2010-7-19
What Tolstoy wrote in War and Peace.
“People who try to see the good qualities of others, and people who try to see the faults of others”—human beings are divided into these two types, he wrote.
There was something I realised at a certain point.
There are actually a great many men who live their lives defining men and women as different creatures—that is, defining a woman as a special creature called a woman, an existence completely different from a man.
This truly astonished me.
That is because, throughout my life, I had always regarded women only as fellow human beings.
There must also be two kinds of people when it comes to relationships between men and women.
Most marriages are presumably built upon a relationship consisting of a man who works and a woman who does the housework.
In other words, a cooking woman and housekeeper, and a man who earns money.
That is what they regard as a family.
When the man returns home after work, a delicious meal is waiting for him.
It would probably not be an exaggeration to say that this alone sustains the household.
On the other hand, there are relationships in the world like those of Sartre and Beauvoir, and John Lennon and Yoko Ono.
I have always been a person who aspired to this kind of relationship.
A relationship between a cooking woman and a working man may not require the sharing of equal depth or keen intelligence, but I am convinced that true human happiness exists only in the joy of intelligence.
People who do not believe that human beings equal intelligence, people whose heads are made of muscle, doctrinaire people, authoritarian people, and people trapped by convention belong to a different world from the outset.
It goes without saying that an intelligent woman who marries a man from this different world will suffer terribly.
The fact that Japan is one of the world’s leading countries for extramarital affairs is well known to my readers.
Why is that?
Because intelligence equals humanity.
One day, the man who earns the money encounters somewhere a woman who touches his intelligence—who touches the strings of his heart.
That is the truth behind the creation of Japan as a great nation of extramarital affairs, or a paradise of infidelity, extending even to the presidents of major banks.
I believe it was Apollinaire who wrote, “I want to have a cat that leaps among books, and a dear friend without whom I cannot pass through any season.”
Now, the “old-man charmer of the business world” referred to in the title is also an article advising the aforementioned Shimozuma to step down.
Strictly speaking, elites constitute one percent of the population.
They are the class also described as the core of society.
There are people who constantly ingratiate themselves with this class.
They are particularly common in the business and sporting worlds.
This one percent is bound together by firm ties resembling those between comrades-in-arms.
Through Shimozuma’s classmates and seniors, a man whose head and body are both made of muscle appears.
A muscleman looks perfectly healthy, is cheerful and lively, and, being simple rather than capable of complex thought, is unlikely to make another person feel uncomfortable at a first meeting.
If his request includes phrases such as “I want to invigorate the people” or “In order to invigorate the people, I sincerely ask you to…,” these old men—because he was introduced by someone with whom they share firm ties—will immediately say, “Understood.”
However, because everything always has two opposing aspects, idiotic things like the present affair also occur.
When Shimozuma, shortly after becoming chairman of the Kansai Economic Federation, began saying in January two years ago that the second-phase land of the North Yard should perhaps be turned into a park like New York’s Central Park, I fought against it then as well.
At that time, there was a female executive of the Association of Corporate Executives who began saying exactly the same thing, to such an extent that it was impossible to tell which of them had originally proposed it.
Even after searching the Internet, I could not discover any details about her.
Despite being the kind of person who served as an executive of the Association of Corporate Executives… all that could be learned were vague facts such as that she had come from a major corporation originating in Kansai and was now the manager of a small company with six employees.
Some time later, when I had an opportunity to meet a senior person from the company where this woman had previously worked, I asked him directly.
“Is she the founder’s daughter?”
“No.”
“Then…”
“All I can say is that she is an old-man charmer…”
I see.
Recalling the expression on her face when she appeared as a panellist at approximately the seventeenth meeting, as the final outline for the first and second phases was approaching completion, I understood immediately.
This may seem sudden, but consider Nagashima, Oh, Ichiro, and Matsui.
People of this calibre never ingratiate themselves with the one percent.
Needless to say, ingratiating oneself with them for the sake of one’s own association or other selfish interests is what second-rate people do.
In the case of someone who is truly first-rate, countless people come to that person of their own accord.
