How Do You Live?

by Genzaburo Yoshino

people back then believed that the sun and the stars circled around the earth, as their own eyes told them. This was in part because, in accordance with the teachings of the Christian church, they also believed that the earth was the center of the universe. But if you think one step further, it’s because human beings have a natural tendency to look at and think of things as if they were always at the center.

there may be nothing more deep-rooted and stubborn than the human tendency to look at and think of things with themselves at the center.

Even among adults, the human tendency to think about things and form judgments with ourselves at the center remains deep-rooted.

people who are able to free themselves from this self-centered way of thinking are truly uncommon. Above all, when one stands to gain or lose, it is exceptionally difficult to step outside of oneself and make correct judgments, and thus one could say that people who are able to think Copernicus-style even about these things are exceptionally great people. Most people slip into a self-interested way of thinking, become unable to understand the facts of the matter, and end up seeing only that which betters their own circumstances.

when people judge their own affairs with only themselves at the center, they end up unable to know the true nature of society. The larger truth never reveals itself to them.

you can’t become a great man without having great thoughts.

when you are grown, you will have to study this and seek out the answers for yourself.

a person discovers the pleasures of painting, sculpture, and music only by experiencing them. You will never be able to make someone understand this if they have not encountered great art. And for this subject in particular, we need more than our ordinary eyes and ears. To appreciate art, you must use your inner eyes and ears. You must open your heart. And your heart, well, it opens only when you actually encounter a great work of art in person and it makes a deep impression on you.

It takes some patience and mindful effort to allow art to have this sort of impact.

If it means anything at all to live in this world, it’s that you must live your life like a true human being and feel just what you feel. This is not something that anyone can teach from the sidelines, no matter how great a person they may be.

This is how you teach, especially children. Precept, example, and meaningful experiences.

For it is only through the life you will lead, building on your many experiences and impressions, that you will be able to understand the truths in the words of these great thinkers.

That is why I think the first, most basic step in these matters is to start with the moments of real feeling in your life, when your heart is truly moved, and to think about the meaning of those. The things that you feel most deeply, from the very bottom of your heart, will never deceive you in the slightest. And so at all times, in all things, whatever feelings you may have, consider these carefully.

you will come to understand something that has a meaning that is not just limited to that one moment.

you must make a habit of thinking honestly, with your own experience as a foundation,

There are lots of people in the world who act just for appearance’s sake—in order to seem great in the eyes of others. That type of person worries first about how they are reflected in other people’s eyes, and they inadvertently end up neglecting their true selves, as they really are.

you absolutely must attend to the things you feel in your own heart, the things that move you deeply.

you should collect many experiences and, while you do, always be true to that voice in your heart.

let’s try to recollect the Fried Tofu Incident. What impressed you about that? Why were you so affected by Kitami’s protest? Why were you so deeply moved watching Uragawa trying to stop Kitami’s attack on Yamaguchi?

Notice how he asks questions that help process the experience that the child found meaningful enough to share.

“Originally, the law of gravity was a law about objects on earth. But if you separate falling objects farther and farther from the surface of the ground and lift them as far as the moon, then the relationship between those objects and the earth is no longer an earthly one. The relationship ultimately becomes celestial. Put simply, it becomes just like the relationship between two planets.

people have been working all this time just to get what we need to live, and somewhere along the line we all became tied together as tightly as if we were segments of a great net. And just as you discovered, it’s come to the point where people who have never seen or met each other have become connected in unbreakable ways. Not a soul can escape these relationships.

I think it is also important that these relationships be voluntary and not coerced, or worse interrupted, by government through socialism.

In the courts, not a day goes by without a lawsuit being filed over money, and when two countries disagree, the conflict may intensify to the point of war. The “human particle relations” that you discovered are, word for word, more like the relations of physical particles and still haven’t become a very “human” sort of human relations.

And yet countries with close trade relationships are more likely to squabble over money and unlikely to go to war.

There is nothing more beautiful than people nurturing goodwill toward their fellow beings. And those are the human relations that humans truly deserve.

But i dont think this is a reasonable goal. It is better to have an econimic relationship globally than restrict yourself to close personal, we might say tribal, relationships to the exclusion of others.

create? You take many things from the world, but I wonder what you will give back in return?

The work of making things itself makes it possible for people to be truly human. This is not just a matter of food and clothing. In the academic world, in the art world, the producers are needed far more than the consumers.

I think everyone should have a heroic spirit, whether they’re a man or a woman,

Win or lose, heroes are heroes!

When I think how sometimes people can be brave enough to overcome any fear, any hardship, it gives me a feeling I can hardly describe. To charge right at the things that are painful and difficult, break through to the other side, and take pleasure in that—don’t you think that’s truly fantastic? The greater the suffering, the greater the joy in overcoming it. So you don’t fear death anymore! I think that’s what a heroic spirit is all about.

people built our world only by working together, and through that mutual effort we escaped from our primitive state. Using very simple tools at first and eventually discovering all sorts of technology and machines, step by step we changed the natural world into a better place for people to live. And along with that, we created art and science and gradually changed human life into a bright and beautiful thing.

The world is full of people who are not bad, but weak, people who bring unnecessary misfortune upon themselves and others for no reason but weakness. A heroic spirit that’s not devoted to human progress may be empty and meaningless, but goodness that is lacking in the spirit of heroism is often empty as well.

Oh, how could he pretend to be a deep thinker, a great person, with this memory clinging to him? How could he deceive himself?

Falling short of being a good person should never stand in the way of becoming a better person.

Why don’t you be brave and take responsibility for what you did, as far as you are able?”

Good advice: The best way to deal with the remorse of being a coward is to stop being a coward about it.

to do it honestly, without excuses. What happens after that is not for you to think about now.

If a rightful ruler loses his throne, he will think himself unfortunate and be sad that he has no throne. He will be sad for his present self, because he who should have a throne now has none. Similarly, a one-eyed man also feels unfortunate, because although we expect human beings to be born with two eyes, he lacks that. If people naturally had only one eye, you can be sure that nobody would be crying over being one-eyed. No, on the contrary, people who had been born with two eyes would be crying at the thought of being deformed. Copper, we must try to think deeply about this. There are important truths to be found here. They can teach us much about the meaning of human sadness and suffering. As we move through our lives as human beings, all of us, young and old, encounter sadness, hardship, and pain, each in our own way. Of course, those are not things anyone ever wishes for. But it is thanks to sadness, hardship, and pain that we come to know what a true human being is.

This relates to the proof from morality argument for the existence of God, which I find persuasive. We have regret because we know we should ne better. A tree has no regrets and a tree does not aspire to greatness.

we must find a way to draw knowledge from all our suffering and sadness!

just knowing the meaning of the words was a very different thing from grasping the truth expressed by those words.

they admired great things for what they were, and had the spirit to understand their value.

“They had a deep admiration for great things and the artifacts of distant countries, and welcoming these, they steadily enriched Japanese culture. And then the Japanese people, too, advanced the progress of the human race in their Japanese way . . .”