by Oe Kenzaburo
(Translated with an introduction by Richard H. Minear)
Introduction: The current disaster in Japan, the worst since World War II, may bring major change in Japanese thinking about nuclear weapons and nuclear power. But the preconditions for that re-thinking existed long before the disaster.
In the March 28 issue of the New Yorker, Nobel laureate Oe Kenzaburo published an essay, “History Repeats.” It reads in part:
I have long contemplated the idea of looking at recent Japanese history through the prism of three groups of people: those who died in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, those who were exposed to the Bikini tests, and the victims of accidents at nuclear facilities. If you consider Japanese history through these stories, the tragedy is self-evident. Today, we can confirm that the risk of nuclear reactors has become a reality.
But just before the tsunami hit, Oe had written a brief essay that was published in the Asahi on March 15.
That essay is a tribute to Oishi Matashichi, a young crewman on the Lucky Dragon #5, and to the Lucky Dragon #5 Exhibition Hall at Yumenoshima near Tokyo. It shows how the lives of ?e and ?ishi intersected fifty-seven years ago, in 1954, and helps explain ?e’s long involvement in the anti-nuclear movement. Oishi’s autobiographical The Day the Sun Rose in the West will be published in summer 2011 by University of Hawai’i Press. RHM
In the summer of my 19th year, in a classroom at Komaba, I had my first French class, and I received a set of charts, in a persimmon-colored binding, of verb conjugations. If I learned them completely, I would be able to enroll in a second-semester course and read the short fiction of Flaubert. Completely?
On my way home, beside Komaba’s main gate, I listened to a speaker, his back to a sign that attacked the H-bomb test at Bikini, and was shocked to learn that because of his father’s death, one young crewman had had to drop out of junior high school: his situation was not far different from my own.1
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