Life & Wisdom Quote by Kenzaburo Oe

Oe’s line lands like a scalpel: it refuses the comforting story that Japan’s wartime aggression was a historical inevitability or a simple outbreak of militarist fever. “Ambiguous orientation” is the key indictment. He’s not talking about a vague national mood; he’s pointing to a deliberate, state-level wobble between identities and allegiances - modernizer versus empire, Asian neighbor versus Western aspirant, victim of Western pressure versus practitioner of Western-style conquest. Ambiguity, here, isn’t harmless complexity. It’s a political technology: the ability to argue one’s innocence to outsiders while rationalizing domination to oneself.

The phrase “drove the country” is doing quiet work, too. Oe suggests a machinery of drift and self-deception rather than a single villain, which is precisely what makes the sentence feel accusatory. If orientation is unclear, accountability can be blurred. An empire can present itself as a “liberator” of Asia from Europe, even as it installs its own hierarchy. That doubleness was central to Japan’s pre-1945 rhetoric, from the language of “co-prosperity” to the performance of pan-Asian solidarity that masked extraction and violence.

Coming from Oe - a postwar writer obsessed with moral responsibility, state mythmaking, and the psychic afterlife of defeat - the quote reads as a warning about how nations narrate themselves. When a country can’t say what it stands for, it becomes dangerously available to whatever power can supply a story, especially one that turns expansion into destiny.