Seventy-three years after the 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which took more than 200,000 lives by the end of that year, we are no closer to a world without nuclear weapons. Pledges to achieve that goal, which Japan has advocated for decades, were repeated in ceremonies held over the past week to mark the anniversaries of the U.S. atomic bombings of the two cities in the closing days of World War II. But more than seven decades later, we can hardly say that a path has been laid out to eliminate nuclear arms.
Last year, a landmark treaty prohibiting nuclear weapons was adopted at the United Nations. But without the participation of nuclear weapons powers as well as countries that rely on the “nuclear umbrella” of their allies, including Japan, there is little prospect that the treaty would effectively pave the way for disarmament. Today, more than 14,000 nuclear warheads exist in the world.
Former U.S. President Barack Obama, whose call for a “world free of nuclear weapons” in his Prague speech earned him the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, became two years ago the first sitting U.S. president to visit Hiroshima. The U.S. strategy for nuclear weapons, however, did not undergo substantial changes during the Obama presidency. And his successor, Donald Trump, released a Nuclear Posture Review in February that promoted the use of smaller nuclear weapons that would be easier to use, and did not rule out pre-emptive nuclear attacks in order to protect the interests of the U.S. and its allies. Tokyo said it “highly appreciates” the new U.S. strategy in that it clarifies Washington’s commitment to providing extended deterrence to its allies.
In a historic summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore in June, Trump signed a joint statement calling for the “complete denuclearization” of the Korean Peninsula. But as subsequent progress in U.S.-North Korea relations remains slow, any optimism that the summit would result in the near-term end to Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program — a serious threat to regional security — has quickly dissipated.
While campaigning for the abolition of nuclear weapons as the sole country in history to suffer a nuclear attack during warfare, Japan has continued to rely on the U.S. nuclear umbrella for its own security — and opposed the U.N. treaty banning nuclear weapons on the grounds that such an accord without the involvement of nuclear weapons states would have little effect on nuclear disarmament. Survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki called this week on the government to endorse the nuclear ban treaty. But Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, attending the ceremonies in both cities, reiterated that Japan will seek to contribute to the goal by serving as a bridge between nuclear weapons powers and non-nuclear weapons states — although concrete results from such efforts do not appear to be on the horizon.
This stalemate in the effort to eliminate nuclear arms must not lead us to give up, in view of the threat from such weapons that continues to grip the world to this day.
The 73rd anniversary of Japan’s defeat in World War II marks the last one under Emperor Akihito, whose abdication next April will officially end his reign and the Heisei Era. The fact that Emperor Akihito, who in 1989 became the first emperor to ascend the throne as “the symbol of the State and of the unity of the people” under the postwar Constitution, is stepping down soon due to his advanced age testifies to the lengthy time that has passed since the end of the war.
The Showa Era of his late father, Emperor Hirohito, posthumously known as Emperor Showa, witnessed the turbulence that Japan experienced during its 64-year period — from its rush into war and its devastating defeat in 1945 to the postwar reconstruction and development under the war-renouncing Constitution.
As the subsequent Heisei Era is set to wrap up next year, memories of the last war that Japan fought and lost — which left 3.1 million Japanese dead — may be fading fast for a large majority of the nation’s citizens. The number of bereaved families of the war dead taking part in the government-organized annual Aug. 15 ceremony to mourn for those who died in the war is declining each year. Today, the number of people born after the war has topped 100 million, accounting for more than 80 percent of the population.
Meanwhile, one of the duties that Emperor Akihito has apparently imposed on himself as the “symbol of the state” is his series of visits over the years to places, both in Japan and abroad, that were the sites of fierce battles and devastation during the war — including Iwojima in 1994, Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Okinawa in 1995, Saipan in 2005, Peleliu Island in Palau in 2015 and to the Philippines in 2016.
According to people close to him, his visits to these sites were intended to pray for the souls of all the people who died in the war — not just the Japanese — and to keep the memories of the war from fading away.
Most Japanese now lack firsthand experience of the war, and with the passage of times it will become increasingly difficult for us to keep the memories of the war alive and to pass them on to future generations. The 15th of August should be a day for each and every one of us to think what we can do to remember the war that ended 73 years ago and what it tells us as we go forward.
“Reflecting on our past and bearing in mind the feelings of deep remorse over the last war, I earnestly hope that the ravages of war will never be repeated. Together with all of our people, I now pay my heartfelt tribute to all those who lost their lives in the war, both on the battlefields and elsewhere, and pray for world peace and for the continuing development of our country,” the Emperor said in his address to the Aug. 15, 2015, Memorial Ceremony for the War Dead on the 70th anniversary of the end of WWII — a message that he essentially repeated in the two past years.
