Yutaka Ozaki - The Trap of Healing and Salvation: How to Live in a Post-Religious Age - Terrorism, Philosophy, and the Meaning of Life, Chapter 3

Chapter 3 of How to Live in a Post-Religious Age
: Terrorism, Philosophy, and the Meaning of Life

From the late 1980s to the early 1990s Japanese society was at the peak of its “bubble economy.” People stopped thinking about things deeply, and lived only for diversions and whatever pleasure could be had in the moment. Serious matters were avoided, and attention was focused on the frivolous and fashionable. Anyone who asked “What is the meaning of life?” would be mocked. Days were spent wrapped up in the booming economy, and nights were devoted to garish “love games” at pleasure spots. According to the mass media, this is what the big city lifestyle had become.

Looking back it seems a bit ironic, but this bubble era was the period during which Aum greatly expanded its power. During this period in which people were intoxicated by the superficial splendor of the bubble economy, Aum grew by picking up on young people’s secret inkling that there was something wrong with their society.

At right around the same time, in the world of music there was someone who was pursuing the questions of “What is right?” and “What is the meaning of my life?” in the most direct way possible. He was a rock singer by the name of Yutaka Ozaki (尾崎豊). Ozaki, who sang about freedom, what is right, and the meaning of life in an era that praised the frivolous and trivial, was not thrust into the limelight by society in general; young people learned about him from each other by word of mouth, and he became a huge star overnight without appearing on TV. Within this administered society full of ostentation and pretense, Ozaki’s stance of persistently questioning the meaning of life was enthusiastically embraced by people in their teens and endowed him with a youthful charisma. Shortly after rising to prominence, however, in 1988 he was arrested for possession of amphetamines.

After being released from prison Ozaki launched a comeback. His concert tour was a success, but once again he came up against his own limitations, and in 1992, at the young age of twenty-six, he died under mysterious circumstances.

“How am I to go on living in this dirty society?” “What is right?” “What is the meaning of life?” Both Aum and Yutaka Ozaki directly pursued these sorts of questions in the 1980s. One formed a community of religious practice outside of society, while the other chose commercial music as his métier. Entering the 1990s, Aum collapsed as a result of its own anti-social activities, and Ozaki died without having been able to get out of his own musical and intellectual cul-de-sac.

Here I think we must stop for a moment and consider the significance of these two social phenomena, Aum and Yutaka Ozaki, both appearing and meeting their end at roughly the same time in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Yutaka Ozaki made his debut in 1983 and died in 1992. Aum originated as a yoga group called the Aum Shinsen no Kai, which was established in 1984, and committed its sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subway system in 1994. This concurrence is by no means coincidental.
My focusing on the music of Yutaka Ozaki in this chapter, however, is not simply the result of his having been active at the same time as Aum.

I have said that we need a way of connecting people to allow for gentle and flexible mutual support in the solitude we encounter when we attempt to face the mysteries of the universe without taking the path of religion. I have also said that this approach must begin with a frank acknowledgment of the fact that we can never escape our own desires, evils, and worldly passions, and must be based on a philosophy of these problematic worldly desires.

At a time in my thirties when I had just begun a new job that was not going very well, had no one around me who understood what I was doing, and felt myself on the brink of sinking into a deep despair in the midst of this fatigue and loneliness, by listening to Ozaki’s CDs I managed to escape this descent and find comfort and encouragement. The words and voice of Ozaki, who at that point had already passed away, went straight from my headphones into my heart. I had the vivid sense that I was not the only one trying to find a glimmer of hope in the midst of solitude.

But that was not all. I will discuss this in greater detail later, but in his later period Ozaki recognized the unavoidable desires and worldly passions inside himself for what they were, and, with this as a starting point, continued to search for his “true self” and “healing.” He did not try to attain salvation by ascending to heaven, but rather by groping for answers while standing here on the desire-drenched Earth. He was clearly thinking about a “philosophy of worldly desires.”

The potential for a “way of connecting people that facilitates mutual support in solitude” and a “philosophy of worldly desires” was latent in Ozaki’s music, but he was unable to bring it to fruition.

Consequently, while it may mean a bit of a detour, here it is necessary to examine the path of success and failure traced by this artist. We must thoroughly analyze why, after attaining commercial success, he could not avoid getting caught in the same trap as Aum.

Of course, Yutaka Ozaki was not the only one looking for “the meaning of life” while making music during this period. But to me it is Ozaki who most vividly exemplifies a certain type of drama with which sincere artists who lived in the same era as Aum were forced to engage.

What Ozaki consistently sang about was how he ought to live in contemporary society. “Within this society entangled in joy and suffering, how am I to find the meaning of life?” This was his theme throughout his career.

His message during his early period, to put it bluntly, was one of ethics. What was being talked about was “rightness,” “freedom,” and “love.” The message of his late period was religion. His songs were full of words like “desire,” “sin,” “peace of mind,” and “life (inochi).” Yutaka Ozaki’s mental and spiritual world underwent a dramatic shift from ethics to religion.
To begin with, let us take a look at the “ethics” he focused on singing about during his early period.

“What is right?” “What is my true self?” “What is the meaning of life?” His first message was that he wanted to search for the answer to these questions.

