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Some people say that the tempo of social life is proportional to the level of the country's key industries. Accordingly, in agricultural countries, social life is estab-lished according to the transition of time: plowing farmland, sowing seeds, and harvesting crops. While in industrial countries, the daily norm is based on the degree of modernization, with increments of hours, minutes, and seconds. Japan is shedding its heavy and large industrial structure and shifting its center of gravity at each tick of the clock to the electronics industry, which is becoming in-creasingly high-tech. Since the quality of labor in key industries is becoming similarly modulated, it can be said that our society lives under the ticking of the second hand. (16.1.1995)

Ueno-san visited me on December 8! When she came in wearing a Dracula mask, the security officer told her to take it off. He seemed to be good-natured, so he must have just been caught off guard. When I think about it, I can’t help but burst into laughter. On her way out, she held a brief poetry reading for me. I was the only one there to listen, but as she waved her arms up and down, she said, "No matter how much you are beaten down, you will not be defeated! This is courage, and your spiritual freedom is a treasure that can never be taken away." (December 12, 1985)

My sewing machine has been giving me trouble. The "feed," the part that moves the fabric is worn out, so the machine sometimes spins out and the needle stitches over the same place. The machine is rumored to have been in use since the ‘ancient’ days of Jyoko Aishi ("The Sad Story of Women Factory Laborers"), so it is not easy to replace parts, but we still manage to meet our quota...
In a special program I saw on TV a while back, there was a scene where an overseas corporation was making shoes in China. When I looked closely at the young women sewing leather goods, I saw that they were using the same sewing machine as mine.
I was told that Achilles, which used to make the same shoe products, pulled out of this prison because we could no longer compete with products from Asia. Because the 3K industries that use a lot of organic solvents and require a lot of manpower are moving overseas one after another, the domestic industry is hollowing out. Shoe manufacturers are a typical example. But small companies that are unable to expand into Asia are heading for the prisons, the ‘Asia’ of Japan. That’s why it’s only natural that the main focus of this prison will become shoe manufacturing. (March 24, 1995)

People often misunderstand the inside of the prison walls as a place of repentance and rehabilitation of criminals, but there is no such system any-where. The purpose of the system is forced labor. (August 29, 1999)

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