The Enigma of Japanese Power (36 page)

Central to the cluster of notions that inspire the imagery of a Japanese spirit is the ideal of
makoto
, which is usually translated as ‘sincerity’. But the criteria for this ‘sincerity’ are somewhat unusual. As in Western languages, it implies that the façade one presents to the world matches one’s inner life. But having
makoto
compels one to force one’s thinking and emotions into line with what is expected by the surrounding society, rather than to show one’s natural feelings. Ideally it involves rearranging one’s conscience to fit one’s demeanour, by pressing the squirming inner self down to a greater depth. This inculcated attitude of accommodating oneself to the audience undoubtedly has, in everyday Japanese life, a pleasing and soothing effect on the human environment.

Makoto
is in conflict with the Western concept of ‘genuineness’, however, and on a deeper level is a highly political notion. It often promotes socially decreed hypocrisy, because suppressing the self too much is uncomfortable. Its connection with the ideal of fatalistic acceptance of one’s socio-political environment is obvious; to be considered
makoto
, individuals must erase their individuality as much as is needed to make them fit in with socio-political exigencies. This connotation of
makoto
indicates a pragmatic awareness of the fact that, throughout the centuries of strict social discipline, many, if not most, ordinary Japanese have not genuinely believed that sacrificing themselves for the sake of others constitutes the ultimate meaning of life. One had to pretend in order to survive, then as today. The famous
Hagakure
, for instance, makes the point that when the wise samurai discovers the meaninglessness of the demanding etiquette, he should guard against giving any hint of this realisation to youth.

The Japanese spirit – as manifested by submission, by
makoto
, by persistence, by sacrifice – is above all a ‘pure’ spirit. This tradition draws heavily on another of the intellectual movements of the Tokugawa period – Kokugaku, or ‘national learning’, which went back to ancient Japanese writings for intellectual sustenance. A few decades into the eighteenth century, the devotees of Kokugaku idealised an imaginary prehistoric epoch in which an emperor, freshly placed on the archipelago by the Sun Goddess, presided over a pure and innocent grand family of happy Japanese. These scholars were the first to introduce the modern notion of a Japanese uniqueness and superiority traceable to the original innocence and purity of the race. Unlike the Chinese, the early Japanese needed no laws because they were naturally good and considerate of each other. As the nativist Kamo Mabuchi (1697–1769) expressed it:

In ancient time, when men’s dispositions were straightforward, a complicated system of morals was unnecessary. It would naturally happen that bad acts might occasionally be committed, but the straightforwardness of men’s dispositions would prevent the evil from being concealed and growing in extent. So that in those days it was unnecessary to have a doctrine of right and wrong.
¹⁴

Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801), the towering figure of the Kokugaku movement, also argued that Japan differed from China because it possessed moral excellence. The Chinese rulers had invented the idea of the mandate of Heaven to justify their perfidy and protect themselves against uprisings, whereas the Japanese were moral by nature and superior because they had no need to enunciate moral norms.
¹⁵
Although the Kokugaku movement was mainly concerned with linguistic and textual exegeses of domestic classical literature, it had a decisive impact on the political ideology of the subsequent Meiji period and on nationalistic thinking in the twentieth century.

This ‘pure’ Japan, unsullied by Chinese cultural influence, was referred to as Yamato, after the kingdom that had conquered and assimilated most Japanese kingdoms by the early centuries of the first millennium. The true Japanese were seen as possessing a
yamatogokoro
, a Yamato soul or spirit, with sensibilities superior to those of any other people. The later Kokugaku scholar Hirata Atsutane (1776–1843), whose xenophobic teachings became very influential once Japan had been forced to end its seclusion, preached that it was absolutely essential to purify one’s
yamatogokoro
. ‘A true Japanese heart and soul was the only valid foundation for discerning truth and error.’
¹⁶

In the 1970s and 1980s many corporations began to worry about a flagging spirit among their employees, and a number have encouraged them to undergo a discipline called
seishin
training.
Seishin
means ‘spirit’ or ‘mind’, but in this context it is closely associated with the idea of ‘pure Japanese spirit’, and having more of it is supposed to increase one’s dedication, perseverance and ability to endure hardship.

