Published on July 16, 2019.
This essay introduces the essence of Susumu Nishibe’s thought and his work “The Media Will Ruin the Nation,” through Toshio Watanabe’s column “Civilization’s False Theories” in the monthly magazine Voice.
It examines how liberal democracy, imported into Japan amid the spiritual vacuum after defeat, distorted the modern Japanese media.

July 16, 2019.
Especially in Japan, because liberal democracy was brought in, virtually as an import, amid the spiritual vacuum after defeat… freedom without order and democracy without restraint were purely cultivated.
The following is a chapter I published on July 23, 2018, but it is something that all Japanese people must read now.
It is an excerpt from an essay about Susumu Nishibe written in Toshio Watanabe’s serialized column titled “Civilization’s False Theories,” which appears at the end of this month’s issue of the monthly magazine Voice.
The emphasis in the text is mine.
Human beings are linguistic animals.
All concepts of life and society are operated through language.
Among thinkers engaged in the operation of concepts, few possess such a fluent literary gift as Susumu Nishibe.
One meaning of radical is fundamental.
Indeed, even when Nishibe’s writings concern current affairs, they always contain a gaze directed toward what lies at the root of those current affairs.
There is a foul odor in the sensationalism and scandalism of today’s mass media.
The masses are people who are generally indifferent to what lies at the root of current affairs, and who continue to live each day as earnestly as they can.
To constantly pour agitational and scandalous reporting toward these masses, and then dress it up as if it were the discourse of liberal democrats: this is the pitfall into which the mass media of contemporary Japan has fallen.
Nishibe had already said this thirty years ago in “The Media Will Ruin the Nation.”
“Especially in Japan, because liberal democracy was brought in, virtually as an import, amid the spiritual vacuum after defeat, and because it also fit well with Japan’s cultural pattern, which is characterized by a marked lack of both class-based social order and religious value order, freedom without order and democracy without restraint were purely cultivated.”
I, too, believe that Nishibe’s argument—that concepts such as freedom and democracy, alien to Japan’s system of customs, that is, to its tradition, were introduced and then became self-inflated into what we see today—is the starting point for thinking about the suspiciousness and danger of the mass media unfolding before our eyes every day.
However, Nishibe, who lived in a world of concepts far more profound than someone like me, must have continued to feel nihilism and despair toward Japan, where the destruction of tradition had become so severe, and this must have exceeded the limits of his endurance, causing him to choose self-death.
The rest is omitted.