The following is a chapter I republished today.
As I reread it while listening to Takagi Ririko’s violin on YouTube, I thought that this chapter ought to be republished now.
Just today, President Trump returned to the United States after the U.S.-China talks.
For this chapter, ♬New Cinema Paradise♬, performed by Takagi Ririko, is a perfect fit.
Around the time when pro-China political hacks, the old media, and others eased visa requirements for Chinese people, and Kyoto, for example, began to overflow with Chinese tourists who were insolent and lawless in every respect.
There was something that left me so stunned that I almost lost myself.
I visit the Kyoto Gyoen National Garden more than forty times a year to take photographs.
In other words, it is one of the places I love most.
There is a toilet near the birdbath.
I use it from time to time.
That day, when I entered the urinal area, I felt a chill run through me.
The way the toilet had been dirtied was something I had never seen before.
How on earth could anyone make a toilet filthy in such a way!
To be continued.
When I was a young university student, the great scholar Maruyama Masao was still alive, and he was frequently crying out in newspapers that “Japanese nationalism has lost its virginity.”
Published on September 17, 2019.
This article introduces the preface to Furuya Hiroshi’s book A Unified Korea Would Be a Disaster for Japan, and discusses the abstract discourse of postwar intellectuals such as Maruyama Masao, the realities of the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, and South Korea, and the importance of viewing the Korean Peninsula realistically.
2019-09-17.
When I was a young university student, the great scholar Maruyama Masao was still alive, and he was frequently crying out in newspapers that “Japanese nationalism has lost its virginity.”
The following is a chapter I published on September 16, 2018.
The following is from the preface to A Unified Korea Would Be a Disaster for Japan, a book of truth written by Furuya Hiroshi, one of the finest intellects alive in the twenty-first century, into which he poured the full force of his own studies for the sake of Japan and the world.
A book written for the sake of society and for the sake of people.
Introduction.
When I was a young university student, the great scholar Maruyama Masao was still alive, and he was frequently crying out in newspapers that “Japanese nationalism has lost its virginity.”
Having gone through defeat in war, he must have feared, or detested, the possibility that that ghost might rise again.
In any case, he could not help but denigrate it.
I understand the feeling, but from those words I could not conjure up any visual image whatsoever.
In fact, most scholars at the time were like that.
I read On the Roman Empire by Yuge Toru, a leading authority on the study of the Roman Empire.
“What is ‘large-scale slave-labor estate management’?”
“‘Tenant-like slaves’…?”
I muttered these words and thought, “You do not understand slaves at all!”
Explain it so that a proper visual image can form in the mind, I almost wanted to shout.
As for “abstract,” the definition in Shin Meikai Kokugo Jiten (1995, Sanseido) says: “To extract from individual, separate things the elements common to all things within that range, and to organize them in one’s mind as ‘in general, what is called … is such a thing.’”
This is truly realistic and correct.
It is something one does only when compelled by necessity.
Yet the pompous scholars of the old days all began by throwing abstract nouns at you, as if flinging them in your face.
They knew nothing of reality, nothing of the world, nothing of hardship.
For better or worse, I traveled through these countries at a time when China and Korea were simply poor.
That was an era in which one could still keep a suitable distance from Moon Jae-in’s South Korea, which has now fallen to the dark side, and from Xi Jinping’s China, which has become like Mordor, the land of darkness in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.
Even so, in the end, I think it was my misfortune.
There are many better countries in the world.
Yet as for me, I walked only through bad countries.
The Soviet Union.
“What is this supposed ‘homeland of socialism’?”
The back streets were full of unemployed people.
One of them grabbed my arm and told me to sell him my Seiko watch.
I did not learn Russian for that.
The People’s Republic of China.
Why were the communal toilets in the provinces so outrageously filthy?
The toilets in the sleeper trains were appalling as well.
The filth of this country has a basis separate from poverty.
When a place is poor, it is filthy, smelly, hungry, and painful.
But this was a different kind of filth.
The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
The very name of the country is a lie.
It was truly a “living hell.”
All the drinking water was hard water, and if you drank it, you immediately got diarrhea.
It was like the town of Jericho in the Old Testament (2 Kings 2:19–22).
Pyongyang, a city like a papier-mâché façade, really was a façade.
Behind it were the actual dwellings where real people lived.
Low, dull concrete buildings.
Broken glass windows.
I could hear the voices of children.
When I turned around, the large man who served as both guide and minder was glaring at me.
The Republic of Korea.
It is an “interesting purgatory.”
Everyone who returns from South Korea starts speaking loudly.
Why?
Because no one listens to what anyone else is saying.
“Listen to me!”
That is why everyone’s voice becomes loud.
The women have had cosmetic surgery, so when you get close, their skin is covered with fine scars.
The men throw their chests out and do nothing but brag.
Even so, in the old days they were simple-hearted, so things somehow worked out.
Recently, however, everyone has become arrogant.
The starting salary at a first-rate company is twice that at a small or medium-sized company?
What kind of country is that?
My greatest misfortune may lie in the fact that, unlike a proper scholar, I cannot play with abstract nouns.
For that reason, in this book, I have tried to write about South Korea as realistically as possible.
Where the writing becomes abstract and difficult, it is only because necessity compelled it to be so.
You may skip those parts as you read, and that will be perfectly fine.
July 6, 2018.
Furuya Hiroshi.