2010-11-2
What a treasure Shukan Asahi is for Japan!…
For this will continue for quite some time before I post an examination comparable to “The Castle of Sand,” which I wrote about at the outset…
Of course, this is last week’s issue.
Cooking oil will become so expensive that we will no longer be able to buy it!
Such a rumor swept through the population, and at a supermarket in a major city in inland China, hundreds of people rushed for discounted goods as soon as the doors opened.
Customers fell over one another, and three people died—.
In fact, this happened three years ago.
Recently, however, signs of a similar danger have begun to emerge.
The common factor is rapidly accelerating food inflation within China.
At the time of that incident, cooking oil reportedly rose in price by about 30 percent in three months.
More recently, in the third week of September, cucumbers rose by 11.2 percent compared with the previous week.
Sharp increases in the prices of agricultural products such as chili peppers and garlic, believed to be caused by speculation, have occurred repeatedly since the end of last year.
Looking at September’s consumer price index, the year-on-year increase for “non-food items” was 1.4 percent, while that for “food” reached as much as 8 percent.
Among low-income households, food expenses are said to account for more than 40 percent of consumer spending.
Rising food prices could lead directly to an “inability to make ends meet.”
“Food inflation has an impact powerful enough to bring China face to face with ‘collapse.’
The anger of ordinary people over soaring vegetable prices in 1986–87 is also said to have been an undercurrent of the Tiananmen Square incident of 1989.”
(A researcher knowledgeable about China)
Ominously, this time too, demonstrations have occurred one after another in various places, beginning in Chengdu and elsewhere on October 16.
These are called “anti-Japanese demonstrations,” but what the participants are shouting is reportedly not, in fact, solely “anti-Japanese.”
Several experts unanimously point out the following.
“There is also a sense in which Japan has been made a ‘scapegoat.’
Might it be that, just as various grievances had been accumulating among ordinary people, the fishing boat collision incident off the Senkaku Islands occurred and provided a pretext for demonstrations?”
Whereas the “anti-Japanese demonstrations” of 2005 took place in Beijing and Shanghai, where Japan’s embassy and consulate-general are located, this time they have occurred in succession in cities unrelated to those diplomatic establishments.
Some experts regard this as “circumstantial evidence.”
Taken together, the experts’ views suggest that the grievances are rooted in “increased expenditure,” “reduced income,” and the “inequality” that has widened alongside them.
＊As I was rewriting this article on 2026.10.13, the suspicion I had harbored about the sudden surge in rice prices some years ago turned into conviction.
My suspicion that it must have been the work of Chinese people turned into conviction.
All the more so because it was something that occurred shortly after the Takaichi administration took office.
What kind of country is China?… It is a country of “bottomless evil” and “plausible lies.”
This conclusion by Tadao Umesao, who was the world’s greatest anthropologist and folklorist, was the result of several years of fieldwork in almost every province of China.
Umesao and the essence of his scholarship stood at the very opposite of armchair theorizing.
My encounter with him… an encounter through his achievements and books… took place after his death, at his solo exhibition—an exhibition of his achievements—a retrospective commemorating him, held at the Museum of Ethnology on the former Expo grounds.
My genius responded instantly to the words, What kind of country is China?… It is a country of “bottomless evil” and “plausible lies.”
I felt that this was also the testament he had left to Japan and the world.
As readers know, I convey his testament to Japan and the world so frequently that it would hardly be an exaggeration to say that not a day goes by without those words appearing in this column.