Self-Discipline

The Self-disciplines of one culture are always likely to seem irrelevancies to observers from another country. The disciplinary techniques themselves are clear enough, but why go to all the trouble? Why voluntarily hang yourself from hooks, or concentrate on your navel, or never spend your capital? Why concentrate on one of these austerities and demand no control at all over some impulses which to the outsider are truly important and in need of training? When the observer belongs to a country which does not teach technical methods of self-discipline and is set down in the midst of a people who place great reliance upon them, the possibility of misunderstanding is at its height.

In the United States technical and traditional methods of self-discipline are relatively undeveloped. The American assumption is that a man, having sized up what is possible in his personal life, will discipline himself, if that is necessary, to attain a chosen goal. Whether he does or not, depends on his ambition, or his conscience, or his ‘instinct of workmanship,’ as Veblen called it. He may accept a Stoic regime in order to play on a football team, or give up all relaxations to train himself as a musician, or to make a success of his business. He may eschew evil and frivolity because of his conscience. But in the United States self-discipline itself, as a technical training, is not a thing to learn like arithmetic quite apart from its application in a particular instance. Such techniques, when they do occur in the United States, are taught by certain European cult-leaders or by Swamis who teach inventions made in India. Even the religious self-disciplines of meditation and prayer, as they were taught and practiced by Saint Theresa or Saint John of the Cross, have barely survived in the United States.

The Japanese assumption, however, is that a boy taking his middle school examinations, or a man playing in a fencing match, or a person merely living the life of an aristocrat, needs a self-training quite apart from learning the specific things that will be required of him when he is tested. No matter what facts he has crammed for his examination, no matter how expert his sword thrusts, no matter how meticulous his punctilio, he needs to lay aside his books and his sword and his public appearances and undergo a special kind of training. Not all Japanese submit to esoteric training, of course, but, even for those who do not, the phraseology and the practice of self-discipline have a recognized place in life. Japanese of all classes judge themselves and others in terms of a whole set of concepts which depend upon their notion of generalized technical self-control and self-governance.

Their concepts of self-discipline can be schematically divided into those which give competence and those which give something more. This something more I shall call expertness. The two are divided in Japan and aim at accomplishing a different result in the human psyche and have a different rationale and are recognized by different signs. Many instances of the first type, self-disciplinary competence, have already been described. The Army officer who said of his men who had been engaged in peacetime maneuvers for sixty hours with only ten-minute opportunities for sleep, that ‘they know how to sleep; they need training in how to stay awake,’ was, in spite of what seem to us extreme demands, aiming only at competent behavior. He was stating a well-accepted principle of Japanese psychic economy that 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. The whole Japanese theory of ‘human feelings’ rests on this assumption. When it is a matter of the really serious affairs of life, the demands of 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.

It does violence, however, to Japanese assumptions to phrase their position in this way. For ‘at the price of whatever self-discipline’ means in ordinary American usage almost the same thing as ‘at the price of whatever self-sacrifice.’ Often too it means ‘at the price of whatever personal frustration.’ The American theory of discipline—whether imposed from the outside or introjected as a censoring conscience—is that from childhood men and women have to be socialized by discipline, either freely accepted or imposed by authority. This is a frustration. The individual resents this curtailment of his wishes. He has to sacrifice, and inevitable aggressive emotions are awakened within him. This view is not only that of many professional psychologists in America. 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’ 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. It may be oatmeal or spinach or bread or orange juice, but the American child learns to raise a protest against foods he ‘has to’ eat. Food that is ‘good for’ him he concludes is not food that tastes good. This is an American convention that is foreign in Japan, as it is also in some Western nations like Greece. In the United States, 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.

These ideas about sleep and food, however, are small in comparison with the whole Occidental concept of self-sacrifice. It is standard Western doctrine that parents make great sacrifices for their children, wives sacrifice their careers for their husbands, husbands sacrifice their freedom to become breadwinners. It is hard for Americans to conceive that in some societies men and women do not recognize the necessity of self-sacrifice. It is nevertheless true. In such societies people say that parents naturally find their children delightful, that women prefer marriage to any other course, and that a man earning his family’s support is pursuing his favorite occupation as a hunter or a gardener. Why talk of self-sacrifice? When society stresses these interpretations and allows people to live according to them, the notion of self-sacrifice may hardly be recognized.

In other cultures all those things a person does for other people at such ‘sacrifice’ in the United States 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 may 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 sanction behind services to others in Japan is of course reciprocity, both in kind and in hierarchal exchange of complementary responsibilities. The moral position of self-sacrifice is therefore very different from that in the United States. 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,’ a Japanese said to me, ‘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.

Americans, in order to understand ordinary self-disciplinary practices in Japan, therefore, have to do a kind of surgical operation on our idea of ‘self-discipline.’ We have to cut away the accretions of ‘self-sacrifice’ and ‘frustration’ that have clustered around the concept in our culture. In Japan one disciplines oneself to be a good player, and the Japanese attitude is that one undergoes the training with no more consciousness of sacrifice than a man who plays bridge. Of course the training is strict, but that is inherent in the nature of things. The young child is born happy but without the capacity to ‘savor life.’ Only through mental training (or self-discipline; shuyo) can a man or woman gain the power to live fully and to ‘get the taste’ of life. The phrase is usually translated ‘only so can he enjoy life.’ Self-discipline ‘builds up the belly (the seat of control)’; it enlarges life.

‘Competent’ self-discipline in Japan has this rationale that it improves a man’s conduct of his own life. Any impatience he may feel while he is new in the training will pass, they say, for eventually he will enjoy it—or give it up. An apprentice tends properly to his business, a boy learns judo (jujitsu), a young wife adjusts to the demands of her mother-in-law; it is quite understood that in the first stages of training, the man or woman unused to the new requirements may wish to be free of this shuyo. Their fathers may talk to them and say, ‘What do you wish? Some training is necessary to savor life. If you give this up and do not train yourself at all, you will be unhappy as a natural consequence. And if these natural consequences should occur, I should not be inclined to protect you against public opinion.’ Shuyo, in the phrase they use so often, polishes away ‘the rust of the body.’ It makes a man a bright sharp sword, which is, of course, what he desires to be.

All this stress on how self-discipline leads to one’s own advantage does not mean that the extreme acts the Japanese code often requires are not truly serious frustrations, and that such frustrations do not lead to aggressive impulses. This distinction is one which Americans understand in games and sports. The bridge champion does not complain of the self-sacrifice that has been required of him to learn to play well; he does not label as ‘frustrations’ the hours he has had to put in in order to become an expert. Nevertheless, physicians say that in some cases the great attention necessary when a man is playing either for high stakes or for a championship, is not unrelated to stomach ulcers and excessive bodily tensions. The same thing happens to people in Japan. But the sanction of reciprocity, and the Japanese conviction that self-discipline is to one’s own advantage, make many acts seem easy to them which seem insupportable to Americans. They pay much closer attention to behaving competently and they allow themselves fewer alibis than Americans. They do not so often project their dissatisfactions with life upon scapegoats, and they do not so often indulge in self-pity because they have somehow or other not got what Americans call average happiness. They have been trained to pay much closer attention to the ‘rust of the body’ than is common among Americans.

Beyond and above ‘competent’ self-discipline, there is also the plane of ‘expertness.’ Japanese techniques of this latter sort have not been made very intelligible to Western readers by Japanese authors who have written about them, and Occidental scholars who have made a specialty of this subject have often been very cavalier about them. Sometimes they have called them ‘eccentricities.’ One French scholar writes that they are all ‘in defiance of common sense,’ and that the greatest of all disciplinary sects, the Zen cult, is ‘a tissue of solemn nonsense.’ The purposes their techniques are intended to accomplish, however, are not impenetrable, and the whole subject throws a considerable light on Japanese psychic economy.

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, and I shall use only the word muga, which is the word used in the flourishing upper-class cult of Zen Buddhism. The description of this state of expertness is that it denotes those experiences, whether secular or religious, when ‘there is no break, not even the thickness of a hair’ between a man’s will and his act. A discharge of electricity passes directly from the positive to the negative pole. In people who have not attained expertness, there is, as it were, a non-conducting screen which stands between the will and the act. They call this the ‘observing self,’ the ‘interfering self,’ and when this has been removed by special kinds of training 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 the actor had drawn of it in his mind.

The most ordinary people seek this kind of ‘expertness’ in Japan. Sir Charles Eliot, the great English authority on Buddhism, tells of a schoolgirl who applied

The Japanese not only connect Christianity and airplanes; they connect training for ‘a calm and well-regulated mind’ with an examination in pedagogy or with speech-making or with a statesman’s career. Technical training for one-pointedness seems to them an unquestioned advantage in almost any undertaking.

Many civilizations have developed techniques of this kind, but the Japanese goals and methods have a marked character all their own. This is especially interesting because many of the techniques are derived from India where they are known as Yoga. Japanese techniques of self-hypnotism, concentration, and control of the senses still show kinship with Indian practices. There is similar emphasis on emptying the mind, on immobility of the body, on ten thousands of repetitions of the same phrase, on fixing the attention on a chosen symbol. Even the terminology used in India is still recognizable. Beyond these bare bones of the cult, however, the Japanese version has little in common with the Hindu.

Yoga in India is an extreme cult of asceticism. It is a way of obtaining release from the round of reincarnation. Man has no salvation except this release, nirvana, and the obstacle in his path is human desire. These desires can be eliminated by starving them out, by insulting them, and by courting self-torture. Through these means a man may reach sainthood and achieve spirituality and union with the divine. 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. Even though Japan is a great Buddhist nation, ideas of transmigration and of nirvana have never been a part of the Buddhist faith of the people. These doctrines are personally accepted by some Buddhist priests, but they have never affected folkways or popular thought. No animal or insect is spared in Japan because killing it would kill a transmigrated human soul, and Japanese funeral ceremonies and birth rituals are innocent of any notions of a round of reincarnations. Transmigration is not a Japanese pattern of thought. 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’ (satori) 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.’ No other Buddhist country uses such language, and when a nation speaks so boldly of its ordinary dead, it is quite understandable that it does not picture any such difficult goal as attainment of nirvana. A man who becomes a Buddha anyway need not set himself to attain the goal of absolute surcease by lifelong mortification of the flesh.

Just as alien in Japan is the doctrine that the flesh and the spirit are irreconcilable. Yoga is a technique to eliminate desire, and desire has its seat in the flesh. But the Japanese do not have this dogma. ‘Human feelings’ are not of the Evil One, and it is a part of wisdom to enjoy the pleasures of the senses. The one condition is that they be sacrificed to the serious duties of life. This tenet is carried to its logical extreme in the Japanese handling of the Yoga cult: not only are all self-tortures eliminated but the cult in Japan is not even one of asceticism. Even the ‘Enlightened’ in their retreats, though they were called hermits, commonly established themselves in comfort with their wives and children in charming spots in the country. The companionship of their wives and even the birth of subsequent children were regarded as entirely compatible with their sanctity. In the most popular of all Buddhist sects priests marry anyway and raise families; Japan has never found it easy to accept the theory that the spirit and the flesh are incompatible. 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.’

The final tenet of Yoga philosophy is also alien in Japan: that the techniques of mysticism which it teaches transport the practitioner to ecstatic union with the Universe. 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, as mystics in other countries do, 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. It is one of the exercises of group Zen to perceive soundless footsteps and be able to follow them accurately as they pass from one place to another or to discriminate tempting odors of food—purposely introduced—without breaking 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.’ There are many vivid statements of this view of the matter among the sayings of the great Japanese Buddhist teachers. One of the best is that of Dogen, the great thirteenth century founder of the Soto cult of Zen, which is still the largest and most influential of the Zen cults. Speaking of his own enlightenment (satori), he said, ‘I recognized only that my eyes were horizontal above my perpendicular nose. . . . There is nothing mysterious (in Zen experience). Time passes as it is natural, the sun rising in the east and the moon setting in the west.’^[2] Nor do Zen writings allow that trance experience gives power other than self-disciplined human power; ‘Yoga claims that various supernatural powers can be acquired by meditation,’ a Japanese Buddhist writes, ‘but Zen does not make any such absurd claims.’^[3]

The Japanese thus wipe the slate clean of the assumptions on which Yoga practices are based in India. Japan, with a vital love of finitude which reminds one of the ancient Greeks, understands the technical practices of Yoga as being a self-training in perfection, a means whereby a man may obtain that ‘expertness’ in which there is not the thickness of a hair between a man and his deed. It is a training in efficiency. It is a training in self-reliance. Its rewards are here and now, for it enables a man to meet any situation with exactly the right expenditure of effort, neither too much nor too little, and it gives him control of his otherwise wayward mind so that neither physical danger from outside nor passion from within can dislodge him.

