What Were “Japan’s Two Brilliant Cultural Heroes”? Kenzaburo Oe, Akira Asada, Kojin Karatani, and Asahi Shimbun-Style Intellectualism

April 6, 2026

Written on May 9, 2019, this essay begins with Kenzaburo Oe’s praise of Akira Asada and Kojin Karatani as “Japan’s two brilliant cultural heroes” and severely criticizes the structures of Asahi Shimbun-style intellectualism, postwar democracy, worship of the West, and contempt for Japan.
Through comparisons with Hiroshi Furuta, Junko Miyawaki, Masayuki Takayama, Yasunari Kawabata, Susumu Nishibe, and others, it brings into sharp relief the gulf between genuine scholarship and pseudo-moralism.

May 9, 2019

Would not everyone think that the expression “Japan’s two brilliant cultural heroes” is virtually identical to, for example, the words of praise used by North Korea or the Chinese Communist Party?

If you wish to remain alive, you should resign from your post as an associate professor at Kyoto University as soon as possible.
Then you should become independent, stand on your own two feet, and live without being cared for by the “natives—”
This was a chapter published on December 18, 2018 under that title.
In disparaging Japan and prostituting himself to China and the Korean Peninsula, he is exactly the same as Oe.
The chapter published on December 14, 2018 under that title is now among the five most-searched articles on Ameba.
The following is what occurred to me while I was reading a book of conversations between Hiroshi Furuta and Genki Fujii.
Although I had been an Asahi Shimbun subscriber for many years, I knew absolutely nothing about him until August four years ago.
Honorifics are omitted below.
Meanwhile, I had been made to read more articles about Kenzaburo Oe than I could ever have wanted.
I also somehow feel that Hiroshi Furuta is a late bloomer destined for greatness…
However, the level he has reached makes him, more than any other Japanese scholar, remind me of Tadao Umesao.
Needless to say, Junko Miyawaki and her husband have also reached a similar level.
Put simply, Hiroshi Furuta is the genuine article, just as Junko Miyawaki is.
Then what of Kenzaburo Oe?
He was merely a person who excelled at entrance examinations and loved reading, who subscribed to and carefully read the Asahi Shimbun and became a consummate pseudo-moralist, and not only that…
He despised Japan and, incredibly, worshipped France—the West—as absolute.
The only things he praised were his own family and the remote mountain region of Ehime where he was born and raised…
He disparaged the rest of Japan and the politicians elected by genuine Japanese people…
And, incredibly, he repudiated Yasunari Kawabata, in whom I had instinctively sensed something similar to myself…
He repudiated him in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech…
He accepted a medal given to him by the King of Sweden, but declared that he would not accept a medal from the Emperor and declined the Order of Culture…
The archetype of a person who grew up subscribing to and carefully reading the Asahi Shimbun, and of the mind produced in that way…
In other words, one might say that he announced to the world that he was merely a man made by the Asahi Shimbun and a representative of the so-called intellectuals who exist together with the Asahi Shimbun.
For China and the Korean Peninsula, which continue to conspire against Japan…
Through their own “bottomless evil” and “plausible lies”…
The Asahi Shimbun Company is their greatest collaborator…
It must therefore have contributed greatly to his winning the Nobel Prize.
The most beautiful country in the world…
Or a country that has created and cultivated that beauty for more than a thousand years…
A country rare even in the world…
It is no exaggeration whatsoever to say that Kyoto is its symbol and culmination…
That is why Chaplin loved Japan, and Kyoto above all…
And twice stayed with his family at the Miyako Hotel in Keage.
For a period when I was around twenty years old, I lived in a subtemple to the left of the Sanmon gate of Nanzenji Temple in Keage…
Oe repudiated “Japan, the Beautiful, and Myself”…
It is no exaggeration whatsoever to call him a colossal fool who extolled the West.
Nor would it be an exaggeration to describe him as an arrogant country bumpkin who grew up deep in the mountains of Ehime reading the Asahi Shimbun.
Every one of his political words and actions proves this.
He is truly the height of shallowness, foolishness, and pseudo-moralism.
＊“I Have No Korea to Which I Should Return,” Kenzaburo Oe
I returned late at night after holding my wedding ceremony, and casually took notice of the television set; I switched it on, and an image appeared.
Thirty minutes later, leaving my bride unattended, I was shedding tears from the depth of my emotion.
It was a story about the repatriation to North Korea, starring Chieko Higashiyama; one day, without warning, an elderly and beautiful Korean woman dresses herself entirely in white Korean clothing and tells her son’s family that she alone will return to Korea……
At that moment, while thinking such rambling thoughts as, ah, what a cruel story this is, and that I have no Korea to which I should return, because I am Japanese, I lost my emotional equilibrium.
(“My Television Experience,” Kenzaburo Oe, Gunzo, March 1961)
The preceding text is omitted
I shudder at the thought of what a country of “natives” I am living in—In 1988, Akira Asada, then an associate professor at Kyoto University, thus ridiculed and slandered his compatriots—the Japanese people—who were praying for His Majesty’s recovery.
The statement appeared in “Special Dialogue 1” in the February 1989 issue of Bungakukai, the prestigious literary magazine published by Bungeishunju.
His interlocutor in the dialogue, which was billed as “Examining the Intellectual History of the Showa Era,” was literary critic Kojin Karatani.
At the beginning of the dialogue, following the introductory sentence, “Intellectuals were unable to resist the existence of the ‘biological’ Emperor,” Asada said the following:
《To tell the truth, I have absolutely no desire to talk about the Showa era.
