Some of recent events in my life have been reasonably important for me as an antinatalist activist, so I'm writing this blog post, partly because I want to allow my future self to read it and remember those events better.
When the news website Encount reached out to us at Antinatalism Japan via our website, I hesitated to accept their request for an interview.
The website didn't look very… shall I say classy, so I worried that things I say at the interview might get taken out of context and lead to some reputational damage to antinatalism, which is the last thing I want as an antinatalist.
In the end, my decision to get interviewed proved right, but not exactly for the reason I originally expected.
I would say the article is the usual type among (not so many) ones on antinatalism – inspired by Japan's declining birth rate, it addresses what antinatalism is and isn't, what motivated its supporters to go anti-natal, what their goals are, etc.
At least 3 parties got interviewed for this article: Masahiro Morioka, Miyuki, and ANJ, represented by me.
Morioka, as he usually does, brings up his concepts of “birth negation” and “procreation negation,” and Miyuki talks about their own experience of extreme pain in their life as their reason to go anti-natal.
Of course, Miyuki doesn't say in this article (and surely could never have said in their interview) things like “my life is bad, therefore human beings cannot procreate.”
But if the article had featured only Morioka and Miyuki, the chance of the readers misunderstanding antinatalism as a personal grief over one's own birth, which doesn't deserve any serious treatment, would be higher.
So I'd say it's lucky, not for us but for those painient consciousnesses who would be created if it weren't for our work, that we were given a chance to point out what would clearly be a terrible way of understanding antinatalism… although of course, to our great regret, my contribution didn't completely get rid of any chance of such a misunderstanding, as we can see in the comment section on Yahoo! News.
The interview itself, which took place in Tokyo, went okay.
I feel like I said almost everything that was there for me to say.
This is an article on antinatalism though, and interviewing me was only a means for the writer to gather information he needed to tell a story, so I do find that only pieces that fit for that purpose of what I said have been picked.
It shouldn't surprise me and I have no intention of blaming the writer for it.
Examples of important things that I said in the interview but didn't make it to the completed piece include: “the way we call procreation wrong is just the same as the way we call racism wrong,” and “the legitimacy of the statement that racism is wrong remains the same, no matter if it's said by the discriminatees, discriminators, or anyone else.”
Also, as to what's formatted as my spoken words in the article, none of them are actually direct quotations of me – they have been paraphrased, or rather composed, by the writer based on the notes he took during the interview.
That's why, to my great regret, I have no difficulty whatsoever in finding sloppy choices of words that I would never make, such as “苦痛を感じる存在” (existence that feels pain), “絶滅すべき” (should go extinct), and “反出生主義を否定” (deny antinatalism).
I should put some blame on myself though, because the writer did give me a chance to take a look at the part of the article concerning the view I shared in the interview, and he did change a couple of bits, which I found particularly crucial, exactly as I suggested.
So I could and should have pushed a bit harder about other parts of his writing.
That's a lesson I'll remember for the next opportunity like this one.
2 weeks after the interview, chapters 46-60 of the Japanese translation of An Antinatalist Handbook, which I had been working on, finally became available to read on the website.
Unlike the first 30 chapters, these new 15 had to be translated only by me, taking what feels like ages to be completed.
Several ANJ members helped me complete the work by proofreading my translation.
One of them in particular spent a lot of time and effort to take a thorough look at every word and give me apt and brilliant suggestions.
If you find the handbook suddenly becoming easier to read from chapter 46 onwards, it's thanks to the proofreaders spending a significant amount of resources to achieve a quality that I could never have achieved alone.
Among the 800 million human beings in this universe, some put in a lot of effort to develop skills and actively choose to use them for ethical purposes.
Working with such people is a great honor.
Especially in this case, the quality of the proofreading work exceeded my expectation by such a country mile as the honor came with great surprise.
I never thought my life would actually be this great.
What a lucky person I am!
I'm glad that I went through lots of painful experiences, which put me in a position where realization of the immorality of creating painient beings was easy, resulting in my co-founding of ANJ, which then lead to the fortune to meet a greatly honorable person – and this is just me expressing my emotions, so please ignore my horrible rudeness of disregarding my past self's well-being and potential logical flaws… although I do think there's a painistically legitimate way to justify the pain I experienced in the past.
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