The following is from the serialized column "Fighting Epicurus" by Hiroshi Furuta, Professor Emeritus at Tsukuba University and one of the world's leading scholars, which appeared in the monthly magazine WiLL from 292 to 3 columns on September 26.
It is a must-read not only for Japanese citizens but also for people worldwide.
Reading Yoko Kato's Autobiography "Thoughtful and Flexible" (published in the Asahi Shimbun)
The left-wing scholar's lizard tail cut off
In the "Opinion & Forum" section of the Asahi Shimbun dated August 1, there was an article that appeared to be an autobiography by Yoko Kato, a historian and professor at the University of Tokyo.
As it was unusually honest for Ms. Kato's previous writings, I took it as an autobiography.
Still, it seems that many people saw it as the "complaints and whining" of a scholar.
Looking at it in order, she says she is a proponent of separate family names for husband and wife but uses her husband's surname of "Kato" in addition to her own surname of "Nojima."
'My spouse teaches Japanese history at a cram school.'
I am a professor at the University of Tokyo, but I also respect my husband, who teaches at a cram school.
I also use the surname Kato, which is what she means.
The interviewer, Satoko Tanaka (editorial committee member Junko Takahashi, who borrowed the name), poked her about this.
She was criticized for being anarchic, saying, "Last year, the NHK program ‘100 Minutes of Feminism' introduced the writings of anarchist Ito Noe, who was massacred by the military police after the Great Kanto Earthquake."
The reason for this is that "the social norm that women should be responsible for looking after the home has caused a lot of women to suffer, both in the past and today."
In this context, she says that Noe, who has been active in social movements, is admirable.
However, in the program, she was ridiculed by Ueno Chizuko.
This was really upsetting.
"Chizuko Ueno, who I have known for a long time and appeared on the show with, was puzzled and asked me 'why I, Yoko Kato, who is meticulous and careful, would choose the crude activist Noe Ito.'
Yoko Nojima says she was highly displeased.
I am always very thorough.
However, there is a reason for this; almost all Japanese sociologists believe that "the family is fiction."
I once asked a group of sociologists at Tsukuba University about this, and when I asked them for the logical basis for it, the kindest of them, Dr. Noriko Tarukawa, brought me a book by a Westerner.
I found it so ridiculous that I forgot the title and author.
Ultimately, it seems this is a tacit agreement about their "studies."
For the sociologist and feminist Ueno, Noda, who was busy with child-rearing and housework because of this "fake," is a crude activist.
Chizuko Ueno's Feminism is just a fake...
I wrote about this in detail in articles 34 to 36 of the May 2022 issue of this series and also in articles 38 and 47.
If you want to know the truth, please take a look.
Useless studies will be eliminated.
The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology policy is to downsize and reorganize the humanities departments of Japanese universities.
In line with this policy, "useless academic disciplines" will be weeded.
I have already written about this process in Chapter 3 of "Usable Philosophy" (Discover Twenty-One, 2015), "Usable and Useless Academic Disciplines."
This story is based on my experiences as a practitioner involved in university administration.
Please look at the list of faculty members at the University of Tsukuba's Graduate School of International Public Policy on the Internet.
You will see that half of the former social science faculty members have been classified into different categories.
My job was to classify the faculty members by political or cultural aspects.
This makes it difficult for the untrained eye to see how many faculty members have been reduced, but those in the know can see which posts have not been filled at a glance (touch the "Details" section).
Looking at this now, you'll see that the number of political science lecturers has almost halved, and the number of cultural anthropology lecturers is on the verge of extinction.
However, the bad news is that sociology, Japan's most useless social science, has remained relatively high.
The sociology lecturers all work together to protect themselves.
The University of Tokyo responded to this pressure to weed out by breaking up the departments and dispersing the lecturers, but the sociology departments have remained intact.
Perhaps this is because Ueno and other alumni throw the ball to check the "tail-cutting of the left" in different fields.
Or is it to threaten their people?
In addition, the University of Tokyo's Korean history research laboratory is in a state of semi-collapse.
Still, since the organization is full of believers in the progressive historical view, it is unlikely that the post will be filled again after the faculty members retire.
