This essay examines Shuichi Kato’s criticism of Motoori Norinaga and Kenzaburo Oe’s Nobel Prize lecture through the perspective of scholar Mikio Nishio.
It criticizes the postwar intellectual tendency in Japan to equate Japanese cultural traditions with political darkness while elevating Western culture as universal.
The essay argues that linking Norinaga’s Kokugaku thought with Nazism reflects historical ignorance and illustrates the self-denying intellectual climate that shaped postwar Japanese discourse.

March 27, 2019.
Kenzaburo Oe’s Nobel Prize lecture denied Japan’s past culture politically as a “dark side” and humbly praised Western culture in the name of universality.
The following continues from the previous chapter.
Next comes the most shocking and serious example.
Shuichi Kato connected Motoori Norinaga’s Kokugaku with Martin Heidegger’s support of Nazism in twentieth-century Germany and argued that Norinaga’s allegedly exclusionary discourse praising the superiority of the “Imperial nation” was identical to the political stance of Heidegger, who was in fact a member of the Nazi Party (Yuhi Mogo, March 22, 1988).
Anyone would first think of the objection that Kato lacked the awareness that the historical periods were far too different.
Kato’s argument contains an intellectual surrender that dismisses Heidegger as worthless simply upon hearing the word Nazi.
This is the second question.
Heidegger was indeed a member of the Nazi Party, but at the same time he was also a great philosopher.
These two facts can coexist, and German culture must continue to confront this coexistence.
Whether Jean-Paul Sartre was truly a great philosopher is debatable, but he was unquestionably a Maoist.
To project the fate of twentieth-century philosophers onto Motoori Norinaga is either emotional politicalism or sheer ignorance of history.
Within German cultural history the closest contemporary comparable to Norinaga would be no more than the Brothers Grimm.
Norinaga did not reject foreign influences themselves.
He merely criticized the lack of judgment among Japanese who worshipped foreign imports such as Confucianism and Buddhism without reflection.
If that is so, for Kato, who never set independence from Western culture as his own task, to say such things is like spitting into the sky and confessing his own ignorance.
It should not be forgotten that it was Kato who discovered Kenzaburo Oe during his student years and served as the bridge that introduced him to the literary world.
Oe’s Nobel Prize lecture denied Japan’s past culture politically as a “dark side” and endlessly praised Western culture in the name of universality, and upon reflection this resembles Kato’s own weak self-understanding.
The starting point of that extraordinary postwar deviation represented by Oe was Shuichi Kato.
This essay will continue.
I myself have recently been forced to say that Kenzaburo Oe and others are human refuse, but Mikio Nishio, who has long walked the path of a great scholar, had already perfectly exposed Oe’s true nature long ago.