Once again the US exporting "corporate democracy"
But, there are thousands of little things that add up to surprising levels of control.
So, the surprising thing is not that it works, but that nobody thinks of it in terms of free speech. After all, of course news organizations will chase profits so access becomes a useful tool.
PS: Press releases are not just a means of corporations using lazy reporters to spread there message.
Consider, did the Fed have anything to do with the recent housing bubble and burst? Well, bubbles become self sustaining up to a point, but was there anything that caused a huge amount of money to slosh into the housing market?
Now, let's take a step back. Are houses a good investment in the abstract?
As mentioned in the article, there already are massive protests around this issue.
What more could they do? Try to take down the government by force? Even if they succeeded, I'm sure the U.S. would be happy to step in to "calm the waters" and impose martial law outright.
It is true though that with FPTP, you don't really need a majority to win elections either so it might be a wash.
The last time they tried that (2009), the different party was literally more of the same. The only thing worth mentioning about the following two elections was their extremely low turnout (the lowest ever in Japan's modern history in the latter).
I'm assuming you have not studied what happened to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the last American of his level of influence to fundamentally criticize the government.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King,_Jr.#FBI_an...
But there's a difference between government stifling of speech illegally and government stifling of speech legally. At least with the former there are legal avenues that can be pursued to correct the situation.
Yes, you can litigate absurdly expensive court battles (assuming the government allows itself to be sued), have your voice silenced for the years and years your case takes to work its way through the courts, and then, assuming you win, finally get to say what you want a whole decade or more after the fact.
Legal avenues are great like that for people that want to delay, distract, and disrupt.
There's a huge difference between a government being able to send the police in broad daylight to do its bidding and beat you up or jail you for breaking the "subversive speech law" vs having to deal with some bureaucratic agency making you jump through endless hoops trying to get your group's 501c tax status.
That's all before you even think about getting into a courtroom.
> For many years, Washington’s Japan-handlers have pressed Tokyo to introduce repressive legislation to protect secrets concerning the US-Japan security alliance