Clearing One’s Name

Giri to one’s name is the duty to keep one’s reputation unspotted. It is a series of virtues—some of which seem to an Occidental to be opposites, but which to the Japanese have a sufficient unity because they are those duties which are not repayments on benefits received; they are ‘outside the circle of on.’ They are those acts which keep one’s reputation bright without reference to a specific previous indebtedness to another person. They include therefore maintaining all the miscellaneous etiquette requirements of ‘proper station,’ showing stoicism in pain and defending one’s reputation in profession or craft. Giri to one’s name also demands acts which remove a slur or an insult; the slur darkens one’s good name and should be got rid of. It may be necessary to take vengeance upon one’s detractor or it may be necessary to commit suicide, and there are all sorts of possible courses of action between these two extremes. But one does not shrug off lightly anything that is compromising.

The Japanese do not have a separate term for what I call here ‘giri-to-one’s-name.’ They describe it simply as giri outside the circle of on. That is the basis of classification, and not the fact that giri to the world is an obligation to return kindnesses and that giri-to-one’s-name prominently includes revenge. The fact that Western languages separate the two into categories as opposite as gratitude and revenge does not impress the Japanese. Why should one virtue not cover a man’s behavior when he reacts to another’s benevolence and when he reacts to his scorn or malevolence?

In Japan it does. A good man feels as strongly about insults as he does about the benefits he has received. Either way it is virtuous to repay. He does not separate the two, as we do, and call one aggression and one non-aggression. To him aggression only begins outside ‘the circle of giri’; so long as one is maintaining giri and clearing one’s name of slurs, one is not guilty of aggression. One is evening scores. ‘The world tips,’ they say, so long as an insult or slur or defeat is not requited or eliminated. A good man must try to get the world back into balance again. It is human virtue, not an all-too-human vice. Giri to one’s name, and even the way it is linguistically combined in Japan with gratitude and loyalty, has been a Western virtue in certain periods of European history. It flourished mightily in the Renaissance, especially in Italy, and it has much in common with el valor Español in classic Spain and with die Ehre in Germany. Something very like it underlay dueling in Europe a hundred years ago. Wherever this virtue of wiping out stains on one’s honor has been in the ascendant, in Japan or in Western nations, the very core of it has always been that it transcended profit in any material sense. One was virtuous in proportion as one offered up to ‘honor’ one’s possessions, one’s family, and one’s own life. This is a part of its very definition and is the basis of the claim that these countries always put forward that it is a ‘spiritual’ value. It certainly involves them in great material losses and can hardly be justified on a profit-and-loss basis. In this lies the great contrast between this version of honor and the cut-throat competition and overt hostility that crops up in life in the United States; in America it may be that no holds are barred in some political or financial deal but it is a war to get or to hold some material advantage. It is only in exceptional cases, as, for instance, in the feuds of the Kentucky Mountains, where codes of honor prevail which fall in the category of giri-to-one’s-name.

Giri to one’s name and all the hostility and watchful waiting that accompany it in any culture, however, is not a virtue that is characteristic of the Asiatic mainland. It is not, as the phrase goes, Oriental. The Chinese do not have it, nor the Siamese, nor the Indians. The Chinese regard all such sensitivity to insults and aspersions as a trait of ‘small’ people—morally small. It is no part of their ideal of nobility, as it is in Japan. Violence which is wrong when a man starts it out of the blue does not become right in Chinese ethics when a man indulges in it to requite an insult. They think it is rather ridiculous to be so sensitive. Nor do they react to a slur by resolving by all that is good and great to prove the aspersion baseless. The Siamese have no place at all for this kind of sensitivity to insult. Like the Chinese they set store by making their detractor ridiculous but they do not imagine that their honor has been impugned. They say ‘The best way to show an opponent up for a brute is to give in to him.’

The full significance of giri-to-one’s-name cannot be understood without placing in context all the non-aggressive virtues which are included in it in Japan. Vengeance is only one of the virtues it may require upon occasion. It includes also plenty of quiet and temperate behavior. The stoicism, the self-control that is required of a self-respecting Japanese is part of his giri to his name. A woman may not cry out in childbirth and a man should rise above pain and danger. When floods sweep down upon the Japanese village each self-respecting person gathers up the necessities he is to take with him and seeks higher ground. There is no outcry, no running hither and thither, no panic. When the equinoctial winds and rain come in hurricane strength there is similar self-control. Such behavior is a part of the respect a person has for himself in Japan even granted he may not live up to it. They think American self-respect does not require self-control. There is noblesse oblige in this self-control in Japan and in feudal times more was therefore required of the samurai than of the common people but the virtue, though less exigent, was a rule of life among all classes. If the samurai were required to go to extremes in rising above bodily pain, the common people had to go to extremes in accepting the aggressions of the armed samurai.

The tales of samurai stoicism are famous. They were forbidden to give way to hunger but that was too trivial to mention. They were enjoined when they were starving to pretend they had just eaten: they must pick their teeth with a toothpick. ‘Baby birds,’ the maxim went, ‘cry for their food but a samurai holds a toothpick between his teeth.’ In the past war this became an Army maxim for the enlisted soldier. Nor must they give way to pain. The Japanese attitude was like the boy soldier’s rejoinder to Napoleon: ‘Wounded? Nay, sire, I’m killed.’ A samurai should give no sign of suffering till he fell dead and he must bear pain without wincing. It is told of Count Katsu who died in 1899 that when he was a boy his testicles were torn by a dog. He was of samurai family but his family had been reduced to beggary. While the doctor operated upon him, his father held a sword to his nose. ‘If you utter one cry,’ he told him, ‘you will die in a way that at least will not be shameful.’

Giri to one’s name also requires that one live according to one’s station in life. If a man fails in this giri he has no right to respect himself. This meant in Tokugawa times that he accepted as part of his self-respect the detailed sumptuary laws which regulated practically everything he wore or had or used. Americans are shocked to the core by laws which define these things by inherited class position. Self-respect in America is bound up with improving one’s status and fixed sumptuary laws are a denial of the very basis of our society. We are horrified by Tokugawa laws which stated that a farmer of one class could buy such and such a doll for his child and the farmer of another class could buy a different doll. In America, however, we get the same results by invoking a different sanction. We accept with no criticism the fact that the factory owner’s child has a set of electric trains and that the sharecropper’s child contents itself with a corncob doll. We accept differences in income and justify them. To earn a good salary is a part of our system of self-respect. If dolls are regulated by income that is no violation of our moral ideas. The person who has got rich buys better dolls for his children. In Japan getting rich is under suspicion and maintaining proper station is not. Even today the poor as well as the rich invest their self-respect in observing the conventions of hierarchy. It is a virtue alien to America, and the Frenchman, de Tocqueville, pointed this out in the eighteen-thirties in his book already quoted. Born himself in eighteenth century France, he knew and loved the aristocratic way of life in spite of his generous comments about the egalitarian United States. America, he said, in spite of its virtues, lacked true dignity. ‘True dignity consists in always taking one’s proper station, neither too high nor too low. And this is as much within the reach of the peasant as of the prince.’ De Tocqueville would have understood the Japanese attitude that class differences are not themselves humiliating.

‘True dignity,’ in this day of objective study of cultures, is recognized as something which different peoples can define differently, just as they always define for themselves what is humiliating. Americans who cry out today that Japan cannot be given self-respect until we enforce our egalitarianism are guilty of ethnocentrism. If what these Americans want is, as they say, a self-respecting Japan they will have to recognize her bases for self-respect. We can recognize, as de Tocqueville did, that this aristocratic ‘true dignity’ is passing from the modern world and that a different and, we believe, a finer dignity is taking its place. It will no doubt happen in Japan too. Meantime Japan will have to rebuild her self-respect today on her own basis, not on ours. And she will have to purify it in her own way.

Giri to one’s name is also living up to many sorts of commitments besides those of proper station. A borrower may pledge his giri to his name when he asks for a loan; a generation ago it was common to phrase it that ‘I agree to be publicly laughed at if I fail to repay this sum.’ If he failed, he was not literally made a laughingstock; there were no public pillories in Japan. But when the New Year came around, the date on which debts must be paid off, the insolvent debtor might commit suicide to ‘clear his name.’ New Year’s Eve still has its crop of suicides who have taken this means to redeem their reputations.

All kinds of professional commitments involve giri to one’s name. The Japanese requirements are often fantastic when particular circumstances bring one into the public eye and criticism might be general. There are for instance the long list of school principals who committed suicide because fires in their schools—with which they had nothing to do—threatened the picture of the Emperor which was hung in every school. Teachers too have been burned to death dashing into burning schools to rescue these pictures. By their deaths they showed how high they held their giri to their names and their chu to the Emperor. There are also famous stories of persons who were guilty of a slip of the tongue in ceremonious public readings of one of the Imperial Rescripts, either the one on Education or the one for Soldiers and Sailors, and who have cleared their names by committing suicide. Within the reign of the present Emperor, a man who had inadvertently named his son Hirohito—the given name of the Emperor was never spoken in Japan—killed himself and his child.

Giri to one’s name as a professional person is very exigent in Japan but it need not be maintained by what an American understands as high professional standards. The teacher says, ‘I cannot in giri to my name as a teacher admit ignorance of it,’ and he means that if he does not know to what species a frog belongs nevertheless he has to pretend he does. If he teaches English on the basis of only a few years’ school instruction, nevertheless he cannot admit that anyone might be able to correct him. It is specifically to this kind of defensiveness that ‘giri-to-one’s-name as a teacher’ refers. The business man too, in giri to his name as a business man, cannot let anyone know that his assets are seriously depleted or that the plans he made for his organization have failed. And the diplomat cannot in giri admit the failure of his policy. In all such giri usages there is extreme identification of a man with his work and any criticism of one’s acts or one’s competence becomes automatically a criticism of one’s self.

These Japanese reactions to imputations of failure and inadequacy can be duplicated over and over again in the United States. We all know persons who are maddened by detraction. But we are seldom so defensive as the Japanese. If a teacher does not know to what species a frog belongs, he thinks it is better behavior to say so than to claim knowledge, even though he might succumb to the temptation to hide his ignorance. If a business man is dissatisfied with a policy he has promoted he thinks he can put out a new and different directive. He does not consider that his self-respect is conditional upon his maintaining that he was right all along and that if he admitted he was wrong he should either resign or retire. In Japan, however, this defensiveness goes very deep and it is the part of wisdom—as it is also universal etiquette—not to tell a person to his face in so many words that he has made a professional error.

This sensitivity is especially conspicuous in situations where one person has lost out to another. It may be only that another person has been preferred for a job or that the person concerned has failed in a competitive examination. The loser ‘wears a shame’ for such failures, and, though this shame is in some cases a strong incentive to greater efforts, in many others it is a dangerous depressant. He loses confidence and becomes melancholy or angry or both. His efforts are stymied. It is especially important for Americans to recognize that competition in Japan thus does not have the same degree of socially desirable effects that it does in our own scheme of life. We rely strongly on competition as a ‘good thing.’ Psychological tests show that competition stimulates us to our best work. Performance goes up under this stimulus; when we are given something to do all by ourselves we fall short of the record we make when there are competitors present. In Japan, however, their tests show just the opposite. It is especially marked after childhood is ended, for Japanese children are more playful about competition and not so worried about it. With young men and adults, however, performance deteriorated with competition. Subjects who had made good progress, reduced their mistakes and gained speed when they were working by themselves, began to make mistakes and were far slower when a competitor was introduced. They did best when they were measuring their improvement against their own record, not when they were measuring themselves against others. The Japanese experimenters rightly analyzed the reason for this poor record in competitive situations. Their subjects, they said, when the project became competitive, became principally interested in the danger that they might be defeated, and the work suffered. They felt the competition so keenly as an aggression that they turned their attention to their relation to the aggressor instead of concentrating on the job in hand.^[1]

The students examined in these tests tended to be influenced most by the possible shame of failing. Like a teacher or a business man living up to his giri to his professional name they are stung by their giri to their name as students. Student teams who lost in competitive games, too, went to great lengths in abandoning themselves to this shame of failure. Crews might throw themselves down in their boats beside their oars and weep and bewail themselves. Defeated baseball teams might gather in a huddle and cry aloud. In the United States we would say they were bad losers. We have an etiquette that expects them to say that the better team won. It is proper for the defeated to shake hands with the victors. No matter how much we hate to be beaten we scorn people who make an emotional crisis out of it.

The Japanese have always been inventive in devising ways of avoiding direct competition. Their elementary schools minimize it beyond what Americans would think possible. Their teachers are instructed that each child must be taught to better his own record and that he should not be given opportunities to compare himself with others. In their grade schools they do not even keep any students back to repeat a grade and all children who enter together go through their entire elementary education together. Their report cards grade children in elementary schools on marks for conduct but not on their school work: when really competitive situations are unavoidable, as in entrance examinations to the middle schools, the tension is understandably great. Every teacher has stories of the boys who when they know they have failed commit suicide.

