RM : Recently, here in Japan probably as much as in America, the breakdown of the family has become a big issue. But from my point of view, it's not so much the family as the "model" of the family that is breaking down. . . We have this ideal image of the family and this image is starting to shatter.

I have been to America a couple of times and the people seem lonesome. Of course America is a country that was built by immigrants and by slaves who have left their home country, so in a way it is natural that they seem lonesome. But this loneliness seems to be intenser than ever. The divorce rate becoming higher, the number of street children increasing. . .

Since I was born very close to the base in Sasebo which is in the southern island of Kyushu, I have seen many Americans. And my image of America has been a very bright and happy one. That was my first image of America. But it seems that this image is starting to disappear or transform.

By reading your books, however, I was encouraged to know that America is not so much weakened as I thought. America still has this strong and positive message delivered from an individual person.

SE : I think the modern nuclear family is actually a relatively new idea. In the early stage of mankind, people lived more in tribal units than in family units. While in a tribe, they might have families, the tribe as a whole also functioned as a kind of a larger family. And then, tribes became countries at some point, with a number of evolutions in between the two.

The whole dynamic of the modern country, or at least the modern country like America, is not one of a larger unit that acts like a family. It is one in which people can basically go off and be by themselves. That's part of the American dream; everybody else will leave you alone. And the ramifications of that are a break- down in the bonds that form the country to begin with.

Particularly in America's case, the whole idea of the country was born out of this great contradiction between a cohesive nation on the one hand, and an almost benign state of anarchy on the other. I think that America is now starting to deal with the ramifications of that contradiction. A contradiction it engendered and that it pursued as a main part of its dream and ideal, and may became part of its nightmare.

RM : This is the first time I heard such an opinion from an American person. Are there many people who think that America has started off with a contradiction in itself?

SE : I don't know, but I can imagine there are, because the contradiction was so evident; it's so evident in retrospect. A nation whose ideal was freedom and whose reality was slavery: it is pretty clear. In America, seventy years after the country began, we fought a Civil War over the contradiction. And built into that contradiction are a hundred other contradictions. The Constitution of the United States actually builds these contradictions into the institutions of America. Between a centralized power and a dispersal power, between governmental power and the rights of the individual. These were all things that were being thrashed out in the Constitution two hundreds years ago, and they are still being thrashed out. The very same complex, the very same political arguments that were raging in the 1790s, between John Adams and Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, are still raging in the 1990s.

And each incarnation of America has wound up being overwhelmed by the contradictions. Abraham Lincoln did a very subversive thing in a speech in Gettysburg during the Civil War. And it was until years and years later that people realized that essentially Lincoln had concluded that America, in its first incarnation, was lost and doomed. Almost secretly Lincoln created a second America. And the question is, now, at what point will America have both　the need or the capacity to create a third America in order to transcend the contradictions and to redeem the American idea.