The Enigma of Japanese Power (39 page)

The difference between Japanism and genuine religions is that the latter transcend socio-political concerns whereas Japanism by definition cannot, since it is derived from and totally governed by those concerns. The relentless affirmation that the existing arrangements governing daily life are immutable and ultimately meaningful has not satisfied all Japanese all the time. Japanism cannot fully satisfy the human craving for ultimate explanations.

Those cravings are part of the Japanese make-up just as with other people, as has been demonstrated by the historical examples given above. Intermittently, new generations of young Japanese also manifest them. Intelligent students sometimes pass through personal upheavals in which they embrace and abandon belief systems at great speed. The absence of any intellectual anchor makes them peculiarly susceptible to newly encountered ideologies. Since they have not been encouraged to think in terms of universal principles, their sudden discovery of creeds that appear to explain everything often leads to very intense involvement.

When this involvement is a collective one, it is still characterised by much regimentation and discipline. Japanese student activism in the 1960s and early 1970s was quite different from that of Europe and the United States in two respects. The Japanese radicals slavishly mouthed slogans derived from some or other rigidly ideological variant of Marxism. At the same time, they put themselves emotionally into the hands of their leaders, obeying their every command. Battles between riot police and student radicals often created the illusion of having been organised by a choreographer. The radicals, sporting their identical helmets with identical insignia, and identical small towels worn between the helmet straps as masks (intended to protect them against tear-gas), and carrying identical wooden staves, gave an impression as disciplined as that of the riot police in their dark blue uniforms and metal shields, while their running in formation would have put the Bersaglieri, the famous Italian bugle corps, to shame.

The contrast with the student ‘revolutionaries’ of the West and the subculture associated with them could hardly have been greater. ‘Spontaneity’ was the imperative of the radical youth culture of the West, its ideal the elimination of all authority restricting the true self – the authority, even, of their own leaders – as well as theories that would channel and thus diminish the ‘revolution’.
²⁴
Even so, the fact that the Japanese student movement of that period (as distinct from its more recent radicalised offshoots) ritualised its protest to such an extent that the riot police could easily deal with it does not detract from the strong devotion of many members to notions that scared the System, and their readiness to make a display of that devotion.

Passionate action in the name of some higher cause, action which earned the disapproval or condemnation of the authorities, was not unknown in Japan’s more repressive eras. It constitutes, in fact, a venerated tradition that has created many, if not most, of Japan’s heroes. To understand the intellectual inspiration of this tradition we must return, once again, to those few inklings of a reality surpassing that of the union of humanity and nature supposedly embodied by the warrior regime. Even though the various movements of officially endorsed Tokugawa learning were wholly domesticated and relentlessly supportive of the regime, they could not be entirely purged of visions that extended beyond the shogunal palace.

The nativist Kokugaku scholars, for one, had such visions when they emphasised Japan’s glorious tradition of divinely descended emperors. And the Chinese neo-Confucianist writings that constituted the main portion of what every Tokugawa student memorised must have given the more probing mind occasional glimpses of a universal morality transcending the ideology of the shogunal administrators. More than a glimmering of this was contained in Japanese explications of the philosophy of the Chinese Wang Yangming school. Nakae Toju (1608–48), founder of the Yomeigaku (Yang-ming studies) in Japan, propounded the existence of a principle, pervading the whole universe, called
meitoku
(‘true virtue’). When a person finds his or her own
meitoku
he or she automatically becomes virtuous.
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In pursuing this idea, Nakae conceived of something close to a single personal God, which he referred to as the absolute truth, infinite and the final end of all.
²⁶
His thinking when stretched this far is neither steady nor consistent, but he did at least affirm with certainty the fact of an intuitive understanding of right and wrong.

Yomeigaku came the closest of all Japanese schools of thought to an apprehension of transcendental principle. A masterless samurai, Kumazawa Banzan (1619–91), applied Nakae Toju’s teachings to a reform programme in the domain of Okayama, setting the example for socially concerned Japanese after him. The motto of his school was ‘Act out of conscience’.
²⁷
Such Yomeigaku notions filtered through to the samurai and gave a vague legitimacy to such passionate action as they felt obliged to resort to under special circumstances.

