==JAPAN: KM== [People]

Just soon after I had entered Cimetiere Montparnasse, I found his grave. It was a greyish, plain one with nothing conspicuous about it. This surprised me a little. In front of the grave, I stood thinking of him, who tried to solve basic problems of this century, our times. After that, I decided I would visit the towns of Montparnasse and St-Germain-des-Pres, where this genius lived for most of his life.
He, Jean-Paul Sartre was born in Paris in 1905 and died of emphysema at the age of 74 in Paris in 1980. He spent most of life searching for the way to be free and talked to us about freedom, despair and action enthusiastically. In short, he explained to us that our life isn't decided by God beforehand, but that it is a work of art we can freely create. So we are free to live and, on the other hand, we must assume total responsibility for our life, he maintained. He introduced this philosophy of this through "La Nausee" in 1938 for the first time and explained it theoretically in "L'Etre et le neant" in 1943.
Montparnasse and St-Germain-des-Pres excited me. Like one possessed, I went about there with no particular destination in mind for a long time. Strange to say, soon I felt these towns were well known to me though I had never been there before, because I could find many places which had been described in books. It seemed that these towns hadn't changed a bit since the days when he and his fellows took a great part in the central ideas of the world. "Oh, that is Cafe Aux Deux Magot, where he wrote L'Etre et le neant". "Restaurant Coupole is over there. He and his friends would very often go there to dine." At Cafe Dome, which he also visited frequently, I was wondering about his life and works over coffee.
He refused every order-family, tradition, custom and so on-, and lived thoroughly freely. The reason why he set forth such a philosophy lies in his unhappy childhood. He lost his father when he was but a small child. Though his mother got married again soon, he was on bad terms with his father-in-law. Moreover, Sartre was worried about his own ugly appearance. That is, he was small for a Frenchman and had a bad squint. I think he wanted to forget his past. So he maintained that a man should live at will, being free from his past. Existentialism, his way of thought, was widely supported by a great number of young people, especially in Europe, who were in a state of stupor after World War 2. This is why he became one of the most famous philosophers in the world soon after the war.
This century has been the time when organizations in place of individuals come to the fore; in other words, under overwhelming influence of organizations each person has to think how he should live. The existentialists tried to solve this problem by maintaining that a man is absolutely free. It is true that they couldn't solve it perfectly, but at least they succeeded in giving us many suggestions to cope with it. Sartre, who was sick, blind and could hardly walk, was ready to take part in many demonstrations to save those who were deprived of freedom and persecuted. These scenes were televised all over the world. Though his thought was pretty difficult, such way of his life impressed not only very serious young people but also people in general.
At the Cafe, many people were talking happily around me. Some seemed to be local people, others tourists. "What does he signify to them?" "To them, is the world without him quite different from the one with in him?" On the day when I left Paris, I visited his grave again. Cimetiere Montparnasse was quiet. I found some beautiful flowers put on by somebody just like the other day when I was there. Today Sartre is thought of as a great man of France like Hugo and Rousseau. But he is sleeping in Cimetiere Montparnasse, not in the Pantheon, where both Hugo and Rousseau are buried. As I said earlier, his grave is small and quite simple, which I think does represent his simple life well.

"Getting It Together"

I hoped to write an essay on what is not popular among Japanese students now, because there are a lot of valuable things that are already "behind the times". I don't know whether this essay is good or not. It is for you to decide it. However, I can say at least that you need to try to deeply understand many things happening around you and have your own ideas on them in order to write a good essay. Much to my regret, my impression of our seniors' essays is that some of them are poor. I'd like to advise those who will write essays for The Kuzuryu Memoirs in the future to read widely and think deeply.