It is also why Mainichi and Asahi only talk about "responsibility for harming Korea" anymore.
The following is a reprint of a chapter I wrote on November 29, 2020, with some corrections to errors and paragraphs.
It is full of content that the Japanese people and people worldwide must-read at this time.
The Japanese people and the rest of the world will find Hiroshi Furuta to be one of the best scholars in the postwar world.
The following is a continuation of the previous chapter.
The emphasis in the text except for the headline and the notes below * are mine.
Why do I write in "essay" style
Adorno, a philosopher of Jewish descent, talked about the style of the essay in his "Literary Notes" in 1958.
At that time in Germany, essays were regarded as miscellaneous writings by intellectuals.
The style of technical books and articles was the traditional form for intellectuals.
Adorno, however, boldly pointed out that this was not the case in Germany, saying, "It is the essay that can reveal that the web of objectivity is the work of subjectivity."
That's how far behind Germany was.
Have you ever heard of the French Moralists?
Montaigne, Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, Lafontaine, and others appeared in the 17th century.
In the 18th century, Hervésius followed in their footsteps.
These moralists rejected the scholastic phraseology of the medieval Christian world of the time and challenged the gestures of the religious, theologians, and moralists.
They ignore the medieval sources of authority and speak freely of the boundlessness of reality in esse style.
In short, they are like the humanities to the social sciences of Hobbes, Locke, and others.
Their enemy, of course, was the medieval Christian world.
So when I read Adorno's essay theory, I was so convinced that I wrote a book titled "The Awakening of the Japanese Civilization Sphere" (2010), published by Chikuma Shobo, entirely in essay form.
Mikiji Nishio was very perceptive when he pointed out to me that this was a technical book.
Since then, I have been writing everything in essay style, whether a newspaper column, a philosophical book with essentially serious contents, or an academic paper.
I have ignored modern authority, rejected modern traditional forms, and freely intuited and transcended them.
At first, Mr. Hiroshi Takeuchi called my writing "Furuta-style," but eventually, no one said anything.
*I remembered that the people around me who used to read my writings used to laugh pleasantly and say that my papers were unique, calling them "K-style."*
One day, while reading the writings of Mr. Hidehiro Okada, he said, "No one believes that people are equal. This is something you can understand as soon as you enter the first grade of elementary school, and there is no other fiction like it" (Asahi Sonorama, 1999).
I thought I was outdone by the genius again because he wrote the horrible things in the style of an essay.
When I asked his wife, Junko Miyawaki, about it, she told me that he was also a hedonist in no uncertain terms.
The Collapse of the Progressive View of History Revealed
Recently, I have been using the term "landingism and viewism" a lot.
At first, I didn't actually understand why I was doing it.
View principle is a method of looking at the memories of the past from the present and talking about the scenery in the linear time in the head, the straight time on the line segment, which is the past, present, and future.
As I mentioned in the last issue of this series, the feminists of the 80s and 90s appear to be "a sex maniac" from the perspective of today's feminists.
However, if we synchronize our internal time with the records of that time and look around us when we land on the ground, the scenery changes dramatically.
If the last time is human, this is the biological time, which is the only time that flows inside the body.
And the landscape was earnestly "feminist hedonist," meaning that these women are suffering from being unsatiated by men.
Why is the feminist landscape changing so much?
A possible inference is that natural time is different from both linear time and internal time.
Natural time, or quantum time, is discontinuous.
As physicist Carlo Roverelli said, "We should think of it as a kangaroo, hopping from one value to another. ...The world is made up of very fine grains, and it is not continuous. God did not draw this world in a continuous line, but dotted it with a light touch like Seurat" (Time Does Not Exist, NHK Publishing, 2019, p. 86. The Japanese translation has a different title.)
