＜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:団塊世代の我楽多（がらくた）帳 | 団塊世代が雑学や面白い話を発信しています
my X’s URL:団塊世代の我楽多帳（@historia49）さん / X
When I was a university student, there was a time when I thought that “difficult texts,” or so-called “kaijyu na bunsyo ” that made full use of difficult Chinese words in legal and philosophical texts, were excellent texts. There is also a phrase “inkyou (rhyming mirror) for ten years,” which means that it is extremely difficult to understand.
It was an illusion that the contents were profound. However, when I learned that Yukichi Fukuzawa instructed his acquaintance to “write sentences that even a monkey could understand” when he saw his acquaintance’s writing, I realized how foolish I had been.
This episode is as follows.
Yukio Ozaki (1858-1954), later called the “God of Constitutional Government” and “Father of Parliamentary Politics,” once visited Yukichi Fukuzawa (1835-1901) to try to make a living with a single brush. When he told Fukuzawa that he wanted to write a book that only a “learned man (a person who has the ability to judge things correctly, or a person with insight)” could understand, Fukuzawa replied, “Idiot! Fukuzawa responded, “You are an idiot! I always write with the intention of showing it to monkeys, but that is just the way the world works.
Come to think of it, I have seen a series of introductory computer books with titles such as “Even a Monkey (But) Can Understand Excel. They call it “Saruwaka” for short.
１．What is good writing?
In novels and other literary works, there were “beautiful writing style” by Keigetsu Omachi and Cyogyu Takayama in the Meiji era, and “common novel styl” by Koyo Ozaki, but I think Soseki Natsume’s writing is good writing.
When I was in high school, my modern Japanese teacher used to say, “Soseki’s writing is so good that even if you read it today, you will not feel its antiquity.” Having read almost all of Soseki’s works (although I could not read through his literary theory and literary criticism) during my college years, I think this is a spot-on assessment.
Soseki was born in 1867 (Keio 3) at the end of the Edo period (1603-1867), but majored in English literature and studied in England. In addition to his writing style, many of his novels are about society, family, ego, love, money, egotism, and loneliness, which are the source of human suffering in the modern and contemporary world, and which probably resonate with us.
In the business world, good writing is “writing that concisely explains even difficult content and clearly presents its conclusions. It is necessary to keep to the point and present your conclusions clearly, without embellishing with more than necessary branches and leaves, or adding imaginations other than facts.
Books on economics such as Marx’s “The Theory of Capital” or research reports by the Bank of Japan are sometimes difficult to understand and the conclusions are difficult to understand, or the perception of the current situation is biased (incorrect), and you may get tired of reading them halfway through.
There are many self-help books published on “study skills” and “work skills,” but “what is the point/conclusion?” I think that many of them are so redundant that I want to rush in and ask “What is the point/conclusion?
There are many checkpoints in golf lesson books, but there is no way that an amateur can check that many things at the time of a shot. It is possible to check one or two things at most.
2. the key to good writing
I believe that a good text is one that is made up of a variety of miscellaneous contents, from which only the “extract” is extracted and summarized in an easy-to-understand manner.
About 25 years ago, I studied for the Real Estate Transaction Chief Examination. At that time, I bought a summary book called “Maru-Memorized Takken-Juku” as a reference book. This book was very useful because it contained all the “extracts” necessary for the exam, and the important parts were written in Gothic type. I was able to pass the exam on the first try just by reading and memorizing this book.
In order to produce good writing, I think it would be a good idea to get into the habit of writing in detail at first and then making a “summary” (summa ratione).
Fukuzawa Yukichi, whom we first mentioned, is said to have called a maid, who had not even graduated from elementary school, to read out what he had written to see if she could understand it or not.
3. good news commentary program
Shinsuke Shimada, who was a famous TV MC, also stated that “TV viewers (even if they are not idiots to begin with) do not take TV seriously, and we on TV are all idiots, so we need to make a habit of explaining things carefully so that even idiots can easily understand. I believe that is why he was able to host the “Sunday Project” news program so well.
Koji Higashino is the MC of “Teach us! News Live: Justice no Mikata” is a program in which ‘people who don’t know much about the news’ are invited as guests to play the role of ‘students,’ and ‘teachers’ who are experts in various fields provide explanations in a way that is easy to understand even for laymen. I can also relate to comedian Hong Kong’s “frank and honest questions and opinions”. In this sense, it may be more successful than “Sunday Project.
I also found Akira Ikegami’s “news commentary” to be very helpful because it is very easy to understand and also based on a broad knowledge base to give a big picture perspective.
He is a former NHK social affairs reporter and newscaster, and was the editor-in-chief and newscaster of “Weekly Children’s News” for 10 years as a news-savvy “father” before he retired from NHK.
The habit of explaining the news in a way that is easy for children to understand, which I acquired at that time, seems to be useful in the “commentary” for many news commentary programs today.
3. Fukuzawa Yukichi’s view on Koreans
I quoted Arai Shiraishi’s view on Koreans in my previous “Article on the Name of the Sea of Japan,” and Fukuzawa Yukichi also stated the following in “Jiji Shinpo” in 1897. I would like to introduce this article as a meander since I believe it will be helpful in considering the current Japan-Korea relations.
No matter what promises the Japanese make to Koreans, they always break their promises, so there is no need to be concerned about it. Since this has already been experienced often in conventional diplomacy, if it is a promise made to Koreans, we must be prepared for it to be invalid from the beginning and take it as a reality.(Jiji Shimpo, October 7, 1897)
It seems that South Korea’s disloyal attitude toward Japan is nothing new.