During the day we work hard at school or at a company, and within an administered society our bodies and minds become worn out and used up. Every day we leave for school or our company at the predetermined time, do the predetermined studying or work assigned to us, and then return home. What I ought to do has been determined ahead of time by someone else, and all that remains is for me to do it in silence. All that is required is that I kill my ego and deal with what I am given in the manner I am told.
When night falls, these worn out “salarymen” and young people, freed from the bonds of their company or school, give themselves over to fleeting moments of freedom and pleasure. They flock to nightspots and occupy themselves with things like alcohol, romantic relationships, music, dancing, and fighting. These nighttime areas endlessly absorb the desires of these sorts of men and women. Young people slip out of their homes to speed through the nighttime streets on motorbikes.

Ozaki saw the people who live in today’s big cities as beings that aimlessly come and go day and night as though possessed.

This teenage singer calls out to us, “Isn’t there something wrong with this life of ours in which we go on repeating this kind of thing over and over again?”

In truth, isn’t there another way of living? Normally we avoid thinking about such things because we are very busy and it is too much trouble. But isn’t there indeed something wrong with the way we are living?
Our society runs on money and desire. It is a society in which preference is given to people who went to good schools, and in the end is constructed to give advantages to those who take hold of money and power. Such things are well understood. But is just being swallowed up by this kind of society really a life I want? There is something wrong with the way this society is, and a different, “right thing” must surely exist somewhere. People say, “If everyone has fun and feels good, isn’t that enough?” But there must be more to life than this. There must be some kind of “right thing” that cannot be reduced to mere pleasure.

Ozaki’s songs are filled with cries of “How am I to reach this kind of ‘right thing’ or ‘truth’?”

The term “right thing” is also rephrased as “true self” many times in his lyrics. In his late period the term “meaning of life” starts to be emphasized more strongly.

What exactly are the “right thing,” “true self,” and “meaning of life?” These were the most important themes Ozaki sang about consistently throughout his career. Of course, in his early period Ozaki was not yet able to express the exact meaning of these ideas. But as someone constantly searching for the “right thing,” his cries from the heart appealed strongly to those who heard his songs. And by sharing in this cry, his listeners received from Ozaki an incomparable energy and desire for life. I listen to Ozaki’s songs to receive this message with my entire being.

This society is an administered society in which everything is subject to administration and control. In an administered society, our lives are all fundamentally under external control, and there is no true freedom. Only by moving in accordance with the established rules are we allowed to exist in a classroom or receive a salary from a company.

Of course, even in our society there are groups of outlaws such as biker gangs and criminal syndicates. Nevertheless, today’s high-level administered society administers our entire society, taking into account in advance the actions of such outlaws as one type of behavior heretical to the system. At first glance people in biker gangs and the like may seem to have obtained “freedom,” but they are only being allowed certain liberties by the police authorities and other such elements within society. The freedom found here is nothing more than a pretense of freedom or sham freedom being put on display. It is only being tacitly permitted as a comparatively safe outlet for young people’s dissatisfaction.

Even freedom from the system has been built in as one of the choices within the system – this is the kind of society in which we are living. Here the irreplaceable “self” is increasingly being lost sight of. Little by little we are losing the reality of this “self” that is not gathered up as a pawn of this administered society or one of its cogs.

True freedom, therefore, must be connected to swimming against the current of this administered society, and trying to regain this “self” here and now must be connected to true freedom.

In this administered society, in which “there might be a way in but there’s no way out,” a way out – in other words, freedom – does not exist.

Ozaki sings that when he speeds through the streets on his motorcycle, “the night of fifteen feels like I have managed to become free” (“The Night” ), but ultimately he only “feels like” he has succeeded in becoming free. In this society, true freedom can never be obtained. He is beset by this kind of pessimism.

This pursuit of freedom eventually veers towards a “death urge.” We can never obtain true freedom in this actual world. But there is still one way to achieve it: we can die. When I choose death, presumably by committing suicide, I am for the first time able to escape this social system, obtain “true freedom,” and at last arrive at my “true self.” In this society where “there might be a way in but there’s no way out,” the only doorway to freedom open to me is the way out of “death.” Ozaki sings about this in the final three lines of one of his most iconic songs, “Graduation.”

His theme here is the “hopelessness of love;” no matter how strongly two people are drawn to and embrace one another, they can never attain oneness. This main idea, though it may have undergone some minor adjustments, remained consistent from his early period right up until the end of his life.

Everyone is alone. But no one can live on their own. So I need you. So I embrace you. We embrace and love each other, and I try to become one with you. But when we do this, what we realize is that no matter how tightly we embrace each other, in the end we remain distinct individuals. Two can never become one. In the end I am always left on my own. I want to love you. And I want to cure this loneliness. Nevertheless, after we have embraced, I am always drawn back into my original loneliness.
Ozaki does not believe in a love in which two people become one. A love in which two become one will never arise through embracing one another. Afterwards you are always alone and left to suffer on your own. Even so, there is nothing for Ozaki to do but go on crying out, “I want you to hold me.”

In the midst of Ozaki’s transition from his early period to his late period he begins to display a new approach to tackling this problem. He adopts the stance of encouraging and emboldening those who have been overwhelmed by the hopelessness of love and left paralyzed in their solitude. You are not the only one trembling, unable to achieve love and unable to escape your loneliness. The door to a future must surely exist somewhere.

Human beings are always alone. The heart that tries to break out of its solitude and seek love will always run into a wall. But you are not the only one. Everyone who is suffering in their search for love confronts this wall. You are not the only one. When it comes to bearing this anguish, you are by no means alone.

At some point Ozaki’s yearning for love transformed into encouragement for others who are suffering.

