The Enigma of Japanese Power (37 page)

In their attempt to convince the Japanese citizen that the emperor was a unique blessing, the Meiji power-holders had a rich tradition to draw on. Japan’s first interpretative history, the
Gukansho
(written by a politically involved Buddhist monk in 1219), reaffirmed that the essence of Japan lay in the uniqueness of its sacred imperial line. Whereas China selected its emperors, the single Japanese line had been created by the Sun Goddess, who had also bequeathed the specific arrangement whereby emperors ruled – in ways that were different but appropriate to the various stages of history.
³⁸

Roughly a century later when, confounding the
Gukansho
, there were two rival emperors, the most learned participant in the politics of this schism, Kitabatake Chikafusa, wrote a scholarly treatise in support of the emperor of his choice. In this famous work on the divine nature of the imperial line, much was made of the unique relationship between throne and people. To describe this phenomenon Chikafusa used the ancient, Chinese-derived term
kokutai
, which in the Japanese context is generally translated as ‘national essence’. This concept eventually became the centrepiece of the Yamatoist ideology with which the Japanese were indoctrinated until 1945.

As we just saw, a number of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thinkers also found proof of Japanese superiority in the sacredness of the unbroken imperial line. Yamaga Soko, an important seventeenth-century theorist of the imperial institution, held that Japan – and not China – was the real Middle Kingdom, and that Shinto had guided the development of Confucianism. His arguments were built around the notion of
kokutai
.

The concept of
kokutai
was popularised again in 1825 by Aizawa Seishisai, compiler of the
Shinron
or
New Theses
, whose contentions were to become a major ingredient in the artificial religion constructed by the Meiji oligarchy. Ironically, it was the power of the West that inspired Aizawa, who believed that Western rulers had achieved a better
kokutai
than the Tokugawa regime.
³⁹

The power-holders who helped determine the ideas of the Meiji intelligentsia seized enthusiastically on
kokutai
. In censorship instructions to the press issued in 1873,
kokutai
was already included as a subject that could not be criticised.
⁴⁰

It took about twenty years before the various strands of Yamatoist propaganda were woven together into a comprehensive mythology of the state. It was spread among the public by two powerful organs that had also been created by the oligarchy: the conscript military and the national education system.

From the 1880s onward, Japanese history books for use in schools did not begin with the Stone Age, but with the gods from which the emperor was a direct descendant. Hints of the kind of indoctrination that the nation was to undergo for half a century could be gleaned from the Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors of 1882. But the Imperial Rescript on Education, issued eight years later, was the first official statement to serve as a basis for deciding what was and what was not truly Japanese. It enjoined the cultivation, to the greater glory of the emperor, of loyalty and filial piety and twelve other virtues. These ideas were incorporated in all the textbooks used in
shushin
(moral training), the first lesson of the day in all the schools. Already in 1892 elementary-school pupils were memorising lines in which they promised to sacrifice their lives gladly for the emperor.
⁴¹
As the Japanese Ministry of Education summed it up for the rest of the world:

Descended in a direct line from the heavenly deities, the Emperor has stood unshaken in his high place through all generations [in a relation to his subjects] of father and child rather than of master and servant. The imperial family was the parental house; the subjects were as relatives and connections.
⁴²

Before the arrival of Western ideas, Shinto revivalists could talk about little else apart from the sacredness of the emperor without falling back on Confucianism. Even though they would have preferred a ‘return’ to the pure Japanese innocence that existed before native religion was besmirched by Chinese thought, Shintoism had produced no sacred texts, doctrines, moral codes or philosophical treatises, and had little more to offer than the idea of an unbroken line of emperors. The discourse revolving around
kokutai
ideology also inevitably had to borrow Confucianist concepts of the family, but it broadened these to encompass the new centrally governed Japan, and incorporated Prussian organismic theories that supported a strong state.

