Literary Master 1983

Chapter 127 Matsunaga's News Report

The excited Matsunaga returned to the Asahi Shimbun's headquarters in Japan, Tsukiji 5-chome, Chuo-ku, Tokyo. Although it was already ten o'clock, the lights in the office were still on.

Young people are working overtime. The news industry is one of the industries with the most irregular working hours. Sometimes when a big news comes out, the written content is required to be added within two or three hours before typesetting and printing.

"Hello, senior!"

"Thank you for your hard work, senior!"

As soon as they saw Matsunaga's appearance, the new juniors immediately bowed to him and greeted him.

Matsunaga is a well-known investigative reporter and a top graduate of the University of Tokyo. Four years ago, he was one of the few reporters in Japan sent to China to conduct an investigation. Behind the Asahi Shimbun is a series of large Japanese conglomerates that have united to invest in China.

The reports written by Matsunaga have a very high reputation in the industry, and he is the ace of the company.

In the past, when Matsunaga met these young people, he would just nod and ignore them. Today, he patted one of the young men on the shoulder for the first time and said, "You've worked hard."

"——Senior, it's not hard!"

"How can it not be tiring? It's almost ten o'clock. If you have nothing to do, why don't you go back?"

He meant what he said sincerely, but to Matsunaga's surprise, the younger generations were instead terrified, thinking that Matsunaga was expressing his dissatisfaction with them.

A junior knelt down and said, "Senior! I will live in the company and will never be so lazy again!"

The others bowed and waited for Matsunaga to lecture them. Someone said, "Please punish us severely."

At this moment, Matsunaga felt mixed emotions and his mouth felt bitter. Could it be that the Chinese writer Lu Xun felt similarly sad after seeing Runtu again?
All he could say was: "Be nice to yourselves."

Then, here Matsunaga wrote an editorial: "The Nuclear Age: After Japan's Destruction."

"Japan is buying up the entire United States, achieving something it couldn't do even before the war."

"Our per capita income will reach $1.3, second only to the United States among the large developed economies in the West; residents will go shopping like crazy in Paris and Milan, as if they were cabbages; Sony will become the Zero fighter of the new era, and Americans will use it to photograph the blue sky and sea on the West Coast; Toyota family cars will become another kind of Azuki tank, this "war vehicle" will unexpectedly gallop in the most developed metropolises in Europe and the United States; luxury cruise ships built in Yokohama will pass through every ocean in the world and stop in Hawaii, with Japanese passengers on board... Nearly forty years after the war, Japan has achieved extremely brilliant economic achievements."

"But is there a price being paid that we don't know about yet, that's hiding in the dark and we're not noticing?"

"In fact, the Japanese are the people with the longest working hours per capita in the world. Many employees feel ashamed of leaving get off work on time. If a man goes home too early every day, his wife will think that he is not valued in the company. The earliest "death from overwork" comes from Japanese. The cost of living in Japan is much higher than other developed countries. In such a prosperous economic era, Japan has become one of the countries with the highest suicide rate in the world, and one-third of them are due to overwork."

"We are also a nation that never sleeps. Office workers have no personal life to speak of. After working overtime, they must go to new social events, followed by a second or even a third one, and go home at two in the morning - and get up early to go to work again the next morning. The fierce competition has made us the world's least sleep-deprived nation, with less than six hours, one hour less than Finland, the second-ranked Arctic country." "Expensive seasonal windbreakers, indoor ski resorts built on the seaside, waving 10,000 yuan bills while waiting for the next taxi - this may be a disease. We don't know yet that the things that make us proud are the things that will destroy us."

At this point, Matsunaga recalled Yu Che’s introduction to nuclear age literature. He wrote the three main points that Yu Che summarized in the article: “extremely high technology and extremely low living standards, indestructible order, and spontaneous destruction of people”, and then said, “The Chinese writer Yu Che depicted such a world for us…”

"In the wasteland after the nuclear war, people all over the world have to compete for pitiful resources. At the same time, technology is still developing, material desires are still being satisfied in every possible way, and people from different classes are heading towards their common destruction under a sophisticated order of terror."

"This is almost a literary setting tailor-made for Japanese society, making all our social problems even more extreme. Indeed, Japan is a country that imports most of its materials. If we were to become an isolated island, nearly one-third of the residents would starve to death within 15 days. People from all walks of life are chasing material desires, and even reduce their food expenses for this purpose. This is simply insane. Except for the top, no one is satisfied with the status quo, no one is happy for a long time, and no one wants to change it."

“We don’t know what we are obeying either. But we are obeying absolutely. When we don’t know why we are obeying, I’m afraid disaster is about to come.”

After that, Matsunaga added a photo of the Tokyo Writers' Club, meaning that this was not an absurd imagination, but something that was discussed by literary scholars.

The manuscript was sent to the editorial office, and after discussion, the report was listed in the editorial column.

Since the last century, Asahi Shimbun has been famous for its editorial columns, which are written by fixed columnists or the editorial department collectively and are regularly placed at the bottom of the front page of the newspaper.

The column was concise and covered many aspects including politics, economy, culture, education, etc. Everything from baseball stars to politicians could be discussed, and it was very popular among Japanese readers, which was equivalent to a "hot search" topic at the time.

Therefore, although Asahi Shimbun is not the newspaper with the largest circulation in Japan, but has long been ranked second, these editorials have enabled it to maintain the color of an "elite newspaper" among Japanese newspapers, with the highest educated readers.

One in four readers has a bachelor's degree or above. Correspondingly, its readers' income is the highest among all newspapers.

——These are exactly the people who should be vigilant in what Yu Qie calls “nuclear age literature”.

Early in the morning, a new day began, an ordinary working day. On the subway, in the company's coffee shop, one-third of the people in Tokyo saw the editorial of the Asahi Shimbun.

The headline of the news that day was "Finance Ministry officials support signing an agreement to appreciate the yen next year" - at that time, this famous agreement was not yet called the Plaza Accord, and people did not know what drastic impact the agreement would have on Japan.

All we know is that according to estimates by officials from the Ministry of Finance, after the signing of this agreement, the Japanese will become even richer. They are already very rich now, but the Ministry of Finance says that better days are yet to come.

Further down is the editorial "The Nuclear Age: After Japan's Destruction", which is less than a thousand words and tells the story of a Chinese writer's literary vision after visiting Japan.

At an impromptu lecture held at the Chinese Philosophy Research Society at the University of Tokyo, journalist Matsunaga concluded that "Japan is heading towards death in a grand manner."

Although newspapers always exaggerate their statements to attract attention, the headlines say that good days are ahead, but the editorials below say that Japan is about to be destroyed. This is really a mix of left and right, top and bottom.

(End of this chapter)