The common language prescribed by the center is then disseminated to children through a national education system and schools across the country. Simultaneously with the creation of a populace comes the creation of a state. Because the state must present an easily comprehensible narrative to an undifferentiated mass, indigenous character is inevitably discarded. If the indigenous histories, cultures, and spiritual traditions of each place were individually incorporated, a unified modern state could never be established. In the process of modernization, the context of place is ruthlessly destroyed. Place after place is discarded and a fabricated space controlled by the center is erected in its stead. This is the typical method of modern state creation. What is invariably born in this process is what I call “hollow history.” By hollow history I mean a formation in which only the outer membrane of the thing called history has been shaped by the politicians, bureaucrats, and scholars positioned at the center of the modern state, while the interior remains empty. In a sense, modernity can sustain itself only by fabricating a history without content and disseminating it relentlessly. This proved remarkably effective.

Behind the emergence of this structure lies the form of intellectual authority that was rapidly established after the Meiji period. Japan’s modernization, or Westernization, began in the Meiji era from 1868 onward. The core actors who erected the outer membrane of the entity called “Japan” were graduates of the Imperial University, the present-day University of Tokyo. At the time, attending university was itself a rarity, and Imperial University professors held an authority virtually equivalent to divinity. In the preceding Edo period, education was delivered through Confucian study. No national school system existed. Across the country, countless private academies called shijuku operated as places where individual teachers taught the people of their village. This was not education in the modern sense. It was learning between human beings, master and disciple facing each other directly. In the Japanese Confucianism of the Edo period, outstanding teachers who gave each person the opportunity to think existed in great numbers in every region. The university system introduced after Meiji concentrated authority in specific professors. Because it was grounded in elitism and was not open to everyone, it inevitably reinforced hierarchies of authority. In other words, Japan possessed a tradition of excellent education, but the Meiji government forcibly abolished it. The purpose of that abolition was the creation of new authority by the new rulers.

In this process the “Japan” they narrated as hollow history was promoted primarily by Imperial University graduates and professors. It shaped the national image that would lead to the Second World War and eventually became fixed as the common understanding of the populace. The greatest problem of modern scholarship comes down to the blind conviction that its authorities adopted on their own, the belief that there must be nothing they do not know. The results produced by this meaningless delusion were devastating. It became the wellspring from which the rich cultural spirit of Japan was systematically extinguished.

From this point onward, discourse that spoke of “what is not Japan as Japan” was installed at the center of history without question, underwritten by institutional authority. This is a structural problem of academia, but the violence born in early modernity did not exist in the Edo period. Personally, I have always trusted what I feel on the ground when I move on my own feet and arrive at a site, more than any theory advanced by some authority somewhere. I am certain that nothing is more trustworthy. Anyone who goes to the actual site can easily see how far off the mark history in its conventional sense has landed. From this vantage point, the Japanese are not a single ethnic people, and Japan is not a unified state. The essence of what Japan is cannot be disposed of with the word “diversity.” It must be called a “pluralistic world.” To read the richness of Japan as a pluralistic world requires looking at it sincerely from an angle that is not the existing framework of “Japan.” In a sense, this is the negation of the historical image constructed by modern Japan.

Within this problem-consciousness there is one theme I want to address in this article. It concerns the conventional wisdom surrounding the routes by which people crossed the sea to reach the Japanese archipelago. In standard Japanese history, the movement of immigrants across the sea is stated to have departed from the southern Korean Peninsula, passed through Tsushima and Iki Island, and arrived in northern Kyushu. Northern Kyushu was certainly a strategic coastal zone from ancient times, and the area was dotted with multiple powerful clans. Representative among them were the Munakata clan based in Munakata City in Fukuoka Prefecture and the Azumi clan based on Shikanoshima island in Fukuoka. They were descendants of early powers that had mastered the sea, leveraging their geographic advantage to seize trade interests with China and Korea and rise to prominence. Before the prototype of a unified state emerged in the southern part of the Nara Basin in a later era, there was an age dominated by clans who controlled the seas of northern Kyushu. This has been forgotten by history. Most people underestimate the importance of understanding sea routes, but given that Japan is surrounded by sea on all sides, the impossibility of understanding Japan without this perspective is self-evident. This is not limited to ancient history. It is a major theme running through the entirety of Japanese history to the present, and without firmly holding this perspective, the cultural transmissions of every era cannot be decoded.

