著者
水田 洋 MIZUTA Hiroshi
出版者
名古屋大学附属図書館研究開発室
雑誌
名古屋大学附属図書館研究年報 (ISSN:1348687X)
巻号頁・発行日
vol.9, pp.45-59, 2011-03-31 (Released:2011-04-18)

I was born in 1919 and grown up in a middle class area of Tokyo. The city was temporarily rather prosperous as a byproduct of WWI (1914-1918). The Factory Law was promulgated in 1916 in spite of the obstinate opposition of business and industry interests. In 1925 the Universal Suffrage Act was enacted as a result of the nationwide movement. But it was immediately followed by the Maintenance of Public Order Act which menaced by death penalty all the attempt to change the imperial regime and private ownership. Needless to say this was a legal reflection of the ruling classes' scare caused by the Socialist revolution in Russia. Marxist thought penetrated among students so widely that it was said clever students would become Marxists. The government strengthened the control in education so as to make students' reading circles the target of police arrest. The present writer was among them, clever or not. Towards the end of December 1941, I was driven out from the final course of the university by the break out of the Pacific War. In December 1942 I was on board for the military occupied Jawa as a civilian research worker attached to the army. The three books I took with me were Leviathan of Thomas Hobbes in the Everyman's Library, Farewell to Arms of Ernest Hemingway in the Penguin Books, and a volume of Japanese poetry of Mokichi Saito. On my arrival at Singapore I was astonished to find nicely supplied bookshops on the very place where the battle was deadly fought less than a year ago. There I bought Studies in Medieval Thought of G. G. Coulton and an introduction to the Russian grammar in English. I had no mind of hoping Japan's victory. While I have been working in Jawa for nearly three years, I learned how books were collected and used in the West, even in a colonial island. In the library of the Higher Law School of Jawa I found Franz Borkenau's Von feudalen zum bürgerlichen Weltbild which I had been looking for. I was lucky enough to make a TS copy of it to bring with me home from POW camp. In December 1949 I was appointed an associate professor of Nagoya University in charge of the history of economic thought. Before I begun to give a first course of lectures I had to face with a fatal problem of the poverty of the library holdings. It was not simply a result of Japan's isolation during the war but also was resulted from the very character of the former Imperial University of Nagoya which totally lacks faculties of humanities and social sciences. Since then it has been my official duty and private interest to collect the books of certain importance published from the time of Gutenberg to the ends of the Pacific War.

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