The Paradoxes of Japan's Cultural Identity: Modernity and Tradition in Japanese Literature, Art, Politics and Religion 9789048559763

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THE PARADOXES OF JAPAN’S CULTURAL IDENTITY: MODERNITY AND TRADITION IN JAPANESE LITERATURE, ART, POLITICS AND RELIGION

Roy Starrs

The Paradoxes of Japan’s Cultural Identity: Modernity and Tradition in Japanese Literature, Art, Politics and Religion v

By

Roy Starrs

Amsterdam University Press

Distinguished Asian Studies Scholars: Collected Writings. Volume 6 Cover design: Juan Hayward Layout: Dataworks

ISBN: 9789048559756 e-ISBN: 9789048559763 (pdf ) DOI: 10.5117/9789048559756 © Roy Starrs / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2023 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted content reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.

Contents v

Acknowledgements

vii

Foreword

ix

Introduction

xiii

Part One: Japanese Politics, Religion and Society 1. Politics and Religion in Japan

1

2. The Kojiki as Japan’s National Narrative

20

3. Prince Shōtoku and Japan’s ‘China Complex’

33

4. Japan’s Perennial New Man: The Liberal and Fascist Incarnations of Masamichi Rōyama

44

5. From Mishima to Aum: Religiopolitical Violence in Late Twentieth-Century Japan

63

Part Two: Japanese Literature and Art 6. Japanese Poetry and the Aesthetics of Disaster

101

7. In Search of the Great Meiji Novel: From Ukigumo to Yoake mae

115

8. Nation and Region in the Work of Dazai Osamu

142

9. Ink Traces of the Dancing Calligraphers: Zen-ei Sho in Japan Today

152

v

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10. Mishima, Bowie and the Anti-Metaphysics of the Mask

174

11. D.T. Suzuki’s Theory of Inspiration and the Challenges of Cross-Cultural Transmission

193

Part Three: Selected Reviews 12. Ninomiya Masayuki, La pensée de Kobayashi Hideo: Un intellectuel japonais au tournant de l’histoire

217

13. Doug Slaymaker, Confluences: Postwar France and Japan

221

14. Alex Bates, The Culture of the Quake: The Great Kantō Earthquake and Taishō Japan

228

15. Alan Tansman, The Aesthetics of Japanese Fascism

233

16. Japanese Literature as a Modern Invention: a review of Haruo Shirane and Tomi Suzuki (eds.), Inventing the Classics: Modernity, National Identity, and Japanese Literature 239 17. Haruo Shirane, Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons: Nature, Literature, and the Arts

247

18. Steven Heine and Dale S. Wright (eds.), Zen Masters

250

Bibliography of Roy Starrs Publications

257

Notes

267

Index

285

Acknowledgements v

My heartfelt thanks go first and foremost to Mr. Paul Norbury, publisher extraordinaire of books on Japan for more than half a century – an unparalleled contribution to furthering knowledge of Japan in the English-speaking world, as deservedly recognized by the Japanese government’s award to him in 2011 of their prestigious Order of the Rising Sun. Paul published my very first book, on Yukio Mishima, in 1994, and now, almost three decades later, this is the eighth book of mine he has published. Many thanks, Paul, for your continued support of my work over all these years. Many thanks also to Professor Mark Williams, great scholar of modern Japanese literature and Vice-President of the International Christian University in Tokyo, for taking time out of his busy schedule to write the Foreword to this book, and of course for his kind words therein. I would also like to express my gratitude to Otago University’s Professor Tim Cooper, Dean of the School of Arts, and Professor Jessica Palmer, Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the Humanities Division, for providing financial support for the copyediting and indexing of this manuscript, so expertly done by Dr. Karen McLean. Many thanks, Karen. Last but not least, I thank my wife Kazuko for her continued support over the decades we have spent together – oh, how quickly they have flown! Roy Starrs Dunedin, New Zealand March 4, 2022

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Foreword v

‘Modernity and Tradition in Japanese Literature, Art, Politics and Religion’: the very subtitle of this volume hints at the breadth of scholarship that Roy Starrs has brought to the table. For the majority of us who devote ourselves to the field of Japanese Studies, the trajectory is clear: years spent honing methodological, theoretical and analytical skills on a narrowly defined topic at the PhD level and the pressure to produce that first monograph lead, in so many cases, to the first book born of extensive revisions to the dissertation. Thereafter, the directions may vary: some will find themselves drawn to a position at a Liberal Arts college where the emphasis may be on developing genuine interdisciplinary breadth; others will move on to a post-doctoral post where the emphasis may well be on delving ever deeper into the subject explored in the original dissertation. And, between these, there exists a plethora of other career trajectories. Each to his or her own. And far be it for any of us to attempt to draw a template of the ideal pathway through an academic career. The most cursory glance at the Table of Contents of this majestic volume, however, offers testimony to both the breadth and depth of Roy’s academic expertise. On the one hand, the list of publications incorporated at the end of this volume is testament to the author’s ongoing – and lifelong – fascination with developments in the field of Japanese literature, especially works of the twentieth century. And it should be noted that he did begin by publishing a (doubtless somewhat revamped) version of his UBC dissertation which focused on nihilism in the novels of Mishima Yukio; and, for all the other, arguably more popular studies that had already appeared following the latter’s sensational suicide in the early 1970s, Roy’s Deadly Dialectics: Sex, Violence and Nihilism in the World of Mishima Yukio was widely praised as the first such study to treat this material through an indisputably academic lens. ix

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I well remember first encountering this work: the content was gripping and answered many of the questions I had about this controversial author. What remains with me more than the content, however, was a throw-away line on the dust jacket of the volume announcing that ‘Roy Starrs is currently working on book-length studies of two other titans of twentieth-century Japanese literature, Shiga Naoya and Kawabata Yasunari’. Both of these works appeared within the next four years. This is a considerable achievement; indeed, it is hard to think of another scholar in the field who has offered comprehensive and carefully researched studies of three such disparate authors. Both of these subsequent monographs were the first full length studies of these authors penned in English; and both remain very much the go-to references for students wishing to know more about these two indispensable literary figures of their age. These three author studies represent an invaluable resource. Equally significant, however, are the words Roy has devoted to what, as he acknowledges in his Introduction to this volume, represents the ‘bigger picture’ in all this: a consideration of the issue of Japanese nationalism and the role exercised by modernism in this particular context. In 2009, I was fortunate enough to be invited by Roy to attend his conference entitled ‘the Otago Conference on Japanese Modernism’ – and, for all the jetlag, I clearly remember an extremely focused introduction from our chair, one in which he drew together so many different strands of his work to date in a highly accessible and informative manner. The individual author studies certainly have value for their contribution to our understanding of the significance of these particular oeuvres: the contribution of what has turned out to be the second half of Roy’s career – which has led to a series of ground-breaking publications that seek to place the texts – and other activities – of these and other authors in the context of Japan’s journey towards a greater appreciation of its national identity is arguably even more significant. The scope of Roy’s engagement with twentieth-century Japan is impressive enough. What such an assessment fails to highlight, though, is the extent to which Roy has sought, at the same time, to introduce a historical perspective to his material. Another trawl through his list of publications, therefore, leaves one amazed at his familiarity with such diverse topics as Prince Shotoku (Taishi); Japan’s first recorded history, the Kojiki; and medieval renga poetry. Much is often made of the importance of contextualization of our topic. Given his familiarity

FOREWORD

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with Japanese literature of the pre-modern period, this comes naturally to a critic like Roy – and the result is a body of works that benefits immensely from the breadth of the groundwork that underpins it. At the same time, moreover, we should note that this groundwork is not limited to a wide-reaching affinity with Japan’s literary traditions. And, particularly in his more recent publications, it is the interdisciplinary scope of his publications that is most noteworthy. Culture and Disaster in Japan (a work inspired by the 2011 tsunami disaster); Politics and Religion in Modern Japan; Globalization and Nationalism in Asia … although I have to confess that I have not read them all from cover to cover, it is clear that Roy is equally at home in a number of disparate fields – and, in crossing so many traditional disciplinary boundaries, he is able to offer fresh insights not always available to those more used to working within stricter confines. Herein lies the true value of this collection. The treatises contained within these pages provide food for thought on an immensely broad spectrum of topics. At the same time, however, they challenge us as readers and scholars to move beyond the immediate object of enquiry – to consider the ‘bigger picture’. In his Introduction to this volume, Roy encapsulates the aim of his career – a career in research that has always fed so neatly into his classroom teaching – as an attempt to capture the ‘soul’ of Japan. I would suggest that a reading of any one of the essays contained within this volume – followed ideally by a trip to the library to read the fuller versions of some of his monographs – represents an excellent step along the path to capturing this enigmatic essence. Mark Williams Vice President International Christian University Tokyo, Japan

Introduction

The Paradoxes of Japan’s Cultural Identity v

1. THE JAPANESE SOUL – AND OTHER IMPONDERABLES

I landed in Japan for the first time in the early spring of 1972, just as the cherry blossoms were beginning to bloom along the Fukuoka canals. Fukuoka (of all places) became my initial experience of a Japanese city, simply because of the exigencies of air travel half a century ago. There were few nonstop long-distance flights anywhere – one had to leapfrog from one city to another, often spending a night or two at hotels along the way. Between Sydney, Australia, my starting point, and Hiroshima, my ultimate destination (where I’d been hired to teach English), I had to make four ‘fuelling stops’: at Darwin, Hong Kong, Taipei, and Fukuoka. Fukuoka then was not the hyper-active industrial port it is nowadays. It resembled more a quiet backwater with a relaxed small-town atmosphere, and its canals gave it extra charm. So, after settling in at my hotel, I enjoyed an evening stroll along a nearby canal under freshly budding blossoms that shone faintly pink in the moonlight. I began to feel I had already entered the enchanted realm of haiku poetry. Before long, however, my aesthetic reverie was interrupted when I was approached by a Japanese man a few years older than me (I was then a tender twenty-six) who stood directly in my path with the obvious intention of engaging me in unwanted conversation. Since I already had plenty of experience being approached this way in places like Tijuana, Kowloon, or the seedier areas of many North American cities, I immediately put my defences up, suspecting that he wanted to sell me something illegal, con me in some way, or perhaps get up to something even more nefarious. But, much to my relief, it turned out that all he wanted was to ask a question. And such an unexpected, xiii

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innocent question it was that half a century later I still remember it clearly. In painfully well-articulated English, he asked: ‘What do you think of the Japanese soul?’ My answer was obviously not so memorable, because I no longer remember it, but I imagine I excused myself by saying that I had only just arrived in Japan, so it was a little early for me to make any pronouncements on a matter so profound. Whatever my answer, it was certainly not intended to poke fun at his question. Like everyone else in 1972, I still believed in the Herderian notion of a ‘national soul’ – the late twentieth-century postmodern cultural theorists had not yet taught us that this was ‘essentialist nonsense’, and that ‘cultural identities’ – the word ‘soul’ of course no longer being accepted as a respectable term in academic discourse – were artificial constructs forever subject to historical change and certainly not rooted in Herder’s ‘blood and soil’. What I do remember is that I was charmed, impressed and intrigued not so much by the question itself as by the fact that Japan was a country where people would approach a foreigner and ask him such a question – rather than try to take advantage of him in all the other ways I had imagined. I may be accused of over-generalizing, but the definitive proof that this wasn’t just a ‘one-off’ came years later when I was interviewed by a Japanese professor for a job at a certain university. His first question – this time in Japanese: ‘What do you think of the Japanese soul?’ Needless to say, by that time I had grown weary of trying to answer such questions, which are of course unanswerable. But when, on that warm spring evening in Fukuoka, I first encountered the questing spirit of nihonjinron (the Japanese obsession with defining their own mentality and culture), it seemed as refreshing as the cherry blossoms that flowered overhead, and only strengthened the conviction that had motivated me to come to Japan in the first place: that there was something unique (a favourite nihonjinron word!), fascinating and valuable about this country and its culture, and that I would like to learn more about that something, whatever it was. (Could it be, perchance, the ‘Japanese soul’?) Now, after half a century of studying Japan and its culture, I wonder whether I am any more able to provide a satisfactory answer to that anonymous gentleman’s ‘unanswerable’ question? Although much of my intellectual history since 1972 has taught me to dismiss such questions as meaningless, now I am not so sure. I’m more inclined these days to think that even ‘unanswerable’ questions

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can have some value, as prods to thought if nothing else, regardless of how naïve or nonsensical they might appear. The non-academic side of my life in Japan, which included Zen kōan practice, helped to persuade me of that. I still think the Japanese professor was silly to ask me that question in the context of an academic job interview – besides, I was heavily jet-lagged, having just got off a twenty-four-hour flight from the other side of the globe, and was in no mood to wax lyrical about the ineffable mysteries of the Japanese soul! (Needless to say, I didn’t get the job.) On the other hand, the context in which the anonymous gentleman in Fukuoka asked me the same question gave it an entirely different aura in my memory – the kōan-like aura of one of those questions in an old Zen story, such as: ‘Why did Bodhidharma come from the West?’ Or: ‘What is the sound of one hand clapping?’ Or: ‘Does a dog have a Buddha nature?’ Just as with a kōan too, the very terms of the question are themselves open to question: most obviously in this case, is there indeed any such entity as a Japanese soul? And, again as with many kōan, the ‘correct’ answer may well be: yes and no, or neither yes nor no – in line with what Nishida Kitarō, the leading Japanese philosopher of the twentieth-century, called sokuhi 即非, literally ‘is and is not’, the apparently contradictory logic of Zen: A is A because A is not-A. Or, as his good friend D. T. Suzuki, the eminent scholar of Buddhism, wrote: ‘To say “A is A” is to say “A is not A”. Therefore, “A is A”’. Culture, after all, is a living thing, and like all living things it is not reducible to any single, rational definition; it exists in a realm beyond our fallible human logic, a realm of contradiction and paradox. How can we explain culture, a Zen master might ask, when we can’t even explain how we grow our fingernails? Perhaps I’m becoming a bit sentimental in my old age, but I’m tempted to say that this book is my much-delayed response to that long-ago kōanlike question – fatefully, it now seems, the first question I was ever asked on Japanese soil. Although I was incapable of answering it at the time, indeed because I was incapable of answering it, it now strikes me as the perfect question anyone could have asked me. So much so, indeed, that I have sometimes wondered, in my more fanciful moments, whether that gentleman – who, after asking his question, disappeared mysteriously into the night – might not have been a welcoming messenger from a local god, if not a local god himself – Inari the fox god perhaps, famous for assuming human form when it suits his purpose? Consequently, although the terms of the Fukuoka gentleman’s question may now seem disreputably un-academic, I think I owe it to him – or perhaps to the fox

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god Inari – to treat it respectfully, as I would a kōan newly assigned to me by a Zen master: ‘What do you think of the Japanese soul?’ The first thing I would venture to say is that, if there is a ‘Japanese soul’ – or, if you prefer, a Japanese cultural identity – it has long been built upon contradiction and paradox. The reason is simple: since Japan entered recorded history in about the sixth century C.E., it has always occupied a peripheral position in relation to a more dominant culture. Thus, one cause – in fact, I think the main cause – of the Japanese obsession with self-definition is that, although their cultural identity is strong, it is also, paradoxically, unstable. China, by contrast, has always possessed a supremely confident sense of itself as the ‘central civilization’ of East Asia, a sense so rocksolid that even on those many occasions when the Chinese body politic disintegrated – through civil war, dynastic collapse, revolution, or foreign invasion – the Chinese sense of a superior cultural identity remained undisturbed – and, indeed, conquerors such as the Mongols and the Manchus were soon persuaded to adopt that ‘superior’ culture as their own. Japan, on the other hand, has been politically far more stable – the continuity of its imperial dynasty over its entire history is the main proof of that – but its cultural identity has been far more fluid, vulnerable, and open to foreign impact. In other words, the Japanese have always had to struggle hard to create a strong, independent, and at least temporarily stable cultural identity. As the essays in this book will show, this struggle began in the time of the semi-legendary Prince Shōtoku (early seventh century C.E.) and it continues into the twentyfirst century, as evident in the public discourse of major writers such as Ōe Kenzaburō, who, in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, expressed concern at his country’s ‘ambivalent’ cultural identity, forever vacillating between the two poles of Asia and the West, as if caught in a cultural version of the whirlpool between Scylla and Charybdis. More recently Ōe has expressed his view in even more extreme terms: Our identity as Japanese has withered away. From the European and American vantage, we appear to be Japanese. But inside ourselves, who are we? What basis do we have for building our identity? …in Japan the family has come apart, and our sense of community has also disappeared. Now we have nothing but the reflection of ourselves we see in the eyes of the West. We are confused and lost. The response to that lostness is nationalism…. The state becomes a crutch for those who are no longer able to stand alone, like plastic implanted in a dysfunctional penis.1

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But it is important to remember that there is nothing new in Ōe’s professed identity crisis: from around 600 C.E. until the mid-nineteenth century, Japanese intellectuals concerned with their country’s cultural autonomy were always confronted by the question: is our culture fundamentally Chinese or Japanese? After the mid-nineteenth century opening to the West, the choices widened to: Western or Asian – or neither Western nor Asian but somehow uniquely Japanese? Those who wished to answer ‘Japanese’, such as the Tokugawa nativists or the early Shōwa nationalists, had to struggle mightily to prove it. Whole ‘nativist’ or ‘nationalist’ ideologies were constructed expressly for that purpose. The Chinese, on the other hand, were rarely if ever troubled by the uncertainties and paradoxes of such an ambiguous cultural identity – at least not until very recently. For Japanese nationalists this could make it seem like they were trapped in a terribly paradoxical double-bind: the foreign culture, whether Chinese or Western, had to be absorbed into the kokutai (national polity) for the sake of national survival and autonomy, but the more successfully it was absorbed, the more Japan began to seem like a foreign country itself: the very Japanese culture they sought to preserve seemed increasingly in danger of being lost. Thus the ongoing nationalist reactions against modernization or Westernization that were so strong in the mid-twentieth century and continue in some right-wing circles even today – in efforts to revise the ‘American-imposed’ postwar Constitution, for instance. The most prominent literary spokesman of this nationalist reaction against the postwar ‘Americanization’ of Japan was Mishima Yukio (1925–1970), the Japanese novelist I have written about more than any other. One might ask why have I returned to him so often, even though I would rate Kawabata, Tanizaki, and Natsume Sōseki more highly as novelists, and I also have a special affection for the work of Shiga Naoya? As the two Mishima chapters herein demonstrate in quite different ways, I have found both the man and his work endlessly fascinating for a number of reasons – aesthetic, psychological, philosophical, cultural, and historical. From my present ‘older’ perspective, Mishima’s writings seem to be essentially those of a young man, true to a young man’s intense, committed, passionate, and Romantic worldview. One wonders how all that might have changed if he had allowed himself to live into old age? Would the restless and reckless Romantic have gone the way of the older Goethe and turned into a more measured, dispassionate classicist? In other words, would Mishima have mellowed and acquired a new kind of wisdom, the more gentle, tolerant,

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compassionate and detached worldview of an (ideal) old man? Judging from the views he expressed about this ‘wisdom of old age’ – for instance, the way he depicts the increasing ‘decadence’ of the aging Honda, the deuteragonist character whose life links together all four novels of his final tetralogy, as opposed to the purity and idealism of the young heroes – one suspects that this is exactly what scared him: that he himself might turn into an aging Honda who would betray all the ideals of his youth. The young Mishima, so to speak, set himself up as an enemy of the old Mishima, and since, in the natural order of things, the young Mishima came first, he was able to abort or ‘murder’ his enemy, that mellowed older version of himself, while this enemy still existed only as a feared potentiality. And there is no doubt that the young Mishima took great satisfaction, amounting even to a sadomasochistic pleasure, in committing this extremely violent crime of self-murder – in the best samurai style, of course. But, for his global readership, Mishima’s suicide at the age of forty-five was one of the great tragedies of twentieth-century cultural history. He was still in vigorous good health and, prolific as he was, might have been only halfway through a career that could have produced many more mature expressions of his genius. Now all we can hope for, perhaps, is that, like Kiyoaki, his last major fictional hero, he might one day be reborn. At any rate, however Japanese writers like Ōe and Mishima may agonize over their country’s seemingly endless identity crises, ‘cultural instability’, contradiction, or ambiguity are not necessarily bad things in the long run – as Hegel argued with his ‘dialectical’ view of history (perhaps it is not surprising that his philosophy of history has been very popular in Japan, not just among Marxists but also among right-wing cultural nationalists such as Nishida’s colleagues in the ‘Kyoto School’). Regardless of the cultural anxieties of Japanese intellectuals, from the viewpoint of a foreign observer, the advantages of their predicament vis-à-vis their more culturally complacent neighbours seem obvious. In fact, I would take the Hegelian view that, for Japan, these dialectical tensions have been a source of great creative energy – like a perpetual low-burning flame that could be used at any time to ignite a new cultural or political movement. And, if one wanted to make the argument thoroughly Hegelian, one could even provide a teleological direction for Japanese history: namely, the increasing democratization of the ‘dominant’ culture of each of Japan’s historical eras, from the elite aristocratic court culture of the Heian period (794–1185) to the increasingly more widespread samurai warrior culture of the Kamakura

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and Muromachi periods (1185–1573, to the ‘middle-class’ merchant culture of the Tokugawa period (1603–1868) and, finally, culminating in the increasingly mass culture of modern Japan. The corollary to this argument, of course, is that societies or cultures without such tensions or contradictions will stagnate in a kind of passive state of cultural complacency. It could be argued that this is exactly what happened to China in recent centuries, and that this cost it the so-called ‘century of humiliation’, since it made the Middle Kingdom so resistant to learning from the West or any other foreign power. On the other hand, it was exactly the eternal ‘instability’ of Japan’s cultural identity that allowed it to adapt so quickly to the challenges presented by the newly industrialized and aggressively imperialistic nineteenth-century West. What further complicates the tension or conflict between the foreign and the native elements in Japanese culture is the fact that the foreign is often conflated with modernity, while the native is often associated with tradition – if only an imagined or invented tradition. Furthermore, the foreign/modern is often equated with the big cities – especially the new urban culture of Tokyo – while the native/traditional is often seen as rooted in the countryside or in the more remote rural regions. (I discuss this tension between mainstream Tokyo and a peripheral regional culture in the chapter herein on Dazai Osamu.) All these ideational or symbolic associations considerably intensify the dialectical conflicts in Japanese cultural history – even more so of course since the mid-nineteenth century opening to the West, although, as we shall see, these tensions were already present from the earliest period of Japanese history. This is not to say that the Japanese have never seen their own country as the source of any new or modern cultural developments. On the contrary, they rightly point with pride to the many examples of outstanding originality in traditional Japanese culture, such as the world’s first great work of psychological fiction, the Tale of Genji, or the unique and profound art of the Noh theatre, or the equally unique poetic form of haiku, or the wabi-sabi aesthetics of the tea ceremony and its related arts, which, with their roughness and rusticity, set themselves against traditional Chinese aesthetic refinement. And this is not even to mention all the dazzling achievements of Japanese modernity over the past century and a half or the contemporary cutting-edge contributions Japan makes to global culture in the twenty-first century. Nonetheless, most anti-foreign ‘return to Japan’ movements, whether political or cultural, have been construed as a return to tradition – for instance,

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the Tokugawa nativists and the wartime ‘overcoming modernity’ movement of the early 1940s. At any rate, the interplay among these closely associated dualities – foreign versus native, modern versus traditional, urban versus rural – takes many different forms and makes for a dynamic but unstable national cultural identity, and, as I have said, a continual struggle to articulate and preserve that identity. In the late nineteenth-century Meiji era, for instance, when Japan seemed in danger of being overwhelmed by a tsunami of Western cultural influence, a popular slogan was ‘kokusui hōzon’(国粋保存) or ‘preserve the national essence’, and, although there was some dispute about exactly what that national essence consisted of (for instance, was it Shintō but not Buddhist?), it was always defined in a kind of sartor resartus way, as in the reconstruction of traditional Shintō as ‘national Shintō’ or of the traditional samurai code of honour as bushidō. By using such terms as ‘Japan’s cultural identity’ rather than, in the Romantic-nationalist style of the nineteenth-century, speaking of the ‘Japanese soul’, we attempt to transform what is essentially a metaphysical concept into something more concrete and quantifiable: we can list, for instance, certain characteristics of that identity as it exists at a certain point in history, without claiming that these constitute any kind of kokusui or eternal ‘national essence’. Whether this brings us any closer to grasping the true nature of the thing in itself is of course still open to question. Even though the postmodern anti-essentialists have scoffed mightily at the essentialists in recent years, in truth neither side of the argument can offer absolute proof or certainty in support of their position. Basically what we have here is a kind of metaphysical or even theological issue. People who believe or disbelieve in the Herderian concept of a ‘national soul’ stand on similar epistemological ground to those who believe or disbelieve in God. Anti-essentialists can point to the innumerable profound changes in cultures over the centuries, but, equally, essentialists can point to certain continuities or patterns in the culture as evidence of an underlying timeless ‘national soul’ or ‘national character’ – something indefinable but nonetheless palpably present. They might, for instance, point to the fact that the very earliest Chinese visitors to Japan some two millennia ago, before Japan was a unified country or even a literate one, made statements about the character and behaviour of the people that still might easily be made by any foreign visitor today – for instance, in the History of the Kingdom of Wei (Wei Zhi, ca. 297 C.E.) that: ‘There is no theft, and litigation is infrequent’.2 How can we account for such remarkable continuities

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over such vast tracts of time and historical development? On the other hand, of course, two thousand years is far from ‘forever’, and one could argue that even certain ‘Japanese national characteristics’ that have survived that long may not survive that long into the future. And so the argument goes on, ‘essentially’ irresolvable. As a living entity, culture is, after all, something more than the sum of its parts – just as is any individual human being. The inner principle, the core dynamic, the DNA that guides a culture’s evolution cannot be defined or exhausted by any simple list of characteristics, however long. It is indeed, in this sense, a ‘metaphysical’ entity – though, arguably, it is universally human rather than uniquely national. But, whether national or universal, since this ‘X factor’ that drives cultural evolution remains indefinable, we may as well call it a ‘soul’, after all, since that word still survives in popular discourse as a marker for the indefinable core of ourselves as human beings. Indeed, the monistic worldview that pervades much of Asian culture would tell us that we are talking here ultimately of the same thing: the ‘Buddha mind’, universal intelligence or life-force that manifests itself in human cultures as much as in plants, animals, and individual human beings. 2. MY CIRCUITOUS ROUTE TO JAPAN STUDIES

We are all creatures of our time and place, as Hegel also tells us, and I am no exception. Had I been born in the U.K. a few decades earlier, probably I would have never left, and may well have spent my life, like my ancestors, in a Scottish coalmine or a Warwickshire farm-field. But I was born in 1946, into an England exhausted by war, where food was strictly rationed and we children would visit the local police station for a free pair of boots. And so I joined – tagging along with my parents of course – the wave of postwar British migration to ‘the colonies’, those sunlit lands of opportunity. Sunlit indeed – the colony my father first chose was Jamaica. I remember my whole family was excited by this prospect and kept singing a popular song of the day, Edmundo Ros and his Rumba Band’s ‘Take Me to Jamaica Where the Rum Comes From’. My Scottish father was a professional chef, trained at London’s Dorchester Hotel, and probably planned to cater for tourists – but for some reason he ultimately decided on a more conservative – and far less sunlit – option: Canada. I sometimes wonder what career I might have pursued as a Jamaican? It’s hard to imagine, but more likely a chef like my father or a hotel bartender or even a reggae musician than a

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Japanologist. But, as the twists and turns of fate would have it, after a few years in Montreal, we ended up on the West Coast of North America, living mainly in Vancouver and Los Angeles, where the Asian cultural influence was already growing strong in the 1950s and 60s. My first contact with Japanese culture was as a twelve-year-old student of judo in Vancouver’s Japan Town – sadly, I never progressed beyond white belt. A few years later I got interested in Zen practice after reading Philip Kapleau’s The Three Pillars of Zen (1965). This was a remarkably influential book at that time which inspired many members of my generation to try Zen practice, hoping to attain the ever-elusive satori, which Kapleau seemed to promise was, with a little effort, within everyone’s grasp. My first direct experience of Zen training was as a student of the Rinzai Zen master Sasaki Jōshū Rōshi (1907–2014), a pioneer in bringing Zen to the West, later celebrated in Leonard Cohen’s poems and other writings. Over a number of years, I attended Sasaki Rōshi’s seishin or week-long meditation retreats in Vancouver, Oregon and Los Angeles, and ‘passed’ a number of kōan under his tutelage. He eventually lived until the grand old age of 107, but when I knew him he was still middle-aged and seemed the perfect embodiment of a traditional Zen master, a tremendously energetic, witty and charismatic teacher. All the more disappointing then that, decades after I had studied with him, complaints began to emerge from his former female students about his continual sexual harassment and exploitation of them. Needless to say, there can be no excuse for this kind of behaviour – although some of his more gullible male students claimed it was all part of the master’s unorthodox ‘Zen’ teaching methods. How convenient! In fact, it’s hard to imagine a more egregious abuse of power. Unfortunately, it turned out that Sasaki wasn’t alone: this scandalous behaviour was all-too-common among that first generation of Zen ‘masters’ in the U.S., men who were supposedly ‘fully enlightened’ but who, freed from the strict discipline of their Japanese temple environments, acted with the unrestrained desire of little boys let loose in a sweet shop. According to Buddhist teaching, ‘fully enlightened’ is also supposed to mean ‘fully compassionate’, but these men did not seem at all concerned about the lasting psychological damage they were causing to the vulnerable young women who came to them for spiritual guidance. I was as shocked and disillusioned by all this as anyone else, and it forced me to rethink my ideas about the supposed fruits of Zen training, especially satori or enlightenment, from a moral perspective in particular. It also forced me to rethink my attitude

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towards institutional Zen in the West, and about the appropriateness of the whole Zen patriarchal hierarchy in a contemporary Western cultural context. Personally, I still practice Zen meditation every day, meaning, presumably, that I still believe in its value, but today I’m much less idealistic about Zen, especially in its institutional form, than I used to be. It’s a mixed bag, like any other product of human culture – the beautiful and the profound mixed with the ugly and the foolish. Another of the paradoxes of Japanese culture. I remember the sobering words of Ruth Fuller Sasaki (1892–1967), the remarkable American woman who was the only foreigner – and the only woman – ever to be head priest of her own Zen temple at the Daitokuji temple complex in Kyoto. After undergoing decades of rigorous Zen training, she told some visiting Americans, perhaps half-jokingly (she’d just consumed one of her famously potent vodka martinis): ‘Zen isn’t all it’s cracked up to be’. Nonetheless, she too continued in her practice for the rest of her life, and continued to publish her pioneering translations of classic Zen texts. In short, the history of Zen’s reception in the West in the late twentieth century is a cautionary tale to the effect that, in approaching foreign cultures, one must avoid uncritical idealization on the one hand as much as prejudiced contempt on the other. I discuss these issues at more length in my review herein of the book, Zen Masters. At any rate, it was my desire to study Zen in its homeland, as well as my interest in Japanese literature, that first motivated me to travel to Japan in 1972, and to stay there several years. After a year spent teaching English in Hiroshima, I moved to the old cultural capital, Kyoto, where I spent about two years studying Zen under Kobori Nanrei Rōshi (1918–1992) at Ryōkōin, his sub-temple of Daitokuji. Kobori was a student of the great Zen scholar, Suzuki Daisetz, the subject of one of my chapters here. Among my ‘dharma brothers’ (and sisters) who participated at the temple regularly in zazen (sitting meditation) and sanzen (when the student presents his kōan answer to the Zen master), and attended Kobori’s weekly talks in English, were a number of the many interesting expatriates who passed through Kyoto in the 1970s, from defrocked Jesuits to Beat poets, from budding philosophers to budding artists, all of them intent upon learning what they could from Japanese culture and integrating it into their own thought and practice. Among those who remain prominent today are the eminent Canadian scholar of Zen, Victor Hori, and the distinguished American neurologist, James Austin, famous for his ground-breaking research on the effects of Zen practice on the brain.

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Besides Zen, during this first stay in Kyoto (there would be many more over the years – I’m married to a Kyoto native and now regard Kyoto as one of my hometowns), I also began my apprenticeship as a visual artist. Although my mother loved to paint, before Japan I was always more attracted to writing and literature than to the visual arts. But the powerful visual aesthetics of Japanese culture transformed me in this respect, and I felt inspired to take up ink painting (sumi-e) and calligraphy (shodō), studying under the well-known avant-garde Kyoto calligrapher, Ibata Shotei. This unique art form, a modernist revitalization of an ancient East Asian tradition, is the subject of Chapter 9 in this book. From sumi-e and shodō I soon branched out to practice also Western-style oil and watercolour painting, and had two one-man shows of my work before I left Kyoto in 1974. So I certainly owe another debt of gratitude to Japan for the great pleasure I’ve taken in practicing as a visual artist since the 1970s. After returning to Vancouver from this first prolonged stay in Japan, I ultimately decided to pursue graduate studies in Japanese literature at the University of British Columbia. (My undergraduate degree from there had been in English literature.) I was fortunate that Japanese studies at UBC at that time included a number of remarkable professors: especially Kinya Tsuruta and Leon Zolbrod in Japanese literature, John Howes in Japanese intellectual history, Shotaro Iida in Buddhist studies, and Leon Hurvitz in Japanese linguistics. Prof. Tsuruta, a leading expert on the great novelist, Kawabata Yasunari, and the principal supervisor of my M.A. and PhD, enjoyed a wide circle of contacts, and through his good offices I was able to meet and learn from some of the leading Japanese literary scholars of the day, including Professors Makoto Ueda of Stanford, Earl Miner of Princeton, Edward Seidensticker of Columbia, Hirakawa Sukehiro of Tokyo University, Hasegawa Izumi of Gakushūin University, Noguchi Takehiko of Kobe University, and Isogae Hideo of Hiroshima University. I cherish fond and grateful memories of every one of them. I’ve also profited in many ways from my long association with the International Research Centre on Japanese Culture (Nichibunken) in Kyoto – particularly through the kind support of Professors Suzuki Sadami and John Breen. The two highlights of this association, besides a number of short-term stays at the centre residence, were the momentous conference held at the centre in 1994, attended by many of the leading Japanologists of the day, and also by Ōe Kenzaburō, who had just been awarded the Nobel Prize in literature; and my one-year stay as a visiting professor in 2004–05, working with Prof. Suzuki Sadami.

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My first-ever publications were book and play reviews and feature articles on culture I wrote for various Vancouver and Toronto newspapers from the mid-1960s until the late 1980s, working as a freelance cultural journalist while also pursuing graduate studies and occasionally teaching at the University of British Columbia. As a journalist I also interviewed a number of interesting personalities in the literary, theatrical, and art worlds of the day. The two most memorable from my present perspective were the witty and influential writer on Zen, the philosopher Alan Watts, and James Clavell, one of the most popular novelists of the twentieth century, author of Shōgun, the novel that initiated a veritable subgenre of English-language novels with a Japanese historical setting. (Recent outstanding examples include Liza Dalby’s brilliant evocation of Heian court life, The Tale of Murasaki, and David Mitchell’s highly accomplished historical romance set in Tokugawa Japan, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.) Late in the autumn of 1975, I sat down for a drink with Clavell and his press agent in the plush Matador Restaurant at the Hotel Vancouver. Nattily dressed in a welltailored suit (very unlike my semi-hippie attire at that time) and with a clipped moustache and an equally clipped accent, Clavell seemed the very model of the British army officer of Second World War vintage: authoritative, practical-minded, highly organized, no nonsense – a man of action, the kind of man one would want to be in charge in any emergency. Quite a formidable character, in fact, and a little intimidating for me to interview, as a twenty-something junior reporter. He had read my recent review of Shōgun in a Vancouver newspaper and didn’t seem entirely pleased that I had identified Will Adams, a ship’s pilot who was the first Englishman to live and work in Japan, as the historical model for his hero, John Blackthorne. He appeared worried that this would leave him open to attack from historians because of the liberties he took with the historical facts. It seemed to me at the time that Clavell was trying to have it both ways: on the one hand, he told me how proud he was that Japanese-American readers wrote letters to him saying how much they appreciated his novel for teaching them a great deal about Japanese history and culture; on the other hand, he insisted to me that his novel was pure fiction and that therefore critics had no right to attack its historical inaccuracies. Somewhat mockingly, in a gentle act of revenge against the ‘know-it-all’ young reviewer who had identified his historical source material, he autographed my copy of his novel: ‘To Roy Starrs, who knows Nippon’ (and, for extra effect, he wrote ‘Nippon’ in kanji).

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Really, he needn’t have worried, and I think it shows the man’s underlying humility (or perhaps, more sadly, intellectual insecurity) that he was concerned at all with what academic historians – or, even more, with what an impudent young critic like me – thought about his novel’s historicity. The fact is that any historical novel – even the greatest, such as Tolstoy’s War and Peace – necessarily plays fast and loose with historical fact for the sake of fictional effect, but it still can perform a great service from a historian’s point of view, by attracting ‘general readers’ to their field, as Clavell’s novel certainly did. Many Japanese Studies programmes in Western universities experienced a steep rise in student numbers after Shōgun (and the equally popular television series based on it) and gratefully acknowledged that fact. Clavell told me that his main purpose was to tell a good story, and certainly he succeeded in that – he was a masterful storyteller, as many reviewers and literary critics since then have testified. Actually I was full of admiration for his achievements – and still am – not just Shōgun but his powerful first novel, King Rat, not to mention his scenario for The Fly, the original version of that classic Hollywood horror movie about a man whose head ends up attached to the body of a fly (and, in one of the most memorable scenes in all of cinematic history, shouts ‘Help me!’ in a tiny voice as a spider prepares to devour him)! But what I most admired about Clavell was the brave and generous spirit of the man: although he had suffered greatly as a captive of the Japanese during the war years, almost starving to death, as recounted in the semi-autobiographical King Rat, rather than spend the rest of his life in bitter hatred of the former enemy he made a great effort to try to understand the cultural reasons why the Japanese had acted the way they did – and one of the fruits of that open-minded effort was his best-selling novels, not only Shōgun but its equally compelling sequel, Gaijin. Clavell may be regarded as a latter-day Lafcadio Hearn, since Hearn too used his superb storytelling skills and lyrical prose style to captivate a large international audience with books about Japan. Like Hearn, Clavell seemed to have an intuitive understanding of and sympathy for Japanese culture and the Japanese worldview. And it is no coincidence that both men emerged from a British cultural background, or that many of the most prominent early Western scholars of Japan – men such as Chamberlain, Aston, Satoh, and Arthur Waley – were also British. Although I myself was born in England, I cannot claim to be ‘purely’ British, culturally rather than ethnically speaking, because I have lived too much of my life overseas,

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and thus have been ‘contaminated’ (if that’s the right word!) by too many other cultural influences. Perhaps most shamefully, I now speak like a North American rather than with the thick Brummie accent I had as a boy. My punishment is that, when I visit England these days, I often find myself referred to as a ‘Yank’! I could be described as an uprooted or deracinated Englishman, mid-Atlantic at one time but now perhaps more mid-Pacific, since I presently live in New Zealand. Nonetheless, I think I am still British enough to understand why so many British writers have felt so deeply attracted to Japan. The similarities between the two countries and their cultures seem obvious. Certainly their comparable geopolitical situations account for some of these similarities, and others may simply be attributed to the fact that modern Japan modelled itself on Britain – for instance, by becoming a parliamentary democracy and constitutional monarchy after the Second World War. 3. JAPAN AND BRITAIN – MIRROR IMAGES?

But to what extent do Japan and Britain really mirror each other, as has often been claimed? As an English-born Japanologist, I have long been interested in this question. Even geographically, these two ancient island realms seem expressly positioned to suggest a kind of mirroring relationship: similar in size, and neatly placed at opposite sides of the Eurasian landmass. Historically and culturally also, there seem to be many other similarities. Largely as the result of being islands off the coast of major civilizations, both were able to ‘have their cake and eat it too’ in terms of their social-political and cultural evolution. That is, they both enjoyed the luxury of absorbing over many centuries the cultural riches of the nearby continental civilization while, at the same time, remaining blessedly free of foreign conquest. This allowed them to develop their own ‘unique’ hybrid cultures free from direct foreign interference, if not from foreign influence. In Japan’s case, the remarkable fact is that, despite its proximity to powerful and sometimes aggressive continental empires, it was not until 1945 that any cultural influence was forcibly imposed on it by foreign conquest. Just as with England since 1066, this long period of freedom from foreign conquest allowed it to pick and choose among foreign cultural influences, adapt them to its own needs and traditions, and thus to develop its own autonomous cultural identity. If Japan had not been an island located across stormy

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seas some distance from the Asian mainland, it would certainly have succumbed to a number of foreign invasions over the centuries: from the Mongols, the Manchus, the Chinese, the Russians, and the aggressively expansionist Western empires of the nineteenth century. This would have destroyed the balance between foreign and native in the composition and ongoing evolution of Japanese culture. In other words, Japan was close enough to learn from major foreign civilizations over the centuries, but far enough away not to be overwhelmed by them. Its fortunate geopolitical situation enabled it to sustain the delicate balance of its cultural dialectics. One might observe also that this ‘splendid isolation’ accounts to some extent for the fundamentally conservative mentality of both island peoples. England, for instance, since abandoning its brief, pioneering experiment with revolutionary republican politics under Cromwell four centuries ago, has ever-so-slowly evolved into an increasingly democratic constitutional monarchy, treasuring its national traditions both political and cultural. On the whole, these conservative instincts – preferring evolution to revolution – have served the English well, enabling them to avoid the political excesses of the continent, which began in the horrors of the French Revolution in the late-eighteenth century and slowly drifted eastwards until, by the mid-twentieth century, they culminated in the political nightmares of Nazism and Stalinism, forms of political madness by no means extinct even today. Of course, it was Britain’s island isolation, more than anything else, which allowed it the luxury of staying aloof from all this continental political and revolutionary turmoil – if not, alas, from continental wars. A very similar geopolitical situation has obtained in Japan over the past few centuries, but Japan’s ‘splendid isolation’ was even more pronounced and allowed it even more leeway to develop its own autonomous political and cultural traditions. Again, it is quite obvious, to the Japanese as much as to anyone else, that these traditions have served them well: Japan emerged from the absolute devastation of the Second World War, despite having few natural resources, to become one of the world’s wealthiest, most productive, and most liveable countries. The Japanese population at large (as opposed to some more sceptical, left-wing intellectuals) believe that this ‘economic miracle’ was made possible by their long-standing traditions of social discipline, mutual collaboration, hard work, loyalty to authority, thirst for education, and so on. To reinforce their argument, they point to the poverty and disharmony that reign in many other countries around the world

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(including, increasingly, in the West), countries that may be far richer in natural resources than Japan but that lack these ‘Japanese’ socio-cultural virtues. Thus it is hardly surprising that, like the British, the Japanese on the whole treasure their traditions and seek to conserve them. Interesting as these obvious similarities between the two island nations are, however, it seems to me that even more interesting – because potentially more instructive – are the profound differences that are only half-hidden by these apparent similarities. For instance, the Japanese find it hard to understand that the United Kingdom – which they usually call ‘Igirisu’ or ‘England’ – is not actually one country but four. ‘Is not England a single nation-state like Japan?’, they often ask. The British, on the other hand, find hard to understand how deeply rooted the political-religious significance of the emperor system still remains in the Japanese cultural and national identity – even though the British themselves have their own royal family. This is a good example, in fact, of how an apparent ‘similarity’, like what the French call a faux ami in language, can be deceptive because of a profound difference lurking in that very similarity. Both countries are ‘constitutional monarchies’, but the cultural, historical, political, and even religious implications of the two ‘royal’ systems are vastly different. There was a time, of course, when even the English monarchy clothed itself in some of that ‘divinity that doth hedge a king’, as Shakespeare put it – especially after Henry VIII cut ties between the Church of England and the Roman papacy. But no English king every claimed the Christ-like status of being a ‘son of God’ or a god himself – if he had dared to make that claim, any Christian church would have condemned him as a heretic. The Shintō religion, on the other hand, makes exactly that claim about the Japanese emperor, especially that modern branch of it called ‘national Shintō’, which, for political reasons, particularly emphasizes this doctrine of imperial divinity. But even in ancient Japanese poetry, dating back to the seventh century, the emperor is referred to as ‘a very god’. And the most ancient Shintō scripture, the Kojiki (712 C.E.), tells us that the emperor is a direct descendent of the principal divinity of its pantheon, the sun goddess Amaterasu. Indeed, recent enthronement ceremonies have included, quite controversially in view of the postwar constitution’s insistence on the separation of church and state, a sacred ritual in which the emperor communes directly, in a shamanistic way, with his divine ancestress. Given, then, this ‘divine’ status of the Japanese imperial family as the

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very core of Japanese ethnic identity, it would be unthinkable, for instance, for an emperor to marry a foreigner, as British kings and queens have often done. Thus, while one can imagine a day, possibly in the not too distant future, after a few more examples of scandalous royal behaviour perhaps, when the British monarchy might be abolished, following a precedent set by many other European countries, in Japan’s case this is still absolutely unimaginable. So closely bound up is the imperial family with the country’s very essence as a nation – indeed, with what we might call ‘the Japanese soul’ – that to abolish it would seem like a perverse act of national self-destruction. The American Occupation authorities were wise to recognize this fact in 1945: they gained for themselves a peaceful occupation and a remarkably cooperative, long-term ally by retaining the emperor and absolving him of all war crimes – despite the protests of those who felt that he should have been summoned to the Tokyo War Crimes Trial. Another crucial reason why the emperor system has always been considered so indispensable to the kokutai or national polity is that, more than anything else, it distinguishes Japan from China – or, more recently, from the West. Since their first diplomatic contacts with China in the early seventh century, the Yamato court famously – or infamously from a Chinese point of view – claimed equality between their ‘emperor’ and the emperor of China, in other words refusing the usual subordinate status assigned to foreign ‘kings’ by the Chinese. In time, of course, the Japanese became convinced that their divine emperor was not just equal but superior to all other merely earthly sovereigns. And they are still proud of the continuity of their imperial dynasty, particularly when compared to the often-interrupted and now-defunct imperial dynasties of China, not to mention the far more short-lived royal families of Europe. At the same time, paradoxically, this very centrality of the emperor system and of its main ideological support, ‘imperial Shintō’, in Japan’s national identity also accounts, in my view, for much of its sense of cultural insecurity. Again, if one compares British and Japanese cultural history, one is struck by the fact that the Japanese have experienced far more ‘anxiety of influence’ (to use Harold Bloom’s phrase in a different context) than have the British. That is, they have long expressed concern that all the foreign culture they have imported – in particular, Buddhism, Confucianism, Christianity, and liberal democracy – might undermine their core national identity. The British, who have also imported much of their

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culture from abroad (as far back as the Roman conquest, at least), have rarely if ever expressed such concerns. Why might this be so? The main reason, surely, is religious – or, more accurately, political-religious. Once the English were converted to Christianity, the indigenous animistic religions of the ancient Celts and Anglo-Saxons died out – as indeed they were obliged to do, since Christianity is an exclusivist religion. But in Japan Buddhism coexisted with the native animistic religion of Shintō, as it did with primal animistic religions all over Asia. In the case of Japan it certainly had no choice, since Shintō was the ideological mainstay of the emperor system. In England Christianity served the same function – especially after Henry VIII, when a close bond was formed between the monarch and the established Church. Thus, no matter how distinct the English felt themselves to be from the ‘continentals’, they did not need to feel any profound religious difference with them: Europeans were all part of ‘Christendom’. Of course, there was some dispute at times over whether an English monarch should be Catholic or Protestant, but continental cultures were also both Catholic and Protestant, and foreign allies could be found in support of either choice. To the Japanese, however, all foreign religion or ideology was a potential threat to their Shintō-based divine emperor system. Again, it is often said that Britain, like Japan, has an ‘island mentality’ that can sometimes cause it to isolate and estrange itself from its continental neighbours – as manifested most recently, of course, by Brexit. Japan certainly does resemble Britain in this respect, but, again, the fact is that its ‘isolationalist’ tendencies are of an entirely different order and magnitude – in short, incomparably stronger. To get some idea of the special quality of this strength, one need only remember the sakoku or ‘national isolation policy’ the Tokugawa regime imposed for some two and a half centuries, until the country was opened in 1853 by the threat of force from American gunboats. No British government in history has ever instituted anything remotely like such a policy. One might half-jokingly say that, because Japan is almost six times the distance from the Asian continent across the Korea Strait as England is from Europe across the Dover Strait, its ‘island mentality’ and accompanying isolationism and conservatism is at least six times stronger – and that wouldn’t be too far from the truth. Despite the official opposition from Japanese companies based in the U.K. – for purely economic reasons, of course – most of my Japanese acquaintances were far less surprised or displeased by Brexit than they were by the fact that Britain had joined the E.U. in the first place.

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Certainly, a similar movement towards union with its Asian neighbours on Japan’s part would be virtually unthinkable – unless it were in the style of the ‘Greater East Asia Coprosperity Sphere’ of the 1930s and 40s, a system with Japan as the colonial master and the whole of Asia accepting the Japanese emperor as sovereign! Finally, apart from these ‘differences in similarities’, another major factor making Japan more isolated than Britain is the country’s language. The British, of course, speak the global language, but the Japanese speak a language little spoken outside their own islands. This makes for a considerable psychological difference in worldview. Native English speakers can travel the world confident they will be able to communicate almost everywhere in their own language. For the Japanese the opposite is true. And what makes things even more problematic is the well-known fact that the Japanese have a particular difficulty in mastering foreign languages – probably for both psychological and linguistic reasons. All this adds to their sense of global isolation on the one hand and national cultural uniqueness on the other. But one final paradox emerges here: of all major world languages, Japanese is undoubtedly the most hospitable to foreign loanwords – many thousands are in use, especially from English. Whereas the French Academy, for instance, tries to suppress even foreign words for which no equivalent exists in French, the Japanese happily use even English words for which there are perfectly good Japanese equivalents. But, of course, those English words are quite severely Japanized, just as were Chinese words for over a millennium, to the extent that native English speakers may not recognize them (‘word processor’, for instance, becomes ‘waapro’). Language is, of course, a central part of any nation’s identity, and so perhaps it is not surprising that the Japanese language too is characterized by that paradoxical hybridity – and dynamic instability – that we have found in the culture as a whole.

Part One: Japanese Politics, Religion and Society

Source: Religion Compass, 3/4 (2009), pp. 752–769.

1.

Politics and Religion in Japan v

I. SHINTŌ AND POLITICS

In May 2000, the then Prime Minister of Japan, Mori Yoshirō, caused a storm of protest, both domestically and internationally, with his declaration before a meeting of lawmakers belonging to the Shintō Seiji Renmei (Shintō Political League), that: ‘We [have to make efforts to] make the public realize that Japan is a divine nation centering on the Emperor. It’s been thirty years since we started our activities based on this thought’.1 Although some foreign observers may have been genuinely shocked by Mori’s reactionary, ‘atavistic’ stance, no one who knew Japan or Japanese politics well was particularly surprised. Indeed, members of his own party generally did not challenge the validity of his remark; they merely regretted its indiscretion as a public pronouncement. As the unintentionally revealing excuse offered by the Secretary General of the party explained: ‘the comment was probably a platitude for the religious group’.2 In other words, in the circles in which Mori and his colleagues moved, the belief that ‘Japan is a divine nation centering on the Emperor’ was merely an accepted truism, so that nothing much should be read into the Prime Minister’s remark – in the context in which it was given, it certainly did not represent any revolutionary departure from the norm. As Klaus Antoni points out, despite Emperor Hirohito’s renunciation of his ‘divine status’ in 1946, ‘the Japanese emperorship receives its whole spiritual and religious authority, now as before, from the religious-political ideology of Shintō’.3 Some analysts have presented Mori’s ‘gaffe’ as yet another symptom of Japan’s ‘move to the right’ in the late twentieth century – and, 3

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more specifically, as yet another challenge to the strict separation of church and state mandated by Japan’s (American-imposed) postwar Constitution.4 There may be some truth in their contention that the economic doldrums of the 1990s made the Japanese public more receptive to open expressions of nationalistic sentiments and resentments. But, as Mori’s own comment makes clear, throughout the postwar period such sentiments have never been far from the mainstream of Japanese political life. Indeed, the ‘thought’ on which Mori had based his political actions for thirty years is a good deal older than that: it has been at the heart of the Japanese polity since Japan first became a nation some sixteen centuries ago. The tradition of ‘sacralized politics’ may be traced back at least as far as the Asuka period (592–645), when the embryonic state’s ‘Seventeen-Article Constitution adopted both Shintō and Buddhism as ‘nation-protecting religions’. As with the ingrained articles of faith found in all nations or cultures, the people who subscribe to this belief do not usually feel called upon to justify themselves by scriptural reference. Nonetheless, if they were pressed to do so, there is only one work to which they could point: the Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters), a collection of diverse mythical and historical materials compiled by the imperial court in 712 (making it the oldest extant Japanese book). In this sense, the Kojiki is sometimes popularly described as the ‘Bible’ of Shintō and of Japanese nationalism in general; it is presented as the ultimate scriptural authority for the two central and related principles of Japanese nationalism as enunciated by Mori: that Japan is a ‘divine nation’ and that it is ‘centred on the Emperor’. By prewar nationalists these two articles of national-Shintō faith were referred to as the kokutai (national essence), the now rather notorious doctrine which, as Shirane Haruo has said, ‘used imperial mythology to legitimize a modern imperial system and to establish the Japanese people as a distinct race’.5 Even today, it is Mori’s two principles that give Japanese nationalism that special ‘religious’ quality which distinguishes it from the modern, secular, state-centred nationalisms of the West. Despite more than a century of ‘modernization’ and the assurances of the postwar Constitution that sovereignty lies with the people and that politics should not be mixed with religion, Japanese nationalists have not yet broken the habit of putting the emperor rather than the people at the center of their national polity – and they are not likely to do so in the foreseeable future. For them the emperor rather than the people or the land itself is the sine qua non of the Japanese nation; without

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the emperor the nation would lose its unique divine status, the very basis of their national pride. This ‘premodern’, theocratic dimension of Japanese nationalism is difficult for modern Westerners to grasp, and easy for us to underestimate. We are accustomed to thinking of Japan as an ‘advanced’ modern or postmodern nation, a ‘first-world’ country at the cutting edge of high-tech global capitalism, and thus it is hard for us to believe that its political leaders subscribe to such an ‘antiquated’ way of thought. And, of course, it is entirely possible that Mori, as the comment by the Secretary General of his party suggests, was merely paying lip-service to a belief system still venerated by a significant portion of his electorate – as an American politician might nod in the direction of Christian fundamentalists. Nonetheless, even the fact that he would feel the political need to do so shows that this belief system still has widespread currency. At any rate, this ‘eruption’ of prewar-style State Shintō in recent Japanese political discourse is only one example of how that religiopolitical ideology continues to survive like hot lava ‘below the surface’ of Japanese political life – and to cause political and diplomatic problems when it occasionally ‘erupts’. Two other significant recent examples, for instance, are the ongoing debate over the appropriateness and constitutionality of the ‘official’ patronage of the famous Shintō shrine, Yasukuni, as a national war memorial (mainly in the form of official visits by Japanese prime ministers to commemorate the war dead), and the official use of Shintō rites at the enthronement ceremony of the new emperor, Akihito, in 1990. Because of the historical and symbolic significance of Yasukuni, much more is involved here than merely the political or religious repercussions of Japanese prime ministerial visits to a Shintō shrine. As Phillip Seaton states: ‘At the beginning of the twenty-first century, no issue has been more emblematic of Japan’s struggles with the history of World War II than Yasukuni’.6 The core problem is that, not only are ‘A-class’ war criminals (as defined by the Tokyo War Crimes Trials) enshrined in its inner sanctum, but also the shrine includes on its grounds a war museum, the Yūshūkan, that proudly and defiantly justifies the wartime actions of Imperial Japan in Asia, presenting the Japanese Imperial Army as the glorious liberator of Asia from Western imperialism. Taken together, these two factors seem to make Yasukuni a bastion of Japanese right-wing ideology and of the ‘whitewashing’ of Japan’s record of aggression and atrocity in Asia. It is hardly surprising, then, that the principal victims of that aggression, Japan’s Asian neighbours,

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take offense when Japanese politicians officially worship at Yasukuni. From a Chinese or Korean perspective, it is almost as if the German Chancellor were to pay annual visits to a war memorial – with attached museum glorifying the ‘anti-Communist struggle’ of the Third Reich’s Wehrmacht – to pray for the repose of the souls of the Nazi dead, including Hitler and Goebbels! But, as Franziska Seraphim points out, the ‘nationalist right has always contested Japan’s official acceptance of the Tokyo trial verdict’.7 One proposed solution has been to build a ‘non-religious’ memorial to the war dead. But, as Seaton discovered from his extensive research into nationalist writings about the Yasukuni issue, they would never accept this, because of the extraordinary ‘emotional bonds between nationalism and the Yasukuni shrine’.8 Seaton neatly encapsulates the emotional and ideological nexus of ‘core elements’ that make this ‘national Shintō shrine’ so important and irreplaceable to Japanese nationalists: ‘The nation as family, the emperor as a father to his children the people, Yasukuni as a spiritual home, self-sacrifice for the nation as the protector of one’s family, ancestor worship as integral to Japanese culture: these are the core elements of nationalist and Yasukuni doctrine’.9 To suggest the depth and intensity of the emotions involved, he also borrows a telling phrase from the Tokyo University philosopher Takahashi Tetsuya, author of Yasukuni mondai (The Yasukuni Problem, 2005): the ‘nation as a religion’.10 There can be few modern nations of which this phrase rings truer than of Japan – and, of course, State Shintō is what makes this so. (Little wonder that even Hitler seemed to be jealous of Japan’s ‘national religion’.11) State Shintō in all its prewar glory seemed (for many observers) to have been resurrected again in November 1990 in the form of the mystical daijōsai rite that was part of the lengthy and elaborate enthronement ceremony of the new emperor, Akihito.12 As John Breen points out, the ceremony went ahead ‘in the face of fierce opposition from various liberal groups, who protested that state funding for it breached the constitutional separation of state and religion. The Daijosai, after all, is a mystical rite that celebrates the emperor’s unique relationship with the Sun Goddess’.13 And Breen also points out the possibly serious repercussions of the victory of the right-wing political establishment in this case; it ‘stands as a warning that Japan’s constitutional monarchy is not quite so secure as it appears; it serves also as a muchneeded reminder of an essential continuity between the pre-and postwar imperial institutions’.14 Although the prewar official state doctrine

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that the emperor was a ‘living deity’ was supposedly abrogated by Emperor Hirohito in 1946 (under pressure from the Allied Occupation authorities, of course), the fact is that ‘Hirohito continued to perform all those rituals which, before the Occupation, defined him as both deity and high priest’ and ‘Akihito performs the same rites today’.15 As Felicia Bock writes: ‘Today, the postwar constitution purports to separate church and state, religion and government, but the distinction between the two areas, like other concepts introduced from an alien culture, is far from clear’.16 And Eric Seizelet sees it as symptomatic of ‘les ambigüitiés du rapport que les Japonais entretiennent avec leur passé’.17 How dangerous this particular conflation of state and religion can become is shown by Walter Skya in his seminal account of the development of pre-war State Shintō nationalist ideology. He demonstrates how, during its fascist phase, it aimed at ‘the creation of “mass man” with total devotion to the emperor’.18 It tried to accomplish this through teaching a kind of mystical unity between the individual and the emperor, thus precluding the possibility of any independent moral will in the individual – the emperor (meaning, of course, the state) was owed absolute loyalty and obedience as well as religious veneration. ‘Thus, State Shintō ideology had become ultranationalist and totalitarian’.19 Skya has demonstrated at length how this transmogrified religious ideology convinced many Japanese in the 1940s that they were engaged in a ‘holy war’ against Western civilization.20 An in-depth historical background on State Shintō and the Yasukuni Shrine issue is provided by Helen Hardacre, who traces it back to the Meiji period (1868–1912) and points out that, dating from that time: ‘Nowhere else in modern history do we find so pronounced an example of state sponsorship of a religion – in some respects the state can be said to have created Shintō as its official “tradition”, but in the process Shintō was irrevocably changed … In the end, Shintō, as adopted by the modern Japanese state, was largely an invented tradition’.21 For, as Hardacre also points out, suprareligious claims that Shintō expresses ‘the essence of the cultural identity of the Japanese people’ are an obvious myth: ‘The idea that a nation of 120 million persons has a single spiritual essence uniting them and wiping out all divisions of gender, class, and ethnicity is of course a convenient fiction that itself constitutes a political appeal or tool’.22 Further evidence for this modern, ‘invented’ nature of State Shintō emerges when we survey the religious situation in Japan prior to the Meiji Restoration of 1868: a separate Shintō religion was virtually

8

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non-existent at that time; rather it existed inextricably as part of a syncretic mix with Buddhism. And its ties with the state were likewise ill-defined: ‘Shintō’s ties with the state before 1868 were obscure and limited for the most part to the rites of the imperial or shogunal courts, always coordinated with, and usually subordinated to, Buddhist ritual. After 1868, Buddhism lost its former state patronage, and Shintō was elevated and patronized by the state’.23 But perhaps the most original part of Hardacre’s argument is that she emphasizes that it was not just the state that exploited Shintō for nation-building purposes – the Shintō priesthood was also eager to ‘build, maintain, and strengthen ties to the state as a means of raising its own prestige’.24 Thus, the ‘priesthood became involved for the first time in the systematic inculcation of state-sponsored values, a role it has tried to preserve down to the present day’.25 Hardacre sees the Meiji government’s patronage of Yasukuni and its newly invented ‘Shintō rituals’ as an attempt, largely successful, to control ‘the religious life of virtually the entire nation by the early decades of the twentieth century’.26 More specifically, the ‘creation of a cult of fallen military combatants – apotheosized as “glorious war dead” – its center in the Yasukuni Shrine, has, of all the invented traditions of State Shintō, most profoundly colored the character of popular religious life and remains an issue at the end of the twentieth century’.27 Although Hardacre agrees with other political analysts that the state today is trying to revive State Shintō as a national unifying force, she is convinced that contemporary Japan is too ‘pluralistic’ to allow for such a possibility: ‘Contemporary Japanese political culture is now irrevocably pluralistic, and hence the state no longer enjoys hegemony in its manipulation of Shintō rites and symbols, though the priesthood may well wish that it did’.28 Thus, the ‘Japanese left, spearheaded by an academic intelligentsia, has consistently opposed moves to reinstate state support for the shrine’.29 And new religions such as Sōka Gakkai are also a powerful part of the opposition. Both groups see ‘state efforts to revive Yasukuni Shrine’ as presaging ‘a resurgence of nationalism and a constriction of personal liberties, especially religious freedom’.30 Since such groups can now freely express their opposition, Hardacre concludes that, in the postwar decades, ‘the state has lost its symbolic hegemony’.31 This may well be true but, as she also points out, the state is very persistent: ‘The state has vigorously sought to regain its former prerogatives ... by introducing a bill to give the Yasukuni Shrine state support no less than five times’.32 Indeed, as we have seen, since Hardacre wrote her book several other Prime Ministers – most

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conspicuously Koizumi Jun’ichirō between 2001 and 2006 – have braved international opprobrium and domestic discord to pay official visits to the shrine. An interesting recent ‘counter-view’ on the ‘Yasukuni problem’ is provided by Kevin Doak, who sees the issue primarily from a religious rather than a political perspective. Noting that the Catholic Church has long sanctioned visits by Japanese Catholics to Shintō shrines when regarded as a purely civic duty, he concludes, quite controversially, that: ‘From my perspective as a Catholic the visits to Yasukuni Shrine by successive prime ministers do not constitute a challenge to the constitutional separation of church and state’.33 Basically Doak argues that such visits are civic gestures honoring the war dead rather than expressions of religious conviction. Obviously this issue is still far from settled (see Breen 2008 for more debates both in favour and against the shrine’s status as an ‘official memorial’). II. THE POLITICS OF JAPANESE BUDDHISM

It might be expected that Buddhism, as a ‘universal’ religion of ‘foreign’ origins, has been far less subservient to the state or complicit with Japanese nationalism than the native religion of Shintō. For a number of historical and cultural reasons, however, examples of such ‘nation-transcendence’ and political ‘independence’ or even ‘opposition’ on the part of Buddhists have been the exception rather than the rule; on the whole the Japanese Buddhist establishment, throughout its entire history, has allied itself closely with political power and has loyally served the interests of conservative and nationalist social forces. The perfect symbol of this inseparable union between the Buddhist church and the Japanese state and nation is Prince Shōtoku (573–621), the imperial prince regarded as the ‘father’ of Japanese Buddhism: it was he who, according to the oldest Japanese national history, the Nihon shoki (The Chronicles of Japan, 720 AD), authored the founding document of the Japanese imperial state, the ‘Seventeen-Article Constitution’, in which he calls for the official patronage of both Buddhism and Shintō as ‘nation-protecting religions’. This inseparability of Buddhism from the state in premodern Japan may seem regrettable both from a modern secular and a modern religious viewpoint – today we tend to believe that the ‘separation of church and state’ is a healthier state of affairs for both parties. And, indeed, there are Buddhist scholars and practitioners who take a strong moral and political position on this issue.