Such training usually consists of exercises that lead via mental and physical exhaustion to a breakdown of any resistance to commands. Chanting continuously for a full day and night, kneeling with overseers hovering around ready to whack the less vigorous trainee on his back, will do the job. Marathon running is another favourite. But most of the companies concerned stick to simpler Zen-style meditation (which includes the occasional whack on the back), or military drills of the kind that salaryman recruits receive at the company’s mountain retreat. Either way, the achievement of the successful
seishin
trainee is the ability to remain mentally calm while unconditionally submitting to authority.

There are good reasons for the salaryman to take such training seriously. Evaluations of the personal qualities of company staff members for the purpose of promotion often tend to be made ‘in terms of a framework provided by the
seishin
orientation’.
¹⁷
The higher up one goes in Japanese organisational life, the more attention is given to such considerations, ‘particularly along those avenues to leadership positions commonly described as “the élite course”’.
¹⁸
Many large Japanese corporations contain an élite subculture very responsive to this special emphasis on ‘spirit’, with its overtones from the past, prodding the salarymen – and especially the more ambitious among them – to adhere to its standards and to spread them downward.

Until well into the nineteenth century it was virtually impossible for Japanese commoners or samurai to shape a comprehensive body of critical thought contradicting what the shogunate wanted them to believe. But even when Japan’s isolation ensured that the ordinary public had no way of knowing how other populations were ruled, there was still enough foreign-and domestic-inspired doubt to give the warrior regime a problem in convincing lower lords and their more intelligent vassals, as well as a class of literati, that the governmental structure which it headed could not be improved upon. There had, after all, been the early Chinese model of statecraft, and during the centuries of civil war some indigenous Buddhist sects had enriched the arid intellectual scene with teachings that might perhaps have grown into a conceptual foundation for attacking the incumbent power-holders. Then there were the expelled Portuguese missionaries, whose legacy could have inspired budding political theorists with ideas about alternative ways to run a country. And the Dutch, even though carefully kept in political quarantine on an artificial island off Nagasaki, were living specimens from a society with very un-Japanese attributes.

As a new scholastic class took over the intellectual lead from the Buddhist priests of pre-Tokugawa days, and as learning was encouraged among the samurai to keep this subsidised leisure class from meddling in politics, circumstances ripened for a proliferation of potentially subversive ideas among the élite. The warrior regime did not formulate, or order the formulation of, any ideology to guard against subversion, but it made clear what could and could not be said, and it enforced these rules. So there was no heretical thought, and ‘those whose speech and practice were different were driven underground’.
¹⁹

Discussion of government affairs was simply forbidden. Criticism of anything involving power relations was treated as treason. Although, over its two-and-a-half-century existence, the Tokugawa regime showed alternating cycles of severity and laxity, it always retained a complete monopoly on moral standards, including those relating to such ‘dangerous phenomena’ as samurai mixing with commoners or talking about the events of the day. Its officials maintained an elaborate censorship system that scrutinised even trivial literature and pictures. ‘Since anything “new” posed a danger to the class structure, the government was especially eager to suppress books and broadsides that mentioned new currents of thought or anything unusual.’
²⁰
It was against such a background of suppression that a number of neo-Confucianist movements flourished.

Neo-Confucianism, especially that of the Chu Hsi school, was able to become the mainstay of Tokugawa orthodoxy because it offered a perspective on the universe that would be the dream of any authoritarian bureaucratic regime. According to it, both the social and the natural order are in concord with unchanging principles of nature. Thus questions as to why those in charge are in charge, and why everyone beneath them should remain ‘in their proper station’, were simply banned from rational discourse.

As we have seen in Chapter 6, Japanese neo-Confucianism developed theories in which the priorities of Chinese Confucianism were turned upside-down by making loyalty to the ruler, instead of filial piety, the overriding moral command. Yoshikawa Koretaru summed it up: ‘There can be desertion of one’s parents for the Sovereign’s sake, but there can be no reason to desert the Sovereign for a parent’s sake.’
²¹
Later, the Meiji oligarchy was to create a myth of the emperor as the benevolent father of all Japanese. Yamazaki Ansai, a student of Yoshikawa Koretaru and a highly influential early Tokugawa thinker, held that rulers, whether virtuous or depraved, should be served with blind loyalty. In a combination of neo-Confucianism and Shinto, Yamazaki viewed existing political and social structures as metaphysically blessed. For him, political change could never be legitimate and was simply unthinkable.
²²