This minimizing of direct competition goes all through Japanese life. An ethic that is based on on has small place for competition whereas the American categorical imperative is upon making good in competition with one’s fellows. Their whole system of hierarchy with all its detailed rules of class minimizes direct competition. The family system minimizes it too for the father and son are not institutionally in competition as they are in America: it is possible for them to reject each other but not for them to compete. Japanese comment with amazement on the American family where the father and the son compete both for the use of the family car and for the attention of the mother-wife.

The ubiquitous institution of the go-between is one of the more conspicuous ways in which the Japanese prevent direct confrontation of two persons who are in competition with each other. An intermediary is required in any situation where a man might feel shame if he fell short and consequently go-betweens serve on a great number of occasions—negotiating marriage, offering one’s services for hire, leaving a job and arranging countless everyday matters. This go-between reports to both parties, or in case of an important deal like a marriage each side employs its own intermediary and they negotiate the details between themselves before reporting to their side. By dealing in this way at second hand the principals need take no cognizance of claims and charges that would have to be resented in giri to their names if they were in direct communication. The go-between too gains prestige by acting in this official capacity, and gets the respect of the community by his successful manipulation. The chances of a peaceful arrangement are the greater because the go-between has an ego investment in smooth negotiations. The intermediary acts in the same way in feeling out an employer about a job for his client or in relaying to the employer the employee’s decision to leave his job.

Etiquette of all kinds is organized to obviate shame-causing situations which might call in question one’s giri to one’s name. These situations which are thus minimized go far beyond direct competition. The host, they think, should greet his guest with certain ritual welcoming and in his good clothes. Therefore anyone who finds a farmer in his work clothes at home may have to wait a bit. The farmer gives no sign of recognition until he has put on suitable clothes and arranged the proper courtesies. It makes no difference even if the host has to change his clothes in the room where the guest is waiting. He simply is not present until he is there in the proper guise. In the rural areas, too, boys may visit girls at night after the household is asleep and the girl is in bed. Girls can either accept or reject their advances, but the boy wears a towel bound about his face so that if he is rejected he need feel no shame next day. The disguise is not to prevent the girl from recognizing him; it is purely an ostrich technique so that he will not have to admit that he was shamed in his proper person. Etiquette requires too that as little cognizance as possible be taken of any project until success is assured. It is part of the duties of go-betweens arranging a marriage to bring the prospective bride and groom together before the contract is completed. Everything is done to make this a casual meeting for if the purpose of the introduction were avowed at this stage any breaking-off of the negotiations would threaten the honor of one family or of both. Since the young couple must each be escorted by one or both of their parents, and the go-betweens must be the hosts or hostesses, it is most properly arranged when they all ‘run into each other’ casually at the annual chrysanthemum show or at a cherry-blossom viewing or in a well-known park or place of recreation.

In all such ways, and in many more, the Japanese avoid occasions in which failure might be shameful. Though they lay such emphasis on the duty to clear one’s name of insult, in actual practice this leads them to arrange events so that insult need be felt as seldom as possible. This is in great contrast to many tribes of the Pacific Islands where clearing one’s name holds much the same pre-eminent place that it does in Japan.

Among these primitive gardening peoples of New Guinea and Melanesia the mainspring of tribal or personal action is the insult which it is necessary to resent. They cannot have a tribal feast without one village’s setting it in motion by saying that another village is so poor it cannot feed ten guests, it is so stingy it hides its taro and its coconuts, its leaders are so stupid they could not organize a feast if they tried. Then the challenged village clears its name by overwhelming all comers with its lavish display and hospitality. Marriage arrangements and financial transactions are set going in the same way. When they go on the warpath too the two sides have a tremendous insult exchange before they set their arrows to their bows. They handle the smallest matter as if it were an occasion that called for mortal fight. It is a great incentive to action and such tribes often have a great deal of vitality. But nobody has ever described them as courteous.

The Japanese on the contrary are paragons of politeness and this pre-eminent politeness is a measure of the lengths to which they have gone in limiting the occasions when it is necessary to clear one’s name. They retain as an incomparable goad to achievement the resentment insult occasions but they limit the situations where it is called for. It should occur only in specified situations or when traditional arrangements to eliminate it break down under pressure. Unquestionably the use of this goad in Japan contributed to the dominant position she was able to attain in the Far East and to her policy of Anglo-American war in the last decade. Many Occidental discussions of Japan’s sensitivity to insult and her eagerness to avenge herself, however, would be more appropriate to the insult-using tribes of New Guinea than they are to Japan, and many Westerners’ forecasts of how Japan would behave after defeat in this war were wide of the mark because they did not recognize the special Japanese limitations upon giri-to-one’s-name.

The politeness of the Japanese should not lead Americans to minimize their sensitivity to slurs. Americans bandy personal remarks very lightly; it is a kind of game. It is hard for us to realize the deadly seriousness that attaches to light remarks in Japan. In his autobiography, published in America just as he wrote it in English, a Japanese artist, Yoshio Markino, has described vividly a perfectly proper Japanese reaction to what he interpreted as a sneer. When he wrote the book he had already lived most of his adult life in the United States and in Europe but he felt as strongly as if he were still living in his home town in rural Aichi. He was the youngest child of a landowner of good standing and had been most lovingly reared in a charming home. Toward the end of his childhood his mother died, and, not long after, his father became bankrupt and sold all his property to pay his debts. The family was broken up and Markino had not a sen to help him in realizing his ambitions. One of these ambitions was to learn English. He attached himself to a near-by mission school and did janitor work in order to learn the language. At eighteen he had still never been outside the round of a few provincial towns but he had made up his mind to go to America.

The next morning he departed with his entire possessions tied in a handkerchief.

He had been ‘assassinated,’ as he felt, by the missionary’s incredulity about a penniless provincial boy’s going to the United States to become an artist. His name was besmirched until he had cleared it by carrying out his purpose and after the missionary’s ‘sneer’ he had no alternative but to leave the place and prove his ability to get to America. In English it reads curiously that he charges the missionary with ‘insincerity’; the American’s exclamation seems to us quite ‘sincere’ in our sense of the word. But he is using the word in its Japanese meaning and they regularly deny sincerity to anyone who belittles any person whom he does not wish to provoke to aggression. Such a sneer is wanton and proves ‘insincerity.’

‘Even murderers I may forgive according to their condition. But about sneering there is no excuse.’ Since it is not proper to ‘forgive,’ one possible reaction to a slur is revenge. Markino cleared his name by getting to America but revenge ranks high in Japanese tradition as a ‘good thing’ under circumstances of insult or defeat. Japanese who write books for Western readers have sometimes used vivid figures of speech to describe the Japanese attitudes about revenge. Inazo Nitobe, one of the most benevolent men in Japan, writing in 1900, says: ‘In revenge there is something that satisfies one’s sense of justice. Our sense of revenge is as exact as our mathematical faculty and until both terms of the equation are satisfied we cannot get over the sense of something left undone.’^[3] Yoshisaburo Okakura in a book on The Life and Thought of Japan uses a particularly Japanese custom as a parallel:

And he continues, saying that thus the Japanese ‘live clean, undefiled lives which seem as serene and beautiful as a cherry tree in full bloom.’ This ‘morning tub,’ in other words, washes off dirt other people have thrown at you and you cannot be virtuous as long as any of it sticks to you. The Japanese have no ethic which teaches that a man cannot be insulted unless he thinks he is and that it is only ‘what comes out of a man’ that defiles him, not what is said or done against him.

Japanese tradition keeps constantly before the public this ideal of a ‘morning bath’ of vendetta. Countless incidents and hero tales, of which the most popular is the historical Tale of the Forty-Seven Ronin, are known to everybody. They are read in their school books and played in the theater, made up into contemporary movies, and printed in popular publications. They are a part of the living culture of Japan today.

Many of these tales are about sensitivity to casual failures. For instance, a daimyo called on three of his retainers to name the maker of a certain fine sword. They disagreed and when experts were called in it was found that Nagoya Sanza had been the only one who had correctly identified it as a Muramasa blade. The ones who were wrong took it as an insult and set out to kill Sanza. One of them found Sanza asleep and stabbed him with Sanza’s own sword. Sanza, however, lived, and his attacker thereafter dedicated himself to his revenge. In the end he succeeded in killing him and his giri was satisfied.

Other tales are about the necessity of avenging oneself upon one’s lord. Giri meant in Japanese ethics equally the retainer’s loyalty to his lord to the death, and his right-about-face of extravagant enmity when he felt himself insulted. A good example is from the stories about Ieyasu, the first Tokugawa Shogun. It was reported to one of his retainers that Ieyasu had said of him, ‘He is the sort of fellow who will die of a fishbone stuck in his throat.’ The imputation that he would die in an undignified manner was not to be borne, and the retainer vowed that this was something he would not forget in life or death. Ieyasu was at the time unifying the country from the new capital Yedo (Tokyo) and was not yet secure from his enemies. The retainer made overtures to the hostile lords, offering to set fire to Yedo from within and lay it waste. Thus his giri would be satisfied and he would be avenged upon Ieyasu. Most Occidental discussions of Japanese loyalty are thoroughly unrealistic because they do not recognize that giri is not merely loyalty; it is also a virtue that under certain circumstances enjoins treachery. As they say, ‘A man who is beaten becomes a rebel.’ So does a man who is insulted.

These two themes from the historical tales—revenge upon someone who has been right when you were wrong, and revenge for a slur, even from one’s lord—are commonplaces in the best-known literature of Japan, and they have many variations. When one examines contemporary life-histories and novels and events, it is clear that, however much the Japanese appreciate revenge in their traditions, stories of vengeance are today certainly as rare as in Western nations, perhaps rarer. This does not mean that obsessions about one’s honor have grown less but rather that the reaction to failures and slurs is more and more often defensive instead of offensive. People take the shame as seriously as ever, but it more and more often paralyzes their energies instead of starting a fight. The direct attack of vengeance was more possible in lawless pre-Meiji days. In the modern era law and order and the difficulties of managing a more interdependent economy have sent revenge underground or directed it against one’s own breast. A man may take a private revenge against his enemy by playing a trick upon him which he never avows—somewhat after the fashion of the old story of the host who served his enemy with excrement which could not be detected in the delicious food and asked no more than to know he had done it. The guest never knew. But even this kind of underground aggression is rarer today than turning it against oneself. There one has two choices: to use it as a goad to drive oneself to the ‘impossible,’ or to let it eat out one’s heart.

The vulnerability of the Japanese to failures and slurs and rejections makes it all too easy for them to harry themselves instead of others. Their novels describe over and over again the dead end of melancholy alternating with outbursts of anger in which educated Japanese have so often lost themselves in the last decades. The protagonists of these stories are bored—bored with the round of life, bored with their families, bored with the city, bored with the country. But it is not the boredom of reaching for the stars, where all effort seems trivial compared with a great goal pictured in their mind’s eye. It is not a boredom born of the contrast between reality and the ideal. When the Japanese have a vision of a great mission they lose their boredom. They lose it completely and absolutely, no matter how distant the goal. Their particular kind of ennui is the sickness of an over-vulnerable people. They turn inward upon themselves their fear of rejection and they are stymied. The picture of boredom in the Japanese novel is quite a different state of mind from that with which we are familiar in the Russian novel where the contrast between the real and the ideal worlds is basic in all the tedium their heroes experience. Sir George Sansom has said that the Japanese lack this sense of a contrast between the real and the ideal. He is not speaking of how this underlies their boredom but of how they formulate their philosophy and their general attitude toward life. Certainly this contrast with basic Occidental notions goes far beyond the particular case in point here, but it has special relevance to their besetting depressions. Japan ranks with Russia as a nation given to depicting boredom in her novels and the contrast with the United States is marked. American novels do not do much with the theme. Our novelists trace the misery of their characters to a character-deficiency or to the buffets of a cruel world; they very seldom depict pure and simple ennui. Personal maladjustment must have a cause, a build-up, and rouse the reader’s moral condemnation of some flaw in the hero or heroine, or of some evil in the social order. Japan also has her proletarian novels protesting desperate economic conditions in the cities and terrible happenings on commercial fishing boats, but their character novels uncover a world where people’s emotions most often come to them, so one author says, like drifting chlorine gas. Neither the character nor the author thinks it necessary to analyze the circumstances or the hero’s life history to account for the cloud. It goes and it comes. People are vulnerable. They have turned inward the aggression their old heroes used to visit upon their enemies and their depression appears to them to have no explicit causes. They may seize upon some incident as its source, but the incident leaves a curious impression of being hardly more than a symbol.

