I LOVE JAPAN. Kazuhiro Arai

Shusaku Endo’s Silence and Christianity (4)               One may think that Christianity is the best religion in the world because it has the largest number of believers. I would like to show that this understanding is wrong.               Why has Christianity spread so widely in the world? This question needs to be answered in two steps, first historically and second economically. I want to consider the second step leaving the consideration of the first to historians. That question can be answered by applying the theory of network externalities. This theory can be understood easily if an example is given. It is beneficial to have a telephone when most others are telephone users. It is not beneficial to have a telephone when only one out of ten thousand people are telephone users. People become telephone users because many others are telephone users...

Shusaku Endo’s Silence and Christianity (3)               Endo’s Silence stimulates me to consider what conditions a religion should satisfy to contribute to world peace and make all people happy. In this regard Christianity has obvious shortcomings because it divides people into Christians and non-Christians and allows the former to attack the latter. Christians always think whether people in question are Christians or not. It is certain that it cannot be a religion for world peace. It may be useful to know that unlike Christians Japanese people have been generous to foreign religions. But if a foreign religion does harm to them, the case will be altered. At present Christians and Muslims live together peacefully in Japan. Japanese culture is likely to be a buffer among many religions. It may have power to change them into more generous religions. In order to consider a condition for a desirable religion, imagin...

Shusaku Endo’s Silence and Christianity (2)               Shusaku Endo wrote Silence by assuming that all what Christians do is right and that a ban on Christianity is wrong. This is the fundamental reason why it is biased. It may be enjoyable for Christians to write and read such a novel but it is quite childish to do so. From the facts and logic discussed above, it is obvious that the author himself is wrong. Christian faith makes people blind to real facts. What is heinous regarding the work is that Endo describes the missionaries with dignity but both Japanese Christians and non-Christians with coarseness. This is more conspicuous in the movie by Martin Scorsese. Kichijiro, a very important fictitious supporting actor, plays a role of dishonoring Japanese people. But there have been very few Japanese like Kichijiro. Japanese Christians were known as honest and earnest. This was a reason exceptionally many died...

Shusaku Endo’s Silence and Christianity (1)               Many people may think that Shusaku Endo’s Silence is a masterpiece and especially Western Christians may enjoy reading it and watching the movie. I would like to claim however that it is a poor work with an ingrained bias of the Christian. The author has spread a barbarous image of Japanese people throughout the world. This is a completely wrong image. First I would like to provide you with information that the author lived a few hundred meters away from my present home. The first photo below shows his residential area. From this you may obtain a bit of image of where he wrote Silence . He used to walk around this neighborhood. So do I sometimes but I have never met him because he had died before I moved in. His close redactor lived nearby.               A key point for fair evaluation of Sil...

Christianity Cannot Be a Religion for Modern Society               Being a Christian may be beneficial to an individual because he can talk to God, his life becomes easier, he can die with more ease, etc. We need to note that these benefits accrue to an individual. Game theory teaches that individual benefits are not necessarily consistent with social benefits. In other words, pursuit of individual benefits can make all people worse off. This mechanism is called the prisoner’s dilemma. Individual rationality does not necessarily mean social rationality, contrary to the individualistic philosophy of Western society.               Religious wars are an example of the prisoner’s dilemma here. People involved think that they are right and that their enemy is wrong. They may even think that their enemy must be eliminated because of wrong belief. Religious wa...

Wars and Religion               I would like to claim that religion is closely related to wars. There have been many religious wars in history. Even wars that are not directly related to religion are sometimes indirectly related to it in the sense that strategies are chosen by religious criteria as in the case of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In addition, inhuman acts in wars are often overlooked because churchmen or other moral leaders are silent about them for religious reasons as in the case of Nazi’s Holocaust.               Take here an example of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East opened after WWII. It was actually a ‘cultural war’ between Japan and victorious or Christian countries. It was obviously illegal because it applied ex-post facto law, but there were virtually no Western churchmen or jurists who opposed ...

