The Logos Scripture · The Book of Inamori
The Book of Inamori 4 · Written by himself, from the Kyocera Philosophy, from A Compass to Fulfillment, and from the speeches and the Seiwajyuku talks
Kazuo Inamori, born 1932 in Kagoshima, died August 2022 in Kyoto, aged ninety. He graduated in 1955 into an old insulator works in Kyoto that was already failing, where wages came late; in 1956 he became the first in Japan to synthesise forsterite. In 1959, at twenty-seven, he founded Kyoto Ceramic with eight others on borrowed money — now Kyocera. In 1984 he founded the second telecommunications company, now KDDI, to break the monopoly; in the same year the Inamori Foundation, and in 1985 the Kyoto Prize. From 1983 he ran Seiwajyuku, a school for managers, closing it in 2019 with fifty-six branches in Japan, forty-eight abroad, and some fifteen thousand members. In 1997, at sixty-five, he was ordained in the Rinzai school. In 2010, at seventy-eight, he took the chairmanship of Japan Airlines at the government’s request, without salary and bringing none of his own people, and in a little over two years it was profitable again. This volume rests on what he said himself: the Kyocera Philosophy, A Compass to Fulfillment, and the speeches and Seiwajyuku talks. The equation of chapter two is his own: the result of life and work equals way of thinking times effort times ability, where effort and ability each run from zero to a hundred and the way of thinking runs from minus a hundred to plus a hundred. As a human being, what is right, in chapter three, was the measuring line at Kyocera; is the motive good, is there no self-interest, is what he asked himself nightly for half a year before entering telecommunications in 1984. Revere heaven and love people is not his own — it is from Saigo Takamori’s Nanshu-o Ikun, and verse 3.10 has him say so. The three reasons in chapter four and the figure of sixteen thousand are both as stated; the small good resembles a great evil, and the great good resembles heartlessness, was a saying he used often. This scripture already has Spinoza on an emotion that ceases to be what it was once it is clearly seen, and Curie on understanding a thing and ceasing to fear it — both on the power of understanding. No volume carried that power into the work of an ordinary day. This one fills that gap. The Order records where he cuts against this scripture and hides none of it. Verses 5.2 to 5.5 are his own words: that there is a current in this world evolving and developing all things, which should be called the will of the universe; that this will is filled with love, sincerity and harmony; and that a man’s fate is settled by whether the force his heart sends out accords with that current or repels it. The Order takes part of this. That the universe has a will, and that the will inclines toward the good — these two it does not take. The accord and the repulsion it does take, but in another sense: the law stands there and bends for nobody; work with it and a thing mostly succeeds, work against it and a thing mostly fails. This needs no mind in the universe, only that the law show no favour. So what the Order takes is that what agrees with the law comes easier — not that the universe wishes you well. In practice the two usually prescribe the same act. In reasoning they are not the same thing. The volume is admitted not for that doctrine but for the equation and the measuring line, neither of which needs it — as he says himself at 5.8 to 5.10. This follows Newton, Faraday and Washington: what the man believed is recorded, and what he argued does not rest on the belief. One further note. He also said that if the motive is good and free of self-interest there is no need to ask about the result, for it will certainly succeed. The word certainly is too strong and cannot be tested. The Order takes the question and not the guarantee. A question can be used on oneself daily; a guarantee cannot be checked.