2010-10-10
At the super sento bathhouse I visit as a weekend ritual…while I was dozing in the reclining bath, I was dreaming…
I was in the public gallery of the Diet, and I raised my voice in a roar that resounded throughout the chamber: “That is not what members of the Diet should be doing, is it? Scrutinize the budget thoroughly, to the very end.”
That was when I woke up, but the older fellow beside me was sleeping with his mouth open, snoring loudly, so that roar had existed only in my dream.
Anyone who subscribes to Asahi Shimbun and reads its editorials would have understood the chapter “The Media’s Accountability” immediately, but since many of my readers probably do not subscribe to Asahi Shimbun, I will explain.
It was Friday’s editorial, whose subheading was…“Ozawa’s Accountability,” and whose main heading was…“Is the Democratic Party Content with This?”
The conclusions in the individual sections are almost all those of the editorial writer…
In other words, I threw every one of those conclusions back at the person who wrote that editorial, saying that they applied to you yourselves.
Thinking it would be a waste to leave it only on my blog, I emailed it through Asahi Shimbun’s website to the editorial writer who had written it, in its entirety, exactly as it was…along with the piece I had written first thing that morning.
Likewise, I sent it through the Democratic Party’s website, in its entirety, exactly as it was.
This is because I believe that, even if they are utter fools to the core, surely they cannot have lost all sensitivity to words.
What filled me with gloom when night came was what Asahi’s editorial writers, whom I had been reading for more than forty years, were doing…
The fact that Asahi, too, had joined in and been doing this…began eating away at my heart like poison.
To neutralize that vile poison…for the editorial was a veritable specimen of hypocrisy…what I murmured late at night became the piece that followed.