2010-12-24
On the summation of Chapter One of “The Turntable of Civilization” and the transition to Chapter Two.
Chapter One of “The Turntable of Civilization” was like the time when, although the business I had been engaged in was entering a difficult financial situation, having suffered the full adverse impact of the drastic changes following the restrictions on total lending introduced on April 1, 1990… to rectify the super-heavy tax… in an unprecedented manner…
I spent 10 million yen on advertising, distributing an opinion advertisement as a newspaper insert to every Nikkei-subscribing household in Tokyo, and, as I had hoped, brought about the correction of that pernicious tax.
…This must have been an unprecedented advertisement… because it was precisely something like the tradition of bankara—the rough-hewn, fiercely independent spirit—that had been passed down within me… no, one could also say that I did it because, following those restrictions on total lending, I had effectively become an impoverished scholar…
For it is the way of the world that those enjoying the security of an elite position do not raise the voices they ought to raise….
Or like the opinion advertisement I distributed seven years ago as an insert to Nikkei-subscribing households in Osaka Prefecture, which undoubtedly reached the very heart of Osaka.
As I have already written, it was also at that time that my writing style took its finished form.
I am convinced that Chapter One has, without a doubt, reached the nerve centre of Japan.
For example, surely no one before me had ever put forward arguments about the mass media such as mine.
I am convinced that, deeply and quietly, my words are reaching our country.
Thirty years since the birth of the PC, the world cannot function without the Internet… I, who am by no means proficient in computer technology, began writing online on July 16 because I could no longer keep my thoughts to myself; like, for example, the great writers of the past, I was someone who disliked writing by hand,
but upon encountering the keyboard, I felt: this is the tool for me… and my writing style took its finished form… these clear characters… these shared characters that anyone can read… whether in Japanese or English… in fact, I attach no great value to such things as styles of lettering…
All that matters in words is whether there is truth in them.
Living a comfortable life, cultivating an appreciation of calligraphy… and so on… taken to an extreme, I even think one could call that, too, a reprehensible vice of the so-called intellectual.
Had one lived in the ninth century… since that was the only means of communicating through the written word, it would certainly have been better to be, like Kūkai, a master of calligraphy as well.
But now it is the twenty-first century… the only question is whether one possesses thought worthy of the twenty-first century; calligraphy and such things are of no consequence.
In pictorial terms, my photographs, or the camerawork—or, rather, the framing—of magnificent American films… or genuine television documentaries, of which there are countless examples throughout the world, such as the work of the director and camera crew who filmed Tasha, whom I mentioned earlier… are far superior.
Though, since I do not type using proper touch-typing technique, it periodically gives me tenosynovitis in my wrists.
If I were someone who possessed all the knowledge there is about computers… I would, as soon as tomorrow, be opening up an unprecedented genre, the finest of the twenty-first century… something that could not have existed in the twentieth century.
I promise those readers who buy my book that I will continue to write thoughts… words… worth their purchase, and Chapter Two contains material that can only be written in such a book form.
There are things in writing, in écriture—expressing oneself—that cannot simply be written continuously for an unspecified multitude.
For écriture cannot be spoken language.
Why?… Because it is the soul.
Just as my photographs, too, are my soul.
Because it is work into which I have poured the time…
Of what we call life… finite… destined to be a life lived only once….
There is no way that a person who goes to Ryōan-ji, Ginkaku-ji, Shisen-dō, Kikoku-tei, and Arashiyama, and sees everything there is to see in all of them, could have failed to observe Japan and the world in their entirety over these forty years.
Please give your support to Chapter Two of my “The Turntable of Civilization”… published by Magmag….
As for photography, with Japan heading into winter, just the other day… I found myself wanting to photograph Hawaii, which I truly loved…
Why had I loved Hawaii so much?… A desire suddenly came over me to take every photograph that only I could take.
But going at this time of year would be expensive, and so, living as I do in poverty, I abandoned the idea with bitter regret…
I would be fortunate if I could discover something in wintertime Kyoto that I had never seen before…
Though I am not particularly fond of a monochrome world, I thought, letting out a small sigh.
If there should be nothing worth seeing in wintertime Kyoto… then I shall watch wonderful films, or look at Kurikinton-san’s lovely smile…
She truly has the smile of goodness itself… and spend the year-end and New Year holidays that way, I thought. (Laughs)