Two Europe

 The following article is an English translation of our March 31, 2018 blog post, 二つのヨーロッパ: 本に溺れたい, (supported by DeepL). We hope you enjoy it.

　Recently, the Pacific side of Kanto has been blessed with fine weather, and the days have been really pleasant. Truly, the weather on the Pacific side of the Japanese archipelago in early spring is wonderful.

◆Climate and mind/body
　Weather directly affects the biorhythms of the mind and body. It is not surprising, then, that such a bleak faith as Calvinism has been accepted by people north of the Alps, where the climate is cloudy and dreary for two-thirds of the year.　The movie "Babette's Dinner" (1987), with its depiction of a chilly village in Jutland, gives some idea of this.

バベットの晩餐会 Babette's Gøstebud (1987年)

◆France, a European Superpower
　France has traditionally been the largest superpower in Europe in terms of population and area. This means that it is an ethnically, linguistically, and culturally complex nation that has been repeatedly annexed (militarily and politically) by successive French royal families. Related to this, in Europe, only France and Spain face both the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean.

◆France, a Mosaic Nation
　France is a kind of mosaic-like complex nation with contrasting geographies and populations in northwestern and southern Europe at the same time. It is no wonder that France has been constantly shaken to the right and left by the great wave of revolution and counter-revolution in the modern era. It is also the Frankish Kingdom that inherited the Roman Empire as a Catholic state and handed it over to northwestern Europe.

◆French hierarchical structure and the North-South problem in Europe
　The general disdain of the French upper class (or "wealthy and educated people") for the middle and lower classes is the same structure as the contempt of Northwestern Europeans for Southern Europeans (Italians and Iberians) as "lazy." It may also be an expression of the inverted and twisted mentality of Northwestern Europeans, as seen in Goethe's Italian travels, of their longing, envy, and jealousy toward Southern Europe.

◆The Possibility of Western Europe in the 16th Century
　If there is a path of salvation for contemporary Western Europe, I believe it is to re-tread the path of Montaigne (1533-92) and Cervantes (1547-1616) in the 16th century.