English translation of the prose
AI-assisted English translation of the prose; quoted poems remain in Japanese. The Japanese original remains authoritative.
Submissions Invited — No. 2 — April 20, 2020
Online Collection of Aphorisms
Initiator: Seishu Hamano, President of the Academia
Judges: the members of the Board
An aphorism is not a patent that only those who have made a name for themselves may issue. It is a painful message passed on, permitted only to those who have suffered and struggled.
Seishu Hamano
Commentary. Ordinary people shrink from leaving their names or words in this world. They do not consider an overbearing way of life honorable. So even when they utter a fine phrase, they tear it up and throw it away. If only those lost sayings had survived, people might have lived more wisely.
The act of leaving words with one's name attached may at first seem a restrained attitude, but it is ordinarily regarded as evading responsibility for what one writes. Therefore, when expressing your own views, always identify yourself. It does not matter if people think you are seeking attention. A good aphorism, refined again and again, encourages people and rescues them from the abyss.
Translator's note: the preceding sentence retains the source's wording “with one's name attached” (名を付して). Its apparent tension with the instruction to identify oneself has not been silently corrected.
● Please send in your submissions enthusiastically.
Do not let the day called “today” manipulate you. It is a glittering archvillain that has kicked aside all the years of the past and appeared with an innocent face.
Seishu Hamano
Commentary. This is exactly what I have often felt in my own life.
The span of time called today looks more powerful and radiant than any day in the past. Yet, within that limited span, I accomplish nothing worthwhile; before I notice, the sun is beginning to set. “Well, there is tomorrow,” I tell myself hopefully, welcoming the night without regret. In reality, however, I have merely been thoroughly toyed with by this monster called today, which appeared with the morning sun wearing a radiant aspect.
I often become aware of this. Many people, I imagine, let the span called today slip past without noticing. We are told to value today; to forget the past and think of the future. A radiant today, a radiant future? Then were the days that have passed not radiant? Can you throw them into the rubbish bin without regret?
Because today has appeared, the today that existed yesterday becomes half-blurred and turns its back to leave. What of the day before yesterday? Its shadow is fainter still. Impressions, memories—everything lies shattered and scattered.
What was I doing on this day a month ago? Without consulting my diary, I cannot remember anything. This day last year? I take out a black leather diary beginning to look old. The ballpoint writing has blurred beyond reading. I was meeting someone. That conversation came to nothing. Five years ago? I had not yet retired … I was shining! Really? No: there was no next job waiting, and I was already struggling in misery, with 「憂しと見し世ぞ今は恋しき」 on my mind.
For things and phenomena, this creature time is utterly vicious. Why, look: the two legs that firmly planted themselves on the earth and carried you around the golf course five years ago are unsteady now. Look at your forehead. What is this white, withered grass emerging from skin that once grew hair as richly as the earth? What has acted on it? The passing years, of course.
Let us confront today as an “archvillain.” Do not lower your guard. Put it cunningly to work. Stroke it down, press your attack, and go about branding this archvillain with enough spirit to stamp your own seal in blood on its forehead again and again.
There is much of Bierce about this aphorism, but the idea came from the bottom of my own belly.
● Please send in your submissions enthusiastically.
It is because you are alone that you can do good work.
Seishu Hamano
Commentary. This, too, is an aphorism drawn from actual life, though it is not as twisted as the preceding one. It is also a straightforward principle I have absorbed as a lesson for my own life.
Faculty meetings, committee meetings, university information sessions, helping revise graduation theses, writing recommendations for graduate students: my years in active employment were a succession of busy days. I was apt to lose even the sense of my own existence, so what I wanted above all was time alone. For example, no sooner would I finish at my main institution, Japan Women's University, at five in the evening than I would head straight to Aoyama Gakuin. In a special lecture on American literature I would discuss nineteenth-century immigrants from Eastern Europe and labor conditions in New York City … writing on the board again and again in a contest whose currency was the extent of one's knowledge. Dozens of staff from various countries' embassies and consulates attended these lectures every evening; with more than 120 people, the classroom was full. Then I finished and went home. Ten at night. From there I turned to writing the eight hundred manuscript pages of If Japan and North Korea Went to War (『日朝、もし戦えば』), a simulation novel commissioned by Chūōkōronsha.
Nothing brought me greater fulfillment than this solitary work. My daytime work was rewarding too, but when I wrote a long novel alone in my study, I became dozens of characters and assembled a story while remaining by myself. I liked it immensely. Solitary work was precisely the time in which I could continue addressing the affairs of the nation and the world through my own thoughts.
● Please send us your own original maxims to live by.
Original wording, author credits, notes and source materials are preserved there.