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Joseph Kitagawa, for instance, in his classic study, Religion in Japanese History, states that Buddhism was quickly ‘transformed into the religion of the throne and the empire’.34 And he goes on to express regret that ‘the Buddhist community (sangha), as such, had no opportunity to develop its own integrity and coherence, because from the time of Prince Shotoku onward “the state functioned not as a patron (Schutz-patronat) but as the religious police (Religions-polizei) of Buddhism”’.35 Similar regrets have been expressed more recently, as we shall see, both by Japanese scholars of the so-called ‘Critical Buddhism’ school and by some Western critics of Zen’s role in Japanese fascism and militarism – both of whom trace the origins of this ‘uncomfortably close’ church/state collaboration all the way back to Prince Shōtoku. But, of course, we must also recognize that there is something anachronistic and ahistorical in such decidedly ‘modern’ viewpoints. As a number of other more historicallyminded scholars have pointed out, no such entity as ‘Buddhism’ as a separate, autonomous ‘religion’ in the modern sense ever existed in ancient Japan – or, for that matter, anywhere else in ancient Asia.36 Thus, for instance, to imply that ‘Buddhism’ was ‘co-opted’ by the state for its own nefarious purposes does not make much sense historically. From the very beginning, Buddhism offered itself, and was adopted, as an arm of the state, and operated as an essential part of the governing apparatus. In other words, there was no Buddhism other than ‘state Buddhism’ in ancient Japan, and it should be noted that, even much later, in the middle ages, an ‘outsider’ sect such as Nichirenism nonetheless aspired to become the ‘national religion’ and place itself at the centre of state power. As its founder, Nichiren, himself proclaimed in his Risshō Ankoku Ron (On Securing the Peace of the Land through Adopting the Correct Teaching), it was the duty of Japan’s rulers to officially accept his teachings, based on the Lotus Sutra, as the one true form of Buddhism in order to free the country of wars and natural disasters. More ‘mainstream’ Buddhist sects also invariably represented their teachings and religious practices as indispensable for the ‘protection of the state’, and governing elites shared this conviction. The chingokokka (protection of the state) and ōbō-buppō (mutual support between the state and Buddhism) theories adopted as official state ideology during the Nara (710–794) and Heian (793–1135) periods made this explicit.37 And the ōbō-buppō ideology, explicitly uniting the interests of church and state, continued to play a supporting role in what the leading medieval historian Kuroda Toshio called the kenmitsu (exoteric-esoteric) system of rule.38 As James C. Dobbins explains:

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[Kuroda] asserted that it was not Buddhism’s new schools but the old ones, what he called kenmitsu (exoteric-esoteric) Buddhism, that pervaded the medieval scene and set the standard for religion. Moreover, Shintō did not exist as a separate medieval religion, but was submerged in this kenmitsu religious culture. Furthermore, the entire kenmitsu worldview functioned as an ideological foundation for the social and political order, providing it with a rationale and giving it cohesion. Thus, religion did not stand apart from the world as a realm of pure ideas, but was fully integrated into all levels and dimensions of medieval Japan.39

In the later middle ages, too, there was a close ‘working relationship’ between some government-sponsored and government-controlled Zen monasteries – the so-called gozan or ‘Five Mountains’ – and the ruling Ashikaga dynasty of military dictators or shoguns. As Martin Collcutt points out in his seminal study of the issue, Ashikaga Tadayoshi, the younger brother of Takauji, the dynasty’s founder, ‘saw most clearly the political advantages to the bakufu [shogunal government] of creating a powerful nationwide system of government-sponsored Zen monasteries’.40 Under his and later Ashikaga patronage, these monasteries flourished to such an extent that they ‘played a major role in the political and economic as well as in the religious and cultural life of medieval Japan’.41 And Collcutt also points out that, for the Zen monasteries themselves, this Ashikaga patronage brought ‘unprecedented prestige, wealth, and influence’.42 Although under the Tokugawa shogunate, the next and last of the shogunal dynasties (1603–1868), neo-Confucianism was adopted as the official state ideology and Buddhism lost some of the high official status it had enjoyed since the days of Prince Shōtoku; nonetheless, the state continued to find important uses for the church. Most notably, Buddhist priests and temples were used by the regime to enforce its system of ‘household registry’ (danka seidō), whereby every family was compelled to register with their local Buddhist temple. Anyone who could not provide an identity paper that showed their temple affiliation was treated as a ‘secret’ Christian (which was illegal) or as a ‘non-person’ (hinin) and subjected to discrimination, and sometimes even arrest and execution. Thus, from the viewpoint of the Tokugawa state, the Buddhist temples were an indispensable tool for controlling the population. On the other hand, the Buddhist clergy themselves seemed to relish, and profit by, the life-and-death power this apparently innocuous ‘registry system’ gave them over those compelled to become their ‘parishioners’.43

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III. FASCIST ZEN

That the consequences of this intimate and millennium-long relationship between church and state continue to be felt in Japan today – and in contemporary Japanese studies – may be seen in two disturbing and provocative recent debates. The first concerns quite a specific issue: the role of Zen Buddhist leaders and thinkers as collaborators with Japanese militarism and fascism in the first half of the twentieth century. The second concerns a larger but in some ways related issue: the alleged ‘misinterpretation’ of fundamental Buddhist doctrines, for political and nationalistic purposes, by Japanese Buddhist leaders since Prince Shōtoku. (These allegations are made by scholars belonging to the so-called ‘Critical Buddhism’ school already mentioned.) It is interesting to note that the first debate was provoked by works written mainly in English, and the second by works written mainly in Japanese. The full dimensions of the modern Zen world’s collaboration with Japanese fascism were first revealed to Western readers in 1995 by an excellent collection of essays edited by James Heisig and John Maraldo, appropriately entitled, Rude Awakenings. The editors acknowledge that, just as revelations about Heidegger’s affiliations with Nazism have provoked a serious reassessment of his philosophic legacy, so too revelations about the fascist sympathies of the Kyoto School philosophers (who had much in common with Heidegger) and their Zen associates has come as a ‘rude awakening’ for Western devotees of Zen and admirers of Kyoto School philosophy.44 The most famous members of this ‘group’ were two close friends: Suzuki Daisetsu (1870–1966) and Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945). Suzuki (or, to use his English penname, D.T. Suzuki) is commonly credited with being the ‘man who introduced Zen to the West’, a feat he accomplished in the 1920s and 1930s by writing in eloquent English a series of highly popular books on Zen. Nishida is regarded as the major Japanese philosopher of the twentieth century, and as the ‘patriarch of the Kyoto School’ who profoundly influenced several generations of Japanese philosophers. In essays written during World War II, Nishida seems to abjectly surrender his critical intelligence to imperial mythology and to put his sophisticated Zen-inspired philosophy entirely at the service of an atavistic emperor-worshipping State Shintō – in fact, admonishing his readers that ‘we must not forget the thought of returning to oneness with the emperor and serving the state’.45 As Christopher Ives notes, these essays ‘served to provide a philosophical basis for the state,

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the national polity, and the “holy war,” and in this way helped “dispel the doubts of students bound for the front and provide a foundation for resignation to death”’.46 (Ives quotes here from Ichikawa Hakugen, the only significant postwar Zen figure to criticize the wartime role of Nishida and Zen.) Despite these rather shocking intellectual capitulations on Nishida’s part, however, his attitude towards Japanese imperialism was actually somewhat ambivalent, as Ives also points out.47 This was even more true of D.T. Suzuki who, while he made nationalistic claims about the superiority of Japanese Buddhism and ‘Japanese spirituality’ in general,48 also seemed to express, as much as he could safely do so during wartime, serious reservations about the identification of Zen with the fascist cult of death.49 The most vociferous and egregious expressions of fascistic thought tended to come from lesser members of the School, such as the junior members who participated in the notorious discussions sponsored by the journal Chūōkōron in 1941, in which strident claims were made about the superiority of the Japanese race and the rightness of imperial Japan’s cause as ‘liberator’ of Asia from Western imperialism.50 And also, perhaps most shockingly, some of the most fanatic support for fascism and militarism came from the Zen (and other Buddhist) clergy themselves. This latter point has been brought home most forcefully by Brian Victoria in his case studies of a number of leading ‘Zen masters’ and associates collected together in two volumes, Zen at War (1997, second edition 2006) and Zen War Stories (2003). Among the prominent Zen leaders whose ‘fascist pasts’ are profiled by Victoria are some of the most influential figures in the postwar transmission of Zen to the West. For instance, the Zen teachings of Yasutani Haku’un (1885–1973) feature prominently in probably the most influential book on Zen ever published in the West, Philip Kapleau’s The Three Pillars of Zen (1965), the book that inspired generations of Westerners to practice Zen meditation. In his book, Kapleau presents his teacher as a ‘fully enlightened’ Zen master, but of course makes no mention of (and perhaps knew nothing about) the darker side of Yasutani’s past. Victoria, on the other hand, devotes a whole chapter to exactly that, quoting profusely from Yasutani’s wartime writings to prove that he was not only a thoroughgoing fascist, emperor-worshipping imperialist, and militant warmonger but also, rather bizarrely, a rabid anti-Semite.51 Apparently he associated Jews (who were virtually non-existent in Japan) with left-wing or liberal thought and, as Victoria points out, ‘Yasutani and his peers . . . had wholeheartedly embraced the role of “ideological shock troops”

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for Japanese aggression abroad and thought suppression at home’.52 Thus, they fervently opposed ‘all forms of thought, left-wing or merely “liberal,” that did not completely and totally subsume the individual to the needs and purposes of a hierarchically-constituted, patriarchal, totalitarian state’.53 Coming on the heels of recent revelations about sexual and other abuses of power by American Zen leaders over the past few decades,54 these ‘rude awakenings’ have had an effect on the Western Zen world comparable, albeit on a smaller scale, to that of the child-abuse scandals on the Catholic Church. Indeed, Victoria’s books have had an historical importance in their own right, since, translated into Japanese, they have induced various branches of the Zen establishment to issue formal apologies for their past political ‘misdeeds’. Nonetheless, it is unfortunate, in my view, that Victoria, even though himself a Soto-sect Zen priest, fails in these books to grab the real Zen bull by the horns – that is, to ponder the larger significance of his revelations for our understanding of the very heart of Zen: satori or ‘spiritual awakening’. Given the fact that he documents the ideological ‘misdeeds’ of officially recognized rōshi or Zen masters rather than merely intellectuals or philosophers influenced by Zen, one is naturally led to ask questions, such as what is the moral value of satori? The traditional Zen answer, in brief, is that, because satori reveals the oneness of all creation, the ‘enlightened’ person naturally feels compassionate towards fellow suffering beings and naturally develops ‘non-discriminative’ wisdom. Looking at the rather hateful and discriminatory writings of wartime Zen masters, however, one feels compelled to choose between two possibilities: either they were not really ‘enlightened’, or Zen enlightenment lacks the moral value traditionally attributed to it. Such difficult questions are, in fact, confronted by some of the contributors to Rude Awakenings, and their answers tend towards either of the above-mentioned poles: those such as Hirata Seikō, who argue basically that Zen is amoral, concerned – as Confucians have always alleged – not with society but only with the nature of the self;55 and those such as the left-wing Zen activist Ichikawa Hakugen, who take a strong moral position and argue that ‘enlightenment’ is worthless without a social conscience.56 Ichikawa’s position is perhaps far more popular among Western Zennists than among their Japanese counterparts;57 for better or for worse, Hirata, a Zen Abbot himself, represents the mainstream Japanese Zen view. Certainly he follows in the famous footsteps of D.T. Suzuki, who stated quite categorically:

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Zen has no special doctrine or philosophy, no set of concepts or intellectual formulas, except that it tries to release one from the bondage of birth and death, by means of certain intuitive modes of understanding peculiar to itself. It is, therefore, extremely flexible in adapting itself to almost any philosophy and moral doctrine as long as its intuitive teaching is not interfered with. It may be found wedded to anarchism or fascism, communism or democracy, atheism or idealism, or any political or economic dogmatism.58

Although Suzuki’s language and logic here are rather loose or inaccurate, perhaps even careless or irresponsible (as was often the case) – obviously Zen does have some sort of guiding doctrine and philosophy, for instance – nonetheless one can understand what he is driving at. Obviously Zen is extremely ‘adaptable’ in both moral and philosophic terms – as with any deep poetic or mystical insight, its very ‘ineffability’ leaves it open to a great range of interpretations. This makes it morally ambiguous, sometimes even dangerous. In the wake of Japan’s disastrous defeat in the Pacific War, even Suzuki was at pains to point this out: he argued that, if satori was not supplemented with a good secular education and critical intelligence, it was morally worthless.59 At any rate, this question about the moral value of satori has itself become a kind of Zen kōan or meditation problem, and perhaps ultimately it is as logically irresolvable as any of the traditional kōan such as: What is the sound of one hand clapping? Or perhaps we should resort to traditional Zen sokuhi logic and say: the correct answer to the question, ‘Does satori have a moral value’, is both yes and no, and neither yes nor no. No doubt the issue will be debated both within and without the Zen world for many years to come. Because the fact is too that Zen Buddhism cannot simply be dismissed as if it were just another ‘evil religious cult’. First of all, it has inspired some of the greatest creative achievements of East Asian culture; secondly, the spiritual or psychological value of meditation practices such as those central to Zen is widely recognized now even in the West – and, indeed, many who have known Zen masters (the present writer included) will testify that they can be extraordinarily impressive people, deeply grounded in themselves as few people are. But, of course, this does not mean that they know everything or are right about everything; in worldly terms, they may actually be quite naïve, wrong-headed, even ignorant. So, what is enlightenment?

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IV. CRITICAL BUDDHISM

Of course, the dubious or problematical relation of Japanese Buddhists with the political establishment is by no means confined to the Zen sects. It must be said that, throughout most of their history, Japanese Buddhists in general have seen little problem in the close relation of their religion to state power, or to the nationalist ideologies and even militarism associated with state power. The tradition of ‘nationalist Buddhism’ is as old, at least, as the Middle Ages, when the prophet Nichiren (1222–1282) claimed that Japanese Buddhism was superior to all others, and would protect the nation from foreign invasion. The general Buddhist ideological support of the militarist state in the 1930s and 1940s, and the excesses of ‘Imperial Way Buddhism’, were only the latest episodes in a long history of such collaborations with the regime in power. Indeed, as already mentioned, the origins of this uncomfortably close relation between church and state in Japan can be traced right back to the ‘father of Japanese Buddhism’, Prince Shōtoku. The third injunction of the Prince’s Constitution of 604 calls for absolute obedience to imperial commands, equating the emperor with ‘heaven’ and consequently claiming for him a divine right to rule. Thus, a good Buddhist must also be a good imperial subject. As Brian Victoria also points out: ‘this emphasis on the supremacy of the ruler . . . set the stage for the historical subservience of Buddhism to the Japanese state’.60 Only very recently have some strong dissenting voices been heard from Japanese Buddhists – in particular, from the left-leaning scholars who presently advocate a so-called ‘critical Buddhism’. The most influential figures in this movement are Hakamaya Noriaki and Matsumoto Shirō, who consciously oppose the mainstream of modern Japanese Buddhist scholarship, much of which has been right-wing nationalist – the above-mentioned ‘Kyoto school’ being the leading example. Critical Buddhism, according to Hakamaya, ‘discusses how some ideas traditionally thought to be at the core of Mahayana Buddhism in fact eviscerate Buddhism’.61 Among these ‘anti-Buddhist’ ideas, in his view, is none other than that old staple of Japanese cultural discourse, reputably first enunciated by Prince Shōtoku in his Constitution: the idea of the social value of wa or ‘harmony’, which the great scholar of Asian thought, Nakamura Hajime, called the ‘spirit that made possible the emergence of Japan as a unified cultural state’.62 Of course, every age has tended to interpret this wa ideal according to its own ideological predilections, but almost always with a

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positive connotation within the context of its particular value-system.63 Now, however innocent the simple idea of ‘harmony’ might seem, Hakamaya severely indicts it as ‘anti-Buddhist and nothing more than political ideology pure and simple’.64 As Stewart McFarlane says: ‘[Hakamaya] is particularly critical of Prince Shotoku’s Constitution . . . He sees Shotoku’s embracing of the value of harmony and Ekayana Buddhism, as a strategy for maintaining bureaucratic control and conformity’.65 Hakamaya is also severely critical of those present-day Japanese scholars who try to make use of ‘Prince Shōtoku’s Buddhism’ for nihonjinron-style assertions of Japanese uniqueness and superiority.66 As a typical example, he points to Umehara Takeshi’s claim that Prince Shōtoku’s Ekayana ‘philosophy of equality and unity’, which extends equality even to ‘mountains, rivers, grasses, and trees’, is ‘unique to Japanese Buddhism’ and ‘is truly important, for it can stave off the destruction of nature resulting from the anthropocentric ideas so strong in European thought’. Thus, Umehara claims further: ‘Ours is a doctrine essential to the future of humanity’.67 Hakamaya’s response to this is quite caustic: If we follow his line of argument, we may well end up in the deluded notion that the Japanese alone, thanks to the [Ekayana Buddhist] doctrine of original enlightenment, have enjoyed a history of peace and equality, free of war and slaughter. This kind of blithely authoritative attitude, completely indifferent to the facts of the matter, combined with a loose logic that mixes indigenous religiosity with Ekayana Buddhism . . . are all typical of the abuse perpetrated by a group of influential intellectuals who conceive of everything in terms of the doctrine of original enlightenment.68 V. RELIGIOUS TERRORISM: THE POLITICS OF AUM SHINRIKYŌ

But the most deadly mix of religion and politics in recent Japanese history has not come from traditional Shintō or Buddhism but from one of the multitude of ‘new religions’ that have sprung up in the postwar era, the notorious ‘doomsday cult’ that called itself ‘Aum Shinrikyō’ (Om Religion of Truth). Finding that it was unable to acquire sufficient political power by ‘legitimate’ democratic means, the group became increasingly hermetic, paranoid, and violent until finally, on March 20, 1995, it staged one of the most horrific terrorist attacks of recent times,

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releasing lethal quantities of sarin gas simultaneously on five trains of the Tokyo subway system, killing twelve commuters and injuring many hundreds more.69 As might be expected, this shocking incident has provoked intense debate as to its ultimate ‘meaning’ for contemporary Japan. Was it a terrible ‘one-off’ or an augury of things to come? Was it a symptom of a widespread malaise among a well-educated younger generation disenchanted with modern-day Japan’s materialistic ‘economic animal’ lifestyle? (Some of the Aum members were products of the country’s most elite universities.) What would be its long-term impact on the Japanese people’s (already rather lukewarm) attitude to religion? The most thoughtful treatment of the subject in English has been by Ian Reader, who rejects attempts to sensationalize or to dismiss the group as an ‘evil cult’ unrelated to ‘genuine religion’. On the contrary, Reader shows that this ‘new religion’ drew much of its ideology and practices from traditional, established religions, but carried certain aspects of these – especially the sense of its own righteousness and consequent alienation from an irreligious, materialistic society – to such an extreme that it finally resorted to a ‘holy war’ against that society. Thus, ‘Aum Shinrikyō provides us with a salient example of the violenceproducing dimensions of religion and reminds us of how religious movements can, through a confluence of circumstances, engender, legitimate and commit acts of violence in the name of their faith’.70 Needless to say, all that we have learned in recent years about the ‘violence-producing dimensions’ of even ‘orthodox’ religions – in the Japanese as in other contexts – makes Reader’s argument quite easy to accept. Indeed, some social analysts even claim that Japan is now living in a ‘post-Aum age’ in which all religion has become seriously suspect in the eyes of the Japanese people. The famous novelist Haruki Murakami, for instance, in his collection of profoundly moving interviews with victims of the Tokyo subway gas attack (and a few Aum members), relates the attack to another tragic event that occurred just two months earlier – the Kobe earthquake – and claims that these two events created a mid-1990s double trauma for the Japanese national psyche, a trauma from which it will not soon recover: The Kobe earthquake and the Tokyo gas attack of January and March 1995 are two of the greatest tragedies in Japan’s postwar history. It is no exaggeration to say that there was a marked change in the Japanese consciousness ‘before’ and ‘after’ these events.71

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But Murakami, appropriately enough in view of all that has been discussed here, believes that the long-term repercussions of these two events will be as much political as religious, since he also claims that, coming in the wake of the bursting of Japan’s ‘bubble economy’, they have ‘ushered in a period of critical inquiry into the very roots of the Japanese state’.72 At the very least, the Aum incident induced many in Japan to take a colder and harder look at the political activities of other religious groups, especially the so-called ‘new religions’. Among these the most politically active and successful by far over the past few decades has been the Sōka Gakkai (Value-Creation Society), which began as an independent lay organization of the Buddhist Nichiren sect. In 1964, the Sōka Gakkai actually founded its own political party, the Kōmeitō (Clean Government Party), which was disbanded in 1994 but then resurrected in 1998 as the ‘New Kōmeitō’ and remains a major player in Japanese politics – it is the third largest party and its support has recently kept the ruling Liberal Democratic Party in power. After the Aum incident most of the other major political parties advocated a proposal to revise the Religious Corporations Law, with its absolute guarantees of religious freedom (and tax reductions), in order to ‘give the authorities greater leeway in monitoring potentially dangerous religious organizations’.73 The Sōka Gakkai and other religious groups strongly opposed any such revision, and Einosuke Akiya, the Sōka Gakkai President, vigorously defended the ‘right of religious organizations to be actively involved in the political process’.74 His opponents, however, pointed out that the tax reductions granted to religious organizations amounted to a public subsidy for their political activities.75 Thus, the question of the proper relation between religion and politics continues to be a thorny and divisive issue even in twenty-first century Japan.

Source: Asian Pasts, Asian Futures, edited by Edwina Palmer. London: Global Oriental (2005), pp. 23–36.

2.

The Kojiki as Japan’s National Narrative v

I. POLITICAL-IDEOLOGICAL USES OF THE KOJIKI

What one might call the standard ‘snapshot’ view of the Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters, 712 AD) is that it was compiled by order of the early Nara imperial court, the ritsuryō state, with one central political purpose in mind: to legitimize the Yamato clan’s hegemony – that is, to support the claim of the Yamato clan chiefs, ancestors of the Japanese emperors, to a ‘divine right’ to rule over all other Japanese clans. This view has been constructed mainly by historians and political scientists who naturally seek to place this, the oldest extant Japanese text, in the context of the early development of the Japanese nation state. Since the kokugakusha or ‘national scholars’ of the eighteenth century, this has also been basically the view of the Kojiki promulgated by emperorcentered Japanese nationalism – and as such it still has great popular currency, perhaps especially among people who have never actually read the work. And, as we have already seen, emperor-centered nationalism still shapes the worldview of Japan’s ruling political establishment.1 But the question I would like to raise here is: to what extent does the Kojiki, the real text as opposed to the ‘snapshot’ version of the political historians or the religio-mythic canonical version of the nationalists, actually support this belief system? II. THE FULL COMPLEXITY OF THE WORK

Reading the Kojiki one finds abundant evidence that, in the several centuries which preceded its compilation, Japan underwent a momentous 20

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transformation. This oldest of Japanese books embodies the great ‘juncture’ or ‘rupture’ between the old and the new ways of thinking and living, one preliterate, prehistorical and prenational, a world of clans and chieftains, shamans and sorcerers, gods and heroes – a mythological world – the other literate and historical, a world of nations and emperors, imperial courtiers and bureaucrats, monks and scholars, a recognizably modern world which, because it now included T’ang dynasty China, included the most sophisticated art, science, medicine, technology and philosophy found anywhere on earth at that time. This was a massive transformation, a transformation more meaningfully from ‘ancient’ to ‘modern’ than even the transformation Japan underwent in the late nineteenth century. (And the Kojiki compilers themselves were fully conscious of living in ‘new times’ – thus their title’s self-conscious reference to ‘ancient’ – that is, ‘pre-modern’ – matters.) We tend to think that revolutionary social and cultural change induced by technological innovation is a phenomenon unique to our history since the Industrial Revolution, but probably no modern technological innovation has had an effect on human consciousness and social organization equal to that of the invention of the various technologies of literacy in ancient times. The Kojiki, we might say, puts us in the privileged position of being able to observe this revolutionary transformation in action. Any analysis of the Kojiki must take account of its multi-layered nature: it is not the work of a single author or even of a single group of authors but of countless generations of myth-makers and chroniclers, some belonging no doubt to a prehistoric oral tradition, and of several generations of compilers in the late seventh and early eighth centuries. Three basic levels may be identified: myth, ‘semi-historical’ chronicle and compilers’ ‘frame’, but none of these is absolutely discrete – for instance, even the mythical or ‘age of the gods’ chapters are hybridized, containing not only ‘authentic’ ancient myths but material obviously fabricated by the compilers, often drawing on Chinese sources. In this sense the work resembles more an archeological site than a work of literature or history in the usual modern sense of the word (although it must be said that this sort of miscellaneous compilation is quite common in the East Asian literary-historical tradition). Its oldest ‘layer’ is the product of an archaic, prehistoric Japan which was not a single unified country but a land divided into dozens of petty kingdoms or clan chiefdoms – as we know from accounts written by Chinese visitors between the first and fourth centuries AD. Its newest layer was composed after the process of national unification

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under Yamato rule was largely completed, in the late seventh and early eighth centuries. The worldview of the preliterate societies which existed prior to national unification was basically similar to that of many other preliterate peoples found all over northern Asia (including what we now call Siberia): a form of animistic, polytheistic shamanism. Both male and female shamans played a powerful role in these societies, sometimes even leading warriors into battle. And the various clans were headed by both male and female chieftains – the absolute supremacy of the male did not become a social reality in Japan until much later. Although they were ruled by an elite warrior class, economically these early Japanese were agriculturalists rather than hunter/gatherers, and this fact also is reflected in their myths and rituals as recorded in the Kojiki. If taken at face value, then, the ‘snapshot’ political/historical view can give a misleading impression of the Kojiki. It is not my intention here to argue that this view is ‘wrong’ but rather to suggest that, in itself, it does not do full justice to the complex, hybrid, multifarious and even contradictory nature of the Kojiki. To put this another way, the standard political/historical account of this work needs to be supplemented by a literary and cultural/anthropological analysis. III. THE KOJIKI COMPILER’S INTENTIONS

One of the basic principles of modern literary analysis is that one should make a careful distinction between an author’s intentions and the actual nature of the work produced. This is obviously even more true when the work in question has multiple authors, many of them anonymous, and is a loose compilation of materials produced in widely different places and times and for different purposes. Certainly we can speculate quite legitimately about the Kojiki compilers’ intentions but, whatever their intentions, the actual text they produced is not so much a single-minded ‘propaganda mouthpiece’ for Yamato imperial rule as a discursive, dialogic expression of the conflict between two different stages of social evolution and their respective world-views: that is, between a literate, elitist, ‘law-and-order’ (ritsuryō), logocentric, Apollonian, centralizing ‘nation-building’ political agenda and the preliterate, folk-culture, ‘carnivalesque’, instinctive, Dionysian, decentralizing and even anarchic nature of much of the material compiled. As we shall see, the compilers obviously made some efforts to ‘manipulate’ this material so that it would better serve their ends, but the

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material itself, in addition to being diverse and even contradictory, is suffused with a wild, primitive, amoral, irrepressible life-force of its own which was not easily reducible to any single political purpose. The compilers’ intentions are most evident, of course, in the Preface, written by a certain Yasumaro in 712. As one would expect, he pays due obeisance to his imperial patrons, praising them to the skies and acknowledging that his inspiration to help compile the Kojiki came from them. It was Emperor Temmu, for instance, who first ordered that the imperial/myth/genealogical records which predated the Kojiki, the ‘Imperial Chronicles’ and ‘Fundamental Dicta’, be corrected, cleansed of all errors, proclaiming that they were ‘the framework of the state, the great foundation of the imperial influence’.2 But, if the Preface may be said to have a significant unconscious subtext, which is very evident to the modern reader, it has to do with Japan’s uneasy relation to China – uneasy in the sense demonstrated by Yasumaro himself, who wishes to assert the superiority of Japan and of the Japanese imperial family, but who cannot do so without betraying his dependency on everything Chinese. His lavish praise of Japanese imperial family members, for instance, is all couched in Chinese terms: of the Emperor Temmu he says: ‘In the Way he excelled the Yellow Emperor; in Virtue he surpassed the king of Chou’.3 Again he flatters the Empress Gemmei, who commanded him to compile the Kojiki, by comparing her favorably with Chinese emperors whom he says she surpasses in fame and virtue. Indeed, he speaks of her as if she were the Empress of China, claiming (obviously spuriously, but using typical Chinese phrases) that tribute comes to her from many foreign lands. Already, then, we can discern, in this oldest expression of Japanese nationalism, its characteristically paradoxical and unstable nature. Japanese nationalism has always had a significant subtext: first China, then the West. The paradox of having to define Japan’s national identity in Chinese terms and establish it with Chinese institutions, while at the same time claiming Japanese uniqueness or non-Chineseness – this is the dialectic or paradox at the core of Japan’s identity, which has always meant that the ingredients of Japan’s national identity make for a highly volatile, highly unstable mixture. And, of course, this paradox or volatile mixture would be repeated again over a millennium later vis-à-vis the West. Although obviously intended as a nationalist and imperialist proclamation, then, even the Preface to the Kojiki seems somewhat at odds with itself. One does not have to read very deeply between the lines to

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realize that the subject is not simply Japan: it is Japan in comparison and contrast with China, the significant other. The obviously exaggerated claims for members of the Japanese imperial family, which even intelligent contemporary readers must have found unconvincing, evince an almost painful sense of an emerging young nation struggling to establish itself as a significant national identity apart from its vast and powerful continental neighbor (and, ironically, using Chinese means to do so). One might doubt whether even Yasumaro himself believed his own inflated rhetoric: in one of his more interesting and self-revealing passages, he explains his difficulties in trying to write what he calls ‘unsophisticated’ ancient Japanese using the Chinese writing system – there were problems with both a semantic and a phonetic approach, and thus he ended up writing in an unsatisfactory ‘mixed’ style, sometimes semantic, sometimes phonetic. As an employee of the imperial court, he obviously could not afford to be this honest in discussing the relative merits of Chinese and Japanese emperors. To put it bluntly: what Yasumaro’s Preface tells us is that Japan was a nation born with – one could say out of – an inferiority complex: a small peripheral island nation making wild claims about its ‘divine origin’ in order to prove itself equal or even superior to a giant continental nation that was the centre of a major civilization – a clear case of overcompensation. Of course, this is not to deny that great things were achieved by these early Japanese nation-builders. It was Japan’s fortune as well as its misfortune to come into contact with T’ang dynasty China at this glorious moment in its history, the seventh and eighth centuries, when it was the most brilliant civilization on earth. IV. THE AGE OF THE GODS

The first of the three books of the Kojiki proper contains stories of the ‘age of the gods’. Some of these seem to have been manufactured by the Yamato court in order to place their principal deity, the sun goddess Amaterasu Omikami,4 in an appropriate mythological context: this strand of Book One culminates in the myth recounted in Chapters 32–7, which tells how Japan was ceded to the offspring of the heavenly deities, and has been described as ‘the central point and the climax of the mythological sections of the Kojiki’.5 But there are other strands of Book One: the ‘raw material’ of some of the stories obviously existed long before the Kojiki’s compilation and was clearly a legitimate part of a prehistoric Shinto and

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even continental Asian ‘folk tradition’ that was completely innocent of the political motives of the court compilers and, indeed, often seems unconsciously to subvert them. In other words, despite the best efforts of the compilers to propagandize on behalf of the Yamato nation state, the pre-national character of the mythic material itself often emerges: one does not have to read very deeply between the lines, for instance, to find tribal or regional divisions hinted at. The most interesting and conspicuous example of this is in the stories surrounding Amaterasu’s brother Susanoō, who plays a role in the Kojiki analogous to that of Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost: the Romantic rebel against divine order, a villain of heroic stature who, because of his anarchic, selfish and contradictory behavior, seems somehow more attractively human than the other gods or angels. Because Susanoō was the principal deity of the Izumo clan and is now enshrined in the main Shinto shrine of the Izumo region, Kumano-jinja, it is generally assumed that his mischievous behavior and rebellion against the Yamato gods is a mythical expression of the powerful Izumo clan’s long and strenuous resistance to Yamato hegemony. Indeed, this seems to be borne out by the contradictory ways in which he is represented in different chapters of the Kojiki (although this is also consistent with his changeable nature as a wind and storm god): in Chapter 16, for instance, he runs amok, destroying his sister’s rice fields, defecating in her hall and violating various other taboos; in Chapters 19 and 20, however, he is presented in a far more positive and heroic light: he slays the eight-tailed dragon and thus saves an old couple’s last daughter from being devoured by the beast, as all her other sisters have been. He kills the dragon not by his superior fighting skills but by a clever trick (he is a trickster hero, a familiar figure in world mythology and folklore): first he gets it drunk on strong saké, then, after the dragon has fallen into a drunken stupor, he hacks it to pieces. When he chops off one of the dragon’s tails, he finds a ‘great sharp sword’ inside which he presents to his sister Amaterasu, the divine ancestress of the Japanese imperial family. This sword, named Kusanagi or ‘Grass-mower’, became one of the ‘three treasures’ or ‘three imperial regalia’ (mirror, sword and jewel) which, even today, symbolize the emperor’s divine descent and thus his divine right to rule Japan. This inconsistency in the Kojiki’s representation of Susanoō – now national hero, now local rebel – suggests to many scholars that the Yamato court compilers had two contradictory purposes in recounting

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these stories: on the one hand, they wanted to present the unruly Izumo god as being in need of some control and discipline by the Yamato gods – and by extension, of course, to argue that, for the sake of law and order, local areas such as Izumo needed to be brought under Yamato central control; on the other hand, they wanted to appease the powerful Izumo clan by incorporating their principal deity into the Yamato pantheon, and even by giving him an important role in legitimizing the Yamato imperial family’s divine right to rule. Nonetheless, the main impression we are left with, as readers, is of Susanoō as a hero of the forces of decentralization, of regional as opposed to national Japan – a kind of god of regionalism who assumes new importance in our age of globalization, with regionalism on the rise and nationalism on the wane. His myth (and he is the major character of a large part of the first, mythological section of the Kojiki) thus symbolizes what, from the beginning, was the most basic political and cultural dialectical tension of Japanese history: between the forces of national unification and those making for regional diversity and independence (in everything from language to political structures), a centrifugal/centripetal dialectic. Besides these displays of tension between the Yamato nation-builders and their regional opponents, the Kojiki embodies a challenge to the national/imperial imperative in another, deeper cultural and ontological sense (or epistemic sense in Foucauldian terms): the earthy, scatological, morally anarchic, carnivalesque nature of much of the material, which is a product of a prehistorical folk-mythic imagination rather than of a historically minded, organizational, elitist, abstract nation-building intellect. This is why the prewar Japanese government was obliged to censor some elements of this supposedly sacred canonical text and why, even for readers today, a good deal of the material seems odd and incongruous for a work that supposedly aims to convince us of the divine descent of the Japanese imperial family. When Amaterasu is driven into a cave by her mischievous brother, for instance, the goddess Ame no uzume becomes possessed (shamanic spirit possession being common among ancient Japanese) and performs a sacred strip tease, exposing her breasts and genitals. The gods respond with uproarious laughter, which piques Amaterasu’s curiosity and causes her to look out of her hiding place. The gods then grab hold of her and pull her out. With this forced re-emergence of the sun goddess, the whole world instantly brightens. There is also the issue of imperial incest: brothers and sisters such as Izanagi and Izanami and Amaterasu and Susanoō mate to produce

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divine children – Confucian scholars of the Edo period criticized this as incest and the modern philosopher Nishida Kitarō regarded it as a Shinto version of original sin.6 The great eighteenth-century Kojiki scholar, Motoori Norinaga, answered Confucian criticisms with nationalist bravado: ‘… Is it perhaps the rules of China? … Why should we adhere so slavishly to the rules of an alien land that we presume to judge thereby the actions of the Visible Gods [i.e., the emperors] of our own empire?’ But the real problem, of course, is inherent in the Kojiki project itself: in the compilers’ attempt to put ancient myths to an imperial, nation-building use for which they were never intended. A similar sense of incongruity is produced by the richly scatological earthiness of much of the Kojiki’s mythic material: for instance, when divine children are born from a goddess’s vomit, excrement and urine (perhaps, it has been suggested, showing the importance of excreta to the Yayoi agricultural economy). But my own favorite example of Kojiki scatology is the story explaining the interesting place-name: Kuso-Bakama (Shit-Trousers): because a rebellious army, pursued by imperial forces, was cornered there and: ‘They were all so sorely pressed that they evacuated faeces, which adhered to their trousers’. Surely this semi-mythical account is based on an actual incident – it smacks so much of reality! And the opponents of the Yamato rulers had good reason to be afraid – certain passages in the Kojiki make it obvious that they were shown no mercy: ‘when they blocked the path of the fleeing army and cut them down, they floated in the river like cormorants’. And ‘because of the cutting down and slaughtering of the warriors, the name of that place is Papuri-sōnō (Slaughter Garden)’.7 The so-called ‘pacification’ of the country was obviously a very sanguinary process, and resistance to Yamato hegemony was fierce and long-drawn-out. Many chapters in Book 2 recount such incidents of ‘pacification’. At any rate, even to the educated elite of the Nara era, the primitive earthy character of the Shinto gods must have formed a stark and strange contrast to the ideal spirituality and sublimity of the Buddhist holy figures depicted in the great sculptures of the period, and the gods’ behavior must have seemed rather less than ideal when judged by Confucian standards of decorum and rationality. Obviously, the native religion would not suffice for nation-building and thus became increasingly marginalized – as did the imperial system itself – until it was artificially revived in the late nineteenth century.

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V. THE AGE OF MEN

The latter part of the Kojiki is often characterized as an account of the ‘age of the men’ – that is, it is closer to history than mythology and seems to be at least partly based on historical records. But here too there are obvious manipulations for political purposes of whatever ‘raw materials’ originally existed. For instance, an interesting example of how the work attempts to reconcile two conflicting worldviews occurs in chapter 139, which tells a story set in the Kojiki’s ‘recent’ past (the late fifth century) – in fact, it is the final story of the entire work, since the remaining chapters are devoted mainly to genealogical lists. The story relates that Emperor Kenzō was so ‘filled with bitterness’ toward his predecessor, Emperor Yūryaku, who had murdered his father, that he planned to destroy his tomb as a way of being ‘revenged upon his spirit’.8 His elder brother, Prince Oke (later Emperor Ninken), suggested that to entrust such a delicate task to anyone other than a member of the imperial family would be to commit an offence of lèse-majesté. The Emperor agreed and sent his brother but became suspicious when he returned from his mission much earlier than expected. When questioned, the brother freely admitted that he had not actually destroyed the whole tomb but merely ‘shamed’ it symbolically by digging up a small amount of earth at its side. Disappointed at first, the Emperor was finally persuaded that this was a ‘just’ solution to the conflict between two ethical imperatives: the need to avenge their father’s death versus the need to maintain the dignity and sacred status of the imperial office. To have completely destroyed an emperor’s tomb would have been too great an act of desecration; by committing such an act they would have undermined the sanctity of the very office that they themselves now embodied. Digging a small hole beside the tomb, on the other hand, was a modest symbolic gesture that sufficiently shamed their father’s murderer without desecrating his sacred office. Thus, two different worldviews and value systems – that of a tribal society united by kinship loyalty and that of a national society based on a more abstract, imperial loyalty – are very cleverly, and apparently quite easily, reconciled in the pages of the Kojiki if not in reality. But, told in this way, the story is clearly apocryphal: that is, it is obvious that the fifth-century historical event is clothed in a seventhcentury ideological raiment: namely, the ritsuryō state’s doctrine of the sacred nature of the imperial office and of any violation of this as a

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crime of lèse-majesté. But is it possible, at this distance in time, to distinguish between the ‘original historical event’ and what we might call the ‘Kojiki accretions?’ Or, if not, is it at least possible to make a reasonably educated guess? What is certainly ‘retrospective’ or anachronistic in the story is the concept of ‘tennō’ (heavenly sovereign) and all that it implies. The villain of the piece, Ō-hatsuse-no-mikoto (Great Hatsuse Lord), whom the Kojiki describes as an emperor and who, later in the eighth century, was given the Chinese posthumous name he is usually known by today, Emperor Yūryaku, was a fifth-century Yamato ruler who was recognized by the Chinese court as ‘King of Wa and Generalissimo Who Maintains Peace in the East’.9 But, as Joan Piggott has pointed out, Yūryaku’s undoubted military prowess and his reputed building of a great keyhole tomb do not necessarily prove ‘the emergence of a fifthcentury Yamato state’.10 Even in his own area of central Japan his rule did not go unchallenged – in fact, as Piggott says, he was ‘obliged to battle rivals ceaselessly’.11 Indeed, according to the Nihon shoki (Annals of Japan, 720), he murdered the father of Princes Oke and Woke precisely because he was a rival to the throne.12 (Usually Kojiki accounts are thought to predate those of the Nihon shoki, but in this case, exceptionally, the latter’s portrayal of Yūryaku as a ruthless murderer of his rivals seems historically more authentic – perhaps the Kojiki, designed more for domestic consumption and for bolstering the status of the imperial family at home, was more constrained in dealing with its ‘black sheep’. Also, as Piggott points out, ‘the confusion over who should rule after Yūryaku’s death ultimately demonstrated the limits of late fifth-century structures of kingship, in which succession was violently contested’.13 Furthermore: ‘Critical facets of kingship – a cosmological charter, distinctive courtly ceremonial, and a legitimizing genealogy – had not yet been sufficiently articulated’.14 Of course, the Kojiki itself would articulate at least two of these ‘critical facets of kingship’ – a cosmological charter and a legitimizing genealogy – just over two centuries later. And, as Piggott also points out, the state-building efforts of the Yamato court in the century following Yūryaku ‘dramatically differentiated paramountcy in the era of Great King Yūryaku from the nascent Chinese-style sacerdotal kingship of the late sixth-century ruler known as Great King Suiko’.15 It seems highly likely, then, that the main point of the Kojiki’s final story – that the imperial brothers Oke and Woke, despite their great desire to avenge their father’s death, were restrained from destroying

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Emperor Yūryaku’s tomb by a sense of lèse-majesté – was a fabrication inspired by late seventh-century ritsuryō state ideology. Indeed, what also seems likely, as the pioneer nineteenth-century Japanologist William George Aston suggested in his translation of the Nihon shoki, is that Yūryaku’s tomb actually had been destroyed in the fifth century but that the compilers of the Kojiki and Nihon shoki ‘regarded the demolition of a misasagi as an impious action, and tried to minimize it’.16 Aston even offered archaeological evidence to support this view: claiming to have visited the remains of the tomb, he records that, although it now consisted of only a single mound surrounded by a moat, he could still detect the remains of a second mound and of an original moat, showing that it was once the double-topped misasagi of a great Yamato king: ‘A large quantity of earth must have been removed in order thus to deprive this tomb of its distinctive character as an Imperial tumulus, and to give it the appearance of the tomb of a mere subject’.17 How, then, do these ‘educated guesses’ contribute to our understanding of the Kojiki’s last story or to our interpretation of it? Donald Philippi makes high claims for the story as a ‘landmark’ in the long process of transformation from native Japanese to alien Chinese values – in other words, an early example of the kind of ‘culture clash’ Japan, as a major importer of foreign cultures, would often experience throughout its history: ‘This account of the moral dilemma of a person confronted with the conflicting claims of revenge and reverence for imperial institutions is an interesting landmark in the development of Japanese morality under the impact of Chinese ethics’ (that is, under the increasing influence of the Chinese imperial ideology which instilled reverence for the ‘Divine Emperor’ – this conflicting with the native Japanese tribal tradition of seeking revenge for any wrong or injury done to one’s family or clan).18 But what our ‘educated guesses’ make clear is that this conflict, such as it was, existed not in the minds of the late fifth-century historical protagonists but in the minds of the late seventh-century Kojiki compilers. In projecting their own sense of lèse-majesté onto their tribal ancestors, the national chroniclers of the Kojiki were creating historical fiction rather than history per se; they were consciously reshaping ‘ancient’ tribal raw material into a ‘modern’ national narrative. The same may be said, of course, for the Kojiki as a whole, though one should add that, on that much grander scale, the compilers were not always as successful as they were with the final story in reshaping the raw material to serve their ideological purposes.

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For Japanese nationalists the fact that it was ‘Chinese ethics’ – specifically, the value system engendered by the Chinese imperial institution – which shaped these manipulations of native historical and mythical materials is a rather inconvenient fact. This is not to say that they have always been conscious of the irony of their position – for instance, one doubts that nationalist thinkers such as the great midTokugawa scholar, Motoori Norinaga, were conscious of any irony when they defended and espoused the emperor system as the supreme signifier of Japan’s national identity – and, more to the point, as the signifier of their nation’ssuperiority over China. Certainly, they would never have acknowledged that they were actually espousing a ‘foreign’, ‘Chinese-style’ ideology and institution that had replaced native tribalism over the two centuries between Yūryaku and the Kojiki. Nonetheless, there has been a noticeable tendency among nationalist historians, a tendency which survives in some quarters even today (among textbook writers, for instance) not to probe too deeply into the prehistoric period, to leave this period reverently shrouded in the ‘mists of time’, to prefer myth to reality in their accounts of the period, and even sometimes to invent their own myths, such as that of a native writing system predating the introduction of Chinese characters.19 But, of course, all sense of contradiction or paradox melts away the moment one rises above a narrow nationalist view of Japanese history and takes a wider supranational view more in keeping with our increasingly globalized age. As the historian Prasenjit Duara has so persuasively argued, history has, in fact, been too long in thrall to the nation.20 From a wider global perspective the fundamental ‘subtext’ of the Kojiki is not the contradictory dependence of Japanese nationalism on Chinese tradition but something far grander, more interesting and universal: the momentous social and cultural transformations involved in the transition from an oral culture to a literate one, and from a tribal society to a national one. In other words, what is involved here is nothing less than one of the major stages in the universal process of human evolution towards ‘civilization’ – that is, towards an ever more largescale, complex and abstract level of social organization and towards all the cultural and material benefits made possible by that. From this perspective Chinese civilization was merely the ‘incidental’ catalyst effecting the transformation: in other words, fundamentally the same transformation would have occurred had the Japanese adopted, say, the Roman alphabet rather than kanji, or the imperial Roman rather than the imperial Chinese political system. This is not to say that the

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‘Chinese cultural style’ of the transformation was irrelevant – it is of course relevant in all kinds of particular ways – but the central or fundamental facts of the transformation resembled all such transformations around the globe regardless of variations in national cultural style. Thus, ironically, a perspective that deemphasizes nationality and places more emphasis on a sociocultural transformation that is universally recognizable actually restores ‘Japan’ to a position of centrality and makes its ‘uneasy relation with the Chinese Other’ seem a mere chimera – not to say an example of self-engendered nationalist paranoia. VI. THE KOJIKI AS NATIONAL NARRATIVE

In conclusion, then, it seems to me that the Kojiki may be quite accurately characterized as a ‘national narrative’ but that this characterization should be more comprehensive and nuanced than what I have called the ‘snapshot view’ of the work. What sort of ‘national narrative’ is the Kojiki? As it turns out, a far more complex and interesting one than the nationalist or political/historical ‘snapshot view’ would suggest. An in-depth reading of the work shows that the Kojiki, far from being merely a straightforward propaganda mouthpiece of the imperial court (although it may have been intended as such), actually embodies two conflicting worldviews – one oral, mythical, tribal and shamanistic, the other literate, historical, national and Buddhist-Confucian – and thus provides an invaluable insight into the ‘growing-pains’ of Japanese society and culture at the first and most crucial ‘nation-building’ stage of the country’s history.

Source: Ji Fengyuan, Lin Jinghua, and Susan Bouterey (eds.), Cultural Interactions and Interpretations in a Global Age. Christchurch: Canterbury University Press (2011), pp. 29–39.

3.

Prince Shōtoku and Japan’s ‘China Complex’ v

The famous ‘ambiguities’ in Japanese attitudes towards China are often said to be rooted in nineteenth-century Japanese imperialism and its first major product, the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95. A wellknown statement of this view, for instance, is that by the novelist Ōe Kenzaburō in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech of 1994: The modernisation of Japan has been orientated toward learning from and imitating the West. Yet Japan is situated in Asia and has firmly maintained its traditional culture. The ambiguous orientation of Japan drove the country into the position of an invader in Asia … Japan was driven into isolation from other Asian countries, not only politically but also socially and culturally.1

Similarly, in a recent theoretical study of Meiji literature, Atsuko Ueda, invoking the postcolonial theorist Homi K. Bhabha’s idea of ‘colonial mimicry’, argues that ‘[Meiji] Japan’s desire for authoritative power (the desire to become ‘the West’) seeks out a more barbaric other (in this case ‘Asia’)’.2 Furthermore, she claims, by its ‘mimicry’ of the West, and especially by its acquisition of an advanced knowledge of Western civilization, Japan could justify its ‘imperial longing’ and claim ‘superiority over China, a clear contender to the position of leader in East Asia’.3 Thus, among the various different stances towards continental Asia current in Meiji Japan, one finds both pan-Asianism – usually including a call for Japan to take over the leadership of Asia – and also datsu-a or a call for the de-Asianization of Japan. Paradoxically, and I think in a typically Japanese fashion, these two positions were 33

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not necessarily mutually exclusive. Ueda paraphrases the intellectual historian Hashikawa Bunzō, who pointed out that there were ‘cases where a valorization and strong contempt for China coexist in an individual, despite their overtly contradictory characteristics’.4 But I would like to ask here: did this split in Japan’s national identity, this ambivalence towards Asia and towards its own Asian identity, this double-edged sword of ‘valorization’ on the one side and ‘contempt’ or defiance on the other, really begin only in the nineteenth century, because of the encounter with the West? Or can it be traced back much further, more than a millennium earlier in fact, to the very beginnings of Japanese history, the early Asuka period, when Japan first entered into formal relations with its Asian neighbours and first tried to establish itself as an imperial state modelled upon China but free of Chinese political and cultural domination – indeed, even as a putative equal to China? To put this another way: is the split or ambivalence in Japan’s national identity the result of a relatively recent historical accident or is it an inherent part of its national polity from the very beginning – implanted in its foundational DNA, so to speak? The leading historical figure of the early Asuka period – at least in the Japanese national imaginary – is, of course, Prince Shōtoku (Shōtoku Taishi, 574–622), who is often presented as the ‘father’ of the Japanese imperial state, the father of Japanese Buddhism, and even as the father of Japanese civilization itself. Although the actual historicity of the man and his achievements has recently been called into question, this has no major bearing on the present argument: whether he existed or not, or whether he achieved all that is traditionally attributed to him or not, we can learn much about Japan’s traditional sense of itself by studying the way this ‘national father figure’ has been represented over the ages. In particular, I would argue that the ancient origins as well as the multilevelled complexity of what I would call Japan’s ‘China complex’ can be discerned not only in what is commonly said about Prince Shōtoku but also in the changing attitudes towards this key figure in the ‘Japanese national imaginary’ over the centuries. The primary ancient source for all biographies of Prince Shōtoku is the Nihon shoki (Chronicles of Japan, 720), a court-compiled history of Japan from its mythical founding until the late seventh century. Much of what is said about Shōtoku in the Chronicles can be classified as Buddhist hagiography: barely a century after his death, he is already presented as a saintly figure, much-loved by all, who possessed semimiraculous powers – the ability to listen to the pleas of twelve men

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at once, for instance. The only political achievement that is explicitly attributed to him is the compilation and promulgation of the so-called ‘Seventeen-Article Constitution’ of 604, the first-ever statement by a Japanese public official on the principles of good government. But the Chronicles also tell us that he ‘had general control of the Government, and was entrusted with all the details of administration’. On the basis of this rather vague assurance, scholars over the centuries have postulated a Suiko-court power structure in which the Empress Suiko herself, being female, was allowed only a symbolic or ceremonial role – perhaps as the high priestess of Shinto – and her nephew, Prince Shōtoku, being male, was the de facto ruler, in charge of all everyday practical affairs of government. Recently this view has been challenged by both Japanese and Western scholars, and both by those who argue that the Empress had more power than was traditionally thought, and by those who argue that the real power-broker was Soga no Umako, chief of the Soga clan – a clan that had been all-powerful in Shōtoku’s day (his own mother was a Soga) but had been ousted and discredited by the time the Chronicles were written, about a century later. Thus, these latter scholars argue, the chroniclers had an understandable political motive for exaggerating Shōtoku’s power and downplaying Soga no Umako’s role as the real ‘power behind the throne’. But this scepticism regarding Shōtoku’s importance is very much a latter-day phenomenon. The vast majority of Japanese historians over the centuries have accepted the Chronicles’ vague assurance that it was this ‘Shining Prince’ who was in charge of the Suiko court, and on this basis they have attributed to him all the political, diplomatic, and cultural achievements of that court: including, most notably, the establishment of a Chinese-style emperor-system and imperial bureaucracy, the patronage of Buddhism and Confucianism as state religions, and the opening of diplomatic relations with the Sui court in China. As will be seen from this shortlist of Shōtoku’s putative achievements, all of them had one thing in common: an opening up to continental and especially Chinese civilization. The Asuka period witnessed the first great opening of Japan to the outside world – and of course it would not be the last. The role of ‘civilizational mentor’ that the West played during Meiji Enlightenment was first played by China more than twelve centuries earlier, during the so-called ‘Asuka Enlightenment’. But if ‘openings to the outside world’ are a central and recurrent fact of Japanese history, needless to say so also are closings or periods of self-imposed national isolation and consolidation. As far as the

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pendulum swings in one direction, it seems to swing back just as far in the other direction. The kokutai or national body breathes in, but it also, inevitably, breathes out. This fact alone tells us much about Japan’s eternal ambivalence regarding foreign influences in its culture and national identity. Such being the case, we might also expect a parallel ambivalence in Japanese attitudes towards Prince Shōtoku – who, more than any other historical figure, is closely associated with the large-scale importation of foreign culture into Japan; as the first great imperial sponsor of the Asuka Enlightenment, it was he, after all, who initiated the irreversible hybridization of Japanese culture. If we survey attitudes towards Prince Shōtoku throughout Japanese history, we find, not surprisingly, that these vary precisely according to the prevailing attitude towards ‘foreign influence’ – and also, more specifically, towards Buddhism. His posthumous apotheosis as the saintly ‘founder of Japanese Buddhism’ reached its height in the middle ages, when Buddhism itself was at the height of its power and prestige in Japan.5 Most notably, the major Buddhist leader, Shinran (1173– 1262), the founder of the Jōdo Shinshū or True Pure Land Sect, was a great devotee of Shinran, composing about two hundred hymns in his praise. As the man who brought Buddhism to Japan, Prince Shōtoku occupied a central place in Shinran’s religious worldview. But it should be noted that there was a nationalistic side to his devotion, too – an attempt to ‘Japanese’ what was originally a ‘foreign’ religion. While perhaps not as overtly nationalistic as the other great medieval Buddhist leader, Nichiren, Shinran nonetheless, in keeping with the medieval Zeitgeist, was obviously attracted to the idea of a native Japanese bodhisattva, and emphasizes Shōtoku’s Japaneseness in the numerous encomiums he wrote about him. In the first of his ‘Hymns in Praise of Prince Shōtoku’, for instance, he enjoins believers to: Take refuge in Prince Shōtoku of the country of Japan! Our indebtedness to his propagation of the Buddhist teaching is profound. His compassionate activity to save sentient beings is far-reaching; Do not be lax in reverent praise of him!6

Historically, this was the time when Japan was threatened by Mongol invasion from the continent (and was twice abortively invaded, in 1274 and 1281), and was going through one of its most extended periods of isolation and alienation from the outside world. Thus, the

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pressure to ‘nativize’ the ‘foreign’ religion of Buddhism was urgent and compelling, and medieval Japanese Buddhist leaders approached this task in a variety of different ways, one of which, quite obviously, was through the apotheosis of Shōtoku as the ‘Japanese Buddha’ – or, at least, as the bodhisattva-founder of Japanese Buddhism who was an exemplary Buddhist in every possible way, including even in the profound depth of his understanding of Buddhist philosophy. In other words, the Prince was living proof that the Japanese, from the very beginning, were capable of the highest levels of Buddhist attainment. As Mark L. Blum has written, for instance, the Vimalakirti sutra commentary long attributed to Shōtoku became ‘a symbol of Japanese native ability to understand the subtleties of Mahayana doctrine’.7 It seems likely, then, that even Prince Shōtoku’s medieval apotheosis was as much the product of a new national assertiveness as an openness to foreign culture (in the form of Buddhism). Strange to say, however, after the dizzying highpoint of Prince Shōtoku’s reputation as a sage-ruler and Buddhist saint in the middle ages, his stock took a sudden and precipitous downturn in the following ‘early modern’ or Tokugawa period (1600–1868) – at least among the newly emergent nationalist scholars. By this time the power and influence of Buddhism had begun to decline, a decline that had been initiated by the attacks on monks and temples launched by ‘the first great national unifier’, Oda Nobunaga, in the 1560s. With neo-Confucianism adopted as the official state ideology of the Tokugawa regime, and the status of Buddhism continuing to fall, by the eighteenth century anti-Shōtoku sentiment was open and vehement among the kokugakusha or nativist scholars. What did they have against him? The main thing no doubt was the very fact that he had become so dear to the heart of the Buddhists. By then he was widely regarded, after all, as the ‘father of Japanese Buddhism’, and the nativist scholars did not thank him for that. On the whole they disliked Buddhism – in fact, some of them detested it. Partly no doubt this was because of Confucian influences on them, but it was also a result of their nationalism. More than a millennium after the anti-Buddhist Mononobe clan chieftains, traditional guardians of Shinto, had been defeated in the late sixth-century ‘religious wars’ by the Soga forces of which Prince Shōtoku was a part, their spirit of resistance to the ‘foreign gods’ was reborn in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Japan. To nativist scholars Buddhism was a foreign religion whose very presence in Japan was an insult to the native gods; besides, its ‘decadent’

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doctrines and worldview threatened to corrupt the natural ‘purity’ and ‘sincerity’ of the Japanese mind and national character, especially as embodied in the bushidō ideals of the samurai class. How could a devout Buddhist who believed in non-violence, karma, and the vanity of all worldly desires ever be a valiant, impassioned warrior willing to fight and die for the Emperor? Just as Edward Gibbon (1737–1794), in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, accused Christianity of having undermined the traditional Roman martial virtues with its pacifist ‘preaching of patience and pusillanimity’, thus hastening the fall of Rome, so the Japanese nativist scholars, Gibbon’s faraway contemporaries, said about Buddhism that it had undermined traditional Japanese values such as loyalty to the Emperor and the martial spirit that made their Empire great.8 Not only was the Sinophile Shōtoku guilty of having betrayed his native gods by his patronage of this ‘evil’ foreign creed but, corrupted by the foreign religion, he had also participated in a heinous crime: the murder of an emperor, Sushun – his own uncle – who, as we have seen, was assassinated in 593 by the Soga so that Empress Suiko could assume the throne with the Prince himself as her Regent. As Satō Masahide has written, leading Tokugawa Confucians such as Hayashi Razan (1583–1657) and nativist scholars such as Hirata Atsutane (1776–1843) severely criticized Prince Shōtoku as an ‘immoral person who was unjust and disloyal’ (fugi fuchū no haitokusha).9 And John Brownlee has also pointed out that ‘Kumazawa Banzan (1619– 91) [another Tokugawa Confucian and Shintō scholar] forcefully criticized Prince Shōtoku, a saintly ruler traditionally beyond criticism, for his role in the affair’.10 Although Prince Shōtoku certainly may be said to have benefited from his uncle’s assassination, this does not prove, of course, that he played any part in it, and, in fact, there is no historical evidence that he did. The consensus among historians today is that it was ordered by the Soga clan chief, Umako. Nonetheless, the mere lack of historical evidence of Shōtoku’s guilt did not deter the Tokugawa nationalists, who were obviously predisposed, for their own Confucian/Shintōist and nationalist reasons, to believe the worst of this Buddhist and Sinophile Prince. And many other nativist scholars took much the same line, including the Mito School authors of the Dai Nihon shi (History of Great Japan, 1715), who also accused the Prince of having ‘destroyed our national religion [Shintō]’.11 Indeed, nationalist feelings against the Prince had become so extraordinarily vehement by the end of the Tokugawa period that

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he was transformed into a symbol of everything they despised. As Itō Kimio has written: … nationalist scholars severely condemned Prince Shōtoku for disrupting the basic structure of the nation by introducing Buddhism. In the period leading up to the Meiji Restoration (1868), when imperial sentiment reached a feverish pitch, Shitennōji [the Buddhist temple in Osaka reputedly built by the Prince in thanks for the victory of the Buddhist Soga over the Shintō Mononobe] became the site of violent protests, including suicides and an incendiary attack that burned twelve buildings on its grounds.12

More than twelve hundred years after the Prince had ‘Sinosized’ Japanese culture, there were still people who would not forgive him for this ‘traitorous’ act. From their perspective, obviously, this ‘Prince Stable-door’ (Umayado, his original name) was far from being the paragon of ‘sagely virtue’ (Shōtoku) portrayed by Buddhists – for their own nefarious purposes – in their reverent portraits and hagiographies!13 How the great had fallen! But the Meiji Restoration also brought a restoration of the Prince’s reputation – in miraculously short order he was transformed from national villain into national hero. Just as other elements of Japanese culture were ‘reconfigured’ to serve the nation-building purposes of the Meiji establishment – literary classics, for instance, or the imperial system itself – so too were ‘historical’ figures such as Prince Shōtoku. And this was despite the haibutsu kishaku (abolish the Buddha, destroy Shakyamuni) movement of the early Meiji period, the attempt to eradicate Buddhism and replace it with a newly nationalized Shintō. Among the new government elite, at least, the ‘Buddhist Shōtoku’ was downplayed and the ‘political Shōtoku’ celebrated: the founder of the imperial system who was a great ‘reformer’ remarkably like the Meiji nation-builders and modernizers themselves. Prince Shōtoku was, after all, arguably the most important historical figure in the Nihon shoki, and, as Kōnoshi Takamitsu points out, the Nihon shoki, along with the Kojiki, was ‘canonized’ by the ‘modern emperor system and nation-state’ as ‘the cultural fountainhead of both the people and the nation’.14 In other words, among the Japanese political establishment in the Meiji period, Prince Shōtoku was ‘reborn’ as a major political and cultural figure, largely shorn of his Buddhist hagiographical accretions, the imperial ‘nation-builder’ at the very beginning of Japanese history who could now be presented as a forerunner of the Meiji nation-builders themselves, who were also making a ‘revolution

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from the top’, similarly transforming Japanese society and culture by the rapid and wholesale importation of a more powerful foreign civilization, now Western instead of Chinese. As a government-authorized history textbook of 1909 proclaimed: ‘The prince adopted some of the strengths of China for our benefit and enacted various new laws’.15 The most famous of these ‘new laws’ was the Seventeen-Article Constitution which, a 1903 textbook claimed: ‘provided a moral basis to people of all ranks’.16 Through the invocation of Prince Shōtoku’s name in this way, the ‘Meiji Enlightenment’ could be satisfyingly represented, despite all the ‘modernization’ it entailed, as fundamentally a revival of Japanese tradition rather than a break with it – in other words, as a modern version of the ancient ‘Asuka Enlightenment’. And, since the Meiji Restoration was also primarily about the ‘restoration’ of the Emperor and the imperial system to the national political power center – symbolically at least – the fact that Prince Shōtoku was a bona fide member of that newly imagined, newly politicized ‘imperial family’ – despite his Soga mother – meant that, for Meiji leaders busily inventing traditions and origins for their new nation state, he presented himself as an excellent candidate for ‘father of the nation’. Furthermore, his appeal promised to be as much international as domestic. Indeed, with his eminently civilized, ‘enlightened’, and saintly image, the Prince Imperial (as the Victorian Japanologist W.G. Aston, translator of the Nihon shoki, quaintly dubbed him) was also bound to impress Westerners in the nineteenth century as much as he had impressed Chinese and Koreans in the seventh century. The Meiji leaders hoped through such means to convince the West that Japan deserved to be admitted into the privileged circle of ‘civilized’ or ‘advanced nations’ – a major concern of theirs, since being recognized as ‘civilized’ promised important political and diplomatic dividends.17 As the leading figure of the ‘Asuka Enlightenment’, Prince Shōtoku was the perfect ‘traditional’ exemplar and symbol of all that the Meiji state hoped to accomplish with its own Enlightenment project of ‘modernization’ by the importation en masse of a foreign civilization. On the domestic front also, who could better exemplify the age-old truth that the imperial system of government was progressive rather than reactionary, and that it had always provided the safest leadership for Japan in a dangerous transitional period such as the present (the eternal present, one might add). By the 1930s the pendulum had swung all the way to the opposite of the Tokugawa extreme, with the Prince now firmly established as a major national symbol, an icon of the ultranationalists and militarists,

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as ‘founder of the imperial state’ – seemingly a strange fate for a ‘Buddhist prince’, but one that clearly demonstrates the ‘ambiguity’ of his position both in ‘real’ historical terms and in terms of the national imaginary. As Itō Kimio has pointed out: ‘The emphasis on Shōtoku’s nationalism [in history textbooks] increased following Japan’s occupation of Manchuria in 1931 and reflected Japan’s growing feeling of superiority over China’.18 A 1934 textbook, for instance, jingoistically claimed that, although ancient China was an ‘arrogant’ imperial power that tended to treat its neighbors as colonial subjects, ‘Prince Shōtoku was not in the least afraid of its power’.19 Thus, although Prince Shōtoku is usually imagined as a Sinophile – based on the Asuka’s court’s ‘opening’ to Chinese civilization as evidenced partly by its diplomatic missions to the Sui court and also by ‘his’ heavily Chinese-influenced Constitution – in post-Meiji Japan he is also often presented by nationalists as the ‘first Japanese nationalist’ because of his supposedly defiant attitude to the dominant East Asian hegemon; he is imagined as a strong ruler who resisted accepting the usual subservient status that the Chinese emperors imposed on neighboring ‘kings’. For instance, Japanese nationalist historians claim to find an assertion of equality in the letters they assume that Shōtoku sent to the Sui dynasty (589–618) court. Most famously, as recorded in the Chinese History of the Sui Dynasty’s chapter on the eastern barbarians, ‘he’ addressed the Chinese emperor as follows: ‘The Child of Heaven in the Land of the Rising Sun to the Child of Heaven in the Land of the Setting Sun’, and also: ‘The Eastern Emperor Greets the Western Emperor’.20 ‘What a noble action!’ enthused a Japanese history textbook of 1920, taking the Prince’s salutation as an early expression of Japanese nationalism.21 His application of the term ‘Child of Heaven’ or ‘emperor’ to the Japanese sovereign was unacceptable to the Chinese court, however, since they reserved this term exclusively for their own ruler. The Sui dynasty Emperor Yang-di is said to have described it as ‘an impolite letter from the barbarians’, and to have warned his minions not to bring such a letter to his attention again.22 Even if, as some scholars have claimed, these impudent salutations (from a Chinese viewpoint) simply ‘reflected an ignorance of Chinese protocol and sensibilities’, there was still an expectation – or perhaps a hope – implicit in them that Japan would be treated as an equal by the great Sui Dynasty Chinese Empire.23 Even today, nationalist writers such as Hirakawa Sukehiro regard what they see as ‘Prince Shōtoku’s letter’ as a manifestation of Japanese dis-

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satisfaction with the ‘hierarchical’, Sinocentric Chinese view of the world order.24 On the one hand, then, the Prince is presented, by modern (postMeiji) nationalist historians as a ‘progressive’ Prince who was open to continental influences; on the other hand, somewhat paradoxically (and this paradox too goes to the heart of Japanese national identity), he is presented as what we might call ‘the first Japanese nationalist’ (even though, as we have seen, to the Tokugawa nationalists he was the first man to ‘betray’ Japan to China) because of his apparently open defiance of the Sinocentric world-order: by his refusal to accept for Japan the inferior status which the Chinese imperial court assigned to all peripheral ‘tributary’ states or kingdoms.25 A ‘progressive’ prince, then, open to continental civilization and cognizant of its potential benefits for Japan, but also a staunch defender of national dignity and sovereignty; the first Japanese Sinophile and the first leader to open full-scale diplomatic and cultural relations with China, but also the first to provoke a major ‘cultural misunderstanding’ by his use of the term ‘emperor’, which the Chinese reserved exclusively for their own ruler. According to this post-Meiji nationalist construction of the Prince and his achievements, then, his ‘defiance’ towards the Chinese court is regarded as the first significant ‘diplomatic’ expression of an incipient Japanese nationalism – a fitting complement to the Prince’s Herculean efforts within Japan itself towards creating a national polity centered on the imperial court. Since the Suiko era, Japan’s national identity has always been defined in uneasy contradistinction to a ‘superior other’, first China, later the West, whose superiority is first acknowledged and later often denied. Prince Shōtoku is the first identifiable ‘historical’ figure who represents, from what is traditionally said of him, the full range of these ‘ambivalent’ attitudes, especially in regard to China. As Atsuko Sakaki has pointed out and explored at some length, Japan had an ‘obsession’ with China that lasted for more than a millennium.26 Thus we can see clearly that the ‘aimaisa’ or ‘ambiguity’ of Japan’s attitude to continental Asia, famously mentioned by Ōe Kenzaburō in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, did not start, as he suggests, in the modern or Meiji era – it was present from the very beginning, indeed an integral part of Shōtoku’s legacy as a ‘Sinophile Prince’ who reputably also resisted Chinese hegemony.27 What even a brief historical meditation on Prince Shōtoku shows clearly is that Japan’s ambivalence or ambiguity towards China is

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also ultimately an ambivalence or ambiguity towards itself – that is, towards its own cultural identity. The question then arises: what is the relevance of this primal national identity crisis or ‘self-contradiction’ in a globalizing, ‘postmodern’ age? Are we still confronted, even today, by the continuing problem of the foundational instability or volatility of Japan’s national identity? Or does the ‘postmodern condition’ of present-day Japan promise, almost by default, some kind of resolution to this problematic – and possibly also, at the same time, to the country’s more recently acquired ‘Western complex’? Perhaps some clue to an answer may be found by a close analysis of Prince Shōtoku’s standing in Japan today.