Osaki’s encouraging and emboldening others in this way can be seen in various instances including the concert he gave just before his death.
Ozaki’s anguish lay in the fact that no matter how hard people suffering from loneliness try to alleviate it through love, in the end this can never bring people together. No matter how hard we embrace each other, we will always be separate. How can we save individual people, who can only exist as thoroughly isolated beings, from the depths of suffering and despair? Who will save me from my own despair? And how?

Ozaki’s thought gradually shifted from “love” as romantic love towards “love” as salvation that relieves the suffering of human existence. Little by little, Ozaki’s music began to take on a religious character.

3. Seeking His True Self

With the desperation of being unable to find his true self in spite of his best efforts, the hopelessness of love, and his sense of being blocked in weighing on him, Ozaki began to use amphetamines.

The whirlpool of desire, the temptation of pleasure, escape from loneliness and anxiety, resistance against society, irritation with the everyday, troubles in his personal relationships – enveloped by such circumstances, Ozaki turned to drugs. This led him to a state of dazed stupefaction, but did not provide him with a fundamental solution. The only result was an even more intense wandering between the everyday and the fantastic, between pleasure and suffering.

In the midst of all of this, Ozaki gradually began to sense his own “sin.” He had committed sins, and was being judged by something transcendent. He began to see his own existence mired in filth in relation to this transcendent figure in heaven. The theme of romantic love gradually transformed into a love that brings “salvation.” Then came an awareness of his own limited life being succeeded by a kind of “life (inochi).” Having passed through the self-negation of giving himself over to drugs and obtaining nothing by doing so, Ozaki began to shift course towards religion. But just as he was setting foot in the religious dimension, he encountered the biggest crisis of his life.

Before discussing this crisis, let us first take a look at the music released during his comeback in the 1990s. It is full of religious characteristics not found in his early work. The young Ozaki, who had searched for freedom and what is right, drowned in drugs and descended to hell; after crawling his way back from these depths, he encountered something religious.

When it comes to the content of his songs, too, he does not sing about freedom and what is right directly, but rather about staring unflinchingly at this self mired in desire who could not do what was right and could not obtain freedom. Then, from this lowest point, he tries to grab hold of “love,” his “true self,” and “healing.”

Human beings live in this world sullied by desire. Driven by this “flame of desire cradling my mind and body,” we give our bodies over to the consoling pleasures of the night. This world of desire wrapped in pleasure and hypocrisy steals away people’s hearts.

But he cannot overcome it.
What assails Ozaki, as he goes on living inundated with desire, is his feeling that he is committing irredeemable “sin.” The burden of those who lose themselves is a sin for which they cannot atone.

When Ozaki sings about losing his “heart,” I think he means his ethical heart that judges “what is right and moral.” He who was supposed to have been searching so hard for his “true self” and “what is right” now drowns in the desire that wells up from deep within his own body, unable to defeat it. When he becomes aware of this self that has lost its moral heart, Ozaki senses his sin, and comes to feel that some transcendent being is judging him.

Although burdened by sin in this way, he does not proceed down the path of redemption through the rejection of desire.

While being urgently aware of sin and the judgment of a transcendental being, Ozaki tries to place himself on the side of “desire.” With the line “Everything that pollutes itself to go on living is dear to me,” he affirms lives that are lived in the midst of pollution and are inundated with desire. Ozaki looks directly at his own being that cannot help but be inundated with desire and makes no attempt to avert his eyes. He is clearly striving for a “philosophy of worldly desires.” From this starting point, he is trying to think about how to deal with his own sin. He is trying to begin a conversation with a supernal, transcendent being.

Ozaki himself, standing inundated with desire upon the earth, and some kind of transcendental being, existing high above his head in heaven – Ozaki powerfully evokes this vertical scheme, the sense that “I on the earth” and “god up in heaven” are facing each other directly while being separated by an infinite distance.

In “Eternal Heart,”which to me is Ozaki’s greatest masterpiece, this interrogation of the transcendental develops further into an interrogation of “life (inochi).”

Ozaki sings about how I, in the midst of living a life burdened by the solitude and loneliness of being on my own, should react to human love. Then in the second half of the song he looks towards something beyond humanity.

If there is something that will give me a love without lies, I want to give my body and mind to it, because that is the truth of “what presides over everything.”

The second line, spoken as though whispering, perfectly illustrates the image of the vertical structure that is Ozaki’s fundamental perception of the world. He is standing on the edge of a precipice. If he looks down, at his feet gapes an infinite abyss. If he looks up, a night sky that seems about to swallow him up expands far above his head. He is standing with unsteady footing in the middle of the infinite expanse between the chasm’s bottomless abyss and the twinkling heavens far above his head. Ozaki then turns to the infinitely distant night sky, raises his arms, and cries out. What Ozaki cries out to, at the far away edge of this night sky, is nothing other than his god.

Ozaki cries out, “Why was I born?” only once in this song. Why was this I, who, while seeking what is right, has become engulfed in desire and descended to hell, born into this world? Turning toward the god of the night sky, toward an infinitely distant being, Ozaki screams this question to which there can be no answer.

Why was I born into this world? And where am I trying to go? These are the fundamental questions Ozaki poses. They are nothing other than the fundamental questions of philosophy and religion: “Where did I come from?” and “Where am I going?”

In the next line this cry shifts toward the meaning of his having been born, or, in other words “the meaning of living” or “the meaning of life.” What is “the meaning of living”? My having lived thus far in the midst of pleasure, despair, and loneliness – what could the meaning of this life be? Writhing in agony, being wounded by betrayal, trying to love women, drowning in drugs, and striving to seek what is right – what is the meaning of this life of mine?