In the latter part of the Tokugawa period, the Hayashi family and their academy became official standard-bearers of the neo-Confucianist explications of the laws of nature and human society, which by then had been precisely fitted to power relations under the regime.
²³
Yet intellectual life was not completely predictable. Occasionally the Tokugawa ‘schoolmen’ could exercise their minds by following some lively dispute among their colleagues. The major political thinker of the period, Ogyu Sorai (1666–1728), shook them up by taking the ideas of earlier advocates of a return to an older Confucianism, and constructing a coherent theory of the immutability of established political institutions throughout historical change. For Sorai, the ancient Chinese sage-kings had created these institutions as instruments of the Confucian Way; they provided a moral principle embodied in governmental structures and surviving any transformations these might undergo.
²⁴

Whereas Tokugawa thought was not immune to change and encompassed scholarly trends that were at odds with one another, the more it changed the more its political thrust remained the same. The participants in Tokugawa intellectual life upheld an orthodoxy not in the sense that they all said the same thing, but in what they did not say. Their debates never recognised the possibility of dissent on basic socio-political matters. Together, they excluded the possibility of heterodoxy. In their world-view the moral autonomy of the individual person did not exist; this was the core of the ideology. The regime, for its part, appreciated the necessity of a certain measure of doctrinal flexibility. From the mid-eighteenth century onward, the intellectual fashion within the government and in many of the domain schools advocated the adjustment of ideology to uphold authority against the background of changing history.
²⁵

The teachers of the Wang Yangming (Oyomei) school, which stressed reliance on intuition in determining what was morally sound, were similarly staunch in their support of the shogunate until almost the very end.
²⁶
As for the Kokugaku movement, Mabuchi started from the premiss that the temporal order was sacred, since ultimately it was governed by the inviolable imperial institution. Motoori Norinaga further endorsed the Tokugawa political arrangement by portraying it as completely in accordance with the intentions of the Sun Goddess. Besides finding it outrageous ever to judge the character of the sovereign, he preached unconditional submission to those of higher rank.
²⁷

The proponents of formally tolerated Tokugawa thought all propagated the view that the order that had been imposed was immutable, being in tune with nature and in accordance with the will of a multitude of divinities. Even among themselves, they strove for more ‘purity’ and for greater ‘loyalty’, just as in the 1920s and until the end of the war Japan’s super-patriots, disagreeing with the authorities and the rest of the population, tried to outdo each other in demonstrations of love for the emperor.

Evidence that the demands for total submission went against the grain with many individuals three centuries ago is seen in the popular culture of the day. Drama and fiction were obsessed with the conflict between
giri
, meaning duty as stipulated by the dictates of a strict society, and
ninjo
, meaning natural human feelings – especially, in this context, the feelings of those obliged to kill a relative or abandon a lover. The
giri–ninjo
dichotomy is still used today, and many Japanese believe that
ninjo
are uniquely Japanese human feelings that cannot be understood by foreigners. The theatre and literature of the Tokugawa period were suffused with imagery based on this theme. Present-day kabuki would be practically nothing without it, and movie and TV audiences, and comicbook readers, cannot get enough of it either. In history,
giri
always won out over
ninjo
in the end. But in the meantime, the dramatic treatment of the quandary provided the symbols needed to understand the human predicament.

In contemporary Japan the tradition of political theory is too weak to eliminate the lingering neo-Confucianist sense that the socio-political hierarchy conforms to a natural order. Very few Japanese question the superior power of the bureaucrats, which has no legal basis whatsoever. The political arrangements of the Tokugawa period were presented as perfect in that they conformed to ‘the order found in the manifold natural phenomena of heaven and earth’.
²⁸
Today, the Prime Minister’s Office and other government departments are forever conducting surveys of social practices, attitudes and opinion, not in order to know what is going on but to translate their findings into a model of proper Japanese behaviour. Study groups attached to government offices publish reports delineating an ideal Japanese identity. The public is regularly reassured, in the form of an opinion report, that 90 per cent of it belongs to the middle class. Japanese women are told that they want to give up their work after they marry and stay at home until they have brought up at least one child.

