Written on May 9, 2019, this essay takes Kenzaburō Ōe’s praise of Akira Asada and Kōjin Karatani as “Japan’s two genius cultural heroes” as a starting point for a severe critique of Asahi-style intellectuality, postwar democracy, Western worship, and contempt for Japan.
Through comparisons with Hiroshi Furuta, Miyawaki Atsuko, Masayuki Takayama, Yasunari Kawabata, and Susumu Nishibe, it brings into relief the vast gulf between genuine scholarship and pseudo-moralism.

2019-05-09
Would not anyone think that the expression “Japan’s two genius cultural heroes” is, for example, virtually identical to the kind of praise used by North Korea or the Chinese Communist Party?

This is the chapter I published on 2018-12-18 under the title, “If he wishes to prolong his life, he should resign from his post as associate professor at Kyoto University without delay.
And then stand on his own two feet and live without being supported by ‘savages.’”
The chapter I published on 2018-12-14 under the title, “In degrading Japan and prostituting himself to China and the Korean Peninsula, he is exactly the same as Ōe,” has now entered Ameba’s top five in search count.
What I thought while reading the dialogue book by Hiroshi Furuta and Genki Fujii is as follows.
Having been a subscriber to the Asahi Shimbun for a long time, I knew absolutely nothing about him until August four years ago.
Honorifics omitted below.
On the other hand, I was made to read Kenzaburō Ōe’s articles to the point of disgust.
I also feel, on my own, that Hiroshi Furuta is the type of person whose great talent flowered late…
However, the level he has reached is such that, among Japanese scholars, he is the very one who brings Tadao Umesao to mind.
Of course, it goes without saying that Atsuko Miyawaki and her husband have likewise reached the same level.
Simply put, Hiroshi Furuta is the real genuine article, just as Atsuko Miyawaki is.
And what of Kenzaburō Ōe?
He was not merely a book-loving exam elite who read and studied the Asahi Shimbun and turned into a splendid pseudo-moralist…
He despised Japan and, unbelievably, absolutely worshipped France, that is, the West.
The only things he praised were his own family and the mountains deep in Ehime where he himself was born and raised…
He belittled the rest of Japan and the politicians chosen by real Japanese people…
And Yasunari Kawabata, toward whom I had instinctively felt something similar…
Unbelievably, he denied him in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech…
He accepted the medal given by the King of Sweden, but declined the Order of Culture, saying that he would not receive a medal from the Emperor…
A human being raised by reading and studying the Asahi Shimbun, the very model of the mind formed in that way…
In other words, it would not be too much to say that he declared to the world that he was simply a man made by the Asahi Shimbun, and a representative of the so-called cultural figures who exist together with the Asahi Shimbun.
For China and the Korean Peninsula, which continue plotting against Japan through their own “bottomless evil” and “plausible lies”…
The Asahi Shimbun is their greatest collaborator…
So it must have contributed greatly to his winning the Nobel Prize.
The most beautiful country in the world…
Or rather, a rare country in the world that has created that beauty over more than a thousand years…
It is no exaggeration whatsoever to say that Kyoto is its symbol and culmination…
That is why Chaplin loved Japan, and above all loved Kyoto…
And stayed twice with his family at the Miyako Hotel in Keage.
For a certain period around the age of twenty, I spent time at a subtemple to the left of the Sanmon gate of Nanzen-ji in Keage….
Ōe denied “Japan, the Beautiful, and Myself”…
And it is no exaggeration whatsoever to say that he was a great fool who praised the West.
It would not be too much to call him a conceited provincial raised in the mountains of Ehime and on the Asahi Shimbun.
All of his political words and deeds prove that.
He truly is the very height of the shallow, foolish, pseudo-moralist.
*“Kenzaburō Ōe: ‘I Have No Korea to Return To’”
We returned late at night after holding our wedding ceremony, and I casually noticed the television set, turned on the switch, and an image appeared.
And thirty minutes later, I had left my bride aside and was weeping with emotion.
It was a story of repatriation to North Korea starring Chieko Higashiyama.
One day, suddenly, an aged and beautiful Korean woman dresses herself in white Korean clothes, and tells her son’s family that she alone will return to Korea…….
At that moment I thought, ah, what a cruel story this is, and while thinking aimless thoughts such as that I myself have no Korea to return to, because I am Japanese, I lost my emotional equilibrium.
(“My Television Experience,” by Kenzaburō Ōe, Gunzō, March 1961 issue)
Omitted from the preceding text.
“I shudder to think what a country of ‘savages’ I am living in” — in 1988, Akira Asada, then an associate professor at Kyoto University, mocked and slandered his fellow countrymen, the Japanese, who were praying for His Majesty’s recovery.
The place where he said this was “Special Dialogue 1” in Bungakukai, Bungeishunju’s flagship literary magazine, February 1989 issue.
His dialogue partner in the discussion entitled “Examining the Spiritual History of the Shōwa Era” was Kōjin Karatani, literary critic.
At the beginning of the dialogue, following the lead sentence, “Intellectuals were unable to oppose the existence of the Emperor as a ‘biological’ being,” Asada said the following.
“To tell the truth, I have absolutely no desire to talk about Shōwa.