Such training is of course just as valuable for a warrior as for a priest, and it was precisely the warriors of Japan who made the Zen cult their own. One can hardly find elsewhere than in Japan techniques of mysticism pursued without the reward of the consummating mystic experience and appropriated by warriors to train them for hand-to-hand combat. Yet this has been true from the earliest period of Zen influence in Japan. The great book by the Japanese founder, Eisai, in the twelfth century was called The Protection of the State by the Propagation of Zen, and Zen has trained warriors, statesmen, fencers, and university students to achieve quite mundane goals. As Sir Charles Eliot says, nothing in the history of the Zen cult in China gave any indication of the future that awaited it as a military discipline in Japan. ‘Zen has become as decidedly Japanese as tea ceremonies or Noh plays. It might have been supposed that in a troubled period like the twelfth and thirteenth centuries this contemplative and mystic doctrine, which finds truth not in scripture but in the immediate experience of the human mind, would have flourished in monastic harbours of refuge among those who had left the storms of the world, but not that it would have been accepted as the favourite rule of life for the military class. Yet such it became.’^[4]

Many Japanese sects, both Buddhist and Shintoist, have laid great emphasis on mystic techniques of contemplation, self-hypnotism, and trance. Some of them, however, claim the result of this training as evidences of the grace of God and base their philosophy on tariki, ‘help of another,’ i.e., of a gracious god. Some of them, of which Zen is the paramount example, rely only on ‘self-help,’ jiriki. The potential strength, they teach, lies only within oneself, and only by one’s own efforts can one increase it. Japanese samurai found this entirely congenial, and whether as monks, statesmen, or educators—for they served in all these rôles—they used the Zen techniques to buttress a rugged individualism. Zen teachings were excessively explicit. ‘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.’^[5]

He who seeks after truth must take nothing at second hand, no teaching of the Buddha, no scriptures, no theology. ‘The twelve chapters of the Buddhist canon are a scrap of paper.’ One may 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. In a Zen book of dialogues a novice asks a Zen priest to expound the Sutra of the Lotus of the Good Law. The priest gave him a brilliant exposition, and the listener said witheringly, ‘Why, I thought Zen priests disdained texts, theories, and systems of logical explanations.’ ‘Zen,’ returned the priest, ‘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.’^[6]

The traditional training given by Zen teachers was intended to teach novices how ‘to know.’ The training might be physical or it might be mental, but it must be finally validated in the inner consciousness of the learner. Zen training of the fencer illustrates this well. The fencer, of course, has to learn and constantly practice the proper sword thrusts, but his proficiency in these belongs in the field of mere ‘competence.’ In addition he must learn to be muga. He is made to stand first on the level floor, concentrating on the few inches of surface which support his body. This tiny surface of standing room is gradually raised till he has learned to stand as easily on a four-foot pillar as in a court yard. When he is perfectly secure on that pillar, he ‘knows.’ His mind will no longer betray him by dizziness and fear of falling.

This Japanese use of pillar-standing transforms the familiar Western medieval austerity of Saint Simeon Stylites into a purposeful self-discipline. It is no longer an austerity. All kinds of physical exercises in Japan, whether of the Zen cult, or the common practices of the peasant villages, undergo this kind of transformation. In many places of the world diving into freezing water and standing under mountain waterfalls, are standard austerities, sometimes to mortify the flesh, sometimes to obtain pity from the gods, sometimes to induce trance. The favorite Japanese cold-austerity was standing or sitting in an ice-cold waterfall before dawn, or dousing oneself three times during a winter night with icy water. But the object was to train one’s conscious self till one no longer noticed the discomfort. A devotee’s purpose was to train himself to continue his meditation without interruption. When neither the cold shock of the water nor the shivering of the body in the cold dawn registered in his consciousness he was ‘expert.’ There was no other reward.

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. The teacher might hold discussions with the novice, but he did not lead him gently into a new intellectual realm. The teacher was considered to be most helpful when he was most rude. If, without warning, the master broke the tea bowl the novice was raising to his lips, or tripped him, or struck his knuckles with a brass rod, the shock might galvanize him into sudden insight. It broke through his complacency. The monkish books are filled with incidents of this kind.

The most favored technique for inducing the novice’s desperate attempt ‘to know’ were the koan, literally ‘the problems.’ There are said to be seventeen hundred of these problems, and the anecdote books make nothing of a man’s devoting seven years to the solution of one of them. They are not meant to have rational solutions. One is ‘To conceive the clapping of one hand.’ Another is ‘To feel the yearning for one’s mother before one’s own conception.’ Others are, ‘Who is carrying one’s lifeless body?’ ‘Who is it who is walking toward me?’ ‘All things return into One; where does this last return?’ Such Zen problems as these were used in China before the twelfth or thirteenth century, and Japan adopted these techniques along with the cult. On the continent, however, they did not survive. In Japan they are a most important part of training in ‘expertness.’ Zen handbooks treat them with extreme seriousness. ‘Koan enshrine the dilemma of life.’ A man who is pondering one, they say, reaches an impasse like ‘a pursued rat that has run up a blind tunnel,’ he is like a man ‘with a ball of red-hot iron stuck in his throat,’ he is ‘a mosquito trying to bite a lump of iron.’ He is beside himself and redoubles his efforts. Finally the screen of his ‘observing self’ between his mind and his problem falls aside; with the swiftness of a flash of lightning the two—mind and problem—come to terms. He ‘knows.’

After these descriptions of bow-string-taut mental effort it is an anticlimax to search the incident books for great truths gained with all this expenditure. Nangaku, for instance, spent eight years on the problem, ‘Who is it who is walking toward me?’ At last he understood. His words were: ‘Even when one affirms that there is something here, one omits the whole.’ Nevertheless, there is a general pattern in the revelations. It is suggested in the lines of dialogue:

Novice: How shall I escape from the Wheel of Birth and Death?

Master: Who puts you under restraint? (i.e., binds you to this Wheel.)

What they learn, they say, is, in the famous Chinese phrase, that they ‘were looking for an ox when they were riding on one.’ They learn that ‘What is necessary is not the net and the trap but the fish or the animal these instruments were meant to catch.’ They learn, that is, in Occidental phraseology, that both horns of the dilemma are irrelevant. They learn that goals may be attained with present means if the eyes of the spirit are opened. Anything is possible, and with no help from anyone but oneself.

The significance of the koan does not lie in the truths these seekers after truth discover, which are the world-wide truths of the mystics. It lies in the way the Japanese conceive the search for truth.

The koan are called ‘bricks with which to knock upon the door.’ ‘The door’ is in the wall built around unenlightened human nature, which worries about whether present means are sufficient and fantasies to itself a cloud of watchful witnesses who will allot praise or blame. It is the wall of haji (shame) which is so real to all Japanese. Once the brick has battered down the door and it has fallen open, one is in free air and one throws away the brick. One does not go on solving more koan. The lesson has been learned and the Japanese dilemma of virtue has been solved. They have thrown themselves with desperate intensity against an impasse; for ‘the sake of the training’ they have become as ‘mosquitoes biting a lump of iron.’ In the end they have learned that there is no impasse—no impasse between gimu and giri, either, or between giri and human feelings, between righteousness and giri. They have found a way out. They are free and for the first time they can fully ‘taste’ life. They are muga. Their training in ‘expertness’ has been successfully achieved.

Suzuki, the great authority on Zen Buddhism, describes muga as ‘ecstasy with no sense of I am doing it,’ ‘effortlessness.’^[7] The ‘observing self’ is eliminated; a man ‘loses himself,’ that is, he ceases to be a spectator of his acts. Suzuki says: ‘With the awaking of consciousness, the will is split into two: . . . actor and observer. Conflict is inevitable, for the actor(-self) wants to be free from the limitations’ of the observer-self. Therefore in Enlightenment the disciple discovers that there is no observer-self, ‘no soul entity as an unknown or unknowable quantity.’^[8] Nothing remains but the goal and the act that accomplishes it. The student of human behavior could rephrase this statement to refer more particularly to Japanese culture. As a child a person is drastically trained to observe his own acts and to judge them in the light of what people will say; his observer-self is terribly vulnerable. To deliver himself up to the ecstasy of his soul, he eliminates this vulnerable self. He ceases to feel that ‘he is doing it.’ He then feels himself trained in his soul in the same way that the novice in fencing feels himself trained to stand without fear of falling on the four-foot pillar.

The painter, the poet, the public speaker and the warrior use this training in muga similarly. They acquire, not Infinitude, but a clear undisturbed perception of finite beauty or adjustment of means and ends so that they can use just the right amount of effort, ‘no more and no less,’ to achieve their goal.

Even a person who has undergone no training at all may have a sort of muga experience. When a man watching Noh or Kabuki plays completely loses himself in the spectacle, he too is said to lose his observing self. The palms of his hands become wet. He feels ‘the sweat of muga.’ A bombing pilot approaching his goal has ‘the sweat of muga’ before he releases his bombs. ‘He is not doing it.’ There is no observer-self left in his consciousness. An anti-aircraft gunner, lost to all the world beside, is said similarly to have ‘the sweat of muga’ and to have eliminated the observer-self. The idea is that in all such cases people in this condition are at the top of their form.

Such concepts are eloquent testimony to the heavy burden the Japanese make out of self-watchfulness and self-surveillance. They are free and efficient, they say, when these restraints are gone. Whereas Americans identify their observer-selves with the rational principle within them and pride themselves in crises on ‘keeping their wits about them,’ the Japanese feel that a millstone has fallen from around their necks when they deliver themselves up to the ecstasy of their souls and forget the restraints self-watchfulness imposes. As we have seen, their culture dins the need for circumspection into their souls, and the Japanese have countered by declaring that there is a more efficient plane of human consciousness where this burden falls away.

The most extreme form in which the Japanese state this tenet, at least to the ears of an Occidental, is the way they supremely approve of the man ‘who lives as already dead.’ The literal Western translation would be ‘the living corpse,’ and in all Occidental languages ‘the living corpse’ is an expression of horror. It is the phrase by which we say that a man’s self has died and left his body encumbering the earth. No vital principle is left in him. 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.’ To encourage someone who is undertaking an important business deal, a friend will say, ‘Be as one already dead.’ 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.’ The great Christian leader Kagawa, since VJ-Day made a member of the House of Lords, says in his fictionalized autobiography: ‘Like a man bewitched by an evil spirit he spent every day in his room weeping. His fits of sobbing verged on hysteria. His agony lasted for a month and a half but life finally gained the victory. . . . He would live endued with the strength of death. . . . He would enter into the conflict as one already dead. . . . He decided to become a Christian.’^[9] During the war Japanese soldiers said, ‘I resolve to live as one already dead and thus repay ko-on to the Emperor,’ and this covered such behavior as conducting one’s own funeral before embarking, pledging one’s body ‘to the dust of Iwo Jima,’ and resolving ‘to fall with the flowers of Burma.’

The philosophy which underlies muga underlies also ‘living as already dead.’ In this state a man eliminates all self-watchfulness and thus all fear and circumspection. He becomes as the dead, who have passed beyond the necessity of taking thought about the proper course of action. The dead are no longer returning on; they are free. Therefore to say, ‘I will live as one already dead’ means a supreme release from conflict. It means, ‘My energy and attention are free to pass directly to the fulfillment of my purpose. My observer-self with all its burden of fears is no longer between me and my goal. With it have gone the sense of tenseness and strain and the tendency toward depression that troubled my earlier strivings. Now all things are possible to me.’

In Western phraseology, the Japanese in the practice of muga and of ‘living as one already dead’ eliminate the conscience. What they call ‘the observing-self,’ ‘the interfering self,’ is a censor judging one’s acts. It points up vividly the difference between Western and Eastern psychology that when we speak of a conscienceless American we mean a man who no longer feels the sense of sin which should accompany wrongdoing, but that when a Japanese uses the equivalent phrase he means a man who is no longer tense and hindered. The American means a bad man; the Japanese means a good man, a trained man, a man able to use his abilities to the utmost. He means a man who can perform the most difficult and devoted deeds of unselfishness. The great American sanction for good behavior is guilt; a man who because of a calloused conscience can no longer feel this has become antisocial. The Japanese diagram the problem differently. According to their philosophy man in his inmost soul is good. If his impulse can be directly embodied in his deed, he acts virtuously and easily. Therefore he undergoes, in ‘expertness,’ self-training to eliminate the self-censorship of shame (haji). Only then is his ‘sixth sense’ free of hindrance. It is his supreme release from self-consciousness and conflict.

This Japanese philosophy of self-discipline is abracadabra only so long as it is separated from their individual life experiences in Japanese culture. We have already seen how heavily this shame (haji) which they assign to ‘the observing self’ weighs upon the Japanese, but the true meaning of their philosophy in their psychic economy is still obscure without a description of Japanese child-rearing. In any culture traditional moral sanctions are transmitted to each new generation, not merely in words, but in all the elders’ attitudes toward their children, and an outsider can hardly understand any nation’s major stakes in life without studying the way children are brought up there. Japanese child-rearing makes clearer many of their national assumptions about life which we have so far described only at the adult level.

The Child Learns

Japanese Babies are not brought up in the fashion that a thoughtful Westerner might suppose. American parents, training their children for a life so much less circumspect and stoical than life in Japan, nevertheless begin immediately to prove to the baby that his own little wishes are not supreme in this world. We put him immediately on a feeding schedule and a sleeping schedule, and no matter how he fusses before bottle time or bed time, he has to wait. A little later his mother strikes his hand to make him take his finger out of his mouth or away from other parts of his body. His mother is frequently out of sight and when she goes out he has to stay behind. He has to be weaned before he prefers other foods, or if he is bottle fed, he has to give up his bottle. There are certain foods that are good for him and he must eat them. He is punished when he does not do what is right. What is more natural for an American to suppose than that these disciplines are redoubled for the little Japanese baby who, when he is a finished product, will have to subordinate his own wishes and be so careful and punctilious an observer of such a demanding code?

