The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Larry McCaffery, Sinda Gregory, and Takayuki Tatsumi, "A Meaning in Art That’s No Longer Possible: An Interview with Kiyoshi Kasai"A Meaning in Art That’s No Longer Possible:
An Interview with Kiyoshi Kasai
Larry McCaffery, Sinda Gregory and Takayuki Tatsumi
Kiyoshi Kasai was born in Tokyo in 1948. Pursuing an early interest in politics, he attended Wako University, a center of student activism. Kasai joined a new-left political organization in 1968, and under the pseudonym Ryuji Kuroki was a prominent radical activist until giving up all political involvement and expatriating to Paris in the mid-seventies. Eventually returning to Japan, he published a novel, Bai Bai Enjeru (Bye Bye, Angel), which won the Kadokawa Award in 1979. Bai Bai Enjeru launched the career of Kasai’s detective protagonist Kakeru Yabuki, who employs phenomenological speculation to solve his murder cases. His most ambitious Kakeru narrative so far is the 2,000-page novel The Philosopher’s Locked Room, which concerns the philosophy of Martin Heidegger and the recent revelations of Heidegger’s involvement in Nazism. When the interviewers visited his house in the summer of 1992, he had published the first 1,000 pages of this in serial form for EQ, the Japanese version of Ellery Queen’s Magazine. But after finishing the serial, there was more to go and he wrote another 1,000 pages. (TT)
Sinda Gregory: Is the world you’ve created for The Philosopher’s Locked Room one where everyone is guilty, or one in which there is only one guilty person whose guilt has to be ascertained?
Kiyoshi Kasai: It’s the former.
Larry McCaffery: Are you interested in the kind of detective created by writers like Van Dine or Ellery Queen as opposed to the hard-boiled detectives of Hammett and Chandler?
KK: I like the hard-boiled ones, too.
Takayuki Tatsumi: You could describe Vampire Wars as being “hard-boiled science fiction.” This novel was turned into a movie which made him a lot of money and allowed him to build this house in the Yatsugatake (Eight Peaks) mountains—he refers to this place as “The Vampire Cottage.”
LM: Takayuki has told us you’ve written earlier detective novels. Is your new book a departure from your detective fiction?
KK: Not really. I’ve already written a trilogy of books with the same hero, Kakeru Yabuki, who also appears in The Philosopher’s Locked Room, so I consider this new book to have expanded the series into a quartet.
SG: Is Kakeru Yabuki a private detective acting on his own or a member of the police who somehow is part of a larger legal system?
KK: He’s a nonprofessional detective somewhat like Poe’s Dupin. The theme of my new book is death—the difference between the nineteenth-century experience of death and the twentieth-century experience of death.
LM: Don DeLillo has also addressed this issue in his recent novels, like White Noise and Mao II, which both imply that technology mediates our experience of death in all sorts of ways.
KK: I agree with that idea. World War I was the first technologized war in which death was completely different from that depicted by Homer or even by Stendhal. In technologized war, people were treated just like garbage; they died without dignity; it was a mass production of death. That war was the actual beginning of the twentieth century. Until then, people were living in an extension of the nineteenth century.
LM: How does Heidegger fit in to this—his connections with fascism?
KK: Heidegger was one of my favorite philosophers when I was a student, along with Gyorgy Lukács. In Sein und Zeit, Heidegger states that the human being becomes the true self only when he is confronted with death. This philosophy was derived from the experience of World War I. Before then, people were able to die their own death, whereas after undergoing World War I, that became impossible. This wound up leaving the theme of death to the philosophers to speculate about. Anyway, I became interested in the fact that the World War I experience in Europe gave rise to Heidegger’s philosophy of death and also the classical type of detective fiction simultaneously.
As you know, most of the major movements associated with modernism—for example, formalism, surrealism, dadaism, and expressionism—originated in countries like Russia, Germany, and France, where battles had actually taken place in front of their very eyes. Whereas, you don’t find these sorts of drastic artistic movements occurring in countries like America and England, which didn’t experience the war firsthand. Then what did happen in America and England? The fad of serious mystery novels! Let’s take a serial story in a magazine or newspaper. Before the war, at least one person per day or per week or per month was killed in those stories. The way death is presented in those works reflected the way people thought about death before the war—it was routine, very easy: people simply died, very quickly, with almost no fuss at all. But in a serious postwar mystery novel, death doesn’t happen so easily: the murderer scrupulously plans the killing in detail and carries out the crime with every due respect to the victim. Even after the murder, the detective works very hard to find out who had done it. This is almost like a double-authorization of the victim. The death of the individual is made very meaningful—perhaps in order to give it meaning in art that’s no longer possible in real life.