Since last September, day after day I have been shown on the news those people prostrating themselves before the Imperial Palace, and all I can do is shudder, thinking what a country of ‘savages’ I am living in.
Even so, when I force myself to think about it, I am bothered by what Karatani-san wrote earlier in Kaiyen (middle omitted), and because of that I again cannot think objectively (laugh).”
(The final parenthetical remark is also exactly as in the original.)
As you can see, this was a remark in which these “intellectuals” sneered at ordinary citizens from above.
Asada closed the first installment of the “Special Dialogue” with the following outrageous remark.
“Well, as a republican, I suppose one can only look on coolly at the commotion over the imperial succession and wait for them to expose their weakness somewhere.”
It was truly an irreverent and insolent dialogue.
Those very Asada and Karatani were praised by Kenzaburō Ōe in 1992, in a lecture delivered at the University of Chicago entitled “New Cultural Relations Between Japan and the United States,” as “Japan’s two genius cultural heroes.”
Would not anyone think that the expression “Japan’s two genius cultural heroes” is, for example, virtually identical to the kind of praise used by North Korea or the Chinese Communist Party?
The background to how Ōe, while refusing the Order of Culture on the grounds that “I am a postwar democrat, and the Order of Culture, tied to the state, does not suit me” (Asahi morning edition, October 17, 1994, “Tensei Jingo”), nevertheless gladly accepted the Nobel Prize, is described in detail in Eiichi Tanizawa’s book Who Turned Japan Into This? An Indictment of Kenzaburō Ōe, Representative of Postwar Democracy. (Crestsha)
In that book, Tanizawa denounced him as follows.
“The history of Japan’s cultural figures insulting their own people is not a short one.
However, to have gone so far as to call them ‘savages’ was, in history, a first with Akira Asada.
Of course, I too respect freedom of speech.
Therefore, no matter what he says, if he himself believes it, then that is that.
But if so, then he ought to stop living on a Kyoto University salary paid for by the taxes offered up by those ‘savages.’ / Kyoto University is run on money taken by the tax office from the income earned in sweat and toil by those vile and foolish ‘savages.’
Asada is an associate professor at its Institute of Economic Research.
Surely, if he were to eat meals bought with the filthy money of those ‘savages,’ his very innards would rot and he would die.
If he wishes to prolong his life, he should resign from his post as associate professor at Kyoto University without delay.
And then stand on his own two feet and live without being supported by ‘savages’……”
Latter part omitted.
He continued to speak on the pages of the Asahi, with a triumphant air, about his association with what the Asahi Shimbun liked to call the wisdom of the West.
(Though, being a pseudo-moralist, he did not forget at least to add in people said to embody the wisdom of the Middle East as well, such as Said.)
Hiroshi Furuta, wholly unrelated to such a foolish world, continued his research…
He himself says with a wry smile that he ended up studying the Korean Peninsula for more than thirty years…
But he is a splendid man in whom true great talent has come fully into bloom, and a genuine treasure for Japan.
I am a man who prides himself on being what Saichō called a national treasure…
But Hiroshi Furuta, Atsuko Miyawaki, Masayuki Takayama, and others…
Did not, like me, stray into side paths in life…
But lived straight along their own roads and became people who benefited others, the nation, and the world.
Between their erudition…
And the Western-infatuated knowledge of Kenzaburō Ōe…
There is a difference as vast as heaven and earth.
To give one example, Ōe was a man who lived a very happy life.
He was loved by his mother and others…
That is why he persistently writes of the village where he was born and raised as though it were a utopia…
And hates Japan for having destroyed that happiness…
One could say that this is the kind of man he was.
Kawabata Yasunari, on the other hand…
Lost both his parents in childhood and was raised by his grandfather…
He was, so to speak, a man utterly alone in the world.
Though I came from a shipowner’s family… I was raised in a household that was unbearable suffering in childhood…
From the first time I read Yasunari Kawabata, I felt something extremely close to him.
Especially…
Because Kawabata’s state of mind when he wrote, “I am drawn to the gentle warmth of daughters from good families, but I feel them to be something different from myself,” was the same as my own state of mind in childhood.
Life is mysterious…
Kawabata married, and I believe he had children…
And yet he…
Despite having gained that much fame… did not wait for a natural death, but took his own life.
Susumu Nishibe, whom I came to know powerfully for the first time a few years ago…
He was from Hokkaido, and I am from Sendai in Tōhoku…
He too…
Must have possessed an aesthetic sense, or perhaps a philosophy, very close to that of Yasunari Kawabata.
What I had felt toward Kenzaburō Ōe…
Can only be described as the mistake of a man who had subscribed to and carefully read the Asahi Shimbun.
As for Haruki Murakami…
I knew from youth what kind of person he was…
But in terms of knowledge and study… to place him on the same plane…
Even if one says they are birds of a feather…
That would surely be unfair to Ōe.
Because…
He…
Was merely a man who splendidly plagiarized the works of the American writers he had translated…
And then added to them the pseudo-moralism that had been formed by the Asahi Shimbun.
In degrading Japan…
And prostituting himself to China and the Korean Peninsula…
He is exactly the same as Ōe.
This稿 continues.