Read The Enigma of Japanese Power Online
Authors: Karel van Wolferen
Tags: #Japan - Economic Policy - 1945-1989, #Japan - Politics and Government - 1945, #Japan, #Political Culture - Japan, #Political Culture, #Business & Economics, #International, #General, #Political Science, #International Relations, #Public Policy, #Economic Policy, #Social Science, #Anthropology, #Cultural, #Political culture—Japan, #Japan—Politics and government—1945–, #Japan—Economic policy—1945–
Nihonjinron
is basically
kokutai
ideology minus the military factor. By means of the homogeneity myth, Japanese are once again telling themselves and outsiders that they are all part of what is essentially one big happy family.
What holds for the nation as a whole holds even more for some of the smaller units of which it is composed, in particular the large firms that make the salaryman believe he is working not only for his wife and children at home, but also for another large, benevolent family at his place of work. As we saw in Chapter 6 the analogy between corporation and family was propagated in the early decades of this century to counter labour unrest and an incipient union movement.
63
And the structure of the
ie
– a household defined not in terms of its blood-ties but by its economic or political task – served in Tokugawa times as a major device for social control.
64
In a major recent
nihonjinron
work, this pre-modern political construct is presented as the fundamental organising principle of post-war Japan.
65
The theory proceeds on the assumption that group life, with the moral subordination of the Japanese individual to the collectivity, is inescapable. In this it endorses, probably unwittingly, the permanent political tutelage of the Japanese adult.
Western admirers of the incorporation of ‘the total man’
66
into Japanese administrative and production structures seem unaware of the fact that this is generally at the cost of ordinary Japanese family life. A cursory appraisal of the married lives of no more than a dozen salarymen should be enough to convince one of this. Nor must it be supposed that through the familistic companies the salaryman gains in genuine intimacy with his fellow workers. On the contrary, the forced nature of these relationships at work often precludes the spontaneity indispensable for intimate bonds.
The family metaphor disguises the power exercised by managers. As one specialist on Japanese industrial working conditions reminds us:
the various dimensions of the Japanese work ethic rest ultimately on a fundamental power relationship that brooks no misunderstanding . . . there is no doubt that it is the Japanese managers, above all, who maintain most of their traditional managerial prerogatives and hold firm to the reins of power. Worker participation, worker commitment, company training, and so on, must all be understood in this context. For those committed to democratising the firm this hardly represents an ideal to be emulated.
67
The familist myth is today enthusiastically propagated by the
zaikai
, appealed to by officials and politicians and endorsed by scholars working within the
nihonjinron
perspectives. But if most Japanese really considered themselves part of a grand national family, would they need all these reminders and so much convincing? Another reason to conclude that we are dealing with ideological deception is that Japanese outside the big cities, and Japanese women, are much less prone to explaining themselves with the phrase
ware ware nihonjin
(‘we Japanese’). It appears that the further removed Japanese are from the vital parts of the System, the less susceptible they have been to ‘big family’ indoctrination.
Japanese power is thus disguised on many levels by the ideology of a unique culture. The central aim of this lifelong indoctrination that Japanese undergo is to keep them submissive. And the culture sustained by this political phenomenon reinforces submission in manifold ways. The ideal of accepting the world as it comes is celebrated in popular songs, numerous famous tales and many a television serial. A socially admired attitude of passive acceptance encourages compliance with the demands of, for instance, the education system and the corporations, even when these reach absurd proportions. Resignation in the face of misfortune, whether caused by people or not, is considered a sign of maturity.
68
Making a fuss over being cheated indicates that one is ‘immature’ – an attitude that invites a great deal of both spontaneous and organised racketeering in Japanese society. Japanese individuals are actively encouraged by many cues in everyday life to ‘submerge’ their individual selves in the larger social entities of which they are members.
69
The effect of an ideology that dominates intellectual constructs in explaining socio-political reality should be measured not just by its power to seduce intelligent citizens, but also by the extent to which it deprives intelligent citizens of other knowledge. In Japan ideology withholds intellectual stimulation from its citizens by withholding ideas that are fundamentally at variance with it. If the salaryman and the worker at the assembly belt are made to believe that they do what they do, in the way they are made to do it, because of some higher culture that they are all mystically tied to, and if furthermore they are told that this is the source of their happiness, then perhaps they will be less inclined to nurse obstinate thoughts. Even more important, if most commentary that they read in their newspapers corroborates the view that in giving up their individual life to the corporation they are fulfilling a higher destiny, they also become intellectually blunted.