SG: Are classical detective novels—the kind you associate with Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie—popular in Japan?
KK: Yes, the fad of the classical British-type detective novel is still pretty popular, even now. The reason for this popularity is that Japan is one cycle removed from the experience of war compared to America or England. That is, since Japan had not really experienced World War I, we had to wait until World War II to truly understand the meaning of the serious classical mystery novel, which emphasizes the significance of death and the horror of mass-slaughter.
SG: What about writers like Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Allan Poe who wrote much earlier than World War I?
KK: The backbone of the detectives of the nineteenth century is positivism. They thought that the truth exists and that they could get to that truth by experience, observation and presumption. Holmes is a good example. However, the detectives of the twentieth century begin by doubting the truth. If there were any truth at all, it would be something that they themselves must create, rather than discover. In a sense, nihilism was pervasive. For them, the key word would be “nihilism.” From this point it is interesting to see that Van Dine was a student of Nietzsche. While Holmes was a typical nineteenth-century Victorian detective, Poe doesn’t fit into this categorization. I am not so interested in Holmes as much as I am in Poe. Poe was a rhetorical writer, a postmodern writer. My new book is going to be the fourth case of Dupin.
LM: Earlier when we asked about the type of the detective you usually depict, you said a phenomenological one. That makes me think of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Michael Butor. I know that you lived in Paris for a time. Were you interested in the French detective novels or the nouveau roman, and was your new story influenced by them in any way?
KK: I like Sarraute and Butor better than Robbe-Grillet. I read the antiromans when I was a university student, and I thought they were different from what I thought was a novel. I think the narrative is very important in a work of fiction, whereas the avant-garde writers try to deprive the novel of their narrative. Detective fictions or SF novels are trying to recover narrativity—that is why my interest lies in these fields. By using the narrativity system of science fiction or detective novels, I would like to present a theme of our time. By this, I hope to avoid the blind alley in which all the antiromans seemed to have trapped themselves.
LM: In the fifties and sixties there were so many discussions about the death of the novel. But now we seem to have gone beyond that. It’s almost as if writers of the eighties and nineties have said, “OK, let’s go back to story, we need it, it’s important.” Voila: the death of the death of the novel.
KK: As a critic, I cannot ignore the hard-core literary theory which had sort of insisted on the death of the novel and the irrelevancy of story. But as a writer, I go back to Balzac and Dumas and emphasize narrativity.
LM: There seems to be a lot of connections between SF and detective fiction. And maybe some significant differences, too. Since you’ve worked in both of them, what connections do you see and what differences?
KK: There are two points that are similar: they are both genre novels and formula fiction. As such, they both tend to repeat certain popular motifs once they have become popular. Let’s take SF novels for example. After the H. G. Wells novel The Time Machine appeared, almost all the novels afterwards build up their story with the time machine functioning as a main gadget. The same thing can be said with the detective story as well. Once a writer uses the locked room murder, so does everyone. I think this is an essential condition for these two types of novels. They are also both concerned with epistemology. The difference is whether the writer uses the rhetoric of science dominantly and consciously, as SF authors do, or the rhetoric of logic and empiricism, which is what detective writers rely on. In both cases, it doesn’t matter if the science or empiricism used in a work is faulty, or even wrong, so long as the rhetoric found there is dominant.
LM: Isn’t it interesting that Poe was, on the one hand, so fascinated in this whole business of rationality, and yet he had that other side to him that distrusted it because on some level he literally considered life as a dream. But that opposition seems to me to be something that has been worked out in detective fiction, too. On the one hand you have the tradition of Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie (the positivist, empiricist, epistemologically optimistic side), and yet you also have Hammett and all these others (Nabokov, Borges, Chesterton, and so on) presenting “solutions” as being aesthetic constructs, inventions—which seems “postmodern” to me. In your own case, your new novel relies on classical detective fiction’s the locked room motif—a premise which suggests that what appears to be mysterious is not. I don’t expect for you to give too much away here, but I’m wondering if in the end, after 2,000 pages, do you wind up suggesting that mystery can be resolved? Or is mystery only something that can be “deferred” in the poststructuralist or deconstructive sense?
