title:My Domina ver.1.0e
by Taro Kimura
1995


AN ENCOURAGEMENT OF LEARNING
BY FUKUZAWA YUKICHI
TRANSLATED BY
DAVID A. DILWORTH AND UMEYO HIRANO

For example, if a merchant from a rural area
plucks up enough courage to dare to engage in trade with the foreigners
at Yokohama, he will first be frightened at their physical size, then at the
amounts of their money, the size of their trading house, the speed of
their steamships. He will utterly lose heart. If in the course of time he
comes forward to do business with them, he will be boggled by their
business techniques. When the foreigners press some unreasonable
negotiation, he will not only be dazzled, but will shudder at their power
and prestige. While he knows that their demands are unreasonable,
he will end up taking great losses at great personal humiliation.
However, this will be the loss not only of that person, but of the entire
nation; the humiliation not only of a sigle individual, but also of Japan.
This absurd spirit of the chonin(1) is the result of the fact that they have for
generation after generation not tasted the spirit of independence. They
have suffered under the samurai and been abused by the law courts.
Even when they met with an ashigaru(2) who earned a minimum kind of
feudal stipend, the chonin had to look up to him as a superior, and this
subservient spirit permeated the very marrow of their bones. It could
not be washed away overnight. Thus it is not unreasonable that such
cowardly people should lose heart before the bold and intrepid foreign-
ers. Their conduct demonstrates my contention that those who lack
personal independence cannot stand up independently before foreigners.
(1)merchant
(2)a samurai of very low rank


AMOK
BY STEFAN ZWEIG
TRANSLATED BY EDEN AND CEDAR PAUL

"You haven't lived in the tropics. You can hardly re-
alized the intolerable impudence of such an action on the
part of a native, and a servant at that. A yellow beast of a
China boy actually presumed to catch hold of my bicycle
and to tell me, a white 'tuan,' to stay where I was ! My
natural answer was to give him one between the eyes. He
staggered, but maintained his grip on the cycle. His slit-
like, slanting eyes were full of slavish fear, but for all that
he was stout of heart, and would not let go.
"Master stoppee here !" he repeated.
It was lucky I had not brought my automatic pistol.
Had I had it with me, I should have shot him then and
there.
"Let go, you dog !" I shouted.
"He stared at me, panic-stricken, but would not obey.
In a fury, and feeling sure that further delay would en-
able her to escape me, I gave him a knock-out blow on
the chin, which crumpled him up in the road.
"Now the cycle was free; but, when I tried to mount,
I found that the front wheel had been buckled in the fall
and would not turn. After a vain attempt to straighten the
wheel, I flung the machine in the dust beside the China
boy (who, bleeding from violence, was coming to his
senses) and ran along the road into the settlement.
"Yes, I ran; and here again, you, who have not lived
in the tropics, will find it hard to realize all that this in-
plies. For a white man, a European, thus to forget his
dignity, and to run before a lot of staring natives, is to
make himself a laughing-stock. Well, I was past thinking
of my dignity. I ran like a mad man in front of the huts,
where the inmates gaped to see the settlement doctor, the
white lord, running like a rickshaw coolie.......


THE CHRYSANTHEMUM AND THE SWORD
BY RUTH BENEDICT

The difficulties were great. During the past seventy-five
years since Japan's closed doors were opened, the Japanese
have been described in the most fantastic series of "but
also's' ever used for any nation of the world. When a seri-
ous observer is writing about peoples other than the Japa-
nese and says they are unprecedentedly polite, he is not
likely to add, "But also insolent and overbearing." When
he says people of some nation are incomparably rigid in
their behavior, he does not add, "But also they adapt them-
selves readily to extreme innovations."When he says they
are loyal and generous, he does not declare, "But also
treacherous and spiteful." When he says they are genuinely
brave, he does not expatiate on their timidity. When he says
they act out of concern for others' opinions, he does not
then go on to tell that they have a truly terrifying con-
science. When he describes robot-like disciple in their
Army, he does not continue by describing the way the sol-
diers in that Army take the bit in their own teeth even to the
point of insubordination. When he describes a people who
devote themselves with passion to Western learning, he does
not also enlarge on their fervid conservatism. When he
writes a book on a nation with a popular cult of aestheticism
which gives high honor to actors and to artists and lavishes art
upon ordinarily have to be supplemented by another which is
devoted to the cult of the sword and the top prestige of the
warrior.


