The Asahi Shimbun Starts the Fire and Then Pretends to Put It Out

2015-12-31
Having decided to fight alone for three months against the Kansai Economic Federation, the Association of Corporate Executives, and Osaka City Hall, I wrote down the course of my discussions with them almost every time after beginning the battle and handed those accounts to my company’s managing director.
I had him deliver them to a reporter named Tagaya, who had written a major special feature on the North Yard, but there was absolutely no response.
The Asahi Shimbun’s Osaka head office should, by rights, have been even angrier than I was.
As readers know, this was also a battle upon which I staked my life after continuing to insist upon remaining in Osaka, even turning down the generous invitation of a Tokyo Dentsu executive, with whom I was very close at the time and who was known as “the lord,” who told me, “You should move into the Imperial Hotel’s office tower and come to Tokyo.
From now on, you should place your effective head office in Tokyo.”
The aforementioned reporter named Tagaya was a man in whom no philosophy whatsoever could be discerned.
He wrote articles like a nue—an inscrutable chimera—which made it utterly impossible to understand why he was producing a major special feature on the North Yard in the first place.
Looking back, he was merely an errand boy, or the person assigned to present the Asahi’s outward, sham moralism.
The great evil remained in the background, plunging the North Yard into confusion and working covertly to bury the phase-two land-sale project by any means necessary.
This was, indeed, the perfect answer to the question of what the Asahi Shimbun really is.
In other words, the Asahi is an arsonist and firefighter in one: it starts the fire and then pretends to extinguish it.
Outwardly, it displays sham moralism and has inconsequential people write articles.
Behind the scenes, successive editorial writers—villains themselves, holding a confused assortment of ideas involving Marxism and other doctrines—used the absolute power they claimed from controlling public discourse in Japan.
Whenever anything arose, they ruled Japan with the attitude that, unless people obeyed them, they would manipulate public opinion and say, “We will erase the likes of you.”
In other words, they are no different whatsoever from the villains who inhabit the streets,
but because they wear the mask of justice and the mask of guardians of democracy, they are more pernicious than those ordinary villains.
To be continued.