Since the traces of seafaring peoples vanish beneath the waves, they are difficult to detect through the terrestrial evidence of archaeology and similar fields. Put differently, virtually everything narrated as Japanese history is history seen from the perspective of the land. It harbors the enormous problem of lacking the perspective of the sea, which is an even more critical factor. To touch that world, let us begin with these two clans. The key to understanding the Munakata lies in their enshrined deities. The key to the Azumi lies in the distribution of their name and the form of their worship. And an intriguing tendency shared by ancient sea-related clans must not be overlooked. The pattern of venerating trinities of deities appears repeatedly. To regard this as mere religious ornamentation is a mistake. From the number three, the memory of the very act of crossing the sea can be read.

At Munakata Taisha, the home shrine of the Munakata clan, a goddess is enshrined on each of three islands within the sacred domain. Tagorihime at Okitsu-miya on Okinoshima, Tagitsuhime at Nakatsu-miya on Oshima, and Ichikishimahime at Hetsu-miya on the mainland side. Okinoshima lies 50 kilometers offshore from the Kyushu mainland, Oshima 11 kilometers, and Hetsu-miya was once a separate island but is now connected to the mainland. I believe this arrangement of three shrines is not simply a matter of religious sanctuaries. It transmits in stages the memory of the sea route taken when crossing from the Korean Peninsula to the Munakata side. Arrivals would call at each island in sequence, performing purification rituals at each stage. Only after completing the final purification could they land at the Munakata headquarters. A protocol of “three purifications” existed along the ancient sea route. Only those who had fully purged the defilement of a foreign land could merge with the local deity and be recognized as kin. It goes without saying that the peculiar modern concept of “race” did not exist at the time. A person who had crossed the sea became one with the deity of the land at the moment the purification was complete. The remnant of this concept of spiritual kinship survives today as the three-shrine system of Munakata Taisha. Okinoshima, the site of the first purification, remains a sacred domain where entry is still forbidden.

The Munakata faith is called the faith of the three goddesses, Tagorihime, Tagitsuhime, and Ichikishimahime. The worship of these goddesses extends across the entire country. Famous examples include Itsukushima Shrine on Itsukushima in Hiroshima Prefecture and Enoshima Shrine on Enoshima in Kanagawa Prefecture. These transmit the traces of the Munakata clan’s movements. The fact that the three Munakata goddesses are enshrined in locations throughout Japan reveals that the clan were not merely gatekeepers of the Genkai Sea off northern Kyushu. They were a people who expanded over a wide area through the sea routes.

At Shikanoumi Shrine, the home shrine of the Azumi clan, the approach differs from the Munakata. Rather than enshrining three deities on three islands, they divide the sea itself into three layers, Soko, Naka, and Uha (bottom, middle, and surface), and enshrine a deity at each.

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Ti Jun, the Wei envoy who landed in northern Kyushu in 240, and Zhang Zheng, who stayed in Yamato for several years beginning around 247. The oldest records of the Japanese side dating to the 240s are the observations of these two men, transmitted through the Wei military’s effective control of the Daifang Commandery on the northern Korean Peninsula to the Chinese imperial court.

What can be determined at this point is only that the Wei envoys set foot in the specific regional confederation they had long called the Wa kingdom [倭国] and met the Wa people [倭人] they called the Wa [委/倭]. But the Wa kingdom does not mean present-day Japan, and the Wa people do not mean present-day Japanese. An uncanny fusion of illusions was taking place in mid-third-century Japan, and as this series has shown, that fusion was perfectly synchronized with the movements of the Three Kingdoms period on the Chinese side.

In the history of the hegemonic struggle among the three kingdoms of Wei, Wu, and Shu, the Gongsun clan had risen to power on the Liaodong Peninsula by threading the gaps between them. They eventually came to control parts of the Lelang and Daifang commanderies on the northern Korean Peninsula and expanded their influence. The rise of the Gongsun on the Liaodong Peninsula was welcome news for Wu, which needed at all costs to advance into North China to contain Wei. Wu promptly dispatched envoys to demand that the Gongsun pledge submission to the Wu emperor. But for the Gongsun, diplomacy with the great power of Wei next door was a far more pressing concern than a distant state with no shared interests. The Gongsun executed the Wu envoys and presented their remains to Wei.

