2010-7-21
The young acquaintance mentioned earlier telephoned me and said, “After that, he pointed out that the English ability of people at managerial level and above in Japanese companies was completely inadequate…”
If that is the case, then that university professor is even more of a complete idiot.
“You may not know this, but the English education received by people of our generation consisted of reading comprehension and English composition, while listening instruction was virtually nonexistent.
In terms of knowledge of world history and geography and the cultural education gained by reading the books of every age and country—which is, in truth, the most important thing when dealing with the world—not a single one of them is inferior to a Samsung employee.
As I said the other day, the yen rises whenever anything happens, while the won becomes abnormally weak, and as this cycle has been repeated, an irreparable gap has simply developed: an enormous difference in product-pricing power, which equals competitiveness.”
The state of our country’s mass media, as described above, has needlessly kept politicians—and their representative, who is the representative of our country—constantly looking inward, leaving them with no policy whatsoever in response to the repeated appreciation of the yen, which has severely deprived the outstanding major corporations that supported Japan throughout the past sixty years of their competitiveness.
The stock market, the very foundation of capitalism, was not even present in their minds.
Journalism’s work should be to continue studying and investigating events.
Instead, it has devoted itself to finding faults in other people and has become abnormally obsessed with political manoeuvring and struggles over personnel appointments—ultimately producing, and it would not be an exaggeration to say staging, a continuous twenty-five-year series of storms in a teacup…
While they constantly said incomprehensible things such as that, although it is perfectly natural for an organisation to have a president and employees, the existence of a president was somehow unacceptable, and while they pursued television ratings and manufactured their own topics, they turned Japan into an outrageously inward-looking and idiotic country…
Foreign countries—especially neighbouring South Korea, which had no path to survival other than expanding its trade with other countries—steadily began developing international hub airports and hub ports.
China and Singapore did the same.
They reached the ultimate extreme of stupidity with their customary, self-serving phrase, “Is it right to leave debts to our children and grandchildren?” and finally began saying that, in order to fulfil children’s dreams, they wanted to build a football stadium on a site even more valuable than Ginza 4-chome and bring the World Cup to Japan…
If there truly is a child whose life’s dream is to bring the World Cup to Japan, I would like to meet that child…
It goes without saying that no such foolish child exists.
The only people who would say something so absurd as to call that their life’s dream are that emperor-like man in the Japan Football Association, an organisation that made a major contribution only to spoiling fine young people and wants to fulfil its own desires even at the cost of sacrificing everyone around it, and the complete fools dancing along with him.
As a result of their foolishness over the past twenty-odd years, Japan has become a country in which one person in seven lives in poverty, and the burden is, in fact, falling upon the children…
There is poverty so severe that some cannot even graduate from high school, let alone attend university, and one consequence is the prosperity of hostess clubs in cities throughout Japan.
They ignore this reality in which children are being hurt, women earn their tuition and living expenses by working in hostess clubs, and men become otaku and cling desperately to intellectual connections within narrow worlds.
They barely manage to survive by working as seasonal labourers or temporary employees.
They pretend not to know that the number of such people has exceeded ten million.
The time to dismantle and completely shake up this mass media and forcibly disperse it by lottery among the six major regions should have arrived long ago.