December 22, 2022
Quite some time ago, an elderly female professor from Monaco’s Royal Ballet School, deeply respected by prima ballerinas around the world, visited Japan.
These are the words she spoke then about the significance of artists’ existence.
“Artists are important because they alone can illuminate truths that have been concealed or remain hidden, and give expression to them.”
Surely no one would dispute her words.
It is no exaggeration whatsoever to say that Masayuki Takayama is not only a journalist without equal in the postwar world but also an artist without equal in the postwar world.
Meanwhile, many of those who call themselves writers—Oe, Murakami, Hirano, and others—and imagine themselves to be artists do not even deserve the name.
For, far from illuminating concealed or hidden truths and giving expression to them, they have merely given expression to lies manufactured by the Asahi Shimbun and others.
The same must be true of people like them not only in Japan but in countries throughout the world.
In other words, true artists are exceedingly few.
This book, too, poignantly demonstrates the correctness of my assertion that no one in the world today is more deserving of the Nobel Prize in Literature than Masayuki Takayama.
China Is, at Its Core, an Irredeemably Barbaric State
Seki Hei:
China is the same.
People are always ruled by some powerful force and want to submit to those who are strong.
That gives them a certain sense of security.
You might call it a kind of “slave mentality.”
Takayama:
You understand that well, Mr. Seki.
In Japan, no matter what sort of tyrant might emerge, no one as wicked and cruel as Ivan the Terrible or Mao Zedong would appear.
This must be incomprehensible to Japanese people.
Moreover, Mao Zedong would tell lies without hesitation, claiming, for example, that sixty thousand tons of rice had been harvested from a single tan of land.
Impossible claims become commonplace.
For Japanese people, the conversation would end with “Don’t be ridiculous,” but that is not what happens there.
Come to think of it, China condemns “Japanese militarism” during the Second World War, but Japanese citizens also went to the battlefield “of their own free will.”
They held the noble aspiration: “Through this war, let us liberate Asia from oppression by the Western powers.”
At the 1951 San Francisco Peace Conference with Japan, the representative of Ceylon, J. R. Jayewardene, who later became president, stated: “When the nations of Asia were colonies, Japan alone was strong and free, and we looked up to it as a protector who would liberate us.
Japan’s slogan of Asian co-prosperity had a powerful appeal for us.
When war began, the leaders of various countries cooperated with Japan in the hope of liberating their homelands.”
He thus rejected U.S. Secretary of State Dulles’s speech condemning Japan, and Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, renounced its right to claim reparations from Japan.
There is a booklet entitled To the Infantryman, written by army staff officer Masanobu Tsuji during the Second World War, which states: “Chinese people cannot understand a higher cause even if it is explained to them.”
“Therefore, cooperation is impossible.”
It then gives extremely detailed instructions on the “proper mindset for battle.”
Understanding it requires a certain level of education.
Japanese Army infantrymen read it properly and acted accordingly.
Compared with this Japanese “rationality,” China is utterly barbaric.
Even without surveying the wickedness and cruelty of the Ming dynasty, there is a tragedy such as that of Fang Xiaoru.
Seki Hei:
You mean the Ming-dynasty thinker.
He served the Hui Emperor, and when the future Yongle Emperor rebelled, he wrote a proclamation calling for a campaign against him.
But when the Yongle Emperor ascended the throne, Fang was ordered, partly because of his reputation, to write the accession edict.
Fang Xiaoru refused, however, and was crucified, while 847 members of his extended family were also condemned to death.
Takayama:
As I read the account, I found myself wondering, “Why did no one stop this?”
When the Yongle Emperor was succeeding to the throne, Fang admonished him: “That is not your Mandate of Heaven.”
In other words, “You have usurped someone else’s throne.”
The Yongle Emperor responded, “How dare you be so insolent,” and killed Fang Xiaoru and his entire family.
Nothing could be more outrageous.
Seki Hei:
Not merely his family, but all nine degrees of kinship.
Takayama:
His paternal family, the maternal side of his paternal family, the paternal side of his maternal family—all nine degrees of kinship were wiped out.
In the end, even his disciples were slaughtered.
Rather than simply calling it terrifying, from the perspective of those around him, no one could have brought more trouble upon others.
Seki Hei:
More than that, the problem is that this is recounted as an admirable story in Chinese history.
He is praised for “refusing to compromise his principles even when all nine degrees of his kin were killed.”
But from my perspective, when the Yongle Emperor ordered him to write the accession edict, I think: “Then write it.
Rather than having all your relatives killed, why not simply compromise your principles?
When you consider hundreds of lives, what does your personal integrity matter?”
Yet he would not write it.
In short, no one in China sees a problem with the loss of the lives of all those relatives for such an unreasonable reason.
On the contrary, they think that “the higher cause is everything.”
Zhu Xi’s Neo-Confucianism carries on that tendency, too.
Takayama:
Yet nothing is more alien to Chinese people as they actually are than a “higher cause.”
There is no higher cause in reality.
Seki Hei:
Exactly.
But precisely because there is none, it is emphasized all the more.
Takayama:
I see…