Praying for the people who lost their lives in the war has indeed been a key purpose of the trips that Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko made over the span of his reign to the sites of fierce battles involving Japanese forces in the Pacific War.
Since their days as crown prince and princess, the Imperial couple has visited Okinawa — which experienced fierce ground battles that killed large numbers of civilians in the closing days of the war and came under extended U.S. military rules in the postwar decades — a total of 11 times, the latest in March this year that took place reportedly based on their strong wishes.
Since their days as crown prince and princess, the Imperial couple has visited Okinawa — which experienced fierce ground battles that killed large numbers of civilians in the closing days of the war and came under extended U.S. military rules in the postwar decades — a total of 11 times, the latest in March this year that took place reportedly based on their strong wishes.
Yutaka Kawashima, a former grand chamberlain who served the Emperor as a top aide, says the trips that Emperor Akihito made to these places — to mourn for the dead and reflect on the sorrow of the families who lost them — carry the message that the war must not be forgotten.
In his August 2015 statement marking the 70th year after the end of the war, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said, “We Japanese, across generations, must squarely face the history of the past. We have the responsibility to inherit the past, in all humbleness, and pass it on to the future.”
It is indeed an obligation for each of us to not forget our last war and to think what needs to be done so that the folly of war will not be repeated in the future.
On the 73rd anniversary of Japan’s surrender in World War II on Wednesday, people across the nation remembered the country’s past and expressed hopes that memories of the war will not be forgotten.
At the Chidorigafuchi National Cemetery in Tokyo, visitors spoke of their aspirations for a peaceful future, some criticizing Prime Minister Shinzo Abe for his calls to revise the pacific Constitution in order to acknowledge clearly the presence of Japan’s Self-Defense Forces and enable them to conduct fully-fledged military operations.
“The anniversary of the end of the war is a good opportunity to stop and think about what happened in the past,” said Kazunori Adachi, a high school history teacher from Hyogo Prefecture who had traveled to Tokyo for the summer holidays.
学校の歴史の先生である足立先生は終戦記念日は過去に何が起こったのかを知り考える絶好の機会だと言う。
“There are many students who have no interest in the war, and a lot of them don’t even know which countries Japan fought against. Somebody has got to hand history down (to younger generations) and I want to do that as a teacher,” the 56-year-old said.
Adachi emphasized the need for a secular war memorial without political overtones like the Chidorigafuchi facility, saying he believes Japanese politicians who visit nearby Yasukuni Shrine — where convicted war criminals are honored along with the war dead — are effectively going against national interests.
a secular war memorial 無宗教の戦没者追悼施設
overtone 付帯的な意味、ニュアンス
Michiko Tanaka, a 71-year-old from Hokkaido, says she comes here almost every summer to pray for the soul of her uncle, who starved to death on Woleai Atoll in the Pacific islands, now part of Micronesia, in 1944 while fighting for Japan.
“His family received only the tip of what was claimed to be his little finger as his remains, so I believe the rest of his body is here,” she said.
Tanaka also expressed her opposition to making constitutional revisions, saying, “I get the feeling that Japan is now moving toward war and that would mean my uncle died in vain.”
Meanwhile, perennial visitors at Yasukuni Shrine thanked those who died in the war for giving their lives to bring peace and prosperity to Japan, while some expressed disappointment that Abe did not come to personally pay homage.
perennial絶え間ない
pay homage参拝する
“Of course I want him to come here,” Masanari Nakamoto, 70, said of Abe.
The prime minister refrained from visiting the Shinto shrine for the sixth year in a row, but sent a ritual donation and dispatched ruling party lawmaker Masahiko Shibayama on his behalf.
“But I guess there are diplomatic issues that stand out more. It’s disappointing that Japan does not have enough power” to go through with a prime minister’s visit despite criticisms from neighboring countries, Nakamoto added.
Countries such as China and South Korea, which suffered under Japan’s wartime aggression, see the shrine as a symbol of the country’s past militarism, and protest when its leaders go to Yasukuni.
