MANAGEMENT TEAM

INABA Yoji

Former Professor, College of Law, Nihon University

In the final section of Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Clara and the Sun,” there is a passage in which the AI robot Clara notes that the person who examined her human master failed to notice anything extraordinary about the girl. Clara claims that the examiner was looking in the wrong place, and that the extraordinary quality was not in the girl, but in the people around her. This perspective resonates strongly with me. Isolation cannot exist in a society of one. I encourage individuals to consider why the term “social” isolation was chosen in this program, recognizing that isolation inherently exists in a social context. In addition, I urge people to refrain from automatically viewing loneliness as an undesirable condition. The imperative is to avoid burdening individuals with societal injustices that push them to despair, often without their knowledge. I hope that the social system will be redesigned to avoid such situations at all costs. The essence of the problem lies not in personal characteristics, but in the social environment surrounding the individual.