As We Saw Him: Masao Miyoshi and the Vocation of Critical Struggle

The essay attempts to present and thus see the literary scholar, activist, and thinker Masao Miyoshi as we constantly saw him crossing the boundaries between the United States and Japan and eventually enlarging his vision to include the world at large. But the act of seeing Miyoshi and his ceaseless effort to overcome the boundaries separating people was paralleled by his voracious desire to cross the boundaries that divided the disciplines of knowledge. The force that lay behind the impulse to expand his acquisition of knowledge was an unrestrained restlessness that prompted a reaching out to know areas and regions that exceeded his chosen academic specialty. He saw this move to the margins and thresholds as the basis of a proper vocation of criticism, which, he believed, had disappeared from the centers of geographic and intellectual power.