More important, though, for a student of other cultures is what Benedict calls “a certain generosity” — the generosity, that is, to see that other perspectives, even if they go against our own views, can have a validity of their own. A zealot cannot be a good cultural anthropologist.
The “Japs” were born fanatics, treacherous, and uncivilized. They were monkey men, savages, rats, mad dogs, or crazed samurai, as ready to kill themselves as others. To tame this brutal race, it was necessary “to lift across 2000 years of backwardness a mind which, below its surface understanding of the technical knowledge our civilization has produced, is as barbaric as the savage who fights with a club and believes thunder is the voice of his God.”
The risk of cultural analysis is that it assumes a world that is both too static and too uniform. But while acknowledging the many changes that affect a nation or culture over time, she did believe in the tenaciousness of certain patterns. As she say about the English, it was just because they “were so much themselves that different standards and different moods could assert themselves in different generations.”
The divinity of the Japanese Emperor is often misunderstood in the West. The common assumption is that the Japanese believed he was God. Benedict points out, quite rightly, that the Japanese did not see a huge gulf between the human and the divine; all kinds of things could be invested with a sacred aura: rocks, mountains, and rivers, as well as human beings after they die. The Emperor, as the pinnacle of a national hierarchy, represented a religious idea of the state. You didn’t have to believe that he was literally a god to adhere to this idea. You owed him absolute obedience if you were Japanese.
This is not a criticism, for an anthropologist is not a fortuneteller. She could not have known what would happen many decades after writing her books. Much has changed in Japan since 1945. Young Japanese today might have a hard time recognizing some aspects of the “national character” described in Benedict’s book. Loyalty to the Emperor, duty to one’s parents, terror of not repaying one’s moral debts, these have faed in an age of technology-driven self-absorption.
It is a classic book because of its intellectual and stylistic lucidity. Benedict was a superb writer who explained complicated ideas without resorting to ugly jargon. Style, some would say, is a reflection of character.
The Japanese have been described in the most fantastic series of “but also” s’ ever used for any nation of the world. When a serious observer is writing about peoples other than the Japanese and says they are unprecedentedly polite, he is not likely to add, “But also insolent and overbearing.” When he says people of some nation are incomparably rigid in their behavior, he does not add, “But also they adapt themselves readily to extreme innovations.”
When he writes a book on a nation with a popular cult of aestheticism which gives high honor to actors and to artists and lavishes art upon the cultivation of chrysanthemums, that book does not ordinarily have to be supplemented by another which is devoted to the cult of the sword and the top prestige of the warrior.
The question was how the Japanese would behave, not how we would behave if we were in their place.
A tribe may share 90% of its formal observances with its neighbors and yet it may have revamped them to fit a way of life and a set of values which it does not share with any surrounding peoples. In the process it may have had to reject some fundamental arrangements which, however small in proportion to the whole, turns its future course of development in a unique direction. Nothing is more helpful to an anthropologist than to study contrasts he finds between peoples who on the whole share many traits.
No matter how bizarre his act or his opinion, the way a man feels and thinks has some relation to his experience. The more baffled I was at some bit of behavior, the more I therefore assumed that there existed somewhere in Japanese life some ordinary conditioning of such strangeness.
A human society must make for itself some design for living. It approves certain ways of meeting situations, certain ways of sizing them up. People in that society regard these solutions as foundations of the universe. They integrate them, no matter what the difficulties. Some degree of consistency is necessary or the whole scheme falls to pieces.
It sometimes seem as if the tender-minded could not base a doctrine of good will upon anything less than a world of peoples each of which is a print from the same negative. But to demand such uniformity as a condition of respecting another nation is as neurotic as to demand it of one’s wife or one’s children. The tough-minded are content that differences should exist. They respect differences. Their goal is a world made safe for differences, where the US may be American to the hilt without threatening the peace of the world, and France may be France, and Japan may be Japan on the same conditions.
Encouraging cultural differences would not mean a static world. England did not lose her Englishness because an Age of Elizabeth was followed by an Age of Queen Anne and a Victorian Era. It was just because the English was so much themselves that different standards and different national moods could assert themselves in different generations.
Systematic study of national differences requires a certain generosity as well as tough-mindedness. The study of comparative religions has flourished only when men were secure enough in their own convictions to be unusually generous. The might be Jesuits or Arabic savants or unbelievers, but they could not be zealots. The study of comparative cultures too cannot flourish when men are so defensive about their own way of life that it appears to them to be by definition the sole solution in the world. Such men will never know the added love of their own culture which comes from a knowledge of other ways of life. They cut themselves off from a pleasant and enriching experience. Being so defensive, they have no alternative but to demand that other nations adopt their own particular solutions.
The very premises which Japan used to justify her war were the opposite of America’s. She defined the international situation differently. America laid the war to the aggression of the Axis. Japan, Italy, and Germany had unrighteously offended against international peace by their acts of conquest. Whether the Axis had seized power in Manchukuo or in Ethiopia or in Poland, it proved that they had embarked on an evil course of oppressing weak peoples. Japan saw the cause of the war in another light. There was anarchy in the world as long as every nation had absolute sovereignty; it was necessary for her to fight to establish a hierarchy — under Japan, of course, since she alone represented a nation truly hierarchal from top to bottom and hence understood the necessity of taking “one’s proper place.” Japan, having attainted unification and peace in her homeland, having put down banditry and built up roads and electric power and steel industries, having, according to her official figures, educate 99.5% of her rising generation in her public schools, should, according to Japanese premises of hierarchy, raise her backward younger brother China.
It is alien to equality-loving Americans but it is nevertheless necessary for us to understand what Japan meant by hierarchy and what advantages she has learned to connect with it.
Even when she was winning, her civilian statesmen, her High Command, and her soldiers repeated that this was no contest between armaments; it was a pitting of our faith in things against their faith in spirit. When we were winning they repeated over and over that in such a contest material power must necessarily fail.
Japan was as completely consistent in playing up nonmaterial resources as the US was in its commitment to bigness.
There are limits to material resources. It stands to reason that material things cannot last a thousand years.
Were people fatigued by 12-hour work in the factories and all-night bombings? “The heavier our bodies, the higher our will, our spirit, rises above them. The wearier we are, the more splendid the training.”
We should not think that we have been passively attacked but that we have actively pulled the enemy toward us. Enemy, come if you wish. Instead of saying, “Finally what has to come has come,” we will say rather, “That which we were waiting for has come. We are glad it has come.”
There are two kinds of opportunities: one which we chance upon, the other which we create. In time of great difficulty, one must not fail to create his opportunity.
American landed on Gualdalcanal, and Japanese orders to troop were that now they were under direct observation “by the world” and should show what they were made of. They should man the lifeboats with the utmost decorum or “the world will laugh at you. The Americans will take movies of you and show them in New York.”
