The Enigma of Japanese Power (30 page)
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–
Although the System may not be Big Brother, the Japanese are asked to accept that it loves them in return for social obedience. This means, among other things, not questioning – at least not continuously and systematically – the political system. They are asked to believe not that they themselves are citizens with rights, but that the administrators have big hearts. To put it simply: whereas power in the West is masked by the illusion of principle, in Japan it is masked by the illusion of benevolence. In the Western tradition, intellectual probing of the socio-political environment is allowed and sometimes encouraged; the Japanese tradition requires emotional trust.
Japanese are conditioned to accept as natural the unequal tie to a social superior, and many develop a psychological need for it. This is fully justified by Confucianist-derived theories, but in China a philosophical tradition tried to find a rational justification for inequality. Chinese Confucianism set out to resolve the basic conflict between the need (deduced from historical experience) for a hierarchical society and the need to mitigate the injustices inherent in such an unequal order. In India, too, the relations between the exercise of power and subjection to it posed an intellectual problem that was solved by religious sanction. In Japan the unequal relationship was made acceptable by appeal neither to religion nor to any rational theory of statecraft, but to a claim of inherent benevolence.
The starkest contrast is in the way the Japanese and Western intellectual traditions handle the fact of inequality and the need for obedience. To understand this crucial difference better, it is necessary to lay bare the intellectual underpinnings of the Japanese socio-political world, and there is no better place to start than with elementary religious and legal thought. Religion and law, in that they both concern ultimate beliefs, are almost always intimately connected during their early development. In respect of both, Japan and the Western nations stand at opposite extremes when viewed in the collective context of human civilisation. To place the two traditions side by side can thus be very instructive. In the West, as we shall see, power-holders became increasingly tied to codes over which they had lost control; whereas in Japan, at least until the end of the Tokugawa period, power-holders were portrayed as the ultimate embodiment of truth and virtue.
On the European side, the idea of legitimate tension between individuals and their political rulers goes back at least to the time when Socrates was forced to take poison for ‘corrupting’ the youth of Athens by insisting on the superiority of individual human reason over society.
Socrates’ most famous pupil, Plato, understood that the human impulse to seek power causes much evil. The noblest task of the city-state (the
polis
) was, in his view, guaranteeing justice to curb power in the raw.
1
This idea lingered on after the breakdown of the Roman Empire, when political life in Europe was no less chaotic or vicious than it was amidst the incessant civil wars of medieval Japan.
Even before Charlemagne, when brutal upstarts and usurpers ruled without much regard for life, there survived at least a dim notion of a reality beyond the thirst for power and the caprices of local overlords. The European monasteries of the early Middle Ages kept alive Mediterranean philosophical constructs implying the possibility of opposition to political arrangements, and provided a faint reminder of transcendental beliefs. The laws of the Roman Empire – which had kept order in Europe longer than any empire that was to follow – were a memory that remained.
In ancient Japan the Yamato chieftains turned power into a right, and thus obedience into a duty, by having it endorsed by
kami
, the Shinto spirits of their ancestors and spirits of nature – a basic method known in many parts of the world. During the fourth century, when they had conquered enough territory to warrant the term ‘kingdom’, they extended their power through a web of real and artificial kinship ties, and established a Shinto shrine to the ancestral deity of the sovereign family, where all their subjects could worship.
2
Henceforth the emperors bore the title ‘one with the divine sanction to hold the world together’.
3
Ritual purification, significantly, was necessary for crimes and other things one wanted to conceal from the gods.
4
Thus Japanese law, like that of so many other cultures, was totally intertwined with the observances of an indigenous religion. Early Confucianism was added to this Shinto tradition from the fifth century onward; its precepts, sanctifying a strictly hierarchical social order, were blended with native practices as a justification for political organisation. As Japan became more familiar with this great secular source of morals, which reached it through Korea, it developed its own simple penal law.
When Buddhism arrived from Korea in the middle of the sixth century, the Japanese aristocracy seized upon its doctrines as an instrument to promote popular obedience. Shotoku Taishi, Japan’s first ‘law-giver’, devoted pride of place to the new religion in his ‘constitution’. This document inspired by Chinese models and still emphasised in elementary schools today as a landmark in Japanese history, consists of a collection of platitudes about good relations between rulers and subjects. It did not place any legal restraint on the acts of the ruler. Neither Confucianism nor Buddhism introduced any rules curbing the exercise of power in Japan.
