2024-01-08

I subscribe to the Sankei Shimbun and the Nikkei, but recently I have not been reading newspapers very much.
The reason should go without saying.
However, everyone who read Masahiko Fujiwara’s essay published in yesterday’s January 7 edition of the Sankei Shimbun must have been moved by its final passage.
It was also the first time I learned that Masahiko Fujiwara was a classmate of Yoichi Takahashi’s—that he graduated from the Department of Mathematics, Faculty of Science, University of Tokyo.
Emphasis within the text, excluding the headings, is mine.
Masahiko Fujiwara　Mathematician　Professor Emeritus at Ochanomizu University
The preceding passage is omitted.
Regarding Japanese morality, as far back as the third-century “Gishi Wajinden,” it was recorded that the Japanese “do not steal or engage in litigation and are courteous.”
Francis Xavier, who came to Japan as a missionary in the sixteenth century, wrote that the Japanese “respect courtesy and honor,” while Carl Peter Thunberg, a Swedish physician who came to Dejima in Nagasaki in the eighteenth century, described them as “frank and fair, honest and sincere, courageous and indomitable.”
Townsend Harris, the American diplomat who concluded the Treaty of Amity and Commerce between Japan and the United States at the end of the Edo period and remained in Japan for nearly six years, wrote as follows.
“In this country, at first glance, there appear to be neither rich nor poor. This must be what the true happiness of a people looks like. I sometimes find myself wondering whether opening Japan and exposing its people to foreign influences will truly make them happier. This is because Japan, unlike any other country in the world, is living in a golden age of simplicity and honesty.”
Japan was a noble country, fundamentally different from every other country in the world.
Just as Harris had feared, Japan was soon swept up in the tide of imperialism, passed through several wars, and ultimately saw its land reduced to scorched ruins and itself transformed into a country populated almost entirely by the poor. Even then, however, its morality escaped without being gravely damaged.
But Japan was defeated by the postwar GHQ program to instill a sense of guilt.
They ingeniously and extensively repudiated Japan’s history and its ancient virtues, traditions, and values.
They sought to eradicate patriotism so that Japan would never again rise and defy the United States.
In its place, they implanted the freedom, equality, and democracy in which America blindly believed.
Left in a state of utter exhaustion by their first defeat in history, the Japanese revered these ideals and the new Constitution, which GHQ had drafted in little more than a week, as the path to peace and prosperity.
Globalism, or neoliberalism, which entered Japan in the mid-1990s after the Cold War, dealt a further blow to Japanese morality.
The financial Big Bang, new accounting standards, market principles, deregulation, small government, attacks on bureaucrats, decentralization, privatization, the Large-Scale Retail Stores Law, structural reform, restructuring, the payoff system, postal reform, fiscal austerity, consumption-tax increases, and shareholder primacy appeared in rapid succession.
All of them were imposed upon Japan by the United States.
It was the shock doctrine, exploiting catastrophes such as major disasters and the collapse of the economic bubble to expand neoliberalism.
Neoliberalism means abolishing regulations and saying, “Let everyone compete on equal terms.”
Because it appeared rational at first glance, politicians, bureaucrats, the business community, economists returning from America, and the media—which had no independent views of their own and merely followed them blindly—strongly supported it.
The public also leapt at it, lured by the slogan, “This is the age of globalism; do not miss the bus.”
As a result, performance-based evaluation emerged, society became a competitive world governed by the law of the jungle, and what had once been called a nation in which one hundred million people all belonged to the middle class was divided into a small number of winners and a great many losers.
Our country, historically the furthest removed from the worship of money anywhere in the world, became a society governed by the supremacy of money.
Honesty and integrity were pushed aside, and the admirable sentiments that had made Japan what it was—people’s kindness, gentleness, consideration for others, hatred of cowardice, and profound empathy for others—together with the “form” that had served as a code of conduct, were forgotten.
GHQ, Anti-Japanese Ideology, and Globalism
Since the civilization and enlightenment movement of the Meiji era, the pernicious habit of immediately embracing every new current of thought from the West has taken root.
Japan embraced imperialism, Marxism, and fascism, and after the war it was innocently indoctrinated with the GHQ view of history, which was nothing more than America’s self-justification for the grave crime of dropping the atomic bombs.
Japan then became possessed by an anti-Japanese view of history and swept along by globalism.
Perhaps anticipating that this would happen, Yukichi Fukuzawa made the following observation in the aforementioned book.
“Customs practiced within a country for hundreds of years must not be changed lightly. Any change requires a thousand considerations, ten thousand deliberations, and the passage of many years.”
This is because the wisdom of our ancestors has accumulated like a vast mountain within institutions, customs, morality, and other inherited practices.
It was unavoidable that samurai would no longer be needed after the advent of the Meiji era, but it was a serious loss that the spirit of bushido—centered upon benevolence, integrity, compassion for the weak, courage, and hatred of cowardice—also declined.
The Japanese lost their “form.”
In his An Attempt at Contemporary History, the philosopher Junzo Karaki made the following observation.
“An individuality without an underlying form will always be overwhelmed by new currents of thought.”
This lay behind the Japanese tendency, from the Meiji era onward, to embrace foreign currents of thought without profound reflection and thereby lose their Japanese character.
Cultivating the traditional sentiments and “form” of the Japanese people within the home and at school is the only fundamental way to bring Japan’s wandering to an end.
There is no time to be distracted by English and computers in elementary school.
When I was in my first year of high school, I read Kenji Miyazawa’s “The Morning of the Last Farewell,” and it profoundly moved me.
The poem begins, “My little sister, who will go far away before this day is over.”
His twenty-four-year-old sister, Toshiko, lay dying and gasping with a high fever when she asked him to gather some snow from the branches of a pine tree in the garden and let her eat it.
When Kenji placed the snow in the bowl familiar to them both and let her eat it, she said, “If I am reborn, I want to be born as someone who suffers not only for herself but also for others,” and then breathed her last.
Kenji vowed, “My brave little sister, I too will go straight forward.”
Moved by this poem, I told myself with great conviction that from that moment onward, I too would live an upright life—an upright life, no matter what.
My encounter with a single poem became the guiding principle of my life.

2024/1/5 in Kyoto