The most extreme aggressive action a modern Japanese takes against himself is suicide. Suicide, properly done, will, according to their tenets, clear his name and reinstate his memory. American condemnation of suicide makes self-destruction only a desperate submission to despair, but the Japanese respect for it allows it to be an honorable and purposeful act. In certain situations it is the most honorable course to take in giri-to-one’s-name. The defaulting debtor on New Year’s Day, the official who kills himself to acknowledge that he assumes responsibility for some unfortunate occurrence, the lovers who seal their hopeless love in a double suicide, the patriot who protests the government’s postponement of war with China are all, like the boy who fails in an examination or the soldier avoiding capture, turning upon themselves a final violence. Some Japanese authorities say that this liability to suicide is new in Japan. It is not easy to judge, and statistics show that observers in recent years have often overestimated its frequency. There were proportionately more suicides in Denmark in the last century and more in pre-Nazi Germany than there have ever been in Japan. But this much is certain: the Japanese love the theme. They play up suicide as Americans play up crime and they have the same vicarious enjoyment of it. They choose to dwell on events of self-destruction instead of on destruction of others. They make of it, in Bacon’s phrase, their favorite ‘flagrant case.’ It meets some need that cannot be filled by dwelling on other acts.

Suicide is also more masochistic in modern Japan than it appears to have been in the historical tales of feudal times. In those stories a samurai committed suicide with his own hand at the command of the government to save himself from dishonorable execution, much as a Western enemy soldier would be shot instead of hanged, or he took this course to save himself the torture he expected if he fell into the enemy’s hands. A warrior was allowed harakiri much as a Prussian officer in disgrace was sometimes allowed to shoot himself in private. Those in authority left a bottle of whiskey and a pistol on a table in his room after he knew that he had no hope of saving his honor otherwise. For the Japanese samurai, taking his own life under such circumstances was only a choice of means; death was certain. In modern times suicide is a choice to die. A man turns violence upon himself, often instead of assassinating someone else. The act of suicide, which in feudal times was the final statement of a man’s courage and resolution, has become today a chosen self-destruction. During the last two generations, when Japanese have felt that ‘the world tips,’ that ‘both terms of the equation’ are not equivalent, that they need a ‘morning tub’ to wipe off defilements, they have increasingly destroyed themselves instead of others.

Even suicide as a final argument to win victory for one’s own side, though it occurs both in feudal and in modern times, has changed in this same direction. A famous story of Tokugawa days tells of the old tutor, high in the Shogunate council, who bared his body and placed his sword in readiness for immediate harakiri in the presence of the whole council and the Shogunate regent. The threat of suicide carried the day and he thereby insured the succession of his candidate to the position of Shogun. He got his way and there was no suicide. In Occidental terminology, the tutor had blackmailed the opposition. In modern times, however, such protest suicide is the act of a martyr not of a negotiator. It is carried out after one has failed or to put oneself on record as opposing some already signed agreement like the Naval Parity Act. It is staged so that only the completed act itself, and not the threat of suicide, can influence public opinion.

This growing tendency to strike at oneself when giri to one’s name is threatened need not involve such extreme steps as suicide. Aggressions directed inward may merely produce depression and lassitude and that typical Japanese boredom that was so prevalent in the educated class. There are good sociological reasons why this mood should have been widespread among this particular class for the intelligentsia was overcrowded and very insecurely placed in the hierarchy. Only a small proportion of them could satisfy their ambitions. In the nineteen-thirties, too, they were doubly vulnerable because the authorities feared they were thinking ‘dangerous thoughts’ and held them under suspicion. The Japanese intellectuals usually account for their frustration by complaints about the confusions of Westernization, but the explanation does not go far enough. The typical Japanese swing of mood is from intense dedication to intense boredom, and the psychic shipwreck which many intellectuals suffered was in the traditional Japanese manner. Many of them saved themselves from it, too, in the middle nineteen-thirties in traditional fashion: they embraced nationalistic goals and turned the attack outward again, away from their own breasts. In totalitarian aggression against outside nations they could ‘find themselves’ again. They saved themselves from a bad mood and felt a great new strength within them. They could not do it in personal relationships but they believed they could as a conquering nation.

Now that the outcome of the war has proved this confidence mistaken, lassitude is again a great psychic threat in Japan. They cannot easily cope with it, whatever their intentions. It goes very deep. ‘No bombs any more,’ one Japanese said in Tokyo; ‘the relief is wonderful. But we are not fighting any more and there is no purpose. Everyone is in a daze, not caring much how he does things. I am like that, my wife is like that and the people in the hospital. All very slow about everything we do, dazed. People complain now that the government is slow cleaning up after the war and in providing relief, but I think the reason is that all the government officials felt the same way as we did.’ This listlessness is the kind of danger in Japan that it was in France after liberation. In Germany in the first six or eight months after surrender it was not a problem. In Japan it is. Americans can understand this reaction well enough but it seems almost unbelievable to us that it should go along with such friendliness to the conqueror. Almost immediately it was clear that the Japanese people accepted the defeat and all its consequences with extreme good will. Americans were welcomed with bows and smiles, with handwavings and shouts of greeting. These people were not sullen nor angry. They had, in the phrase the Emperor used in announcing surrender, ‘accepted the impossible.’ Why then did these people not set their national house in order? Under the terms of occupation, they were given the opportunity to do it; there was no village-by-village foreign occupation and the administration of affairs was in their hands. The whole nation seemed to smile and wave greeting rather than to manage their affairs. Yet this was the same nation which had accomplished miracles of rehabilitation in the early days of Meiji, which had prepared for military conquest with such energy in the nineteen-thirties and whose soldiers had fought with such abandon, island by island, throughout the Pacific.

They are indeed the same people. They are reacting in character. The swing of mood that is natural to them is between intense effort and a lassitude that is sheer marking time. The Japanese at the present moment are chiefly conscious of defending their good name in defeat and they feel they can do this by being friendly. As a corollary, many feel they can do it most safely by being dependent. And it is an easy step to feeling that effort is suspect and that it is better to mark time. Lassitude spreads.

Yet the Japanese do not enjoy ennui. To ‘rouse oneself from lassitude,’ to ‘rouse others from lassitude’ is a constant call to the better life in Japan, and it was often on the lips of their broadcasters even in wartime. They campaign against their passivity in their own way. Their newspapers in the spring of 1946 keep talking about what a blot it is on the honor of Japan that ‘with the eyes of the whole world upon us,’ they have not cleaned up the shambles of bombing and have not got certain public utilities into operation. They complain about the lassitude of the homeless families who congregate to sleep at night in the railway stations where the Americans see them in their misery. The Japanese understand such appeals to their good name. They hope too that as a nation they will be able to put forward utmost efforts again in the future to work for a respected place in the United Nations Organization. That would be working for honor again, but in a new direction. If there is peace among the Great Powers in the future, Japan could take this road to self-respect.

For in Japan the constant goal is honor. It is necessary to command respect. The means one uses to that end are tools one takes up and then lays aside as circumstances dictate. When situations change, the Japanese can change their bearings and set themselves on a new course. Changing does not appear to them the moral issue that it does to Westerners. We go in for ‘principles,’ for convictions on ideological matters. When we lose, we are still of the same mind. Defeated Europeans everywhere banded together in underground movements. Except for a few diehards, the Japanese do not need to organize resistance movements and underground opposition to the occupying forces of the American Army. They feel no moral necessity to hold to the old line. From the first months, single Americans traveled safely on the sardine-packed trams to out-of-the-way corners of the country and were greeted with courtesy by erstwhile nationalistic officials. There have been no vendettas. When our jeeps drive through the villages the roads are lined with children shouting ‘Hello’ and ‘Good-bye,’ and the mother waves her baby’s hand to the American soldier when he is too small to do it by himself.

This right-about-face of the Japanese in defeat is hard for Americans to take at face value. It is nothing we could do. It is even harder for us to understand than the change of attitude in their prisoners of war in our internment camps. For the prisoners regarded themselves as dead to Japan, and we judged that we really did not know what ‘dead’ men might be capable of. Very few of those Westerners who knew Japan predicted that the same change of front characteristic of the prisoners of war might be found in Japan, too, after the defeat. Most of them believed that Japan ‘knew only victory or defeat,’ and that defeat would be in her eyes an insult to be avenged by continued desperate violence. Some believed that the national characteristics of the Japanese forbade their acceptance of any terms of peace. Such students of Japan had not understood giri. They had singled out, from among all the alternative procedures that give one an honorable name, the one conspicuous traditional technique of vengeance and aggression. They did not allow for the Japanese habit of taking another tack. They confused Japanese ethics of aggression with European forms, according to which any person or nation who fights has first to be convinced of the eternal righteousness of its cause and draw strength from reservoirs of hatred or of moral indignation.

The Japanese derive their aggression in a different way. They need terribly to be respected in the world. They saw that military might had earned respect for great nations and they embarked on a course to equal them. They had to out-Herod Herod because their resources were slight and their technology was primitive. When they failed in their great effort, it meant to them that aggression was not the road to honor after all. Giri had always meant equally the use of aggression or the observance of respect relations, and in defeat the Japanese turned from one to the other, apparently with no sense of psychic violence to themselves. The goal is still their good name.

Japan has behaved in similar fashion on other occasions in her history and it has always been confusing to Westerners. The curtain had hardly risen after Japan’s long feudal isolation when in 1862 an Englishman named Richardson was murdered in Satsuma. The fief of Satsuma was a hotbed of agitation against the white barbarians, and Satsuma samurai were known as the most arrogant and warlike of all Japan. The British sent a punitive expedition and bombarded Kagoshima, an important Satsuma port. The Japanese had made firearms all through the Tokugawa Era, but they were copied from antique Portuguese guns, and Kagoshima was of course no match for British warships. The consequences of this bombardment, however, were surprising. Satsuma, instead of vowing eternal vengeance upon the British, sought British friendship. They had seen the greatness of their opponents and they sought to learn from them. They entered into trade relations with them and in the following year they established a college in Satsuma where, as a contemporary Japanese wrote, ‘The mysteries of Occidental science and learning were taught. . . . The friendship which had sprung out of the Namamuga Affair continued to grow.’^[5] The Namamuga Affair was Britain’s punitive expedition against them and the bombardment of their port.

This was not an isolated case. The other fief which vied with Satsuma as the most warlike and virulent haters of foreigners was Choshu. Both fiefs were leaders in fomenting the restoration of the Emperor. The officially powerless court of the Emperor issued an imperial rescript naming the date of May 11, 1863, at which time the Shogun was directed to have expelled all barbarians from the soil of Japan. The Shogunate ignored the order but not Choshu. It opened fire from its forts upon Western merchant ships passing off its coast through the Strait of Shimonoseki. The Japanese guns and ammunition were too primitive to injure the ships but to teach Choshu a lesson an international Western war squadron soon demolished the forts. The same strange consequences of bombardment followed as in Satsuma, and this in spite of the fact that the Western powers demanded an indemnity of three million dollars. As Norman says of the Satsuma and Choshu incidents, ‘Whatever the complexity of motive behind the volte-face executed by these leading anti-foreign clans, one cannot but respect the realism and equanimity which this action attests.’^[6]

This kind of situational realism is the bright face of Japanese giri-to-one’s-name. Like the moon, giri has its bright face and its dark face. It was its dark aspect which made Japan take events like the American Exclusion Act and the Naval Parity Treaty as such extravagant national insults and which goaded her to her disastrous war program. It is its bright aspect which made possible the good will with which she accepted the consequences of surrender in 1945. Japan is still acting in character.

Modern Japanese writers and publicists have made a selection from among the obligations of giri and presented them to Westerners as the cult of bushido, literally The Way of the Samurai. This has been misleading for several reasons. Bushido is a modern official term which has not the deep folk-feeling behind it that ‘cornered with giri,’ ‘merely for giri,’ ‘working strongly for giri’ have in Japan. Nor does it cover the complexities and the ambivalences of giri. It is a publicist’s inspiration. Besides, it became a slogan of the nationalists and militarists and the concept is discredited with the discrediting of those leaders. That will by no means mean that the Japanese will no longer ‘know giri.’ It is more important than ever for Westerners to understand what giri means in Japan. The identification of bushido with the Samurai was also a source of misunderstanding. Giri is a virtue common to all classes. Like all other obligations and disciplines in Japan giri is ‘heavier’ as one goes up the social scale but it is required at all levels of society. At least the Japanese think it is heavier for the samurai. A non-Japanese observer is just as likely to feel that giri requires most of the common people because the rewards for conforming seem to him less. To the Japanese it is sufficient reward to be respected in his world and ‘a man who does not know giri’ is still a ‘miserable wretch.’ He is scorned and ostracized by his fellows.

The Circle of Human Feelings

An Ethical Code like Japan’s, which requires such extreme repayment of obligations and such drastic renunciations, might consistently have branded personal desire as an evil to be rooted out from the human breast. This is the classical Buddhist doctrine and it is therefore doubly surprising that the Japanese code is so hospitable to the pleasures of the five senses. In spite of the fact that Japan is one of the great Buddhist nations of the world, her ethics at this point contrast sharply with the teachings of Gautama Buddha and of the holy books of Buddhism. The Japanese do not condemn self-gratification. They are not Puritans. They consider physical pleasures good and worthy of cultivation. They are sought and valued. Nevertheless, they have to be kept in their place. They must not intrude upon the serious affairs of life.