This act of vile discourtesy and betrayal toward Wu’s diplomatic overture sent immediate shockwaves from the ancient Korean Peninsula all the way to the ancient Japanese archipelago. We underestimate the historical awareness of the ancients out of our own selfish arrogance, but this region of East Asia has been connected since antiquity. The notion that each area developed its history in isolation is an impossibility.

The Gongsun’s recklessness transformed the geopolitical situation in ancient China. In 233 the Wu emperor Sun Quan had dispatched a massive fleet carrying 10,000 soldiers and a fortune in treasure to Liaodong, offering the Gongsun patriarch Gongsun Yuan the title of King of Yan and seeking to conclude a formal military alliance. For Wei, whose operations had been based primarily in North China, this was a geopolitical crisis. Until that point Wei had only needed to watch Wu to the south in the Yangtze region and Shu to the west in the Sichuan Basin. Wei controlled the northern half of the Yellow River basin including the Central Plains, the historical heartland of Chinese civilization, and held a relatively advantageous position for monitoring both Wu and Shu. But Wu’s scheme to ally with the Gongsun behind Wei’s back meant that Wei would be surrounded on virtually all sides. If a military alliance among Wu, Shu, and the Gongsun were concluded, it would be the end.

In this precarious situation, Wei was saved by the betrayal of Gongsun Yuan himself. But it was now forced to make a major shift in its strategy for unifying China.

First, on the iron principle that a man who betrays once will betray again, the Wei emperor Ming immediately appointed Gongsun Yuan as Grand General and extracted a pledge of loyalty to the Wei throne. For Gongsun Yuan a direct war with Wei was not realistic, so he allowed himself to be co-opted. But simultaneously in 238 Wei ordered its key minister Sima Yi to lead a force of tens of thousands in a military invasion of Gongsun territory. Combat began in Liaodong around June of 238. The Daifang and Lelang commanderies on the northern Korean Peninsula were swiftly seized. By August Gongsun Yuan had been executed.

Word of this upheaval across the sea in 238 reached Queen Himiko of Yamato almost immediately. Whether the political decision that followed was the product of deliberation among the multiple male kings of the various tribes who held real power within Yamato, or the result of a divine oracle delivered through Himiko’s trance, is uncertain. My own reading, based on the character of Yamato in this era, is that it was the queen’s oracle. What matters is that when the Yamato side detected the upheaval in the Three Kingdoms, what took place was not an immediate political strategy meeting to determine the future. It was a ritual in which the question was put to the gods.

When the oracle delivered its result and Himiko, as the consensus of Yamato, resolved to pledge submission to the Wei emperor, it can be said that Japanese history was set in motion in a certain sense. The queen of Yamato was discarding the possibility of submitting to the emperors of Wu or Shu and publicly declaring a position of vassalage to Wei. Realistically, submission to Shu, far removed from Yamato, was difficult to conceive. But Wu was in close proximity to the southern part of the Japanese archipelago and had maintained intense contact since the Jomon period as a deeply connected region. In the midst of all this, the gods determined that the next hegemon of China would be Wei. Receiving this divine will, Himiko immediately decided to dispatch envoys to the Wei emperor.

With the conferral of the title [親魏倭王] (Friend of Wei, Queen of the Wa) by Emperor Ming, Himiko officially entered a status resembling that of a tributary state within the Wei sphere. Wei then dispatched envoys from the Daifang Commandery on the Korean Peninsula to investigate the realities of this Wa kingdom it knew little about. This is better understood as a strategic survey to determine whether the Wa kingdom might become the next Gongsun. The Gishiwajinden is rich in what we would today call ethnographic content, but it must be grasped as one component of an intelligence operation aimed at winning the Three Kingdoms struggle.

Here a powerful question surfaces. Why did Wei need to establish an alliance with a Wa kingdom so far away?

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On the Chinese side, where writing and documentary techniques were acquired early, the imperative of knowing one’s neighbors grew steadily in importance as a means of maintaining a stable regime anchored in the dynasty, given the reality of a vast territory open on all sides. Out of this imperative the concept of the Four Barbarians eventually emerged, and the world of ancient Japan came to be understood as one of the peoples of the Eastern Barbarians. The earliest documentary source for this understanding is the text now known as the Gishiwajinden. Yet if one attempts to gain insight into the Wa people of the Wa kingdom as the true image of ancient Japan, or into Himiko the queen of Yamatai, a single lifetime will not suffice. The historical confusion involved is so intense and so deeply entangled with the broader history of East Asia that no single interpretation or definitive answer can be clearly offered. Still, with that impossibility as a premise, the journey of cutting through layer upon layer of extraordinary complexity to bring the image of ancient Japan to the surface can be continued on one’s own terms.

