This passage argues that the wisdom, aesthetic sense, and rationality cultivated by the Japanese people have influenced the world in many fields, from the discovery of fingerprints and the appreciation of ukiyo-e to bathing culture, taste, and ways of thinking about marine resources.
It also criticizes the anti-whaling activists who dominate the International Whaling Commission, as well as the stance of the Asahi Shimbun that aligns with them, thereby reexamining the value of Japanese civilization itself.
It is a forceful essay calling on the Japanese people to recognize the superiority of their own cultural inheritance and to speak of it to the world without hesitation.

2019-05-26
In the early Meiji period, the English missionary Henry Faulds came to Japan and was astonished to learn that Japanese people were using thumbprints for personal identification.
Had he reported it, he could have become the discoverer of “the world’s first fingerprints.”

The chapter I published on 2019-01-11 under the title, “Minke whales and other sea cockroaches are increasing, and precious marine resources are in a critical condition. Yet the present whaling commission has no proper marine-resource specialists,” has now entered goo’s real-time top ten.
What follows is from Masayuki Takayama’s celebrated column “Henken Jizai,” published in the recent issue of Shukan Shincho.
The Japanese people and the world will clearly come to know both that he is the one and only journalist in the postwar world and what the Asahi Shimbun really is.

Fill the Earth with Knowledge.
In the United States, the well-known female journalist Paula Span recently published a column in The New York Times titled “Babies Are Really Listening.”
Its argument was roughly this: “One suddenly finds oneself humming a tune one should never have heard. In fact, that is because one had firmly remembered songs sung by one’s mother or grandmother when one was a baby, even though one had assumed one had no consciousness at the time.”
A veteran journalist, she teaches aspiring young reporters at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism what the reporter’s path is all about.
So to speak, she is America’s best-informed auntie.
She says this.
Research over the past several decades has revealed that babies in fact closely observe their parents’ behavior, feel their mother’s heartbeat, and are hurt by stress.
A five-month-old baby can distinguish both the rhythm and the melody of songs hummed by the mother and engrave them in the brain.
That is why, when one becomes an adult and holds one’s own five-month-old grandchild, one suddenly remembers it and naturally begins humming it.
However, she apparently did not know of the much earlier debate, decades before that, between Chief Nurse Mathison of GHQ’s Public Health and Welfare Bureau and the nurse Tanaka Tatsu.
Tatsu criticized the American-style practice of separating mother and child immediately after birth.
“When a mother hears her baby’s voice, her milk flows better, and the child too is reassured by the mother’s heartbeat.”
Mathison crushed Tatsu’s argument, saying, “A baby is in a vegetative state for about the first year and a half after birth, and sleeping together is merely dangerous and meaningless,” and imposed separate mother-and-child rooms on Japanese society.
Akayoshi Yamamura, GHQ no Nihon Senno.
Only after more than half a century did Americans finally learn Japanese wisdom.
There are mountains of things they learned from Japan.
In the early Meiji period, the English missionary Henry Faulds came to Japan and was astonished to learn that Japanese people were using thumbprints for personal identification.
Had he reported it, he could have become the discoverer of “the world’s first fingerprints.”
Europeans who saw ukiyo-e were astonished by their free and unrestrained compositions, utterly different from realism, and many painters came to Japan to learn.
Van Gogh, who lacked the money for travel, repeatedly copied ukiyo-e prints and became a fine painter.
Perry was astonished that Japanese people enjoyed bathing every day, although bathing was taboo in Christianity.
Moreover, public baths were, scandalously enough, mixed.
In his Narrative of the Expedition to Japan, he denounced the Japanese in the strongest terms as “licentious.”
Recently, while I was soaking in a mixed open-air bath in Niseko, a completely naked Australian girl jumped in.
She was beautiful.
It seems they have finally come to understand Japanese bathing culture.
These days there is a noisy controversy there over tattoos.
Foreigners tattoo themselves everywhere on their bodies, and it is vulgar and dirty.
“Body, hair, and skin are received from one’s parents; not daring to injure them is the beginning of filial piety” is the only sensible thing the Chinese ever said.
Japanese people think so too.
But there are foolish Japanese as well.
Through its editorials and articles, the Asahi Shimbun says that white people, even emperors, have tattoos, that there is artistic significance in them, and therefore asks whether it is right to exclude them from bathhouses and hot springs just as one excludes gangsters.
Why not accept them as culture, it says.
But Japanese are not excluding them merely as part of anti-gang measures.
They are saying that barbaric customs that cannot be called culture, such as slavery or smoking, should be abandoned.
What Japanese taught them was not only an aesthetic sense.
They also taught them that taste has a category called “delicious.”
I believe the backward world ought frankly to learn as well the rationality that Japanese people prize.
The Japanese government recently decided to withdraw from the International Whaling Commission.
Minke whales and other sea cockroaches are increasing, and precious marine resources are in a critical state.
Yet the present whaling commission has no proper experts in marine resources.
Its representative posts are taken up by activists driven by jealousy toward “Japanese, who are non-Christian and non-white.”
This withdrawal is a declaration that Japan will no longer associate with racists who borrow the name of anti-whaling.
That is a good thing, but here too the Asahi editorial chief Nemoto Kiyoki flatters white people and criticizes the withdrawal.
“Who needs to eat whales anyway?” he says.
That is not the point.
Do you not sense a kindness in making them realize the ugliness of their jealousy and, while at it, teaching them how delicious whale tail meat is?