This essay recounts how over 200,000 blog entries were suddenly deleted by Ameba and how note later suspended public access to almost a year’s worth of daily posts, all amid ongoing search interference and analytics tampering. The author reflects on the cost—years of labor, emotional damage, and the impossibility of fully seeking legal redress under Japan’s slow, uncertain court system. He contrasts profit-driven platforms that treat speech merely as a tool for making money with his own project “Civilization’s Turntable,” supported by a major Japanese company and enriched by over 200,000 photographs of Kyoto and surrounding regions. Despite relentless attacks, he continues to write for free, grounded in Kūkai’s teachings and, above all, in “gratitude” toward thinkers like Masayuki Takayama and other Japanese intellectuals he regards as the world’s highest-level minds. That gratitude, he declares, will sustain this column for the next 170 years.

June 21, 2024.

Last night, I had a dream full of implications.
To say it without any affectation, it was a dream befitting a genius.
It was a dream of winning something like a Nobel Prize, or a gold medal at the Paris Olympics.
Moreover, it was a dream in which I was certain I would win the gold medal and then actually did.
If you ask what kind of gold medal it was, it was in taste—in the field of taste and flavor.

For some time, I had been thinking of writing an essay about genius.
However, because it would inevitably include private matters, I had been planning to make it my first paid article on note.
It was, if I remember correctly, the night before last.
Wanting to check how to set up a paid article, I opened note.
When I tried to post something, a message appeared saying, “You are temporarily unable to post. Please wait a while…”
I thought, “Huh?” and tried again.
To my astonishment, all of the chapters I had been writing almost every day since last September 9 had been set to private, no longer publicly available.

The story of how I reluctantly appeared on the internet on July 16, 2010, to convey the truth of things to the Japanese people and to people all over the world has already been told.
At first, I posted the same essays from three sites—goo, Ameba, and FC2.
This was because I wanted as many people as possible to know and to receive what I was saying.
Posting to three sites, not just two, was an even more demanding task.
At some point I heard unsavory rumors about FC2, such as the hosting of adult videos, and I took that as a trigger to stop using FC2.
With one site gone, the workload was reduced, and I felt relieved.

From then until last August 8, I continued to post, almost daily, more than 200,000 articles in total to the remaining two companies.
Then, on August 8, when I posted to Ameba, a message appeared saying, “The site is under maintenance…”
Because no such notice had been sent from the management office, I found this suspicious and tried searching various things.
A login screen appeared, and thinking “That’s strange,” I entered my ID and password.
Instead of resolving the situation, I found that all of the more than 200,000 chapters had been deleted.
The subsequent developments have already been described.

I seriously considered suing the operating company, CyberAgent, not only to demand severe punishment for the criminal acts of copyright infringement and so on, but also to claim massive damages by converting into monetary terms the years and labor required to produce more than 200,000 essays, including the immense psychological harm.
However, I already knew from experience that even the initial retainer fee alone would cost at least several million yen, and that Japanese lawsuits are both lengthy and uncertain in outcome, so I decided to put the matter on hold.
If something should happen—for example, if I were to fall seriously ill and have only a short time left to live—I will never forgive this company.
Because I can say definitively that it is a company that grew large and went public in the world of speech while not even having a concept of freedom of expression, but existing solely as a money-making enterprise.
To use speech merely as bait for making money is, as a human being, the lowest possible state.
The managers and employees of this company may think of themselves as successful people, basking in their moment in the sun.
Even if they are not punished in this life, the King of Hell will surely judge them.

Now, as for note.
I knew the name, but I did not know what kind of company it was, so I looked it up.
At times like this, I am prone to doing something rash, and as usual I realized through this incident that I had made a major misunderstanding by only glancing quickly at the information.
I may have written this somewhere already, but until the day before yesterday I had mistakenly believed that the founder (CEO) of this company had enrolled in and graduated from Osaka University.