Those who had lived in Japan well knew that nothing stung the Japanese people to bitterness and whipped up their morale like any depredatory word against the Emperor or any outright attack on him.
These prisoners had not been instructed about what to say and what to keep silent about when captured. This failure to indoctrinate was of course due to Japan’s no-surrender policy.
I think there are various ways to arouse the Japanese people but the most important one is freedom of speech. In these few years, the people have not been able to say frankly what they think. They have been afraid that they might be blamed if they spoke certain matters. They hesitated, and tried to patch up the surface, so the public mind has really become timid. We can never develop the total power of the people in this way.
There was virtue only in accepting life and death risks; precautions were unworthy.
The American prisoners got better medical treatment than the Japanese soldiers.
In the armies of Occidental nations it is almost a truism that troops cannot stand the death of one-fourth to one-third of their strength without giving up; surrenders run about 4:1.
A Japanese for whom there was nothing left but death was often proud that he could take an enemy with him when he died; he might do it even after he was captured. Having determined, as one of them put it, “to be burned on the altar of victory, it would be a disgrace to die with no heroic deed achieved.”
The shame of surrender was burned deeply into the consciousness of the Japanese. They accepted as a matter of course a behavior which was alien to our conventions of warfare. And ours was just as alien to them. They spoke with shocked disparagement of American prisoners of war who asked to have their names reported to their government so that their families would know they were alive.
Their reliance upon order and hierarchy and our faith in freedom and equality are poles apart and it is hard for us to give hierarchy its just due as a possible social mechanism.
Equality is the highest, most moral American basis for hopes for a better world. It means to us freedom from tyranny, from interference, and from unwanted impositions. It means equality before the law and the right to better one’s condition in life. It is the basis for the rights of man as they are organized in the world we know. We uphold the virtue of equality even when we violate it and we fight hierarchy with a righteous indignation.
He reported therefore at length on this new world. Here people really considered themselves the equals of others. Their social intercourse was on a new and equal footing. They fell into conversation as man to man. Americans did not care about the little attentions of a hierarchal etiquette; they did not demand them as their due nor offer them to others. They liked to say they owed nothing to any man. These Americans trusted equality as they trusted nothing else; even liberty, he said, they often practice let fly out of the window while they looked the other way. But they lived equality.
When we stated to Japan therefore just before Pearl Harbor the high moral bases on which the US based her policy in the Pacific we were voicing our most trusted principles. Every step in the direction in which we pointed would according to our convictions improve a still imperfect world. The Japanese, too, when they put their trust in “proper station” were turning to the rule of life which had been ingrained in them by their own social experience. Inequality has been for centuries the rule of their organized life at just those points where it is most predictable and most accepted. Behavior that recognizes hierarchy is as natural to them as breathing.
Japan for all its recent Westernization is still an aristocratic society. Every greeting, every contact must indicate the kind and degree of social distance between men. The Japanese have what is called a “respect language,” as many other peoples do in the Pacific, and they accompany it with proper bows and kneelings.
It is no empty gesture. It means that the one who bows acknowledges the right of the other to have his way in things he might well prefer to manage himself, and the one who receives the bow acknowledges in his turn certain responsibilities incumbent upon his station.
Besides, Japan was a feudal country. Loyalty was due, not to a great group of relatives, but to a feudal lord. He was resident overlord, and the contrast with the temporary bureaucratic mandarins of China, who were always strangers in their districts, could not have been greater.
Even in the cemetery the markers on the graves of great-grandparents are no longer relettered and the identity even of the third ancestral generation sinks rapidly into oblivion.
The eldest son is the heir. Travelers speak of “that air of responsibility which the eldest son so early acquires in Japan.”
“Japan is the elder brother and they are Japan’s younger brothers. This fact must be brought home to the inhabitants of the occupied territories. Too much consideration shown for the inhabitants might engender in their minds the tendency to presume on Japan’s kindness with pernicious effects on Japanese rule.” The elder brother, in other words, decides what is good for his younger brother and should not show “too much consideration” in enforcing it.
The father or the elder brother is responsible for the household, whether its members are living, dead, or yet unborn. He must make weighty decisions and see that they are carried out. He does not, however, have unconditional authority. He is expected to act responsibly for the honor of the house. He recalls to his son and younger brother the legacy of the family, both in material and in spiritual things, and he challenges them to be worthy.
In Japan caste has been the rule of life through all her recorded history and even back in the 7th century AD she was already adapting the ways of life she borrowed from casteless China to suit her own hierarchal cultural.
Before that time Japan had not even had a written language; in the 7th century she took the ideographs of China and used them to write her own totally different language.
The official titles Japan adopted were in China given to administrators who had passed the State examinations, but in Japan they were given to hereditary nobles and feudal lords.
Nor did Japan adopt the Chinese idea of a secular Emperor. The Japanese name for the Imperial House is “Those who dwell above the clouds” and only person of this family can be Emperor. Japan has never had a change of dynasty, as China so often had. The Emperor was inviolable and his person was sacred.
The merchants ranked just above the outcasts. However strange this seems to Americans, it was highly realistic in a feudal society. A merchant class is always disruptive of feudalism. As business men become respected and prosperous, feudalism decays.
For the warrior-retainer, unlike his European counterpart, was not a sub-seigneur owning his own land and serfs nor was he a soldier of fortune. He was a pensioner on a set stipend which had been fixed for his family line at the beginning of the Tokugawa Era. It was not large. Japanese scholars have estimated that the average stipend of all samurai was about what farmers were earning and that was certainly bare subsistence.
Common people who behave unbecomingly to the samurai or who do not show respect to their superiors may be cut down on the spot.
James Wilson, who visited the island of Tonga, wrote that its government resembles most the government of Japan where the sacred majesty is a sort of state prisoner to the captain-general.
There were genuine guarantees in Japan that aggression would be rectified if they were acts that were not allowed on the existing map of conduct. One trusted the map and was safe only when one followed it. One showed one’s courage, one’s integrity in conforming to it, not in modifying it or in revolting against it.
When feudalism broke down in Europe it was due to the pressure of a growing and increasingly powerful middle class and this class dominated the modern industrial period. In Japan no such strong middle class arose. The merchants and money lenders “bought” upper-class status by sanctioned methods. Merchants and lower samurai became allies.
When the Tokugawa regime crumbled in the first half of the 19th century, no group in the nation was in favor of tearing up the map. There was no French Revolution. There was not even an 1848. Yet the times were desperate. From the common people to the Shogunate, every class had fallen into debt to the money lenders and merchants. There mere numbers of the non-productive classes and the scale of customary official expenditures had proved insupportable. Japan was in dire domestic extremity by 1853 when Admiral Perry appeared with his men of war. His forced entry was followed in 1858 by a trade treaty with the US which Japan was in no position to refuse.
