2010-11-2
The following passage is an excerpt from “Tadao Umesao Speaks,” interviewed by Shuzo Koyama,
and it is a passage that proves what I previously wrote: that my brain is the same as that of the great Tadao Umesao…
Please refer to that chapter.
Therefore, dear readers, please read my writing with the conviction that I am truly Gifted…
Please read with the happiness of witnessing the moment when one of the most important writers of the postwar era is being born.
(A hearty laugh)
Koyama
After that, journalists such as Takane Fujiki and Katsuichi Honda also emerged from the journalism side, and newspaper companies began sending their own people, didn’t they?
Before that, they never sent reporters to places like those, did they?
Originally, they needed accounts written by scholars who had gone on expeditions, so they would say: we will provide this much funding, and you are to write when you return.
I understand that you divided things up, with you, Mr. Umesao, handling the Asahi Shimbun and Mr. Nakao the Mainichi Shimbun.
Umesao
Yes, that’s how it was.
Professor Hitoshi Kihara distinguished between the Asahi Shimbun for academic matters and the Mainichi Shimbun for sports at the time, and assigned the people under his influence accordingly.
“You go to Asahi,” “You go to Mainichi.”
Koyama
After that, you distanced yourself from television and radio, didn’t you?
Umesao
I do not appear on any broadcasts at all.
I do not go on the air.
I made that point very clear.
Even when the National Museum of Ethnology opened, I heard plenty about it.
“What do you mean, the director won’t appear?”
Koyama
Even though you were the most sought-after.
It must have been hard on the media when their star attraction wouldn’t appear.
But you did say, “There’s nothing I can do about being filmed from a distance.”
Umesao
There’s nothing I can do about being filmed as news.
But I do not make appearances.
Koyama
But at one point, you were even writing scripts.
Perhaps “scripts” is an odd word, but things like the Japanese-language course we mentioned earlier.
At one point, you were involved to that extent.
Umesao
It’s not that I dislike broadcasting.
I simply do not make appearances.
Koyama
Why did you decide that?
I sense something like a feeling of emptiness.
Umesao
The specific circumstances were that the children who appeared with me became very badly behaved.
This means that broadcasting makes people worse.
The children came to be treated almost like heroes, you see.
They became very badly behaved.
So I decided that, since this sort of thing makes people worse, I was done with it.