Chapter 1.6: Growing Up, Standing Tall

Mr Shintaro Ishihara was the Goethe of Japan. I was his pupil, a person in the same profession, and his escort runner. In this chapter, I have woven together my own experiences and private recollections that span as long as twenty-plus years and "my unfulfilled promise" to him. ー Shin Ushijima

Chapter 1.6: Growing Up, Standing Tall

Read other chapters in My Mentor, Shintaro Ishihara

Recently, when I was reading The Great War of Showa and that Tokyo Trial (昭和の大戦とあの東京裁判, Kawade Shobu Shinsha, Ltd, 2011) by Professor Sukehiro Hirakawa, a sudden realization came to me about Mr Shintaro Ishihara.

"In my boyhood, we Japanese stood tall without having any inferiority complex. When I went to a summer resort on the Bōsō Peninsula every summer, I saw a number of battleships of the Imperial Japanese Navy offshore. Japan was among the three biggest naval countries in those days. I was brought up as a boy with great pride, and I cannot make myself disbelieve that this largely shaped who I am." (Ibid, p 143)

The author, Professor Hirakawa, was born in 1931, and Mr Ishihara in 1932.

That's when it dawned on me. Shintaro Ishihara had written somewhere that immediately after Japan's defeat in the war, he had climbed a hill commanding a panoramic view of Sagami Bay, which was filled with a great many American naval vessels. They were so numerous that, in fact, they seemed to line the entire bay. He must have been a first-year junior high school student, and already he had great pride in his homeland, Japan.

Otherwise, he would not have inked his story about going all the way to see the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, where he was taken to task for walking up the stairs in wooden clogs. And he would not have mentioned that while walking in Zushi City (Kanagawa Prefecture) with a popsicle, he was slapped on the face by a passing American soldier.

By that age, pride in his homeland was already integral to his identity.

On War and Pride

The thought made me realize why Nobel Prize-winning author Kenzaburo Oe, who was born only three years after Ishihara, was so different in his views and thinking. And the same holds true for Shuji Terayama, also born in 1935, who composed the verse that inspired the title of my book, "Is My Homeland Worth Sacrificing My Life For?" (2020).

Both men were 10 years old at the end of the war, and a boy of 10 is too young to establish an identity in relation to his homeland. It follows that, unlike Ishihara, Oe was unable to nurture his pride in Japan. It is exactly like the man in his book The Late Youth (Shincho Bunka, 1968).

How about Shuji Terayama? He must have felt like an orphan, believing that he had no homeland worth sacrificing his life for.

Mr Oe at the age of 10 vs Mr Ishihara at the age of 12.

I thought back to my own childhood for a moment.

predictions spy balloon — *Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park (©Sankei)*

Hiroshima

Until I was 10, my family lived in Tokyo. I attended Taisei Elementary School in Toshima-ku. Then, just as I was about to enter fifth grade, my father's job transfer took us to Hiroshima.

We were a family of six, and it took the help of one whole Japanese National Railway boxcar to move us. Before moving, several men came to our house and, armed with saws and hammers and nails, they made wooden frames, fabricating makeshift boxes to hold our chests, refrigerator, and other family furniture. The boxes were taken to nearby Higashi-Nagasaki Station on the Seibu Ikebukuro Line and loaded into a pitch-black freight car called a boxcar. That was before shipping containers were introduced.

It was only after I moved to Hiroshima that I started thinking about my future education and university entrance examinations. As a child in Tokyo, I spent my time playing baseball with friends. But when I moved to Hiroshima, I decided to go to cram school.

My goal was singular: I had to get into the six-year integrated junior-senior high school boasting a large number of students who passed the entrance exams for Tokyo University.

And what of my thoughts on my homeland?

The Teacher's Records

There was someone who undertook a search of my historical consciousness from the seventh grade, when I was 12 years old, to 33 years old. Apparently, it was for his doctoral dissertation. That person was Sennosuke Fujii, who had taught me social studies and history at junior and senior high school.

Later, he became a professor at Hiroshima University and published the book titled A Theoretical and Empirical Study of Historical Consciousness (歴史意識の理論的・実証的研究, Kazuma Shobo, 1985). In it, he records the thoughts of a boy who is clearly recognizable as me, and notes how his views transformed over the years from boyhood to young adulthood.

I discovered the book by remarkable coincidence. Never had I imagined that my teacher, Sennosuke Fujii, was conducting research with such audacious ambition.

Through junior and senior high school, Fujii assessed that I was "particularly brilliant in the academic performance of social studies" (P 239). But my stance toward the nation itself had been negative since the seventh grade. That was likely because I would read the Asahi Shimbun at home and frequently talk with my father, who advocated unarmed neutrality.

Therefore, as a boy, I did not have an identity that encouraged me to take pride in my homeland. The boy born in 1949 was different from the boy born in 1932, and I would have cultivated and harbored a critical view of the nation, just like the boys born in 1935. I suspect this is a common sentiment among those of the Baby Boomer generation.

By the way, in his book, Fujii says, "It seems that Shuichi Kato's work, A Sheep's Song (羊の歌) exerted what I believe to be a significant influence — albeit indirectly rather than directly — upon [me] during [my] high school years." (P 306)

The Way Men Should Live and Die

According to Kato's book, I also had a positive opinion of Kenzaburo Oe.

Later, as I entered the legal profession, I succeeded in transcending the worldview of Shuichi Kato in my own right.

Among Mr Ishihara's writings, there is one passage about the relationship of the people and the nation that strongly impressed me. It was about a conversation that Mr Ishihara had with an elderly man from Okinawa.

According to the elderly man, his son had been shot and killed by an American soldier when he was a young man. As the father tells it, his son was stepping in to intervene on behalf of a woman who the American soldier was about to assault. And while trying to protect the woman from the soldier's brutality, the American shot him in the chest.

But the father told Mr Ishihara that he was proud of his son for having done what a man should do, even at the cost of his own life. What the father said did not necessarily make perfect sense to Mr Ishihara, but he squarely embraced the straightforwardness and verity of the father's feelings. He was much moved ー that was the way men should live and die.

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(To read the book in Japanese, please visit the publisher's website.)