Kokoro

In Kokoro, the narrator’s diploma represents the diverging worldviews between him and his father. While the narrator, sharing Sensei’s “secret contempt” for university education, sees his diploma as commonplace and insignificant, his father, being a rural farmer with no such degree of his own, takes great pride in his son’s accomplishment. When the narrator arrives back home after graduating, his father cannot stop praising him, and the narrator, taken aback by such “unaffected pleasure,” is initially pleased. However, as he begins to compare his father’s reaction to that of the worldly, metropolitan Sensei—who treats the narrator’s graduation with polite indifference—his pleasure turns to annoyance. His immersion in metropolitan life in Tokyo and his time at university has shifted his worldview, and the “naive provincialism” his father exhibits now seems embarrassing and outdated.

Learning that his father’s reaction was not born of rural naivete but is rather the expression of a desire to see his son graduate before he dies, the narrator backtracks on his earlier assessment. He realizes it was he who was naive and, handing his father his crumpled diploma, berates himself for being so conceited. He was so sure of his superiority that he was blinded to something so simple as fatherly love. In this way, the crumpled diploma comes to represent not just the diverging worldviews of the narrator and his father, but also the pitfalls of the narrator’s supposedly “superior” metropolitan perspective. Though his education and time in Tokyo has undoubtedly made him more worldly than his father, it has also instilled in him a false sense of superiority, blinding him to the emotional reality of those who do not belong to his new world.