The fundamental and implicit principle of US policy toward Japan has been to weaken her military and economic power in order to maintain its supremacy. Against international law USA established after WWII the new Japanese constitution that renounces the right of belligerency. USA enforced strict censorship over Japanese media for several years after WWII. It tried to build up an image that Japan’s militarism caused the ‘Pacific War’ and prohibited criticizing its occupation policy. Censorship obviously contradicts the fundamental principle of free society, which USA was going to build for Japan after WWII. What USA does often contradicts what it says. For example, it criticized Japan for not declaring war before attacking Pearl Harbor by naming it a sneaky attack. How many times did it declare war? USA is always obsessed with the idea that it needs to get rid of obstacles to maintaining the position of number one. Japan has long been such an obstacle. Ezra Vogel’s Japan as Numb...

              Americans are totally obsessed with a clear and simple idea. It is that they are number one and others must obey them. They used to express it explicitly before as ‘manifest destiny.’ Today they do not do so, but they do possess it inside and this fact can be confirmed by their behavior. This idea has caused countless disasters all over the world.               Early European immigrants to the North American Continent could live there and become Americans because Native Americans kindly taught them the method of agriculture. However, they thanked their god instead of the Native Americans and eventually killed most of them by employing dirty tricks. Native Americans are peaceful and trustworthy people. Most of them, however, live today in the Indian reservations of 55.7 million acres or about 2.3% of the area of the United States. This perc...

              Western people seem to have illusions about China. First of all, most of them cannot distinguish China from Japan. China is a country that lacks freedom of speech and law governance. Many people there are extremely poor. Japanese civilization is quite different from Chinese civilization, as is discussed in Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. Japan is a country that has highest levels of freedom of speech and law governance. Equality prevails in most aspects of Japanese society.               The western illusions about China have led some countries to have close relationships with it. Germany is one of them and supplied it with weapons and staff when Japan had the Tripartite Pact with Germany and fought with China. Today’s Germany seems still very friendly to it. USA also employed unwise polic...

Chinese people are almost everywhere in the world. Japanese universities are full of Chinese students. My impression is that about a half foreign students are Chinese. They are better at the Japanese language than other foreign students, but poorer at mathematics, economics, and English. Many of them are unable to read English books. I feel that Chinese female students lack elegance. When I talked about this to some professors, they agreed. Many Chinese visit Japan for sightseeing and their bad manners make most Japanese people dislike them. Chinese are disliked in most countries including Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, which have many Chinese immigrants. On the other hand, Chinese government is trying to establish footholds in many countries for economic and military expansion. China is the world’s only country that is obsessed with expansionism today. It annexed Tibet, Turkestan, and part of Mongolia. It claims that Taiwan belongs to it. It is now trying openly to take the...

Koreans take an extremely hostile attitude when facing a Japanese team in sporting events. A reason is that they have received anti-Japanese education. Then, do they really dislike Japan? The answer is not necessarily ‘Yes.’ So many Koreans visit Japan every year. Very few Korean residents in Japan return to Korea. There are many Japanese restaurants run by Koreans in America and Europe and the owners pretend to be Japanese. Many other Koreans are said to pretend overseas to be Japanese too.               Koreans criticize Japan for the case of ‘comfort women.’ They claim that the Japanese army took Korean women away and forced them to become its ‘sex slaves.’ This claim is based only on a fiction forged by a Japanese writer. This is most puzzling. There is no evidence for such cases. Why did not they examine the cases and offer enough evidence? Korea (has) had actually a widespread culture of prostitution. The cultu...

North Korea is today’s most dangerous country in the world and South Korea is the most risky country since it is weighing USA with China for a friend. The world divided the Korean Peninsula into two and has created two problematic countries. If it had not done so, it would have faced only one problematic country. Only Koreans in the world are unable to unite long after the end of the Cold War. Koreans are the world’s most difficult people to understand. One of the reasons is that they pretend to be under democracy with separation of powers. Another is that their culture is not sufficiently refined and quite childish. Still another is that they have subordinate mind because they have been surrounded by big countries through history. People in the world were dumbfounded by the backbiting diplomacy of the former South Korean President Park Geun-hye. Was the president a primary school pupil? Most South Korean presidents were prosecuted and some were sentenced to death. It is hard to ...