Exclusive Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro - NHK NEWSLINE - News - NHK WORLD
https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/nhknewsline/inconversation/kazuoishiguro/
カズオ・イシグロ氏 単独インタビュー全文
https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/special/nobelprize2017/jyusho_bungaku/kazuo-ishiguro.html
あなたがされているジャーナリズムという仕事はとても重要だと思います。また、２０世紀半ばの第二次世界大戦の中ごろ、ファシズムや共産主義が台頭し、まさに政府によるプロパガンダの時代だった当時のように、人々が真実とニュースの操作について社会全体として自覚を持ち、警戒することが重要ですし、最近のフェイクニュースのからくりを理解するために、私たちも精通する必要があると思います。
I think the important thing about the literature is that it emphasizes the human experience, and the emotions, that we need to decide what we do with the knowledge that we discover.
I was thrilled when he won the Nobel Prize last year, and I'm hoping that what it is…I’m hoping that he was given the prize not just for his words, but that it was a broadening of the idea of what literature was. Because I think there are some very important works created by people like Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, and many others. There is an art form that has grown up in the last several decades which I think is a very important art form.
You may know that I was born in Nagasaki, and my mother was there when the atomic bomb fell. So I grew up, in a way, under the shadow of the memory of Nagasaki. But, also, after I came to the West, I grew up during the era of the Cold War, and at several points it became very, very tense.
I think this one of the…it seems to me countries have the same question that individuals do, who have come through difficult periods. You know, when is it better to forget? And when do you have to remember? So, these themes have really preoccupied me from the start till the present.
I think, you know, how you build a good society, as Japan has become, perhaps that depends on forcibly forgetting things, even if it seems that justice has not always been addressed. And I think this question applies to many, many countries around the world. Yes, Japan has forgotten many things, but Japan has succeeded in becoming a great liberal democracy in the free world, and I think that's a considerable achievement.
And I think many other countries have done this, and countries have issued apologies-official apologies-for things that happened generations earlier. But it's not for me to make any suggestions about Japan, but I’m making a general point here, because how one treats the past often has a lot to do with what happens now, and what happens in the future.
My wife is very good at pushing people away and telling me ‘you mustn't do that, go upstairs and do some writing’.
In my lifetime, living in the West, I've gone from somebody who came from the enemy country in the Second World War, to the country from where television, cameras, and cars come from, to a country where Haruki Murakami and a certain kind of artistic ascetic beauty, and a whole kind of popular culture of anime and games-Nintendo, and all these things come from. I'm very proud of that progress. Even clothes design, it's everywhere. And I think that's something that Japan should be proud of.
And it's easy to say, for those of us who are lucky to live in very comfortable and sophisticated parts of these countries, to say these are backward people who are frightened of change and progress and they are inward looking. But I think there is a very good case to say that we have neglected the feelings and interests of huge numbers of people. And it is partly because I think after the end of the Cold War and the collapse of communism, this idea that capitalism could just be let loose like a wild monster with no restraint. The kind of neo-liberal idea of economics and the free market ruling everything. I think it has created enormous divisions between the successful in a rich country and people who are left behind.
In many ways I think it is right that somebody should say that many people have been left behind in society but trouble comes when, in order to control the electorate and get the political support, the easiest thing to do is to choose a group that is a scapegoat, usually a minority group in a society or people who are trying to get into the society. This is a technique that was used in the 1930s by Fascists, we have to be very careful of this. And society is dividing and I find it depressing that countries that seemed to be stable for a long time are now dividing into different factions as in Spain.
It is not just that we are afraid to contradict a very powerful person who tells one version of the truth, but I think there is an idea going around that that doesn't matter, what matters is what emotions come out of that statement. So, if you feel that some incident that was supposed to have happened yesterday expresses my anger or my sentimentality about something, then let's pretend that it happened. And that is a very dangerous thing to do, and I think that is something quite new. That people don't really care if something really happened or didn't happen, as long as its fictional value is useful for some argument. I think what you do, journalism is very important, and I think it is important for all of us as a society to become as aware and alert about the manipulation of truth and news as people had to do in generations before in the era of government propaganda in the middle of 20th century when we had the Second World War, Fascism and Communism and we have to become sophisticated to understand how fake news works now.
We will be able to create babies that are more intelligent or more athletic. And then we will have a kind of apartheid in society, where some people are officially superior to others, and what will we do then with our ideas of meritocracy?
より知的でより運動能力の高い赤ちゃんを、私たちはつくることができるようになります。正式に他者よりも優れた人間というものができて、一種アパルトヘイトのような仕組みが社会にできることになりますが、そうなると、能力主義という観点についてはどうしたらよいのでしょうか。物事がこのように大きく変わっていく際にどのように社会を組織していくのかという点について、社会全体としてはまだあまり検討されていないように思います。
ゾンビの襲撃に対しては世界中で十分準備ができているにもかかわらず、実際に私たちに迫っているものに対しては、ほとんど準備ができていないということなのです。
