Tuesday, February 24, 2009

"He shall be called a Nazarene"







"He shall be called a Nazarene"

(More than Literacy Value for Japan)


The most respected Japanese novelist in the Japanese history is Soseki Natsume (1867 - 1916).

His literature is a kind of missing link in the Japanese literary development when observed outside Japan.

He did not write a novel comparable to those crated in Europe or America in those days when measured by the Western academic criteria. In other words, no students or scholars in the West would find anything original and creative in his works as pieces of art to be respected in the West.  

However, he is the one who found the gap in the concept of literature between the East and the West. Accordingly, he made a great effort to present a style and a philosophy Japanese literature needed to adapt itself to the modern era dominated by the Western Civilization.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natsume_S%C5%8Dseki

He once said in his speech to elite students in a certain public occasion in Japan.

"When you become members of the society to be leaders in business, politics, academic circles, or any other fields in this country, your money and power would buy you many false friends or only false friends. You have to avoid such a situation...otherwise you would harm others as well as yourself..."

Details might be a little different, but he said so in a defiant attitude to authority, though he had graduated from the Imperial University of Tokyo to be officially dispatched to England to learn the European literature at national expense, with expectation of his creating a chair in the Imperial University which however he never did (he went down to Ehime Prefecture in western Japan to be a high-school teacher in English, instead).

That is why I like Soseki Natsume as much as I like some of his works.




(Quand je vais à Hollywood, mon cher, si ce n'est à Shanghai en 1930?

http://www.fukuchan.ac/music/j-senzen/herijunzailai.html)


Mat 2:21 And he arose, and took the young child and his mother, and came into the land of Israel.

Mat 2:22 But when he heard that Archelaus did reign in Judaea in the room of his father Herod, he was afraid to go thither: notwithstanding, being warned of God in a dream, he turned aside into the parts of Galilee:

Mat 2:23 And he came and dwelt in a city called Nazareth: that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophets, He shall be called a Nazarene.