Incidentally, in the August issue of the magazine 'Hanada,' Mr. Tomokazu Shigemura (Professor Emeritus at Waseda University) wrote, 'Sadly, in Japan, the 'top-class' commentators and journalists do not get involved in the issues of South Korea and North Korea. By 'top-class,' I don't mean famous people. I mean outstanding people in their humanity, insight, and wisdom (page 212). and courageously reports the truth, so I would like to respond to this sincerely.
Masao Okonogi, Professor Emeritus at Keio University, was a disciple of the genius Fujii Kamiya.
Still, he rebelled and held the war origin theory that the Korean War was caused by the "invasion of the North" by the US and South Korea.
In other words, he was a leftist.
However, in 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed and the so-called "Stalin telegram" was leaked, in which Stalin gave the go-ahead for Kim Il-sung's invasion of the South, he is said to have told his students the following year, "I've given up research. From now on, I'll be on TV".
I heard this directly from Ms. Akika, a former Japan-Korea Cultural Exchange Fund employee who was in the Okonogi seminar at the time.
After that, his research papers were written by his students.
Mr. Masayuki Suzuki (former professor at Shobi University) wrote seven, Mr. Hideya Kurata (current professor at the National Defense Academy) wrote five, and Mr. Toshiji Hiraiwa (current professor at Nanzan University) wrote three.
The above information was obtained directly from the individuals concerned.
When I asked him if he had taken over writing the books, he replied, "When I actually started writing them, I found myself putting a lot of effort into it."
He was able to do more research than his teacher.
His top disciple, Tetsugi, supported Okonogi's administrative work related to publishing, while Furuta, who was not even his disciple, supported the administrative work related to academic societies.
He was unable to do any practical work.
Even though he used his students to do all this work, he never helped them find jobs, and this led to a backlash, but he was good at using people.
He turned this into favoritism towards Kurata alone, which led to internal strife and scattered them from the academic world.
Furuta created the modern Korean Studies Association, but after Okonogi, no people supported it.
The academic society prize was named the Okonogi Prize.
Yoko Kato's teacher
On August 19, Takashi Ito, historian and Professor Emeritus of the University of Tokyo, passed away from complications (Yomiuri Shimbun, August 27).
He was a strange man, and although he was on the right wing, he did not care whether someone was left-wing or right-wing as long as they could do academic work.
He seemed to be able to understand things immediately when he read them.
When I sent him a copy of my book "Kami no hon wa Kaku kakariki" (Chikuma Bunko) in 2013, he immediately sent me a postcard saying, "I understand how amazing you are."
I have no idea what he liked about it, but he was like the moonlight that sometimes shines through the darkness under the trees.
Reading his final work, "History and I" (Chuokoron-shinsho, 2015), I found that he was an "eternal student" who seemed to be several times more complex than the old-fashioned scholars of the prewar era, and he said, "Without a logical foundation, empirical research cannot be carried out, and I have continued to develop my research along this same framework."
(p.56), and a simple diagram is presented, but I raised an eyebrow just a little.
There are also several people from my generation.
Nobukatsu Fujiwara seems to be the type I really liked (p.96).
If you look at interviews on BUNSHUN Online, etc., it says that he was quick to pick fights and was a pain to deal with.
It seems that he had something in common with Susum Nishibe.
I think this person belongs to the people I call "math-heads."
Susum Nishibe, Fujiwara Nobukatsu, Karatani Kojin, Takahashi Yoichi, etc.
Between you and me, math-heads can actually do both left and right.
However, as they are humanities-oriented, they know they need to be seen as either right or left to be trusted by the general public, so they choose one side.
Is it a contest between intuition and clarity, logic and the empiricism of versatility?
They differ slightly from the "science-oriented" people, such as Omori Shozo, Okada Hidehiro, and Hirakawa Sukehiro.
This one flies more often and is right because it is forceful in logic.
Professor Hidehiro Okada believed in the god of natural science.
Look at the beginning of "History and I," the preface.
You will see a "dreamlike story" about how he was called to the Akasaka Palace a while after the era changed to Heisei and lectured to the Emperor on modern Japanese history.
What surprised me greatly was the fact that Professor Takashi Ito could write such a shamanic text.
