By examining the Umeda North Yard sales and the Nakanoshima Festival Tower projects, this essay argues that media-driven narratives distorted markets and damaged public assets, exposing stark double standards in land and contamination debates.

2017-05-02
The following is a revision of paragraphs from a paper published on March 3.
At the time when the first and second phases of construction, completion, and tenant recruitment for the Nakanoshima Festival Tower—projects undertaken with the fate of one’s own company at stake—
overlapped with the first and second phases of land sales at the Umeda North Yard,
Asahi Shimbun ran articles during the first phase of the North Yard sales
claiming, in a strange line of argument, that if the land were sold at too high a price through a simple public auction, there would be concerns about a resurgence of an economic bubble.
These articles were published not during a bubble but in the depths of severe deflation, when there were scarcely any tenants for office buildings.
In effect, Asahi Shimbun led a scheme in which the Umeda North Yard—
a national asset belonging to the public,
and a commercial site of the highest rank in Japan, on par with Ginza—
was sold off at half price, discounted yet again, through deceptive means.
In addition, it was Asahi Shimbun that further muddled the execution of the project and created a situation in which the second phase remains undecided to this day.
As for the land in Toyonaka’s Noda district, an area that was originally a heavy industrial and manufacturing zone and likely seized by the state,
with large quantities of contaminated soil buried underground,
the maliciousness with which a Democratic Party legislator, acting as a SanbyakuDaigen, stated in a Diet committee that this was a good residential area is striking.
This too was almost certainly led by Asahi Shimbun.
I wish to say to the SanbyakuDaigen legislators of the Democratic Party and the Communist Party, and to Asahi Shimbun itself:
If you truly believe that the few hundred million yen reduction granted in exchange for permanently waiving liability for soil contamination defects on this third-rate piece of land is a grave problem,
then you should immediately calculate the loss incurred by selling off the vast commercial land of the North Yard’s first phase—
which should naturally have fetched prices exceeding one hundred million yen per tsubo—
at half price with further discounts,
and pursue that loss in the Diet without delay.
Words of abuse spring unbidden to my lips toward you.
You utter fools, you utter blockheads.
You appear not even to realize that you are engaging in “bottomless evil” and “plausible lies.”
You may think yourselves safe, believing that, like China and South Korea, you cannot be punished under existing laws,
but the place to which you will fall is nothing but hell,
and the King of Hell will be waiting for you with the severest torments.
I proclaim this to you in a thunderous voice, as the reincarnation of Kūkai and Oda Nobunaga.
To be continued.