Japan, the Ambiguous, and Myself: The Nobel Prize Speech and Other Lectures

by Kenzaburō Ōe

In December 1994, on the acceptance of only the second Nobel Prize awarded to a Japanese writer, Kenzaburo Oe gave a speech that was a message for mankind: one that pledged his own faith in tolerance and human decency; in the renunciation of war; and in the healing power of art - the power to calm and purify.

It is also worth examining how the postwar writers dealt with the problem of the emperor system, for this was the cultural and political axle on which the program of modernization turned. One of the conditions necessary to maintain this program was national unity. Thus, until the defeat in 1945, the emperor was made the absolute figure-head and essentially a living deity, and progress was pursued under the pretext of his inviolable authority.

Kenzaburō's family had lived in the village tradition for several hundred years where he grew up, and no one in the Ōe clan had ever left the village in the valley. I learned about his work when studying with Rebbecca Brown in a course about the literature of war. Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids is his novel which deals with fifteen adolescent boys from a reformatory in World War II Japan. The boys are sent to a rural village (strongly echoing the regions of Shikoku in which Oe was raised) to work and live in a small village. Upon arrival, the boys find the village afflicted by plague, with piles of rotting animal corpses dominating the atmosphere. Soon after the boys' arrival, the villagers flee from the plague to a neighboring village, barricading the boys in and abandoning them to their fate.
At the end of Ōe's Nobel Prize Speech he quoted Miyazawa:

We are all farmers, the work is hard and unrelenting.
We seek a way to a livelier and more cheerful life, the way our ancestors lived.
I want to have the sort of talk that combines the facts of modern science, the experiments of seekers of the truth, and our own intuition.
No individual can be happy unless the whole world is happy.
Awareness starts with the individual and gradually spreads to the group, to society, and to the universe beyond.
Isn't this the path shown us by the saints of old?
A new age is coming when the world shall be one in its awareness and become a living entity.
Truth and strength comes from being aware of the galaxy of stars within us, and living according to t his knowledge.
Let us seek true happiness for the world--the search for the path itself is the path.