Japanese whose intellectual capacities and personal inclinations might otherwise cause them to wonder at the reason for it all are systematically presented with intellectual garbage. This often drives them to become nihilists or to flee into extreme types of aestheticism.
The success of the modern ideology of Japaneseness is partly due to the general intellectual poverty of post-war Japanese life. In the absence of an intellectual tradition that vigorously analyses the conventional certainties of power relations and the social behaviour these relations have spawned, the accounts of socio-political reality in the sensationalist weekly magazines and the intellectual monthly press tend to be of doubtful quality. They routinely carry
nihonjinron
messages. It is very difficult for serious Japanese commentators to sustain their intellectual vigilance in the face of the overwhelming, overpowering, ubiquitous ideology of Japanese culture. Some intellectuals may be aware of the misuse of the cultural explanation in the area of their own pursuits, yet oblivious to it in other areas. Against the din of reassurances that Japanese love group living, are by nature not litigious, do not need to think logically,
ad infinitum
,
ad nauseam
, the few voices in the wilderness are heard only by those predisposed to hearing them. One will rarely find them in the newspapers or be exposed to them through television. Such is the power of contemporary Japanese orthodoxy.
The degree of regimentation that the System demands is met with apparent equanimity, simply because it does not occur to most Japanese to question it. As the eminent connoisseur of Japanese life and literature, Edward Seidensticker, puts it: ‘The key to understanding Japanese society is to understand that Japanese have not been taught to say No!’
70
Most Japanese middle and high schools, far from encouraging a questioning attitude towards social arrangements, tend to frown on pupils asking questions at all. It is the same with most Japanese parents. The indulged Japanese child may be very recalcitrant, but playing psychological games with the mother is no substitute for learning to view oneself objectively in relation to the social framework. The Japanese do, of course, share in the general human ability to say ‘no’ to what they themselves have constructed, but young Japanese are not reminded by their upbringing that society is ultimately a product of human design, and not an inevitable consequence of the caprices of nature.
If, against all odds, Japanese individuals nevertheless question their socio-political environment, they are constantly prodded to stop doing so. Japanese clinical treatments for sociogenic psychological disorders, such as Morita and Naikan therapies, suppress the human hankering to establish one’s identity as an individual. Patients are led to alter their attitudes towards the outside world, rather than to come to terms with themselves. ‘Healing’ begins when they empty their minds of personal ways of reasoning and personal emotions.
71
Japan’s institutionalised and ‘culturally’ sanctioned arrangements of submission and the flexibility permitted the power-holders in their representation of reality create ideal circumstances for the exercise of authoritarian power. In fact, as we have noted, the label ‘bureaucratic authoritarianism’ probably comes closest to describing the Japanese body politic. The only problem with this is that when one speaks of authoritarianism one expects to be able to point to a source from which the forces controlling society emanate. In the Japanese case these forces appear to be coming from everywhere, as well as being constantly generated from down within society itself. The public authority structure and society – the latter for the salaryman meaning mostly his company – are lumped together in the popular mind and constitute the essentials of ‘Japanese culture’. State, society and culture, in one grand amalgam, affect most Japanese as an enveloping natural phenomenon, an inescapable force. The Japanese are made to view this force as virtuous.
Since they consistently employ neither law, nor religion, nor systematic articulate, intellectual inquiry as a means of evaluating their sociopolitical arrangements, the Japanese have little choice but to measure them in reference to everyday ‘truths’ based on the demands and dictates of their immediate social environment. There being thus nothing outside the System to overrule or judge it, the System can only judge itself. This means that it is intrinsically virtuous, and that criticism of its essence is impossible; its guardians confirm this when they insist that the order they represent is inherently benevolent. In this way, the System also becomes a substitute for religion.
The religious qualities of the socio-political order that was constructed shortly before the turn of the century, and lasted until the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were openly emphasised. State Shinto, established to provide spiritual nourishment for the ‘emperor system’, functioned as an umbrella organisation incorporating all other religions, which had to abandon any tenets that conflicted with emperor-worship.