He was given a cigarette with the Imperial Chrysanthemum crest on it, and he thought it was terrible, but I thought it was good.
Yoko Kato's Story of Her Family
As I mentioned before, Kato's appointment to Todai came in 1994, as if it had been waiting for him after Professor Ito left Todai in 1993.
Let's return to Kato's autobiography.
The story then turns to her family home.
"I've seen women in my family who didn't have the right to make their own decisions, "'My father lost his first wife to illness, and his' mother-in-law' lived with us," "There was always a sense of tension in the house. I thought it was sad that they couldn't decide where they should be," "My mother and mother-in-law had no choice but to obey my father," "There is a shelf life for exercising the right to make one's own decisions. My step-grandmother and mother didn't fit the bill. I'm sorry. I wonder why I'm crying... "It was also when my mother's two brothers, born in 1931, could go to university, but the four sisters were not allowed to go. So, I decided early on that I would use the power of learning to increase my options in life. Thinking back now, I was an outstanding student...".
According to the late Mr. Yoshiyuki Kasai, who was the honorary chairman of JR Tokai, Mr. Kato's family ran a foundry in Saitama that made train wheels.
When Mr. Kasai was told this, he is said to have replied, "Oh, so we're all in the same boat then."
The idea that women's right to self-determination and their fathers' wishes twisted the course of their lives is all a critical view from today's standpoint, looking back on the past with today's values.
It's the same way that Yoshida Erika, the scriptwriter for the morning drama "Tora ni Tsubasa," made a gay couple appear in the 1960s and looked back on the past from the perspective of the present.
Those of us who make our living from writing should not do this.
Otherwise, history will become licentious, and we will end up like the Koreans.
This is the case with all Korean historical dramas.
If you skip forward to the 1960s without bringing your current values with you and look around, you will see that Mr. Kato's family was very peaceful for a "lower" class family.
As I mentioned, my family home, a pawn shop in Yokohama Geisha Town, was not peaceful.
It was a place where ignorance and darkness reigned, and vice oozed out of the storehouse.
The third real sister, who a relative gave away, grew up to betray her family and run away with her aunt's inheritance, was found dead in a particular place last September.
The intense heat of last year had made the floor sticky with her juices.
The Horrors of Class Among Intellectuals
From there, Kato's writing is devoted to a loyalty competition, reporting to the goddess of feminism how much hatred he had accumulated towards men, including "the story of being punched by a man with a back tooth" and "the insult of being asked to marry me and go to America because women can't get jobs at universities when I was doing my masters."
In the end, this person has no confidence in himself.
"I would write down the dates so I wouldn't forget my anger, and I would also record the 'date I got a research and teaching position' and the 'date I first visited America for research' and so on, and I would strike a victory pose.
"Perhaps because I had been living my life since I was a child with the attitude that I was a person 'carrying out a special mission,' I never looked adequately at either woman from the past or other women of my generation.
Yes, that's exactly right.
"I was self-conscious even though I lacked confidence."
This is no different from the Kumiko Tochiori before she met Arimasa Mori, the grandson of a Meiji statesman, as described in the 28th installment of this series in the November 2021 issue, or the Hannah Arendt before she was accepted by the upper-class couple of the Jaspers, as described in the 50th installment of this series in the September 2023 issue.
Those of the "lower" classes have never seen a "good person."
As I wrote in the 51st subheading, "The Terrifying Power of Class in Intellectuals," even if it is painful or insulting if those of the "lower" classes do not have contact with those of the upper classes, at some point in their life journey, their "lack of class dignity" will overflow.
Jesus was the son of a carpenter, Hobbes was the son of a drunken vicar, Calvin was the grandson of a river ferryman, Luther was the son of a miner, Arendt was the daughter of a syphilitic electrician, and Schleiermacher was the son of a poor military chaplain.
They were all re-educated in the homes of priests, gentry families, monasteries, and upper-class families.
That is why something called "noblesse oblige" exists in the West.
I don't want Mr. Tsuneyasu Takeda to say things like "Japan is a country where the ruler is one, and the people are many, and there are no classes" on his video channel.
This is a request from someone who has suffered because of class.
2024/10/6 in Umeda, Osaka