In early Western discourse, the legitimation of morals and behaviour depended on paramount principles above and beyond immediate social reality. The abstractions to which medieval priests and Renaissance thinkers appealed were considered true precisely because they transcended worldly concerns. Thus there was a firm concept of permanent limitations to worldly power. By contrast, the Confucianist scholar and Buddhist monk in Japan, even when dealing with higher, abstract levels of reality, remained fully dependent on temporal rulers. Warriors and commoners were ordered to follow their teachings only in so far as these accorded with the political priorities of the day. Unlike Western kings and lords, Japanese power-holders could not be commanded to answer morally for their deeds. They were never judged by standards that they themselves had not established.
The officially sponsored spread of Buddhism entailed risks in that some of its doctrines enjoined the individual to follow the Way shown by an inner light rather than by external guidance. But at the same time it compensated for this individualistic streak by preaching the spirit of resignation. As one Japanese specialist has noted, Japanese Buddhism did not develop an independent ethic, ‘and the vital ability of Buddhism to free people from community pressures and tradition was almost totally lost’.
5
Shotoku Taishi and most of his successors were not bothered by the incompatibilities of Shintoism, Confucianism and Buddhism so long as these creeds served their political purposes. This was well illustrated by a religious feast, held about one and a half centuries after the introduction of Buddhism, at which five thousand Buddhist monks chanted sutras to celebrate the bestowal of a high civil rank on a Shinto god recently installed in a newly built Shinto shrine in the palace.
6
The amalgamation of the two religions was clearly an official policy designed to strengthen their joint endorsement of existing worldly rule. They have existed more or less amicably side by side throughout most of the ensuing centuries.
Kami
were enshrined near some Buddhist temples, becoming their (Shinto) guardian deities, and Shinto divinities appeared as Boddhisatvas as easily as Greek gods pop up in Roman mythology.
An indispensable requirement for the development of laws that curb the power of rulers, as distinct from laws used to control and curb the activities of the ruled, is the concept of legitimate opposition. And this notion of legitimate resistance to one’s rulers is alien to the Japanese tradition.
The way superiors dealt with those below them was regularised to some degree by the
ritsu-ryo
legal system based on Japan’s first legal codes: the Taiho code formulated in AD 701 and its replacement, the Yoro code, written seventeen years later. Both were inspired by the legal writings of T’ang China.
7
Ritsu
meant the chastisement of wrongdoers and was left virtually as the Chinese had written it, save for the scaling down of punishments (which came in a choice of five degrees: flogging, beating, forced labour, exile and death).
Ryo
, a body of administrative law, was amended to suit Japanese needs and enlarged by some new rules. Whenever practices contradicted ryo they were maintained under the label ‘contemporary practice’.
8
This is an early example of the enduring Japanese habit of only partially assimilating foreign systems and papering over the discrepancies with euphemisms. Among many examples in contemporary Japan is the anti-monopoly law that, as part of the post-1945 ‘free-market’ system, exists in fraternal harmony with all manner of cartels.
9
By the time Japanese political power had fully passed into the hands of the
bushi
, the warrior class – as it most definitely had in what came to be known as the Kamakura period (1185–1333) – there existed no less than three systems of law. One applied to the imperial court; a second was for the proprietors of the landholdings (
shoen
) that were part of early Japanese feudalism; and the third was for the shogunate, the formal military government. Law, however, here meant whatever edicts the rulers cared to promulgate: edicts that were generally arbitrary and unrelated to any overall concept of justice. By the time the daimyo (the barons of later Japanese feudalism) emerged towards the end of the fifteenth century, what was and what was not lawful depended wholly on the locality, and many domains had no formal codes at all.
Power-holders are more ready to believe that they are subject to laws if they are aware of some superior or coexisting force that must be accommodated. This may take the form of either an anthropomorphic god, an abstract notion of Justice, or the State.
A major factor in the earlier phases of European legal thinking was the notion of a separation between church and state. At the end of the fifth century. Pope Gelasius I had redefined a variety of older ideas concerning the existence of two orders of human affairs, one governed by priestly authority and the other by secular rulers. The notion of the possibility of the state maintaining a justice transcending arbitrary feudal authority survived in Europe as part of the dim memory of the Roman Empire. At a later stage, the universities joined the monks in upholding an intellectual tradition embodying theories and moral precepts that were without question considered valid in an ultimate sense, applicable at any time to any person and in any circumstances. These theories and precepts were inextricably linked with the concept of law.