THE GOLDEN BOUGH
BY SIR JAMES GEORGE FRAZER

Intellectual progress, which reveals itself in the growth of art
and science and the spread of more liberal views, cannot be
dessociated from industrial or economic progress, and that in its
turn receives an immense impulse from conquest and empire.
It is no mere accident that the most vehement outbursts of activity
of the human mind have followed close on the heels of victory,
and that the great conquering races of the world have commonly
done most to advance and spread civilization, thus healing in
peace the wounds they inflicted in war. The Babylonians, the
Greeks, the Romans, the Arabs are our witnesses in the past: we
may yet live to see a similar outburst in Japan.


THE SPIRIT OF LAWS
BY MONTESQUIEU
TRANSLATED BY THOMASSNUGENT

Were I to vindicate our right to make slaves of the negroes,
these should be my arguments:-
The Europeans, Having extirpated the Americans, were
obliged to make slaves of the Africans, for clearing such vast
tracts of land.
Sugar would be too dear if the plants which produce it were
cultivated by any other than slaves.
These creatures are all over black, and with such a flat nose
that they can scarcely be pitied.
It is hardly to be believed that God, who is a wise Being,
should place a soul, especially a good soul, in such a black
ugly body.
It is so natural to look upon color as the criterion of human
nature, that the Asiatics, among whom eunuchs are employed,
always deprive the blacks of their resemblance to us by a more
opprobrious distinction.
The color of the skin may be determined by that of the hair,
which, among the Egyptians, the best philosophers in the
world, was of such importance that they put to death all the
red-haired men who fell into their hands.
The negroes prefer a glass necklace to that gold which
polite nations so highly value. Can there be a greater proof of
their wanting common sense?
It is impossible for us to suppose these creatures to be men,
because, allowing them to be men, a suspicion would follow
that we ourselves are not Christians.
Weak minds exaggerate too much the wrong done to the
Africans. For were the case as they state it, would the Euro-
pean powers, who make so many needless conventions among
themselves, have failed to enter into a general one, in behalf
of humanity and compassion?


CAPITAL
BY KARL MARX
TRANSLATED BY ERNEST UNTERMANN

the slave-
holder considers a negro, whom he has bought, his property,
not because slavery as such entitles him to that negro, but
because he has acquired him just as he does any other com-
modity, by means of sale and purchase, but the title itself is
only transferred, not created by sale.


WAR WITH THE NEWTS
BY KAREL CAPEK
TRANSLATED BY M. and R. Weatherall

Two months later I played chess with Mr. Bellomy in the
lounge of the Hotel France at Saigon; by that time I was no
longer a paid seaman.
"Look here, Bellomy," I said to him, "you are a decent kind
of man, a gentleman as one says. Doesn't it go sometimes
against the grain to earn your living from what in actual fact
is downright slavery?"
Bellomy shrugged his shoulders. "Newts are Newts," he
grunted evasively.
"Two hundred years ago they used to say Negroes are
Negroes."
"And wasn't it true?" said Bellomy. "Check!"
I lost that game. It suddenly struck me that every move in
chess was old and had already been played by someone. Perhaps
our history has already been played too, and we shift our
fingers with the same moves to the same checks as in times
long past. It is quite likely that just such a decent and reserved
Bellomy once rounded up Negroes on the ivory coast, and
shipped them off to Haiti or to Louisiana, letting them peg out
in the steerage. He didn't think anything wrong with it then,
that Bellomy. Bellomy never things anything wrong. That's
why he's incorrigible.
"Black has lost," said Bellomy with satisfaction, and got up
to stretch himself."


THE SANE SOCIETY
BY ERICH FROMM

Science fiction is not different from
science fact, nightmares and dreams from the events of next year.
Man has been thrown out from any definite place whence he can
overlook and manage his life and the life of society. He is driven
faster and faster by the forces which originally were created by
him. In this wild whirl he thinks, figures, busy with abstractions,
more and more remote from concrete life.


THE EGOIST
BY GEORGE MEREDITH

Of necessity he associated Clara with the darker point-
ing the knife at the quick of his pride. Still, he would have
raised her weeping; he would have stanched her wounds bleed-
ing; he had an infinite thirst for her misery, that he might ease
his heart of its charitable love. Or let her commit herself, and
be cast off. Only she must commit herself glaringly, and be cast
off by the world as well. Contemplating her in the form of a
discarded weed he had a catch of the breath; she was fair. He
implored his Power that Horace De Craye might not be the
man! Why any man? An illness, fever, fire, runaway horses,
personal disfigurement, a laming, were sufficient. And then a
formal and noble offer on his part to keep to the engagement
with the unhappy wreck; yes, and to lead the limping thing to
the altar, if she insisted. His imagination conceived it, and the
world's applause besides.
Nausea, together with a sense of duty to his line, extin-
guished that loathsome prospect of a mate, though without
obscuring his chivalrous devotion to his gentleman's word of
honor, which remained in his mind to compliment him per-
manently.


