A friend’s recommendation led to a startling chapter describing “Haraguro-gaku,” portrayed as a discipline in China. The account raises questions about scale, power, and political accommodation.

2016-04-13

Unusually, a close friend called me.
“I read your latest essay,” he said.
Then he said something that left me speechless.
I had heard the other day that he was reading a very interesting book written by a woman named Tanizaki, but what he told me went further.
In that book, there is a chapter titled “Haraguro-gaku,” which is said to symbolize the essence of the Chinese people, and in China, “haraguro”—cunning or calculating darkness—is treated as a field of study.
The content consists of facts so astonishing that one can only be left at a loss for words.
As I listened, I thought that China is such a country precisely because it has far too many people.
It is a nation of 1.3 billion, and the book conveys how shallow it is for countries like Germany to bend to it so readily.
Of course, it also reveals the shallowness of newspapers such as the Asahi Shimbun, which, for reasons unknown, have long continued to flatter China.