Does it happen to you? You are looking for something which you can't find, but what you do find are all sorts of things you have looked for previously but have not been able to locate. One "something" I found was about indiscreet remarks by politicians, many of whom are still making similar indiscreet remarks today.
This 1988 Asashi Shimbun list (the present prime minister was on it) was summed up at the end with: "Recently even the LDP politicians have started to feel that this rash of statements stems from the arrogance of having 300 seats in the Diet. If this arrogance continues, the LDP will get their just due at the next election."
It tends to confirm what I was looking for, a letter to the editor about a Japanese tendency toward collective forgetfulness, so cleverly written that the prejudice, the generalizations, tended to be overlooked. He explained how topics such as bullying, comfort women and graft/corruption are reported periodically, people wring their hands in despair, official reports are issued, and then they are forgotten until the next time around.