Apparently this is very common of young people in japan. A couple semesters ago we had a few group meetings with some of the japanese exchange students on campus and the japanese language program here and most of them said that young people in japan generally don't know anything about politics...
For those curious, those are all real books brought up in this chapter. The Eternal Zero is a hugely successful novel published in 2006, and Botchan and No Longer Human are considered classics of Japanese literature by Natsume Soseki and Osamu Dezai, respectively. The latter two have been...