I have a close classmate who entered and graduated from Osaka University and then worked for a major trading company.
I have already written that, during the days when my life had been forced onto a sidetrack and I was working as a mid-career hire at Haseko, I unexpectedly ran into him on the subway platform at Yodoyabashi.
I will never forget that evening among the wonderful memories of my life when, invited by him, I went to his apartment—one of the condominiums built and sold by Haseko at Ryokuchi-koen—and he treated me to dinner.
I had already heard while I was in Sendai that he had married while still a student.
Back then, my classmates in Sendai used to joke, “Are there even any beautiful women at Osaka University?”

When I met his wife, I immediately understood.
At a glance, I understood why this exceptionally handsome man had married while still a student.
She was not only beautiful; she was an absolutely wonderful woman.
As we chatted endlessly on the balcony, occasionally watching planes heading for Itami Airport beyond the veranda, his beloved wife would bring out exquisite dishes at the perfect timing.
He said that he had gained weight since getting married, but looking at her, I could see why.
She was a superb woman, the ideal partner for a man.
Their student marriage was entirely understandable.

When he was transferred to the New York branch, he asked me to decide immediately to rent out my condominium as a company housing unit to one of Japan’s leading prestigious firms.
That too was a good relationship.
When he did not return to Japan for a long time, I inquired and was astonished.
He had left the company and was working as a lawyer at a famous law firm in New York.
I thought, “Of course.”
He was the top student in the humanities at our alma mater.
If I had not had the kind of family misfortune I have already described, I would have considered him my only rival.
His English ability was extraordinary.
Just as I once said in world history class, “I know this part better,” and stood at the podium to teach one unit for two full periods, his English was on a level that put the teacher to shame.

There is one scene from the time when I was enrolled at our alma mater that remains vividly in my memory.
You might say it was when my path to devoted study was blocked and he asked me, “What happened?”
When he heard my story, he said, “I had no idea things were like that for you. I never noticed…”
He had no way to comfort me, and he merely murmured.
By the time I was being treated to his hospitality at his home, he had of course forgotten that moment.
After all, he was enjoying a life as good as life gets, with the best possible partner at his side.

For me, Osaka University essentially means him and Professor Nobuyuki Kaji, who graduated from Kyoto University and became a professor emeritus at Osaka University.
So when I saw the name Osaka University in an article about the founder of note, I jumped to conclusions.
I thought, “In that case, it should be all right.”
However, the day before yesterday I thought, “This is not something a graduate of Osaka University would do,” and searched again, and once again realized my own carelessness.
He had not entered and graduated from Osaka University.
He was, in fact, a graduate of Yokohama City University.
His connection to Osaka University was something to do with graduate school.

To put it bluntly, Yokohama City University and Osaka University are as different as the moon and a soft-shelled turtle.
There is no way he could have the same understanding of freedom of expression, the importance of speech, or the essence of things as my close friend or Professor Kaji.
He may be able to use speech as a means of making money, but it is no exaggeration to say that he is ignorant of the freedom and essence of speech.

Compared to Ameba, which suddenly deleted all more than 200,000 of my chapters—my entire body of work—and remains unfazed, note is better.
What is especially malicious about Ameba is that, even after doing something so unbelievable, it continues to send emails almost every day saying things like, “Thank you as always for your wonderful posts,” or “So-and-so whom you follow has just posted…”
The maliciousness is obvious.

Just before the incident on note, strange people unlike those who had previously given my posts “likes” began liking them.
There was a blog that seemed intended to sell commercial products, a man’s blog that put on a respectable façade while publishing so-called erotic fiction about three women, and finally a blog about wealth building through cryptocurrency.
“Likes” from such people suddenly began to appear.

On X, countless IDs of foreign women of unknown nationality, dressed provocatively and trying to lure users to dangerous sites, were giving me “likes.”
Each time, I reported and blocked them, but on some days their number reached more than twenty.
And then, the night before last, the incident occurred.

