A Revered Teacher and His Times, Part 2

English translation

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

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

A Revered Teacher and His Times

2. Takao Suzuki in the Lineage of Those Who Renounced the World Since Meiji

(1) Keio Also Trains People to Renounce the World

When I entered Keio, the thought that came to me intuitively was this: from Fukuzawa onward, were not all the teachers in the Faculty of Letters people who had renounced the world? There is a familiar saying: “Half a mat when awake, one mat when asleep; even if you steal the whole realm, two and a half measures of rice are enough.” I felt that these words, with their affinity to Bashō and Santōka, applied to Keio as well. Keio has sent numerous great figures into politics and business, but might its Faculty of Letters be the principal establishment for producing world-renouncers? Such an atmosphere even seemed to pervade it.

It is amusing that a paradox which would not pass in the economics department should pass freely in the Faculty of Letters. But it is true. For someone like me, who has taught at both national and private universities, saying this is no exaggeration.

Takao Suzuki even published a book entitled How Much Do People Need? (『人にはどれだけの物が必要か』), just what one would expect of a sage who abandoned medicine for literature. He speaks of “bread and circuses,” the habitual policy of keeping people docile practiced by the emperors of ancient Rome and Byzantium. Today's Japan, with its gourmet food, golf, and tennis, looks much the same. He points out that homo economicus (economic man) and homo faber (the technician) alone stand out, while the homo philosophicus (thinker) who tackles environmental destruction is nowhere to be seen.

The book was published in 1994, a quarter of a century ago. Pollution has since come to the surface as a problem viewed through this line of thought, but even today we are far from being able to consider it resolved. At that point Suzuki also lamented that the world's population was 5.6 billion and would exceed 10 billion in the twenty-first century. Conditions of extreme poverty have spread further, and the number of newborn children dying as their victims keeps increasing. His reading has unfortunately proved right, yet scarcely any wealthy country has been able to provide an adequate response.

Seen in Suzuki's way, one might diagnose this as the developed nations having recoiled and regressed before the force exerted by the second and third waves of emerging nations, whose geopolitics proceed under nationalistic egoism in the very manner of prewar colonialism. There may be admirers of the prevailing bureaucracy at the University of Tokyo, but there are none in Keio's Faculty of Letters.

Looking back, the founder, Yukichi Fukuzawa, always lamented bureaucracy under state direction: policy led from above while the people were left behind. That is why he would not accept the disgrace of submitting to its umbrella and indulging in idle sleep. Was it not Suzuki who inherited that spiritual current and spoke with fiery vigor, almost as Fukuzawa's spokesman?

(2) Let Us Reflect on Conditions in Japan in the Early Meiji Years, at the Time of “Admonition”

Translator's note: the Japanese heading reads 戒告, “admonition.” Its intended reference is unclear; the wording has not been silently replaced.

Responding to the rise of modern hegemonism, the Meiji government made enriching the nation and strengthening its armed forces a national policy. As a logic considered indispensable to stabilizing the European state system, it drew a line around the periphery—called a “line of interests,” and later a “lifeline”—as a strategy for protecting its own country. Because Japan treated the Korean Peninsula as the object of this line of interests, this was also an age in which the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars were accepted as though inevitable. One could say that the threat from the Western powers and Russia made circumstances unavoidable. Yet, from the standpoint of local populations and of lower-ranking soldiers at home, the high-handed efforts to dispatch troops constituted a thoroughly unreasonable policy. The prevailing assumption was still that ordinary people should naturally be willing to offer their lives for the state's security. So it was with pollution: the people had only to endure it. Factories, locomotives, and warships billowing black smoke were regarded as little more than symbols of growing national power. Labor issues and reform of the political system scarcely counted as questions at all.

Yet Fukuzawa and others felt compassion for countries that had lost their leaders and seen their territory overrun by Western colonialism, and offered protection to revolutionaries. There were, then, intellectuals whose patterns of thought were already countercultural.

Ideas of the Fukuzawa or Suzuki kind were hard even for ordinary people of the time to accept. From the establishment's viewpoint, such thought ought to be excluded. Among the seven universities bearing the name Imperial University, examples of university presidents themselves opposing militarism were exceedingly rare.

Of course, professors at the imperial universities sometimes questioned the situation. When this became pronounced, it was labeled an “incident” and made a target of repression by the authorities. Looking back, one can only say that it was an age so constricted that we smile wryly and wonder why bureaucrats were so troubled by theories of the state as modest as those. Takao Suzuki, however, lived in the present rather than that age. Thanks to freedom of speech—or rather the flexibility of speech, or rather its “discretionary latitude”—perhaps he came to be regarded neither as a heretic nor as a problem.

(To be continued)