The subject of this piece is the relationship between the Wei envoys who visited the Japanese archipelago in the 240s and Himiko. In fact, even the description of Himiko as queen of Yamatai conceals a number of premises that must be questioned. Let me begin with the dimension of sound.

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The capital where Himiko resided was a nation called Yamatai, yet the location of this ancient seat of power, sometimes spoken of as a kingdom, remains unknown to this day. This is, in fact, quite strange. By that period, the Chinese side already possessed advanced techniques of surveying and geographical understanding, and the account in the Gishiwajinden [魏志倭人伝], though concise, describes the very route along which the envoys traveled to gain an audience with Himiko. Hearing this alone, one might assume the location of Yamatai could be settled without difficulty, and yet it has never been definitively established. Why has the question of where Yamatai stood produced such confusion?

In this article, we will trace the path toward understanding that mystery.

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The problem of origin is a process accompanied by the pain of thoroughly excavating one’s own abyss. The truth of origin, achieved by diving deeper and deeper toward the last Utopia left for humans begins first and foremost with gazing intently at one’s own existence. This is because when one thoroughly gains insight into the individual illusion that constitutes one’s existence, one inevitably grasps the complex modes of communal illusion and pair illusion psychologically. At this juncture, many people tend to look outward rather than at their own origins, finding comfort in escape; however, whether in anthropology or any other field, it is self-evident that one must explore one’s own origins before investigating ancient civilizations. In fact, origin investigations of other countries conducted by foreigners are destined to have their sloppy structures exposed by local scholars in later generations. This is because a person who has not thoroughly examined their own origins fails to notice the first limit held by communal illusion: that it is impossible to gain insight into another country without doing so. Since they are unaware of this fundamental premise, any research they conduct on another country’s origins will inevitably be reclaimed within the realm of the signified. Even if such research becomes an artifact displayed in a museum, it does not speak the truth. This impossibility of reaching the truth from the outside is not a problem unique to the modern era, but has already appeared as a problem of the same quality since ancient times.

In my case, I am diving in by placing that origin in Japan, but this type of problem was already exposed at the time of the Gishiwajinden [魏志倭人伝], a section of the Book of Wei, which is a Chinese historical text recording the appearance of the oldest Japan. As we have seen throughout this series, taking even a single ancient word of the local Japanese tribes, “Wan,” reveals immense complexity. The dimension of Wan, which was the word for the local tribes to say “us,” was transformed through ancient Chinese envoys into the characters [倭] or [委] as bureaucratic and academic terms of the dynasty. Eventually, when these characters were re-imported to the Japanese side, the sound transformed from the former Wan into Wa through the medium of the written character. However, if we alter the ancient sound world based on these characters, regulations arise that limit our ability to grasp the world prior to writing. As known in Japan through the concept of Kotodama (spirit of words), a pluralistic world existed in the sound itself in ancient Japan. Yet, once even a single sound comes to be treated as a written character, it inevitably undergoes alteration in meaning subject to the regulations of each era. This implies that a type of ideology intervenes in that sound through its carriers, and the sound of Wa is a material that typically narrates that history. In a sense, the sound of Wan can be said to be the oldest material on the Japanese side regarding that alteration.

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The conceptual space of Wakoku, objectified by the ancient Chinese state as the country where the Wajin resided, exposes this problem. This is because the very word “Wa,” which had long been in general use as a bureaucratic term on the Chinese side to refer to ancient Japan, later came to be perceived by the Japanese side as discriminatory and derogatory, and a reactionary movement against this archaic designation occurred on a national scale. However, it goes without saying that the concept of the nation at this point is not equal to that of the modern era and remains within a localized space. Furthermore, the figure of Japan seen from the Han to the Wei dynasties, which possessed a perspective deployed on the premise of Chinese civilization, appears as a world of different tribes possessing neither writing, literature, nor a unified system. Actually, the descriptions in the Gishiwajinden [魏志倭人伝], which recorded the oldest figure of Japan in terms of literature, reveal that when viewed by the envoys of Wei at the time, Japan appeared as a reasonably alien existence. However, such ancient documents gradually became a troublesome problem for the Imperial Court forces on the Japanese side, which later acquired the technology of writing and literature and gained power using information compilation as a weapon. This is because, in the process of the Japanese side assembling the Court around the Emperor, a certain sense of ethnic consciousness blossomed locally; yet the expression of this consciousness could not occur actively, and it was always linked to the circumstances on the Chinese side assumed to be outside. In other words, if internal strife occurred on the Chinese side and the system weakened, thereby causing its influence on Japan to decline, then ethnic consciousness on the Japanese side would rise reactionarily. Of course, I am simplifying considerably here, but such dynamics can be understood as homogeneous from the perspective of the dynamics between Japan and the United States after the Second World War.

