2010-11-2
This is Tadanori Yokoo’s review, published in the book review section of Sunday’s Asahi Shimbun, of the book discussed in the preceding chapter, Tadao Umesao Speaks, written by Tadao Umesao, with Shuzo Koyama as interviewer.
Tadao Umesao Speaks
Written by Tadao Umesao; interviewer: Shuzo Koyama
When I had a conversation with Kinji Imanishi while he was alive, he said, “You’re not a scholar, so today I’ll talk about anything and everything as though I were leaving my last testament,” and launched into a freewheeling discourse in his distinctive Imanishi manner, but as I read this book, I could not help seeing Umesao and Imanishi overlapping.
This was because Umesao had passed away before this book came out, so his final words sounded like a testament addressed to the Japanese people of today.
If that is so, we must listen with due care.
The way Umesao breaks through all bounds is, like Imanishi’s, extraordinary.
“Exhilarating” is the only word for it.
From the opening onward, criticism of Japan’s intellectuals erupts throughout the book.
He says that “intellectuals are the successors to the samurai” and that they look down on ordinary townspeople, declaring, “We are the intellectuals.”
For example, he goes on like this: “What utter nonsense—nothing but a derivative of Marx, isn’t it? … There’s no originality whatsoever,” naming prominent scholars and tearing into them.
Merely reading other people’s books does not qualify as originality; originality springs from an idea, and with “If that bothers you, try coming up with an idea yourself,” his sharp tongue knows no bounds in attacking those who pursue scholarship in their heads.
Since thought does not arise from scholarship, one should walk on one’s own feet, think with one’s own head about what one has seen with one’s own eyes, and write it down; he dismisses writers who quote other people’s books with a single stroke: “It’s pretentiousness.”
And he maintains that what ultimately determined his life was “play,” turning thought into play as well.
This has something in common with art itself and rises to the purposelessness of life, but, as if to underpin such thinking, he called himself a follower of Laozi and Zhuangzi and was a practitioner of their philosophy, which valued non-action and the way of naturalness.
Having relinquished lingering attachments, material desires, and indulgence in pleasure, this man of “exhilarating non-possession” seems to have understood himself as a being who would disappear as one individual within humanity as a whole, not because of his long life of ninety years, but because he was a nihilist by nature and a “cheerful pessimist” (his own words).
Why not acquaint yourself with the outlook on life of Umesao, who learned everything through his own feet and eyes, including going on academic expeditions led by Kinji Imanishi?
Review by Tadanori Yokoo, painter