Source: Matthew Feldman et al, editors, The ‘New Man’ in Radical Right Ideology and Practice, 1919–45. London: Bloomsbury (2018), pp. 193–212.

4.

Japan’s Perennial New Man: The Liberal and Fascist Incarnations of Masamichi Rōyama v

I. THE ‘NEW MAN SOCIETY’

In 1918 a ‘New Man Society’ (Shinjinkai) was founded at Japan’s leading academic institution, Tokyo Imperial University, by a group of young students and academics. Although now known as ‘Japan’s first student radicals’ because of their revolutionary activism a few years later, initially the Society members were not fire-breathing radicals but idealistic liberal-democrats who were, by no coincidence, gentlemanly young members of the privileged elite. As in Europe after World War I, there was a widespread conviction that the ‘new age’ required a ‘new man’. Thus, fascists were by no means the only ones to make use of the idea – it was part of the general zeitgeist of the age, as other writers in this volume have pointed out was also the case in Europe. Politically speaking, it would be hard to imagine a more inoffensive and moderate group than the Japanese New Man Society of 1918. Nonetheless, as William Miles Fletcher has written, they ‘aspired to be the “new men” who would pioneer the economic and social rebirth of Japan’.1 With all the high idealism and ambition of youth, they yearned not merely for political reform but for a far more fundamental transformation of the underlying values and structure of society. In their own high-flown language, they sought nothing less than ‘to eradicate the system of materialistic competition which stands in the way of love and peace and to liberate mankind from the state of materialistic 44

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struggle’.2 These idealistic students at first opened themselves to a variety of international political and social influences and reformist movements – most especially, at first, the new populist and unionist developments that were occurring in British parliamentary democracy (with the rise of the new Labour leader, Ramsay MacDonald). By the mid-1920s, however, most members of the New Man Society had veered sharply to the left. In Japanese political history today, in fact, the New Man Society is known as an important and influential group of elite young Marxist intellectuals who eventually served as a propaganda arm of the Japanese Communist Party and, for several years, put up a brave last-ditch stand against the rising tide of militarism and fascism in late 1920s Japan. Being elite university students, they were allowed more free rein than their working-class revolutionary comrades; but, as the government increasingly cracked down on Communist activity in the late 1920s, even they were finally targeted by the thought police and forced to disband in 1929.3 But the fact is that not all New Man Society members moved to the extreme left. A few rejected that trajectory and moved just as far in the other direction, to the extreme right. The most famous example is the political scientist, Masamichi Rōyama (1895–1980), who had helped found the Society as a young academic at the Imperial University in 1918. Rōyama went on to become probably the most influential exmember of the New Man Society, and a figure of some importance in mid-twentieth century Japanese history, both in the academic world, as a leading political scientist, and also within the ruling political establishment, as an influential ideologue who provided intellectual support for the increasingly fascist direction of Japanese government policies, both domestic and foreign, in the 1930s. How then are we to understand his transformation from a liberal democrat to a fascist ideologue in the space of less than 20 years? And what does it tell us about the wider history of this period in Japan? II. RŌYAMA’S ROAD TO FASCISM

When the New Man Society was founded in 1918, Japan seemed well on its way to becoming a full-fledged British-style parliamentary democracy and constitutional monarchy, and the proclaimed goal of the Society was to further advance this process. Japan had been a formal ally of Great Britain since the turn of the century, and during the period of what is now known as ‘Taishō democracy’ (after the Emperor Taishō,

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who reigned 1912–1926), there was an increasing democratization of the national polity, including the first ‘party cabinet government’ (replacing the previous cabinet of Meiji oligarchs or genro) in 1918 under Prime Minister Hara Takashi and his majority political party, the Seiyūkai (Political Friendship Party, an ancestor of the present-day Liberal Democratic Party), and culminating in 1925, when the Diet passed the Universal Manhood Suffrage Act. In the intellectual world, the most influential advocate of this move towards liberal democracy was the political scientist Sakuzō Yoshino (1878–1933), a professor at Tokyo Imperial University. Yoshino was Rōyama’s teacher and, as the historian Marius Jansen has written, both the ‘chief theorist and exponent’ of Taishō democracy and the ‘principal intellectual and academic sponsor’ of the New Man Society.4 His influence may be seen, for instance, in the fact that the Society ‘grew initially out of a student campaign for universal manhood suffrage’.5 As Fletcher has pointed out, Yoshino knew that the political establishment would never countenance republicanism or any other challenge to the emperor system, and thus ‘argued that Japanese politics should approach the British parliamentary model as much as possible’.6 Consequently, he advocated such typical liberal-democratic reforms as ‘universal suffrage, firmer guarantees of the people’s rights, a clearer separation of powers between the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary, and popular election of both houses in the Diet’.7 Yoshino’s relatively modest proposals for reform, however, soon came to seem inadequate to the young New Man Society members. A combination of increasing popular unrest at home and revolutionary movements abroad (in particular, the Chinese Revolution of 1911 and Russian Revolution of 1917), convinced them that more radical measures were required to genuinely transform and reform Japanese society. The newly awakened Japanese masses seemed to demand more than the gradual or perhaps merely ‘cosmetic’ changes called for by liberal-democratic academics. The birth of mass politics in Japan, especially as expressed through street-level popular demonstrations, is usually dated to the aftermath of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5. Although Japan nominally won the war, the Japanese public was convinced that it lost the peace: in their view, the Treaty of Portsmouth, which brought the war to an end, cheated Japan of the territorial and monetary gains it rightfully deserved for the great sacrifices that had been made in lives lost and wealth expended. Protest riots broke out in Tokyo and then across the country, resulting in widespread violence and destruction of property,

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and ultimately leading to the collapse of the government. Thus, began what Japanese historians refer to as the ‘period of popular disturbances’, the most serious of which were the ‘rice riots’ of 1918. Again, although Japan, as an ally of the Western democracies, was on the winning side in World War I, the main beneficiaries were the wealthy new capitalist class, who profited from the extensive new markets opened up by the war. The impoverished masses suffered from the inflation brought on by an overheated economy, and especially from the soaring price of the country’s main food staple, rice. Nationwide riots, the most violent in modern Japanese history, occurred over several months in 1918 and again brought about the collapse of the government with the resignation of the Prime Minister and his cabinet. Labour unions and socialist groups, including the Communist Party, were able to harness this widespread popular discontent to widen their membership and strengthen their political position. Coming at about the same time as the Russian Revolution and other anti-establishment rebellions in Europe precipitated by the catastrophic impact of World War I, these popular uprisings in Japan seemed to many members of the conservative political establishment an ominous prelude to a Marxist-style revolution. And, sure enough, there was a rise in militant unionism and Marxist agitation. The New Man Society members were certainly not immune to these stirring new developments and, as already mentioned, many of them began to move sharply towards the left. As Henry De Witt Smith points out: ‘Labour unrest and political change led many intellectuals, including students, to conclude that a new era of popular discontent was at hand, needing only proper leadership to effect a broad social revolution’.8 And their attention was not just focused on domestic developments: more surprisingly, some New Man Society members, in sympathy with Dr. Sun Yat-sen’s revolution, even began to voice opposition to Japan’s increasingly aggressive imperialistic bullying of China – a particular irony in view of the major role some of them later played in justifying far greater instances of aggression against China during the fascist period of the 1930s and 40s.9 By 1921, disagreements had broken out between the original liberaldemocratic founders of the New Man Society, by now alumni of Tokyo Imperial University, and new student members who were becoming more radically socialist in their political ideology. It was decided to split the Society, with the younger radical students keeping the name of New Man Society and the older founding members, now gainfully employed, establishing a new society called the Social Thought

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Association (Shakai shisōsha). Significantly, the New Man Society journal changed its name from ‘Democracy’ to Narod (‘People’ in Russian). (They were joined by other left-wing student societies, such as the People’s League at Waseda University in Tokyo and the Labour-Student Society at Kyoto Imperial University.) The Social Thought Association, on the other hand, was still committed to Western social democracy and to peaceful and moderate reform. As Fletcher writes, ‘the organization provided intellectuals like Rōyama a forum for developing their analyses of society and their ideals for social and political change’.10 Rōyama’s path to fascism most likely began with his increasing belief in the all-importance of a strong central government. This led him progressively away from the traditional liberal prioritization of individual human rights and liberties and, in more general terms, from the Western humanist focus on individualism, individual identity and individual free will as the basis of all higher culture and morality. In this respect, it might be said that he underwent a typical Nippon kaiki or ‘return to Japan’ change in his life-course – a well-known phenomenon in which Japanese writers and intellectuals tend to ‘return’ to their own tradition after a youthful infatuation with all things Western. As with other Confucian cultures, since the beginning of their recorded history, Japanese political theorists have prioritized the rights of the group – whether family, clan, village, or nation – over those of the individual, the key Confucian term here being wa (social harmony), a word which appears in the very first article of the so-called Seventeen-Article Constitution of Prince Shōtoku (603 AD), the oldest political document in Japan. There may be an element of truth in this – Nippon kaiki and the corresponding ‘overcoming modernity’ movement was certainly part of the zeitgeist of the fascist 1930s and 40s, and this may well have reassured Rōyama that he was on the right path. Nonetheless, judging by his own writings, such a ‘return to tradition’ was not his central consideration or the major influence on his thinking. As Fletcher points out in regard to Rōyama and other right-wing Japanese political theorists, a ‘striking characteristic of their writings is the lack of reference to Japan’s own intellectual past; their works are almost all concerned with European writers or the policies of European nations’.11 In his major 2009 study, Japan’s Holy War, Walter Skya has rightly called our attention to the important role played in Japanese fascism by what he calls ‘radical Shinto ultranationalism’ and its guiding idea of a ‘holy war’ against the West. But the fact is that many different thought-streams fed into Japanese fascism; intellectually and ideologically, it was an extremely

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diverse phenomenon, a hybrid of sometimes even contradictory worldviews – which is why, of course, there was much infighting among Japanese fascists, sometimes with fatal results. Rōyama is a significant example of a fascist ‘new man’ of a more secular type than the radical Shinto ultranationalist: in a sense, more purely ‘modernist’, an elitist rather than a populist, and a technocrat devoted to the idea that a totalitarian state ruled by an elite bureaucracy could best advance the economic and social development of Japan and the rest of Asia; priding himself on his ‘scientific rationality’, and on his wide-ranging knowledge of Western political-andsocial-scientific theory; a close student of European history and culture and therefore more open to direct influence from European Nazi and fascist practice and political theory. In other words, he was, like many other members of his cosmopolitan, elite educated class who had studied in Europe, mainly Germany, in the 1920s and who supported the increasingly militarized and imperialistic Japanese state of the 1930s, the kind of ‘Westernized’ Japanese fascist who seemed quite immune to the ‘invented’ mass political religion of national Shinto and its cult of emperor-worship. Even on those rare occasions when Rōyama did wax emotional or mystical, it was not over the emperor, as we shall see, but rather over Japan’s historical ‘destiny’ as leader and liberator of Asia – or over the pan-Asian utopia that would eventuate once the Anglo-American world order had been overthrown. As Eri Hotta has pointed out: ‘For him, this theory of a regional body with a common Eastern destiny was one of meta-theoretical belief, just as many of Germany’s National Socialists’ claims about German national destiny were often based on dubious scientific theories’.12 As this implies, Rōyama was closer to the fascist ‘new men’ among his fellow intellectuals in Europe than to the Shinto ultranationalists. There seems to have been no room in his hardheaded worldview for that sentimental mood of mono no aware nostalgia for a long-lost ‘true Japan’ or ‘true Japanese culture’ that Alan Tansman identifies as a central element of the ‘aesthetics of Japanese fascism’.13 Indeed, his idea of utopia resembled more Plato’s Republic than some historical fantasy of a ‘restored’ golden-age Japan under the direct rule of the emperor. This is not to say, of course, that he was in any way opposed to the emperor system; like his teacher Yoshino, his attitude was pragmatic, accepting the ‘irrational’ imperial institution as the inseparable ‘affective’ part of the Japanese body politic and also, no doubt, as a highly effective agent of mass political mobilization. Like other members of the educated elite in the wake of World War I and the Russian Revolution, Rōyama, in fact, worried that the growing

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unrest and political activism of the masses might lead ultimately to a violent revolution in Japan that could disempower men of his own class, as well as threaten the traditional national polity, and finally result in a new ruling class of ignorant populist demagogues. On the other hand, he had begun to lose faith in the ability of traditional liberal democracy to control this dangerous rising power of the masses. Parliamentarians, it seemed to him, were more interested in petty power struggles among themselves than in intelligently confronting the real problems of the world outside their debating chamber. Rōyama’s impatience with the political infighting and jockeying for power of competing interest groups in a parliamentary democracy is perhaps made more understandable by the fact that his academic specialty was government administration. What was needed for efficient and effective government was a strong centralized administration, a powerful state apparatus manned by elite bureaucrats, products of the best universities, who were above petty party politics and who could solve the country’s problems through the application of expert knowledge and rational, scientific thought. Indeed, he claimed that this kind of government existed even in liberal democracies during wartime, as for instance during World War I in Britain, which, out of the need for urgent action, created what he regarded as the first modern example of a powerfully centralized state bureaucracy. Ideally, Rōyama wrote, ‘politics or administration have the same character as war. They have a tendency to direct and to intensify the cooperative relationships between all elements of society to a high degree’.14 Writing in 1924, he was able to point to other examples in contemporary Europe also of precisely the kind of centralized governmental efficiency he was talking about: ‘When we see how efficiency has expanded, we feel that cries for socalled decentralization are no more than poetic liberalism or nostalgia’.15 Looking around the world for an alternative political system to liberal democracy, one that he felt could accommodate both the new political power of the masses and the need for a strong state apparatus manned by elite bureaucrats, he was first attracted to British guild socialism. Influenced by its leading theorist, G.D.H. Cole (1889–1959), he became convinced that ‘guild socialism’ was the most appropriate system for a modern industrial democracy: that is, that democratic representation of worker or occupational groups was more important than of individual citizens, and that the state could more effectively control its working class (forestalling, for instance, the violence of class warfare) through control of these guilds.16 As Fletcher writes, Rōyama’s ‘belief in the centralization

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and functionalization of state administration was closely linked to his perception of basic changes occurring in industrial societies all over the world. For him, the rise of the proletariat meant that society was splitting into occupational groups which a new political system would have to incorporate … Individualism was no longer a realistic social principle. Looking at trends in Europe, Rōyama became convinced that occupational units would soon become the most important elements in Japanese society and that their role, rather than issues relating to individual liberties, should be the central concern of his writings’.17 In this way Rōyama may be said to have slowly drifted away from the classic liberal defense of the individual and individual liberties that descended from nineteenth-century thinkers such as John Stuart Mill and gravitated more towards a belief in the primacy of the needs of the group or of the state over those of the individual. Needless to say, this new belief made him altogether more amenable to the new totalitarian visions of state power that were also taking shape in Europe at the same time. In the 1930s, in the wake of the Great Depression, Rōyama was attracted to Rudolf Hilferding’s model of ‘organized capitalism’, a capitalism that, as J. Victor Koschmann writes, would move away ‘from the “irrational” system of free enterprise to “rational” organization under the state’.18 Contemporary examples that impressed him included not only ‘the Soviet five-year plans and the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany, but the emergence out of the Labor Party in Great Britain of Oswald Mosley’s “social fascism” and the American New Deal, which he interpreted as emblematic of constitutional dictatorship’.19 (By ‘constitutional dictatorship’ he meant ‘the concentration of power entailed in governments’ use of constitutional prerogatives to sidestep parliamentary institutions and administratively institute radical economic and other reforms’.20) And when finally, in October 1940, all existing political parties were dissolved and the ‘Imperial Rule Assistance Association’ (Taisei Yokusankai) was established as the main political institution of the ‘new order’ (shin taisei), in many ways this represented, as Koschmann writes, ‘the realization in Japan of Rōyama’s model of constitutional dictatorship’.21 It also represented, of course, the closest Japan came to the European model of a fascist one-party state. III. RŌYAMA AS FASCIST IDEOLOGUE

Post-World-War-One Europe, of course, soon provided Rōyama and other Japanese political thinkers with another, more extreme, and apparently

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more successful (in economic terms at least) model of centralized state power than guild socialism: namely, fascism. But, to understand fully why Japanese intellectuals such as he were attracted to fascism, we must also take account of the international situation of the time, and specifically of the international reaction to Japan’s attempts at empire-building on the Asian mainland. Liberal democracy was closely associated in the Japanese mind with Britain and the U.S., but it was exactly those two powers that were the most vocal critics of Japan’s aggressive expansionism in China, especially after the ‘Manchurian incident’ of 1931. Up until the early 1920s, Japan had been a cooperative partner of Britain and the U.S. and, at the Washington Conference of 1921–22 and the London Naval Conference of 1930, had even agreed to limit the buildup of her naval forces in the Pacific (a concession that enraged the nationalist right-wing and led to some assassinations of the politicians held responsible, including the prime minister in 1933). But AngloAmerican attitudes towards Japan began to sour as the scale of Japanese imperialist ambitions in China progressively expanded and began to threaten British and American interests in East Asia. Ultimately Western pressure on Japan would cause her to storm out of the League of Nations in 1933 and thereafter stubbornly pursue her own course as something of a ‘rogue state’. As Han Jung-Sun writes: ‘Increasing alienation from the international community fanned a sense of “national emergency” and led to efforts to cope with the crisis by establishing a “national defense state”. These developments undermined the position of the political parties and led to the army and the bureaucracy gaining greater power’.22 Within a few years, however, Japan found that she was not alone. The European fascist powers, especially Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy, were also defying the post-World-War-One geopolitical order – and making some remarkable territorial acquisitions by doing so. In fact, these two fascist powers had taken some courage from Japan’s earlier defiance, and the Japanese in turn were encouraged by events in Central Europe and Ethiopia to think that they too were facing a ‘paper tiger’ in the liberal democracies. In short, the rise of an alternative to the ‘Anglo-Saxon world order’ that had prevailed since the nineteenth century – the putative new world order of the fascist powers – seemed to promise a ‘reformed’ international system altogether more friendly to Japan’s geopolitical ambitions. Thus, unsurprisingly, by the late 1930s the Japanese Empire had entered into a formal alliance with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, first by signing the Anti-Comintern

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Pact in 1936 and then by joining the so-called Axis Alliance with the Tripartite Pact of 1940. During these turbulent years Rōyama emerged as a major intellectual spokesman and apologist of the new world order and of the highly aggressive form of Japanese imperialism that it inevitably involved. The erstwhile liberal internationalist was now well on his way to becoming a nationalist-imperialist ideologue – in particular, a leading propagandist for the Japanese military’s vision of a new order in Asia; an order which demanded, in short, that Japan replace the West as the new master of this vast area and its abundant resources. And, to make sure his voice would be heard, Rōyama allied himself with the most powerful politician of late 1930s Japan, Prince Konoe Fumimaro, who was prime minister for most of the period from 1937 to 1941. Prince Konoe had established his own think-tank, the Shōwa Research Association, in 1933, described by one contemporary wit as ‘a factory in charge of manufacturing Konoe’s intellectual vitamins’.23 Rōyama, one of its guiding lights from the beginning, became head of its World Policy Section in 1937, just after the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War. For Rōyama China at that historical moment, in its chaos and poverty, provided the principal negative example of the allimportance of a strong central government – since its all-too-obvious lack of such seemed to prove his theory of its necessity in the modern world. For some years he had been arguing that Western condemnations of Japanese actions in China were based on the misconception that China was a modern nation-state ruling over a clear-cut national territory. On the contrary, he insisted, although China had once been a loose assemblage of territories ruled by an emperor, that imperial system had finally collapsed in 1911 after being undermined for many years by the incursions and depredations of the Western powers. The chaos that presently prevailed in China (in the 1920s and ‘30s), with nationalists, communists, and warlords all contending for power, proved that it was incapable of ruling itself as a modern nation-state. Therefore, it was meaningless for the Western liberal democracies or the League of Nations to invoke Eurocentric international law, designed only to apply to modern nation-states, in their condemnations of Japan. In a 1934 article rebutting League of Nations criticisms and defending Japanese actions in Manchuria, he claimed that China ‘is not a modern nation-state in the full sense of the term but a country that has not yet emerged from a medieval mode of existence. In China, a strong central government that can rule its territory legally and effectively has not

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come about owing to various obstacles’.24 Japan, in fact, was the only power capable of imposing unity and peace on China and, as already demonstrated in Manchuria, of thus ushering in a new age of efficient government and prosperous modern development that would benefit China even more than Japan. In this sense Rōyama was, as already mentioned, a modernist, convinced, like Japanese modernists going back to the influential mid-nineteenth-century figure, Fukuzawa Yukichi, that Japan must lead the rest of Asia into a modernist utopia.25 But, as Roger Griffin has demonstrated convincingly and in great detail, a ‘profound kinship … exists between modernism and fascism’.26 At that very moment, of course, China, under the Nationalist Government of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, was energetically engaged precisely in trying to constitute itself as a modern nation state and in trying to develop a modern sense of national identity. But Rōyama had little respect for Chinese nationalism, which, he rather perversely argued, was merely a weapon devised by Western imperialists to undermine Japanese interests. The Chinese, he remonstrated, should abandon the ‘ideas of perverted xenophobic nationalism’ and the ‘legacy of the Middle-Ages-like Chinese empire’ and, for their own good, side with their liberator Japan against the West.27 Needless to say, very few Chinese were convinced by this line of argument. Ironically, a ‘New People’s Society’ or shinminkai [Hsin-min Hui in Chinese] was formed by the Japanese in China to try to create a new breed of Chinese who believed in the Co-Prosperity Sphere and, of course, in the necessity of Japanese mastery of that sphere. If, as Roger Griffin writes, the ‘goal of producing a generation of “new men” and “new women” incarnating national rebirth – was intrinsically unrealizable’ by the European fascist powers in their own countries, how much more so the attempt to impose such a ‘national rebirth’ from the outside by an imperialistic foreign power.28 Even so, some recruits were found, since, as W.G. Beasley points out, various material inducements were offered, such as ‘jobs, rations, housing’, to persuade the natives to join this collaborationist group – who, needless to say, formed a rather pathetic contrast to the idealistic ‘new men’ of 1918!29 The Nationalist leader, Chiang Kai-shek himself, quite dryly and decisively declared: ‘the policy [of a new order in East Asia, founded on the concept of the East Asia Cooperative Community] was merely a catch-all designation for Japan’s plan to overturn the international order in East Asia, enslave China, establish hegemony over the entire Pacific region, and conquer the world’.30 The stage was thus set for

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one of the longest and most brutal wars of the twentieth century, the Second Sino-Japanese war of 1937–45, a war in which the Japanese Imperial Army committed a range of war crimes and genocidal atrocities in China and elsewhere comparable in scale and cruelty to those committed by Japan’s Nazi ally in Eastern Europe. And there was also, of course, an almost total destruction of the Chinese industrial economy – not to mention the vast losses in men and materiel the Japanese themselves suffered. Nonetheless, throughout this whole tragic period, Rōyama continued blithely to insist that Japan had only the highest motives in China and that, if only the Chinese themselves would accept this fact, they could look forward to a future of peace and prosperity. This, in a nutshell, was the veneer of rational justification that he, once famous as an ‘internationalist liberal’, gifted to the wartime regime in support not just of Japan’s conquest of China but also, shortly afterwards, of its ‘move south’ into Southeast Asia and the Pacific islands – the justification of imperial conquest that was ultimately summed up under the title of the ‘Greater East Asia Coprosperity Sphere’. Whereas Rōyama had always prided himself, as an elite academic, on his calm rationality and freedom from the kind of nationalistic emotionalism that was particularly common among other advocates of Japanese imperialism in the 1930s, as the war heated up, he began to sound more like any other fascist hothead – carried away perhaps by the atavistic instincts aroused by Japan’s initial military successes. His rhetoric became more strident and violence-prone (that is, more typical of the fascist rhetoric of the time) when, for instance, he vented the classic fascist theme of national rebirth through violence or war: ‘[I]n the smoke of cannon and the shower of bullets, the Orient, baptized with guns and swords, will rationalize Oriental thought’.31 In other words, war to him now not only led to a more efficient and powerfully centralized state bureaucracy, as he had previously claimed, but it would also result in a new world order shaped by a ‘rationalized’ panAsianism, a pan-Asianist utopia (to be ‘rational’ here, of course, meant to ‘realistically’ accept the inevitability of Japanese overlordship of Asia, recognizing that the Japanese were more ‘advanced’ than the rest of Asia not merely because of fortunate historical circumstances but because of their racial and cultural superiority, which made them the natural leaders of Asia). According to this new Orwellian double-talk, the worst kind of imperialistic aggression was greeted as a higher form of rationality: war became peace, and emotionalistic ultra-nationalism

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became a higher form of reason. In short, Rōyama himself had now begun to embody the emotional and irrational nationalism he had previously professed to reject. And, of course, this makes his blanket condemnation of Chinese nationalism seem all the more devious and hypocritical. But it is also revealing that Rōyama at this time adopted an entirely different tone when writing academic works directed at a Western readership, such as his Foreign Policy of Japan: 1914–1939, which was published in English by the Institute of Pacific Relations in 1941, just a few months before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Here he adopts a more rational, conciliatory tone, writing euphemistically of the need for ‘a readjustment’ in Japan-China relations, of ‘the new relationship of mutual reliance which Japan is inviting China to build jointly’, and assuring his Western readers that ‘this Japanese policy of a new order in East Asia has not been a policy suddenly or accidentally conceived, but has been nationally formulated after long and serious deliberation and with a view to settling not only the present conflict but rather the age-long instability of the Far East’.32 No talk here of the ‘smoke of cannon and the shower of bullets’ or of the ‘Orient, baptized with guns and swords’. Han Jung-Sun’s contention that Rōyama was captive of ‘his own economic rationality and developmentalist mentality’ and thus ‘grossly misjudged the intensity of the Chinese commitment to national independence and self-respect’ seems to me to downplay somewhat what increasingly drove him: his own nationalism. As the war with China intensified in the late 1930s, he seemed increasingly to be driven by emotive and mystical nationalism rather than by coolheaded scientific rationalism. As J. Victor Koschmann points out, this nationalistic turn was also expressed in his political theory. Influenced by American political scientist, W. Y. Elliot’s, ‘co-organic theory’, he began to argue that ‘political society now included not only organization directed toward end values but an inner tendency toward organic unity based on cultural values’. And, Koschmann continues: Elliot’s theory led Rōyama to understand the constitutional part of ‘constitutional dictatorship’ in Japan in an unconventional way, as ‘something constructed on the intrinsic principles of the national political formation centering on Japan’s “national essence” (kokutai)’. Thus, by the late-1930s, Rōyama was to some extent accommodating a less rational, more nativistic-sounding conceptual framework than had been the case earlier.33

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Another major intellectual influence at this time was the philosopher Kiyoshi Miki (1897–1945), a fellow member of the Shōwa Research Association. Miki had studied with Heidegger in the 1920s, and through him Heidegger’s philosophy may be said to have exerted some influence on Japanese as well as on European fascism. As Yasuo Yuasa has pointed out, in his Philosophy of History (Rekishi tetsugaku, 1932) Miki tried to apply the ‘existentialist’ view of the human condition found in Being and Time to a new ‘methodological theory for understanding history’ in its ‘ontological’ dimension (basically, as human self-realization through action).34 Rōyama’s argument for a Japanese version of America’s ‘manifest destiny’ – that Asia was the equivalent of the American frontier for Japan, necessary for the realization or ‘construction’ of its full national destiny – seems to have been shaped to some extent, as Koschmann points out, by this paradoxical ‘Mikian/Heideggerean’ theory of historical destiny: ‘that historical agents discover their destiny in the process of making history’.35 Nonetheless, when it came to Miki’s vision of a ‘Greater East Asian Coprosperity Sphere’, a sphere that would see Japan expand its hegemony far beyond northeast Asia to the South Seas and southeast Asia, Rōyama thought that Japan could not accomplish this alone but only as part of a new fascist world order, a ‘historical movement that would subsume Japan’s own regionalism, German and Italian efforts to form a new order in Europe, and Asian movements for selfdetermination’.36 At any rate, as Fletcher points out, the writings of Rōyama and other leading intellectuals such as Miki and Shintarō Ryū (1900– 1967), who also willingly served as fascist ideologues and propagandists in the 1930s, ‘helped provide the intellectual framework that enabled prominent intellectuals to support the ideology of the Greater East Asian Coprosperity Sphere and a fascist new order in Japan. These writers illuminate a more general pattern of thought and behavior of activist intellectuals during the transition from the 1920s, when political parties controlled the Japanese cabinet and attempts to cooperate with the Western powers shaped Japanese diplomacy, to the jingoism and attacks on parliamentary government that marked the 1930s’.37 And, as Koschmann adds, Rōyama ‘continued throughout the Pacific War to participate in public discourse related to East Asian policy and to put his international political expertise at the service of Japan’s wartime empire … The vision of an Asian community that would represent the

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dialectical overcoming of Western-centered imperialism, nationalism, and liberalism was extremely attractive to modern, Western-oriented social scientists such as Rōyama’.38 IV. OLD MAN AS NEW MAN: RŌYAMA’S POSTWAR CAREER AND LEGACY

From a Western perspective, perhaps the most remarkable fact about Rōyama, or about his career, is the effortless way this leading fascist ideologue of the 1930s managed to reinvent himself, yet again, in the immediate postwar era, as a leading spokesman of the ‘new liberal democracy’, and even as a pacifist – and to be unconditionally accepted as such by the intellectual and political elite.39 Masao Maruyama (1914– 1996), for instance, widely regarded as the major new liberal thinker of postwar Japan, greeted Rōyama’s postwar tome, The Development of Modern Political Science in Japan (1949), as a ‘brilliant work’ and also described Rōyama himself as one of ‘Japan’s foremost political scientists and a leading pre-war liberal’.40 A leading pre-war liberal – no mention at all of his long career as a mouthpiece of that militarist regime that Maruyama himself had bitterly condemned as fascist! Among recent Japanese scholarly works that carry on this hagiographical treatment of Rōyama are Tsunao Imamura’s highly reverential Gabanansu no tankyū: Rōyama Masamichi o yomu (Quest for Governance: A Japanese Pioneer’s Effort) (2009), which presents Rōyama as a scholar who lived an exemplary life and who deserves to be more widely recognized as the indispensable ‘pioneer’ of political and administrative studies in Japan, and Ken Yonehara’s Nihon seiji shisō (Japanese Political Thought, 2007), which includes a respectful study of ‘Rōyama’s thought’ that accepts, more or less at face value, his justifications of the ‘new order in Asia’ as a liberation from Western colonialism.41 As for the Allied Occupation authorities, they briefly placed Rōyama’s name on a list of war criminals to be purged but soon forgave him his sins. By the late 1940s, he was already publishing again and occupying a prominent position as a professor of political science. It was almost as if he were still the idealistic young founder of the New Man Society in 1918 and all that had happened in the intervening years was merely a nightmare from which he had suddenly awakened and for which he bore absolutely no responsibility. Or like Urashima Tarō, the Japanese version of Rip van Winkle, it was as if he had returned to Japan in 1946 thinking it was still 1918 and completely unaware of the events

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of the past quarter century. It may well be relevant here to recall that Rōyama had long been a dedicated student of Machiavelli, that great teacher of the art of survival by adroit adaptation to changing political circumstances. But his impressive feat of sartor resartus, we should also acknowledge, tells us as much about postwar Japan as about Masamichi Rōyama. Postwar Japan was full of Urashima Tarōs, of memory-slates wiped clean, of innocent ‘new men’ just awakened from the nightmare of history. Rōyama’s was far from being the only case of adept ‘political retailoring’. Indeed, Rōyama’s postwar self-reinvention must be seen as part of the much larger exercise of postwar Japan’s national reinvention, and in particular the ‘liberal-democratic’ retailoring of the whole conservative political establishment, from the emperor on down. The Americans, perhaps wisely, had decided, like all previous warlord conquerors of Japan, that they could make effective use of the emperor system to legitimize their rule and ensure nation-wide cooperation. Thus the emperor was presented, on Occupation commanding general Douglas MacArthur’s orders, as a complete apolitical innocent, indeed as a liberal and a pacifist who had done his best, however ineffectually, to rein in the military. When General Hideki Tōjō, the World War II prime minister, let slip in his testimony that actually the emperor had approved and even encouraged most of the major aggressive military actions, he was ordered to change his testimony, and promptly did so ‘for the sake of the emperor’. This behind-the-scenes political manipulation by the Americans, with the all-too-willing complicity of the Japanese conservative establishment, marks a crucial difference between the Nuremberg and the Tokyo War Crimes Trials. At Nuremberg there was at least an attempt at a thoroughgoing top-down purgation of those members of the Nazi regime deemed to be war criminals; at Tokyo there was only a partial, ‘symbolic’ purgation of a few scapegoats, combined with a cover-up of the key wartime roles of a number of imperial family members, including Emperor Hirohito himself. This is an all-important difference that has had far-reaching and profound implications up until today. As Hirohito’s biographer, Herbert Bix has written: ‘MacArthur’s truly extraordinary measures to save Hirohito from trial as a war criminal had a lasting and profoundly distorting impact on Japanese understanding of the lost war’.42 For instance, in his surrender announcement the emperor had apologized to other Asians for failing to rescue them from Western colonialism – thus slyly preserving in the Japanese

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people’s minds the myth of that Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere of which Rōyama was a major exponent. Even today, the myth of ‘Japan as the noble liberator manqué of Asia’ is the common justification of Japanese military conquest used by the country’s innumerable neo-fascist groups – as well as by leading members of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party. It is featured prominently, for instance, at the war memorial museum, the Yūshūkan, at the national Shinto shrine, Yasukuni Jinja, where the souls of the war dead are enshrined and venerated – including, controversially, those convicted as Class A war criminals. There is also a memorial to the Kempeitai, the ‘Japanese Gestapo’, on the grounds of this shrine which Japanese government officials, including the prime minister, regularly visit to pay their respects. (One can imagine the outcry on all sides if an equivalent national shrine were erected in Germany.) On the other hand, somewhat contradictorily, those same neo-fascist groups will not countenance any suggestion that the emperor himself instigated this pan-Asian war of liberation – as the unfortunate mayor of Nagasaki found out in 1990.43 Thus, in the world of postwar Japanese politics, it was all-too-often a case of ‘plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose’. Certainly, there are far more continuities between prewar and postwar Japanese politics – and political ideology – than is the case in its erstwhile European fascist allies. And Rōyama is an excellent, indeed prototypical, case in point. As Seok-Won Lee has pointed out, for instance: Rōyama Masamichi was one of the leading social scientists who developed postwar Asian regional discourses in the 1950s, and much of his Cold War Asianist thinking came from economic developmentoriented wartime Pan-Asianism. He called for the Japanese government to actively intervene in government-led economic development plans in Southeast Asian countries, most of which were Japan’s former colonies. At the same time, Rōyama and like-minded social scientists aimed to promote Japan’s position in a United States-led Cold War Asian order. Their involvement in the making of a Japan-led colonial empire during the wartime period continued to influence Japan’s postwar encounter with Asia.44

And there was, in fact, far more to it than that. Domestically also, Rōyama’s prewar vision of a strong, authoritarian central government guided by an elite bureaucracy in the interests of social harmony and

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economic efficiency – all the while preserving the imperial system and the oligarchic status quo – became the widely accepted vision of the ‘new men’ of the postwar ‘new Japan’. In other words, this somewhat pared-down version of the prewar kokutai (national polity), complete with its underlying nationalistic ideology, was adopted as the official policy of the conservative ‘liberal-democratic’ establishment that has ruled the country, almost without interruption, for the past seventy years – surely the closest thing to a ‘one-party-state’ among the world’s putative liberal democracies. Nonetheless, as the country that experienced the first ‘economic miracle’ of postwar Asia, Japan – now dubbed ‘Japan Inc’. because of the close collaboration between its government and industry – provided the economic and political model of mercantilist ‘Asian capitalism’ that was adopted by the smaller Asian ‘tiger economies’, all its former colonies or occupied territories, and finally even by China itself – with the momentous results we are still living with in the twenty-first century. China today, in fact, is already uncomfortably close to being the East Asian superpower Japan aimed to be in the 1930s: economically dominant, ultranationalistic (driven by a myth of Han-Chinese racial and cultural superiority), ruled by an almighty single-party central state, and a growing military power behaving in an increasingly threatening way towards its neighbours. Ironically, then, by its adoption of the ‘Japanese model’, essentially as outlined by Rōyama and his fascist colleagues in the 1930s, China has succeeded in turning the tables on its former imperial master. Which begs the question: will this rising threat of China incite Japan itself to revive its own tradition of fascism and militarism – still far from dead – especially if the Pax Americana in the Pacific disintegrates at any future point? This is a question that has portentous implications, and not only for Japan’s future. Anyone following the ongoing territorial disputes between Japan and China, and who fears the prospect of a third SinoJapanese War and the catastrophic impact this would have on the entire globe – both countries being far more powerful today, economically and militarily, than they were in the 1930s – will not be reassured by the present Japanese prime minister, the aggressively nationalistic Shinzō Abe.45 As the grandson of a leading fascist politician and suspected war criminal (who nonetheless became prime minister in the late 1950s), Abe himself is a living embodiment of the remarkable continuity of the wartime political establishment. Needless to say, he is an enthusiastic supporter and perpetrator of the postwar Liberal Democratic

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Party policy of systematically reviving the prewar kokutai and all the nationalistic agenda and ideology it entails – including the myth of Japan as Asia’s liberator and as the beneficent ruler of the Greater East Asia Coprosperity Sphere.46 In this respect, one might say, he is doing his best to perpetuate the legacy of his distinguished ‘liberal/fascist’ forebear, Masamichi Rōyama.

Source: Roy Starrs, ed., Politics and Religion in Modern Japan: Red Sun, White Lotus. London: Palgrave Macmillan (2011), pp. 240–277.

5.

From Mishima to Aum: Religiopolitical Violence in Late Twentieth-Century Japan v

Why do Japanese undertake political action which they know to be futile? Yet if an act has really passed the test of nihilism, then even though totally ineffective, it should surprise no one. I can even predict that from now on, to the extent that the action principles of Yang-ming [neo-Confucian] Thought are imbedded in the Japanese spirit, perplexing political phenomena which are incomprehensible to foreigners will continue to crop up in Japan. Mishima Yukio1 I. A TALE OF TWO TERRORISTS

On November 25, 1970, the internationally famous writer Mishima Yukio, a frequent nominee for the Nobel Prize, shocked the world by committing an act of suicidal terrorism. With a half dozen members of his private army, the ‘Shield Society’, he entered the office of the commanding officer of a Tokyo military base and forcibly took him hostage – delivering sword blows to some other officers in the process. Then he coerced the commander to call an assembly of his troops on the parade ground outside. While helicopters hovered noisily overhead, almost drowning out his words (the media-savvy Mishima had summoned the Press that morning to record what he called his ‘little show’), he stood precariously perched on the balustrade of a balcony high above the assembled troops and harangued them at the top of his voice. If he had fallen off at that point, as seemed quite likely, his ‘attempted coup’ would have come to the abrupt and farcical ending that perhaps it deserved. 63

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But, luckily for Mishima, he kept his balance, and for ten minutes or so tried to incite the troops to rebel against a ‘corrupt’ government that had consigned them to the ‘shameful’ status of a mere ‘self-defense force’ – in such sad contrast to their proud erstwhile role as the ‘Imperial Army’, the shield of the divine emperor and the scourge of all his enemies. It was as if he were addressing a pathetic paper tiger that had been de-fanged and de-clawed, imploring it to recover its fighting spirit. No doubt Mishima knew beforehand that it would be a hopeless attempt; in fact, he had already made meticulous plans for what he would do next. When the troops responded with shouts of baka-yarō (You idiot!) and oriyō (Get down from there!’), as if chastising a mischievous boy, Mishima returned to the commander’s office and, before that elderly officer’s horrified gaze, performed ritual suicide (seppuku) in the precise manner stipulated by the traditional code of the samurai: stripping to a white loincloth, he knelt on the floor, plunged a short-sword into his abdomen, cut his own guts out with a crosswise and then an upward pull of the razor-sharp blade, then signaled to his ‘second’ (kaishaku), who proceeded to lop off the great writer’s head (not too skillfully, one regrets to say – it took three blows). About a quarter century later, on March 20, 1995, a ‘new religion’ that called itself ‘Aum Shinrikyō’ (Om Religion of Truth) staged one of the most horrific terrorist attacks of recent times, releasing lethal quantities of sarin gas simultaneously on five trains of the Tokyo subway system, killing twelve commuters and injuring many hundreds more.2 This shocking incident was a product of the most deadly mix of religion and politics in recent Japanese history and, in a way that seems significantly representative of the age, it had been perpetrated not by adherents of any of the traditional Shinto or Buddhist sects but by followers of one of the multitude of ‘new new religions’ that had sprung up in the latter half of the twentieth century – in other words, since the defeat of ‘traditional Japan’ in the Pacific War. Under the leadership of their strangely charismatic leader, the half-blind ‘guru’ Asahara Shōkō, the Aum sect had at first tried to acquire political power by ‘legitimate’ democratic means, running twenty-five candidates of their so-called ‘Shinri-tō’ (Truth Party), including Asahara himself, in the House of Representatives elections of 1990. Soundly rejected by the Japanese electorate, the group withdrew from mainstream society and began to act in the ‘cult-like’ manner familiar from other such groups around the world, growing increasingly hermetic, paranoid, and violent. Finally, on that fatal March morning in 1995, it tried to mount an attack that would

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cause so much indiscriminate carnage, especially among the many government bureaucrats who used those subway lines that all converged on Kasumigaseki, the heart of the national capital, that it would actually bring down the government. Furthermore, because Asahara and his closest disciples were now living in a fantasy world of their own creation, absolutely immune to any ulterior checks on their sense of reality, they were also convinced that the government’s downfall would compel the Japanese nation to accept the Aum guru himself not only as their spiritual saviour but as their new emperor, thus actualizing his long-held ambition for limitless political power in the ‘real world’. In other words, Asahara, like Mishima, aimed to effect an abrupt and radical transformation of the national polity, but his political ambition dwarfed even Mishima’s, since his goal was not to ‘restore’ the emperor but to replace him. And even that would not be the end of it: his motto seemed to be ‘today Japan, tomorrow the world’ – absurd and incredible as this seems, in the megalomaniac delusional state he had now entered Asahara aimed at nothing less than becoming the absolute dictator of the whole planet. At first sight, there may seem to be little in common between these two terrorist incidents and the men who perpetrated them. Indeed, it may even strike some devotees of ‘high culture’ as somewhat sacrilegious to compare the major postwar writer Mishima, a world-class literary genius, with the barely literate, half-mad ‘doomsday cult’ leader Asahara. But I would like to argue here that there are fundamental affinities as well as obvious differences between these two men and their respective resorts to violence, and that, whereas the differences between them speak significantly to the changes Japanese society underwent between 1970 and 1995 – and perhaps, more specifically, to the changes that occurred in the relation between politics and religion in Japan over the same period – their affinities are at least equally instructive for what they reveal about some common traits of twentieth-century religiopolitical violence, not only in Japan but throughout the world. On the more intimate level of individual psychology, to compare Mishima’s ‘sacralized politics’ with Asahara’s ‘politicized religion’ is ultimately, it seems to me, to tell a similar story of lives ruined by a runaway political ambition. Much of the world was left scratching its head at these two disturbing and perplexing events: the two perpetrators were both ‘mature’ men in their forties at the time they staged their respective ‘incidents’, and, on the face of it, both were at the height of remarkably successful careers, the one as a highly regarded novelist and playwright, the other as the founder and leader of a growing new religion. Nonetheless,

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both were driven, at least partly by religious and political conviction, to launch a self-destructive attack on the society to which they ostensibly belonged, the society that had produced and sustained them. So, the question inevitably arises: why did they do it? The militant nationalism Mishima developed in the last decade of his life led him to take sides in an age-old religious conflict that had periodically erupted since the beginnings of Japanese history: that between Shinto as the ‘native’ religion devoted to the worship of the Japanese gods and Buddhism as a ‘foreign’ pan-Asian religion of universal human values. To understand Mishima’s religiopolitical position, we must first understand something about the long history of ideological and political conflict (as well as of simultaneous coexistence) between these two Japanese religious traditions. There was always a potential for serious conflict between the two, since Shinto was often perceived by its most devoted adherents as the only genuinely ‘national’ or ‘Japanese’ religion, and Buddhism was often castigated by these same nativists as a foreign newcomer and interloper that never really belonged in the ‘land of the gods’. Thus, although Japanese history has been comparatively free of sectarian violence in recent centuries (the last major incident was the massacre of Christians following the Shimabara Rebellion of 1637–8), if one were to look for a fundamental religious split that always had the potential to cause ideological, political, and even military conflict in Japan, the Shinto/Buddhist divide would be the closest thing to it. Of course, we must also remember that this particular fissure has behaved like some geological fault-line or semi-active volcano that ‘lays dormant’ for centuries at a time. Nonetheless, it was present from the very starting point of Japanese history proper: in the late sixth-century Japan’s earliest recorded civil war was fought between two rival clans, at least partly on religious grounds – that is, to determine whether or not Buddhism was a politically acceptable religion, and would be allowed to establish itself alongside Shinto on Japanese soil. The victory of the Soga clan (who were of foreign, Korean descent and therefore devotees of continental Buddhism) over the Mononobe clan (who were ‘native’ traditional guardians of Shinto and thus implacably and violently opposed to the establishment of Buddhism) ensured that the continental religion would be allowed to flourish under the new Soga-dominated imperial state and with the generous patronage of Prince Shōtoku, putative builder of many temples, and a Soga on his mother’s side.3 But this was far from the end of the story. Although the fundamental conflict

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between Shinto and Buddhism was submerged for many centuries and the two traditions even seemed to join forces under state patronage, the conflict would re-emerge again ‘with a vengeance’ over a thousand years later, in early modern times, at first in the nativist ideology of highly influential eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century thinkers such as Kamo no Mabuchi, Motoori Norinaga and Hirata Atsutane.4 The anti-Buddhist sentiment of these Tokugawa thinkers was partly no doubt because of Confucian influences on them, but it was also a result of their Shinto-centered nativism – a nascent form of modern cultural nationalism but existing, of course, prior to the formation of any modern nation state. Thus, more than a millennium after the antiBuddhist Mononobe clan chieftains, traditional guardians of Shinto, had been defeated in the late sixth-century ‘religious wars’ by the Soga forces, their spirit of resistance to the ‘foreign gods’ was reborn in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Japan. To nativist scholars (kokugakusha) Buddhism was a foreign religion whose very presence in Japan was an insult to the native gods; besides, its ‘decadent’ doctrines and worldview threatened to corrupt the natural ‘purity’ and ‘sincerity’ of the Japanese mind and national character, especially as embodied in the bushidō ideals of the samurai class. In other words, Buddhism was suspect not only for its foreign origins but also for its putative pacifism – or what Mishima called its ‘passive nihilism’. (Of course, the often militaristic and nationalistic historical reality of Japanese Buddhism – right up to the Pacific War – actually belied this view.) Just as Edward Gibbon (1737–1794), in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, accused Christianity of having undermined the traditional Roman martial virtues with its pacifist ‘preaching of patience and pusillanimity’, thus hastening the fall of Rome, so the Japanese nativist scholars, Gibbon’s faraway contemporaries, said about Buddhism that it had undermined traditional Japanese values such as loyalty to the Emperor and the martial spirit that made their Empire great.5 Thus the ‘father of Japanese Buddhism’, the Sinophile Prince Shōtoku, was attacked by the Tokugawa nativists for having betrayed his native gods by his patronage of this ‘evil’ foreign creed. As Satō Masahide has written, leading Tokugawa Confucians such as Hayashi Razan (1583–1657) and nativist scholars such as Hirata Atsutane (1776–1843) severely criticized the Prince as an ‘immoral person who was unjust and disloyal’ (fugi fuchū no haitokusha).6 And many other nativist scholars took the same line, including the Mito School authors of the Dai Nihon shi (History of Great Japan, 1715), who also accused

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the Prince of having ‘destroyed our national religion [Shinto]’.7 Indeed, the nativists’ feelings against the Prince had become so vehement by the end of the Tokugawa period that he was transformed into a symbol of everything they despised. As Itō Kimio has written: … nationalist scholars severely condemned Prince Shōtoku for disrupting the basic structure of the nation by introducing Buddhism. In the period leading up to the Meiji Restoration (1868), when imperial sentiment reached a feverish pitch, Shitennōji [the Buddhist temple in Osaka reputedly built by the Prince in thanks for the victory of the Buddhist Soga over the Shintō Mononobe] became the site of violent protests, including suicides and an incendiary attack that burned twelve buildings on its grounds.8

More than twelve hundred years after the Prince had ‘Sinosized’ Japanese culture, there were still people who would not forgive him for this ‘traitorous’ act. As part of the haibutsu (eliminate Buddhism) movement of the early Meiji period, imperial Shintoists were thus prepared even to resort to terrorist attacks in their attempts to rid Japanese culture of this ‘foreign’ legacy – the first incidents of religiopolitical violence in modern Japan. Somewhat later, this national-Shinto political religion again provided the ideological driving force behind Japan’s imperialist expansion into continental Asia and the Pacific, as well as behind the increasing incidence of domestic terrorism during the period of ‘Taishō democracy’ – what has been called the ‘politics by assassination’ that terrorized and ultimately defeated more liberal politicians in the 1920s and ‘30s. In particular, this new ultranationalist form of Shinto made it possible for the fascist and militarist leaders of the 1930s and ‘40s to represent Japan’s imperialist war against China and the West as a ‘holy war’.9 Although not specifically linked to the anti-Buddhist movements of the past, it had many of the same ingredients, being nativist and antiforeign, and, because of its contempt for China and continental Asia in general, suspicious of any continental influence in Japan. In this respect, these modern imperial Shinto nationalists were heirs to the sixth-century Mononobe Shinto guardians as well as to the eighteenthcentury Tokugawa nativists. As Walter Skya has shown in his major study of the subject, radical Shinto ultranationalism was the main ideological driving force behind both Japan’s domestic fascism and its international imperialism in

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the 1930s. Although Skya recognizes, of course, that 1930s Japanese fascism was not a purely indigenous phenomenon and can be fully understood only within the context of the international rise of fascism at the same time, he also throws light on the vexed question of how the ‘traditional’ Shinto religion was made to serve the purposes of a ‘modern’ Japanese fascism. Through studies of a number of nationalist ideologues, he shows how radical ultranationalist Shinto was used to ‘mobilize the masses’ for conquest and war – most especially, the ‘holy war’ against the West (he also points out the significant parallels with present-day Islamic jihadist ideology). At the heart of Skya’s analysis is his contention that ‘a fundamental transformation in the ideology of Shinto ultranationalism took place in the Taishō period’, and that this transformation was necessary because earlier nationalist ideologies (most notably as propounded by Hozumi Yatsuka) portrayed the masses as ‘passive political objects to be acted on’ and thus had little appeal to the masses themselves.10 As with European fascism, a key historical factor in the rise of a new, more populist form of Japanese nationalism was the increasing politicization of the masses in the early twentieth century, beginning with the riots following the Russo-Japanese War in 1905 and culminating in the rice riots of 1918. These demonstrations of popular political power convinced right-wing thinkers that a new form of emperorcentered nationalism was called for, one that would have more popular appeal than Meiji patriarchal authoritarianism. Most crucially, the new ideology would have to inspire an intense religious fervor in the masses, a willingness to sacrifice themselves ‘for the emperor’ – or, in other words, for the state. The Japanese did not have to look for a god-like national leader in a Hitler or a Mussolini – they already had one in the emperor, who could be turned to the uses of a fascist ideology just as easily as he was to other ideologies and political systems in the past. Right-wing political theorists such as Uesugi Shinkichi and Kakehi Katsuhiko cleverly conjured up the idea of an unmediated union between the emperor and the people, and suggested that all Japanese could bring ultimate meaning to their lives by achieving a kind of mystical union with the emperor – especially, of course, through death in battle. As Skya writes: ‘Loyalty to the emperor was religious devotion ... Personal union with the emperor was the individual’s ultimate objective; it was this objective that was at the heart of radical Shintō ultranationalist ideology. The individual was driven beyond the self to his essential being, to the emperor’.11

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As we shall see, this populist idea of a mystical union of the Japanese people with their emperor was central also to Mishima’s thought. And conversely, like many of his nativist predecessors, he came to regard the all-pervasive, millennium-long influence of Buddhism as inimical to Japan’s native traditions, above all to its traditions of emperor-worship, national Shinto and bushidō. The most compelling expression of these two dialectical poles of his latter-day worldview – emperor-centered Shinto mysticism consciously opposed to philosophical and religious Buddhism – is found in the culminating work of his literary career, the work he intended as his magnum opus and final testament, his tetralogy of novels published under the general title, The Sea of Fertility (Hōjō no umi, 1965–70). II. MISHIMA AND BUDDHISM

The Sea of Fertility was not the first Mishima work to make significant use of Buddhism. The work generally regarded as his most successful single novel, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (Kinkakuji, 1956), is implicated with Zen Buddhism on several different levels. On the level of narrative, it tells the story, based on an actual historical incident, of a deranged Zen monk who destroys a cultural treasure belonging to his own temple – the famous ‘golden pavilion’ located in the garden of the Zen temple named after it, ‘Kinkakuji’. On the level of moral and philosophical argument, the novel uses – or misuses – Zen iconoclastic teachings in an attempt to justify the protagonist’s final nihilistic act of destruction. Interpreted literally, it could thus be regarded as a perversion of Zen. Interpreted on a more allegorical level, it could also be regarded as itself a kind of Zen parable of spiritual self-reliance, similar in spirit to those famous Sung dynasty ink paintings which depict Zen monks ripping up sutras or tossing Buddha statues into the flames. On the whole, Mishima seems to have found Zen more sympathetic than any other form of Buddhism, and the image he presents of it in Kinkakuj is at least partially positive. We can see this above all in the figure of the Zen master, Zenkai: he represents the more vigorous, ‘masculine’, activist side of (Rinzai) Zen, and serves as a positive foil to the negative counter-example of the Abbot of the temple, who represents the passive, ‘feminine’ side of Buddhism that Mishima despised. In a Japanese political/historical context, Mishima’s partial sympathy for Rinzai Zen is quite understandable, since that sect, with its tough, no-nonsense attitude and its rigorous training, was favored by Japanese

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militarists from the days of the medieval samurai up to the time of the Pacific War. Indeed – paradoxically for a Buddhist sect, one would think – Zen was associated with Japanese militarism and nationalism almost as much as was modern national Shinto.12 In some respects, Buddhism seems even more deeply implicated in the final tetralogy than in the Temple of the Golden Pavilion – especially because the traditional Buddhist idea of reincarnation is used as the main device linking the four novels together. Primarily Mishima refers here to an older, more complexly philosophical form of Buddhism than Zen: the ‘Mind Only’ or Yuishiki school that was popular among eighth-century Nara court aristocrats. There is even an excursion into Thai Buddhism in the third volume of the tetralogy. But what seems to be a profoundly Buddhist tenor in much of the work is actually deceptive. The tetralogy is ultimately anti-Buddhist, in marked contrast to the Zen-centered Temple of the Golden Pavilion. Although, as I have pointed out, there are understandable political/historical reasons for Mishima’s sympathy with Zen, there is surely another factor at work here too: in the few years intervening between 1956, when he wrote the Temple, and the early 1960s, when he began to write the tetralogy, Mishima’s right-wing political stance had hardened and he had turned himself into a political activist, publicly agitating for a ‘restoration’ of the prewar kokutai centered on the national-Shinto cult of emperorworship. It hardly seems surprising, then, that the world-view underlying the tetralogy is not Buddhist but precisely this brand of militant national-Shinto. Ultimately the work makes clear that these two worldviews, the Shinto and the Buddhist – or, in other words, the native Japanese and the continental Asian – are mortally opposed to each other. Mishima is by now too extreme a nationalist to tolerate the easy-going syncretism that had been common in Japanese culture since ancient times, with Buddhism and Shinto often inseparably intermixed, and Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines often sharing the same precincts. In this respect his attitude is close to that of Tokugawa nativist scholars such as Kada no Azumamaro (1669–1736), Andō Shōeki (circa 1710– 60), Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801), Hirata Atsutane (1776–1843), and Aizawa Seishisai (1782–1863), and also to that of the late nineteenth-century Meiji government: Shinto needed to be disentangled from Buddhism (shinbutsu bunri, as the slogan went) so that it might serve as a purely ‘native’ national religion that fostered the true virtues of the Japanese national character, traditional virtues such as loyalty,

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perseverance, and courage. As Marius Jansen puts it, ‘the national gods would reassert their sovereignty just as Japan was resolved to restore its own integrity’.13 Or as Mikiso Hane writes, somewhat more prosaically: ‘The [Meiji] government leaders’ support of Shinto was linked to the resurgence of cultural nationalism in the 1880s and after. It was a reaction against the move to “civilize and enlighten” [i.e., Westernize] the country’.14

III. THE ANXIETY OF (INDIAN) INFLUENCE

The fact is that Japanese nativists suffer an ‘anxiety of influence’ not only from the usually noted sources of China and the West but also from India, the ultimate source of the most influential religion in Japanese history, Buddhism. Mishima was an interesting case in point. It was his habit to undertake extensive ‘field trips’, both in Japan and overseas, to gather background information and inspiration for any novel he was planning to write. While writing his final tetralogy in the 1960s, he travelled to Thailand and India on this kind of ‘fact-gathering’ mission. On his trip to India in 1967 he visited Calcutta, Benares and the Buddhist cave-paintings of Ajanta. Although modern India is no longer a Buddhist country, Buddhism, of course, was originally a product of Indian or ‘Hindu’ culture, although in some respects it could also be regarded as a reaction against that culture.15 In the Sea of Fertility Mishima, as already mentioned, uses – or misuses – a Buddhist (Yuishiki sect) interpretation of the idea of reincarnation as a kind of plot device to tie the four novels together. That is, each novel tells a separate ‘story’ in that each recounts the life of a new protagonist – three heroes and one heroine. At the same time, these protagonists are not entirely ‘new’, since each is supposedly a reincarnation of his or her predecessor. The reader’s credibility is somewhat strained by the fortuitous manner in which the viewpoint character, Honda (who survives through all four novels), reencounters the three later incarnations of his childhood friend, Kiyoaki, the hero of the first novel: by discovering the same tell-tale birthmark of three moles under their left armpits! Our credibility is further strained by the way each hero or heroine dies promptly at the age of twenty, as if following a predetermined schedule. And also by the way the Thai princess, heroine of the third novel, remembers her previous incarnations as a Japanese.