Therefore, the way of viewing Japan in the documents of the ancient Chinese side gradually came to be regarded within the Court as discriminatory and derogatory. Particularly for some forces that had acquired a certain degree of consciousness of hegemony centered on the Emperor, historically their diplomacy had been to sometimes allow Chinese influence to flow in and sometimes to buffer it; thus, it is valid to say that in the process where the political real power of the Emperor or the clans increased, independence from Chinese influence came to be demanded. The emotional repulsion that began around this time headed toward a movement to discard the designation Wa from Wajin [倭人] and Wakoku [倭国] over a vast period of time. This movement eventually reached the current designation of the country as Nippon [日本] and the designation of the ethnicity as Nipponjin [日本人], but its origin lay in psychological repulsion. However, I must add one thing: the fact that this driving force is perceived as discriminatory or derogatory as mentioned above belongs strictly to our dimension since the modern era, and we must not link this emotion to that time. In other words, it was an alienation from China within the limited category of state formation. What is important is that this consciousness of alienation did not occur generally among Japan and the Japanese people in the current sense, but was merely a phenomenon that occurred in the closed place of the Court, which was a quite limited political center. That is, the ones who viewed the alienation from China as a problem were only the administrators closed within the field of the Court, and it occurred completely unrelated to the residents of the pluralistic world spreading vastly outside the Court. Therefore, the historical insight that sees the Japanese people as departing from Chinese influence and beginning to become independent in this era is a complete error. Such errors stem from a failure to understand that this is a problem of illusion. In a sense, it can be said that precisely because this consciousness was realized first, the Emperor and the surrounding clans were able to seize hegemony, but that was merely hegemony in a limited field and cannot possibly be called unitary rule.

What is significant is that the ancient Japanese administrators who regarded the designation of Wa as discriminatory here did not immediately call its replacement Nippon. In fact, the transformation of the concept indicating the state from this ancient Wa to the modern Nippon involves a transition that is far too complex.

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Another crucial fulcrum is to question whether a people called Wajin, or a specific ethnic group that could be positively identified as such, actually existed in the early historical period of Japan. That is to say, we must ask whether the Wajin functioned historically as a rigorous concept indicating a specific ethnicity or tribal collective equal to the name. However, as a practical matter, the examination of the Wajin up to the present day has been egregious. Even now, there is a strong tendency to abuse this abstract and nebulous concept of Wajin, employing it capriciously across various fields. I am weary of this strange situation where everyone speaks of the Wajin while knowing nothing of them, yet one could argue that the historical image of Japan is being distorted by this very phenomenon. Or perhaps, rather than distorted, it is fundamentally flawed from its very standpoint. If historical arguments are developed based on concept formation that ignores these basics, the innumerable ideologies deployed in the modern age will inevitably intervene and ensnare the discourse. Consequently, the outrage of meaninglessly producing ethnic problems is affirmatively manufactured. However, I will proceed by completely discarding the attitude of those who see only the signifier in history. From a strong stance of refusing to pander to such foolish perspectives, I wish to deepen the consideration of the Wajin, which floats as a phantom full of misunderstandings. The reason is that the Wajin is being exploited for indigenous issues, a problem that does not apply within the context of Japan.

First, the figure of the so-called Wajin ethnicity frequently posited as a premise is narrated as follows. It is a structure of binary opposition in the history of the settlement of the Shogunate forces in Hokkaido around the late Edo period, where the Wajin invaded the land of the Ainu, the indigenous people of Hokkaido.