State Shinto, together with theories of a ‘family state’ centring on a divine emperor, is a thing of the past, and for some three decades following defeat in 1945 the Japanese heard much devastating criticism of the ‘emperor system’. Yet such criticism has not been based on theories profound and strong enough to serve as an alternative source of final explanations and political beliefs, and no secular system of beliefs, no socialistic, humanistic or liberal world-view, has eradicated the old mythology. Nor has the post-war period produced even a simple determination that Japan should be governed in accordance with its constitution and its laws. Thus the political culture of submission persists, and the System is for all practical purposes an unchallenged surrogate-religious force. The label ‘Japanism’, often used to describe pre-war behaviour, is still useful in describing practices in the service of the System today. It is of course inextricably bound up with the ideology described in Chapter 10. The fact that the ideology of Japaneseness is nowhere concisely summed up and cannot be found embodied in a neatly bound volume on bookstore shelves is immaterial; it serves its purpose of supporting the System as admirably as would a formal Holy Writ.
Communist ideology has frequently been likened to a religion, has indeed been labelled a ‘secular religion’. Its religious characteristics are obvious; it provides a closed philosophical system, capable of ‘explaining’ everything, which counters critical arguments against it by invoking the principles on which it itself is based. It has spawned a class of exegetes and a pseudo-priesthood. It invests those who use it with the great power of religious fervour expended in the-name of a superior goal. In some ways Japanism is an even more effective surrogate religion than communism, because it is less examined, more taken for granted and more inescapable. And it comes with a number of the peripheral attributes of organised religion, including the risk of fanatical behaviour and the fear of secularisation.
The intensely religious quality of the Japanese power structure is thrown into relief if one examines what has happened to the competition.
All religions have a social basis, according to a famous sociological theory.
1
Society’s order must, at an early developmental stage, be codified and be accorded a sacred quality if it is to be maintained. Political power is most convincingly legitimate if it is believed to be an extension of divine authority, or an expression of divine arrangements. Although the higher religions cannot convincingly be traced to such an elementary origin, religions centred on nature and ancestor-worship are plausibly covered by the socio-political origin theory. Shintoism is one of the most striking examples of religions of this kind that still exist. Native Japanese religious beliefs derive from the idea of
kami
(‘divine spirits’), which was originally used to sanctify the group. Communal worship of those divinities mystically affirmed the individual’s belonging to that group, and helped legitimise the early Yamato rulers as well as local chieftains. Today, shrine Shinto is basically an ossified system of traditional rites, its purposes by and large forgotten; like ‘village’ Shinto with its ancestor-worship and the worship of trees, rocks, waterfalls and the like, it offers no spiritual competition to the System. Instead, both still serve to some extent to reinforce veneration of those in power.
As for Buddhism, this was, as we have seen, mixed with Shinto and Confucianism to create a religious hotchpotch that played a major role in sanctioning Japanese power relations well into modern times. Although Buddhism may still serve the individual as a force of consolation in adversity, the political effect of this is to reconcile the individual to the existing social situation. Neither Shintoism nor Buddhism provides the contemporary Japanese with anything approaching political principles, a view of life or even moral standards.
Most Japanese go through a Shinto-style ceremony when they marry, and have Buddhist sutras chanted over them after they die. Shinto shrines provide a centre for communal festivities, while Buddhist temples run the afterlife industries, from wakes, funerals and burials (nearly always after cremation) to periodic services held for the souls of the dead. In the early 1980s tax investigators confirmed the impression that Buddhism is a lucrative business. Its traditional activities had become increasingly mixed with heavy profiting from the tax-exempt status enjoyed by acknowledged religions. Some Buddhist temples make much money by running parking lots, crammer schools and kindergartens, or selling effigies to pray for the souls of aborted babies. Traditional business is profitable too; droning sutras at a funeral nets between a quarter of a million to a million yen, while posthumous names are conferred for similar amounts. Temples that have their own cemeteries – which means that they have many ‘parishioners’, tied to them by the family graves situated there – can easily make fortunes. One temple in Kyoto, founded by an emperor three hundred years ago and inherited by the daughter of the last abbot, manages blocks of flats, a parking lot, a vegetarian restaurant and a night-club. Buddhist nuns must in theory shave their heads, but abbess Okada Kumien has received special dispensation, since a bald pate would look strange amidst her bar hostesses. Her excuse for this unusual sideline is the need to meet the mounting costs of keeping up an inherited cultural treasure.
