Written May 18, 2022, as a memorandum for a future essay. The author invokes Hiroshi Furuta’s concept of “intuition and transcendence” and elevates Kumiko Takeuchi’s Seiron essay as the most important postwar line of thought, exposing how Japanese universities were dominated by ideology rather than scholarship. Through personal experiences, he contrasts true elites with figures like Chizuko Ueno, critiques the influence of leftist academia and media, and connects Naomi Trauden’s rise to her parents’ Kyoto University background. A sharp reflection on postwar Japan’s intellectual decay and the meaning of true scholarship.

An essay from May 18, 2022. The author argues that true elites exist to pursue scholarship to its highest degree, and that universities are not platforms for spreading ideology. He praises a paper by Kumiko Takeuchi, a Kyoto University graduate, as “one of the most important post-war papers” for exposing the reality of how Japanese universities have been dominated by ideology. Drawing on his own experiences and the example of Naomi Trauden and her parents, he critiques the state of Japanese intellectuals who have deviated from the essence of scholarship and questions what true learning is.

Universities Do Not Exist to Dominate and Spread Ideology

May 18, 2022

The following is a memorandum for an essay I will write at a later date.

That essay, like the debut of my Turntable of Civilization on July 16, 2010, will be one of the most important writings of the postwar era.
It will be written because, this morning, the definitions of “intuition and transcendence” by Furuta Hiroshi, a rare genuine scholar—indeed, a true great scholar in the postwar world—appeared in my mind as a revelation.

Yesterday, Kumiko Takeuchi, who studied at Kyoto University, published one of the most important postwar essays in the Seiron column of the Sankei Shimbun.
No one recognized that her essay was one of the most important of the postwar era.
Why was I able to recognize it?

An elite is one who exists to pursue scholarship to the utmost.

All the more, universities cannot possibly exist to dominate and spread ideology.
And yet, postwar Japan was exactly that.
Her essay made this clear in a single line.

She was able to write it precisely because she studied and graduated from Kyoto University.

As sincere readers know, I was born in Miyagi Prefecture, achieved unprecedented grades at Yuriage Junior High School in Natori City, and studied at Sendai Second High School, the school where those endowed with elite intellects in Miyagi converged.

The professor of world history, loved by all, who had seen my true nature—just as at Yuriage Elementary and Junior High—had himself advanced from Ni-Kō to Tohoku University and later taught at his alma mater.
He had wished to study at Kyoto University but was prevented by family circumstances, and so studied at Tohoku instead.
Perhaps for that reason, he transcended with intuition both my true essence and my family troubles.

One day, passing me in the corridor, he stopped me and said:

“You must go to Kyoto University and carry that institution upon your shoulders.”

As sincere readers know, my family troubles ran deeper than even his intuition and transcendence.
I walked a life much like J. M. G. Le Clézio’s breakthrough work The Book of Flight.

Contrary to my teacher’s stern directive, I did not go to Kyoto University.
But somehow, I did reach Kyoto.
Perhaps because Kyoto University was then barricaded with great banners proclaiming “Rebellion is Justified.”

At that moment too, revelation came to me:

“I have no need of university.”

Soon after, I chose Osaka as the stage of my life, founded a company literally from scratch, and despite being a completely unknown small-to-medium enterprise, I paid over 17 billion yen in taxes to the Japanese nation in just ten peak years.

Kumiko Takeuchi, who continues the most important reflections of postwar Japan, studied at Kyoto University.

That line she wrote so casually is, I say, the single most important line of the postwar era.
And yet, not a single person has recognized it—save me.

Although the university was notorious as a leftist university, surrounded entirely by leftists.

Chizuko Ueno also studied at Kyoto University, but since she was not endowed with the intellect of a true elite… and because the time is now urgent, I will say it firmly: she is a fool.
She has not only spread arguments that serve authoritarian states like China but has virtually dominated the humanities at the University of Tokyo.

The fact that male academics who call themselves “scholars” worship her is itself symbolic of the foolishness of postwar Japan and of the existence of camps peddling foolish arguments.

Some programs on TV Tokyo are amusing; I watch them.
But the people of the news department that controls the BS nightly news program, which employs Naomi Trauden as though she were an anchor, are the lowest of the low as journalists.
For the record here: her parents are professors at Kyoto University, infamous as a leftist university—her father is German, her mother Japanese.

There is a small path along the wall of the Kyoto State Guest House.
Deep in the Kyoto Imperial Palace forest along that path, there is a tree whose autumn leaves I always consider the most beautiful and which I photograph every year.

A few years ago, feeling an irresistible urge to photograph there while listening to Otis Redding’s “White Christmas,” I visited.
John Lennon and Yoko Ono once produced a record whose jacket shows them standing beneath a tree.

Beneath the above tree, there stood a couple, striking a pose exactly like that photograph: a foreign man and a Japanese woman.
They looked unmistakably like university professors—the man pretending to read a book, the woman too.
Since Doshisha University lies next to the Imperial Palace, I assumed they were professors there.

When I later saw Naomi Trauden on TV Tokyo and was dismayed, I realized intuitively that this couple were her parents.

Last year, during the plum season, I again encountered them at the plum grove.
On the path alongside the Kyoto Imperial Palace, I passed Naomi Trauden face to face, and our eyes met.

My parents embody the entire lineage of Japan stretching unbroken from the Jōmon era.
Naomi Trauden and her parents embody only the postwar.

The fact that her parents are professors at Kyoto University, infamous as a leftist university, and that she is favored by the leftist-controlled news department at TV Tokyo, is inevitable.

That I should encounter them in such ways is also inevitable.

Furuta Hiroshi, a true great scholar, would grasp this silently.
To be continued.