2024/04/29

The following is an entirely rough draft, but it is an important essay for the Conservative Party of Japan and for Japan itself.
Yesterday brought fine weather and, on top of that, high temperatures.
From the outset, I had thought: this does not bode well.
As I do every year, I headed to Kyoto to photograph flowers and butterflies.
[Passage omitted.]
In substance, it was a victory.
The reason the Conservative Party of Japan lost is also clear.
It plainly lies in the unbelievably low voting rate.
One reason for this, too, was the unbelievably poor coverage by the TV Asahi news program I watched for the first time at nine last night.
In other words, they had continued reporting as though this election were of little significance.
The result was an unbelievably low voting rate.
They had completely ignored Akari Iiyama’s remarkable campaign efforts.
It was therefore only natural that young people should have prioritized leisure on a sunny Sunday.
In Tokyo’s 15th district, Japan’s mass media effectively engaged in the greatest obstruction of the election.
It is plainly the established media that produced the district’s lowest-ever voting rate—a situation that can only be described as the collapse of democracy.
Why?
Because the Conservative Party of Japan had continued rejecting them outright on YouTube and elsewhere without spending a single yen on advocacy advertisements in their outlets.
With their own survival at stake, they provided coverage that completely ignored the Conservative Party of Japan.
For the sake of their survival, they brazenly continued committing clear violations of the Broadcasting Act.
Even on election day yesterday, TV Asahi’s nine o’clock news program did not so much as mention Akari Iiyama’s name.
It is clear that the largest crowd at the final street rallies on April 27 gathered for Kaori Iiyama and the Conservative Party of Japan.
Yet TV Asahi completely ignored this and brazenly broadcast the outright falsehood that the largest crowd had gathered for either Ototake or the Constitutional Democratic Party’s candidate.
The footage showed an overwhelming number of police officers and others assembled as though surrounding a small audience.
Encountering this reality for the first time, I was stunned by how casually Japanese television stations now filled their coverage with lies.
They openly demonstrated to the entire world that their enemies were Akari Iiyama and the Conservative Party of Japan.
To jump straight to the conclusion: Japan’s mass media have been completely brought under China’s influence.
For the first time, as a viewer, I saw the reality that China’s operations targeting news production at each television station had been entirely successful—that the process was already complete.
But that was not all.
They put a young couple, apparently husband and wife, who looked to me as though they might be associated with Soka Gakkai, on screen under the guise of a street interview.
They had them say such absurd things as: “We want to vote properly and seriously, but in this situation there isn’t a single candidate we want to vote for.”
If television stations are allowed to remain in this condition, Japan has no future whatsoever.
The moment I saw it, and for some time afterward, I was overcome by a gloom unlike anything I had felt before.
Japan is finished.
What am I to do now?
There is no point in continuing to write this column.
Must I spend the rest of my life living only for myself?
I felt this way because even the vote count in Tokyo’s 15th district—an election truly important to Japan—was not being reported.
The situation was the same even on YouTube.
Only the channel of the monthly magazine Hanada was broadcasting live.
Two women I did not immediately recognize were appearing, so for a moment I could not make sense of what I was watching.
After a while, I remembered having seen one of them somewhere before.
What a surprise—it was Kanna Fuji!
Ah, so she, too, was supporting the Conservative Party of Japan.
Yet accurate information about the count—the number of votes and so forth—was not coming through.
Only late at night did the vote totals finally appear on YouTube.
The gloom I had felt until then, born of despair about Japan, vanished in an instant.
For what those vote totals meant was that, in substance, Akari Iiyama had won.
What the Conservative Party of Japan must do from now on.
What follows assumes that it intends to continue making street campaigning its principal activity.
Not every member of the Diet is hopeless.
The party must bring in several people with sound convictions and establish itself as a legally recognized political party as quickly as possible.
Otherwise, it will merely suffer needless disadvantages: being classified by the media among miscellaneous political groups, being permitted to use only one campaign vehicle, and so forth.
Moreover, people who are virtually gangsters, such as those in the Tsubasa Party, exploit the weakness of the Conservative Party of Japan’s lack of recognized party status and make it the target of unbelievable intimidation and disorder.
Even when the police are informed, they provide little meaningful assistance because it lacks that status.
Their target was clearly the Conservative Party of Japan.
The attacks on other parties’ candidates were merely camouflage.
Was the mastermind China, or perhaps a camp of left-wing activists connected to what I call the “Constitutional-Communist bloc”?
Either way, unless the party obtains recognized status, it will continue to be targeted by the same devastating obstruction in future elections.
As for the election obstruction carried out this time by these people, who are practically gangsters,
we must also act decisively to file criminal complaints in order to save Japan.
The necessary expenses should be raised immediately through crowdfunding.
We must retain the best law firm, assemble a team positioned to win without fail, and ensure that those gangsters are punished.
Japan’s courts are beginning to fall under the control of people afflicted with infantile leftism, a self-denigrating view of history, and antijapanese ideology.
It is no exaggeration to say that the situation is so critical that we can no longer laugh at the farcical state of affairs in South Korea.
To deliver a rebuke to Japan’s judiciary as well, we must assemble the country’s finest legal team, seek the prosecution and conviction of everyone involved in the Tsubasa Party, and, preferably, secure punishments that send them to prison.
Their connections behind the scenes must also be exposed.
The individuals and organizations providing them with funds must be revealed to the entire world.
In one sense, this is the quickest gateway to setting society right.
Late at night, the vote totals finally became clear.
This column—the one and only blog of its kind in the postwar world—learned that Akari Iiyama was, in substance, the winner.
For now, I am conveying that fact not only to Japan but to the world.
At the same time, the Conservative Party of Japan cannot continue with its present tactics.
The established newspaper and television media have been thoroughly subjected to Chinese influence operations.
Last night, I could think of nothing beyond the uninspired idea that Ms. Arimoto and Mr. Hyakuta simply needed to appear on television more often.
Now I say it clearly.
From now on, conduct vigorous crowdfunding both before and during elections!
Come to think of it, this has long been commonplace in the United States.
Raise funds to the fullest extent possible and frequently place full-page advocacy advertisements in newspapers—this will achieve two things at once!
In particular, newspapers will not treat their best customers—those who repeatedly pay substantial advertising fees—with the discourtesy of ignoring them or refusing even to report on them.
We cannot make the established media disappear overnight.
That is precisely why we must implement the solution that flashed through my mind—the mind of a genuine genius.
Merely criticizing them and the Liberal Democratic Party on YouTube and elsewhere will only benefit the even worse—indeed, the worst—Constitutional-Communist bloc.
One thing this election coverage revealed is that many people involved in news production in the established media sympathize with that bloc.
The result also exposed the limits of a strategy that relies solely on Takashi Kawamura’s political strength.
From now on, even more than concentrating on street campaigning,
we must repeatedly seek crowdfunding contributions from the Japanese people and continue placing television and newspaper advertisements.
We must recognize that there is no other way to win the media over—or, rather, to avoid their greatest act of obstruction: ignoring us.
To be continued.