Tokyo Gov. Yuriko Koike, whose lies and obfuscations have been the public face of a Tokyo Metropolitan Government plan to gentrify the vital green Jingu Gaien oasis in the center of Tokyo got a taste of karma on Tuesday,
For some reason, someone thought it would be a good idea to honor her at Meiji Jingu Stadium by having her throw out a ceremonial first pitch at the historic ballpark she is working hard to tear down.
And while the stadium cannot speak or act, it take a toll on the governor, who stumbled on her throw. The 72-year-old suffered a knee injury in the form of an avulsion fracture, when the bone is too weak to withstand the strain exerted on it by a ligament and splinters.
The Tokyo Jingu redevelopment plan, whose sole benefactor appears to be Mitsui Fudosan, will destroy historic trees, the fourth-oldest active major league baseball stadium,, the home of rugby in Tokyo, futsal courts and a number of fields used by hundreds of ordinary citizens to play baseball every day, so that a private tennis club can expand, a tiny arena can be built — ostensibly as a replacement for the historic rugby ground — along with a new hotel, shopping building and office space.
Instead of a green oasis, Tokyo will get another neighborhood bulldozed and replaced with even more glass and steel. I swear, it’s like these things are reproducing. My one-hour walk to the office takes me pass any number of these linked glass-and-steel eye-sores.
It would have been justice if the ground had opened up and consumed the recently re-elected lying piece of excrement.
But as Gertrude Stein said when asked why her hometown of Oakland, California, was relatively untouched by the 1906 earthquake that destroyed San Francisco just across the bay, “There are some things even the earth won’t swallow.”
