To Mr. Hideo Tsuchiya, columnist for the Nikkei newspaper.
2010-09-21
Now, since I have work early tomorrow morning, let me write this now.
…I have realized something momentous.
Even when I was at my customary weekend super sento public bath later than usual, the sense of unease I had written about that morning kept following me…
First, as the readers of “The Turntable of Civilization” already know, what has shaped these past twenty years has been their great chorus of justice.
Justice—is that something you people have any business talking about?… A muttering in my head…
And another thing: justice, at this late date?… What Bob Dylan once sang… The Russians have “God on their side,” and the Americans have “God on their side”…
And so they wage war…
If you are going to speak of justice, surely you have no choice but to mention that, throughout history and across the world… even now… wars are being fought for the sake of justice,
Or surely the argument is hopeless unless it goes there.
Yet what he brings up is Ichiro Ozawa.
In other words, they have not changed at all since before the war.
Their way of using this kind of reasoning to turn a person into a villain or an enemy of the people.
I do not particularly think that a Harvard professor is someone who will save the world…
Because I am convinced that, had I been born into a happy family in America, I might have graduated from Harvard at nineteen.
Since it is the pinnacle of America, a country that is exceptionally intellectual to begin with, it is only natural to pay it respect.
The problem is the way Japan’s mass media construct editorials like this.
After these twenty years, Japan’s authorities must all be crumbling… so let us borrow Harvard…
But Professor Sandel himself might well be blinking in bewilderment at being used to construct an argument like this.
Anyone with intelligence, when confronted with justice, must inevitably turn their thoughts toward religion… If he were to proceed from there to write a profound discussion of religion, that would be right… but Mr. Tsuchiya, of all things, brought in Ichiro Ozawa.
Since he is presumably associated with the Nikkei newspaper, he surely would never subscribe to Shukan Asahi.
He presumably has not examined any of the sequence of events I have already described.
First comes Professor Sandel’s theory of justice… talk of its having been broadcast on NHK and so on, with no details whatsoever about its substance… In short, he wants to lend authority to the word justice through Harvard.
Then Mr. Ozawa appears… without his having heard even the slightest thing about Mr. Ozawa’s thoughts or opinions on “justice.”
If what he means is, “I think Mr. Ozawa is a bad man, an unpleasant man, a man I dislike,” then why not simply say so?
There is surely no need to use Harvard’s Professor Sandel as his opening.
This is what I think… If he were a man of the prewar era, even Masao Maruyama would be imprisoned, merely for attending a lecture by Nyozekan Hasegawa, through this way of constructing his argument.
The many brilliant minds who were brutally killed were also accused of crimes through exactly this same reasoning.
What on earth…
It is Mr. Tsuchiya himself who is profoundly lacking in justice… In exposing a person to the whole world as a villain, he has not personally heard a single one of that person’s thoughts or opinions.
Where could one find an editorial like this?
I am grateful for the sense of unease I felt this morning.
I am grateful for the shower at the hot spring with its outstanding water quality.
Because it was while taking that shower that I realized all the answers.
Since I have no time, tonight I will conclude in the manner of an aphorism.
Justice is the word of those in power.
Nobility is the word of ordinary people… Even in the wars these self-righteous men started, they all went to their deaths for their country.
Hollywood films are sweeping the world not because of anything like justice.
It is because almost every film contains human nobility, the nobility of the human soul,
And it goes without saying that America is great not because of anything like justice.
It is because it possesses genuine intelligence and the world’s greatest “freedom of speech.”
Even without looking at the recent example of Toyota, “justice” is dangerous.
If we cite the example of McCarthy’s anti-Communist witch hunts, “justice” is something appalling.