The meaning of life is to communicate everything I have learned to those who have need of me. Everything I have learned, everything I have come to know, everything I have grasped amid my numerous failures in my life up until now, and the things I have not been able to accomplish – Ozaki says that for him the meaning of life is to communicate all of these things to those who will go beyond him and try to live as best they can in the next era. He wants to communicate these things, and to share them with others. He is filled with this desire to communicate and share with those who will live in the next era the tracks he has laid down as someone who, while falling into the depths of despair time and time again and repeating his life’s failures, nevertheless unswervingly attempted to chase down and corner the questions to which there can be no answer.

To what was an unanswerable question in Ozaki’s early period, namely, “What is the meaning of life?”, here at last he is able to find an answer. Even if his energy is exhausted and he can go no further, by passing on everything he has learned this life full of humiliation can be redeemed.
When Ozaki said, “I want to communicate,” what he had in mind was, to begin with, the fans who listened to his music. But what was also certainly present in his thoughts was his own child who had been born right around this time. This album was given the title Birth . This presumably referred to Ozaki’s own rebirth and also to the birth of his child. When he says, “those who have need of me,” I think he must also have been alluding to his own newborn infant extending his feeble hands to the father on whom he depended. To Ozaki, wouldn’t his child have indeed exuded unbounded potential and the possibility of breaking through the limitations of his own life? And behind this image of his child, wouldn’t he have glimpsed the countless fans who had heard the cry of his heart?

But here too, in these lyrics of Ozaki’s, I detect an odor of “death.” When he sings so intensely about wanting to pass on everything he has experienced, I sense behind these words another message: “Even after I have died, I want you to take these things and live bravely.”

Who is the “you” that cannot see for their tears? Is it not perhaps those closest to Ozaki, crying for him at his funeral? Is he not perhaps calling out to them, saying, “I am here in the world of death, the eternal world of death, and I am always watching over you”? It feels as though he had anticipated this kind of scene.

In the last song on this album, “Birth,” Ozaki’s intention to communicate the meaning of life to his son is expressed more directly.

Nobody wants to be alone – that is life. Even if you are driven wild by sadness, there is nothing to fear, because that is the meaning of life. Ozaki is affirming the loneliness and anxiety from which he is suffering by asserting that they are life, or that they are the meaning of life.

He also tells us not to forget the meaning of living strongly. There may not be some kind of answer, we may not find something certain. But rather than letting this defeat us, we should go on demanding meaning from life, continuing to run, to cry out, and to want. This is the “brilliance of life.” This is what Ozaki sings. “Don’t forget the meaning of living strongly.” This is a message of encouragement Ozaki sends to a new life that has just been born.

To go on running, crying out, and wanting, trying to break through your own intractable limitations – this effort itself is passed on to the next generation in an unbroken line. Here a religious, prayer-like quality can be found in this entrusting of the future to a “chain of life” that transcends your own miniscule life and death and moves forward without end.

Ozaki’s gaze as he tells his own child about the meaning of life and encourages him to live well in the future is directed in precisely the same manner towards the fans at his concerts. Ozaki spoke to his fans about the meaning of life and said that he wanted to heal their suffering from the stage. In the end, however, this stance of Ozaki’s drove him into an excruciatingly narrow place from which he was unable to escape.

From the stage he would turn to his fans, who suffered the same kind of anguish he did and had gathered at his concert to escape, if only briefly, their everyday existence, and cry out to them that he understood them well, that he had been the same way for a long time, and that they must all go on living strongly without losing heart.

By taking in Ozaki’s cries with their entire beings, his fans came to feel in their bones that they were not alone in their suffering and were guided toward a deep healing. A man who had been brought to the depths of despair by drugs was now standing there on stage and singing these beautiful songs. This same Ozaki, who had been betrayed and wounded, had revolted against society, and had failed at life, had come back to the stage and was now encouraging us. A person can recover this beautifully from failure and despair. Even I, plagued as I am by suffering, anxiety, and frustration, can perhaps be like Ozaki and try a little harder to live without succumbing to myself. Thank you, Ozaki. Thank you for encouraging me. Thank you for your beautiful songs.

“I had the same worries, suffering, loneliness and hope as you. I failed at life and descended to the depths of despair, and now, on this stage, just for you I am singing songs of loneliness and hope, giving you strength, encouraging you, comforting you, and healing you. When you are worn out by life and your dreams seem lost, listen to my music. I am always beside you. I am beside you, and I will keep watching over you.”

Ozaki sent this kind of message to all the fans in his audiences that numbered in the tens of thousands. But in the eyes of each individual watching his performance, this message was received as though it were being directed toward him or her alone. Ozaki was speaking these words of encouragement to me alone. In this way, with a voice and manner of speaking that could be understood in an instant, Ozaki called out to his audience.

In sociology this kind of communication, in which it feels as though a person is speaking only to me even though they are actually speaking indiscriminately to a large number of people, is called a “parasocial interaction,” and Ozaki’s performance on stage seems to be a typical example of this.

When I think that someone is speaking only to me, the words sink deeply into my mind. They reach the feelings of anxiety and fear I have been holding deep within myself and gently envelope them.

What sort of point did Yutaka Ozaki’s “rock and roll as healing” reach? The answer to this question can be clearly understood by listening to a performance he gave a few months before his death. The atmosphere of that night is captured in the album The Day 1991.10.30 Live at Yoyogi Olympic Pool . This album is a complete recording of that night’s performance, and it provides a detailed record of the interaction between Ozaki and his fans.

