President's Message to You - 12th Letter (June 22nd) Read the book by Shuichi Yoshida, an alumnus of Hosei University

→ English (by Google Translation)

Shuichi Yoshida. Shuichi Yoshida is a genuine best-selling author who is not to be pushed around. He has won the Bungakukai New Writer Award, the Shugoro Yamamoto Award, the Akutagawa Award after being nominated many times, the Mainichi Publication Culture Award, the Obutsu Jiro Award, the Shibata Renzaburo Award, the Minister of Education's Art Encouragement Prize, and the Chuo Koron Bungei Award. There is no telling how many more awards he will win in the future. Among them, there is a novel titled "Yokomichi Yonosuke" (Bungeishunju), which won the Shibata Renzaburo Prize.

Yokomichi Yonosuke" is modeled on Hosei University and its students, and the university and its surroundings were used as locations for the film adaptation. In "Sequel to Yokomichi Yonosuke" (Chuokoron Shinsha), as was the case with Mr. Yoshida, the main character studied at what is believed to be the Faculty of Business Administration at Hosei University, and his best friend from that time appears in the book. Incidentally, in "Parade" (Gentosha), a novel narrated by five protagonists living in the same room taking turns, the character Ryosuke Sugimoto is a third-year student in the Faculty of Economics at U of H.

In the novel, the character of Ryosuke Sugimoto is a third-year student in the Faculty of Economics at the University of H. "In the 1980's, when most university students were engaged in job hunting with the aim of getting ahead in the world, Yonosuke took a different path. When I wrote "The Plaza of Freedom" (Hosei University Press) in 2016, I mentioned Shuichi Yoshida's "Yokomichi Yonosuke. Mr. Yoshida began serializing "Sequel to Yokomichi Yonosuke" in that 2016, and published it in 2019. Including this "Sequel to Yokomichi Yonosuke," Shuichi Yoshida brilliantly and vividly depicted "another way of being human" and "ordinary people with completely different values" living in this era. Therefore, he is a "Yonosuke" who has gone "sideways. Yonosuke is the name of the main character in Ihara Saikaku's "Koshoku Ichidai Otoko," and refers to the "new townspeople" who do not fit into any framework of authority, career, or the like.

Yokomichi Yonosuke is a man who, despite taking a different path than everyone else, does not look down on the world, but rather puts himself aside and thinks only of others. He is an extremely positive person, but he is optimistic not about his own future or interests, but about meeting other people and helping others. He is optimistic in the sense that he can help others. "Life is never full of good times," he says. There are good times, there are bad times, there are the best years, and of course there are the worst years. ・・・・・The bad times are not good, but life goes on, and perhaps it is during the bad times that we meet the people we meet." (Soku, Yokomichi Yonosuke).

On January 26, 2001, two men died trying to save a man who fell onto the tracks at JR Shin-Okubo Station. They were Lee Soo-hyun, a Korean exchange student, and Shiro Sekine, a freelance photographer. Although the Korean exchange student was the topic of conversation and Mr. Sekine was conspicuously absent, the model for Yonosuke Yokomichi was that Mr. Shiro Sekine. He is the kind of person who thinks, "Don't worry, I can help you," and helps others on the spur of the moment, no matter what happens. Shuichi Yoshida created such a character, which is rare nowadays, as a "person of the future.

A characteristic of Shuichi Yoshida's writing style is that he traces what is going on in the protagonist's head and verbalizes it. People are sometimes inspired by what they see in front of them, and associations and memories come to mind, which then become a series of associations and memories. This often happens in Shuichi Yoshida's novels, regardless of the storyline. For example, in "Park Life" (Bungei Shunju), the associations extend from a Starbucks cup seen in Hibiya Park to the streets of New York and the people he meets there, and we can read what kind of life the protagonist has led. However, it is not related to the storyline, but rather, it is a space in which other colors and shapes are placed within the artwork, so to speak, and we can appreciate them together.

The other characteristic is that the words are not related to the storyline, but are instead a series of events that are scooped up and presented one after another. The novel "Akujin" (Asahi Shimbun Publications) is about a murder case. As the title suggests, the theme is what is a "bad person." In other words, it is a novel that makes one wonder "who is the real bad person? For example, there is a man who kicked a murdered woman out of his car on a mountain road before that murder. Not only is that man not charged with any crime, but he makes a laughingstock of the murdered woman. There are also several scenes in which the grandmother Fusae, who raised the main character Yuichi after his mother abandoned him, is threatened by a con man who targets the elderly. They use verbal abuse to terrorize people and make them shrink in order to sell them things. This has nothing to do with the subject matter of the murders. However, it does relate to the novel's theme, "What kind of person is really a bad person? As in "Park Life," several "real bad guys" are placed not in the story but in the space. The young man who is arrested for the actual murder must be the murderer, but by looking down on him with the bad guys placed elsewhere, the reader is left to wonder, "Is this murderer really a bad guy?" The question arises, "Is this murderer really a bad guy? In the media and social networking sites, when someone commits a crime, it is often assumed that he or she is a bad guy before the trial is over. However, each one of us should keep asking the question, "What is true evil? We should keep asking ourselves the question, "What is true evil?

Shuichi Yoshida's idea of "encounters" is also interesting. There are people who get to know each other through "dating sites," as in "The Villain," people who get to know each other through "helping" each other, as in "Yokomichi Yonosuke" and "Sequel to Yokomichi Yonosuke," and people who get to know each other completely by chance in anonymous spaces such as urban subways and parks, as in "Park Life. Of course, old friends from long ago also appear, but it is through chance acquaintanceship that stories are born. Encounters are the starting point of one's own story. As Yonosuke says, "There are people you can meet because you were in a bad period." Without disappointment, sadness, and shortcomings, there would be no encounters. By the way, encounters with books are also encounters.

By the way, I concluded Shuichi Yoshida's essay in "The Plaza of Freedom" as follows. The cameraman who kept taking pictures of hope jumped onto the railroad tracks thinking, "Don't worry, I can help you. Shuichi Yoshida overlapped himself with such a Yonosuke. As I was pondering this, Yoshida and Yonosuke overlapped exactly with someone else. Kenji Goto, who was killed in Syria on January 30, 2003.

I was already President at the time of this incident, so I was greatly shocked and watched the incident from the kidnapping and detention until it ended with the murder, and then I sent out a message on my website.

• Message from the President to all who study and work at Hosei University and its affiliated schools (February 2, 2015)

Kenji Goto, who was almost the same age as Shuichi YOSHIDA Kenji and was a student at Hosei University at the same time, left his full-time job after three months to become a journalist, just like Yonosuke, and was finally killed when he entered Syria to rescue his friend who was being held there. His book, "I Want Peace More Than Diamonds" (Shiodensha), is about Sierra Leone in western Africa, where more than 5,000 children are being turned into soldiers. After his death, this book and four others, "Born in an AIDS Village," "Prayer in Rwanda," and "If I Go to School," were published as the "Journalist Kenji Goto Nonfiction Series" (Shiodensha). We encourage you to read the books of our alumnus, Kenji Goto. It will broaden your world.

June 22, 2020
Hosei University President TANAKA Yuko