断片 English

I

When I was serving as a professor in the Faculty of Economics at Kyoto Imperial University, I was appointed dean of the faculty at the start of the new academic term in September of the ninth year of Taisho.

Most professors were eager for this position, but to me it was thoroughly unwelcome.

The reason was that I had already launched the personal journal 'Shakai Mondai Kenkyu' in January of the previous year,

and was publishing it, roughly one issue per month; perpetually pressed as I was by lecture preparations, I had my hands nearly full, and I had no wish to add to that the administrative drudgery of running the faculty.

The faculty's internal rules did, however, stipulate that professors serve as dean in order of seniority, one month each, and I could not very well be the only one to refuse.

As luck would have it, within less than a month I fell ill.

After taking to my bed with influenza, a low-grade fever persisted, and I was examined by Dr. Shimazono, who at the time was a professor of internal medicine in the Medical Faculty; he told me my illness was nothing serious, but that in any case I was thin and in poor health, and that I would do well to go somewhere for a change of air and rest a little, and he would write me a certificate.

I welcomed this windfall with open arms, promptly resigned the deanship, and set off for convalescence to Tanabe, a small town on the southern coast of Kishu.

Dr. Shimazono, himself a man of Kishu, wrote in advance to the principal of a girls' school there on my behalf.

On my arrival, I was met at the boat by the principal and, thanks to his care, was able to settle into a room at a small inn.

The inn stood near the beach, where a great pine grove stretched over sandy ground, and it was a cheap lodging house; the gloomy room assigned to me had a rough hanging scroll in the alcove.

In the pine grove directly to the south a fine hotel was visible, but the conscientious principal, having presumably considered the expense on my behalf — for I was expected to stay some time — had avoided the grander establishment and instead secured me a room at the inferior cheap inn.

The daily rate had been arranged at a fair discount.

I thought it perhaps a little too cheap, and indeed, whether one looked at the tea things, the tableware, or the bedding, even I, accustomed as I was to simple living at home, felt that things were rather too plain.

The coarseness of the utensils was one thing, but the coarseness of the food seemed to defeat the very purpose of coming here for convalescence, so before long I tried negotiating a higher room rate — yet even that had little effect, and on one occasion I was served putrid blue-backed fish and broke out in a rash all over my body.

Still, I am by nature a person who can find contentment in any circumstances, and on warm days I would stroll along the shore, or walk the half-ri or so into the town of Tanabe to buy sweets — I have a sweet tooth, and whenever I was in the country I always suffered from the lack of good confections.

Even walking all the way to the main street of Tanabe to buy them, one could not find anything refined, as was only to be expected in a country town.)

Or I would take my paints and go out to sketch. (I had brought along some paints my eldest son had been using and two or three boards.

One painting showed a farmhouse with citrus fruits ripening yellow in the garden and daikon radishes hung drying under the eaves; another was a still life of apples in a pot; the third was a self-portrait — these were what I painted then, and before and since, these three oil paintings are the only ones I have ever made in my life.)

Occasionally I would read, and so I passed a full month, from December into January, in that lonely town at that lonely inn.

I believe I had brought only two or three books, but among them was one about the Russian Revolution: Sack's 'The Birth of Russian Democracy,'

which I read with great interest.

I found it engrossing reading.

(As I will describe later, this was the seed from which the whole story I am now telling grew.

Had I not been ill and confined to such a place, I would never have had the leisure to lose myself in such a book.)

On returning to Kyoto, in February I wrote an essay based on that material, titled 'Fragments,'

and sent it to the journal 'Kaizo.'

It was submitted for publication.

It consisted entirely of a dialogue between S and B, who, while sorting through the posthumous notes of a certain deceased person K, converse and exchange their thoughts. (The designations S, B, and K were chosen entirely at random, but in some quarters rumors circulated that S must be Sakai Toshihiko, B must be Baba Kocho, and K must be Kotoku Shusui.

) Even setting aside the fact that it could not be placed in the fiction section, it was at most what one might call middlebrow reading matter and was not of a character that ought to have been treated as a polemic.

