AUTHOR'S POSTSCRIPT TO THE ENGLISH EDITION

And So Life Goes On

The narrative of A Sheep's Song ends with the year 1960. In the thirty-five years since then, many changes have taken place in the world and in Japan. During these years I lived in Japan half the time and spent the rest abroad. I had the good fortune to meet a number of people who have since become very dear to me, but I also had to part with others who are irreplaceable in my heart. Their friendships brought stimulation not only to the intellect but also to the senses, and together, I have been blessed with moments of unimaginable joy. Needless to say, I have also had my share of frustrations and disappointments, but I think that my way of life remained fundamentally unchanged. Perhaps it did so because I was unable to change it, or perhaps it was because I had little desire to do so. I continued to earn my living as a writer and as a lecturer in universities at various places. I spent a lot of time traveling and reading, and I continued to enjoy the camaraderie my friends provided me. When the occasions presented themselves, I would listen to music, look at paintings, and watch plays and films. And so life goes on.

One of the books I wrote during this period was A History of Japanese Literature , in which I tried to trace the intrinsic and extrinsic determinants on the development of Japanese literature and elucidate the characteristics of the Japanese mind.^[1] To that end, I felt the need to advance a broader definition of "literature" (bungaku ) and to discuss writers and writings that literary histories had rarely taken seriously. Another thing on my mind was the comparative angle between Japanese literature and the Chinese classics on the one hand and modern West-

[1] Original title: Nihon bungakushi josetsu .

ern literature on the other. To accomplish that, I tried to present my narrative as lucidly as possible by using critical criteria with the broadest universal application. Fortunately, the book has a wide readership in Japan, and through its translation into six foreign languages (English, French, German, Italian, Chinese, and Korean), it has also become accessible to the non-Japanese audience.

I also wrote a number of books and articles on the plastic arts, and some of these works are known outside Japan in English translations. Additionally, I compiled and wrote poetry collections and published a collection of short stories, but they did not attract much attention. Besides that, I wrote articles for a column in the Asahi Shimbun once a month in which I expressed my views and impressions on the political, social, and cultural affairs of the time. My column was under the collective title "Random Talks of a Mountain Recluse," and later its name was changed to "Untempered Utterances."^[2]

I taught at three universities: the University of British Columbia, the Free University of Berlin, and Sophia University. Because I spent most of the time as a visiting professor at various universities in different countries, I had little involvement with university administration. My primary duty was to interact with students in the classroom. In most instances, my lectures had to do with Japanese thought and culture under the rubric of area studies. The only exception was a series of five lectures I gave at Princeton University under the title "The United States as Seen by a Japanese."

Those were the things I did. On the other hand, I did not acquire any wealth to speak of. I was satisfied with my modest living, sustained as it was by the income from writing and teaching. I had little desire for more. I also did not get myself involved in politics. I did not belong to any political party or political organization. I did vote in elections, but I took no part in election campaigns, nor did I participate in mass movements or street demonstrations. It was not because I thought active political participation was meaningless, but because such activities did not agree with my temperament.

As a man without wealth, power, or organizational affiliation, I have always lived as a private citizen on the fringes of Japanese society. Chance and circumstances contributed to this state of affairs, but I also con-

[2] Sanchujin^[*] kanwa , now collected in Kato^[*] Shuichi^[*] chosakushu^[*] , 21, and Sekiyo^[*] mogo^[*] , in vols. 21 and 22.

sciously chose to take this position. Likewise, a combination of circumstances and inclination explained the time in Japan or abroad after the war. It goes without saying that my life abroad was that of a marginal existence. And the many long years I spent outside Japan clearly contributed to my inevitable disengagement from the center of social influence in that country. If living on the periphery of society deprives one of social influence, it can also afford the greatest degree of spiritual freedom. There is a certain advantage to observe, to analyze, and to discern the totality of our condition from the periphery as opposed to the maelstrom of activity. In retrospect, perhaps I was more interested in achieving an understanding of my social, cultural, and political environment than in transforming it. I was not always successful in my attempts. For instance, I was right in my prediction on the day of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor that Japanese militarism would be defeated, but I was incorrect in my understanding of postwar Japan and failed to predict the course of its subsequent economic development. I was not surprised when two or three East European countries I knew to some extent broke away from Soviet domination, but I never expected the disintegration of the Soviet Union itself. After it happened, I recognized my total unfamiliarity with the Soviet Union.

Awareness of my own ignorance did not, however, dilute my strong sense of curiosity, nor did it cause me to waver in my conviction of an intrinsic order of causality embedded in the ebb and flow of historical events. While I do not discount the accidental element in historical processes, I still believe in our ability to comprehend their dynamics. My primary intellectual interest, regardless of where in the world I happen to be, has always been Japanese history and society. They are the very entities that had the most profound effects on my total makeup. How did Japan and its culture evolve and where are they heading? These were the questions that occupied my thoughts. I might have been in a Zen garden in Kyoto or inside a conference room in Tokyo. Or at home in Vancouver as I watched ships going in and out of the harbor on their trans-Pacific journeys, or in a Berlin tearoom as I listened to students arguing with impassioned ambiguity about the revolution, or in Venice as I reminisced about the trip of the young Japanese delegates in the late sixteenth century on the canals just outside my classroom window.^[3]

[3] In 1582 the "Christian" daimyos of Otomo^[*] , Omura^[*] , and Arima in Kyushu sent a delegation of young men to visit the papal states. They left Nagasaki inFebruary 1582, reached Rome in March 1585, and had an audience with the pope before returning to Japan in 1590. See Dai Nihon shiryo^[*] Tensho^[*] ken'o^[*] shisetsu kankei shiryo , ed. Tokyo daigaku shiryo^[*] hensanjo (1959), Bekkan 2.

And time went by with increasing relentlessness. Perhaps the protagonist of Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier is right when she says that time is an extraordinary thing. Once conscious of its passage, one will be left without a capacity to sense anything else. Several decades flashed by after the completion of A Sheep's Song . And occasionally, time came to a halt. I suppose such moments marked the turning points in my history. The experiences these nodular markings represent are what engage my act of reminiscing here. I have little to say about old age, nor do I intend to mention each and every reminiscence that happens to cross my mind; for I still wish to look ahead, to the things I plan or aspire to do.

Discoveries of North America

In 1960, fifteen years after the war, I set foot on the soil of North America for the first time in my life. On the invitation from the University of British Columbia to join its faculty, I went alone to take up my position that autumn. My initial status was that of an assistant professor; later I became an associate professor, and shortly afterwards a full professor. In the Fine Arts Department, I lectured on "Introduction to Oriental Art," and in the Department of Asian Studies, on "Japanese Literature in Translation." I established my residence in a student dormitory before Professor Bill Holland was kind enough to make available to me a room in his house. Bill was the former executive director of the Institute of Pacific Relations, based in New York. After the institute was forced to close down as a result of McCarthyism, he sought refuge in Canada and became the head of UBC's Asian studies program. At the same time, he also became the editor of the journal Pacific Affairs , then published through UBC Press instead of in New York.

From my room on the second floor of his house I looked down a small hill toward the harbor and the mountain range on the other side, as ships loaded with Canadian wheat passed through the straits on their way to China. This was the time when the United States adopted a containment policy toward China, and the ships seemed to symbolize the delicate differences between the U.S. and Canada with respect to their China policies.

