This article exposes how the Asahi Shimbun manipulated public opinion to sell off Japan’s most valuable national land—the Umeda North Yard—at a fraction of its true value during a deep deflationary period, while diverting attention to unrelated land issues through political distortion.

March 3, 2017
The period during which the first and second phases of construction of the Nakanoshima Festival Tower—upon which my own company staked its very fate—were carried out, completed, and tenants were recruited, overlapped with the first and second phases of the sale of the Umeda North Yard.
At that very time, during the first-phase sale of the North Yard, the Asahi Shimbun published peculiar articles warning that if the land were sold at too high a price through open bidding, there might be concerns about a resurgence of the economic bubble.
This was done not during a bubble, but in the midst of extreme deflation, when there were hardly any tenants for office buildings.
In doing so, the Asahi Shimbun effectively led a fraudulent scheme that allowed the Umeda North Yard—national property in substance, and one of Japan’s most prestigious commercial districts, rivaling Ginza—to be sold off at a “half-price, then eight-tenths” bargain.
Furthermore, it was also the Asahi Shimbun that plunged the execution of the project into confusion, leaving the second-phase development still undecided to this day.
Meanwhile, land in Toyonaka’s Noda district—originally a heavy industrial and factory zone, likely seized by the state—was revealed to have massive soil contamination buried beneath it.
Yet a slick-tongued Democratic Party legislator went so far as to describe such land in a Diet committee as a “good residential area,” an act of sheer malice.
There is little doubt that this, too, was orchestrated under the guidance of the Asahi Shimbun.
I want to say this to the slick-tongued legislators of the Democratic Party and the Communist Party, as well as to the Asahi Shimbun itself.
If you truly believe that the few hundred million yen reduction—granted in exchange for permanently waiving liability for soil contamination on this third-rate plot of land—is a grave national problem, then you should immediately calculate the loss incurred by selling the vast commercial land of the Umeda North Yard’s first phase at “half-price, then eight-tenths,” when it should naturally have fetched over 100 million yen per tsubo, and pursue that loss in the Diet.
Words of abuse spring unbidden to my lips toward you—what utter fools and blockheads you are.
You behave as though you are not even aware that you are committing acts of “bottomless evil” and “plausible lies.”
You may believe that, like China and South Korea, you cannot be punished under the laws of the living world, but the place where you will ultimately fall is nothing other than hell.
There, King Enma will be waiting for you with the harshest of punishments.
As the reincarnation of Kūkai and Oda Nobunaga, I proclaim this to you in a thunderous voice.
To be continued.