How Do You Live?

by Genzaburo Yoshino

seemingly unrelated events are actually the consequences of other events or actions, and everyone in the film is acting according to what they believe to be their best interests without realising that what they do affects everyone else.

Yet below them, without a shadow of a doubt, hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of people were thinking their own thoughts, doing their own things, and living their lives. Yes, and those people, every morning, every evening, were rising and falling like the tides.

I’m sure you know all this from reading How Many Things Have Human Beings Done? but still, 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.

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.

What your mother and I want more than anything is for you to grow up into a good person. Those were also your father’s final wishes. So when I see that you hate that which is low minded, crude, and prejudiced, and that you show respect for an honest, brave spirit—how shall I put it? That comes as a tremendous relief.

“I want him to become a great man! A fine example of a human being.” I commit these words to paper, here in this book, for you. You must hold them close and never forget them. I bear them in mind myself and think that I will not forget them either.

For example, 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.

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. You will never really know these writings just by reading them, the way you would study mathematics or chemistry. 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.

The most important thing—more than what other people think, more than anything—is that you should first know for yourself, truly and deeply, where human greatness lies.

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. I hope you don’t become that sort of person. And that is why you absolutely must attend to the things you feel in your own heart, the things that move you deeply. That is what is most important, now and always. Do not forget this, and think carefully about what it means.

Over such a great distance, he thought, all the way from the earth to the moon up there, an invisible power is working.

When you think about a thing as if it were self-evident and follow it wherever it may lead, soon enough you run into a thing that you can no longer call self- evident. This is not only true when it comes to the science of physics . . .” The

That’s why, because of my idea, I feel that human particles are all connected like strings in a net, with countless other people that they haven’t met or even seen, and without even knowing

What you discovered, without anyone teaching it to you, is a great thing! Although even if it had been an academically obvious matter, I would, of course, still have respected it. To think things through to such an extent at your age is not something easily done.

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

Human beings should never be so humiliated as to damage their self-respect. But people who live in poverty are often forced to endure such indignities, so we must remember that their pride can be easily wounded.

For now, what I want you to understand clearly is what a gift it is, in a society like this, to be able to study unhindered, as you do, and to be able to expand your abilities as you wish. In Japanese, we might call it arigatai.

People working in great hardship and those of us living in relative happiness are completely cut off from each other in our daily lives, but actually we are bound together by an unbreakable net.

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

You and your classmates ought to have humble respect for Uragawa, who, even if he can’t change his station, has, without complaint, taken on a great responsibility in helping with his family’s business. To mock that from your social position, even for a moment, is to not know your own place and is a great error.

Win or lose, heroes are heroes! Actually, real heroes are great even when they lose.

Think of how old Napoleon was at this time. He was thirty-five. In a scant ten years, he had made a lightning ascent in a single breath, from the circumstances of a poor undistinguished officer whom nobody would look at twice, to the throne of the emperor. There’s no success story as spectacular as this one.

But more than humbling ourselves to these people, we must be bold enough to ask questions. Such as “What did they accomplish using these extraordinary abilities?” Or “Of what use are their extraordinary accomplishments?” And with extraordinary abilities, isn’t it possible that one might just as easily accomplish extraordinarily bad things?

First, you might notice that the great people and heroes that loomed so large in your eyes until now were, ultimately, no more than drops of water drifting in that great stream. Next, you’d surely see that no matter what things those extraordinary people did, they were exceptionally fleeting, unless their work was firmly bound to the current of the stream. Some among them, watching this stream, pour the whole of their brief lives into it, devoting their extraordinary abilities to driving it forward properly.

In the course of history, many people arise and do many different things, but ultimately, if what they do is not consistent with the flow of that current, all the accomplishments of any one person will, finally and fleetingly, fall to ruin.

Among those we call heroic and great, the only people we can truly respect are those who have helped to advance the human race. And among all the achievements of these people, only the ones that follow the flow of this advancing current have true value.

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.

“The older we get, the bigger the things are, the harder they are to take back, and the more we feel this way, compared to when we were children.

If you think only of that one thing, you’ll never be able to change it, but if your regrets help you to really learn an essential thing about being human, that experience won’t have been wasted on you. Your life afterward, thanks to that, will be better and stronger than it was before. Jun’ichi, that’s the only way for a person to become great.

“Error has the same relationship to truth as sleeping does to waking. I have seen that when one wakes from error, one turns to truth again as if revived.” These are the words of Goethe. We have the power to decide on our own who we will be. Therefore, we will make mistakes. However— We have the power to decide on our own who we will be. Therefore, we can also recover from mistakes.

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

“Copper, imagine these difficulties, and then consider the journey that Buddhist sculpture made before its introduction to Japan. Isn’t it a tremendous thing? “‘Art and knowledge know no borders.’

In this respect, it’s a unique book and particularly valuable to us now, when violence against citizens is on the rise and independent thinkers in many places around the world are being attacked by their governments.