Bill Holland knew practically every senior Asian scholar working at North American universities. One could find newly published books on area studies on every bookshelf in his house, and there was always a pile of newspapers and journals from the United States on his desk. The newspapers and journals in particular greatly stimulated my intellectual curiosity, but I couldn't even skim through all of them. For relaxation after dinner, Bill himself would watch Hollywood Westerns on TV without the sound while listening to Brahms's symphonies on his stereo and browsing through the New York Times , all at the same time. And the spectacle struck me as a spontaneous coalescence of American popular culture, the "American dream"—though a Western movie actor had not yet become an American president—modern journalism, and the legacies of nineteenth-century Western European culture.

Besides Bill Holland, there was quite an assembly of interesting people at the University of British Columbia. B. C. Binning, who single-handedly ran the Fine Arts Department, was a well-known artist in Canada and lived in the woods of West Vancouver with his elegant wife. Gentle and self-effacing, he loved the sea, the sailboats, and England, and was fond of talking about Cézanne, Tomioka Tessai, and Beckmann.^[4] When Binning visited Japan, I took him to Takarazuka's Seichoji^[*] Temple, where the head priest, Sakamoto Kojo^[*] , was Tessai's disciple during the master's later years. Bert—that was what I called Binning—later invited Mr. Sakamoto to Vancouver and organized the first Tessai exhibition outside of Japan. "Tessai is like Cézanne," he used to say. "Their art represented the culmination of tradition and heralded the advent of modernity."

Among the faculty in the Department of Sociology was Kasper Naegeli. A Viennese who had coauthored a book with Parsons, he sought political asylum in Canada during the Nazi years. One time, on seeing some books I was reading in my office, he muttered, "Now you can find everything in there." If I remember correctly, the books he saw were Heidegger's Sein und Zeit , Karl Kraus's Die letzten Tage der Menschheit , and Christian Morgenstern's poetry collection Galgenlieder . Perhaps these books brought back memories of his distant homeland. His air un-

[4] Tomioka Tessai (1836–1924), a celebrated and imaginative Japanese-style painter known for his vivacious sense of color and bold execution, drew his inspiration from yamato-e, nanga , and other Ming and Qing genres, taught at the Kyoto School of Art (1894–1904), and became a member of the Imperial Academy of Art in 1919.

mistakably reminded me of a typical Western European intellectual of a certain era. His acute sense of history, his deep interest in every aspect of culture, his cultivated habits as a polyglot, along with his ever-present sense of temperate skepticism toward himself and the world . . . Reminiscent of the nimbus of a Buddhist statue, the aura Naegeli exuded was that of an ancient capital on an old continent.

One time we had Kasper as our house guest. At one point, my companion, herself a Viennese, started to talk about "Herr Karl," a performance by a well-known actor in a Vienna political cabaret at the time. The story was an autobiographical narrative triumphantly recounting the life of a petty bourgeois named Karl who managed to live through Nazi Germany's annexation of Austria, the country's defeat, and its postwar turmoil, thanks to his skills at unbridled opportunism. Told in a seemingly endless monologue in the local Viennese dialect, the story as a whole emerged as a relentlessly trenchant satire. Kasper said he wanted to listen to the story on the LP we had. I was interested to see his reactions to the monologue, which I could only half-understand. As he listened, his expressions grew increasingly somber, even anguished. Then at last he said in English, "Let's stop it! I can't stand it any more." His suicide occurred shortly after that.

Of course, what killed him was not a single LP. But for a long time I regretted my role in bringing back to his memory the Austria of Herr Karl. I asked several of his close friends at the university what could have been the reason for his suicide, and yet no one there seemed to have even the faintest clue.

The Chinese historian Bing-ti Ho was a member of the Asian Studies faculty. A graduate of Beijing University, he came to Canada in the wake of the Chinese Revolution of 1949. Although he became a naturalized Canadian citizen, his allegiance to China was still quite extraordinary. While he opposed the Communist government on the mainland, he took great personal pride in the success of China's atomic experiment under the same regime. Each day he would write with his brush a few lines from the Chinese classics, saying that his skills in calligraphy would deteriorate if he did not observe this daily routine. He was very knowledgeable about the Confucian classics, and whenever I asked him the source of a quotation from such texts, he could tell me without a moment's hesitation.

One time I invited him for lunch at the faculty club. "I never have lunch there," he said. "I usually go home and prepare some simple Chi-

nese dishes. There isn't any food in this country worthy of the name cuisine." When I asked him how good the food was at Beijing University, he said with perfect composure that he had never eaten at the university dining room, even during his student days there. "My lunch was always delivered to me from home" was his reply.

"Every day?" I asked.

"That's right. Every day."

"Who prepared it for you?"

"I had a cook at home, and I also had someone deliver the food to me at the university," he answered as if that was the most natural thing in the world.

And so, at Bill Holland's house I managed to get acquainted with his guests such as the ones I have described. The person who came most often was a petite Irish-American woman called M, an editorial assistant of Pacific Affairs who came from New York with Bill. With rich facial expressions and rarely shy, after a few drinks of her favorite whisky she would confront everyone head-on with a harangue of caustic words and excoriate all dissenting opinions in an endless string of curses. Some of them were unique. Speaking of the history of British imperialist oppression in Ireland, she would say, "You Anglo-Saxons! Do you know how much blood you have on your hands!" Bill, who must have heard her remark dozens of times, would say something like, "Come on, M, that was in the past!" On rare occasions, she would even direct her curses at me, whereupon Bill, with a wry smile, would remind her of my nationality.

With her, I visited Mexico for the first time, and I was fascinated by the country. Through her work at the Institute of Pacific Relations, she came to know Frederick Vanderbilt Field, and we spent half a day at his house. Well known in the United States for a time as the "American millionaire Communist," Field was married then to a beautiful Mexican dancer and lived in the suburbs of Mexico City, engrossing himself in pre-Columbian archeology. Details about his life are available from his work From Right to Left: An Autobiography (Lawrence Hill, 1983).

I cannot quite remember the immediate circumstances now, but in Mexico City I also had the pleasure of meeting Sano Seki. When he showed me around his newly created theater, he stood onstage and, with no one in the audience except me in the front row, proceeded to give an impassioned recital of Ibsen as if it were the first opening performance. Rather than a mere presentation for a lone spectator, his mind must have

supplied the vision of a full house. I could never forget this legendary figure from the history of modern Japanese proletarian drama. Active in Japan in the late 1920s, he spent most of the 1930s in the Soviet Union as a political refugee and sought asylum in Mexico in 1939 after Stalin's purge. Since then he had established his drama school and begun his important contributions to the Mexican theater. There was no question in my mind that his theater, along with his plays, was the culmination of his career and the pinnacle of his life. Perhaps Sano had never allowed himself as much hope and optimism as when he stood before me in Mexico City in the early 1960s. When I returned to Mexico later as a visiting professor at the Colegio de México, Sano was no longer with us.^[5]

My first impressions of Mexico were of course not limited to my experiences with the two exiles I met. With its roots in pre-Columbian civilization, the country's culture—and in particular its architecture and sculpture—was far more refined, more regionally varied, and more magnificent than that of indigenous American Indians north of Mexico. In the realm of the formative arts, I came to realize that Mexico is not simply a region or a country; rather, it represents quite another world altogether. Moreover, the Mexican character manifested itself not only in its past but also in numerous forms in the present—in its sense of color and in its expressions of violence, in its capacity for deep compassion, its poverty, its nationalism, and the cosmopolitan character of its upper classes. I also became acutely aware of how dramatically different the United States appeared when observed from Mexico or from its other neighbor, Canada. From the north it seemed so close, but so infinitely far away from the south.

