Scholarship can be a dangerous vocation. The ideological witch-hunt against Tadao Yanaihara, holder of the prewar chair of colonial policy at Tokyo Imperial University, began with a military ambush across the sea in China. The same nighttime clash that plunged Japan into war on the Chinese mainland in September 1937 also set in motion the academic ruin of one of 20th-century Japan's most remarkable intellectuals.
If Osip Mandelstam, the great Soviet poet, invited imprisonment and death by composing a sonnet against Stalin in 1934, Yanaihara exposed himself to the wrath of the Japanese establishment by giving a sermon-as-lecture titled "The Kingdom of God" in October 1937.
Refusing to shelter any longer behind ivory-tower disinterestedness and the mixed blessings of the Japanese gift for ambiguity, he declared: "The nation's leaders are false; they listen without hearing, see without perceiving and speak without comprehending . . . All value judgments are turned on their heads."