The site on which I have been continuously writing this column since July 16, 2010, is genuinely operated by a major Japanese corporation that represents Japan.
Last year, at the same time the Ameba incident occurred on August 8, a notice appeared on the notifications page stating that “Four posts have been set to private.”
I wondered, “Huh? Which chapters?” and clicked on it.
All of them were chapters in which I had introduced to my readers articles posted on the internet about Kiyomi Tsujimoto—articles whose complete truth is obvious.
In other words, these chapters had almost nothing to do with the essence of my “Civilization’s Turnble,” so I left them alone.
Later, I thought I might as well delete them, and I deleted one of the chapters.
I decided to leave the remaining three.
Whether it was Tsujimoto herself or someone connected to her, I do not know, but I thought it would serve as a concrete example of how they operate—this is how they do such things, this is how they suppress speech.

The night before last, on a whim, I looked at the notifications again, and to my surprise the number had suddenly increased to twelve.
When I clicked, every one of them was a chapter consisting of articles posted on the internet about Kiyomi Tsujimoto or my brief comments attached to such articles.
By coincidence, the Tokyo gubernatorial election was beginning.
Tsujimoto is a senior member of the Constitutional Democratic Party and is strongly backing Renhō.
“So that’s where the cause lies,” I thought.
Even so, to make all the chapters I have been writing almost daily since last September 9 unavailable to the public!
My blog had quickly accumulated an enormous number of achievement badges for posting milestones, as note users will know.

The main reason I found note so useful was that I could put a photograph at the top of each article.
I have probably taken more than 200,000 photos, mainly in Kyoto but also in Nara, Shiga, and Osaka.
I am confident that when it comes to photographing Kyoto, I am the best amateur in the world.
If you add up all the admission fees for temples and shrines and the transportation costs I have paid, that too is probably the highest total in the world for an individual.

Those photographs of mine can truly live.
If they are kept only inside my PC, they are almost like being buried alive.
Now, at last, my photographs can come alive.
I can finally deliver the beauty of my photographs to people all over the world.
Above all, I can display a photo at the very top, as if it were a title image.
On this column, I have always put the photo at the end of the essay, so I could sandwich the text between an image at the top and one at the bottom.

When I went out shooting on a clear day, I would, that day or the next, put a photo at the top of the chapter I had posted most recently on note.
At the same time, I would look at the quality of the photos I had taken.
Because many of my chapters are addressed to the world, that alone is in fact a fairly exhausting and demanding task.
If I continued the work of putting photos at the top, all too often my digestive system would start to suffer.
It was that arduous a task.
But the joy of seeing the photos I had taken placed at the top of essays in which I had great confidence outweighed the burden.
That is why I was able to keep doing it.

Now then, I cannot delay lunch any longer, so I will break off here.
But let me abruptly write just one thing.
Coinciding exactly with the incident the night before last, the criminal act of tampering with search analytics for this column—which had stopped on June 6—resumed.
This was the second time this year that it had ceased.
This time the suspension had entered its second week.
An acquaintance had speculated, “He’s probably made a killing in the stock market and gone overseas on vacation.”
But in the wake of this incident, the criminal activities started up again.

So, why do I continue to write in such a world of the internet, where the dark is full of monsters and demons, while under such intense interference?
And why do I continue to do it completely free of charge?
As I have already written, Kūkai’s teachings are the foremost reason.
But now I am certain of something else.
It is “gratitude.”

Especially since 2014.
I once subscribed to the Asahi and Nikkei and watched the news programs of NHK and the commercial networks.
After I cut off those bad habits, there appeared Masayuki Takayama and other intellects whom Japan can proudly present to the world—minds of the very highest caliber on earth.
Gratitude for their labors is what will allow me to continue this column for another 170 years.
To continue showing not only the Japanese people but people all over the world that the kind of intellect worthy of living in the 21st century exists in Japan.

This chapter will be continued.