What was happening in the United States? In November 1963 at the University of British Columbia, I learned about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. On that day many teachers and students at UBC, myself included, decided to cancel our classes. As we all know, after the Kennedy assassination the American government decided to escalate the Vietnam War. Meanwhile, domestic antiwar activities were also gathering momentum. Eventually, on March 31, 1968, while I was with a number of university colleagues at a friend's house in Vancouver, we heard the tel-

[5] Sano Seki (1905–66) organized Teatro de las Artes in Mexico City in 1939 and after 1945 directed plays ranging from King Lear to A Streetcar Named Desire . See Tsurumi Shunsuke (Sano's cousin), Nihonjin to wa nan daroka^[*] (Shobunsha^[*] , 1996), 399–410.

evised speech by President Johnson in which he announced the termination of American bombardment of North Vietnam and his decision not to run in the next presidential election.

The "anti-Communist" war in Vietnam reminded me of the "sacred war" brought about by the militarist government of Japan. First you have the establishment of a local puppet regime, followed by the claim that there were only a few "anti-Japanese Chinese" (or Vietcong in the former case). Then came repeated proclamation that fighting was localized and the American version that "victory is just around the corner," the gradual escalation of the theater of war, and the sending of troops, resulting in the increase in the number of "anti-Japanese Chinese" (or Vietcong) and the phantasm of the Great East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere (or domino theory). . . . But at the same time, I was also struck by the remarkable differences between Japan during the Fifteen-year War and the United States during the Vietnam War. The Japanese bureaucratic machinery under the emperor-system effectively crushed any hopes for antiwar movements. Even criticism of Japan's war policy was almost nonexistent during the late 1930s. On the other hand, freedom of speech and of public assembly existed in the United States. The impact of antiwar activities, beginning first in the universities, started to be felt in the churches and in certain sectors of the financial establishment, as well as among ordinary citizens outside academia. These forces, combined with their influence on the television media and Walter Cronkite, brought about a change in the government policy. While Japan had no effective mechanism for changes in national policy before its surrender, the power of public opinion in the United States provided that possibility. It led me to ponder the factors that gave rise to these differences between the two countries.

1968

During the 1960s I customarily stayed in Vancouver from September of each year to the following April. During these eight months in Canada I gave lectures at the university and read mostly Japanese classical works in the university library, which happened to contain part of the George Sansom and E. H. Norman collections. I wrote A History of Japanese Literature as well as Essays on Art .^[6] I traveled frequently to the United

[6] Geijutsu ronshu^[*] (Iwanami shoten, 1967).

States, giving lectures, visiting art museums, and participating in Japan-related conferences. During the four and a half months of summer break beginning in May, I lived either in Tokyo or Vienna or sometimes in both places. I maintained a small residence in both cities, and from Vienna I could easily visit other European countries.

The United States I saw in 1968 was San Francisco and the Bay Area in April and New England and Chicago in November. By then, anti-Vietnam War demonstrations seemed to have flared up everywhere in that country. Their effects were felt on Canadian university campuses as well. In Japan, the Beiheiren, a citizen's movement with the slogan "Peace to Vietnam," was active in organizing public rallies and in offering assistance to American army deserters.

American supporters of the Vietnam War insisted that the conflict was caused by North Vietnam's "aggression" against the south, an action seen as a manifestation of China's "expansionism." So went the domino theory according to which other Asian countries were supposed to fall one after another under Communist control should South Vietnam first turn red. It struck me that this view and all its interpretations were a concoction spun out of fantasy without due recognition to the realities of local history and Vietnamese nationalism. What could have given rise to a theory so far removed from reality? Just as many antiwar advocates in the United States pointed out, it was not merely an accidental error in judgment but a way of thinking intimately connected with the ideological framework of Cold War logic. Among American scholars, particularly political scientists and Asian area specialists, the views of "concerned scholars" could also be heard.

At the University of British Columbia, I had the occasion to participate in an antiwar teach-in. At a gathering of mostly students mixed with their instructors, a series of antiwar speeches were made by historians, professors of English literature, and mathematicians, all nonspecialists in American politics. Then a professor of political science stood up and said that the former speakers had no idea how American foreign policy decisions were made. In his view as a specialist in the field, the war was not simply a unilateral decision by President Johnson but the result of a complex interaction of forces consisting of the internal power politics of the United States Congress, the bureaucracy, the military, and a large number of other pressure groups. He went on to say that ignorance of this fact would render any opposition against the war ineffectual.

While I believed he was right, I also thought that the more convinc-

ing a political scientist was in explaining the realities of a situation, the more he would find himself inclined to support the status quo. To explain how the status quo has come into being is almost tantamount to demonstrating how preexisting conditions have led to the formation of the status quo as a natural progression of events. And if the given conditions cannot be altered, it also becomes impossible to change the inescapable consequence. All this means that it is meaningless to oppose the status quo because it is the predetermined consequence of such conditions.

But when we are speaking about an extremely complex phenomenon such as war, references to its inevitability are no more than just a superficial facade. Strict adherence to the laws of causality cannot explain a phenomenon when a myriad of factors come into play. To oppose a war is not a matter of scientific interpretation but a question about basic human values. We cannot tolerate children dying every day under the bomb. This is not the conclusion but the beginning of any discussion.

I went on a journey in 1968. I visited my friends during the early spring in California and spent two months during the early summer in Japan, a month and a half during midsummer in Europe, and the late autumn on the east coast of the United States and Canada. In Japan the policy of high economic growth pushed ahead by the Sato^[*] cabinet, the successor to the Ikeda administration, was starting to change the everyday life of the Japanese people. It witnessed, in material terms, the emergence of an affluent consumer society represented by the so-called age of the three Cs—car, cooler, and color television. Psychologically, it gave rise to a sense of complacency among most Japanese and political conservatism. It was said that the Japanese people as a whole were being transformed into the middle class.

On the other hand, Japanese university students continued to be critical of the structural realities of high economic growth itself and "collusion" among the universities, the financial world, and the conservative political establishment. Their protest took the form of confining their instructors inside their offices, occupying university buildings, and blockading lecture halls. Student activists at Tokyo University occupied Yasuda Hall at the center of the Hongo^[*] campus, an event that led to their confrontation with the Japanese riot police in January 1969. I did not have any direct dealings with the students during my two-month stay in Tokyo; the first time I met with student activists during the 1968 student movement was not in Tokyo but in Berlin in the following year.

In mid-July, I went to Europe via Moscow. For the Parisians at that

time, the May revolution was still very fresh in their memory, and every conversation I had with my friends inevitably returned to that subject. They instantly recalled the huge gatherings of students and citizens of Paris that buried the boulevard St-Michel. They also vividly remembered Jean-Louis Barrault's speech at the citizens' meeting at the Odéon, the tear gas thrown by the police, Cohn-Bendit, and the prudent reactions of the Renault factory workers. The graffiti on the walls of university buildings were still visible with the words "Imagination au Pouvoir!" "Changez la Vie!" It must have been a time of uncertain hopes, a time filled with a sense of emancipation and vivacious visions about the future. At the same time, the events of May also seemed to evoke images of a festival just the day before, of a legend buried in the great distant past. When I met Sartre, he told me that whatever real possibility he had felt for a revolution and a commune disappeared after the first week of events.

During this time, my colleague at the University of British Columbia B. C. Binning and his wife were spending their summer vacation in England. My wife and I met them in Vienna and together we decided to journey around Alexander Dubcek's^[*] Czechoslovakia in my small Volkswagen. In January 1968 Dubcek^[*] had succeeded his country's Stalinist predecessor as national party chief and subsequently sought to liberalize the socialist regime by instituting thorough administrative as well as organizational reforms within the Communist party. This was the Prague Spring of 1968. Come to think of it now, I think it is fair to say that Dubcek's initiatives preceded Gorbachev's perestroika by twenty years.

