A Will.
Yoro Takeshi Thinks!
Hello, everyone. Today, I'm very nervous, can do nothing but go on as always. Now I'm picking up "A Will" written by Yoro Takeshi whom I look up to as my only intellectual master.
I guess most of foreign people don't know him, haven't ever heard his name although I believe he's definitely one of the foremost thinkers of contemporary Japan.
Yoro Takeshi, now 80 years old, used to work as a professor specializing in dissecting cadavers at the Medical Department of the Tokyo University til 1995. To say simply, he's just a retired anatomist.
Yoro Takeshi came to be well-known as the author of his 2003 "Baka no Kabe" (What A Fool Believes). The best-seller's sold over 4.3 million copies to date in Japan.
What ensures his popularity is his intelligence. We're always surprised at not just a lot of knowledge, however also his thinking way.
He always says. Our consciousness tends to be stuck up, desires to control our bodies. But it can manipulate nobody in fact. For example, we can't switch on consciousness when we wake up from a sleep. Consciousness can't stand alone, because it's only a part of a brain in a body. That's forgotten all the time, however.
Consciousness tends to be proud, dislikes something beyond expectations. So we, mankind, have built cities all over the world for a long time. Cities are what we make, reducing something beyond expectations as much as possible, ignoring nature of our bodies. So it makes us kind of wrong somehow to keep living in urban areas.
What truly makes our life good?
What matters in our urban spaces?
Yoro Takeshi thinks about those, "A Will" contains his ideas of his 80 years. Nobody knows when death comes. So this might be, as he says, the vol. 1 of his will.