This essay condemns Japan’s long-term deflation as a historic failure of policy and leadership, tracing responsibility to central bank officials, the Asahi Shimbun’s role in shaping public discourse, and external manipulation by South Korea and China. It asks why those involved could remain unmoved even after creating three decades of deflation.

2016-05-22

That is precisely why they were able to remain completely untroubled even after creating three decades of deflation.
Above the previous chapter, there is a book review of The Day the Central Bank Ends by Mitsuru Iwamura, a man born in 1950 who once served as a Bank of Japan councillor, but I thought this was an utterly worthless book.
This is because this man must have been serving as a Bank of Japan councillor at the very time when the Bank of Japan was continuing to create “Japan’s Lost Twenty Years.”
Until Shinzo Abe reappeared, he must have been one of the principal figures responsible for creating Japan’s uniquely long-term deflation—the first such case among advanced nations.
Japan’s long-term deflation is now nothing less than a historic example of policy paralysis and misgovernance, and countries around the world detest it like a venomous snake or scorpion.
As I have stated many times, it was also the Asahi Shimbun that created this situation.
I am now convinced that the Asahi Shimbun was a company completely controlled by the governments of South Korea and China, and by their information services—that is, their intelligence agencies.
What South Korea and China have consistently sought to do is to diminish Japan and keep it a political prisoner within the international community.
They have sought to prevent Japanese people from ever fully recognizing the true scale of Japan as a nation.
At the same time, by constantly manipulating media such as the Asahi Shimbun, they continued to set traps to extract massive amounts of aid from Japan—a country that is in reality a global power and, economically, the world’s superpower second only to the United States—until China finally drew out more than 30 trillion yen, the largest amount of aid in human history, part of which I have already noted must have been diverted to aid for Africa.
South Korea, for its part, obtained aid amounting to three times its national budget at the time, linking it to the “Miracle on the Han River” and rapidly developing its economy.
Commentators who understood the true nature of the Asahi Shimbun continued to describe it as a newspaper that published self-abasing articles.
In reality, however, it was nothing of the sort.
In this chapter, I define for the first time in Japan that it was completely in the hands of South Korea and China—that it was not self-abasement at all, but simply writing exactly what it was directed to write and allowing their intentions to permeate every corner of Japan.
Recently, I realized that media such as the Asahi Shimbun have absolutely no desire to make their own country larger or stronger, or even to think in those terms, and I was the first in the world to write this fact.
I am convinced that the Asahi Shimbun had absolutely no wish to make Japan larger or stronger because it was being manipulated by South Korea and China.
There is little doubt that this author, Iwamura, was also a subscriber to the Asahi Shimbun.
Therefore, it is no exaggeration to say that he too was indirectly manipulated by South Korea and China,
and that he must have had no conception whatsoever of wanting to make Japan a great nation or a strong nation.
That is precisely why he could remain completely untroubled even after creating three decades of deflation.