And he was a very popular leader. At a small town near the Austrian border, I saw perhaps twenty to thirty townspeople in groups of three to five standing on the roadside watching a car slowly passing them by. Some of them were waving at the vehicle. Who could be the passenger inside? There was no motorcade in front or behind that particular car, and not a single policemanlike figure anywhere in sight. It was Dubcek. Could any other East European leader travel freely like an individual citizen without being surrounded by police and security guards or having secret police positioned at various destination points? What was happening in Czechoslovakia then, in terms of the relationship between the socialist leadership and the people, was unprecedented. There was no doubt of the country's long search for political liberalization and of the people's overwhelming support for Dubcek's administration, which brought it about. If the Chinese peasants had not supported Mao Tse-

tung while he was fighting the Kuomintang with his People's Liberation Army, the victory of the 1949 Chinese Revolution would have been inconceivable. Mao was not an elected leader. Dubcek^[*] , too, was not elected by popular vote in 1968, and yet he could move about freely in his country without armored protection.

Compared with Austria, Czechoslovakia then was not as prosperous. But it was not poor; goods and commodities were plentiful and I saw no lines in front of food stores. There were many black marketeers trading in foreign currencies, and even at my hot-spring lodge in the Slovakian mountains such individuals came up to foreigners and tried to buy dollars at the black-market price. Obviously, economic problems in the country still remained to be solved, but the severity of these problems eluded the casual traveler.

During my journey, whenever I had an opportunity I would ask local people in provincial towns what they thought about liberalization. None of us spoke Czech, Slovak, or Russian, and we had no interpreter with us. But some townspeople we met spoke simple English or German. One man said that it was wonderful to have political liberalization, but he wondered how long it could last. An elderly woman was more pessimistic and said in rather fluent German that she did not believe the process would continue much longer. "Liberalization is going too fast," she asserted. "They'd never allow it." And it was not difficult to guess whom she meant by "they."

Totally contrary to this gloomy outlook in the provinces was the optimism among the Prague intellectuals. I met a number of newspaper reporters, writers, editors of literary journals, and other intellectuals, and their predominant sentiments were almost euphoric. Finally, the freedom of speech had returned, I was told. Censorship had disappeared, and now they could criticize socialism as well as capitalism not only in their journals but even in newspapers and on radio and television. They could now freely visit cities in the Western bloc; and Prague, they said, was now a European city again just like London and Paris. "Our spiritual horizon has opened up," an editor who had just returned from Paris spoke rapidly in French as he offered me French wine and cheese. "Our journal serves not only Europe but the whole world. We welcome manuscripts from the United States or from Japan. We don't want any left-wing dogmatism or anti-Communist propaganda, but as long as the writings are based on a free, critical spirit, we welcome any variety of views on any subject." I promised them that after my return to Vienna, I would

think of something to write about. "We don't have any deadlines or length limitations. Any subject you care to write about is okay," the editor continued.

How long would the spring in Prague last? When I asked them about the possibility of Soviet intervention, all the Prague intellectuals I met answered in the same way. "We have absolutely no worry about that. Why? The answer is simple. There's no reason for them to intervene. Dubcek^[*] is a socialist, and so are we. We are neither anti-Soviet nor anti-socialism. All we're trying to do is overcome Stalinism and build a free, humanistic, and true socialist society. We cannot imagine that a socialist country like the Soviet Union would come and crush our hopes. It just won't happen."

Perhaps they are right, I thought to myself. Dubcek was trying to rekindle the last hopes of socialism that Stalin had killed. While it has been my habit not to cherish any absolute faith in anything, I realized that our different thinking on this matter reflected the fact that it was they, not I, who were the citizens of Prague. This was the time when they needed hope more than anything else.

And hope was contagious. As I was driving on the motorway on my return trip to Austria, I was lost in thought, pondering the possibility of living in Vienna for a while and traveling back and forth between Vienna and Prague.

Several days after my trip to Czechoslovakia, I went to Salzburg for the music festival. There I found myself immersed in an intimately familiar environment—the Vienna Philharmonic and Mozart, German spoken with an Austrian accent, terraces of coffee houses overlooking swiftly flowing streams, lights scattering on the icy surface of night streets, and old castles on hilltops illuminated against a dark sky. On August 20, I heard Christa Ludwig singing Fidelio conducted by Karl Böhm. This was a world infinitely removed from the student movements in Tokyo, the May revolution in Paris, or even the milieu of the Prague Spring. Which of these worlds held a greater sense of reality?

In the pension where I was staying, a simple breakfast was served to the guests down in a room on the first floor with five or six small tables. As I had no particular plans until the evening on the following day after Fidelio , I got up late and went downstairs for a leisurely cup of coffee. And I learned from the pension's proprietor that the Soviet army had entered Prague. His message immediately transformed Salzburg into an unreal world, and the Prague I had visited just ten days before along

with every fragment of my experiences there came alive vividly in my mind—the faces of the people waving to Dubcek's^[*] car, the eyes of the old woman asserting that Prague's spring would never be allowed to continue, the conversation in the editor's office so filled with hopes and dreams, the taste of French cheese blended with the aroma of freedom. . . . Soviet tanks had entered the city limits last night, declaring their mission to "rescue our ally from national crisis." My immediate priority was to find out as much as possible about what was happening in Prague and what was about to take place.

Quickly, I changed my plans for Salzburg, though the music festival did appear to continue into the end of August as if nothing had happened. I loaded my bags into my Volkswagen and left for Vienna the same afternoon. Back home in Vienna, I could leave my television on and have easy access to newspapers from various countries. I could also consult some of my many friends who knew about the internal situation of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Driving on the Salzburg-Vienna Westautobahn, I saw quite a number of small cars with Czechoslovakian plates. It seemed safe to assume that many of these Czechs had come with their families to visit the Western bloc during the summer vacation without any premonition that troops from the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact would intervene in their country's affairs. With the situation changing so traumatically, were they now returning hastily to Czechoslovakia? Or were they thinking of seeking political refuge elsewhere, realizing how difficult it would be for them to leave the country again once they returned?

In Budapest in 1956, Soviet tanks had opened fire on the armed insurrectionists, but the same did not happen in Prague in 1968. The Czechoslovakian army was not mobilized, and the people did not stage an armed resistance. Instead the citizens of Prague changed all the road signs to make them point toward Moscow. Young Soviet soldiers had come expecting to protect the citizens of Prague from "anti-revolutionaries," but the latter were nowhere to be found. Instead, when these young Soviets found themselves and their tanks surrounded by the protesting citizens who demanded their withdrawal, they scarcely knew what to do.

That night the news broadcast on Vienna television was suddenly interrupted by a somewhat indistinct half-length image of a man. Facing the camera with a sad expression and speaking clearly in German, he was making repeated appeals to the citizens of Vienna. "The television station in Prague has now been occupied," he said, "and we are broad-

casting this message to the citizens of Vienna from a secret location. The Soviet troops certainly did not come to Prague at the invitation of our government as they claim. They are here in spite of the will of our government and all the people in Prague. Dear citizens of Vienna, please relate this message to the rest of the world. I will continue to speak out, and when my face disappears from the screen and my voice can no longer be heard, it means they have found out about this location and have come to stop us. I don't know how much time we still have, but we will go on as long as we can. . . "

Those might not have been his exact words, but who could forget their message? I knew then what forces stood in the streets of Prague. On one side was an army of overwhelming power with nothing legitimate to say, and on the other a powerfully persuasive and deeply humanistic vision filled with wisdom and hope for a better society. In Prague in August 1968, the war against Soviet tanks was waged with words. I took that as the title of a book I later wrote.^[7]

Berlin, New Haven, China

In the fall of 1969 I was invited to be a professor at the Free University of Berlin and to head its East Asian Research Institute.^[8] The university had officially hired me, but it was the students there who had chosen me for the position. It was a time of great student activism, and in Berlin reforms in university governance had already been put into effect. As a result, university policy—including personnel matters—was to be decided by committees with equal representation from three groups, namely professors, students, and assistants and other clerical staff. Student decisions thus carried considerable weight. Moreover, students were also able to boycott classes not to their liking.^[9]

[7] Kotoba to sensha (Words and tanks) (Chikuma shobo^[*] , 1969).