The Japanese, however, do not follow this course. The arc of life in Japan is plotted in opposite fashion to that in the United States. It is a great shallow U-curve with maximum freedom and indulgence allowed to babies and to the old. Restrictions are slowly increased after babyhood till having one’s own way reaches a low just before and after marriage. This low line continues many years during the prime of life, but the arc gradually ascends again until after the age of sixty men and women are almost as unhampered by shame as little children are. In the United States 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 or their energy or become dependent. It is difficult for Americans even to fantasy a life arranged according to the Japanese pattern. It seems to us to fly in the face of reality.

Both the American and the Japanese arrangement of the arc of life, however, have in point of fact secured in each country the individual’s energetic participation in his culture during the prime of life. To secure this end in the United States, we rely on increasing his freedom of choice during this period. The Japanese rely on maximizing the restraints upon him. The fact that a man is at this time at the peak of his physical strength and at the peak of his earning powers does not make him master of his own life. They have great confidence that restraint is good mental training (shuyo) and produces results not attained by freedom. But the Japanese increase of restraints upon the man or woman during their most active producing periods by no means indicates that these restraints cover the whole of life. Childhood and old age are ‘free areas.’

A people so truly permissive to their children very likely want babies. The Japanese do. They want them, first of all, as parents do in the United States, because it is a pleasure to love a child. But they want them, too, for reasons which have much less weight in America. Japanese parents need children, not alone for emotional satisfaction, but because they have failed in life if they have not carried on the family line. Every Japanese man must have a son. He needs him to do daily homage to his memory after his death at the living-room shrine before the miniature gravestone. He needs him to perpetuate the family line down the generations and to preserve the family honor and possessions. For traditional social reasons the father needs his son almost as much as the young son needs his father. The son will take his father’s place in the on-going future and this is not felt as supplanting but as insuring the father. For a few years the father is trustee of the ‘house.’ Later it will be his son. If the father could not pass trusteeship to his son, his own rôle would have been played in vain. This deep sense of continuity prevents the dependency of the fully grown son on his father, even when it is continued so much longer than it is in the United States, from having the aura of shame and humiliation which it so generally has in Western nations.

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. Her husband will adopt a son to carry on his line but according to Japanese ideas the childless woman is still the loser. Japanese women are expected to be good childbearers. The average annual birth-rate during the first half of the nineteen-thirties was 31.7 per 1000 which is high even when compared to prolific countries of Eastern Europe. In the United States in 1940 the rate was 17.6 per 1000. Japanese mothers, too, begin their childbearing early, and girls of nineteen bear more children than women of any other age.

Childbirth is as private in Japan as sexual intercourse and women may not cry out in labor because this would publicize it. A little pallet bed has been prepared for the baby with its own new mattress and bedcover. It would be a bad omen for the child not to have its own new bed, even if the family can do no more than have the quilt covers and the stuffing cleaned and renovated to make them ‘new.’ The little bed quilt is not as stiff as grown-ups’ covers and it is lighter. The baby is therefore said to be more comfortable in its own bed, but the deeply felt reason for its separate bed is still felt to be based on a kind of sympathetic magic: a new human being must have its own new bed. The baby’s pallet is drawn up close to the mother’s, but the baby does not sleep with its mother until it is old enough to show initiative. When it is perhaps a year old, they say the baby stretches out its arms and makes its demand known. Then the baby sleeps in its mother’s arms under her covers.

For three days after its birth the baby is not fed, for the Japanese wait until the true milk comes. After this the baby may have the breast at any time either for food or comfort. The mother enjoys nursing too. The Japanese are convinced that nursing is one of a woman’s greatest physiological pleasures and the baby easily learns to share her pleasure. The breast is not only nourishment: it is delight and comfort. For a month the baby lies on his little bed or is held in his mother’s arms. It is only after the baby has been taken to the local shrine and presented there at the age of about thirty days that his life is thought to be firmly anchored in his body so that it is safe to carry him around freely in public. After he is a month old, he is carried on his mother’s back. A double sash holds him under his arms and under his behind and is passed around the mother’s shoulders and tied in front at the waist. In cold weather the mother’s padded jacket is worn right over the baby. The older children of the family, both boys and girls, carry the baby, too, even at play when they are running for base or playing hopscotch. The villagers and the poorer families especially depend on child nurses, and ‘living in public, as the Japanese babies do, they soon acquire an intelligent, interested look, and seem to enjoy the games of the older children upon whose backs they are carried as much as the players themselves.’^[1] The spread-eagle strapping of the baby on the back in Japan has much in common with the shawl-carrying common in the Pacific Islands and elsewhere. It makes for passivity and babies carried in these ways tend to grow up, as the Japanese do too, with a capacity for sleeping anywhere, anyhow. But the Japanese strapping does not encourage as complete passivity as shawl and bag carrying. The baby ‘learns to cling like a kitten to the back of whoever carries it. . . . The straps that tie it to the back are sufficient for safety; but the baby . . . is dependent on its own exertions to secure a comfortable position and it soon learns to ride its bearer with considerable skill instead of being merely a bundle tied to the shoulders.’^[2]

The mother lays the baby on its bed whenever she is working and carries it with her wherever she goes on the streets. She talks to it. She hums to it. She puts it through the etiquette motions. If she returns a greeting herself, she moves the baby’s head and shoulders forward so that it too makes salutation. The baby is always counted in. Every afternoon she takes it with her into the hot bath and plays with it as she holds it on her knees.

For three or four months the baby wears diapers, very heavy cloth pads upon which Japanese sometimes blame their bow-leggedness. When the baby is three or four months old, the mother begins his nursery training. She anticipates his needs, holding him in her hands outside the door. She waits for him, usually whistling low and monotonously, and the child learns to know the purpose of this auditory stimulus. Everyone agrees that a baby in Japan, as in China too, is trained very early. If there are slips, some mothers pinch the baby but generally they only change the tone of their voices and hold the hard-to-train baby outside the door at more frequent intervals. If there is withholding, the mother gives the baby an enema or a purge. Mothers say that they are making the baby more comfortable; when he is trained he will no longer have to wear the thick uncomfortable diapers. It is true that a Japanese baby must find diapers unpleasant, not only because they are heavy but because custom does not decree that they be changed whenever he wets them. The baby is nevertheless too young to perceive the connection between nursery training and getting rid of uncomfortable diapers. He experiences only an inescapable routine implacably insisted upon. Besides, the mother has to hold the baby away from her body, and her grip must be firm. What the baby learns from the implacable training prepares him to accept in adulthood the subtler compulsions of Japanese culture.^[3]

The Japanese baby usually talks before it walks. Creeping has always been discouraged. Traditionally there was a feeling that the baby ought not to stand or take steps till it was a year old and the mother used to prevent any such attempts. The government in its cheap, widely circulated Mother’s Magazine has for a decade or two taught that walking should be encouraged and this has become much more general. Mothers loop a sash under the baby’s arms or support it with their hands. But babies still tend to talk even earlier. When they begin to use words the stream of baby talk with which adults like to amuse a baby becomes more purposive. They do not leave the baby’s acquiring of language to chance imitation; they teach the baby words and grammar and respect language, and both the baby and the grown-ups enjoy the game.

When children can walk they can do a lot of mischief in a Japanese home. They can poke their fingers through paper walls, and they can fall into the open fire pit in the middle of the floor. Not content with this, the Japanese even exaggerate the dangers of the house. It is ‘dangerous’ and completely taboo to step on the threshold. The Japanese house has, of course, no cellar and is raised off the ground on joists. It is seriously felt that the whole house can be thrown out of shape even by a child’s step upon the threshold. Not only that, but the child must learn not to step or to sit where the floor mats join one another. Floor mats are of standard size and rooms are known as ‘three-mat rooms’ or ‘twelve-mat rooms.’ Where these mats join, children are often told, the samurai of old times used to thrust their swords up from below the house and pierce the occupants of the room. Only the thick soft floor mats provide safety; even the cracks where they meet are dangerous. The mother puts feelings of this sort into the constant admonitions she uses to the baby: ‘Dangerous’ and ‘Bad.’ The third usual admonition is ‘Dirty.’ The neatness and cleanness of the Japanese house is proverbial and the baby is admonished to respect it.

Most Japanese children are not weaned till shortly before a new baby is born, but the government’s Mother’s Magazine has in late years approved of weaning the baby at eight months. Middle-class mothers often do this, but it is far from being the common custom in Japan. True to the Japanese feeling that nursing is a great pleasure to the mother, those circles which are gradually adopting the custom regard the shorter nursing period as a mother’s sacrifice to the welfare of her child. When they accept the new dictum that ‘the child who nurses long is weak,’ they blame the mother for her self-indulgence if she has not weaned her baby. ‘She says she can’t wean her baby. It’s only that she hasn’t made up her own mind. She wants to go on. She is getting the better part.’ With such an attitude, it is quite understandable that eight-month weaning has not become widespread. There is a practical reason also for late weaning. The Japanese do not have a tradition of special foods for a just-weaned baby. If he is weaned young, he is fed the water in which rice has been boiled, but ordinarily he passes directly from his mother’s milk to the usual adult fare. Cow’s milk is not included in Japanese diet and they do not prepare special vegetables for children. Under the circumstances there is a reasonable doubt whether the government is correct in teaching that ‘the child who nurses long is weak.’

Children are usually weaned after they can understand what is said to them. They have sat in their mother’s lap at the family table during meals and been fed bits of the food; now they eat more of it. Some children are feeding problems at this time, and this is easy to understand when they are weaned because of the birth of a new baby. Mothers often offer them sweets to buy them off from begging to nurse. Sometimes a mother will put pepper on her nipples. But all mothers tease them by telling them they are proving that they are mere babies if they want to nurse. ‘Look at your little cousin. He’s a man. He’s little like you and he doesn’t ask to nurse.’ ‘That little boy is laughing at you because you’re a boy and you still want to nurse.’ Two-, three-, and four-year-old children who are still demanding their mother’s breast will often drop it and feign indifference when an older child is heard approaching.

This teasing, this urging a child toward adulthood, is not confined to weaning. From the time the child can understand what is said to it, these techniques are common in any situation. A mother will say to her boy baby when he cries, ‘You’re not a girl,’ or ‘You’re a man.’ Or she will say, ‘Look at that baby. He doesn’t cry.’ When another baby is brought to visit, she will fondle the visitor in her own child’s presence and say, ‘I’m going to adopt this baby. I want such a nice, good child. You don’t act your age.’ Her own child throws itself upon her, often pommeling her with its fists, and cries, ‘No, no, we don’t want any other baby. I’ll do what you say.’ When the child of one or two has been noisy or has failed to be prompt about something, the mother will say to a man visitor, ‘Will you take this child away? We don’t want it.’ The visitor acts out his rôle. He starts to take the child out of the house. The baby screams and calls upon its mother to rescue it. He has a full-sized tantrum. When she thinks the teasing has worked, she relents and takes back the child, exacting its frenzied promise to be good. The little play is acted out sometimes with children who are as old as five and six.

Teasing takes another form too. The mother will turn to her husband and say to the child, ‘I like your father better than you. He is a nice man.’ The child gives full expression to his jealousy and tries to break in between his father and mother. His mother says, ‘Your father doesn’t shout around the house and run around the rooms.’ ‘No, no,’ the child protests, ‘I won’t either. I am good. Now do you love me?’ When the play has gone on long enough, the father and mother look at one another and smile. They may tease a young daughter in this way as well as a young son.

Such experiences are rich soil for the fear of ridicule and of ostracism which is so marked in the Japanese grown-up. It is impossible to say how soon little children understand that they are being made game of by this teasing, but understand it they do sooner or later, and when they do, the sense of being laughed at fuses with the panic of the child threatened with loss of all that is safe and familiar. When he is a grown man, being laughed at retains this childhood aura.

The panic such teasing occasions in the two- to five-year-old child is the greater because home is really a haven of safety and indulgence. Division of labor, both physical and emotional, is so complete between his father and mother that they are seldom presented to him as competitors. His mother or his grandmother runs the household and admonishes the child. They both serve his father on their knees and put him in the position of honor. The order of precedence in the home hierarchy is clear-cut. The child has learned the prerogatives of elder generations, of a male as compared with a female, of elder brother as compared with younger brother. But at this period of his life a child is indulged in all these relationships. This is strikingly true if he is a boy. For both girls and boys alike the mother is the source of constant and extreme gratifications, but in the case of a three-year-old boy he can gratify against her even his furious anger. He may never manifest any aggression toward his father, but all that he felt when he was teased by his parents and his resentments against being ‘given away’ can be expressed in tantrums directed against his mother and his grandmother. Not all little boys, of course, have these tantrums, but in both villages and upper-class homes they are looked upon as an ordinary part of child life between three and six. The baby pommels his mother, screams, and, as his final violence, tears down her precious hair-do. His mother is a woman and even at three years old he is securely male. He can gratify even his aggressions.