As everyone knows, the fulfilment of the desires of such second-rate people has never benefited society.
Now, Mr. Shimozuma, you have displayed unforgivable arrogance twice in rapid succession.
You should step down now.
Your great predecessor, Hosai Hyuga, must have valued free competition and even fought against the government.
Yet you, his successor, overturned an urban plan that numerous predecessors had reached only after devoting so much time and enduring so much hardship.
I do not know whether it was ORIX’s Miyauchi or someone else among the people around you—who originally constitute one percent of the population—or what circumstances may have existed, but after the successful bidder had already been selected, the floor-area ratio was raised from 1,200 percent to 1,600 percent, and then the same people asked for the start of the project to be postponed for eighteen months.
I can easily imagine that one of those short-sighted fools brought you a statement such as, “In Osaka’s present condition, it is simply impossible to attract tenants…,” and that, like an old man who had achieved success and fame and now occupied an honorary position, you replied, “That is certainly true…”
If that were the case, the answer would be to introduce tax incentives for the companies entering and occupying the development.
Yet you failed to realise that this was the only means of reversing Osaka’s enormous decline.
No, even without saying that, all that was required was to follow the original decision that the second-phase land would be put out to tender approximately five years after the first phase and to conduct an open, fair, and transparent competitive bidding process available to the entire world.
The fact that, through personal connections and favouritism, you twice acted contrary to the need to recover the greatest possible amount of the people’s hard-earned tax money is sufficient reason for you to step down and retire.
At your advanced age, there is no need to tarnish your reputation in the final stage of your life.
Still less should you do anything that would cause you, on the bank of the Sanzu River, to have your legs pulled by those who, amid suffering and economic despair, were deprived of the path they should have followed.
I say this in keeping with the season of Jizo Bon.
You are a person who has already fulfilled his role sufficiently.
You admirably completed your career responsibility by managing Sumitomo Metal Industries, one of Kansai’s finest corporations.
Even I am approaching the age for a life of cultivating the fields on fine days and reading on rainy days—although I am still working because I have not yet completed my plans for life in old age—while you passed that age long ago.
It is written on your face that you must have exercised a powerful personality and leadership and behaved like an emperor within the organisations to which you belonged.
Nevertheless, in this affair, you committed two grave mistakes in rapid succession.
If you fail to recognise this and actually carry out what is now being proposed, then Christian teaching tells us that merely having belonged to the one percent does not entitle you to enter heaven—the teaching of the so-called narrow gate.
According to the origins of Jizo Bodhisattva, you will have your legs seized on the bank of the Sanzu River by people such as me.
Because of the enormous decline of the Kansai economy over twenty years, people lost their lives or had the paths they should have followed closed to them… The other ninety-nine percent, everyone apart from people like you, endured one hardship after another throughout those twenty years.
What a ruler must do has been simple since ancient times: govern the country, save the people, and bring peace to all under heaven.
If you contemplate bringing rubbish to one of Japan’s foremost diamond-like locations, it is all over.
If you are so arrogant as to believe that you are far more intelligent than the numerous people who devoted so much time to the North Yard, than the collective wisdom of Kansai led by the president of Osaka University, and than the wisdom of the nation—and that you alone can make the most correct decisions in Kansai—then the situation is beyond salvation.
The idea of constructing a football stadium in the North Yard is so foolish and absurd that even I, writing about it, have become sick of it.
Considering that Japan’s competitors include South Korea and the United States, it is immediately apparent that there is absolutely no possibility of the 2022 World Cup coming to Japan.
If the costs of helicopters and other expenses being incurred for something so ridiculous are being paid from tax revenues, it is utterly outrageous.
The problem is that something so ridiculous is being advanced without the citizens of Osaka ever being asked.
Until I watched the aforementioned NHK television programme at the end of June, I had absolutely no idea that the Japan Football Association and Hiramatsu had advanced the proposal this far, and even an employee of one of the companies that had successfully bid for the first-phase project had never considered it realistic, saying, “Surely that cannot happen.”
The problem is also that Japan’s mass media have not raised a single critical voice concerning a proposal involving such an enormous burden on taxpayers.