Shigeo Matsuda publishes an article criticizing old-style education

Shigeo Matsuda’s article criticizing old-style education makes a published argument about the past become a present conflict. Matsuda says that children in Japan were taught damaging lies and discouraged from seeing or questioning; Ogata-San, by contrast, insists that the educators he knew had worked sincerely to preserve the country’s values. Their disagreement is not simply about schooling. It concerns whether good intentions can excuse a system’s consequences, and how the postwar generation should judge those who helped sustain it.

The Article and Its Argument

The article is discussed after its publication, rather than reproduced for the reader. In a later conversation, a journal is identified uncertainly as The New Education Digest, where an article had appeared. Matsuda affirms that he believed what he wrote and still stands by it. His central charge is that children were taught falsehoods and, more consequentially, taught not to see or question. He connects that failure of education to Japan’s descent into what he calls the most disastrous period in its history.

Matsuda’s accusation thus reaches beyond particular lessons or teaching methods. As he presents it, education shaped the habits by which a society could accept what it was told instead of examining it. The article makes that suppression of scrutiny a source of national harm. Its claim is severe because it treats the disaster not as an inexplicable rupture, but as connected to what children had been taught and to the limits placed on their judgment.

The Dispute with Ogata-San

Ogata-San hears the article as an attack on the family name and on the work of his generation. In retrospect, Etsuko understands that Jiro had been promising to deal with the matter promptly and write to his old school friend, while waiting for Ogata-San to return to Fukuoka so that the affair might be forgotten. Jiro’s repeated assurances kept the dispute alive without forcing him to resolve it. Etsuko recognizes this as characteristic of his way of approaching awkward confrontations, and recalls that she herself had wanted him to make his position clearer to his father.

The disagreement becomes explicit when Matsuda meets Ogata-San. Matsuda says he knows of Ogata-San’s career, citing the dismissal and imprisonment of five teachers at Nishizaka. He adds that the men are now free and will help bring about a new dawn. The reference gives the argument a concrete institutional history: Matsuda is not speaking only in generalities about what children were taught, but pointing to educators punished in connection with the old order. He then excuses himself rather than prolonging the discussion.

Ogata-San answers from a different account of defeat and responsibility. Japan, he argues, lost the war because it lacked guns and tanks, not because its people were cowardly or its society shallow. He invokes his own hard work and that of Dr Endo, insisting that they cared deeply for the country and sought to preserve the correct values. His defense rests on sincere devotion and material explanations for military defeat, whereas Matsuda’s criticism concerns the direction and effects of that devotion. Matsuda grants that Ogata-San and his colleagues may have been sincere and hardworking, but argues that their energies were spent in a misguided and evil direction. He does not deny their effort; he contests what that effort served.

Family Stakes and Delayed Confrontation

The article’s consequences unfold within an already strained conversation among generations. Etsuko wants Jiro to clarify his position to his father, but knows that he would consider the issue none of her business. She also expects him to be tired and impatient at night, and says that open discussion of such matters was not customary in their marriage. Her silence is therefore part of the article’s domestic aftermath: although the argument concerns public values and an old friend’s publication, it also exposes how difficult it is for the family to speak plainly about conflict.

The interrupted chess game between Jiro and Ogata-San, and Ogata-San’s return to studying its pieces the following evening, frame the delay before the decisive conversation. Ogata-San announces that the next day is the big day, while the article dispute has already persisted through Jiro’s promises and evasions. Matsuda’s eventual directness contrasts with that postponement. His short account of the article’s argument and the Nishizaka teachers forces into the open what Jiro had hoped might simply fade after his father left.

Generational Judgment and Aftermath

Matsuda’s position is not presented as a simple dismissal of the older men’s character. He accepts that they may have acted with devotion, but separates honorable intention from historical effect. That distinction is the article’s sharpest challenge to Ogata-San: sincerity does not settle whether the values being handed on were sound, or whether the education built around them helped produce catastrophe. Ogata-San, in turn, refuses to let defeat erase the effort and patriotism he associates with his generation.

After Matsuda walks away, Ogata-San watches him disappear down the hill and remains standing silently for several moments. He then smiles around the eyes and observes that young men are confident, adding that he supposes he was once just as certain of his opinions. The remark softens the encounter without resolving it. Matsuda leaves his accusation intact; Ogata-San’s final response turns toward the recurring certainty of youth, rather than answering the historical charge. The article therefore remains consequential beyond its publication: it provokes a conflict over education, national responsibility, and whether inherited ideals should be defended or judged by what they led people to do.