This essay analyzes how Japan’s media and political actors distorted energy policy, weakened major corporations, and caused massive capital outflows. Using the Kumamoto earthquake and nuclear shutdowns as examples, it argues that Japan’s national interests were sacrificed by ideological media influence.

April 27, 2016

Until a few years ago, responses to crimes committed on the internet were almost nonexistent—for example, the Osaka Prefectural Police were largely incapable of dealing with them. Today, compared to that time, staffing has been greatly increased and preparations for cybercrime are in place. Needless to say, cybercrime is a vicious form of crime. From last weekend through the beginning of this week, I repeatedly consulted with legal professionals well versed in cybercrime. This was around the time of the Kumamoto earthquake.

While deliberately suspending my work as a modern-day Kūkai, I realized something else of great importance.

To state the conclusion first: the Asahi Shimbun must never again be allowed to dominate Japan.

Details will be discussed later, but in the United States, government officials exist as the vanguard of private corporations. Europe, in fact, is no different from the United States in this respect.

When Hayato Ikeda was prime minister, he visited Europe accompanied by leading figures from the business world. In response, I believe it was de Gaulle who mocked the Japanese by calling it “transistor diplomacy.”

Today, Germany’s Angela Merkel rarely visits Japan, yet she has traveled to China—now the world’s largest human-rights–suppressing state—around ten times. On many of those occasions, she was accompanied by large delegations of business leaders.

In response to this, not a single one of us Japanese sneers by calling it “automobile diplomacy” or ridicules it as “economic animal” behavior.

Now then, media outlets such as the Asahi Shimbun presided over a situation in which Japan’s leading corporations, after having the TRON revolution crushed, were reduced to mere PC case manufacturers, dragged into price competition with anything-goes developing countries, and then pushed further into hardship by the strong yen—and then the super-strong yen—advocated by Asahi and others. As a result, Sharp ultimately fell under the control of a Taiwanese company.

Throughout this period, media outlets like Asahi never once argued that Sharp should be saved, revived, or that its employment should be protected.

Through Masayoshi Son, Naoto Kan, Mizuho Fukushima, and the Asahi Shimbun—these four actors, to put it bluntly—the foundations of Japan’s energy policy were overturned. Japan remains, in substance, the world’s second-largest economic superpower, and a country in which the turntable of civilization continues to turn by divine providence. The massive deficits Japan suffered as a result of this upheaval were enormous.

In an international society dominated by people who prioritize their own national interests, Japan—behaving with the foolishness of kindergarten children—was exploited. Under the name “Japan Premium,” oil and coal were sold to Japan at the highest prices in the world.

In just a few short years, around ten trillion yen in Japanese taxpayers’ money flowed overseas.

At the same time, Toshiba—an even greater source of pride for Japan than Sharp—was driven into severe hardship by an utterly foolish policy tantamount to a total shutdown of nuclear power plants, a policy decided almost solely by the same four actors. Yet there was no possibility that media outlets like Asahi would raise their voices to “save Toshiba.”

This foolish policy— the Kumamoto earthquake has proven that point as well. It is no exaggeration to say that, in this massive earthquake, the only facilities that were not shaken at all were nuclear power plants. Even in the face of this fact, last night’s news reported that there are political parties that petitioned Prime Minister Abe to shut down nuclear plants in Kyushu.

This time, I have presented my arguments in a somewhat scattered manner. Please forgive that.

To be continued.