This essay confronts intellectual denial of Japan by invoking the tangible beauty of Kyoto’s natural aesthetics. By juxtaposing personal experience with national history, it challenges the legitimacy of rejecting Japan’s cultural inheritance.

2016-03-04

I realized that my life had been exactly the same as Japan’s.

For my life, too, was one in which people who repaid kindness with betrayal appeared at every major turning point.

In that sense, it has been an unbearable postwar—and an unbearable life.

Those who repay the debt of having been born in Japan—a country that can truly be called the most magnificent and beautiful in the world—are the so-called intellectuals.

When I was living the life of a businessman who had started from nothing, Ōe Kenzaburō, a Nobel Prize laureate, stated that he could not agree with—indeed, that he rejected—the phrase “beautiful Japan” in the Nobel Prize acceptance speech “Beautiful Japan and Myself” by the solitary writer Kawabata Yasunari, who had received the prize before him. I believe it was Takayama Masayuki who told me this.

Now I find myself thinking: then which country, exactly, did Ōe consider to be beautiful?

As readers know, I am now one of Ōe’s harshest critics.

Put simply, since he denied Japan, I deny him in return.

You possess not even a hair’s breadth of anything that could rival the beauty of Kyoto—its flowers, birds, wind, and moon.

In other words, when measured against the countless great figures Japan has produced, what, in the end, were you to Japan?

To be continued.