Item 2023-013/005(07) - Fusé Lecture

Item includes a recording of Fusé’s suicide seminar at a Buddhist organization in 2003. In the lecture, Fusé provides the Western etmology of the word ‘suicide,’ and its negative connotations (e.g. being defined as self-murder) in Western countries and contrasts it with over 30 different terms used to describe acts of suicide in Japanese, with indication of the motive and the number of people involved in the suicide. He makes additional references to Eastern and Western cultural differences as he compares Western individualism to Japanese collectivism, which are further showcased in the Western film “Shane” (1953) and the Japanese comedy “Tora-san.” As this lecture took place during the Iraq War, Fusé discusses the suicide attacks committed by Al-Qaeda hijackers that crashed two passenger airplanes into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City on September 11, 2001. He explains that the tragedy caused his pacifist stance to waver momentarily and reignited memories of his own wartime experience, with memories of kamikaze pilots flying overhead and his military training as a teenager in the final years of the Second World War that prepared him for the same fate, had the war not ended in 1945.