Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets

Shuji Terayama

Before we understood that “justice” is a political term, we had to pay for it with a long stretch of time and great sacrifice.
In this situation, when we see the politically weak masses demanding “another justice” and “another law,” doesn’t the demand itself already reflect the ugly reality that they can only accept being managed and ruled, without conditions?
“Evil is nothing but justice in disguise.” One society’s justice is another society’s evil.
“Since anything goes in this world anyway, everyone has turned into ‘anything goes.’”
In fact, judging only from their outward lives, modern salarymen (that is, most Japanese people) are already in despair. So when they try to find “something fun” in this stagnant age, they play mahjong, play pachinko, or go to the racetrack and bet a little money to see if they can double it. Because of this, they feel more and more that the work they do is only a temporary way to get by. This is the early symptom of “hope sickness.” “My life now looks like a passive retreat from the world, but sooner or later I will surely make a living from literature.” Bar hostesses are not the only ones who say this.
In fact, there is no such thing as a “true self.” When they get tangled up in this sense that their job is only a “front,” they have to come down with “hope sickness” to ease their distress. Those who cannot ease their distress this way are the salarymen who die on the second floor of mahjong parlors.
They no longer even have prejudices. Neither prejudices of thought nor prejudices of taste. Of course, Leo Lowenthal pointed out in Studies in Prejudice: “When prejudice exists, there is a latent tendency inside the individual. This tendency can sometimes become an external stimulus that rescues a person from a closed-off society.” But he did not notice that the salarymen who died had been treated, without distinction, as nothing more than parts of the system.
A mechanical social system mass-produces identical people, and if this goes on, people will gradually stop knowing who they are. In the past, if you had run a survey asking “What is frightening?”, most people would surely have answered “monsters.” Today, most people would answer “the atomic bomb.” But what is truly frightening may be neither the atomic bomb nor monsters, but “peace and quiet.”
An age of “peace and quiet” lacks romance. It means the despair of those who know full well that they will achieve nothing in the future. “If you knew in advance what would happen tomorrow, who would still care to live until tomorrow!” Let’s set this romantic sigh aside for a moment and look at the salarymen again. They know perfectly well “what will change before they retire.” Modern ghost stories tell of exactly this “horror” of peace and quiet.
This shows that single destructionism must be a “real action” that can shake one’s whole life even more. What it challenges is everything we have been given, so without changing jobs, moving house, and running away from home again and again, tirelessly… it means nothing. I am by no means encouraging progress; I am only encouraging movement. Moving after the coordinate axes are fixed always opens up a fresh view. I believe that if we want to challenge a closed-off society and the state of “already knowing what tomorrow will bring,” this age surely needs this kind of endless movement. C. Wilson was right: “Faced with a challenge, there are civilizations that meet it soundly, and civilizations that fail to meet it.” Still, even if changing jobs and moving house seem to do nothing, I think it is necessary to try this single destruction.