Published on January 7, 2020. Beginning with the author’s childhood memory of attending lectures by Toshihiko Tokizane and Takeo Kuwabara and deciding that Kyoto University was where he should go, this essay moves to his first visit to the University of Tokyo and then to criticism of Professor Tonomura Masaru’s forced-labor conscription theory, which the author learned about through Ruriko Kubota’s essay in Sound Argument. It criticizes the structure in which the Asahi Shimbun and NHK promote figures such as Kang Sang-jung and Tonomura Masaru as University of Tokyo professors, describing it as a pathology within Japan’s intellectual system that produces the exact opposite of what Saichō called national treasures.

2020-01-07
The result is that people such as Kang Sang-jung and Tonomura Masaru end up calling themselves professors of the University of Tokyo, and the Asahi Shimbun and NHK end up promoting them.
When I was a boy, I went to listen to a lecture meeting by Toshihiko Tokizane and Takeo Kuwabara held in Sendai because I felt that I absolutely had to go.
At that time, I came to the truly youthful conclusion that the place I should go was Kyoto University, and that I was the one who should become Takeo Kuwabara’s disciple.
Since then, the University of Tokyo was not in my mind at all.
Last year, when I went to Tokyo on business, I had quite a lot of time left.
I thought, “That’s right, I should go and see the University of Tokyo,” and visited it for the first time.
It is completely different from Kyoto University and Osaka University—if anything, there are parts that resemble Tohoku University.
It has an appearance that truly calls to mind Japan in the Meiji period.
The beginning of government-sponsored learning that began in order to compete with Europe and the United States.
Gathering Japan’s most outstanding players.
The laborious essay by Ruriko Kubota published in this month’s issue of the monthly magazine Sound Argument, which I introduced the other day, is an essay that every Japanese citizen must read.
Through this essay, I learned for the first time that there is a University of Tokyo professor named Tonomura Masaru, who spreads the forced-labor conscription theory and other such claims, and that the Asahi Shimbun has made such laughable arguments its sacred banner.
When I searched online, I found that, like Kang Sang-jung, he is of the same kind: someone who graduated from Waseda and became a professor at the University of Tokyo.
Today, I thought the following.
There is no doubt that intellectually brilliant people crowd into the University of Tokyo.
Those outstanding players who represent Japan go to Kasumigaseki and steer the Japanese state, or go to great corporations that Japan boasts to the world and become presidents, or, in a small number of cases, remain at universities and become researchers.
But the absolute number who become professors is probably small.
Today, many of them probably head to foreign-affiliated firms and aim for annual incomes of 50 million yen in their twenties, and as you know, I have judged that this will destroy the nation.
Where that absolute number is insufficient, they fill the gap with strange Korean slots, Chinese slots, or other-university slots.
The result is that people such as Kang Sang-jung and Tonomura Masaru end up calling themselves professors of the University of Tokyo, and the Asahi Shimbun and NHK end up promoting them.
In other words, there exists a production process for junk that is the exact opposite of what Saichō called national treasures, and that brings harm to the nation.
Because this is done with the investment of the people’s taxes, the University of Tokyo truly has one aspect that is foolish beyond salvation.