An August 4, 2017 critique exposing the intellectual and moral collapse of Japan’s public broadcaster NHK, questioning its failure to show basic respect toward the Prime Minister, and highlighting the broader crisis of media ethics, political literacy, and national responsibility in contemporary Japan.
What exactly is Japan’s state broadcaster, if it cannot even utter a single sentence saying, “Please do your best for the sake of Japan”?
2017-08-04
Because I had not looked at the newspaper television listings at all, I had no idea that Prime Minister Abe would appear on NHK’s Watch 9 last night.
Even so, despite the fact that the Prime Minister of Japan deliberately appeared on the program,
they could not even say, “Thank you very much for appearing today despite your busy schedule,” or,
“Please do your best for the sake of Japan.”
What, then, is Japan’s state broadcaster supposed to be?
Does Ueda, the current chairman, who has not only led one of Japan’s representative corporations but also worked on the global stage, truly lack even such basic common sense?
Among the countries of the world with which you have dealt, is there even a single nation that shows no respect for its own government or its own prime minister or president?
China, a one-party communist dictatorship, forces such attitudes by coercion, to be sure.
Even so, was it not the case that all discerning observers were appalled by the disgraceful demeanor of Kuwako?
While hosting what is supposed to be the flagship news program of Japan’s state broadcaster as her profession, she—or perhaps the news division that appointed her—
has she not, for some reason, never read even once the monthly magazines to which I have repeatedly referred?
If one is to speak about politics, about international politics and global affairs, about diplomacy,
what kind of commentary can one possibly offer without reading the monthly magazines filled with essays that every Japanese citizen must read?
The proof is that the questions Kuwako directed at Prime Minister Abe last night were of a level beneath even childishness.
The entire process surrounding the application for the new veterinary school at Kake Gakuen is publicly available on the internet, yet without reading even that, they went so far as to base their comments on reporting by media such as the Asahi Shimbun.
They asked questions of the utmost vulgarity, identical to those of a tabloid talk show, claiming that it was strange that the issue of the veterinary school had not come up despite Abe and Kake being friends who had often played golf and dined together,
or rather, they went so far as to interrogate the Prime Minister of Japan.
What made clear why Kuwako is that kind of person was the splendid essay by Yukihiro Hasegawa, editorial writer of the Tokyo Shimbun, which I introduced the other day.
For corporate employees living truly pathetic, worthless lives in which currying favor with superiors is treated as the most important thing,
everything is calculation, and concepts such as the bond between gentlemen are utterly incomprehensible.
Kuwako.
I will teach you something you cannot possibly understand, but which every true adult, every true elite, knows as a fact of life.
Fortunately, I have been able to have two elites active at major corporations representing Japan as lifelong best friends.
Prime Minister Abe is an elite of the highest order even among Japanese politicians.
Even during his time as an employee of Kobe Steel, where he learned about real society through something like an apprenticeship, he lived his life as a remarkably sophisticated employee.
The university from which he graduated is, in a positive sense, an “ojōchan” university, attended by many children of wealthy families and founders.
He and the chairman of Kake Gakuen have been friends since their university days.
What other country besides Japan has media so base as to criticize someone for that fact?
They are close friends.
Over more than thirty years, they have played golf and dined together a dozen or more times.
I myself have played several times that number of rounds of golf and dined more than a hundred times with the close friends mentioned above.
I am always the one who extends the invitation.
That is because being a company president is a lonely occupation.
They are my close friends, and they are admirable people.
Simply eating and drinking with them brings me immense joy.
A bond in which one can bare one’s liver and gall to the other is something irreplaceable.
I take pride in being a man among men and someone who loves women more than anyone else in the world,
yet my life has been such that the joy of time spent with them has been so great that I remain unmarried to this day.
I am someone who, though running an unknown small-to-medium-sized enterprise, accomplished work among the best in Japan, and during just the peak ten years alone paid more than 17 billion yen in various taxes to the Japanese state.
They are wonderful people, but they are salaried employees.
Moreover, they have families.
Their incomes are limited.
I am a company president.
And in almost all cases, I am the one who invites them.
Not only with them, but also with women with whom I occasionally spend time, or men with whom I have merely social relations,
unless the other party is also a company president, I have never once made anyone pay when I was the one who extended the invitation.
For those engaged in the lonely, almost solitary occupation of running a company, there is no joy greater than the smile of a close friend, or the teasing that only a close friend can offer.
At the time, for me, this was a joy greater even than intimate matters between men and women.
Such intimate matters require time-consuming effort, and truly busy executives simply do not have the leisure for them.
I came to know my close friends through work.
Yet although I have dined hundreds of times—more than ten times as many as Abe and the chairman of Kake Gakuen—I have never once made a business-related request of them.
That is only natural.
Failing to understand even this, thinking in exactly the same manner as vulgar tabloid talk shows—the very epitome of baseness (and with an air that makes it obvious she believes her own thinking to be absolutely correct),
they direct questions they believe to be proper at the Prime Minister of Japan, who even now, in substance, as the leader of the world’s second-largest economic power, has boldly restored Japan’s economy to the threshold of escaping more than twenty years of deflation,
and who, at a level no one before has achieved, is magnificently leading the world,
the Prime Minister of Japan, a nation in which the turntable of civilization is turning.
That such people consider it right to ask questions that can only be described as the height of vulgarity,
and that people of such a level serve as hosts of the flagship news program of Japan’s state broadcaster NHK,
is precisely Japan’s great problem.
The time has long since come for the Japanese people to recognize this.
In particular, the citizens of Tokyo and Sendai must read this chapter with the utmost seriousness.