The real problem, however, is not from what class they came but how it happened that they were so able and so realistic. Japan, just emerging from medievalism in the last half of the 19th century and as weak then as Siam is today, produced leaders able to conceive and to carry out one of the most statesmanlike and successful jobs ever attempted by any nation. The strength, and the weakness too, of these leaders was rooted in traditional Japanese character and its is the chief object of this book to discuss what that character was and is. Here we can only recognize how the Meiji statesmen went about their undertaking.
They did not take their task to be an ideological revolution at all. They treated it as a job. Their goal as they conceived it was to make Japan into a country which must be reckoned with. They were not iconoclasts. They did not revile and beggar the feudal class. They tempted them with pensions large enough to lure them into eventual support of the regime. They finally ameliorated the peasants’ condition; their 10-year tardiness appears to have been due rather to the pitiful condition of the early Meiji treasury than to a class rejection of peasants’ claims upon the regime.
The energetic and resourceful statesmen who ran the Meiji government rejected, however, all ideas of ending hierarchy in Japan. The Restoration had simplified the hierarchal order by placing the Emperor at its apex and eliminating the Shogun.
One of these gifts from above was the Constitution of Japan, which was given by the Emperor to his people in 1889. It gave the people a place in the State and established the Diet. It was drawn up with great care by Their Excellencies after critical study of the varied constitutions of the Western World. The writers of it however, took every possible precaution to guard against popular interference and the invasion of public opinion. The very bureau which drafted it was a part of the Imperial Household Department and was therefore sacrosanct.
In the villages the headman is an old resident, a member of a land-owning farm family. He serves at a financial loss but the prestige is considerable. He and the elders are responsible for village finances, public health, maintenance of schools and especially for property records and individual dossiers.
At the topmost level of policy “popular opinion” is out of place. The government asks only “popular support.” When the State stakes out its own official field in the area of local concern, also, its jurisdiction is accepted with deference. The State, in all its domestic functions, is not a necessary evil as it is so generally felt to be in the US. The State comes nearer, in Japanese eyes, to being the supreme good.
Since it was concerned with proper respect to national symbols, as saluting the flag in the US, State Shinto was, they said, “no religion.” Japan therefore could require it of all citizens without violating the Occidental dogma of religious freedom any more than the US violates it in requiring a salute to the Stars and Stripes. It was a mere sign of allegiance.
Instead of beginning with the production of consumer goods and light industry, she first undertook key heavy industries. Arsenals, shipyards, iron works, construction of railroads had priority and were rapidly brought to a high stage of technical efficiency. Not all of these were released to private hands and vast military industries remained under government bureaucracy and were financed by special government accounts.
In this whole field of the industries to which the government gave priority, the small trader or the non-bureaucratic manager had no “proper place.”
Narikin is often translated “nouveau riche” but that does not do justice to the Japanese feeling. In the US nouveaux riches are strictly “newcomers”; they were laughable because they are gauche and have not had time to acquire the proper polish. This liability, however, is balanced by the heartwarming asset that they have come up from the log cabin, they have risen from driving a mule to controlling oil millions. But in Japan a narikin is a term taken from Japanese chess and means a pawn promoted to queen. It is a pawn rampaging about the board as a “big shot.” It has no hierarchal right to do any such thing. The narikin is believed to have obtained his wealth by defrauding or exploiting others and the bitterness directed toward him is as far as possible from the attitude in the US toward the “home boy who makes good.” Japan provided a place in her hierarchy for great wealth and kept an alliance with it; when wealth is achieved in the field outside, Japanese public opinion is bitter against it.
As long as “proper station” is maintained the Japanese carry on without protest. They feel safe. They are of course often not “safe” in the sense that their best good is protected but they are “save” because they have accepted hierarchy as legitimate. It is as characteristic of their judgment on life as trust in equality and free enterprise is of the American way of life.
They could not extract from other nations what they had exacted of themselves. It was their mistake that they thought they could. They did not recognize that the system of Japanese morality which had fitted them to “accept their proper station” was something they could not count on elsewhere.
Because Westerners pay such extremely slight attention to their debt to the world and what it has given them in care, education, well-being or even in the mere fact of their ever having been born at all, the Japanese feel that our motivations are inadequate. Virtuous men do not say, as they do in America, that they owe nothing to any man. They do not discount the past. Righteousness in Japan depends upon recognition of one’s place in the great network of mutual indebtedness that embraces both one’s forebears and one’s contemporaries.
Both the Chinese and Japanese have many words meaning “obligations.” The words are not synonyms and their specific meanings have no literal translation into English because the ideas they express are alien to us. The word for “obligations” which covers a person’s indebtedness from greatest to least is on. In Japanese it is translated into English by a whole series of words from “obligations” and “loyalty” to “kindness” and “love,” but these words distort its meaning. On is in all its uses a load, an indebtedness, a burden, which one carries as best one may.
People do not like to shoulder casually the debt of gratitude which on implies. They are always talking of “making a person wear an on” and often the nearest translation is “imposing upon another”. Casual favors from relative strangers are the ones most resented. They would prefer avoid getting entangled in all the consequences of on.
It is hard to be a debtor and resentments come easily.
Let me preface my remarks by saying that I gather from your letter that you are asking from me the answer you want and that this makes me have some antagonism to you. I of course appreciate your long unmarriedness, but you have used this to make your children wear the on and also to justify yourself in your present line of action. I don’t like this. I’m not saying that you are sly, but your personality is very weak.
You say that the girl and her parents are good people. That is what you want to think. One knows that people’s good and evil depend on the circumstances, the situation, and because they are not at the moment seeking an advantage one can’t say they’re “good people.” I think the girl’s parents are dumb to let her serve as concubine of a man about to die. If they’re going to consider their daughter’s being a concubine, they ought to seek some profit or advantage from it. It’s only your fantasy to see it otherwise.
There are two courses open to you:
- As “a complete man” (one so well rounded that nothing is impossible to him) cut off the girl and settle with her. But I don’t think you could do that; your human feelings wouldn’t permit.
- “Come back to being a common man” (give up your pretensions) and break up the children’s illusion about you as an ideal man. About the property, make a will immediately and state what the girl’s and the children’s shares are.
In conclusion, remember that you are old, you are getting childish, as I can see by your handwriting. Your thinking is emotional rather than rational. You want this girl as a mother substitute, though you phrase this as wanting to save her from the gutter. I don’t think any infant can live if its mother leaves — therefore, I advise you to take the second course.
Americans are not accustomed to applying these financial criteria to a casual treat at the soda counter or to the years’ long devotion of a father to his motherless children or to the devotion of a faithful dog like Hachi. Japan does. Love, kindness, generosity, which we value just in proportion as they are given without strings attached, necessarily must have their strings in Japan. And every such act received makes one a debtor.
