Published on January 27, 2020. This article republishes chapters originally posted on July 16, 2019, and July 23, 2018, introducing Toshio Watanabe’s essay on Susumu Nishibe from the “Civilization’s False Theories” column in Voice. It examines Nishibe’s thought and his criticism of the mass media, analyzing how modern Japanese journalism constantly delivers sensational and scandalous reporting to the masses while disguising it as the discourse of liberal democracy, in light of Nishibe’s Mass Media Theory of National Ruin.

January 27, 2020
Constantly directing inflammatory and scandalous reporting toward these masses, and disguising it as if it were the discourse of liberal democrats—
This is a chapter I posted on July 16, 2019, under the title, “The sensationalism and scandalism of today’s mass media give off a foul odor.”
The following is a chapter I posted on July 23, 2018, but it is something that every Japanese citizen must read precisely now.
It is an excerpt from an essay about Susumu Nishibe written by Toshio Watanabe in his serialized column titled “Civilization’s False Theories,” which appears at the end of this month’s issue of Voice.
The emphasis in the text is mine.
Human beings are linguistic animals.
All ideas concerning life and society are operated through language.
Among thinkers engaged in the operation of ideas, it is rare to find one with as fluent a literary talent as Susumu Nishibe.
One meaning of radical is fundamental.
Yes, even when Nishibe’s writings dealt with current affairs, they always contained a gaze directed toward what lies at the root of those current affairs.
The sensationalism and scandalism of today’s mass media give off a foul odor.
The masses are people who have almost no interest in what lies at the root of current affairs, and who continue to live each day as earnestly as they can.
Constantly directing inflammatory and scandalous reporting toward these masses, and disguising it as if it were the discourse of liberal democrats — this is the trap into which modern Japanese mass media has fallen.
Nishibe said this as long as thirty years ago in Mass Media Theory of National Ruin.
“Especially in Japan, because liberal democracy was brought in, almost as an import, amid the spiritual emptiness after defeat in the war, and because it fit well with the Japanese cultural pattern characterized by a remarkable lack of class-based social order and religious value order, freedom without order and democracy without restraint were purely cultivated.”
Nishibe’s argument is that the ideas of freedom and democracy, which are alien to Japan’s system of customs, that is, to its tradition, were introduced and have now become self-inflated.
I too believe that this is the starting point for thinking about the suspiciousness and danger of the mass media that unfolds before our eyes every day.
However, Nishibe, who lived in a world of ideas far deeper than someone like me, must have continued to feel nihilism and despair toward a Japan where the destruction of tradition had become so severe.
And this must have exceeded the limits of his endurance and led him to choose death by his own hand.
The rest is omitted.