Nevertheless, 'Kaizo'

carried it as the lead piece in its April issue.

The issue went on sale in mid-March, but the moment it did, it was immediately seized on the grounds of disturbing the peace and public order.

It was the first time anything I had written met with such a fate.

II

I, who rarely traveled, happened at the time to be away on business in Yamaguchi.

I had gone there to negotiate directly with the principal of Yamaguchi Higher Commercial School about bringing its professor, Sakuta Soichi (who later became a professor at Kyoto Imperial University and, after retirement, vice-president of Manchukuo National University), to Kyoto Imperial University.

Sakuta was a Tokyo Imperial University graduate; at the time he had not yet produced any substantial writings, had published very few papers, and was not widely known.

I, however, had known him for a long time and had confidence in his abilities, and so I had proposed to the faculty council that he be invited to Kyoto as an associate professor, argued for it earnestly, and finally secured the council's approval.

Sakuta was, however, an important man at Yamaguchi, and the principal, a man named Yokochi, was reluctant to let him go easily.

And so I, who disliked travel, had bestirred myself to make the trip all the way to Yamaguchi.

On the night of the day when I had nearly finished my business and was intending to leave the following evening, I had already gone to sleep when I was woken in the middle of the night by a telegram.

It was from the Kaizo publishing house,

informing me that the April issue of 'Kaizo' had been banned from sale.

Before long another telegram arrived.

This one had been sent by my colleague Kawada Jiro from Kyoto.

One might think it wildly excessive to send a telegram in the middle of the night merely because a magazine had been banned from sale, but the state of affairs at the time made this not entirely unwarranted.

As I have already mentioned, I had been publishing 'Shakai Mondai Kenkyu'

since January of two years earlier; the very reason I had founded such a journal was that I had made up my mind to use my position as a university professor, to whatever extent possible, as a platform for propagating socialism. Naturally, not long after its founding, it had become a source of controversy among those in the seats of power.

A man named Taki Masao, with whom I had formerly been on friendly terms in Kyoto — (he later served as president of the Cabinet Legislation Bureau under the Konoe cabinet, then as president of the Cabinet Planning Board, and after retirement was imperially appointed to the House of Peers —

when he first stood as a candidate for the House of Representatives after resigning his lectureship in the Faculty of Economics at Kyoto Imperial University, I, who disliked public speaking, had traveled to his electoral district in Aichi Prefecture and spent several days stumping for him — that was the degree of intimacy between us up to that point —

at the time he had already become private secretary to Home Minister Tokonami.) —

this man wrote to me saying that my 'Shakai Mondai Kenkyu'

was now being talked about at length, and urging me to stop publishing it as soon as possible, before any troublesome situation arose.

When I read his letter, I thought: he may be someone I know well, but when all is said and done he is now a party politician carrying the bag for the Home Minister; the worst he could mean by 'trouble' would be losing my post; I have no reason to meekly retreat in the face of such a veiled threat — and with this thought I coolly ignored what was, outwardly at least, a friendly word of advice.

Around the same time, Fukuda Tokuzo, seeing that I had devoted the fourth issue of 'Shakai Mondai Kenkyu'

to a complete translation of the Engels edition of Marx's 'Wage Labour and Capital,'

ranted loudly to the effect that Kawakami was using the name of scholarship as a cover for propagating his ideology, and why on earth was the Ministry of Home Affairs not banning it from sale.

Yet the eighth year of Taisho passed without incident, and the ninth year passed as well, and now it was March of the tenth year of Taisho.

By this time, I had been branded by the authorities as 'the ringleader of dangerous thinkers among university professors,'

and was in a state in which I might be made an issue of at any moment.

There was a well-founded rumor — which I myself had already taken to heart — that if any of my writings were banned from sale, that would immediately be the occasion for my dismissal.

(This was not peculiar to my case; in general, if a university professor's writing were found to disturb the peace and public order and banned from sale, this could become grounds for putting his position in question.