If someone who had never been to a rock concert were to listen to it, this album might sound like the meeting of a “new religion” or something of the sort. Such is the level of intimacy between Ozaki and his audience. This kind of fiction of intimacy between the performers on stage and the audience watching them often arises naturally at rock concerts, but Ozaki’s shows were something different. The atmosphere was very close to that of a charismatic religious leader and their believers.

Let us begin by listening to “Freeze Moon,” the song that forms the climax of the middle part of that night’s performance. Riding an intense beat, Ozaki begins singing with a full-throated scream. Continuing at what is almost a shout, his words are difficult to catch. The first half of the song ends in the midst of this yelling and excitement, and the band suddenly lowers its volume. Here Ozaki’s talking and ad-libbing begins.

Soft piano accompaniment repeats in the background. From the audience there is a steady buzz of clapping and encouraging cries of “Ozaki!” These cries of “Ozaki!” can be heard coming from all directions, voiced by both men and women. Ozaki begins to speak as though singing, leaving ample pauses so that the audience can respond.

When Ozaki sings a single word, cheers, clapping, and shouts of “Ozaki!” continue to echo from the audience unabated. The exclamations of “Ozaki!,” in particular, with an echoing back-and-forth between the high-pitched screams of women and the deeper voices of men, create a distinctive atmosphere. Up on the stage, Ozaki deliberately sings or speaks one phrase at a time while acknowledging and confirming this audience response.

A voice from the audience calls out to Ozaki standing on the stage, “Don’t fall!” Laughter erupts from the audience. This was shouted by a fan who had in mind an incident in which, during a 1984 performance at the Hibiya Open-Air Concert Hall, an overly excited Ozaki had jumped into the stands from a seven-meter-high lighting rig and broken his left leg. They were words of concern for Ozaki, who had moved close to the edge of the stage.

This is met with thunderous applause from the audience. Ozaki continues speaking.

This scene offers an excellent illustration of the core of Ozaki’s healing message.

“A man who once fell down there has climbed back up!” refers both to Ozaki’s having fallen down, broken his leg, and recovered to sing here again today, and also to his having been reborn to sing again after he had drowned in drugs, gotten arrested, and descended to the depths of despair. Haven’t I, after hitting rock bottom and tasting my fill of despair, come back to sing in front of you once again? Look at me. Look at this man who came back from such a low place to sing for you once more.

You may be suffering right now. You may be standing in the depths of despair. I understand. I understand because I used to be standing there myself. Destroyed by my relationships with other people, drowned by drugs, and betrayed, I had hit the very bottom. But as you can see, I have been reborn. Look at me, up here on the stage, singing in front of everyone. Believe that every human being has it, this power of recovery. Believe in this power to climb back from rock bottom. No matter how deep you may sink into despair, you must never throw away your dreams. Hold on to your dreams and believe in your future, because I will be watching over you. Because I who have tasted the same suffering as you will always be watching over you.

Ozaki stops talking and begins singing “Freeze Moon”again. After singing the last lyric, with the band still playing he starts ad-libbing to the audience once more at the top of his voice.

To stop everyone’s dreams from being crushed, to stop everyone from succumbing to themselves, I will keep singing, I will keep screaming. This, to Ozaki, is the meaning of rock and roll. “Rock and roll as encouragement,” “rock and roll as healing” – these are the sorts of things Ozaki was aiming at in his final years. Music to give solace to those in the depths of despair and strength to those close to giving succumbing to themselves – this is what Ozaki was looking for. This was not simply saying “Come on!” or “Keep fighting!” but sharing his own experience of having sunk to the depths of despair and singing compassionately about the strength of a human being capable of climbing their way back from such a place. This was the kind of path to healing for which he was searching.

Ozaki certainly seemed to be searching for this kind of path, but only a few months after this concert he died under mysterious circumstances that resemble suicide. What happened to Ozaki as he proceeded down the path of rock and roll as healing? At this point nobody knows.

But to me there is one clearly understandable route by which Ozaki could have been forced to turn towards death. It is ultimately nothing more than a supposition, but the image of a pitfall lying in wait for him on the road to rock and roll as healing appears vividly in my mind. Was there no other path for him to take? Was there truly nothing else for him to do but carry everything on his own shoulders and set a course for his own destruction?
Ozaki’s music encouraged people who were mired in despair. But when he sang at his concerts about being a “rock and roller who can heal” people’s hearts, did he not perhaps step over a line that shouldn’t have been crossed? I can’t help thinking that he did.

From up on the stage, Ozaki gave the audience an impression of himself as a man who had climbed his way out of the depths of despair and told them they were not the only ones suffering. The audience superimposed their current, suffering selves on the image of Ozaki suffering in the past. They tried to see their own future in this image of Ozaki who had been reborn after suffering, take strength from it, and find healing.

In order for the audience to take strength from listening to Ozaki, it was necessary that he be burdened with the anguish of his past. What would have happened if, with a buoyantly happy expression on his face, he had said, “In the past I suffered, but now just look at me – body and mind both feel great. So you have hope too!” The audience who had come to be comforted in their suffering would surely have been deflated and unleashed a storm of booing. In order for the audience to superimpose their own suffering and despair on Ozaki, the same suffering and despair they were experiencing had to adhere to the Ozaki they saw in front of them. The audience could superimpose their own suffering on this vivid suffering attached to Ozaki, and then try to see their own future in the image of him having climbed his way out of it. Ozaki would thus always have to bear the burden of suffering and despair in front of the audience. In fact, Yutaka Ozaki’s facial expressions were always somehow tense and pained. He was full of the pain of trying to take on everything in his past.
What we have here is the following structure: “I am being healed here and now because Ozaki, who is suffering, is singing for me.” To put it more bluntly, it is precisely because Ozaki bears the burden of suffering that I am healed.