[8] That is, the Freie Universität, Berlin, and the Ostasiatisches Seminar.

[9] Student activism and reforms (Drittelparität ) began in 1967 in Berlin, then in Frankfurt and Marburg—"as a movement against an outmoded university system and the heavy authoritarianism of senior teachers"—before it spread to other parts of Europe: "Maoist and other groups, in fierce rivalry, roamed the faculties breaking up lectures, sometimes locking professors into their rooms or scuffling with the police, while students boycotts led to many seminars and courses being cancelled, especially in the social sciences" (John Ardagh, Germany and the Germans: An Anatomy of Society Today [New York: Harper and Row, 1987], 423, 213).

Day after day, I met with students either at the institute or at restaurants surrounded by woods in the Dahlem district, an affluent residential area in which the university is situated. There we discussed the methodology and the content of our instruction. The students were consistently critical of the kind of learning based on what they called "bourgeois positivism." For example, did elementary Japanese language instruction fit that description? According to a student activist, the answer depended on whether those on the receiving end were sufficiently imbued with "revolutionary ideology." Thus, before newcomers to such courses began to read Japanese, they must first study revolutionary ideology! While discussion with students on the appropriate ways of instruction went on, the teaching itself did not begin until later.

In those days, the Berlin Wall divided the city into two parts. To get to the East sector from where I lived in the West, I had to pass through Checkpoint Charlie. On the western side, two or three soldiers from the British, American, or French forces were standing with a bored look on their faces and letting people pass even without inspecting their identification papers. Then the visitor came to the checkpoint in East Berlin. There, the inspection was meticulous and took a long time before anyone was let go. The procedure became even more tedious if one had to pass through East Germany by car in order to go to Western Europe from West Berlin. I myself often used the British, French, or American airlines for that purpose; Lufthansa still did not have flights connecting West Germany and West Berlin. Isolated in Eastern Europe, West Berlin was no longer a manufacturing center. But the impact of West Germany's consumer society was quite evident there—one could find ample supply of all kinds of consumer goods, from ordinary everyday products to luxury items.

The cultural activities in this part of the city were lively, thanks to its preferential economic status and, surely, to its own cultural traditions since the nineteenth century. Students from various parts of West Germany came to its universities; one reason, I suppose, was that young people who established their residence in Berlin were exempt from compulsory military service. The Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra held regular performances at concert halls with splendid acoustics; in opera houses one could hear world-class singers throughout the year. Berlin perhaps had more theaters than any other West German city, with troupes from Hamburg and Munich performing their most famous plays. Moreover, one could also go to Brecht's Berliner Ensemble in East Berlin

and watch the performance of Frau Weigel, as long as one remembered to return to Checkpoint Charlie before midnight.^[10]

I lived in a prewar building in the middle of the city. The ceiling in my room was incredibly high, an effect driven home more dramatically as I looked down from a ladder when I climbed up to hang my window curtains. And because my house was situated at the intersection between Kantstrasse and Leibnizstrasse, whenever I was asked where I lived, I often replied, "At the place where epistemology and ontology meet." The opera house was only a very short distance away, and the theaters, too, were also not very far off. I met with my students at the institute in Dahlem during the daytime, and at night I often enjoyed going to concerts and plays. While I had no interest in watching German-dubbed American movies in the cinema, I often enjoyed watching East European films from my television at home. It was in Berlin that I first encountered Hungarian and Czechoslovakian films that in those days could rarely been seen in Tokyo or in Western Europe.

The heroes among my students were men like Ho Chi Minh, Che Guevara, and Mao Tse-tung. Their common characteristics were their status as leaders against imperialist colonialism and the fact that their geographical centers of activity were too far away from Berlin to allow my students intimate knowledge about the background of their words and actions. The gods certainly do not live in the next city block, but way up in the skies. In their conversations, my students often quoted Benjamin, Adorno, and Marcuse as well as Frantz Fanon and even more historically remote figures such as Rosa Luxemburg, but very rarely Marx or Engels. It was true that the pronouncements of my students lacked logical precision or any realistic program for political action, but there was a consistent undertone of anti-authoritarian sentiment. I found these conversations quite interesting.

And yet it was not easy to come to an agreement in my deliberations with student activists over the interpretation and application of the new regulations on university policy. Our views differed sharply when a number of students asked if they could jointly present their graduation thesis (a work equivalent to a master's thesis at an American university). As a piece of joint endeavor, there would be no clear indication as to the extent of each individual's contribution to the work. As a result,

[10] Helene Weigel took over control of Berliner Ensemble after her husband's death in 1956 (see Ardagh, Germany and the Germans , 364–65).

it would be impossible to judge the degree of knowledge or competence of each participant. But the degree was to be granted not to the students as a group but to each and every individual. I therefore indicated to them that I could not accept their suggestion because I found it unreasonable. They in turn told me that my arguments betrayed individualistic thinking reflective of the competitive nature of bourgeois society and that I failed to appreciate the solidarity among my students. But I refused their proposal on the grounds that it would be irresponsible of me as a university instructor to approve the granting of a degree when no sufficient basis for such recognition existed. My student representative then replied that students on their part would refuse to take classes from an "authoritarian professor" such as I. That they were at total liberty to do.

As a matter of principle I neither refuse those who choose to come nor attempt to detain those who wish to leave. I enjoy speaking to those who wish to listen, but I have little desire to waste my limited time with those who have no desire to stay. I came to Berlin because I was so invited, and I had no intention whatsoever of overstaying my welcome. It was then that I decided to leave the city.

I visited New Haven in New England in 1974. The autumn was beautiful, but the little town had nothing that characterized Berlin—no art museums, theaters, opera houses, no Herbert von Karajan, not even a place where one could have a good glass of draft beer. The streets were not named after men like Kant or Leibniz; instead they were called First Street, Second Street, and so on. There was no Checkpoint Charlie to pass through on my way to New York for plays. But the town has a splendid university, and I lectured on Japanese history and Japanese literature for Yale's graduate students. As far as Japanese studies was concerned, Yale during the 1970s had everything the Free University of Berlin didn't.

