About this site

ゴーギャン《我々はどこから来たのか 我々は何者か 我々はどこへ行くのか》
Gauguin <Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?>

Hata-Hata (旗旗) is a personal website run by Kosuke Soka(草加耕助), a self-proclaimed leftist, as a hobby. I hope it will help you on your journey of life and give you a chance to look at yourself…that’s about it.

I am Japanese. I have been writing for more than ten years on a Japanese website. Only a few of them have been translated yet. I will add more in the future, but I would be happy if you could look through it using Google Translate, etc. I look forward to communicating with you all.

We hope that this site will be an oasis or a place of relaxation where people who feel something about this site can drop by from time to time and interact with each other, or provide a little information and a place for people like me who want to attend demonstrations and meetings from time to time, but are worried about various things.

My stance is that this is a nerdy place where I do only what I think is interesting, without any consideration for “general acceptance”. In other words, this is not a site where the main purpose is to influence other people’s ideas, much less to organize them.

Well, there is no big mistake if you think of it as a site where ex-leftists tweet whatever they want, and if people find it interesting and respond to it, that’s fine. I don’t think I have any right to complain about that.

I have no desire to get involved in or denounce the ideas of others who generally have different values than mine (except for the words and actions of public officials in their official capacity). I am who I am. I welcome anyone’s opinion, but I ask those who cannot understand that the concept of “justice” can only exist relatively and temporarily, and those who impose their own ideas on others, such as Netoyo and Gorilla Stalinists, to go home. Or, better yet, get the hell out of here.

To put it another way, the site is dedicated to the individual subject, “me” first, and each of my existences. If there is a “selling point” of the site, it is only my life. From my point of view, I can only think “it’s nice to be young (smiles)” when I see young boys with blue butts shouting “please spread the word” about a text that is little more than a “flyer” filled with political declarations. The point is that this is not a site aimed at turning those people around.

At any rate, I wish to be free, at least mentally, from all kinds of logic, “theory,” dogma, the state, organizations, and, above all, myself (greed, petty self-esteem, fear). I would like to be able to talk to my intuition and conscience and trust them and act on them. That is the only policy of this site at the moment.

I am a crooked person who has been arrested three times for wearing a helmet in a revolutionary movement at a time when the world was enjoying a booming economy, but now I would like to live my life valuing my conscience as a human being. Principles, ideologies, and theories are merely “means” to an end. I hope to live my life unashamedly, never confusing the means with the end.

(Revised on February 20, 2010)