Therefore, when there was such a fear, it was customary for the author himself, anticipating the ban, to withdraw his book from the market and take it out of print.

Among the economics professors of Kyoto Imperial University, Kawada Jiro had done this long before, and more recently Ishikawa Koji had taken such a step.)

Bearing these circumstances in mind, one can understand that the arrival of two telegrams at my bedside while I was away on a journey was not without significance.

A university professor's work being deemed to disturb the peace and public order of society and being banned from sale was, in all likelihood, unprecedented.

Accordingly, the officials of the censorship division of the Police Affairs Bureau adopted a deferential attitude, claiming that there were two or three problematic passages also in articles and fiction other than 'Fragments,'

apparently trying to make the situation as vague as possible.

Comments attributed to the authorities were even published in the newspapers, saying something like: since university professors have the freedom to publish their research, there was no reason for something to be put in such a manner.

It seems like a dream now, but more than twenty years ago a university professor carried that much authority — even under the militaristic and police-state imperialism of the time, a professor could occupy a corner of the university and boldly enjoy freedom of expression.

(At the time I enjoyed far broader freedom of speech than civilian socialists.

Things that would have immediately been banned if written by the likes of Sakai Toshihiko or Yamakawa Hitoshi, I wrote without even using blanks, without any concern.

Until the Japan Communist Party openly revealed itself before the people at the end of the second year of Showa, the Japanese capitalist class had not yet lost confidence in itself, and was still comparatively tolerant with respect to the freedom of academic research at the universities.

Moreover, the freedom of research that Kyoto Imperial University had won by the threat of mass resignation in the early Taisho period had become a firm tradition of the university, and I benefited from it in no small measure.)

Awoken in the middle of the night by telegrams in my room on the second floor of an inn in Yamaguchi, I thought, so it has come at last — but when I turned off the lamp I fell straight back into a sound sleep.

When I woke in the morning, I was surprised at myself, finding I was unexpectedly composed.

I left Yamaguchi that evening.

Thinking this was probably the end of my life as a university professor and that such an opportunity would never come again, I splurged on a first-class sleeping car.

I had scrambled aboard just as the train was about to depart and must have looked flustered and inexperienced, or perhaps my appearance was too undistinguished, for no sooner had I entered the sleeping car than a porter came to me and said this was first class.

I merely grunted in reply and showed no sign of moving, so the porter finally demanded to see my sleeping berth ticket.

Much to his evident surprise, I produced a proper first-class ticket and sleeping berth ticket from my pocket, and he silently, if reluctantly, prepared my berth.

I was so irritated that I did not give him so much as a sen in tip.

On arriving at Kyoto Station, I found Yamamoto, the president of Kaizo-sha, who had rushed down from Tokyo, waiting for me on the platform.

An automobile was waiting outside the station.

We got in together and he drove me to my lodgings at Yoshida Nihonmatsu.

After that I must certainly have heard news from the Tokyo direction, but whatever it was, I have now entirely forgotten.

The manuscript fee of several hundred yen that Kaizo-sha subsequently sent me, I returned at once.

April is one of the peak seasons for popular magazines, and every publisher prints more copies than usual.

The 'Kaizo' in question, moreover,

had been put together as a special third-anniversary issue with many pages and a very large print run.

And all of it had come to nothing, so the loss I had caused Kaizo-sha was not inconsiderable.

I could not compensate them for it, but it did not sit well with me to fatten my own pocket while causing such a large loss to the other party, so I thought I would at least sacrifice the manuscript fee.

Kaizo-sha, however, sent a reporter all the way from Tokyo to say that unless I accepted this bank draft, they would be in a difficult position.

No matter how I explained my feelings on the matter, the reporter insisted that going back with it still in hand would make him look like a child sent on a fool's errand, and the other party simply would not give way.

The two of us were talking across a large ceramic brazier, and I finally lost my temper and said that if it came to that, there was nothing for it but to burn the bank draft, and made as if to toss it into the fire; the other man grabbed my hand and said: burning it won't do anyone any good.

