Cleaning Out The Filter — On the Occasion of the Foundation of the Congress of Japanese Culture, by Mishima Yukio
"We are merely striving to secure some fair site of choice through speech."
Cleaning Out The Filter — On the Occasion of the Foundation of the Congress of Japanese Culture1
Mishima Yukio
I was a boy without any social responsibility, so when I consider the bygone wartime era, even having later heard of the numerous sufferings that “independent men”2 then went through, I only think, “So that’s how it was.” But when I study the cultural world at that time, which was in the same position of irresponsibility, I feel that the way they were carried away by the era was somehow a little too sloppy. There is nothing wrong with that, but when I saw the speed of their postwar defection, and how those “independent men” began like women to say that they were deceived, I felt that I had seen the nature of so-called intellectuals and men of culture.