You can't float in an evanescent world too long

Being swept up in the mess of things applies to anyone considered to be in the “wrong place at the wrong time”. It certainly doesn’t help when you might be of particular importance to your surroundings and a well enough known figure to sway the opinion of others around you.

Confucious once said “Ignorance is the night of the mind, but a night without moon and star.”

Masuji Ono’s reasoning to leave his “floating world” for his state of propagandist and imperialistic ideal had all the best intentions, yet none of the necessary resources to adequately battle it. His ignorance on the matter and naivety, as Matsuda put it, kept him in the darkness of his own mind, and with no particular guiding moonlight to illuminate a path he was in a sense swept up in ambitions not his own, but Matsuda’s.

Ono see’s economic instability, he walks through poverty and witnesses the carnage of the poor. The very image of the three boys, with little else to do but torture a small animal, embeds an image in Ono’s mind of a diseasing society and a realism of life he has never seen.

It’s like staring through the glass of a window, you see it but you can’t touch it. For Ono seeing that decaying image of society instilled new ambitions within his own mind, but those same ambitions lacked the whole scope of the situations Matsuda kept referring to. Obviously Matsuda himself spoke arrogantly because he felt he knew more about “life” than Ono did, but that sense of letting on more than he really knew hooked Ono, like a child to chocolate.

You sympathize with Ono because you know he is getting into something way over his head. To be part of something you don’t really understand is the same as to contribute to a cause you don’t agree with. With such great skills and a virtually young un-tapped early career Ono ignores the warnings of his sensei Mori-san and tangents off into another profession that can’t develop his abilities with as much detail but can satisfy, in his eyes, his social ambitions.

He isn’t completely wrong; can you tell a child they are wrong for believing Santa Clause is real? I’m not trying to “dumb” down Ono’s character by referring to his thought as a child, I just think his ambitions were not in the right order.

He’s wrong for not finding a specific niche for which to battle poverty and economic instability, but he’s not wrong for being swept up by what sounds like the solution to the menacing problem at hand. Take Nazi Germany for example, were all the German people wrong for accepting Fascist Hitler? Not at all because of the situation they were in. Put enough hungry people around a loaf of bread and chaos is bound to ensue. Now point out the problem why there isn’t enough bread to go around and you have a mobile army at your disposal as long as you keep satisfying them with what they think is the solution.

You wonder though, if someone can so blindly (even though not in their eyes) commit themselves to something beyond their full understanding. Ono wanted to help battle poverty and re-ignite Japan’s society of economic culture. Instead he fueled a cause that would end up being on the losing side.

He was still somewhat young you could say, and more often the ill-advised decisions are made by those who lack the experience or knowledge that comes with age. But I think those decisions make you who you are when you’re older, and that experience and knowledge has taught you a thing or two.