To his father he may show only respect. His father is the great exemplar to the child of high hierarchal position, and, in the constantly used Japanese phrase, the child must learn to express the proper respect to him ‘for training.’ He is less of a disciplinarian than in almost any Western nation. Discipline of the children is in the woman’s hands. A simple silent stare or a short admonition is usually all the indication of his wishes he gives to his little children, and these are rare enough to be quickly complied with. He may make toys for his children in his free hours. He carries them about on occasion long after they can walk—as the mother does too—and for his children of this age he casually assumes nursery duties which an American father ordinarily leaves to his wife.

Children have great freedom with their grandparents, though they are also objects of respect. Grandparents are not cast in the rôle of disciplinarians. They may take that rôle when they object to the laxness of the children’s upbringing, and this is the occasion of a good deal of friction. The child’s grandmother is usually at hand twenty-four hours of the day, and the rivalry for the children between father’s mother and mother is proverbial in Japanese homes. From the child’s point of view he is courted by both of them. From the grandmother’s point of view, she often uses him in her domination of her daughter-in-law. The young mother has no greater obligation in life than satisfying her mother-in-law and she cannot protest, however much the grandparents may spoil her children. Grandmother gives them candies after Mother has said they should not have any more, and says pointedly, ‘My candies aren’t poison.’ Grandmother in many households can make the children presents which Mother cannot manage to get them and has more leisure to devote to the children’s amusements.

The older brothers and sisters are also taught to indulge the younger children. The Japanese are quite aware of the danger of what we call the baby’s ‘nose being put out of joint’ when the next baby is born. The dispossessed child can easily associate with the new baby the fact that he has had to give up his mother’s breast and his mother’s bed to the newcomer. Before the new baby is born the mother tells the child that now he will have a real live doll and not just a ‘pretend’ baby. He is told that he can sleep now with his father instead of his mother, and this is pictured as a privilege. The children are drawn into preparations for the new baby. The children are usually genuinely excited and pleased by the new baby but lapses occur and are regarded as thoroughly expectable and not as particularly threatening. The dispossessed child may pick up the baby and start off with it, saying to his mother, ‘We’ll give this baby away.’ ‘No,’ she answers, ‘it’s our baby. See, we’ll be good to it. It likes you. We need you to help with the baby.’ The little scene sometimes recurs over a considerable time but mothers seem to worry little about it. One provision for the situation occurs automatically in large families: the alternate children are united by closer ties. The oldest child will be favored nurse and protector of the third child and the second child of the fourth. The younger children reciprocate. Until children are seven or eight, what sex the children are generally makes little difference in this arrangement.

All Japanese children have toys. Fathers and mothers and all the circle of friends and relatives make or buy dolls and all their appurtenances for the children, and among poorer people they cost practically nothing. Little children play housekeeping, weddings, and festivals with them, after arguing out just what the ‘right’ grown-up procedures are, and sometimes submitting to mother a disputed point. When there are quarrels, it is likely that the mother will invoke noblesse oblige and ask the older child to give in to the younger one. The common phrase is, ‘Why not lose to win?’ She means, and the three-year-old quickly comes to understand her, that if the older child gives up his toy to the younger one the baby will soon be satisfied and turn to something else; then the admonished child will have won his toy back even though he relinquished it. Or she means that by accepting an unpopular rôle in the master-servants game the children are proposing, he will nevertheless ‘win’ the fun they can have. ‘To lose to win’ becomes a sequence greatly respected in Japanese life even when people are grown-up.

Besides the techniques of admonition and teasing, distracting the child and turning his mind away from its object has an honored place in child-rearing. Even the constant giving of candies is generally thought of as part of the technique of distraction. As the child gets nearer to school age techniques of ‘curing’ are used. If a little boy has tantrums or is disobedient or noisy his mother may take him to a Shinto or Buddhist shrine. The mother’s attitude is, ‘We will go to get help.’ It is often quite a jaunt and the curing priest talks seriously with the boy, asking his day of birth and his troubles. He retires to pray and comes back to pronounce the cure, sometimes removing the naughtiness in the form of a worm or an insect. He purifies him and sends him home freed. ‘It lasts for a while,’ Japanese say. Even the most severe punishment Japanese children ever get is regarded as ‘medicine.’ This is the burning of a little cone of powder, the moxa, upon the child’s skin. It leaves a lifelong scar. Cauterization by moxa is an old, widespread Eastern Asiatic medicine, and it was traditionally used to cure many aches and pains in Japan too. It can also cure tantrums and obstinacy. A little boy of six or seven may be ‘cured’ in this way by his mother or his grandmother. It may even be used twice in a difficult case but very seldom indeed is a child given the moxa treatment for naughtiness a third time. It is not a punishment in the sense that ‘I’ll spank you if you do that’ is a punishment. But it hurts far worse than spanking, and the child learns that he cannot be naughty with impunity.

Besides these means of dealing with obstreperous children, there are conventions for teaching necessary physical skills. There is great emphasis on the instructor’s putting children with his own hands physically through the motions. The child should be passive. Before the child is two years old, the father folds its legs for it in the correct sitting position, legs folded back and instep to the floor. The child finds it difficult at first not to fall over backward, especially since an indispensable part of the sitting training is the emphasis on immobility. He must not fidget or shift position. The way to learn, they say, is to relax and be passive, and this passivity is underscored by the father’s placing of his legs. Sitting is not the only physical position to be learned. There is also sleeping. Modesty in a woman’s sleeping position is as strong in Japan as modesty about being seen naked is in the United States. Though the Japanese did not feel shame in nudity in the bath until the government tried to introduce it during their campaign to win the approval of foreigners, their feeling about sleeping positions is very strong. The girl child must learn to sleep straight with her legs together, though the boy has greater freedom. It is one of the first rules which separate the training of boys and girls. Like almost all other requirements in Japan, it is stricter in upper classes than in lower, and Mrs. Sugimoto says of her own samurai upbringing: ‘From the time I can remember I was always careful about lying quiet on my little wooden pillow at night. . . Samurai daughters were taught never to lose control of mind or body—even in sleep. Boys might stretch themselves into the character dai, carelessly outspread; but girls must curve into the modest, dignified character kinoji, which means “spirit of control.” ’^[4] Women have told me how their mothers or nurses arranged their limbs for them when they put them to bed at night.

In the traditional teaching of writing, too, the instructor took the child’s hand and made the ideographs. It was ‘to give him the feel.’ The child learned to experience the controlled, rhythmic movements before he could recognize the characters, much less write them. In modern mass education this method of teaching is less pronounced but it still occurs. The bow, the handling of chopsticks, shooting an arrow, or tying a pillow on the back in lieu of a baby may all be taught by moving the child’s hands and physically placing his body in the correct position.

Except among the upper classes children do not wait to go to school before they play freely with other children of the neighborhood. In the villages they form little play gangs before they are three and even in towns and cities they play with startling freedom in and out of vehicles in the crowded streets. They are privileged beings. They hang around the shops listening to grown-ups, or play hopscotch or handball. They gather for play at the village shrine, safe in the protection of its patron spirit. Girls and boys play together until they go to school, and for two or three years after, but closest ties are likely to be between children of the same sex and especially between children of the same chronological age. These age-groups (donen), especially in the villages, are lifelong and survive all others. In the village of Suye Mura, ‘as sexual interests decrease parties of donen are the true pleasures left in life. Suye (the village) says, “Donen are closer than a wife.” ’^[5]

These pre-school children’s gangs are very free with each other. Many of their games are unabashedly obscene from a Western point of view. The children know the facts of life both because of the freedom of grown-ups’ conversation and because of the close quarters in which a Japanese family lives. Besides, their mothers ordinarily call attention to their children’s genitals when they play with them and bathe them, certainly to those of their boy children. The Japanese do not condemn childish sexuality except when it is indulged in the wrong places and in wrong company. Masturbation is not regarded as dangerous. The children’s gangs are also very free in hurling criticisms at each other—criticisms which in later life would be insults—and in boasting—boasts which would later be occasions of deep shame. ‘Children,’ the Japanese say, their eyes smiling benignantly, ‘know no shame (haji).’ They add, ‘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.

Children of this age criticize each other’s homes and possessions and they boast especially about their fathers. ‘My father is stronger than yours,’ ‘My father is smarter than yours’ is common coin. They come to blows over their respective fathers. This kind of behavior seems to Americans hardly worth noting, but in Japan it is in great contrast to the conversation children hear all about them. Every adult’s reference to his own home is phrased as ‘my wretched house’ and to his neighbor’s as ‘your august house’; every reference to his family, as ‘my miserable family,’ and to his neighbor’s as ‘your honorable family.’ Japanese agree that for many years of childhood—from the time the children’s play gangs form till the third year of elementary school, when the children are nine—they occupy themselves constantly with these individualistic claims. Sometimes it is, ‘I will play overlord and you’ll be my retainers.’ ‘No, I won’t be a servant. I will be overlord.’ Sometimes it is personal boasts and derogation of the others. ‘They are free to say whatever they want. As they get older they find that what they want isn’t allowed, and then they wait till they’re asked and they don’t boast any more.’

The child learns in the home his attitudes toward the supernatural. The priest does not ‘teach’ him and generally a child’s experiences with organized religion are on those occasions when he goes to a popular festival and, along with all others who attend, is sprinkled by the priest for purification. Some children are taken to Buddhist services, but usually this too occurs at festivals. The child’s constant and most deep-seated experiences with religion are always the family observances that center around the Buddhist and the Shinto shrines in his own home. The more conspicuous is the Buddhist shrine with the family grave tablets before which are offered flowers, branches of a certain tree, and incense. Food offerings are placed there daily and the elders of the family announce all family events to the ancestors and bow daily before the shrine. In the evening little lamps are lighted there. It is quite common for people to say that they do not like to sleep away from home because they feel lost without these presences which preside over the house. The Shinto shrine is usually a simple shelf dominated by a charm from the temple of Ise. Other sorts of offerings may be presented here. Then too there is the Kitchen-god covered with soot in the kitchen, and a host of charms may be fastened on doors and walls. They are all protections and make home safe. In the villages the village shrine is similarly a safe place because benevolent gods protect it with their presence. Mothers like to have their children play there where it is safe. Nothing in the child’s experience makes him fear the gods or shape his conduct to satisfy just or censorious gods. They should be graciously entertained in return for their benefits. They are not authoritarian.

The serious business of fitting a boy into the circumspect patterns of adult Japanese life does not really begin till after he has been in school for two or three years. Up to that time he has been taught physical control, and when he was obstreperous, his naughtiness has been ‘cured’ and his attention distracted. He has been unobtrusively admonished and he has been teased. But he has been allowed to be willful, even to the extent of using violence against his mother. His little ego has been fostered. Not much changes when he first goes to school. The first three grades are co-educational and the teacher, whether a man or a woman, pets the children and is one of them. More emphasis at home and in school, however, is laid on the dangers of getting into ‘embarrassing’ situations. Children are still too young for ‘shame,’ but they must be taught to avoid being ‘embarrassed.’ The boy in the story who cried ‘Wolf, wolf’ when there was no wolf, for instance, ‘fooled people. If you do anything of this kind, people do not trust you and that is an embarrassing fact.’ Many Japanese say that it was their schoolmates who laughed at them first when they made mistakes—not their teachers or their parents. The job of their elders, indeed, is not, at this point, themselves to use ridicule on the children, but gradually to integrate the fact of ridicule with the moral lesson of living up to giri-to-the-world. Obligations which were, when the children were six, the loving devotion of a faithful dog—the story of the good dog’s on, quoted earlier, is from the six-year-olds’ reader—now gradually become a whole series of restraints. ‘If you do this, if you do that,’ their elders say, ‘the world will laugh at you.’ The rules are particularistic and situational and a great many of them concern what we should call etiquette. They require subordinating one’s own will to the ever-increasing duties to neighbors, to family and to country. The child must restrain himself, he must recognize his indebtedness. He passes gradually to the status of a debtor who must walk circumspectly if he is ever to pay back what he owes.

This change of status is communicated to the growing boy by a new and serious extension of the pattern of babyhood teasing. By the time he is eight or nine his family may in sober truth reject him. If his teacher reports that he has been disobedient or disrespectful and gives him a black mark in deportment, his family turn against him. If he is criticized for some mischief by the storekeeper, ‘the family name has been disgraced.’ His family are a solid phalanx of accusation. Two Japanese I have known were told by their fathers before they were ten not to come home again and were too shamed to go to relatives. They had been punished by their teachers in the schoolroom. In both cases they lived in outhouses, where their mothers found them and finally arranged for their return. Boys in later elementary school are sometimes confined to the house for kinshin, ‘repentance,’ and must occupy themselves with that Japanese obsession, the writing of diaries. In any case the family shows that now it looks upon the boy as their representative in the world and they proceed against him because he has incurred criticism. He has not lived up to his giri-to-the-world. He cannot look to his family for support. Nor can he look to his age group. His schoolmates ostracize him for offenses and he has to apologize and make promises before he is readmitted.

