How the Mass Media Drove Japan into Poverty — Two Decades of Inward Reporting and Neglect of the Strong Yen;
Japan’s mass media ignored the devastating effects of chronic yen appreciation, undermining major corporations’ competitiveness. For over two decades, they fueled inward politics, obsessed over scandals, and spread false rhetoric about debt and future generations. The result: one in seven Japanese fell into poverty, with youth driven into nightlife work or precarious jobs. The time has come to dismantle and decentralize Japan’s mass media.

The Architects of a “Lost 20 Years”: A 2010 Critique of Japanese Media and the Spiral of Poverty;
This 2010 commentary delves into the author’s view on the causes of Japan’s “lost 20 years,” focusing on the role of the mass media. The author criticizes the media’s failure to address the detrimental effects of the high yen on Japanese companies, contrasting it with South Korea’s aggressive currency devaluation policies. The piece argues that the media’s obsession with political infighting and internal drama, driven by a pursuit of ratings, contributed to Japan’s social stagnation and a rise in poverty.

Mass Media Theory, July 21, 2010.

A young acquaintance I mentioned earlier called me and said, “After that, he pointed out that the English skills of managers and above in Japanese companies were totally useless…”

If that’s the case, then that university professor is an even bigger fool. You may not know this, but English education for people of our generation was focused on reading comprehension and writing, with almost zero emphasis on listening.

When it comes to engaging with the world, not a single person is inferior to a Samsung employee in terms of the culture and knowledge gained from reading world history, geography, and various books from all ages and places—things that are the most important. As I said the other day, while Japan was suffering from a constant high yen, South Korea continued to pursue a policy of an abnormally low won. By repeating this, an irreversible and huge gap was created in product price competitiveness—that’s all there is to it.

The state of our country’s mass media, as mentioned earlier, has unnecessarily and constantly made politicians—their representatives, the representatives of our country—inward-looking. The repeated appreciation of the yen continued to significantly strip away the competitiveness of the excellent major corporations that had supported post-war Japan. The Japanese mass media was completely helpless in the face of this. It goes without saying that they had no consideration whatsoever for the continuous decline of the stock market, which is the very foundation of capitalism.

Journalism, whose job it should be to continue to study and explore events, simply didn’t do so. It has been a 20-year period of an abnormal obsession with finding fault with people. It’s no exaggeration to say that political squabbles and personnel disputes were orchestrated by them. It has been a continuous spectacle of inward-looking turmoil for over 25 years.

In an organization, it is a given that there is a president and employees, yet they have constantly said unreasonable things like “it’s unforgivable for there to be a president.” While they were playing the part of an inward-looking, big, foolish country, chasing ratings and creating their own news topics… Other countries—especially our neighbor South Korea, which has no other way forward than expanding trade with other countries—were steadily building up their world-class hub airports and hub ports. The same was true in China and Singapore.

The media has been repeatedly spouting the well-worn, deceitful phrase, “Is it okay to leave debt to our children and grandchildren?” Finally, to fulfill the dreams of children, they even started saying they should build a soccer stadium in front of Osaka Station, a commercial area as prime as Ginza 4-chome, in one of the best locations in Japan. They reached the pinnacle of low intelligence by saying they wanted to host the World Cup in Japan, even if it meant doing something like that. If there’s really a child whose life dream is to have the World Cup hosted in Japan, I’d like to meet them. It goes without saying that such a foolish child doesn’t exist.

The Japan Football Association, which seems to have a person acting like an emperor, has made a great contribution only to spoiling good young people, wanting to fulfill their own desires even at the cost of sacrificing everything around them. It is probably only big fools who would dance along with such a person and say something so ridiculous as that being the dream of a lifetime.

As a result of their foolishness over the past 20-plus years, Japan has become a country where one in seven people is poor. The brunt of this is actually being borne by the children. As a result of poverty so severe that they can’t even graduate from high school, let alone go on to university, cabarets where young girls in miniskirts entertain customers are thriving in cities all over Japan. This is the reality: children are being hurt, women earn their tuition and living expenses in cabarets, and men become otaku, clinging to intellectual connections in a narrow world. They barely scrape by as seasonal or temp workers. They are feigning ignorance about the fact that over 10 million people have become like this.

The time has long since come to dismantle this mass media and forcibly disperse it to the six major regions.

---

I have provided a full translation of the text you provided. The author’s strong opinions and specific examples from 2010 are a key part of the text.

Is there a specific part of this commentary you’d like to discuss further, or would you like to provide the next Japanese text to be translated?