The Japanese chose the principle of eternal peace as the basis of morality for our rebirth after the War.

In the recent years there have been criticisms levelled against Japan suggesting that she should offer more military forces to the United Nations forces and thereby play a more active role in the keeping and...

What was more, Japan was driven into isolation from other Asian countries, not only politically but also socially and culturally.

My observation is that after one hundred and twenty years of modernisation since the opening of the country, present-day Japan is split between two opposite poles of ambiguity.

After the end of the Second World War it was a categorical imperative for us to declare that we renounced war forever in a central article of the new Constitution.

Of course I would not presume to rank myself with the poetic genius Yeats. I am merely a humble follower living in a country far removed from his.

By reading Huckleberry Finn I felt I was able to justify my act of going into the mountain forest at night and sleeping among the trees with a sense of security which I could never...

On the other hand, the culture of modern Japan, which implied being thoroughly open to the West or at least that impeded understanding by the West.

During the last few years I have been engaged in writing a trilogy which I wish to be the culmination of my literary activities.

Paradoxically, the people and state of Japan living on such moral props were not innocent but had been stained by their own past history of invading other Asian countries.

Even though we now have the half-century-old new Constitution, there is a popular sentiment of support for the old one that lives on in reality in some quarters.

The way Japan had tried to build up a modern state modelled on the West was cataclysmic.

From another point of view, a new situation now seems to be arising in which Japan’s prosperity is going to be incorporated into the expanding potential power of both production and consumption in Asia at...

The moral props for Japanese aspiring to such a rebirth were the idea of democracy and their determination never to wage a war again.

However, please allow me to say that the fundamental style of my writing has been to start from my personal matters and then to link it up with society, the state and the world.

With love and patience, nothing is impossible.

I am one of the writers who wish to create serious works of literature which dissociate themselves from those novels which are mere reflections of the vast consumer cultures of Tokyo and the subcultures of...

The ambiguous orientation of Japan drove the country into the position of an invader in Asia.

I have survived by representing these sufferings of mine in the form of the novel.

After I got married, the first child born to us was mentally handicapped.

In Japan itself there have all along been attempts by some to obliterate the article about renunciation of war from the Constitution and for this purpose they have taken every opportunity to make use of...