placed by the people of Hong Kong this morning without shedding tears.

That is, apart from those who live not in the 21st century but in the 19th century, the Middle Ages, or even ancient times.

Since I rediscovered Kyoto about 15 years ago, I have visited it more often than anyone in the world who does not live there.

At temples such as Nanzenji and Daikakuji, and at bus stops, I have met office workers traveling alone from Hong Kong. Many of them were repeat visitors.

It was not unusual for someone to say, “I’ve already been here ten times.”

When I was 25, at a time when I was considering taking my own life, I set out for Kyushu to meet and talk with someone who wanted to see me.

For some reason, I was reading Night on the Galactic Railroad at the time.

It was the night I crossed the Kanmon Straits for the first time, changed trains, and headed toward Nagasaki.

I continued reading on the crowded train and came across Giovanni’s words:

“What can I do for my aging mother……?”

Suddenly, I cried out and began to weep.

I could not stop the tears that welled up, one after another.

I could not bear to continue crying with tears streaming down my face on the crowded train, so I got off at the station where it stopped.

I stood and cried on the empty station platform at night until my tears dried up.

It was then that I returned to this world.

Note: Giovanni’s words are translated from the English text previously provided; they are not a quotation from the original text of Night on the Galactic Railroad.

The turmoil surrounding Osaka’s Umeda North Yard was that severe.

As my perceptive readers know, I had no choice but to enter the fray and continue writing about it.

As a result, I came to realize that the Asahi Shimbun was the mastermind behind the turmoil.

It was so terrible that I found myself wondering what my life, in which I had devoted so much to Osaka, had amounted to. For several days, I lost the will to work.

At that stage of my life as a businessman, I remained committed to Osaka. I was so committed that I even turned down the advice of a close friend from Fukushima Prefecture, who was then working at Dentsu and urged me to come to Tokyo.

A few days later, however, I woke up and thought:

“You’ve got to be kidding me. I refuse to be killed by something so incomprehensible and absurd.”

I went to see Hiroshi Shimozuma, then chairman of the Kansai Economic Federation.

I visited Yukiko Takenaka of the Japan Association of Corporate Executives.

I also visited the person in charge at Osaka City Hall.

Osaka’s public and private sectors had pooled their wisdom for more than 20 years to create a project plan that could be called the best of the postwar era. Why, then, could it not be carried out according to that plan? For three months, I alone continued to press that question.

Foolishly, I wrote down in detail what I had said to those three parties, gave the document to our senior managing director, and had him deliver it to the Asahi Shimbun’s headquarters!

I can only laugh at myself for acting like a lone Don Quixote.

I had the document delivered to Katsuhiko Tagaya, who at the time was writing full-page articles on the “North Yard turmoil” featuring prominent figures.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that this was the greatest act of folly in my life.

Our senior managing director, whom I had made carry the document to the Asahi Shimbun, still occasionally chides me: “It was like sending salt to the enemy. It was such a waste of time that it isn’t even funny.”

Note: The names and positions in this section are based on the English text previously provided and require comparison with the original Japanese.

And, as readers know, events unfolded from there.

I became a target of those evildoers precisely because I had appeared under the pen name “The Turntable of Civilization” in the world of the Internet, where countless forms of evil still run rampant and operate behind the scenes.

The evil that the world continued to ignore, and that the United Nations continued to ignore.

The world has acknowledged that what I said yesterday struck at the heart of the matter.

I was targeted by the evil that followed and suffered a serious illness that nearly cost me my life. I then accepted a publisher’s request that I had kept on hold and announced the decision to publish my book from my hospital room.

That was on June 1, 2011.

As I have described above, this villain defrauded our company of a large sum of money.

As I have already said, the anger and disappointment caused by that incident became a killer stress that led to my serious illness.

He launched unbelievable attacks on my book, my blog, and my author’s name on the Internet.

The evil I suffered and the evil the people of Hong Kong are suffering now are identical and of exactly the same nature.

The evil that the world continued to overlook, and that the United Nations continued to overlook.

That evil stopped the progress of “The Turntable of Civilization” and created this situation.

All I can do is continue writing like this, believing that some of my readers must have been among those who placed the opinion advertisement this morning.

There must be people who make their living as intellectuals, journalists, and politicians in order to prevent dictatorships and totalitarianism from arising, and to prevent them from inciting hatred against other countries and peoples.

It is all your responsibility.

This is the result of your attitude, and you bear responsibility for the suffering of the people of Hong Kong.

Those who continue to report in ways that please China and the Korean Peninsula, believing that their sins will not be punished in this life.

Those who wield “sycophantic, hypocritical morality,” the height of foolishness.

Even though you wear good-natured smiles, you must go to hell.

For the unbearable suffering you have caused, I can only tell you now that King Yama is waiting for you with torments beyond what anyone could endure in this world.