Love, with us, is a matter of the heart and is best when freely given. Patriotism, in the sense of putting our country’s interests above everything else, is regarded as rather quixotic or certainly as not compatible with fallible human nature until the US is attacked by the armed forces of an enemy. Lacking the basic Japanese postulates of great indebtedness automatically incurred by every man and woman born, we think that a man should pity and help his needy parents, should not beat his wife, and should provide for his children. But these things are not quantitatively reckoned like a debt of money and they are not rewarded as success in business is. In Japan they are regarded quite as financial solvency is in America and the sanctions behind them are as strong as they are in the US behind being able to pay one’s bills and the interest on one’s mortgage. They are not matters that must be attended to only at crises such as a proclamation of war or the serious illness of a parent; they are one’s constant shadow like a small New York farmer’s worry about his mortgage or a Wall Street financier’s as he watches the market climb when he has sold shot.
Both forms of gimu are unconditional. In thus making these virtues absolute Japan has departed from the Chinese concepts of duty to the State and of filial piety. The Chinese ethical system has been repeatedly adopted in Japan ever since the 7th century and chu and ko are Chinese words. But the Chinese did not make these virtues unconditional. China postulates an overriding virtue which is a condition of loyalty and piety. It is usually translated “benevolence” (jen) but it means almost everything Occidentals mean by good interpersonal relations. A parent must have jen. If a ruler does not have it it is righteous for his people to rebel against him. It is a condition upon which one’s gift of loyalty is predicated.
In the US all such stories are taken as instances of outside interference with an individual’s rightful happiness. Japan cannot consider this interference as “outside” because of her postulate of indebtedness. Such stories in Japan, like our stories of honest men who pay off their creditors by incredible personal hardships, are tales of the truly virtuous, of persons who have earned their right to respect themselves, who have proved themselves strong enough to accept proper personal frustrations. Such frustrations, however virtuous, may naturally leave a residue of resentment and it is well worth noting that the Asiatic proverb about the Hateful Things, which in Burma, for instance, fists “fire, water, thieves, governors and malicious men,” in Japan itemizes “earthquake, thunder, and the Old Man (head of the house; the father).”
They cannot express their aggressions as young wives but they do not therefore become genuinely mild human beings. In later life they turn, as it were, an accumulated weight of resentment against their own daughters-in-law. Japanese girls today openly talk about the great advantage of marrying a son who is not an heir so that they will not have to live with a dominating mother-in-law.
Early Meiji statesmen wrote after they had visited the nations of the Occident that in all these countries history was made by the conflict between ruler and people and that this was unworthy of the Spirit of Japan. They returned and wrote into the Constitution that the Ruler was to “be sacred and inviolable” and not reckoned responsible for any acts of his Ministers. He was to serve as supreme symbol of Japanese unity, not as responsible head of a State.
Kami, the word rendered as “god,” means literally “head,” i.e., pinnacle of a hierarchy. The Japanese do not fix a great gulf between human and divine as Occidentals do, and any Japanese becomes kami after death.
Just as loyalty to the Stars and Stripes is above and beyond all party politics so the Emperor was “inviolable.” We surround our handling of the flag with a degree of ritual which we regard as completely inappropriate for any human being.
The Japanese point of view is that obeying the law is repayment upon their highest indebtedness, their ko-on. The contrast with folkways in the US could hardly be more marked. To Americans any new laws, from street stop-lights to income taxes, are resented all over the country as interferences with individual liberty in one’s own affairs. Federal regulations are doubly suspect for they interfere also with the freedom of the individual state to make its own laws. The Japanese judge therefore that we are a lawless people. We judge that they are a submissive people with no idea of democracy.
Some Western prophets still thought after months of peaceful occupation that all was lost because no Western-type revolution had occurred or because “the Japanese did not know they were defeated.” This is good Occidental social philosophy based on Occidental standards of what is right and proper. But Japan is not the Occident. She did not use that last strength of Occidental nations: revolution. Nor did she use sullen sabotage against the enemy’s occupying army. She used her own strength: the ability to demand of herself as chu the enormous price of unconditional surrender before he fighting power was broken. In her own eyes this enormous payment nevertheless brought something she supremely valued: the right to say that it was the Emperor who had given the order even if that order was capitulation. Even in defeat the highest law was still chu.
Giri then was a loved face-to-face relation dressed in all the feudal trimmings. To “know giri” meant to be loyal for life to a lord who cared for his retainers in return. To “repay giri” meant to offer even one’s life to the lord to whom one owed everything.
This is, of course, a fantasy. Feudal history in Japan tells of plenty of retainers whose loyalty was brought by the daimyo on the opposite side of the battle. Still more important, as we shall see in the next chapter, any slur the lord cast upon his retainer could properly and traditionally make the retainer leave his service and even enter into negotiations with the enemy. Japan celebrates the vengeance theme with as much delight as she celebrates loyalty to the death. And they were both giri; loyalty was giri to one’s lord and vengeance for an insult was giri to one’s name. In Japan they are two sides to the same shield.
The rules of giri are strictly rules of required repayment; they are not a set of moral rules like the Ten Commandments. When a man is forced with giri, it is assumed that he may have to override his sense of justice and they often say, “I could not do right (gi) because of giri.” Nor do the rules of giri have anything to do with loving your neighbor as yourself; they do not dictate that a man shall act generously out of the spontaneity of his heart. A man must do giri, they say, because, if he does not, people will call him “a person who does not know giri” and he will be shamed before the world.
The Japanese have another convention about giri which parallels Western conventions about money repayment. If repayment is delayed beyond due term it increases as if it drew interest.
Giri to the world is an obligation to return kindness and giri to one’s name prominently includes revenge. The fact that Western languages separate the two into categories as opposite as gratitude and revenge does not impress the Japanese. Why should one virtue not cover a man’s behavior when he react to another’s benevolence and when he reacts to his scorn or malevolence?
Giri to one’s name and all the hostility and watchful waiting that accompany it in any culture, however, is not a virtue that is characteristic of the Asiatic mainland. It is not, as the phrase goes, Oriental. The Chinese do not have it, nor the Siamese, nor the Indians. The Chinese regard all such sensitivity to insults and aspersions as a trait of “small” people — morally small. It is no part of their ideal of nobility, as it is in Japan. Violence is wrong when a man starts it out of the blue does not become right in Chinese ethics when a man indulges in it to requite an insult. They think it is rather ridiculous to be so sensitive. Nor do they react to a slur by resolving by all that is good and great to prove the aspersion baseless. The Siamese have no place at all for this kind of sensitivity to insult. Like the Chinese they set store by making their detractor ridiculous but they do not imagine that their honor has been impugned. They say “The best way to show an opponent up for a brute is to give in to him.”
