Published on January 19, 2020.
Drawing from the late Susumu Nishibe’s Mass Media Ruins the Nation, this article examines the mass media’s cultural amnesia, the loss of meaning and value in the advanced information society, the rule of signs, and the cultural regression of the Japanese people revealed by the Recruit scandal. It criticizes how “anti-power,” a stock phrase of postwar democracy, came to be shouted as an empty phrase, while the mass media and intellectuals joined in collective lynching.

January 19, 2020
As the role of codes and signs in expressive activity grew, meaning and value became increasingly neglected, until finally “anti-power,” the stock phrase of postwar democracy, came to be shouted even though everyone knew it was an empty phrase.
The following is from the late Susumu Nishibe’s book Mass Media Ruins the Nation.
Every Japanese citizen who can read printed text must immediately go to the nearest bookstore and purchase it.
People around the world will learn, through my translation, that the mass media in your own countries are the same.
The Sin That Clearly Revealed the Cultural Regression of the Japanese People
Why do the Japanese not remember that accurately?
Why do they not recall this dubious history of the mass media?
When we are afflicted with what may be called this kind of cultural amnesia, we cannot go around proclaiming the arrival of an advanced information society.
That is because what matters is not mere information, but information that contains value and meaning.
Information that contains no meaning or value is nothing more than a sign.
And in order to know what kind of meaning or value information possesses, there is no choice but to judge it in light of the accumulated stock of such things in the past.
Because we have fallen into an extreme amnesia concerning the past, we expect only the momentary stimulus of signs from the information that passes before our eyes, such as whether it stands out or seems interesting.
A sign is a code without meaning, and what reacts to such things is a robot, not a human being.
Modern society gives the impression of having entered an age of “rule by signs,” that is, “semiocracy.”
This is said not only of Japan but also of Western societies.
Meaning and value are steadily draining away, and only signs that carry scarcely any meaning or value pierce our minds.
It may indeed be possible to say that the age of semiocracy is arriving.
However, it is not as though we are prepared to entrust ourselves to semiocracy.
If we had such resolve, then why, over the Recruit scandal, did we wave about such childish meaning and value, of the sort exchanged in an elementary school homeroom, such as “we will not allow people to make easy money without effort”?
If it is said that we cannot escape from the age of “the rule of signs,” then there should have been more technical and more fanciful methods of expression, for example methods making full use of complex parody.
We possess that capacity for expression.
But we did not use it.
Semiocracy was merely something we said.
In truth, we cannot separate ourselves from the dimension of meaning and the universe of value.
Even so, we have neglected the effort to discover and invent meaning and value with our own minds.
And so we took out old documents from an old chest of drawers and regressed into childish meanings and values such as “we will not allow people to make easy money without effort.”
In that sense, the Recruit scandal was a major incident, both absurd and grave, that plainly revealed the cultural regression of us Japanese.
As the role of codes and signs in expressive activity grew, meaning and value became increasingly neglected, until finally “anti-power,” the stock phrase of postwar democracy, came to be shouted even though everyone knew it was an empty phrase.
When it came to the dubiousness of those occupying relatively high social positions, such as politicians and business executives, members of the mass media and the intellectuals who joined them set aside their own dubiousness and rushed about trying to offer those in power as sacrificial victims.
The dubiousness of those in power, even when it remained within existing rules, was made the target of collective lynching.
What was seen there was the emotionalism of vulgar democracy, which regards anti-power as good in itself.
Moreover, the participants in that collective lynching are people who, in their own lives, are quite robust in following and pandering to power.