2010-10-16
Another piece of writing worthy of a Nobel Prize has been born.
Today, I had work in the morning and went to my usual super sento bathhouse in the evening.
There, in the reclining bath, I found an answer I had never anticipated.
First, as I was leaving the office, I had said this to our company’s senior managing director… If everyone in Japan who could read were reading Shukan Asahi, I could confidently declare that Japan had achieved a true democracy, with genuine freedom of speech and the highest level of intelligence in the world.
Everyone must have thought that achieving true democracy in this country would be difficult… that it could not be done overnight…
In the reclining bath, I thought this… The cost of making Japan a truly democratic nation, with genuine freedom of speech and the highest level of intelligence in the world… is 350 yen!
If everyone in Japan who could read were reading Shukan Asahi, I could confidently declare that Japan had achieved a true democracy, with genuine freedom of speech and the highest level of intelligence in the world… And the cost is 350 yen.
You should pay it… Because, although the internet certainly is not bad… you cannot obtain all the truth for free… Just as I wrote before, there is no truth to be found simply sitting in your living room…
Because those who write about hidden truths, truths that have been concealed, are not people within the establishment… Those people could never write about them.
People who once belonged to the establishment as members of the elite… people with selfless hearts, people who keep seeking genuine intelligence and freedom… become aware of the establishment’s falsehoods and contradictions, and when their patience reaches its limit… they abandon their positions, their prestige, and their guaranteed high salaries… venture outside the establishment… and begin pursuing the truth… Their livelihood… the livelihood of those worthy people… comes from the fees paid for their writing, and nothing else.
One such person, at the age of sixty-five, wrote a wonderful piece for our country… After sixty-five years, he explained to us, concretely and completely, what kind of country ours had been.
We must reward these people more generously than those connected with the prosecution or the editorial writers of major newspapers… indeed, more generously than the enormous sums earned by those worthless entertainers.
Needless to say, tonight must also mark an end to the spectacle of these worthless people with their squashed faces and potato faces behaving as though Japan belonged to them.
Throughout history and across the world, great people have, of course, written the truth, holding that it is at the geopolitical margins that truth resides, or writing from the margins of the mind… Those within the establishment all become steeped, amid their complacent arrogance, in hypocrisy and the evils called self-preservation and egotism.
If everyone in Japan who could read were to read Shukan Asahi, this magazine would also be able to pay enormous sums to those whose writing had reached the truth.
You… think you watch television… for free, but you do not.
For you, living your one and only life, the most precious thing… your time… is being stolen by fools, while they merely amass enormous wealth.
In exchange for your watching for free, they receive money from capitalism.
There is no reason for them to make programs for you… to show you the truth… That is precisely what should have been made into a major issue: “television and money,” an issue over which the Diet should have kept raising an uproar for twenty years.
You have presumably continued to believe that television is so generous that it would make programs to help you become wiser, even though you have not paid it a single yen.
People as generous as Naoki Komuro or me are regarded by society as eccentrics, oddballs, or unusually benevolent individuals…
Ordinarily, no one will write for you or teach you for free…
That is why you should spend 350 yen to buy and read Shukan Asahi.
For just 350 yen, you can become someone possessing the highest level of intelligence in the world.
Once that happens, both you and Japan will be like an oni armed with an iron club—stronger still.