The full significance of giri to one’s name cannot be understood without placing it in context all the non-aggressive virtues which are included in it in Japan.
A samurai should give no sign of suffering till he fell dead and he must bear pain without wincing.
Giri to one’s name also requires that one live according to one’s station in life. If a man fails in this giri he has no right to respect himself.
Americans are shocked to the core by laws which define these things by inherited class position. Self-respect in America is bound up with improving one’s status and fixed sumptuary law are a denial of the very basis of our society. We are horrified by Tokugawa laws which stated that a farmer of one class could buy such and such a doll for his child and the farmer of one class could buy a different doll. In America, however, we get the same results by invoking a different sanction. We accept with no criticism the fact that the factory owner’s child has a set of electric trains and that the sharecropper’s child contents itself with a corncob doll. We accept differences in income and justify them. To earn a good salary is a part of our system of self-respect.
A borrower may pledge his giri to his name when he asks for a loan; a generation ago it was common to phrase it that “I agree to be publicly laughed at if I fail to repay this sum.” If he failed, he was not literally made a laughingstock; there were no public pillories in Japan. But when the New Year came around, the date on which debts must be paid off, the insolvent debtor might commit suicide to “clear his name.”
And the diplomat cannot in giri admit the failure of his policy. In all such giri usages there is extreme identification of a man with his work and any criticism of one’s acts or one’s competence becomes automatically a criticism of one’s self.
In Japan, however, this defensiveness goes very deep and it is the part of wisdom — as it is also universal etiquette — not to tell a person to his face in so many words that he has made a professional error.
The loser “wears a shame” for such failures, and, though his shame is in some cases a strong incentive to greater efforts, in many others it is a dangerous depressant. He loses confidence and becomes melancholy or angry or both. His efforts are stymied.
We rely strongly on competition as a “good thing.” Psychological tests show that competition stimulates us to our best work. Performance goes up under this stimulus; when we are given something to do all by ourselves we fall short of the record we make when there are competitors present. In Japan, however, their tests show just the opposite.
Their subjects, they said, when the project became competitive, became principally interested in the danger that they might be defeated, and the work suffered. They felt the competition so keenly as an aggression that they turned their attention to their relation to the aggressor instead of concentrating on the job in hand.
In the US we would say they were bad losers. We have an etiquette that expects them to say that the better team won. It is proper for the defeated to shake hands with the victors. No matter how much we hate to be beaten we scorn people who make an emotional crisis out of it.
Their report cards grade children in elementary schools on marks for conduct but not on their school work: when really competitive situations are unavoidable, as in entrance examinations to the middle schools, the tension is understandably great.
This go-between reports to both parties, or in case of an important deal like a marriage each side employs its own intermediary and they negotiate the details between themselves before reporting to their side. By dealing in this way at second hand the principals need take no cognizance of claims and charges that would have to be resented in giri to their names if they were in direct communication.
Since the young couple must each be escorted by one or both of their parents, and the go-betweens must be the host or hostesses, it is most properly arranged when they all “run into each other” casually at the annual chrysanthemum show or at a cherry-blossom viewing.
Let me give you my own definition of two words. Murderer: one who assassinates some human flesh. Sneerer: one who assassinates others’ soul and heart.
Soul and heart are far dearer than the flesh, therefore sneering is the worst crime.
In revenge there is something that satisfies one’s sense of justice. Our sense of revenge is as exact as our mathematical faculty and until both terms of the equation are satisfied we cannot get over the sense of something left undone.
Many of the so-called peculiarities of the Japanese owe their origin to the love of purity and its complementary hatred of defilement. But, pray, how could it be otherwise, being trained, as we actually are, to look upon slights inflicted, either on our family honor or on the national pride, as so many defilements and wounds that would not be clean and heal up again, unless by a thorough washing through vindication? Your may consider the cases of vendetta so often met with in the public and private life of Japan, merely as a kind of morning tub which a person take with whom love of cleanliness has grown into a passion.
And he continues, saying that thus the Japanese “live clean, undefiled lives which seem as serene and beautiful as a cherry tree in full bloom.” This “morning tub,” in other words, washes off dirt other people have thrown at you and you cannot be virtuous as long as any of it sticks to you.
Most Occidental discussions of Japanese loyalty are thoroughly unrealistic because they do not recognize that giri is not merely loyalty; it is also a virtue that under certain circumstances enjoins treachery. As they say, “A man who is beaten becomes a rebel.” So does a man who is insulted.
Japan ranks with Russia as a nation given to depicting boredom in her novels and the contrast with the US is marked. American novels do not do much with the theme. Our novelists trace the misery of their characters to a character-deficiency or to the buffets of a cruel world; they very seldom depict pure and simple ennui. Personal maladjustment must have a cause, a build-up, and rouse the reader’s moral condemnation of some flaw in the hero or heroine, or of some evil in the social order.
Their character novels uncover a world where people’s emotions most often come to them, so one author says, like drifting chlorine gas.
Suicide, properly done, will, according to their tenets, clear his name and reinstate his memory.
They play up suicide as Americans play up crime and they have the same vicarious enjoyment of it. They choose to dwell on events of self-destruction instead of on destruction of others.
In modern times suicide is a choice to die. A man turns violence upon himself, often instead of assassinating someone else. The act of suicide, which in feudal times was the final statement of a man’s courage and resolution, has become today a chosen self-destruction.
This growing tendency to strike at oneself when giri to one’s name is threatened need not involve such extreme steps as suicide. Aggressions directed inward may merely produce depression and lassitude and that typical Japanese boredom that was so prevalent in the educated class. There are good sociological reasons why this mood should have been widespread among this particular class for the intelligentsia was overcrowded and very insecurely placed in the hierarchy. Only a small proportion of them could satisfy their ambitions.
No bombs any more. The relief is wonderful. But we are not fighting any more and there is no purpose. Everyone is in a daze, not caring much how he does things. I am like that, my wife is like that and the people in the hospital. All very slow about everything we do, dazed. People complain now that the government is slow cleaning up after the war and in providing relief, but I think the reason is that all the government officials felt the same way as we did.
They are indeed the same people. They are reacting in character. The swing of mood that is natural to them is between intense effort and a lassitude that is sheer marking time. The Japanese at the present moment are chiefly conscious of defending their good name in defeat and they feel they can do this by being friendly. As a corollary, many feel they can do it most safely by being dependent. And it is an easy step to feeling that effort is suspect and that it is better to mark time. Lassitude spreads.
Newspapers in the spring of 1946 keep talking about what a blot it is on the honor of Japan that “with the eyes of the whole world upon us,” they have not cleaned up the shambles of bombing and have not got certain public utilities into operation.
They confused Japanese ethics of aggression with European forms, according to which any person or nation who fights has first to be convinced of the eternal righteousness of its cause and draw strength from reservoirs of hatred or moral indignation.