There are, of course, a few Buddhist priests who discuss life’s problems with their parishioners, but the majority do not consider this a major task. Only the so-called ‘new religions’ provide their members with any opportunity for deeper involvement.
The
shinko shukyo
, or ‘newly arisen religions’, are products of the past one and a half centuries. One of them, the highly respected Tenrikyo, dating from the late Tokugawa period, dominates an entire city (Tenri city) and has a university, schools, an ethnological museum, a historical library and missionaries and doctors in the Third World. Two other major bodies with a largely rural following, Omotokyo and Konkokyo, date from shortly after the Meiji Restoration.
2
But it was in post-war Japan, after the lifting of all formal suppression, that new religions really began to proliferate. They included such esoteric specimens as Denshinkyo, the ‘electricity religion’, which worshipped Thomas Edison. In 1951, 720 new religions were registered, but a revision of the law to cope with widespread tax fraud has roughly halved their always fluctuating number.
Some of these religions have become fairly large, rich and powerful. The best-known among them, Soka Gakkai, is of political significance because of its size; it claims 6 million members. It is also the most successful among the
shinko shukyo
that have set up shop abroad. In the 1960s it created a great deal of disquiet in the System with its militant proselytising and active hostility towards other, rival new religions. But it has settled down now and, with its own schools, university, political party and publishing empire, has become a successful, albeit still somewhat controversial, participant in the System.
Another large new group, claiming more than 5 million members, is the Rissho Kosei Kai, which has a colossal wedding-cake-shaped main temple (done in pink, the favourite colour of its foundress, who received the divine call during a nervous breakdown in the 1930s), a famous hospital and the largest concert hall in the country. Like the Soka Gakkai, it is a laymen’s organisation descended from Nichiren Buddhism. Co-founder Niwano Nikkyo, who is very much at the centre of the sect, lobbies for the Nobel peace prize and has himself established a ‘Niwano peace prize’ to improve his chances. The third of the large new post-war sects is PL Kyodan, once known by outsiders as the ‘golf religion’ because of the hobby of its founder and the roof-top driving ranges on some of its churches.
The most remarkable aspect of the
shinko shukyo
, aside from the enormous wealth that most appear to have no difficulty in amassing, is the utter simplicity of their religious doctrines. One sometimes wonders whether their creeds embody anything substantial that non-members do not already believe in. None of them has developed any intellectually noteworthy doctrines or provided its members much in the way of philosophical, let alone political, guidance. True, Soka Gakkai has spawned the Komeito party. But this new group of parliamentarians – which in the 1970s formally distanced itself from its parent organisation – has not enriched the Japanese political world by providing a new choice based on recognisably alternative political principles. It could just as well be another
habatsu
of the LDP.
The main function of Japan’s new religions is social. They provide havens for those who crave intensive group involvement but are not ‘members’ of a large corporation. Among
shinko shukyo
devotees one finds large numbers of lonely housewives, bar hostesses and workers in marginal occupations.
That the individual could be involved with religion to his inner core is an idea strange to most Japanese. Religion is seen rather as a tool, as something you adopt because it will get you somewhere. A newspaper advice column once told a mother worried about her daughter, who had become ‘a different woman’ since joining a Christian church, that she should try to find out what personal problems had made her become a convert in the first place.
3
A fair number of intellectuals in the early Meiji period adopted Christianity only to give it up when the immediate results disappointed them.
An exception to the casualness with which people join and quit Japanese religious sects is the Unification Church. This movement originated in Korea, and its followers are known in the West as ‘Moonies’, after the name of its founder. Japanese Moonies are hardly less fanatical than their Western counterparts. By infiltrating parts of the political and academic worlds – aided by the large funds they have available for buying favours, by their intimidating practices and by their fervent anti-communism – they have become highly influential. The Moonies provide an important hacking for those elements in the System that advocate the need for greater Japanese independence through remilitarisation.
The companies are suspicious of employees who belong, or whose parents belong, to a new religion. The point is often investigated when firms are sifting recruits; religious fervour in Japan is expressed by supreme loyalty to the component one belongs to, and the potential conflict between company loyalty and religious affiliation would be too great. The older Buddhist sects, which take little if any of the adherent’s time, pose no threat here. Some companies require their employees to worship at the ‘company shrine’ on the roof of the office building, which has been known to lead to embarrassment for Christian employees. An explicit reference to the company as a source of religious sustenance was the famous suicide note left behind by an executive of Nissho Iwai, a large trading firm. Before jumping from a building as a result of involvement in a scandal, the manager wrote to all his colleagues that ‘the company is eternal, and we should dedicate ourselves to its eternity’.