THE RAINBOW
BY D.H.LAWRENCE

And why is a man more than the beast
and the cattle that serve him? It is the same thing.

Their children became mere offspring to them, they lived
in the darkness and death of their own sensual activities.
Sometimes he felt he was going mad with a sense of Absolute
Beauty, perceived by him in her through his senses. It was
something too much for him. And in everything, was this
same, almost sinister, terrifying beauty. But in the revela-
tions of her body through contact with his body, was the
ultimate beauty, to know which was almost death in itself,
and yet for the knowledge of which he would have under-
gone endless torture. He would have forfeited anything, any-
thing, rather than forego his right even to the instep of her
foot, and the place from which the toes radiated out, the little,
miraculous white plain from which ran the little hillocks of
the toes, and the folded, dimpling hollows between the toes.
He felt he would have died rather than forfeit this.


NAOMI
BY JUNICHIRO TANIZAKI
TRANSLATED BY ANTHONY H. CHAMBERS

MY HEART was a battleground for the conflict-
ing emotions of disappointment and love. I'd made the
wrong choice; Naomi was not as intelligent as I'd hoped. I
couldn't deny it any longer, much as I wanted to. I could
see now that my desire for her to become a fine woman was
nothing but a dream. I was resigned to the situation: bad
breeding is bad breeding; a girl from Senzoku ought to be
a cafe hostess, and there's nothing to be gained from giving
someone an inappropriate education. And so I abandoned
my ambitions. But at the same time, her body attracted me
ever more powerfully. I use the word "body" advisedly. It
was her skin, teeth, lips, hair, eyes-the beauty of her en-
tire form-that attracted me. There was nothing spiritual
about it. She'd betrayed my expectations for her mind, but
her body now surpassed my ideal. Stupid woman, I thought.
Hopeless. Unhappily, the more I thought so, the more I
found her beauty alluring.


THE DIARY OF A WRITER
BY DOSTEVSKY
TRANSLATED BY BORIS BRASOL

I remember, Lukeria came running after me, when I had left;
she stopped me in the street, and hurriedly she said: "God will
reward you, sir, for sheltering our dear girl! Only, don't tell her
that she is so proud!"
Well, proud! I am fond of the proud ones myself. The proud
ones are particularly beautiful when...when you no longer doubt
your power over them.-Eh? Oh, mean, maladroit man! Oh, how
pleased I was!


THE GAMBLER
BY DOSTEVSKY
TRANSLATED BY CONSTANCE GARNETT

"You know that I consider myself at liberty to say anything
to you, and sometimes ask you very candid questions. I repeat,
I'm your slave, and one does not mind what one says to a slave,
and cannot take offence at anything he says."
"And I can't endure that 'slave' theory of yours."
"Observe that I don't speak of my slavery because I want
to be your slave. I simply speak of it as a fact which doesn't
depend on me in the least."
"Tell me plainly, what do you want money for?"
"What do you want to know that for?"
"As you please," she replied, with a proud movement of her
head.
"You can't endure the 'slave' theory, but insist on slavish-
ness: 'Answer and don't argue.' So be it. Why do I want
money? you ask. How can you ask? Money is everything!"
"I understand that, but not falling into such madness from
wanting it! You, too, are growing frenzied, fatalistic. There
must be something behind it, some special object. Speak
without beating about the bush; I wish it."
She seemed beginning to get angry, and I was awfully
pleased at her questioning me with such heat.
"Of course there is an object," I answered, "but I don't
know how to explain what it is. Nothing else but that with
money I should become to you a different man, not a slave."
"What? How will you manage that?"
"How shall I manage it? What, you don't even understand
how I could manage to make you look at me as anything but a
slave? Well, that's just what I don't care for, such surprise
and incredulity !"
"You said this slavery was a pleasure to you. I thought it
was myself."
"You thought so!" I cried, with a strange enjoyment. "Oh,
how delightful such naivete is from you! Oh, yes, yes, slavery
to you is a pleasure. There is-there is a pleasure in the utmost
limit of humiliation and insignificance !"


THE CONFESSIONS OF JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU
BY JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU
TRANSLATED BY W. CONYNGHAM MALLOR

Never did I taste with any other woman pleasures equal to those two
minutes which I passed at the feet of Madam Basile without even daring
to touch her gown.