Published on August 15, 2019.
This essay examines Kenzo Nakajima’s writing on Japan’s postwar “Culture Day” and criticizes postwar intellectuals for uncritically accepting the Allied historical interpretation that modern Japan was feudalistic and that fascism arose from old social consciousness.
Through figures such as Yoshio Nakano, Takeo Kuwabara, Osamu Kuno, Hideo Odagiri, Shugo Honda, and Shunsuke Tsurumi, it discusses the lack of awareness among progressive cultural figures that occupied Japan had lost its free will as the price of peace.

August 15, 2019.
Even among humanities intellectuals alone, this kind of intellectual included Yoshio Nakano, Takeo Kuwabara, Osamu Kuno, Hideo Odagiri, Shugo Honda, Shunsuke Tsurumi, and many others too numerous to list.
This is a chapter I published on August 14, 2018, under the title, “They Swallowed Whole the Historical Interpretation Imposed on Japan by the Allied Forces: that modern Japan was feudalism, and that the old nature of feudalism was the cause of fascism.”
The following is the continuation of the previous chapter.
Swallowing whole the historical interpretation of the Allied nations.
Around that same time, on November 3, 1948, the first “Culture Day” arrived.
Until then, it had been “Meiji-setsu.”
In the newspapers, there were also voices honestly murmuring that they did not know what it meant.
The Tokyo Shimbun of that day had been preserved, tucked into my diary.
I could feel sympathy for the ironic sentence by a newspaper reporter, who, half-mockingly, reflected the mood of the times by writing, “On a long autumn night when one ought to enjoy reading by lamplight, while even candles are in short supply and one is threatened by power outages, one coldly peels the skins of requisitioned potatoes.”
But what was worst of all was, for example, the following passage in the arts and culture section, written by a public intellectual who pompously preached the significance of “Culture Day” in the tone of a formal admonition.
The writer was Kenzo Nakajima, a scholar of French literature and professor at the University of Tokyo.
“In present-day Japan, there is a conflict of ideas.
This is a conflict that the Japanese are carrying out of their own accord, without being urged by anyone, but to see it as a struggle between left and right is to be too fixated on a worldly way of looking at things.
Whatever it may look like, the deepest conflict in present-day Japan is the conflict between the old and the new.
Old things remain deeply rooted in the heart.
Moreover, they are gradually trying to perish.
I do not mean to decide that old things are bad.
Among old things, there are bad things, and they are stuck fast.
What are they?
Feudal social consciousness.
And the skin of fascism painted over it.
This new holiday called ‘Culture Day’ must be made into a day for peeling off this thin skin, exposing the old social consciousness writhing beneath it to the wind, and causing it to collapse.”
What a commonplace notion of that time.
What a frivolous way of speaking.
He simply swallowed whole the historical interpretation imposed on Japan by the Allied forces, namely that modern Japan was feudalism and that the old nature of feudalism was the cause of fascism, and he had no thought of his own whatsoever.
It was the fashionable way of speaking in an era when intellectuals were joining the Communist Party as though in an avalanche.
Needless to say, Kenzo Nakajima was one of the representative progressive cultural figures who, for decades, continued to say foolish things without ever learning.
About ten years later, I came to doubt that his writings were being proudly published in first-rate magazines, and whenever I saw them, I felt as though my eyes were being defiled by something filthy, and I would instinctively turn the page face down.
Even among humanities intellectuals alone, this kind of intellectual included Yoshio Nakano, Takeo Kuwabara, Osamu Kuno, Hideo Odagiri, Shugo Honda, Shunsuke Tsurumi, and many others too numerous to list.
They did not have even the slightest trace of the bitter awareness that even I, as a child, possessed: that their own country had become newly imprisoned, and that the loss of free will was the price of peace.
This article continues.