Such a code keeps life at a particularly high tension. A Hindu finds it far easier to see these consequences of Japanese acceptance of the pleasures of the senses than an American does. Americans do not believe that pleasures have to be learned; a man may refuse to indulge in sensual pleasures, but he is resisting a known temptation. Pleasures, however, are learned much as duties are. In many cultures the pleasures themselves are not taught and it therefore becomes particularly easy for people to devote themselves to self-sacrificing duty. Even physical attraction between men and women has sometimes been minimized till it hardly threatens the smooth course of family life, which in such countries is based on quite other considerations. The Japanese make life hard for themselves by cultivating physical pleasures and then setting up a code in which these pleasures are the very things which must not be indulged as a serious way of life. They cultivate the pleasures of the flesh like fine arts, and then, when they are fully savored, they sacrifice them to duty.

One of the best loved minor pleasures of the body in Japan is the hot bath. For the poorest rice farmer and the meanest servant, just as much as for the rich aristocrat, the daily soak in superlatively heated water is a part of the routine of every late afternoon. The commonest tub is a wooden barrel with a charcoal fire under it to keep the water heated to 110 degrees Fahrenheit and over. People wash and rinse themselves all over before they get into the tub and then give themselves over to their enjoyment of the warmth and relaxation of soaking. They sit in the bath with their knees drawn up in fetal position, the water up to their chins. They value the daily bath for cleanliness’ sake as Americans do, but they add to this value a fine art of passive indulgence which is hard to duplicate in the bathing habits of the rest of the world. The older one is, they say, the more it grows on one.

There are all sorts of ways of minimizing the cost and trouble of providing these baths, but baths they must have. In the cities and towns there are great public baths like swimming pools where one may go and soak and visit with one’s chance neighbor in the water. In the farm villages several women will take turns preparing the bath in the yard—it is no part of Japanese modesty to avoid the public gaze while bathing—and their families will use it in turn. Always any family even in fine homes go into the family tub in strict succession: the guest, the grandfather, the father, the eldest son and so on down to the lowest servant of the family. They come out lobster-red, and the family gathers together to enjoy the most relaxed hour of the day before the evening meal.

Just as the hot bath is so keenly appreciated a pleasure, so ‘hardening oneself’ traditionally included the most excessive routine of cold douches. This routine is often called ‘winter exercises’ or ‘the cold austerity’ and is still done, but not in the old traditional form. That called for going out before dawn to sit under waterfalls of cold mountain streams. Even pouring freezing water over oneself on winter nights in their unheated Japanese houses is no slight austerity and Percival Lowell describes the custom as it existed in the eighteen-nineties. Men who aspired to special powers of curing or prophecy—but who did not then become priests—practiced the cold-austerity before they went to bed and rose again at two A.M. to do it again at the hour when ‘the gods were bathing.’ They repeated when they rose in the morning and again at midday and at nightfall.^[1] The before-dawn austerity was particularly popular with people who were merely in earnest about learning to play a musical instrument or to prepare for some other secular career. To harden oneself, one may expose oneself to any cold and it is regarded as particularly virtuous for children practicing calligraphy to finish their practice periods with their fingers numbed and chilblained. Modern elementary schools are unheated and a great virtue is made of this for it hardens the children for later difficulties of life. Westerners have been more impressed with the constant colds and snotty noses which the custom certainly does nothing to prevent.

Sleeping is another favored indulgence. It is one of the most accomplished arts of the Japanese. They sleep with complete relaxation, in any position, and under circumstances we regard as sheer impossibilities. This has surprised many Western students of the Japanese. Americans make insomnia almost a synonym for psychic tenseness, and according to our standards there are high tensions in the Japanese character. But they make child’s play of good sleeping. They go to bed early, too, and it is hard to find another Oriental nation that does that. The villagers, all asleep shortly after nightfall, are not following our maxim of storing up energy for the morrow for they do not have that kind of calculus. One Westerner, who knew them well, wrote: ‘When one goes to Japan one must cease to believe that it is a bounden duty to prepare for work tomorrow by sleep and rest tonight. One is to consider sleep apart from questions of recuperation, rest and recreation.’ It should stand, just as a proposal to work should, too, ‘on its own legs, having no reference to any known fact of life or death.’^[2] Americans are used to rating sleeping as something one does to keep up one’s strength and the first thought of most of us when we wake up in the morning is to calculate how many hours we slept that night. The length of our slumbers tells us how much energy and efficiency we will have that day. The Japanese sleep for other reasons. They like sleeping and when the coast is clear they gladly go to sleep.

By the same token they are ruthless in sacrificing sleep. A student preparing for examinations works night and day, uncurbed by any notion that sleep would equip him better for the test. In Army training, sleep is simply something to sacrifice to discipline. Colonel Harold Doud, attached to the Japanese Army from 1934 to 1935, tells of his conversation with a Captain Teshima. During peacetime maneuvers the troops ‘twice went three days and two nights without sleep except what could be snatched during ten-minute halts and brief lulls in the situation. Sometimes the men slept while walking. Our junior lieutenant caused much amusement by marching squarely into a lumber pile on the side of the road while sound asleep.’ When camp was finally struck, still no one got a chance to sleep; they were all assigned to outpost and patrol duty. ‘ “But why not let some of them sleep?” I asked. “Oh no!” he said. “That is not necessary. They already know how to sleep. They need training in how to stay awake.” ’^[3] That puts the Japanese view in a nutshell.

Eating, like warmth and sleeping, is both a relaxation freely enjoyed as pleasure, and a discipline imposed for hardening. As a ritual of leisure the Japanese indulge in endless course meals at which one teaspoonful of food is brought in at a time and the food is praised as much for its looks as for its flavor. But otherwise discipline is stressed. ‘Quick eating, quick defecating, those together make one of the highest Japanese virtues,’ Eckstein quotes a Japanese villager as saying.^[4] ‘Eating is not regarded as an act of any importance. . . . Eating is necessary to sustain life, therefore it should be as brief a business as possible. Children, especially boys, are not as in Europe, urged to eat slowly but are encouraged to eat as quickly as possible’ (italics mine).^[5] In the monasteries of the Buddhist faith where priests are under discipline, they ask in their grace before meals that they may remember that food is just a medicine; the idea is that those who are hardening themselves should ignore food as a pleasure and regard it only as a necessity.

According to Japanese ideas, involuntary deprivation of food is an especially good test of how ‘hardened’ one is. Like foregoing warmth and sleeping, so, too, being without food is a chance to demonstrate that one can ‘take it,’ and, like the samurai, ‘hold a toothpick between one’s teeth.’ If one meets this test when one goes without food, one’s strength is raised by one’s victory of the spirit, not lowered by the lack of calories and vitamins. The Japanese do not recognize the one-to-one correspondence which Americans postulate between body nourishment and body strength. Therefore, Radio Tokyo could tell people in raid shelters during the war that calisthenics would make hungry people strong and vigorous again.

Romantic love is another ‘human feeling’ which the Japanese cultivate. It is thoroughly at home in Japan, no matter how much it runs counter to their forms of marriage and their obligations to the family. Their novels are full of it, and, as in French literature, the principals are already married. Double love-suicides are favorite themes in reading and conversation. The tenth century Tale of Genji is as elaborate a novel of romantic love as any great novel any country in the world has ever produced, and tales of the loves of the lords and the samurai of the feudal period are of this same romantic sort. It is a chief theme of their contemporary novels. The contrast with Chinese literature is very great. The Chinese save themselves a great deal of trouble by underplaying romantic love and erotic pleasures, and their family life has consequently a remarkably even tenor.

Americans can, of course, understand the Japanese better than they can the Chinese on this score but this understanding nevertheless goes only a little way. We have many taboos on erotic pleasure which the Japanese do not have. It is an area about which they are not moralistic and we are. Sex, like any other ‘human feeling,’ they regard as thoroughly good in its minor place in life. There is nothing evil about ‘human feelings’ and therefore no need to be moralistic about sex pleasures. They still comment upon the fact that Americans and British consider pornographic some of their cherished books of pictures and see the Yoshiwara—the district of geisha girls and prostitutes—in such a lurid light. The Japanese, even during early years of Western contact, were very sensitive about this foreign criticism and passed laws to bring their practices more nearly into conformity with Western standards. But no legal regulations have been able to bridge the cultural differences.

Educated Japanese are thoroughly aware that English and Americans see immorality and obscenity where they do not, but they are not as conscious of the chasm between our conventional attitudes and their tenet that ‘human feelings’ should not intrude upon serious affairs of life. It is, however, a major source of our difficulty in understanding Japanese attitudes about love and erotic pleasure. They fence off one province which belongs to the wife from another which belongs to erotic pleasure. Both provinces are equally open and aboveboard. The two are not divided from each other as in American life by the fact that one is what a man admits to the public and the other is surreptitious. They are separate because one is in the circle of a man’s major obligations and the other in the circle of minor relaxation. This way of mapping out ‘proper place’ to each area makes the two as separate for the ideal father of a family as it does for the man about town. The Japanese set up no ideal, as we do in the United States, which pictures love and marriage as one and the same thing. We approve of love just in proportion as it is the basis of one’s choice of a spouse. ‘Being in love’ is our most approved reason for marriage. After marriage a husband’s physical attraction to another woman is humiliating to his wife because he bestows elsewhere something that rightly belongs to her. The Japanese judge differently. In the choice of a spouse the young man should bow to his parent’s choice and marry blind. He must observe great formality in his relations with his wife. Even in the give and take of family life their children do not see an erotically affectionate gesture pass between them. ‘The real aim of marriage is regarded in this country,’ as a contemporary Japanese says in one of their magazines, ‘as the procreation of children and thereby to assure the continuity of the family life. Any purpose other than this must simply serve to pervert the true meaning of it.’

But this does not mean that a man remains virtuous by limiting himself to such a life. If he can afford it he keeps a mistress. In strong contrast to China he does not add to his family this woman who has caught his fancy. If he did that, it would confuse the two areas of life which should be kept separate. The girl may be a geisha, highly trained in music and dance and massage and the arts of entertainment, or she may be a prostitute. In any case he signs a contract with the house where she is employed and this contract protects the girl from abandonment and ensures her a financial return. He sets her up in an establishment of her own. Only in highly exceptional cases when the girl has a child whom the man wishes to bring up with his own children does he bring her into his home, and then she is designated as one of the servants, not as a concubine. The child calls the legal wife ‘mother,’ and ties between the real mother and her child are not acknowledged. The whole Oriental arrangement of polygamy, which is so pronounced a traditional pattern in China, is thus quite un-Japanese. The Japanese keep family obligations and ‘human feelings’ even spatially apart.

Only the upper-class can afford to keep mistresses, but most men have at some time visited geishas or prostitutes. Such visits are not in the least surreptitious. A man’s wife may dress and prepare him for his evening of relaxation. The house he visits may send the bill to his wife and she pays it as a matter of course. She may be unhappy about it but that is her own affair. A visit to the geisha house is more expensive than a visit to a prostitute but the payment a man makes for the privilege of such an evening does not include the right to make her a sexual partner. What he gets is the pleasure of being entertained by beautifully dressed and punctiliously mannered girls who have been meticulously trained for their rôle. To gain access to a particular geisha, the man would have to become her patron and sign a contract according to which she would become his mistress, or he would have to captivate her by his charms so that she gave herself to him of her own free will. An evening with geisha girls, however, is no asexual affair. Their dances, their repartee, their songs, their gestures are traditionally suggestive and carefully calculated to express all that an upper-class wife’s may not. They are ‘in the circle of human feelings’ and give relief from ‘the circle of ko.’ There is no reason not to indulge oneself but the two spheres belong apart.

Prostitutes live in licensed houses, and after an evening with a geisha a man may visit a prostitute if he wishes. The fee is low and men with little money have to content themselves with this form of relaxation and forego geishas. The pictures of the girls of the house are displayed outside and men commonly spend a long time quite publicly studying the pictures and making their choices. These girls have a low status and they are not put on a pinnacle as the geishas are. They are most of them daughters of the poor who have been sold to the establishment by their families when they were hard-pressed for money, and they are not trained in geisha arts of entertainment. In earlier days, before Japan realized Western disapproval of the custom and ended it, the girls themselves used to sit in public showing their impassive faces to customers choosing their human wares. Their photographs are a substitution.

One of these girls may be chosen by a man who becomes her exclusive patron and sets her up as a mistress after making a contract with the house. Such girls are protected by the terms of the agreement. A man may, however, take a servant girl or salesgirl as a mistress without signing a contract and these ‘voluntary mistresses’ are the ones who are most defenseless. They are precisely those girls who are most likely to have been in love with their partners, but they are outside all the recognized circles of obligation. When the Japanese read our tales and poems of young mourning women ‘with my baby on my knee’ abandoned by their lovers, they identify these mothers of illegitimate children with their ‘voluntary mistresses.’