KK: It will be resolved. If it is not solved, the novel will become postmodern, and I don’t want that. It’s not a feeling I wish to have about my own writing.
SG: In most detective fiction, the world is set up and controlled by reason. The question is answerable. This seems to me to be one of the defining characteristics of what is not postmodernism: a solution, a finality, a denouement exists and does not shift. That’s one of the reasons why I would argue that Hammett is pushing the borders of modernity because what he is suggesting in his books is that the solution is one that is constructed by the detective. The truth does not exist; it’s simply a construct of the detective.
KK: I think it’s very unproductive to say that the only truth is that there is no truth. When they say “there is no truth,” in actuality, most people automatically believe in a truth that there is no truth. Generally, this attitude characterized highly fashionable Japanese postmodernism during the 1980s. In those days, college students used to carry about the texts of Derrida and Deleuze just like accessories. They often referred to “deconstruction” or “rhizome,” but it was just because the terms sounded smart and fashionable. And now, no one reads Derrida. It went out of fashion. The same thing can be said about failed metafictions. Metafiction attempts to erase the existence of its author, the authority of its fictional world, who is even analogous to God. Poor metafiction, however, transgresses the fictional order of realism so easily and arbitrarily that it provides the author with much more authority than that of realistic fiction. At this point, the fiction is no longer a metafiction that implies there is no truth, but a fake metafiction that makes propaganda for the truth that there is no truth.
LM: But in Dashiell Hammett’s ending of The Thin Man, Nora says to Nick, “So is that what happened more or less?” And he says, “I don’t know. All that I know is that it fits the case, it seems to explain things.” This solution is very “real” in the sense that it fits the observed phenomenon and provides an explanation that is consistent with all the facts. But the author emphasizes that the solution is a construct, a kind of useful fiction or metaphor rather than truth. This seems to be the same kind of position that people like Kuhn and Kark Popper have taken in regard to scientific “laws.”
TT: I’m wondering if this sort of constructing will also construct the authority of the detective. Would it encourage the detective to claim his authority?
LM: I don’t think so. If anything, it should have the opposite effect. In most postmodern works, what seems to be emphasized is that there is no final authority—that sounds very pessimistic, but it can be seen as something very liberating. Since the detective/artist is shown being able to invent something like this, so, too, can the reader. That’s what Borges, Nabokov, Coover and Barth seem to me to be showing—it’s just that their characters frequently forget the nature of what they’re involved in. It’s also what Hammett is telling us.
KK: I’ve never read Hammett in that way. What I found interesting in The Maltese Falcon is that the reader does not know until the end about the detective’s love for the widow even though the story is told in a third person narrative with one point of view. In other words the detective conceals his feelings from the reader. For example, it is often pointed out that Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is based on a trick that the writer is the criminal. It is incorrect, yet. When you read this novel, you naturally feel sure it is a first person narrative. But what is revealed just before the solution of the case is the fact that the text you were reading was a note written by a character named Shepard. It is a story within story, in short. You inevitably read the story within story as a first person narrative. This switching provides the trick of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd as detective fiction. Christie used the form of fiction itself as a trick of detective fiction. The same thing is also true of The Maltese Falcon. Whenever he or she reads a third person narrative with one point of view, the reader presupposes that the interiority of the protagonist must be transparent. But the author never reveals the fact that the protagonist loves Bridget, though it is very important for the protagonist. Even at the close of the story, the fact is not expressed clearly. At this point, Hammet displaces the modern fictional conventions. It is these kinds of attempts to displace and deconstruct the modern fictional conventions as seen in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and The Maltese Falcon that has long attracted me very much.
SG: Because the narrator of The Maltese Falcon is a Jamesian, restricted third person narrator, it seems like it’s narrated from the first person although it is actually a third person narrative. We always see everything from Spade’s point of view but he’s not an “I.” But you’re absolutely right in that it’s a very tricky point of view because presumably the main character, Sam Spade knows the solution in the beginning of the book but doesn’t tell the reader. And there are lots of other ambiguities—in fact, what I tried to show in my book about Hammett [Private Investigations] is that the whole book functions as a kind of “ambiguity machine.” So even at the end of the book, the reader doesn’t know whether or not Bridget O’Shaunnessy was the villain who was simply all along trying to evade justice or whether she did love Sam Spade.