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My point is that all of these ‘untoward coincidences’ seem to be based more on a literal-minded Hindu interpretation of reincarnation than on the more philosophical-minded (idealist) Yuishiki Buddhist interpretation. And this despite the fact, paradoxically, that Mishima demonstrates in the third novel, The Temple of Dawn (Akatsuki no tera, 1970), that he understands the Yuishiki doctrine perfectly well. The middle-aged Honda is shown to be puzzled by the apparent contradiction between the Buddhist doctrine of ‘no-soul’ (anatman) and the doctrine of reincarnation. If mortal beings have no soul, then what exactly is reincarnated? Who suffers on the endless wheel of life and death? And who is finally liberated from that suffering, attaining the endless bliss of nirvana? Through an in-depth study of Buddhist philosophy, Honda eventually discovers the Yuishiki answer: what is reincarnated is not a personal soul but an impersonal karmic force, the alayavijnana or ‘storehouse consciousness’. This alaya consciousness is a ‘stream of no-self ’ (muga no nagare) which the Yuishiki scriptures compare to a torrent of water, never the same from moment to moment. These ingenious and tortured reasonings of the Buddhist philosophers, and Mishima’s own vacillation between a literal-minded and an idealist-philosophical interpretation of reincarnation, both seem to point to one basic fact: that the very doctrine of reincarnation does not sit comfortably in the Buddhist worldview. Indeed, there is an obvious logical contradiction between the idea of reincarnation and the core Buddhist doctrine of ‘no-self ’. What this suggests further is that the idea of reincarnation was a survival from an earlier tradition (namely, what we now call ‘Hinduism) that, for some reason, Buddhist leaders felt obliged to retain, even though it contradicted one of their core beliefs (or disbeliefs). Perhaps it was simply too popular, too deeply rooted in folk belief, for any religion of Indian origin to risk trying to dispense with it. It is perhaps quite understandable, then, that Mishima, in trying to give concrete fictional expression to, or in trying to find an appropriate ‘objective correlative’ of, the idea of reincarnation, should end up with a fictional rendition that is more Hindu than Yuishiki Buddhist, even though, on an intellectual level, he knew well enough what the Yuishiki Buddhist interpretation was. The idea of reincarnation itself was originally a Hindu idea and remains more naturally ‘at home’ in that religious context. Furthermore, Indian religious culture has elaborated that idea more thoroughly than any other. In visiting India, Mishima no doubt hoped to deepen his understanding of the phenomenon by

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observing at first hand a culture in which belief in reincarnation was still very much a part of the fabric of everyday life. He seems to have gotten more than he bargained for – especially at Benares. His experience of the raw physicality, ephemerality, and squalor of human existence in that ‘holy city’ evoked in him a Sartrean sense of ontological nausea. As he confessed later: ‘I felt that I had never experienced anything more terrible than Benares’.16 More importantly, he made good use of this experience in the tetralogy. Indeed, Mishima himself claimed that the experience of Benares which he gave to the tetralogy’s viewpoint character Honda was meant to be the ‘most climactic scene’ of the entire work.17 In this scene Honda is confronted by an appalling, phantasmagoric vision of the cheapness of life and the omnipresence of disease and death; in short, by a vision of human physical existence in its most repugnant and nauseating form: Everything was floating there. Which is to say, everything most ugly, most mournful, the realities of human flesh, the excrements, the stenches, the germs, the poisons of the corpses – all together were exposed to the sun and, like a steam arising from ordinary reality, floated through the sky. Benares. It was a carpet so ugly it was splendid. One thousand five hundred temples, temples of love with scarlet pillars on which all the positions of sexual intercourse were carved in black ebony reliefs, houses in which widows waited for death while continually and fervently chanting sutras in loud voices – inhabitants, visitors, the dying, the dead, children covered with syphilitic sores, dying children clinging to their mother’s breast ...18

After this overpowering ‘vision of Benares’, we witness its effect on Honda throughout the remainder of the tetralogy, an effect consisting mainly of his steady moral and psychological decline. It is as if the mere sight of those horrors has permanently contaminated his mind. Honda confesses to himself that ‘since his eyes had seen such an extremity, he felt they would never be healed. It was as if the whole of Benares suffered from a holy leprosy, and as if Honda’s vision itself had also been contaminated by this incurable disease’.19 Throughout the tetralogy up to this point Honda has played the role of passive observer of the lives of the more active and heroic characters. Now it is as if reality has finally taken revenge on him for his passivity; he is no longer secure in his pose of intellectual detachment. Mere voyeurism is no longer a harmless avocation; he has been forever ‘contaminated’ by what he has seen. The practical effects of this ‘contamination’ become increasingly

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evident in the remainder of the tetralogy. Soon after his return home from India, the Pacific War breaks out, but Honda is completely uninterested: ‘when the vision of Benares arose before him, all kinds of brilliant heroism lost their luster. Perhaps the mystery of reincarnation had paralyzed his spirit, robbed him of his courage, and convinced him of the nullity of all action ... Perhaps, finally, it had made him use all his philosophy only to serve his self-love?’20 In other words, Honda’s contact with India and Hinduism has turned him into a passive nihilist in the Nietzschean sense, incapable not only of heroic actions but even of heroic thoughts.21 His descent into nothingness begins at Benares and ends, in the final scene of the tetralogy, at the Yuishiki temple outside Nara, with Honda’s complete disillusionment and despair. The sun so strongly present in this final scene is neither the life-giving Greek sun (so admired by Mishima on his trip to that country) nor the national Shinto sun symbolic of the Imperial Way (kōdō); it is the merciless Indian sun which beats down on the disillusioned Honda, only increasing his sense of the ruthless indifference of the universe to all human suffering. We might conclude then that India and Indian religious culture (including Buddhism as its major agent of transmission to Japan) are used in the tetralogy to reinforce a world-view that is fundamentally nihilistic. IV. MISHIMA’S ‘RETURN TO JAPAN’

A ‘conventional’ view of Mishima’s life and career, and no doubt a widely accepted one, is that, in his last few years, he was finally able to eschew his foreign tastes and lifestyle and ‘return to Japan’, following a familiar pattern (Nippon kaiki) established by older Japanese writers such as Tanizaki and Kawabata.22 Mishima himself, we could say, wrote the last act of the narrative of his life in conformity with this pattern. If his ‘return to Japan’ took a particularly extreme and even violent form, perhaps this was only to compensate for the extremity and depth of his ‘Westernization’. In Mishima’s case, however, this simple pattern is complicated by one other important element: India. On the face of it, one could argue that India’s ‘displacement’ of the West in Mishima’s worldview was a natural part of his ‘return to Japan’, since India is the ultimate source of Buddhism, a major part of Japanese tradition. But that is not how Mishima himself saw it. In fact, for him India represented an even greater threat to Japanese cultural identity than did the West – all the

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more dangerous because it had insinuated itself into Japanese minds and hearts for more than a millennium. Indeed, if we are to judge by the outcome of The Sea of Fertility, Mishima’s ‘last testament’ as a creative writer and his final judgement on twentieth-century Japanese history, then the grip of India on Japan was a fatal one; it was like a ‘black hole’ which ultimately devoured any culture which tried to raise up a beautiful, heroic, idealistic or simply positive view of life, whether Western or Japanese. In short, India was the cultural homeland of passive nihilism in the Nietzschean sense, a worldview so bleak that it sapped away all will to action – a decadent wordview characterized by, in Nietzsche’s words, ‘the weary nihilism that no longer attacks … a sign of weakness’.23 By no coincidence, Nietzsche, who exerted a major influence on Mishima’s thought, also regarded Buddhism as the ‘most famous form’ of passive nihilism.24 Although Mishima’s ‘return to Japan’ did indeed take a more extreme form than that of most other modern Japanese writers, what really set it apart from the usual pattern is that it was based not so much on a rejection of the West as on a rejection of continental Asia. In this sense it was much closer in spirit to the ‘return to Japan’ of the eighteenthand nineteenth-century nativist scholars and revolutionaries than to the Nippon kaiki of his fellow Japanese writers of the twentieth century. A scholar in this earlier nativist tradition, one Kaidō Masugi, is the Shinto teacher of the young terrorist Isao, hero of the second novel of the tetralogy, Runaway Horses. Kaidō views Buddhism as an insidious anti-life philosophy which ‘robbed the Japanese of their Yamato spirit, and their manly courage’.25 Furthermore: Kaido Masugi’s aversion to Buddhism was celebrated. Since he was an admirer of [Hirata] Atsutane, this was only to be expected, and it was his practice to make Atsutane’s diatribes against Buddha and Buddhism his own and to deliver them unchanged to his students. He condemned Buddhism for denying life and, as a consequence, denying that one could die for the Emperor, for knowing nothing of the ‘abundant life of the spirit’ and, as a consequence, shutting itself off from the essential, life-giving source that was the object of true devotion. And as for Karma, that was a philosophy of evil that reduced everything to nihilism.26

Western culture, on the other hand, is not seen as necessarily inimical to the Japanese warrior spirit. Indeed, the wartime alliance of Japan with Germany and Italy is celebrated in the same novel as ‘an alliance

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of German mythology, Roman mythology and the Kojiki, a friendship between the manly, beautiful, pagan gods of East and West’.27 Of course, all this is very much in harmony with the kind of overblown pseudo-mythologizing of the German Nazi and Italian fascist ideologues of the 1920s and ‘30s. If Mishima can be said to have hoped for any concrete, positive result from his rightist activism – beyond the realization of a private fantasy – it was to ‘enhance the spiritual strength’ of Japanese men – to use the phrase in which Nietzsche defined the primary aim of active nihilism – by making their lives more ‘manly’, more dangerous, more violent.28 When he argues that the Emperor is the indispensible cornerstone of Japanese culture – the ‘Emperor as cultural concept’ [bunkagainen toshite no tennō], as he says in his late essay, ‘On the Defence of Culture’ (Bunka bōei ron, 1969) – what he means by ‘Japanese culture’ is not just such things as the tea ceremony and flower arrangement.29 What he means, above all, is the samurai warrior code of bushidō, the code according to which one resolves all moral conflicts ‘by choosing immediate death’.30 It is the divine Emperor who sanctifies this code – and, indeed, who enables the warrior to die happily. During the Pacific War, after all, all good Japanese soldiers were expected to die shouting: ‘Tennō Heika banzai!’ (Long live His Majesty the Emperor!’). Without the divine Emperor, the modern Japanese warrior would have nothing to die for. Mishima wholeheartedly accepted the American anthropologist Ruth Benedict’s characterization of Japanese culture as having ‘two sides’, one peaceful and the other warlike, symbolized by the ‘chrysanthemum’ and the ‘sword’.31 And he felt that the ‘sword’ side had been increasingly neglected in modern times. It follows from this, of course, that in order to reverse the process, in order to ‘remasculinize’ the Japanese male, the nation would have to become more warlike. Over the past century the process of ‘feminization’ had only worsened. In Runaway Horses the narrator speaks of the ‘spiritual massacre’ (seishin-teki gyakusatsu) that had been committed by the Meiji government in 1876 when it banned the wearing of swords.32 This symbolic ‘castration’ of the most manly of Japanese men – the samurai – was repeated on an even larger scale by the ‘emasculation’ of the Imperial Army after its humiliating defeat in the Pacific War: its reduction to the farcical status of a ‘self-defense force’ – as Mishima lamented in his ‘final address’ to members of this force on the day of his death. Being ‘condemned’ forever to play the contradictory role of a ‘pacifist army’,

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the flower of Japanese manhood (as Mishima conceived the military to be) were no longer allowed to be ‘real men’ – aggressive, dangerous, quick to defend their honor with their lives; they were nothing more than paper tigers. But, if Japan could become once again a nation of swordsmen instead of salarymen, the Emperor and the Imperial Army would naturally be restored to their rightful position. During his trial Isao, the young 1930s right-wing terrorist, who serves as the ideal hero of the tetralogy, delivers a paean to the sun as the ‘true image of His Sacred Majesty’.33 When, after his release from jail, he finally succeeds in exercising his ‘assassin’s will’ and stabs to death the ‘un-Japanese’ capitalist, Kurahara, the murder is justified on national-Shinto grounds: for Kurahara’s supposed ‘profanation’ of the major imperial shrine at Ise (by carelessly sitting on a sacred sakaki branch there). Thus Isao’s violent action, like other such actions by 1930’s right-wing terrorists, is putatively undertaken in service to the emperor (even if actually against the imperial will), and in the hope of achieving a kind of mystical union with him in the death that would inevitably follow. Indeed, what really interests Mishima is the subsequent scene of Isao’s seppuku. He lingers over this in loving detail, and the final ‘explosion’ which occurs after Isao plunges the knife into his abdomen resembles nothing so much as a sexual orgasm – albeit one with the ‘sun-god emperor’ as his partner. As we have already seen, this idea of mystical union with the emperor was a keystone of 1930’s Japanese fascist ideology. But it is interesting – and no doubt significant – to note that when the sun again appears in the very last scene of the tetralogy, to ‘punctuate’ Honda’s experience of nothingness, it is no longer the ‘divinized’ or anthropomorphized imperial sun but merely the ordinary, impersonal sun of a hot summer’s day – which, with its ruthless and unrelenting heat, seems only to reinforce the temple garden’s ‘message’ of the indifference if not hostility to man of the whole universe. The all-powerful, benevolent Emperor, fountainhead of the national culture, seems to have vanished into thin air along with all the other ‘illusory’ identities of the tetralogy. He is as conspicuously absent from this final scene as is Nietzsche’s famous ‘dead God’ from the novels of modern Western nihilists. Thus, in Mishima’s final tetralogy, the Nietzschean active/passive nihilist dialectic, used in earlier novels such as The Temple of the Golden Pavilion and Confessions of a Mask to define the basis of the psychological struggles of an individual protagonist, is brought onto a wider

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historical, religious and philosophic stage: the Hindu-Buddhist worldview as passive nihilism is opposed by nationalist Shinto emperorworship and rightist terrorism as active nihilism. Ironically, despite Mishima’s own obvious sympathy with the latter, the work’s despairing conclusion, its shattering of all illusions of value and faith, suggests that it is ‘Indian’ passive nihilism which triumphs in the end. But the ‘ending’ Mishima planned for his own life, although as consciously designed as the tetralogy’s ending, had quite the opposite import. In his final political manifestoes, including the one he delivered to Japanese troops just before his suicide, he argued that Japan could indeed be rescued from the morass of passive nihilism and recover its true warrior spirit – if only the military would disavow the Americanimposed ‘Peace Constitution’, an emasculating insult to the nation, take back its proud prewar status as the Imperial Army, and restore the Emperor to his proper position at the power centre of the national polity. Always eager to show that, unlike most intellectuals, he was not afraid to put his ideas into action, on the final day of his life Mishima signed the last page of the tetralogy, then set off with some members of his private army to attempt his ‘takeover’ of the Japanese Self-Defence Force headquarters in Tokyo. Although he would end his own life in a grusomely violent way – hardly a positive outcome from most points of view – Mishima was fond of pointing to what he saw as a crucial difference between the Japanese and the Judeo-Christian tradition: that in the Japanese tradition suicide is often regarded as a kind of moral victory. By committing ritual suicide in the traditional samurai manner, he no doubt hoped that it would be accepted by his fellow countrymen in this spirit. And one must admit that, although most Japanese initially regarded his seppuku as the act of a madman or a vulgar exhibitionist, under the patina of time it has assumed more of a legendary status and, at least in right-wing circles, Mishima is now firmly established in the national pantheon of martyrs and heroes. V. THE POLITICIZED RELIGION OF ASAHARA SHŌKŌ

As might be expected, the shocking sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway system by Aum Shinrikyō provoked intense debate as to its ultimate ‘meaning’ for contemporary Japan. Was it a terrible ‘one-off’ or an augury of things to come? Was it a symptom of a widespread malaise among a well-educated younger generation disenchanted with

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modern-day Japan’s materialistic ‘economic animal’ lifestyle? (Some of the Aum members were products of the country’s most elite universities.) What would be its long-term impact on the Japanese people’s (already rather lukewarm) attitude to religion? The most thoughtful treatment of the subject in English is by Ian Reader, who rejects attempts to sensationalize or to dismiss the group as an ‘evil cult’ unrelated to ‘genuine religion’. On the contrary, Reader shows that this ‘new religion’ drew much of its ideology and practices from traditional, established religions, but carried certain aspects of these – especially the sense of its own righteousness and consequent alienation from an irreligious, materialistic society – to such an extreme that it finally resorted to a ‘holy war’ against that society. Thus, ‘Aum Shinrikyō provides us with a salient example of the violence-producing dimensions of religion and reminds us of how religious movements can, through a confluence of circumstances, engender, legitimate and commit acts of violence in the name of their faith’.34 Needless to say, all that we have learned in recent years about the ‘violence-producing dimensions’ of even ‘orthodox’ religions – in the Japanese as in other contexts – makes Reader’s argument quite easy to accept. Indeed, some social analysts even claim that Japan is now living in a ‘post-Aum age’ in which all religion has become seriously suspect in the eyes of the Japanese people. The novelist Murakami Haruki, for instance, in his collection of profoundly moving interviews with victims of the Tokyo subway gas attack (and a few Aum members), relates the attack to another tragic event that occurred just two months earlier – the Kobe earthquake – and claims that these two events created a mid-1990s double trauma for the Japanese national psyche, a trauma from which it will not soon recover: The Kobe earthquake and the Tokyo gas attack of January and March 1995 are two of the greatest tragedies in Japan’s postwar history. It is no exaggeration to say that there was a marked change in the Japanese consciousness ‘before’ and ‘after’ these events.35

But Murakami, in a way that is entirely apropos to the central concerns of the present volume, believes that the long-term repercussions of these two events will be as much political as religious, since he also claims that, coming in the wake of the bursting of Japan’s ‘bubble economy’, they have ‘ushered in a period of critical inquiry into the very

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roots of the Japanese state’ – in other words, into what has traditionally been called the kokutai.36 VI. AUM’S RADICAL CHALLENGE TO THE KOKUTAI

The religiopolitical goals of Aum were nothing if not ambitious. Not only did they aim to replace State Shinto with State Aum, they also intended to replace the democratic government headed by the Heisei Emperor as its symbolic soverign with a religio-fascist dictatorship headed by Emperor Asahara as absolute soverign. Aum organized itself as a mirror image of the Japanese government, complete with ‘twenty-four separate ministries and agencies, all of them comparable to the government with similar functions and responsibilities’.37 Thus the sect’s elaborate political structure was ready to precisely replace and replicate that of the established government after the imminent Armageddon that Asahara had prophesized (and ultimately would try to engineer). In order to precipitate the state’s collapse, the gas attack was organized with military precision as a coordinated strike on all the major subway lines leading to the heart of the Japanese government in Kasumigaseki – and designed time-wise too to kill thousands of government bureaucrats on their way to work in the morning. Because, in post-Armageddon Tokyo, Asahara himself planned to assume the position of emperor, he had also already established his own imperial-style ‘Household Agency’, exactly like the real Japanese emperor’s. Absurdly over-ambitious as these goals might seem, the Aum phenomenon could not just be laughed away. From a practical viewpoint, of course, Asahara’s attempted coup d’état, like Mishima’s, was a feeble and inept affair, ridiculous apart from its tragic consequences; but, like Mishima’s again, it also seemed to many observers symptomatic of serious, deeper and wider, discontents, anxieties and uncertainties in the Japanese society of its day, a general sense that something was wrong with the body politic and perhaps even with the nation’s ‘spiritual condition’. Certainly both Mishima and Asahara encouraged exactly this interpretation of the terrorist incidents they launched. Both exploited Japan’s religion-influenced ‘seishin culture’, the complex of traditional popular-cultural beliefs about the health or sickness of the human ‘spirit’, to justify their acts of ‘spiritually purifying’ violence. As Mishima asked the assembled troops in his ‘last speech’: ‘Is there no one who will die by hurling his body against the [‘Peace’] Constitution which has mutilated her? If there is, let us rise together even now,

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and let us die together. It is in the fervent hope that you who are pure in spirit will once again be men and true bushi that we have resorted to this act’.38 And Asahara, who by 1995 had taken to seeing himself as a manifestation of the destructive side of the Hindu god Shiva, justified his murderous attack by claiming that it would ‘purify’ a ‘decadent’ Japanese society.39 Although, of course, there were important religiopolitical and cultural differences between the ‘cures’ the two men prescribed for an ailing society, it must also be said that their ‘prescriptions’ were both fundamentally in tune with a major twentieth-century religiopolitical tradition: namely, that of fascism. Politically, Aum may be regarded as a proto-fascist movement – in the sense defined by Umberto Eco. Speaking of the essential characteristics of what he calls ‘Ur-Fascism’ – that is, fascism in its most basic and universal form – Eco explains the origins of fascism’s ‘Armageddon complex’, in words that seem perfectly applicable to Aum (indeed, Asahara adopted the Christian idea of ‘Armageddon’ in precisely the way Eco specifies): For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle. Thus pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. It is bad because life is permanent warfare. This, however, brings about an Armageddon complex. Since enemies have to be defeated, there must be a final battle, after which the movement will have control of the world.40

Indeed, had Asahara actually achieved his political ambitions, he would have created a new form of Japanese fascism, more revolutionary than the 1930s variety in its total rejection of the Meiji kokutai, and closer to the ‘revolutionary’ European fascism that broke completely with the established authorities of the past. As it turned out, sarin gas was not the only thing he borrowed from the Nazis; his worldview had much in common with theirs – even to the reductio ad absurdum of a Japanese religious leader espousing anti-Semitism. In January 1995 ‘the sect formally declared war on the Jewish people, which it described … as “the hidden enemy” and “the world shadow government”’, echoing traditional Nazi and other anti-Semitic propaganda, and even accusing some of their wealthy and cosmopolitan compatriots of being ‘Jewish Japanese’.41 Apart from this increasing demonization of all manner of outsiders as the ‘enemy’, in its ‘internal affairs’ too Aum began to show all the classic signs of a group or society undergoing fascistic transmogrification:

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the demand for absolute submission to the leader, who is increasingly presented as a perfect and omniscient, godlike figure (‘Mussolini is always right’, as a popular fascist slogan of the 1920s proclaimed); the sacralization of politics and the politicization of religion; absolute totalitarian control of members’ lives, including thought control (one of the original and most notorious contributions of Aum in this area was the electric headset, which Asahara’s followers wore supposedly to attune their brainwaves to the Master’s); this was matched by zero tolerance for and violent suppression of any hint of dissent; increasing militarization of members’ daily lives and of the group’s power structure; and the ultimate glorification of violence as a good or end in itself – as indeed the royal road to salvation. Kevin Doak asks an intriguing question vis-à-vis the possibility of seeing Aum as symptomatic of some larger truths about Japanese reliopolitical culture: … the sensationalism of that terrorist attack may have distracted attention from a broader and more fundamental challenge that continues to inform debates over religion and politics in Japan: how the modern state dealt with Shintoism at its very outset in the late nineteenth century. Shinto activists figured prominently among the revolutionaries that gave birth to the Meiji State. Does the historical fact of religious activists influential at the birth of the modern Japanese state mean that religion (at least Shintoism) will always be inextricably linked to politics in modern Japan? Did the ‘restoration’ of the Meiji monarch as a Shinto ruler constitute a fundamental compromise of religious freedom in modern Japan? And, in any event, did the postwar revision of the Religious Organization Law and the new Constitution of 1946 render that earlier history irrelevant? Perhaps lying underneath such questions is an implicit, cultural essentialist one: is there something unique in Japanese attitudes about religion and politics that weaves together the warp of Shinto revolutionaries and the woof of Aum terrorists of more recent memory?42

In a sense, then, one could argue that the modern kokutai, constructed, in its initial form, during the Meiji period, prepared the way for a postmodern political religion such as Aum, which was also founded on the premise that politics and religion should join together for the national good. In fact, Aum was not the first fascistic new religion to challenge the established kokutai: most notably, the prewar Ōmotokyō, although deriving its beliefs largely from Shinto, deviated from

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the official State Shinto line by questioning the supremacy among the gods of the Sun Goddess Amaterasu. Since Amaterasu was officially considered to be the imperial ancestress, this amounted to lèse-majesté, and the sect was ruthlessly suppressed in 1935. Also, as Sheldon Garon has pointed out: Its charismatic patriarch organized paramilitary groups, and he mimicked the sacrosanct emperor by reviewing them mounted on a white horse. Perhaps Omotokyo’s eeriest resemblance to Aum lies in their common prophesy of an impending apocalyptic war with the United States, which would destroy all of Japan except their own compounds. In contrast to Aum, however, neither Omotokyo nor any other prewar new religion was ever charged with committing violent acts to bring about that apocalypse.43

Indeed, as Garon suggests, none of these earlier ‘new religions’ seemed to pose anywhere near as serious a threat to the state as was posed by Aum. Ōmoto-kyō’s ‘charismatic patriarch’ may have mimicked the emperor by riding on a white horse, but he never dared suggest that he should replace the emperor at the heart of the kokutai. Such mad effrontery – or political recklessness – was inconceivable in the 1930s, but obviously it had become quite conceivable by the 1990s. What made it conceivable, of course, was not just Asahara’s personal arrogance or megalomania but the momentous social, political and ideological changes that Japan had undergone in the intervening six decades. To understand the nature of these profound changes more clearly, we will consider, again, the difference in religiopolitical motivation between the ‘two incidents’ of 1970 and 1995. VII. MISHIMA’S ATTEMPT TO RESTORE THE ‘SACRED CANOPY’

In Nihilism (Nihirizumu), a volume of stories and essays he edited in 1968, the nationalist philosopher and cultural critic Umehara Takeshi credits Mishima with being the first to recognize the nihilist philosophical and moral implications of the postwar Japanese version of the ‘death of God’ – the Emperor’s renunciation of his divinity: This collapse of the godhead of the Emperor was really a metaphysical kind of event (keijijogaku-teki jiken] in Japan. Mishima Yukio was the one who noticed this – though rather a long time after the event itself.

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Unlike Sakaguchi [Ango] or the scholars demobilized after the war, he had not staked his life on the Emperor and then experienced nihilism when the imperial system collapsed. Rather he was a thinker about the reality of the confusion of values after the defeat. Something was missing in peace and democracy. Intense enthusiasm was lacking, and thus Mishima longed for his past in which this enthusiasm and faith existed. Did not faith in the Emperor exist exactly as this kind of enthusiasm and faith some twenty years before? He depended on the reality of the existence of this kind of god, and criticized the corruption of those people who had lost this god. And Mishima criticized the human emperor, asking whether it was not a breach of faith for a god to confess that he was not a god.44

The Mishima of whom Umehara is speaking here is the Mishima of the 1960s. It was not until then that he began explicitly to discuss the ‘metaphysical’ or ‘nihilist’ import of the Emperor’s renunciation of his godhead. There is an echo here, of course, of the crisis in modern Western culture that Nietzsche prophesized would result from the ‘death of God’ in the Judeo-Christian context. More recently, the sociologist of religion Peter Berger argued that modern secularism has eroded the ‘sacred canopy’ that human beings need as a shield against anomie – that is, against a sense of nothingness, meaninglessness, and despair. Expanding on this key insight, Roger Griffin has applied it to the ‘psychodynamics’ of fascism which he sees as an attempt to restore the ‘sheltering sky’ in the face of the ‘primordial terror induced by modernity’: ‘A modern political movement born of nomic as well as socio-economic crisis is thus the manifestation of the collective search for a new nomos, a new community living under a new sky’.45 Although no doubt ‘new’ in a sense, the fascist and Nazi projects also involved the putative ‘revival’ of ancient Roman and Teutonic religious mythologies. As we have already seen, this ‘mythological’ aspect of the fascist and Nazi ideologies was highly attractive to Mishima, who celebrated the wartime alliance of Japan with Germany and Italy as ‘an alliance of German mythology, Roman mythology and the Kojiki, a friendship between the manly, beautiful, pagan gods of East and West’.46 As Emilio Gentile has pointed out, myth and ritual were used by fascist regimes to ‘sacralize’ politics: ‘The sacralisation of politics takes place when politics is conceived, lived and represented through myths, rituals and symbols that demand faith in the sacralised secular entity, dedication among the community of believers, enthusiasm for

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action, a warlike spirit and sacrifice in order to secure its defence and its triumph. In such cases, it is possible to speak of religions of politics in that politics itself assumes religious characteristics’.47 And Roger Griffin has also shown that at the heart of this mythological revival was the fascist and Nazi belief in the myth of a timeless, essentialized ‘nation’ – for instance, in Hitler’s case, what he called the ‘eternal German nation’ and the ‘eternal values of blood and soil’ – which needed to be restored by a violent process of ‘purging’ and ‘purification’. As Griffin explains (in words that could apply equally to Asahara and his followers and, though perhaps less obviously, to Mishima and his): ‘It was the projection onto Hitler of this temporalized utopia of a purified society created within historical time that lay at the heart of the Hitler cult, and allowed him to assume the role of the propheta leading his new community through its collective rite of passage into the new world beyond decadence and decay’.48 Following upon this, of course, was perhaps the central fascist myth, a myth found in both the political and religious varieties of fascism (if the two can be distinguished): the myth of the redeeming power of violence. In short, the ‘purified society’ that is ‘beyond decadence and decay’ could be achieved only by violent force, whether in the form of ‘small-scale’ terrorist attacks or by ‘ethnic cleansing’ on a massive genocidal scale. Hermann Rauschning, a German scholar of the 1930s, described the recent Nazi assumption of power as the ‘revolution of nihilism’, and explained clearly how its typically terrorist emphasis on ‘direct action’ – in other words, violence – was related to its nihilist philosophy/psychology: Direct action is defined as ‘direct integration by means of corporativism, militarism, and myth;’ this is to replace democracy and parliamentarism. But the true significance of direct action lies in its assignment of the central place in its policy to violence, which it then surrounds with a special philosophical interpretation of reality. Briefly this philosophical system amounts to the belief that the use of violence in a supreme effort liberates creative moral forces in human society which lead to social and national renewal. ... The barbaric element of violence ... is the one element that can change a social order ... [Such is] the logical and inevitable outcome of the National Socialist philosophy, of the doctrine of violence.49

Mishima’s own readiness to use violence in support of his rightwing agenda, then, places him squarely within the ‘mainstream’ of

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twentieth-century fascism. This also means that his politics were entirely consistent with the rest of his ‘nihilist program’ – a fact which might easily be missed if they were viewed exclusively within a national context. Indeed, if Mishima’s ultranationalism were regarded only as a narrowly Japanese phenomenon, it might well seem an unaccountable anomaly – in fact, it has often been depicted as merely an eccentric or quixotic blend of politics with aesthetics or, worse yet, with personal psychosis. The great majority of postwar Japanese writers and intellectuals identified themselves as liberal democrats, socialists or communists, and thus welcomed the spread of democracy, the ‘Peace Constitution’, the de-deification of the Emperor, and the relegation of the military to the status of a ‘self-defense force’. In his perception of all these ‘reforms’ as inimical to the ‘Japanese spirit’, Mishima found himself almost alone among the leading intellectuals of his generation. In his ‘New Theory of Fascism’, Mishima tried to dissociate himself – and the war-time Japanese nationalists – from the European fascists by pointing to what he saw as some crucial differences: Japanese nationalism was not based on a systematic, manmade philosophy such as that of fascism but on Emperor-worship; it did not appeal to the intelligentsia as fascism appealed to many European nihilists, and, finally: The genesis of fascism is inseparably linked to the spiritual conditions of Europe from the latter part of the nineteenth century to the beginning of this century. And the fascist leaders themselves were definite nihilists. Nothing could be further than fascism from the optimism of the Japanese right wing.50

Though he grants that the Japanese ultranationalists were as racist as the fascists, he contends that racism is only a ‘secondary phenomenon’ of fascism: ‘What the Japanese right wing had in common with fascism was mainly this secondary aspect’,51 and this is simply because ‘racism is the easiest weapon to use’ – presumably, to arouse the masses.52 But Mishima’s attempts here to befuddle those leftist critics who would associate him with the fascists are somewhat disingenuous. While there may be a cultural or stylistic difference between pledging blind obedience to a tennō on the one hand and a Führer or a duce on the other, for the fascist both these ‘acts of submission’ may be made to serve the same purpose: forging a whole populace into one mass expression of the national will to power. As Walter Skya has pointed out, the Japanese militarists’ ideological mobilization of their citizens for a

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‘holy war’ against the West was based on a more personalized form of emperor-worship than that constructed in the Meiji period: ‘Personal union with the emperor was the individual’s ultimate objective; it was this objective that was at the heart of radical Shintō ultranationalist ideology’.53 Mishima’s own exaltation of blind devotion to the Emperor as deity certainly fits this fascist pattern; and, on the other hand, the European fascist’s exaltation of blind submission to a Hitler or a Mussolini as personifications of the national will to power was every bit as ‘suprarational’ or ‘mystical’ as emperor-worship. During the last decade of his life, Mishima, as we have seen, devoted all his energies, both as a writer and as a political activist, precisely to an attempt to restore the ‘sacred canopy’ of State Shinto with the ‘divine emperor’ at its core – knowing full well that, without these, the modern kokutai had become meaningless and was no longer viable as a religiopolitical system. And, on the very last day of his life, his final act was a desperate attempt either to realize this goal or to inspire others to do so in the future. As he said in his exhortation to the assembled troops just before committing seppuku: What kind of an army is it that has no higher value than life? Right now we will show you that there is a value higher than reverence for life. It is neither freedom nor democracy. It is Japan. Japan, the country whose history and traditions we love. Is there no one who will die by hurling his body against the [‘Peace’] Constitution which has mutilated her? If there is, let us rise together even now, and let us die together. It is in the fervent hope that you who are pure in spirit will once again be men and true bushi that we have resorted to this act [his terrorist attack on the SDF headquarters].54

VIII. ASAHARA’S ATTEMPT TO REPLACE THE ‘SACRED CANOPY’

Mishima, then, tried to restore the ‘sheltering sky’ of the prewar kokutai. Coming a few decades later, Asahara knew that it was far too late for that; indeed, he may be said to have ‘exploited’ the spiritual vacuum that remained for his own nefarious purposes. He knew instinctively that the ‘sheltering sky’ was severely eroded and he saw in this an opportunity for himself: to offer his own newly minted political religion as a substitute ‘shelter’ for a ‘lost generation’. In this sense he was the right man at the right time, which is no doubt why he was able to attract many thousands of followers in such a remarkably short time.

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For a new generation of young Japanese ‘disinherited minds’, he seemed to hold out far more promise of meaning and purpose than any ‘archaic’ Mishimaesque scheme for a ‘Heisei Restoration’ of the imperial, national-Shinto kokutai. In other words, the ‘Aum generation’, unlike Mishima, was historically too far removed from the postwar collapse of the imperial godhead and the kokutai to believe in the possibility – or even in the desirability – of its restoration (something so many young Japanese revolutionaries had demanded in the past). For Asahara and his followers, the modern kokutai could not be restored but only replaced, albeit with a new form of fascistic political religion. Both Mishima and Asahara struggled to achieve some kind of ‘reconfiguration’ or ‘readjustment’ of the interplay between politics and religion in Japan; like the Shinto activists, they both sought to transform their religious vision into a ‘state religion’, a kind of totalitarian theocracy. And, like the Shinto revolutionaries, both were willing to resort to terrorist violence to achieve their religiopoitical goals. But there is a crucial distinction between Asahara’s religiopolitics and those of both Mishima and the nineteenth-century Shinto activists: Asahara’s complete break with the modern imperial state to create a wholly new ‘counter-kokutai’. This is precisely what makes Aum a ‘postmodern’ phenomenon. IX. AUM AND POSTMODERNITY

Certain more immediate historical factors – namely, the ‘collapse’ of the booming Japanese economy of the 1980s and the continuing rise of a global postmodern culture – no doubt also played a part in making it unlikely that young Japanese of the 1990s would be receptive to a ‘Heisei Restoration’ or, in other words, any attempt to ‘restore’ the modern nationalist kokutai. The 1980s were a golden age for Japanese nationalists, with the economy booming, Japan predicted to soon overtake the U.S. economically and become, as the title of Harvard professor Ezra Vogel’s bestseller proclaimed, ‘Number One’. Politically, the right-wing was newly ascendant, with ultranationalist Prime Minister Nakasone in power for much of the period, a close ally of the archconservatives Reagan and Thatcher in the U.S. and Britain. By cruel contrast, the following two decades were a far less happy time – a time, quite literally, ‘to try men’s souls’. With the economic collapse that occurred shortly after the death of the Shōwa emperor (Hirohito) in 1989 – a historical moment charged with immense symbolic

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significance for the Japanese – the postwar ‘golden age’ seemed to have come to an abrupt end and many Japanese again felt troubled or confused in their relationship with modernity. Thus, it was inevitable that the Aum incident would be interpreted as symptomatic of a wider malaise in the post-boom Japan of the 1990s. Indeed, certain diehard nationalists took the Aum incident as a kind of call to arms, convincing them of the imperative need to revive the kokutai for the sake of the nation’s ‘spiritual health’. The ultranationalist cartoonist Kobayashi Yoshinori, for instance, whose cartoons glorifying Japan’s ‘liberation’ of Asia in the Pacific War have sold tens of millions of copies, suggests that the Aum attack traumatized him and others into embracing ultranationalism. In short, he became convinced that the doomsday cult’s attack was an extreme expression of the alienation of the Japanese from their own past, an alienation which has cut them off from the source of a stable belief and value system. In other words, like many other social analysts, he sees the attack as a product of postmodern anomie. As he told John Nathan: ‘We have a responsibility ... If we reject our inheritance we create the emptiness we live in now’.55 As an antidote to what he sees as Japan’s masochistic obsequiousness and lack of a strong and confident sense of national identity, Kobayashi urges his fellow countrymen to become more ‘arrogant’ in order to free themselves from foreign – especially American and Chinese – influences and pressures (or intimidations)! And he also advocates a revival of the prewar kokutai. He ends Sensōron (On War, 1998), his comic book glorifying Japan’s role in the Pacific War, with the following rhetorical flourish: ‘May I be an arrogantist? Japan is a country of the gods ... We must never forget that legacy, where we came from and who we are’.56 A more mainstream attempt to revive the kokutai has come from the conservative political establishment, which has toyed in various ways with resurrecting a somewhat ‘toned-down’ or more politically respectable version of prewar nationalism. The establishment attitude is perhaps best – or most notoriously – symbolized by Prime Minister Mori’s public pronouncement in 2000 that ‘Japan is a divine land centered on the emperor’, but there have been a long series of ‘kokutai-friendly’ official and unofficial policies and projects: from restoring the national flag and anthem to schools to authorizing revisionist (more nationalistic) history textbooks, other hints of emperorworship and national-Shintō mysticism in public pronouncements by politicians, the more frequent use of prewar national symbols,

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including the Yasukuni Shrine as a memorial to the heroic war dead – and even the evocation of a possible revival of pan-Asianism. Nonetheless, it seems unlikely that any of these government-sponsored efforts to revive the prewar kokutai will have a very deep or lasting effect on the younger generation. The rise of global postmodern culture (aided by travel, education, mass media, and the internet) has produced a new generation who seem so different from ‘traditional’ Japanese that their elders call them shinjinrui (‘a new species of human’). These sophisticated, well-travelled, cosmopolitan youth are hardly promising subjects for a conversion to a revived national Shinto or emperor cult. On the other hand, some of the ‘best and brightest’ of them obviously did prove susceptible to a new-age transnational ‘hybrid’ religion like Aum, a syncretic religious hodgepodge. One might well ask why? As has often been pointed out, postmodern culture is pre-eminently a culture of choice and, as a consequence of this historically unprecented ‘freedom of choice’, a culture that is increasingly transnational and hybridized. The archetypal cultural products and primary symbols of life in a globalized, late capitalist society are the supermarkets, megastores, and shopping malls, with their ever-growing abundance and variety of consumer goods that leave the customer ‘spoiled for choice’. In such a society shopping becomes a major pastime. Indeed, as one sociologist has remarked: ‘shopping is no longer just a chore but a way of life’.57 And the more important point is that this unprecedented level of individual ‘free choice’ seems to extend also to matters of personal identity. Not only can we choose among a myriad of material and cultural products but also, cut off from the past and from all kinds of traditions, we can also choose our personal life-style, identity, beliefs and values. We ‘life-stylize’ continually to construct ourselves, freely selecting the components of our identity from potentially an almost infinite range of different ‘cosmopolitan’ sources. At least, so says the great postmodern myth. In this respect Aum was a typically postmodern ‘new new religion’: its teachings represented a veritable smorgasbord of world religious traditions, with fragments drawn from Hinduism, Yoga, Vedanta, Tantric Buddhism, Zen, Christianity, and rival new religions – all of it given a unique ‘twist’, of course, as it passed through the rather over-heated brain of the self-styled ‘Ultimate Liberated Master’, Asahara himself, whose worldview seemed to have been shaped, again in a very postmodern way, by science-fiction cartoons

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and comic books as much as by his readings in the ‘sacred texts’ of global religions.58 We can see this clearly, for instance, in the contrast between his attitude towards India as a postmodern cosmopolite and Mishima’s as a modern nationalist. As it happens, India played an interesting if unexpected role in both men’s lives and thought, the India that was the ultimate source of Japan’s ‘universal’ religion, Buddhism. We have already seen its meaning for Mishima. But, if Mishima sought to banish the feared Indian influence from Japan forever, Asahara may be said to have brought it back with a vengeance. Like Mishima, Asahara travelled to India in search of some kind of ‘enlightenment’. But his experiences there, at least as he himself reported them, were far more positive and uplifting than Mishima’s. In this sense, of course, both men found what they were looking for: India provided a negative contrasting continental-Asian ‘other’ to Japan for the anti-Buddhist Mishima, and an equally positive ‘other’ to Japan for Asahara, who drew from both Buddhism and Hinduism to create his ‘new religion’. For Mishima and his followers Japan was the land of the gods, the fountainhead of all goodness and spiritual purity; India, on the other hand, represented every kind of evil and decadence; for Aahara and his followers it was exactly the opposite. As Ian Reader points out: ‘India was a potent image and a popular religious destination in Aum. It was a holy land (seishi) which Asahara visited on many occasions and where he had some of his formative religious experiences’.59 On his ‘pilgrimage’ to India in 1986, Asahara, by his own account, practiced meditation alone in the Himalayas for two months, by the end of which time he became ‘the first Japanese in history to have attained ultimate liberation’.60 Whatever actually happened to him in India, he certainly came away with an inflated sense of his own importance, and even megalomaniac delusions of grandeur, claiming that he was now the spiritual equal of the Buddha and would ‘restore “original Buddhism” (genshi Bukkyō) to the world’.61 He also claimed that he had met a number of gurus in India who predicted that Japan faced imminent destruction and only he could save it.62 This enabled him to quite effectively practice the oldest kind of ‘religious blackmail’ in the world, which might be paraphrased as: ‘Accept my religion (and me) as supreme or face an unprecedented apocalypse!’ Thus Asahara’s ‘sense of mission’ was clarified and greatly strengthened by his sojourn in India. It tells us something about the Zeitgeist of the 1980s that a founder of a Japanese new religion at that time

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felt it necessary to turn to India’s religious culture, rather than Japan’s own, to provide the indispensible foundation in a ‘genuine’ religious tradition – in other words, the imprimatur or ‘proof of authenticity’ both of his new religion and of his own inflated self-presentation as a great guru to Japan and the world. He even went so far as to adopt the outer trappings of a stereotypical Indian guru, by then so familiar from mass media images, growing his hair and beard long and wearing flowing white robes. And, of course, the very name he chose for his new religion, ‘Aum’, pointed to its putative Indian origins. Even in his references to Buddhist scripture, he showed a preference for the Pali sutras of Theravadin (South Asian) Buddhism rather than the Sanskrit sutras of traditional Japanese Mahayana Buddhism. Asahara was canny enough to realize that, in late twentieth-century postmodern, globalized Japan, the younger generations who had absorbed pop-cultural ‘new age’ religious influences since the 1960s were more likely to follow an ‘Indian-style guru’ than anyone who looked or sounded like a traditional Japanese-style religious figure. As D.W. Brackett writes: ‘To many young people [in Japan] the image of traditional Buddhism is one of elaborate funeral services held in ornate temples, and most show very little interest in the established sects of Japanese Buddhism’.63 Significantly too, Asahara drew inspiration from Hinduism as well as Buddhism – although it may be said that his Hinduism seems closer to the pop-cultural, cartoonish, Indiana Jones (Kali Ma! Kali Ma!) version than to the real thing. As we have seen, he was especially attracted to the Hindu deity Shiva, the ‘destroyer god’ in one of his aspects, whom Asahara interpreted in his own increasingly nihilistic way as his worldview darkened and he decided that he must resort to violence. Thus, Shiva ultimately was transmogrified in the Aum leader’s exhortations to his followers into a kind of patron god of terrorism. As Reader points out, Shiva became ‘Aum’s main image of worship’, Asahara often claimed to be guided by messages received from the god, and finally he began to claim that he himself was a manifestation of Shiva.64 Thus the final acts of mayhem and murder perpetrated by Asahara and his followers against a ‘decadent’ Japanese society could be justified as paradoxical Shiva-like acts of ‘creative destruction’, purifying or even saving the ‘unenlightened’ by ‘compassionately’ murdering them. Of course, this was not the first time in religious history that ‘true believers’ have been guided by such a perverse logic. Just the year before he launched the subway attack, Asahara announced to his followers that ‘he had received a message from Shiva, informing him that

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the time for war had come, and that only he (Asahara) could purify this polluted world’.65 As Reader points out, in the ‘final stage in Aum’s violence’ its ‘sacred war against evil became a real one’ and the talented young scientists among its members began to prepare chemical weapons to be used indiscriminately against their fellow Japanese.66 Thus Asahara’s total rejection of the kokutai, and especially the religiopolitical manner and cultural style in which he expressed that rejection, with what might be called his ‘counter-kokutai ideology’, seems so thoroughly characteristic of the ‘postmodern’ Japan of the 1990s that it is hard to imagine it as having occurred in any previous age. CONCLUSION

In the 1930s idealistic young people who were concerned about Japan’s ‘spiritual decline’ because of ‘decadent Western influence’ were sometimes persuaded to join right-wing terrorist groups. These groups were motivated by a radical Shinto ideology that convinced them that the ultimate good was to die – or to kill – for the emperor and his empire, and thus to help return their divine nation to its true pristine spirit. It was these ‘pure-hearted’ youth whom Mishima celebrated in his fiction and whom he emulated on that final day of his life in 1970. Even in 1970, of course, Mishima’s action seemed somewhat anachronistic, a throwback to the famous young radical right-wing coup attempt of February 1936 (a historical echo no doubt intended by Mishima, who hero-worshipped those young rebel officers in particular67). In other words, Mishima’s nationalShinto, emperor-worshipping, militarist, fascist, and ultranationalist political religion represented the response to modernity of an earlier generation of nationalists, an attempt to ‘overcome modernity’ by reviving certain privileged and often imaginary or mythical aspects of the national tradition. As a member of the last generation who had fought for that vision of the imperial kokutai, Mishima in 1970 could still bring himself to believe in its religiopolitical viability. But if he hoped by the example of his own ‘death for the great cause’ to inspire such ‘pure-hearted’ national-Shinto, emperor-worshipping fervour in future generations of young Japanese, his efforts seem to have been in vain. By the 1990s similar groups of young idealists, equally convinced that a postmodern Japan was spiritually bankrupt because of the evil influence of Western materialism, were too far removed from their native religiopolitical traditions to follow any

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such program as Mishima had espoused. Rather, somewhat bizarrely but in a way typical of the global postmodern age, they preferred to follow a pseudo-guru who sought to transform himself into a pseudoemperor and who inspired them with his syncretic mélange of transnational religious traditions and stereotypical pop-cultural notions of ‘spiritual power’. Asahara and his followers had little interest in the national tradition; for them India was the sacred land, not Japan. Thus, in many respects, they were highly representative of a younger, more globalized generation of postmodern Japanese. Although just as uneasy as Mishima with the ‘materialism’, ‘corruption’ and ‘decadence’ of late capitalist society, they sought salvation or spiritual purification not through any revival of national-Shinto or imperial tradition, but rather, in a typically postmodern way, in an apocalyptic cult or ‘new religion’ that was a veritable smorgasbord of undigested tidbits of world religions mixed with a worldview concocted largely from science-fiction comic books, video games, and cartoons. Their cultural style was popular or ‘low-cultural’ rather than elite or highcultural; transnational and hybrid rather than ‘purely’ national. Both politically and religiously, Aum and its actions did not fit in any traditional category. Could there be any clearer evidence that, by 1995, the Meiji kokutai, and the national-Shinto ideology that supported it, was well beyond hope of ‘restoration’? I have argued here that the different character of two incidents of late twentieth-century religiopolitical violence in Japan, in 1970 and 1995 – and the different character of their principal perpetrators, Mishima and Asahara – tell us something important about the changes the island nation underwent in the intervening quarter century, culturally as well as sociopolitically. In general, as one would expect, the influence of traditional, national, and high-cultural values and beliefs markedly declined, and global, transnational, postmodern, and popcultural influences became increasingly predominant. More specifically, these social and cultural changes inevitably also produced a fundamental change in the relation between politics and religion. The late nineteenth-century State Shinto kokutai was a spent force by the 1990s, no longer viable either politically or religiously, and the Aum incident was interpreted by some as an ominous sign that dangerous new political religions – far more dangerous even than the Sōka gakkai – might try to replace it, should significant portions of the Japanese population become dissatisfied with their secular or non-sectarian democracy. In other words, the State Shinto kokutai first constructed in the Meiji

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period no longer sufficed as a ‘sheltering sky’ for vast numbers of Japanese, especially of the younger generation, the ‘Murakami generation’ and younger, despite the continuing and increasingly desperate efforts of the (mostly older) conservative political establishment to revive that moribund religiopolitical system and worldview. The leading perpetrators of the two incidents, Mishima and Asahara, were probably the two most troubling and controversial figures of the latter half of the twentieth century in Japan, and two of the most threatening to the political establishment. Both staged terrorist incidents designed to bring down the Japanese government of their day and to replace it with a kind of fascist theocracy or sacral political system ruled by a divine emperor (in the case of Asahara, himself ). Both considered – or at least claimed to consider – the Japan of their own day to be decadent, materialistic, overly Americanized, and inimical to the ‘spiritual’ life, which for Mishima was the life of the self-sacrificing warrior ready to die for the emperor, and for Asahara the life of the bodhisattva ‘holy warrior’ willing to sacrifice himself for the ‘enlightenment’ of others (at least that was the traditional Mahayana Buddhist doctrine with which he exhorted his disciples). Although Mishima attempted to restore the modern kokutai and Asahara to replace it, in another sense they were both true to its spirit – in the limited sense that they both aimed for a revival of sacral politics, a reunion of church and state. Thus, in both cases, their terrorist actions seemed to be motivated by a religiopolitical goal first and foremost. And yet, and yet … in both cases, there also seemed something more to the story than that. In both men there was a complex personal psychology at work that complicated their politics and their religion and created a puzzling air of ambiguity about their ideas, actions, and beliefs. Did Mishima actually believe his attempted coup had any real chance of success? And did he really believe in the divinity of the emperor and that he would achieve a mystical union with him in death? Did Asahara actually believe his gas attacks on the Tokyo subway system, near the government headquarters in Kasumigaseki, had any real chance of bringing down the government and forcing the nation to turn to him as its savior? And did he really believe he was a reincarnation of Shiva sent to purify a decadent society through violence? Were these megalomaniac delusions on the part of both men, or canny manipulations of the media for other and more hidden purposes? If the latter, what were these ‘hidden purposes’? A raw grab for attention and power? Or, given what we know of both men’s ‘extreme

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psychology’, were their terrorist actions disguised suicide attempts – a will for self-immolation in the best fascist tradition of a final grand Götterdämmerung? After all, psychologists such as Freud and Lacan have taught us that both narcissism and megalomania, or the excessive will to power that often goes with these, can lead, paradoxically, to a self-destructive death-wish.68 And Umberto Eco, as noted above, has meticulously explained the steps by which the ‘ur-fascist’ develops an ‘Armageddon complex’. On the other hand, Mishima and Asahara may have longed for ‘Armageddon’, but both also both ensured that their particular ‘Armageddons’ would be major ‘media events’. Both were masterful selfpublicists who skillfully manipulated the new mass media of the late twentieth century to make themselves loom large in the public eye. Mishima called upon the media to record his own last act (phoning a number of reporters that very morning to make sure they showed up). Asahara’s terrorist attack, staged at prime time in the very heart of Tokyo, was obviously also designed to achieve maximum media impact. Earlier he had skillfully shaped his media image as a new-age healer and as a ‘guru’ with occult powers, a clever way of attracting new followers. As already noted, both men obviously had strong narcissistic and megalomaniac tendencies and, consequently, an insatiable will to power. This naturally led many observers to question the sincerity of their religious beliefs – were these assumed merely for the ‘ulterior motive’ of realizing their fantasies of power? Such questions are probably unanswerable (as with anyone’s motives for their personal beliefs), but certainly both were able to use their professed ‘beliefs’ as a rationale for their violent attempts to impose their will upon the world and to achieve some measure of ‘real’ political power – and in the meantime draw attention to themselves on a worldwide scale otherwise unimaginable. Nonetheless, it is strangely ironic that both men chose to cut short highly successful careers ostensibly out of an excess of political ambition, with disastrous consequences both for themselves and for others. Given that Mishima was forty-six when he committed suicide and Asahara forty when he launched his attack, the former might well have added a good many more significant works to his oeuvre and perhaps won the Nobel Prize he coveted so much, while the latter might well have become an even more powerful religious figure, ruling over a worldwide community of devoted followers.69 From this perspective, the life stories of both men take on something of the character of Greek

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tragedy: heroes to their many admirers, but brought down by the tragic flaw of hubris, manifesting itself as an excessive and inappropriate political ambition. In this respect both were ordinary human beings writ large: filled with demonic energy no doubt, but not demons.

Part Two: Japanese Literature and Art

Source: N. Minh, New Essays in Japanese Aesthetics. Lexington: Rowman and Littlefield (2017), pp. 285–298.

6.

Japanese Poetry and the Aesthetics of Disaster v

Art created in immediate response to disaster must confront certain ethical as well as aesthetic issues. Indeed, this is one clear case in which ethics and aesthetics seem inextricably linked – and, more than that, a case in which they often seem to conflict with each other. With time comes detachment, but in the immediate aftermath of a disaster writers and artists can feel themselves condemned to silence by the sheer overwhelming magnitude of human suffering that surrounds them. They are virtually compelled to ask fundamental questions about the value or appropriateness of their art in the face of such suffering. And they often tend, in the first instance, to be overcome by the debilitating sense that mere words or images cannot do justice to the enormity and tragic meaning of the disaster, or even that the making of ‘artistic capital’ out of it is a kind of ‘disaster exploitation’ on a par with the proverbial ambulancechasing of other professions. But such fainthearted hesitations or ambivalences also, almost inevitably, give rise to a creative counter-reaction and new forms of ‘apologia’ for the ultimate value of art. The creative energy of the artist overcomes initial ethical reservations and, especially in those most aware of this ethical/aesthetic conflict, a new and more powerful form of artistic expression may ultimately result. Writers, for instance, must write, even if almost in spite of themselves, and their words can possess a mysterious healing power of their own. In the wake of ‘3/11’ (as the March 11, 2011 ‘triple disaster’ of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown in northeastern Japan is now conventionally designated), Tanikawa Shuntarō, a senior figure in the Japanese poetic world, wrote a poem called ‘Words’ which, as Jeffrey Angles notes, poses ‘the question of how we can even write 101

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about things for which there are no words; yet “Words put forth buds / From the earth beneath the rubble”’.1 This familiar pattern (in Japan as elsewhere) – an initial traumatized silence followed by a ‘defiant’ outburst of creative productivity – may be seen among writers and artists after an earlier disaster such as the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923 and it may also be found in the literature and art produced, ultimately in great profusion, in the aftermath of 3/11. One significant new factor in the recent disaster, however, was the omnipresence of social media: Twitter, Facebook, and other communications progeny of the Internet. The immediacy, informality and democratic ease of access of these new media (requiring no imprimatur from any literary or political establishment) seemed to make them the perfect ‘ethical’ means for giving voice to the immediate responses of the victims themselves – and especially of those among them who possessed some literary talent. From this point of view, it is perhaps no coincidence that the most notable literary response to the March 2011 disaster, at least in the short term, was a rich harvest of poetry. As Jeffrey Angles writes: ‘it is no exaggeration to say that in the midst of the crisis, it was the poetic world that asked some of the most incisive questions about the meaning of language, art, and truth – questions that continue to resonate even now’.2 Why poetry, one might ask? A poet, of course, can respond more quickly to an event than a novelist or even a short-story writer, genres that usually require some time to filter the experiences they deal with; poetry, after all, at least in its most common lyrical form, often involves the more or less spontaneous expression of an immediate personal response on the part of the poet – the fresher the better, one might say. Again, social media are obviously well suited to this purpose. For instance, one poet who came quickly to the fore after 3/11 was the Fukushima resident Wagō Ryōichi, who became an ‘overnight sensation’ by using Twitter, a medium that seems ideally suited for haiku-like poetic one-liners, to broadcast to the world his mini-poems and journal entries written in immediate response to his experiences as a resident of one of the worstaffected areas. Since Wagō had been relatively unknown up to that point, his sudden prominence was a good example of what Angles notes: ‘At the same time that it shook poetry into the public eye, the earthquake leveled – at least temporarily – the hierarchical culture that had tended to keep established poets and relative newcomers apart’.3 This opening up, democratization, or mixing of the different Japanese poetic worlds in the wake of the disaster – as if, for one historical moment at least,

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the tsunami had washed away all barriers even in the literary world – is one of the unique features of the post-3/11 literary flowering. Even so, the issue of the tension between ‘ethics’ and ‘aesthetics’ in the artistic response to disaster was by no means decisively resolved. Although, as a victim broadcasting his spontaneous responses over the Internet, Wagō seemed above reproach ethically, questions were soon raised about the aesthetic value of his work. Wagō himself acknowledges that ‘other Japanese poets sometimes criticized his post-earthquake work for being too direct and not “poetic” enough’.4 Thus, the issue of how best to ‘deal with disaster’ becomes an aesthetic problem in itself: feelings of creative debility and disempowerment contend with an active creative struggle to find the right words or the right artistic style to do justice to the event – and its victims. This raises the interesting and perhaps unexpected question: is there actually an identifiable literary ‘style of disaster?’ And the answer seems to be, somewhat surprisingly, yes – at least, in the short term. The general consensus among many writers, both in poetry and prose, seems to be that the appropriate way to write about disaster, at least in its immediate aftermath, is in a simple, straightforward, sketch-like, ‘documentary’ style of writing – a kind of ‘Hemingway style’, a barebones minimalistic style which lets the experience speak for itself, without any unnecessary comment or elaboration from the writer. Indeed, Hemingway’s own style was created in the first instance as a literary response to the devastating mega-disaster of World War I, as a way of writing about the unspeakable shock and trauma of that war, and in explicit reaction against the high-flown empty rhetoric of all those patriotic ‘war leaders’ who had led Hemingway’s ‘lost generation’ into that unprecedented and meaningless slaughter.5 Wagō Ryōichi, for instance, as Angles notes, believes that ‘the events surrounding 3/11 revealed how self-isolating and even obscurantist the Japanese poetry world had been’ and thus ‘his particular brand of down-to-earth language and powerful, relatively non-abstract expression represent one important direction that poetry seems to be taking in the post-3/11 poetic world’.6 Nonetheless, the fact remains, as we have seen, that his work was sometimes criticized for not being ‘poetic enough’. Indeed, these debates are universal: the widespread acceptance of a ‘simple, direct’ or ‘documentary’ style as the appropriate style for ‘disaster writing’ is inevitably short-term. The question soon arises: is such writing no more than a kind of ‘higher-level’ literary journalism or reportage? In particular, is poetry written in this style ‘poetic’ enough?

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No less a poet than W.B. Yeats became acrimoniously involved in just this debate when, as editor of the Oxford Book of Modern Verse in 1936, he chose to exclude all World War I combatant poets, explaining in his typically lofty, oracular way that: ‘passive suffering is not a theme for poetry. In all the great tragedies, tragedy is a joy to the man who dies; in Greece the tragic chorus danced. When man has withdrawn into the quicksilver at the back of the mirror no great event becomes luminous in his mind; it is no longer possible to write The Persians, Agincourt, Chevy Chase: some blunderer has driven his car on to the wrong side of the road – that is all’.7 In short, what Yeats seems to be saying is that the war poets did not have sufficient aesthetic distance from the disaster they had experienced to be able to turn it into significant poetry; the disaster overwhelmed their poetic gift, robbing them of that joyful, playful spirit that is a necessary element of poetic creation. Japanese poets wrestled with this issue in the wake of the greatest natural disaster (in terms of loss of life) ever to have struck modern Japan, the Great Tokyo (or Kantō) Earthquake of 1923. One solution they discovered is, again, a familiar one: as Leith Morton puts it, they struggled to transform ‘documentary realism into art’ through a ‘process of formalization’.8 Comparing their efforts to the ‘documentary realism’ of some Holocaust poets, Morton writes of Mizutani Masaru’s and Kawaji Ryūkō’s work, for instance: The objectivity of representation is an interesting notion when applied to poetry. The variety of lyric poetry that Mizutani employs, by virtue of its lyricism, acts to distance the reader from the horror of the devastation caused by the earthquake but, at the same time, it also memorializes it in a way that transcends mere documentary journalism. Mizutani does this by utilizing a traditional figure and device of poetic art: anthropomorphizing the autumn wind; and, in exactly the same way, Kawaji anthropomorphizes Nature (which is why I capitalize it in translation) in his first poem. The transformation of documentary realism into art is one of the defining characteristics of significant poetry. In this sense, the memorialization of trauma/tragedy is the product of a process of formalization. The use of formal categories of poetic expression such as the dirge or elegy or lament transcend the reality of the present and point to a future where only memory – the memory of tragedy formally rendered into art – remains.9

But there are also poets who, while making good use of elements of the formal aesthetic tradition, at the same time, undermine the comfortably

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‘aesthetic’ worldview implicit in that tradition as a way of expressing their outrage at the disaster that has befallen them. In other words, rather than by adopting the ‘simple documentary style’ of a Wagō, they challenge the literary tradition which now seems inadequate to deal with disaster by the kind of postmodern parody that, so to speak, turns the tradition back against itself. An excellent example is this post-3/11 haiku by Seki Etsushi: crushing Japan soiling Japan the spring sea Nihon o tsubushi Nihon ni yogore haru no umi10

Miniature though it is, this poem is brilliantly innovative in the way it uses the traditional haiku ma (a kind of suspenseful pause between images) to create a powerfully jolting tension between the traditionally lyrical poetic phrase ‘haru no umi’ (spring sea) and the two brutal verbal phrases. This is one beautiful spring sea that has a very ugly impact: it demolishes and dirties Japan. In a few words, the poet has issued a devastating challenge to the thousand-year-plus tradition of Japanese nature lyricism. He calls for a radical reconfiguration of nature in the public imagination and challenges the sanitized, idealized or aestheticized vision of nature that was prevalent in much of traditional Japanese poetry. For, the fact is, the mainstream Japanese poetic tradition of court poetry, especially after the Kokinshū (905), excluded much of ‘nature in the raw’ in the interests of an aristocratic aesthetic refinement – including, as Janice Brown has recently shown, much of the reality of the female half of humanity.11 Thus, it could be argued, modern Japanese poets, in rebelling against this ‘exclusivity’ or ‘hermeticism’, especially after the experience of major disasters, are intent on showing that nature is not all cherry blossoms, Mount Fuji, and fireflies on a summer’s night – it is also earthquakes and tsunami and the holocaust of indiscriminate death and destruction they can cause. What this implies, of course, is also that, although the Japanese have lived with major natural disasters since time immemorial, their mainstream classical poetic tradition has largely tended to ignore this fact. From this perspective, one might say that the traditional Japanese poetic vision of ‘nature’ is every bit as idealized, aestheticized, or Romanticized as, for instance, that of Wordsworth and the other English Romantic poets.