Homosexual indulgences are also part of traditional ‘human feelings.’ In Old Japan these were the sanctioned pleasures of men of high status such as the samurai and the priests. In the Meiji period when Japan made so many of her customs illegal in her effort to win the approval of Westerners, she ruled that this custom should be punishable by law. It still falls, however, among those ‘human feelings’ about which moralistic attitudes are inappropriate. It must be kept in its proper place and must not interfere with carrying on the family. Therefore the danger of a man or a woman’s ‘becoming’ a homosexual, as the Western phrase has it, is hardly conceived, though a man can choose to become a male geisha professionally. The Japanese are especially shocked at adult passive homosexuals in the United States. Adult men in Japan would seek out boy partners, for adults consider the passive rôle to be beneath their dignity. The Japanese draw their own lines as to what a man can do and retain his self-respect, but they are not the ones we draw.

The Japanese are not moralistic about autoerotic pleasures, either. No people have ever had such paraphernalia for the purpose. In this field, too, the Japanese tried to forestall foreign condemnation by eliminating some of the more obvious publicity these objects received, but they do not themselves feel that they are instruments of evil. The strong Western attitude against masturbation, even stronger in most of Europe than in the United States, is deeply imprinted on our consciousness before we are grown up. A boy hears the whispered words that it makes a man crazy or that it makes him bald. His mother has been watchful when he was a baby, and perhaps she has made a great issue of it and physically punished him. Perhaps she tied his hands. Perhaps she told him God would punish him. Japanese babies and Japanese children do not have these experiences and as adults they cannot therefore reproduce our attitudes. Autoeroticism is a pleasure about which they feel no guilt and they think it is sufficiently controlled by assigning it to its minor place in a decorous life.

Intoxication is another of the permissible ‘human feelings.’ The Japanese consider our American total abstinence pledges as one of the strange vagaries of the Occident. So too they regard our local agitations to vote our home area dry. Drinking sake is a pleasure no man in his right mind would deny himself. But alcohol belongs among the minor relaxations and no man in his right mind, either, would become obsessed by it. According to their way of thinking one does not fear to ‘become’ a drunkard any more than one fears to ‘become’ a homosexual, and it is true that the compulsive drunkard is not a social problem in Japan. Alcohol is a pleasant relaxation and one’s family and even the public does not consider a man repulsive when he is under the influence of liquor. He is not likely to be violent and certainly nobody thinks he is going to beat up his children. A crying jag is quite common and relaxation of the strict rules of Japanese posture and gestures is universal. At urban sake parties men like to sit in each other’s laps.

Conventional Japanese strictly separate drinking from eating. As soon as a man tastes rice at a village party where sake is served it means that he has stopped drinking. He has stepped over into another ‘circle’ and he keeps them separate. At home he may have sake after his meal but he does not eat and drink at the same time. He gives himself up in turn to one or the other enjoyment.

These Japanese views on ‘human feelings’ have several consequences. It cuts the ground out from under the Occidental philosophy of two powers, the flesh and the spirit, continually fighting for supremacy in each human life. In Japanese philosophy the flesh is not evil. Enjoying its possible pleasures is no sin. The spirit and the body are not opposing forces in the universe and the Japanese carry this tenet to a logical conclusion: the world is not a battlefield between good and evil. Sir George Sansom writes: ‘Throughout their history the Japanese seem to have retained in some measure this incapacity to discern, or this reluctance to grapple with, the problem of evil.’^[6] They have in fact constantly repudiated it as a view of life. They believe that man has two souls, but they are not his good impulses fighting with his bad. They are the ‘gentle’ soul and the ‘rough’ soul and there are occasions in every man’s—and every nation’s—life when he should be ‘gentle’ and when he should be ‘rough.’ One soul is not destined for hell and one for heaven. They are both necessary and good on different occasions.

Even their gods are conspicuously good-evil in this same fashion. Their most popular god is Susanowo, ‘His Swift Impetuous Male Augustness,’ brother of the Sun Goddess, whose outrageous behavior toward his sister would in Western mythology identify him as a devil. His sister tries to throw him out of her rooms because she suspects his motives in coming to her. He behaves wantonly, scattering excrement over her dining hall where she and her followers are celebrating the ceremony of the First-fruits. He breaks down the divisions of the rice fields—a terrible offense. As worst offense of all—and most enigmatic to a Westerner—he flings into her chamber through a hole he makes in the roof a piebald horse which he ‘had flayed with a backward flaying.’ Susanowo, for all these outrages, is tried by the gods, heavily fined and banished from heaven to the Land of Darkness. But he remains a favorite god of the Japanese pantheon and he duly receives his worship. Such god-characters are common in world mythologies. In the higher ethical religions, however, they have been excluded because a philosophy of cosmic conflict between good and evil makes it more congenial to separate supernatural beings into groups as different as black and white.

The Japanese have always been extremely explicit in denying that virtue consists in fighting evil. As their philosophers and religious teachers have constantly said for centuries such a moral code is alien to Japan. They are loud in proclaiming that this proves the moral superiority of their own people. The Chinese, they say, had to have a moral code which raised jen, just and benevolent behavior, to an absolute standard, by applying which all men and acts could be found wanting if they fell short. ‘A moral code was good for the Chinese whose inferior natures required such artificial means of restraint.’ So wrote the great eighteenth century Shintoist, Motoöri, and modern Buddhist teachers and modern nationalistic leaders have written and spoken on the same theme. Human nature in Japan, they say, is naturally good and to be trusted. It does not need to fight an evil half of itself. It needs to cleanse the windows of its soul and act with appropriateness on every different occasion. If it has allowed itself to become ‘dirty,’ impurities are readily removed and man’s essential goodness shines forth again. Buddhist philosophy has gone farther in Japan than in any other nation in teaching that every man is a potential Buddha and that rules of virtue are not in the sacred writings but in what one uncovers within one’s own enlightened and innocent soul. Why should one distrust what one finds there? No evil is inherent in man’s soul. They have no theology which cries with the Psalmist, ‘Behold, I was shapen in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me.’ They teach no doctrine of the Fall of Man. ‘Human feelings’ are blessings which a man should not condemn. Neither the philosopher nor the peasant does condemn them.

To American ears such doctrines seem to lead to a philosophy of self-indulgence and license. The Japanese, however, as we have seen, define the supreme task of life as fulfilling one’s obligations. They fully accept the fact that repaying on means sacrificing one’s personal desires and pleasures. The idea that the pursuit of happiness is a serious goal of life is to them an amazing and immoral doctrine. Happiness is a relaxation in which one indulges when one can, but to dignify it as something by which the State and family should be judged is quite unthinkable. The fact that a man often suffers intensely in living up to his obligations of chu and ko and giri is no more than they expect. It makes life hard but they are prepared for that. They constantly give up pleasures which they consider in no way evil. That requires strength of will. But such strength is the most admired virtue in Japan.

It is consistent with this Japanese position that the ‘happy ending’ is so rare in their novels and plays. American popular audiences crave solutions. They want to believe that people live happily ever after. They want to know that people are rewarded for their virtue. If they must weep at the end of a play, it must be because there was a flaw in the hero’s character or because he was victimized by a bad social order. But it is far pleasanter to have everything come out happily for the hero. Japanese popular audiences sit dissolved in tears watching the hero come to his tragic end and the lovely heroine slain because of a turn of the wheel of fortune. Such plots are the high points of an evening’s entertainment. They are what people go to the theater to see. Even their modern movies are built on the theme of the sufferings of the hero and the heroine. They are in love and give up their lovers. They are happily married and one or the other commits suicide in the proper performance of his duty. The wife who has devoted herself to rescuing her husband’s career and arousing him to cultivate his great gifts as an actor hides herself in the great city on the eve of his success to free him for his new life and dies uncomplainingly in poverty on the day of his great triumph. There need be no happy ending. Pity and sympathy for the self-sacrificing hero and heroine has full right of way. Their suffering is no judgment of God upon them. It shows that they fulfilled their duty at all costs and allowed nothing—not abandonment or sickness or death—to divert them from the true path.

Their modern war films are in the same tradition. Americans who see these movies often say that they are the best pacifist propaganda they ever saw. This is a characteristic American reaction because the movies are wholly concerned with the sacrifice and suffering of war. They do not play up military parades and bands and prideful showings of fleet maneuvers or big guns. Whether they deal with the Russo-Japanese War or the China Incident, they starkly insist upon the monotonous routine of mud and marching, the sufferings of lowly fighting, the inconclusiveness of campaigns. Their curtain scenes are not victory or even banzai charges. They are overnight halts in some featureless Chinese town deep in mud. Or they show maimed, halt and blind representatives of three generations of a Japanese family, survivors of three wars. Or they show the family at home, after the death of the soldier, mourning the loss of husband and father and breadwinner and gathering themselves together to go on without him. The stirring background of Anglo-American ‘Cavalcade’ movies is all absent. They do not even dramatize the theme of rehabilitation of wounded veterans. Not even the purposes for which the war was fought are mentioned. It is enough for the Japanese audience that all the people on the screen have repaid on with everything that was in them, and these movies therefore in Japan were propaganda of the militarists. Their sponsors knew that Japanese audiences were not stirred by them to pacifism.

The Dilemma of Virtue

The Japanese View of life is just what their formulas of chu and ko and giri and jin and human feelings say it is. They see the ‘whole duty of man’ as if it were parceled out into separate provinces on a map. In their phrase, one’s life consists of ‘the circle of chu’ and ‘the circle of ko’ and ‘the circle of giri’ and ‘the circle of jin’ and ‘the circle of human feelings’ and many more. Each circle has its special detailed code and a man judges his fellows, not by ascribing to them integrated personalities, but by saying of them that ‘they do not know ko’ or ‘they do not know giri.’ Instead of accusing a man of being unjust, as an American would, they specify the circle of behavior he has not lived up to. Instead of accusing a man of being selfish or unkind, the Japanese specify the particular province within which he violated the code. They do not invoke a categorical imperative or a golden rule. Approved behavior is relative to the circle within which it appears. When a man acts ‘for ko,’ he is acting in one way; when he acts ‘merely for giri’ or ‘in the circle of jin,’ he is acting—so Westerners would judge—in quite different character. The codes, even for each ‘circle,’ are set up in such a way that, when conditions change within it, the most different behavior may be properly called for. Giri to one’s lord demanded utmost loyalty until the lord insulted his retainer; afterward no treachery was too great. Until August, 1945, chu demanded of the Japanese people that they fight to the last man against the enemy. When the Emperor changed the requirements of chu by broadcasting Japan’s capitulation, the Japanese outdid themselves in expressing their co-operation with the visitors.

This is baffling to Westerners. According to our experience, people act ‘in character.’ We separate the sheep from the goats by whether they are loyal or whether they are treacherous, whether they are co-operative or whether they are stiff-necked. We label people and expect their next behavior to be like their last. They are generous or stingy, willing or suspicious, conservative or liberal. We expect them to believe in one particular political ideology and consistently to fight the opposite ideology. In our war experience in Europe there were collaborationists and there were resistance people, and we doubted, quite rightly, that after VE-Day collaborationists would have changed their spots. In domestic controversies in the United States, we recognize, for instance, New Dealers and anti-New Dealers, and we judge that as new situations arise these two camps will continue to act in character. If individuals move from one side of the fence to the other—as when an unbeliever becomes a Catholic or a ‘red’ becomes a conservative—such a change has to be duly labeled as a conversion and a new personality built up to fit.

This Western faith in integrated behavior is of course not always justified, but it is no illusion. In most cultures, primitive or civilized, men and women picture themselves as acting as particular kinds of persons. If they are interested in power, they reckon their failures and successes in terms of others’ submission to their will. If they are interested in being loved, they are frustrated in impersonal situations. They fancy themselves as sternly just or as having an ‘artistic temperament’ or as being a good homebody. They generally achieve a Gestalt in their own characters. It brings order into human existence.

Occidentals cannot easily credit the ability of the Japanese to swing from one behavior to another without psychic cost. Such extreme possibilities are not included in our experience. Yet in Japanese life the contradictions, as they seem to us, are as deeply based in their view of life as our uniformities are in ours. It is especially important for Occidentals to recognize that the ‘circles’ into which the Japanese divide life do not include any ‘circle of evil.’ This is not to say that the Japanese do not recognize bad behavior, but they do not see human life as a stage on which forces of good contend with forces of evil. They see existence as a drama which calls for careful balancing of the claims of one ‘circle’ against another and of one course of procedure against another, each circle and each course of procedure being in itself good. If everyone followed his true instincts, everyone would be good. As we saw, they regard even Chinese moral precepts as proving that the Chinese need that kind of thing. It proves the inferiority of the Chinese. Japanese, they say, have no need of over-all ethical commandments. In Sir George Sansom’s phrase which we have already quoted, they ‘do not grapple with the problem of evil.’ According to their view, they adequately account for bad behavior by less cosmic means. Though every soul originally shines with virtue like a new sword, nevertheless, if it is not kept polished, it gets tarnished. This ‘rust of my body,’ as they phrase it, is as bad as it is on a sword. A man must give his character the same care that he would give a sword. But his bright and gleaming soul is still there under the rust and all that is necessary is to polish it up again.