First, my university colleagues. As far as Japanese studies was concerned, I had experienced very little intellectual stimulation from the scholars I met in Berlin, but at Yale there was my old friend the historian John W. Hall. Along with Professor Marius B. Jansen at Princeton, he was one of the central figures who espoused the "modernization theory" for Japan not long after the war. He was the person who invited me to Yale, and while there I often worked in his office. On many occasions, I also met Professor Edwin McClellan, a specialist on modern Japanese literature. Regrettably, I think extremely few readers these days, inside or outside Japan, can match his critical judgment when it comes

to assessing the quality of Japanese prose. One time he asked me for the names of living Japanese writers whose prose I evaluated most highly. With little hesitation, I mentioned two names: Ishikawa Jun and Nakano Shigeharu. "I agree completely," he said. "But I would like to add Ibuse Masuji's name to the list."^[11]

When I was at Yale, the scholar of psychoanalysis Robert Lifton, well known in Japan for his investigation of Hiroshima survivors, was with the Yale Medical School. He was interested in developing general psychological theories regarding attitudes toward death encompassing the experiences of survivors. Together, we organized a seminar on modern Japanese attitudes toward life and death, with equal enrollment from students in the medical school and graduate Japanese studies. The ensuing discussions with our students, always quite lively, greatly stimulated the instructors themselves as well. Michael Reich, a graduate student and the coordinator for the seminar, worked on writing up the contents, and the three of us published through Yale University Press Six Lives Six Deaths: Portraits from Modern Japan . A two-volume Japanese version, entitled Nihonjin no shiseikan and translated by Yajima Midori, was also published in the Iwanami shinsho series.^[12]

Active interactions existed between American universities. While I was teaching at Yale, I became acquainted with a number of sociologists and Japan specialists from other universities as well. The intellectual

[11] On Ishikawa Jun see chapter 37, note 10. • Nakano Shigeharu (1902–79), a leading prewar proletarian theorist and the movement's most celebrated literary figure, founded the New Japan Literary Society (Shin Nihon bungakukai) after 1945 and had a central role in the postwar democratic literary movement; his works include poetry (Nakano Shigeharu shishu^[*] [Collection of the poetry of Nakano Shigeharu, 1935]) and novels (Uta no wakare [Farewell to poetry, 1939], Nashi no hana [Pear blossoms, 1957–58], and Ko^[*] otsu hei tei [ABCD, 1965–69]); on his prewar career see Miriam Silverberg, Changing Song: The Marxist Manifestos of Nakano Shigeharu (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). • Ibuse Masuji (1898–1993), novelist, short-story writer, and essayist, whose works include Yofuke to ume no hana (Midnight and plum blossoms, 1930), "Yohai^[*] taicho^[*] " (The worshiping captain, 1950), Chinpindo^[*] shujin (Master of the curio shop, 1959), and Kuroi ame (Black rain, 1966); see Anthony V. Liman, A Critical Study of the Literary Style of Ibuse Masuji (Lewiston: E. Mellen Press, 1992).

[12] In 1979. The three authors offer case studies of six well known modern Japanese men: Nogi Maresuke, Mori Ogai^[*] , Nakae Chomin^[*] , Kawakami Hajime, Masamune Hakucho^[*] , and Mishima Yukio. • Its Japanese version was published in 1977.

stimulation I got from them was not inconsiderable, but at this point I would not go into this subject.

Second, the students I had. They no longer spoke about things like "revolution," "the military-industrial complex," or "bourgeois positivism," nor were they particularly passionate about antiwar movements or university reforms. In 1975 when Saigon was captured by the Communists and when the last Americans were returning home from Vietnam, I commented on these matters with some of my students at the university cafeteria. Their reaction made it abundantly clear that they were interested not in talking about the righteousness of the anti-Vietnam War movements in the 1960s but in dropping the subject.

Generally speaking, the students were quite knowledgeable and their analytical ability was rather good in their specialized field. In the foreign universities where I have taught, only Yale's history graduate students were able to give commentaries in Japanese on the original texts by Japanese historians we were reading—or those at Beijing University. The differences between the students I met in Berlin and those in New Haven were quite considerable. But I was in Berlin in the late sixties, and in New Haven in the mid-seventies. During those five years, everywhere in Europe and in the United States, as well as in Japan, another crop of students had emerged. Instead of criticizing and negating the system, they were now seeking to explore the various mechanisms within the system itself. As a matter of fact, twenty years later, when I returned to the Free University of Berlin for one semester of lectures, the students in Berlin had a different outlook altogether.

The Yale students were generous to me even outside the classroom. Far from insisting on unpleasant confrontations, they offered me great assistance. This continued after their graduation and into their professional careers. Those who became university professors, lawyers, and diplomats assisted me in my academic work or accommodated me in their various capacities. When I was in New Haven, I rented a house with Michael Reich, then a graduate student in Political Science and later a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health. As there was no furniture in the house, we rented secondhand items from the local Salvation Army. For transportation, I relied on his car; while some of its windows could not be rolled up, the engine was still working. He was the coordinator and the organizer of my joint seminar with Professor Lifton; at the same time, he was also my student, friend, roommate, chauffeur, English teacher, as well as my valued guide to certain facets of American society.

The third difference had to do with the easy availability of source materials. The university's main library had all the Japanese materials I wanted. Moreover, the library was right next to my department building and it was open until late into the night. Whether inside or outside Japan, I have never experienced such convenience in gaining access to source materials.

That is why I said earlier that the university in the rather solitary town of New Haven was so wonderful. I spent two years there, often spending my weekends in New York and on rare occasions in Cambridge. During our holidays and with Michael Reich, I also had the opportunity to visit the South, which reminded me of Japan. I found it strange that there had been so few comparative studies of postwar Japan's society and culture and those of the American South, though I myself was unable to look into the subject.

During the years I lived in Berlin in the early 1970s, followed by my stay in New Haven, I did return to Japan from time to time. And in the autumn of 1971 I was invited by my old friend Nakajima Kenzo^[*] to visit China with the Association for Japan-China Cultural Exchange.^[13] I had no idea why Mr. Nakajima invited me to go along. I had never visited that country, and before our departure he told me how splendid a country China was and added, "It's totally impossible to imagine its splendor without going and seeing it for yourself." Then he added, "You and your Western fixations, you always jabber away. But China is a serious country, and if I were you I'd be more circumspect."

That year, 1971, witnessed the China-U.S. rapprochement. In early July President Nixon's Assistant for National Security Affairs, Henry Kissinger, had met with Premier Zhou En-lai in Beijing, while in China itself Zhou and the People's Liberation Army must already have taken measures to bring the Cultural Revolution to an end. But what I saw gave me the impression that China was still in the maelstrom of the Cultural Revolution. The "Gang of Four," as the group would be referred to later, was still in complete control. The Red Guards filled the streets, and the people were brandishing their little red books. Mr. Nakajima was right; it was certainly wise to be prudent.

In late September, after I walked across the border from Hong Kong into China, I was in a totally different world. There were no advertise-

[13] See chapter 17 on Kato's^[*] friendship with Nakajima at Tokyo Imperial University.

ments, no exhaust fumes from automobiles, no noise pollution, and no skyscrapers. Instead, what I saw was a serene world with wide open blue sky, clean streets, and weeping willow trees with branches swaying in the wind. Without exception, men and women wore the light gray "people's uniform" that did little to underscore differences of figure, social status, or even age. I didn't come across many corpulent people or many who were skinny as a result of malnutrition. The first people I spoke with through the aid of an interpreter were the train service personnel, the fumuyuan , who served us tea on our journey to Guangzhou. In all my train trips in other countries, I had never encountered a service personnel so flawlessly clean and attentive. I wondered what made them so and was told that their job was "to offer their services to the people by following the teachings of Chairman Mao."

"What about it? Aren't you impressed with China?" Mr. Nakajima said.

"Mmm . . . ," I replied vaguely.

I was in China only a few hours. My first impression was that everything I saw was different from my previous experiences. It struck me that the organization of Chinese society was based on a different grammar from those of all other societies I knew. I had no idea how that grammar worked, and I started to become curious.

