[My New Year's Resolution] To regain my 'continuity as a Japanese person'

As for resolutions, I have none; I am simply going to live out the remainder of my life after retirement as I please, following a philosophy of 'hedonism within budget'.

Even so, as I choose books at the library on a whim (since I no longer have the money to buy new ones), I have begun to see what I am vaguely aiming for.

When I worked at publishing houses and newspapers, I had to read trendy books, but now that I have retired, I can read unpopular books to my heart's content. That is the best part.

The people I have been enjoying reading lately are as follows...

Soho Tokutomi, Yukio Mishima, Tetsutaro Kawakami, Shiro Ozaki, Ashihei Hino...

I will likely continue this 'dialogue' with these people through reading again this year.

What I hope to gain from that dialogue is to reclaim 'myself as a Japanese person'.

Japanese people whose continuity between pre-war and post-war has been severed

Because we received post-war education, we were taught history by emphasizing the rupture between the pre-war and post-war periods.

'Pre-war Japan was wrong.'

'Post-war Japan must make a new start.'

The goal of the occupation forces was to make the Japanese 'start life over' based on these premises.

Politicians, the educational world, the media, and even the Imperial Household based their views on this historical perspective, and it could not be publicly denied.

Right-wingers call this a 'masochistic view of history,' but from the left-wing perspective, it is also a 'self-congratulatory view of history' that says 'the post-war Article 9 of the Constitution is wonderful.'

As values, I think both are one-sided, but if anything, the right-wing has the upper hand.

Thanks to that post-war education, the Japanese have become the least patriotic people in the world.

And that is not all. Japan has become a rare country where the middle-aged and elderly have less patriotism than the youth (usually, the middle-aged and elderly are more patriotic). Having experienced the Ukraine war last year, I could not help but strongly recognize that distortion. In any case, since the connection between pre-war and post-war was publicly severed, it was inevitable that we could only have a biased view of Japan.

The task of reclaiming Japanese continuity had to be done by each individual on their own.

Reclaiming continuity from before the Meiji era

The same can be said about the rift between the Edo and Meiji periods created by the Meiji Restoration.

It is said that the Meiji government spoke of the Edo period in a dark and negative light to emphasize their own legitimacy.

They claimed that Japan finally modernized and experienced 'civilization and enlightenment' after transitioning from Edo to Meiji. But is that true?

We must also reclaim the continuity between the pre-Edo and post-Meiji eras.

This is an issue frequently touched upon in recent academia as well.

For example, Tadashi Karube writes the following in 'The Road to the Meiji Revolution' (2017).

If we remove the trap of 'Japanese spirit, Western learning' and think about it, modern Western thought—and 'civilization'—was not entirely incomprehensible or mysterious to the inhabitants of the Japanese archipelago at the time. It was accepted precisely because there were elements in pre-modern thought and culture that could understand and empathize with it. (p. 37 of the same book)

In this way, the continuity between pre-Meiji and post-Meiji is being pursued.

This trend in academia likely arose from a reflection on the Marxist historical view that swept through the post-war period.

We tend to think that not only socialism, but also rationalism, democracy, and liberalism are all 'imports' of ideas from great Western thinkers.

However, there is a possibility that we are being deceived by university professors and critics who act as 'import' agents.

In academia, alongside the aforementioned re-examination of the pre-modern era, there is a similar movement to reclaim the continuity between the pre-war and post-war periods.

I believe this can be seen in the fields of political science and intellectual history, for example, in Takao Sakamoto's re-evaluation of Soho Tokutomi and Kiyoshi Hiraizumi.

This pursuit of continuity could likely be traced back even further in time.

Generally, later eras tend to speak ill of previous ones, but conversely, they sometimes idealize them as well. Removing those biases and looking back at a "life" as if one had lived as a Japanese person for 2,000 years is perhaps the true "Japanese history."

Becoming free from <ideology>

Dividing the modern from the pre-modern, or the postwar from the prewar, is merely a matter of <convenience> for politics and ideology.

The more sensitive people are to politics and ideology, the more seriously they take such convenient ruptures. They begin to view the world through understandings like "prewar was this-ism" and "postwar was that-ism." They view the world through some kind of "theory." Intellectuals and university researchers have tended to view things that way. That itself was a characteristic of the 20th century, which was swept by Marxist "theory."

I myself have been a person who thinks about things through isms and ideologies throughout my life, so I would like to correct that, even if only a little, in the remainder of my life.

Re-experiencing continuity through a concrete <life>

To that end, it is useful to read books by people who lived across the so-called "modern" and pre-modern, or the prewar and postwar periods.

Even if power and ideology are severed, people continue to live. By re-experiencing their lives through their writings, perhaps we can reclaim the continuity of history.

How did flesh-and-blood human beings continue to live while overcoming the "fault lines" of history?

What I am interested in are people who make me feel that kind of "historical continuity."

Tokutomi Soho (1863–1957, writer and journalist)
Ozaki Shiro (1898–1964, novelist)
Kawakami Tetsutaro (1902–1980, critic)
Hino Ashihei (1907–1960, novelist)
Mishima Yukio (1925–1970, novelist)

They continued to write throughout the prewar and postwar periods.

Tokutomi Soho, in particular, lived through and wrote about the Edo, Meiji, Taisho, prewar Showa, and postwar Showa periods (in fact, he attempted to write a Japanese history in his "Kinsei Nihon Kokumin Shi" [History of the Japanese People in the Early Modern Period] that continuously covered everything from the Sengoku period to his own time from a single perspective).

And, starting with Soho, these individuals did not follow "ideology" very much. In a good sense, they were "insensitive" to ideology. Ozaki and Hino were writers who were said to "have no ideology," and Kawakami and Mishima always went against mainstream thought. That is what I like about them.

I am not exactly "researching" anything in particular, but driven by this awareness of the issues, I intend to continue writing down what comes to mind here again this year.

I had thought that once I retired, I would like to research the circle around Soho Tokutomi, which I had been interested in for some time, but while I was unable to move due to COVID, my range of interest expanded a little more—

Yukio Mishima, Tetsutaro Kawakami, Shiro Ozaki, Ashihei Hino...

I have come to think that I would like to research them as well.

Soho Tokutomi (1863–1957, writer and journalist)
Shiro Ozaki (1898–1964, novelist)
Tetsutaro Kawakami (1902–1980, critic)
Ashihei Hino (1907–1960, novelist)
Yukio Mishima (1925–1970, novelist)