＜prologue＞
I started a blog called “The Baby Boomer Generation’s Miscellaneous Blog”（Dankai-sedai no garakutatyou:団塊世代の我楽多（がらくた）帳） in July 2018, about a year before I fully retired. More than six years have passed since then, and the number of articles has increased considerably.
So, in order to make them accessible to people who don’t understand Japanese, I decided to translate my past articles into English and publish them.
It may sound a bit exaggerated, but I would like to make this my life’s work.
It should be noted that haiku and waka （Japanese short fixed form poems） are quite difficult to translate into English, so some parts are written in Japanese.
If you are interested in haiku or waka and would like to know more, please read introductory or specialized books on haiku or waka written in English.
I also write many articles about the Japanese language. I would be happy if these inspire more people to want to learn Japanese.
my blog’s URL:https://skawa68.com/
my X’s URL:団塊世代の我楽多帳（@historia49）さん / X
Recently, there was news that “genuine human bone specimens are being found in schools all over the country. Including those currently being examined by the police, they have been confirmed in a total of 10 schools in at least four prefectures, including Kagoshima and Oita. It is not known how any of the specimens were obtained, and schools are struggling to deal with the situation.”
I can’t help but wonder why such a thing is becoming an issue now and making the news. Did the reporter who wrote this article think about the “connection to the murder case”?
The high school I attended was founded as a former junior high school in 1895, and 2019 marks its 124th anniversary.
In the hallway of the “Natural History Classroom” at that high school, many stuffed animals and bone specimens were displayed. During the “Biology” class, the teacher brought out a “formalin-preserved human brain” from the storage room and showed it to the students. He said, “This brain must have thought, cried, and laughed when it was alive.”
I was a little surprised and thought, “Is this a real human brain?!”, but the teacher’s explanation left a strangely strong impression on me.
Even now, Natsume Soseki’s brain is preserved in ethanol at the University of Tokyo’s Faculty of Medicine. This is because Soseki requested in his will that his body be dissected.
However, I can’t help but think it must be awful to have your death mask taken and dissected right after you die.
However, in his disciple Oka Eiichiro’s essay “Recollections of Natsume Sensei,” he writes as follows:
When the time comes for my life to run out, I will gladly face death. Death is a state of comfort to me. (Omitted) I want people to gather around my coffin and shout “Banzai!”
In one of his essays, Soseki states, “When we die, consciousness simply ceases, so there is no such thing as a soul.”
As an aside, specimens of Einstein’s brain are preserved in various places around the world, and in Japan there are apparently two slices at Niigata University.
Kazuhiro Sakagami, research director at the Department of Anthropology at the National Museum of Nature and Science, points out the following:
The legal treatment of human bones is not clearly stated, and if they are considered to be corpses, they will be investigated for the possibility of foul play in accordance with the Corpse Dissection and Preservation Act. On the other hand, they may be considered cultural property and subject to storage, and if an educational institution wishes to keep them as educational property, I think they may be able to keep them under the Cultural Property Protection Act. Many historic schools have genuine human specimens, and there are probably many specimens across the country whose origins have become unknown.
I think this is a reasonable opinion. Isn’t there really no need for educational institutions, such as high schools across the country, to go to such unnecessary trouble as investigating the origins of human bone specimens?