Beyond the company, the System as a whole provides religious sustenance. It will be remembered that a demonstration of repentance will let most law-breakers off the hook; that the administrators expect the institutions they run to be collectively considered as a fount of benevolence; and that in the extreme cases represented by the heterodox opinions of radical detainees much effort goes into attempts to make them apostatise. While there is great freedom of speech in Japan, any heterodox ideas that become organised and associated with a group appear to activate the System’s absorptive or neutralising powers immediately. The moral possibility of individual resistance to the established socio-political arrangements is simply not recognised.
The religious character of Japanese society helps explain the poverty of Japanese intellectual probing of society. Where social concerns are forever paramount, and have religious significance, analysis of society is akin to analysis of the divinity, and such analysis always undermines faith. Just as with the ideology of Japaneseness, embedded in
nihonjinron
, the surrogate religion of Japanism is not recognised for what it is – which makes the System all the more insidiously religious.
The fact that a tradition of referring to truths beyond the political order has not taken root in Japan does not of course mean that Japanese are incapable of conceiving and appealing to such beliefs and principles. The Japanese System has not evolved naturally as a substitute for a religion, the product of a people who, for some unexplained reason, were never interested in religious speculation. The human mind inevitably searches for an invisible order governing what the mind’s eye perceives. It does so without instruction and often in the face of active obstruction. That people are not merely a product of their upbringing is evidenced by the Japanese experience as much as by any other.
At several junctures in history, Japanese power-holders have eradicated the hints of transcendental values and universal principles that were present in the formal Japanese religions. They have always shown great fear of such potential threats to their presentation of themselves as representing ultimate virtue. We can be sure of this, because some religious groups did not give up without a fight, and had to be actively suppressed.
Take, for example, Honen (1133–1212), the first of the great Buddhist reformers of the Kamakura period, who preached the possibility of individual salvation. Buddhism had already altered the Shinto view of life after death – which taught a gradual merging with ancestral spirits – by postulating rebirth in a number of different realms. Since around the tenth century, this idea of an individual afterlife had to some extent influenced ethical norms not subject to political control, but it first gained great popularity with the flourishing of the indigenous Japanese Buddhist sects of which Honen was the pioneer. His message was that childlike reliance on Amida Buddha’s fatherly love and compassion, rather than on ritual deeds, would lead to rebirth in the Pure Land, a Buddhist paradise. Establishment Buddhism, centred on the monasteries of Mount Hiei near Kyoto, found Honen dangerous enough to take drastic action against him. Its monks burned all the copies of his treatise they could lay their hands on, together with the wooden blocks with which they had been printed. Eventually, Honen’s popularity moved the authorities to exile him.
The next great Buddhist theorist, Shinran (1173–1262), also spent most of his life in virtual exile among common people, far from Japan’s political and cultural centres. Taking Honen’s theory a step further, he preached that simple faith alone would lead to redemption: no chanting of Buddha’s name, no ritual, no celibacy – piety alone was the key to salvation. While Buddhism in its imported form had become a tool of the governing élite, Shinran did more than any other Japanese to make the faith accessible to the simplest villagers. The sect he founded, the Jodo Shinshu, is still the largest in the country.
Nichiren (1222–82), the third of the founders of the indigenous Japanese schools of Buddhism, was the most colourful, the most political and hence the most controversial religious leader in Japanese history. It is significant that more than six centuries later he should be remembered as a singular example of putting individual convictions above the interests of the state.
4
Nichiren taught that belief in the transcendental truth of the Lotus Sutra, accompanied by chanting of its ‘sacred name’, was necessary to save the souls of individual Japanese and, in turn, the nation as a whole. He predicted that unless there was a general conversion there would be all manner of calamities, including a foreign invasion. Kublai Khan, the Mongol chieftain and ruler of China, did in fact launch invasions against Japan in 1274 and 1281, thereby helping ensure Nichiren’s fame in subsequent centuries.