But it was this structure of healing he himself had constructed that drove Ozaki to his death.

The members of his audience may perhaps have had the following thoughts: “Listening to you tonight, I had the feeling I was being healed. Thank you, Ozaki. Tonight was wonderful. From tomorrow I will return to my boring everyday life. There I will probably once again be beset by despair and overrun by anxiety. When this happens, I’m sure I’ll want to listen to you again. I’m sure I’ll want to see the moving and beautiful figure of Ozaki, a man who climbed his way back from suffering, up on that stage.”

“Please, Ozaki, keep singing forever. Keep healing me. Keep showing me the figure of a man who, while continuing to bear the burden of suffering, stands up in the face of it. Yes, Ozaki, I want you to keep showing me this figure of a man standing up in the face of suffering over and over again whenever I need it. When you do this, I can watch you, be healed, and get back up myself.”

“In order for me to always have the comfort of this healing, Ozaki, please keep suffering. And keep on giving these performances in which you climb out of this suffering forever.”

If this is the case, then in order to heal his audience Ozaki had to keep on endlessly repeating this performance of undergoing suffering in which he climbs out of it, falls back into it, and then climbs out again. To truly take on the role of a “rock and roller who can heal,” Ozaki had to go on repeatedly suffering like this forever. To be able to heal his audience, Ozaki himself must never be healed. To always be able to give strength, comfort and healing to his audience, Ozaki must continue to internalize the “suffering,” “worry,” “screams,” “despair,” and “anxiety” they carry, and go on suffering, worrying, and screaming, wringing his voice out of his entire self.

This was the structure of healing Ozaki created between himself and his audience.

Once he had been caught up in this structure, there was no getting out. To step beyond it, saying, “I’ve managed to become happy. Good luck, everyone!” would be an act of betrayal. It would be the kind of betrayal Ozaki hated more than anything. Ozaki could not betray the desires of his audience. As long as this kind of request kept coming from his audience, Ozaki could not step down from this role of reproducing suffering in himself.

The more sincere this structure of healing was, the more difficult it would have been for Ozaki to escape from the world of suffering. What was going on in the heart of this sincere singer, bathed as he was in the unconscious gaze of fans that said, “For the sake of my healing, Ozaki, please keep suffering”?

He must eventually have felt as though he were under some kind of threat. “Hey, Ozaki, don’t run ahead and get healed by yourself.” He was assailed by this tacit pressure. When he stood before an audience of tens of thousands and spoke his words of healing, behind the cheering and the clapping and the cries of “Ozaki!”, did he perhaps sense an unconscious, almost murderous desire from his fans – “Keep suffering, Ozaki, so that I can be healed”?

In the concert I talked about earlier there is a moment when a male voice shouts, “Keep singing to us forever!” How did Ozaki take this cry from a fan? Would he have viewed it simply as a fan saying, “I want you to keep singing forever,” or would he have taken it as something closer to a threat: “I want you to keep repeating this state of climbing out of suffering forever”?

When I listen to the recording of the concert, I can vividly sense, hidden behind the excitement of the fans, something like a threat or murderous intent being directed toward Ozaki. This is like a voice emanating from a submerged place of which the audience themselves are not consciously aware. If this were a voice from their subconscious, then Ozaki must also have received it in the domain of his own subconscious. He must have sincerely perceived his fans saying, “Go on suffering for us forever” in his subconscious.

What happens if we examine the subconscious of the audience more closely? What the audience ultimately wants is for the repetition of Ozaki’s suffering to continue “eternally.” This is the only way the healing of their minds and hearts can be promised “forever.” But Ozaki’s suffering might not continue endlessly. At some point, Ozaki may indeed find happiness. If this happens, he will no longer heal me. This would be a problem. I have to eliminate this possibility. How should I do this?

There is only one answer. I should kill Ozaki. I should kill Ozaki and have him become an eternal martyr bearing his suffering. By doing so I will keep Ozaki locked up in the world of suffering forever. If he dies, the actual Ozaki will be gone, and I will no longer be able to go to his concerts. The best part of Ozaki, however, is contained in his CDs and videos, and I can take them off the shelf whenever I want. I can savor the memory of the martyred Ozaki while listening to his music whenever it suits me. While crying over the sadness of his life full of suffering, along with my tears I can obtain a pleasurable sense of healing.

Ozaki died a few months after this concert, shortly after the announcement of what would be his final album. It seems to me that he may have taken this message from his audience to heart, and killed himself in order to complete his creation of “rock and roll as healing.” He seems to have been led to a death nearly indistinguishable from suicide by the death-wish or death-urge he had harbored since he was a teenager being amplified by the unconscious “please die for us” message he received from his audience.

What we got as a result was a young, good-looking rock star steeped in mystery. His CDs continue to sell very well, and we can listen to Ozaki just as he was at twenty-six years old whenever we want to gain strength, be comforted and be healed. Things have indeed turned out just the way the audience’s subconscious wanted them to.

I want to ask his fans, “Weren’t you waiting eagerly for Ozaki’s early death in some part of your mind? How many of you can hold your heads up and say with certainty that you harbored no such desire?”

In this sense, what killed Ozaki was the desire of his audience. The desire on the part of his audience to be able to go on being healed forever, and Ozaki’s earnest effort to satisfy this desire, that is, his attempt to bear on his own shoulders the worries and suffering of each member of his audience.