If you feel so strongly about it, I will take it back with me — and so it was settled.

The only incident that arose after the ban on sale was about that much, and in the end I was neither dismissed nor put on leave nor even given so much as a warning.

The moment when I truly had to submit my resignation did not come until April of the third year of Showa — after which I managed to survive a further seven years as a university professor without incident.

(As for the first-class sleeping car, that was the first and last time.)

III

Had the repercussions of 'Fragments'

ended as described above, I would not have bothered to write this reminiscence.

But at the time I could not have dreamed of it: this one piece unexpectedly exerted a decisive influence on the mind of a young man, and approximately two and a half years after it was published, there occurred the grave incident known as the Toranomon Affair.

Namba Daisuke, who had long harbored revolutionary ideas and was nursing the audacious plan of inflicting harm on the sovereign in order thereby to plant in the hearts of the people a doubt concerning the imperial system, read 'Fragments'

and arrived at his final resolve, and from that point threw himself earnestly into the preparatory acts.

His native place was Iwata Village, Kumage District, Yamaguchi Prefecture.

The family was in fact an old and established one in the region, large landowners, and at that time his father had been elected to the House of Representatives.

It was a family with longstanding close ties to the late Prince Ito Hirobumi (Prince Ito was also from Kumage), and among the household furnishings there was a pistol-concealing walking stick that the Prince was said to have acquired in London.

It was, sure enough, ingeniously made — to all outward appearances it was indistinguishable from an ordinary walking stick, but when bent, it was found to contain an exceedingly well-crafted pistol.

Daisuke asked his father's permission to use it, claiming he wanted to take up hunting.

His father, who had noticed that Daisuke had for some time been shutting himself in his room, apparently lost in thought, and had been worried this would harm his health, was pleased to see him seemingly resolved on a change of direction, and happily granted the request.

So Daisuke openly obtained a license to purchase gunpowder, went into the mountains with the pistol-stick, and practiced shooting for a long time.

Having finally gained confidence in his aim, he then went to Tokyo for a while to research conditions and geography there.

Then on the first of September of the twelfth year of Taisho — (that was some two years and more after 'Fragments' had appeared) —

a great earthquake struck the Kanto region, Tokyo was instantly reduced to a burnt-out wasteland, enormous numbers of people perished in the disaster, and the damage reached the staggering sum of 5.5 billion yen.

At this time the anarchist Osugi Sakae was brutally murdered by a military police captain named Amazaki; also brutally murdered at Kameido were several men including Hirasawa Keishichi and Kawai Yoshitora, leaders of the Nankatu Labor Union; and countless unknown Koreans were murdered for no reason whatsoever — events that must surely have given Namba Daisuke no small stimulus.

In order to carry out his long-cherished resolve, he left Tokyo after the earthquake and headed home to his native place.

To retrieve the walking stick.

It was shortly after the earthquake; transportation and communication had not yet returned to normal, and from time to time people claiming to be disaster victims would call asking for money, while a vaguely unsettled atmosphere still hung in the air — at such a time, a young man called at my lodgings at Yoshida Nihonmatsu.

My wife went to answer the door, and he told her he was a certain Namba from Iwata Village, Kumage District, Yamaguchi Prefecture, and that on his way home from Tokyo he had run out of travel money and asked if someone might lend him some.

My wife thought at the time that Iwata Village was the name of the village to which her younger brother had been adopted, but did not notice that the Namba family had any connection to those relatives.

The young man said 'please show this to the professor' and handed over a slip of paper.

I was at the time in the upstairs parlor talking with a friend, Kojima Sukema, and when I looked at the slip of paper my wife brought up, there was no name or address on it — only the words 'I am a communist,' followed by a penciled scrawl saying much the same thing he had said aloud.

I consulted Kojima as to what to do, and he said it would have been all right if it did not say 'communist,' but the man could be some kind of spy, and on the whole it would be safer to refuse.

I thought this reasonable and acted accordingly.

The young man made no demands and took his leave quietly.

What became clear much later was that this young man was none other than Namba Daisuke.