Although Nichiren never called for the overthrow of the ruling class, he did exhort the aristocracy to reform itself and to suppress Jodo Buddhism and the older sects. His attacks on the life-style of the élite in Kamakura and the established Buddhist sects brought him a death sentence (which he miraculously escaped) and exile. After a settlement of uncertain nature with the authorities, he went into retirement in the mountains west of Mount Fuji. There he developed his vision of a single Buddhist church while conducting a voluminous correspondence with followers all over Japan. The universal church of his dreams would be based in Japan, at the foot of Mount Fuji, whence it would spread all over the world.
5
It is no coincidence that Soka Gakkai, the biggest offshoot of the Nichiren sect among the new religions, has its headquarters at that very spot.
While the teachings of the founders of Japan’s great indigenous Buddhist sects did not add up to an enduring body of political theory, and while the religious challenges to established authority inherent in their work were never transformed into successful military challenges, they were nevertheless politically significant. Their teachings, though simple, provided for the mass of the people an example of a truth explicitly transcending that represented by temporal authority. It has become clear to historians that a large number of popular rebellions were in part inspired by religion.
The numerous regional peasant uprisings called
ikki
that occurred from at least the early fourteenth century onward, sometimes with the cooperation of discontented warriors, were usually triggered by such causes as heavy village debts, inability to pay taxes or ruined harvests. But transcendental Buddhism had undoubtedly contributed to political consciousness and a sense of unity among villagers. In the century preceding the Tokugawa political settlement, the most formidable
ikki
uprisings were organised by believers of Shinran’s sect, Jodo Shinshu, which had blossomed under the great Rennyo (1415–99), chief abbot of the main Honganji temple. Known as the
ikko ikki
, these village-based military actions increased in number along with greater use of naked military power by the warrior leaders, suggesting that there may have been many peasants who understood ‘the new exploitative nature of the emerging order’.
6
Not surprisingly the three generals who, appearing in close succession at the close of the sixteenth century, ended centuries of strife and bloodshed by their gradual unification of Japan, had absolutely no patience with indigenous Buddhism. The first of them, Oda Nobunaga, countered the
ikko ikki
ferociously for some ten years. His view of the Buddhist fighters was demonstrated by the extermination campaigns that frequently followed victorious battles against them. According to one record, some 20,000 sect members were burnt alive in 1574. The same Nobunaga spared defeated enemy barons and regular warriors.
7
The latter were part of the normal order of power, whereas the religiously inspired fighters were not.
Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the second of the great unifiers, used the tactic of putting the Buddhist establishment in his debt. He co-opted popular Buddhism, helping to undermine the
ikki
that had been inspired by it. Once this had been accomplished, the world-view preached by popular Buddhism had to remain suppressed.
8
The theoretical distinction between the laws of the Buddha and the laws of men that had evolved in the preceding centuries was gradually obscured and forgotten. Once again, secular authority became fundamental and obedience to it the paramount duty.
9
But there are indications that the believers in a ‘truth’ beyond that of the authorities did not give up that easily, notwithstanding the feats of the third unifier, Tokugawa leyasu, who extended his control over Buddhist institutions, regulating their teachings and activities.
10
The Buddhists resisted organised oppression well into the fourth decade of the Tokugawa shogunate that began at the outset of the seventeenth century. An early bestseller,
Kiyomizu Monogatari
(
The Tale of Kiyomizu
), published in 1638, explicitly identified the pockets of ideological recalcitrance in Japan: the
ikko
believers, the followers of Nichiren and the Christians.
11
The most striking illustrations of the fear of religious competition in the Tokugawa and Meiji periods, and for several decades into the present century, involved intolerance for Japanese Christians.
In the last decades of the sixteenth century and the first decades of the seventeenth, Portuguese Jesuits and other missionaries made up to one million converts, including some feudal lords. Opinions differ as to what brought this era to an end. According to one theory, the shogun saw the priests as the forerunners of colonisation by the Portuguese or Spaniards. More important, probably, was the Tokugawa shogunate’s fear that the less loyal domains might receive military backing from the foreigners. But there was more to it than this. The potential power over the political order of belief in an alien Lord above shogun and emperor, even if this Lord was only in heaven, must have been very frightening to those who ruled. And the relentless persecution of Christians that continued long after the country was virtually cut off from international traffic suggests that the shogunate was indeed afraid of more than political moves by Portugal. As a result of the perceived threat to the established political order, the country was cut off from contact with Westerners except for a handful of Dutch traders, who had managed to convince the shogunate officials that they did not worship the same God as the Portuguese. Following the expulsion of the missionaries, Japanese Christians were tortured, crucified and sent into exile.