KK: Having the case remain unsolved or suspended is certainly “metafictional,” but it is also admitting that we are trapped, that there can be no truth we can rely on to solve the mystery of existence. This can be a very self-defeating view that people use to evade responsibility. You see this all the time with deconstructionists and postmodernists. So as a strategy, I solve my mystery and at the same time leave it unsolved as well.
TT: And by giving some kind of a solution, Mr. Kasai puts emphasis on political options. To present the solution as only being provisional or a fiction might allow people to evade such an option. And that seems to be the case in most metafictions.
LM: Yes, and it’s also the case with most American deconstructionists (the Yale School, and so on) who are kind of a critical equivalent of metafictionists (this isn’t nearly so true of the European brand of deconstruction written by Baudrillard, Lyotard, even Derrida, who tend to be much more politically engaged). But it’s not true of Coover, Barth, Barthelme, Vonnegut and most of the other metafictionists I admire. Maybe related to this is that most American writers today don’t feel that fiction can have any significant political impact any more (this was one of the main points in DeLillo’s novel Mao II, for example). Part of this feeling has to do with the fact that politics, art, the government, the mass media and business all seem so integrated these days—all part of an interlocking system. Since this situation seems, if anything, even more the case in Japan today, what can the artist do? Is there is any chance for a writer’s work being able to have any real impact, either on the world or at least on the ways people think about the world?
KK: During the Gulf War, there was a controversy amongst the Japanese poets and critics. On the one hand, a magazine called Hatoyo! (O, Dove!) asked several poets to write a poem about the Gulf War. So they wrote antiwar poems using motifs of the dying sea birds and so on. On the other hand, there were those who criticized these poets and poems. Of course, this reaction was not because the criticizer was approving the war but because he or she thought that it was not a very good thing for a poet to jump onto a social issue and take stands against or for it by means of poetry.
TT: Some of these writers who came against the war just seemed to do so because it was fashionable—it was a stance that grew out of a postmodern posture and seemed the thing to do. Opposition to war just became another new thing that could be put out there to consume. There were those of us who thought this was irresponsible coming immediately after the Gulf War began. Expressing one’s antiwar feelings right after the war was declared could cause problems because it is too hasty.
SG: Most people who think about these things and who are not just knee-jerk patriots had very ambivalent feelings about the war. It was more complex feeling than the way we felt about Vietnam. Most people felt that Hussein needed to be stopped, that he was a dangerous and brutal man. A lot of people who were vehemently against the Vietnam War had more divided feelings because we had strong opinions about Hussein and what he had done. But there was also a recognition that George Bush was using this for political reasons.
KK: Until the post-Vietnam era of 1970s, people were still able to believe in truth, justice, the existence of the center of the world. Then why did postmodern skepticism or nihilism become “fashionable”? I think the boat people of Vietnam and the great massacre of Cambodia had a lot to do with it. Those incidents exposed, the “justice,” that one thing you always thought you had to stand up for, suddenly turned fake. It was not until then that people started to be skeptical, in America, in Europe and even in Japan. So comes the approximately ten years of the “noncentered world,” “no absolute world,” “no justice world.” But then, especially in Japan, we began to get bored with that situation. That is when the Gulf War occurred. We Japanese were not the ones that were actually involved; we were the outsiders, which made us all the more “irresponsible.” So some people, mainly those who could not bear the unstableness, the uncertainty of postmodernism any more, made an attempt again to insist on the old-fashioned justice opposing to America’s imperialism. This is how I see the “Anti-War Protest” of Hatoyo! magazine, and I think it is wrong.
LM: I completely agree with you. I don’t think postmodernism or the implications of postmodernism should be used to justify nihilism. It is important to recognize subjectivity, but you also have to understand the absolute necessity to finally take positions and to make distinctions between systems that lead to death and chaos versus those that are life-enhancing and create cooperation and community. If you just say that they are all equal, you wind up saying that something that creates death is the same as what creates life. The postmodern artists that I admire are those who are absolutely taking stands.
KK: Ever since the Gulf War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, postmodern issues have become more and more critical. I think we must try to find out what kind of justice can exist on the premise that no such absolute justice exists.
