A nation is a people who share “causal stories” such as history, grammar, custom, and common sense, and is never complete from the outset. Drawing on Hiroshi Furuta’s argument, this essay examines the historical omissions of the Japanese people, their weak understanding of slavery and abducted slave labor, and the resulting vulnerability in issues such as the comfort women controversy, in order to show the danger of simple nationalism and the need for a nation to grow wiser through learning.

2019-04-11
Simple nationalism is perilous.
A nation is a people who share these “causal stories.”

This is a chapter I published on 2018-11-06 under the title: That Is Why, Even When They Were Taken to Siberia as Defeated Slaves, They Thought It Was Mere Internment and Worked.
The following is from an essay by Hiroshi Furuta, Professor at the Graduate School of the University of Tsukuba, published yesterday in the Seiron column of the Sankei Shimbun under the title “A Unified Korea Is a Dangerous Fantasy.”

Earlier in this Seiron column, I said that “there is neither progress nor inevitability in history,” but if one asks what does progress, the answer is obviously human beings.
History is written by human beings; human beings are not written by some “god of history.”
However, since human beings die within a single generation, what is passed down to their descendants and progresses is culture.
More specifically, it is causal stories such as “history, grammar, customs, and common sense.”
When one says feudalism, for example, Oda, Toyotomi, and Tokugawa immediately come to mind, or one knows that Japanese cuisine looks beautiful when arranged in a certain way, or one feels it absurd that a great sumo wrestler like Takanohana should be punished by petty stablemasters.
All of these are causal stories.

◎Simple nationalism is perilous.

A nation is the people who share these “causal stories.”
If you speak of feudalism to Koreans, they will not understand.
That is because they have no such history.
They remained a centralized monarchy throughout, and the regions were never industrialized by local lords.
In the basement food floors of Korean department stores, there is no rich variety colored by regional character.
The claim that feudalism existed all over the world is a lie of Marx.
For that reason, a “nation” is not something complete and perfect.
Things in history that it did not take an interest in have dropped out.
In the case of the Japanese nation, because everyone liked division of labor and everyone worked, it does not understand “slavery.”
That is why, even when they were taken to Siberia as defeated slaves, they thought it was mere internment and worked.
Because they do not understand abducted slaves, when Koreans say, “You abducted women and made them sexual slaves,” even though they were in fact commercial prostitutes, the Japanese are liable to think, “Perhaps that is so,” and thus have a false accusation laid upon them.
Let us learn this as a “protocol of omission” so that we are never deceived again.
A nation is something that must make such efforts and thereby strengthen itself.
That is why, generation after generation, it progresses and becomes wiser.
Simple nationalism that assumes from the very beginning that one’s own nation is already complete and flawless is no good.
That way lies fantasy.
To be continued.