The Japanese derive their aggression in a different way. They need terribly to be respected in the world. They saw that military might had earned respect for great nations and they embarked on a course to equal them. They had to out-Herod Herod because their resources were slight and their technology was primitive. When they failed in their great effort, it meant to them that aggression was not the road to honor after all. Giri had always meant equally the use of aggression or the observance of respect relations, and in defeat the Japanese turned from one to the other, apparently with no sense of psychic violence to themselves. The goal is still their good name.
An ethical code like Japan’s, which requires such extreme repayment of obligations and such drastic renunciations, might consistently have branded personal desire as an evil to be rooted out from the human breast. This is the classical Buddhist doctrine and it is therefore doubly surprising that the Japanese code is so hospitable to the pleasures of the five senses. In spite of the fact that Japan is one of the great Buddhist nations of the world, her ethics at this point contrast sharply with the teachings of Gautama Buddha and of the holy books of Buddhism. The Japanese do not condemn self-gratification. They are not Puritans. They consider physical pleasures good and worthy of cultivation. They are sought and valued. Nevertheless, they have to be kept in their place. They must not intrude upon the serious affairs of life.
Such a code keeps life at a particularly high tension. A Hindu finds it far easier to see these consequences of Japanese acceptance of the pleasures of the senses than an American does. Americans do not believe that pleasures have to be learned; a man may refuse to indulge in sensual pleasures, but he is resisting a known temptation. Pleasures, however, are learned much as duties are. In many cultures the pleasures themselves are not taught and it therefore becomes particularly easy for people to devote themselves to self-sacrificing duty. Even physical attraction between men and women has sometimes been minimized till it hardly threatens the smooth course of family life, which in such countries is based on quite other considerations. The Japanese make life hard from themselves by cultivating physical pleasures and then setting up a code in which these pleasures are the very things which must not be indulged as a serious way of life. They cultivate the pleasures of the flesh like fine arts, and then, when they are fully savored, they sacrifice them to duty.
Modern elementary schools are unheated and a great virtue is made of this for it hardens the children for later difficulties of life.
The contrast with Chinese literature is very great. The Chinese save themselves a great deal of trouble by underplaying romantic love and erotic pleasures, and their family life has consequently a remarkably even tenor.
Americans can, of course, understand the Japanese better than they can the Chinese on this score but this understanding nevertheless goes on ly a little way. We have many taboos on erotic pleasure which the Japanese do not have. It is an area about which they are not moralistic and we are. Sex, like any other “human feeling,” they regard as thoroughly good in its minor place in life.
The Japanese set up no ideal, as we do in the US, which pictures love and marriage as one and the same thing. We approve of love just in proportion as it is the basis of one’s choice of a spouse. “Being in love” is our most approved reason for marriage. After a marriage a husband’s physical attraction to another woman is humiliating to his wife because he bestows elsewhere something that rightly belongs to her.
They are “in the circle of human feelings” and give relief from “the circle of ko.” There is no reason not to indulge oneself but the two spheres belong apart.
These Japanese views on “human feelings” have several consequences. It cuts the ground out from under the Occidental philosophy of two powers, the flesh and the spirit, continually fighting for supremacy in each human life. In Japanese philosophy the flesh is not evil. Enjoying its possible pleasures is no sin. The spirit and the body are not opposing forces in the universe and the Japanese carry this tenet to a logical conclusion: the world is not a battlefield between good and evil. “Throughout their history the Japanese seem to have retained in some measure this incapacity to discern, or this reluctance to grapple with, the problem of evil.” They have in fact constancy repudiated it as a view of life. They believe that man has two souls, but they are not his good impulses fighting with his bad. They are the “gentle” soul and the “rough” soul and there are occasions in every man’s — and every nation’s — life when he should be “gentle” and when he should be “rough.” One soul is not destined for hell and one for heaven. They are both necessary and good on different occasions.
Such god-characters are common in world mythologies. In the higher ethical religions, however, they have been excluded because a philosophy of cosmic conflict between good and evil makes it more congenial to separate supernatural beings into groups as different as black and white.
The Japanese have always been extremely explicit in denying that virtue consists in fighting evil. As their philosophers and religious teachers have constantly said for centuries such a moral code is alien to Japan. They are loud in proclaiming that this proves the moral superiority of their own people. The Chinese, they say, had to have a moral code which raised jen, just and benevolent behavior, to an absolute standard, by applying which all men and acts could be found wanting if they fell short. “A moral code was good for the Chinese whose inferior natures required such artificial means of restraint.” Human nature in Japan, they say, is naturally good and to be trusted. It does not need to fight an evil half of itself. It needs to cleanse the windows of its soul and act with appropriateness on every different occasion. If it has allowed itself to become “dirty,” impurities are readily removed and man’s essential goodness shines forth again. Buddhist philosophy has gone farther in Japan than in any other nation in teach that every man is a potential Buddha and that rules of virtue are not in the sacred writings but in what one uncovers within one’s own enlightened and innocent soul. Why should one distrust what one finds there? No evil is inherent in man’s soul.
To American ears such doctrines seem to lead to a philosophy of self-indulgence and license. The Japanese, however, as we have seen, define the supreme task of life as fulfilling one’s obligations. They fully accept the fact that repaying on means sacrificing one’s personal desires and pleasures. The idea that the pursuit of happiness is a serious goal of life is to them an amazing and immoral doctrine. Happiness is a relaxation in which one indulges when one can, but to dignify it as something by which the State and family should be judged is quite unthinkable. The fact that a man often suffers intensely in living up to his obligations of chu and ko and giri is no more than they expect. It makes life hard but they are prepared for that. They constantly give up pleasures which they consider in no way evil. That requires strength of will. But such strength is the more admired virtue in Japan.
It is consistent with this Japanese position that the “happy ending” is so rare in their novels and plays. American popular audiences crave solutions. They want to believe that people live happily ever after. They want to know that people are rewarded for their virtue. If they must weep at the end of a play, it must be because there was a flaw in the hero’s character or because he was victimized by a bad social order. But it is far pleasanter to have everything come out happily for the hero. The Japanese popular audiences sit dissolved in tears watching the hero come to his tragic end and the lovely heroine slain because of a turn of the wheel of fortune. Such plots are the high points of an evening’s entertainment.
Their modern war films are in the same tradition. Americans who see these movies often say that they are the best pacifist propaganda they ever saw. This is a characteristic American reaction because the movies are wholly concerned with the sacrifice and suffering of war. They do not play up military parades and bands and prideful showings of fleet maneuvers or big guns. Whether they deal with the Russo-Japanese War or the China Incident, they starkly insist upon the monotonous routine of mud and marching, the sufferings of lowly fighting, the inconclusiveness of campaigns. Their curtain scenes are not victory or even banzai charges. They are overnight halts in some featureless Chinese town deep in mud. Not even the purposes for which the war was fought are mentioned. It is enough for the Japanese audience that all the people on the screen have repaid on with everything that was in them, and these movies therefore in Japan were propaganda of the militarists. Their sponsors knew that the Japanese audiences were not stirred by them to pacifism.
