Published on September 17, 2019.
This essay discusses Nishio Kanji’s criticism of Bungeishunju, the decline of public discourse after the discontinuation of Shokun!, the loss of resistance against the Asahi Shimbun and NHK, and Hando Kazutoshi’s view of history, arguing that postwar Japanese discourse has fallen into a distorted form of self-centered historical thinking.

September 17, 2019.
Someone once said that Hando’s history is the reverse side of the Imperial View of History, but this biting irony will probably never reach his intellect.
The following is a chapter published on August 16, 2018.
The following is a continuation of the previous chapter.
The decline of Bungeishunju and its third-rate actor.
Soon, Watanabe Shoichi and Nishio Kanji: The Complete Dialogues, a volume collecting nine dialogues, will be published by Business-sha.
At the beginning of that volume is a dialogue between the two men, held in WiLL, May 2009 issue, on the occasion of the discontinuation of Shokun!, in which they worried about the future of Bungeishunju.
Rather than saying they worried about its future, it may be more accurate to say that it was a dialogue that predicted Bungeishunju’s present self-destruction.
It is probably well known that in the first half of 2018, Bungeishunju exposed an unprecedented disgrace through internal strife over the appointment of its president.
However, one could also say that the present decline, almost amounting to self-destruction, had been predictable from the moment it discontinued Shokun!, the journal of opinion that formed its backbone.
It was a company whose strength lay in the free and expansive spirit of the independent intellect, taking jabs at the official opinions of Bungei Asahi and NHK, but it entered an age in which maintaining balance became difficult.
The Asahi Shimbun and NHK turned into rigid ideological groups, and Shokun! showed a posture of fighting against them.
The company tried to run away from both sides.
Thus, it became able to produce only magazines of speech that seemed to be holding back out of deference to something, timid, neutral, sanitary, and harmless, and its circulation fell.
In the dialogue, when I said, “At this rate, Bungeishunju is in danger,” and “Bungeishunju has been absorbed into the Asahi Shimbun,” Watanabe said that even if the work of anti-communism had ended, the enemies of thought should still have remained; anything that obstructs the purpose of making the Japanese state independent is an enemy.
He then raised questions, repeatedly saying “It is strange” and “It is a mystery,” with remarks such as, “Perhaps those who could no longer see that structure of confrontation became the mainstream at Bungeishunju,” “It is certain that today’s Bungeishunju is strongly colored by Hando Kazutoshi. It is strange why Hando has more influence over Bungeishunju after leaving the company,” and “Hando was not even an editor-in-chief who especially increased circulation, so why he now has influence over Bungeishunju is a mystery.”
Shokun!, Sound Argument, Voice, WiLL, and others were the resistance that opposed the power inside the media that controlled the Asahi Shimbun and NHK, namely the left.
Trying only to escape from the walls of pressure on both the left and the right, Bungeishunju created an empty spiritual space inside the company.
Into that space, from the left, the perfectly suited messenger of the devil named Hando Kazutoshi was sent.
Yes, Hando is a third-rate actor who suddenly appeared as a substitute for the collective will that had reached the limit of its ability to fight through the Article 9 Association or Shukan Kinyobi, after seeing the failure of the theory of the forcible taking away of comfort women.
The two men mentioned earlier, Nakajima Kenzo and Kato Shuichi, at least wore the masks of cultural figures called progressivism and Westernism.
They were, in a sense, literary men and thinkers.
Hando Kazutoshi is nothing.
He is not a specialist in anything.
Let me say one final thing about Hando’s view of history.
War is something that involves an opponent, yet he treats only what Japan did as the issue and does not try to see matters from an international perspective.
He almost always ignores how other countries were.
Nor does he try to view history on a long scale beyond modern and contemporary history.
No matter how reflectively the defects of one’s own national history are enumerated, this gives the impression of being made to read a self-centered view of national history.
Someone once said that Hando’s history is the reverse side of the Imperial View of History, but this biting irony will probably never reach his intellect.