‘It is worth emphasizing,’ as Geoffrey Gorer says, ‘that the degree to which this is carried is very uncommon sociologically. In most societies where the extended family or other fractional social group is operative, the group will usually rally to protect one of its members who is under criticism or attack from members of other groups. Provided that the approval of one’s own group is maintained, one can face the rest of the world with the assurance of full support in case of need or attack. In Japan however it appears that the reverse is the case; one is only sure of support from one’s own group as long as approval is given by other groups; if outsiders disapprove or criticize, one’s own group will turn against one and act as the punishing agents, until or unless the individual can force the other group to withdraw its criticism. By this mechanism the approval of the “outside world” takes on an importance probably unparalleled in any other society.’^[6]

The girl’s training up to this point does not differ in kind from the boy’s, however different in detail. She is more restrained than her brother in the home. More duties are put upon her—though the little boy too may be nursemaid—and she always gets the little end of the horn in matters of presents and attention. She does not have the characteristic boys’ tantrums, either. But she has been wonderfully free for an Asiatic little girl. Dressed in bright reds, she has played in the streets with the boys, she has fought with them and often held up her own end. She, too, as a child ‘knew no shame.’ Between six and nine she gradually learns her responsibilities to ‘the world’ much as her brother does and by much the same experiences. At nine the school classes are divided into girls’ and boys’ sections, and boys make a great deal of their new male solidarity. They exclude girls and object to having people see them talking to them. Girls, too, are warned by their mothers that such association is improper. Girls at this age are said to become sullen and withdrawn and hard to teach. Japanese women have said that it is the end of ‘childish fun.’ Childhood ends for girls in an exclusion. They have no path marked out for them now for many, many years but ‘to double jicho with jicho.’ The lesson will go on and on, both when they are betrothed and when they are married.

Boys, however, have not yet, when they have learned jicho and giri-to-the-world, acquired all that is incumbent upon an adult Japanese male. ‘From the age of ten,’ Japanese say, ‘he learns giri-to-his-name.’ They mean of course that he learns that it is a virtue to resent insult. He must learn the rules too: when to close with the adversary and when to take indirect means to clear his honor. I do not think they mean that the boy has to learn the aggressiveness that the insult behavior implies; boys who have been allowed in early childhood so much aggressiveness toward their mothers and who have fought out with their age-mates so many kinds of slurs and counterclaims, hardly have to learn to be aggressive when they are ten. But the code of giri-to-one’s-name, when boys are included under its provisions in their teens, channels their aggressiveness into accepted forms and provides them with specified ways of dealing with it. As we have seen, the Japanese often turn this aggressiveness against themselves instead of using violence against others. Even school boys are no exception.

For those boys who continue their schooling beyond the six-year elementary school—some 15 per cent of the population, though the proportion in the male population is larger—the time when they are becoming responsible for giri-to-their-name falls when they are suddenly exposed to the fierce competition of middle school entrance examinations and the competitive ranking of every student in every subject. There is no gradual experience which leads up to this, for competition is minimized almost to the vanishing point in elementary school and at home. The sudden new experience helps to make rivalry bitter and preoccupying. Competition for place and suspicion of favoritism are rife. This competition, however, does not figure so largely in the life stories as does the middle school convention of older boys tormenting the lower classmen. The upper classes of middle school order the younger classes about and put them through various kinds of hazing. They make them do silly and humiliating stunts. Resentments are extremely common, for Japanese boys do not take such things in a spirit of fun. A younger boy who has been made to grovel before an upper-classman and run servile errands hates his tormentor and plans revenge. The fact that the revenge has to be postponed makes it all the more absorbing. It is giri-to-his-name and he regards it as a virtue. Sometimes he is able, through family pull, to get the tormentor discharged from a job years later. Sometimes he perfects himself in jujitsu or sword play and publicly humiliates him on a city street after they have both left school. But unless he sometime evens the score he has that ‘feeling of something left undone’ which is the core of the Japanese insult contest.

For those boys who do not go on to middle school, the same kind of experience may come in their Army training. In peacetime one boy in four was drafted, and the hazing of first-year recruits by second-year recruits was even more extreme than in the middle and upper schools. It had nothing to do with officers in the Army, and only exceptionally even with non-commissioned officers. The first article of the Japanese code was that any appeal to officers caused one to lose face. It was fought out among the recruits. The officers accepted it as a method of ‘hardening’ troops but they were not involved. Second-year men passed on to the first-years the resentments they had accumulated the year before and proved their ‘hardness’ by their ingenuity in devising humiliations. The draftees have often been described as coming out of their Army training with changed personalities, as ‘true jingo nationalists,’ but the change is not so much because they are taught any theory of the totalitarian state and certainly not because of any inculcation of chu to the Emperor. The experience of being put through humiliating stunts is much more important. Young men trained in family life in the Japanese manner and deadly serious about their amour-propre may easily become brutalized in such a situation. They cannot stand ridicule. What they interpret as rejection may make them good torturers in their turn.

These modern Japanese situations in middle school and in the Army take their character, of course, from old Japanese customs about ridicule and insult. The middle and upper schools and the Army did not create the Japanese reaction to them. It is easy to see that the traditional code of giri-to-one’s-name makes hazing practices rankle more bitterly in Japan than they do in America. It is also consistent with old patterns that the fact that each hazed group will pass on the punishment in time to a victim group does not prevent a boy’s preoccupation with settling scores with his actual tormentor. Scapegoating is not the constantly recurring folkway in Japan that it is in many Western nations. In Poland, for instance, where new apprentices and even young harvesters are severely hazed, resentment is not vented against the hazers, but upon the next crop of apprentices and harvesters. Japanese boys will also have this satisfaction, of course, but they are primarily concerned with the immediate insult contest. The tormented ‘feel good’ when they are able to settle scores with the tormentors.

In the reconstruction of Japan those leaders who have their country’s future at heart would do well to pay particular attention to hazing and the custom of making boys do silly stunts in the post-adolescent schools and in the Army. They would do well to emphasize school spirit, even the ‘old school tie,’ in order to break down the upper-under classmen distinctions. In the Army they would do well to forbid hazing. Even though the second-year recruits should insist on Spartan discipline in their relations with the first-years, as Japanese officers of all ranks did, such insistence is no insult in Japan. The hazing behavior is. If no older boy in school or Army could with impunity make a younger one wag his tail like a dog or perform like a cicada or stand on his head while the others ate, it would be a change more effective in the re-education of Japan than denials of the Emperor’s divinity or elimination of nationalistic material from textbooks.

Women do not learn the code of giri-to-one’s-name and they do not have the modern experiences of boys’ middle schools and Army training. Nor do they go through analogous experiences. Their life cycle is much more consistent than their brothers’. From their earliest memories they have been trained to accept the fact that boys get the precedence and the attention and the presents which are denied to them. The rule of life which they must honor denies them the privilege of overt self-assertion. Nevertheless, as babies and as little children, they have shared with their brothers the privileged life of little children in Japan. They have been specially dressed in bright reds as little girls, a color they will give up as adults until they are allowed it again when they reach their second privileged period at the age of sixty. In the home they may be courted like their brothers in the contest between mother and grandmother. Their brothers and sisters, too, demand that a sister, like any other member of the family, like them ‘best.’ The children ask her to show her preference by letting them sleep with her, and she can often distribute her favors from the grandmothers to the two-year-old baby. Japanese do not like to sleep alone, and a child’s pallet can be laid at night close up beside that of a chosen elder’s. The proof that ‘you like me best’ that day is very often that the beds of the two are pulled up close together. Girls are allowed compensations even at the period when they are excluded from boys’ play groups at nine or ten. They are flattered by new kinds of hair-do, and at the age of fourteen to eighteen their coiffure is the most elaborate in Japan. They reach the age when they may wear silk instead of cotton and when every effort is made to provide them with clothes that enhance their charms. In these ways girls are given certain gratifications.

The responsibility for the restraints that are required of them, too, is placed squarely upon them, and not vested in an arbitrarily authoritarian parent. Parents exercise their prerogatives not by corporal punishments but by their calm, unswerving expectation that the girl will live up to what is required of her. It is worthwhile quoting an extreme example of such training because it gives so well the kind of non-authoritarian pressure which is also characteristic of less strict and privileged upbringing. From the age of six little Etsu Inagaki was taught to memorize the Chinese classics by a learned Confucian scholar.

And Mrs. Sugimoto summarizes one of the most characteristic parental attitudes in Japan when she describes a grandmother in another context:

One of the reasons why this ‘expectation, soft as silk floss and quite as strong,’ can be so effective is that training is so explicit for every art and skill. It is the habit that is taught, not just the rules. Whether it is proper use of chopsticks in childhood or proper ways of entering a room, or is the tea ceremony or massage later in life, the movements are performed over and over literally under the hands of grown-ups till they are automatic. Adults do not consider that children will ‘pick up’ the proper habits when the time to employ them comes around. Mrs. Sugimoto describes how she set her husband’s table after she was betrothed at fourteen. She had never seen her future husband. He was in America and she was in Echigo, but over and over, under her mother’s and her grandmother’s eyes, ‘I myself cooked the food which Brother told us Matsuo especially liked. His table was placed next to mine and I arranged for it to be always served before my own. Thus I learned to be watchful for the comfort of my prospective husband. Grandmother and Mother always spoke as if Matsuo were present, and I was as careful of my dress and conduct as if he had really been in the room. Thus I grew to respect him and to respect my own position as his wife.’^[8]

A boy too receives careful habit training by example and imitation, though it is less intensive than the girl’s. When he has ‘learned,’ no alibi is accepted. After adolescence, however, he is left, in one important field of his life, largely to his own initiative. His elders do not teach him habits of courting. The home is a circle from which all overt amorous behavior is excluded, and the segregation of unrelated boys and girls has been extreme since he was nine or ten. The Japanese ideal is that his parents will arrange a marriage for him before he has really been interested in sex, and it is therefore desirable that a boy should be ‘shy’ in his behavior with girls. In the villages there is a vast amount of teasing on the subject which often does keep boys ‘shy.’ But boys try to learn. In the old days, and even recently in more isolated villages of Japan, many girls, sometimes the great majority, were pregnant before marriage. Such pre-marital experience was a ‘free area’ not involved in the serious business of life. The parents were expected to arrange the marriages without reference to these affairs. But nowadays, as a Japanese said to Doctor Embree in Suye Mura, ‘Even a servant girl has enough education to know that she must keep her virginity.’ Discipline for those boys who go to middle school, too, is sternly directed against any kind of association with the opposite sex. Japanese education and public opinion tries to prevent pre-marital familiarity between the sexes. In their movies, they reckon as ‘bad’ those young men who show some signs of being at ease with a young woman; the ‘good’ ones are those who, to American eyes, are brusque and even uncivil to an attractive girl. Being at ease with a girl means that these boys have ‘played around,’ or have sought out geishas or prostitutes or café girls. The geisha house is the ‘best’ way to learn because ‘she teaches you. A man can relax and just watch.’ He need not be afraid of exhibiting clumsiness, and sex relations with the geisha girl are not expected of him. But not many Japanese boys can afford the geisha house. They can go to cafés and watch how men treat the girls familiarly, but such observation is not the kind of training they have learned to expect in other fields. Boys keep their fear of gaucherie for a long time. Sex is one of the few areas of their lives where they have to learn some new kind of behavior without the personal tutelage of accredited elders. Families of standing provide ‘bride books’ and screens with many detailed pictures for the young couple when they marry, and, as one Japanese said, ‘You can learn from books, the way you learn the rules for making a garden. Your father doesn’t teach you how to make a Japanese garden; it’s a hobby you learn when you’re older.’ The juxtaposition of sex and gardening as two things you learn from books is interesting, even though most Japanese young men learn sex behavior in other ways. In any case, they do not learn through meticulous adult tutelage. This difference in training underscores for the young man the Japanese tenet that sex is an area removed from that serious business of life over which his elders preside and in which they painstakingly train his habits. It is an area of self-gratification which he masters with much fear of embarrassment. The two areas have their different rules. After his marriage he may have sexual pleasures elsewhere without being in the least surreptitious about it, and in so doing he does not infringe upon his wife’s rights nor threaten the stability of his marriage.

His wife has not the same privilege. Her duty is faithfulness to her husband. She would have to be surreptitious. Even when she might be tempted, comparatively few women in Japan live their lives in sufficient privacy to carry off a love affair. Women who are regarded as nervous or unstable are said to have hysteri. ‘The most frequent difficulty of women involves not their social but their sexual lives. Many cases of insanity and most of hysteri (nervousness, instability) are clearly due to sexual maladjustments. A girl must take whatever her husband may give her of sexual satisfaction.’^[9] Most women’s diseases, the farmers say in Suye Mura, ‘begin in the womb’ and then go to the head. When her husband looks elsewhere, she may have recourse to the accepted Japanese customs of masturbation, and, from the peasant villages to the homes of the great, women treasure traditional implements for this purpose. She is granted in the villages, moreover, certain exuberances in erotic behavior when she has borne a child. Before she is a mother, she would not make a sex joke, but afterward, and as she grows older, her conversation at a mixed party is full of them. She entertains the party, too, with very free sexual dances, jerking her hips back and forth to the accompaniment of ribald songs. ‘These performances invariably bring roars of laughter.’ In Suye Mura, too, when recruits were welcomed back at the outskirts of the village after their Army training, women dressed as men and made obscene jokes and pretended to rape young girls.