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In general perception, there is a deep-seated tendency to view Japan as a nation rare even on a global scale, possessing a mono-ethnic population of one hundred million; the evaluation stands out that its original culture, nurtured in the soil of this island nation, has been sublimated by a unique spirit while accepting complex external influences. Indeed, such evaluations are still rampant, and one frequently encounters them. Certainly, I believe these contain a measure of fact, but at the same time, in the modern age, such frivolous ways of thinking serve well enough as mere pastimes, yet they fail to truly move the life force to gratitude or awe. Therefore, for me—an independent researcher who has spent the last eight years traversing the various regions of Japan, exploring without regard to disciplinary boundaries—answering this question has become of critical importance. Of course, the answer I present is, after all, only provisional. However, as I am soon to reach the age of thirty-five, I feel that facing this question with sincerity over the next fifteen years or so has become more important than ever before.

Thus, we have decided to establish a new serialized section within Shitsurae titled Communal Illusion, and here I shall release essays that approach the theme of “What is Japan?” through a unique lens. There is a decisive awareness of the problem in titling this Communal Illusion. While there have been voluminous inquiries into the question “What is Japan?” heretofore, the one who influenced me most intensely was the philosopher Yamamoto Tetsuji. And it was through Yamamoto that I came to confront Yoshimoto Takaaki, hailed as the greatest thinker of the post-war era. In fact, theories of Japan prior to Yoshimoto’s arrival were basically premised on the theory of the State as an ideology constructed before the war, and had not been able to break free from it. This State theory, in essence, positioned the Emperor at the apex and discussed Japan from the perspective of an image of the State characterized by an unbroken imperial line spanning over two thousand years and a single ethnicity. In my personal interpretation, the “unbroken imperial line” [万世一系説] is the unification of bloodlines. The “single ethnicity” [単一民族説] is the unification of tribes. By unifying this bidirectional movement within the modern State of Japan, the State reclaimed the origin itself, establishing a structure wherein Japan was discussed within that reclamation.

In reality, the academic system imported from the West upon entering the Meiji era was extremely complex, engaging in a syncretism where systems from multiple countries were simultaneously adopted in Japan, rather than emphasizing a relationship with any specific nation. However, at least when founding scholarship in Japan at the time, it was almost without exception under the influence of this ideology. Rather, scholarship and scholars pandered to the ideology of this new era. That is to say, they entered into the architectural work of reinforcing the real image of “Japan”—which until then had only been spoken of ambiguously—by enlisting Western academic techniques.

What requires caution in this instance is that the majority of the results released in this era were thought out with the new modern ideology, with the Emperor at its apex, as a premise. In other words, because thinking was conducted on the premise of erecting a modern ideology crowned by the Emperor, inevitably, no scholar could deviate from this stipulation. Because they concentrated so heavily on the construction of this ideological structure, the function possessed by thinking itself was slighted; eventually, this caused a misalignment, where the new image of the State—the Japanese ethnicity centered on the Emperor—was produced as an ideology in a form different from the initial design. The struggle surrounding this misalignment unfolded particularly across the three domains of the Meiji, Taisho, and early Showa periods. Countless political bodies and activist groups arose one after another—numbering in the hundreds—so one cannot discuss it monistically. However, what we must grasp here is the fact that, at the time, the real image of “Japan” did not possess that much intensity. Because the erroneous premise is held today that a solid State image of Japan has flowed continuously through history, I feel this viewpoint is often overlooked. At that time, the real image of Japan had not yet been established.

However, once the 1930s began, the situation started to metastasize. The turning point was a change in the quality of military personnel. Conventional soldiers did not possess much political voice, but here, fanned by the waves of accumulated State ideology, a new existence called “political soldiers” appeared. In short, these were people who, while being soldiers, actively involved themselves in politics; in the process of the rising power of these political soldiers, the Army seized hegemony. Thus, the voice of the Army’s political soldiers came to surpass that of conventional bureaucrats and politicians, and eventually, a militaristic ideology positioning the Emperor himself as the supreme ruler was established. This was adopted as a technology of State governance. Passing through the tumultuous era of the Second World War in this manner, upon the defeat in 1945, most people had no composure to summarize and think about what “Japan” had been—a concept propagandized at the time. Since everything had burned down, they were fully occupied with starting everything from zero. Under conditions where survival was the highest priority, ideology held no meaning. As a result, the conclusion to the inquiry “What is Japan?”, which had intensified from the pre-war to the wartime period, was postponed. Moreover, because a new ideology called democracy, transplanted from the chaotic intervention of the victor nations, intervened there, the answer to the problem was extended even further.