The lessons extolling the ‘family state’ were accompanied by warnings that the national spirit could be threatened by dangerous and un-Japanese thought. Eager Meiji-period students were exposed to a vast spectrum of Western ideas that included British liberalism, Rousseau’s popular sovereignty, Anglo-American empiricism, utilitarianism and social Darwinism. Hegelian ideas of the state found Japanese interpreters, even before the introduction of Marxism and anarchism. But increasing suspicion was thrown on Western systems of moral or political thought providing a conceptual framework that could encompass all human experience.

By the beginning of this century Yamatoist mythology had sufficient consistency to serve as a substitute religion. Whereas in the 1880s it was possible to believe that all nations had a
kokutai
in some form or another, after the turn of the century it was a monopoly of Japan.
⁴³
Initially,
kokutai
was rendered in English as ‘national polity’, but later it was more often than not described as a concept that could not be conveyed in any foreign language, because it was imbued with uniquely Japanese spiritual significance. As a Japanese historian said, summing up the political evolution of the Meiji period:

A change had taken place from . . . when the state had been observed, studied and criticised . . . by law, by myth, and by the revival of ancient ethics the State was to be revered; it had become something to be obeyed submissively. One no longer explained the State, one
believed
in it!
⁴⁴

That many appeared to believe in it can be gathered from a dissertation with which George Etsujiro Uyehara received a doctorate degree at the London School of Economics in 1910. The Japanese, Uyehara explained, had lived under one and the same government ever since the first (mythological) emperor Jimmu, and had always scrupulously maintained their ethnic unity.
⁴⁵
For him, proof that Japan was one big family resided in the fact that the Japanese all behave in the same way and have the same feelings. A ‘strong affection for the country stirs their whole nervous system’. The emperor system ‘penetrates to their very flesh and bone’. From the emperor, ‘everything emanates; in him everything subsists; there is nothing on the soil of Japan existent independent of him. He is the sole owner of the Empire, the author of law, justice, privilege, and honour, and the symbol of the unity of the Japanese nation.’ It occurred to the LSE doctoral candidate that the emperor was not much in evidence in the governing of Japan, but this was no problem, since ‘there is no need for the Sovereign of Japan to make any attempt to show his personal greatness’.

The ‘family state’ ideology, along with military values and a military approach to social organisation, was effectively spread throughout the country by the large new army of conscripts. This and the education system together brought about a rapid ‘samuraisation’ of the country: a dissemination, among the lower layers of the population, of the disciplinary ideals and extremist ‘loyalty’ code that had exemplified the education of samurai.

In the first decades of the twentieth century the Army gradually infiltrated the countryside. It insinuated itself into local councils, exploited the rural population’s commitment to the small community and combined its own priorities with those decreed by natural village custom. In 1910 the Imperial Military Reserve Association was established. It was followed in 1915 by the Greater Japan Youth Association, promoted by the military élite, the Naimusho and the Ministry of Education. In 1926 military training centres for youth were set up by the military and education bureaucrats. Nationally organised women’s defence organisations completed the effort. Through these four organisations, which in 1935 had an enrolment of between eleven and twelve million people,
⁴⁶
the Army set up a gigantic apparatus for indoctrination. Thus by the onset of the war in China the organisers of the ‘family state’ had gained considerable control over what went into the hearts and minds of Japanese between the ages of 6 and 40: via the schools up to age 14, via the youth associations between 14 and 20 and via military service and the reservist associations from 20 onward.