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Japanese court poets, of course, had no inkling of the modern ideas of realism or naturalism, of ‘holding the mirror up to nature’; if anything, they wanted to ‘improve on nature’, in the same manner as, say, a gardener who turns ‘natural trees’ into bonsai by rigorous pruning. In a recent review of Haruo Shirane’s Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons, which posits the existence of a ‘secondary nature’ in Japanese culture – that is, not ‘nature in the raw’, but the highly aesthetic, artificial construct of Heian poets – Richard Bowring ventures some interesting speculations about the possible psychological origins of this cultural phenomenon: It emerged in the tenth century with an aristocracy coming to terms with having to live in one of the most violent and insecure environments on the planet. Hardly surprising that it sought to transform that environment into something it was not, to invent a ‘secondary’ nature that brought comfort and beauty. The myth of a harmonious society living in a benign world was in this sense a fiction necessary to survival. So, are those such as Watsuji Tetsuro who followed in the footsteps of Johann Gottfried von Herder and argued that climate informs national character correct? Well, yes, but not quite in the way intended.12

Actually, there is an ethical choice involved here too, but the ethics implicit in classical Japanese poetry are exactly the opposite of the modern realist ethical imperative of ‘telling the whole truth about nature’. As the very first article of Prince Shōtoku’s Constitution of 604 AD announced, quoting Confucius directly: ‘Harmony is to be valued, and contentiousness avoided’.13 In ancient Japan, as in other Confucian-influenced cultures, ‘harmony’ or wa was regarded as the supreme moral imperative or ethical value: harmony between man and man, man and nature, man and Heaven, man and state. Thus, as with all other forms of culture in ancient Japan, poetry’s primary purpose was to help achieve this harmony. And so its formal, restrictive, highly aestheticized character has an ethical and ideological, as well as aesthetic purpose. As Haruo Shirane points out, nature in classical Japanese poetry is associated not only with beauty, but also with harmony: union with nature brings harmony.14 Indeed, the traditional word for Japanese poetry, waka, literally means ‘songs of the land of harmony’. Thus disharmonious elements or forces of nature were not considered appropriate for poetry. The great classical poet, Fujiwara no Teika (1162–1241),

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summarized court poetry aesthetics very tellingly as follows: ‘No matter how frightening a thing may be, when one writes about it in Japanese poetry, it must sound graceful and elegant’.15 Thus, as Shirane writes, classical waka tends to be ‘gentle and deeply moving’ (mono no aware).16 The stress is not on what nature necessarily is, but on what it should be: gentle and harmonious, graceful and elegant. This is a quintessentially aristocratic aesthetic. The famous Japanese ‘closeness to nature’, argues Shirane, is really closeness to this refined ‘secondary nature’ rather than to nature in the raw.17 It is a nature which is not only highly aestheticized, but also highly ethicized (in that it is made conducive to harmony). ‘Negative aspects’ of nature such as ‘pestilence and natural disasters’ were ‘not considered the proper subject matter for classical poetry’, especially waka of the imperial anthologies, ‘which were intended to manifest the harmony of the state and the cosmos’.18 Thus, there was a political, as well as an ethical dimension to court poetry aesthetics. It was not only a highly aestheticized representation of nature and the four seasons, but also an ‘ideological’ one. That is why, for instance, there was a ‘disjunction’ between the actual climate (short spring and autumn, long and severe winter and summer) in Kyoto and Nara, the heartland of classical culture, and the ‘culture of the four seasons’ which focused on spring and autumn as the main seasons.19 The unpleasant or ‘difficult seasons’, summer and winter, were either ignored or idealized. A gentle dusting of snow was appropriately poetic, but not a heavy snowfall; the pleasant cool of a summer evening was an acceptable topic, but not the unpleasant heat of a midsummer’s day. Untamed or wild nature was similarly shunned; it was the realm of ‘violent gods’ who could cause natural disasters, gods such as the river serpent in the Kojiki (712) who caused floods and was vanquished by the wind god Susanoō.20 For an agricultural people, wild nature and its violent gods were the enemy of civilization. (Significantly, the Japanese attitude to nature changed from mid-to late Heian: the violent gods became harvest gods as the wilderness was tamed and cultivated.) Nonetheless, it would be superficial – and misleading – to conclude from all of this that the Japanese poetic tradition, and its attendant aesthetics, is outmoded, irrelevant to the modern world, or incapable of an adequate response to the human experience of disaster. In fact, there is ample proof that quite the opposite is true: some of the most moving, powerful – and durable – poetry written in response to 3/11, as to earlier disasters such as the 1923 earthquake, have been haiku and tanka. These traditional genres have proved, indeed, to be highly effective media for

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‘disaster poems’ – and by no means merely in parody form. Haiku and tanka seem to be uniquely suited to the task of representing the unrepresentable, if only in microcosmic form, of capturing the everyday human experience of an overwhelmingly vast catastrophe, of expressing a tragic pathos without sentimentality. Their minimalist aesthetic obviously helps here, their tradition of leaving much to the reader’s imagination, of presenting the telling image and allowing it to speak for itself (especially in haiku). As the above-mentioned Seki Etsushi, one of the most highly regarded of the younger haiku poets today, has pointed out, haiku ‘focuses on small moments of revelation and is often written extemporaneously’, and so is very effective at ‘documenting the small details of large events, thus bringing colossal events like 3/11 down to a manageable human scale’.21 Seki has published a number of his own haiku describing the earthquake and its aftermath, such as: the gravestones have twisted and fallen – the spring equinox22 bōseki-ra mawari taore ya haru higan

Or, more ominously: in the neighboring prefecture the nuclear reactor bursts and blackens the eastern wind23 rinken ni genshiro ga haze kurozumu higashikaze the children of Fukushima practicing their calligraphy writing ‘nuclear energy’24 Fukushima no kodomo no shuji ‘genshiryoku’

Of course, ‘nuclear reactor’ and ‘nuclear energy’ are not among the ‘approved poetic words’ of the classical poet’s aesthetic lexicon.25 Traditionalists would banish such words as unpoetic or anti-aesthetic. And, of course, one of the ways in which traditional art forms such as haiku, tanka – and also, in painting, nihonga – have adapted or ‘modernized’ is precisely by opening up to ‘realistic’ subject matter that all-too-obviously violates the aesthetic conventions of traditional Japanese poetry and art. But it is not as simple as that. There is actually a deeper issue at stake here, an issue that involves fundamental questions about the

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nature of poetry, its relation to reality, and the aesthetic implications of this relation. Before we reach any facile conclusions, I think we should probe a little deeper into these issues. First of all, it should be acknowledged that what is happening here is simply the conflict between a modernist and a traditionalist form of poetics. The struggle over ‘subject matter’ was, after all, a major part of the more general struggle of the ‘realist agenda’ of modernism since the mid-nineteenth century: to encompass within poetry and the other arts aspects of life that were traditionally considered ‘unpoetic’ or unmentionable in other ways, and also, stylistically, vulgar colloquial diction, slang, and even obscenities. If we think of a great modernist master such as James Joyce, for instance, we remember that he shocked his contemporaries not only with his explicit sex scenes, but also with such narrative innovations as an account of his protagonist’s thoughts while relieving himself on a toilet. Hardly a ‘poetic topic’ as traditionally conceived! This struggle has long since been won, however, and the ‘realist’ view has itself become a new orthodoxy. Looking back on the aesthetic values of classical poetic traditions such as the Japanese, it is all too easy for us today, from our present modernist perspective, to dismiss these as naïvely unrealistic or idealistic. On the one hand, there is no denying that subject matter is important. On the other, we should also recognize that, from a purely aesthetic point of view, subject matter is not really of primary importance in any of the arts. As we have seen, the choice of subject matter involves ethical as well as aesthetic values, and these inevitably vary from culture to culture, age to age. Furthermore, it is also true that great art can be entirely ‘abstract’ or ‘non-referential’ – that is, lacking any obvious ‘subject matter’ apart from the artistic medium itself: line, color, structure, etc., in the case of painting – as the modernists also discovered. And, in the art of poetry too, subject matter is certainly not of the essence. But, even more importantly, subject matter is also not really the equivalent of truth in art – although the two are often confused. What a poem is explicitly ‘about’ does not define its implicit or ultimate ‘meaning’ or its depth of ‘poetic understanding’ of the world. A poem about ice cream may be simply a children’s poem celebrating the delicious taste of ice cream or it may be Wallace Stevens’ ‘The Emperor of Ice Cream’, which is really about death. Symbolism and synecdoche are, after all, central to the poetic worldview and to poetic technique. Thus a poem about disaster or the cruel indifference of nature does not have to explicitly refer to these subjects and certainly

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does not have to provide an exhaustively detailed description of all the tragic effects of a large-scale natural disaster. A single image might be just as effective or even more so. As William Blake wrote, ‘to see a World in a grain of sand’ is the poet’s ultimate mission and also modus operandi. Whether writing about the overwhelming destructive power of a natural disaster or about the gentle plop of a frog jumping into an old pond, it is the poet’s insight which ultimately matters. With this in mind, we might look again at traditional Japanese poetry and ask: what does it really tell us about nature? Or, more specifically, about man’s relation to nature? One might question whether the poetry of Bashō, for instance, really does give us an ‘unrealistic’, ‘idealistic’ or ‘utopian’ impression of nature. Yes, it tells us that nature is beautiful, but, as we shall see, even natural beauty in Bashō has a ‘bite’, that astringent quality characterized by the key aesthetic terms, wabi and sabi. As we shall also see, the ‘lonely’, ‘impersonal’ atmosphere of the natural world in his poetry leaves us in no doubt that nature can be coldly and cruelly indifferent to individual human suffering – which is surely also the major theme of more ‘realistic’ modernist disaster poetry. In fact, there is absolutely no conflict between ‘truth’ and ‘beauty’ in the poetry of Bashō; nature is seen or experienced exactly as it is. And, more generally too, one finds on closer observation that the worldview or religious/philosophic perspective implicit in traditional Japanese poetry, especially as found in the work of its greatest practitioners, was never really ‘untrue’ to nature – even though its focus often seems ‘narrow’ from a modern perspective. Consequently, to claim that classical poetry is somehow deficient in reality merely because it neglects to deal with certain subject matter is not only reductive, but betrays an ignorance of the true nature of poetry. In considering this issue, it is important to recognize that the aristocratic influence was not the only one to shape traditional Japanese poetry. Another major influence was Buddhism, and this ultimately counteracted the tendency of classical Japanese poetry to become a kind of highly formalized game that served only an aristocratic ideal of beauty. With Buddhism, especially from the late Middle Ages onwards, a new moral imperative entered the world of poetry, one that to some extent was even in conflict with the Confucian imperative of harmony, at least as interpreted by the aristocracy. Enlightenment, rather than harmony, was the highest goal of Buddhism, and to achieve enlightenment, the Buddhist practitioner had first of all to recognize certain ‘negative’ facts about nature and human life within nature: impermanence,

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transiency, death, ‘emptiness’ and ‘nothingness’, all key concepts of the Buddhist worldview. With its central doctrines of accepting that life is transient and full of suffering and that it is therefore necessary to free oneself through enlightenment from the wheel of life and death, Buddhism provided a cogent and consoling worldview for a disaster-prone country. The Buddhist attitude is well expressed by the thirteenth-century hermit Kamo no Chōmei, who fled to the hills above Kyoto to escape a series of natural and man-made disasters. In his poetic diary, An Account of My Hut (1212), he admonishes that: ‘The flow of the river is ceaseless and its water is never the same. The bubbles that float in the pools, now vanishing, now forming, are not of long duration: so in the world are man and his dwellings’.26 (Echoes here of Heraclitus.) This sense of life as transient and fragile was elaborated into a more formal philosophy by Dōgen (1200–53), the Thomas Aquinas of Zen Buddhism. Dōgen’s philosophy is one of impermanence and emptiness, or nonessentialism: it is not only nature that has no fixed or permanent identity, neither does man. ‘The thought of enlightenment ... is the mind which sees into impermanence’.27 Or, more poetically: How seems the world? Like moonlight caught In water droplets, When a crane shakes its bill.28

Impermanence (mujō) became a central theme of Japanese art and literature, and has permeated every other realm of the culture. Based on these Buddhist insights, a new aesthetic arose in the late Middle Ages, one that combined aristocratic elegance and playfulness with a darker view of natural existence. This is what is now commonly referred to as the ‘wabi-sabi’ aesthetic. As the leading architect Tadao Andō writes: ‘Pared down to its barest essence, wabi-sabi is the Japanese art of finding beauty in imperfection and profundity in nature, of accepting the natural cycle of growth, decay, and death’.29 Bashō’s poetry may be legitimately regarded as the ultimate culmination of this ‘Buddhist deepening’ of the classical Japanese tradition. In his haiku, we can see a fusion of aristocratic elegance with a Buddhistic profundity. Indeed, some of his haiku are quite dark and would no doubt have shocked the aesthetic conventions of the Heian aristocrats. But it is still, on the whole, a poetry of small things, of seeing the world

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in a grain of sand, rather than of representing wholesale disasters, for instance. As Makoto Ueda points out, many of the poems of Bashō’s ‘peak years’, 1686 to 1691, are unique because of their ‘quality of sabi’, which he defines as a ‘a primeval lonely feeling’.30 A good example is the following haiku: a crow alights on a withered branch – autumn dusk31 kareeda ni karasu no tomarikeri aki no kure

The ‘desolate atmosphere’ of this poem exemplifies what Ueda calls Bashō’s ‘admiration for harsh, austere natural beauty’.32 This is very different to the ‘tame’, refined beauty admired by the court aristocrats; it is beauty with a certain ‘bite’, a certain astringency. Indeed, Bashō is traditionally said to have attained maturity with this poem – that is, attained to a new level of Buddhistic profundity, eschewing the merely formalistic, aesthetic wordplay which, as a young poet, he had learned from the aristocratic tradition. There is a new and darker tone and vision. And, most significantly, as Ueda points out, the poem is ‘objective and impersonal’ – the poet has ‘almost vanished’.33 Under the influence of Zen, Bashō began to see poetry as a way to enlightenment, a dō. The poet would transcend his personal ego and achieve enlightenment by becoming one with nature, not the artificial ‘secondary’ nature of the court aristocrats in their palace gardens at Kyoto, but the ‘lonely’ wild nature of the Japanese countryside, the forests, rivers, moors and mountains. As Ueda writes, Bashō wanted to ‘dissolve his ego’ through sabi, to become one with ‘primitive nature’ and to ‘submerge himself in the vegetable and mineral worlds’.34 In this respect, his sabi has a moral, as well as an aesthetic dimension. It was a way human beings could rise above their sufferings and achieve a sense of detachment, even in the face of natural disasters. Bashō’s life was full of loss and sorrow, but he turned to nature to transform, or ‘refine’, that sorrow into sabi. For him, poetic practice was an exercise in self-abnegation, rather like what John Keats called ‘negative capability’. As Keats wrote: ‘With a great poet, the sense of beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration’.35 As Ueda points out, Bashō often used the word sabishii (lonely). But he conceived of loneliness ‘as an impersonal atmosphere, in contrast with grief or sorrow, which is a personal emotion.

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The contrast cannot be over-emphasized, because loneliness thus conceived lay at the bottom of Bashō’s view of life, pointing toward a way in which his plea “return to nature” can be fulfilled’.36 Sorrow, in other words, belongs to the human world, whereas loneliness belongs to the world of nature. Thus, human beings ‘can escape from sorrow only when they transform it into an impersonal atmosphere, loneliness’.37 This transformation is brought about by a deep communion with nature, as in the following haiku of Bashō: make my sad self more deeply lonely, oh cuckoo!38

The poet, writes Ueda, ‘as he set out to compose the poem, was still in the world of humanity, with a personal feeling like sorrow. The cuckoo, on the other hand, seemed to have already transcended sorrow, as it was closer to the heart of nature. Thereupon the poet wished that the bird’s cry might enlighten his soul and eventually lead him into the realm of impersonal loneliness, where he would no longer feel sorrow … Such a dissolution of personal emotion into an impersonal atmosphere constitutes the core of Bashō’s attitude toward life’.39 Significantly, at the very end of his life, Bashō chose to wander in the realm of a wild, primeval nature, far from the refined, artificial ‘secondary’ nature of the Heian court aristocrats. His last poem, written just four days before his death, is one of his darkest: Falling sick mid-journey – my dreams go roaming over withered fields.40 tabi ni yande yume wa kareno o kakemeguru

The imagery here is as desolate and disturbing as in any more explicit ‘disaster poem’ – although there is also a suggestion of transcendence in the dying old poet’s ‘dreams’. To the modern ear, Bashō’s withered moor (kareno) inevitably carries echoes of T.S. Eliot’s wasteland (karechi), an arch-modernist symbol (indeed, a major school of postwar Japanese poets, traumatized by their recent experience of the ‘disasters of war’, called themselves the ‘Wasteland School’). Like many great poems, this haiku functions on both a microcosmic and a macrocosmic level: Bashō’s own personal disaster, his death as a lonely old traveler on

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a withered moor, is, at the same time, the disastrous fate of the whole of humanity. What could be a more poignant image of the ‘aloneness’ of human beings existing in a vast world of impersonal, indifferent nature? Or, as so much better expressed by Bashō himself in an earlier poem: such loneliness – the cicadas’ cries pierce through rock41 sabishisa ya iwa ni shimikomu semi no koe

Although these haiku are characterized by a highly refined aesthetic restraint, and indeed are worthy in this respect of the best traditions of classical court poetry, the view of nature they represent is by no means sentimental, romantic, or reductive. Their brevity does not impose a narrow focus on any courtly ‘secondary nature’. On the contrary, we feel the full force of a ‘primary’ or primal nature here: beautiful but also ruthlessly transient and impersonal. In this raw natural world, the death of the old poet in a bleak landscape amounts to nothing more than a cicada’s cry. Reading Bashō in the wake of 3/11, we see clearly that he, rather than the court poets, may be claimed as the true ancestor of presentday ‘post-disaster’ poets such as Seki Etsushi. Like Bashō, Seki fearlessly confronts nature ‘in the raw’, but, like Bashō too, he presents his vision in that most aesthetically restrained and minimalist of poetic genres, the haiku. Both poets prove that haiku of the highest quality can achieve that perfect union which, in John Keats’ words, ‘dost tease us out of thought/As doth eternity’ and that Keats found embodied in a Grecian urn: a perfect union between truth and beauty, ethics and aesthetics.42

Source: Coloniality, postcoloniality and modernity in Japan. V. Mackie, A. Skoutarides, A. Tokita, eds. Clayton: Monash Asia Institute (2000), pp. 197–217.

7.

In Search of the Great Meiji Novel: From Ukigumo to Yoake mae v

PREFACE

Although written in the early Shōwa period, Shimazaki Tōson’s Yoake mae (Before the Dawn, 1929–35) may be regarded as the longawaited ‘great Meiji novel’ in at least two important respects: on the one hand, it seems to approximate more successfully than earlier works of Japanese fiction the nineteenth-century Western ideal of the novel espoused by Meiji writers since Tsubouchi Shōyō; on the other hand, it presents a satisfying ‘national narrative’ of historical developments leading up to and following the central event of the Meiji period: the imperial restoration. And yet, when we look more closely at this massive and obviously important work, we find that it still retains some of the more ‘intimate’ features of that ‘peculiarly Japanese’ form of more or less autobiographical fiction which Tōson had spent most of his career writing: the shi-shōsetsu (literally, ‘I-novel’). Given the argument recently in favour among scholars of Japanese literature that a strict distinction should be made between the Western novel and the Japanese shōsetsu, we might well ask: is Yoake mae ultimately a novel or a shōsetsu, or is it a unique hybrid of both? If both, do its novelistic elements and its shōsetsu elements work harmoniously together or are they in irreconcilable conflict? Finally, do our answers to these questions throw any light on the novel/shōsetsu argument or, indeed, do they threaten that argument with a reductio ab absurdum? 115

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I.

NATIONAL NARRATIVE IN MODERN JAPANESE FICTION PRIOR TO YOAKE MAE

When Japanese writers began to read and translate Western literature in the late nineteenth century, they encountered a very powerful vehicle of national narrative: the nineteenth-century Western novel. Just as one of the main features of Western political history over the previous few centuries had been the rise of the modern nation state, so an equally central feature of Western literary history had been the rise of the novel. These two phenomena were not merely parallel but symbiotic: each had contributed to the other’s growth. And this mutually enriching relationship reached its climax and apogee in the nineteenth century – at exactly the historical moment when Japan ‘reopened’ to the West. The nineteenth-century novel brought the full scope of national life alive to the imaginations of the newly literate peoples of Europe and America in a way possible to no other artistic form, and perhaps rivalled only by the newly emergent national newspapers – with which, by no coincidence, many novelists were associated and in which they often first serialised their novels. Nineteenth-century nationalism joined together with the nineteenth-century novel to produce some very impressive examples of what we might call the ‘national novel’. The paragon of them all was Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1865–69), which is undoubtedly the greatest national narrative of the nineteenth century, not only a masterful novel in the usual sense of the term but a grand-scale epic celebrating the Russian people’s victory over the invading armies of Napoleon. The Meiji Japanese recognised quite early on this nation-building function of the Western novel, and realised that, like the national flag and the national anthem, the national novel was one of the standard fixtures of the modern nation state, even though it was a ‘cultural property’ which could not be so easily assimilated. Spurred by the obvious disparity between Western and Japanese images and practices of fiction, the influential Meiji novelist and critic, Tsubouchi Shōyō published his stirring call to arms, Shōsetsu shinzui (The Essence of the Novel), in 1885, urging his fellow writers to improve the quality of their fiction so that ‘we may finally be able to surpass in quality the European novels’.1 This was obviously an appeal to the nationalism and competitive spirit of Japanese writers, but their response over the following years was not as resoundingly nationalistic as might have been expected. Despite all

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the pressures on Meiji writers to contribute in their own way to the great nation-building project of the age, no Japanese Tolstoys arose to celebrate their nation’s heroic struggle against and ultimate victory over the nineteenth-century imperialist West, which had threatened to reduce the divine land to the status of a colony. Indeed, nothing approximating a Tolstoyan, epic treatment of the age appeared until Tōson’s Yoake mae, which, although written by a writer whose career began in the Meiji period, was written very much in retrospect, several decades after that period had ended. Also, as we shall see, Tōson’s view of Meiji nation-building as a human experience was more tragic than heroic. If one, then, were to regard the large-scale nineteenth-century Western novel as the only form of fiction capacious enough to serve as a national narrative, one would have to conclude that Meiji Japan, despite all its frenetic nation-building, produced no national narratives of any significant literary quality. But, of course, developments in the theory and practice of fiction, especially of the short story, since the nineteenth century have taught us the various ways in which fiction may take on metaphorical or symbolic overtones, and thus encompass very large areas of meaning within even the smallest areas of text. Using this approach, even a short story can present a meaningful image of an entire nation or period. The best Meiji fiction writers took easily to the new approaches of symbolic fiction, and thus were able to write their own style of what we might describe as national narrative on an intimate scale. Mori Ōgai’s short story, ‘Fushinchū’ (‘Under Reconstruction’, 1910), is an excellent case in point. At first glance it appears to present a slight if charming vignette from the love life of an upper-class Meiji gentleman, a government official: in a small hotel under reconstruction, he has a brief re-encounter with a former lover, a German woman now touring the world as a professional singer. On this immediate level it is a beautifully written, understated story of faded love: the couple find that they cannot rekindle the old flame – sadly, time has taken its toll on their former passion. But the story also works brilliantly on another level: as Ōgai’s image of the uneasy mixture of Eastern and Western culture in late Meiji Japan. As the government official himself tells the German lady, not just the hotel, with its awkward melange of Western and Japanese decor, but the whole country is ‘under reconstruction’, and the very awkwardness of their meeting, the result not just of lapsed time but of culture clash, echoes the awkwardness of Japan’s encounter with the West.

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The symbolic approach to fiction, though, was not so much a matter of particular techniques – such as Ōgai’s use of synecdoche, a hotel representing the nation as a whole – as it was a whole new attitude towards fiction as symbolic. Any element of the story can function as a symbol – even the characters themselves. Perhaps the first significant example of this kind of symbolic use of character was the ‘superfluous man’ of mid-nineteenth century Russian literature, an early symbol of the modern social disease of anomie or alienation, appearing in writers such as Lermontov, Gogol, Goncharov and Turgenev. It was precisely from this rather nihilistic tradition of Russian literature, rather than from Tolstoy, that Futabatei Shimei learned what proved to be of most use to him in writing the first significant and successfully modern Meiji novel, Ukigumo (Drifting Cloud, 1886–89). As Futabatei himself said, when he began to study Russian literature, he had two motives: a nationalistic one, to know an important potential enemy, and an aesthetic one, to enjoy reading great literature, but soon, he wrote, ‘my nationalistic fervor was quieted and my passion for literature burned on’. It seems that much the same was true for many Meiji writers. Nevertheless, this did not mean that Futabatei became a pure aesthete without any concern for the state of the nation. On the contrary, Ukigumo may be read as a bitter criticism of the social values encouraged by the Meiji oligarchs. Futabatei’s anti-hero, Bunzō, who loses both his job and his fiancée, is on his way to becoming a superfluous man because he is too honest, in the old samurai way, to prosper or even to survive in the ruthlessly competitive society of early Meiji, a nouveau riche society of self-made men. This theme of the man too sensitive to survive in the brave new world of modern Japan would become a very familiar one, and Futabatei’s alienated anti-hero, his superfluous man, became an archetypal character in modern Japanese literature, reappearing again and again in different forms, often as an obvious alter ego of the author himself, in the work of many of the major writers of twentieth-century Japan – including, as we shall see, Tōson’s Yoake mae, although here as an alter ego of the author’s father rather than of the author himself. Obviously, then, we might say that Futabatei created a powerful national symbol in this character, and that his novel, Ukigumo, came to be accepted, by Japanese intellectuals at least, as a compelling national narrative, albeit of a negative or critical rather than a positive or celebratory kind. Once we accept this more comprehensive idea of a national narrative – that is, as any work of fiction which attempts to present an image of the nation as a whole, whether literal or symbolic, positive

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or negative – then it becomes clear that the two major writers who appeared in the late Meiji period, Mori Ōgai and Natsume Sōseki, were national narrators par excellence and – a point I would particularly like to emphasise – they were national narrators in a way that the writers who came immediately after them, the writers of the Taishō generation, were not. Ōgai, for instance, was so constantly preoccupied with the state of the nation that even in a story which seems entirely personal, ‘Hannichi’ (‘Half a Day’, 1909), which is about the tensions between his own wife and mother, we still feel larger issues looming in the background. Thus, a very perceptive critic, Mishima Yukio, was moved to remark after reading this story: ‘I believe it is true to say that Ōgai saw in his own household the failure of Japan’s modern age’.2 At any rate, to illustrate the way in which both Ōgai and Sōseki were sensitive readers of the pulse of the nation, one could do no better than examine their responses to the disturbing events of late Meiji. The political situation of the late Meiji period was rather volatile: on the one side, a rising tide of liberal democratic and socialist opposition to the status quo, on the other side an increasingly authoritarian and oppressive government of elder statesmen. The climax came in 1911 with the execution of the distinguished socialist leader, Kōtoku Shūsui, along with others, because of their supposed plot to assassinate the emperor. Ōgai himself had felt the oppressive weight of intolerant authority just the year before when his novel Vita Sexualis, a satire on the naturalists’ obsession with sex, was banned by the censors and Ōgai was personally reprimanded by the Vice-Minister of War. As a high official himself in the Imperial Army medical corps, he of course could not afford to openly criticise what he considered to be the irrational behaviour of higher officials. But his stories of this period clearly reflect his dissatisfaction – using the symbolic fictional approach he had by now mastered. ‘Chinmoku no tō’, (‘The Tower of Silence’, 1910), for instance, borrows an image from India – the tall towers on Malabar Hill in which the Parsis dispose of their dead – to symbolise the way the Meiji government silences people who read, translate or write ‘dangerous books’, which are defined as ‘books about naturalism and socialism’. Ōgai ends the story with a bold rhetorical flourish, condemning all forms of censorship: Both art and the pursuit of learning must be seen to be dangerous if you look with the conventional eye of the Parsi clan. Why is this?

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In every country and every age, crowds of reactionaries lurk behind those who walk new paths awaiting an unguarded moment. And when the opportunity arises they inflict persecution. Only the pretext changes, depending upon the country and the times. ‘Dangerous Western books’ is no more than such a pretext.3

Just two years after this story was written Ōgai’s work underwent a dramatic transformation, and in an unexpectedly conservative direction – surprisingly for a writer who had seemed so pro-modern and pro-reform in his scientific rationalism. The immediate cause was the death of the Emperor Meiji and the subsequent junshi or ritual suicide of his vassal, General Nogi. Like many of his contemporaries, Ōgai was deeply moved by both events: on the one hand, the emperor’s death bringing to an end a long and remarkable reign, on the other hand, the general’s suicide harking back to the samurai values of an earlier age. These two events naturally produced a mood of nostalgia in many people, but in Ōgai they seemed to have produced a lasting change of heart. It was as if they shocked him into realising what he really valued: now that the world of traditional, heroic values seemed to be passing away, he would devote himself as a writer to preserving its memory. The irony, of course, is that Ōgai himself up to this point, as both a writer and a doctor, had done his best to precipitate the very process of modernisation which was destroying the culture he most valued. But he was not alone in his ironic ambivalence: in this too he was emblematic of the whole elite class to which he belonged, the Meiji nation-builders. Before 1912 there seemed to have been two Ōgais: the army officer, a descendant of samurai, and a high-ranking official in the Meiji establishment; and, on the other hand, the writer, a sceptical rationalist and a lover of Western literature and philosophy, somewhat rebellious in spirit and anti-establishment in many of his attitudes. It was as if the army officer used writing as a means of escape from the oppressive confines of his official life. After 1912, however, the two persona seemed to come much closer together: the essential conservatism of the samurai-class army officer found expression in the writing of historical stories and biographies. For many Western readers, the earlier Ōgai may seem a more attractive writer. But Japanese critics generally regard his historical works as his major achievement. One thing certainly may be agreed upon: in the fiction Ōgai wrote in the last decade of his life, modern Japanese literature finally gained a national narrative of a positive, celebratory kind.

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In the four days immediately following General Nogi’s junshi, Ōgai wrote a story, Okitsu Yagoemon no isho (‘The Last Testament of Okitsu Yagoemon’, 1912), which is a moving tribute to this ultimate act of loyalty: the faithful samurai Yagoemon commits junshi to follow his master into death and, like General Nogi, to atone for a mistake he has committed in the distant past – but what is presented as even more admirable is that, like Socrates paying off his debts before his death, Yagoemon allows himself the privilege of committing junshi only after he has discharged his various worldly obligations – even leaving behind enough money to pay for his own cremation. In short, he is a paragon of the samurai virtues of loyalty, courage and dutifulness, and, in the second version of the story, published a year after the first, Ōgai makes it clear that he was rewarded with a brilliant posterity, which is described in a genealogical table of almost Biblical proportions, down to the eleventh generation! Since Ōgai’s day, of course, samurai stories of this kind have become a standard part of Japan’s popular national myth, functioning in much the same way as do Hollywood Westerns in the U.S.A. But Ōgai’s historical fiction is far above the standard: he performed an important service as a national narrator by bringing the samurai story to a new level of intellectual and literary sophistication. From our present point of view more than a century later we may judge a story like Okitsu Yagoemon to be anachronistic – or worse, potentially to have contributed by its apparent reverence for bushidō to the atavistic attitudes and behaviour of the ultranationalists and militarists of the early Shōwa period. And it could be argued that, by retreating into the past and its traditional values, Ōgai was trying to escape further censure from increasingly intolerant authorities – in effect, caving in to their intimidation and sacrificing his writing for the sake of his career. But even if all this were true or partly true, it would not vitiate the literary quality of Ōgai’s historical literature. And when we read that literature as a whole, the impression we are given is far from that of a mindless, reactionary traditionalism. He did not abandon his modern education, his scientific rationalism or his critical intelligence after 1912. In fact, the very next story he wrote, Abe Ichizoku (‘The Abe Clan’, 1913) is a critical, even satirical treatment of the practice of junshi: when a certain daimyō dies, so many men end up killing themselves – even men who hardly knew the daimyō – that we have a farcical as well as tragic reductio ad absurdum of the whole custom; on the

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other hand, choosing not to commit junshi in this society could lead to equally tragic consequences, as we are shown by what happens to Abe Michinobu. Even though he is ordered not to kill himself, a conflict arises between his samurai duty to obey orders and his samurai sense of personal honour: troubled by rumours that he has failed to commit junshi because of cowardice, he finally feels obliged to kill himself in front of his five sons. But the matter does not end there: persecuted by the new daimyō, Abe’s whole family is ultimately destroyed, the young and the old, men, women and children, and the story ends with a bloodbath of more than Shakespearian proportions. But with a very modern sense of absurdity rather than with any cathartic sense of tragic greatness; as Ōgai writes of the final fighting in the Abe mansion: ‘Just as street fighting is far uglier than fighting in the field, the situation here was even more ghastly: a swarm of bugs in a dish devouring one another’.4 In fact, when one surveys the bulk of Ōgai’s historical stories and biographies, one finds that most of them celebrate more quiet virtues than the heroic ones demonstrated in junshi. This is especially true of the shiden or historical biographies: one author of a recent study of them has aptly characterised their subjects as ‘paragons of the ordinary’.5 Although samurai of the Tokugawa period, they epitomise not so much the martial virtues as the Confucian/samurai virtues of a time of peace, leading quiet lives of moderate, usually scholarly, achievement. These historical biographies are far from being ‘blood-and-guts’ samurai adventure tales; indeed, the problem with them for many readers may be the blandness of their central characters and the uneventfulness of the lives portrayed. In Shibue Chūsai, for instance, Ōgai commemorates the life of a now-forgotten samurai-physician and scholar of that name, whose career, Ōgai felt, ‘strangely resembled my own’. He celebrates Chūsai’s devotion to obscure areas of scholarship such as the study of samurai genealogies as well as his more conventional samurai virtues such as his loyalty to his clan. Chūsai was a man who lived a good life but did not achieve any lasting fame. In rescuing him from obscurity, Ōgai, uniquely among modern writers, created a new order of national narrative, one that celebrates lives of ordinary goodness and achievement. To give further emphasis to this point, he continues the story long past Chūsai’s death, to show how he lived on in his descendants and disciples. Thus, we are given a powerful sense of the great flow of national life, continuing on from generation to generation, in an undramatic

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but nonetheless moving way. In this sense it might be said that many of Ōgai’s historical works are fundamentally ahistorical rather than anachronistic, in that they aim to present an essentially timeless image of Japanese life as it has existed over many centuries – and still perhaps continues to exist at some subterranean level. A good expression of this may be found in the story, Jiisan Baasan (‘Old Man, Old Woman’, 1915), a simple but moving account of a woman’s loyalty to her husband, a samurai who was sent into exile for a rash act of violence. The faithful wife waits thirty-seven years to be reunited with him, and the couple spend their last few years living together happily and idyllically in a small cottage. Although the story is set in the Tokugawa period, it has the timeless atmosphere and symbolic power of a fairy tale. As Ishikawa Jun once wrote: ‘The two central characters and their fates stand concretely before us, and the world described in the work seems to be something eternal. It is, so to speak, riding the tide of the lives that Japanese have led without break from ancient times to the present’.6 In other words, it is a form of national narrative which attempts to present a timeless, archetypal image of national life – as do fairy tales or folk tales. It is interesting to compare Ōgai’s literary response to the endof-Meiji events – especially General Nogi’s junshi – with Natsume Sōseki’s: Sōseki’s is far more time-bound. That is, in his 1914 novel, Kokoro, he emphasises the anachronistic nature of the general’s act. He does so because his purpose in Kokoro is not so much to celebrate the Japanese tradition, as Ōgai does in Okitsu Yagoemon, as to mourn its passing; his mood is elegiac rather than heroic. Thus, he emphasises the fact that the general’s act belongs to a now-dead tradition. In the climactic final pages of the novel, when the man referred to as ‘Sensei’ explains his reasons for committing suicide, he explicitly identifies himself with General Nogi as a man of the past, and tells the young narrator that he reached this decision just two or three days after hearing of the general’s suicide. Then he adds: ‘Perhaps you will not understand clearly why I am about to die, no more than I can fully understand why General Nogi killed himself. You and I belong to different eras, and so we think differently. There is nothing we can do to bridge the gap between us’.7 In contrast, then, to Ōgai’s apparent belief in certain timeless features of the Japanese national character and mentality, Sōseki’s protagonist subscribes to a kind of historical determinism: especially at a time of rapid modernisation, each age has such different values that there

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is a mutual incomprehension between the different generations. And Sensei identifies himself so closely with the Meiji era that he feels that he cannot survive beyond it. ‘On the night of the Imperial Funeral’, he writes quite majestically, ‘I sat in my study and listened to the booming of the cannon. To me, it sounded like the last lament for the passing of an age’.8 But, as it turns out, the booming cannon are also his own death-knell, for as he himself confesses: I felt as though the spirit of the Meiji era had begun with the Emperor and had ended with him. I was overcome with the feeling that I and the others, who had been brought up in that era, were now left behind to live as anachronisms. I told my wife so. She laughed and refused to take me seriously. Then she said a curious thing, albeit in jest: ‘Well then, junshi is the solution to your problem’.9

In this way Sōseki consciously and explicitly creates a correspondence between his characters and crucial events in their lives on the one hand and, on the other, important figures and events in national history. A novel such as Kokoro thus becomes a symbolic national narrative – but not of Ōgai’s positive, celebratory kind; rather it is a national narrative in an elegiac mode. We may conclude from this as from other of Sōseki’s works that he was much more pessimistic than Ōgai about the survival of traditional Japanese values in a rapidly Westernising and modernising Japan. Indeed, Sōseki’s pessimism about Japan’s future suffuses much of the work he wrote in the latter part of his career, after he abandoned the comic manner of his early novels. In this way the fiction he wrote from about 1908 until his death in 1916, dealing mainly with the historical present, contrasts sharply with Ōgai’s Taishō fiction, which is more optimistic but perhaps for the very reason that it deals mainly with the past. A well-known and powerful expression of Sōseki’s views is voiced by the central character of Sore kara (And Then, 1909), Daisuke, a superfluous man like Futabatei’s Bunzō but a more intellectually aware one. He wants to believe that modernity does ‘not necessarily cause anxiety’ and that those Japanese writers who deal with ‘modern anxiety’ are merely affecting an imported Western fashion.10 But this feigned positivism is contradicted by his own woeful laments on the present state of his nation, especially vis-à-vis the West, which he voices, significantly, as an excuse for his own character as a superfluous man, his idleness and ineffectuality:

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... to exaggerate a little, it’s because the relationship between Japan and the West is no good that I won’t work ... The point is, Japan can’t get along without borrowing from the West. But it poses as a first-class power. And it’s straining to join the ranks of the first-class powers. That’s why, in every direction, it puts up the facade of a first-class power and cheats on what’s behind. It’s like the frog that tried to outdo the cow – look, Japan’s belly is bursting. And see, the consequences are reflected in each of us as individuals. People so oppressed by the West have no mental leisure, they can’t do anything worthwhile. They get an education that’s stripped to the bare bone, and they’re driven with their noses to the grindstone until they’re dizzy – that’s why they all end up with nervous breakdowns.11

This is a far more extreme, and far grimmer, view of Japan’s position in the world following the Russo-Japanese War than was presented by Ōgai in the above-mentioned story, ‘Fushinchū’, which was written at about the same time. Ōgai’s hotel, a rather mild symbol of an incomplete project of modernisation and of a half-comic, half-tragic mix of cultures is now replaced by a sham frontage, not merely unfinished but unfinishable because it is totally false. Whether in a positive or negative form, however, both Ōgai and Sōseki were exemplary national narrators in their continual engagement with issues of national relevance and in their continual effort to present an image of the nation as they saw it. One of the key questions in the history of modern Japanese literature must be: why were their immediate successors in the Taishō period so noticeably deficient in this area, despite the first tentative budding of what is known as Taishō democracy – which one might have expected not only to encourage but to demand the active engagement of writers in a public or civic discourse? Yet Taishō writers such as Shiga Naoya, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke and Tanizaki Jun’ichiro are remarkably inward-looking, almost exclusively concerned with their own psychological states, seemingly uninterested in the state of the nation as a whole. The kind of mutual incomprehension caused by a chronic generation gap, described so well by Sōseki’s Sensei in Kokoro, an early Taishō novel, became, in fact, a characteristic feature of the Taishō period. In literature as in other realms of national life, Taishō sons seemed intent on liberating themselves in every possible way from the overpowering legacy of their Meiji fathers. Since this legacy included, above all, an intense concern with the state of the nation, the young Taishō writers were almost ostentatious in their rejection of any such concern.

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Thus, it is hardly surprising that inter-generational conflict itself became a major theme of Taishō literature – most famously, in the work of Shiga Naoya, the leading writer of the Shirakaba group, who were in this as in other respects the quintessential Taishō writers. It was the Shirakaba writers, for instance, who most clearly voiced the Taishō generation’s negative response to General Nogi’s suicide, viewing it, from their Tolstoyan humanist perspective, as an anachronistic and inhumane act.12 Of course, the differences and conflicts between the Meiji and Taishō generations were not simply a matter of the commonplace kind of ‘gap’ one finds universally between parents and children, or between the old and the young. There was a wide range of historical factors which widened this gap and exacerbated the resultant conflicts. Enormous changes had occurred in Japan in the less than half century which separated the early Meiji from the early Taishō period. By 1912 the Meiji nation-building project had been largely accomplished, and the essential elements of modern Western civilisation – even in the literary and artistic realms – had been more or less successfully absorbed. Thus, it is hardly surprising that, among the younger, ‘Taishō generation’ of writers, there is a distinctly different attitude towards both the nation and Western or modern culture. Generally speaking, their attitude may be characterised as more ‘relaxed’, or perhaps even ‘benignly negligent’. It was as if, since both the modern nation state and the importation of Western civilisation were now more or less faits accomplis, the Taishō writers felt that they no longer needed to be much concerned about either one of them as compelling issues to write about. In the cultural realm this was perhaps all very well: as the first generation of Japanese writers educated more in Western languages and literatures than in the traditional Sino-Japanese canon, they suffered very little of the sense of ‘cultural conflict’ which was quite pronounced in the Meiji writers. The Shirakaba group pronounced themselves to be Tolstoyan humanists apparently without any sense of incongruity. Akutagawa made such free use of his encyclopedic knowledge of Western literature and philosophy that he seemed to regard it as very much part of his own inheritance. Tanizaki glorified the exotic charms of the moga or modan gaaru, the Taishō equivalent of the American flapper. (By the late 1920s, all of these writers would be having second thoughts about these, ‘Western tastes’ of their youth, but we are speaking now about the ‘high Taishō’ period when such tastes were still very much in vogue.) In the social/political realm, however, the Taishō generation’s navelgazing and insouciance towards public issues may seem to have had more

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dangerous or, at least, less positive consequences. Looking back now with the advantage of hindsight, especially with our awareness of the reactionary forces which would soon derail Japan’s progress towards modernity and liberal democracy, it may seem to us that they were living in a fool’s paradise. Unable to outgrow the shadow of their Meiji fathers, they wrote a kind of ‘botchan no bungaku’, a literature which took no responsibility for a world created and sustained by the will of their fathers. Thus, it was inevitable that, in the aftermath to the Pacific War, the Taishō writers should become the favourite whipping boys of new converts to liberal democracy among Japanese intellectuals who were looking for someone to blame for the failure of ‘Taishō democracy’.13 But the issue, of course, is complex and eminently debatable. One may question, for instance, to what extent Taishō writers could reasonably be expected to have had faith in their ‘democratic rights’. I have already mentioned an incident which occurred on the eve of the Taishō period and which had a profound impact on the Japanese literary world: the execution of the socialist leader Kōtoku Shūsui and many of his followers. As Nagai Kafū pointed out in his famous essay of 1919, Hanabi (Fireworks), this incident seemed to have the same meaning for Japanese writers that the Dreyfus affair had for French writers just a few years earlier: trumped-up charge of treason motivated by the prejudices of the political establishment, although in this case the prejudices were anti-socialist rather than anti-Semitic. But, significantly, the response of Japanese writers was quite the opposite of their French counterparts. Even among the Japanese ‘naturalists’, no Zola arose to confront the establishment with a brave and furious ‘J’accuse’. On the contrary, the lesson which most of them seemed to learn from the incident was that they had better not meddle in politics. In ‘Fireworks’ Kafū confesses that, ashamed of his own capitulation to the bullying authorities, he resolved to regard himself thereafter as a writer not worth taking seriously, a mere Edo-style scribbler of light and frivolous fiction: Of all the public incidents I had witnessed or heard of, none had filled me with such loathing. I could not, as a man of letters, remain silent this matter of principle. Had not the novelist Zola, pleading the truth in the Dreyfus Case, had to flee his country? But I, along with the other writers of my land, said nothing. The pangs of conscience that resulted were scarcely endurable. I felt intensely ashamed of myself as a writer.14

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In other words, the incident convinced Kafū and many of his colleagues that, despite all the modernisation or Westernisation which Japan had undergone since 1868, it was still close enough to a Tokugawa-style ‘police state’ to make the exercise of any anti-government free speech a very dangerous business. Although what we now refer to as ‘Taishō democracy’ no doubt included such phenomena as a rise in the power of political parties and the extension of male suffrage, it is perhaps understandable that, for many of the writers of the age, it did not seem to include the privilege of speaking out against the government. Indeed, from the writers’ perspective, the Taishō period was bounded by two ominous exercises in government suppression: the Kōtoku incident of 1911 and the Peace Preservation Law of 1925, which initiated a ruthless campaign to extirpate all left-wing opposition to the status quo. In a well-known study of the intellectuals and writers of the period, Tatsuo Arima claims that their non-engagement with Japan’s budding liberal democratic movement resulted ultimately in ‘failure of freedom’ – that is, in the defeat of ‘Taishō democracy’ by early Shōwa militarism.15 But writers who lived through the period might well be puzzled by this claim: after all, how much real ‘freedom’ was theirs to ‘fail’? There is a definite ex post facto feel about Arima’s view: it smacks of the romanticisation of the Taishō period which became popular among Japanese intellectuals in the postwar period – perhaps in their overeagerness to prove that Japan had its very own democratic tradition; which had been scuttled by the militarists and their various collaborators. (And this may now be seen as part of a more general tendency to evade war responsibility by blaming everything on the ‘militarists’ – a tendency still strong over fifty years later.) To put it bluntly: Japanese writers did not really begin to feel that it was safe to speak out against the government until the radical restructuring of the political system which occurred after Japan’s ‘second opening’ to the West in 1945. If we are to look, then, for historical factors behind the Taishō writers’ non-engagement with political issues, the Kōtoku incident of 1911 would be a good place to start. At any rate, given all the historical forces that were leading Japan, along with Germany and Italy, towards the debacle of the Second World War, one may question whether the voices of a few dissenting writers would have made much difference. Germany had quite a few such writers but, unfortunately, they did nothing to slow down Hitler’s war machine. On the other hand, one could point out that it was precisely such ‘decadent’, ‘narcissistic’ writers as Tanizaki and Nagai Kafū who, later on, were among the most conspicuous non-cooperators with

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the military, whereas many of the more ‘committed’ Marxist writers were equally conspicuous collaborators. This is by no means to argue that a writer’s social or political views are irrelevant, or that they can have no effect on public life; but it seems that the effectiveness of a writer’s views is also contingent upon his or her historical situation. Dickens is often given as the example par excellence of the novelist who shaped public opinion and public policy. But if Dickens had been transplanted from Victorian England to Taishō Japan, and had written novels celebrating democracy and excoriating fascism, one doubts that his views would have had such effectiveness. It is not my intention here, then, to adopt a moralistic or condemnatory tone towards the Taishō writers: like the rest of us, they were simply the products – and perhaps the victims – of their age. But they are not ‘national narrators’ in the way their Meiji predecessors were, and this fact, it seems to me, is worthy of contemplation – for the light it sheds both on them and on their predecessors. Of the three major writers who emerged in the Taishō period – Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Shiga Naoya and Akutagawa Ryūnosuke – Akutagawa seemed most likely, at first, to inherit the mantle of ‘national narrator’ from Ōgai and Sōseki. With his wide knowledge of both East Asian and Western literatures, his interest in writing historical fiction, and his command of a detached, ironic, ‘cerebral’ style, he seemed to promise to succeed Ōgai in particular as historian of the national soul. The fact that he never quite lived up to this promise says something significant not only about Akutagawa himself but about Taishō writers in general. Like his contemporary Tanizaki, Akutagawa had imbibed the ‘decadent’ aestheticism and world-weary attitudes of fin de siècle Europe, deeply immersing himself in writers such as Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Strindberg and Wilde. According to the editors of a standard Japanese literary history of the period, it was precisely such aestheticism which was the key new feature of Taishō literature.16 Art took precedence over life, and any concern with political or social issues would be vulgarly unaesthetic. Akutagawa’s infatuation with Western culture was accompanied by a corresponding contempt for a good part of the Japanese tradition – including, especially, those samurai virtues so highly lauded by Ōgai. When Akutagawa did concern himself with the national culture, it was often with a satirical intent. For instance, Ōgai’s reverential and Sōseki’s elegiac treatments of General Nogi may be compared with Akutagawa’s satirical treatment in his story, Shōgun (1922). But an even more impressive example of

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this new ‘Taishō generation’ attitude occurs in his brilliantly effective little story, ‘Hankechi’ (‘Handkerchief ’, 1916). The professorial protagonist of the story, modelled on Nitobe Inazō, author of a famous book on bushidō, believes that he has found a splendid example of ancient samurai virtue when he is visited by the mother of one of his students. She stoically maintains a smile while telling him of the death of her son. But he notices that, at the same time, ‘probably due to the effort to suppress her emotions, her hands, as they trembled, grasped the handkerchief on her knees so hard that they all but tore it in two’.17 The professor’s elation at this discovery of living bushidō is soon deflated, however, when, by coincidence, he happens to read a passage from Strindberg’s book of advice to actors, wherein the great Swedish dramatist mocks the melodramatic mannerism of an actress who tries to convey depth of emotion by smiling and tearing at her handkerchief at the same time. Thus, by an uneasy juxtaposition of traditional Japanese behaviour and the cynical thought of a fashionable Western writer, Akutagawa undoubtedly intends to undercut tradition, reducing bushidō to the level of a mere mannerism out of an old-fashioned sentimental melodrama. The few satirical works of this sort which Akutagawa wrote may be regarded as national narratives of a negative kind, or perhaps as antinational narratives. But even Kappa (1927), which of all Akutagawa’s works comes closest to being a full-scale Swiftian satire of contemporary society, and does seem to satirise such things, for instance, as the blind worship of Western culture by Japanese intellectuals (Akutagawa himself not least among them), nonetheless seems driven by a basic satirical thrust which is more general than that: one might say that it is more an existential satire of the human condition in general than a social satire focussing on any particular nation. And the fact that, as with other Taishō ‘humanitarians’, Akutagawa’s real interest lay more in ‘the state of man’ than in ‘the state of the nation’ may be seen even in his ‘historical’ stories. Although, as many Japanese critics and even Akutagawa himself pointed out, he was inspired by Mori Ōgai’s historical fiction to try to write his own, there is a very telling difference between Ōgai’s historical stories and Akutagawa’s. Whereas Ōgai took painstaking efforts to ensure the historical accuracy of his stories in every detail, Akutagawa defended his ‘artistic license’ to distort history in the interest of art. In fact, he confessed that the only reason why he set his stories in remote historical periods was to facilitate the reader’s suspension of disbelief: he was convinced that,

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had he given a contemporary setting to his tales of human psychology and behaviour in extremis, readers would refuse to believe in them. In a work such as ‘Jigokuhen’ (‘Hell Screen’, 1918), perhaps his most powerful historical story, the setting – vaguely Heian – is entirely secondary to Akutagawa’s central theme, which is, significantly, that, for the artist, art must take precedence over life, even when this necessitates the most extreme sacrifice imaginable. Thus, the painter Yoshihide is willing to countenance even the burning of his own beloved daughter so that he might paint a more convincing picture of the agonies of hell. The fact that the story is set in some vague historical past probably does make it more acceptable to our imaginations. Unlike Ōgai, then, Akutagawa’s intention was neither to present an image of national life in a particular historical period nor an eternal image of the national character but rather to present a timeless and universally human psychological truth in an aesthetically satisfying form. We might even say that, in his historical stories, he was a Taishō aesthete disguised as a Meiji national narrator. Akutagawa’s aestheticism certainly was shared by two other writers who began their long careers in the Taishō period and who would go on to become perhaps the two greatest novelists of twentieth-century Japan: Tanizaki Jun’ichirō and Kawabata Yasunari. Both of these writers may also be fairly characterized as ‘apolitical’ in the typical Taishō manner. But the real point of interest, from the perspective of the present essay, is that both must be regarded, nonetheless, as exemplary national narrators, since each developed in his own way a new form of national narrative, one based not on social or political engagement but on a form of cultural nationalism. That this is an obvious fact to the present generation of Japanese writers was made clear to the world in 1994 by Ōe Kenzaburō’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech: by titling his speech ‘Japan the Ambiguous and Myself ’ (‘Aimai na Nippon no watashi’), Ōe pointedly sought to distance himself from the cultural nationalism of older writers such as Kawabata, a previous winner of the prize, whose own acceptance speech, ‘Japan, the Beautiful, and Myself ’ (‘Utsukushii Nippon no watashi’) had been a wholehearted encomium to the Japanese aesthetic and spiritual tradition.18 As someone who had grown up in wartime and postwar Japan, Ōe felt that he could not share Kawabata’s unambivalent enthusiasm for the glories of Japanese culture. Nevertheless, the gentle cultural nationalism of Kawabata and, even more so, of Tanizaki, should not be equated with the fanatic ultranationalism of their contemporaries, the early Shōwa militarists – although,

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as Alan Tansman has pointed out, their writings certainly proved useful to the construction of a general ‘fascist aesthetic’.19 Indeed, from a historical viewpoint, both phenomena may be seen as manifestations of the conservative ‘back to Japan’ movement of the period, but the resultant worldviews were quite literally ‘worlds apart’. Both Kawabata and Tanizaki may be said to have created an ‘alternate Japan’, very different from the pseudo-samurai Japan of the militarists – equally idealized perhaps, but following a very different ideal, closer to the ‘feminine’ tradition of the Heian courtiers than to the ‘masculine’ tradition of the more violent Middle Ages so often evoked by the militarists. It also is important to note that neither Kawabata nor Tanizaki sought chauvinistically to exclude the West from his vision of a Japanese cultural renaissance. On the contrary, both profited enormously as artists from the dialectical interplay between Western culture and their own tradition. Indeed, much of the dynamism and originality of their work derives precisely from this cultural interplay. As long as Tanizaki, for instance, confined himself to an ardent devotion to all things Western, from the esthétique du mal of Baudelaire and Poe to the more vulgar pleasures of such new Taishō fads as Hollywood movies and ballroom dancing, his fiction rarely rose above the level of a rather superficial sensationalism. It was only after the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923 forced him to move to the Kansai area and to rediscover the pleasures of Japanese tradition that his work may be said to have acquired the depth of serious literature. It seems that he needed the inspiration of the theme of East-West cultural conflict to give his work this necessary depth. Thus, his first major novel, A Fool’s Love (Chijin no ai, 1924),20 brilliantly satirizes his own earlier infatuation with Western culture, borrowing the basic plotline of Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage but giving it a new cross-cultural twist: the femme fatale with whom the male protagonist is foolishly infatuated is a monster created by his own desire for a self-assertive, exotically ‘Western’ woman. Some Prefer Nettles (Tade kū mushi, 1929), written five years later, is a more elegant and mature expression of Tanizaki’s ‘rediscovery’ of traditional pleasures. Here the male hero, unlike the ‘fool’ of the earlier novel, consciously chooses to ‘revert’ to native tastes in art, women, and even domestic architecture – and ends up a happier and a wiser man. Judging, then, by the vastly improved quality of Tanizaki’s fiction at this time, which occurred with a startling suddenness and permanency, the move to Kansai seems to have precipitated the major

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creative breakthrough of his life. The erstwhile connoisseur of all things Western and modern now felt the pull of a counterattraction: the great charm and value of the old native traditions of the Kansai area. What occurred for him was not simply an ‘exchange’ of Japan for the West, or of tradition for modernity – this would hardly have served as such a powerful creative stimulus. Rather a new dialectical tension was introduced into his thinking and his work. Unlike the ultranationalists of the day, he never adopted a xenophobic tone or favoured a one-way pendulum swing away from the West or modernity and toward Japan or tradition. He preferred to keep the pendulum swinging both ways. Even in A Fool’s Love he obviously relishes the male hero’s ‘Occidentalism’ – to the extent of taking some pleasure in his masochistic submission to the ‘Westernized’ female’s arbitrary and dictatorial treatment of her male lover – at the same time that he satirizes this example of male ‘folly’. One of the outstanding features of works of Tanizaki’s later career such as The Key (Kagi, 1956) and Diary of a Mad Old Man (Fūten rōjin nikki, 1962) is the charming and effortless way in which his ‘mad old men’ take as much pleasure in, say, a gleaming new swimming pool as in a statue of the boddhisattva Kannon. Always more the tolerant hedonist than the closed-minded ideologue, Tanizaki was happy to take his pleasures wherever he could find them and thus was often pulled in two directions at once. But, like other Taishō writers and unlike the older, more politically or ideologically inclined Meiji writers, he never seemed to suffer any great psychological pain on account of the resultant ‘culture clash’. Tanizaki’s down-to-earth, laissez-faire attitude is nicely epitomized by a story his wife once told. An architect whom he had hired to build a new house had dutifully read his essay, In Praise of Shadows (In’ei raisan, 1933–1934), which waxes lyrical about traditional domestic architecture, and thus confidently assured the writer that he knew exactly what he wanted. But Tanizaki promptly responded that he could never actually live in such a house – when aesthetics clashed with comfort, there was no doubt as to which took precedence with Tanizaki!21 In contrast to that of Tanizaki, Kawabata’s intercultural or EastWest drama was played out in more purely formal literary terms. When he first appeared on the literary scene in the late Taishō period, it was as a leading spokesman of the shinkankaku-ha, the so-called neosensory school of young writers who, inspired by the European modernism of the 1920s, were eager to develop radical new techniques of

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literary expression. In conscious opposition to the Marxist ‘proletarian literature’ school that also appeared at this time, these writers insisted on the primacy of aesthetics over politics or any other ‘extraliterary’ considerations.22 The young Kawabata tried his hand at a variety of the latest modernist experimental techniques – most notably, a remarkably successful exercise in Joycean stream-of-consciousness narrative, Crystal Fantasies (Suishō gensō, 1931), which also made good use of the recently fashionable Freudian concept of the unconscious for an in-depth analysis of the psychology of an infertile woman. This early ‘flirtation’ with Western ideas and styles was, sure enough, followed by a ‘return’ to a more traditionally Japanese style of writing in the mid1930s. Still, looking more closely, we find that, as with Tanizaki, what this ‘conservative reaction’ involved was less a divorce from the foreign culture than a marriage between that and Japanese culture. Certainly, the great ‘haiku novels’ that Kawabata wrote over the next twenty years – masterpieces such as Snow Country (Yukiguni, 1935–1947), Thousand Cranes (Sembazuru, 1952), and The Sound of the Mountain (Yama no oto, 1954) – may be properly regarded as celebrations of Japanese tradition; at the same time, they successfully revitalize that tradition precisely by a subtle incorporation of much that Kawabata had learned from Western modernism. In particular, a close analysis of these texts reveals that he never lost his taste for surrealistic imagery and stream-of-consciousness narrative.23 And the fact that he never really abandoned modernism was made even clearer by the powerful surrealist stories he wrote in the last decade of his career: Sleeping Beauties (Nemureru bijo, 1961), ‘One Arm’ (‘Kata ude’, 1965), and Dandelions (Tanpopo, 1972). One may question whether Tanizaki’s and Kawabata’s highly aesthetic form of cultural nationalism contributed as concretely to the nation-building enterprise as Ōgai’s and Sōseki’s more direct concern with the health of the body politic. Of course, it is to the more insubstantial but nonetheless indispensable ingredients of nationhood that such ‘aesthetic’ literature contributes, those ingredients that Ernest Renan judged to be of paramount importance in his celebrated talk of 1882, ‘What is a nation?’: A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle ... More valuable by far than common custom posts and frontiers conforming to strategic ideas is the fact of sharing, in the past, a glorious heritage and regrets … or the fact of having suffered, enjoyed, and hoped together.24

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In the Japanese context in particular, purely ‘aesthetic’ literature had long been assigned a central place in definitions of national identity. Since so much of the nation’s religious and philosophical culture was imported from continental Asia, it was to the native language and literature that nationalists often turned in their search for the defining characteristics of ‘Japaneseness’. We may see this brand of cultural nationalism at work especially in such Tokugawa nativist scholars and revivalists of Shinto as Kamo Mabuchi (1697–1769) and Motoori Norinaga (1730–1817), who held up literary classics such as the Manyōshū, the Tale of Genji, and the Shinkokinshū as pure expressions of Japanese sentiment – or, in Mabuchi’s words, as the ‘voice of our divine land’. But the importance to the nation of Tanizaki’s and Kawabata’s form of cultural nationalism did not become fully apparent until after 1945. By providing a positive model of an ‘alternate Japan’ that was uncontaminated by the militarist ethos, they played a key role in the difficult task of nation-rebuilding that Japan had to undertake in the dark days following its defeat in the Pacific War. By showing that there remained much of value in the native tradition, and much that could still be successfully integrated into modern culture, they provided a salutary alternative to those intellectuals who, in their eagerness to distance themselves from the evils of the immediate past, were prepared to scuttle the whole of Japanese tradition – Bashō’s haiku along with Tōjō’s bushidō. And when Kawabata was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1968, to many Japanese this seemed an important milestone in their postwar history, one marking Japan’s acceptance back into the community of civilized nations. It was made all the sweeter by the fact that, as the Nobel committee acknowledged, the prize was awarded to recognize Kawabata’s achievement in revitalizing a distinctly Japanese tradition. II. TŌSON AS NATIONAL NARRATOR

But to return now to the period more particularly under consideration here: toward the very end of that period, in April 1929, there finally began to appear, serialized in the journal Chūō kōron, a large-scale novel that in many respects may be regarded as the culminating achievement of Japanese writers’ long struggle, after 1868, to create a satisfying national narrative. This, of course, was the work of Shimazaki Tōson I have already mentioned, Before the Dawn (1929–1935). In 1930 Tōson may have seemed an unlikely candidate as the writer who would finally attempt the ‘great Meiji novel’, a national narrative

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of epic, Tolstoyan proportions which would encompass the immense historical theme of Meiji nation-building. If anything, he seemed to belong more in the camp of the younger, inward-looking Taishō writers than with his great, public-minded Meiji contemporaries, Ōgai and Sōseki. Indeed, as a ‘father’ of Japanese ‘naturalism’, he was legitimately considered to be one of the main progenitors of that most inward-looking form of fiction, the shi-shōsetsu. To be sure, after his early career as a lyric poet, he had achieved his first success in fiction with a work which, more than any other work of Japanese naturalism, did come closest to French naturalist practice by its brave confrontation with an important but embarrassing national issue: the plight of the eta, Japan’s ‘untouchable’ caste who, despite laws proclaiming their equality, were still much discriminated against. But in the intervening years after this novel, Hakai (The Broken Commandment), was published in 1906, Tōson followed the other Japanese naturalists in narrowing his focus down to his own psychological history, friendships and family life. Works such as Haru (Spring, 1908), Ie (The Family, 1910–11) and Shinsei (A New Life, 1918–19), may all be regarded as shi-shōsetsu in that their fictional worlds are filtered through the consciousness of a single central character who is an obvious alter ego of the author himself. Nevertheless, it was Tōson who, with immense ambition, finally attempted what none of the major Japanese writers to date had attempted: to present a massive but coherent image of Japan’s transformation from feudalism to modernity in the nineteenth century, and to do so on a grand enough scale that the reader would be given an adequate sense of both the duration of the historical events and of the diversity of human responses to them. Furthermore, it is only when Tōson’s achievement is seen within the context I have adumbrated here – the development of serious Japanese fiction since Ukigumo – that the true dimensions of his achievement can be understood and appreciated. On the one hand, Yoake mae may justifiably be regarded as in many respects the culmination of Japanese writers’ long struggle, after 1868, to create a satisfying national narrative. On the other hand, what is even more interesting, however, especially in light of the other works discussed here, is that it achieves this culminating status by conflating the public dimension of Meiji fiction with the private dimension of Taishō fiction, the concern with history with the concern with family relations – and, in particular, with the relation between father and son. In other words, it combines elements of Meiji historical fiction

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in the style of Mori Ōgai – and even elements of nineteenth-century Western historical fiction on its most grandiose, Tolstoyan scale – with elements of the intimate Taishō shi-shōsetsu in the style of Shiga Naoya – and so it may legitimately be regarded as the culmination of the two major, although apparently antithetical, tendencies in the Japanese fiction of the first three decades of this century. Which, of course, leads one to question whether these two tendencies really are antithetical and whether recently fashionable critical arguments which would strictly dissociate the Japanese shōsetsu – especially the shi-shōsetsu – from the Western novel have any value beyond their ‘postcolonial’ political correctness. Although Yoake mae presents a great diversity of historical characters and events, it is also made coherent by a single unifying thread: the life and character of Aoyama Hanzō, who is closely modelled on the author’s own father. Tōson’s father, who had been a village headman under the Tokugawa feudal system, found himself suddenly dispossessed of his power and even of his social usefulness by the new Meiji order, and this led to his steady moral decline and ultimate descent into madness. This tragic father-figure had haunted and also embarrassed Tōson since his youth. Thus when, in his late fifties, he resolved to write his first historical novel and confront the complex reality of the transformation Japan had undergone in the late Tokugawa and early Meiji period, this also became, inevitably, a resolve to confront his own troubled family history. On a personal level, the novel is both an elegy and an exorcism. But, unlike a shi-shōsetsu, Shimazaki’s novel also attains to a much wider dimension: by using his own father’s tragic story in a symbolic way, to represent the human costs of nineteenth-century Japan’s nation-building and modernisation, Shimazaki both achieves a Shiga-style ‘reconciliation’ with his traditionalist father and creates an exemplary national narrative in the tradition if not quite in the style of Ōgai. As the translator who accomplished the Herculean labour of rendering the novel into English, William E. Naff, has written: ‘... Tōson’s version of the story of the Meiji restoration has played a major role in defining the form in which those great events of the middle third of the nineteenth century have entered the Japanese national consciousness’.25 From an historical point of view, of course, this may not have been an entirely good thing: it may have been preferable if the ‘Japanese national consciousness’ had taken its view of late Tokugawa and early Meiji history from a less passionate, more disinterested source than Shimazaki’s novel. Yoake mae’s conflation of family history with national history is

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its weakness as well as its strength. The tragic father figure is a passionate devotee of the Hirata school of nationalist ideology, and thus, for him, the only legitimate response to the challenge of the West is a revitalisation of Japanese tradition: ‘The more the foreign countries provoke us, the more we’ll look back to our own past’.26 Unfortunately for him, however, this ‘we’ did not include the early Meiji leadership: instead of the restoration of ‘pure’ Japanese and imperial tradition which had been promised, they engineered a renewed opening to the West on an unprecedented scale. Even the sacred imperial court itself was not untouched; even there European fashions and manners became à la mode. For a simple country traditionalist and nationalist like Hanzō, it seemed that the new Meiji regime was intent on destroying millennia of Japanese tradition and turning Japan into a foreign country, a country in which there would be no room for men like himself. And, of course, he was not alone in his disaffection, and people who called for a return to tradition and a new imperial restoration by no means died out with his generation. Indeed, at the very time Shimazaki was publishing this novel they were in the process of taking over the national government. Looking back on Yoake mae from our present historical perspective, then, we may feel uncomfortable about its tendency to idealise and romanticise the Japanese past, its presenting of Tokugawa village life as a model of law and order and as a kind of sweet pastoral idyll, its championing of the more noble qualities of kokugaku nationalism and agrarianism, and, on the other hand, its demonisation of the Meiji government and of the Western powers who are seen standing threateningly behind it. Whether or not such was Shimazaki’s intention, this unbalanced and rather simplistic view of history obviously fed very nicely into the simple pieties of the nationalist ideology which was very much on the rise in the early 1930s. Of course, any historical novel runs the risk of being judged as history rather than as fiction – a price to be paid for the ambiguous status of the genre. Although Yoake mae, given the time at which it was written, may be a particularly sensitive case in point, even the most innocuous historical romance may be condemned for misleading its readers with its historical distortions. But a historical novel is first and foremost a novel and must be judged as such; questions of its historical accuracy are secondary. Judged as fiction, Shimazaki’s presentation of late Tokugawa and early Meiji history is eminently successful, because it represents so well the worldview of its central protagonist, Aoyama Hanzō, and provides a more than sufficient ‘objective correlative’

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for his descent into madness. As for the novel’s wider historical meaning: although one would not want it taken as the ‘last word’ on mid-nineteenth century Japanese history, the fact that there were many others like Hanzō, and that their disaffection and rage would ultimately erupt onto the world stage with such disastrous consequences in the 1930s and ‘40s, surely gives the novel profound significance as a historical document as well. III. A THEORETICAL POSTSCRIPT: IS YOAKE MAE A NOVEL OR A SHŌSETSU?