「the shrine as a symbol of the country’s past militarism」ということですが、これが政治問題化したのは、日本側が火付け役だったことは間違いない。
外交問題化すること自体がおかしい。内政干渉だと撥ね付ければよいだけのこと。日本の政治家の決断力を求められる。安倍ちゃんにはそのガッツがないですな。
An 82-year-old Tokyo woman who identified herself only by her surname, Murosawa, said she believes Abe as well as Emperor Akihito actually want to visit but can’t due to the circumstances. “I pray for the day when they will be able to visit the shrine and pay respect to the war dead who sacrificed themselves for Japan,” she said.
東京大学理学部数学科卒、都立大学理学研究科（数学専攻）修了。
大学生時代から、平岡塾で数学を教え、1981年に、中高生対象の塾ＳＥＧ（科学的教育グループ）を創立。また、同時に、駿台予備学校、河合塾でも教鞭をとり、1985年より、月刊「大学への数学」に連載を執筆。定積分の「回転体の求積の傘型分割」、「行列のｎ乗の、多項式の割り算を利用した解法」などを発表し、一世を風靡する。
また、数学だけでなく、英語教育を改革すべく、ＳＥＧで新しい英語文法指導法を模索するが、文法指導法の改良の限界を悟り、Graded Direct Method等、英語で英語を教える直接教授法の研究・実践を行うなかで、「どうして英語が使えない」の著者酒井邦秀（当時、電気通信大学）と知り合い、英語多読を実践。その効果を確信し、SSS英語学習法研究会を設立し、英語多読の実践・普及活動を始める。自らが代表をつとめる中高生対象塾ＳＥＧでも、多読教室を始め、中１〜大学生・社会人まで、自ら多読指導にあたる。現在は、多読・多聴を軸に、文法・語彙・会話・Writingを組み合わせた、より効果的な英語指導を研究。ＳＳＳ英語多読研究会理事長、日本多読学会事務局長、「多読多聴マガジン」アドバイザー、Extensive Reading Foundation 理事をつとめ、多読指導の実践・研究・普及活動を行っている。
COLIN WILSON AND THE OCCULT A FOREWORD BY COLIN STANLEY
When his now classic study The Occult was published in 1971, some critics, fans and scholars of Colin Wilson’s previous non-fiction – particularly the ‘Outsider Cycle’ in which he had created his ‘new existentialism’ and established himself as a philosopher of some note – were surprised, others downright horrified. It had seemed that after the terrible mauling he had received from the critics and the tabloid press, in the late 1950s, his reputation was recovering somewhat and his career taking an upturn. Many thought this leap into the rather contentious unknown was a retrograde step: both mystifying and likely to be a disaster. Wilson, they felt, was merely jumping onto the occult bandwagon in order to make money.
When the book was suggested, he made no secret of the fact that the occult was not a subject that interested him greatly and when he sought the advice of none other than the poet Robert Graves, asking him whether he should write it, he was told very firmly that he should not. But with a young family to support, he had spent far too much of the 1960s on the arduous American university lecture trail, keeping him away from home for lengthy periods of time. This was to be his first commissioned work, a sign that he had finally ‘arrived’ as a professional writer. The financial terms from his would-be publishers, Random House in the US and Hodder & Stoughton in the UK (a $4000 advance), were obviously too tempting and so he went ahead.
During the course of his research, he found his attitude to the subject changing:
Although I have always been curious about the ‘occult’ ... it has never been one of my major interests, like philosophy, or science, or even music. ... It was not until two years ago, when I began the systematic research for this book, that I realised the remarkable consistency of the evidence for such matters as life after death, out-of-body experiences (astral projection), reincarnation. In a basic sense my attitude remains unchanged; I still regard philosophy – the pursuit of reality through intuition aided by intellect – as being more relevant, more important, than questions of the ‘occult’. But the weighing of the evidence ... has convinced me that the basic claims of ‘occultism’ are true.
The completed book, dedicated to Graves, was published on October 4, 1971 with a distinctive dust jacket, in the UK, depicting a large open eye.
Up until then Wilson had always anticipated trends in literature and thought, rather than being one for jumping onto bandwagons. In 1961, for example, he published with Pat Pitman An Encyclopedia of Murder, a book which anticipated the boom in true crime studies by almost twenty years. His The Strength to Dream – a book on literature and imagination, published in 1962 – heralded the late sixties’ obsession with fantasy and science fiction literature. The late sixties also brought about a surge in interest in all things mystical and on this occasion Wilson was not altogether ahead of the game: the pioneers were Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, whose The Morning of the Magicians had been a bestseller in France for several years. His publishers clearly wanted Wilson to replicate its success in the English-speaking world and he did not disappoint them: his monumental study went on to be a bestseller and an inspiration to many who read it. So although he lost some readers by taking this seemingly unexpected and bold move into the occult, he gained many, many more.
