Triggered by criticism of the English ability of Japanese corporate managers, this essay exposes the inward-looking nature of Japan’s media and political class, their total lack of strategy toward the yen, the stock market, and global trade, and the 25-year collapse that followed. While South Korea, China, and Singapore built global hub airports and ports, Japan wasted time on childish fantasies such as proposing a World Cup stadium in Ginza. The result is a nation where one in seven lives in poverty, children drop out of school, women turn to hostess bars to survive, and over ten million people exist on the margins. The author concludes that the time has long come to “shuffle” the media by lottery and forcibly disperse it across six major regions.

It Is Long Past Time to “Shuffle the Media” and Force a Regional Dispersion
2010-07-21

The young acquaintance I mentioned earlier called me on the phone and said,
“After that, I was pointing out that the English ability of Japanese corporate managers and above is utterly hopeless…”

Then all the more so, that university professor is a complete fool.
“You do not know this, but the English education of our generation consisted of reading comprehension and English composition, and listening was almost nonexistent.
World history and geography, and above all the cultivation gained from reading the great books of East and West—this, in truth, is what matters most when dealing with the world at large.
In these respects, there is not a single person among Japanese employees who is inferior to the employees of Samsung.
As I also said the other day, repeated bouts of yen appreciation and the abnormally weak won have produced an irreparable gap in price competitiveness—that is all that has happened.”

The state of our country’s mass media as described above has constantly driven politicians, the very representatives of our nation, into an inward-looking posture.
And in the face of repeated yen appreciation—that is, the serious erosion of the competitiveness of the great corporations that supported Japan for sixty years—they have adopted absolutely no countermeasures.
They scarcely even had the stock market, the very foundation of capitalism, in their minds.

Journalism, which should be a profession devoted to continuous study and persistent investigation of events, has instead become something that searches for people’s flaws.
It has obsessed to an abnormal degree over political power struggles and personnel conflicts—indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that these were largely staged by the media themselves—producing over twenty-five years of nothing but a storm in a teacup.
In any organization it is natural that there is a president and employees, yet they constantly claimed that “having a president is unacceptable,” and by doing so they chased ratings or manufactured their own topics.
While they were engaged in this outrageous inward-looking national folly…

Foreign countries—especially neighboring South Korea, which has no path to survival other than expanded trade with the outside world—steadily moved ahead with the construction and development of global hub airports and hub ports.
China and Singapore did the same.

The trite excuse, “Is it right to leave debt to our children and grandchildren?” was endlessly repeated.
In the end they even reached the extreme of idiocy by declaring that, “In order to fulfill children’s dreams, we want to build a soccer stadium at Ginza 4-chome and invite the World Cup to Japan.”
If there truly exists a child whose life dream is to host the World Cup in Japan, I would like to meet such a child.
Needless to say, there is no such foolish child.

The only ones who could possibly say that such a thing is a life dream are the great fools dancing alongside that man who ruled the Japan Football Association like an emperor—
an organization that made a major contribution to nothing except the spoiling of promising youth, sacrificing everything around it to fulfill its own desires.

As a result of their foolishness over these more than twenty years, Japan has become a country where one person in seven lives in poverty,
and in fact that burden has fallen on the children.
Poverty so severe that they cannot even graduate from high school, let alone enter university,
and as a consequence, the flourishing of hostess clubs in cities throughout Japan.

They turn a blind eye to these realities.
Children are beaten down, women earn their tuition and living expenses in hostess bars,
men become otaku, clinging desperately to fragile intellectual connections in narrow worlds,
and they survive by scraping by as seasonal laborers or temporary workers.
That such people now number more than ten million is something they pretend not to see.

The time to shuffle this mass media in a “galagala-pon” fashion and forcibly disperse it by lottery across the six major regions of the country has long since arrived.

(274) John Lennon – Help Me to Help Myself – YouTube