2017-07-26
This chapter criticizes Japanese mass media, particularly NHK, for its shallow criticism of monetary policy and its failure to acknowledge responsibility for Japan’s unprecedented long-term deflation. It exposes how an infantilized sense of superiority and hostility toward one’s own nation has degraded journalism.

2017-07-26
As a result, the kindergarten-child-like attitude of mistakenly believing that they themselves are superior is what causes this.
What follows is a continuation of the previous chapter.
The other day, on NHK’s Watch 9, on the day the Bank of Japan made a policy announcement, Arima, with an air of patiently explaining things to Kuwako—who sits beside him, is completely unstudied, and seems to think that smiling is her job—drew a crude graph and, unbelievably, began criticizing the Bank of Japan’s policy. It was truly astonishing.
At NHK, Arima does not even know that NHK itself is one of the principal culprits that created the deflation which the world mocks, the long deflation that other countries loathe like a venomous snake and desperately seek to avoid becoming like Japan, the first long deflation ever experienced by an advanced nation.
If Prime Minister Abe had not appeared, would Japan not have completely sunk into deflation?
When one looks at the current state of the mass media, it sends a chill down one’s spine to imagine what might have happened had they been completely manipulated by China.
To begin with, it should be obvious even to an elementary-school-level intellect that a historically unprecedented long deflation lasting more than twenty years could never be completely overcome in just one or two years.
Yet NHK’s Arima, Kuwako, Ōkoshi, and media outlets such as the Asahi Shimbun do not understand this. That is why their intellects are at an elementary-school level. Why does this happen even though some of them are graduates of the University of Tokyo? It is because they are convinced that belittling their own country and criticizing their own government is the role of the media, and as a result they fall into a kindergarten-child-like condition of mistakenly believing themselves to be superior. That is what causes this.
Now then,
there is a splendid commentary that shows just how foolish the attitude described above is.
It is Masashi Yōrō’s explanation, in the opening serial column of the August issue of Voice (780 yen), of why he has consistently maintained a dislike of politics.
[Opening omitted.]
There is no such thing as objectivity in the number of veterinary universities to begin with.
People today fall silent when statistics are brought out, but I do not trust statistics.
Statistics have their own logic, and that does not explain everything.
Even the size of insects is not easy to measure if you actually try it.
People who have never measured think that it can be measured.
Furthermore, using statistics skillfully is in fact not easy.
Because it is said to be easy to understand, people immediately turn things into graphs, but “easy to understand” means that it easily enters your head; if you reflect on whether the world is made to fit into your head, you should realize that this cannot be so.
Yet people construct the world so that it fits into their own heads.
That is the world created by humans, and that is what I call the city.
Therefore, in cities, the distortions and strains inherent in human beings appear.
[Ending omitted.]