Books You Should Read in Your Student Years

Cafeteria Curry

National City, Tokyo, is where I spent my student days. Back then, I thought the over 1,000 yen round-trip commute from home to university was a waste of money. Instead, I'd buy groceries worth that amount, bring them to a friend's place, cook, and spend every night there.

I never took home economics classes in junior high or high school, so that was pretty much my first real cooking experience. I did it all without anyone teaching me, relying purely on intuition and sheer hunger.

I once coughed up a storm all over the room from adding too much chili pepper, or used up a friend's entire gas bill trying to make pork bone broth, only to end up with a liquid that smelled like nothing but animal. It was full of failures, but it was fun. That experience connects to today.

Lately, besides my lectures at Meiji Gakuin, I often get to talk with current students. The tricky question I always get is, "What books should I read during my university years?"

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Max Weber, translated by Hisao Otsuka, Iwanami Shoten)

When I desperately try to remember what it was like when I was a student, I recall that several professors told me, "If you are a student of sociology, you should read Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Iwanami Shoten)."

This book, commonly known as "Pro-Rin," explains the historical paradox that it was precisely the ascetic Protestant ethic that contributed greatly to modern capitalism, which affirms the pursuit of profit. In the end, I was unable to read it cover to cover during my student days.

One professor said, "Forget business books. Just read one proper management book—any one will do. If you can read it until you feel, 'I get this!' that's enough."

But there's a major catch here. Without understanding the prior research, grasping the book's arguments is impossible. Ultimately, you'd have to read the vast amount of material cited in the footnotes and references. The moment I realized this, I gave up on the challenge back then.

Therefore, when asked, "What books should you read as a student?" I don't have a good answer. Instead, I tell them, "It's better to read books after you've gained some social experience, ten or twenty years down the line."

Discourse on the Method (Descartes, translated by Takako Tanigawa, Iwanami Shoten)

For instance, I never imagined I'd ever read something like Discourse on the Method (Iwanami Shoten). But when I picked it up at 40, I empathized with Descartes's despair over the uncertain foundations of scholarship at the time. He wrote, "I loved mathematics above all else, because of the certainty and clarity of its reasoning," and felt compelled to introduce mathematical rigor as the basis for all thought.

At the same time, his overly strict and correct way of thinking made me picture someone who only ever says, "Is that right?" or "Can you prove it?" and I thought, "Ah, so you're the reason this world is so boring!" It was only at that age that I could truly feel this book (or at least a very small part of it) deep in my gut.

Strategies and Logic of Invisible Assets (Edited by Takayuki Itami and Dai Karube, Nikkei Publishing)

The same thing happened with 'Strategy and Logic of Invisible Assets' (Nikkei Publishing). I picked it up because it was written by my university friend, Hiroshi Karube (Professor at Hitotsubashi University), co-authored with Professor Takayuki Itami. But content that surely wouldn't have felt real to me in my youth, when viewed after a decade of business experience, allowed me to read it as something personal, interjecting "Is that really true?" as I went along.

When I tell students, "It's better to read books after gaining social experience," they usually look dissatisfied. Of course they do. They're asking questions because they want to learn now, only to be told about a future 10 or 20 years down the line. To them, that's an unimaginably distant future.

But for me, who was happily partying every night, that was the limit.

Please, help yourself!