Recently, I have had more opportunities to talk with individuals who are not researchers or activists. Sometimes they visit me at my house, or we meet by chance on the street and talk for a while in a coffee shop. Such persons do not waste much time talking. Sometimes they criticize my books or ask questions about things they don’t understand. But there are other, more fundamental criticisms. Recently, some have been very severe.

I am interested in the facts of discrimination, or the mental structures that have been shaped by it, as I have been able to share from other people’s lives. Hence, I sometimes ask for interviews. When I asked one woman, I was shocked by her reply. She said: “The more I talk about it, the more I encourage discrimination. When what I have said is published in society in the form of articles and papers, no matter how it is expressed, it reminds the people reading it of miserable Buraku. I alsofeel helpless after reading such texts.” The interpretation of this is that when the living memory of a person from Buraku is converted into a record, it reproduces discrimination, and is in any case harmful to the mental health of the parties concerned. Another man stated that “it is vain to narrate”. I could not find the words to reply to these harsh statements.

As I hear these remarks, I am reminded of Tomiaki Yamada’s Critique of Everydayness. It was a statement by a woman with a disability, Ms. Azumi, who loves to read. No matter which book she read, disability, illness and death are always portrayed only as misery and despair in every area of unhappiness and sadness. She said that there was not a single book that sent the message to the disability that they were valuable. Under these circumstances, she was driven to choose death herself.

Reflecting back as a reader, the research articles I found interesting were based on the reproduction of discrimination, which is becoming more complex and more serious. In this way, research is built on the misery of others. But to stop research would leave that situation even worse. I believe that research that encourages the reader is possible. The Capital was an unsparing depiction of the misery of exploited and oppressed workers, but I gained hope when I read it.