If a Japanese official or intellectual today were to start talking about the ‘heavenly task’, ‘sovereign path’ or ‘moral way’, most of his compatriots would think that he had gone out of his mind. Even though a minority believes that Japan did not unconditionally surrender in 1945 (because the imperial institution was left intact), the atomic bombs of August 1945 proved that the unique and divinely ordained
kokutai
could not ultimately save the nation in war. For the first time in history, foreign conquerors arrived to disprove the notion of superior valour based on ethnic unity and an unbroken line of emperors. On New Year’s Day 1946 the Japanese were informed by their morning newspapers of an imperial proclamation assuring them that ‘the ties between Us and Our people . . . are not predicated on the false conception that the Emperor is divine and that the Japanese are superior to other races and fated to rule the world’. But a booklet published by the Japanese cabinet in November 1946 to explain the new constitution could still state that
kokutai
, now interpreted as meaning ‘the basic characteristics of the nation’, was the foundation of Japan’s existence, and that its substance was the adoration of the people for the emperor as the national uniting force.
⁴⁷
The Japanese concept of the nation automatically implies that it will endure for ever. In this respect the concepts expressed in the idea of
kokutai
are still a basic factor in contemporary thought.

In trying to establish how much of Tokugawa and Meiji ideology survives in contemporary Japan, one is on shakier ground. One reason for this is that the Japanese are content with vague meanings, another the great ambivalence with which the Japanese approach their traditional ideals and the problem of their identity. On the one hand, many of the common terms of early twentieth-century propaganda seem absurdly anachronistic today. On the other, popular books on psychological and sociological themes still preach the political submission of the individual by ‘analysing’ this as the Japanese way; corporations claim to be large and benevolent families, and the belief in racial uniqueness and superiority is fairly widespread.

The ethics of submission and wartime mythology continually appear as a theme in popular entertainment.
⁴⁸
Much pre-war propaganda has seeped through to present-day Japan. In the late 1980s this appears to have the potential to flood the nation with the old imagery as a result of a collective attack of self-pity and self-doubt brought on by, say, international sanctions against Japanese trade.

On the whole,
nihonjinron
concedes that Japanese do not believe in universal values and are ‘not logical’. It portrays such traits as assets that supposedly give Japanese closer contact with the here and now of concrete circumstances, and make them more loving towards other people. Western ways and manners are said to be ‘dry’ or ‘hard’, those of Japan are ‘wet’ and ‘soft’. Unlike Westerners – and, for that matter, the Chinese – who are individual and unconnected like grains of sand, the Japanese, as a result of their ‘wetness’ and ‘softness’, stick together like glutinous rice. Similarly, Western reason is held to be ‘cold’, ‘dry’ and ‘intolerant’, while the Japanese approach is thought to be ‘warm’, ‘wet’ and therefore more humane.
Nihonjinron
theorists believe that Japanese are extremely sensitive to each other’s needs and have a special gift for wordless communication. All emphasise the primacy of the group rather than the individual, and imply that Japanese prefer to submerge their own selves in the communal life.

Nakasone Yasuhiro, one of Japan’s stronger post-war prime ministers, is a devout adherent of
nihonjinron
theories. He believes in a special Japanese compassion that derives from a ‘monsoon culture’ (in the summer Japan is very humid, warm and sticky). For him. Christian love must have derived from the same Asian monsoon culture that produced Buddhism. It could not have come out of the desert climate of the Middle East, which produced the Judaeo-Christian values of ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’. In a 1986 speech Nakasone did not mince his words in talking of Japan’s international mission to spread its monsoon-inspired compassion to the rest of the world.
⁵⁰
He also implied that contracts are a product of the non-compassionate desert culture.

This type of ‘analysis’ comes straight from the nationalist philosopher of ethics Watsuji Tetsuro (1889–1960), who was a major apologist for Japan’s conquests, believing them to be part of a destiny imposed upon the nation by the pressure of world history. His famous pre-war work
Climate and Culture
has inspired many a
nihonjinron
practitioner.
⁵¹
In addition to the ‘monsoon’ and ‘desert’ type cultures, Watsuji also postulated the existence of a ‘meadow’ type, found primarily in Europe. Most Westerners are a mixed product of meadow and desert, which means they are capable of gentle love as well as dry, abstract, contractual reasoning. Japan has, according to Watsuji, a very peculiar version of the monsoon culture, producing people ‘full of emotional vitality and sensitivity’. All this allegedly fosters intimate, family-style relations among Japanese.
⁵²

Ordinary Japanese people have never been encouraged to take this kind of writing with a grain of salt.