SG: The problem that most Americans had with the Gulf War was not a result of nihilism. You didn’t hear people say “Why does it really matter?” or “There is nothing worth fighting for because all systems are a pack of expedient lies.” The motivation behind a lot of objections to the war was more a recognition of the cynicism of our government, which was using the Gulf War to raise their position in the polls. The whole rhetoric was very cynical.
TT: It convinced us, once again, that the difference between rhetoric and politics was radically deconstructive.
SG: To a large extent, I think the Gulf War was the result of the confusion after Vietnam and the response to two decades of feminism. American men are undergoing an identity crisis. And the easiest way of redefining yourself is through physical domination.
TT: But in this country the situation is rather different. In the eighties, the postmodern discourse was really trendy. Many intellectuals tried hard to keep up with the movement. When the Gulf War happened, suddenly all those intellectuals jump to that. Mr. Kasai is attacking that kind of frivolousness—taking positions just because they are trendy. This is a perfect example of Japanese posthistorical hyperconsumerism.
LM: Yes. “Trendy nihilism”—which justifies a lot of the stupidity and the kind of greed that have taken place.
TT: Again, it’s important to consider the difference between the Japanese and the American attitude. American men were trying to recuperate whereas the Japanese were just trying to be trendy.
LM: Are these ideas really primarily intellectual fads or trends that you consume—like a product that you just consume and discard?
TT: Certainly. In Japan even truly major intellectual movements in Europe and America never, in a sense, filters down. They become popular in Japan, yes, and very trendy, but in the end what is left is really just another trendy foreign image that is consumed but doesn’t have any real affect. In this sense, Japan represents a perfect example of “Cynical Reason.”
LM: I am distressed that postmodernism and the theories of deconstruction are used as a way to evade taking political stance and the need for political action.
KK: Yes, but I also think we should avoid taking political action too easily. Japan is a rare country in that it has never experienced a war in the true sense, except World War II. It is not a matter of yourself or your own son having to go to the battlefield but a matter of an idea. So in the case of this Gulf War, most Japanese did not even care about it, but the intellectuals did in their own strange way of making a fuss over which idea you stand for.
TT: In other words, Japanese intellectuals were thinking of the war from a purely abstract level. In the United States, it was a national issue all the people feel responsible for.
KK: Yes, among the fifty thousand people who had to go to the actual war, there’s apt to be someone whom you know or a relative maybe. But the antiwar declaration of the poets was nothing of a political action but was an abstract statement of identity.
LM: Given postindustrial capitalism’s expanded ability to instantly co-opt or commodify even art with very radical impulses, do you see any hope for writing, or artists of any kind, having any real impact on the real world? This is a big issue right now in America—especially in our postmodernist age when even political opposition or radicalism are themselves a sort of commodity used to sell things.
KK: That’s a difficult question. But it is something that we Japanese need to think about, too, and for many of the same reasons that serious artists and critics in your country must do.
SG: Since “serious” forms of literature, at least in America, are read by a very very few people, their potential for generating political action is almost nonexistent. But it seems like pop culture, which is the dominant culture both in terms of prevalence and marketplace clout, has a potential for actually affecting large numbers of citizens. The dynamic is in place for art to change things even if it’s rarely used for anything other than repackaging the same old merchandise/information. In other words, pop culture could challenge the norms just as well as reinforce them—that’s what Larry is proposing with his Avant-Pop concept.
KK: In Japan, the difference between popular fiction and literary fiction is unique, compared to that of Europe or America. When Japan started its modernization a hundred years ago in the Meiji era, the bureaucrats, university teachers and high-ranked military men were the ones who wore western clothes. And serious fiction was read by those who wore “western clothes.” Pure literature was something western, something imported. Now, during this same time, all the ordinary people were wearing their kimonos. For them, there was Kabuki, Kodan and other forms of popular culture which had succeeded in establishing themselves from the Edo period. This division continued for about a century. Nowadays, of course, most of us Japanese wear western clothes. The border between serious literature and popular literature has become vague.
SG: In the U.S., the distinction remains clear in terms of sales. Serious lit doesn’t sell. When Pynchon’s Vineland appeared in the U.S.—this much-awaited novel by arguably America’s greatest living author—it sold practically nothing. Meanwhile, The Bridges of Madison County keeps going and going. . . .