This era continued for a long time, but the atmosphere began to change with the heightening of the leftist movements that intensified in the 1960s. Having already escaped the situation where there were no material goods, and welcoming an era where a new generation lived in high spirits without the threat of war, the question “Come to think of it, what was the Japan of that time?” manifested in the generation born and raised in the shadow of the war. in this case, during the first Anpo Protests (security treaty struggles) of 1960, the people participating in this social movement were in a situation where this question arose relatively easily, as they had been born and raised in the era when the war was occurring, even if they did not have the experience of directly entering the military and fighting. On the other hand, by the late 1960s—the time of the second Anpo Protests—the pivot was a new generation born post-war, so they possessed no direct experience of war. However, in the psychology of the youth of this later period, there was one decisive malfunction. That was: “The older generation, including our parents, executed that war, yet not a single one of them has summarized (reckoned with) it.” This question turned into irritation toward their elders; it presented a fierce doubt toward a State system that, while causing the death of multitudes of its own citizens and devastating the country through war, was building a new era without reflection.

At this time, the entity against which they took a particularly reactionary stance was the academic system. Those among the youth of the time who could go to university had a privileged aspect; the majority of their generation had no such opportunity. Therefore, they harbored feelings of inferiority rather than superiority regarding the situation where they were fortunate enough to advance to university while many friends of the same generation could not. This was because it was common for friends more excellent than oneself to be unable to go to university due to their parents’ financial circumstances. The conviction that “I must study for their share as well, since I can go to university despite being inferior to those friends” was a relatively common sentiment among the urban youth of the time. Another important thing is that, because they were born and raised under the influence of the democracy of the victor nations, the attitude that “Japan must not cause war again” was quite strong. However, at the same time, this later fragmented into leftist movements, while on the other hand, the attitude of those believing “Japan should suffuse its armaments and rise again” also strengthened reactionarily.

Because they were studying with such seriousness, scholarship appeared meaningless to them unless it confronted the problems of the real in a practical manner. Of course, not all students were like this, but a certain number held such an attitude. However, a problem existed here. The university professors they learned from at the time were, without exception, people who had experienced the war, and among them remained many scholars who had enlisted scholarship in the service of the wartime regime. Yet, they merely spoke the sophistry of scholarship; while soldiers and politicians were judged by international law, the scholars’ own responsibility was hardly questioned, and many remained in their professorial positions at universities after the war. Against this, the students of the time began to press intensely: “Do you truly have the aptitude to teach us?” What was being questioned here was not social rights or such foolishness, but how that person themselves had summarized the war and lived through it. This point of contention is extremely important.

It is not often considered, but in truth, the ones who first self-domesticated into the post-war system were these scholars, such as university professors. The students of the time saw through this inconvenient fact, but because the scholars had self-domesticated into the system, they shielded themselves with democratic rights and the like, and would not answer the students’ questions at all. The students were questioning the person themselves, but the scholars answered with the regulations, norms, and rights of the system. Enraged by this, the students began to explode, feeling that being taught by such professors would serve no purpose whatsoever. In fact, in the leftist movement rising at the time, it was rampant that professors teaching Marx by jumping on the bandwagon had not actually read Marx’s Capital. In short, they had looked through related books by Marxists, but had not read the works of Marx himself. Ambitious students rebelled against this. Because they hungered to build a new era, the students of the time read more books than the scholars, and they pondered how the knowledge gained from those books connected to the problems of the real. However, a troublesome problem lurked here. That was their failure to see that the residue of Zhu Xi (Neo-Confucianism)—which places absolute value on knowledge-centrism and the overemphasis on knowledge, a topic I frequently handle in Shitsurae—was intervening in the system.

Scholars and politicians who had self-domesticated into the indescribable edifice of the system could not respond properly to the youth who were trying to face the reality of the time seriously. A fierce, unidentifiable anxiety that their assertions merely echoed within a sealed concrete room, reaching nowhere. Because the youth harbored pent-up feelings that could not objectify the true nature of this anxiety, they provisionally called it “power” or “authority,” but in truth, the opponent they were facing was not something that could be dismissed as mere power. Yet, the leftist ideology the youth were enthusiastic about offered no solution either. Because they were being defeated one after another in the university struggles, they were nearly crushed by the sense of crisis that they, too, would be defeated like the losers of the leftist movement of 1960, and eventually end their lives by self-domesticating into the system like their elders. In this desperate spiritual crisis, at the end of 1968 when the final thread of the youth was about to snap, a single shocking work suddenly appeared. That was Communal Illusion [共同幻想論] by Yoshimoto Takaaki.

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