Using a land purchase controversy in Toyonaka as a case study, this essay exposes how politicians and media propagated blatant falsehoods. It argues that such SanbyakuDaigen-like sophistry, divorced from legal and logistical reality, has become widespread not only in Japan but across the world.

2017-05-02
The following is a paper I published on February 28.
For some reason, the Democratic Party and the Communist Party took it up, and TBS and TV Asahi reported it day after day as if it were a major incident.
In other words, it concerns the elementary school in Noda, Toyonaka City, which the Mainichi Shimbun and Asahi Shimbun reported extensively day after day.
I informed the world of what kind of land this property actually was.
This too must be a truth the world learned for the first time.
While talking with a friend, I remembered one thing I had forgotten to write about this matter.
With the air of a SanbyakuDaigen, he spread the malicious lie that this location was a good residential area.
If a condominium were built here, it is 100 percent certain that he himself would never buy it.
In addition to this lie, there is another serious falsehood.
He attacked the government by claiming that another school had been trying to buy the land for some five hundred million yen, and that therefore the deal was improper.
Any halfway competent real estate professional would immediately understand how malicious a lie this is.
If politicians of the Democratic Party and the media attacking the government in concert with them do not even recognize this as a lie, then they are clearly revealing themselves to be a party and media that understand nothing about real society, clinging only to the outrageous notion that Japan is an evil country, Japanese people are evil, the government is evil, and power itself is evil.
A real estate sales contract is nothing at all until it is concluded.
Moreover, when it became clear that the land contained a large volume of contaminated soil, such that during the work of reburying the polluted soil that had emerged from the site beneath what was to become the schoolyard, the stench of ammonia was so severe that workers testified they could not even eat their meals,
who on earth would buy such land for five hundred million yen or so.
This kind of story is what is called SanbyakuDaigen.
It is called sheer nonsense.
That such SanbyakuDaigen and nonsense are brazenly allowed to prevail not only in Japan but throughout the world
is something that the Japanese people and people all over the world must know.
Just as the mayor and city council members of Glendale, California, must know that the absurd claim that a war could be conducted while transporting two hundred thousand prostitutes is, as Mr. Yon, a former U.S. serviceman, has clearly pointed out, logistically impossible.