This Japanese view of life makes their folktales and novels and plays seem particularly inconclusive to Westerners—unless we are able, as often happens, to recast the plot to fit our demands for consistency of character and for conflict of good and evil. But that is not the way the Japanese look at these plots. Their comment is that the hero is caught in a conflict of ‘gin against human feelings,’ ‘chu against ko,’ ‘giri against gimu.’ A hero fails because he is allowing his human feelings to obscure his obligations of giri, or he cannot pay both the debt he owes as chu and the debt he owes as ko. He cannot do right (gi) because of giri. He is cornered by giri and sacrifices his family. The conflicts so portrayed are still between obligations both of which are in themselves binding. They are both ‘good.’ The choice between them is like the choice that faces a debtor who owes too many debts. He must pay some and ignore others for the time being, but the fact that he pays one debt does not free him of the rest of his debts.

This way of viewing the hero’s life is in great contrast to the Western view. Our heroes are good precisely in that they have ‘chosen the better part,’ and are pitted against opponents who are bad. ‘Virtue triumphs,’ as we say. There should be a happy ending. The good should be rewarded. The Japanese, however, have an insatiable appetite for the story of the ‘flagrant case’ of the hero who finally settles incompatible debts to the world and to his name by choosing death as a solution. Such tales would in many cultures be stories teaching resignation to a bitter fate. But in Japan that is exactly what they are not. They are tales of initiative and ruthless determination. The heroes put forth every effort to pay some one obligation incumbent upon them, and, in so doing, they flout another obligation. But in the end they settle with the ‘circle’ they flouted.

The true national epic of Japan is the Tale of the Forty-Seven Ronin. It is not a tale that rates high in the world’s literature but the hold it has on the Japanese is incomparable. Every Japanese boy knows not only the main story but the subordinate plots of the tale. Its stories are constantly told and printed and they are retold in a popular modern movie series. The graves of the forty-seven have been for generations a favorite pilgrimage where thousands went to pay tribute. They left their visiting cards, too, and the ground around the graves was often white with them.

The theme of the Forty-Seven Ronin centers around giri to one’s lord. As the Japanese see it, it portrays the conflicts of giri with chu, of giri with righteousness—in which giri is of course virtuously triumphant,—and of ‘merely giri’ with limitless giri. It is an historical tale of 1703, the great days of feudalism when men were men, according to the modern Japanese daydream, and there was no ‘unwillingness’ in giri. The forty-seven heroes offer up everything to it, their reputations, their fathers, their wives, their sisters, their righteousness (gi). Finally they offer up to chu their own lives, dying by their own hands.

The Lord Asano was appointed by the Shogunate as one of two daimyo in charge of the ceremony at which all the daimyo made their periodical obeisance to the Shogun. The two masters of ceremonies were provincial lords and therefore they had to apply for instructions in required etiquette to a very great daimyo of the Court, the Lord Kira. Unfortunately Lord Asano’s wisest retainer, Oishi—the hero of the tale—who would have counseled him prudently, was away in the home province and Asano was naïve enough not to arrange to pay a sufficient ‘gift’ to his great instructor. The retainers of the other daimyo who was being instructed by Kira were men of the world and showered the teacher with rich gifts. The Lord Kira therefore instructed Lord Asano with bad grace and purposely described to him an entirely wrong costume for his wear at the ceremony. The Lord Asano appeared thus clad on the great day and when he realized the insult put upon him he drew his sword and wounded Kira on the forehead before they could be separated. It was his virtue as a man of honor—his giri to his name—to avenge Kira’s insult but it was against his chu to draw his sword in the Shogun’s palace. The Lord Asano had conducted himself virtuously in giri to his name but he could only come to terms with chu by killing himself according to the rules of seppuku. He retired to his house and dressed himself for the ordeal, waiting only for the return of his wisest and most faithful retainer Oishi. When they had exchanged a long look of farewell, Lord Asano, having seated himself in required fashion, thrust his sword into his belly and died by his own hand. No relative being willing to succeed to the place of the dead lord who had violated chu and incurred the displeasure of the Shogunate, Asano’s fief was confiscated and his retainers became masterless ronin.

According to the obligations of giri, Asano’s samurai retainers owed it to their dead master to commit seppuku as he had done. If in giri to their lord they did what he had done in giri to his name, this would voice their protest against Kira’s insult to their lord. But Oishi was secretly determined that seppuku was too small an act by which to express their giri. They must complete the vengeance their own lord had been unable to carry through when retainers separated him from his high-placed enemy. They must kill Lord Kira. But this could only be accomplished by violating chu. Lord Kira was too near to the Shogunate to make it possible for the ronin to get official permission from the State to carry out their revenge. In more usual cases, any group contemplating vengeance registered their plan with the Shogunate, stating the final date before which they would complete the act or abandon the enterprise. This arrangement allowed certain fortunate people to reconcile chu and giri. Oishi knew that this course was not open to him and his fellows. He therefore called together the ronin who had been Asano’s samurai retainers but he spoke no word of his plan of killing Kira. There were more than three hundred of these ronin and, as the story was taught in Japanese schools in 1940, they all agreed to commit seppuku. Oishi knew, however, that not all of them had unlimited giri—in the Japanese phrase, ‘giri plus sincerity’—and could therefore be trusted in the dangerous exploit of a vendetta against Kira. To separate those with ‘merely’ giri from those with giri plus sincerity he used the test of how they were to divide their lord’s personal income. In Japanese eyes this was as much of a test as if they had not already agreed to commit suicide; their families would benefit. There was violent disagreement among the ronin about the basis of the division of property. The chief steward was the highest paid of the retainers and he led the faction which wanted the income divided according to previous salary. Oishi led the faction which wanted it divided equally among them all. As soon as it was well established which ones of the ronin had ‘merely’ giri, Oishi agreed to the chief steward’s plan for partition of the estate and allowed those who had won to leave the company. The chief steward left and has earned thereby the fame of being a ‘dog samurai,’ a ‘man who did not know giri,’ and a reprobate. Oishi judged only forty-seven to be strong enough in giri to be made privy to his plan of vendetta. These forty-seven who joined him pledged by that act that no good faith, no affection, no gimu should stand in the way of the completion of their vow. Giri was to be their supreme law. The forty-seven cut their fingers and joined in a blood compact.

Their first task was to throw Kira off the scent. They disbanded and pretended to be lost to all honor. Oishi frequented the lowest public-houses and engaged in undignified brawls. Under cover of this abandoned life he divorced his wife—a usual and thoroughly justified step for any Japanese who was about to run foul of the law since it kept his wife and children from being held accountable along with him in the final act. Oishi’s wife parted from him in great grief, but his son joined the ronin.

All Tokyo was speculating on the vendetta. All who respected the ronin were of course convinced that they would attempt to kill Lord Kira. But the forty-seven disclaimed any such intention. They pretended to be men who ‘did not know giri.’ Their fathers-in-law, outraged at such dishonorable conduct, turned them out of their homes and dissolved their marriages. Their friends ridiculed them. One day a close friend met Oishi drunk and reveling with women, and even to him Oishi denied his giri to his lord. ‘Revenge?’ he said. ‘It is silly. One should enjoy life. Nothing is better than to drink and play around.’ His friend disbelieved him, and pulled Oishi’s sword out of its sheath, expecting its shining brilliance to disprove what its owner had said. But the sword was rusted. He was forced to believe and in the open street he kicked and spat upon the drunken Oishi.

One of the ronin, needing money to cover his part in the vendetta, had his wife sold as a prostitute. Her brother, also one of the ronin, discovered that knowledge of the vendetta had come into her hands and proposed to kill her with his own sword, arguing that with this proof of his loyalty Oishi would enroll him among the avengers. Another ronin killed his father-in-law. Another sent his sister to serve as maid and concubine to Lord Kira himself so that the ronin might have advice from inside the palace telling them when to attack; this act made it inevitable that she should commit suicide when vengeance was accomplished, for she had to clear herself by death of the fault of having appeared to be on the side of Lord Kira.

On a snowy night, December fourteenth, Kira held a sake party and the guards were drunk. The ronin raided the stronghold, overcame the guards, and went straight to Lord Kira’s bedroom. He was not there, but his bed was still warm. The ronin knew he was hiding somewhere in the enclosure. At last they discovered a man crouched in an outhouse used for storing charcoal. One of the ronin drove his spear through a wall of the hut, but when he withdrew it there was no blood upon it. The spear had indeed pierced Kira, but as it was withdrawn he had wiped off the blood with his kimono sleeve. His trick was of no avail. The ronin forced him to come out. He claimed, however, that he was not Kira; he was only the chief steward. At this point one of the forty-seven remembered the wound their Lord Asano had given Kira in the Shogun’s palace. By this scar they identified him and demanded his immediate seppuku. He refused—which proved of course that he was a coward. With the sword their own Lord Asano had used in his seppuku, they cut off his head, ceremonially washed it, and having finished their work, set off in procession to carry the doubly bloodied sword and the severed head to Asano’s grave.

All Tokyo was filled with enthusiasm for the deed of the ronin. Their families and fathers-in-law who had doubted them rushed to embrace them and to do obeisance. Great lords urged hospitality upon them along the way. They proceeded to the grave and placed there not only the head and the sword but a written address to their lord which is still preserved.

Their giri was paid. They had still to pay their chu. Only in their death could the two coincide. They had broken the State rule against undeclared vendetta but they were not in revolt against chu. Whatever was demanded of them in the name of chu they must fulfill. The Shogunate ruled that the forty-seven should commit seppuku. As fifth-grade children’s Japanese Readers say:

That is, in killing themselves with their own hands the ronin paid the supreme debt both to giri and to gimu.

This national epic of Japan varies somewhat in different versions. In the modern movie version, the bribery theme at the outset is changed to a sex theme: Lord Kira is discovered making advances to Asano’s wife, and because of his attraction to her he humiliates Asano by giving him false instructions. Bribery is thus eliminated. But all the obligations of giri are told in blood-curdling detail. ‘For giri they forsook their wives, parted with their children and lost (killed) their parents.’

The theme of the conflict between gimu and giri is the basis of many other tales and movies. One of the best historical movies is placed in the time of the third Tokugawa Shogun. This Shogun had been named to his office when he was a young and untried man, and his courtiers were divided among themselves about the succession, some of them supporting a near relative of the same age. One of the defeated daimyo nursed this ‘insult’ in his bosom in spite of the capable administration of the Third Shogun. He bided his time. At last the Shogun and his entourage notified him that they were to make a tour of certain fiefs. It was incumbent upon this daimyo to entertain the party and he seized the opportunity to even all scores and fulfill his giri to his name. His home was already a stronghold and he prepared it for the coming event so that all egress could be blocked and the stronghold sealed. Then he provided means by which the walls and ceilings could be knocked down on the heads of the Shogun and his party. His plot was staged in the grand style. His entertainment was meticulous. For the enjoyment of the Shogun he had one of his samurai dance before him and this samurai was under instructions to plunge his sword into the Shogun at the climax of the dance. In giri to his daimyo the samurai could in no wise refuse his lord’s order. His chu, however, forbade him to lift his hand against the Shogun. The dance on the screen fully portrays the conflict. He must and he must not. He almost brings himself to strike the blow but he cannot. In spite of giri, chu is too strong. The dance degenerates and the Shogun’s party becomes suspicious. They rise from their seats just as the desperate daimyo orders the demolition of the house. There is danger that the Shogun, though he has escaped the dancer’s sword, will be killed in the ruins of the stronghold. At this point the sword dancer comes forward and guides the Shogun’s party through underground passages so that they escape safely into the open. Chu has conquered giri. The Shogun’s spokesman in gratitude urges their guide to go with them in honor to Tokyo. The guide, however, looks back into the falling house. ‘It is impossible,’ he says. ‘I stay. It is my gimu and my giri.’ He turns from them and dies in the ruins. ‘In his death he satisfied both chu and giri. In death they coincided.’