In fact Wilson had not abandoned philosophy at all. Indeed, he always considered his ‘serious’ occult books – i.e. ‘The Occult Trilogy’* – to be a logical extension of his ‘new existentialism’, providing evidence that man possesses latent powers which, if tapped and harnessed, could lead to hugely expanded consciousness and potentially even an evolutionary leap. In a lengthy Introduction to the new Watkins edition of Beyond the Occult, published in 2008, he wrote:
When The Occult appeared in 1971, it soon became apparent that many people who had regarded me as a kind of maverick existentialist now believed that I had turned to more trivial topics, and abandoned the rigour of my ‘Outsider’ books. To me, such a view was incomprehensible. It seemed obvious to me that if the ‘paranormal’ was a reality – as I was increasingly convinced that it was – then any philosopher who refused to take it into account was merely closing his eyes.
Readers of Wilson’s fiction, however, were definitely not taken by surprise and had no qualms about his serious foray into the subject; for occult instances and anecdotes abound in all of his novels from the first in the Gerard Sorme trilogy, Ritual in the Dark (1960), onwards. For example, in his 1963 novel The World of Violence (published in the US as The Violent World of Hugh Greene), the young protagonist Hugh, after listening to a piece of music by Beethoven that deeply moves him, sees a ghost (which he calls a ‘presence’) in the garden and speculates, ‘... it seems to me that I saw the “presence” in the garden because I was in a disturbed state after listening to the Beethoven, and some new faculty in me had been awakened.’ The important phrase here being, of course, ‘some new faculty in me had been awakened’. It seems that here we have the germ of an idea that became the focal point of The Occult, that is to say ‘Faculty X’ (‘that latent power that human beings possess to reach beyond the present’), formulated originally in 1966 and featured in his novel The Philosopher’s Stone in 1968. Wilson considered ‘Faculty X’ to be ‘... the key not only to so-called occult experience, but to the whole future evolution of the human race ... [and] ... it is the possession of it – fragmentary and uncertain though it is – that distinguishes man from all other animals.’
Also in 1963, Wilson’s novel The Man Without a Shadow (published in the US as The Sex Diary of Gerard Sorme), the second in the Gerard Sorme trilogy, appeared in print. It featured Caradoc Cunningham, a larger than life character and practitioner of sex magic, based on the ‘Great Beast’ Aleister Crowley, who, when he first meets Sorme, impresses him with his telepathic powers. This anticipates the chapter on Crowley in The Occult by several years. Wilson then went on to write a short biography, Aleister Crowley: The Nature of the Beast, in 1987 (recently reprinted).
In a later novel, The Glass Cage, published in 1966, Damon Reade, a William Blake scholar, is approached by the police in the hope that he can help them catch the Thames Murderer, who leaves a quote from Blake beside each victim. Reade has a file of correspondence from Blake fans and decides to take a couple of the weirder letters to an old man in his village who has ‘strange powers’ and whom he believes will be able to tell intuitively if one of them has been written by the murderer.
And in the final part of the Sorme trilogy, The God of the Labyrinth (The Hedonists in the US), published in 1970, just before The Occult, Sorme researches an eighteenth-century rake by the name of Esmond Donelly. On an increasing number of occasions he finds himself seeing the world through Donelly’s eyes, gradually becoming his subject.
So we have devil worshippers, ghosts, telepathy, men with ‘strange powers’, duo-consciousness, and there are many other such ‘occult’ instances in the early novels, most of which had been out of print for some time before Valancourt Books set about systematically reprinting them in 2013.
Wilson confirmed his early interest in the subject in the opening chapter of The Occult, when he informed us that as a twenty-year-old, living in rented accommodation in London with his wife and young child, forced to work in various dead-end factory jobs – long before the publication of his first book, The Outsider, in 1956 – he read all the books on magic and mysticism that he could find in libraries; not just as an escape from his lot but ‘... because they confirmed my intuition of another order of reality, an intenser and more powerful form of consciousness than the kind I seemed to share.’ By the time he came to write the book, in the late 1960s, he had apparently accumulated a library of over five hundred volumes on the subject. And in his 2004 autobiography Dreaming to Some Purpose, he revealed that his interest in the subject went right back to his childhood:
As a child, I had been fascinated by ghost stories. My grandmother was a spiritualist, so I accepted the idea of life after death from the age of six or so.
