著者

中畑 邦夫 Kunio Nakahata

出版者

麗澤大学経済学会

雑誌

麗澤学際ジャーナル = Reitaku Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies (ISSN:21895333)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.23, pp.115-130, 2015-03-20

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In this article, I deal with unique arguments on the masses in Ango Sakaguchi’s works which was written mainly after the Pacific War, and try to show its significance.To understand Ango’s arguments on the masses, it is necessary to comprehend his concept of Karakuri. Karakuri means systems, which involve not only ‘visible systems’ such as political systems or legislative systems, but also ‘invisible systems’ such as morals, manners and customs of communities, and even habits in personal life. Karakuris are established based on human nature, or on the fact that as long as humans live, they have will to live, and to live better, and in Ango’s works, human nature is nature of masses who are faithful to their will personally in any social circumstances, and all the humans are masses radically and intrinsically. But there are cases where to be faithful to human nature impedes our life of a person, or of a community. So Karakuri must be established, even though it is contradictory to human nature. For example, during the war time, the military had to make soldiers faithful to a Karakuri called bushido, morals of soldiers that it is much better to die than to receive disgrace as captive, because Japanese would hate to battle in general, and without such Karakuri, Japanese would escape from the battles for their country.In this way, Karakuris shows peculiarity or special characteristics of persons or communities, even though they are based on universal human nature or nature of masses, and in Japan they brought about tragic situations. Never to repeat such situations, and to realize eternal peace, Ango points out absurdity and contradictory construction of conventional Karakuri as to what Japanese people are, or peculiarity of Japanese people, and insists that Japanese people go back to or evolve into, nature of masses or universality. And as a way to universality, Ango argues the importance of art which is not conventional in or peculiar to Japan, but is open to masses universally.