Very little serious writing by Japanese on anything relating to their society is entirely free of
nihonjinron
influence. It is also amazing how much
nihonjinron
has crept into assessments by foreign authors. The possibility of coercion or indoctrination as formative factors of Japanese behaviour is not considered in the universe of
nihonjinron
imagery. And therein lies its propagandistic force. In the
nihonjinron
perspective, Japanese limit their actions, do not claim ‘rights’ and always obey those placed above them, not because they have no other choice, but because it comes naturally to them. Japanese are portrayed as if born with a special quality of brain that makes them want to suppress their individual selves.

It is striking how casually Japanese seem to accept that they are physically ‘a race apart’ from other peoples. I have heard officials explain to foreign businessmen that medicine manufactured by foreign firms must undergo special tests before being allowed into Japan because of the different construction of Japanese bodies.
⁵³
The former chairman of the association of agricultural co-operatives, Zenchu, Iwamochi Shizuma, once explained before an audience of foreign correspondents that since ‘everyone knows that Japanese intestines are about one metre longer than those of foreigners’ we should all understand that American beef was not suitable for digestion by Japanese. Visiting Washington in December 1987, the chairman of the Liberal Democratic Party’s agricultural policy research council, Hata Tsutomu, also spoke of longer Japanese digestive tracts that had difficulty in coping with red meat.
⁵⁴

The great ‘scientific proof’ of Japanese uniqueness was supposed to have arrived with the famous studies of Dr Tsunoda Tadanobu, who discovered that Japanese brains are essentially different from Western brains or, indeed, the brains of most other people in the world. According to this researcher, Japanese hear insect sounds, temple bells, humming and snoring with the left half of the brain, whereas Westerners do so with the right half.

Dr Tsunoda implies that Japanese reasoning is different from that of other people because they use their two brain halves differently. His testing methods are highly suspect. My impression, based on an account by one of his foreign guinea-pigs, is that auto-suggestion plays an important role. Yet his books sell well in Japan, and his views have been officially credited to the extent of being introduced abroad by the semi-governmental Japan Foundation.
⁵⁵

A popular sub-category of
nihonjinron
theories concerns the Japanese language, which is widely thought by Japanese to be particularly difficult to learn, not because of its insanely complicated writing system, but because it possesses a ‘spirit’ unlike any in other languages. This spirit, called
kotodama
, was an important mythological ingredient of the pre-war ideology of superior uniqueness. It is seen as manifest in
yamato kotoba
, the supposedly pure Japanese words which can express profound meanings beyond the semantic capabilities of the linguistic borrowings from China and the West.
⁵⁶
The belief in the uniqueness of the Japanese language is important for
nihonjinron
practitioners in general, who like to furnish new evidence of Japanese uniqueness by contrasting the delicate nuances and connotations of Japanese words with their supposedly cruder Western counterparts.

Inspired by a survey on the Japanese way of thinking conducted by the Institute for Statistical Mathematics, affiliated to the Ministry of Education, Yamamoto Shichihei, a major
nihonjinron
author, has concluded that Japan’s youth are returning to the values and social attitudes of the Tokugawa period. He characterises this Tokugawa-type Japanese as conforming to traditional discipline in a relaxed manner, accepting and enjoying it without strenuous or conscious effort. For him this is the best way to enjoy the present, because one need not try to be anything but one’s natural self. And he claims that all this is possible because Japanese society functions on the basis of a quasi-blood-relation community.
⁵⁷
In 1971, pretending to be a Jew who admired aspects of Japanese uniqueness, Yamamoto wrote and published the first and one of the biggest
nihonjinron
best-sellers.

