Before the August three years prior, Asahi Shimbun had already begun strangely boosting Osaka lawmaker Kiyomi TsujiMoto. In this essay, the author explains how TsujiMoto, Yuichiro Tamaki, and the Communist Party exploit the Toyonaka land issue to attack the Abe government while carefully hiding the actual place name and the fact that the plot is a “dirt-cheap” site full of mysterious buried waste next to a highway interchange. By contrasting this with the astronomical loss of tax revenue caused when Asahi helped drive down prices at Osaka’s Umeda North Yard, the article exposes the true scandal behind the Toyonaka story and warns LDP lawmakers not to be tricked into politically correct word traps about the area’s “land character.”
February 24, 2017
Before August three years ago, the Diet member whom Asahi Shimbun began to boost with a strange degree of favoritism was Kiyomi TsujiMoto, elected from Osaka.
She and Yuichiro Tamaki, a man with the kind of television-friendly appearance this party so loves, are now gleefully attacking the government over the current Toyonaka land issue, with the Communist Party backing them up.
Just from the fact that the media keeps calling it simply “land in Toyonaka” and never reports the crucial actual place name, I understood the truth of this matter.
As I have already written, I chose real estate as my profession in life.
They have probably calculated that if they say only “Toyonaka,” it conjures up the image of an upscale residential area.
But Toyonaka is a place where people who are a bit poor with directions often have a hard time when they drive, and it is also a place where any professional in real estate knows the land prices vary wildly.
Anyone who drives a car has driven National Route 176 at least once.
Toyonaka is a place where the east and west sides of this Route 176 are completely different worlds.
The west side, to put it in a word, is an industrial zone, or an area lined with so-called love hotels.
I had assumed that, in this case, the land in question was a plot whose love hotel or factory owner had gone bankrupt and which had therefore been seized as national property.
It is land right next to an interchange on the Meishin Expressway, facing directly onto the expressway.
There is no way one would run an expressway or fly airplanes directly overhead through a high-class residential area or a prime commercial district representing that area.
The reason goes without saying. If you did something that foolish, you would never have enough money to pay for the land acquisition.
If the Umeda North Yard land had been sold at more than 100 million yen per tsubo, as in the case where George Soros’s company might have won the bid, versus the price of 45 million yen per tsubo at which a single private company, after careful maneuvering, actually won it,
Then the 800 million yen figure they are now freely bandying about in this case would, when calculated by the Umeda North Yard standard above, amount to a mere ten tsubo.
It goes without saying how much the recovery of tax money that we are still paying has been diminished.
These people, who have never once said a single word about the abnormality of all this, are now using as a pretext for attacking the administration a plot that, for various reasons, can fairly be called dirt-cheap land, and moreover land whose underground portion is full of mysterious buried matter.
It is as if they want to say that Japan is just like South Korea.
In Toyosu, where in fact there is no problem at all, they are the ones who made a huge fuss over this very issue of buried matter.
As for why the Democratic Party and others, with TsujiMoto at their head, are taking up this issue, I cannot help suspecting that, with this childish and yet most malicious barrage of verbal attacks, they are trying to make some LDP member lose his temper and blurt out some phrase about the character of the area or similar that would fall into the kind of “political correctness” TsujiMoto and Asahi Shimbun so adore.
LDP members must be extremely careful not to fall for their tactics when they respond.
To be continued.