as a child, prayed for his father's recovery, and ultimately followed in his father's footsteps in building this huge nonprofit organization. The association now has its own assembly halls and offices, and holds significant influence in the Diet, where Eiji Uehiro himself is friends with the leaders of Japan's business and politics. The association publishes its own periodicals, and Eiji Uehiro has authored over a dozen books, of which this is one of the latest.
In the 1990s the association set up a research unit which works with the Carnegie Council in New York and the Eranos Foundation in Switzerland, among others, in projects likely to improve ethics education and international understanding. These include research teams, graduate scholarships, awards for exemplary teaching and scholarship, and international conferences that seek ethical commonalities between East and West. At the same time, Uehiro lectures tirelessly, traversing every town and prefecture of the country several times a year, addressing issues of timely ethical concern and inspiring millions in his charismatic way.
Uehiro's Practical Ethics Association is not a religion, but is deeply grounded in a faith in the goodness and improvability of humankind and in our ability to find and follow a more sustainable lifestyle within the limits of our natural environment and resources.
This book, Practical Ethics for Our Time, lays bare some of the latest thinking of Japan's elite about Japan's role in the modern world, its family traditions, and its relations with the environment, capitalist consumerism, and the United States. These and many other issues of timely concern to Americans are all revealed without the equivocation and tech-manual English all too common in Japanese English. A must-read for those interested in the thinking of Japan's moral majority, it also contains countless hints— sometimes provocative, sometimes funny, sometimes disturbingly astute—as to what it means to live as a modern human approaching the 21st century.
Translation of Japanese into English is a difficult art. When Yasunari Kawabata was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1968, he demurred that the prize should go to Edward Seidensticker, the scholar and translator who made his books available in English. While Seidensticker's translations were far from literal renditions, they gave a sense of the flavor and flair which infused Kawabata's novels in the original Japanese.
Using Seidensticker's experience as a guide, I tried as much as possible to convey meaning above and beyond literal wording in many cases. The Japanese language many times argues by repetition rather than by syllogism, and the elements in an argument may be arranged in a very different order than a Western reader would expect. Some points which seem elementary and obvious to Western readers are stressed repeatedly, while other points which are obvious to Japanese readers are not mentioned explicitly at all. In such cases, I took pains to convey the meaning of the text in ways most comprehensible to the English reader, reducing reiterations, supplying missing premises, and on rare occasion rearranging the order of the argument to make it more natural and accessible in English.
Since this book was originally published in 1991, the Western press has made much of the slowing of the Japanese economy and shocking murders by deranged cultists and teenagers. Some Americans have rejoiced that Japan is not invulnerable to the economic slumps and tragedies seen in Western societies. Despite whatever collective soul-searching these incidents occasioned, they have not fundamentally changed the Japanese world-view. Japanese measure the health of economies on their import-export balances; on this score, Japan remains quite healthy. The tragedies of a subway gassing or teen violence still do not approach 2 percent of America's rates for similar homicides. No one is more cognizant of the state of the Japanese economy and society than author Eiji Uehiro, whose foundation's incomes directly reflect the surplus and largesse of the economy, and whose life work is devoted to ethical education against crime and corruption. Uehiro's perspectives on everything from economic to family issues may remind many Americans that their value judgments are not shared universally.
Throughout this project, I relied on periodic conferences with Mr. Uehiro himself and his advisors at the Uehiro Foundation on Ethics and Education. I wish to thank Akiko Ochiai, Tomoko Iwasawa, and the many students and colleagues who offered moral support and advice on English translation. I also wish to thank the staff at Charles E. Tuttle for their efficient and conscientious production of this text, which would not otherwise be available in English.
—Carl Becker, PhD., DLitt.
Kyoto University, Japan
October, 1997
CHAPTER 1
Dangers to the
Natural Environment
Pollution of the Skies and Seas
The Beauty of Nature
Until this century, Japanese people lived among beautiful woods and forests, grassy parks and gardens of flowers, pure water, and fresh air. This was true even in the cities, not to mention the suburbs and remote villages. Aerial photographs taken early in the century show our cities studded with natural greenery. Even when we engaged in commerce or industry, we could feel the presence of nature around us. Although our daily lives were urban, the greenery around us refreshed us and kept us feeling pure and natural.
In the past, a five-minute walk from a residential district would lead to a different world—a beautiful grove where we could breathe the fresh air and refresh our souls. We could see the sun shining above the trees or feel a gentle breeze blowing. Beyond the trees, we could see fields bathed in sunshine. We could smell the fragrance of wildflowers. The water in the babbling brooks was clear and pure, and we could flirt with the fish darting through them.
Even in the cities the air was fairly fresh. When we breathed in the morning air, we could feel the natural energy of health arising in our souls. Today, the refreshing feeling of the morning air is dulled by the pollution of the past night. When we think back carefully on those days, we can call up many other memories that nature has given us.
The point is that in the past even our cities enjoyed so much nature. The populations of our cities were smaller, and our urban lifestyles did not pollute the environment so much. It goes without mention that nature was even more beautiful in rural districts. Now destruction of nature has become a worldwide problem. Nature had never been damaged to this extent until the last forty or fifty years. During this short period—only an instant in the long history of humankind—we have cruelly crippled our natural environment, and now it is dying before our very eyes.
It is becoming apparent that our destruction of nature directly affects the lives and deaths of humans as well. Still, many people underestimate the severity of this destruction. They imagine that the environmental crisis is a problem only for future generations, having no immediate impact while they are still alive. They do not pause to reconsider their own behavior and activities that are causing this degradation of nature, much less to find and adopt lifestyles that would minimize the destruction.
The Illusion of a Limitless World
People used to think that the universe was shaped like a bowl, covering the flat lands of the earth. They thought that the earth was center of the universe, and that the sun, moon, and stars all moved around the earth. In Europe this was known as the Ptolemaic theory, widely believed until about three hundred years ago. Since the Vatican strongly maintained this theory as Christian orthodoxy, hardly anyone dared to publicly challenge the theory.
Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) and Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) were among the first modern Europeans to assert that the earth moved around the sun just like the other planets. Copernicus's contemporaries could not stomach his new theory, which purported to show that the earth was not the center of the universe. Copernicus first presented this theory in about 1512 but refrained from publishing his earth-shaking De revolutionibus orbium coelestium until shortly before his death in 1543. Even a century
