The following is from the book published on October 1, 2021, "The Theory of Learning from Germany Will Destroy Japan" (EU in Great Turmoil after Merkel's Stray).
It is a must-read not only for Japanese citizens but also for people worldwide, especially for German citizens.
Any citizen who can read must head to the nearest bookstore to subscribe.
I'll let the rest of the world know as much as I can.
Why my admiration for Germany has gone undeceived
Toyota
As for my relationship with Germany, let me open my mouth as an elder; when I took the university entrance examination from Musashi High School after the war, I tried to take it in German.
I studied by putting a chart of irregular verbs on the wall. At that time, it was easier to take the exam in a language other than English.
Then the Ministry of Education said that was unfair and changed the policy to make the German exam more difficult, so I switched to taking the exam in English.
Even so, many students took the German exam at Musashi High School.
At the science fiction coterie magazine "Space Dust," a coterie member who was a university professor who had studied in Germany said to me, "You used to speak German, didn't you?" He gave me the original copy of the Perry Rhodan series, the first German space opera.
I wrote about these books in my coterie magazine, and they are prevalent, selling hundreds of millions of copies worldwide to this day.
It is made to appear as leading to the effect that I was the first to discover it, which is one of the reasons for my connection with Germany.
There are now 650 books in the Space Heroes Rhodan series in the Hayakawa library.
The series has been written by many professional writers in rotation and is a long seller in the world of science fiction.
When I was young, Germany was generally popular.
Nowadays, Germany is not as popular as it was in the past, even in universities. Still, since the Meiji era (1868-1912), Japan had studied military systems, science and technology, medicine, and music in Germany and looked up to Germany as the representative of Western civilization.
However, at a certain point in my life, as was the case with myself, my admiration for Germany waned, and I felt that my love for the country took a turn for the worse, and I began to view it critically from a Japanese perspective. It's as if it's not enough to respect Germany.
I also realized that Japanese people like Germany, but Germans don't necessarily like Japan.
After I learned about Wilhelm II's "Yellow Peril Theory" and other works, it was even more so.
There are similarities and differences between Germany and Japan.
I want to ask Mr. Kawaguchi, who has lived in Germany for 40 years, about this.
German journalists pretending to be pro-Japan
Kawaguchi
What surprised me when I read your book was that you know a lot about Germany.
Usually, when I read a book and come across a description of Germany, I tend to think it's not quite right, but in your book, I often found myself thinking, "Yes, yes, that's right," to the sentences that were mentioned in passing.
And yet, I was surprised when you said you had never been to Germany.
For example, Mr. Gebhard Hielscher, a reporter for the Süddeutsche Zeitung, cited as an example that Germans do not necessarily like Japanese people.
It was right when you said, "As a spokesman for the German people, he pretended to be pro-Japanese toward the Japanese."
I also imagine that he was probably pro-Japanese to those who were around him in Japan.
So I think we were all surprised when we saw the manuscript he was sending to Germany.
Japanese Welcoming Germans' Bad Words about Japan
Toyota
Hielscher is the chief writer of the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper.
He used to be popular for his sharp analysis of Japanese and German comparative culture, but he gradually became an anti-Japanese opinion leader.
I guess he wanted to say that the Germans did terrible things, but so did the Japanese.
It was not only the Germans who committed atrocities.
I was not happy to see that he was trying to gain a kind of indulgence by involving Japan.
Japanese people like to be reminded of what they have done, and they even welcome foreigners to say bad things about them.
The masochistic view of history that is often mentioned is based on the national tendency to be remorseful.
There is an aspect of using what is said as food for thought and correcting what is wrong and making it better.
It may have been easy for Hielscher to say such things.
As Joseph Goebbels said, "If you tell a lie a hundred times, it becomes true," and if you exaggerate the horrible things that Japanese people have done, some people will believe it.
The truth is that there should be Japanese people who can adequately tell such foreign journalists that such a way of doing things is unacceptable, but we just let it happen.
The Japanese may not like that kind of thing, but in the end, it is a problem on the Japanese side.