In recent decades, some of the leading scholars of modern Japanese literature writing in English have shown a reluctance to call the shōsetsu a novel. Edward Fowler, for instance, in his impressive study of the shi-shōsetsu, The Rhetoric of Confession, takes quite a strong stand on this issue: That the shi-shōsetsu differs from classical western narrative is plain for all to see. I wish to stress, however, that the basic ‘difference’ derives from the fact that the shōsetsu itself – that Japanese word we glibly translate as ‘novel’ – also differs fundamentally from western narrative. Indeed, to translate shōsetsu or shi-shōsetsu as ‘novel’ or ‘I-novel’ at all is to assume, wrongly, I believe, some easy interchangeability of narrative method between the two cultures.27

Among other recent writers, Masao Miyoshi and James Fujii have also argued strongly along similar lines, and many scholars of modern Japanese fiction now studiously avoid using the word ‘novel’.28 One understands, of course, the motivation for this. By calling a shōsetsu a novel one may awake false expectations in the mind of the unsuspecting Western reader, who may then be lost forever to the special pleasures of Japanese fiction. Indeed, a few decades ago even some quite prominent Western scholars of Japanese literature took a dim view of the shi-shōsetsu exactly because it did not offer what they expected from a ‘novel’. In a well-known essay entitled ‘Tōson and the Autobiographical Novel’, Edwin McClellan, for instance, laments the fact that, after his first successful novel, Hakai (The Broken Commandment, 1906), Tōson went on to write nothing but shi-shōsetsu for the rest of his career – among which he includes Yoake mae and all of which, according to McClellan, ‘make very dull reading ... even the frequently

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beautiful lyrical passages begin to seem not sufficient compensation for the absence of plot and drama’.29 It seems to me, however, that after the past few decades of ‘postmodern’ fiction, the Western reader’s expectations about what constitutes a ‘novel’ have been profoundly transformed, and few cling to the narrow view that was once common even among eminent scholars of Japanese literature. Besides, it is not a good idea to banish words merely because they arouse the wrong expectations. If that practice were taken to its logical conclusion, we would have to say that Zen gardens are not gardens but teien, that Kurosawa’s films are not films but eiga, that the Japanese do not live in houses but in ie – in other words, we would end up with a taboo against the use of any foreign words in speaking of Japan, which would no doubt delight some Japanese nationalists. Rather than banish a word like ‘novel’, then, it would seem that the better policy would be to allow it to expand, as it has been doing over the past few decades, to include anything that remotely qualifies as a ‘novel-length’ work of fiction – and I do not think that the word ‘novel’ means much more than that in English today. The inherent weakness of Fowler’s argument is betrayed, in fact, by the way he glides without any intervening justification from his phrase ‘classical western narrative’ (itself an ambiguous and debatable term: does he mean Greco-Roman narrative? Boccaccio? Elizabethan narrative? Rabelais? Cervantes? French seventeenth-century novels? English eighteenth-century novels? – arguments could be made for all of these very different authors and traditions as the locus classicus of modern Western narrative) to the word ‘novel’, as if these were self-evidently two terms of an equation. On the other hand, I would be in favour of introducing the term shi-shōsetsu into English, just as we have terms such as roman à clef or Bildungsroman. As with those French and German genres, we should regard the novel-length shi-shōsetsu as a national variety of novel but as a novel nonetheless. I am aware, of course, that those who think we should never call any kind of shōsetsu a novel will think that I have missed their main point here: which is, to quote Fowler again, that the shōsetsu ‘differs fundamentally’ from the novel. In answer to this, I must first raise a rather philosophical question: how much difference must exist between two phenomena before we can say that they ‘differ fundamentally’? It seems to me that the only logically possible answer to this is that the two

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phenomena must differ in kind, not just in degree. To take the present example, for instance (and if the reader will pardon my Latin): are there any sine qua non elements that are sui generis to the shi-shōsetsu; or does the shi-shōsetsu consist of a number of elements which may also be found in the Western novel, albeit in very different combinations and degrees? It seems to me that the latter alternative is the more likely one. In more practical terms, it would seem to me that, if the shi-shōsetsu were indeed fundamentally different to the novel, any such combination as I have just claimed for Tōson’s Yoake mae – of elements of the historical novel à la Tolstoy with elements of the shi-shōsetsu à la Shiga Naoya – would be aesthetically if not logically impossible. Anyone interested in this question, then, would do well to study the case of Shimazaki Tōson. To conclude this theoretical digression on a more positive note, I also think there would be one important advantage in allowing the word ‘novel’ back into the Japanologist’s vocabulary: it would affirm the relatedness of Japanese fiction to that of the rest of the world. One of the problems of Fowler’s argument is that it is far too bipolar: Japanese shōsetsu versus Western novel. Even the so-called ‘Western novel’ is not nearly so Western any more, with writers such as Salman Rushdie, Timothy Mo and Kazuo Ishiguro making major contributions (and, indeed, a similar process of ‘internationalisation’ has even begun to encroach upon contemporary Japanese fiction, with Koreans and other ‘non-Japanese’ making significant contributions – one wonders whether their shōsetsu will also be seen as resisting categorisation as novels?). Besides which, the Chinese novel, Indian novel, Egyptian novel, and so on, are also flourishing. To cut Japanese fiction off from this international mainstream by insisting on its fundamental difference would seem to serve the interests only of the ‘myth of Japanese uniqueness’.

Source: Roy Starrs, ed. Japanese Cultural Nationalism: At Home and in the Asia Pacific. London, Global Oriental and Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press (2004), pp. 88–98.

8.

Nation and Region in the Work of Dazai Osamu v

A growing body of theoretical and historical work on the modern nation state and on its attendant nationalist ideologies and discourses has made us increasingly aware over the past two decades of the ‘constructed’ nature of national cultures and of the sacrifice of regional cultures often involved in the assertion of the nation state’s hegemony. Japan seems a particularly clear case in point: before 1868 its body politic was a loose federation of several hundred feudal domains, each with its own more or less distinctive history, traditions and cultural identity – in other words, a heterogeneity of cultures making for a strong sense of regional autonomy. After 1868 a policy of cultural homogenization accompanied and facilitated the policy of political unification and centralization imposed by the new Tokyo government. Of course, tensions between centre and periphery in Japan did not begin in 1868: since the Yamato clan first imposed its rule over other clans in the 4th and 5th centuries AD, such tensions have been a central dialectic of Japanese history. But there is a significant difference after 1868: using all the institutions and technologies of modernity, the Meiji government initiated a process of political and cultural integration and homogenization that was unprecedented in its totality. Never before in Japanese history had the balance of power tilted so overwhelmingly onto the side of the central government and the central cultural establishment. And, thus, never before had regional cultures been so thoroughly marginalized and even threatened with extinction. To take one obvious example, a modified form of the Tokyo dialect became ‘standard Japanese’ and all other dialects 142

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became marginalized as ‘regional dialects’, soon to be consigned to the realm of the humorously quaint, folksy and old-fashioned, the language of old people but not of ambitious youth. Again, of course, Japan is not alone in this – it is often compared to Italy and Germany as another ‘late-developing’ nation state, a product of late nineteenth-century imperial nationalism. But it was ‘latedeveloping’ only in comparison to West European and American models – in the Asian context Japan was a pioneer. Indeed, what makes Japan’s case particularly striking is the fact that, because it was an Asian nation, and because its feudalistic social and political system survived until the mid-nineteenth century, its sudden ‘leap’ into modernity covered more ground in less time than that of any Western counterpart. It is often said that what took a century or two in Europe took a decade or two in Japan. There are two potential consequences of this ‘accelerated pace’ that interest me here: firstly, in such ‘instant’ nations – created overnight, so to speak (and, of course, many more would follow Japan once the European empires began to disintegrate), the ‘constructed’ nature of the modern nation state’s political, ideological and cultural support systems is likely to be more clearly visible than in countries where these evolved over many generations; secondly, the accelerated pace of change may be expected to generate both social and psychological tensions – in other words, a cultural identity crisis that can manifest itself both in social/ political and in individual psychological unrest. In Japan, it must be said, the ruling powers have been remarkably successful in keeping social/ political unrest under control – except perhaps for a few years in the 1870s and the 1930s; but individual psychological unrest is, of course, another matter and, to say the least, modern Japanese literature provides eloquent testimony of its pervasiveness, at least among intellectuals. Since the very first modern Japanese novel of significance, Futabatei Shimei’s Ukigumo (A Floating Cloud, 1889), the dominant mood of serious fiction and poetry in Japan has often been one of malaise if not despair, cynicism if not nihilism. The high number of major twentieth-century Japanese writers who committed suicide may be regarded as testimony to the psychological price of Japan’s sudden ‘leap into modernity’, and especially to the dis-ease caused to minds disinherited from their native traditions and unsure of what to replace them with. Dazai Osamu, one of the most famous of those literary suicides, is a telling case in point. For any consideration of issues of nation versus region in modern Japanese literature, it seems to me that Dazai is one of the most instructive cases to look at. Firstly, because he was from Tsugaru, historically

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one of the most isolated and therefore most culturally distinctive areas of mainland Japan. And secondly, because the tensions between Tokyo and Tsugaru played a major role in his life and work, and were never completely resolved. It may be said that, as a ‘provincial’ from Tsugaru, Dazai was doubly disinherited by the process of modernization and national integration: Tsugaru culture was ‘preempted’ by Tokyo as much as Japanese culture was preempted by the West. Because of its extreme isolation through most of its history, Tsugaru (which occupies part of presentday Aomori Prefecture, at the northernmost extremity of the main island of Honshu), has a very strong and distinctive local culture, including a dialect which is almost incomprehensible to other Japanese – even those from neighbouring areas. (Dazai himself, by the way, is said to have had such a strong Tsugaru accent that he could not pronounce his own name properly – at least not for central Japanese ears. He would pronounce his real family name, Tsushima, as something like ‘Shishima’ or ‘Chishima’, and thus, according to one story, adopted the pseudonym Dazai Osamu in order to avoid embarrassment.1 Whether true or not, this story is a good token of the first phase of Dazai’s relation with central Japan – his initial craving for acceptance.) The harshness of the Tsugaru climate – the land deeply snow-bound over a long winter – the sparseness of the population, and the poverty of the small farming communities, which were often threatened with starvation in times of poor harvest, made for a life experience, cultural expression. and psychological makeup very different to that of the heavily populated, verdant and temperate lands of central and southern Japan. Not surprisingly, Tsugaru people are known to be tough, taciturn, serious-minded, down-to-earth, hard drinking and a little gloomy – the melancholy Danes of Japan. And, for comic relief, they are prone to a species of dark gallows humour. Perhaps the quickest inroad into Tsugaru culture is through its music: during my recent stay in Hirosaki, I witnessed the current revival of the folk music of the ‘Tsugarujamisen’. It is a tough-sounding, almost raucous music, very different to the gentle, refined tones of ‘classical’ Japanese music, which is essentially the music of the upper classes in the sophisticated urban centres of central Japan. But of course, the Tsugaru music movingly expresses the hard life of ordinary people in a harsh if beautiful environment. Needless to say for anyone familiar with his life and character, Dazai himself seemed to fit, almost to the point of caricature, at least one of the stereotypes of the typical ‘man of Tsugaru’: in his extreme

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melancholia, which drove him to hard drinking and drug-taking and put him in constant danger of committing suicide. Although, of course, it is possible that a man of such a profoundly melancholy temperament might have come from the gentler, sunnier climes of southern Japan, the fact that he came from the cold, dark north seems to make his gloominess a little more understandable. And the dark, mordant sense of humour often evident in his writings also seems in keeping with his Tsugaru roots. Of course, it is not much easier to define a regional character or cultural identity than it is to define a national character or cultural identity – and perhaps both enterprises are highly suspect from a scholarly or scientific point of view. It seems obvious that our moods and thoughts are affected by the weather and other environmental factors, as well as by the local history of the places where we live, but whether this makes for permanent psychological and cultural characteristics, and, if so, how to define those characteristics, is another and more controversial question. Certainly, in the past some of the answers to this question were simplistic and overly deterministic, and recently we have been taught to be suspicious of anything smacking of ‘essentialist’ discourse. After all, the human spirit can resist environment and history – no doubt there are some gloomy, in-going Italians, and perhaps even some cheerful, out-going Swedes. More to the point here, however, is that Dazai himself seemed convinced that there was a distinctive Tsugaru character and mentality different to that of central Japan and that he himself – and thus his writings too – had been indelibly marked by that character and mentality – although it must be admitted that his delineation of that character sometimes seems confusingly inconsistent. To give some examples of Dazai’s thinking on the differences between central Japan and Tsugaru: on, for instance, the over-insistent, overbearing quality of Tsugaru hospitality, he wrote in his usual emphatic manner: People from Tokyo, Osaka, and the other big cities probably think it rude and uncouth if you express your affection by forcing your guests at gunpoint to accept everything you own, including even your life, and they will most likely give you a wide berth for your pains ... Visitors from other parts of the country will probably find the expressions of affection of Tsugaru people hard to swallow without – as it were – diluting them before consumption. Tokyo people give themselves airs and serve you food morsel by tiny morsel. I don’t

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offer fresh mushrooms like Lord Kiso, but many is the time I have suffered the scorn of Tokyo’s snooty socialites because of my excessive hospitality! For like Lord Kiso, I urge people, ‘Have some more! Do have some more!’2 [This is a reference to an incident in the Tale of the Heike, in which the rustic Lord Kiso offers a refined Kyoto courtier plain, unsalted mushrooms, and the horrified courtier runs away in confusion.]

On the other hand, he claims that ‘another characteristic of Tsugaru people’ is that they are ‘bashful and sensitive’: The true Tsugaru person is usually far from being a clumsy boor. He has a far more refined and sensitive understanding of others than the superficial city dweller. But when circumstances cause this pent-up feeling to burst through its dams and run out of control, he becomes quite flustered and cries in his confusion, to the utter disdain of the supercilious urbanite, ‘Eat these fresh mushrooms! Quick!’3

But, despite the apparent Tsugaru boosterism of these passages, Dazai’s actual feelings about Tsugaru were ambivalent to say the least, as well illustrated by the following passage: A few years ago I was asked by a magazine to write ‘Some Words for My Homeland’ and I submitted: I love thee, I hate thee. I have said all sorts of uncomplimentary things about Hirosaki – not out of hatred for the place, but rather as the result of some deep reflection on my own part. I am a Tsugaru man. For generations, my ancestors have tilled the land of the Tsugaru domain. I am, so to speak, of pure Tsugaru stock; that explains why I can speak ill of Tsugaru without reserve. But if people from other parts of the country were to dismiss Tsugaru because of my criticisms, I would of course feel unhappy, because, no matter what I may say, I love Tsugaru.4

In the ambivalence of his feelings Dazai typifies, of course, many twentieth-century young people who left their hometowns to find success in the big city: you can take the boy out of Tsugaru, but you can’t take Tsugaru out of the boy! Glad to have escaped the restrictive atmosphere of a provincial backwater, yet he felt that he had left part of himself behind, and that he needed to return in order to get back in touch with that most authentic part of his identity. And yet there were

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ironies in this too: only on his nostalgic return journey home in 1944, after many years of absence, did Dazai express any sense of connectedness with the Tsugaru peasant; when he actually lived there as a young man he identified with the elite class of wealthy landowners his family belonged to – indeed, so much so that, during his brief flirtation with the Communist Party in his twenties, he was tortured by feelings of guilt because of his politically incorrect ancestry. In other respects, too, Dazai seemed to fight against his Tsugaru heritage – especially as represented by his oldest brother, Bunji, the official head of the family after their father’s early death. In the travelogue-cum-memoir he wrote about his return home after a long stay in Tokyo, entitled simply Tsugaru (1944), Dazai gives us a vivid sense of the psychological distance that separated him, the wayward bohemian artist, from his conventional, serious-minded, stay-at-home brothers, who, despite his growing success as a writer, never forgave him for the sense of shame his public antics – his drunken binges, his hospitalization for drug addiction, his well-publicized suicide attempts with geisha, etc. – had brought to them. When he pays a visit to his family home in Kanagi and apologizes for his long absence, his taciturn brothers simply grunt ‘ah’ – represented by hiragana ‘a’ – and nod slightly in reply, then keep on drinking their sake. ‘That is our family style’, writes Dazai, ‘or rather, perhaps I should say, that is our Tsugaru style’.5 Nonetheless, in his short work, ‘Fifteen Years’ (Jūgonenkan, 1946), Dazai portrayed the effects of his recent ‘return to Tsugaru’ in a very positive light: I returned to Tokyo [from Tsugaru] feeling something akin to confidence in the pure Tsugaru character that flowed in my blood. In other words, it was rejuvenating to discover that in Tsugaru there was no such thing as ‘culture’, and accordingly, I, a Tsugaru man, was not in the slightest a ‘man of culture’. My work after that seemed to change somewhat ... I thought to myself that even if I died at that point, I could be said to have left good enough work as a Japanese writer.6

This may seem nonsensical at first glance – Dazai was obviously a cultured man, a literatus, even a kind of Tsugaru aristocrat. But here he seems to be using the word ‘culture’ to signify the high culture of central Japan: by the standards of that culture Dazai felt himself to be uncultured: that is, he was blunt-spoken, given to exaggeration, openly emotional, uncontrolled, even crude – in a word, Dionysian – rather

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than disciplined, restrained, elegant, subtle, indirect, Apollonian – the moral and aesthetic virtues valued by central Japanese high culture. In this sense he was more like a Tsugaru peasant than a Heian courtier – for more than a millennium the model of the Japanese literary gentleman, an ideal still perpetuated in Dazai’s day by major mainstream writers such as Kawabata and Shiga, who had both already judged Dazai and his work rather harshly. Since moving to Tokyo as a twenty-year-old hopeful writer, Dazai had naturally craved recognition and acceptance by the Tokyo literary establishment. In 1935, for instance, he hoped to establish himself firmly by winning the first Akutagawa Prize – he submitted his well-received story Gyakkō (Losing Ground) and was very confident of winning. But he lost. What particularly enraged Dazai was that the principal judge, Kawabata Yasunari – by this time a leader of the bundan or literary establishment – tied his criticism of Dazai’s work to a criticism of his moral character: his writing, Kawabata wrote, ‘is filled with the author’s views on life and literature, but as I see it, there is an unfortunate cloud over his life at present, which regrettably prevents his talent from emerging straightforwardly’.7 Dazai was so angry that he wrote a bitter public rejoinder to Kawabata, accusing him of arrogance and hypocrisy, and including a scathing counter-attack on Kawabata’s own lifestyle: ‘To spend your time raising birds and going to dance concerts – is this such a splendid life?’8 About a decade later he would react in a similar way to criticism from another major establishment writer, Shiga Naoya, who criticized the scene in The Setting Sun (Shayō, 1947) in which an elderly aristocratic lady is shown urinating in the garden, in defiance of all merely bourgeois niceties. Shiga claimed that ‘real aristocrats’ do not act that way, but an again enraged Dazai saw Shiga’s reaction as typical of the bourgeois prudishness of the Tokyo literary establishment.9 Because of these perceived rejections by the central Japanese literary establishment, Dazai clearly felt obliged to create an alternate cultural value system that would legitimate both himself and his work (the two, of course, being closely associated for a shi-shōsetsu or ‘autobiographical’ writer). In a no doubt pleasurable gesture of defiance, he constructed a value system that was diametrically opposed to that of the literary establishment – rather in the manner of a rebellious child defying his parents. And he associated this value system with Tsugaru, an area geographically as well as culturally remote from Tokyo, and identified himself as a ‘man of Tsugaru’. In other words, there was obviously a defensive or protective element in his newfound, latter-day

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regionalism. One may thus feel some scepticism regarding the large claims he makes about the effects on him of his ‘return to Tsugaru’: that his renewal of his roots had a profound effect on the writing of the culminating works of his career, such as his two major novels, No Longer Human (Ningen shikkaku, 1948) and The Setting Sun. But one could also argue that, even if Dazai’s renewed ‘Tsugaru identity’ was a fiction, it was a necessary fiction that gave him the confidence or courage to write his final, most daring works. A brief but important confirmation of this comes in an autobiographical story written just after the war, ‘The Garden’ (Niwa, 1946). It consists largely of a conversation between Dazai and his oldest brother, Bunji, as they work to restore the family garden, which has been sadly neglected during the recently ended war. Their action, of course, carries an obvious symbolic import: an attempt to return to order and normalcy – and particularly to the comforts of the Japanese cultural tradition so perfectly represented by gardening – after the chaos and madness of the kind of total modern warfare that devastates all cultural tradition. But Dazai is shown to be stubbornly resistant to the vision of order and tradition his older brother seeks to reimpose, which is precisely that of the central Japanese cultural establishment, of which his older brother is a Quisling-like representative. In this conversation so full of ambiguities and unstated ironies Dazai gives a fascinating insight not only into his troubled relations with his older brother and the rest of his family but also with the establishment culture of central Japan: his brother first lectures him on the central Japanese historical and aesthetic tradition behind their garden; although uninterested (he describes himself ironically again as a ‘barbarian’) Dazai feels obliged to listen, now that he is merely a ‘guest’ in the family home (indeed, he also describes himself as the ‘parasite younger brother’).10 Perhaps irritated by his lack of interest, his brother begins to bait him, demanding to know why he does not write about such an interesting man as the sixteenth-century teamaster, Sen no Rikyū – who, it soon becomes evident, is a surrogate of the brother himself, as well as a symbol of the mainstream cultural tradition of the Japanese establishment that Bunji identifies with. On the face of it one would expect Dazai to identify with Rikyū as a ‘man of culture’ and a ‘parasite on the powerful’. But Dazai, as we saw, denied that he was a ‘man of culture’ in the central Japanese sense. Although he is dependent on his brother as Rikyū was on Hideyoshi, as a Tsugaru man in the Japanese literary world – rejected as ‘crude’

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and ‘uncultured’ by establishment writers such as Kawabata and Shiga, as Hideyoshi was by the sixteenth-century cultural establishment – he identifies more with the upstart provincial, Hideyoshi. Equally revealing is that his brother, ironically, as a Tsugaru ‘aristocrat’ who has been co-opted by central Japan, identifies more with the ‘man of culture’, Rikyū, and his aesthetic values of restraint and refinement. Nonetheless, Dazai cannot be said to have ever consciously problematized his relationship as a ‘provincial’ to the modern Japanese nation state on a political level – in the way that younger writers of the postwar generation did. Although politics did not play much of a part in his life or thought – despite his early flirtation with Marxism – if anything he became something of a nationalist in the immediate postwar period, emotionally identifying with his defeated country and even with the emperor, and feeling something close to contempt for all the establishment intellectuals who suddenly jumped on the liberaldemocratic and internationalist bandwagon. In a late autobiographical essay entitled ‘An Almanac of Pain’ (Kunō no nenkan, 1946), Dazai sums up the vagaries of his not-very-committed political life as follows: ‘At ten, a democrat; at twenty, a communist; at thirty, a pure aesthete; at forty, a conservative. And then does history repeat itself after all?’11 Today we may read another, unconsciously ironical meaning into Dazai’s late story, ‘The Garden’: namely, that it represents very well a tragic failure at the heart of his life and work. Generally speaking, he reacted towards the dominance of central Japan neither with a rational political programme of sustained, well-thought-out resistance nor by simply going his own way and ‘cultivating his garden’ in Tsugaru; rather it must be said that he reacted in an inconsistent, immature, peevish, and over-emotional way that was bound to end in failure and frustration: on the one hand, craving acceptance by the central Japanese literary establishment and reacting with fury when that acceptance seemed denied; on the other hand, defensively over-insisting on his unique cultural identity but not really developing that identity in the sustained and consistent way that would have enabled him to be a ‘light unto himself ’, to have jiriki or ‘self-power’ (to use the Zen term) – in other words, to assert his own strong identity and autonomy as a ‘Tsugaru man’ in his life and work. Of course, if Dazai had been the sort of man who could resolve his identity crises in this calm and reasonable way, he probably would never have achieved his cult status in postwar Japan, and he probably would have been far less popular with the Japanese reading public, a large part of which seems to adore a tragic failure.

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So what would have been good for the man would not necessarily have been good for the writer. But rather than situating the problem on such a personal, individual level, more or less blaming Dazai’s weak character as many biographers have done, one could adopt a wider historical perspective and say that he was very much a creature of his age. As such, it never occurred to him to seriously question the hegemony of the post-1868 Japanese nation state. In our own age, on the other hand, regionalism is again on the rise as an ideological response to the perceived danger of a transnational cultural homogeneity imposed by the forces of globalization. It is as if, perceiving our national cultures to be at risk, we seek refuge in even smaller and more inaccessible entities, regional cultures now seen as more deeply rooted, ecologically sound and culturally authentic. But in Dazai’s age regionalism in any form was still seen as an obstacle to national integration and progress – in other words, to ‘modernization’. The regions were backwards and impoverished; Tokyo was the shining city on the hill, a beacon of civilization and enlightenment. Indeed, regionalism was often identified with the atavistic right-wing, those pre-war fanatics and terrorists who had resisted modernity in the name of a nostalgic vision of a supposedly unspoiled and purely Japanese rural utopian past. This is not to say that a more left-wing kind of regionalism or agrarianism did not exist in pre-war Japanese society and literature – one could point to Miyazawa Kenji, for instance – but it did not really shape itself into an expression of strong political resistance to the central government until the postwar period. It was finally able to do so no doubt for a variety of reasons: Japan’s defeat in the war, the consequent ease-up of censorship, the excesses of unbridled capitalist development during the high-growth postwar period, and so on. Because Dazai succeeded at last in killing himself (after many failed attempts) in 1948, only three years after the war’s end, he was not able to absorb the full implications of his country’s defeat, nor to observe the machinations of the central government over the next few decades. Had he lived a little longer, or been born a little later, he might have challenged central Japan’s hegemony even on a political level – as a younger postwar writer like Ōe Kenzaburō has done. One can even imagine that he might have written an Ōe-esque novel in which Tsugaru declares war on Tokyo. But I’d better stop here, before getting too carried away.

Source: Henry Johnson and Jerry C. Jaffe, eds., Performing Japan: Contemporary Expressions of Cultural Identity. London, Global Oriental and Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press (2008), pp. 11–33.

9.

Ink Traces of the Dancing Calligraphers: Zen-ei Sho in Japan Today v

It is the body that is enlightened. Dōgen Zenji (1200–1253) INTRODUCTION: CALLIGRAPHY AS THE ‘SEED ART’ OF EAST ASIA

The high cultural status and centrality of calligraphy in the Japanese visual-art tradition, as in that of East Asia generally, is perhaps the most obvious of the defining features of that tradition. Although from a Western viewpoint it may also seem a unique feature, such is not actually the case: calligraphy is also central to much Islamic art, for instance, though for very different reasons and with quite different aesthetic results. Calligraphy is not the ‘seed art’ of Japan and East Asia because of any religious taboo against depicting the human image, but rather because of the high aesthetic and spiritual value attached to the calligraphic art itself. There are a number of historical and cultural reasons for this, which I can only briefly adumbrate here. Most obvious is the sheer visual complexity of the Sino-Japanese writing system, which still retains something of its primordial ‘pictographic’ nature. The thousands of characters that comprise that system present a variety and complexity of form that no mere alphabet could even remotely match. In addition, there is a wide variety of styles in which the characters can be written, from the archaic pictographic style to the conventional ‘block’ style to the most minimalist cursive style. With this 152

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degree of visual richness inherent in the writing system itself, it is easy to see why it readily lent itself, from an early stage, to high aesthetic development as an ‘abstract’ art in visual terms (although, until quite recently, it never abandoned its ‘representational’ character in lexical terms). A related and equally important factor is the close alliance between calligraphy and painting in China, Japan and other East Asian countries which adopted Chinese characters as part of their writing system. Because in China writing did not stray so far from its pictorial origins as in Western cultures that adopted alphabetical writing systems, the separation of the arts of drawing and painting from the art of writing never became as extreme as in the West (as indicated by the Japanese word kaku, which means both ‘to write’ and ‘to draw or paint’). The aesthetic consequences of this are easy to see if one glances even cursorily over the several thousand years of the Sino-Japanese painting tradition – that is, up until the modern period, when it started to come under Western influence. One finds in this tradition an effortless integration of writing and painting in the same artworks. It is not just that the writing is appended to the painting as a kind of incidental commentary; rather in the best examples of this calligraphic/pictorial art the writing functions as an integral part of the total aesthetic effect – in this sense, the writing is the painting, fully as much as are the pictorial images. The visual effect of the writing has as much impact as its semantic content: in other words, how the written words look is as important as what they mean. On the one hand, then, the fact that Sino-Japanese writing still retains something of its original pictorial quality makes it, compared to an alphabetical writing system, more easy to integrate with pictorial images. On the other hand, the images themselves blend so well with the writing because they are also a kind of writing – they are ‘written images’, often executed in a calligraphic style with the same brush and ink used to write Sino-Japanese characters. Van Gogh said that all painting begins with the rough sketch, but in East Asian art it would be more accurate to say that all painting begins with the calligraphic brushstroke. In more concrete technical terms, what facilitates the intimate relation between painting and writing in East Asian art, more than anything else, is the fude or brush, since this soft, highly flexible animal-hair brush is the perfect instrument for either writing or painting, a sensitive recorder of every movement or non-movement of the artist’s hand and body. In use now for more than two thousand years, this brush may be said to be the first secret to understanding SinoJapanese art. It is the fude that makes possible the calligraphic nature

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of Sino-Japanese painting – along with, to a lesser extent, the sumi or free-flowing India ink and the ink-absorbing paper. Consequently, even Chinese or Japanese paintings that have no writing in them are still commonly painted in a calligraphic style, with the same repertoire of gestural brushstrokes used to write Chinese characters. Conversely, even works of pure calligraphy are displayed just as if they are paintings – for instance, on hanging scrolls displayed in the alcove (tokonoma) that is a standard feature of traditional Japanese living rooms. In more general aesthetic terms, the calligraphic nature of Sino-Japanese paintings gives them a rather flat appearance to Western eyes; they seem to have little aspiration to three-dimensionality, little use for perspective or chiaroscuro, or indeed little attempt at verisimilitude or realism of any kind. They are not mirror images or windows onto the world; they are content to be recognized for what they are: calligraphic gestures on a flat surface that are, more than anything else, direct expressions of the artist’s ‘inner reality’. But how is that ‘inner reality’ conceived or defined? At this point, of course, East Asian artists must look to their own religious, philosophical and psychological traditions for intellectual clarification. And in this respect, certainly, they have been well served – as the eminent Swiss psychologist Carl Jung often pointed out, the Buddho-Daoist psychological tradition was unrivalled in its depth, richness and sophistication, at least until the advent of modern Western psychology.1 And here, indeed, we have the third and most important reason for the high status and centrality of calligraphy in East Asian culture: the religio-ideological view of this art-form that is deeply grounded in the Buddho-Daoist value-system and worldview (as well as in Confucianism, though that is of less relevance here).2 I. JAPANESE VERSUS WESTERN EXPRESSIONISM

In a very general way, then, the East Asian calligraphic aesthetic – prevalent not only in calligraphy and painting but also in many other related visual-art forms – may be linked to the various Western forms of expressionism, which also aim primarily to represent a subjective state or ‘inner reality’ rather than to depict the ‘external world’ in a literal or conventional way. In modern Western terms, this prevailing aesthetic of traditional East Asian art may thus be described as expressionist or lyrical rather than realistic or mimetic – a ‘song of the brush’, to borrow the title of a Japanese art exhibit at the Seattle Art Museum.3 The viewer tends

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to focus more on the work itself, as an object of power in its own right, rather than on any external world or reality the work might point to. But, of course, there are also significant cultural differences between the Japanese and Western forms of expressionism, the first of which has to do with exactly what is meant by the artist’s ‘inner reality’ – that is, how this is constructed according to the different models of human subjectivity prevalent in each culture. As already suggested, this is a complex matter with wide-reaching ramifications in both cultures. Can one say, for instance, that the ensō or circle drawings of Zen calligraphers are ‘expressionistic’ in the same sense as a painting such as Edvard Munch’s striking image of 1893, The Scream (to take two extreme examples, each iconic in its own tradition)? In Munch’s painting, arguably the seminal work of modern Western expressionism, the ‘inner reality’ expressed – not only in the screaming figure itself but in the whole distorted and garishly painted surrounding landscape – is one of an extreme personal emotion (though not necessarily the artist’s own): a neurotic fear or paranoia, a mind overcome by a panic attack or on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Of course, one could see this painting as symptomatic of a general condition of alienation and anxiety in late nineteenth-century Europe, or, more narrowly, as an expression of the famous ‘Nordic melancholy’. But the point is that, in the first instance, it is an expression of personal mental imbalance, whether of the artist himself or of an imagined subject.4 The Zen circle drawings or ensō, on the other hand, are an expression of an equally extreme mental balance, a level of mental poise and of disciplined self-control that few people could aspire to. But the difference is not just between a negative and a positive mental state. Even more importantly, it is between a personal and an impersonal one: that is, between the mental state of an individual neurotic and a mental state that, according to the Buddhist way of thinking, results from the dissolution of the personal ego and the awakening of a suprapersonal, cosmic consciousness – the universal ‘Buddha-Mind’. In Alexandra Munroe’s neat summation: ‘As the ultimate form in Zen painting, the ensō represents void and substance, emptiness and completion, and the union of painting, calligraphy, and meditation’.5 Especially for those ink painters and calligraphers who follow the Zen tradition known as bokuseki (literally, ‘ink traces’), what is meant by the artist’s ‘inner reality’ is not merely his personal, passing moods or emotions; rather it is seen as being identical at heart to the inner reality of all creation.6 He practices his art both to realize and to manifest this monistic

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truth. Thus art itself becomes a form of spiritual practice, a kind of active meditation. The traditional Zen concept of artistic creation was expressed by the great scholar of Zen, Daisetz T. Suzuki, as follows: The artist’s world is one of free creation, and this can only come from intuitions directly and immediately rising from the isness of things, unhampered by senses and intellect. He creates forms and sounds out of formlessness and soundlessness. To this extent the artist’s world coincides with that of Zen.7

The Buddho-Daoist philosophy of an all-embracing unity – the unity of body and mind, man and nature, form and emptiness – also has concrete aesthetic consequences. Body/mind unity implies, for instance, that the painter/calligrapher’s brushstrokes are infused with his ki or life-force and express his moral character and state of mind, his heart (kokoro) and soul (tamashii) – he writes not merely with his hand but with his whole body and mind. Calligraphers’ terms such as hitsui (brush intention) and hissei (brush-force) invoke the idea of the brushstroke as a direct psychophysical manifestation or an ‘imprint of the mind’.8 One of the most devastating criticisms that a student calligrapher can hear from his teacher (I speak from experience) is that his brushstrokes are ‘soulless’ (tamashii ga nai).9 At the other end of the spectrum, as the artist becomes increasingly ‘enlightened’ – that is, as he awakens to the full truth of his oneness with the whole of creation and his mind ‘expands’ to embrace that infinite whole – his brushstrokes are thought to express something far more than his personal ‘inner reality’: they take on an awesome, almost sacred power that is identified with the mysterious power at the heart of all creation – the creative power, often symbolized by a dragon, that causes form to arise from emptiness.10 The ultimate unity of form and emptiness, as most famously expounded in the ‘heart of wisdom’ book of Mahayana Buddhism, the Heart Sutra, is regarded also as the highest truth underlying the arts of the brush: the intimate interplay of black ink and white space – in Buddhist philosophical terms, their ‘dependent co-origination’ – is what makes this art-form, in aesthetic terms, simultaneously both figurative and abstract. When a beginning student is given the assignment of painting bamboo, he is told: ‘First you must become a bamboo’. This is the student’s first lesson in ‘form/emptiness’: to become a bamboo he must empty his mind of everything except the bamboo (displaying what the

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English poet Keats called a ‘negative capability’), but this is possible only because both his mind and the bamboo already exist in a state of emptiness – that is, both consist entirely of a temporary congregation of constituent elements and thus possess no ‘essential nature’. Such is the radical non-essentialism of Buddho-Daoist philosophy, which extends to the human self as well as all other ‘created forms’. But it is important to note also, from a purely artistic perspective, that the implication is that, the more successful the student is in becoming a bamboo, the more successful he will be in painting bamboo. In other words, if his ‘inner reality’ becomes ‘bamboo’, he will be able to represent the bamboo more truthfully in ink on paper. But this representation will not necessarily be a precise or literal one. Most often the artist will capture with a few decisive brushstrokes the most characteristic formal gestures that denote ‘bamboo’. The end result will probably be not so much a formal painting as a kind of minimalist calligraphic writing of bamboo. Traditionally critics were fond of saying that the artist, with a few deft brushstrokes, had captured ‘the essence of bamboo’. One understands what they mean but, strictly speaking, this is an inaccurate and misleading statement, since it contradicts the non-essentialism of the East Asian art’s underlying Buddho-Daoist philosophy. It would be more accurate to say that the artist had captured ‘in bamboo’ the paradoxical interplay of form and emptiness that characterizes the whole phenomenal world. By his minimal use of brushstrokes to convey the formal idea of bamboo, the artist manages to evoke a sense not only of bamboo’s form but also of its emptiness – albeit a pregnant emptiness that is capable of giving birth to bamboo! II. ZEN-EI SHO – THE MARRIAGE OF JAPANESE AND WESTERN EXPRESSIONISM?

There was a moment in the history of the separate careers of Japanese and Western expressionism when the two traditions made tentative contacts with each other and a genuine and lasting meeting of minds and even of artistic practice seemed a real possibility. This was in the early 1950s, when a recently defeated Japan opened itself wide to Western, especially American, cultural influences and when many Western artists and writers became fascinated with Zen Buddhism and all its related cultural traditions, from rock gardening and tea ceremony to ink painting and calligraphy. American artists such as Mark Tobey and Franz Kline successfully adapted what they learned from Sino-Japanese

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calligraphy to their own practice of modernist abstraction, and many of their paintings bear a striking similarity to East Asian calligraphic art. To a lesser but nonetheless significant extent, this is also true of the work and artistic practice of even the leading abstract expressionist of the time, Jackson Pollock, who, of course, is often ranked as the greatest American artist of the twentieth century. Pollock’s calligraphic style of painting necessitated his move away from traditional oil paints and brushes in search of a more liquid medium – and so he ended up using house paints which he often dripped or splattered onto the canvas, which was laid out on the floor like a Japanese calligrapher’s paper. These ‘drip paintings’, with their maze of squiggly, writerly lines, were compared by one Japanese calligrapher to ‘the kyōsō or “crazy grass” style of calligraphic script, the freest form of self-expression in Far Eastern art’.11 Indeed, Pollock provides a good example of ‘convergence’ in another respect too – in his answer to the above-mentioned question: what exactly is the nature of the ‘inner reality’ that expressionist art is thought to express? Influenced by surrealism and by Freudian and Jungian psychology, as well as by the Zen and Asian art boom in postwar New York, Pollock, like the Japanese calligraphers and many of his abstract expressionist colleagues, became convinced that, in his ‘spontaneous’ acts of creation, in the deepest throes of inspiration, he was giving expression to what might be called a ‘larger mind’. Whether this was the Freudian unconscious or the Jungian collective unconscious – and Pollock was especially attracted to Jung’s more impersonal model – it was certainly something more than his personal, conscious, everyday mind. He repeatedly insisted that: ‘The source of my painting is the unconscious’.12 And he would work himself up into a creative frenzy while immersing himself in his ‘action paintings’, aiming for an unmediated, ‘mindless’, purely spontaneous act of creation that supposedly gave direct expression to his unconscious – something like the non-deliberated, ‘mindless’ (mushin) dance of the Zen calligrapher. His drip paintings in particular, inspired in part by the ‘automatic writing’ of the surrealists, introduced an element of chance as well as of unconscious automatism (and the two often seem indistinguishable) and in this respect they are also reminiscent of the haboku or ‘flung ink’ paintings of medieval Zen artists (Sesshū’s ‘flung ink landscape’ is probably the most famous example). In the other direction, leading Japanese calligraphers and aesthetic theorists such as Hidai Nankoku, Ueda Sōkyū, Hasegawa Saburō, and, above all, Morita Shiryū (1912–1998), editor of the influential journal

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Bokubi (Ink Art) and founder of the Bokujin-kai (Ink People Society) calligraphy group, eagerly absorbed the ‘calligraphic’ abstractions of their American and French contemporaries and were inspired by these in their own efforts to introduce modernist abstraction into the ancient art of calligraphy.13 As William Seitz has suggested, they ‘borrow[ed] back their own writing methods in the abstract’.14 The resultant school of so-called ‘avant-garde calligraphy’ or zen-ei sho became one of the most interesting and influential movements in Japanese art in the latter half of the twentieth century, and continues as a vital force even today. Zen-ei sho seeks to liberate calligraphy from a strict adherence to the traditional form of Chinese characters: the artist may use a character as a starting point, but he is free to change it any way he pleases, in the interests of aesthetic effect or emotional power – in this sense creating an abstract calligraphy. Like the Western abstract expressionists, these avant-garde calligraphers often produce very large-scale works, presumably to achieve greater impact on the viewer. In terms of its immediate historical origins, then, zen-ei sho must be seen within a larger international context of postwar or 1950s art, especially the abstract expressionist movement, with which it had something in common and with which it had fruitful interactions. In this sense it was very much the product of postwar intercultural relations between Japan and the West, and of artistic influences or confluences that were significantly mutual in a way that had not been seen since the japonisme boom of late nineteenth-century Europe.15 Indeed, the postwar ‘cross-fertilization’ between the Japanese avant-garde calligraphers and the (mainly) French and North American abstract expressionists is surely the most important case of mutual influence between Japanese and Western artists after japonisme. But it was not all smooth sailing: as Bert Winther-Tamaki has shown in his excellent study of the key figures and events, the ambitious aspirations to international cultural cooperation (and international fame) ultimately were brought crashing down by the harsh realities of the deeply ingrained cultural nationalism of both sides.16 Indeed, in the history of this relationship between the Japanese avant-garde calligraphers and the Western abstract expressionists over the few years that it lasted, with its typical highs and lows, one can see a fascinating microcosmic image of the dynamics of cultural relations between Japan and the West since Japan’s ‘opening’ in the mid-nineteeth century – of which, it turns out, the late nineteenthcentury japonisme boom/bust episode of intercultural infatuation was only the first and most famous example.

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In the end, then, the East/West ‘marriage’ of the ‘two expressionisms’ was not to be. Each side found that it could not extricate itself from the cultural nationalism of its own artistic milieu. Nonetheless, the ‘brief encounter’ of the two traditions had a substantial and lasting impact on both of them. No doubt more was promised than was ever delivered, but it was a fruitful relationship while it lasted, helping to give birth to a dynamic ‘calligraphic’ movement in Western art (involving some of the major European and American artists of the day), and an equally dynamic and daring move into abstraction or semi-abstraction by the Japanese calligraphers, who sought at that historical moment to align themselves with the Western gestural abstractionists. But, inevitably, after the initial exciting sense of artistic liberation that the Japanese calligraphers felt on ‘freeing themselves’ from Chinese characters began to fade away, they found themselves confronted by an absolutely fundamental question: without characters, what was the aesthetic basis of their art? Could it be considered calligraphy at all? In other words, what relation, if any, did it still maintain with the ancient tradition of Sino-Japanese calligraphy? This became known as the issue of the mojisei (writerly nature) of calligraphy, and it was a hotly debated issue in the 1950s. Certainly, in terms of ‘viewer response’, some cognizance of the millennia-long calligraphic tradition and its centrality in Japanese culture is necessary for a full understanding of the impact of zen-ei sho in postwar Japan. Although, as with all modernist art, it derived its initial impact from the ‘shock of the new’, this ‘shock value’ had such an immediate effect on Japanese viewers, of course, only because of their deep and widespread familiarity with ‘the old’ – that is, with traditional calligraphy. Training in calligraphy has been for centuries a normal part of every Japanese child’s education. Thus, the obvious fact is that, regardless how abstract or non-representational sho becomes, moji will always play a fundamental role in it, by their absence if not by their presence. That is, their absence will inevitably be noticed by an East Asian audience brought up with the firm conviction that calligraphy involves the writing of Chinese characters; the confounding of this expectation will always form part of their response to abstract calligraphy. The artist, of course, is then able to play with or play off against this fact – for instance, with vague suggestions of recognizable moji, in the same way that a Western abstract artist such as Kandinsky is able to ‘tease’ his viewers, who expect a painting to be ‘of something’, with vague suggestions of recognizable objects.

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In other words, it is only because calligraphy is one of the most popular traditional Japanese art-forms that avant-garde calligraphy was able to become one of the major modernist art-forms of late twentieth-century Japan, as a significant innovation in a mainstream cultural tradition. Indeed, one might say that the maintenance of avant-garde calligraphy as an on-going vital art-form depends on the maintenance of traditional calligraphy – it is only because the latter still thrives in Japan today that the former still retains its creative power – just as, in modern Western art, there has been a continual creative interplay between abstract and figurative art, sometimes in the oeuvre of the same artist. In both cases the relation between ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ is not antithetical but symbiotic. And this is true in another, even more important sense too: despite its initial ‘shock value’, zen-ei sho ultimately represented not a significant departure or ‘cutting-off’ from the calligraphic tradition but a continuation of it in modern form – in fact, another application of one of the most famous principles in traditional Japanese aesthetics, that articulated in the seventeeth century by Japan’s greatest poet, Matsuo Bashō: fueki ryūkō, or the principle of the harmony in art of ‘the eternal and the current’, a more impersonal version of T.S. Eliot’s ‘tradition and the individual talent’. More explicitly, this principle calls for the reshaping of tradition in popular modern form, with an equal emphasis on the necessity of both a traditional foundation and an original ‘refashioning’ of tradition – a Japanese version of Carlyle’s sartor resartus. This became increasingly evident in the debates that raged among the avant-garde calligraphers in the 1950s: as they sought to articulate an aesthetic and philosophic basis for their artistic practice – in particular, one that would give their work a unique ‘national’ character distinct from Western art – it was naturally to the aesthetic and philosophic values of the East Asian calligraphic tradition that the mainstream practitioners of zen-ei sho turned under the leadership of Morita Shiryū. Morita himself had come under the influence of the leading Japanese philosopher, Nishida Kitarō, founder of the so-called ‘Kyoto school’ of philosophy, which developed its own form of ‘retailored’ Zen philosophy and aesthetics. Thus, in the case of avant-garde calligraphy at least, it is hard to accept Alexandra Munroe’s contention that postwar Japanese avant-garde art is completely uprooted from the native tradition and that it represents ‘a purge of history, a beginning from absolute nothingness’.17 On the other hand, it would be foolish to deny that the example of Western modernism also played a significant role in inspiring the postwar avant-garde calligraphy movement.

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The movement may legitimately be regarded, in fact, both as a natural outgrowth of the ancient cursive style of calligraphy (sōsho or ‘grass style’), especially the extremely free form practiced by Zen monks, and of the mutual influence between Japanese calligraphers and Western abstract expressionists in the mid-twentieth century. The general commonalities between the East Asian calligraphic aesthetic and Western expressionism initially seemed to provide a fertile ground for intercultural exchange and perhaps even the basis of a unified East/ West artistic movement, but ultimately a number of fundamental differences made themselves felt, and the two sides may be said to have retreated back into a familiar ‘East is East and West is West’ kind of cultural nationalism.18 As Bert Winther-Tamaki has shown, raw nationalist considerations came into play: neither side wanted to be seen as ‘tainted’ by an excess of influence from the other: the Japanese calligraphers, heirs of a great native tradition, did not want to be seen as overly ‘Westernized’ or, worse yet, ‘Americanized’, nor did the Western artists want to be seen as mere second-hand imitators of an ‘Oriental’ tradition. The postwar American artists in particular dreaded being labeled as ‘un-American’ – this was the McCarthy era, after all! But, besides these eruptions of raw nationalism, there were also some genuine cultural differences that ultimately came into play – chief among these, as one might expect, the very different cultural attitudes toward calligraphy itself, and toward the relation between ‘writing’ and ‘painting’. The Western artists, of course, had been conditioned by centuries of art history to regard calligraphy as a minor and perhaps even moribund art-form, best kept strictly separate from painting. With a few exceptions such as the eccentric mystical poet-painter, William Blake (1757–1827), Western artists had not tried to integrate writing and painting since the Middle Ages, and had regarded the presence of words in paintings as an ‘unpainterly’ intrusion. Although many of the abstract expressionists’ works had a kind of ‘writerly’ quality – Pollock’s drip paintings, for instance – they nonetheless maintained their abstract character, excluding written words as well as images. The Japanese calligraphers, of course, were at first inspired by this level of pure abstraction, by the creative freedom it seemed to offer, and some of them went so far as to exclude all reference to the Sino-Japanese writing system from their work, creating what seems to be a contradiction in terms, a ‘wordless calligraphy’. As already mentioned, this issue of moji-sei or the ‘writerly nature’ of calligraphy (as opposed to its zōkeisei or ‘formal nature’) became a major and hotly contested issue among

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the postwar avant-garde calligraphers. Could calligraphy dispense with words and still claim to be calligraphy, or was the very idea of ‘abstract calligraphy’ an absurd illogicality? This was a uniquely Japanese version of the ‘abstract/representational’ debate that had been under way in the West since the ‘pure abstractions’ painted by Kandinsky and Mondrian earlier in the twentieth century. On the ‘representational’ side in the West were those artists and critics who argued, harking back to Cézanne, that painting, however abstracted, would lose its fundamental values if it were not ultimately grounded in visible nature. Painting ‘pure abstractions’ one would end up, at best, with a kind of superior wallpaper – a work of purely decorative value. On the ‘representational’ side in Japan were those calligraphers and critics who argued that calligraphy, however abstracted, would lose its fundamental values if it were not ultimately grounded in the Sino-Japanese writing system – that is, unless it were ‘representational’ not in the sense of representing recognizable physical objects but in the sense of representing recognizable Chinese characters or other elements of Japanese writing. Otherwise one would end up with meaningless squiggles completely stripped of the allusive significance and high cultural status of East Asian calligraphy. In other words, were Chinese characters the sine qua non of the Sino-Japanese calligrapher’s art, regardless how ‘distorted’ they were in the interests of formal experimentation, or could calligraphy become a purely abstract play of lines and forms on paper, without any relation whatsoever to the writing system – something comparable to Western abstract expressionism – and yet still remain calligraphy?19 Morita Shiryū, who became the most influential calligrapher/theorist of the time, staked out the middle ground between traditional formalism and pure abstraction, arguing that the art of sho would lose its East Asian cultural identity if deprived of its foundation in Chinese characters.20 This cultural nationalist argument won the day – most avant-garde calligraphers seemed to agree that something was needed to distinguish their work from the various forms of modernist abstract art that were then in vogue internationally. Only a firmly maintained link, however tenuous, with the ancient calligraphic tradition would give their art a distinctive ‘national flavour’. (Although, strictly speaking, sho is an East Asian rather than a specifically Japanese art form – of course the main point in postwar Japan was that at least it did not belong to the all-conquering Westerners and, for similar reasons, pan-Asianism was back in style anyway.) This also meant that they should use calligraphic

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brush, ink, and paper rather than the new-fangled implements and materials used by Western abstract expressionists (e.g., drippers, house paints, carpet-sized canvasses). Certainly, most works of zen-ei sho – at least those that are exhibited in galleries if not always those produced as part of calligraphic performances – have a far more formal appearance than, for instance, Pollock’s huge drip paintings, which attempt to submerge the viewer in an all-enveloping all-over experience or environment. However remote they may become from the original ideographs that inspired them, the zen-ei sho pieces still retain some of the characteristic features of traditional works of calligraphy: defined writerly linear forms interacting with surrounding white space and confined within a definitive overall frame. They may be ‘illegible’ semantically, but they are still ‘legible’ pictorially, as what might called be ‘single-impact images’. The giant Pollock works, on the other hand, might be called successive-or serialimpact paintings – and this is as much because of the ‘all-over’ way they are painted, without defining borders or outlines or any use of empty space, as because of their immense size. On the other hand, since Morita and his colleagues also longed for the international recognition necessary for anyone to be recognized as a ‘major artist’ in modern Japan, they also consciously shaped their art to appeal to Western tastes. (And they achieved considerable success, exhibiting at major international art shows and galleries in the 1950s and ‘60s – to some extent riding on the coat-tails of the Western ‘Zen boom’ and the huge popular success of abstract expressionism.) For instance, Morita established what became something of an established convention among avant-garde calligraphers: limiting a work to one or two characters ‘writ large’ rather than a series of many characters such as one would find in most traditional works of calligraphy (although there were precedents for big one-or-two-character works too in the Zen tradition). An important aspect of the calligraphic art traditionally was the ‘rhythm’ of a long line of characters in interplay with each other: some thick, some thin; some big, some small; some dark, some light; some complex, some simple; some written quickly, others slowly, but all of them moving rhythmically together across the sheet of paper like black figures dancing across a white floor. Morita neglects this whole side of the art in favour of the dynamic impact of a single giantsized character (written, of course, with brushes of a size no traditional calligrapher would have contemplated using). One reason for this was his awareness that Westerners could not be expected to read Japanese

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or Chinese: they might be able to appreciate the beauty of a single character (and they could easily be told its meaning), but, unlike East Asians who could actually read this script, it was unlikely that they would have any appreciation for the beauty of the rhythmic variations of a whole series of characters, or any ability to decipher their meaning. Ironically, Morita was probably wrong about this. As a matter of fact, many of the most ‘calligraphic’ works of the Western abstract expressionists – with the conspicuous exception of Franz Kline, with whose work, especially the simple black-and-white calligraphic abstractions of the 1950s, the Japanese calligraphers around Morita were most familiar – often imitate or reproduce the serial structure of written sentences. Perhaps we might take this as a fairly typical example of the kind of misunderstanding that all too often arises in East/West cultural relations, with each side seriously underestimating the other’s capacity for cross-cultural appreciation and understanding. Apart from the issue of ‘viewer response’, another important reason why it proved necessary for zen’ei sho to maintain mojisei and, in general, a strong link to the East Asian calligraphic tradition was for the sake of artist training. In line with the old adage known to all art teachers: ‘before you break the rules, you should first master them’, it is assumed that anyone who would practice zen’ei sho must first attain a reasonable level of competence in the traditional art of sho – just as, in the West, students who wish to practice abstract painting are often advised to master the techniques and principles of figurative painting first. This is not just a matter of mastering the manual skills necessary for the expert handling of brush and ink; it is also a matter of developing a ‘calligrapher’s eye’ for the fundamental elements of the art: the form of the characters, their disposition in space, the expressive quality of the brushstroke, the tone and spread of the ink. The would-be calligrapher must devote years of practice to this art before achieving anything like mastery even in the writing of the most simple-seeming ideographs – for instance, the ensō or circle. The calligrapher’s mastery – or lack of it – is immediately apparent in the quality of the circle he or she writes. Indeed, the writing of a perfect circle requires a level of spiritual unity between mind, body, and brush that can be attained only after long practice – which is why this exercise is often practiced by Zen calligraphers. In this sense training in traditional sho is regarded as a necessary spiritual as well as technical and aesthetic training for the would-be avant-garde calligrapher; it is a form of active meditation that can ultimately bring him or her to the level of mind/body/brush unity required for the creation of great works of

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calligraphy, whether ‘abstract’ or ‘representational’. Without this training and the spiritual force it bestows, calligraphy would become an empty academic exercise. What all this implies too is that the primary value of this art-form as conceived by its practitioners themselves is not formal originality but spiritual depth or expressiveness: countless calligraphers over many generations have written the ensō, but only a few of them have managed to endow it with perfection or imbue it with transcendent force. Of course, zen’ei sho artists are more concerned with formal originality than are traditional calligraphers – that is part of their modernity, and it is what leads them to ‘distort’ the traditional characters – but, because they also retain the traditional attitude regarding the ultimate spiritual basis of their art form, they are, inevitably, less concerned with formal originality than are their Western counterparts. And this has become even more evident in the recent movement toward ‘performative calligraphy’. III. CALLIGRAPHY AS PERFORMANCE IN RECENT ZEN-EI SHO

Since the Japanese avant-garde calligraphy movement is now more than half a century old, the question naturally arises: can it still claim to be ‘avant-garde’ (zen-ei) or have the passing years inevitably turned that designation into an absurd misnomer? More is at stake here than simply a name. Of course, the name could and perhaps should be changed, but hardcore avant-gardists will not be satisfied with a mere name change. For them the issue is cut-and-dry and reducible to a simple dogmatic rule: once an art movement has been identified as ‘avantgarde’, it can trade only upon its newness or shock-value, and that will last for only a decade or so at most. As Renato Poggioli proclaims (with a little poetic hyperbole): ‘each specific avant-garde is destined to last only a morning’.21 In his excellent study of zen-ei sho and its encounter with abstract expressionism, Dragon knows Dragon (1998), Ryan Holmberg speaks of its ‘demise’ after a decade or so and argues that this was brought about by the calligraphers’ return to their native tradition rooted in the ideogram or moji: ‘Issues of identity and tradition thus maintained the East-West schism and ended the decade-long, experimentalist activities of calligraphy in the immediate postwar era’.22 Although Holmberg concedes that ‘[m]any calligraphers today still regard themselves as ‘avant-garde’, he argues that this is ‘a misnomer. What is known today

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as zen’ei sho (avant-garde calligraphy) is merely a ‘style’ of calligraphy, completely derivative of the works from the true avant-garde movement of the immediate postwar decade’.23 Strictly speaking it is perhaps true that, more than half a century after the movement began, its designation as ‘avant-garde’ has become a ‘misnomer’. (Although even this limited point is arguable – as I have already suggested, it still retains its ‘shock of the new’ value for each new generation of East Asians at least, who, of course, are still educated from early childhood with a very different idea of what is meant by ‘calligraphy’.) Nonetheless, if the word ‘avant-garde’ is problematic, perhaps a better term for today’s art-form would be something like ‘abstract calligraphy’, ‘free calligraphy’, (in the sense of vers libre or free verse) or perhaps even, increasingly, performative calligraphy. But the truth is that ‘zen-ei sho’ has by now become merely a conventional term for a type of calligraphy that takes greater liberties with the forms of Chinese characters than calligraphers usually did before the 1950s. The more important question is: is there anything of lasting value in this art-form (whatever we call it), or did its value belong only to a particular historical moment? Holmberg’s own experience, so attractively described in his Preface, of the ‘profound impact’ on him of works of zen-ei sho when he first saw them exhibited at the Boston University Art Gallery in 1997, would seem to argue for a supra-historical value, since he was not viewing these works as a Japanese of the 1950s, and I doubt that it would have mattered much to him at the time whether the works were executed in the 1950s or the 1990s. At any rate, the fact remains that the zen-ei sho movement is still going strong and, I would argue, has actually developed some new dimensions or directions since the 1950s, especially in terms of its performative aspects. There is often a fine line between art that is merely ‘derivative’ and art that builds upon and further develops a great tradition (which all significant art does). Certainly, I would take issue with Holmberg’s harsh and sweeping assessment that all zen-ei sho since the 1950s has been ‘completely derivative’. One wonders, for instance, if he would say the same thing about all Western abstract art since the early twentieth century – has it been ‘completely derivative’ of Kandinsky and Mondrian? If not, what accounts for the difference? Of course, it is true that certain specific painting styles have a short shelf life. Anyone who painted today in an early impressionist style, for instance, would certainly risk being regarded as old-fashioned and derivative.

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But I would argue that abstract calligraphy, like abstract art in general, is not a specific painting style (despite Holmberg’s claim that it is). It is a new genre or at least subgenre, not a new style, and thus, like abstract art in general, it can accommodate an almost infinite variety of styles – many of which, no doubt, are still to be discovered. Actually, this issue impinges upon a much larger debate in the modern international art world regarding the value of a work of art. With ‘originality’ becoming the supreme value of so much modern art – as opposed to such traditional values as craftsmanship, draftsmanship, or technical mastery of the medium – and with so much modern art seeming to depend for its impact on the ‘shock of the new’, the question arises: what happens when the new is no longer new, or when the shock wears off? Take, for instance the Dadaist art of the 1920s, so shocking in its time but quite tame now and, in fact, almost humorously quaint to our eyes – is such art only of historical value today? In other words, does such twentieth-century ‘avant-garde’ art – including zen’ei sho – possess merely a fading shock-value and lack the kind of permanent aesthetic value that we ascribe to the great art of the past? Perhaps we could do no better here than to invoke again the seventeenth-century haiku poet Bashō’s advice to his disciples as represented by his motto: fueki ryūkō, which could be translated as ‘grounded in tradition, but going with the flow’. That is, to achieve a high and permanent value a work of art must both be deeply rooted in its own tradition and reinvigorate that tradition with new ideas and a new style. An excessive emphasis on fueki leads to a stultifying, formalistic, academic art but, just as surely, an excessive emphasis on ryūkō leads to a superficial kind of art that lacks permanent value. It was exactly for this reason, I suspect, that calligraphers such as Morita Shiryū did not wish to cut their links with the sho tradition by completely eliminating moji. And it is also for this reason that their work continues to have a great appeal even a half century after it was created – and likewise the work of more recent ‘free-style’ calligraphers. But, actually, the story does not end there. Although recent ‘zen-ei’ calligraphers such as my own teacher, Ibata Shotei, continue to produce ‘permanent’ works of calligraphic art for exhibition and sale, they have also introduced a significant change into the nature of the art by placing a new emphasis on its temporal and performative aspects. Indeed, as zen’ei sho becomes more performative, the whole issue of the artistic value of its products becomes somewhat academic. In other words, the focus is shifted away from the aesthetic value of the end

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product as a calligraphic objet d’art and more towards the social and spiritual value of the momentary performative act of calligraphic writing itself, as a kind of dance with a brush in front of an audience. Of course, one could see this as the Japanese calligraphers’ way of keeping abreast of movements in the wider international art world, since, like their Western counterparts, they have moved on from abstract expressionism to performance art. But, as with the Japanese calligraphic version of abstract expressionism, this new ‘performative calligraphy’ is also deeply rooted in the native cultural tradition. Indeed, it is of some relevance that zen-ei sho was primarily a Kansai art-form from the beginning, and thus a product of the part of Japan that still remains closest to the traditional culture, Zen culture in particular. As practiced by Kyoto calligraphers such as Ibata, what we might call ‘calligraphy as public performance’ becomes a dance-like expression of the artist’s life-force (ki 気) or mental/emotional state (kokoro ⼼ or tamashii 魂) before an audience, sometimes accompanied by music (even rock music), with the use of giant brushes and huge writing surfaces. The art of calligraphy thus becomes three-dimensional and extends into time as well as space. The actual calligraphic work on paper is now only one dimension of that art, a lasting record of the expressionist performance, the dance of calligraphic gestures witnessed by the audience at a particular moment in time. Indeed, some avant-garde calligraphers throw away their productions on paper right after the performance, proving that the performance rather than the resultant objet d’art takes priority. Thus, calligraphy becomes a characteristically disposable postmodern art-form. The fact that the Chinese characters written are often so ‘deformed’ that they are unreadable by the audience also undermines the traditional high-cultural status of the work as a finished piece of ‘calligraphy’. These works of so-called ‘abstract calligraphy’ record the calligraphic gestures of the artist, and thus have purely expressive rather than semantic value. But this ‘throwaway nature’ of the art also has precedents in the Zen aesthetic (and iconoclastic) tradition, in which ‘finished’ pieces of calligraphy were regarded as mere ‘ink traces’ (bokuseki) of the act of mind-manifestation that occurred in the moment of writing. That momentary act had the true taste of reality – its byproduct was only a ‘finger pointing to the moon’, not the moon of enlightenment itself. In the same way we might say that, in the new ‘performative’ calligraphy, the calligrapher’s dancelike performance takes precedence over its mere ‘ink traces’. On a more practical, less philosophical level, it is also true that, because calligraphy is a ‘spontaneous’, quickly executed art-form that

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allows very little room for correction and none for deletion, it has always been the case that ‘many are written but few are chosen’. That is, the calligrapher usually selects only a few of his works for preservation, mounting, and exhibition – the rest are thrown away. In the case of those works executed with giant brushes by ‘performance calligraphers’, another practical consideration comes into play: they are simply too big to mount in the traditional way (a delicate process which involves gluing the thin rice paper onto a thicker paper backing). Purists of the traditional calligraphy world may scoff at the presentation of calligraphy as a ‘performing art’ before paying audiences of (mainly Western) tourists and gallery-goers, finding this to be a violation of the traditional Zen spirit of wabi, sabi, and quiet introspection – a spirit opposed to all forms of showmanship and commercialization. They may also find something gimmicky or circus-like about Ibata’s use of the ‘world’s largest calligraphy brush’, and certainly it is true that a brush of that size cannot be wielded with the same masterly control as the much smaller brushes calligraphers normally use, which sensitively register every slight movement of the artist’s hand. And, so, it is easy to detect a whiff of fakery and vulgar showmanship in these ‘calligraphic performances’. On the other hand, it could be argued that, in more prominently involving his own body as a ‘medium’ of his art, a calligrapher like Ibata is actually drawing closer to the Zen ideal of art as an unencumbered, ‘direct expression’ of being. ‘It is the body that is enlightened’, Dōgen Zenji (1200–1253) famously said. And, as Daisetz Suzuki wrote as long ago as the 1930s: What differentiates Zen from the arts is this: While the artists have to resort to the canvas and brush or mechanical instruments or some other mediums to express themselves, Zen has no need of things external, except ‘the body’ in which the Zen-man is so to speak embodied ... What Zen does is to delineate itself on the infinite canvas of time and space the way the flying wild geese cast their shadow on the water below without any idea of doing so, while the water reflects the geese just as naturally and unintentionally.24

One might say that the ‘dancing’ calligrapher casts ‘ink traces’ on paper just as ‘mindlessly’ as the flying geese cast shadows on water. It seems that even Western audiences at Ibata’s ‘calligraphic performances’ intuit this fact – or are somehow convinced of it – as the following two

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‘eye-witness accounts’ of his recent demonstrations or ‘performances’ in Australia testify: The art of Sho ... is an ancient art valued as a visual art ... but also a form of ‘moving meditation’ and as a means to enhance concentration, willpower and poise. We witnessed this recently at the Art Gallery of NSW [New South Wales] as Shotei Ibata, a Japanese living treasure at the age of 68, heaved the world’s largest calligraphy brush out of a bucket of ink (he almost couldn’t get the brush over the lip) and proceeded to sweep across a floor of paper which must have been about 4x6 meters in size. His state of balance was such that on his first failed attempt to lift the brush he smiled and laughed with the audience without becoming distracted from his task and the connected state that he had connected with prior to the performance. Meditation is a must for all performers of the art of sho and this is where the art becomes a mere extension of the seated meditative state. Later he told us that he never knew which calligraphic character he would draw or how he would do it – his aim was to become empty and allow that emptiness to create form.25 A master practitioner of the art of Sho (a brush art that combines calligraphy, Buddhist philosophy and formative art), Shotei Ibata hefted his six foot tall, 40 pound ‘big brush’ and proceeded to let himself go in a moment of Zen release to produce a single character. This time, it was the character for ‘cloud’. The 300 square foot canvas is washi (Japanese handmade paper). You only get a single chance, as the brush touches the paper only once. Locked in a fleeting moment of rhythm and fluidity, both the canvas and the artist’s mind are clear and empty, with neither knowing what the final result will be until the instant ink caresses canvas. The idea is not perfect legibility but an expression of the time it was drawn, the beauty being captured as it is being written. A performance as much as a composition, the moment frozen in a dynamic stroke of muscle and concentration.26

At the very least, then, we can say that Ibata is serving as a kind of ‘cultural ambassador’ of Japanese tradition in his worldwide performances of the ‘Zen art’ of sho. Indeed, in his own writings on his artistic practice, Ibata seems well aware of his role as ‘cultural ambassador to the West’, as in these words which could serve as an eloquent justification for his presentation of calligraphy as a performing art: The art of Sho is a formative art of lines and space in which time plays an important part. The artistic meaning of lines is created and determined

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by the pressure applied on the brush and the direction and speed of its movement. The rhythm thus produced is not a mere rhythm of forms but a dynamic representation of the very rhythm of life as it moves on. When a work of Sho is created on a piece of paper, the limited space of the paper is transformed into an infinite space wherein the rhythm of life moves. Where strokes of the brush cross or overlap each other an effect of depth is produced. A work of Sho possesses an exquisite threedimensional quality. The graceful art of black and white possesses a sentiment that may be thought of as a mystic manifestation of the human spirit. In recent times, particularly from the influence of the avant-garde movement, we find ourselves inclined towards stressing the formative function of our art at the expensive of the form of the characters. This new art, known as Bokusho, which is derived from the art of Sho, is not based on characters but is a much more abstract form of self expression. I believe that the art of all people is ultimately a genuine expression of human life and not an art of portraying objects. The art of Sho, which has at its very basis the desire to express the human spirit, is therefore, an art which has an appeal to all.27

As one would expect from a practitioner of quite free or ‘abstract’ calligraphy, Ibata’s position on the issue of mojisei tends to the ‘liberal’, freely interpretive side of the argument: The art of Sho is essentially an abstract art. It is not representational nor is it merely the art of refined handwriting. Characters as used in the art of Sho are no more than a convention and merely provide a field for artistic expression. Their meaning, denotative or connotative, is not considered important except in special cases ... Suppose the artist has chosen the character ‘kawa’ which means a river: it is composed of three vertical lines drawn from side to side. The artist is quite free to decide how thick and in what form each of these lines is to be, how they are to be spaced and with what force and speed they are to be drawn, That is the point of the art of Sho. I would like to emphasize that this is the art in which characters are used as motifs for artistic expression. One may question why characters are used. The answer lies in the beauty and variety of form – almost limitlessly variable.28

But, as with all ‘popularizations’ of a venerable high-cultural tradition – rock music versions of Beethoven’s Ninth, for instance – one cannot help but feel of two minds about ‘performance calligraphy’. Its undeniable aspects of showmanship, commercialization, and aesthetic

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crudity are disturbing to any lover of the subtle, refined art of traditional calligraphy. (Of course, in the case of Ibata-sensei, his mastery of traditional calligraphy when he uses a traditional-sized brush is beyond question.) On the other hand, it may be urged in their favour that contemporary ‘performance calligraphers’ such as Ibata have developed a whole new dimension of calligraphy, opening up a traditionally hermetic and elite art to popular and international participation and to interaction with other art-forms, especially music. In cultural-nationalist terms, these calligraphers, as evident in the above excerpts from Ibata’s writings, help to perpetuate, for good or for bad, the traditional ‘Zen’ paradigm of a quintessential Japanese culture, as most famously articulated for the West in Daisetz T. Suzuki’s Zen and Japanese Culture (somewhat ironically, in view of the fact that Zen itself is philosophically anti-essentialist). Would it be too cynical to suggest that this is an ‘instant Zen’ designed mainly for Western consumption? Most of the calligraphers are no doubt sincere in their private pursuit of ‘the way of the brush’, but their public ‘performances’ in black kimono with impressive super-sized brushes for largely tourist or foreign audiences inevitably raise such suspicions. These events can assume an almost circus sideshow atmosphere that seems diametrically opposed to the quiet, introspective, monkish tradition of Zen. Although the performance is certainly some sort of ‘contemporary expression of cultural identity in Japan’, one cannot help but wonder how deep the culture and the identity go. Do they go any deeper, for instance, than those instant ‘Christian chapels’ found in Japanese cities that are purpose-built for ‘white weddings’? Perhaps not, but, as with those ‘instant Christian’ white weddings, these ‘instant Zen’ calligraphic performances certainly are fun to watch – and that may be sufficient raison d’être in itself.

