The Guru of the Anti-Emperor Cult Chooses to Walk The Slugging Blogger That I am
On September 14, I wrote: "I will be interviewing Mr. [Yoshiro] Takeuchi by the end of this month unless something happens to either of us in the meantime." Unfortunately, this something happened.
Yesterday, he told me over the phone that he would never see me again. He cited the following reasons for shying away from the proposed talk:
■ Everything I said in the regular meeting of the Takeuchi School and in my followup letters was totally unacceptable.
■ Everything I said there indicated that I have become totally learning-disabled with my brain seriously suffering senility.
More specifically the 85-year-old philosopher didn't like the following remarks I had made:
■ We should not expect Obama or Hatoyama to deliver on their promises of change because they are downright swindlers.
■ Harry S. Truman should have used the Little Boy and the Fat Man on Tokyo, instead of the relatively unimportant local cities, to exterminate the imperial institution and decapitate Japan.
Takeuchi is one of those computer-illiterates. The only tools he can use when sharing his thoughts with others are his hoarse but solemn voice and the archaic fountain pen. Quite naturally he makes believe that it still makes sense to discuss socio-political issues out of the context of the Internet. Every time his message fails to get through, he thinks the receiver, not the sender, of the message is at fault.
These are why I had had to snail-mail him some letters along with the printouts of my blog pieces to elaborate on my points. In relation to the first one, I had sent him the hardcopy of my September 21 piece. As to Truman's choice of the target cities, I had had to consume another envelope and postage stamp just to send him the printout of my September 23 post.
How could he have thought I am more learning-disabled than himself?
But all he could say in our last telephone conversation was that my "rant" was totally impermissible. This really indicated that it's not me, but himself who is suffering a serious senile dementia.
Now it looks as though the private school the old philosopher started 20 years ago to "confront the climate immersed in tenno-kyo (the Emperor Cult)" has turned into a cult in itself. And now he is the guru who forces his disciples, if implicitly, to swallow everything written in his 1999 book titled Confrontation with the Emperor Cult as if it were the bible. He insists that the book was just a compilation of debates among his disciples, but unfortunately for the poor philosopher, the number of his students has dramatically decreased from more than 100 in 1999 to a mere 3 or 4 by now.
I don't know whether the rest of the clandestine discussion group left it voluntarily or they were just excommunicated for suggesting the guru purchase a personal computer.
Intellectually lazy intellectuals in Japan can only view things in terms of left or right, just like their counterparts in America always see a confrontation between liberals and conservatives. But these are all imaginary things and I see the real battleground somewhere else. To these narrow-minded and empty-headed people, there's no room to accept heretical views which are, like mine, "lefter" than the left and "righter" than the right.
Takeuchi is no exception. In my definition, the word philosopher means one who takes nothing for granted. Since I have been really fed up with the pointless arguments between leftists and rightists, I thought I might be able to get back to the basics of things once again if I could talk to the philosopher, in person, who looked to have a certain amount of intellectual prowess at least half a century ago. But I was wrong. in fact. Takeuchi simplemindedly thinks people who were disappointed with the LDP or the GOP should all rally behind the self-proclaimed liberals. Small wonder he found my criticism against the democratic parties of Japan and the U.S. impermissibly outrageous.
I don't know whether this person was already like this when I first met him half-a-century ago, or the 50 years of unrewarded fight against injustice have perverted his way of thinking. Whichever is the case, now I must admit that my expectation from the former philosophy professor was totally misplaced.
I have made it a rule always to avoid preemptively offending the dignity of a person whom I speak to. But, now Takeuchi has put me in a position to defend my own pride. He called me names as if he was speaking to his own reflection in the mirror. Under the circumstances, I think what I write here of the guy can all be justified. ·