Message to Japanese Students [1950]

This letter was written in response to a request for “advice” from a Japanese student called Masao Takizawa. An identical solicitation was sent to Albert Einstein and possibly other public figures. Russell’s youthful correspondent had communicated with some anguish the terrible impact of war and occupation on Japan, and told of a student generation pulled towards Marxism on the one hand and “Nihilism and Decadence” on the other (17 July 1950). A sympathetic Russell offered Takizawa and his student peers some eloquent guidance about avoiding “despair and cynicism” (358: 26), after attesting to the wisdom of steering a middle way between the poles of Soviet communism and American capitalism. Einstein took a slightly different tack, comparing post-war Japan to pre-independence India and suggesting that the principal leaders of the struggle against British rule, Gandhi and Nehru, offered “the right advice—not only for Japan but for all other nations” (3 Aug. 1950, Albert Einstein Archives, 61–509). Since Takizawa identified himself as editor of the student press at Tokyo University, it is quite likely that Russell’s reply (and Einstein’s) was solicited with the purpose of translating it for a campus publication. Yet no published version has been discovered either in English or Japanese.