Having been turned away at my door, he next called on Professor Ichikawa of the Medical Faculty, with whom he had a family connection, and obtained the travel money he needed there.

As a result, after the incident, Professor Ichikawa was summoned to court and subjected to a preliminary inquiry.

Had it been me instead, it would have created a double connection to 'Fragments'

and might well have become quite awkward.

But the reason Namba came to my house first, passing over a close relative, was presumably because he felt a thread of fellow-feeling toward the author of 'Fragments,'

toward the author of that essay.

That I let him down — when I think of it now, it seems like a thing I ought to feel sorry for.

Namba, having returned briefly to his native place, set out again for Tokyo with the walking stick, and on the twenty-seventh of December of that year, the day of the imperial procession to the opening ceremony of the Diet, he lay in wait for the cortege and fired.

The vigilance along the road was, as was customary, extremely stringent, but since the outward form of the pistol he carried was perfectly that of an ordinary walking stick, no one suspected anything.

The bullet struck the glass window of the imperial carriage.

However, the glass was of a special manufacture and the bullet did not pass through in a straight line, so there was no harm whatsoever to the imperial person.

This was the incident known as the Toranomon Affair, and taking responsibility for it, the Yamamoto Gonnohyoe cabinet — which had been formed just some three months earlier, on the second of September, in the very midst of the devastation of the great earthquake — resigned en masse that same day, and the then Metropolitan Police Superintendent Yuasa Kurahei (later Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal and Minister of the Imperial Household) was removed from his post by disciplinary action.

At the time I had not the slightest dream that this affair had any connection to me whatsoever.

The Namba family, however, had a connection by marriage to the Kokko family into which my younger brother-in-law Otsuka Yusho had been adopted, and so, although the contents of the preliminary examination were kept entirely secret, word got out that among Namba's statements there was a confession to the effect that reading 'Fragments'

had led him to his final resolve.

My brother-in-law Otsuka Takematsu, who first learned of this, was at the time serving as a compiler of Restoration historical materials at the Ministry of Education; alarmed by the gravity of the matter, he had my youngest brother, Sakyo, who was in Tokyo, come all the way to Kyoto to inform me in person.

He was so cautious that he did not commit even the information to a letter.

This young man, Namba Daisuke — unlike the Communist Party members of later years, who, once arrested, one after another and from the most famous leaders down to the most obscure rank-and-file, made pledges of renunciation — he never wavered in his conviction to the last, maintaining from first to last an unwavering, resolute bearing; he was a remarkably steadfast man, the likes of whom the world rarely sees.

The then Chief Justice of the Supreme Court who served as presiding judge at his trial (whose name I now cannot recall) wrote in a later memoir of his judicial career spanning decades, that of the countless defendants he had handled, he had never seen a man as steadfast as Namba.

That he wrote this about someone who should have been regarded as a traitor tells us how truly admirable Namba's bearing must have been.

(That memoir ran, I believe, under a title something like 'Recollections from the Window on Law,'

serialized in the 'Osaka Mainichi,'

if memory serves.

A curious researcher who went to a library to look it up would certainly be able to find it, but I at present have no energy for such trouble.)

Namba never said he regretted his actions.

But if even one such person could be said to have been born in imperial Japan, it would be a most inauspicious and deeply undesirable affront to the dignity of the imperial house, and so the authorities exhausted every means before the trial to persuade the defendant to repent.

Every possible desperate stratagem was employed.

For a time Namba stolidly refused, but when they sent in the sister he loved most dearly and had her weep repeatedly in his presence, he finally could hold out no longer, and agreed that he would at least comply outwardly with what the authorities required.

And so it was all arranged: on the day of the trial, the defendant would first make a statement to the effect that his actions had been entirely wrong and that he was now truly repentant; on that basis, the presiding judge would recognize clear signs of remorse, take the circumstances into account, reduce his sentence by one degree from death, and hand down a verdict of life imprisonment.

