Originally published on April 22, 2019.
This essay criticizes Kenzaburō Ōe as a symbol of “authority” manufactured by publishers and the media, while condemning the pseudo-intellectualism and pseudo-moralism of postwar Japan, epitomized by Asahi Shimbun and sustained by readers who accepted it without question.
Through Ōe’s contemptuous attack on those who began speaking truth on the internet in the wake of the comfort women reporting scandal, dismissing them as proponents of a “cheap-liquor mentality,” the piece exposes the structure of false prestige and deception that long dominated postwar Japan.

2019-04-22
These, again, are the fools led above all by Asahi Shimbun… .
Those who go on subscribing to it and believing it without the slightest doubt… .
They alone are the worst kind of sinners in the world.

The following is from a chapter I published on October 16, 2015.

I now dare to say that the foremost among them is Kenzaburō Ōe.

Or rather, he is a man manufactured by publishers in order to survive the publishing slump… .

From beginning to end, he plagiarized the ideas of a genuine female genius writer from America… .

Though people all over the world, who in reality are nothing more than dim-witted petty bourgeois, have never even read her books… .

With the massive publicity of Japanese publishing houses also proving effective, that man became a bestselling author… .

He stayed at expensive resorts throughout the world… .

He continued writing bestsellers that beguiled pseudo-moralist, petty-bourgeois readers, and became an ultra-millionaire.

That man, the very embodiment of snobbery, who has made it his life to sit before ultra-high-end audio equipment, sip fine wine, and listen to classical music.

Last year, with the comfort women reporting as the decisive trigger… .

People came to realize the strangeness of Asahi Shimbun’s articles, and the fraudulent reality behind them… .

And toward those who had begun to speak rightful words in the world of the internet, the greatest library in human history… .
That world of intelligence in the truest sense… .
Free, and connected instantly with the entire world… .

He hurled the phrase “the ideology of cheap liquor” at them.

Forgetting that he himself… .
Was a manufactured writer… .
And a writer who had continued plagiarizing the ideas of a genuine female genius writer, he made a ludicrous attack.

And those who imagine that the truth and reality of the world reside in the kind of life he lives, a life that is the very height of the petty bourgeois… .

Are, once again, the fools led above all by Asahi Shimbun… .

Those who go on subscribing to it and believing it without the slightest doubt… .

They alone are the worst kind of sinners in the world.