Japanese women are therefore allowed certain kinds of freedom about sexual matters, the more, too, the lower-born they are. They must observe many taboos during most of their lives but there is no taboo which requires them to deny that they know the facts of life. When it gratifies the men, they are obscene. Likewise, when it gratifies the men, they are asexual. When they are of ripe age, they may throw off taboos, and if they are low-born, be as ribald as any man. The Japanese aim at proper behavior for various ages and occasions rather than at consistent characters like the Occidental ‘pure woman’ and the ‘hussy.’

The man also has his exuberances, as well as his areas where great restraint is required. Drinking in male company, especially with geisha attendants, is a gratification which he makes the most of. Japanese men enjoy being tipsy and there is no rule which bids a man carry his liquor well. They relax their formal postures when they have had a few thimblefuls of sake, and they like to lean against each other and be very familiar. They are seldom violent or aggressive when they are drunk, though a few ‘hard-to-get-along-with men’ may get quarrelsome. 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.’

The contradictions which all Westerners have described in Japanese character are intelligible from their child-rearing. It produces a duality in their outlook on life, neither side of which can be ignored. From their experience of privilege and psychological ease in babyhood they retain through all the disciplines of later life the memory of an easier life when they ‘did not know shame.’ They do not have to paint a Heaven in the future; they have it in their past. They rephrase their childhood in their doctrine of the innate goodness of man, of the benevolence of their gods, and of the incomparable desirability of being a Japanese. It makes it easy for them to base their ethics on extreme interpretations of the ‘Buddha-seed’ in every man and of every man’s becoming a kami on death. It gives them assertiveness and a certain self-confidence. It underlies their frequent willingness to tackle any job, no matter how far above their ability it may seem to be. It underlies their readiness to pit their judgment even against their own Government, and to testify to it by suicide. On occasion, it gives them a capacity for mass megalomania.

Gradually, after they are six or seven, responsibility for circumspection and ‘knowing shame’ is put upon them and upheld by the most drastic of sanctions: that their own family will turn against them if they default. The pressure is not that of a Prussian discipline, but it is inescapable. In their early privileged period the ground has been prepared for this development both by the persistent inescapable training in nursery habits and posture, and by the parents’ teasing which threatens the child with rejection. These early experiences prepare the child to accept great restraints upon himself when he is told that ‘the world’ will laugh at him and reject him. He clamps down upon the impulses he expressed so freely in earlier life, not because they are evil but because they are now inappropriate. He is now entering upon serious life. As he is progressively denied the privileges of childhood he is granted the gratifications of greater and greater adulthood, but the experiences of that earlier period never truly fade out. In his philosophy of life he draws freely upon them. He goes back to them in his permissiveness about ‘human feelings.’ He re-experiences them all through his adulthood in his ‘free areas’ of life.

One striking continuity connects the earlier and the later period of the child’s life: the great importance of being accepted by his fellows. This, and not an absolute standard of virtue, is what is inculcated in him. In early childhood, his mother took him into her bed when he was old enough to ask, he counted the candies he and his brothers and sisters were given as a sign of how he ranked in his mother’s affection, he was quick to notice when he was passed over and he asked even his older sister, ‘Do you love me best?’ 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. This is of course a sanction invoked in child training in most cultures, but it is exceptionally heavy in Japan. Rejection by ‘the world’ has been dramatized for the child by his parents’ teasing when they threatened to get rid of him. All his life ostracism is more dreaded than violence. He is allergic to threats of ridicule and rejection, even when he merely conjures them up in his own mind. 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—makes private life extremely public for those who cannot afford a wall and garden.

Certain symbols the Japanese use help to make clear the two sides of their character which are based on the discontinuity of their child rearing. That side which is built up in the earliest period is the ‘self without shame,’ and they test how far they have kept it when they look at their own faces in the mirror. The mirror, they say, ‘reflects eternal purity.’ It does not foster vanity nor reflect the ‘interfering self.’ It reflects the depths of the soul. A person should see there his ’self without shame.’ In the mirror he sees his own eyes as the ‘door’ of his soul, and this helps him to live as a ‘self without shame.’ He sees there the idealized parental image. There are descriptions of men who always carry a mirror with them for this purpose, and even of one who set up a special mirror in his household shrine in which to contemplate himself and examine his soul; he ‘enshrined himself’; he ‘worshipped himself.’ It was unusual, but it was only a small step to take, for all household Shinto shrines have mirrors on them as sacred objects. During the war the Japanese radio carried a special paean of approval for a classroom of girls who had bought themselves a mirror. There was no thought of its being a sign of vanity. It was described as a renewed dedication to calm purposes in the depths of their souls. Looking into it was an external observance which would testify to the virtue of their spirit.

Japanese feelings about the mirror are derived from the time before the ‘observing self’ was inculcated in the child. They do not see the ‘observing self’ in the looking glass. There their selves are spontaneously good as they were in childhood, without the mentor of ‘shame.’ The same symbolism they attribute to the mirror is the basis too of their ideas of ‘expert’ self-discipline, in which they train themselves with such persistence to eliminate the ‘observing self’ and get back the directness of early childhood.

In spite of all the influences their privileged early childhood has upon the Japanese, the restraints of the succeeding period when shame becomes the basis of virtue are not felt solely as deprivations. Self-sacrifice, as we have seen, is one of the Christian concepts they have often challenged; they repudiate the idea that they are sacrificing themselves. Even in extreme cases, the Japanese speak, instead, of ‘voluntary’ death in payment of chu or ko or giri, and this does not seem to them to fall in the category of self-sacrifice. Such a voluntary death, they say, achieves an object you yourself desire. Otherwise it would be a ‘dog’s death,’ which means to them a worthless death; it does not mean, as in English, death in the gutter. Less extreme courses of conduct, too, which in English are called self-sacrificing, in Japanese belong rather in the category of self-respect. Self-respect (jicho) always means restraint, and restraint is valuable just as self-respect is. Great things can only be achieved through self-restraint, and the American emphasis on freedom as a prerequisite for achievement has never seemed to them, with their different experiences, to be adequate. They accept as a principal tenet in their code the idea that through self-restraint they make their selves more valuable. How else could they control their dangerous selves, full of impulses that might break out and confound a proper life? As one Japanese expresses it:

The contradictions in Japanese male behavior which are so conspicuous to Westerners are made possible by the discontinuity of their upbringing, which leaves in their consciousness, even after all the ‘lacquering’ they undergo, the deep imprint of a time when they were like little gods in their little world, when they were free to gratify even their aggressions, and when all satisfactions seemed possible. Because of this deeply implanted dualism, they can swing as adults from excesses of romantic love to utter submission to the family. They can indulge in pleasure and ease, no matter to what lengths they go in accepting extreme obligations. Their training in circumspection makes them in action an often timid people, but they are brave even to foolhardiness. They can prove themselves remarkably submissive in hierarchal situations and yet not be easily amenable to control from above. In spite of all their politeness, they can retain arrogance. They can accept fanatic discipline in the Army and yet be insubordinate. They can be passionately conservative and yet be attracted by new ways, as they have successively demonstrated in their adoption of Chinese customs and of Western learning.

The dualism in their characters creates tensions to which different Japanese respond in different ways, though each is making his own solution of the same essential problem of reconciling the spontaneity and acceptance he experienced in early childhood with the restraints which promise security in later life. A good many have difficulty in resolving this problem. Some stake everything on ruling their lives like pedants and are deeply fearful of any spontaneous encounter with life. The fear is the greater because spontaneity is no fantasy but something they once experienced. They remain aloof, and, by adhering to the rules they have made their own, feel that they have identified themselves with all that speaks with authority. Some are more dissociated. They are afraid of their own aggressiveness which they dam up in their souls and cover with a bland surface behavior. They often keep their thoughts busy with trivial minutiae in order to stave off awareness of their real feelings. They are mechanical in the performance of a disciplined routine which is fundamentally meaningless to them. Others, who have been more caught by their early childhood, feel a consuming anxiety in the face of all that is demanded of them as adults and try to increase their dependence when it is no longer appropriate. They feel that any failure is an aggression against authority and any striving therefore throws them into great agitation. Unforeseen situations which cannot be handled by rote are frightening to them.^[11]

These are characteristic dangers to which the Japanese are exposed when their anxiety about rejection and censure are too much for them. When they are not overpressed, they show in their lives both the capacity for enjoying life and the carefulness not to step on others’ toes which has been bred into them in their upbringing. It is a very considerable achievement. Their early childhood has given them assertiveness. It has not awakened a burdening sense of guilt. The later restraints have been imposed in the name of solidarity with their fellows, and the obligations are reciprocal. There are designated ‘free areas’ where impulse life can still be gratified, no matter how much other people may interfere with their wishes in certain matters. The Japanese have always been famous for the pleasure they get from innocent things: viewing the cherry blossoms, the moon, chrysanthemums, or new fallen snow; keeping insects caged in the house for their ‘song’; writing little verses; making gardens; arranging flowers, and drinking ceremonial tea. These are not activities of a deeply troubled and aggressive people. They do not take their pleasures sadly either. A Japanese rural community, in those happier days before Japan embarked on its disastrous Mission, could be in its leisure time as cheerful and sanguine as any living people. In its hours of work it could be as diligent.

But the Japanese ask a great deal of themselves. To avoid the great threats of ostracism and detraction, they must give up personal gratifications they have learned to savor. They must put these impulses under lock and key in the important affairs of life. The few who violate this pattern run the risk of losing even their respect for themselves. Those who do respect themselves (jicho) chart their course, not between ‘good’ and ‘evil,’ but between ‘expected man’ and ‘unexpected man,’ and sink their own personal demands in the collective ‘expectation.’ These are the good men who ‘know shame (haji)’ and are endlessly circumspect. They are the men who bring honor to their families, their villages, and their nation. The tensions that are thus generated are enormous, and they express themselves in a high level of aspiration which has made Japan a leader in the Orient and a great power in the world. But these tensions are a heavy strain upon the individual. Men must be watchful lest they fail, or lest anyone belittle their performances in a course of action which has cost them so much abnegation. Sometimes people explode in the most aggressive acts. They are roused to these aggressions, not when their principles or their freedom is challenged, as Americans are, but when they detect an insult or a detraction. Then their dangerous selves erupt, against the detractor if that is possible, otherwise against themselves.

The Japanese have paid a high price for their way of life. They have denied themselves simple freedoms which Americans count upon as unquestioningly as the air they breathe. We must remember, now that the Japanese are looking to de-mok-ra-sie since their defeat, how intoxicating it can be to them to act quite simply and innocently as one pleases. No one has expressed this better than Mrs. Sugimoto in describing the plant as-you-please garden she was given at the mission school in Tokyo where she was sent to learn English. The teachers let each girl have a plot of wild ground and any seeds she asked for.

All the other girls planted flowers. She arranged to plant—potatoes.

It was a new world.

This simulated wildness stood to her for the simulated freedom of will in which she had been trained. And all Japan was full of it. Every great half-sunken rock in Japanese gardens has been carefully chosen and transported and laid on a hidden platform of small stones. Its placing is carefully calculated in relation to the stream, the house, the shrubs, and the trees. So, too, chrysanthemums are grown in pots and arranged for the annual flower shows all over Japan with each perfect petal separately disposed by the grower’s hand and often held in place by a tiny invisible wire rack inserted in the living flower.

Mrs. Sugimoto’s intoxication when she was offered a chance to put aside the wire rack was happy and innocent The chrysanthemum which had been grown in the little pot and which had submitted to the meticulous disposition of its petals discovered pure joy in being natural. But today among the Japanese, the freedom to be ‘unexpected,’ to question the sanctions of haji (shame), can upset the delicate balance of their way of life. Under a new dispensation they will have to learn new sanctions. And change is costly. It is not easy to work out new assumptions and new virtues. The Western world can neither suppose that the Japanese can take these on sight and make them truly their own, nor must it imagine that Japan cannot ultimately work out a freer, less rigorous ethics. The Nisei in the United States have already lost the knowledge and the practice of the Japanese code, and nothing in their ancestry holds them rigidly to the conventions of the country from which their parents came. So too the Japanese in Japan can, in a new era, set up a way of life which does not demand the old requirements of individual restraint. Chrysanthemums can be beautiful without wire racks and such drastic pruning.

In this transition to a greater psychic freedom, the Japanese have certain old traditional virtues which can help to keep them on an even keel. One of these is that self-responsibility which they phrase as their accountability for ‘the rust of my body,’—that figure of speech which identifies one’s body with a sword. As the wearer of a sword is responsible for its shining brilliancy, so each man must accept responsibility for the outcome of his acts. He must acknowledge and accept all natural consequences of his weakness, his lack of persistence, his ineffectualness. Self-responsibility is far more drastically interpreted in Japan than in free America. In this Japanese sense the sword becomes, not a symbol of aggression, but a simile of ideal and self-responsible man. No balance wheel can be better than this virtue in a dispensation which honors individual freedom, and Japanese child-rearing and philosophy of conduct have inculcated it as a part of the Japanese Spirit. Today the Japanese have proposed ‘to lay aside the sword’ in the Western sense. In their Japanese sense, they have an abiding strength in their concern with keeping an inner sword free from the rust which always threatens it. In their phraseology of virtue the sword is a symbol they can keep in a freer and more peaceful world.

