2010-9-20
In my day, none of the most outstanding people thought of becoming politicians from the outset… Yet, as a result… as with a senior alumnus of my alma mater, who became Director-General of the Budget Bureau of the Ministry of Finance… they reached the pinnacle of the elite, and naturally, their work was to think about running the country… It would be no exaggeration to say that the most important thing in governing a country is the economy, and culture follows after it… The supply of outstanding people who would enter politics was assured.
Who created the present situation, in which hereditary politicians and their kind are increasing more and more?
What our country’s major newspapers and mass media recognize and what I recognize are diametrically opposed.
The misfortune of 185 years ago… The turntable of civilization had not yet turned to the United States… It was an era when the turntable of civilization belonged to Britain, the last champion in the chain of colonialism.
Passage omitted.
The worst war in history.
With nothing left… as Yoko Ono sang… Hiroshima, sky is always blue… Having gained the freedom attested to by the blue sky above our heads, we were fortunately not concentrated entirely in Tokyo as we are today.
Outstanding minds existed throughout the country.
Everyone worked hard.
And they brought about a miracle… It was something important, different from advancing by virtue of having a population of 1.3 billion.
What ruined it was not the economic supremacy you speak of… Since it is capitalism, it is natural that the economy should take precedence.
Your democracy had no backbone…
I became a complete outsider, in accordance with the ordeal God had given me, and devoted myself first to living…
In the world of business, I worked hard, repeating the fundamentals.
More than twenty years ago, there was a brief moment when I should have retired and begun writing, but God did not allow it…
Looking back now, was it a matter of: You still have not studied enough, nor gained enough insight into the economy, the foundation of the nation?
The suffering caused by misfortune in my family from childhood through youth was no simple matter either, but I think the suffering of these twenty years was even greater…
Because it was economic suffering, the suffering of having my path as an entrepreneur closed off.
Naturally, I had no room to begin putting words into writing as I do now.
Although you had more than enough.
Passage omitted
In other words, democracy had not been completed at all.
The fatal negligence of those of you who are not engaged in business… Your system must have made it so… Mistaking the taking of orders at press clubs for democracy, you lost sight of true journalism; if you had thought with your own minds and continued to reflect, things would not have turned out this way.
To begin with, those who are truly first-rate always look at the essence, at the root.
There is no “I” there.
Those who are second-rate always look at superficial techniques and think about themselves.
If you read my writing in its entirety, you should understand that our country’s setbacks stem from the fact that its highest-level mass media were first-rate in cultural matters such as book-review sections, but second-rate in economics.
I propose that, as soon as possible, the six television stations should first be dispersed to the regions.
For example, as is conspicuous here on Ameba, there is an astonishing number of entertainers… most of them are lovely people.
And all of them are in Tokyo.
She, or they, would disperse to the regions together with the television stations they mainly work with.
The regions would not merely become vibrant in an instant; the tendency for everyone and their brother to head to Tokyo would also end in an instant.
Newspapers and magazines would also disperse to their respective regions.
Until I said this, politicians and the mass media had been speaking of decentralization without substance or soul, as you readers must now have realized.
People gather, the economy flourishes.
Mass media, if you think yourselves first-rate, you should take the lead in dispersing to the seven major regions.
Why? Because first-rate culture does not grow where there is no first-rate intelligence.
Economic exhaustion and decline bring about cultural exhaustion and decline.
The result is the spread, throughout every region over these twenty years, of Japan as an archipelago of murders.
Who created it?
Passage omitted.
You yourselves alone headed to Tokyo.
The bill for that is now coming due, and it is one hundred percent not the result of economic supremacy, as you say.
It is the opposite.
Every day, from morning until night, whichever channel one turns to, everyone looks happy, dressed up, adorned, beautiful, and laughing.
Meanwhile, what of one’s own life in a region left behind?
What a gulf! What misery.
And on top of that, over these twenty years, even jobs have disappeared.
Kazumi Takahashi once wrote: “If one considers life to consist of leaving home to go to work, then returning to rest, no emperor is needed there.”
If you realize the danger of what you are now doing before ninety percent of the nation’s people, from morning… from the time they leave home… until they rest… beginning to mistake yourselves for emperors and, in particular, dominating their living rooms,
You should choose to disperse to the regions immediately and change the way you now exist.
Commercial broadcasters, what you are doing is a new totalitarianism, and although you are now utterly foolish, you reign over our country as emperors.
If you were true journalists, surely you could not remain in such a position.
Disperse to the regions now… Your model is Yoji Yamada, the greatest film director of our time.
The beauty of places throughout Japan that he captured on film, particularly in “It’s Tough Being a Man.”
The “beautiful places… How fair this place” that exist in countless numbers in each region… Capture on film those beautiful places where this world and the next seem to be connected, and there devote your thoughts to philosophy…
To capture on film our finite lives… being alive, dying… surely that is the duty of people involved in visual media.
I declare that murders and the number of suicides, which may amount to as many as 35,000 people, would decrease substantially.
Because what drives people most deeply into despair is, in comparison with the dazzling splendor of those of you in Tokyo, now at the height of your success, appearing through screens and newspapers,
The despair of knowing that, although they did not intend to live this way, although they have lived as hard and desperately as they could, they have no savings and have merely grown old and decrepit, or have no choice but to decay as they are; nothing robs them of the will to live more than this.
You are such that people who are now in the regions, or who do not even have jobs, feel despair at your brilliance…
You… you yourselves should know that you are not such beings…
That is precisely why you should disperse to the regions as soon as possible.
You six commercial broadcasting companies. You newspaper and magazine companies.
Your role is to portray and show the truth, surely not to make people who live on the land and at sea taste despair through your pretension and foolishness.
In the seas, the mountains, and the forests, there is an infinity of thought to be deepened.
Realize as soon as possible that it is Tokyo that lacks true reflection.
That is the urgent task of those of you who make your living by writing and speaking.