Published on July 15, 2019.
Drawing from Masayuki Takayama’s celebrated Shukan Shincho column “Henken Jizai,” this essay examines the reality of France through the Seine River, the reconstruction of Paris, French Indochina, the opium trade, nuclear tests, and the Paris Olympics.
It reflects on the underside of “glorious France,” which Westernized Japanese intellectuals fail to see.

July 15, 2019.
But Africa is close to Europe.
Since public scrutiny there is troublesome, France conducted 194 nuclear tests in the South Pacific.
In 1997, Chirac said that this had made France a great power.
As I have already written, I subscribe to Shukan Shincho every week in order to read the serialized columns by Masayuki Takayama and Yoshiko Sakurai.
People such as Kenzaburo Oe and a certain Kokubun think that Japan is an inferior country compared with France and others.
But what kind of country is France in reality?
Masayuki Takayama, the one and only journalist in the postwar world, splendidly depicts a reality that such Westernized people could never understand.
This is from “Henken Jizai,” the famous column that adorns the closing pages of Shukan Shincho, released today.
Going Down the Seine.
Masayuki Takayama.
The pollution of the Seine flowing through Paris has a long history.
Around the time when Saigyo, using water to cleanse his hands, composed the poem, “May I die in spring beneath the blossoms,” the people living along this river had no concept whatsoever of toilets or washing facilities.
They ate things with their hands, and threw excrement into the Seine together with kitchen waste.
As a result, the current stagnated, and a rotten stench covered the area.
To make matters worse, slaughterhouses stood in rows on the opposite bank of the Île de la Cité, and herds of pigs and cattle added another stench and uproar.
Prince Philippe, son of Louis VI, was riding his horse along that riverside road when he collided with a sow that had escaped from a slaughterhouse.
The prince fell from his horse, plunged face-first into the muddy filth, and suffocated to death.
Even though the heir to the Capetian dynasty died because of the filth, the citizens of Paris showed no remorse.
They did not change the custom of throwing excrement into the river and urinating against the walls of houses nearby.
Because of this, buildings rotted at their foundations, tilted, and collapsed like a department store in Seoul.
Eight hundred years later, a politician finally appeared who thought to clean up the city.
He was Napoleon III, the nephew of Napoleon.
He appointed Georges-Eugène Haussmann, demolished the slums that occupied one third of Paris, and carried out an urban reconstruction project that sent twelve broad avenues radiating from the Arc de Triomphe.
He also rebuilt the underground infrastructure, laid out 600 kilometers of sewers, required citizens to install toilets, and transformed Paris into a city without the smell of excrement.
Even now, if one enters an old shop along the Seine, all the toilets are in the basement.
This came from the idea that, even if it was a government order, it was unthinkable to sacrifice precious ground-floor space.
Napoleon III decided to finance this urban reconstruction through the issuance of government bonds, and also, following Britain’s example, through the opium trade.
Conveniently, a French missionary was killed in Indochina.
Using that as a pretext, the French army attacked and obtained colonial French Indochina.
An opium public corporation was established in each town, and opium was allocated to the residents and sold.
“They intended eventually to get all Vietnamese people addicted to opium and make money from it,” journalist Andrée Viollis wrote in “Indochine S.O.S.”
With the profits from the opium trade, they were able to earn about half the cost of the sewer construction.
So, did the Seine become clean?
In fact, it did not.
Although the excrement flowed into the sewers, from there it was discharged into the Seine.
In order to make the Seine cleaner, the French government imposed not only a poll tax and a salt tax on the residents of French Indochina, but even taxes on marriages and funerals.
The sewer system doubled in length.
During the last war, the Japanese army entered and stopped the unscrupulous taxation, but de Gaulle appealed to Roosevelt, saying, “Return French Indochina to us for the restoration of glorious France” (C. Zorn, “The Pacific War for Britain and America”), and immediately after the war the exploitation of French Indochina resumed.
However, de Gaulle did not put those revenues toward cleaning the Seine.
For the revival of glory, he first chose nuclear testing.
Thus, the revenues from the colonies were poured into nuclear research, and after 1960, four atmospheric nuclear tests were conducted in the desert of Algeria.
But Africa is close to Europe.
Since public scrutiny there is troublesome, France conducted 194 nuclear tests in the South Pacific.
In 1997, Chirac said that this had made France a great power.
Then France began working on the unfinished task of cleaning the Seine, but by that time its colonies, including French Indochina, which had been its source of revenue, had long since become independent.
France had returned once again to being a poor household.
Today, 300,000 sewer pipes run through Paris, and although 90 percent are treated at wastewater treatment plants, the remaining 30,000 discharge untreated filth directly into the Seine.
After Tokyo, the Olympics will be held in Paris.
Various races, including the triathlon, are scheduled to take place in the Seine, but there is no clear prospect for purification.
At the Asian Games, sailing was held in Jakarta Bay, which was teeming with E. coli, and Japanese athletes suffered from diarrhea.
In the French Olympics, French athletes raised amid filth appear to have the advantage.
Would this not amount to reverse doping?