A Revered Teacher and His Times, Part 1

English translation

AI-assisted English translation. The Japanese original remains authoritative.

Originally published: 2021-02-24

This is material published on the Japanese website. Dates and notices describe circumstances at the time of its original publication.

In Memory of Takao Suzuki, Professor Emeritus of Keio University and Adviser to the Academia

A Revered Teacher and His Times

1. Meeting Professor Takao Suzuki in the Year of the 1960 Security-Treaty Protests

I first met Professor Takao Suzuki in the spring of Showa 35, on the very first day I came from Hiyoshi to Mita to begin specialized classes as a student of English and American literature. The class used Simeon Potter's Our Language, a demanding text that explained the composition of English historically. Undaunted by material incomparably more difficult than entrance-examination English, Professor Suzuki delivered a brilliantly expansive lecture, immersed in the fascination of its contents and displaying astonishing erudition. I was overwhelmed. Was this a reincarnation of 福沢諭吉? This class was truly worthy of Keio, and even carried a sense of anguish. Every classmate in that room must have felt the same.

For it was 1960, in the very midst of the security-treaty protests. Tens of thousands of Zengakuren demonstrators thronged the area around the National Diet. Professor 大橋吉之輔, a specialist in contemporary American literature, told us how, during the war, he had been arrested by the Special Higher Police merely for carrying Dante's Divine Comedy, taken into a dark place and tortured. We too became obsessed with the fear that student mobilization awaited us, and joined the march from Shimizudani Park to the Diet. Those were the times we lived in.

Professor 厨川文夫, an authority on Old and Middle English, told us that just before the Meiji Restoration, Keio had continued its lectures without interruption even amid the fighting surrounding the opening of Edo Castle. He taught us that scholarship must not be swayed by temporary surges of emotion. Takao Suzuki's classes embodied precisely that principle. He was a scholar by temperament, without politics; what his lectures made clear was that Western systems of thought were not necessarily things poisoned and distorted by political ideology.

Do not fall into one-sidedness or prejudice. At only nineteen, I told myself this too. Looking down from the roof of Shibuya's Toyoko Department Store, I could clearly see the crowds walking below. I must not become another zero in the city. Yet however egocentrically I thought, I could not escape that consciousness of myself as a zero, and I felt ashamed of my inadequacy.

Back at my lodgings in Shibuya, my desk was piled with books bought at Taiseido: 大岡昇平's 野火 and 俘虜記, 田宮虎彦's 足摺岬, 火野葦平's 土と兵隊, and, unforgettable to me, 大江健三郎's 死者の奢り and ワレラノ時代. There were writers indispensable to discussions in the Gakukenren Literary Study Group; the absurdist and existentialist ideas of Sartre and Camus; and Colin Wilson's English essay in Declaration, associated with the Angry Young Men. I would not give in. Compared with the struggles of my father and elder brother, study did not count as hardship. Reminding myself of this again, I spent my days reading and taking notes.

In this period, Professor Suzuki wrote the celebrated 言葉と文化, published by Iwanami and still selling today. Professor 大橋 translated Norman Mailer's critical essay White Negro for 三田文学. Reading it at once, I became possessed by the word hipster, set against the key terms square and organization man. Mailer was disappointed in the American public living as conformists during the heyday of Americanism in the 1950s. Distinguishing the hipster from the “beaten generation” called beat, he explicitly described someone who courageously confronted the United States–Soviet antagonism of the Cold War. I felt that unless I too adopted such a position, I could not claim to have come all the way from Kansai to Tokyo to knock at the gates of scholarship.

On the day I left for Tokyo, my elder brother apparently said to my mother—as I later heard from my brother himself—“成生 will never come back to Osaka.”

We had grown up as brothers with different mothers. From my brother's perspective, I was my mother's only son; through her mother-in-law, conflict between my mother and my brother had continued without cease since the war. His words perceptively grasped what it meant for me to leave home in those circumstances.

“Am I an unfilial son?”

This feeling of remorse has continued not only through my student years but right up to the present. Certainly, entering Keio was the right choice. Had I not come here, I would surely have lived out an ordinary life in Kansai, without much concern for politics or society's contradictions.

My wise elder brother had foreseen even the course his younger brother's life would take. For me, however, each day of my four years as a Keio student was filled with repeated self-questioning. Before every teacher, awareness of how shallow my learning still was made me lose confidence. The days became a desperate struggle to fill that void.

Viewed from today's quiet, the tumult of the 1960 security-treaty protests was almost beyond imagining.

Day after day and night after night, crowds encircled the Diet in layer upon layer, chanting “Down with Kishi!” and “No to the Japan–U.S. Security Treaty!” These chants rang out in major cities across the country too, echoing beneath the overcast skies of the rainy season. The University of Tokyo student 樺美智子 was crushed by the police and died. She was twenty-two. Every one of us taking part feared that we would be made agents of the American government, forcibly thrown into the army again and sent to the Korean Peninsula. Only seven years had passed since the Korean War ended.

In the US-Japan Security Treaty, now called the “Japan–U.S. alliance,” the image of instant death suggested by Mailer in The White Negro—immediate enlistment, immediate atomic war—is no longer clear. Perhaps the anguished cries of young people then reached their audience. It is said that the greatest reason was the Soviet Union's declaration that it was relinquishing its state power as a communist country—the country is now Russia—but is that really so? Once the danger had passed, did vigilance not rapidly fade from Japanese hearts and vanish into thin air? Was that not the main reason? Japanese people quickly resign themselves with “It can't be helped.” That is how it seems to me, though perhaps this too reflects Professor Suzuki's way of thinking.

Be that as it may, I believe this period nurtured a major cause of my resolve to devote my life to making Japan a better country. At the time, I spent my days challenging my capacity to develop myself, asking how far my own system of knowledge could go. Looking back now, there is no doubt that one of the goals I sought to attain was Professor Suzuki's system of knowledge. (To be continued.)