Or, as Shozo Omori, a philosopher of temporal theory, put it, "As is well known, there is a phenomenon that is difficult to understand: the observation of a certain physical quantity in a certain physical system causes the state function representing the state of the system to shift discontinuously to one of the eigenfunctions of that quantity, the so-called 'wave packet contraction'" ("Shozo Omori Iwanami Shoten, 1999), he is talking about discontinuous quantum time.
Then, why did I come to advocate such things as "viewism" and "landingism"?
It seems to be because the Hegelian-Marxian view of the history of progress has completely broken down, and the idea of time flowing linearly has become meaningless.
Let me give you another example.
In the thirteenth article of this series, I mentioned that the "progressive cultural figures" of the 1960s were instrumental in reducing discrimination and prejudice against Koreans living in Japan.
The descendants of these progressive cultural figures, who are now self-proclaimed liberals, have said something like this.
" Koreans living in Japan are in Japan because they betrayed their homeland. South Korea cannot be happy to give such a testimony."(NHK commentator Tadashi Ideishi, who complained about the Gunkanjima exhibition at the Industrial Heritage Information Center, in the October issue of Hanada, Yasuko Kato, "Reporters or activists, the Industrial Heritage Information Center is the enemy of Asahi and Mainichi").
It's quite the opposite, isn't it? "From "people discriminated against in Japan" to "traitors in Korea."
Mr. Tadashi Ideishi, my wife, a former Korean resident in Japan who was grateful to the radical cultural figure, was furious.
She said, "If my parents hadn't escaped from Korea, I wouldn't have been able to go to school in the poor village on Jeju Island; how grateful I am. And you call it a traitor!" She champed with anger.
Anyway, how did this happen?
We can only solve it by looking at viewism and landingism.
Look at the dots and points in time.
First, the progressive culture thought that socialism was a more advanced economic system than capitalism.
China and North Korea were superior to Japan, and Japan was guilty of doing bad things to those excellent countries.
It was the "Asian Atonement."
South Korea is capitalist, so it was evil from them, and North Korea, which is socialist, was good.
Zainichi Koreans, they did not say.
They called them Chosun living in Japan, and Chosun was connected to North Korea.
That is why they tried to eliminate discrimination and prejudice against Chosun living in Japan.
And it had a specific effect.
Today, Mr. Tadashi Ideishi is a descendant of intellectuals with progressive ideas which can no longer say that the socialist system is sound because of the Soviet invasion of the Czech Republic in 1968, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Kim Jong-il's confession of abduction in 2002. The only thing that remains is "Asian redemption."
China, too, is at odds with the rest of the world over nationalism and wields evil.
Korea is the only alternative.
The original mistake was that intellectuals with progressive ideas used foreign countries as fodder for their ethics.
*I am convinced that this is also the case with German politicians and cultural figures.*
Because of this, ethics became externalized and possessed Korea.
They still hold to the progressive view of history.
Look, South Korea has made progress, maybe even more progress than Japan, they might think.
"Because you have escaped from such a fine country, Koreans in Japan, you are traitors." They said so.
It is why Mainichi and Asahi only talk about "responsibility for harming Korea" anymore.
I write verbosity, but currently, the chief of the textbook researcher of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Goro Nakamae, who is from the University of Tsukuba and I am familiar with, is a believer in the "intrinsic development theory" of East Asia.
The Asian version of Marx's materialistic view of history holds that East Asian countries have developed following universal laws of development based on their intrinsic capabilities and is characterized by a lack of interest in extrinsic opportunities.
In the background of his current suppression of the Jiyusha textbook in the textbook examination, we can see the exact figure as that of Asahi, Mainichi, and NHK commentator Tadashi Ideishi, whose view of Asia has been perverted in a desperate attempt to protect the collapsed "progressive view of history."
In the past, when the socialists were in full swing in Japan's intellectual circles, I too was ideologically oppressed. Still, when I look back at the past in a hopeful way, I see that they may have been trying to guide me onto the right path, the "wrong Furuta" in their eyes.
I hope that the old-fashioned view of the history of progress will soon be discarded, and they will establish a perspective of looking at history in quantum time.
