On May 5, 2026, Nakanoshima Rose Garden in Osaka was filled with unprecedented crowds, food stalls, and the brightness of early summer. The music placed over this scene is Borodin’s “Polovtsian Dances” from the opera Prince Igor, conducted by Herbert von Karajan with the Berlin Philharmonic.

Today, May 5, freshly shot scenes from Nakanoshima Rose Garden.
I went there before noon.
It has been about ten years since I first became aware of Nakanoshima Rose Garden.
There were already tremendous crowds beside Osaka City Hall.
It was a first-time experience for me.
Even food stalls were lined up.
I decided to go along the riverside on the opposite bank.
Now that Chinese tourists are gone, the people must all be rejoicing.
Japanese people, who had avoided domestic tourist spots because they were full of Chinese people, are now turning out in great numbers.
I became convinced.
That for Japanese people, Chinese people are, in fact, an unnecessary and useless presence.
The nightmare Democratic Party government created by the old media, beginning with the Asahi Shimbun.
It was also a government that continued to leave the extremely strong yen unchecked.
Many manufacturing companies went to China.
China is a grotesque country.
Profits made in China can hardly be brought back into Japan.
They do not contribute to Japan’s GDP.
That is why GDP remained almost unchanged for thirty years.
When I appeared as “The Turntable of Civilization,” Japan’s GDP was 550 trillion yen, and America’s was 750 trillion yen.
Abe worked hard and raised it to 600 trillion yen, but America is now more than six times larger… surely over 4,500 trillion yen.
Advanced countries, too, have grown severalfold in their own ways.
Only Japan did not grow.
The root cause was China.
Only great horse-deer fools such as a certain Matsumoto, chairman of the Kansai Economic Federation, praise China.
It is not merely that large-scale invested manufacturing plants and the like have been taken hostage.
The conduct of most people in key positions at Keidanren can only be described as having fallen into China’s trap.
A country of “bottomless evil” and “plausible lies,” and what kind of friendship can possibly be formed with people raised under not merely an utterly absurd anti-Japanese education, but a Nazism in the name of anti-Japanese education, begun by Jiang Zemin in order to turn the people’s eyes away from the Tiananmen Square incident?
I do not recognize at all people raised under the anti-Japanese education of China and South Korea who, for example, make their living as classical musicians.
That is because there can be no such thing as an artist who raises no voice whatsoever against that kind of worst-ever education, and against the condition of the country that results from it.
The conditions of China and South Korea are such that scholarship and art cannot exist.
This essay will continue.
I thought that the music most fitting for today’s Nakanoshima Rose Garden was Borodin’s “Polovtsian Dances” from the opera Prince Igor, conducted by Karajan with the Berlin Philharmonic.
After all, the sound of festival music was ringing out.