On March 21, 2011, confusion in relief supply transport and the prime minister’s useless inspection revealed the cabinet’s incompetence. This essay condemns how television and politics spread vulgarity for over two decades, contrasting the decency of disaster victims with the indecency of panic buying and shallow comedy.

In a blog post from March 21, 2011, the author harshly criticizes the Naoto Kan cabinet’s incompetent response to the Great East Japan Earthquake, citing inefficient aid distribution and the Prime Minister’s unnecessary on-site inspections. The author blames the media for the crisis, arguing that decades of creating “vulgar” TV programs led to the “indecency” seen in panic buying in the Tokyo metropolitan area. The piece contrasts this with the true “decency” of the disaster-affected people, which the author attributes to their connection with nature, and concludes with a scathing critique of the Osaka media for its intellectual shallowness.

This ○○○ cabinet was, just as I pointed out, a ○○○○ cabinet.
March 21, 2011.

(Honorifics omitted)
What made me think “hmm?” has now become reality, as NHK has just broadcast.
The cabinet decided that “relief supplies must go through local governments as the point of contact, and the Self-Defense Forces will transport them there.”
But I immediately wondered—at such a time, is it right to impose such restrictions?

The supplies had arrived in abundance, yet they sat idle in warehouses.
Instructions for destinations changed again and again.
Supplies were loaded, advanced, unloaded in other warehouses, destinations altered—such absurd behavior.

This time, television did remarkably well.
The will and execution power of private citizens, wanting to help somehow, were unprecedented.
Had that will been entrusted, those in evacuation centers would not have suffered from shortages of food and drink, nor from the cold of lacking blankets.

What Naoto Kan—the hopeless fool—did was a useless, unnecessary inspection.
It was a major negative, exactly as I had fiercely criticized.
Iijima Isao wrote as much this morning in the Asahi.

Naoto Kan, remove yourself.
That is the only thing you should do.
And Hoshi, Soga—you too must immediately leave the stage.

This disaster has put an end to everything you have been doing.
To put it bluntly: pretenses, repeated lies, makeshift measures, the thick skin born of no reflection, lack of principle, lack of discernment, lack of philosophy—all of that era is over.

The consequence of watching television with a mental age of 13 for more than twenty years—one manifestation of which is the panic buying in the Tokyo metropolitan area.
As I have said many times, vulgar television produces nothing but vulgarity.
This has been proved perfectly.
Why not measure how saturated society has become with the vulgarity created by television?
There are surely one or two such people around you.
Many who grew up watching vulgar television, spreading vulgarity, and ultimately descending into crime.
Television executives must reflect as if their lives depended on it.

The decency of the disaster victims is nurtured by the sea and the mountains.
The indecency of people in the Tokyo metropolitan area, and of those one or two around you, is the product of vulgar television, made over more than twenty years.
The panic buying we now see is the result.

What has been produced by base laughter?
Nothing of worth.
Living my life in Osaka, I feel this acutely.
Such worthless things have wounded Japanese decency terribly.
They are far removed from the decency given by the sea, mountains, rivers, and forests.
They are not to be imitated.
They are precisely the indecency of Asia—poverty, lack of intellect, shallow democracy, bullying, impulsive thought, shallow thinking, bathroom 100-watt light, lies, rash tempers, etc.

This is no time to laugh for a moment’s amusement.
That poison may already have reached the very core of your being.
It is time to realize that no life can be saved by worthless laughter.

The Osaka Asahi Shimbun is particularly guilty—declaring that Osaka’s culture is comedy, lining up fools.
It is this poverty of intellect, this contemptible conformism, that Asahi ought to be ashamed of.