‘Boy genius’ is Japan’s new cult hero

Press, 23 August 1984, Page 21

‘Boy genius’ is Japan’s new cult hero

PETER McGILL in Tokyo reports on the assistant at Kyoto University who the Japanese media call the “intellectual messiah.”

Japan’s press calls him a “boy genius” and “the intellectual messiah” for the “young generation of the 1980 s.” His books are compulsory status accessories for Japan’s student chic and the middle-aged hip. Few of those who drop his name have read his books; fewer still claim to have understood his writing. Yet Akira Asada, 27-year-old assistant at Kyoto University’s Humanities Research Institute, has been interviewed by more than 30 Japanese magazines in less than a year, from the highbrow “Asahi Journal” (front cover) to “Playboy Japan.” Asada’s sudden debut as a media phenomenon springs from the publication last September of a philosophical tome, the title of which alone should have guaranteed a one-way ticket to instant oblivion: “Structure and Power — Beyond Semiotics.”

Intended as an overview of French structuralism and poststructuralism, the book overflows with forbidding references to philosophers such as Marx, Nietsche, Hegel, Levi-Strauss, Derrida, Foucault, Althusser, and Guatari. “We only bothered to print 2000 copies,” says a bewildered publisher, Masaru Tomioka, “but they sold out in 10 days. Now we’ve sold 103,000 copies, and demand is still strong.” Asada’s more racily-titled sequel, “On Running Away — the Adventure of Schizo Kids,” has topped 80,000 in sales since it arrived in bookstores last March. Asada adheres to the theories of “post-structuralist” French thinkers such as Derrida, who reject the belief that there are certain “absolute” or “ultimate” structures underlying human behaviour and literature. Instead of this, poststructuralists see many different

patterns, often contradictory. Asada sees industrial capitalist and State-communist societies as, belonging to “paranoid” man. Postindustrial man, on the other hand, sees no negative conflict in holding contradictory ideas or beliefs at the same time, hence Asada’s term for him as “schizo.” This message is delivered in the books in a stylish, stimulating, and provocative fashion unusual among stuffy Japanese intellectuals. In “Structure and Power,” he writes: “Never squarely answer a ‘Choose between the two’ type of

question. If possible, dislodge the question itself . . . Don’t adhere to the selfs secured consistency. Open and explode the self in all directions.” In “On Running Away,” he comforts the reader with: “Who knows where we are going? Anyhow, away, away, run, run, wherever we may end up ... A great transformation is going on. From the paranoid type of man to the schizoid type of man. From the civilisation of settling in one place to the civilisation of running away.” Asada’s philosophy of “play” has

already been, attacked as “meism,” one suspects, because of its challenge to the traditional Japanese relegation of the individual to the service of the family, company, and State. From the Left, Asada is assailed for his lack of “engagement” to the cause of social change. “Akahata” (“Red Flag”), the newspaper of the Japan Communist Party, fired off a series of critical articles. Where Asada’s writing strikes a chord is with readers aged in their early 20s, who often write him letters to say they have . found “redemption” or been “cheered up” by what he says, even though they find it hard to understand. Unlike their elders, these young Japanese are not frightened by technology and prompted to seek refuge in ecology movements of Green Power. Asada says: “They don’t feel overwhelmed by technology, but see it as a tool and in

some sense a toy. Creative as well as destructive.” - The son of two practising doctors, Asada studied maths and economics at Kyoto University before starting post-graduate studies in eighteenth century French economic theory (he is fluent in English and French) before he "got bored” and ventured into contemporary French philosophy. Prodigies being somewhat rare in Japan, most of his magazine interviewers have been more interested in his personality and lifestyle than what he writes: Asada sitting on the floor of a bookshop, Asada drinking coffee and listening to music at home, Asada dressed in casual clothes ... Being a post-industrial man may not be all it is cut out to be, however. “My lifestyle is quite ordinary, tiresome,” he confesses.— Copyright, London Observer Service.