If that came to pass, it would mean that there was after all not a single person in all Japan who would sincerely take up arms against the imperial house, and furthermore, by reducing the sentence by one degree, the boundless benevolence of the imperial house could be displayed in the trial conducted in the Emperor's name — or so the reasoning went.

And so judge, prosecutor, defense lawyer, and family alike had all settled their minds with that understanding.

But on the day of the trial, when Namba stood in the courtroom, contrary to the expectation of every person present, he unexpectedly and calmly declared his unchanged conviction, and at the end raised his voice and three times cried, 'Long live the Comintern!'

Judge, prosecutor, and defense lawyer — everyone in the room lost their composure, and realizing for the first time that they had been deceived, stood aghast in astonishment, but by then there was nothing to be done.

And so Namba vanished from this world as he had wished, young, on the execution ground.

(Let me add, in passing, that the Comintern had long since rejected terrorism against individuals.

But in Japan in the Taisho tens, communist thought was still in its extreme infancy, and the Comintern's policies were not yet widely known.

I believe that had Namba appeared at a later period, he would certainly have taken a different course of action.)

IV

Those who know the full details of the above facts must be very few indeed.

It was purely by chance — solely because Namba happened to have a connection by marriage with my brother-in-law's family — that I was able to learn all these particulars.

And then, by yet another coincidence, I was also able, on one occasion, to learn in full detail what happened at the time Namba Daisuke's body was buried.

In the winter of the tenth year of Showa, I was serving my sentence at Kosuge Prison when I was seized by a severe gastric pain and was for a time housed in the infirmary.

There was only one solitary cell in the infirmary, and at the time it was occupied by a critically ill patient near death; so I, a convict under the Peace Preservation Law who should properly have been isolated in a solitary cell, was for the time being placed in a dormitory room where a dozen or more beds were lined up.

And so — thanks to the fact that idle conversation was, surprisingly, less strictly controlled in the infirmary — from a fellow convict lying in the bed next to mine, I was able to hear in detail what had happened on the day the grave was dug for Namba.

Namba had in all likelihood been executed at Ichigaya Prison.

Kosuge had no execution facility.

But on the far bank of the Arakawa Floodway there was a small temple with a cemetery attached to the prison.

Namba's body was buried there.

At the time there were rumors that a band of socialists was planning to block the route and seize his body along the way, so the authorities were on edge and took various special precautions.

The man who spoke to me had been taken one day during daytime, together with other inmates, to that shared cemetery — (inmates who work outside the prison walls like this are called 'outside-detail' in prison parlance) — and put to work digging a hole; he had been quite mystified as to why the hole had to be so deep.

Several large timbers of five-sun-square lumber had also been prepared.

The burial took place after nightfall, and this man helped with the work then as well.

On top of the Arakawa embankment, police officers and military policemen with paper lanterns were gathered here and there.

The coffin was buried deep in the ground, and over it the timber that had been prepared was laid crosswise in a solid frame and firmly fixed in place; finally earth was heaped over it and the work was done, and only then did the supervising guard explain the circumstances to them.

At the spring equinox, the autumn equinox, and the annual memorial service for those who died in prison, held on the twentieth of October, the outside-detail inmates always go to clean the shared cemetery; even now, he said, there is a grave-marker for Namba Daisuke.

Since I listened so eagerly, the other man grew animated and told me even more vividly and in greater detail, but now my memory has faded, and I can only reproduce it to the degree set out above.

Hearing this story, I had thought that when the day came for me to leave prison I would most certainly visit that cemetery once — but when the day actually came, things did not go as I had hoped.

Finally, let me write about the judgment pronounced in Namba's case.

The trial was held entirely in secret, with spectators excluded, and so the text of the judgment read to the defendant was likewise kept completely secret.

Of course, senior officials of the judiciary and elsewhere would have known all the details, but since the matter concerned the imperial house, and in particular since the defendant's bearing had been something that stained the dignity of the imperial house, not one among those circumspect high officials ever breathed a word about it unnecessarily.

I, in my good fortune, was spared as a result.