12
To prove that they had apostatised, they were made to trample on crosses and swear an oath that began and ended in this curious fashion: ‘By the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, Santa Maria and all the angels. . . . If I break this oath may I lose the grace of God for ever and fall into the wretched state of Judas Iscariot.’
13
The officials who designed that formula seem to have understood the power of transcendental religion when they saw it.
In 1637, after many Christians had been massacred or forced to recant their religion, supposed apostates were joined by masterless samurai in a rebellion under the Christian banner on the Shimabara peninsula in Kyushu. As many as 37,000 men, women and children marched on and occupied a local castle and held it for four months against shogunate forces. This was to be the last time before the Meiji Restoration, some 230 years later, that a samurai army fought a major battle.
The hankering for something more than the prescribed ‘truth’ did not disappear entirely with the persecuted Buddhists and Christians. Ando Shoeki, a thinker who lived in the first half of the eighteenth century, was one who saw the shogunate for what it was: arbitrary rule dependent on military power buttressed by ideology.
14
There may have been more like him. Ando’s writings were not discovered until 1899, and were introduced to a wider Japanese public only after the Second World War.
Christianity was ruthlessly eradicated. Buddhism was gutted of the transcendental notions it had developed, and several of its sects were outlawed.
15
Under Tokugawa rule the new power relationships were frozen within ideological orthodoxy. All this was crucial in the shaping of Japanese political culture as we know it today. And all of it was the direct result of political decrees.
That the unifying generals understood the political significance of religion is further witnessed by their efforts at religious innovation. Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi and Tokugawa leyasu were no less upstarts than the ambitious warriors of previous centuries. All three, however, hoped to avoid the political bondage implied in legitimisation by the imperial court, and therefore needed a spiritual basis for their rule. All three, accordingly, tried to solve the legitimacy problem by raising themselves to divine status and launching cults centred on themselves.
16
One of the most famous Japanese architectural complexes, the Toshogu Mausoleum at Nikko, bears testimony to the importance the Tokugawa regime attached to the cult of leyasu. In the first century of Tokugawa rule, this shrine vied in popularity with the most important Shinto shrine at Ise, where the emperors worshipped their ancestors.
In the two and a half centuries of the police state forged by the Tokugawas, no new set of propositions about the relationship of human beings to society or the universe ever had a chance to compete with the regime for the minds of the Japanese. When competition finally arrived in the form of the foreign learning of the Meiji period, the guardians of the power system took a couple of decades to decide on their own doctrines of the individual’s relationship to society, then once again took the inevitable protective action.
Again, it started with the Christians. Three decades into the Meiji period, they became the target of official restrictions. In 1899 the Ministry of Education forbade religious instruction in schools. Six years before that, Inoue Tetsujiro, philosophy professor at Tokyo Imperial University, had published his famous
Conflict between Education and Religion
in which he drew ‘the logical conclusion . . . that Christianity is absolutely anti-national’.
17
Another nationalist and journalist, Kuga Katsunan, who was famous for his editorials instructing the government on how to preserve Japanese morals, pleaded for an assimilation of Christianity in the way Buddhism had once been absorbed by the political system.
18
The ban on religious education affected Buddhist schools too, to the extent that these had emulated the Christians in trying to become a new ethical force in society. But it was the Christians who ‘served the ideologues as metaphorical foreigners in whose alien reflection the silhouette of patriotism emerged that much more clearly’.
19
The Christians were expected to drop their faith in a supreme God and in individual responsibility so as to fit in with society as sanctioned by the Meiji oligarchy. In other words, Japanese Christianity was to be deprived of precisely those beliefs that made it Christian. Even so, many believers did adjust, albeit at times under protest. Some Christian schools exchanged the Bible for the Imperial Rescript on Education, the catechism of the emperor cult, as their source of moral instruction.
