2010-10-21
You should still be able to buy it, so please do… The cost of bringing true democracy to completion is a mere 350 yen (laugh).
In this week’s issue, the regular columnists in particular, men and women, young and old, are writing truly good articles…
A single reading will also show you… just how full of deception and hypocrisy the essays of the major newspapers’ editorial writers are.
From among them, let me introduce a piece by Kozaburo Arashiyama… just a taste of it…
I think this piece brilliantly sums up what I have been saying, in Arashiyama’s own inimitable style.
The Specter Called “Citizens” — Kozaburo Arashiyama
Isn’t the Prosecution Review Commission (the Commission), which decided on the mandatory indictment of Ichiro Ozawa, just a bunch of kids gossiping around the well? Reading last week’s Shukan Asahi, I shuddered at the thought.
They are not prosecution reviewers but prosecution dogs. The Commission consists of 11 reviewers selected by lottery from among eligible voters, and their term is six months.
It monitors “whether a prosecutor’s decision not to institute prosecution was appropriate.”
When prosecutors become self-righteous and are swayed by political party forces, a Commission that keeps watch over the prosecution is useful, but for the Commission to run unchecked when the ruling and opposition parties are in a parliamentary deadlock, as they are now, is sheer madness.
To begin with, it is absurd that 11 people with an average age of 30.90 (later corrected to 33.91. They said they had forgotten to include a 37-year-old reviewer in the calculation. Furthermore, that calculation was also wrong, and the final figure was said to be 34.55. Pathetic!) should conduct a review as representatives of a population of 120 million.
The minutes of the Commission’s meetings should be disclosed anonymously, with the ages included.
Those chosen by lottery are complete amateurs, and the average age of eligible voters in Tokyo aged 69 and under is approximately 43.66, you know.
If they were selected fairly, there is no way the average age would turn out like this; wasn’t something manipulated behind the scenes?
It appears that more than half are young guys and girls in their twenties, but because the reviewers are protected by anonymity, things are arranged so that the exact details cannot be known.
This is what one calls citizens running amok.
The reviewers have to read and digest an enormous amount of investigative material, some 2,000 pages, but there is no way they could read it in about a month; in other words, they reached their decision on the basis of television news, the opinions of commentators on television programs, and newspaper reporting.
However much distrust there may be of prosecutors, this is a case in which the prosecution questioned those involved and twice decided not to indict.
Wasn’t this an emotionally driven review, with the defeated prosecution inciting the Commission out of spite?
…The rest is omitted…
Please buy it and read the rest.