In the early days of the Second World War, the Sunday People had published a series by Air Marshall Dowding, in which he discussed the after-death experiences of an airman, as relayed through a spirit medium. The next world, the dead airman claimed, was not all that different from this one, except that there were no discomforts; grass, trees and sky all looked much as on earth, but when he tried swimming, the water was not wet, so it felt rather like swimming in cotton wool. I read the series avidly every week.
Our local library in Leicester, St Barnabas, had an excellent section on psychical research, and I read all I could find by Harry Price – The Most Haunted House in England, Confessions of a Ghost Hunter, and Poltergeist over England ...
Despite the advice against it, writing The Occult turned out to be very advantageous to Wilson both critically and financially. For it was, by and large, received favourably by the critics, sold very well on both sides of the Atlantic and has been translated into many different languages. Cyril Connolly and Philip Toynbee, who were instrumental in turning The Outsider into a bestseller in 1956, but had subsequently changed their minds and then ignored his work for fifteen years, relaxed their embargo and came out in support of him again. Indeed, Connolly went on to write:
I am very impressed by this book, not only by its erudition but by the marshalling of it, and above all by the good-natured, unaffected charm of the author whose reasoning is never too far-fetched, who is never carried away by preposterous theories. Mr Wilson’s mental processes are akin to Aldous Huxley.
Alan Hull Walton, writing in Books and Bookmen, declared:
... in an age of talented mediocrity, [Colin Wilson] is blessed with far more than talent – he is blessed with insight, sincerity, humility, an extraordinarily wide learning (comparable to that of the ‘universal man’ of the Renaissance), and also manifests something of the breadth of genius of a Goethe. ... His new book ... is by far and away his best work to date, and worthy to be placed on the same shelf alongside William James, F. W. H. Myers’ monumental study of Human Personality ... and Frazer’s Golden Bough. ... A review of a thousand words ... cannot do justice to a book of this calibre. ... The Occult is a valuable ‘must’ for anyone with the remotest interest in the future of civilised man.
James Blish in The Spectator advised that ‘anyone wishing to begin reading in this field might well begin with this book (which also contains a good bibliography)’.
In the US, Joyce Carol Oates praised the work as a ‘book of wonders’, recommending it as: ‘one of those rich, strange, perplexing, infinitely surprising works that repay many readings. Though it contains a great deal of history it is really, like most of Colin Wilson’s books, about the future.’ And Clifford P. Bendau, in his book on Wilson’s work, wrote:
The Occult establishes that Wilson has the ability to research and interpret vast quantities of information. It is apparent that he is able to convey consistent and challenging ideas that prod those who are most comfortable with their established beliefs.
The book’s success inspired Wilson’s publishers to commission another, Mysteries: an investigation into the occult, the paranormal and the supernatural, an equally bulky tome, which appeared in 1978, and then a third, ten years later, Beyond the Occult, which summed up his twenty years of research into the subject. The three books amount to a monumental 1,600 pages and also spawned many ephemeral popular illustrated spin-offs – too numerous to mention here individually – but listed entirely in my guide to his ‘Occult Trilogy’ published by Axis Mundi in 2013.
According to Wilson, the reviews ‘had a serious and respectful tone that I hadn’t heard since The Outsider’ and in his 2003 Introduction to the Watkins reprint, he wrote:
But for me, The Occult did a great deal more than make me ‘respectable’, it also served as a kind of awakening. Before 1970, I had been inclined to dismiss ‘the occult’ as superstitious nonsense. Writing The Occult made me aware that the paranormal is as real as quantum physics (and, in fact, has a great deal in common with it), and that anyone who refuses to take it into account is simply shutting his eyes to half the universe.
Colin Stanley is author of The Colin Wilson Bibliography, 1956–2010; Colin Wilson’s ‘Outsider Cycle’: A guide for students; Colin Wilson’s ‘Occult Trilogy’: A guide for students; and Colin Wilson’s Existential Literary Criticism: A guide for students.
He has edited Around the Outsider: Essays presented to Colin Wilson on the occasion of his 80th birthday and Colin Wilson, a Celebration: Essays and recollections. He edits the series ‘Colin Wilson Studies’, which features essays on Wilson’s work by scholars worldwide.
He has written Introductions to new editions of four of Colin Wilson’s novels: Ritual in the Dark, The Man Without a Shadow, The Philosopher’s Stone and Necessary Doubt.
ショックだ！大好きだったアレサ・フランクリンが死んでしまった。今ロイターから入った速報で悲しみを禁じ得ない。60〜70年代の彼女が大好きだった。ご冥福をお祈りする。
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