The Japanese Since VJ-Day

Americans have good reason to be proud of their part in the administration of Japan since VJ-Day. The policy of the United States was laid down in the State-War-Navy directive which was transmitted by radio on August 29, and it has been administered with skill by General MacArthur. The excellent grounds for such pride have often been obscured by partisan praise and criticism in the American press and on the radio, and few people have known enough about Japanese culture to be sure whether a given policy was desirable or undesirable.

The great issue at the time of Japan’s surrender was the nature of the occupation. Were the victors to use the existing government, even the Emperor, or was it to be liquidated? Was there to be a town-by-town, province-by-province administration, with Military Government officers of the United States in command? The pattern in Italy and Germany had been to set up local A.M.G. headquarters as integral parts of the combat forces, and to place authority for local domestic matters in the hands of the Allied administrators. On VJ-Day, those in charge of A.M.G. in the Pacific still expected to institute such a rule in Japan. The Japanese also did not know what responsibility for their own affairs they would be allowed to retain. The Potsdam Proclamation had stated only that ‘points in Japanese territory to be designated by the Allies shall be occupied to secure the basic objectives we are here setting forth,’ and that there must be eliminated for all time ‘the authority and influence of those who have deceived and misled the people of Japan into embarking on world conquest.’

The State-War-Navy directive to General MacArthur embodied a great decision on these matters, a decision which General MacArthur’s Headquarters fully supported. The Japanese were to be responsible for the administration and reconstruction of their country. ‘The Supreme Commander will exercise his authority through Japanese governmental machinery and agencies, including the Emperor, to the extent that this satisfactorily furthers United States objectives. The Japanese government will be permitted, under his instructions (General MacArthur’s), to exercise the normal powers of government in matters of domestic administration.’ General MacArthur’s administration of Japan is, therefore, quite unlike that of Germany or Italy. It is exclusively a headquarters organization, utilizing Japanese officialdom from top to bottom. It addresses its communications to the Imperial Japanese Government, not to the Japanese people or to the residents of some town or province. Its business is to state goals for the Japanese government to work toward. If a Japanese Minister believes them impossible, he can offer to resign, but, if his case is good, he may get the directive modified.

This kind of administration was a bold move. The advantages of this policy from the point of view of the United States are clear enough. As General Hilldring said at the time:

When this directive was being drawn up in Washington, however, there were still many Americans who feared that the Japanese would be sullen and hostile, a nation of watchful avengers who might sabotage any peaceful program. These fears did not prove to be justified. And the reasons lay in the curious culture of Japan more than in any universal truths about defeated nations or politics or economics. Probably among no other peoples would a policy of good faith have paid off as well as it did in Japan. In Japanese eyes it removed from the stark fact of defeat the symbols of humiliation and challenged them to put into effect a new national policy, acceptance of which was possible precisely because of the culturally conditioned character of the Japanese.

In the United States we have argued endlessly about hard and soft peace terms. The real issue is not between hard and soft. The problem is to use that amount of hardness, no more and no less, which will break up old and dangerous patterns of aggressiveness and set new goals. The means to be chosen depend on the character of the people and upon the traditional social order of the nation in question. Prussian authoritarianism, embedded as it is in the family and in the daily civic life, makes necessary certain kinds of peace terms for Germany. Wise peace directives would differ from those for Japan. 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 the Sturm und Drang of adolescent rebellion.

The problem in Japanese culture is not crass authoritarianism. The father is a person who treats his young children with a respect and fondness which has seemed to almost all Western observers to be exceptional in Occidental experience. Because the Japanese child takes for granted certain kinds of real comradeship with his father and is overtly proud of him, the father’s simple change of voice can make the child carry out his wishes. But the father is no martinet to his young children, and adolescence is not a period of revolt against parental authority. Rather it is a period when children become the responsible and obedient representatives of their family before the judging eyes of the world. They show respect to their fathers, as the Japanese say, ‘for the practice,’ ‘for the training,’ that is, as a respect-object he is a depersonalized symbol of hierarchy and of the proper conduct of life.

This attitude which is learned by the child in his earliest experiences with his father becomes a pattern throughout Japanese society. Men who are accorded the highest marks of respect because of their hierarchal position do not characteristically themselves wield arbitrary power. The officials who head the hierarchy do not typically exercise the actual authority. From the Emperor down, advisors and hidden forces work in the background. One of the most accurate descriptions of this aspect of Japanese society was given by the leader of one of the super-patriotic societies of the type of the Black Dragon to a Tokyo English-newspaper reporter in the early 1930s. ‘Society,’ he said, meaning of course Japan, ‘is a triangle controlled by a pin in one corner.’^[1] The triangle, in other words, lies on the table for all to see. The pin is invisible. Sometimes the triangle lies to the right, sometimes to the left. It swings on a pivot which never avows itself. Everything is done, as Westerners so often say, ‘with mirrors.’ Every effort is made to minimize the appearance of arbitrary authority, and to make every act appear to be a gesture of loyalty to the status-symbol who is so constantly divorced from real exercise of power. When the Japanese do identify a source of unmasked power, they regard it, as they have always regarded the moneylender and the narikin, as exploitive and as unworthy of their system.

The Japanese, viewing their world in this way, can stage revolts against exploitation and injustice without ever becoming revolutionists. They do not offer to tear the fabric of their world in pieces. They can institute the most thoroughgoing changes, as they did in the Meiji era, without casting any aspersion upon the system. They called it a Restoration, a ‘dipping back’ into the past. They are not revolutionists, and Western writers who have based their hopes upon ideological mass movements in Japan, who during the war magnified the Japanese underground and looked to it for leadership in capitulation, and who since VJ-Day have prophesied the triumph of radical policies at the polls, have gravely misunderstood the situation. They have been wrong in the prophecies they have made. The conservative Premier, Baron Shidehara, spoke more accurately for the Japanese when he formed his cabinet in October, 1945:

Such a phrasing of democracy seems less than nothing to American readers, but there is no doubt that Japan can more readily extend the area of civil liberties and build up the welfare of her people on the basis of such an identification than on the basis of Occidental ideology.

Japan will, of course, experiment with Western political mechanics of democracy, but the Western arrangements will not be trusted tools with which to fashion a better world, as they are in the United States. Popular elections and the legislative authority of elected persons will create as many difficulties as they solve. When such difficulties develop, Japan will modify the methods upon which we rely to achieve democracy. Then American voices will be raised to say that the war has been fought in vain. We believe in the rightness of our tools. At best, however, popular elections will be peripheral to Japanese reconstruction as a peaceful nation for a long time to come. Japan has not changed so fundamentally since the 1890s, when she first experimented with elections, that some of the old difficulties Lafcadio Hearn described then will not be likely to recur:

In more recent elections in the nineteen-twenties, villagers used to say before they cast their ballots, ‘My neck is washed clean for the sword,’ a phrase which identified the contest with the old attacks of the privileged samurai upon the common people. All the connotations of elections in Japan will differ even today from those in the United States, and this will be true quite apart from whether Japan is or is not pursuing dangerous aggressive policies.

Japan’s real strength which she can use in remaking herself into a peaceful nation lies in her ability to say of a course of action, ‘That failed,’ and then to throw her energies into other channels. The Japanese have an ethic of alternatives. They tried to achieve their ‘proper place’ in war, and they lost. That course, now, they can discard, because their whole training has conditioned them to possible changes of direction. Nations with a more absolutist ethic must convince themselves that they are fighting for principles. When they surrender to the victors, they say, ‘Right was lost when we were defeated,’ and their self-respect demands that they work to make this ‘right’ win next time. Or they can beat their breasts and confess their guilt. The Japanese need do neither. Five days after VJ-Day, before an American had landed on Japan, the great Tokyo paper, the Mainichi Shimbun, could speak of defeat and of the political changes it would bring, and say, ‘But it was all to the good for the ultimate salvation of Japan.’ The editorial stressed that no one should forget for a moment that they had been completely defeated. Because their effort to build up a Japan based on sheer might had met with utter failure, they must henceforth tread the path of a peaceful nation. The Asahi, another great Tokyo newspaper, that same week characterized Japan’s late ‘excessive faith in military force’ as ‘a serious error’ in its national and international policy. ‘The old attitude, from which we could gain so little and suffered so much, should be discarded for a new one which is rooted in international co-operation and love of peace.’

The Westerner observes this shift in what he regards as principles and suspects it. It is, however, an integral part of the conduct of life in Japan, whether in personal or in international relations. 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 pursue lost causes. ‘It is no use,’ he says, ‘biting one’s navel.’ Militarism was in the nineteen-thirties the accepted means by which they thought to gain the admiration of the world—an admiration to be based on their armed might—and they accepted all the sacrifices such a program required. On August 14, 1945, the Emperor, the sanctioned voice of Japan, told them that they had lost. They accepted all that such a fact implied. It meant the presence of American troops, so they welcomed them. It meant the failure of their dynastic enterprise, so they were willing to consider a Constitution which outlawed war. Ten days after VJ-Day, their newspaper, the Yomiuri-Hochi, could write about the ‘Beginning of a New Art and New Culture,’ and could say, ‘There must be a firm conviction in our hearts that military defeat has nothing to do with the value of a nation’s culture. Military defeat should serve as an impetus . . . (for) it has taken no less than national defeat for the Japanese people to lift their minds truly to the world, to see things objectively as they really are. Every irrationality that has warped Japanese thinking must be eliminated by frank analysis. . . . It takes courage to look this defeat in the face as a stark fact, (but we must) put our faith in Nippon’s culture of tomorrow.’ They had tried one course of action and been defeated. Today they would try the peaceful arts of life. ‘Japan,’ their editorials repeated, ‘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.

These newspaper editorials were not just the voice of a few intellectuals; the common people on a Tokyo street and in a remote village make the same right-about-face. It has been incredible to American occupying troops that these friendly people are the ones who had vowed to fight to the death with bamboo spears. The Japanese ethic contains much which Americans repudiate, but American experiences during the occupation of Japan have been an excellent demonstration of how many favorable aspects a strange ethic can have.

American administration of Japan under General MacArthur has accepted this Japanese ability to sail a new course. It has not impeded that course by insisting on using techniques of humiliation. It would have been culturally acceptable according to Western ethics if we had done so. For it is a tenet of Occidental ethics that humiliation and punishment are socially effective means to bring about a wrongdoer’s conviction of sin. Such admission of sin is then a first step in his rehabilitation. The Japanese, as we have seen, state the issue in another way. Their ethic makes a man responsible for all the implications of his acts, and the natural consequences of an error should convince him of its undesirability. These natural consequences may even be defeat in an all-out war. 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.

Japan, in her one great victory over a major power, showed that even as a victor she could carefully avoid humiliating a defeated enemy when it finally capitulated and when she did not consider that that nation had sneered at her. There is a famous photograph of the surrender of the Russian Army at Port Arthur in 1905 which is known to every Japanese. It shows the Russians wearing their swords. The victors and the vanquished can be distinguished only by their uniforms for the Russians were not stripped of their arms. The well-known Japanese account of that surrender tells that when General Stoessel, the Russian commander, signified his willingness to receive Japanese propositions of surrender, a Japanese captain and interpreter went to his headquarters taking food. ‘All the horses except General Stoessel’s own had been killed and eaten so that the present of fifty chickens and a hundred fresh eggs which the Japanese brought with them was welcome indeed.’ The meeting of General Stoessel and General Nogi was arranged for the following day. ‘The two generals clasped hands. Stoessel expressed his admiration for the courage of the Japanese and . . . General Nogi praised the long and brave defense of the Russians. Stoessel expressed his sympathy with Nogi for the loss of his two sons in the campaign. . . . Stoessel presented his fine white Arab horse to General Nogi, but Nogi said that, much as he would like to receive it as his own from the General’s hands, it must first be presented to the Emperor. He promised, however, that if it came back to him, as he had every reason to believe it would, he would take care of it as if it had always been his.’^[3] Everyone in Japan knew the stable which General Nogi built for General Stoessel’s horse in his front yard—a stable often described as more pretentious than Nogi’s own house, and after General Nogi’s death a part of the Nogi national shrine.

It has been said that the Japanese have changed between that day of the Russian surrender and the years of their occupation of the Philippines, for instance, when their wanton destructiveness and cruelty were known to all the world. To a people with the extreme situational ethics of the Japanese, however, this is not the necessary conclusion. In the first place, the enemy did not capitulate after Bataan; there was only a local surrender. Even when the Japanese, in their turn, surrendered in the Philippines, Japan was still fighting. In the second place, the Japanese never considered that the Russians had ‘insulted’ them in the early years of this century, whereas every Japanese was reared in the nineteen-twenties and -thirties to regard United States policy as ‘taking Japan cheap,’ or in their phrase, ‘making her as faeces.’ This had been Japan’s reaction to the Exclusion Act, to the part the United States played in the Treaty of Portsmouth and in the Naval Parity agreements. The Japanese had been encouraged to regard in the same way the growing economic rôle of the United States in the Far East and our racial attitudes toward the non-white peoples of the world. The victory over Russia and the victory over the United States in the Philippines, therefore, illustrate Japanese behavior in its two most opposed aspects: when insults are involved and when they are not.

