The Man of Preface
 | When I was with that Swiss company named Siber Hegner, I was known as the Man of Preface because every time I addressed the predominantly Japanese and Swiss audience, the introductory section of my speech was by far longer than the main part. For the same reason, my e-mails tended to be something they likened to ふんどし (Fundoshi or Japanese loincloth.) |
For that reason, I was extremely unpopular, hated, or even feared among my bosses, subordinates and peers.
In Japan, or any other country to a lesser degree, there are so many red herrings being dragged around to distract attention from the real issues. They include:
■ how to realize a nuke-free world,
■ how to counter the global warming,
■ how to stem the shrinking and aging of population,
■ how to attain a vice-free world,
■ how to create jobs to bring down unemployment rates,
■ how to redress income disparities at home, and between developed countries and underdeveloped countries,
■ whether to part ways with the "modern 2-party system" to go for a postmodern tripolar system,
■ whether to amend the Constitution,
■ where to identify wasteful spending and which 独立行政法人 (Dokuritsu Gyosei Hojin - Independent Administrative Entities) to eliminate to that end,
■ where to relocate the U.S. Marine Corps' V-22 Osprey unit.
The list of decoy issues, or nonissues, goes on and on until the end of time.
The only question they would never think about asking is:
"How practicably can we make justice prevail?"
I think there are two reasons why red herrings keep proliferating all the time:
■ without the lure of the scent from these fish, even the rhinitis-suffering bloodhounds could easily track down the foxes, e.g. the Emperor,
■ no politicians, pundits, analysts, journalists, or scholars could live a single day without them; they would be out of work altogether.
These are why I always found it absolutely necessary to immunize my audiences, before I threw my heretical views at them, with full-length preliminary remarks. If I had gotten directly into "the main subject," they would have been so upset at my proposition as to refuse to listen to my words which were utterly unpredictable and unacceptable to them.
At a meeting where speakers were required to strictly adhere to the given time, the timekeeper seated in the back row always stood up in the middle of my speech to signal the time was running out. I never failed to say, "Don't tell me it's time to wrap up my presentation; I'm still in the middle of my preface."
In fact, though, the timekeeper should not have fretted too much about my preface overrunning the time because once the real problem had been clearly identified, even a kindergarten kid could have come up with a valid solution to it right away.
More than ten years have passed since I left the Siber Hegner company. Yet I still remain convinced that I wasn't born to answer questions asked by others. I know apes, kindergarten kids and Japanese "adults" by far outdo me when it comes to solving problems identified by others. I came into existence, and was educated only to raise my own questions.
Maybe I have not yet fully recovered from the distressful experience I had in the 1980s through '90s. The other day, when I had a talk with my son, he interrupted me to say, "Dad, how long do I have to wait until you tell me the answer? It's just a yes-or-no question whether you opt to live with us." ·