Masaru Sato, former Japanese intelligence analyst turned prolific author, fields a question from a second-year university student in his advice column for Business Insider Japan. The student, pseudonym "Hyururu," studies Christian theology at a Tokyo university, maintains above-average grades, competes in ballroom dance, and has grown contemptuous of his institution. His complaint: classmates who sleep through lectures still pass because attendance-based grading rewards warm bodies over intellectual engagement. He has stopped attending class, reading alone in the library instead. Sato's diagnosis is blunt and structural. The student's framing — that the system is broken and he is above it — is textbook cognitive distortion. The peers he dismisses as lazy may be working night shifts to afford tuition while still meeting every attendance requirement. The comment-paper system he disdains actually requires students to demonstrate comprehension, and the professor evaluates those papers. The student has constructed a narrative where his absence is principled and others' presence is hollow. Sato calls this what it is: self-serving rationalization disguised as intellectual rigor. The deeper cut targets the student's escalator-school background. Students who passed through Japan's brutal entrance exam system at the high school level — or earlier, through middle school exams — develop a positional awareness that calcifies into brittle pride. Hyururu's boast about taking Math III (advanced calculus) as a humanities student is revealing: if he genuinely loved mathematics, it would not register as a status marker. Pride in credentials rather than curiosity about subjects is the tell. Sato constructs a thought experiment. If the university switched to exam-only evaluation and a student who never attended class scored higher than Hyururu, would he celebrate the meritocracy he claims to want? Experience tells Sato the answer is no — cognitively distorted individuals shift their grievance to fit whatever outcome disadvantages them. The goalposts are always moving because the real function of the complaint is ego protection, not systemic critique. The professional consequences are concrete. Japanese corporate hiring funnels candidates through HR professionals trained to detect exactly this pattern: high self-regard, low self-reflection, externalized blame. A candidate who radiates "the world has failed to recognize me" gets screened out before the department interview. Graduate school admissions committees see the same signals. The trajectory, left uncorrected, is a person who ages into permanent under-evaluation while insisting their true abilities remain unrecognized. Sato's prescription is literary rather than therapeutic. He recommends Lu Xun's "The True Story of Ah Q" and Nakajima Atsushi's "The Tiger Poet" (Sangetsuki) — both canonical stories of men destroyed by the gap between self-image and reality. For a contemporary version, Yuzuki Asako's "Ito-kun A to E" depicts a screenwriter who never writes a screenplay because submitting work to judgment would risk his self-concept as talented. The character prefers the safety of potential over the vulnerability of output. The column's value is in its refusal to validate the student's framing. In a media environment that routinely flatters Gen Z grievances about institutional failure, Sato treats the student as an adult capable of hearing that the institution may be functioning correctly and the problem may be internal. He does this while explicitly noting the student is young enough to change — the harshness is calibrated, not gratuitous.