Japan’s most famous Christian, Uchimura Kanzo (1861–1930), epitomises the insoluble conflict felt by many Christians who wanted to remain functioning members of the Japanese community – which automatically means accepting that no intellectual or moral command may be considered as overriding the needs of the established socio-political order. Uchimura’s training in the United States had, he found, made him unfit for teaching in Japanese schools. In one celebrated episode in 1891 he refused to bow to the emperor’s seal affixed to the Rescript on Education, before finally yielding to the pleas of his colleagues. His dilemma is poignantly captured in his famous short piece ‘Two J’s’, dating from 1925:
I love two J’s and no third; one is Jesus, and the other is Japan. I do not know which I love more, Jesus or Japan. . . . For Jesus’ sake, I cannot own any other God than His Father . . . and for Japan’s sake, I cannot accept any faith which comes in the name of foreigners . . . my faith is not a circle with one center; it is an ellipse with two centers.
Uchimura sought a Christianity that could be purely Japanese, untainted by Western influence – a tall order if ever there was one. He thought he had found it by keeping the biblical tales and some Christian ethical teachings, but by doing away with the institution of the church.
Among the churches that other Japanese Christians have established, none has given the power-holders much of a headache. In conflict situations, such as when, just before the war, all Japanese were required to worship at the Yasukuni shrine (a state Shinto shrine, home of the souls of fallen soldiers), the authorities had their way. The Vatican told Japanese Catholics that they could consider the gesture a civic duty, and most Protestant churches followed suit. In 1941 several dozen Protestant churches merged to form a government-sponsored United Church of Christ in Japan. The Anglicans and some other groups withdrew from the organisation after the war, but it is still the largest Protestant body in Japan today. Today, only the Jehovah’s Witnesses occasionally make news by running into trouble in the schools, when children of believers are asked to do things that conflict with sect rules, and school principals refuse to make exceptions for religious minorities.
Earlier in this century, Japanese Christians were held up as models of how not to be Japanese. It did not help that it was they who had first introduced the political left into Japan. Some of the founders of the Society for the Study of Socialism and its offspring, the Socialist Democratic Party (banned two days after its formation), were Christians, as were the organisers of Japan’s first national labour organisation, the Yuaikai.
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Both Marxists and Christians were left alone in this century only so long as they accepted social compromises that entailed, as a basic condition, abandonment of the principles essential to their adopted faiths. In the early 1900s a common topic of discussion in high circles was how the government could best suppress ‘dangerous thoughts’ – meaning, mainly, thoughts derived from the Christian and Marxist interpretations of the world. In 1923 an imperial message was issued in which, without further ado, people were ordered to stop having such thoughts.
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From the 1930s till the end of the war recalcitrant Marxists were harassed or cajoled into performing
tenko
, the public recanting of their beliefs. Persecution was at its most straightforward in the case of the communists; the Communist Party could easily be portrayed as the agent of a foreign power, since it took its orders from the Comintern.
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The party was, of course, illegal. It was racked by severe factional wars and further weakened by mass arrests. Its leadership spent most of the war years in prison.
Freedom of expression in post-war Japan has brought no drastic changes in the fortunes of what were once the main sources of ‘abnormal foreign thoughts’. Some Christian churches do a roaring business in weddings, but that is because getting married before a Catholic or Protestant clergyman is fashionable. Only 1 per cent of the Japanese population calls itself Christian.
As for Japanese socialists and communists, they have refused to relate their theorising to attainable socio-political goals. The communist organisation is heir to the same habits of Japanist political thought and behaviour as the mainstream components of the System. Until the 1960s the party justified its decisions with reference to the infallibility of the Soviet party, and the myth of collective leadership obscures individual responsibility.
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Long-established Marxist stereotypes are influential among a still large but dwindling group of academics and intellectual commentators. Their concept of ‘monopoly capitalism’ is weighed down with a thick crust of ideological barnacles accrued over three-quarters of a century. They apply it with such unthinking regularity that they convince only each other and perhaps a handful of gullible students.
Nevertheless, this hoary old version of Japanese Marxism is the single firmly established alternative to ‘Japanism’. It provides at least some intellectual backing for the only genuine political opposition challenging the System’s claim to a monopoly of righteousness. It is no coincidence that the one large political organisation capable of rejecting the ‘inescapable embrace’ (at least until the mid-1980s) was Nikkyoso, an organisation led by doctrinaire Marxists. And the only consistent opposition to the politicisation of the Japanese judiciary by the judicial bureaucrats, the only energetic attempt to preserve judicial autonomy, has come from Seihokyo, another organisation at least partly under the influence of Marxist ideologues.