Published on August 19, 2019. Prompted by an opinion advertisement placed in the Nikkei by citizens of Hong Kong, this article connects the author’s own experiences with Japan’s total lending restrictions, the Umeda North Yard turmoil, the Asahi Shimbun, online attacks, and the announcement of his book, with the evil of totalitarianism now confronting Hong Kong citizens, while questioning the responsibility of the world, the United Nations, intellectuals, journalists, and politicians.

August 19, 2019.
The world has continued to overlook it, the United Nations has continued to overlook it…and that evil…is creating this situation.
I now subscribe to three newspapers: the Sankei, the Nikkei, and the Yomiuri.
In the past, I always read the newspaper in the morning, but now that is not the case at all.
I try to read the Sankei, but it was no exaggeration to say that I hardly read the other two papers.
However, this morning I woke up one hour earlier than planned, and so I first began reading the Nikkei.
And what leapt into my eyes was the following full-page opinion advertisement.
It is a clear fact that the greatest cause of “Japan’s lost twenty years” and of the shadow of deflation that still continues was the total lending restriction imposed on March 27, 1990, in Heisei 2.
Around that time, the advertising director of the Nikkei’s Osaka head office regularly visited the president’s office to listen to what I had to say.
His reason was that, because of his work, he met all kinds of business managers, but had never heard talk, or insight, like mine.
Immediately after the total lending restriction was issued, I asked him to place a full-page opinion advertisement in the Nikkei’s national edition.
I also immediately accepted the 35 million yen that was presented as the cost.
But the Nikkei never published my advertisement.
There should not have been a single person living in the twenty-first century who read this morning’s desperate opinion advertisement by the citizens of Hong Kong and did not weep.
Except, that is, for people living not in the twenty-first century, but in the nineteenth century, the Middle Ages, or antiquity.
Since I rediscovered Kyoto again and again about fifteen years ago, as a person who does not live in Kyoto, I am the person who has visited Kyoto more than anyone else in the world.
At Nanzen-ji, Daikaku-ji, and other places, I have met office ladies traveling alone from Hong Kong at bus stops and elsewhere.
Most of them were repeat visitors.
It was not unusual for them to say, “I have come at least ten times…”
Around the age of twenty-five, during the only period in my life when I thought I might end my own life, I headed to Kyushu in order to meet once and listen to someone who had said that he wanted to meet me.
For some reason, what I was reading at that time was Night on the Galactic Railroad.
It was the night when I passed through the Kanmon Strait for the first time, changed trains, and was heading toward Nagasaki.
While I continued reading even in a train whose compartments were all full, I encountered Giovanni’s line.
“What can I do for my mother…”
Suddenly, I sobbed.
Tears overflowed and would not stop.
I could not very well cry with streaming tears inside the crowded train, so I got off at a station where the train stopped.
On the platform of a nighttime station where no one was present, I stood there and cried until my tears ran dry.
At that moment, I returned alive to this world.
Because of the terrible confusion surrounding Osaka’s Umeda North Yard—and as all people of insight know, it was as a result of having no choice but to appear in this way and continue writing that I realized that the mastermind who had caused that confusion was the Asahi Shimbun—I had made Osaka the stage of my life as a businessman, even refusing the advice of my close friend from Fukushima Prefecture, who was then at Dentsu, that “you should come to Tokyo,” and had remained committed to Osaka; seeing this, I felt for several days that my life had truly been a complete failure, and I lost even the energy to work.
But several days later, I woke up thinking, “This is no joke. I will not let myself be killed by such incomprehensible, absurd nonsense,” and I visited Shimotsuma of Kansai Economic Federation, visited Takenaka Yukiko of the Japan Association of Corporate Executives, and visited the official in charge at Osaka City Hall.
All alone, for three months, I continued to argue why it could not be done according to the decided business plan, which had gathered the wisdom of Osaka’s public and private sectors and had finally been completed after more than twenty years, a plan that could without exaggeration be called the best of the postwar era.
However, in an extremely foolish and comical way…or perhaps one should say appropriately for a lone Don Quixote,
each time I went to the three related organizations above and spoke with them, I wrote down the contents in detail and had our managing director deliver them to the Asahi Shimbun headquarters!
I had him deliver them to Tagaya Katsuhiko, who at the time was writing full-page articles with his name attached under the theme “North Yard Confusion.”
It would not be an exaggeration to say that this was perhaps the greatest foolish act of my life.
The managing director of our company, who was made to serve as the courier for those documents, still teases me from time to time, saying, “It was like sending salt to the enemy, and it was fruitless labor that cannot even be turned into a joke…”
After that, as readers know, came the circumstances under which I came to appear in this way.
Because I appeared in the world of the Internet, a world where countless evils still run rampant and operate behind the scenes, I was truly targeted by villains…the world has continued to overlook it, and the United Nations has continued to overlook it…and as the world recognizes, what I sent out yesterday hit the mark exactly…
And because I was targeted by the evil brought about as a result and suffered a grave illness that nearly cost me my life, I said yes to the request from the publishing company that had been pending, and it was on June 1, 2011, that I announced the decision to publish from my hospital room.
Not only was I defrauded of a large amount of money, but this time they began unbelievable attacks on the Internet against my book, my blog, and my author name.
The evil I suffered and the evil the citizens of Hong Kong are now suffering are one and the same in nature.
The world has continued to overlook it, and the United Nations has continued to overlook it…
That evil is stopping the progress of “The Turntable of Civilization” and creating this situation.
All I can do is think that among the people who placed this morning’s opinion advertisement, there must have been readers of mine,
and continue writing in this way.
To prevent the birth of dictatorships and totalitarianism,
and to prevent them from inciting hatred toward other countries and other peoples, that is, from making people hate,
surely those who make their living by calling themselves intellectuals, as well as journalists and politicians, are supposed to exist.
Everything is your responsibility.
The suffering of the citizens of Hong Kong is the result of your conduct, and it is your responsibility.
Even if that sin is not punished in this life, those who, as the height of your foolishness, continue to engage in “self-serving pseudo-moralism,” or to carry out reporting that flatters China and the Korean Peninsula,
despite your sanctimonious smiles, have no choice but to fall into hell, and all I can do now is tell you that King Enma is waiting, having prepared torments equal to, and greater than, the unbearable suffering caused by you.