This essay presents a deeply personal narrative asserting identity with Japan itself. Through family history, wartime memory, postwar bureaucracy, and social stratification, it challenges media moralism and affirms economic hardship as the most devastating human burden.

2016-03-04

That I am Japan itself—that I am Japan—is something all perceptive readers already know.

I first appeared writing precisely that, as the soul of Akutagawa Kenji.

The people of Yuriage, and my classmates from Sendai Second High School, did not know why I had been, so to speak, missing.

They could not have known, because it was entirely due to my own personal circumstances.

That life began when I was truly small, when I stretched up and opened the top drawer of my mother’s chest of drawers.

My parents were part of what was then called student mobilization—the so-called volunteer corps—during the war, when students and women worked in factories.

This was a condition seen in every country, as depicted in the film Since You Went Away, starring Jennifer Jones, which I loved.

That is where they met and married.

Both my father and my mother graduated as class representatives from higher elementary school.

My father was from Miyagi Prefecture, my mother from Gunma Prefecture, and perhaps because of that, God granted me, by the time I was in the fifth grade, the intellect of a third-year high school student.

As readers know, I have long stated that the reason most children born of international marriages are handsome or beautiful is God’s reward.

Because overcoming difference is the first step toward human progress and peace.

I rarely watch NHK’s Taiga dramas, yet for some reason I watched almost all of Hanamoyu.

I thought it was because it dealt directly with the Meiji Restoration, but toward the end, the setting shifted to Gunma Prefecture.

I was astonished at how things come full circle.

Because of that ending, I realized why I had watched nearly every episode—something exceedingly rare for me.

My parents graduated from higher elementary school in the midst of the century of war.

My father’s family were shipowners.

I remember my grandfather saying that a fisherman’s son did not need learning.

My father wanted to study.

He must have resented my grandfather for it.

I still vividly remember the scenes of strife that unfolded before my eyes when I was very small.

My father fought as a soldier in the fierce battlefields of the South Seas.

Fortunately, he survived.

That is why I was born.

He passed the civil service examination and became a prefectural government official.

By any standard, he must have been an able bureaucrat.

In times of need, I believe he even possessed the ability to build a house.

Yet he never rose through the ranks of the prefectural office.

He likely ended his career as an assistant section chief or section head.

Needless to say, those who advance in the prefectural bureaucracy are graduates of my alma mater or Tohoku University.

That pent-up frustration likely gave rise to a fact I first learned when I was in my final year of high school.

In a sense, my father was a man living in a burning house.

Yet regarding that, I felt no pain, no anger—nothing at all.

This is something that even Japan’s media—so foolish that it does not realize it is imprisoned by superficial moralism—must learn with piercing clarity.

For the greatest suffering for a human being is economic hardship.

It has nothing to do with matters below the navel.

What ultimately shattered me was learning that the house—which for a child is also a bird’s nest—had been put up as collateral because of that hardship.

At that moment, even the path of remaining at Kyoto University, living the life my mentor urged—“Stay and shoulder the burden with both shoulders”—was utterly destroyed.

To be continued.