Ōe Kenzaburō’s casual remark praising Soviet hydrogen bombs, coupled with his resentment toward being Japanese, reveals an ideology aligned with Cold War-era propaganda rather than moral consistency.

2016-04-10

He casually made remarks suggesting that Soviet hydrogen bombs in the past were somehow “clean.”
There is not the slightest trace of what might be called Japanese integrity in him, and in fact he himself has written that he resents being Japanese.
In a passage he wrote for Gunzō in 1961, he described how, on the night of his wedding, he watched a television drama depicting a Korean resident woman boarding a repatriation ship bound for North Korea, and how he burst into a flood of tears and murmured, “I have no Korea to return to, because I am Japanese.”
At that time, the Asahi Shimbun was running a campaign proclaiming that “North Korea is a paradise on earth.”
In reality, this was a false propaganda campaign devised at the behest of Kim Il-sung to funnel labor and funds to the North, and Ōe cooperated in it.
If he wished so badly to go to Korea, he should simply have gone.
Japanese people would not be saddened by it; rather, many would gladly have seen him off.
To be continued.