Each circle has its special detailed code and a man judges his fellows, not by ascribing to them integrated personalities, but by saying of them that “they do not know ko” or “they do not know giri.” Instead of accusing a man of being unjust, as an American would, they specify the circle of behavior he has not lived up to.
The codes, even for each “circle,” are set up in such a way that, when conditions change within it, the most different behavior may be properly called for. Giri to one’s lord demanded utmost loyalty until the lord insulted his retainer; afterward no treachery was too great.
This is baffling to Westerners. According to our experience, people act “in character.” We separate the sheep from the goats by whether they are loyal or whether they are treacherous, whether they are co-operative or whether they are stiff-necked. We label people and expect their next behavior to be like the last.
Though every soul originally shines with virtue like a new sword, nevertheless, if it is not kept polished, it gets tarnished. This “rust of my body,” as they phrase it, is as bad as it is on a sword. A man must give his character the same care that he would give a sword. But his bright and gleaming soul is still there under the rust and all that is necessary is to polish it up again.
This Japanese view of life makes their folk tales and novels and plays seem particularly inconclusive to Westerners — unless we are able, as often happens, to recast the plot to fit our demands for consistency of character and for conflict of good and evil. But that is not the way the Japanese look at these plots. Their comment is that the hero is caught in a conflict of “giri against human feelings,” “chu against ko,” “giri against gimu.” A hero fails because he is allowing his human feelings to obscure his obligations of giri, or he cannot pay both the debt he owes as chu and the debt he owes as ko. He cannot do right because of giri. He is cornered by giri and sacrifices his family. The conflicts so portrayed are still between obligations both of which are themselves binding. They are both “good.” The choice between is like the choice that faces a debtor who owes too many debts. He must pay some and ignore others for the time being, but the fact that he pays one debt does not free him of the rest of his debts.
Westerners are likely to feel it is a sign of strength to rebel against conventions and seize happiness in spite of obstacles. But the strong, according to Japanese verdict, are those who disregard personal happiness and fulfill their obligations. Strength of character, they think, is shown in conforming not in rebelling.
The Japanese do not, as the Chinese do, base all virtues on the prompting of the benevolent heart; they first set up the code of duties and then add, at the end, the requirement that one carry these out with all one’s heart and wit all one’s soul and with all one’s strength and with all one’s mind.
Sincerity, that is, not-deceiving, means “putting forth one’s whole being,” technically known as “the whole being in action” in which nothing is kept in reserve, nothing is expressed under disguise, nothing goes into waste. When a person lives like this, he is said to be a golden-haired lion; he is the symbol of virility, sincerity, whole-heartedness; he is divinely human.
So long as his bad behavior does not “get out into the world” he need not be troubled and confession appears to him merely a way of courting trouble. Shame cultures therefore do not provide for confessions, even to the gods. They have ceremonies for good luck rather than for expiation.
True shame cultures rely on external sanction for good behavior, not, as true guilt cultures do, on an internalized conviction of sin.
The Japanese — except for priests who know the Indian sutras — are quite unacquainted with the idea of reincarnation dependent upon one’s merit in this life, and — except for some well-instructed Christian converts — they do not recognize post-death reward and punishment or a heaven and a hell.
She felt herself “a being fallen from some other planet with senses and feelings that have no use in this other world. My Japanese training, requiring every physical movement to be elegant and every word uttered to be according to etiquette, made me extremely sensitive and self-conscious in this environment where I was completely blind, socially speaking.
It is also the philosophy within which each generation is brought up by parents in the home, and the psychologists’ analysis has therefore a great deal of truth in our own society. A child “has to” to be put to bed at a certain hour, and he learns from his parents’ attitude that going to bed is a frustration. In countless homes he shows his resentment in a nightly battle royal. He is already a young indoctrinated American who regards sleeping as something a person “has to” do and he kicks against the pricks. His mother rules, too, that there are certain things he “has to” eat. In the US, becoming adult means emancipation from food frustrations. A grown-up person can eat the food that tastes good instead of the food that is good for him.
In other cultures all those things a person does for other people at such “sacrifice” in the US are considered as reciprocal exchanges. They are either investments which will later be repaid or they are returns for value already received. In such countries even the relations between father and son my be treated in this way, and what the father does for the son during the boy’s early life, the son will do for the father during the old man’s later life and after his death. Every business relation too is a folk contract, which, while it often ensures equivalence in kind, just as commonly binds one party to protect and the other to serve. If the benefits on both sides are regarded as advantages, neither party regards his duties as a sacrifice.
The Japanese have always objected specifically to the teachings of Christian missionaries about sacrifice. They argue that a good man should not think of what he does for others as frustrating to himself. “When we do the things you call self-sacrifice, it is because we wish to give or because it is good to give. We are not sorry for ourselves. No matter how many things we actually give up for others, we do not think that this giving elevates us spiritually or that we should be rewarded for it.” A people who have organized their lives around such elaborate reciprocal obligations as the Japanese naturally find self-sacrifice irrelevant. They push themselves to the limit to fulfill extreme obligations, but the traditional sanction of reciprocity prevents them from feeling the self-pity and self-righteousness that arises so easily in more individualistic and competitive countries.
Their concepts of self-discipline can be schematically divided into those which give competence and those which give something more. The will should be supreme over the almost infinitely teachable body and that the body itself does not have laws of well-being which a man ignores at his own cost. When it is a mater of the really serious affairs of life, the demands for the body, no matter how essential to health, no matter how approved and cultivated as things apart, should be drastically subordinated. No matter at what price of self-discipline, a man should manifest the Japanese spirit.
A long series of Japanese words name the state of mind the expert in self-discipline is supposed to achieve. Some of these terms are used for actors, some for religious devotees, some for fencers, some for public speakers, some for painters, some for masters of the tea ceremony. They all have the same general meaning, which is “there is no break, not even the thickness of a hair between a man’s will and his act.” The expert loses all sense that “I am doing it.” The circuit runs free. The act is effortless. It is “one-pointed.” The deed completely reproduces the picture and the actor had drawn of it in his mind.
Yoga is a way of renouncing the world of the flesh and of escaping the treadmill of human futility. It is also a way of laying hold of spiritual powers. The journey toward one’s goal is the faster the more extreme the asceticism.