Yutaka Ozaki died trying to shoulder the worries and suffering of each member of his audience.

That’s right, it’s just like the destiny of Jesus Christ, who is said to have taken on the sins of all mankind, been crucified, and died. It’s just like the figure of this savior, who gave everyone hope of eternal salvation by shouldering the burden of their sins and being killed.

Yutaka Ozaki was well aware of the fact that his own destiny was similar to that of Jesus Christ. Consider the jacket design for his final album, Confession for Exist [sic], which had been completed just before his death. Ozaki himself, eyes closed and peaceful, is lying on a cross-shaped pattern, just as though he has been crucified. Ozaki died shortly after having completed an album on the cover of which he is crucified like Christ. He had clearly been conscious of the destiny he took on when he started “rock and roll as healing.” In an interview given a week before his death, referring to the album Confession for Exist he mentions that he wrote the songs thinking about “Christ, someone crucified on a cross” in the sense of “a person who had endured severe trials, or a person who had undertaken to atone for all sins, someone with this kind of fate or destiny.” The Christ who had taken on this kind of destiny was none other than Ozaki himself.

Ozaki did not by any means die cradled in bliss. His death was a tragedy brought about by his having taken on the role of giving strength and healing to all of his fans and the larger-than-life expectations this placed on him. He tried to take on all of the wishes and desires of his audience by himself. This is where his tragedy arose. He earnestly accepted the role of a “rock and roller who can heal your frozen heart,” and he had to go on playing it until death finally tore him away. This was the pitfall lying in wait for him.

The structure of “healing” Ozaki had created of his own volition turned on him and began to swallow him up. The more he tried to face up to this directly the more deeply mired in it he became, until ultimately he became completely caught up in it and was destroyed. This seems to have been the route Ozaki followed.

In “Last Christmas,” a track included on the album Confession for Exist, he sings:

“People I don’t know are watching the me I don’t know.” These words must have been very keenly felt indeed. The Ozaki who stood on the stage and sang things like “a rock and roller who can heal your frozen heart” was, in Ozaki’s own eyes, a “me” that was not his true self, a “me that I don’t know.” It was a self somehow like an other who continued to play this “role” of a counselor healing the hearts of people he didn’t know.

Here there is a “me that nobody knows,” a true self that none of these people can see. When he steps away from the role of “Yutaka Ozaki” there is a “me” that none of the people in the audience can see. There is a “me” that, without flattering the audience, as a lonely subject looks only at itself and creates songs.

Ozaki’s state just before his death was one of being torn between the “me that I don’t know” of whom others had expectations and the “me that nobody knows” whom other people could not comprehend. And the self that was being torn apart, unable to vanquish this state of affairs, chose death.

Was this really the only way to strengthen, encourage, comfort, and heal those who have fallen into despair and anxiety? Was this the only place a soul that sought what was right, its true self, and freedom could end up?
I do not think the place Ozaki reached on the album Birth, namely, the idea that the meaning of life is to pass on to the next generation everything I have learned and the stance, cries from the heart, and energy needed to live strongly, was mistaken. His mistake came when he entered the world of “I will heal you.”

One, as I have mentioned several times, was his adopting an “I will heal you” stance towards a large, indiscriminate audience, and his attempting to take on by himself the wishes and desires that were inevitably aroused in this audience by this “heal-and-be-healed” relationship. To completely heal another person is not something that can be achieved so easily. Of course, it may well be possible to heal a person’s heart or mind for a moment. Ozaki possessed a genius that allowed him to do this through music. But he had not thought ahead to what these people would begin to want next after they had obtained a momentary sense of healing. He had not anticipated the way this desire would be amplified by the atmosphere of the concert hall.

The other reason may have been that when Ozaki was suffering under the weight of this burden, he did not have anyone with whom he could share it. He did, of course, have a loving family, including his parents and brothers. When he descended into suffering, I’m sure they consoled himempathetically and did their best to help him get back on his feet. I think he must have taken considerable comfort from his immediate family.
Nevertheless, when Ozaki was in the grip of the unanswerable questions that lay at the core of his anguish and suffering — “What is right?” “What is my true self?” “Am I being judged by someone?” “What is the meaning of life?” “What should I do with these desires?” — there doesn’t seem to have been anyone around him who shared these questions of the soul, and who could turn to him and say, from the standpoint of another seeker like himself, “You are not the only one suffering like this.” If there had been such a person close to him, or even among his more distant acquaintances, then presumably Ozaki would not have had to carry the burden of his anguish all by himself and succumb to an early death.

I believe that the causes of Ozaki’s death were that he shouldered the many burdens of his audience on his own, and that there was no one around him who could share his questions of the soul. I will never be able to confirm it, of course, but that is my feeling about what happened.
If so, what we can learn from Ozaki’s death is the following.

I must not take on the desire for healing from a large, indiscriminate group of people by myself, and I must not take on the burden of their suffering and despair alone. I will not heal you, and I will not bear your burdens. I will only address my own burden. Fighting only this battle I will shoulder this burden and live my life to the fullest. This brings us back to Yutaka Ozaki’s starting point. “For me to be me, I fight with myself.” And when it seems that I cannot bear my own burdens any longer and am close to giving in, or when, because I have become shut away in my own shell, I am no longer able to properly see the outside world, at such times people struggling to reach the same goal can encourage each other from afar. Many people must give strength to each other so that none of them is broken on their own. Their burdens must be dispersed rather than concentrated.