The
nihonjinron
writings can be seen as essays defending the ideology of Japaneseness against the encroachment of Western concepts of individual worth, against the Western example of political self-assertion and against the threat that Western logical consistency poses for Japan’s political culture. As such,
nihonjinron
is comparable to the nativist Kokugaku reaction to Chinese learning in the Tokugawa period. Both then and now the attempt to prove superiority is evident. The Kokugaku scholars portrayed the Japanese as superbly moral in comparison with the Chinese, who had not understood the morality of their own teachings. Under Motoori Norinaga’s most famous disciple, Hirata Atsutane, Japanese traditions were extolled as having had a major influence on foreign countries. Even in countries far to the west of India, people believed that heaven, earth and humankind were created by a great God. ‘Accordingly, Japan is the original ancestor of all countries, the main or root country of the world. The Emperor is the sole true Son of Heaven and sovereign of the world, destined to rule all within the four seas as lord and master.’
⁵⁸
Today Japan is portrayed as teaching foreigners to ‘love world peace’; and it is held up to the world as a model of strength achieved through harmony. Throughout
nihonjinron
there are echoes of Japanese wartime imagery about the loss of will in the West, contrasted with the strength and dynamism of a Japan made superior through collective hard work.

The Japanese government (encouraged by then prime minister Nakasone) has decided to sponsor an inter-university centre that will investigate the distinctiveness of Japanese culture in order to present its findings to a world that, so the explanation goes, is full of misunderstanding about Japan. Judging by the writings of some of the scholars associated with the project, an entirely new approach to the concept of civilisation will be attempted.
⁵⁹

The ulterior aim of the centre seems to be to lift assessments of Japan – its history, social customs and politics – out of the general international discourse. To its credit, the Japanese press – though not averse to presenting explanations based on the
nihonjinron
perspective – has demurred at government participation in the new institute in Kyoto. The
Asahi Shimbun
, for instance, remarked that foreign countries will not pay much attention to the pronouncements of a group of Japanese professors who follow the lead of their 1930s predecessors, and a
Yomiuri Shinbun
editorial reminded the authorities that the era has passed when the government can decide how an individual must live.

An essential tenet of
nihonjinron
, and a core concept of Japan’s current political ideology, is the supposed homogeneity of the Japanese people. The old myth of racial purity and social homogeneity has come back in a new guise. Ignoring the great regional variety in customs, attitudes and concerns – as well as the almost 3 million
burakumin
(descendants of former outcasts), plus almost one million Japanese-born Koreans, the Okinawans, a small number of Ainu and hundreds of thousands of naturalised and native-born Japanese of recent Korean, Chinese and other foreign ancestry – the Japanese are asked to be proud of the fact that their country harbours no minorities and that they are all driven by the same group-centred ethics. Judged by the context in which it is constantly used, ‘homogeneity’ is a code word for uniqueness.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in a ‘blue book’, a diplomatic report published in the summer of 1985, congratulated the nation on its great economic successes and attributed them to its racial homogeneity. Other officials, but most conspicuously Nakasone, have indicated that there is good reason to be grateful for the fact that they have not had to accommodate representatives of other races on their soil. In September 1986 Nakasone caused consternation in the United States and elsewhere when he said that the USA was a less ‘intelligent’ society than Japan because of its black and Hispanic minorities.
⁶⁰
This was not misunderstood or quoted out of context, as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs claimed in the face of disturbed US reactions. His words were contained in a speech intended solely for Japanese ears, in the context of his long-term campaign to stimulate ethnic pride among the public. Only two of some fifty Japanese journalists who heard him speak found it worth reporting, since Nakasone had made similar statements before and many Japanese share such views.