While the moral injunctions chaining people to their proper stations that permeated life in the Tokugawa period had religious qualities, the various ideological strands were not yet woven into a single grand faith that could be summed up concisely. Only after Japan had come out of its isolation were ideological fragments, old mythology and new patriotic sentiments mixed into an all-encompassing Japanese faith, in the name of which millions of Japanese were to give their lives and still more millions of other Asians to lose theirs. The Meiji oligarchy, in its attempt to mould a state commanding the allegiance of commoners as well as the members of the samurai caste it had just abolished, quite consciously created the new faith to serve political purposes.

Many writers have concluded that no other people in a major nation lived through more changes in a mere score of years than the Japanese of the early Meiji period. B. H. Chamberlain, an eyewitness of the times, begins his famous book
Things Japanese
with the observation that to have lived through those events ‘makes a man feel preternaturally old; for here he is in modern times, with the air full of talk about bicycles and bacilli and “spheres of influence”, and yet he can himself distinctly remember the Middle Ages’.
²⁹
What began as a
coup d’état
grew into a momentous political transition. Both power-holders and government structures were new. Probably the single most revolutionary change was one that followed from the creation of national military forces: after centuries of being forbidden on pain of death to possess any kind of weapon, able-bodied men of non-samurai caste were trained to fight. For the first time Japanese commoners became, very tangibly, involved in the aims of the state.

Just when the general public was becoming a political factor, the importation of foreign theories made many Japanese aware that government was something that could be scrutinised. The examples of foreign government systems prompted urgent questions about the government at home. Curious Japanese minds had to be inoculated against the potentially subversive foreign ideas of individualism, liberalism and democracy. The exercise of power in Japan had to be explained and justified in ways never required before, and new methods of control had to be introduced.

This entailed, among other things, the articulation of a national identity. No foreign wars of the kind that periodically ravaged Europe had stimulated a ‘natural’ growth of any consciousness of shared national aims. Between 1600 and 1850 France had been at war for a total of 115 years, Britain for 125, Russia for 124, Spain for 160 and Austria for 129.
³⁰
During the same period Japan had fired at only one United States ship that, defying a ban, approached its coast.
³¹
Compelling new nationalist beliefs that would simultaneously strengthen Japan against the pushy Western powers and justify the rule of the new oligarchy were obviously necessary.

The Men of Meiji had concluded that the source of Western power, which in their eyes appeared overwhelming, lay precisely in those universalistic and transcendental systems of thought and belief that Japan lacked: the Western legal systems, the US constitution and especially the Christian religion. The impression was widespread that the Western powers had purposely adopted Christianity because it was the best instrument with which to conquer the world. Shortly before the Meiji Restoration one scholar had already explained that Christianity was ‘a trick that European rulers used to “make their peoples docile and easy to lead”’.
³²

From the very start of the Meiji period, religion became an official concern. The oligarchs left no doubt that they considered it very much their business. A major figure among them, Ito Hirobumi, concluded that, because Japanese religions were feeble, some substitute had to be found.
³³
The links between the government and religion were the subject of a hot debate in the early 1870s, touched on by Nishi Amane, a major thinker of the so-called Meiji Enlightenment, in a series of magazine articles. He advocated tolerance, but warned that religion should not interfere with the interests of the state. He also strongly urged that the government should not rely on religion: ‘How can any regime avoid destruction and ruin if . . . it relies on something the falseness of which it conceals?’
³⁴
He criticised moves by the new rulers to establish a state religion. The government in the meantime created a Shinto Department, organised a national shrine system and sent out missionaries to co-opt Buddhist priests in undermining the influence of Buddhism. But this early movement to establish a state religion petered out because of the reluctance of the priests to endorse and propagandise the new nationalist faith, and because the whole effort made Japan look bad in Western eyes.
³⁵

The solution proposed by another Meiji Enlightenment luminary, Nakamura Masanao (famous as translator of John Stuart Mill’s
On Liberty
), was that the emperor should set an example by being baptised a Christian.
³⁶
Emperor Mutsuhito (posthumously called Meiji) did not take this advice, though eventually he was made to set another kind of example by adding milk and beef to his diet. It was believed that since these products came from a big and sturdy animal they would make the Japanese as big and sturdy as the Westerners who had been eating beef and drinking milk for centuries.
³⁷

While Christianity did not prove to be the answer, the Meiji oligarchy did make the emperor the key to a quasi-religious solution. Invoking an imagined Japanese antiquity for the formula they settled on, the new power-holders sought to legitimise themselves through a divine emperor of their own creation.