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Foreword

As the first atomic bomb detonated above him, Tetsuhiko Uehiro was in the men's room of a train station, one stop away from his appointed meeting place with a group of teenage workers. Feeling the shock and heat, he dove out the door, ducking and rolling away from the blast as he had learned in judo. Waves of thermonuclear fire rolled over him, searing his outer garments; radioactive dust rained on his head and shoulders.

Uehiro picked himself up and began walking through horrific fires and devastation toward the next train station. There he found only the charred cinders of a few of the teenagers who belonged to his work group. For the next four days he wandered through the radioactive rubble in his underwear, searching for anyone he knew, offering what little aid he could. Countless disfigured faces cried out for water and screamed in the pain of unrelievable burns; thousands more were burned and distorted into unimaginable shapes. After four days of searing these memories into his increasingly benumbed brain, Uehiro staggered ten miles more to his home outside Hiroshima and collapsed.

For six months thereafter, bedridden Uehiro fought for his life day and night against radiation sickness. His skin was scarred, his hair fell out, and his internal organs were ridden with radioactivity. Almost miraculously, he began to recover. But while bedridden, Uehiro was not idle. His mind was working continuously on a single problem: how to avoid future war and conflict. Today, we might call his experience posttraumatic stress. But instead of asking people's aid, this amazing man tried to think how he could solve the problem in the future. Inevitably, he returned to the same conclusion: as long as hate and conflict remain in people's minds, there will be no end to armed conflict.

How to eliminate hate and conflict from people's minds? This seemed a tall order. As he gradually recovered from his radiation sickness, Uehiro began walking across the country, networking with people, telling them what he had experienced, asking their help in leading more moral lives. Among those whom he met and conversed with were many who were inspired, even physically healed, by his burning devotion and commitment to the cause of moral living. An acquaintance in a rural part of Japan set up a group to study Uehiro's teachings and try to practice his principles. They rose early every morning, pledged themselves to avoid hate, envy, greed, and any kind of interpersonal disharmony, and spent time cleaning public places and doing minor public service works.

The movement spread. Fifty years later the Practical Ethics Association, born of Uehiro's search for a more practical and ethical lifestyle, is the largest nonreligious association in Japan, numbering nearly four million members. Every morning, in every part of the country, thousands of Japanese get up before the sun rises to join the association's Early Risers' Club. Committed to working personally and collectively for a more ethical society, they are comprised largely of housewives, but include businessmen, farmers, fishermen, students, retired persons, and others from all walks of life. In a country noted for its hierarchy, the association is notably egalitarian.

Its current president is Eiji Uehiro, the son of the late Tetsuhiko. Eiji also observed the tragedy of Hiroshima firsthand 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