War & Peace Quote by Kenzaburo Oe

There is a deliberate moral flex in Oe reaching for "categorical imperative" to talk about a constitutional clause. He is not describing a policy preference or a strategic posture; he is describing a postwar vow as an ethical command that precedes politics. The phrasing matters: it borrows the authority of philosophy to lock the door on the old national reflexes - militarism, empire, the habit of treating violence as a legitimate instrument of state identity.

The subtext is that Japan's renunciation of war (the famous Article 9) was never merely a legal technicality or an American-imposed constraint, the line critics often use to delegitimize it. Oe recasts it as an act of self-authorship: "for us" signals collective agency, and "central article" insists this isn't decorative pacifism but the Constitution's beating heart. Coming from a novelist who spent his career interrogating Japanese responsibility, memory, and postwar denial, the sentence reads like an argument against the easy alibis of "we had no choice" and "it was all occupation."

Context sharpens the stakes. Post-1945 Japan rebuilt under U.S. security guarantees, while conservative governments steadily tested the boundaries of "self-defense" forces and later sought reinterpretations that edge toward normalizing military power. Oe's intent is to remind readers that pacifism was not weakness but an existential corrective - a hard-won principle meant to prevent the nation from making its most catastrophic story into a repeatable script.