An essay dated June 13, 2019.
Through reflections on film, actresses, San Francisco, the Asahi Shimbun, and views of the Imperial Household, this piece criticizes uncritical admiration of the West and anti-Japan discourse, while strongly asserting the essential value of Japanese civilization and art.
Centered on the beauty and history embodied in Kyoto, Nara, and Shiga, it reexamines the spiritual and cultural stature of Japan.

2019-06-13
Because it is a city ruled by people even more malicious than those countries themselves, people who have been completely dominated by the countries of China and the Korean Peninsula, countries of “bottomless evil” and “plausible lies,” and who take their propaganda at face value.

Omitting the earlier part.
In 1995, with the success of Seven and Fight Club, Fincher suddenly came to be noticed as a hitmaker.
For The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and The Social Network, he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director.
*I see, so after all it was that kind of encounter.
As my readers know, when I watched The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, I decided that Cate Blanchett, who played the ballerina active in Paris in that film, was the greatest actress of our age.
Queen Elizabeth, Bob Dylan, and then a ballerina…
What she expresses…
it is no exaggeration to say, is all of the splendor that the West possesses.
But here I want to say clearly to Japan and to the world.
Long before them… more than 1,000 years earlier…
things of this kind… Japan and the Japanese people…
were already a nation that created supreme art… were moved by it… and appreciated it…
and the world needs to know the unshakable fact that we were such a people.
If it did, then there could be no such thing as the utter fools on the San Francisco city council…
or the New York Times, which has had the outrageous discourtesy to assume that Asahi represents Japan…
or major German newspapers that are like the very extreme of vulgarity.
Readers should know that I am one of Japan’s major television viewers of Major League Baseball, and that when Shohei Ohtani set out to challenge Major League Baseball, I hoped he would not go only to the San Francisco Giants… because I would not be able to support that from my heart…
because it is a city ruled by people even more malicious than those countries themselves, people who have been completely dominated by the countries of China and the Korean Peninsula, countries of “bottomless evil” and “plausible lies,” and who take their propaganda at face value.
At the same time, you should know that I even declared that as long as it remained such a city, that team would never become world champion.
The following year, because they made lavish reinforcements such as bringing in former MVPs, I felt a very slight concern, but the result was exactly as you can see… and this year’s miserable state is no different.
Recently, when a friend and I were watching NHK air footage under the title of something like “the beautiful city of San Francisco,” we both cried out in unison, “What part of it is beautiful?”… because rather than beautiful, the footage much more accurately showed a decayed and dirty city.
It was a reality befitting a city ruled by “bottomless evil” and “plausible lies.”
Anyone who doubts what I say…
if he possesses the highest intelligence, let him spend at least a week strolling through Shiga (Mount Hiei, Mii-dera, Ishiyama-dera), Nara (Tōdai-ji, Tōshōdai-ji, Yakushi-ji, etc.), and Kyoto (every possible place and all the gardens I continue to visit through spring, summer, autumn, and winter)…
then he will silently understand the correctness of my argument.
At the same time, he will also naturally come to know how utterly fraudulent the Asahi Shimbun’s criticism of the Tennōsei is.
As already noted, the late Shōichi Watanabe, one of the greatest and most genuine scholars of the postwar era, taught us that the word Tennōsei was a term created by communists, and that Japanese people should properly call it the Imperial Household.
Kenzaburō Ōe and the like are, for Japan and the Japanese people, no more than minor figures.
To criticize him harshly, it is no exaggeration to call him a foolish man infatuated with the West.
Another man, whom people mistakenly raise up because the mass media created him and because they wrongly imagine that life means rejoicing together with the mass media, is, as I have mentioned in recent days, nothing more than a person who plagiarized, from beginning to end, the ideas of a genuine American woman writer.