July 23, 2010
The first time I decided that, if things had come to this, I had no choice but to write in the form of a blog while walking was out of profound anger at the fact that something so utterly foolish was being committed openly in broad daylight, even though I had sometimes worked like a carriage horse, taking only two days off in an entire year, had paid more than 17 billion yen in taxes in various forms, and still pay more than 10 million yen in fixed-asset taxes to the City of Osaka every year.
Yesterday, I thought that I had finished writing Chapter One, and I also felt that, considering I had written it while walking, I had done quite well, even if I say so myself.
However, yesterday, when such words as “Japan’s proposal” and “favorable response” came through on a television sports news program—even if the result was exactly as I had surmised—I truly became disgusted.
[Omitted]
Yet even young birds and lion cubs that require their parents’ protection need a quiet nest.
For a boy endowed with sensitivity commensurate with his abilities, the loss of peace becomes correspondingly unbearable.
Years later, when I encountered Engels’s words, “I did not learn Marxism at school; I learned it through my own family,” I realized that this is what human beings who transform an age are like.
The same must have been true of Shakyamuni—Gautama Siddhartha.
I believe the same was true of Christ.
Knowledge acquired at school may enable one to make money, but it cannot pierce an age, change an age, or make history…
That is what Kazumi Takahashi meant when he wrote, as quoted earlier, “In every age, those who created and transformed the times were men of humble means who possessed nothing.”