The road Ozaki walked is somehow similar to the path of the young people who, seeking the meaning of life and absolute truth, entered Aum and did things like kidnapping believers’ family members and releasing sarin gas. Noriyuki Ueda says that when religious groups become large, the founder, too, is “brainwashed” into conforming with the group’s system. This may well have been something common to both Ozaki and Aum.

Ozaki and Aum both engaged in vigorous activities in pursuit of things like the meaning of life, what is right, and absolute truth in the mid 1980s and early 1990s, and in doing so acquired a large number of zealous believers or fans. Both projects, however, collapsed suddenly. Seeking the meaning of life, what is right, and absolute truth was not by any means a mistake in itself. This is the great task that human beings must face in every era. Both Aum and Ozaki took up this task directly. But what was the result? Aum committed acts of indiscriminate terrorism and was destroyed, and Ozaki succumbed to himself and met a death similar to suicide. Their initial intention seems to have led to a completely contrary outcome.

What Aum and late-period Ozaki have in common is that they both created “communities” for the purposes of healing or salvation. Aum built its community in an isolated rural area. Ozaki assembled a community of healing within his rock concerts, fictional spaces that can only exist temporarily. On the other side of this fictional space were the tens of thousands of listeners who might attend a concert. Of course, these two communities had different characteristics. But they were the same insofar as both attempted to share a space and construct, if only temporarily, an intimate relationship in order to obtain something in common.

Within both communities everyone’s gaze was focused on a single charismatic leader. In the case of Aum this was its founder, Asahara, and in the case of Ozaki these gazes were of course focused on Ozaki himself. Those seeking healing or salvation wholeheartedly concentrated their gaze on a single figure. These were a special kind of community in which all of the members tried to build a one-on-one relationship with a single charismatic individual.

Why did they focus their gaze on this single figure? It was because this was the only person who could give them healing or salvation, through initiation in the case of Asahara and through his singing in the case of Ozaki.

In this kind of community, the path to healing or salvation comes only from this single individual. By accepting the energy and words of this one person with their whole body, everyone is able to obtain fulfilment. This means, in short, that in this community the ultimate answers always come from just this one individual. To put it another way, in this community there is no need for members to work out the ultimate answers for themselves using their own eyes and mind, and this is something they are indeed not supposed to attempt. The ultimate answers must always be left up to that one individual. Members must not try to obtain things of an ultimate nature on their own. Therefore, to put it bluntly, this is a community of shifted responsibility.

People are very comfortable within this kind of community of shifted responsibility. When it comes to what is important and what is difficult, all they have to do is listen to the words of their charismatic leader and implement them faithfully. If Asahara says I should do something, I need only do as I am told; just by doing this I am automatically moving closer to the truth. In the case of Ozaki, all I must do is focus my entire being on whatever words Ozaki sends next to heal me and make me feel good. I do not have to invent my own lyrics and melodies and start singing on my own. All I must do is wait for Ozaki to sing for me.

This is a very pleasant place. Within this closed off space in which only the figure of the charismatic leader can be seen, I focus my consciousness completely on the words and energy emitted by this figure, and I have this charismatic individual do my thinking and singing for me. I am only listening. I give my entire being over to what is emitted by the charismatic leader, forgetting myself as though drugged and letting this nectarous pleasure seep into the marrow of my bones. I want to remain lost in this blissful world forever. Give me more words. More energy. More sweet nectar.

Aum responded to the desires of such people organizationally, creating a hierarchy of stages of spiritual practice and training, while Ozaki tried to take on these desires directly by himself and in doing so brought about his own ruin.

This is what makes me think that when we seek the meaning of life, what is right, and absolute truth, we may need to follow a path that does not include creating communities of healing.

On his first album, he sang, “For me to be me / I must keep on winning / What is the right thing? / Until I know it in this heart.” For me to be me, I must struggle to keep winning against myself. I must fight on – while receiving support from others – until this battle is won.

Ozaki’s attempt to create something like a community of healing did not begin until he had reached the final years of his life. This is where he took a wrong turn. He should never have sung things like “a rock and roller who can heal your frozen heart” in front of his audience. These sorts of words should never have passed his lips.

By starting down the path of healing, he ran into an enormous wall. If at that point he had returned to where he had started and set out again in a different direction, he may well have been able to avoid dying the way he did.

It is painful to think of what happened in this way, because Ozaki is no longer in this world.

Instead, I turn to the path Ozaki couldn’t take, and, while learning from everything he experienced and communicated to me, begin to walk down it. With no idea of what lies in wait for me, I set out from the place where Ozaki fell.

「僕が僕であるために」.

「15の夜」.

「卒業」. Regarding the interpretation of “Graduation,” see Etsuko Yamashita, The Soul of Yutaka Ozaki (山下悦子『尾崎豊の魂』 PHP研究所), 1993; Noriyuki Ueda, Religion Crisis (上田紀行『宗教クライシス』岩波書店), 1995. I interpret this song as a “song of death.”

「太陽の破片」.

「永遠の胸」.

『誕生』.

『約束の日』.

『放熱への証』.

Etsuko Yamashita, The Soul of Yutaka Ozaki (『尾崎豊の魂』), p. 136.

「太陽の瞳」.

“Founders Too Are Brainwashed” (「教祖もまた洗脳される」, 『仏教』 no. 33), 1995, pp. 2-15.

See my book Consciousness Communication (『意識通信』ちくま学芸文庫), 1993, 2002.

“My Song.”

日本音楽著作権協会（出）許諾第1903052-901号

Philosophical study of life, death, and nature