Early in the nineteenth century, these ideas were transformed into a basis for rebellion. The period’s most famous rebel, Oshio Heihachiro (1792–1837), applied Yomeigaku thought to unambiguous political activism.
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For him the essence of all things, alive or dead, was at once a universal absolute and a creative force; it was an absolute spirit that was also morally right. He concluded from this that action against evil was an immutable command. To treat evil as something outside oneself was in fact to condone its existence in one’s own heart. Thus he advocated what he described as continuous ‘pure’ action, implicitly justifying a permanent state of rebellion. He even went so far as to write that one’s actions in society should be ‘as if one were mad’.
²⁹
If anything appealed to a universal principle, this was it. But it provided little intellectual basis for sustained political involvement. Oshio translated theory into practice and started a rebellion in 1837, in the course of which a quarter of the city of Osaka burned down. He gave famished farmers swords and sold his library to buy guns and a cannon. The large merchant houses were plundered and burned; Oshio was found by the authorities and committed suicide. His army was tortured and killed to a man.

What happened to Oshio’s theory is characteristic of the perversion that heterodox political thought in Japan appears doomed to undergo once it spreads. On the eve of the Meiji Restoration, Oshio was revered by anti-shogunate forces. But his ethical ideals were converted into slogans for ‘national survival’, meaning expulsion of the foreigners. The idea of saving the poor became transformed into the idea of saving the country.
³⁰
Both the Yomeigaku and Kokugaku movements in their advanced stages had become intellectual weapons with which the power of the Tokugawa bureaucracy could be defied by calling for the restoration of the imperial institution.
³¹
So intense was the Kokugaku scholars’ endorsement of the idea that the emperor sanctified the political order that their message gained an unintended revolutionary potential.

Spread by numerous followers of Motoori Norinaga and Hirata Atsutane among commoners all over the country,
³²
the ideas of the mystic value of ancient customs and the imperial blessing helped, in combination with the concept of intuitive moral action exemplified by Oshio, to inspire the young warrior firebrands known as
shishi
, who in the final decades of the shogunate created havoc in the name of re-establishing an imperial Japan. In the end, they contributed to the fall of the Tokugawa regime.
³³
The
shishi
, some of them masterless samurai, often lived as vagabonds, but a few became popular heroes. They represented a variety of characters, but the most important among them were xenophobic nationalist zealots who filled the air with their cries of ‘Revere the emperor and expel the barbarians!’ Their ranks included the terrorists who murdered early European residents in the 1850s and 1860s.

Here we have the beginnings of a romantic tradition of heroes and ‘patriotic’ scoundrels supposedly inspired by pure Japanist motives in their search for a ‘purer’ Japan. It is one of the great tragedies in the history of Japanese political thought that ideas which could have served to exert pressure on the established order ended up in the arsenals of those who sought to be more Japanist than the Japanists.

The romanticised
shishi
tradition provided an acknowledged ‘moral’ basis for the murders committed by the alleged patriots of the 1930s, mixed-up young men with delusions of grandeur who believed they could ‘save’ Japan. The purity of spirit extolled by the ideology of Japaneseness examined in Chapter 10 becomes still more enticingly pure when it permits intuitive action to take precedence over disciplined reasoning.
³⁴
Such reasoning, in the view of the Japanists, encourages wrong motives. An important attribute of this radical Japanism is that it often leads to self-destruction. It is expected to do so.

The imagery of a ‘pure’ spirit made socially respectable by the
kokutai
ideology became a powerful motive force for many Japanese during the war. For Japanist mythology, to go further and contend that the Yamato race was inherently superior and therefore destined to lead in Asia, if not the world, was not such a big step. According to the expanded imagery, Japan enabled all nations it colonised to take their ‘proper place’ in the world: that is, under the original, purer subjects of the emperor. At the same time, to die for Japan was the most spiritual and most purifying act imaginable. The anger of the psychological cripples who were ‘saving Japan’ with their assassinations in the 1930s had become a socially acceptable rage that, like all rage, was immune to understanding. The possibility of political dissension was excluded.
³⁵