Source: J. Curcio, ed., Masks: Bowie and Artists of Artifice. Bristol, U.K.: Intellect Books (2020), pp. 72–90.

10.

Mishima, Bowie and the Anti-Metaphysics of the Mask v

The truths of metaphysics are the truths of masks. Oscar Wilde, ‘The Truth of Masks’ It was the mask engaged your mind, And after set your heart to beat, Not what’s behind. W. B. Yeats, ‘A Mask’ On my wall hangs a Japanese carving, The mask of an evil demon, decorated with gold lacquer. Sympathetically I observe The swollen veins of the forehead, indicating What a strain it is to be evil. Bertolt Brecht, ‘The Mask of Evil’1 I. MISHIMA AND BOWIE

No major twentieth-century writer had a stronger sense of the constructed, mask-like nature of personal identity, wrote more obsessively about it, or acted it out more publicly or flamboyantly in the ‘performance’ of his own life than Yukio Mishima. Both personally and professionally, he intrigued and dazzled the Japanese public by playing, often with great success, a dizzying array of roles and by assuming, often at the apparent risk of inconsistency, a number of different and sometimes contradictory personae: a high-cultural novelist, playwright, essayist and film-maker who was also a low-cultural bitplayer in gangster movies and devotee of body-building; an extoller of 174

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suble Japanese aesthetic and spiritual traditions and critic of ‘Western materialism’ who himself lived an opulent lifestyle in a kitsch ‘antiZen house’ (as he called it), full of faux-Greek statues, garish rococo furniture, and Victorian bric-a-brac; a ‘perverted’ sadomasochistic homosexual (according to his own self-depiction) who also played the part of a dutiful son and staid married man and father; an eminent, internationally famous man of letters, often named as a leading candidate for the Nobel Prize, who ended his life as a sword-wielding right-wing terrorist attempting to stage a coup d’état – the ‘act of a madman’, as the Japanese prime minister, among others, described it. One could extend this list even further, but perhaps the point has been sufficiently made. Mishima presented the world with such a diverse array of personae that one naturally wonders which, if any, was the ‘real Mishima’. As one of the Western Japanologists who knew him best remarked: ‘Mishima struggled hard to find a persona in which he felt comfortable – like a man in search of a perfect suit of clothes’.2 It was perhaps this flamboyantly performative aspect of Mishima’s life and work that David Bowie initially found so attractive – just as he was also attracted to the kabuki theater, another flamboyantly performative aspect of Japanese culture. Bowie first visited Japan just three years after the writer’s death and his fascination with Mishima, as with Japanese culture in general, remained with him for the rest of his life. The fact that he painted a striking portrait of Mishima during his Berlin years – appropriately, in German-expressionist style – is only one indication of this abiding interest. Indeed, I have no doubt that, had Mishima lived a little longer, he would have been equally fascinated by Bowie. They were kindred spirits in many respects. In his persona as The Thin White Duke in 1976, Bowie even seemed to flirt with fascism for a brief time (‘Britain is ready for a fascist leader ... I think Britain could benefit from a fascist leader’, he half-jokingly proclaimed) – a possible sign that, even politically, he was succumbing to Mishima’s influence. Indeed, believers in divinely ordained ‘karmic relations’ or parallel virtual realities might even claim that the two became semi-romantically involved ‘by proxy’: in Nagisa Oshima’s film, Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983), in which a Mishimaesque sadomasochistic homoerotic attraction develops between a handsome captive British officer, Major Jack Celliers, played by Bowie, and the equally young and handsome Japanese officer in charge of the prison camp, Captain Yonoi, played by Ryuichi Sakamoto (like Bowie, also a major popular musician). The director,

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Oshima, admitted that the Japanese officer was intended as a portrait of Mishima.3 Also, the celebrated theme music Sakamoto composed for the film was entitled ‘Forbidden Colors’ after Mishima’s novel of that title, which, as the title suggests, also deals with ‘forbidden’ homosexual relationships. The fatal kiss Bowie exchanges onscreen with his ‘proxy Mishima’ has apparently made the film into something of a gay cult classic.4 But Bowie’s engagement with Mishima went far beyond any initial attraction to his flamboyant, provocative character and lifestyle. He was in fact a deep reader of Mishima’s work over many decades, as shown most conspicuously by a number of references to the writer and his work in his songs over the years. But the ‘Mishima motiv’ running through Bowie’s work culminated and climaxed in his 2013 song and video, ‘Heat’, which, as I hope to show here, can only be understood as deeply embedded in a particular literary context: that of Mishima’s final magnum opus, The Sea of Fertility. II. CONFESSIONS OF A MASK

Although in the West Mishima is known mainly as a novelist, in Japan he is also highly regarded as a playwright. Indeed, a good argument could be made that his genius was more suited to theater than to fiction, especially given his pronounced Wildean sense of the performative or mask-like nature of personal identity. That being the case, it may seem surprising, at first glance, that he refrained from using masks in his plays, even in what he called his ‘modern Noh plays’ (Noh being a form of theater, of course, that famously makes use of exquisitely carved masks). After all, even some major Western playwrights such as W.B. Yeats and Eugene O’Neill were inspired by Noh to use masks in their own plays. Perhaps Mishima gave some hint as to why he chose not to when he remarked: ‘Of all the kinds of masks, the mask called “a natural face” is the one I distrust the most’.5 What this suggests is that, for Mishima, all faces are masks, even ‘natural’ ones; there is no such thing as a fixed and ‘true’ personal identity, a genuine face behind the mask. Thus, to use a theatrical mask would be misleading because it would imply a distinction between that and a ‘real face’ or ‘real self ’ – as do, for instance, the masks used in Eugene O’Neill’s play, The Great God Brown. Both Mishima and O’Neill considered themselves disciples of Nietzsche, but their resultant nihilism took very different forms, especially in regard to human identity. Of course, we might say that

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each interpreted Nietzsche from the perspective of his own cultural tradition. O’Neill, influenced by Freudian psychology as well as by, no doubt, the Catholic idea of a ‘soul’ – the ‘metaphysics of presence’, to use Derrida’s phrase – sought for a ‘true identity’ that was tragically hidden behind the masks of social convention. Thus, what has been called his ‘cult of sincerity’. In his novel, Confessions of a Mask, Mishima was exactly attacking the Japanese version of this cult in its ‘I-novel’ form: his confessions, after all, are of a mask, not of any ‘true self ’. For Mishima, identity is nothing but a series of masks – take one off and another mask appears. In this sense Mishima’s view of the self might be regarded as traditionally Japanese or Buddhist – as most evident in the last major work of fiction he wrote, the Sea of Fertility tetralogy. In Buddhist philosophy and psychology, the personal self has no fixed or absolute identity; it exists and defines itself only in relation to others. In this sense any personal self is a mask that differs according to one’s social role. Even the neurotic Freudian unconscious subject that suffers from past traumatic family relationships, as so vividly depicted by O’Neill, would be regarded in Buddhism as yet another illusory, transient construct, empty at heart – that is, lacking any essential existence. In the words of a famous Zen kōan (meditation problem): ‘What was your true face before your parents were born?’ For Zen monks, that ‘true face’ is not a personal self but the universal, impersonal ‘mindground’ (shinji), which is the ground of all reality. The various social personae we assume throughout our lives may be regarded as masks hiding that ultimate reality. For Mishima as nihilist rather than Buddhist, what ultimately seems to lie behind the masks of self is not a liberating universal Self or mind-ground but a malevolent nothingness that induces not mystical ecstasy but vertigo and paralyzing despair. In O’Neill the painful confrontation with truth carries some promise of a life-affirming catharsis, but in Mishima the only escape or transcendence is in death. (In this sense ultimately, as I have pointed out elsewhere, despite all his mask-wearing right-wing activism, he was, in Nietzschean terms, a ‘passive nihilist’.)6 In this respect Mishima is much closer to another major Western dramatist, Henrik Ibsen, whose man-of-action hero, Peer Gynt, describes how, when he looks within to try to find his ‘true self ’, he merely encounters one social persona after another from his long and adventurous life – sailor, merchant, gold-digger, trapper, student, man of leisure – but it’s just like peeling an onion: when all layers are peeled away, nothing remains.7 Peer’s dizzying encounter with his own inner

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emptiness convinces him that he must turn away from this vertiginous inner void and create himself through action, even though he knows that neither the self nor the action has any ultimate meaning or reality. Life becomes merely a game of masks. At any rate, Mishima’s sense of the unreality of personal identity led him to prefer, as a playwright, another, rarer Noh tradition in which the actors do not wear masks but act as if their own faces were masks. As the Noh actor Kunio Komparu tells us: ‘there are some plays in which masks are not used, called hitamen-mono (maskless pieces) … In such plays the idea is to fix a still expression like a mask on the “bare wood” of the actor’s face – the hitamen is a mask that is not a mask. The face is strictly required to function as a mask, so of course makeup is never used and the facial muscles must not be used to make expressions. In fact, in the most extreme terms, the actor should not even allow the eyelids to blink’.8 One may see a good example of this technique used by Mishima in his film, Patriotism (Yūkoku, 1966), in which he plays a terrorist officer who commits suicide after the failure of an attempted coup d’état in 1936. As his biographer John Nathan points out, the suicide scene, which Mishima called a ‘rite of love and death’, is ritualistically enacted on a Noh stage. Indeed, he seemed to have the hitamen Noh in mind. As Nathan writes: His performance was designed to turn the lieutenant into a robot; what he wanted was ‘merely a soldier, merely a man who sacrifices himself for a great cause’. To reduce the hero’s individuality even further, he wore his soldier’s cap down over his eyes, as if it were a Nō mask.9

Nonetheless, despite his non-use of theatrical masks, Mishima made frequent use of the concept of ‘mask’ in the metaphorical sense. Furthermore, I would argue that the concept of mask is absolutely essential for any accurate, in-depth understanding of Mishima, both the man and his work. Most famously, the first novel that won him a wide readership in postwar Japan was intriguingly entitled Confessions of a Mask – intriguing, of course, because of the apparent oxymoron. Confessions of a Mask is the closest thing Mishima ever wrote to an autobiography and, whereas the word ‘confessions’ teasingly leads us to expect some ‘sincere’ self-revelations – of the sort found, for instance, in Eugene O’Neill’s plays when the characters ‘drop their masks’ (physically or metaphorically) – such expectations are immediately challenged by

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the word ‘mask’ (kamen in Japanese, which literally means ‘temporary face’). According to a conventional interpretation at least, a mask or ‘temporary face’ cannot be an honest or ‘true’ self and therefore its ‘confessions’ are immediately suspect. The reader might suspect, for instance, that the confessions themselves are just another means of masking any ‘true’ identity, presuming that such a thing exists. Mishima’s strategy here has a literary purpose firstly: to satirize the very popular twentieth-century Japanese literary genre of autobiographical fiction, the so-called ‘I-novel’ (shi-shōsetsu) and its ‘cult of sincerity’.10 But there is also a larger purpose related to this: to radically question the very nature of human identity and the very idea of a ‘sincere confessing subject’ or a ‘true face behind the mask’. On one level, a conventional reading of the novel is certainly possible: one could interpret the mask as that of a ‘normal’, ‘healthy’ heterosexual male who confesses that his ‘true self ’, behind this mask, is quite the opposite: an abnormal, sadomasochistic homosexual. But this interpretation assumes that Mishima actually (as opposed to just fictionally) accepts modern Western psychosexual categories, in particular the notion of a fixed self-definition based on one’s ‘prevalent sexuality’. Such a notion would have seemed bizarre to premodern Japanese, or indeed to the ancient Greeks. Traditional East Asian culture generally had no concept of an absolute binary opposition between ‘male’ and ‘female’ or between ‘homosexuality’ and ‘heterosexuality’. The ancient Daoist yin/yang cosmology posited that all phenomena, including human beings, contained an admixture of male and female elements. Mishima too liked to emphasize that the samurai cultivated the ‘feminine’ as well as the ‘masculine’ sides of their nature, for instance by practicing the gentle arts of flower-arrangement or tea ceremony or by applying makeup before going into battle – so their faces would look attractive even in death. Judith Butler’s idea of the ‘performative’ nature of sexuality would hardly have seemed like news in this culture – one need only think of the female impersonators who play such a central role in the most popular form of traditional Japanese theater, kabuki (which, not surprisingly, so greatly appealed both to Mishima and Bowie). Mishima’s sense of the fluid, indeterminate and therefore changeable, mask-like nature of his sexuality is another thing, of course, that he shared with David Bowie, especially in his early ‘androgynous’ period as a 1970s ‘glam rocker’. (Not surprisingly, one of Bowie’s favorite books was Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae.) As Simon Frith has pointed out in

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his Music for Pleasure, this sexual ambiguity was central to the appeal of glam rock in general and had a transformative effect on social attitudes regarding sexuality among British youth: ‘for thirty years now British pop iconography, our understanding of what makes music and musicians sexy, has depended on a confusion of sexual address. Since David Bowie, such ambiguity has been self-conscious’.11 One might also say that the rock star’s performed sexuality has become another form of mask-wearing. With his ‘gender-bending performances’ and typically postmodern ‘slippage in identity’, Bowie was a seminal influence on this trend away from earlier twentieth-century binary categorizations of sexuality as ‘gay’ and ‘straight’.12 Shelton Waldrep argues that this trend also shows Oscar Wilde’s continuing influence on twentieth-century culture, especially of his ‘fluid sexuality’ and his ‘performative paradigm’ that challenged the ‘categorical oppressions within bourgeois society’.13 Needless to say, Wilde was as much an inspiration for Mishima (who referred to him often) as he was for Bowie. There is ample evidence to suggest that Mishima, unlike his alter ego in the Confessions, was close to his own cultural tradition in his actual attitudes towards sex, a tradition in which homosexuality was simply accepted as a natural part of the spectrum of human sexuality. Homosexual love affairs were common among the samurai but to a samurai the idea of defining himself as either ‘homosexual’ or ‘heterosexual’ would have seemed absurd. In this respect the samurai attitude was completely Vidalian (Gore Vidal also famously rejected the idea of a fixed binary sexual identity). Premodern Japanese literature provides us with ample evidence of this traditionally flexible, tolerant attitude, from the large body of homoerotic love poems written by medieval Buddhist monks to the major novelist Ihara Saikaku’s Great Mirror of Male Love (Nanshoku Ōkagami, 1687), a frank celebration of the variety of homosexual relationships. Mishima, of course, identified strongly with his samurai ancestry and wanted to project himself as a kind of modern-day samurai; it hardly seems surprising, then, that, in his own personal life as distinct from his fiction, he adopted the traditional samurai attitude towards sex, which was pragmatic rather than moralistic: more or less everything was permitted, as long as it did not interfere with one’s social duties. In Mishima’s case, this meant that he was free to carry on a double life as both ‘practicing homosexual’ and dutiful family man. Indeed, if Mishima may be said to have exhibited any kind of ‘dominant trend’ in his actual sex life, judging from the ‘tell-all’ memoirs of his lovers in recent years, it was neither homosexual

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nor heterosexual but autoerotic – a peculiarity he apparently shared with another famous ‘narcissist’, Jean-Jacques Rousseau.14 In short, despite what his Confessions might lead us to believe, he had no real anxieties or hangups about his homosexuality or even about his sadomasochism – he counted his ‘perversions’, as he half-jokingly called them, as just another part of the repertoire of roles he enjoyed playing. This relaxed attitude seemed to enable him to be generally successful in keeping his ‘gay life’ separate from his ‘family life’. When his wife objected on one occasion to his bringing home his bodybuilder friends for semi-nude photo shoots, he promptly desisted.15 On the whole, he was, in the best samurai tradition, a dutiful husband to his wife, father to his children, and son to his parents. Nor did he ever allow his pursuit of pleasure to interfere with his strict daily – or rather nightly – writing habits. The games he played with his various sexual personae were strictly for ‘off-hours’. In this respect he was as remarkably selfdisciplined as any of his samurai ancestors. But Mishima’s fictional alter ego in the Confessions of a Mask is not nearly so self-possessed or light-hearted. When he finally realizes, in the novel’s concluding, climactic scene, that homosexuality is his ‘inescapable destiny’, this comes as a kind of devastating epiphany that tears away the ‘mask of normalcy’ he has laboured so hard to construct. During the latter half of the novel, he has been trying desperately to disguise his homosexuality, even from himself. Thus he has been halfheartedly courting a girl named Sonoko, and has even managed to convince himself that he might love her. In the last scene he takes her to a low-class American-style dancehall – itself a prime symptom of the Americanization and degeneracy of postwar Japan during the Occupation. Instead of dancing with his girlfriend, though, he soon becomes lost in rapt contemplation of the muscular, hirsute torso of a half-naked young tough with a peony tattooed on his chest. He is ‘beset by sexual desire’ and soon assailed by the kind of sadistic, homoerotic fantasies which have troubled him since boyhood: the half-naked young man would get into a fight with a rival gang, a dagger would pierce his splendid torso, and his blood-soaked corpse would be carried back into the dance-hall for the protagonist’s delectation.16 Suddenly snapped out of these fantasies when Sonoko talks to him, the protagonist experiences a shocking moment of self-realization. But what is revealed when his mask of normalcy is so forcibly torn away? Is the sadomasochistic homosexual who seems to hide behind that mask a ‘true face’ – or just another mask? The answer is given quite clearly:

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In this instant something inside me was broken in two by a cruel force. As if a thunderbolt had struck and cleaved apart a living tree. I heard the miserable collapse of the structure I had been building with all my energy up to now. I felt I had seen the instant when my existence was transformed into some kind of terrible ‘non-being’.17

The scene is a good example of one of Mishima’s favorite narrative ‘gestures’: the forcible removal of his hero’s mask, a gesture with which he ends a number of his major novels. He seems to be following here Nietzsche’s advice to ‘philosophize with a hammer’: by smashing his nihilist hammer into a mask of illusion – in the case of the Confessions, a ‘mask of normalcy’. What stands revealed once the mask falls away is not any ‘true face’ or ‘true self ’ but only a gaping void, the nothingness at the core of his identity: as the narrator says, ‘some kind of terrible “non-being”’. In other words, the protagonist’s ‘secret identity’ as a sadomasochistic homosexual is no more a ‘true self ’ than his ‘open identity’ as a ‘normal heterosexual male’ – it is merely another mask, a mask behind a mask. If, as Oscar Wilde assured us, ‘the truths of metaphysics are the truths of masks’, when no mask remains, as in this case, the only ‘truth’ is an anti-metaphysical absence of essential self. It is important to note here that the young Mishima’s self-dramatizing presentation of his alter ego as a Romantic ‘tragic hero’ and ‘outsider’ in the Confessions relies entirely on such Western psychological concepts as ‘inversion’ and even on the Christian idea of ‘predestination’. Early in the first chapter the protagonist/narrator tells us that, since childhood, his ‘ideas regarding human existence have never strayed from the Augustinian notion of predestination’.18 And, indeed, the memories he recounts from his early years all support his claim that: ‘I was handed, so to speak, the menu of the sum-total of my life-problems before I could even read it’.19 Lest the reader have any doubt on this score, he recalls that he first experienced homosexual urges when he was a mere four years old, and goes on to give detailed accounts of a series of such experiences throughout his childhood. Similarly, with his masochistic and sadistic urges, he recounts, for instance, how already as a boy he derived a quasi-erotic pleasure from imagining his own violent death and, still more, from imagining the violent deaths of handsome fairytale princes. Thus, before he knew what was happening, his sexuality was corrupted by violence, directed either inwards or outwards. And he even calls upon the authority of a nineteenth-century German sexologist, Magnus Hirshfeld, to substantiate his view that ‘the sadistic and

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homosexual impulses were inseparably linked with each other in the overwhelming majority of homosexuals, especially congenital homosexuals’.20 But does this mean that Mishima himself actually subscribed to these notions, so alien to Japanese ways of thinking? That hardly seems likely. The point is that the traditionally flexible, tolerant Japanese attitude would not have served his fictional – or satirical – purposes so well. In other words, the novel’s central argument, based on Western ideas of self and sexuality, is itself a kind of mask – indeed, the ‘confessions of a mask’. But for Mishima, it must also be said, any confession, whether of Augustine, Rousseau, or anyone else, is the confession of a mask: the author, of necessity, must assume a fictional persona in order to confess – for instance, Augustine the mask of a penitent Christian and Rousseau the mask of a nature-loving Romantic rebel. This is Mishima’s ultimate argument against the cult or myth of ‘sincerity’ so popular in Japan at the time he wrote the novel. What this also implies is that even the protagonist’s self-depiction as a ‘sadomasochistic homosexual’ must be taken as just another mask designed to hide the emptiness at his core, the void behind the mask. And, as we have seen, the fact that the Confessions protagonist’s heavy guilt feelings about his ‘sadomasochistic homosexuality’ may be taken as the exaggerated protestations of just ‘another mask behind the mask’ accords perfectly with what we know of Mishima’s actual everyday attitude towards his own sexuality. To put it bluntly and in another way, in Confessions of a Mask Mishima – or at least his alter ego narrator/protagonist – writes as if he were a Westerner – that is, someone brought up with all the Judeo-Christian and Freudian hangups about sex in general and homosexuality in particular. But this ‘Western mask’ should not fool us into thinking that the ‘real Mishima’ was culturally Westernized to such an extreme extent. He was, after all, an elite-class Japanese inordinately proud of his samurai ancestry, and his ‘real’ attitude towards his sexuality was very much within that tolerant native tradition. We also have to remember that the Confessions is a satire, a mockery of over-serious, ‘sincere’ Japanese ‘I-novels’ which were themselves often desperate attempts to create a Western-style ‘subject’ or ‘subjectivity’ for modern Japanese fiction. This is why, when the novel first appeared in 1949, Japanese critics of his generation tended not to take his ‘homosexual confessions’ very seriously. They quickly recognized that the sadomasochistic homosexual who exists ‘behind the mask’ is not a ‘true self’ but merely another mask.

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This is not to say that anyone doubted that he indulged in homosexual or, for that matter, sadomasochistic practices, but they regarded his ‘exaggerated’ fictional representation of this fact as ‘metaphorical’. In other words, it was regarded as an artificial exercise in ‘aesthetic self-invention’, as an overblown self-dramatization, and as little more than another mask assumed for the sake of fictional metaphor and philosophical argument. More specifically, it was generally taken by Japanese critics as a mask or symbol of his feeling of ‘alienation’ in the immediate postwar era of the late 1940s, the mask of an ‘outsider’ uncomfortable in the ‘new Japan’. The critic Masafumi Moriyasu, for instance, suspects that these judgments are purposely exaggerated, as when the narrator describes his homosexual urges as an ‘evil decadence’ (jaaku na daraku) and the ‘most malignant form of degeneration’ (ichiban akushitsu no taihai).21 Moriyasu argues that, given Mishima’s experience of the aristocratic boarding school, Gakushūin, where, just like at equivalent upper-class English boarding schools, homosexual affairs among the boys were ‘commonplace’, ‘I do not think Mishima really felt, as he emphasized so repeatedly in the novel, that homosexuality was such an extraordinarily shameful thing as to be a “cursed ... special circumstance” or an “unusual ... sexual perversion”’.22 Moriyasu suspects that these ‘exaggerations’ enable Mishima to dramatize himself by donning the ‘mask’ of a ‘chronic case of the age’.23 In a similar vein, the leading Mishima scholar Takehiko Noguchi argues that Mishima’s donning of the ‘mask of a sexual deviant’ was an example of his ‘aggressive opportunism’ – in other words, a case of ‘painting himself black’ so as to blend in with a dark age: ‘this post-war “age” of disorder and confusion, of the collapse of social taboos, of an unprecedented reversal of values, was what made these “confessions” possible’: In Mishima’s own words: ‘Truly I slept together with that age. No matter what pose I assumed of being against the age, still I slept with it’. So Mishima’s opportunism was skillfully aggressive. Putting on the ‘mask’ of a sexual deviant, which seems like his unmasked face, he went out into the world ‘confessing’ honestly that he could not adjust to the postwar ‘everyday life’. While people were looking at this monstrous apparition, trying to decide whether to believe in it or not, Mishima gained his rightful position in the post-war literary world.24 [my emphasis]

Another of Mishima’s contemporaries, Yukio Miyoshi, reminisced as follows in 1981 about the impact the Confessions had on his generation when it was first published:

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Reading it at that time, our generation understood very well that the homosexuality had a symbolic meaning … [After the war] we were in suddenly new conditions, and we continually felt alienated from those conditions ... Mishima and I are about the same generation; the Pacific War started when we were in Middle School. For our type of generation, the relation between reality and normalcy cannot be maintained, so we can understand homosexuality as a metaphor of the effort to form a relation with reality, of a kind of connected/nonconnected relation with reality.25

As already noted, none of this is meant to imply that Mishima was not, in fact, a ‘practicing homosexual’, but, as the Japanese-American scholar Masao Miyoshi writes: ‘It is absurd to see Confessions of a Mask as simply a record of a young homosexual, almost as absurd as calling Lolita a memoir of a child molester. There is a certain aspect of loneliness that only a sexual pathology can accurately shape. Thus homosexuality and autoeroticism in Mishima’s work are not allowed to be the end-meaning of the story, but are made to serve as metaphors’.26 On the other hand, it is also true, in a sense, that, without such ‘exaggerations’, it would have been difficult for Mishima to present himself, in his autobiographical novel, as an ‘alienated outsider’. For, in reality, within the context of Japanese society Mishima was never, at any point in his life, a true outsider. From the moment he received his silver watch for achievement from the Emperor as a high-school student at the aristocratic Peers School in 1944 until the moment he ended his coup attempt by committing ritual suicide in the samurai tradition in 1970, he was firmly entrenched in the powerful elite class that forms Japan’s sociopolitical establishment. And he was well aware of that fact: like the aristocratic grandmother who raised him until he was twelve, his attitude to the ‘common people’ was often shockingly snobbish.27 Mishima’s elite status in a very status-conscious society also explains why, of course, he could get away with so much ‘unorthodox’, ‘transgressive’, hell-raising behavior – any ordinary person would have been hammered down like an out-of-place nail, as the old Japanese proverb tells us. But, both socially and politically, Mishima was an insider who enjoyed playing the role of outsider – that too was a mask, part of his contrarian persona. For instance, even the final act of his life, his attempted right-wing ‘coup’, was of course condemned as ‘madness’ by the ruling conservative Liberal Democratic Party politicians – as lawmakers they had no choice but to distance themselves

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from such disruptive, illegal behavior. But we must remember that, without their friendship and patronage in the first place, he would not have been able to gain such privileged access to the very heart of the military’s Tokyo headquarters. Furthermore, the politicians had patronized him for the very reason that they were deeply sympathetic with his goal to restore the prewar kokutai or national polity, with a re-politicized emperor system and Imperial Army at its core. Indeed, since his death they have been doing exactly what Mishima called for in his final speech to the assembled troops, except by more conservative, gradualist means. As recently as the year 2000, for instance, the prime minister, Mori, announced, in the best prewar nationalist rhetoric, that ‘Japan is a divine country centered on the emperor’. Mishima must have smiled down from heaven! Over the past few years, the present prime minister, Abe, has been working hard to revise Japan’s ‘pacifist’ postwar constitution and to strengthen the military and emperor system – with President Trump, of course, cheering him on from across the Pacific. Indeed, the posthumous Mishima has finally assumed the persona he had longed for during his life: he is now firmly enshrined as patriot and national prophet in the pantheon of right-wing heroes, and every November 25, his ‘death day’, well-attended memorial services for him are held by right-wing groups in Tokyo (although most of these neo-fascists probably haven’t actually read a word written by their esteemed ‘Mishima-sensei’). III. ‘HEAT’: BOWIE’S LAST HOMAGE TO MISHIMA

Given Bowie’s intense, decades-long interest in Mishima, it is not surprising that there are incidental references to the Japanese writer and his work in a number of Bowie’s songs, especially those written in his Berlin years, when, as already noted, he also painted a large-scale portrait of Mishima. But none of these earlier lyrics engage as deeply with Mishima, and in such a sustained way, as his late song, ‘Heat’ (the last track on his 2013 album, The Next Day) and its accompanying music video. Indeed, it seems fitting that Bowie’s ‘last statement’ on the issue of ‘identity and masks’ also engages so deeply with the last work of another artist who was a master of the ‘aesthetics of self-invention’. The work referenced is the tetralogy of novels under the general title, The Sea of Fertility, a work Mishima intended as his magnum opus and final statement of his worldview, and the culminating achievement of his career. Bowie returns here to Mishima mainly, no doubt, because ‘Heat’

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explores in depth the Mishimaesque themes of mask-wearing, multiple personae, and the loss of identity. This is shown most obviously in the ‘Heat’ music video in which Nathan Sawaya lego sculptures are used ingeniously to suggest Mishima-like postures: first a figure kneeling as if about to commit seppuku, then a red figure (suggesting heat and blood) ripping himself open in ‘symbolic seppuku’ to reveal the gaping emptiness within and finally a colourless figure who tears away his own mask and gazes at it with a faceless face (the void behind the mask) while Bowie sings the song’s repeated chorus: ‘And I tell myself, I don’t know who I am’. It is interesting indeed that in this late song Bowie turns to Mishima to exemplify his own struggles with these identity issues – and in the process reveals himself to have been a deep reader of Mishima’s novels. Just as with Mishima’s Sea of Fertility, with Bowie’s ‘Heat’ there is a sense of this being the culminating work of his career, a summing-up of some of his central concerns and obsessions. Nicholas Pegg, in his new edition of The Complete David Bowie, writes that: ‘It is one of the quiet masterpieces of his later career: a profoundly imagined, superbly controlled piece of work which gathers up the distilled loneliness, selfdoubt and existential anxiety of fifty years of songwriting, and boils them away on a slow, relentless simmer’. In a voice ‘languid, sonorous, minimalist, aching with suppressed pain and regret’, Bowie traverses ‘his familiar territory of spiritual uncertainty’. But who is the lyrical subject expressing so much sadness and anxiety? Pegg quotes Bowie’s producer on this point: ‘“The lyrics are so bleak I asked him what he was talking about,” Tony Visconti told the Times. “Oh, it’s not about me,” he said. “None of these songs are”’. The lyrical subject, then, is not Bowie himself. As he has so often done in the past, he wears a mask – or multiple masks – as he sings, and here it is none other than the personae of Yukio Mishima and of the two main characters of his tetralogy, Honda and Kiyoaki. It seems to me that one cannot understand the song’s dark mood and larger import unless one recognizes this fact. Pegg misses this point when he describes the song’s initial reference to ‘Mishima’s dog’ as ‘a willfully obscure literary reference’. On the contrary, it is a rare case of Bowie clearly providing a key to the meaning not merely of a single reference but of the whole song. As we shall see, even the very title, ‘Heat’, cannot be understood outside of this Mishimaesque context. Like Visconti, a number of interpreters of the song have been puzzled by its dark, ‘oppressive’ atmosphere and its starkly nihilistic

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mood. One Bowie blogger, Chris O’Leary, even half-presciently notes the apparent dissonance between the evocation of the idyllic Spring Snow, the first novel of the tetralogy, by the ‘Mishima’s dog’ reference, and the ‘oppressive mood’ of the song as a whole: ‘But the oppressive mood of “Heat” is far from that of Spring Snow, whose setting is a jewel of a prewar Japanese world. “Heat” is more a blasted landscape’.28 But that is exactly the point – the dark mood and ‘blasted landscape’ of ‘Heat’ shows that the song refers not just to Spring Snow but to the tetralogy as a whole, and especially to the typically Mishimaesque mask-shattering final scene of the last novel, The Decay of the Angel, in which the central character Honda is confronted by the nihilistic void at the core of his existence. The sensory impact of this scene is exactly of extreme heat: an atmosphere of desolate impersonality and despair under a blazing, merciless sun. As Bowie obviously knew, extreme heat and a blazing sun often serve an important symbolic function in Mishima’s work: to represent what he called ‘cosmic nihilism’, the power of nature to ruthlessly extinguish our little lives and identities, to make a desert of the earth as well as of the human soul. This is exactly what Mishima had in mind when he gave the tetralogy the overall ironic title of the ‘Sea of Fertility’; he admitted that it was ‘intended to suggest the arid sea of the moon that belies its name. Or I might say that it superimposes the image of cosmic nihilism on that of the fertile sea’.29 Thus a hot, blazing sun often appears in scenes that depict the protagonist’s awakening to the ‘void behind the mask’ – such as the final scenes of both the Confessions of a Mask and the Sea of Fertility. Bowie’s song opens with the lines: Then we saw Mishima’s dog Trapped between the rocks Blocking the waterfall

The reference here is to a key scene early in Spring Snow: the three main characters of the novel, the hero Kiyoaki, his love interest, Satoko, and the observer-character Honda, are walking in a garden together with Kiyoaki’s mother and Satoko’s great-aunt, a Buddhist Abbess, when they are confronted by a disturbing sight that shatters their cheerful mood:

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At last their climb ended at the bridge below the topmost waterfall, and they stood looking up toward its rim. Just as his mother was savoring the compliments of the Abbess, whose first view of the falls this was, Kiyoaki made an ominous discovery which cut across the mood of the day. ‘What’s that? At the top there, what’s damming the water like that?’ … ‘I wonder what can be the matter. Something seems to have lodged itself up there’, his mother said to the Abbess, openly puzzled … ‘Isn’t it a black dog? With its head hanging down?’ said Satoko quite plainly. And the ladies gasped as if they were noticing the dog for the first time … The dog had probably been mortally sick or wounded when it came to the stream to drink, and had fallen in. The force of the current had wedged its corpse into the cleft of rocks at the top of the falls … The dog’s black fur glistened in the clear spray, its white teeth shining in the gaping, dark red, cavernous jaws.30

The Buddhist significance of the image of the dead black dog in the waterfall is hinted at by the Abbess, who says that it reminds her of an old Chinese parable about a certain traveler who lay down to sleep in a graveyard. Waking in the middle of the night with a terrible thirst, he stretched out his hand and scooped up some water from a hole by his side. It tasted delicious: pure, fresh and cold. In the morning, though, he saw that he had actually drunk from a human skull – and felt sick. This experience taught him about the way our minds shape our perception of ‘reality’ and, in particular, about the difference in our experience of life depending on whether our thinking is discriminative or non-discriminative. From a Buddhist point of view, ego-based discriminative thinking is what impedes our ability to live fully, freely and joyfully, to ‘go with the flow’ of life. Especially according to the philosophically idealist Yuishiki (Consciousness-Only) sect to which the Abbess belongs, the life-flow impeded is not external but internal: what is called the ‘flow of non-self ’ (muga no nagare). Discriminative thinking creates an illusory sense of a solid, permanent ego, the one who discriminates between self and other, subject and object; only by awakening to the ‘emptiness’ of the ego – its relative rather than autonomous or essential existence – can we free ourselves from its bondage. Although Mishima himself does not necessarily accept this Buddhist worldview, especially its more ‘positive’, transcendental implications, one might say that he plays or ‘dallies’ with it throughout the tetralogy

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(as his continual use of the waterfall image reminds us) because it seems somewhat consonant with his own more nihilistic view of the ultimate nothingness of the self. Indeed, the tetralogy culminates with a powerful scene in which these two views of the nothingness of the self – Buddhist and nihilist – are pointedly contrasted in the encounter of the viewpoint-character, Honda, with the aged Satoko, who has now herself become a Buddhist Abbess. These two characters personify two starkly different responses to the experience of the inner void: she in the Buddhist way as liberation; he in the nihilist way as disillusion and despair. The 83-year-old Abbess is depicted as an ideal ‘enlightened’ Buddhist nun: serene, dignified, profoundly self-possessed, her beauty almost untouched by old age: Age had sped in the direction not of decay but of purification. The skin seemed to glow with a still light; the beauty of the eyes was clearer, shining through something like a patina. Age had crystallized into a perfect jewel. It was cold though diaphanous, roundly soft though hard, and the lips were still moist. There were wrinkles, deep and innumerable, but they were bright as if washed clean one by one. There was something brightly forceful about the tiny, somewhat bent figure … Her eyes and her always beautiful voice were serene.31

As a longtime, highly disciplined Buddhist practitioner, she has confronted the ‘inner void’, the dark night of the soul, and ultimately found this to be a liberating and spiritually nourishing experience. While no doubt she points the aged Honda towards the ‘illusory nature of individual existence’ in a Buddhist spirit of compassion, his response is rather like that of the Chinese traveler who found out that he had been drinking water from a human skull. Faced with his imminent death and self-dissolution, the worldly and by now rather decadent Honda (who has taken to spying on lovers in public parks) is far too aware of the ‘skull’ to be able to enjoy the sweet taste of the life-giving water. His mental state is far from ready to embrace his own ‘emptiness’, the ego-chastening via negativa of the mystics. Rather he is overwhelmed by his final experience of the mask-shattering nothingness at the core of the self – and of all reality. The annihilation of his personal identity profoundly demoralizes him, and the tetralogy ends not with his Buddhist satori or enlightenment but with his mood of nihilistic despair.

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The scene transpires at the Gesshū Temple, a nunnery in the hills outside Nara. Honda Shigekuni, the only character who appears in all four novels of the tetralogy, has come to visit the Abbess of this nunnery, who is none other than Ayakura Satoko, the heroine of the first novel of the tetralogy, Spring Snow. Honda has not seen her for sixty years, though he has thought of her often, and he has finally come to visit her because he knows he is dying and feels a need to see her before he dies. The reasons for this need seem various. As an old man, he naturally wants to reminisce pleasantly with someone who shared the most meaningful experiences of his youth. Then again, he seems to need to reassure himself that her love for his friend Kiyoaki, who sacrificed his life for her, remains undiminished, despite her ‘enlightenment’. And, perhaps most urgently, he hopes that she, in her mature Buddhist enlightenment, might be able to help him understand some of the puzzling incidents of his own life – especially his encounters with reincarnation – which still perplex him. Lastly, he no doubt hopes not only for enlightenment but also for purification from his contact with her: he has, after all, sunk into a moral quagmire in his old age – he has even turned into a voyeur – and so he feels himself to be in urgent need of a spiritual cleansing before he dies. In short, Honda’s expectations as he goes to visit the old nun could not be higher, and he is so moved when, finally, he finds himself in her presence that his eyes fill with tears and he is unable to look at her. But his expectations are soon cruelly dashed. Instead of the various kinds of comfort and consolation he has come for, he receives a great shock. The Abbess does not even remember his friend Kiyoaki, a young man who died for love of her! Honda suspects that she is only pretending ignorance to avoid being tainted by the scandal which had surrounded her affair with Kiyoaki. If so, if she still is guided by such worldly considerations, then obviously her ‘enlightenment’ is disappointingly shallow. But Honda is in for another kind of shock. The Abbess persuades him to doubt that Kiyoaki had ever even existed, and not only Kiyoaki but also his ‘reincarnations’, Isao, the hero of the second novel, and Ying Chan, the heroine of the third, and indeed Honda himself – all now seem enveloped in a mist of unreality:32 ‘But if there was no Kiyoaki from the beginning’ – Honda was groping through a fog. His meeting here with the Abbess seemed half a dream. He spoke loudly, as if to retrieve the self that receded like traces of breath vanishing from a lacquer tray. ‘If there was no Kiyoaki, then there was

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no Isao. There was no Ying Chan, and who knows, perhaps there has been no I’.33

To which the Abbess responds: ‘That too is as it is in each heart’. The Abbess’s ‘lesson’ is now reinforced, as it were, by the ‘lesson’ of the garden. Stunned into silence by what she has said to him, Honda is led like an automaton to view the temple’s south garden, a vision of absolute stillness, emptiness, blazing sunshine and oppressive heat. The only sound is a monotonous one: the shrilling of cicadas – a sound which only intensifies the silence. As the narrator tells us: ‘there was nothing in this garden’ (kono niwa ni wa nanimo nai).34 Gazing upon this dizzying apparition, Honda’s final thought, which forms the penultimate sentence of the tetralogy, is that he has come ‘to a place of no memories, of nothing at all’ (Kioku mo nakereba nanimo nai tokoro e, jibun wa kite shimatta to Honda wa omotta).35 This is the ‘blasted landscape’ of the self confronting its own nonexistence that Bowie evokes so powerfully in ‘Heat’, at the same time demonstrating that he fully understood Mishima’s ‘anti-metaphysics of the mask’.

Source: John Breen, Sueki Fumihiko, and Yamada Shōji, eds., Beyond Zen: D. T. Suzuki and the Modern Transformation of Buddhism. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press (2022), pp. 225–246.

11.

D.T. Suzuki’s Theory of Inspiration and the Challenges of Cross-Cultural Transmission v

INTRODUCTION

One of the most noteworthy facts about D.T. Suzuki is the remarkable success of his writings in English. As has often been pointed out, these varied and numerous works were almost single-handedly responsible for the rise of an interest in Zen among leading Western philosophers and psychologists of the prewar period, as well as for the much more widespread ‘Zen boom’ among artists, writers, and eventually the public at large from the 1950s onwards. The major contemporary American poet Gary Snyder has described Suzuki as the ‘most cosmopolitan Japanese thinker of the 20th century’ and asked: ‘Can you think of any Japanese person who has done as much as he has to affect the rest of the world?’1 How can we account for this remarkable success? It seems to me that Suzuki was ideally suited to be a cultural translator – that is, a translator not just in the narrow linguistic sense, of particular texts, but, in a much wider sense, a translator/interpreter/transmitter of ideas, of cultural values, of spiritual and aesthetic sensibilities, and of the many other immaterial elements that constitute a complex and ancient cultural tradition. More than any other scholar and writer of the age, he was able to bridge the wide cultural gap which existed between Japan and the West in the early twentieth century. It was an achievement that required a rare combination of talents, abilities and even life experiences: not only a profound practical and scholarly knowledge of Zen Buddhism and its vast cultural-historical context, an equally wide 193

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and deep knowledge of Western culture, and a consummate mastery of English prose style, but also a prolonged period of residence in a Western country, prolonged enough to give him an intimate feel for the way Westerners think and express themselves. All these factors came together to enable him to create works in English that had enormous appeal to Western readers. Another relevant factor no doubt was the cultural milieu of the early twentieth century, especially what has been called the ‘inward turn’ of Western culture, as manifest in the rise of the psychological novel, symbolist poetry, the psychology of the unconscious, the modernist stream-of-consciousness novel, surrealism, and so on. The moment was obviously right for an interest in Zen as another, and indeed very direct and methodical, form of ‘inward-turning’. But it might also be said that Suzuki’s ‘mode of translation’ or ‘interpretive methodology’ belongs to some extent to the cultural context of the early twentieth century. It was a context in which translators or interpreters of East Asian culture could not assume much familiarity with their subject among even educated Western readers. Thus, understandably, they would often resort to providing Western parallels or equivalents to help their audience understand better the unfamiliar cultural phenomenon. Inevitably, this raises the question for us today of whether this communicative strategy led to serious distortions or misrepresentations – for instance, in Suzuki’s case, when he explains Zen in terms borrowed from American transcendentalism, from Christian mysticism, from the religious psychology of William James, or from Freud or Jung. No doubt his use in this way of terms and ideas familiar to Western readers made Zen seem less ‘alien’ to them and enabled them to feel that they ‘understood’ it far more readily than would otherwise have been the case. But how much was ‘lost in translation’? Was his readers’ ‘understanding’ based on a false sense of familiarity? In other words, does the sophisticated knowledge of Western culture Suzuki brings to bear on his interpretation of Zen cloud or distort its ‘original nature’ or, on the contrary, does it help clarify it – even for a Japanese audience? Should his ‘free translation’ of Zen into Western cultural terms be regarded as a ‘historical relic’ or as a stillseminal influence for the future, which will continue to advance the international understanding of Zen in the global age of the twenty-first century? The question is further complicated, of course, by the fact that anyone’s answer will depend on their understanding both of Zen and of the Western religious, philosophical, and psychological terms

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Suzuki uses to describe it. And, of course, one could also argue, from a more purely pragmatic point of view that, even if his works caused some misunderstandings of Zen in the West, these were ‘creative misunderstandings’ that helped inspire some interesting new directions in postwar Western culture – the music of John Cage, the poetry of the ‘Beat generation’, the painting of the abstract expressionists, all supposedly characterized by ‘Zen spontaneity’ – and that also led many to study Zen further and even ultimately to practice it. I. SUZUKI’S CROSS-CULTURAL TRANSMISSION OF HAIKU

Since my own academic background is more in literary than in religious studies, I would like to explore these issues in more depth by focusing here on the intellectually ambitious and lengthy essay (about fifty pages in the 1970 Princeton edition) Suzuki wrote on ‘Zen and Haiku’ as part of his general study, Zen and Japanese Culture. The first question one might ask is: why would a scholar of religion devote such intensive study to such a narrowly literary topic as haiku? The answer, of course, is found in the essay itself. One thing it shows is the influence of his literary friend, R.H. Blyth, the pioneer English scholar of haiku who wrote numerous lengthy volumes on the subject. Suzuki praises Blyth’s work highly, apparently regarding him as the only foreigner who ever really understood haiku. But the essay also shows Suzuki’s own strong literary bent, his literary talents and tastes, his considerable abilities as a literary critic, and especially of course his love for haiku. Even more importantly, it also illustrates his view that the ultimate truth of Zen, being logically incomprehensible and inexpressible, is best expressed through the more indirect and intuitive means of poetry and art than through direct, logically constrained, philosophic or religious discourse. Indeed, this is one of Suzuki’s most attractive features for Western readers, and helped greatly to popularize his work, especially among writers and artists. In this sense, he is no ordinary scholar of religion. More specifically for our purposes here, in this essay too Suzuki has some interesting things to say on the issue of cross-cultural translation and transmission, not only explicitly but implicitly: he demonstrates his own methodology in action. It must be admitted, however, that, despite these many virtues, the essay also is not without its ‘vices’. There are passages that, for the contemporary reader at least, smack of an offensively chauvinistic form of nihonjinron – statements such as ‘it takes a Japanese mind to appreciate

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fully the value of a haiku’.2 Or: ‘To understand the spirit of Zen along with haiku, a thorough acquaintance with Japanese psychology and surroundings is essential’ – as if Zen were of purely Japanese origin!3 But then, as already mentioned, in the same essay he quotes at length from R.H. Blyth, praising his analysis as ‘really illuminating, showing how much of the haiku spirit the commentator has imbibed’.4 As is by now widely recognized, these kinds of ‘contradictions’, if such they be, are fairly common in Suzuki’s work, in his presentation of Zen and Buddhism in general as well as in his writings on Japanese culture. Generally, he seems to be guided by two opposing impulses: one towards Japanese or Asian cultural exceptionalism and the other towards a remarkably open-minded universalism. Another writer might try to ‘finesse’ these contradictions by pointing to the element of truth in both of the opposing propositions – before tidying up with an appropriate Hegelian synthesis. Suzuki does not seem to bother with such academic niceties. He simply states the two apparently contradictory positions in absolute terms, as if no qualifications were necessary. One might perhaps regard this as a mental habit acquired from his long years of training in Rinzai Zen which, to say the least, does not shy away from logical contradiction, and may even be said to thrive on it, as manifested most famously in many of its kōan. As Suzuki himself says in his haiku essay, ‘The experience of reality itself … refuses to be so sharply defined that “yes” can never be “no” and “no” “yes”. Nowadays, I am told, the physicists are trying to use the concept of complementarity, seeing that one theory in exclusion of an antagonistic one does not explain everything. Life goes on whether or not we logically comprehend and mechanically control it’.5 In other words, Life or Reality itself is contradictory, or at least seems so from the perspective of our limited intellects; thus, if we wish to grasp life as it is, sono mama, we must be willing to live with contradictions. What this suggests to me is that Suzuki purposely leaves his ‘contradictions’ unresolved, thus inviting his reader to resolve them or to ‘fill in the blanks’. One could compare this with the kinetic caesura in haiku itself: it is a way of activating the reader’s dormant mind. Presumably, the reader’s mind will flit between the two poles of the ‘contradiction’, struggling somehow to reconcile them – a state of creative mental tension. Of course, this is a dangerous technique, not recommended for novice writers. In this respect, Suzuki’s method of communication is less that of a conventional academic than of a poet

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such as Walt Whitman, who wrote: ‘Do I contradict myself? / Very well, then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes)’.6 At any rate, whereas today’s reader, confronted by the occasional exceptionalist or chauvinist passage, is likely to wince and move on, readers a century or so ago would have been much more sympathetic to such sentiments, since the general consensus of the time was that a wide and perhaps unbridgeable cultural chasm separated Asia from the West – and the point would be reinforced with the inevitable quote from Kipling. On the other hand, Christian readers of the time might well have resisted any comparison of their religion with the ‘heathen’ creed of Buddhism. Today, of course, we ‘global citizens’ are naturally drawn towards the opposite, universalist end of the pole – perhaps also because very few of us today are ‘exclusivist’ Christians in the Victorian sense and find nothing objectionable in Suzuki’s free use of Christian ideas and symbols. In fact, we are more likely to see them as evidence of an admirably open mind. Also, we are heirs of the now long-popular idea of ‘mysticism’ as a universal ‘perennial philosophy’ or religion – thanks to William James, Aldous Huxley and, of course, Suzuki himself among others. Thus, few of us today are likely to find his wide-ranging cross-cultural comparisons objectionable, although we may still find ourselves startled at times by their unexpected nature. In his haiku essay, for instance, just as in many of his other writings, Suzuki makes frequent use of Christian terms and references. He uses the word ‘divine’ quite often, as when he writes that ‘satori is to be an act of divine grace, as Christians would declare’, or even, in writing of ‘the spiritual relationship between Zen and the Japanese conception of art’, he maintains that, when art ‘moves us to the depths of our being’, it ‘becomes a divine work … something approaching the work of God’.7 Perhaps his most startling and ingenious use of a Judeo-Christian analogy is in his powerful defense of the value of haiku, despite its brevity, when he writes that ‘we must remember that “God” simply uttered, “Let there be light,” and when the work was finished, he again simply remarked that the light was “good”. And this was the way, we are told, that the world started, this world in which all kinds of dramatic events have been going on ever since it made its debut in such a simple style. “God” did not use even as many syllables as ten and his work was successfully carried out’.8 This witty and highly original analogy (who else could have thought of it?) might well have had some pedagogical utility in helping Western readers better understand the value of haiku; but in my view, it is

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far more than that: a brilliant insight in its own right which can be appreciated as such by anyone, including his fellow Japanese. Indeed, what is often most remarkable and original in Suzuki’s work, it seems to me, is precisely these unexpected but enlightening crosscultural associations and comparisons, which achieve a kind of mutual illumination of cultures. And this is something even more relevant and valuable today than it was a century ago. II. SUZUKI’S THEORY OF INSPIRATION

But here, as already mentioned, I would like to focus more on a literary than a religious aspect of his efforts at cross-cultural translation and transmission, looking from a comparative-literary perspective at the aesthetic philosophy he presents in his haiku essay and, more particularly, at his ‘theory of inspiration’. This is a branch of aesthetic theory that attempts to describe the psychological process of creative writing or other forms of artistic creativity, especially as it involves the relationship between self, mind, and literary or artistic work. I should add that, although my main focus here is literary and aesthetic, it seems to me that Suzuki’s ‘theory of inspiration’ is not, as might first be thought, only of secondary or peripheral significance in his understanding and presentation of Zen. Actually, I would argue, it is of central import, primarily because of his view of the truth or reality of Zen as graspable only by intuition or feeling and not by logic or intellect. Art therefore becomes the most suitable medium for the expression of Zen – or, one might say, the best way to ‘express the inexpressible’, the ‘Dao that cannot be spoken’ but only hinted at, as in the Buddha’s own ‘flower sermon’, supposedly the first historical example of a Zen-style ‘transmission of mind to mind’. Furthermore, in perhaps the most controversial part of his argument, as we shall see, Suzuki ultimately even seems to conflate artistic with spiritual attainment: he applies the word satori both to the ultimate insight of the Zen practitioner and to the ultimate inspiration of the artist. From time immemorial, of course, poets and other artists have been possessed by a strong sense that the ‘inspiration’ for their work comes from somewhere beyond, below or above their everyday conscious selves – whether from a goddess Muse or from a ‘deeper’ unconscious level of their own minds. In this respect, this fundamental artistic experience is similar to the fundamental Zen or mystical experience – and, in both cases, much aesthetic or psychological theory and religious belief has been founded upon this very basic but ‘inexpressible’ insight or experience.

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‘Where does a poem come from?’ is a question comparable in this respect to: ‘Where does a mystical experience such as satori come from?’ In a word, the answer Suzuki provides to both questions in his haiku essay is: ‘the Unconscious’. Furthermore, he argues that, to access the unconscious, the poet or Zen practitioner must enter a receptive psychological state, which he characterizes with words such as mushin, munen, muga, and samadhi. Thus, Suzuki’s central concern with the psychology of Zen experience is paralleled here by a concern with the psychology of poetic creativity. One might say that he is able to apply his Zen understanding of the mind to an in-depth analysis of the process of poetic creation and of the relation therein between self, mind, and poem. The question arises then: how does the aesthetic philosophy he presents here fit within a larger context of East/West cultural tradition? And to what extent does he succeed in ‘translating’ or ‘transmitting’ it from the Japanese and Asian to the English-speaking world? More specifically: is Suzuki’s theory of inspiration authentically ‘Japanese’ – that is, does it accurately represent Zen tradition on the one hand and the literary tradition of waka, renga, and haiku on the other? Or does it distort or misrepresent those two traditions? And, if it is ‘authentically Japanese’, is it understandable or ‘transmittable’ to a Western audience or, on the contrary, is it so alien to the ‘Western mind’ that misunderstandings and misrepresentations are bound to arise? To give some more concrete examples of what I mean: does Suzuki’s use of the term ‘the unconscious’, then so au courant in Western psychological and artistic circles, misrepresent Buddhist psychology, especially in the context of Japanese poetic theory? Or, on the other hand, does his use of such Zen concepts as ‘no-mind’ and ‘no-self ’ make his theory of inspiration incomprehensible to an audience familiar only with the Western poetic tradition? Although a surprising number of statements predicated on a theory of inspiration are scattered throughout Suzuki’s haiku essay, these tend to be made ‘in passing’ rather than set out as a sustained, logically progressive theoretical argument. With this in mind, I take the liberty here of summarizing these various statements as a series of five propositions or claims that, it seems to me, represent the central argument of his theory and also its major psychological, philosophical, and aesthetic implications: his first claim, in his own words, is that the ‘human mind can be considered to be made up, as it were, of several layers of consciousness, from a dualistically constructed consciousness down to the Unconscious’.9

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Secondly, what Suzuki ultimately means by ‘the Unconscious’ is not the personal Freudian unconscious or even the Jungian ‘collective unconscious’ (which is still a purely human phenomenon) but rather what he calls the ‘Cosmic Unconscious’, the indivisible, non-dualistic mind-ground of all creation: ‘Psychologically speaking, this ālayavijñāna or “collective unconscious” may be regarded as the basis of our mental life; but when we wish to open up the secrets of the artistic or religious life, we must have what may be designated “Cosmic Unconscious”. The Cosmic Unconscious is the principle of creativity, God’s workshop where is deposited the moving force of the universe. All creative works of art, the lives and aspirations of religious people, the spirit of inquiry moving the philosophers – all these come from the fountainhead of the Cosmic Unconscious, which is really the store-house (ālaya) of possibilities’.10 Thirdly then, haiku poets, like all artists, must gain access to and derive inspiration from this very deepest level of the mind if they are to produce work of the highest aesthetic order, ‘works vibrating with “spiritual (or divine) rhythm” (ki-in), exhibiting myō (or the mysterious), or giving a glimpse into the Unfathomable, which is yūgen’.11 Fourthly, to open themselves to this deepest level of inspiration poets or artists must enter a passive but profound meditative state in which they are so intensely focused on the task at hand that they completely forget themselves and transcend their everyday ‘superficial’ minds. Only this level of ‘selflessness’ enables the poet or artist to ‘broaden himself out to embrace the whole universe in his arms’.12 For, Suzuki asks: ‘Is life really so connected with the analysis which occupies our superficial consciousness? Is there not in every one of us a life very much deeper and larger than our intellectual deliberation and discrimination – the life of the Unconscious itself, of what I call the “Cosmic Unconscious”’?13 Fifthly and, as I have said, perhaps most controversially, Suzuki seems to unconditionally equate this aesthetic trajectory of the poet or artist with the spiritual trajectory of the Buddhist monk: both achieve ‘enlightenment’ (satori) – that is, in his terms, union with the Cosmic Unconscious – by intense concentration (samādhi or ekāgratā) while in a state of no-self (muga) or no-mind (mushin). The following are a few examples of Suzuki actual deployment of this theory in his haiku essay: The artist, at the moment when his creativeness is at its height, is transformed into an agent of the creator. This supreme moment in the life

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of an artist, when expressed in Zen terms, is the experience of satori. To experience satori is to become conscious of the Unconscious (mushin, no-mind), psychologically speaking. Art has always something of the Unconscious about it.14 Haiku, like Zen, abhors egoism in any form of assertion. The product of art must be entirely devoid of artifice or ulterior motive of any kind. There ought not to be any presence of a mediatory agent between the artistic inspiration and the mind into which it has come. The author is to be an altogether passive instrument for giving an expression to the inspiration.15 Whatever aspects of the Unconscious there may be, they can never be tapped unless one experiences samādhi or sammai, which is the state of one-pointedness (ekāgratā), that is, of concentration. And this state is realized only when the artist, with his knowledge of all the technicality, is still sincerely and loyally looking for a complete mastery of the art.16 To reach the bedrock of one’s being means to have one’s Unconscious entirely cleansed of egoism, for the ego penetrates even the Unconscious so called. Not the ‘Collective Unconscious’ but the ‘Cosmic Unconscious’ must be made to reveal itself unreservedly. This is why Zen so emphasizes the significance of ‘no-mind’ (mushin) or ‘no-thought’ (munen), where we find infinite treasures well preserved.17

A somewhat subtler use of the theory occurs in his explication of haiku master Bashō’s most famous work: ‘An old pond/a frog jumps in:/the sound of water’, (Furu ike ya kawazu tobikomu mizu no oto). Suzuki’s Rinzai Zen training reveals itself in his rejection of any suggestion of quietism and his interpretation of the haiku’s satori insight as a dynamic intuition of the unity of form and emptiness, the natural world and the Cosmic Unconscious. It is not the serene placidity of the old pond that precipitates the poet’s moment of awakening to a deeper reality but rather the plop made by the frog as it leaps into the water. This reminds us of the Zen ‘enlightenment stories’ narrated by Suzuki himself in which a monk’s satori is said to have been triggered by a sudden sound – for instance, of a stone striking bamboo. In this respect, such everyday sounds often play a key role in the world of Zen: It is by intuition alone that this timelessness of the Unconscious is truly taken hold of. And this intuitive grasp of Reality never takes place when a world of Emptiness is assumed outside our everyday world of the senses; for these two worlds, sensual and supersensual, are not separate

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but one. Therefore, the poet sees into his Unconscious not through the stillness of the old pond but through the sound stirred up by the jumping frog. Without the sound there is no seeing on the part of Bashō into the Unconscious, in which lies the source of creative activities and upon which all true artists draw for their inspiration. It is difficult to describe this moment of consciousness where polarization ceases or rather starts, for these contradictory terms are applicable there without causing logical inconvenience. It is the poet or the religious genius who actually has this kind of experience. And, according to the way this experience is handled; it becomes in one case Bashō’s haiku and in the other a Zen utterance.18

Furthermore: Bashō came across this Unconscious, and his experience was given an expressive utterance in his haiku. The haiku is not just singing of a tranquility imagined to be underneath the superficial tumult of the worldly life. His utterance points to something further below, which is at the same time something we encounter in this world of pluralities, and it is on account of this something that our world gains its value and meaning. Without reckoning on the Cosmic Unconscious, our life, lived in the realm of relativities, loses its moorings altogether.19

As may be seen, Suzuki freely mixes traditional Buddhist terms – samādhi, ekāgratā, mushin, etc. – with terms drawn from modern psychology describing the unconscious, always a central concern of his thought. But, among his Japanese contemporaries, he was certainly not alone in adopting this ‘culturally hybrid’ mode of thought. Most conspicuously, his close friend, the major Kyoto School philosopher, Nishida Kitarō, took much the same approach. For instance, Nishida’s early aesthetic philosophy, as Steve Odin has pointed out, ‘reformulates the Kantian sense of beauty as a disinterested pleasure, or an artistic detachment from egoistic desires, in terms of a key philosophical notion of Zen Buddhism in Japan: namely, muga 無我 (Sanskrit: anātman)’.20 Indeed, Odin also notes that: ‘Nishida’s early notion of beauty as muga designating no-self or ecstasy itself corresponds to his associate Daisetz T. Suzuki’s position expressed in Zen and Japanese Culture, whereby the traditional Japanese arts of ink wash painting, calligraphy, flower arrangement, haiku poetry, the tea ceremony, and samurai martial arts are all alike based on the realization of Zen satori (悟り) or sudden enlightenment rooted in mushin (無心) or “no-mind”’.21

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As already noted, this invites two questions: firstly, by adopting such apparently contemporary and ‘Western’ terms as Freud’s ‘the unconscious’, Jung’s ‘the collective unconscious’, or a term reminiscent of Richard Bucke’s ‘cosmic consciousness’, and, by using these terms to argue that the haiku poet’s insight is somehow equivalent to a Zen satori, does Suzuki misrepresent the cultural tradition to which both haiku and Zen belong? For instance, are ideas such as muga and mushin incompatible with a Western psychology of the unconscious? Secondly, if this is a ‘misrepresentation’, does it give Western readers merely the illusion that they have been afforded an in-depth understanding of Zen and haiku and of the relation between them? Early in the essay Suzuki offers a rather conventional definition of satori as ‘seeing directly into the mystery of our own being, which, according to Zen, is Reality itself ’.22 He also points out that, from an epistemological point of view, satori is ‘an intuitive mode of understanding’ as opposed to a mere ‘conceptual knowledge’ that is ‘superficial’ because it is not a direct personal apprehension of the ‘living truth’.23 But he then goes on to claim that this direct intuitive experience of reality is obtainable as much through artistic as through Zen practice and, indeed, that the greatest art is always an expression of this ultimate experience: ‘This supreme moment in the life of an artist, when expressed in Zen terms, is the experience of satori. To experience satori is to become conscious of the Unconscious (mushin, no-mind), psychologically speaking’.24 In other words, the artist’s intuition of reality deserves to be called satori because it too is an experience of the ‘Unconscious’. On the face of it, this is an extraordinary claim from a Zen or even from a more generally Buddhist point of view. In religious terms, it could even be considered heretical. Artistic practice, after all, was never part of Shakyamuni’s ‘noble eightfold path’ to liberation and enlightenment. Orthodox Buddhists, in fact, have often regarded artistic pursuits as dangerous distractions from the correct path. Although, of course, there is a long and rich tradition of Buddhist art throughout Asia, artistic practice was usually regarded as secondary to more purely spiritual practices such as meditation – a finger pointing at the moon, perhaps, but not the moon of enlightenment itself. Even Buddhist artists themselves have often felt a certain ambivalence about the spiritual value or otherwise of their art. The great haiku poet Bashō, for instance, whose Zen insight is so highly praised by Suzuki in this essay, may well have suffered from this ambivalence. According to one of