After we reached our hotel in Guangzhou, we were given our own little red books, Quotations from Chairman Mao edited by Lin Biao, and we were told to bring them along when we left our hotel to visit the people's commune, for example. These pamphlets reminded me of the Michelin travel guides but, heeding the advice of the leader of our party, Mr. Nakajima, I kept my mouth shut on this frivolous thought.

We were also given volumes of Important Documents of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution , which contained many speeches by comrade Lin Biao. Lin ended all of them by giving three cheers to the paramount Chinese leader: "Long live Chairman Mao!" I understand that there was such a thing as giving three cheers, but I commented to someone in our party that chanting "Long live ten thousand years! Ten thousand years! Ten thousand upon ten thousand years!" was a little excessive. Because of that, someone in our party seemed to think of me as being anti-Chinese. In any case, at the time when we were in China Lin Biao had already died. But it was not until the next spring when it was officially announced that Lin, having failed in his military coup d'état against Chairman Mao, had died in Mongolia in August the year before.

After my return from China, I published my impressions in Japanese newspapers and journals. These writings were collected in a book called Chugoku^[*] okan^[*] and subsequently translated into English under the title The Japan-China Phenomenon (London: Paul Norbury Publications, 1974).^[14] The opinions of reviewers inside Japan and abroad were split between those who thought I was being too positive and those who thought I was too negative about China during the Cultural Revolution. Since my first trip to China, I have visited the country repeatedly, once every few years, sometimes as a member of Japan's delegation from the Association for Japan-China Cultural Exchange, sometimes as a private individual, and at one time as a visiting professor under the auspices of Beijing University. Essentially, classical China to a Japanese is comparable to classical Greece to a Westerner; it is impossible to separate Japanese history from Chinese continental civilization and make sense of the former. And my travels to China have become a regular event until this day.

During the first half of the 1970s, I lived primarily in foreign countries and returned from time to time to Japan as a visitor. From the latter half of the same decade, I lived primarily in Japan and made frequent trips abroad. In Japan from 1975, I became a teacher at Tokyo's Sophia University lecturing on Japanese intellectual history, and there I met a number of very enthusiastic students. Three among them later became teachers at Japanese universities and another two at American universities. One of the latter is Chia-ning Chang, who translated A Sheep's Song into English. I also began to write for the literary column in the Asahi Shimbun , where I often published my views on current affairs. Meanwhile, I managed to finish the latter half of my book Nihon bungakushi josetsu , and Chikuma shobo^[*] published the first volume in 1975, followed by the second in 1980.

The End of the Journey

After that, I made my home in Tokyo and traveled abroad frequently. Writing was my primary vocation, and since that activity amounts to a sort of manual labor, I could in principle do this kind of work wherever I might happen to live in the world. My secondary occupation was that of a university professor, and when invited I could take off as a visiting professor to various institutions around the world. And thus I spent an

[14] The original book was published by Chuo^[*] koron^[*] sha, 1972.

academic year each in Geneva and Venice and half a year each in Cambridge, Zurich, and Berlin after the German unification. I also spent some time in Providence on the east coast and Davis on the west coast of the United States, teaching at Brown University and the University of California—and in Mexico City, at the Colegio de México. I also lectured for a period ranging from a few weeks to several months in places such as Beijing and Princeton.

Since invitations from foreign universities came at their own discretion, I often lived in cities and towns where I just happened to work. These places or the universities or sometimes both often struck me as intellectually engaging and sometimes sensually enchanting as well. The crocus flowers in Cambridge announcing the coming of early spring, fragmentary conversations at high table, students coming and going on their bicycles, and the wonderful and ever seductive bookstores. And then there were images of the Venetian winter, of steam whistles piercing the fog, snow falling on the canals, labyrinthlike alleyways, gondola crossings, the now burned-down opera house La Fenice, the city of Tintoretto with its carnivals and marble sculptures. These were the cities where I spent my days and met various people. Even today I still fondly remember many of my acquaintances, people who have become or might have become, if fate had appropriately intervened, close friends of mine.

I suppose I could attribute my reason for residing abroad to my strong curiosity about foreign environments. 1919 was the year in which I was born. But if my birth year had been 1819, how would my experiences have turned out? The question invites a historical retrospective. On the other hand, Tokyo was where I was born and raised. But if the city in question had been Beijing or Mexico City instead of Tokyo, what would I have seen, how would I have felt, and what would have inspired my thoughts? These questions invite a journey into the unknown. Life is filled with accidents. Our physiological makeup is accidentally determined by the composition of our DNA. But our external conditions—which turn into our flesh and blood and give definitive form to our very being—consist particularly of the time and place of our birth. No one can dictate the particular circumstances of these conditions or do anything to transcend them. But at least on the intellectual level, whether we accomplish it by virtue of our historical knowledge or by our choice of our living environment, we can challenge the peculiarities of our given conditions and establish our own spiritual freedom.

"I wonder when it all began, as I found myself carried away by the wind trailing the thin clouds, hopelessly infatuated with thoughts of wandering." Basho^[*] wrote these words at the beginning of his Narrow Road through the Provinces , but he did not offer an explanation for his wanderlust. Yet for a poet sensitive enough to the flow of historical time to speak about notions of immutability and temporality, I strongly suspect that the motive lay in an attempt to free himself from the peculiarities of his spatial environment, convinced as he was of the transience of temporal living. He was an indefatigable traveler, and the impressions he gathered on his trips are condensed in his haiku compositions. "Hopelessly infatuated with thoughts of wandering." Perhaps the same can be said of my own wanderlust. Not only did I often change my domicile inside and outside Japan, I often embarked on various journeys.

For all these years, I visited France many times and stayed in locales in virtually every part of the country. Sometimes my purpose was to participate in conferences, sometimes to give lectures at universities, but for most of the time I went to visit friends. The sites include an isolated village in Bretagne where the Nabi painters used to live and where remnants of Celtic culture still remain today. And one friend lived in a pine forest in the depopulated department of Landes, the setting of one of François Mauriac's novels. Another friend lived in the foothills of the Jura range near the Swiss border and commuted to Lyons and Paris for work. Yet another lived in a remodeled farmhouse on a small hill deep in the massif Central so that he could devote himself to writing. My sojourns brought me into contact with the nature, customs, and traditional culture of places far removed from metropolitan areas. I also learned about how they were being preserved as well as the state of their deterioration. Industrial consumerism first transformed the cities, as it did Paris in the sixties. Increasingly, the charms of the good old days could be found only in the countryside.

When I was living in Cambridge, I once drove around England when friends from France came to visit; and when I was making my home in Geneva, I visited various places in Italy with my Japanese friends. I enjoyed these trips enormously, but they rarely reminded me of faraway Japan. On the other hand, I must admit that my experiences did inspire all sorts of musings on my part as I compared the various local customs with those in Japan. My plans to embark on a trip to the South when I was living in New England grew from my conscious desire to broaden my focus for comparing U.S. and Japanese societies. And sure enough, I

discovered that many of the things that have traditionally been pointed out as well-defined contrasts between the United States and Japan were themselves characteristic differences between the American Northeast and the South. What I saw in the South—its lingering memories of defeat in the Civil War, its emphasis on family roots and the prestige of the family name, its tenacious hold on the land and the effects of such tenacity on the region's social mobility—pointed to the coexistence of a highly industrialized society with the fundamental values of a historically agricultural setting. It seemed to me that the historical differences between the American Northeast and Japan also helped to explain the similarities between the American South and my country.