We know that many Japanese in this period never stopped using their heads, but the officers who led them into war certainly did. The products of the Army Academy learned to rely on
seishin-shugi
, the victory of spirit over the material, and to ignore logical thought. A large proportion of them had no contact with reality and were pathologically self-confident.
³⁶
Colonel Kobayashi Junichiro, a close friend of War Minister (later Minister of Education) Araki Sadao, warned in a famous pamphlet that excessive reliance on ‘material goods’ would corrupt the soul of the Japanese Army.
³⁷
Belief in the superiority of Japanese capabilities owing to their ‘pure Japanese’ character survived the battle of Nomonhan on the Manchuria–Mongolia border in 1939. More than seventeen thousand Kwantung Army soldiers, ordered by their officers to rely on their superior fighting spirit, met death in ‘human-wave’ clashes with superior Soviet mechanised units and superior tactical skills – an early and terrible defeat that was kept a deep secret from the Japanese public.
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The official line even before the Pacific War, propagated by officers who had intimidated their more cautious colleagues into silence, was that Japan’s will-power would overcome United States physical might. Admiral Kato Kanji believed that the acknowledged impossibility of victory against vast military superiority could with such will-power be turned into a possibility. At the Imperial Conference that sanctioned a
de facto
decision to go to war. Admiral Nagano Osami, supreme commander of the Imperial Japanese Navy, spoke of the need to fight the USA, because surrender without a struggle would spell ‘spiritual as well as physical destruction for the nation’.
³⁹
Defeat occurred. Minister of Education Maeda Tamon explained in a memorandum to school principals following the surrender, ‘as a result of insufficient efforts and a lack of true patriotism on our part’.
⁴⁰

Another claim that contributed to the general religious mania concerned the boundless energy that had supposedly existed ever since the birth of the country.
⁴¹
The
Kokutai no Hongi
, the 1937 propaganda booklet in which the Ministry of Education explained the ‘national essence’, insisted that the invasion of Manchuria was an ‘unavoidable expression of the national vitality’. War flowed naturally from the country’s boundless energy, and was needed to maintain its vitality.

In contemporary Japan, the US-imposed post-war constitution has emasculated the state by renouncing forever Japan’s sovereign right to wage war. But while war is no longer considered a noble activity, the idea of an innate Japanese energy, borne out by industrial statistics, is very much alive.

In the same way, the ideal of ‘pure’ motives and ‘pure’ acts still creates objects for a pernicious form of sentimental identification. The tradition of breaking through everyday thought into an intensified celebration of Japaneseness, a tradition that starts with the transmogrification of Oshio’s fervour into support of a super-Japan and continues via the
shishi
and pre-war supernationalists, is not dead. It provides something ultimate, something replete with meaning, to contrast with the drab materialistic routine of daily life from which it is an escape. It remains today, as it was before the war, a sorry substitute for the individually liberating force of intellectual constructs that transcend Japanism.

The pathetic behaviour of Mishima Yukio, in asking Japan’s Self-Defence Forces to rise up and ‘restore the emperor’, before disembowelling himself ‘in the most manly form of Japanese action’, fits squarely in this tradition. In 1969 Mishima took students to task in a public debate for having recently given in to police tear-gas and water-cannons and meekly surrendering the Yasuda Hall of Tokyo University (which they had occupied) without a single student making the supreme gesture of jumping to his death. From contemporary commentary it appears that he managed to shame many leftist students.

The belief that radicals have a right to exist if they are prepared to die for their cause could not have been more explicitly stated than in a 1972 editorial in the
Mainichi Shimbun
following a sensational siege by 1,500 policemen of five members of the extremist Red Army. The radicals, who had ‘purified’ their ranks by torturing eleven comrades to death, subsequently fled into a mountain lodge with a hostage. After ten days of (nationally televised) cautious police action the extremists surrendered, disappointing those who, as the Mainichi put it, ‘believed that after exhausting their ammunition, they would either take their own lives or die fighting hand-to-hand with the riot police’. The same newspaper continued: ‘this belief was utterly betrayed . . . the five youths offered almost no resistance. . . . Such an attitude brings out their “pampered spirit”!’
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The editor dwelled some more on the pampered way of thinking, contrasting it with the readiness of others to die for their causes. Ian Buruma summed it up:

The most serious charge against the students was not that they brutally murdered eleven of their friends and a policeman or that their cause was, at best, absurd, but that they failed to die for it. They lacked sincerity, their hearts were not pure. The editor who wrote this piece could hardly be called a sympathiser with the ‘Red Army’s’ goals. But whether he was or was not was beside the point. It was the purity of motive that counted. If only their attitude had been right, they could have been heroes.
⁴³

The tradition of heroic extremist Japanism remains a potential source of instability. Frustration and tension, both of which can be found in abundance in Japan, could combine with future economic problems and a growing sense that the nation is being deprived of its just goals to ignite emotional and irrational Japanist movements. The structure for them is present among various rightist groups. And they will be able to count on much sympathy as the sense of the need to ‘return to true Japanese values’ increases along with a sense of being victimised by an anti-Japanese world.