Had that judgment text been published in any newspaper, I would long since have been killed any number of times over by someone of the type of Captain Amazaki.

The reason is this: the judgment text was a very short one, but in one passage it explicitly states something to the effect that 'having read "Fragments" by Kawakami Hajime'

and arriving at his final resolve — those words are clearly set down there.

A former colleague with whom I had been on close terms when I was teaching at Kyoto Imperial University, Professor [Takigawa], had on one occasion copied it out from the secret documents preserved in the Ministry of Justice and shown it to me.

Since it was short, I should have transcribed the whole text; now I regret that I did not.

Regrettable, too, is the disappearance of the original manuscript of 'Fragments'

— the original manuscript that has since gone missing.

I had asked Kaizo-sha to return to me the draft, which had already been sent to the printer and had the type sizes and such marked in red ink.

I had prized it as something especially important — indeed, prized it so excessively that, fearing it might be confiscated in the event of a house search, I had stored it separately from my other papers, and now, no matter which drawer of my filing cabinet I search, I cannot find it.

V

Having written out all of the above reminiscences, what strikes me deeply is that I am truly a fortunate man.

When I take out that old issue of 'Kaizo' whose paper edges have now gone yellow

and look at it, I find that near the opening of 'Fragments'

there is a passage about the young terrorist Grigory Gershuni, who in 1904 planned and directed the assassinations of Interior Minister Sipyagin, Governor of Ufa Bogdanov※ch, and Governor of Kharkov Prince Obolensky, and who was sentenced to death — (this Gershuni, though once sentenced to death, subsequently succeeded in escaping from prison, passed through Japan and the United States, and died of illness after reaching France;

when he traveled from Nagasaki to Tokyo, Japan's socialists held a solemn welcoming party in his honor, and before he left Yokohama a special farewell party was also held) —

to which I had added the observation: 'Note that it is possible for the assassin to possess a keener conscience than the one who is assassinated,'

and such was the reflection I had written in there.

And in the courtroom statement of a woman named Konoplyannikova, who in 1906 vanished from the world on the guillotine at the age of twenty-eight, there are words such as these: 'You will sentence me to death. But wherever I may die — whether on the gallows, in exile, or in any other place — I will die with but one thought: "Forgive me, my people! The only thing I can give you is my life, nothing more than this." And thus, as the poet once sang, I will die with the firm belief that the day will come when "□□ will stumble and fall, and the sun of freedom will rise over all the plains of Russia."'

And also: 'Life itself taught me the following: just as you cannot stab a thought to death with a bayonet, so too you cannot, with thought alone, stand against the force of the bayonet.'

And words of this kind as well.

I believe that nowadays, no matter who had said them or where, putting such words into print would be absolutely forbidden to anyone.

That was more than twenty years ago, it is true, yet I had dared to do so, and in the end received not the slightest censure.

Were one to tell people of today, they would in all likelihood find it astonishing.

Just quite recently, Ishikawa Koji, a professor in the Faculty of Economics at Kyoto Imperial University, was suspended from his post on account of a book he had written — a book, moreover, that the author himself had withdrawn from the market and taken out of print two or three years before — Ishikawa is essentially a man who energetically brandishes the doctrine of national polity and dedicates himself to propagating emperor-centered thought, yet merely because he happened to have criticized the capitalist system a little too carelessly in that book, he was instantly struck by this misfortune.

The very book that became an issue had once circulated in the world for a while without even being banned from sale, and the author, struck by this disaster overnight, must surely have found it beyond all expectation.

Compared with his case, I had written so much as 'Fragments'

alone and should by rights have been dismissed at that very time; and yet for seven further years after that I remained at the university, writing freely to my heart's content; and even after leaving the university I did as I pleased, and still remain alive today without incident — in this age of worldwide upheaval, living in poverty yet in tranquil contentment, writing reminiscences like these as the mood strikes me, and being able to enjoy what remains of my life; when I think of it, this must truly be called more happiness than I deserve.

Thinking such thoughts, I here lay down my pen on this, the eleventh of these reminiscences.