Ogata-San and Matsuda clash over the article

Ogata-San and Shigeo Matsuda clash over an article that condemns Japan’s former education system and the influential men who upheld it. Their exchange turns a dispute over words into a reckoning with responsibility: Ogata-San defends the sincerity and patriotic purpose of his generation, while Matsuda argues that their efforts served a disastrous cause. The scene offers no easy reconciliation. Instead, its final image—Ogata-San watching Matsuda walk away, then smiling at the confidence of the young—leaves the disagreement unresolved and its generations separated by sharply different accounts of the past.

Background and the article

Ogata-San has come to speak with Matsuda about an article that criticized the older educational order and included attacks on figures such as Ogata-San and Dr Endo. He says he had intended to visit for several days but let the matter slip his mind; now he wants Matsuda to explain what led him to write it. The request is not merely for a defense of the article. Ogata-San says he is worried and hopes to return to Fukuoka with his mind at rest, making the conversation a personal attempt to understand how a former acquaintance has come to judge their shared past so differently.

Matsuda initially gives little away. He takes a deep breath, looks down, and later prods a pebble with his shoe before sighing, looking up, and adjusting his spectacles. His first explanation is that much has changed in recent years. When pressed, he says the country now lives in a different age from the period when Ogata-San was influential. The pauses and downward glances make his opening hesitant, but not his ultimate position: the change of age, for him, has changed what can be said about the past and how its consequences should be judged.

The argument over education and responsibility

Matsuda eventually states that he believed, and still believes, what he wrote. In his account, children in Japan were taught damaging lies and, worse, were taught not to see or question. He connects that education to the country’s descent into what he calls its greatest disaster. His charge is therefore broader than a personal accusation against Ogata-San: it implicates a system that trained children to accept claims without scrutiny, as well as the adults who preserved and transmitted its values.

Ogata-San rejects Matsuda’s explanation of the country’s defeat. He argues that Japan lost because it lacked guns and tanks, not because its people were cowardly or its society shallow. He invokes the hard work of men like himself and Dr Endo, insisting that they cared deeply for the country and labored to preserve and pass on what they considered the correct values. His defense distinguishes patriotic intention from the criticism Matsuda directs at the results, though it does not answer Matsuda’s claim about what children were taught or what those teachings enabled.

Matsuda does not dispute that the older men were sincere or hardworking. He says that their energy was spent in a misguided, even evil, direction, while also allowing that they could not have known where their actions would lead. He regards that lack of foresight as no reason to deny the harm. The difference between the men thus lies partly in how they interpret the same commitment: Ogata-San presents devotion as evidence of honorable service, whereas Matsuda treats sincerity as compatible with grave error and lasting consequences.

The Nishizaka case and the parting

Ogata-San asks who taught Matsuda to speak this way and protests that he had been only a small boy at the time, too young to know what the older men experienced or achieved. Matsuda answers with a specific example from Ogata-San’s career: the dismissal and imprisonment of five teachers at Nishizaka, which he places in April of a year he does not fully specify. This reference gives the abstract argument a concrete institutional history. The dispute is no longer only about national defeat or educational ideals; Matsuda points to people punished under the order Ogata-San helped represent.

Matsuda says those men are now free and will help lead the country toward a new beginning. Ogata-San calls the prospect nonsense and returns to the effort and devotion of men like Dr Endo, asking how Matsuda can judge what he was too young to understand. Matsuda does not try to prolong the argument. He says there is no time to discuss the whole matter, excuses himself, picks up his briefcase, bows to both people present, and sends his regards to Jim before walking away. The movement toward departure closes the exchange without settling its central question: whether good intentions can answer for the historical effects of the values they served.

Aftermath and significance

Ogata-San watches Matsuda disappear down the hill and remains standing silently for several moments. When he turns back to Etsuko, he smiles around the eyes and reflects on how confident young men are, adding that he supposes he was once much the same and very sure of his opinions. The reaction is neither a recantation nor a renewed argument. The smile and self-comparison suggest that he recognizes something of his former certainty in Matsuda, even as the scene leaves their judgments unreconciled.

The encounter stages postwar disagreement as a struggle over both historical evidence and the authority to interpret it. Ogata-San appeals to the intentions and sacrifices of his generation; Matsuda answers with the consequences of its teaching and the example of the five teachers at Nishizaka. Their exchange also marks a reversal in status: the man Ogata-San remembers as a boy now speaks with authority, while Ogata-San must defend an era in which he was influential. Matsuda’s confidence in a new beginning remains in tension with the older man’s skepticism, and the parting leaves the reader with neither a shared account of the past nor a settled verdict on how responsibility should be assigned.