Unexpectedly, Germans who lack confidence
Kawaguchi
It's a little different from self-torturing, but Germans have something similar, maybe because the Holocaust has accused them of being terrible people from all over the world, and in both good and bad ways, they're something special. They have something to think about it in such away.
We're excellent, but we have this ambivalent feeling that we must be reserved somewhere because people might not like us.
Once, when I was writing an essay about German food, a friend found out about it and told me not to write too badly about it.
At that time, I thought, "They're not so sure about the food, are they?
So they feel a sense of inferiority to France and Italy.
Toyota
I experienced that feeling in Korea when I first started to get into Korea.
I stayed at various hotels, but at that time, there were no Korean restaurants at all.
Since I had come to Korea, I went to a restaurant in town.
When I asked my acquaintance why there were no Korean restaurants in Korean hotels, he replied that Korean food was unsuitable for a foreigner's diet.
I guess because they were not confident.
But now Koreans are saying that Korean food is the best in the world.
It seems that they are torn between lack of confidence and overconfidence.
By the way, when it comes to food, people often say, "The English can eat any kind of bad food so that they can rule the seven seas. The French did not, so they wanted to make their limited colonies French-style.
Vietnam has good French bread, doesn't it?
There you go, Germany is .......
Kawaguchi
Germans were never really interested in food, to begin with, so it's not as if they can eat anything, and many of them are satisfied if they can eat what they ate yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
There is not much desire to try new things.
On the other hand, Japanese people love new things and are always trying to improve the taste of their food to make it even better.
Because of their strong spirit of research, Japanese Chinese food is really delicious. Chinese food in Germany is not so good.
There is no sharing custom, so in German Chinese restaurants, each person orders one plate and eats it silently.
Even if you propose to share it with everyone, it is usually rejected.
It is hard to keep eating only "Chinese-style stir-fry containing green peppers and meat" by myself.
Toyota
They say that countries with powerful dynasties have good cuisine.
They always call in skilled cooks to the royal palace.
Kawaguchi
According to this tradition, since the country was a collection of small countries, the idea of Germany was rare.
Even in a relatively large country, cooks were often brought from France, musicians from Italy, etc., and the genre of German food was never established.
Even though there were delicious foods, what is German cuisine? It is hard to say.
Japanese people mention sausage (wurst) and potatoes, but sausage is a light meal, like standing soba noodles, and potatoes are a staple food.
So, when people say that those are German dishes, Germans are like, "What? "
There are so many delicious ingredients, both meat and wild game, but I don't think there is anything that can be imagined as German cuisine.
Sauerkraut is a pickled Napa cabbage used as a vitamin C supplement during the winter, and Eisbein is so brutal to look at that even many Germans don't like it.
However, there are many delicious local dishes from each of the traditional territorial states.
Meat, whether beef, pork, chicken, turkey, duck, or deer, is delicious in its own right if you pay a specific price, and vegetables are also delicious.
If you go to the North Sea or the Baltic Sea in northern Germany, you will find an abundance of fish dishes.
When Japanese people travel, they don't understand that part of the world, so they go out of their way to order not-so-tasty food and then complain about it.
For example, they say the steak is too rigid. Don't expect it to be well-marbled.
Toyota.
I have made the same mistake.
It was when I went to Mexico for a television job dealing with the Maya Aztec civilization.
Sakyo Komatsu and I acted as narrators in a kind of comic dialogue.
We had just arrived at the hotel late at night, and I ordered a steak because I was too lazy to examine the menu, but it was rigid and challenging to eat.
The next day, first thing in the morning, we went to the zoo to interview the Hagual (jaguar), which is considered a god by the Mayan Aztecs.
It was just mealtime, and a massive chunk of meat was thrown in front of the jaguar.
The jaguar tries to bite into it but can't quite finish it.
We all remembered the steak from last night.
Sakyo Komatsu made a joke. "Hey, he's a pro!"
Of course, it's not the same meat, but if a professional meat-eating jaguar can't bite off a piece of meat, there's no way a human can (laughs).
This article continues.