Such philosophy is alien in Japan. The idea of nirvana, too, not only means nothing to the general public but the priesthoods themselves modify it out of existence. Priestly scholars declare that a man who has been “enlightened” is already in nirvana; nirvana is here and now in the midst of time, and a man “sees nirvana” in a pine tree and a wild bird. The Japanese have always been uninterested in fantasies of a world of the hereafter. Their mythology tells of gods but not of the life of the dead. They have even rejected Buddhist ideas of differential rewards and punishments after death. Any man, the least farmer, becomes a Buddha when he dies; the very word for the family memorial tablets in the household shrine is “the Buddhas.”
The saintliness of the “enlightened” consisted in their self-disciplinary meditations and in their simplification of life. It did not consist in wearing unclean clothing or shutting one’s eyes to the beauties of nature or one’s ears to the beauty of stringed instruments. Their saints might fill their days with the composition of elegant verses, the ritual of tea ceremony and “viewings” of the moon and the cherry blossoms. The Zen cult even directs its devotees to avoid “the three insufficiencies: insufficiency of clothing, of food, and of sleep.”
Wherever the techniques of mysticism have been practiced in the world, whether by primitive peoples or by Mohammedan dervishes or by Indian Yogis or by medieval Christians, those who practice them have almost universally agreed, whatever their creed, that they become “one with the divine,” that they experience ecstasy “not of this world.” The Japanese have the techniques of mysticism without the mysticism. This does not mean that they do not achieve trance. They do. But they regard even trance as a technique which trains a man in “one-pointedness.” They do not describe it as ecstasy. The Zen cult does not even say that the five senses are in abeyance in trance; they say that the “six” senses are brought by this technique to a condition of extraordinary acuteness. The sixth sense is located in the mind, and training makes it. Supreme over the ordinary five, but taste, touch, sight, smell, and hearing are given their own special training during trance. Smelling, seeing, hearing, touching, and tasting “help the sixth sense,” and one learns in this state to make “every sense alert.”
This is very unusual training in any cult of extra-sensory experience. Even in trance such a Zen practitioner does not try to get outside of himself, but in the phrase Nietzsche uses of the ancient Greeks, “to remain what he is and retain his civic name.”
Zen seeks only the light man can find in himself. It tolerates no hindrance to this seeking. Clear every obstacle out of your way. If on your way you meet Buddha, kill him! If you meet the Patriarchs, kill them! If you meet the Saints, kill them all. That is the only way of reaching salvation.
He who seeks after truth must take nothing at secondhand, no teaching of the Buddha, no scriptures, no theology. “The 12 chapters of the Buddhist canon are a scrap of paper.” One my with profit study them, but they have nothing to do with the lightning flash in one’s own soul which is all that gives Enlightenment.
Zen does not consist in knowing nothing, but in the belief that to know is outside of all texts, of all documents. You did not tell me you wanted to know, but only that you wished an explanation of the text.
Mental training had to be equally self-appropriated. A man might associate himself with a teacher, but the teacher could not “teach” in the Occidental sense, because nothing a novice learned from any source outside himself was of any importance.
Muga is “ecstasy with no sense of I am doing it,” “effortlessness.” The “observing self” is eliminated; a man “loses himself,” that is, he ceases to be a spectator of his acts.
The Japanese use “living as one already dead” to mean that one lives on the plane of “expertness.” It is used in common everyday exhortation. To encourage a boy who is worrying about his final examinations from middle school, a man will say, “Take them as one already dead and you will pass them easily.” When a man goes through a great soul crisis and cannot see his way ahead, he quite commonly emerges with the resolve to live “as one already dead.”
In the US we stand this curve upside down. Firm disciplines are directed toward the infant and these are gradually relaxed as the child grows in strength until a man runs his own life when he gets a self-supporting job and when he sets up a household of his own. The prime of life is with us the high point of freedom and initiative. Restrictions begin to appear as men lose their grip of their energy or become dependent.
A woman too wants children not only for her emotional satisfaction in them but because it is only as a mother that she gains status. A childless wife has a most insecure position in the family, and even if she is not discarded she can never look forward to being a mother-in-law and exercising authority over her son’s marriage and over her son’s wife.
Children know no shame. That is why they are so happy. It is the great gulf fixed between the little child and the adult, for to say of a grown person, “He knows no shame” is to say that he is lost to decency.
Every adult’s reference to his own home is phrased as “my wretched house” and to his neighbor’s as “your august house”.
Apart from such “free areas” as drinking, men should never be, as they say, unexpected. To speak of anyone, in the serious conduct of his life, as unexpected, is the nearest the Japanese come to a curse word except for the word “fool.”
In the later period he is asked to forego more and more personal satisfactions, but the promised reward is that he will be approved and accepted by “the world.” The punishment is that “the world” will laugh at him.
Because there is little privacy in a Japanese community too, it is no fantasy that “the world” knows practically everything he does and can reject him if it disapproves. Even the construction of the Japanese house — the thin walls that permit the passage of sounds and which are pushed open during the day — make private life extremely public for those who cannot afford a wall and garden.
Germans do not regard themselves, like the Japanese, as debtors to the world and to the ages. They strive, not to repay an incalculable debt, but to avoid being victims. The father is an authoritarian figure, and, like any other person who has superior status, it is he who, as the phrase is, “enforces respect.” It is he who feels himself threatened if he does not get it. In German life each generation of sons revolt in adolescence against their authoritarian fathers and then regard themselves as surrendering finally at adulthood to a drab and unexciting life which they identify as that of their parents. The high point of existence remains, for life, those years of adolescent rebellion.
The Japanese sees that he has made an “error” in embarking on a course of action which does not achieve its goal. When it fails, he discards it as a lost cause, for he is not conditioned to purse lost causes. They had tried one course of action and been defeated. Today they would try the peaceful arts of life. Japan must be respected among the nations of the world, and it was the duty of the Japanese to deserve this respect on a new basis.
But these are not situations which the Japanese must resent as humiliating. In the Japanese lexicon, a person or a nation humiliates another by detraction, ridicule, contempt, belittling, and insisting on symbols of dishonor. When the Japanese believe themselves humiliated, revenge is a virtue. No matter how strongly Western ethics condemn such a tenet, the effectiveness of American occupation of Japan depends on American self-restraint on this point. For the Japanese separate ridicule, which they terribly resent, from “natural consequences,” which according to the terms of their surrender include such things as demilitarization and even Spartan imposition of indemnities.
Our country was not devastated. We are not primarily an agricultural country. Our crucial problem is industrial overproduction. We have perfected mass production and mechanical equipment until our population cannot find employment unless we set in motion great programs of armament or of luxury production of welfare and research services. The need for profitable investment of capital is also acute. This situation is quite different outside the US.
What the US cannot do — what no outside nation could do — is to create by fiat a free, democratic Japan. It has never worked in any dominated country. No foreigner can decree, for a people who have not his habits and assumptions, a manner of life after his own image.