美食家としても有名だった古川緑波のグルメ・エッセイ、河出文庫『ロッパ食談』。『あまカラ』、『ロッパ食談』、『ロッパ悲食記』を再編集したエッセイ集。
これを読むと、ロッパが育ちのいい江戸っ子だったことがよく分かる。いかにも都会風で、時代が全然ちがうが、永井荷風でも読むつもりで読むとちょうどいいかもしれない。
食について、戦前と戦後のようすのちがいがわかるのも興味深い。東京にギョーザ屋ができたのが意外と遅くて戦後だったとか、戦前コカコーラはコカコラと短く発音して、色もほとんど透明だったとか、そんなことがおもしろい。「蛍光燈の下に美味なし」と、食事の見た目について語ったりしているのも時代。あと、やたらに食に関する本を読んでいて、その感想が並べてある。
瀟洒っていうのか、軽く軽く書いて小気味よい。矢野誠一『エノケン・ロッパの時代』（岩波新書、2001年）なんかをみると、とくに晩年にはずいぶん苦労をしていたと暗く書かれているが、こういうエッセイは別物として眺めるべき。『古川ロッパ昭和日記』など、青空文庫でもいくつかロッパの文章を読める。
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The book Recidivist Disabled* by YAMAMOTO Joji exposes a shocking situation of Japan today in which many disabled persons are socially and systematically made into “criminals.” The book was published firstly in 2006, and in 2009 as the paperback edition.
Yamamoto shows that 3 of 10 inmates in Japan have an intellectual disability in the statistic data of 2004. In addition, over 70% of inmates with intellectual disability are recidivists and 20% of them are put in jail over 10 times. How should we interpret these data?
For this kind of data, many people tend to believe that the intellectual disabled should be unable to recognize the social morality, and so be a threat to the social order. In fact, the murder case which “a man with a lesser panda cap,” who were reported as mildly intellectually disabled, committed in 2001 pervasively evoked such interpretation. The author reveals how much ignorance and prejudice it involves.
The phrase “over 10 recidivation” may be seemingly monstrous; but on the other hand it means that the crimes are so petty. If it were so serious, he/she could not commit crimes so many times because she/he should stay in prison for a long time.
Yamamoto points out that inmates with disability committed offenses such as shoplifting or dine-and-dash because they could not help in order to survive. The “antisocial” behavior is caused by insufficiency of social welfare in Japan today.
In fact, as Yamamoto says, in cases of petty crimes committed by the disable, legal judgement depends on whether he/she has his/her caretaker or not. Prisons virtually functions as a substitute of social welfare.
This is only an abstract. You should feel more depressed if you read concrete and minute descriptions of the facts in this book.
*山本譲司 『累犯障害者』 新潮社、2006年．[The English title is only for the blog entry.]
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For these months, I have read some works on French Revolution. Although I can hardly use the French language, Japanese is not an inconvenient language to access studies on French Revolution. Let me show it:
This is far from an exhaustive list of Japanese translations in the field, and I actually have read only some of them. However, as not a proper historian, I find interesting that the study field appears to be an exhibition of a variety of historical interpretations.
In addition, it makes the situation more complicated that each historical interpretation of the Revolution has a certain interrelation with national or cultural identity of each nation and classe, as KUMAGAI Hideto shows the case of Germany in the 19th century in his recent book (*Note).
It is also the case for the Japanese situation; the French Revolution has been often regarded as a symbol of positive modern values which the Japanese society should follow. In recent decades, conscientious historians have relativized such an idealized vision, but at the same time it may be undeniable that the revision of historical recognition could authorize some kind of Japanese nationalism against the so-called modern Western cultures.
Note: KUMAGAI Hideto, The French Revolution as a Mirror: The Age of German Historicism in the 19th Century. 2015. 『フランス革命という鏡』白水社．(The English title is just a translation by the blog author.)
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