In 1159, a quarter-century before the establishment of the Japanese shogunate, the first major European work on political theory since Roman times explicitly stated the king’s subjecthood to law and ultimately to God.
10
In
Policraticus
, or
The Statesman’s Book
, John of Salisbury argued that ‘inferiors should cleave and cohere to their superiors, and all the limbs should be in subjection to the head; but always and only on condition that religion is kept inviolate’.
11
Salisbury contended that even the murder of sovereigns is warranted if their flouting of justice is too flagrant. This was theory; the many European rulers who were killed were in fact mainly victims of the greed for power of their enemies. In Japan, too, emperors ran some risk of being killed. A thirteenth-century history written by a highly placed Buddhist priest relates several murders and assassination attempts.
12
Imperial crown princes were usually brought up outside the parental palace because of the risk to their lives from scheming members of the court. But a
theoretical
justification for killing the descendant of the gods was totally inconceivable throughout Japanese history.
In thirteenth-century Europe one of the greatest medieval political theorists. St Thomas Aquinas, made clear that the state existed for the citizen, and his work constitutes one of the most powerful reminders to kings that they are subject to ‘Christ’s law’. Late-medieval European thought evolved the idea that the maintenance of justice was the first and principal task of the state. ‘The Platonic idea of the Legal State proved to be a real and active power: a great energy that not only influenced the thoughts of men but became a powerful impulse of human actions.’
13
Christian authority became a powerful legitimating force because worldly rulers craved its endorsement. Charlemagne was eager that people should believe he was crowned by God. Later, from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries, the nobles of Rome and the Holy Roman emperors together with other European sovereigns had perhaps little reverence for the pope, and were never above using his blessings to further their own political ends, but they needed the church’s endorsement and had to be careful not to be branded heretical. Political writing during these centuries was much concerned with the relative powers of church and state, and the tension between the two.
14
It is true that intellectual constructs often have little correspondence with the reality they are supposed to reflect; and there are views of history that belittle the practical power of ideas, see principles as illusory and admit only the cynical manipulation of subject populations by vested interests. But this approach is blind to aspects of European history that demand attention in any comparison with Japanese history. Western theory has often been strongly reflected in political reality. Henry IV knelt in the snow outside the papal palace of Canossa in a show of humiliation that has been remembered ever since. Frederick 11 may have fought the papacy as if he were at war with any ordinary state, but even he could never publicly question the pope’s authority.
The popular participation in government practised by the Germanic tribes of northern Europe brought with it early notions of political equality that mingled with the systematic medieval theories of the rule of law. The Stoics, known in medieval Europe through the writings of Cicero, had argued that all human beings are fundamentally equal, and under their influence medieval scholars began to view the law as an entity even more universal than Plato had suggested.
The ‘absolute’ monarchs of Europe, in organising more sophisticated structures of national power, could not destroy this tradition. The Divine Right they claimed was still a sanction, one that made them accountable to God; the weight of religious and philosophical tradition meant in fact that no political power could be considered absolute any more. Power-holders submitted to the authority of principles, in the form of laws that were ‘irrevocable and inviolable because they express the divine order itself, the will of the supreme lawgiver’.
15
The idea that power must be subjected to moral ends eventually leads, in European history, to concepts of the sovereignty of the people.
16
By the time of the Renaissance and Reformation, when political and religious conflicts were nearly tearing the universities apart
17
and man no longer stood in the centre of a universe ruled by God, reinterpretations of Stoic philosophy had gained a hold over European thinkers, who no longer needed Christian dogma to support the concept of universal law and universal moral good. Hugo Grotius, the Dutch jurist and founder of international law, asserted that even the will of the Almighty cannot change the principles of morality or abrogate the fundamental rights guaranteed by natural laws.
Legal thinking in the contemporary world is ultimately based on this reasoning. It gave the state a legal basis through the concept of state contract. It led directly to the moral philosophies of Immanuel Kant, John Locke, Montesquieu and Spinoza, positing the existence of ‘natural rights’ as a rational basis for liberalism, and through these to contemporary ideas of international law, human rights and the idea of ‘justice’ in general.
Moving through Japanese history one finds, by contrast, only the strengthening of an ideology in which rulers figured as the embodiment of morality. The neo-Confucianist teachings current from the late seventeenth century onward offered, in essence, little more than an elaborate scholastic vindication of the innate ethical flawlessness of the military dictatorship. We will come back to this at length in Chapter 11.
