Japan’s Meiji-era achievements, exemplified by rapid railway construction, contradict postwar narratives that demean the nation.
Anyone who understands Kyoto through lived experience can naturally grasp the excellence of Japan and its people.

Anyone who knows Kyoto through lived, physical experience can naturally understand the excellence of Japan and the Japanese people.
2016-01-03
In order to continue the chapter I wrote this morning, I will write the following section.
In last year’s Buratamori episode on Karuizawa, the program explained how, in 1891, Japan decided to adopt the Abt system to overcome the steep slopes of the Usui Pass,
and how this achievement, along with electrified operation, occupies a distinguished place in the history of Japanese railway technology.
Many viewers may have overlooked it, but the program also revealed that the Japanese government opened no fewer than nineteen railway lines within a period of just one and a half years.
This fact alone is sufficient.
It fully exposes the unfathomable foolishness of the Asahi Shimbun,
the Japan Federation of Bar Associations,
and so-called cultural figures represented by Kenzaburō Ōe,
who for seventy years after the war have persisted in slandering and diminishing Japan,
while claiming that a constitution hastily copied by GHQ from Western documents in just two weeks somehow created the finest possible Japanese nation and people.
Anyone who knows Kyoto through lived, physical experience can naturally grasp the greatness of Japan and its people.
This manuscript continues.