Between Emotion and Reason: A Dialogue between Kiyoshi Oka and Terumi Azuma in 1977

Between Emotion and Reason: A Dialogue between Kiyoshi Oka and Terumi Azuma in 1977

In 1977, as Japanese society was moving from high growth to maturity, a weekly magazine published a conversation between mathematician Kiyoshi Oka and actress Terumi Azuma. The unusual pairing of the elderly mathematician and the young actress was an event that symbolized the "popularization of knowledge" of the time. Oka explains that "people feel the world not by reason but by emotion," and Azuma responds with a sense of reality, saying that "women lose out if they live according to their emotions. This dialogue, in which reason and sensibility, philosophy and life intersected, reflected the moment when rigid ideas were transformed into light words. In the late 1970s, after the end of the university struggles and the descent of academia into the streets, the media began to treat thought as entertainment. Yasutaka Tsutsui wrote that he was "embraced" by the media because he sensed the lightness and danger of an era in which authority had collapsed and intellectuals and enter
tainers spoke on the same stage. The fact that Kiyoshi Oka's phrase "emotion beyond reason" became a headline in a weekly magazine was itself a symbol of the changing times.