My immediate impressions after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border were unlike my discovery of the American South. There I found a world totally different from Japan and the United States. Even the differences between the United States and Canada now seemed negligible, to say nothing of regional disparities between north and south. Japan retreated so far into the distant background that any attempt at comparison seemed impossible. There I learned about the coexistence of many cultures and the multifarious ways of interpreting the world depending on just where one happened to stand. The specter of violence as well as expressions of human compassion filled the rhythms of daily living, dominated by the realities of extreme wealth on the one hand and dire poverty on the other. The poor congregated in huge slums at the outskirts of the city, while the rich fortified themselves behind high walls, punctuated only by well-hidden entrances to their large estates.

Three different kinds of commodity prices appeared to be at work at the same time. The incredibly low fares for public transportation seemed to be socialist-inspired. Free market forces, on the other hand, clearly dictated the price for hotel accommodation according to its particular class, while taxi fares relied on a precapitalistic relationship between the driver and his passenger. The World's Soccer Games happened to take place in Mexico City while I was living there. Despite the fact that I spoke almost no Spanish, my mere mention of the word "soccer" on my taxi ride often sent the driver into an endless discourse on the strengths and weaknesses of the Mexican national team—at least that was what I thought he said—until we reached my destination. And as long as my hand gestured my agreement with his views from time to time, I could get away with paying only half what he normally charged.

There would really be no end to talking about my impressions of Mex-

ico if I were to delve into the subject in any depth. All I can say is that I tried my best to understand how the Mexicans behaved within their society, how these patterns related to the country's long historical past, and how they differed from those of the Japanese. I was also trying my best to appreciate the richness of Mexican culture that has managed to survive despite the worst destructive impulses of the Spaniards.

Also in the early spring of 1988, under the auspices of the Japan Foundation, I was able to undertake a lecture tour through the socialist bloc in Europe—beginning with Moscow and Warsaw through Prague and Budapest and ending with Bucharest under Ceauçescu. It was my second visit to Prague after the spring of 1968; as for Budapest, I think it was my third visit. My dialogue with a number of Moscow's intellectuals was free-flowing and very stimulating intellectually; and in Warsaw and Budapest I had various informative conversations with my friends and their families. But in Prague and Bucharest, I got the impression that the custom of engaging a foreign visitor in any substantive conversation had not been a common practice. In Prague, I spoke in English on matters concerning Japan that my audience wanted to know, though today I can scarcely remember what the exact subject was. The Prague audience appeared to listen attentively but made absolutely no reaction after my talk. In Bucharest, I spoke in Japanese through an interpreter and met a similar response from the audience. I then asked to meet and speak with university students, a request finally granted under the conditions of specific time limits and the accompaniment of an interpreter. Afterwards, in a small room with a self-proclaimed interpreter and three or four male students, I said I had no need for an interpreter and proceeded to talk with the students in French. Although their French was not fluent, it was evident that they understood my questions and tried to articulate their thoughts, intensely curious as they were about the views of a visitor from a faraway land who had suddenly shown up before them.

What did I learn from my short visits to these East European countries? I learned almost nothing about what was happening at the time. I had only two observations. First, the general economic conditions were poor, and in Bucharest they were exceptionally bad. The other was that the strong resentment against Soviet domination had permeated widely into the masses. I had been aware of such popular feelings in Poland and Hungary. Not only did my trip confirm these impressions, there was no reason to believe that the same could not be said of Czechoslovakia and

Romania as well. It was a year and a half later that the Berlin Wall came down.

The traveler, free from the cultural specificity of his own historical environment, is concerned only with the immediacy of the present; neither the past nor the future seem to exist.^[15] The movement in space effectively suspends the continuity of historical time. That is probably why a traveler is always sensitive to the irrevocable uniqueness of experience at any given moment. Perhaps it was for this reason—of course there might have been economic factors as well—that Basho^[*] was so fond of traveling. In waka reminiscences and premonitions may be superimposed on immediate experiences; haiku, on the other hand, invariably seizes the fleeting moment of the present.

I recall the Marschallin's lines near the end of act one in Der Rosenkavalier , when she has made up her mind to leave her young lover. There she expresses the state of mind of a middle-aged woman seized with the premonition of her declining years. The arias, along with the lines of the contessa in Le nozze di Figaro ("Dove sono"), are absolutely superb and probably matched by none other. "Die Zeit, die ist ein sonderbar Ding. . . . Wenn man so hinlebt, ist sie rein gar nichts. Aber dann auf einmal, da spürt man nichts als sie." True, the sentiment has to do with age, but it is more than that. Experiencing foreign cultures always cuts across specific time barriers, which in turn sharpens one's awareness of time.^[16]

One time after saying good-bye to a friend, I was traveling on a northbound train from New York City. The late evening had already cast a darkening shadow on the thickets outside. As I looked out vacantly from my window seat, the distant treetops of an expansive wooded area suddenly began to turn bright crimson in the evening sun. I stared at this fleeting spectacle, with layerings of flaming red projecting on the expanse of darkening hues. At the same time, my memory presented an image of the friend I'd just left, an image so vivid it seemed she stood right before my eyes. At that moment, I was clearly aware of her immediate presence, and yet at the same time I knew it would last

[15] I partly summarize and partly translate a portion of the relevant paragraph.

[16] In the Japanese postscript of A Sheep's Song (Kato^[*] Shuichi^[*] chosakushu^[*] , vol. 23), this paragraph from the manuscript was edited out, but I retain it to convey the original narrative's spontaneous movement.

no more than a split second. An evanescent, irreplaceable experience never to be repeated. And the intensity of this experience only deepened with passing time.

It was an autumn in Nara inside the temple garden of Shin-Yakushiji where the hagi flowers, blooming in great profusion, greeted the soft rays of the afternoon sun under a clear sky.^[17] The place was quiet and had no other visitors. There within its spatial cosmos, I once experienced a self-contained present with neither past nor future. Even the images of the Twelve Divine Generals of the Tempyo^[*] period I'd just looked at seemed to retreat into the distant background, to say nothing of the totality of the world I had known. It was at that moment and within that space that I seemed to live in eternity.

And there were other places at other times: along the waterways in Hawaii, on the footpath through the bamboo grove in Kyoto's Gioji^[*] Temple, in the wheat fields and woods of the île de France . . . But here I'd rather not dwell on my private affairs. I continued to travel, to think, and to write, and my daily life scarcely adds up to anything out of the ordinary. In between these activities, my love and affection found their objects in a few individuals, and I came to recognize in no uncertain terms the possibility of experiences that transcend history and society. Of course, I am not talking about the Zen notion of disentangling oneself from the bondage of worldly matters, nor do such experiences have anything to do with overcoming the human condition of "existence within the world."^[18] And yet these experiences will not be buried under the flow of history or overwhelmed by the onslaughts of societal forces.

Now my journey is coming to an end. Regardless of what my own sentiments and thoughts may be, history marches on into an unknown future. The last decade of the twentieth century saw the disintegration of the Soviet Union and began the process of changing the post-1945 world overshadowed by the Cold War to a new order dominated by the world's only superpower. I had thought it was only a matter of time for Eastern Europe's socialist bloc to rid itself of Soviet domination, but I had not anticipated the collapse of the Soviet Union itself. I have no idea where the future will lead us. Returning to the subject of Japan, my firm belief on

[17] Hagi , Japanese bush clover.

[18] In the margin of the original manuscript Kato^[*] sent me, he wrote the German phrase In-der-Welt-Sein .

the day of Pearl Harbor was that its eventual defeat was merely a matter of course, but during the days of the Occupation I failed to imagine that the country would one day become an economic giant. I have no idea how this country will continue to survive into the future. I can only turn to myself and mutter the lines, "There are more things in heaven and earth . . . than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

KATO SHUICHI
EARLY 1997, TOKYO