Since last September, day after day, I have been shown news reports of people prostrating themselves in front of the Imperial Palace, and I can do nothing but shudder at the thought of what a country of “natives” I am living in.
Even when I deliberately try to think about it, I find myself preoccupied with what Mr. Karatani previously wrote in Kaien (omitted), and that again prevents me from thinking objectively (laughs)》
(The contents of the final parentheses also appear exactly as in the original.)
As you can see, this was a statement in which these “intellectuals” looked down upon and mocked ordinary citizens from a position of supposed superiority.
Asada concluded the first installment of the “Special Dialogue” with the following reckless remark:
《Well, as a republican, I suppose I shall watch the commotion surrounding the Imperial succession with detachment and wait for them to reveal their true colors somewhere along the way.》
It was a truly irreverent and insolent dialogue.
In 1992, Kenzaburo Oe praised Asada and Karatani as “Japan’s two brilliant cultural heroes” in a lecture titled “A New Cultural Relationship Between Japan and the United States,” delivered at the University of Chicago in the United States.
＊Would not everyone think that the expression “Japan’s two brilliant cultural heroes” is virtually identical to, for example, the words of praise used by North Korea or the Chinese Communist Party?＊
The circumstances under which Oe gladly accepted the Nobel Prize while refusing the Order of Culture on the grounds that “I am a postwar democrat, and the Order of Culture, which is associated with the state, does not suit me” (Asahi Shimbun morning edition, “Tensei Jingo,” October 17, 1994) are described in detail in Eiichi Tanizawa’s Who Made Japan This Way?—An Indictment of Kenzaburo Oe, the Representative of Postwar Democracy (Crest Publishing).
In that book, Tanizawa denounced him as follows:
《There is no shortage of instances in which Japanese intellectuals have reviled their own people.
However, Akira Asada was the first person in history to go so far as to revile them as “natives.”
Of course, I too respect freedom of speech.
Therefore, whatever he may say, if he genuinely believes it, then so be it.
In that case, however, he should stop living on a salary from Kyoto University funded by the taxes paid by those “natives.”／Kyoto University is operated with money taken by the tax office from the income that the lowly and foolish “natives” earn through their sweat and toil.
Asada is an associate professor at its Institute of Economic Research.
Surely, if he eats food paid for with the filthy money of the “natives,” all five of his internal organs and all six of his viscera will rot away and he will die.
If you wish to remain alive, you should resign from your post as an associate professor at Kyoto University as soon as possible.
Then you should become independent, stand on your own two feet, and live without being cared for by the “natives”……》
The remainder is omitted
He continued to speak smugly in the pages of the Asahi Shimbun about his associations with what the newspaper favored as the wisdom of the West.
(However, because he was a pseudo-moralist, he did not forget to include people supposedly representing the wisdom of the Middle East—Said and others.)
Hiroshi Furuta continued his research entirely removed from that kind of foolish world…
He wryly remarks that he ended up studying the Korean Peninsula for more than thirty years…
Yet he is a remarkable man whose innate greatness has fully blossomed, and he is a genuine treasure for Japan.
I am a person who takes pride in considering myself a national treasure in the sense defined by Saicho…
But Hiroshi Furuta, Junko Miyawaki, Masayuki Takayama, and others…
Unlike me, they did not stray from the path in their lives…
They lived straight along their own paths and became people who served other people, their country, and the world.
Between their profound learning…
And Kenzaburo Oe’s Westernized knowledge…
There is a difference as vast as that between heaven and earth.
To give one example, Oe was a man who led a very happy life.
He was loved by his mother and others…
That is why he persistently depicts the village where he was born and raised as if it were a paradise…
He hates Japan for having destroyed that happiness…
One could describe him as that kind of person.
Yasunari Kawabata, on the other hand…
Lost both his parents when he was young and was raised by his grandfather…
He was, so to speak, entirely alone in the world.
Although mine was a ship-owning family…I grew up in a household that brought me unbearable suffering during my childhood…
From the first time I read Yasunari Kawabata, I felt something extremely close to myself in him.
In particular…
Kawabata’s state of mind when he wrote, “Although I am drawn to the gentle warmth of young people from good families, I feel something in them that is different from myself”…
Was the same as my own state of mind during my childhood.
Life is a mysterious thing…
Kawabata married and, if I remember correctly, must have had children…
Even so…
Despite having attained such great fame…he did not wait for a natural death but took his own life.
Susumu Nishibe, whom I came to know with tremendous force for the first time several years ago…
He was from Hokkaido, while I was from Sendai in Tohoku…
He, too…
Must have possessed an aesthetic sense, or perhaps a philosophy, almost identical to that of Yasunari Kawabata.
What I had felt toward Kenzaburo Oe…
Can only be described as the mistake of a person who had subscribed to and carefully read the Asahi Shimbun.
As for Haruki Murakami…
I had known what kind of person he was since I was young…
But in terms of knowledge and study…placing him on the same level…
Would, indeed…even though they are birds of a feather…be disrespectful to Oe.
Because…
He…
Is merely a person who skillfully plagiarized the works of the American writers he had translated…
And added nothing more than the pseudo-moralism that had been formed in him by the Asahi Shimbun.
In disparaging Japan…
And prostituting himself to China and the Korean Peninsula…
He is exactly the same as Oe.
This essay will continue.