The tales of olden times do not give central place to the conflict between obligations and ‘human feelings.’ In recent years it has become a principal theme. Modern novels tell of love and human kindness which have to be discarded because of gimu or giri, and this theme is played up instead of being minimized. Like their war movies, which readily seem to Westerners to be good pacifist propaganda, these novels often seem to us a plea for greater latitude to live according to the dictates of one’s own heart. They are certainly testimony to this impulse. But over and over Japanese who discuss the plot of novels or movies see a different meaning. The hero we sympathize with because he is in love or cherishes some personal ambition, they condemn as weak because he has allowed these feelings to come between him and his gimu or his giri. Westerners are likely to feel it is a sign of strength to rebel against conventions and seize happiness in spite of obstacles. But the strong, according to Japanese verdict, are those who disregard personal happiness and fulfill their obligations. Strength of character, they think, is shown in conforming not in rebelling. The plots of their novels and movies, consequently, often have quite a different meaning in Japan from that which we give to them when we see them through Western eyes.

Japanese make the same kind of appraisal when they pass judgment on their own lives or on those of people they have known. They judge that a man is weak if he pays attention to his personal desires when they conflict with the code of obligations. All kinds of situations are judged in this way, but the one which is most opposite to Western ethics concerns a man’s attitude toward his wife. His wife is only tangential to ‘the circle of ko’ but his parents are central. Therefore his duty is clear. A man of strong moral character obeys ko and accepts his mother’s decision to divorce his wife. It only makes the man ‘stronger’ if he loves his wife and if she has borne him a child. In the Japanese phrase, ‘ko may make you put your wife and children in the category of strangers.’ Then your treatment of them belongs at best in ‘the circle of jin.’ At worst they become people who have no claims upon you. Even when a marriage is happy, a wife is not centrally placed in the circles of obligations. A man should therefore not elevate his relation to her so that it seems to be on a level with his feelings toward his parents or his country. It was a popular scandal in the nineteen-thirties when a prominent liberal spoke publicly about how happy he was in returning to Japan, and mentioned reunion with his wife as one of the reasons for his pleasure. He should have spoken of his parents, of Fujiyama, of his dedication to the national mission of Japan. His wife did not belong on this level.

The Japanese themselves have shown in the modern era that they were not satisfied to leave their code of morals so heavy with emphasis on keeping different levels separate and different ‘circles’ distinct. A great part of Japanese indoctrination has been devoted to making chu supreme. Just as statesmen simplified the hierarchy by putting the Emperor at the apex and eliminating the Shogun and the feudal lords, so in the moral realm they worked to simplify the system of obligations by bringing all lower virtues under the category of chu. By this means they sought not only to unify the country under ‘Emperor worship,’ but to lessen the atomism of Japanese morals. They sought to teach that in fulfilling chu one fulfilled all other duties. They sought to make it, not one circle on a chart, but the keystone of a moral arch.

The best and most authoritative statement of this program is the Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors given by the Emperor Meiji in 1882. This Rescript and the one on Education are the true Holy Writ of Japan. Neither of the Japanese religions makes a place for holy books. Shinto has none and the cults of Japanese Buddhism either make a dogma out of disillusion with textual scriptures or substitute for them the repetition of phrases like ‘Glory to Amida’ or ‘Glory to the Lotus of the Book.’ The Meiji Rescripts of admonition, however, are true Holy Writ. They are read as sacred rituals before hushed audiences formally bowed in reverence. They are treated as torah, taken from a shrine for reading and returned with obeisance before the audience is dismissed. Men appointed to read them have killed themselves because they misread a sentence. The Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors was primarily for men in the service. They were the ones who learned it verbatim and meditated upon it quietly for ten minutes each morning. It was read to them ritually on important national holidays, when the new conscripts entered the barracks, when those left who had finished their period of training and on similar occasions. It was also taught to all boys in middle schools and continuation classes.

The Rescript for Soldiers and Sailors is a document of several pages. It is carefully arranged under headings and is clear and specific. Nevertheless, it is a strange puzzle to a Westerner. Its precepts seem to him contradictory. Goodness and virtue are held up as true goals and described in ways Westerners can appreciate. And then the Rescript warns its hearers not to be like heroes of old who died in dishonor because, ‘losing sight of the true path of public duty, they kept faith in private relations.’ This is the official translation and though it is not literal it fairly represents the words of the original. ‘You should, then,’ the Rescript continues, ‘take serious warning by these examples’ of old-time heroes.

The ‘warning’ conveyed is not intelligible without a knowledge of the Japanese map of obligations. The whole Rescript shows an official attempt to minimize giri and to elevate chu. Not once in the whole text does the word giri appear in the sense in which it is a household word in Japan. Instead of naming giri, it emphasizes that there is a Higher Law, which is chu, and a Lower Law which is ‘keeping faith in private relations.’ The Higher Law, the Rescript is at pains to prove, is sufficient to validate all the virtues. ‘Righteousness,’ it says, ‘is the fulfillment of gimu.’ A soldier filled with chu inevitably has ‘true valor’ which means ‘in daily intercourse to set gentleness first and to aim to win the love and esteem of others.’ Such precepts, if followed, the Rescript argues by implication, will suffice without invoking giri. Obligations other than gimu are Lesser Law and a man should not acknowledge them without the most careful consideration.

All this instruction about the superiority of chu to giri is written, as we have said, without mentioning giri, but every Japanese knows the phrase, ‘I could not do righteousness (gi) because of giri,’ and the Rescript paraphrases it in the words, ‘If you are convinced you cannot keep your word (your personal obligations) and fulfill righteousness . . .’ With Imperial authority it says that in such a situation a man should abandon giri, remembering that it is a Lesser Law. The Higher Law, if he obeys its precepts, will still keep him virtuous.

This Holy Writ exalting chu is a basic document in Japan. It is difficult to say, however, whether its oblique detraction of giri weakened the popular hold of this obligation. Japanese frequently quote other parts of the Rescript—‘Righteousness is the fulfillment of gimu,’ ‘If only the heart be sincere, anything can be accomplished’—to explain and justify their own and others’ acts. But, though they would often be appropriate, the admonitions against keeping faith in private relations seem seldom to come to their lips. Giri remains today a virtue with great authority and to say of a man that ‘he does not know giri’ is one of the most drastic condemnations in Japan.

Japanese ethics are not easily simplified by introducing a Higher Law. As they have so often boasted, the Japanese do not have at hand a generalized virtue to use as a touchstone of good behavior. In most cultures individuals respect themselves in proportion as they attain some virtue like good will or good husbandry or success in their enterprises. They set up as a goal some life objective like happiness or power over others or liberty or social mobility. The Japanese follow more particularistic codes. Even when they talk about Higher Law, tai setsu, whether in feudal times or in the Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors, it is only in the sense that obligations to someone high in the hierarchy should overrule obligations to someone who is lower down. They are still particularistic. To them Higher Law is not, as it has generally been to Westerners, a loyalty to loyalty, as against a loyalty to a particular person or a particular cause.

When modern Japanese have attempted to make some one moral virtue supreme over all the ‘circles,’ they have usually selected ‘sincerity.’ Count Okuma, in discussing Japanese ethics, said that sincerity (makoto) ‘is the precept of all precepts; the foundation of moral teachings can be implied in that one word. Our ancient vocabulary is void of ethical terms except for one solitary word, makoto.’^[1] Modern novelists, too, who in the early years of this century celebrated the new Western individualism, became dissatisfied with the Occidental formulas and tried to celebrate sincerity (usually magokoro) as the only true ‘doctrine.’

This moral stress on sincerity has the backing of the Rescript for Soldiers and Sailors itself. The Rescript begins with an historical prologue, a Japanese equivalent to American prologues which name Washington, Jefferson, and the Founding Fathers. In Japan this section reaches a climax by invoking on and chu:

Then follow the precepts: (1) The supreme virtue is to fulfill the obligations of chu. A soldier or sailor, however skilled, in whom chu is not strong, is a mere puppet; a body of soldiers wanting in chu is in crisis a mere rabble. ‘Therefore, neither be led astray by current opinions nor meddle in politics, but with singleness do chu, remembering that gi (righteousness) is weightier than a mountain while death is lighter than a feather.’ (2) The second injunction is to observe outward appearance and behavior, i.e., in reference to rank in the Army. ‘Regard the orders of superiors as issuing directly from Us’ and treat inferiors with consideration. (3) The third is valor. True valor is contrasted with ‘burn-blood barbaric acts’ and is defined as ‘never despising an inferior or fearing a superior. Those who thus appreciate true valor should in their daily intercourse set gentleness first and aim to win the love and esteem of others.’ (4) The fourth injunction is the warning against ‘keeping faith in private relations,’ and (5) the fifth is an admonition to be frugal. ‘If you do not make simplicity your aim, you will become effeminate and frivolous and acquire fondness for luxurious and extravagant ways; you will finally grow selfish and sordid and sink to the last degree of baseness, so that neither loyalty nor valour will avail to save you from the contempt of the world. . . . Being harassed with anxiety lest it should break out, We hereby reiterate Our warning.’

The final paragraph of the Rescript calls these five precepts ‘the Grand Way of Heaven and Earth and the universal law of humanity.’ They are ‘the soul of Our soldiers and sailors.’ And, in turn, ‘the soul’ of these five precepts ‘is sincerity. If the heart be not sincere, words and deeds, however good, are all mere outward show and all avail nothing. If only the heart be sincere, anything can be accomplished.’ The five precepts will thus be ‘easy to observe and practice.’ It is characteristically Japanese that sincerity should be tacked on at the end after all the virtues and obligations have been spelled out. The Japanese do not, as the Chinese do, base all virtues on the promptings of the benevolent heart; they first set up the code of duties and then add, at the end, the requirement that one carry these out with all one’s heart and with all one’s soul and with all one’s strength and with all one’s mind.

Sincerity has the same kind of meaning in the teachings of the great Buddhist sect of Zen. In Suzuki’s great compendium of Zen he gives a dialogue between the pupil and the Master:

Special Japanese meanings of this word ‘sincerity’ have already been referred to in passing. Makoto does not mean what sincerity does in English usage. It means both far less and far more. Westerners have always been quick to see that it means far less than it does in their language, and they have often said that when a Japanese says anyone is insincere, he means only that the other person doesn’t agree with him. There is a certain truth in this, for calling a man ‘sincere’ in Japan has no reference to whether he is acting ‘genuinely’ according to the love or hate, determination or amazement which is uppermost in his soul. The kind of approval Americans express by saying, ‘He was sincerely glad to see me,’ ‘He was sincerely pleased,’ is alien in Japan. They have a whole series of proverbial expressions casting scorn on such a ‘sincerity.’ They say derisively, ‘Behold the frog who when he opens his mouth displays his whole inside’; ‘Like a pomegranate who when it gapes its mouth shows all that’s in its heart’; it is a shame to any man to ‘blurt out his feelings’; it ‘exposes’ him. These associations with ‘sincerity’ which are so important in the United States have no place in the meaning of the word ‘sincerity’ in Japan. When the Japanese boy accused the American missionary of insincerity, it never occurred to him to consider whether the American ‘genuinely’ felt amazement at the poor lad’s plan to go to America without even a shoestring. When Japanese statesmen in the last decade accused the United States and England of insincerity—as they constantly did—they did not even think whether the Western nations were acting in ways they did not in reality feel. They were not even accusing them of being hypocrites—which would have been a minor accusation. Similarly when the Rescript for Soldiers and Sailors says ‘sincerity is the soul of these precepts,’ it does not mean that the virtue that will put all other virtues into effect is a genuineness in the soul which will make a man act and speak in conformity to his own inner promptings. It certainly does not mean that he is enjoined to be genuine, no matter how much his convictions may differ from others’.

Nevertheless makoto has its positive meanings in Japan, and since the Japanese so strongly stress the ethical rôle of this concept it is urgently necessary for Westerners to grasp the sense in which they use it. The basic Japanese sense of makoto is well illustrated in the Tale of the Forty-Seven Ronin. ‘Sincerity’ in that story is a plus sign added on to giri. ‘Giri plus makoto’ is contrasted with ‘merely giri,’ and means ‘giri as an example for ages eternal.’ In the contemporary Japanese phrase, ‘makoto is what makes it stick.’ The ‘it’ in this phrase refers, according to context, to any precept of the Japanese code or any attitude stipulated in the Japanese Spirit.

Usage in the Japanese Relocation Camps during the war was exactly parallel to that in The Forty-Seven Ronin, and it shows clearly how far the logic is extended and how opposite to American usage the meaning can become. The stock accusation of the pro-Japan Issei (American immigrants born in Japan) against the pro-United States Nisei (second-generation immigrants) was that they lacked makoto. What the Issei were saying was that these Nisei did not have that quality of the soul which made the Japanese Spirit—as officially defined in Japan during the war—‘stick.’ The Issei did not mean at all that their children’s pro-Americanism was hypocritical. Far from it, for their accusations of insincerity were only the more convinced when the Nisei volunteered for the United States Army and it was quite apparent to anybody that their support of their adopted country was prompted by a genuine enthusiasm.