KK: Serious literature does not sell in Japan either! Most “serious writers” would only be able to make a living by becoming a university teacher. In America, I guess it would be the publishing companies who support them.
LM: Not really—most of our serious writers wind up having to teach in university creative writing programs. The one good thing in the States right now is there has been an active response on the part of university and small presses to take up the slack left by the absence of serious publishing on the part of our mainstream commercial houses.
KK: In Japan, the role of academism is undertaken by journalism. You would have to produce something once a year that would sell 50,000 copies if you want to make an average living. I suppose there are less than ten “serious writers” who are able to do that in Japan. There are five major publishing companies that turn out serious literary magazines every month. If you are prestigious enough to be able to have your short story published in one of these major magazines, there will be requests for lectures, reviews, and essays from all over. That is how you would make a living.
LM: In the States that would not happen unless you got a certain celebrity status. Then you can make money doing a lecture circuit and appearing on television or whatever. But in the States, there’s no network that can support writers for writing essays or reviews.
KK: I’ve read in Brian Aldiss’s Three Trillion Years Spree that in England, the first edition of an SF novel would be a print-run of only around 3,000. That is much less than Japan. The number 3,000 would be for hard-core criticism. If it was SF, they would print at least 8,000 and probably be10,000 for hard-cover books.
LM: You’ve said earlier that both SF and detective fiction are formulas. But when you began writing the science fiction series, Vampire Wars, was there anything you would say that was fundamentally different about writing SF and detective fiction?
KK: I don’t think there were any big differences, no. Both of them are formula fiction, and both of them are really gadget-oriented. And both of them are dealing not with the “I” but with something more general.
LM: Was there any particular reason that you used the vampire motif?
KK: My interest in vampires wasn’t very abstract. The main reason for using the vampire motif was that I wanted to write a novel in which the vampire, who is usually the bad guy, is the good guy, and the human beings, who are usually the victims, are in turn the bad guys. I was trying to make a remixture of Gothic romance and SF. As a theme, I wanted to differentiate humanism by using the vampire device.
LM: You apparently were writing Vampire Wars primarily as popular entertainment. Would you be interested in writing “serious” SF, or do you not much consider such distinctions?
KK: Theory and practice are two different things. I just want to do something new. Having experienced the Hawaii Tour and London Tour, even Sumo has become international. The only things unique in Japan are probably No, Kabuki and the classic puzzle-solving type detective fiction. Nowadays, Japan is the only country that enjoys this genre. So I think we should preserve this as one of our national traditions. There are several awards for detective fictions in Japan but none for the classical type. I guess I would have to establish one. At present, in Japan, the mainstream of the mystery genre is Frederick Forsyth or Robert Ludlum, who write long political novels.
LM: Is this 2,000-paged book serialized?
KK: Yes, it’s the fourth of the series, and it will continue. The next novel will deal with Michel Foucault, gays, and AIDS. Every book of this series has a philosopher in it. The second book had Simone Weil, the third had Georges Bataille, the fourth has Heidegger, and the fifth will have Foucault. Vampire Wars, by the way, was influenced by Bataille.
SG: The French have been importing Algerian workers for a long time, and they are very conscious of not allowing those workers to have any kind of influence on their culture and society. It seems like France, like Japan, is acutely aware of the uniqueness of their nation; they seem reluctant to let their foreign workers fully participate in society. Do the Japanese feel the same way?
KK: I think Japan is worse than France. The relationship between Algeria and France is equivalent to that of Taiwan or Korea and Japan. The reason why France does not “get rid of” the Algerian workers is that they are embarrassed or feel guilty about the colonial period when they once victimized the Algerians. In other words, even though they were imperialistic, there is a certain kind of ethics here, a sense of responsibility. On the other hand, Japan colonized Korea and Taiwan and doesn’t even accept the workers. Japanese imperialism has no ethics at all. There should be more commotion about these foreign workers, but there isn’t. This means that the present peace that we are enjoying exists only because we have not owed the responsibility that we should have. It is very hypocritical.
SG: Do the workers have any access to forums where they could make a commotion? Make their voices heard?
KK: I think it is a matter of quantity. Right now, I think we have about 500,000 foreign workers in Japan. If we had ten times that, which is 5 million, I believe the Japanese society will be forced to change.
