Professor Hiroshi Furuta examines the failure of intellectual thinking in academia and explores how what a people historically ignored continues to shape their present. By comparing ancient civilizations, the Japanese, and Koreans, he argues that a lack of interest in the rule of law and culture has had lasting consequences.

August 6, 2017.
The following is from an essay by Professor Hiroshi Furuta of the University of Tsukuba, published in the Sankei Shimbun on July 26.
Japanese people should think rather than merely study.
By fortune or misfortune, having become a university professor, and now approaching retirement, I have come to realize an astonishing fact.
Many of my colleagues at the university do not seem to engage in “thinking” at all.
Once I noticed this, their academic papers suddenly appeared faded to me.
They follow disciplinary conventions, introduce Western theories, combine them with Japanese research, add a clever remark or two, and conclude with hopeful observations such as awaiting the discovery of further sources.
Is this not essentially the same as an elementary school student’s “study diary” that says, “I studied this much”?
There exist propositions that have dropped out of entire peoples.
Pascal said, “Man is a thinking reed,” but we humanities professors are “non-thinking legs.”
We conduct investigations, gather historical materials, and indulge in self-satisfaction.
University lectures fall into only three types: (1) the repetitive “sutra-chanting type,” (2) the self-indulgent “speech type,” and (3) the “training type” that makes students do the work.
Shocked, I immediately converted my seminar into the training type.
Each session presents questions designed to provoke thinking.
Such as, “Why has not a single history book survived from ancient Egypt?”
Or, “What is the difference between memory and record?”
The moment you give the answer, it becomes mere knowledge and no longer thinking.
However, since this is a newspaper page, readers would become irritated if I did not provide an answer.
So I will state it explicitly.
Every people has things they are interested in and things they are not.
The ancient Egyptians had no interest in history.
That is why there are no history books, only inscriptions and fragments of papyrus.
The people of the Inca Empire had no interest in writing.
Then what about the Japanese?
They had no interest in “slavery” and “shields.”
As a result, they mistook the enslavement following defeat, the “Siberian internment,” for mere detention, and worked earnestly.
From this, one can infer what the Russians now expect from joint economic activities in the Northern Territories.
As for “shields,” I learned about this from novelist Naoki Hyakuta, so readers should someday hear the original account directly from him.
What did Koreans show no interest in?
The rule of law and culture.
Because they do not understand the rule of law, even former President Roh Moo-hyun, a former lawyer, confiscated the property of descendants of so-called pro-Japanese figures.
Despite evidence of innocence, former Sankei Shimbun Seoul Bureau Chief Tatsuya Kato was made an example through prosecution.
As for culture, they possessed only Chinese culture, so this too is poorly understood.
Thus they make culturally tone-deaf claims that judo and kendo originated with “us.”
This is what is commonly called “Uriginal.”
For a people, what they showed no interest in historically remains poorly understood even today.
To be continued.