Peter Goldsbury

Mr Cereijo,

I think you might have some idea from my longer response to Mr Arriola. Shakespeare was 'bowdlerized' and Basil Hall Chamberlain's translation of the Kojikiincluded several sections in Latin. Why? Because it was considered that the original might shock or offend.

To give some context, in Japan there is a long tradition of producing scholarly editions of major works. Iwanami Shoten is especially renowned in this respect. Perhaps this corresponds to the work of publishers like the presses of universities such as Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard or Tokyo. So, if you want to read the works of Shakespeare or Dickens or Mark Twain, or read the Kojiki as close to the original as possible, given the present state of knowledge, you will go to such works. Of course, you can read and enjoy Shakespeare, Dickens and Twain as literature, but I think this is supported by the scholarly work: the disinterested pursuit of the truth about what the author actually wrote and meant.

With Morihei Ueshiba, there is no such scholarly tradition. Nobody is collating manuscripts or doing research to produce a scholarly version of O Sensei's discourses and the likelihood of this happening is decreasing with the passage of time. The writings we have are not scholarly in this sense: they do not simply stand for what they are, but are seen as part of a wider enterprise to present O Sensei in a particular way.

This is what I have in mind by 'sanitization'.