This article was originally published on October 9, 2010.
How should politics and the press address the people’s taxes and livelihoods?
Although written against the backdrop of the political situation at the time, I am republishing it to put its fundamental question before the world once again.
Contempt Is What Lies Right Next to Despair.
2010-10-9
Mr. Tanaka, what you were saying…
The Budget Committee is…a forum where the ruling party explains where, how much, and for what purpose the people’s tax money will be spent, and the opposition checks how much economic benefit that spending will produce and how many poor people it will help…whether there is waste, or whether any former bureaucrats in cushy post-retirement jobs are skimming money along the way—a forum for examining such things…
You are absolutely right.
The Asahi editorials—that is, the editorial writers—are so appalling that I threw those very words straight back at them…
I wondered how they could keep writing such things every day; I could not possibly bear to go along with them to the end, and their stupidity left me dumbfounded.
I could not help thinking about why this was happening…
Though I was utterly sick and tired of it…
Because one rarely encounters fools of this magnitude.
In other words, this is happening because both sides are utter blockheads.
On one side are those who make their living with their pens…and politics, essentially, is their bread and butter…
What is more, they are highly paid…but compared with businesspeople and companies, they do not pay much in taxes…
Their salaries arrive without fail every month, and their taxes are withheld, so they have never once struggled to pay their taxes.
On the other side are the politicians…right now, I feel like calling them political hacks…
They, too, do not earn their pay by tilling rice fields themselves…
The other day, T of Kurikinton told me something they had looked up online: members of the House of Councillors supposedly receive the highest pay…when their various privileges and so forth are added up, it amounts to the equivalent of an annual income of 80 million yen (I feel that even taking the time to verify this would be a waste, so I ask you, my readers, to check it yourselves).
The point is that neither of these groups really has any sense of working to pay their taxes.
One earns a living writing worthless prose, the other by talking…
Taxes are somebody else’s concern.
That is why both sides can engross themselves in worthless scandals.
Fools who watch only television and read only newspapers may not realize it, but a considerable number of citizens know that the prosecutors tried to crush the ruling party…
Do the Jihentō, Kōhentō, Kyōhentō, Shahentō, Minhenotō, etc., not even know what a majority of the people know…?
Or have you yourselves never made an incorrect entry of even a single yen…?
Do you not know better than anyone that donations to politicians depend on those politicians’ clout…?
When you were nobodies, surely hardly anyone donated to you.
Do you, like those esteemed editorial writers on the other side, seriously believe that what eleven people with an average age of thirty thought constitutes the voice of the people…?
A conscientious female Asahi journalist later investigated and told us at least that those said to have filed the complaint were conservatives in their sixties…
But not a single one has disclosed their name or affiliation.
Since when has Japan become a country where some twenty people whose names and faces we do not even know can judge an individual and even hold the nation’s destiny in their hands…since when has it become a country like a dictatorship?
Asahi editorial writers, opposition and ruling-party politicians (right now, I want to call you nothing but political hacks), explain it to me so that I can understand…
You utter blockheads, you “horse-and-deer” fools posing as learned authorities.
Your lofty pronouncements, overflowing with hypocrisy, cannot save even one poor person—which means they cannot save the nation—and that is not all:
You are defiling words…what matters most…to human beings.
In that respect, I will never forgive you, and I hold you in fierce contempt.
Yours.
That idiotic back-and-forth of yours—God will no longer permit it…
Because Japan has almost no time left.