The final victory of the United States again changed the situation for the Japanese. Their ultimate defeat brought about, as is usual in Japanese life, the abandonment of the course they had been pursuing. The peculiar ethic of the Japanese allowed them to wipe the slate clean. United States policy and General MacArthur’s administration have avoided writing fresh symbols of humiliation upon that washed slate, and have held simply to insisting on those things which in Japanese eyes are ‘natural consequences’ of defeat. It has worked.

The retention of the Emperor has been of great importance. It has been handled well. It was the Emperor who called first upon General MacArthur, not MacArthur upon him, and this was an object lesson to the Japanese the force of which it is hard for Westerners to appreciate. It is said that when it was suggested to the Emperor that he disavow his divinity, he protested that it would be a personal embarrassment to strip himself of something he did not have. The Japanese, he said truthfully, did not consider him a god in the Western sense. MacArthur’s Headquarters, however, urged upon him that the Occidental idea of his claim to divinity was bad for Japan’s international repute, and the Emperor agreed to accept the embarrassment the disavowal would cost him. He spoke on New Year’s Day, and asked to have all comments on his message translated for him from the world press. When he had read them, he sent a message to General MacArthur’s Headquarters saying that he was satisfied. Foreigners had obviously not understood before, and he was glad he had spoken.

The policy of the United States has also allowed the Japanese certain gratifications. The State-Army-Navy directive specifies that ‘encouragement shall be given and favor shown to the development of organizations in labor, industry and agriculture, organized on a democratic basis.’ Japanese labor has organized in many industries, and the old farmers’ unions which were active in the 1920s and 1930s are asserting themselves again. To many Japanese this initiative which they can now take to better their condition is a proof that Japan has won something as a consequence of this war. One American correspondent tells of a striker in Tokyo who looked up at a G.I. and said, beaming broadly, ‘Japan win, no?’ Strikes in Japan today have many parallels to the old Peasants’ Revolts where the farmers’ plea was always that the taxes and corvées to which they were subject interfered with adequate production. They were not class warfare in the Western sense, and they were not an attempt to change the system itself. Throughout Japan today strikes do not slow up production. The favorite form is for the workers ‘to occupy the plant, continue work and make management lose face by increasing production. Strikers at a Mitsui-owned coal mine barred all management personnel from the pits and stepped daily output up from 250 tons to 620. Workers at Ashio copper mines operated during a “strike,” increased production, and doubled their own wages.’^[4]

The administration of any defeated country is, of course, difficult, no matter how much good sense the accepted policy shows. In Japan the problems of food and shelter and reconversion are inevitably acute. They would be at least equally acute under an administration which did not make use of Japanese governmental personnel. The problem of demobilized soldiers, which was so much dreaded by American administrators before the war ended, is certainly less threatening than it would have been if Japanese officials had not been retained. But it is not easily solved. The Japanese are aware of the difficulty and their newspapers spoke feelingly last fall about how bitter the brew of defeat was to the soldiers who had suffered and lost, and it begged them not to let this interfere with their ‘judgment.’ The repatriated army has in general shown remarkable ‘judgment,’ but unemployment and defeat throw some soldiers into the old pattern of secret societies for nationalistic goals. They can easily resent their present status. The Japanese no longer accord them their old privileged position. The wounded soldier used to be clothed all in white and people bowed to him on the street. Even a peacetime Army recruit was given a send-off party and a welcome-home party by his hamlet. There were drinks and refreshments and dancing and costumes, and he sat in the place of honor. Now the repatriated soldier gets no such attentions. His family makes a place for him, but that is all. In many cities and towns he is cold-shouldered. It is easy, knowing how bitterly the Japanese take such a change of behavior, to imagine his satisfaction in joining up with his old comrades to bring back the old days when the glory of Japan was entrusted to soldiers’ hands. Some of his war comrades will tell him, too, how luckier Japanese soldiers are already fighting with the Allies in Java and in Shansi and in Manchuria; why should he despair? He too will fight again, they will tell him. Nationalistic secret societies are old, old institutions in Japan; they ‘cleared the name’ of Japan. Men conditioned to feel that ‘the world tips’ so long as anything is left undone to even scores were always possible candidates for such undercover societies. The violence which these societies, such as the Black Dragon and the Black Ocean, espoused is the violence which Japanese ethics allows as giri-to-one’s-name, and the long effort of the Japanese Government to emphasize gimu at the expense of giri-to-one’s-name will have to be continued in the coming years if this violence is to be eliminated.

It will require more than an appeal to ‘judgment.’ It will require a reconstruction of Japanese economy which will give a livelihood and ‘proper place’ to men who are now in their twenties and thirties. It will require improvement in the lot of the farmer. The Japanese return, whenever there is economic distress, to their old farm villages, and the tiny farms, encumbered with debts and in many places with rents, cannot feed many more mouths. Industry too must be set going, for the strong feeling against dividing the inheritance with younger sons eventually sends all but the eldest out to seek their fortune in the city.

The Japanese have a long hard road before them, no doubt, but if rearmament is not provided for in the State budget they have an opportunity to raise their national standard of living. A nation like Japan which spent half its national income on armament and the armed forces for a decade before Pearl Harbor can lay the foundation of a healthy economy if it outlaws such expenditures and progressively reduces its requisitions from the farmers. As we have seen, the Japanese formula for division of farm products was 60 per cent for the cultivator; 40 per cent he paid out in taxes and rents. This is in great contrast to rice countries like Burma and Siam where 90 per cent was the traditional proportion left to the cultivator. This huge requisition upon the cultivator in Japan was what ultimately made possible the financing of the national war machine.

Any European or Asiatic country which is not arming during the next decade will have a potential advantage over the countries which are arming, for its wealth can be used to build a healthy and prosperous economy. In the United States we hardly take this situation into account in our Asiatic and European policies, for we know that we would not be impoverished in this country by expensive programs of national defense. 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 or of welfare and research services. The need for profitable investment of capital is also acute. This situation is quite different outside the United States. It is different even in Western Europe. In spite of all demands for reparations, a Germany which is not allowed to rearm could in a decade or so have laid the foundations of a sound and prosperous economy which would be impossible in France if her policy is to build up great military power. Japan could make the most of a similar advantage over China. Militarization is a current goal in China and her ambitions are supported by the United States. Japan, if she does not include militarization in her budget, can, if she will, provide for her own prosperity before many years, and she could make herself indispensable in the commerce of the East. She could base her economy on the profits of peace and raise the standard of living of her people. Such a peaceful Japan could attain a place of honor among the nations of the world, and the United States could be of great assistance if it continued to use its influence in support of such a program.

What the United States 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. The Japanese cannot be legislated into accepting the authority of elected persons and ignoring ‘proper station’ as it is set up in their hierarchal system. They cannot be legislated into adopting the free and easy human contacts to which we are accustomed in the United States, the imperative demand to be independent, the passion each individual has to choose his own mate, his own job, the house he will live in and the obligations he will assume. The Japanese themselves, however, are quite articulate about changes in this direction which they regard as necessary. Their public men have said since VJ-Day that Japan must encourage its men and women to live their own lives and to trust their own consciences. They do not say so, of course, but any Japanese understands that they are questioning the rôle of ‘shame’ (haji) in Japan, and that they hope for a new growth of freedom among their countrymen: freedom from fear of the criticism and ostracism of ‘the world.’

For social pressures in Japan, no matter how voluntarily embraced, ask too much of the individual. They require him to conceal his emotions, to give up his desires, and to stand as the exposed representative of a family, an organization or a nation. The Japanese have shown that they can take all the self-discipline such a course requires. But the weight upon them is extremely heavy. They have to repress too much for their own good. Fearing to venture upon a life which is less costly to their psyches, they have been led by militarists upon a course where the costs pile up interminably. Having paid so high a price, they became self-righteous and have been contemptuous of people with a less demanding ethic.

The Japanese have taken the first great step toward social change by identifying aggressive warfare as an ‘error’ and a lost cause. They hope to buy their passage back to a respected place among peaceful nations. It will have to be a peaceful world. If Russia and the United States spend the coming years in arming for attack, Japan will use her know-how to fight in that war. But to admit that certainty does not call in question the inherent possibility of a peaceful Japan. Japan’s motivations are situational. She will seek her place within a world at peace if circumstances permit. If not, within a world organized as an armed camp.

At present the Japanese know militarism as a light that failed. They will watch to see whether it has also failed in other nations of the world. If it has not, Japan can relight her own warlike ardor and show how well she can contribute. If it has failed elsewhere, Japan can set herself to prove how well she has learned the lesson that imperialistic dynastic enterprises are no road to honor.

THE END

Glossary

ai, love; specifically a superior’s love of a dependent.

arigato, thank you; ‘this difficult thing.’

buraku, a hamlet of some fifteen houses; a district in a village.

bushido, ‘the way of the samurai.’ A term popularized during this century to designate traditional Japanese ideals of conduct. Doctor Inazo Nitobe in Bushido, The Soul of Japan, itemizes as Bushido: rectitude or justice, courage, benevolence, politeness, sincerity, honor, loyalty, and self-control.

chu, fealty to the Emperor.

daimyo, a feudal lord.

donen, age-mates.

eta, a pariah class in pre-Meiji times.

geisha, a courtesan especially trained and given high prestige.

gi, righteousness.

gimu, a category of Japanese obligations. Vide Chart, p. 116.

giri, a category of Japanese obligations. Vide Chart, p. 116.

go, a unit of measure of capacity; less than one cup.

haji, shame.

haraki’ri or seppuku, suicide according to the samurai code. Seppuku is the more elegant term.

hysteri, nervousness and instability. Generally used of women.

ǐnkyo, the state of formal retirement from active life.

Issei, an American of Japanese ancestry born in Japan. Vide Nisei.

ǐsshǐn to restore, to dip back into the past. A slogan of the Meiji Restoration.

jen (Chinese), good human relations, benevolence.

jicho’, self-respect; circumspection. ‘To double jicho with jicho,’ to be superlatively circumspect.

jǐn (written with the same character as Chinese jen), obligation which is outside the obligatory code. But vide ‘knowing jin,’ p. 119, footnote.

jǐngi (variant of jin), an obligation outside the obligatory code.

jǐri’ki, ‘self-help,’ spiritual training dependent solely on one’s own disciplined human powers. Vide tariki.

judo, a form of jujitsu. Japanese wrestling.

jujǐtsu, Japanese wrestling.

kabuki, popular drama. Vide noh.

kagura, traditional dances performed at Shinto shrines.

kami, head, source. Shinto term for deity.

kamika’ze, ‘divine wind.’ The hurricane which drove back and overturned Genghis Khan’s invading fleet in the thirteenth century. The pilots of suicide planes in World War II were called the Kamikaze Corps.

katajikĕnai’, thank you; ‘I am insulted.’

kino do’ku, thank you; ‘this poisonous feeling.’

kǐnshǐn, repentance. A period of withdrawal to remove ‘the rust of the body.’

ko, filial piety.

koan (pronounce ko-an), problems having no rational answer, set by the Zen cult for those in training.

ko-on, obligation to the Emperor, the State.

magokoro, ‘sincerity.’

makoto, ‘sincerity.’

Meiji Era, the period of the reign of the Emperor Meiji, 1868-1912. It designates the beginning of the modern era in Japan.

moxa, powdered leaves of a certain plant, which are burned in a cone on the surface of the body for curative purposes. It cures ailments and naughtiness.

muga, the elimination of the observer-self achieved by those who have taken training.

narǐkǐn’, nouveau riche. ‘A pawn promoted to queen’ (chess).

nǐrva’na (Sanskrit), final emancipation of the soul from transmigration; state of not-being; absorption into the divine.

Nisei, an American of Japanese ancestry born in the United States. Vide Issei.

noh, classic drama. Vide kabuki.

nushi, master.

on (pronounce own), a category of incurred obligations. Vide Chart, p. 116.

oya, parents.

ronǐn, in feudal times samurai retainers who, because of disgrace or because of the death or dishonor of their overlord, had become masterless men.

sake (pronounce sa-ke), a rice-beer which is the principal alcoholic drink of the Japanese.

samurai, in feudal times the warriors, two-sword men. Below them were the common people: farmers, artisans, and merchants.

satori, Buddhist enlightenment.

seppu’ku or harakiri, suicide by piercing the abdomen. In feudal times it was the exclusive privilege of the nobles and samurai.

shogun, in pre-Meiji times the actual ruler of Japan; succession was hereditary as long as a family could remain in power. The Shogun was always invested by the Emperor.

shuyo, self-discipline; mental training.

sonno joi, ‘Restore the Emperor and expel the barbarians (Westerners).’ A slogan of the Meiji Restoration.

sumimasen’, thank you; I’m sorry; ‘this never ends.’

sutra (Sanskrit), short collections of dialogues and aphorisms. The disciples of Gautama Buddha wrote such sutras in the conversational idiom of their day (Pali).

tai setsu, Higher Law.

tari’ki, ‘help of another.’ Spiritual blessing which is an act of grace. Vide jiriki.

tonari gumi, small neighborhood groups of about five to ten families.

yoga (Sanskrit), a form of ascetic philosophy and practice prevalent in India from earliest historical times.

zaibatsu, big business; influential members of the economic hierarchy.

Zen, a Buddhist cult introduced from China and important in Japan since the twelfth century. It was an upper-class cult of the rulers and warriors and still contrasts with the great tariki Buddhist cults with their huge membership.

Index