TT: We could rearrange the whole structure of Japan by importing more foreign workers. Our homogenous society is repressing so many differences within us we need something . . .
LM: Whatever the good or the bad of America is, one of the keys to the good in our culture is precisely the clash and interaction of cultures. This is what produces so much of our energy.
KK: I don’t think there is any possibility at all for the Japanese society to change intrinsically from within, so an outer impact would be the only hope. There are two ways to get a breakthrough. One is to import foreign workers in terms of tens of millions. The other is to become the 52nd state of America! In that way the Japan-U.S. trade friction would be solved instantaneously.
SG: What about an “alien” culture that is indigenous to Japan—the Ainu?
KK: The number of Ainu is so small. If there are only tens of thousands, that is too small a number for a certain race to have impact.
SG: As I understand it, the Japanese government has, as a policy, refused to make any distinction between Ainus and everyone else, which is the exact opposite of what our government has historically done. They have insisted that Native Americans are separate.
KK: But you can say that the Japanese government has been repressing them as well by having the same law. During the sixties, I would see on TV, the American police killing blacks. For example, members of the Black Panthers. In Japan, they would never kill, not even terrorists. They would happily risk the lives of two or three policemen in order to arrest a terrorist, put him to jail and make him apologize. In America, the villians have to be killed. There is a strict line between friend and enemy. But in Japan, even if he were a terrorist, he is still a member of the family. He is the prodigal son who is at the moment under a bad spell but sooner or later will repent and come back. This is what I call “the repression of the homogeneous.” The terrorist is willing to give his or her life, but the society will not even kill him. They will put him into jail and make him say, “I’m sorry,” which is worse than death.
SG: Yet Japanese authority and culture has a value or a kind of respect for people who are willing to be extremists. They see that as a commitment to an ideal that is admirable even if the actions aren’t. Perhaps this is connected to the fact that the rebel, the deviant, the antisocial misfit is not a norm in Japan. Without a doubt, one of the first things that any American becomes instantly aware of here is how law-abiding the people are. It may have something to do with our emphasis on individual freedom, but I think, in general, Americans at heart are criminals. Or at least always looking for a way around the law in a way that the Japanese wouldn’t think to do.
KK: In Paris, there are many Chinese and Vietnamese people. Their reputation is not so bad among French people, when compared to, let’s say, that of the people from Arabian countries. It is very dangerous to generalize, but Asian or Indo-Chinese people are, as you say, rather gentle. This might have something to do with Confucianism.
LM: Second generation Vietnamese and Cambodians in California are having a lot of problems with gangs and juvenile crime and violence. The cliches about Asians being by and large more peaceful and law-abiding aren’t holding true. Although it’s certainly true that black/white relations remain the most problematic in the States. . . .
KK: This is what I thought when the L.A. riots occurred. I think America can solve all but one problem, that is the Afro-American people’s issue. America has accepted many races, for example, the Irish, the Hispanics, the Japanese. All of these immigrants start from the bottom but gradually inch their way to the top. Not that they actually reach the top but they do pretty well. The Afro-Americans, however, even though they were one of the earliest to come to America, rarely climb up the ladder. Eventually, everybody else catches up and surpasses them. The reason is that all the other immigrants start off as an individual but little by little form a racial network. They live close to each other, they call their family to America, they do business together . . . By this they increase their power and grow together. Italian Mafia, Chinese Mafia and Korean Mafia are a result of this racial network. But the blacks were not allowed to gather. Slavery distorted everything. Afro-Americans were the first and only people to undergo the peculiar experience of existing as a pure individual.
A long long time ago, I presume Japan also enforced immigration. The people nearby, for example those living on the Korean peninsula or China, were unwillingly brought to this country. But it was amongst the same race, the mongoloids, and in the long run, everything got mingled and so no one can tell who was originally here and who wasn’t. But in the case of the Afro-Americans, since their skin is black, it is so obvious. The visual distinction is very strong.
SG: The question of whether or not we can solve the black-white issue is the essential question of America’s future. All other issues are secondary.
KK: Japan’s future depends on a breakthrough, too. Like I was saying earlier, I would approve of Japan becoming the 52nd state of America—that might have been possible, you know, right after World War II. But if that happened now, it would be very interesting to see how America would digest or reinterpret the whole of Japan.
Transcribed by Reiko Tochigi; translated by Takafumi Akimoto