cant personal vindication that brings a kind of closure to his life-long
political stance. This issue of "war responsibility" has been the bone of
contention underlining the critical perspective of Ōe's writings, both
his fiction and his essays. As recently as 1986, in a speech he gave at
"The Challenge of Third World Culture" conference at Duke Univer-
sity, Ōe, playing the role of the "disappointing clown," took issue with a
Japanese foreign policy full of discriminatory practices toward neigh-
boring countries, a continual frustration for him as a Japanese citizen:

. . . Japan appeared on the international scene clearly as a Third World
nation from about the time of the Meiji Restoration ( 1868). In her pro-
cess of modernization ever since, she has been a nation blatantly hostile
to her fellow Third World nations in Asia, as evidenced by her annex-
ation of Korea and by her war of aggression against China. Her hostility
toward her neighbors continues even today . . . even now, more than
forty years after the end of the war, I do not think that we Japanese have
done enough to compensate for what we can compensate for--either
economically or culturally. . . . We are often aggressors toward nations of
the Third World, of which we ourselves are in fact a member. The burden of
that image weighs heavily on my back as I stand before you now. ³

When Japan surrendered unconditionally to the Allied forces on
August 15, 1945, Ōe was ten years old, a patriotic boy ready to die at the
command of the Emperor. The spontaneous sense of elation and liber-
ation among Japanese at the end of the war was soon replaced by
uneasiness about the impending crisis of the Cold War. For the sensi-
tive and precocious Ōe, the Occupation of Japan ( 1945-1952) turned
out to be doubly humiliating. On the one hand, Japanese adults who
made an about-face overnight on emperor worship, had betrayed the
young patriot and abandoned him; on the other hand, the United
States, in the name of fighting the Communist Menace, took away the
freedom of speech and the spirit of tolerance and democracy given to
the Japanese with such generosity at the beginning of the Occupation.
Ōe could forgive neither country for the duplicity of its actions. This
double sense of betrayal had an enormous impact on him as it cut deep
into his own vulnerability.

In his passionate espousal of progressive issues that range from nu-
clear disarmament, the environment, A-bomb victims and dissident
writers to minorities and the handicapped, Ōe has unleashed enormous
energy and imagination in playing, through his writings, the roles of

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