Published on October 29, 2019. Citing an essay by Masayuki Takayama, this article criticizes child-abuse cases, media coverage of a retrial in an arson-murder case, and the conduct of TBS and the Mainichi group, denouncing false moralism and the responsibility of the media.

October 29, 2019.
Ryūnosuke Akutagawa wrote, “Outside there is only a black, cavernous night…,” but unlike him, I am not a man who remains merely sunk in gloomy thoughts.
I am republishing the chapter first sent out on December 5, 2015, under the title, “When I think of what we are, granting a nationwide broadcasting license to such a company.”
The other day, when the course of the following incident was reported on television news, I instinctively felt that something was wrong.
Masayuki Takayama, the greatest journalist in the postwar world, wrote the following in his serialized column in this month’s issue of the monthly magazine Sound Argument.
As is the case with many of his articles, this one also tells us facts that most Japanese people did not know.
I also believe it is no exaggeration to say that Masayuki Takayama’s sensibility and my own are exactly the same.
I mentioned this the other day as well, but I declare that he is the one and only journalist in the world who should receive next year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, and that he is a writer who conveys only the truth in magnificent prose.
The preceding text is omitted.
The passages between asterisks are mine.
A frivolous woman is apt to fall in love with a frivolous man.
When they marry and have children, the frivolous man leaves the home.
The woman never awakens and thinks, “I will live with this child.”
The nature, or karma, of a woman makes her choose the path of living with another man.
A new father is generally harsh toward a child who is not his own.
There is a good example.
The monkeys of Takasakiyama.
When a new boss drives out the old boss, he kills the baby monkeys held by the female monkeys “instantly with sharp teeth and claws” (Kumiko Takeuchi).
When the baby monkey dies, the female monkey immediately comes into heat and mates with the new boss.
But human beings are worse than boss monkeys.
An unemployed man, Akira Murayama, aged 42, who had moved into the home of a woman in Nishitokyo City, assaulted the woman’s fourteen-year-old son for a year and a half, ordered him to “die within twenty-four hours,” made him feel “unbearable despair” (court judgment), and drove him to suicide.
In court, Murayama shifted the blame, saying, “His real mother hit him without even trying to protect him. She is the real culprit” (Nippon Television).
He committed every kind of inhuman act by taking advantage of a woman’s karma.
And after making that excuse, the sentence was only six years.
There are other cases in the world that make us think even more deeply.
Twenty years ago, a fire broke out in the garage of a house in Sumiyoshi Ward, Osaka City.
The mother, her child, and her common-law husband, a resident Korean man, escaped, but the eldest daughter, Megumi Aoki, then eleven years old, who was taking a bath, was burned to death.
As a result of the investigation, it was discovered that, despite their poor living conditions, they had decided in January of that year to purchase a forty-million-yen condominium, while also taking out life insurance policies of fifteen million yen on the eldest daughter and twenty million yen on the eldest son.
There were also questions about the cause of the fire.
The mother and her common-law husband, who had claimed the eldest daughter’s life insurance money, were questioned and then arrested on charges of murder, arson of an inhabited structure, and attempted fraud.
At first, both admitted the crime.
The common-law husband also admitted to raping the eldest daughter, and both were sentenced to life imprisonment.
However, from the time of the trial, both denied the arson-murder charge and began claiming innocence.
In a letter to his supporters, the common-law husband admitted the fact, writing that “the remorse of not being able to save the child, and the heavy remorse of having sexually abused her, possessed my heart.”
The mother also wrote to supporters, “I was told by the police about the sexual abuse of my daughter,” and “I was told that my husband’s semen had been detected from my daughter’s body.”
Regarding the two defendants’ claim of innocence, the defense requested a retrial, arguing that “if ignition occurred when gasoline had been spread as described in the confession, the fire would have flared up explosively.”
The Osaka High Court recently judged, based on a fire-reenactment experiment and other evidence, that there was a possibility they were innocent of arson-murder.
It rejected the prosecution’s appeal and decided to grant a retrial.
The two were released the same day.
The newspapers, in a festive mood as if the false accusation against innocent death-row prisoners had been cleared, placed photographs of the two after their release side by side and had the mother say, “I can hear my daughter’s voice from somewhere in this blue sky saying, ‘Mama, I’m so glad.’”
Even if, as the two claim, they did not set the fire, does the mother truly think that her dead daughter said such a thing?
In a letter to supporters, the mother wrote, “I saw a small fire flickering in the garage, drew water into a bucket and threw it on the fire, and then it spread with a whoosh. I was startled and called 119,” and then she escaped with her son.
She did not think to evacuate her daughter, who was in the bathroom.
She did not notice that the man she had brought into the home had continued to violate her daughter.
But are we to believe that she remembered taking out the insurance policies?
That question will be clarified in the retrial court next year, but why do the newspapers deliberately conceal such points and devote themselves to a festival-like celebration?
You…。
If you read this magnificent article by the greatest journalist in the world today and then watch TBS’s “Hōdō Tokushū,” as I just did, you cannot help but understand how terrible this company, this broadcasting station, is.
When I think of what we are, granting a nationwide broadcasting license to such a company, everyone must be seized by the same gloomy feeling that I am.
Ryūnosuke Akutagawa wrote, “Outside there is only a black, cavernous night…,” but unlike him, I am not a man who remains merely sunk in gloomy thoughts.
The appalling childishness and viciousness of TBS, that is, Mainichi.
They do not even realize that the place reporting under the guise of moralism is, in fact, the very lowest form of evil.
I feel intense anger.
I believe my readers feel exactly the same.
If you are a decent Japanese citizen.