In a 1980 government report to the Human Rights Commission of the United Nations, Japan denied the existence of minorities in its society. Such official denial is of great symbolic significance, since the idea of Japanese homogeneity is vitally important to Japan’s administrators. When foreign nationals become naturalised, they are strongly encouraged to adopt a Yamato (ethnic-majority) name for their official registration, despite the absence of any such legal requirement. Officials from the Ministry of Justice oppose the use of non-Yamato names written in the Japanese syllabary on the grounds that such names ‘do not match the single-race Japanese society’.
⁶¹

Another manifestation of the homogeneity myth is the image of Japan as a classless society, with only slight differences between rich and poor. Every year since 1958 the government has surveyed the Japanese to find out what they think of their own social status, and since the mid-1960s an increasing majority – which has climbed to 90 per cent in the 1980s – has described itself as ‘middle class’. The result of this poll is almost invariably an occasion for the newspapers once again to congratulate their readers on the fact that they all belong to a homogeneous nation of which they can be proud. The reports are based on a subjective evaluation; no standard for the concept ‘middle class’ is provided, and there is no hint concerning differences in income.

If incomes are measured against the domestic buying power of the yen, a considerable number of Japanese must be considered relatively poor. Several government officials have conceded that real unemployment rates are roughly double the official figure, and by some calculations they must be about triple. On the other hand, Japan learned in 1987 to its great surprise that it had twenty-two billionaires, one more than the USA (which has double Japan’s population). One of them was worth $21 billion.
⁶²
Exchange rates and horrendously inflationary land prices no doubt helped boost the statistic, but the people listed must have had considerable wealth to begin with. In short, it is not reasonable to describe Japanese society as ‘one-class’ or ‘classless’.

The notions of homogeneity and of a special Japanese purity of character are often linked together. This is rarely spelled out in so many words, but it is conveyed in films and television serials in their treatment of the encounter between Japanese culture and the ways of foreigners.

The idea of a ‘pure’
yamato gokoro
or
yamato damashii
(the soul or spirit of the Yamato people, the true Japanese, a mystical core untainted by Chinese or Western cultural influence) has made quite a dramatic comeback, after several decades, following the defeat of 1945, in which it was kept out of sight. But even if the
yamato gokoro
is not explicitly mentioned, in the 1980s the idea of homogeneity has begun to be accompanied by an increased use in the media of the term
minzoku
to denote the Japanese people or ‘race’, implying an organismal, familial solidarity, in some contexts comparable to the Nazi usage of the German
Volk
. Prime Minister Nakasone seemed, judging by some of his speeches, to prefer
minzoku
to
kokumin
or
minshu
, terms for ‘people’ without the racial overtones, and it is also frequently used in official publications and explanations given by bureaucrats of Japanese attitudes and behaviour. In government reports one finds traces of the assertions once recorded in the
Kokutai no Hongi
, a tract published in 1937 by the Ministry of Education and listing the essential points of the ‘national essence’. These supposedly ancient qualities are said to have made Japan the sole industrial power that has created a prosperous society of great harmony, without hostile classes tearing the fabric of national unity.

Serious Western observers of Japan also tend to endorse the reasoning that racial and social homogeneity explain the social cohesion and the ‘consensus’ and co-operation in politics, frequently pointing out that the mixing of the races took place more than a millennium ago in Japan. Such logic is attractive, especially for observers brought up in a melting-pot country such as the United States or with first-hand experience of recent adjustment problems caused by the influx of migrant workers and former colonial subjects in some European countries. But Japan’s ‘homogeneity’ cannot explain what it sets out to explain, and is very misleading in that it makes one ignore the problematic Japanese minorities that do exist, and an unacknowledged but very significant measure of social tension.

It is true that open disagreement makes many Japanese feel distinctly uncomfortable. The centuries-old approach of blaming both parties to a conflict still continues today. It has been a very effective mechanism for making Japanese subjects put on a continuous show of getting on famously with each other. But Japanese do not love their neighbours more than other people do. Appearances of like-mindedness and uniformity of behaviour effectively camouflage the latent problems of cohesion. Their society abounds in conflict that must be concealed by the myth of homogeneity. The myth covers up the interminable conflict among members of the governing élite, who can be counted on to agree absolutely on only one thing: a continuation of present power arrangements. It also conceals chronic, albeit largely ritualised, political conflict between, on the one hand, the administrators of the System and, on the other, the Japanese left and some other circles and individuals who disagree with what the System stands for.