Originally published on October 25, 2019.
Based on Takayama Masayuki’s column “The Article That Could Not Be Written” in Shukan Shincho, this article discusses the Kansai Electric Power money-and-gifts scandal, former Takahama deputy mayor Moriyama, the media taboo surrounding the Buraku Liberation League, and the connection with Edano Yukio’s anti-nuclear policy.
It examines the postwar pressure structure that newspaper reporters could not write about and the true nature of the Kansai Electric issue.

October 25, 2019.
However, using Edano’s anti-nuclear policy as a pretext, Moriyama was moving large sums of money in defense of nuclear power.
It seems that the responsibility to explain lies with Edano rather than Kansai Electric Power.
A friend of mine, one of the most avid readers I know, said to me, “Have you read the Shukan Shincho that came out today? Takayama Masayuki and you are in resonance.”
So I immediately went to a nearby bookstore to buy Shukan Shincho, and after returning home, I at once read Takayama Masayuki’s column, which adorned the final pages.
The Article That Could Not Be Written.
Takayama Masayuki.
A department manager from a certain company came to meet an economic department reporter at the Asahi Shimbun.
The reporter drove him away, saying, “I only meet presidents.”
This is one scene from Nagae Kiyoshi’s Thirty-Six Years of a Newspaper Man’s Life.
Or take Mochizuki Isoko of the Tokyo Shimbun.
Even if the other party is the Chief Cabinet Secretary, it is enough to ask whatever comes to mind; if she keeps pressing him, he will expose a flaw.
A mere newspaper reporter has come to believe that she has more power than a prosecutor of the Special Investigation Department.
Most interview subjects are gentlemen.
There are rarely yakuza who use their hands before their mouths.
That is why, including myself, I think newspaper reporters in general were, to some extent, Mochizuki-like.
“That is what is wrong,” Miyazaki Ken, who was three years senior to me and with whom I worked at the Yukan Fuji editorial office, told me as he related his own experience.
He came from the Osaka headquarters and was assigned to the Mie bureau.
He had no story, but he also did not want to move.
From the prefectural government press club, he gazed outside blankly.
Outside, unemployment-relief workers were tending the plantings.
It looked like a still photograph.
In fact, their hands were not moving.
They squatted down, chatted with their companions, and spent the whole day that way.
After a long observation, he interviewed the prefectural department in charge.
They were being paid astonishingly high wages.
He immediately turned it into print.
However, the next day, one phone call came in, and the bureau chief’s face changed color.
The group criticized in the article were people connected with the Buraku Liberation League.
Even if he explained that he had “written the facts,” facts meant nothing.
He was summoned to a discrimination denunciation meeting, denounced for having committed unjust discrimination through the newspaper pages, and told to engage in self-criticism.
Even when he apologized, he was abused, and the denunciation continued endlessly.
“I could not stop crying,” said, with a serious face, a man who usually seemed to live by eating other people alive.
In this world, there are beings even Mochizuki Isoko cannot match.
Not long after hearing that story, I had an opportunity to catch a glimpse of it.
When I stopped by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Office for reporting, strange groups were sitting in the lobby and on every staircase.
When I asked the public relations section what was going on, I was told that “the Buraku Liberation League is in collective bargaining with Minobe, demanding that he hand over two wards,” and that the sit-in had already continued for a month.
The 23 wards were about to become 21 wards.
No newspaper wrote a single line about such a major matter, because they were afraid.
Then the Recruit scandal occurred.
It began when Ezoe Hiromasa came to Narazaki Yanosuke seeking help.
Narazaki, who had been the chief steward of Matsumoto Jiichiro, the don of the Buraku Liberation League, secretly recorded and made public the speech of the person who came as Ezoe’s messenger, in exchange for helping Ezoe.
The newspapers never wrote a word about Narazaki’s betrayal.
Nor did they mention Matsumoto Jiichiro behind him.
To touch on that was taboo.
After the Great East Japan Earthquake, there was an incident that made one think such an era might have ended.
Matsumoto Ryu, Reconstruction Minister and grandson of Matsumoto Jiichiro, visited Sendai.
At the prefectural office meeting, he reproached Governor Murai for being late and cursed him.
At the end, he said, “This statement is off the record. Any company that writes it is finished.”
It was a line that reporters had heard often and trembled at.
However, the Tohoku media did not know who the Reconstruction Minister was.
They broadcast the abusive remarks just as they were.
The Reconstruction Minister was forced to resign.
It gave a slight premonition of the arrival of a new era.
Executives of Kansai Electric Power had received money and gifts totaling 300 million yen from a certain Moriyama, a former deputy mayor of Takahama Town.
Amid the rumors that the Asahi Shimbun kept writing up, Moriyama had worked to invite nuclear power plants.
Kansai Electric was grateful and gave work to local companies.
The 300 million yen seems to have been a return gift, but it was far beyond bounds.
When they went to return it, the chairman of Kansai Electric answered that Moriyama “became furious and said something about what would happen to the safety of our families.”
It is a bizarre story difficult to believe at first, but with the single word “Buraku Liberation League” reported by Shukan Shincho, everything made sense.
The new era had not yet come.
Edano Yukio, of the former Democratic Party lineage, who should know that area best, said in the Diet, completely missing the mark, that “this was a reflux of nuclear power funds arranged by Kansai Electric.”
If one speaks ill of nuclear power, the public will be convinced.
Is he trying to cover things up with that?
However, using Edano’s anti-nuclear policy as a pretext, Moriyama was moving large sums of money in defense of nuclear power.
It seems that the responsibility to explain lies with Edano rather than Kansai Electric Power.