Published on September 17, 2019.
This essay criticizes Kato Shuichi’s comparison of Motoori Norinaga with Heidegger’s support for Nazism, as well as Oe Kenzaburo’s Nobel Prize lecture, arguing that postwar Japanese intellectuals displayed servility toward Western culture and a self-denying attitude toward Japan’s own cultural tradition.

September 17, 2019.
Oe’s Nobel Prize lecture was servile in content, politically denying Japan’s past culture as a “dark side” and simply elevating Western culture in the name of universality.
Thinking about it, this was common to the weakness of Kato’s self-understanding.
The following is a continuation of the previous chapter.
Next comes the most tremendous and serious example.
Kato connected Motoori Norinaga’s National Learning with the support for Nazism shown by Heidegger in twentieth-century Germany, and said that Norinaga’s exclusionary discourse, which preached the superiority of the “Imperial Nation,” was identical to the political stance of Heidegger, who was a genuine Nazi Party member.
Yūhi Mōgo, March 22, 1988.
The first objection that will occur to anyone is that Kato lacked the sense of distinction that the eras were far too different.
There is in Kato’s argument an abandonment of thought that regards Heidegger as worthless simply upon hearing the word Nazi.
This is the second question.
Heidegger was a Nazi Party member, but at the same time he was also a great philosopher.
These two things can coexist, and German culture must make them coexist from now on.
I do not know whether Sartre was a great philosopher, but he was a genuine Maoist.
To superimpose the fate of a twentieth-century philosopher onto Motoori Norinaga is, if not emotional politicalism, then excessive ignorance born of not knowing history.
In the history of German culture, Norinaga’s contemporaries would be, at most, the Brothers Grimm.
Norinaga was not rejecting foreign things.
He was merely taking issue with the lack of judgment on the part of Japanese people who defenselessly worshipped foreign things such as Confucianism and Buddhism.
If that is so, then for Kato, who did not make independence from Western culture his own task, to say such a thing is like spitting at heaven and confessing his own ignorance.
What must not be forgotten is that it was Kato who discovered Oe Kenzaburo when Oe was a student and served as the bridge that brought him into the literary world.
Oe’s Nobel Prize lecture was servile in content, politically denying Japan’s past culture as a “dark side” and simply elevating Western culture in the name of universality.
Thinking about it, this is common to the weakness of Kato’s self-understanding.
The starting point of Oe, the representative of that tremendous postwar deviation, was Kato Shuichi.
This essay continues.