A basic meaning of ‘sincerity’ as the Japanese use it, is that it is the zeal to follow the ‘road’ mapped out by the Japanese code and the Japanese Spirit. Whatever special meanings makoto has in particular contexts can always be read off as praise of some agreed-on aspects of Japanese Spirit and well-accepted guide posts on the map of virtues. Once one has accepted the fact that ‘sincerity’ does not have the American meaning it is a most useful word to note in all Japanese texts. For it almost unfailingly identifies those positive virtues the Japanese actually stress. Makoto is constantly used to praise a person who is not self-seeking. This is a reflection of the great condemnation Japanese ethics pronounces on profit-making. Profit—when it is not a natural consequence of hierarchy—is judged to be the result of exploitation, and the go-between who has turned aside to make a profit out of his job becomes the hated moneylender. He is always declared to ‘lack sincerity.’ Makoto, too, is constantly used as a term of praise for the man who is free of passion, and this mirrors Japanese ideas of self-discipline. A Japanese worthy of being called sincere, too, never verges on the danger of insulting a person he does not mean to provoke to aggression, and this mirrors their dogma that a man is responsible for the marginal consequences of his acts as well as for the act itself. Finally, only one who is makoto can ‘lead his people,’ put his skills to effective use and be free of psychic conflict. These three meanings, and a host of others, state quite simply the homogeneity of Japanese ethics; they reflect the fact that a man can be effective and unconflicted in Japan only when he is carrying out the code.

Since these are the meanings of Japanese ‘sincerity,’ this virtue, in spite of the Rescript and of Count Okuma, does not simplify Japanese ethics. It does not put a ‘foundation’ under their morality, nor give it a ‘soul.’ It is an exponent which, properly placed after any number, raises it to a higher power. A ² will square 9 or 159 or b or x, quite indifferently. And likewise makoto raises to a higher power any article in the Japanese code. It is not, as it were, a separate virtue but the enthusiasm of the zealot for his creed.

Whatever the Japanese have tried to do to their code, it remains atomistic, and the principle of virtue remains that of balancing one play, in itself good, against another play which is also in itself good. It is as if they had set up their ethics like a bridge game. The good player is the one who accepts the rules and plays within them. He distinguishes himself from the bad player because of the fact that he is disciplined in his calculations and can follow other players’ leads with full knowledge of what they mean under the rules of the game. He plays, as we say, according to Hoyle, and there are endless minutiae of which he must take account at every move. Contingencies that may come up are covered in the rules of the game and the score is agreed upon in advance. Good intentions, in the American sense, become irrelevancies.

In any language the contexts in which people speak of losing or gaining self-respect throw a flood of light on their view of life. In Japan ‘respecting yourself’ is always to show yourself the careful player. It does not mean, as it does in English usage, consciously conforming to a worthy standard of conduct—not truckling to another, not lying, not giving false testimony. In Japan self-respect (jicho) is literally ‘a self that is weighty,’ and its opposite is ‘a self that is light and floating.’ When a man says ‘You must respect yourself,’ it means, ‘You must be shrewd in estimating all the factors involved in the situation and do nothing that will arouse criticism or lessen your chances of success.’ ‘Respecting yourself’ often implies exactly the opposite behavior from that which it means in the United States. An employee says, ‘I must respect myself (jicho),’ and it means, not that he must stand on his rights, but that he must say nothing to his employers that will get him into trouble. ‘You must respect yourself’ had this same meaning, too, in political usage. It meant that a ‘person of weight’ could not respect himself if he indulged in anything so rash as ‘dangerous thoughts.’ It had no implication, as it would in the United States, that even if thoughts are dangerous a man’s self-respect requires that he think according to his own lights and his own conscience.

‘You must respect yourself’ is constantly on parents’ lips in admonishing their adolescent children, and it refers to observing proprieties and living up to other people’s expectation. A girl is thus admonished to sit without moving, her legs properly placed, and a boy to train himself and learn to watch for cues from others ‘because now is the time that will decide your future.’ When a parent says to them, ‘You did not behave as a self-respecting person should,’ it means that they are accused of an impropriety rather than of lack of courage to stand up for the right as they saw it.

A farmer who cannot meet his debt to the moneylender says of himself ‘I should have had self-respect,’ but that does not mean that he accuses himself of laziness or of fawning upon his creditor. It means that he should have foreseen the emergency and been more circumspect. A man of standing in the community says, ‘My self-respect requires this,’ and he does not mean that he must live up to certain principles of truthfulness and probity but that he must manipulate the affair with full consideration for the position of his family; he must throw the whole weight of his status into the matter.

A business executive who says of his firm ‘We must show self-respect’ means that prudence and watchfulness must be redoubled. A man discussing a necessity to avenge himself speaks of ‘revenging with self-respect,’ and this has no reference to heaping coals of fire upon the head of his enemy or to any moral rules he intends to follow; it is equivalent to saying ‘I shall exact a perfect revenge,’ i.e., one meticulously planned and taking into account every factor in the situation. Strongest phrase of all in Japanese is ‘to double self-respect with self-respect’ and that means to be circumspect to the nth degree. It means never to jump to a hasty conclusion. It means to calculate ways and means so that no more and no less effort is used than is strictly necessary to attain the goal.

All these meanings of self-respect fit the Japanese view of life as a world in which you move with great care ‘according to Hoyle.’ This way of defining self-respect does not allow a man to claim an alibi for his failure on the ground of good intentions. Each move has its consequences and one should not act without estimating them. It is quite proper to be generous, but you must foresee that the recipient of your favors will feel that he has been made ‘to wear an on.’ You must be wary. It is quite allowable to criticize another, but you must do so only if you intend to take on all the consequences of his resentment. A sneer such as the American missionary was accused of by the young artist is out of the question precisely because the missionary’s intentions were good; he did not take account of the full meaning of his move on the chessboard. It was in the Japanese view completely undisciplined.

The strong identification of circumspection with self-respect includes, therefore, watchfulness of all the cues one observes in other people’s acts, and a strong sense that other people are sitting in judgment. ‘One cultivates self-respect (one must jicho),’ they say, ‘because of society.’ ‘If there were no society one would not need to respect oneself (cultivate jicho).’ These are extreme statements of an external sanction for self-respect. They are statements which take no account of internal sanctions for proper behavior. Like the popular sayings of many nations, they exaggerate the case, for Japanese sometimes react as strongly as any Puritan to a private accumulation of guilt. But their extreme statements nevertheless point out correctly where the emphasis falls in Japan. It falls on the importance of shame rather than on the importance of guilt.

In anthropological studies of different cultures the distinction between those which rely heavily on shame and those that rely heavily on guilt is an important one. A society that inculcates absolute standards of morality and relies on men’s developing a conscience is a guilt culture by definition, but a man in such a society may, as in the United States, suffer in addition from shame when he accuses himself of gaucheries which are in no way sins. He may be exceedingly chagrined about not dressing appropriately for the occasion or about a slip of the tongue. In a culture where shame is a major sanction, people are chagrined about acts which we expect people to feel guilty about. This chagrin can be very intense and it cannot be relieved, as guilt can be, by confession and atonement. A man who has sinned can get relief by unburdening himself. This device of confession is used in our secular therapy and by many religious groups which have otherwise little in common. We know it brings relief. Where shame is the major sanction, a man does not experience relief when he makes his fault public even to a confessor. So long as his bad behavior does not ‘get out into the world’ he need not be troubled and confession appears to him merely a way of courting trouble. Shame cultures therefore do not provide for confessions, even to the gods. They have ceremonies for good luck rather than for expiation.

True shame cultures rely on external sanctions for good behavior, not, as true guilt cultures do, on an internalized conviction of sin. Shame is a reaction to other people’s criticism. A man is shamed either by being openly ridiculed and rejected or by fantasying to himself that he has been made ridiculous. In either case it is a potent sanction. But it requires an audience or at least a man’s fantasy of an audience. Guilt does not. In a nation where honor means living up to one’s own picture of oneself, a man may suffer from guilt though no man knows of his misdeed and a man’s feeling of guilt may actually be relieved by confessing his sin.

The early Puritans who settled in the United States tried to base their whole morality on guilt and all psychiatrists know what trouble contemporary Americans have with their consciences. But shame is an increasingly heavy burden in the United States and guilt is less extremely felt than in earlier generations. In the United States this is interpreted as a relaxation of morals. There is much truth in this, but that is because we do not expect shame to do the heavy work of morality. We do not harness the acute personal chagrin which accompanies shame to our fundamental system of morality.

The Japanese do. A failure to follow their explicit signposts of good behavior, a failure to balance obligations or to foresee contingencies is a shame (haji). Shame, they say, is the root of virtue. A man who is sensitive to it will carry out all the rules of good behavior. ‘A man who knows shame’ is sometimes translated ‘virtuous man,’ sometimes ‘man of honor.’ Shame has the same place of authority in Japanese ethics that ‘a clear conscience,’ ‘being right with God,’ and the avoidance of sin have in Western ethics. Logically enough, therefore, a man will not be punished in the afterlife. The Japanese—except for priests who know the Indian sutras—are quite unacquainted with the idea of reincarnation dependent upon one’s merit in this life, and—except for some well-instructed Christian converts—they do not recognize post-death reward and punishment or a heaven and a hell.

The primacy of shame in Japanese life means, as it does in any tribe or nation where shame is deeply felt, that any man watches the judgment of the public upon his deeds. He need only fantasy what their verdict will be, but he orients himself toward the verdict of others. When everybody is playing the game by the same rules and mutually supporting each other, the Japanese can be light-hearted and easy. They can play the game with fanaticism when they feel it is one which carries out the ‘mission’ of Japan. They are most vulnerable when they attempt to export their virtues into foreign lands where their own formal signposts of good behavior do not hold. They failed in their ‘good will’ mission to Greater East Asia, and the resentment many of them felt at the attitudes of Chinese and Filipinos toward them was genuine enough.

Individual Japanese, too, who have come to the United States for study or business and have not been motivated by nationalistic sentiments have often felt deeply the ‘failure’ of their careful education when they tried to live in a less rigidly charted world. Their virtues, they felt, did not export well. The point they try to make is not the universal one that it is hard for any man to change cultures. They try to say something more and they sometimes contrast the difficulties of their own adjustment to American life with the lesser difficulties of Chinese or Siamese they have known. The specific Japanese problem, as they see it, is that they have been brought up to trust in a security which depends on others’ recognition of the nuances of their observance of a code. When foreigners are oblivious of all these proprieties, the Japanese are at a loss. They cast about to find similar meticulous proprieties according to which Westerners live and when they do not find them, some speak of the anger they feel and some of how frightened they are.

No one has described these experiences in a less exacting culture better than Miss Mishima in her autobiography, My Narrow Isle.^[2] She had sought eagerly to come to an American college and she had fought down her conservative family’s unwillingness to accept the on of an American fellowship. She went to Wellesley. The teachers and the girls, she says, were wonderfully kind, but that made it, so she felt, all the more difficult. ‘My pride in perfect manneredness, a universal characteristic of the Japanese, was bitterly wounded. I was angry at myself for not knowing how to behave properly here and also at the surroundings which seemed to mock at my past training. Except for this vague but deep-rooted feeling of anger there was no emotion left in me.’ She felt herself ‘a being fallen from some other planet with senses and feelings that have no use in this other world. My Japanese training, requiring every physical movement to be elegant and every word uttered to be according to etiquette, made me extremely sensitive and self-conscious in this environment, where I was completely blind, socially speaking.’ It was two or three years before she relaxed and began to accept the kindness offered her. Americans, she decided, lived with what she calls ‘refined familiarity.’ But ‘familiarity had been killed in me as sauciness when I was three.’

Miss Mishima contrasts the Japanese girls she knew in America with the Chinese girls and her comments show how differently the United States affected them. The Chinese girls had ‘self-composure and sociableness quite absent in most Japanese girls. These upper-class Chinese girls seemed to me the most urbane creatures on earth, every one of them having a graciousness nearing regal dignity and looking as if they were the true mistresses of the world. Their fearlessness and superb self-composure, not at all disturbed even in this great civilization of machinery and speed, made a great contrast with the timidity and oversensitiveness of us Japanese girls, showing some fundamental difference in social background.’

Miss Mishima, like many other Japanese, felt as if she were an expert tennis player entered in a croquet tournament. Her own expertness just didn’t count. She felt that what she had learned did not carry over into the new environment. The discipline to which she had submitted was useless. Americans got along without it.

Once Japanese have accepted, to however small a degree, the less codified rules that govern behavior in the United States they find it difficult to imagine their being able to manage again the restrictions of their old life in Japan. Sometimes they refer to it as a lost paradise, sometimes as a ‘harness,’ sometimes as a ‘prison,’ sometimes as a ‘little pot’ that holds a dwarfed tree. As long as the roots of the miniature pine were kept to the confines of the flower pot, the result was a work of art that graced a charming garden. But once planted out in open soil, the dwarfed pine could never be put back again. They feel that they themselves are no longer possible ornaments in that Japanese garden. They could not again meet the requirements. They have experienced in its most acute form the Japanese dilemma of virtue.

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.