2010-9-12
The cultural section of that day’s Asahi Shimbun evening edition lay spread out on the table.
Explorer of Knowledge　The Path of Tadao Umesao　An Ecological View of the History of Civilization
That headline was on the right, and on the left was a half-length photograph of Tadao Umesao when he was young.
Hmm…I thought, and as I began reading, I exclaimed…Oh!…Just as I thought.
Japan lies on the periphery of the world.
Since that is our destiny, why don’t we embrace being people of the periphery to the fullest…it is exactly the same as what I wrote in the first chapter of my “The Turntable of Civilization”…as a true island nation…it is enough for us to be the Galápagos of the world…just as I thought…
At one of Japan’s leading schools for university preparation, where I was unquestionably an outstanding student, the renowned history teacher with ties to Kyoto University stopped me in the corridor…and said…You should remain at the university and become someone who carries Kyoto University on his shoulders….
Teacher, there was nothing mistaken in those words, but when I was in my third year of high school, my family finally collapsed completely, and afterward, I was an empty shell.
But what you said was not mistaken at all…it has taken me more than forty years…of which I think twenty were truly wasted…but, in any event, I have begun writing…and to think that, right from the outset, it was pointing to the same thing as Tadao Umesao…
Thinking this, I began reading, only to find that it was an explanation of a bestseller by Tatsuru Uchida, a professor at Kobe College…but…in Chapter One, Uchida writes that what he wants to say is expressed in Tadao Umesao’s book “An Ecological View of the History of Civilization”…and, indeed, in that case, I understand…
Because, I am sorry, Mr. Uchida.
But a mind like mine or Tadao Umesao’s can understand…the meaning of almost the same thing having taken root in the minds of two people who led entirely different lives.
I tell my readers…without any affectation whatsoever…that they can confidently read “The Turntable of Civilization” as a collection of writings by a genuinely Gifted person.
Please understand that I am not telling a ghost story on a midsummer night.
Then, several days later, I remembered something…a remarkably beautiful professor at Kobe College had lived next door to my home…occasionally, when she was coming or going with her mother, we would meet at the entrance and merely exchange greetings.
As she was moving away, she came to visit our company’s office, which was diagonally opposite my home—although it was just an ordinary apartment.
She said, “Although we have been neighbors for a long time, Mr. President, we have never once had a conversation”…
This was almost twenty years ago….
In the president’s office, I told her about “The Turntable of Civilization,” the answer I had found in Rome twenty-five years ago…
Naturally, there was no part about the stock market or Japan’s revival…
Because I had heard from my younger sister that she was devoted to Christianity and herself held a leading position in a certain church.
She was probably the very first person to hear my “The Turntable of Civilization.”
The reason I remembered was that, later, my younger sister told me, “The professor said that after hearing your story, she could not sleep for three days and three nights…she had never heard anything from such a perspective, nor had she ever thought about it…”
“I don’t understand it myself, but apparently she was profoundly shocked”…that was what I was told.
Incidentally, although I owe the esteemed Umesao a sincere apology, I have never read his “An Ecological View of the History of Civilization” at all…
Nor have I read any of his other books…
Why?…
I can no longer return to the world of scholarship…
When I thought that my only path was to earn money through practical work and establish myself…I made a resolution in my heart…
For the next ten years, I would neither watch any film I wanted to see nor read any book I wanted to read…I would immerse myself in work.
From that day onward, I, who had thought that doing any work after six in the evening, even for a single second, was utterly out of the question,…
Until two in the morning, or even three…
Suddenly became someone who could work…
Since then, I have hardly read any of your books…
Because I can instinctively tell whether something is genuine…
I have simply and single-mindedly lived thinking only about when and how I would write the one book God gave me as my mission,…
Given the nature of its subject, just how should I write it…
All this time, that alone has occupied my thoughts.
Encouraged by John Lennon and Bob Dylan (tears…)
Note: The person I have been referring to as U has a somewhat similar name, but, naturally, he is not the esteemed Tadao Umesao.