This article argues that both Japan’s prolonged deflation and the 10% consumption tax hike were the result of public opinion shaped by the Asahi Shimbun. It exposes the Ministry of Finance’s failure to offer solutions to deflation, the political responsibility behind the tax increase, and the Japanese Communist Party’s inaction despite the severe impact on low-income households.

The flustered behavior of the Minister of Finance and the Ministry of Finance during yesterday’s Diet deliberations should be described as the exposure of the folly — or perhaps the culpability — behind the decision to raise the consumption tax to 10 percent. At the time this increase was approved, the Ministry of Finance was unable to present any solution whatsoever to Japan’s long-term deflation, a condition that nations around the world now strive above all else to avoid. Yet it forced through this single bad law alone.

Needless to say, both Japan’s long-term deflation and the 10 percent consumption tax increase were created through the shaping of public opinion by the Asahi Shimbun.

However, because the decision was made by a resolution of the Diet, even the Japanese Communist Party cannot put on airs or strike self-righteous poses. At that time, the Communist Party mobilized even today’s students, who barely study at all, to oppose, under the childish and vicious guise of “anti-war” slogans, the kinds of laws that every nation in the world possesses in order to defend itself. They persistently displayed to the world a grotesque spectacle of pseudo–kindergarten morality. Yet when it came to the consumption tax increase — which should have dealt the greatest blow to low-income households — they did absolutely nothing. They carried out no movement at all and allowed the resolution to pass.