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his leading contemporary interpreters, Ueda Makoto, in Bashō’s rather melancholy death poem that begins Tabi ni yande (Falling ill on a journey) – so different to the usual triumphant tone Zen masters adopt in their death poems – the image of the withered moor ‘seems to suggest Bashō’s ultimate failure to enter a realm of religious enlightenment’ and thus represents his disillusion with poetry as a ‘way’ to liberation.25 So how is it that Suzuki can make such a bold and apparently radical claim? In providing an answer to this question, his haiku essay also sheds light on his general view of what is really important or essential to Zen practice. In short, he is able to make this claim because of his conception of what he calls the ‘Zen method’, that is, ‘a method of its own to realize satori, to bring it within the reach of every ordinary mind’, a method, he claims, by which ‘Zen is distinguished from other schools of Buddhism’.26 By ‘Zen method’ one might naturally assume that Suzuki is referring to zazen (seated meditation), which, as the Buddhist sect’s name indicates, is commonly regarded as its central practice. But seated meditation is a practice common to all forms of Buddhism and, besides, Suzuki’s attitude towards zazen was famously ambivalent. Indeed, at times in his writings he seems to disparage the practice on the grounds that it is not a natural activity of the mind but rather yet another artificial encumbrance. In his Introduction to Zen Buddhism, for instance, he writes: If there is anything Zen strongly emphasizes it is the attainment of freedom; that is, freedom from all unnatural encumbrances. Meditation is something artificially put on; it does not belong to the native activity of the mind.27

And, in the same work again: Zen perceives and feels, and does not abstract and meditate. Zen penetrates and is finally lost in the immersion. Meditation, on the other hand, is outspokenly dualistic and consequently inevitably superficial.28

As might be expected, he has often been criticized for his attitude by more ‘orthodox’ Zen practitioners. The popular American Zen teacher, Philip Kapleau, for instance, complained that Suzuki’s almost complete failure to mention zazen in his writings was proof of his overly ‘philosophical, theoretical approach to Zen’.29 In my view, however, this is not quite accurate. What Suzuki’s ‘neglect’ of zazen really signifies is

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that he preferred, at least in his writings, to emphasize another, albeit closely related, aspect of the practice of the Rinzai school of Zen, in which he himself was trained. I refer to the kōan (meditation problem) system – which, as he makes clear, is designed, just as much as is zazen, to take the student beyond what he called ‘conceptual knowledge’, that is, theory and philosophy. This is what Suzuki refers to in his haiku essay as the ‘Zen method’, and it is his emphasis on this particular aspect of Zen training that enables him, in this essay, to draw such close parallels between the painful struggles towards ‘enlightenment’ of both Zen students and artists, as for instance in the following passage: Generally speaking, satori breaks out when a man is at the end of his resources. He feels within himself that something remains to complete his mastership of the art, whatever it may be. He has nothing to learn as far as the techniques are concerned, but if he is really dedicated to his chosen field of work and sincere to himself, he is sure to have a feeling of uneasiness owing to something in his Unconscious, which is now disquietingly trying to move out into the open area of consciousness. In the case of Zen study as it is carried on nowadays, there are the master and the kōan confronting the student. In the case of artistic disciplines. individual experiences may vary, though there are a certain number of fixed patterns.30

We begin to see the full implications of this argument when Suzuki next applies it to the particular case of haiku. He illustrates his point by recounting an episode in the life of the well-known ‘haiku poetess’, Chiyo (1703–1775). When she studied with a certain haiku master, he asked her to write about a cuckoo. She struggled mightily day and night to write a good haiku on this topic, just as Zen students struggle relentlessly to answer their kōan, but the haiku master, just like a Zen master, rejected one attempt after another. Then, at last, came her breakthrough moment – or, as Suzuki would have it, her satori. She was so intent on composing her haiku that she lost all sense of selfconsciousness and the poem naturally formed in her mind. Whereupon, as Suzuki writes: When this was shown to the master, he at once accepted it as one of the finest haiku ever composed on the cuckoo. The reason was that the haiku truly communicated the author’s genuine inner feeling about the hototogisu and that there was no artificial or intellectually calculated

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scheme for any kind of effect; that is to say, there was no ‘ego’ on the part of the author aiming at its own glorification. Haiku, like Zen, abhors egoism in any form of assertion. The product of art must be entirely devoid of artifice or ulterior motive of any kind. There ought not to be any presence of a mediatory agent between the artistic inspiration and the mind into which it has come. The author is to be an altogether passive instrument for giving an expression to the inspiration.31

In other words, Chiyo’s intense mental struggle and ultimate self-surrender, just as in the case of a Zen student tackling a baffling kōan, finally gave her access to the Unconscious, the ‘intuitive prehension’ of which, according to Suzuki’s theory of inspiration, is ‘the foundation not only of philosophy but of all other cultural activities’.32 But, before we can attempt to address the two questions posed above regarding Suzuki’s central argument in his haiku essay, we must next look, however briefly, at some well-known examples of the theory of inspiration in the Japanese and Western poetic traditions, and try to determine how Suzuki’s theory fits within that much larger context. III. SHINKEI’S SASAMEGOTO

Suzuki’s use of the term ‘the unconscious’, what exactly he means by it, and how this relates to Buddhist and modern psychology, and to Zen practice, are all of course complex issues that could be debated at great length. Trying to define ‘the unconscious’ is rather like trying to define ‘nothingness’ – there’s nothing to hold on to! Both nothingness and the unconscious, Suzuki would say, can only be intuited or ‘felt’ rather than logically defined: ‘It is by intuition alone that this timelessness of the Unconscious is truly taken hold of ’.33 But one thing he makes clear in this essay is that the unconscious he refers to is not a Freudian, personal unconscious or even a Jungian collective unconscious. It is what he calls a ‘cosmic unconscious’, something no doubt like the ‘Buddha mind’, an impersonal mind that pervades the whole of reality. And certainly it is also true, as Suzuki himself points out, that Buddhism has possessed some idea of an unconscious dimension of the human mind at least as far back as the Yogacāra school of fourth-century India, with its idea of ālayavijñāna or ‘storehouse consciousness’. But here I am interested in the issue mainly from a literary point of view, and the fact is that Japanese writers on poetry have also long applied this aspect of Buddhist psychology to a theory of inspiration. An eloquent example may be

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found in the fifteenth-century aesthetic treatise, Sasamegoto (Murmured Conversations, 1463–1464), by Shinkei, a renga master who was also a Tendai Buddhist monk. Shinkei’s work is a thoroughgoing exposition of the relation between Buddhism and poetry. In a way typical of the aesthetic theorists of the Muromachi period, he wanted nothing less than to turn his art form – in this case, poetry – into a meditative discipline that would lead its practitioners to spiritual liberation and enlightenment. In this respect he was every bit as spiritually ambitious for poetry as was Suzuki. Shinkei’s aim, in writing his treatise/handbook, was to revive what he saw as the ‘golden age’ tradition of major earlier poets such as the courtier Fujiwara Teika (1162–1241) and the Buddhist monk-poet Saigyō (1118–1190), whose poetry, whether the short, 31-syllable waka or the lengthy renga (commonly 100 verses), was deeply imbued with Buddhist meditative practice, philosophy and aesthetics. Such poets had a high ambition for poetry. Not only would it somehow ‘express the inexpressible’ – the profound insights into reality gained by Buddhist meditation – but the practice of poetry in itself would become a michi, a Way to enlightenment more or less equivalent to the practice of meditation. Poets of this golden age, wrote Shinkei, ‘held that it is the Style of Meditation [ushintei] that is the most noble and consummate. It is poetry in which the mind has dissolved and is profoundly at one with the numinosity [aware] of things; poetry that issues from the very depths of the poet’s being and may truly be said to be his own waka, his own authentic renga’.34 As Shinkei’s Englishlanguage translator, Esperanza Ramirez-Christensen, writes, ‘The focus in ushintei is the non-egoistic mind, one that has “dissolved” its own narrow concerns and relates to things in the profound spirit of aware, which here refers to a recognition of the numinosity of phenomena, the utter uniqueness of each and every thing in its very temporality and ontological dependency, a self-overcoming nondualism of “subject” and “object” that paradoxically enough gives rise to the poet’s “own waka, his own authentic renga” (waga uta waga renga). From this point of view, “the ultimate” refers to the attainment of the illumined mind in meditation and is in this sense synonymous with ushintei’.35 The term used by Shinkei that seems closest to Suzuki’s ‘unconscious’ is ‘mind-ground’ (shinji) and, as with Suzuki’s unconscious, he regards this as the ultimate source of poetic inspiration. As with Suzuki’s theory of inspiration too, the poet must enter a meditative, egoless state of mind in order to access this deepest level of the ‘ground’ mind. Because mind is regarded as the absolute, all-pervasive ground of reality,

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an experience of mind or Mind at the deepest level is not, strictly speaking, seen as a personal or subjective experience. In fact, one cannot enjoy this (often ecstatic, unitary) experience of Mind unless one surrenders one’s sense of personal, subjective self-standing in opposition to an ‘objective’ world. At any rate, it is fairly obvious from all this that Suzuki’s theory of inspiration is perfectly in accord with Shinkei’s. Of course, it is also true that not all Japanese poets have had such a highly ambitious vision of poetry’s spiritual mission; but, certainly, one can trace a tradition of major poets of this Buddhist type over the centuries from Saigyō through Shinkei and Sōgi up to Bashō and on even to the important modern Zen poet, Takahashi Shinkichi. All would have been fundamentally in agreement with Suzuki’s Zen theory of inspiration. Suzuki has sometimes been accused of exaggerating the influence of Zen on Japanese culture. Whatever the truth of that generally, it is undeniable that Zen had a profound influence on a number of major Japanese poets, from Saigyō to Bashō. But it also depends what is meant by ‘Zen’. When Saigyō says that ‘The Way of Poetry is wholly the practice of Zen meditation’ (kadō wa hitoe ni zenjō shugyō no michi)’, and Shinkei quotes this approvingly, what they are both referring to is probably not the Zen sect (neither of them were Zen monks) but Zen in the generic sense of ‘meditation’ or dhyāna.36 Meditation has had a great appeal for Japanese poets, probably for the same reason it has appealed to Western poets such as Gary Snyder, Leonard Cohen, and many other contemporary writers and artists: it promises a way of access to the deep-mind source of creative inspiration. Indeed, generations of English-language poets no doubt have been inspired to practice Zen meditation by Suzuki’s theory of inspiration, as elaborated in this particular haiku essay. One can also see the influence of this theory, either directly or indirectly, in the many popular how-to books on ‘Zen and the art of writing’, such as Natalie Goldberg’s bestseller, Writing Down the Bones. In his commemorative essay on Suzuki, Gary Snyder speaks eloquently of the great influence his work had on himself and his generation of ‘Beat’ poets: ‘We stood for original human nature and the spontaneous creative spirit. Dr. Suzuki’s Zen presentation of the “original life force,” the “life-impulse,” “the enlivening spirit of the Buddha” – the emphasis on personal direct experience, seemed to lead in the same direction’.37 Furthermore: ‘I also came to see that Dr. Suzuki’s presentation of Zen is in many ways a creative leap out of the medieval mentality that brought Zen to that point, a personal way of pointing Zen in

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a fresh, liberating direction, without even saying so. D.T. Suzuki gave me the push of my life and I can never be too grateful. Now, living again in America, I see evidence of his strong, subtle effect in many arts and fields, as well as in the communities of Americans now practicing Zen’.38 A similar claim could be made about Suzuki’s impact on postwar American visual artists, especially such ‘abstract expressionists’ as Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell. In his study of Motherwell, Robert Hobbs writes: ‘So important were Zen Buddhist ideas to Americans during the initial post-World War II decade that this time period should be regarded as the Zen moment in American culture’.39 And he acknowledges that the ‘primary sources for learning about Zen were the publications of Suzuki’, who ‘in his many writings was able to couch Zen in universal terms, often using Western philosophic concepts and making comparisons with Christianity, so that Zen, which at the time had few serious followers in post-war Japan, was able to achieve wide acceptance in the U.S’.40 This popularity, the ‘Zen boom’ among writers and artists, also already seems to provide an answer to my second question: does Suzuki’s use of such Zen concepts as ‘no-mind’ and ‘no-self ’ make his theory of inspiration incomprehensible to an audience familiar only with the Western poetic tradition? But does this also suggest that these ideas are not really as ‘alien’ to an educated Western readership as might first be suspected? In the concluding part of his essay, in which he proposes to ‘take up some of the haiku in their relation to the Japanese character’ (a rather dubious project in itself ), Suzuki, rather ironically, seems to argue for an essential difference between Japanese and Western poetic practice. He sets up a nihonjinron-style dichotomy between Japanese and Western poetry on the basis of a supposed greater ‘personalism’ or self-consciousness or perhaps even egotism on the part of Western poets. The ‘haiku masters’, he claims, ‘are not at all ego-centered’ because: ‘if they were they could not be poets. For the poet first of all must be selfless so that he can broaden himself out to embrace the whole universe in his arms’.41 In short, ‘the haiku poet, if he at all aspires to be one, cannot have his self assertive in any circumstance’.42 On the other hand, comparing a ‘flower poem’ by Bashō with one by Tennyson, which he finds overly analytical and self-centered, he finds that: ‘Bashō knew better than Tennyson. He was no scientist bent on analysis and experiment, nor was he a philosopher. When he saw the white-flowered nazuna,

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so humbly, so innocently, and yet with all its individuality, growing among other vegetation, he at once realized that the herb was no other than himself ’.43 In other words, Suzuki here seems to claim that the haiku poet, because of his humility or egolessness, has a unique ability to overcome subject-object dualities and become one with the object of his rapt attention. If this were actually true, it would mean, indeed, that haiku poets are the world’s only genuine poets, since, as Suzuki himself points out, this capacity for an ego-transcending relationship with the world is a necessary condition for all great poetry: ‘For the poet first of all must be selfless so that he can broaden himself out to embrace the whole universe in his arms’.44 On this latter point, in fact, many Western theorists of poetic inspiration would completely agree with him. But Suzuki’s legendary cross-cultural understanding seems to desert him here, since he seems unaware of the rich tradition of something very similar to the idea of muga/mushin in the Western theory of poetic inspiration. On the contrary, he argues that: ‘What we can say generally about Western poetry on nature is that it is dualistic and personal, inquisitive and analytical’.45 In contrast: ‘Bashō has no need for dualism and personalism’.46 As an example of the ‘dualism and personalism’ of Western nature poetry, he refers to Wordsworth’s lines about ‘a violet by a mossy stone half hidden from the eye’ and claims that, unlike a Japanese poet: … his interest is not in the violet as such. It comes to his notice only when he thinks of the fate of a country maid who lives and dies unknown and unpraised. The violet may bloom unknown and unpraised, it may wither unknown and unpraised. The poet would pay no attention to it. It is only when he thinks of the maid he loves. His romantic contemplation of it comes only in connection with a human interest.47

But surely, one might object, in many classical Japanese poems too, the poet is reminded of his love by a flower or some other beautiful object in nature? In fact, it would be harder to find a more universal trope in all of world poetry than this, and thus to try to characterize it as somehow uniquely ‘Western’ and symptomatic of the inability of Western poets to overcome subject/object dualism is obviously absurd. Suzuki’s exaggerated and stereotypical presentation here of an East/ West cultural divide in the world of poetry may perhaps be explained if not excused by the literary-historical context in which he was writing, and by the consequent polemical tone he adopts in some parts of the

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essay. Writing in English and addressing himself to an English-speaking audience of the mid-twentieth century, he intended his essay, on one level at least, as a ‘defense of haiku’. But why did he feel that such a defense was necessary? No doubt he was aware of the possible influence on his readers of the deprecatory comments about haiku made by the earlier, Victorian generation of Western Japanologists – in particular W.G. Aston, pioneer author of the first book-length history of Japanese literature in English, who dismissed haiku rather summarily with the claim that: ‘nothing which deserves the name of poetry can well be contained in the narrow compass of a verse of seventeen syllables’.48 To this sort of patronizing view Suzuki retorts: ‘I am afraid that the uninitiated may not be able to recognize anything poetically enlivening in those seventeen syllables so loosely strung. And yet what a deep truth of intuition is herein given utterance – a truth which cannot be expressed so inspiringly even with a formidable array of ideas!’49 Furthermore: ‘As far as original inspiration is concerned, Bashō is just as great a poet as any of the West. The number of syllables has nothing to do with the true quality of the poet’.50 It may well be that he had Aston in mind when he wrote the rather chauvinistic statement already quoted, and what follows it: ‘It takes a Japanese mind to appreciate fully the value of a haiku; foreign critics, whose way of feeling is not in accord with the Japanese way because they were not born in this climate and brought up with its cultural tradition, may fail to enter into the spirit of a haiku’.51 And, of course, the high claims that he makes for the spiritual value of the best haiku, for their satori-like intuitions of the Unconscious, may be regarded as his most powerful defense of that miniature art form, and his most convincing demonstration of the kind of background cultural knowledge, particularly in Zen, lacked by the ‘uninitiated’ Western critics. Here too his theory of inspiration is deployed to bolster his claims for the potential greatness of haiku as a direct, spontaneous expression of the Unconscious: ‘We now can understand why it is not necessary for the Japanese haiku to be long and elaborate and intellectual. It avoids an ideational or conceptual construction. When it appeals to ideas, its direct pointing to the Unconscious is warped, marred, interrupted, its refreshing vitality forever gone. Therefore, the haiku attempts to offer the most appropriate images in order to make us recall the original intuition as vividly as possible’.52 Thus Suzuki obviously hoped to prove to his Western readers that what prevented Victorian interpreters from fully appreciating the

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value of haiku was precisely the kind of in-depth understanding of its grounding in Zen that he was providing in the present essay. And, indeed, one might reasonably claim that his eloquent advocacy of haiku had something to do with its present worldwide acceptance as a major poetic genre, one that has even been adopted into many foreign literatures. On the other hand, the rather deprecatory comments he directs at Western poetry, like the doubts he expresses about Westerners’ ability to really understand haiku, may be taken as a kind of ‘payback’ for the similarly patronizing evaluations of haiku by earlier Western commentators. But then this begs another question: How valid are Suzuki’s judgments regarding the characteristically ego-centered and dualistic nature of Western poetry? IV. SELF AND NO-SELF IN WESTERN POETRY

When the major twentieth-century Mexican poet, Octavio Paz, wrote that ‘Poetry does not save the “I” of the poet, it dissolves it in the vaster and more powerful reality of speech’, and that the ‘practice of poetry requires abandonment, renunciation of the “I”’, he was not merely revealing a Japanese influence (though he did write haiku and renga), he was also reiterating a theory of the poetic self that may be traced back at least as far as John Keats and his influential idea of ‘negative capability’.53 In a letter of October 27, 1818, Keats used words that are as startlingly ‘Zen-like’ as any that might have been written by a Japanese renga master. Of the ‘poetical character’, for instance, he asserts that ‘It is not itself – it has no self – it is everything and nothing – It has no character’.54 In fact, since Keats many poets have testified to the creative necessity of this passive state of receptivity or ‘non-ego’. One might recall Rimbaud’s succinct formulation: ‘Je est un autre’.55 Baudelaire expressed the same insight with a striking metaphor: ‘An artist is a kaleidoscope endowed with consciousness … an ego athirst for the non-ego, and reflecting it at every moment in energies more vivid than life itself, always inconstant and fleeting’.56 Along similar lines, Stéphane Mallarmé wrote: ‘The work of pure poetry implies the elocutionary disappearance of the poet, who yields the initiative to words’.57 Another famous expression of this ‘impersonality’ principle is by T.S. Eliot. In ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, Eliot wrote that ‘the progress of the artist is a continual self sacrifice, a continual extinction of

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personality’.58 And that: ‘Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality’.59 In his seminal work, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, the French cultural philosopher, Jacques Maritain (1882–1973), made a connection which is also highly relevant to Zen aesthetics when he pointed out that poetry’s ‘I’ belongs to a far deeper level of the mind than the everyday ego; it is ‘the creative Self, a subject as act, marked with the diaphaneity and expansiveness proper to the operations of the spirit’ and it ‘resembles in this respect the “I” of the saint’.60 Thus, by necessity of nature, poetic activity is, of itself disinterested. It engages the human Self in its deepest recesses, but in no way for the sake of the ego. The very engagement of the artist’s Self in poetic activity, and the very revelation of the artist’s Self in his work, together with the revelation of some particular meaning he has obscurely grasped in things, are for the sake of the work. The creative Self is both revealing itself and sacrificing itself, because it is given; it is drawn out of itself in that sort of ecstasy which is creation. It dies to itself in order to live in the work …61

Although he is writing here from his customary Catholic, Thomistic worldview, the all-important distinction Maritain makes between the everyday self-centered ego and the deeper creative Self is also completely in accord with Suzuki’s aesthetic philosophy and psychology. In order to achieve unity with God – or, in the case of Zen Buddhists, with the ground-mind, Buddha-Mind or what Suzuki calls the ‘cosmic unconscious’ – the mystic undergoes a via negativa of self-abnegation, because only an ‘empty vessel’ can be filled with the infinite. The mystic, like the poet, must assume that state of passive receptivity which Keats called negative capability – or which one anonymous medieval English mystic more graphically described as a ‘cloud of unknowing’.62 Needless to say, Japanese poets have also long been fully aware of the creative necessity of this negative poetic self, especially Zen-influenced poets. All of which suggests that we should be careful not to exaggerate East/West cultural differences. In fact, the principle of muga or ‘no-self ’ is globally present in theories of poetic practice, composition or inspiration. In poetry, and in Zen too, much that is fundamental is also universal, and cross-cultural comparisons such as Suzuki’s perform a valuable service when they remind us of this fact. In an increasingly

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fractious world, after all, where populist demagogues seem on the rise again, it is good to be reminded of our common humanity. CONCLUSION

My conclusion, I am afraid, is a rather banal one: that Suzuki’s theory of inspiration neither misrepresents his own tradition nor presents any insuperable problems in translation or transmission for a Western readership, since – apparently unbeknownst to him – comparable ideas have long existed among Western poets and theorists of poetic inspiration. The essence of what he says seems to fit comfortably, mutatis mutandis, within both literary traditions. Nonetheless, I think the banality of this conclusion today does tell us something about our present global age. A century or so ago, when Suzuki first started publishing in English, it would not have seemed so banal. I suspect in fact that it would have seemed quite startling, challenging to conventional wisdom, even revolutionary. The fact that it no longer seems so is one index of the great changes that have occurred in global culture, both East and West, over the past century – changes for which Suzuki’s work is in no small measure responsible.

Part Three: Selected Reviews

Source: Monumenta Nipponica 50: 4 (Winter, 1995), pp. 553–555.

12.

Ninomiya Masayuki, La pensée de Kobayashi Hideo: Un intellectuel japonais au tournant de l’histoire v

At one point in this study of the thought of the major Japanese literary critic of the twentieth century, Kobayashi Hideo, 1902–1983, Ninomiya Masayuki describes Kobayashi’s conviction that being born a Japanese was an inescapable destiny that included specifically for the writer an obligation to work within the traditions of the Japanese language. Ninomiya then confesses: ‘Le fait que le Japonais que je suis écrit cet ouvrage en français contredit ... l’idée de Kobayashi sur ce point’ (p. 85). Indeed it does, and we may all be thankful that Ninomiya has dared to defy his linguistic destiny – and his intellectual hero – by writing this first major study of Kobayashi in any Western language. Furthermore, the fact that it is written in French by someone intimate with French culture is an equally fortunate circumstance because, as Ninomiya abundantly shows, French literature and philosophy loomed large in the background of Kobayashi’s thought – although it must be added that, as often with Japanese writers, this ‘influence’ seemed mostly to reinforce tendencies already present (for instance, his emphasis on vital forces and on intuition seems as much traditionally Japanese as Bergsonian). Finally, a more subtle but equally significant advantage is suggested by Ninomiya himself when he poses this rhetorical question: En interrogeant en français un texte de Kobayashi Hideo, ne peut-on pas espérer le placer dans un espace littéraire ouvert au-delà des frontières 217

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des langues et se détacher du ‘ghetto culturel japonais’, dans lequel Kobayashi Hideo eut parfois tendance à s’enfermer, quand il s’attacha trop passionnément au débat d’idées et devint en quelque sorte un idéologue malgré lui, alors que Kobayashi Hideo, créateur, sut dépasser ces limites? (p. 101)

To which I can only answer with an emphatic ‘oui, oui!’ and ‘bravo, Monsieur Ninomiya!’ The work is divided into three parts, each dealing with a different phase of Kobayashi’s response to one of the great ‘turning points’ of modern Japanese history, those few hectic years in the 1940s during which the country went from the apex of military and imperial power to a catastrophic defeat and then to a new postwar ‘liberal democratic’ order imposed by the Allied Occupation. For the normally rather apolitical Kobayashi, this was the period of his life when his relation to his own country was, as Ninomiya puts it, most ‘aiguë’. Part 1, ‘Dépasser la modernité’, focuses on a famous zadankai (roundtable discussion) on this theme at the Kindai no chōkoku (Overcoming Modernity) conference held in July 1942, just a few months after Pearl Harbour, in a heady atmosphere of mounting victories, when even many of the country’s leading intellectuals surrendered their reason to the enthusiasms of the moment. Thus, as might be expected, the tone of the debate was quite nationalistic: the ‘modernity’ that had to be superseded was equated essentially with Anglo-Saxon cultural dominance, and the panellists proclaimed themselves to be troubled by the ‘conflict between our Japanese blood and our Western education’. Although Kobayashi was no less a patriot than the others, who included members of the Nippon roman-ha (Japan Romantic School) and the Kyoto school of philosophers, he was distinguished from them most conspicuously by his common sense. This became evident when he suddenly brought them all down to earth by personalizing the discussion and asking, ‘How can I go beyond modernity when I myself am a product of modernity?’. Ninomiya shows that this kind of reduction of issues from abstract, high-flown rhetoric to questions of more immediate and personal existential urgency was characteristic of the power of Kobayashi’s thought. Nonetheless, Kobayashi was not unaffected by the ‘return to Japan’ spirit of the times, and, in Part 2 of his study, ‘Apprendre à faire vivre l’histoire’, Ninomiya shows how the long-time scholar of French literature found his way to ‘transcend modernity’ and revive his native

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literary tradition. The beautifully written essays collected under the title Mujō to iu koto (On Transiency), Kobayashi’s celebration of medieval Japanese literature and of the Buddhist culture behind it, are also a profound meditation on the nature of history and on the way the past remains mysteriously alive within us. Ninomiya pays close attention to the style of these works, which he rightly sees as central to their appeal. In particular, he traces the evolution of this style from the first appearance of the essays in a wartime journal to their postwar publication in book form. For the essay ‘Taima’, which Ninomiya sees as a kind of watershed in the development of Kobayashi’s style, he analyses the stylistic changes between the journal and the book versions, and finds, generally, that the second version is written in a more pareddown, direct, immediate style, avoiding intellectual commentary and the intrusion of the writer’s own psychology. This style possesses the evocative power of poetry and music, and thus is able to appeal to the reader directly on an intuitive, imaginative, and emotional level, bypassing, so to speak, the intellect. Of course, this stylistic ideal is much in consonance with the medieval literary tradition that Kobayashi was writing about in the essays of Mujō to iu koto, and it is natural that his later writings, dealing with other forms of literature and art, do not manifest it so clearly. But Ninomiya is no doubt correct in implying that it did remain a stylistic ideal for Kobayashi ever afterwards and that: ‘Les traits principaux du style que révèle cet essai, apparaûtront avec plus ou moins d’intensité dans ses oeuvres ultérieures’ (p. 134). More generally, Kobayashi’s ‘revival’ of medieval literature gave him a new respect for the particular power and beauty of the Japanese language, and a new commitment to his responsibilities as a writer in that language. Thus he opposed the postwar language ‘reforms’ and objected to ‘l’introduction massive de termes mal définis et mal compris, empruntés trop hâtivement à la pensée occidentale’ (p. 86). As Ninomiya points out, he was convinced that, unless Japanese thinkers confronted this basic linguistic problem and developed an intellectual vocabulary with roots in their own culture, ‘une véritable pensée ne pourra se développer au Japon’ (p. 87). Part 3 of Ninomiya’s study, ‘Voir, penser, vivre’, centres on a lecture that Kobayashi gave in Osaka in 1948, ‘Watashi no jinsei-kan’ (My View of Life), and includes a complete translation of the expanded version later published in book form. The rather banal title was apparently assigned to him by the lecture organizers, but Kobayashi turned

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it to brilliant use, delivering an in-depth and wide-ranging disquisition on the word kan 観, especially as used in different forms of Buddhist art and philosophy, where it connotes not just physical sight but spiritual or imaginative vision. Along the way he provides some fascinating insights into a wide variety of subjects, from the history of Japanese Buddhism and the art it inspired to the impact of Western thought on modern Japan. By translating this lengthy address in toto, Ninomiya wisely allows Kobayashi to speak for himself, for it is a truly masterful performance that would only be violated by any attempt at paraphrase. Seen in the historical context of 1948, the talk assumes a wider significance as Kobayashi’s appeal to his fellow Japanese not to abandon their best traditions in their headlong rush for postwar ‘reform’. Overall, Ninomiya’s study provides a convincing account of the evolution of Kobayashi’s thought and style over the crucial years 1942– 1948. Of course, in choosing to take this in-depth approach to a particular period of his subject’s career, Ninomiya inevitably leaves many important works out of consideration. In particular, I would have liked to have had his analysis of the culminating work of Kobayashi’s career, generally regarded as his magnum opus, his study of the great Tokugawa nativist scholar, Motoori Norinaga. But perhaps Ninomiya may be persuaded to write a follow-up volume on Kobayashi’s later career? La pensée de Kobayashi Hideo ends with a useful annotated chronology of Kobayashi’s career and an equally useful bibliography, covering not only his works and works about him but also modern Japanese intellectual history in general.

Source: The Journal of Japanese Studies 30: 2 (Summer 2004), pp. 533–538.

13.

Doug Slaymaker, Confluences: Postwar France and Japan v

As Katō Shūichi, with his usual frankness, points out in an essay included in this collection: ‘The France-Japan ratio of influence is anything but symmetrical. That is to say, the impact that French writing and thinking has had on Japan is much greater than that of Japan on France’ (p. 62). Although Doug Slaymaker entitles the collection ‘Confluences’ (which, admittedly, sounds a lot better than ‘Influences’), eight of the ten essays deal almost exclusively with unidirectional influence from France. Actually, I think a better case could have been made for creative influence in the opposite direction, but I will reserve a brief comment on that until the end. The first two essays, by Matt Matsuda and Jean-Philippe Mathy, make a brave attempt to puff up the occasional writings on or references to Japan of French critical theorists such as Barthes, Kojève, and Lacan into some sort of serious body of work in cross-cultural interpretation. I find this less than convincing and, anyway, would not regard it as a genuine case of Japanese ‘influence’. Rather than learn anything from the present and actual Japan, the French theorists generally used their own cliché images of the country, culled from a century of Orientalist stereotyping, to lend a kind of illusory substance to their fanciful theories. This was a literary tradition that began with Pierre Loti, and should not be confused with japonisme, which remains the one great example of a widespread Japanese cultural influence in France, and was confined mainly to the visual arts, with perhaps the one exception of a haiku influence on French poetry. The crucial difference is between a positive creative use of foreign artistic practices, as in not 221

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only japonisme but in many of the Japanese borrowings from French literature documented in this book, and a narrow-minded tendency to exoticize, dehumanize, or negatively stereotype the foreigners themselves – a tendency unfortunately not uncommon in either France or Japan. Japonisme differed radically from Orientalism of this latter type; the French artists involved made an honest and even humble attempt to learn from their Japanese models (for instance, by making painstaking copies of ukiyo-e). Matt Matsuda’s attempt to associate the critical theorists’ views with japonisme is thus, in my view, fundamentally mistaken. They did not approach Japan with the openness or intellectual humility of the nineteenth-century artists; rather, with their idées arrêtées, they resembled more the novice in the old Zen parable: having come to the tea ceremony with their cups already full, they could not experience the true flavour of fresh tea. Refreshing as a newly made cup of green tea, on the other hand, is Katō Shūichi’s essay on ‘literature and thought in postwar Japan and France’. Getting Katō to contribute to this collection was a real coup, because, of course, he was himself a major player – perhaps the major player – in postwar Franco-Japanese cultural relations. In this essay he is concerned not with high-flown cultural theory but the more concrete, practical, and creative matter of actual literary influences (a word he is not squeamish about using) of French on Japanese writers, and on the reading public in general, beginning in the late nineteenth century with Jules Verne and the Naturalists Zola and Maupassant, and culminating in the postwar with the influence of writers like Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Camus on Katō’s own generation. As usual with Katō, his essay is full of fascinating and original insights stated in a clear, strong, and straightforward style – for instance, in his discussion of the implications of the fact that most Meiji writers were unfamiliar with the scientific background of French Naturalism and read Zola and Maupassant in English rather than French; in his elucidation of the way Romain Rolland’s great Bildungsroman, Jean-Christoph, struck a special chord with the Taishō generation because of their own preoccupation with personal cultural development (kyōyō shugi); in his explication of the influence of Valéry’s ‘sophisticated literary criticism’ on Kobayashi Hideo and his many followers; and, above all, of course, in his comments on French influences on his own postwar generation. Katō also makes an important and moving statement here about his generation of writers: ‘those of us who had lived through the war were very much surprised, indeed shocked, when we learned of the existence

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of the French littérature de la résistance, even during France’s occupation by the Nazis ... we could not imagine an equivalent situation in Japan’ (p. 54). Katō himself translated some of this literature. This French example of a literature committed to engagement with social-political issues, especially as embodied in the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, helped set the tone and direction of much of Japanese postwar writing, from Noma Hiroshi to Ōe Kenzaburō. Through the latter writer, of course, it continues to reverberate even in the early twentyfirst century. Katō himself is also one of these writers, and here, in a short but important statement of his own position, he affirms his agreement with Sartre’s famous argument that, since we live inescapably in a political world, a writer who remains silent also makes a political statement, a conservative statement in favour of the status quo. He also includes a fascinating explanation of why the more purely philosophical part of Sartre’s message, his existentialism, found such a receptive audience among postwar Japanese intellectuals. These various points first adumbrated by Katō are elaborated at greater length in many of the later essays. Nishikawa Nagao discusses the Matineé Poétique Group, active between 1941 and 1951, whose members included Fukunaga Takehiko, Nakamura Shin’ichirō, and Katō. As their name makes obvious, this group of young writers were determined to imbue their work with French poetics and aesthetics – an act of defiance in 1941, when Japanese war fever was at its height. From both a Marxist and a militarist point of view, they were a privileged group of effete young aesthetes overly enamoured with European culture and writing romantic verse and pretentious prose from the safety of their mountain retreat in Karuizawa, while less privileged members of their generation suffered the real agonies of war. While acknowledging that this view had some cogency, Nishikawa also argues that, during a time of militarist oppression, they helped keep alive a certain European-derived civilized tradition that ‘subsequently flowered brilliantly, albeit shortly, in the period of postwar democracy that revived Western-style thinking’ (p. 71). Doug Slaymaker’s own essay concerns the now rather surprising role of Sartre’s fiction in postwar Japan – it first became widely appreciated not for its serious social-political engagement or its existential philosophy but for its eroticism; mainly because of the story ‘Intimité’, especially as interpreted by Sakaguchi Ango, it was ‘equated with the sensual and the pornographic’ (p. 86). Thus it served as immediate inspiration for those postwar writers who celebrated the joys of sex

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as a way of liberating themselves from the asceticism that had been recently imposed on them by the militarists. As Slaymaker neatly puts it, they wanted to replace kokutai (the national body) with nikutai (the physical body). In a response strangely reminiscent of the Japanese Naturalists’ misunderstanding of Zola about half a century earlier, they welcomed existentialism as a new form of literary eroticism. Interestingly, though, Slaymaker makes the case that, although no doubt exaggerated or one-sided, this first Japanese interpretation of Sartre might also be seen as illuminating an aspect of his work and thought that is too often overlooked in the West. The body is, after all, a central focus of Sartre’s philosophy. Watanabe Kazutami gives a useful overview of the furious pace at which French literature was devoured by postwar Japanese readers, at first mainly through the plethora of new or newly revived literary journals. He also provides some very interesting depictions of the lives of Japanese expatriates in wartime and postwar France – around 200 in Paris by 1951 – among whom were the ‘students’ Endō Shūsaku, Katō Shūichi, and Mori Arimasa. Mori’s was a particularly dramatic example of a Japanese who completely fell under the spell of Paris, giving up his already well-established position in Japan to live out his days in the City of Light, and confessing, at last, that what was most important to him in this long experience of exile was not what he was able to learn about Paris but what he was able to learn about himself. He felt that only by developing a strong sense of his own individual self was he able to freely experience European civilization – as a direct apprehension unmediated by ‘philosophical terms, theorems, or categories’ (p. 122). (If only the French critical theorists had also learned this lesson!) And, as Watanabe points out, by seeing the West in this way, unclouded by myths and stereotypes, Mori and his fellow ‘international students’ Katō and Endō were also able to see Japan with an equally unclouded vision, ‘in a broader, more universal manner’ that marked the beginning of a new era in Japan’s relationship with the West (p. 124). Kevin Doak adds a deeper perspective to Watanabe’s picture by showing how the French tradition of democratic nationalism was absorbed and turned to good use by the postwar generation, especially those who had spent some time in France. One exemplary practical outcome was the Université Populaire movement, based on the belief that the war represented a failure of culture, and that popular education was thus a precondition of the development of an unwarlike, democratic nationalism. Doak makes a convincing case that,

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by following the French example, Japanese intellectuals were able to transform the German-inspired ethnic or Volkisch nationalism of the war years into a healthier cultural and democratic nationalism, one that freed itself from ultranationalist xenophobia and thus was able to take a more balanced view of Japan vis-à-vis Western countries such as France. In literary terms, Doak provides an interesting example of the ‘difference between the wartime insular nationalism and the postwar cosmopolitan nationalism’ by comparing Yokomitsu Riichi’s Ryoshū (Travel Weariness) with Endō Shūsaku’s Ryūgaku (Foreign Studies) (p. 141). As he rightly points out, there is a pronounced contrast between the Yokomitsu protagonist’s sense of his own absolute racial and cultural alienation as a Japanese in France and the Endō protagonist’s far greater openness to intercourse with both the French and their culture. Likewise, Yokomitsu’s theme, in Doak’s words the ‘incompatibility of East and West and the need to reject cosmopolitan culture as no more than an empty dream’, seems as consonant with the tenor of wartime nationalism as Endō’s ‘attraction to, and appreciation for, the beauty of French culture’ seems in tune with the postwar (pp. 142–45). As Doak also points out, Endō is still well aware of the distance that remains between the Japanese and the French – not least because of French ignorance and prejudice – but, unlike Yokomitsu, he does not use this as a pretext to reject French culture outright as ineluctably alien. Rather he is resolved to pay the sometimes high price necessary to absorb the foreign culture and make it part of himself. The collection is rounded off with two more purely literary studies and an account of postwar Japanese theatre. In explaining the appeal of existentialism for Ōe Kenzaburō, Kuroko Kazuo argues that the Sartrean ‘imprisoned situation’ that often appears in Ōe’s early fiction represents the claustrophobic and humiliating condition of postwar Japan under American occupation. This suggests to me that there was another good reason for the appeal of France in postwar Japan: for many Japanese intellectuals, the French were a welcome alternative to the Americans, the immediate occupiers. French cultural and intellectual sophistication could be invoked as a defence against what was often seen as crude, simple-minded, overweening American interference in all aspects of Japanese life. Better a distant and idealized Frenchman as mentor than an all-too-close and all-too-real American! Hiroaki Sato is at his usual delightful best in assessing French surrealist influence, especially on the poets Takiguchi Shūzō and Yoshioka Minoru. With its encouragement of dream-like fantasy, surrealism

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seemed to offer poets a chance to get beyond the gritty postwar reality, and the ‘bleakness, angst, and disillusionment’ of the ‘Wasteland’ poets of the immediate postwar era, with their jeremiad style that, as a young poet himself, Sato had found ‘somewhat histrionic’ (p. 153). As he wittily notes, his compatriots were ‘one war behind’, in that both surrealism and Eliot’s great poem were responses to the horrors of the First World War. But this is understandable, since the Japanese were relatively unscathed by the First War but suffered terribly in the Second. What the Japanese poets seemed to adapt from French surrealism most successfully was the practice of automatic writing or free association – but, interestingly enough, this led some of them to approximate traditional forms such as renga and tanka. J. Thomas Rimer, probably the best-known authority on FrancoJapanese cultural relations writing in English, gives an expert account of the French presence in Japanese theatre in the two decades following the war. Rimer finds that, surprisingly, the Japanese theatre did not respond to postwar French theatre as enthusiastically as one might expect. The productions that were mounted were often of older prewar plays or even the French classics, rather than of postwar playwrights such as Giraudoux, Anouilh, Sartre, and Camus. As a case study suggesting some possible reasons for this, Rimer examines the career of the influential postwar actor and director, Senda Koreya. Among other things, he suggests that Senda may have preferred older playwrights such as Molière to the postwar French playwrights because the latter’s drama was ‘too grounded in the early postwar situation of France to mirror with sufficient ease the situation of postwar Japan’ (p. 168). Which is an honest and interesting insight, because it seems to contradict the more general message of this book about the many ‘congruences’ between postwar France and Japan. Of course the contradiction is not absolute, but Rimer’s essay provides a welcome balance against any too-easy assumption of doppelganger-like affinity between two countries that, after all, have very different histories and cultures. Judging by this book at least, postwar Franco-Japanese cultural relations were very largely an all-male as well as a unidirectional affair. However, it seems to me that both these impressions could have been somewhat palliated with an essay each on the two Marguerites, Yourcenar and Duras, two major postwar French writers who became creatively engaged with Japan and wrote significantly out of that engagement (much more significantly, I would say, than the critical theorists). The first impression could have been ameliorated even more by a study

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of Simone de Beauvoir’s influence on Japanese feminism. But perhaps we can look forward to a further collection? At any rate, we must be grateful for the moment that this is the first relatively comprehensive treatment of the subject in English, and congratulations are due to Doug Slaymaker for assembling so many excellent essays on such an interesting and important topic.

Source: Journal of Japanese Studies 44: 1 (2018), pp. 203–07.

14.

Alex Bates, The Culture of the Quake: The Great Kantō Earthquake and Taishō Japan v

Alex Bates’ The Culture of the Quake is a significant addition to recent studies of cultural responses to disaster in Japan. Bates focuses on the Great Kantō Earthquake of September 1, 1923, a mega-disaster that struck at the very heart of Japan’s largest city and cultural/ political capital. This made the 1923 quake a far more devastating disaster than, for instance, the more powerful 2011 Tohoku quake, at least in the short term (there was, of course, no nuclear fallout), in terms of both human lives lost and traumatic impact on the society and culture. Surprisingly, scholarly attention in English has only recently begun to focus in depth on the vast and diverse array of cultural responses occasioned by this disaster: most notably, Gennifer Weisenfeld’s Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923 (University of California Press, 2012), Charles Schencking’s The Great Kantō Earthquake and the Chimera of National Reconstruction in Japan (Columbia UP, 2013), and two chapters in my edited book, When the Tsunami Came to Shore: Culture and Disaster in Japan (Global Oriental, 2014): Leith Morton’s ‘The Great Tokyo Earthquake of 1923 and Poetry’ and Mats Karlsson’s ‘Proletarian Writers and the Great Tokyo Earthquake of 1923’. Whereas Schencking focuses mainly on sociopolitical responses, Weisenfeld on visual culture, and Morton and Karlsson on particular literary genres and movements, Bates’s new work is the first to provide a comprehensive overview and analysis of the full range of literary and cinematic responses to the disaster, from sensationalistic popular 228

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melodramas to high-cultural literary reminiscences, from old-guard naturalist I-novels to avant-garde neo-perceptionist (shinkankaku) urban fictions and Marxist social-realist plays and stories. The inclusion of this wide range of fictional material allows for some instructive comparisons and contrasts – for instance, between popular melodramatic treatments of real earthquake stories (jitsuwa) in the mass media and in popular literature and the generally more muted and nuanced responses to the disaster by members of the highcultural literary establishment (bundan); or between the politically charged responses of the proletarian writers and the more literarytechnical responses of the modernist aesthetes. Altogether, Bates provides a satisfyingly complete picture of post-quake literary and cinematic culture, a culture that ranged from mass popular entertainment to the radical experiments in artistic representation that appealed to the intellectual elite. One of Bates’s most interesting arguments focuses on the impact of the disaster on the mainstream literary genre of the day, the I-novel, as practiced both by senior naturalist writers such as Tayama Katai and by younger White Birch (Shirakaba) writers such as Arishima Takeo and Satomi Ton. Although I-novels were written in response to the disaster – most famously, Katai’s Tōkyō shinsaiki (Record of the Tokyo Earthquake, 1924), which Bates cogently depicts as the work of an ‘earthquake flâneur’ (p. 51) – the widespread devastation and loss of life, especially among the more disadvantaged Tokyoites who lived in the densely populated downtown (shitamachi) area, made the narrow self-preoccupation of such novels seem inadequate to express the enormities of the new post-quake reality. New, more outward-looking, more socially aware modes of writing seemed urgently called for, and the new generation of Taishō writers was eager to supply them. The earthquake did not initiate the famous debate between advocates of a hermetic, elitist ‘art for art’s sake’, such as Satomi Ton, and those such as Kikuchi Kan, who argued for an art that valued ‘content’ over ‘form’, an art more open to the world, including even the new mass culture. However, as Bates points out, the disaster certainly instilled a new sense of relevance and urgency in this debate. By adopting a post-quake perspective, Bates is able to throw new light on this and other debates that were at the heart of Taishō literary culture. One aspect of the new urban reality that the quake had made embarrassingly obvious was the stark inequality in living conditions across the city: those, such as almost all writers, who lived in the spacious hill

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suburbs (Yamanote), survived the disaster relatively unscathed, while tens of thousands of lower-class workers who lived in crowded conditions downtown were incinerated in the post-quake fires. While many writers blithely indulged in the voyeuristic fad of disaster tourism – and made good money writing up their observations – a few expressed some form of survivor anxiety. Bates offers Nagata Mikihiko’s ‘Honō no ranbu’ (Wild dance of the flames, 1923) as a pertinent example of the latter: when he visits the disaster zone, the story’s middle-class narrator actually dresses down in a working-class outfit so as to appear like a fellow sufferer and thus avoid being seen as a voyeuristic tourist. For Marxist writers, the disaster seemed at first like a heaven-sent object lesson on the inevitable injustices of the capitalist system. But this automatic response was soon complicated by an inconvenient truth: many workers participated in the most notorious post-quake incident, the massacre of Korean residents of Tokyo, on the unfounded suspicion that those residents were taking advantage of the disorder to exact revenge on their Japanese colonizers by setting fi res, poisoning wells, raping and pillaging, etc. Needless to say, this shocking violence of worker on worker confounded orthodox Marxist notions of working-class solidarity. Bates analyses how several proletarian writers responded to this challenge: some, like Sano Kesami in his play, Konran no minato (The harbour of mayhem, 1924), tried to preserve orthodoxy by shifting the blame from the workers to the petit bourgeoisie; others more honestly accepted that ‘the Korean Massacre revealed a populace ready to believe imperial fear mongering and direct its anger toward fellow workers of a different ethnicity rather than against the government and the capitalists who oppressed them’ (p. 169). For proletarian writers, this meant that literature must be dedicated all the more to educating the masses, so that they might finally be able to identify their true (class) enemies. But, as Bates points out, by treating ethnic identity as a purely capitalist construct and by trying to replace it with class identity, the Marxists were not only ignoring ‘the ethnically motivated persecution of Koreans among Japanese labourers’ but also denying to the Koreans that nationalist sentiment that helped them stand united against Japanese colonial subjugation (p. 188). At the same time, Bates also rightfully acknowledges that the proletarian writers must be credited for daring to expose ‘the brutality of the massacre and the inequalities inherent in the colonization of Korea’ (p. 189). In his conclusion, Bates tries to assess the more long-term cultural impacts of the 1923 disaster. As with any disaster, this is always a more

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difficult matter to judge. Because there is no exact scientific way of measuring complex processes of cultural causation over an extended period, one must rely as much on intelligent speculation as on hard evidence. Bates’s speculations are undoubtedly intelligent but, like all of us who deal with the impacts of disaster on culture, he seems occasionally tempted to give an exaggerated or overly deterministic account of those impacts. Here, for instance, he uses Kawabata’s metropolitan-modernist novel, Asakusa kurenaidan (The scarlet gang of Asakusa, 1930), as an exemplary case of an impact he has already argued for: the outward-turning of literature after the great disaster of 1923. Comparing it to Tayama Katai’s self-absorbed Tōkyō shinsaiki, he finds that: Kawabata’s subject is always Asakusa and never himself. The fragmented city in fact undermines the notion of the bounded, self-contained subject … The process of observing and describing the chaos in the city outside fractures the subjectivity of the narrator until the self and the outside are dissolved into almost indistinguishable fragments of modernity. (p. 200)

Bates attributes this conspicuous difference to: ‘changes occurring over the six years between the two works, and to the generational difference between the two authors: Katai was a member of the bundan establishment and a key figure in the development of the I-novel, while Kawabata was a rising avant-garde star’ (p. 200). True enough, but I would say that far more decisive are the psychological factors at play here: namely, Kawabata’s lifelong struggle to escape from himself, a self that had been profoundly wounded in childhood – in other words, that yearning for self-transcendence and even self-annihilation that manifests itself throughout his work, even before the earthquake or his exposure to international modernism. The bone-chilling, objectifying power of Kawabata’s gaze was legendary – reputedly, it made bill collectors squirm in their seats and excuse themselves without daring to ask for payment. When turned inward, this gaze was just as merciless, objectifying the writer himself to such an extent that distinctions between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ begin to lose their meaning. Although these psychological tendencies may well have been reinforced by the extensive ‘disaster-sightseeing’ he indulged in after the 1923 quake, we should also remember that, to use his own phrase, he was already a ‘master of funerals’ long before this particular experience of death and disaster

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(having lost every last member of his immediate family in childhood). To use him as a representative example of a quake-affected or quaketraumatized author thus seems rather problematic. Also, although the urban environment may not have featured as prominently as in Asakusa kurenaidan in any of his later works, it would be a mistake to think that Kawabata ever returned to the kind of self-satisfied, navel-gazing inwardness of the Taishō naturalists and I-novelists. One might offer a late story such as ‘Kata ude’ (One arm, 1964), for instance, as a remarkable example of how his fiction can be both intensely subjective and intensely objective at the same time. Of course, none of this detracts in any way from my high estimation of Bates’s achievement here. The Culture of the Quake is a seminal work that will help shape scholarly debate on this topic for a long time to come.

Source: Journal of Japanese Studies 37: 1 (Winter 2011), pp. 174–179.

15.

Alan Tansman, The Aesthetics of Japanese Fascism v

The ‘fascinating’ thing about fascism, to use Susan Sontag’s famous word, is the way it supercharges politics with aesthetics and religion – to such an extent that politics itself becomes almost unrecognizably transformed into something approaching an aesthetic mood or a spiritual exaltation. As Sontag also pointed out, fascism has its gentler side: the cult of beauty, for instance – although the fascist ‘cult of beauty’ does have an inconvenient habit of transmogrifying into a cult of violence and death.1 Nonetheless, as Alan Tansman shows in the present study, its initial come-on can be gentle and pleasing indeed, particularly in Japanese fascism, which, in its cultural form, often assumes a fascinatingly seductive guise by clothing itself in the finest raiment of the native literary and artistic tradition. In stark contrast to the Nazi taste for Wagnerian ‘sublime grandeur’ (as in Leni Riefenstahl’s Hitlerglorifying film, Triumph des Willens [Triumph of the will, 1934]), ‘the aesthetics of Japanese fascism manifest a melancholy tonality’ stamped by ‘popular Buddhist sensibility’ (p. 15). In other words, Japanese fascism, quite naturally, assumes its own national cultural style, which is often ‘the traditionally sanctioned aesthetics of the pathos of melancholy loss, revolving around the affective pull of a feminine figure – a figure that appears across culture, whether in a complex modernist essay or a sentimental popular movie’ (p. 15). Needless to say, this makes the Japanese fascist aesthetic rather less obvious to us, rather less easily detectable in literary or art works, than its pompous, bombastic, and triumphalistic German and Italian 233

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equivalents. Although there have been more overtly political, more ‘European-style’ Japanese fascist writers – Mishima Yukio, for instance – in this study Tansman is uninterested in an over-obvious fascist such as Mishima, whom he dismisses as ‘more a figure of parody than a force of politics’ (p. 257). To prove his point about both the subtlety and the pervasiveness of the Japanese fascist aesthetic, he prefers to focus on those who seem more or less apolitical at first glance, putative ‘pure aesthetes’ such as Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, Shiga Naoya, Kawabata Yasunari, and Kobayashi Hideo, because ‘it is precisely those creations of the imagination most resistant to political readings that best reveal the aesthetic strains of fascism ... In these works we can see ideology refracted through beauty and discern its consequences for the quality of social life’ (p. 1). This unexpected choice, and the theoretical position on which it is based, constitutes the most original and provocative part of Tansman’s argument and probably also the part some readers will find hardest to accept. Certainly it is a complex and tricky issue: at what point can a writer’s aesthetic be legitimately described as ‘fascistic’ (presuming we accept the premise that there is such a thing as a particular ‘fascist aesthetics’)? Tansman himself acknowledges that understanding ‘the relation between cultural atmosphere and real-world politics or between the imagination and life as it is lived – is always challenging’ (p. 17). This is especially true in regard to questions of causation: ‘no one read Kawabata Yasunari’s novel Snow Country [Yukiguni, 1948] and dissolved into a beautiful selflessness’ (p. 30). But Tansman is advancing a historical argument, not an essentialist one. Literary and artistic works, like individual words, assume different meanings in different historical contexts: ‘The very same fascist aesthetic moment may, in one particular context, possess the charge of political consequence; in another it may have a considerably diminished political valence, retaining only its fascist aesthetic shell’ (p. 255). Nonetheless, he does attempt to identify some of the recurrent qualities both of ‘fascist aesthetics’ and, at the heart of that, of what he calls the ‘fascist moment’. Following Sontag, he finds that fascist aesthetics in general have ‘exalted mindlessness and glamorized death’ (p. 2). Also, they have expressed ‘an urge for aesthetic wholeness’ and a ‘passion for violence’, and favoured a use of language that was ‘concrete, rhythmic, and musical’ and ‘provided intimations of a beauty that triumphed over rational thought and defeated abstraction by merely existing – a beauty that could also serve as a model for action in the world’ (p. 2).

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From a more purely historical perspective, Tansman agrees with Roger Griffin and other recent interpreters of fascism regarding its paradoxical relation to modernity and modernism: in short, fascists were ‘anti-modern modernists’ (pp. 17–18). In this respect, Japanese fascism arose from the same historical conditions as its European counterpart: ‘In Japan, as in Europe, fascism emerged as a reactionary modernist response to the threats of social and political division created by the economic and social crises following the First World War’ (p. 3). In the political context of the 1920s, Japanese fascism was a reaction against ‘Taisho democracy’ and its ‘cosmopolitan liberalism’ (p. 9), just as German fascism was a reaction against the liberal values of the Weimar Republic. Against diversity, cosmopolitanism, and modernity, it opposed a mythical national unity and tradition: the ‘Japanese fascist response to modernity shared much with other inflections of fascism: it provided the possibility for an experience of immediacy and unity that countered the alienation and fragmentation of the modern individual, and it promised an end to class division by promoting the myth of a nation unified by natural bonds of its blood and spirit’ (p. 3). Thus, fascist aesthetics were designed as a kind of ‘cure’ to this perceived cultural crisis of modernity and to the sense of malaise and anomie that accompanied this, attempting ‘to resolve the conflicts of modernity by calling for complete submission, either to absolute order or to an undifferentiated but liberating experience of violence’ (p. 3). But there was also a hidden price to be paid: ‘It offered a cure to the ills of modernity with solutions that began in the imagination but ended in a politics of death’ (p. 3). In order to persuade the public to accept the ‘fascist solution’, then, it was first necessary to convince them that modernity itself was a kind of chronic cultural disease. As Tansman writes, an ‘atmosphere of crisis’ had to be created, and it was in this task, first of all, that writers and artists proved to be of great help to the state. The Japanese Romantic School leader, Yasuda Yojūrō, for instance, obligingly proclaimed that he and his fellow Japanese were ‘mourning the loss of both the gods and ancient Japan itself ’ and that their wounded souls could be consoled only by rapt contemplation of the beauty of traditional Japanese bridges – among other things (pp. 16–17). But, as Tansman points out, Yasuda’s famous essay on the ‘cultural and literary meanings of Japanese bridges’ carries a nasty political punch: ‘from innocent musings on bridges Yasuda arrives at a spiritual glorification of the shedding of blood’ (p. 49).

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Other writers were less wittingly complicit. Certainly Akutagawa, when he ‘sang the swan song at what appeared to be the collapse of modernity’, had no idea of the political implications of his lamentations (p. 40). As Tansman writes: ‘I do not mean to say that Akutagawa’s writings in the 1920s were responsible for the development of fascist aesthetics, only that his melancholy modernism of fragmented, musical moments provided glimpses of things to come and set into motion the beginnings of the fascist aesthetic in its literary form’ (p. 39). Nonetheless, although Akutagawa ‘never married those aesthetics to a politics of violence or death’, Tansman argues that ‘Kobayashi Hideo’s modernism, so richly informed by Akutagawa’s, made that very turn’ (p. 40). And, for Tansman, Kobayashi’s work is at the ‘heart of the fascist aesthetic’ (p. 32). Furthermore: ‘To readers of Kobayashi’s literary essays the people on the battlefield seem like battalions composed of Shiga Naoyas, men of clear vision, concrete experience, and pure action. War provided the aesthetic solution offered by a writer like Shiga ... To dispense with literature is to learn to think simply, and to cease and desist from criticizing war’ (p. 238). Of course, Akutagawa cannot be blamed for any of this, but, as Tansman states earlier, ‘writers can aesthetically sow the seeds of a fascist atmosphere without intending to do so’ (p. 2). Tansman’s argument on this rather delicate and controversial point is given considerable strength and subtlety by his use of the concept of ‘fascist moments’. ‘Through an analysis of these moments’, he writes, ‘we can begin to see the relation between Japanese fascism and its corresponding cultural texts’ (p. 18). These are moments of ‘binding’ (musubi) between self and other, moments that provide the glue for the ‘new myth of wholeness’ based on the ‘mystique of national and racial destiny’ (p. 18). In their more active, war-like phase, fascist moments ‘offered images of self-obliteration evoked through the beauty of violence, often in the name of an idealized Japan’ (p. 18). The apotheosis of all such moments was the achievement of ‘union’ with the emperor by death in battle. Yasuda in particular ‘wrote prose that bestowed beauty on the act of self-immolation in war’, offering a cure to the ‘wounds of modernity’ (p. 53). The aesthetico-spiritual experience of becoming one with nature or works of art could thus slip imperceptibly into the religio-political experience of becoming one with the emperor or the state: ‘Rife with state religious implications, musubi suggests the harmonizing powers of the gods and, by extension, the binding power of the state’ (p. 19). State power is thereby given a religious rather than a political

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foundation, leading Japanese fascism to a ‘disavowal of its own politics’ (p. 19). But, interestingly, Tansman also finds that there is a kind of dialectical tension present in all cultural expressions of the fascist aesthetic, a ‘rhythm found in all the cultural work considered at length in this book: an oscillation between immersion in and retreat from the fascist moment’ (pp. 32–33). Thus, ‘fascist moment’ does not necessarily equate to ‘fascist writer or artist’. Of course, it is not difficult to find ‘musubi moments’ in modern Japanese literature – or culture in general. The issue is whether these can also be legitimately classified as ‘fascist moments’. Again, Tansman bases the force of his argument largely on historical context. Of the celebrated Mount Daisen scene of the hero’s mystical ‘self-transcendence’ that ends Shiga’s An’ya kōro (A dark night’s passing, 1936) for instance, he remarks: ‘Written in 1937, amid escalating totalitarianism, militarism, and a din of exhortations to give up one’s life for the state, such lines necessarily cast a disturbing shadow on the work’ (p. 142). Similarly, of the equally celebrated scene of self-transcendence that ends Kawabata’s Yukiguni: ‘The ecstatic moment when individuals merge through violence at the end of Snow Country uncomfortably resembles the orgiastic vision of war that the Japanese state offered its citizens from the 1930s through the end of the war in 1945’ (pp. 128–29). Like Yasuda, Kawabata ‘tapped into fascistic impulses’ (p. 130). In both novels, however, as Tansman also points out, the moment of self-transcendence and ecstatic union does not last: Kensaku suffers from diarrhoea, and Shimamura leaves the snow country. ‘Because Shimamura finally leaves the snow country, Snow Country is not a fascist novel’ (p. 125). Obviously we are quite remote here from the hardcore fascistic world of the 1937 manifesto of the kokutai, The Essence of the National Polity, to which Tansman also devotes an illuminating chapter, analysing the repetitive, hypnotic way it used cliché language for the ‘cultivation of a fascist cultural aesthetic’ (p. 152). Major writers such as Shiga and Kawabata were naturally resistant to writing propaganda of that narrow-minded ilk, but their flirtation with ‘fascist moments’, Tansman suggests, had a potentially dangerous influence on especially younger – military-aged – readers of the 1930s: ‘Epiphanies, if not checked, can be dangerous’ (p. 118). Since we are touching here upon what might be regarded as the cherished inner sanctum of Japanese culture, the ‘natural mysticism’ that has inspired much great artistic and religious achievement, some readers may balk at any suggestion of its ‘guilt by association’ with

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fascism. But in this respect, Tansman’s study is the aesthetic equivalent of works on ‘fascist Zen’ such as James Heisig and John Maraldo’s Rude Awakenings (University of Hawai’i Press, 1995) or Brian Victoria’s Zen at War (Rowman and Littlefield, 2006) – a salutary reminder that even high cultural aesthetic or spiritual traditions can be turned to nefarious uses in an age of ascendant fascism. Alan Tansman has also recently edited a ‘companion piece’ to the present work, The Culture of Japanese Fascism (Duke UP, 2009). Together these two works should put an end forever to the reluctance – always more prevalent among Western than Japanese scholars, as Tansman points out – to apply the word ‘fascism’ to the politics and culture of 1930s Japan. Like the former book, The Aesthetics of Japanese Fascism makes a ground-breaking contribution to an exciting and newly developing field and no doubt will provide much food for thought to all future researchers on this important subject.

Source: New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 4: 1 (June 2002), pp. 194–200.

16.

Japanese Literature as a Modern Invention: a review of Haruo Shirane and Tomi Suzuki (eds.), Inventing the Classics: Modernity, National Identity, and Japanese Literature v

As its title clearly indicates, Inventing the Classics: Modernity, National Identity, and Japanese Literature brings together two ideas currently very much in vogue: that of the ‘invention of tradition’, especially in support of the processes of modernization and nationbuilding, and the related idea of the literary canon as a more or less arbitrary expression of power that is, as artificially constructed for political rather than literary or aesthetic purposes. In other words, the traditional view that a long-established cultural monument or institution such as the literary canon represents quite simply, in Matthew Arnold’s words, ‘the best which has been thought and said in the world’, is now seen as politically naïve at best and as disingenuous (along elitist, racist, sexist, or imperialist lines) at worst. As one of the editors, Haruo Shirane, writes in his Introduction, the word ‘canon’ is used in this book in the ‘broader, more political sense’ to mean ‘those texts that are recognized by established or powerful institutions’ (p. 2). (He refers to Paul Bourdieu’s The Field of Cultural Production [1994] as a key text of this new canon theory.) More specifically, the book’s objective is to ‘historicize this complex sociopolitical process [of Japanese canon formation], particularly as it relates to the emergence of linguistic and cultural nationalism. which privileged certain texts as ‘cultural icons of Japan’s “tradition”’ (p. 1). Against the traditional 239

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‘foundational’ canon theory which sees a foundation in the text, ‘some universal, unchanging, or absolute value’, the new relativistic approach is described by Shirane as ‘antifoundational’ in that it ‘holds that there is no foundation in the text, that works in a canon reflect the interests of a particular group or society at a particular time’ (p. 2). Shirane argues further that this concept of canon implies conflict and change, unlike the terms classic and tradition, ‘both of which suggest something unchanging or given’ (p. 2). ‘Traditions’ and ‘classics’ are now seen as ‘constructed, particularly by dominant communities or institutions’, rather than (presumably, although Shirane does not really spell this out) as naturally or spontaneously arising out of a lengthy aesthetics-based literary-historical process of sifting out the great from the merely good – or the downright bad. As for the actual processes of canon formation, Shirane identifies no less than ten different ‘institutional practices’ in the Japanese case, including: the preservation and transmission of texts (especially before printing); commentary and criticism; use in school curricula; use as a model and a source of allusion; use for historical knowledge; use as a religious scripture; inclusion in anthologies; use in genealogies; mention in literary histories; and, finally, use in state ideology (p. 3). In many of these practices, Shirane also points out, ‘there is a prominent stress on genealogy and “origins”, which become a frequent source of authority, ranging from the origins of a clan (uji), a family house (ie), a school (mon), to national origins’ (pp. 3–4). Another important aspect of the history of canon formation is the ‘rise and fall of different genres or modes’ (p. 4). The end result is that, when we survey Japanese literary history as a whole, we are confronted not by a single, permanently established canon but by a number of ‘competing canons’. In the Heian period, for instance, Buddhist scriptures were regarded as the ‘highest’ genre, followed by Confucian texts, histories, Chinese literature, and only lastly by the two native literary genres, waka (poetry) and monogatari (fiction) written not in Chinese characters but in the native kana syllabary. This was a genre and language hierarchy that followed the Chinese model: fiction relegated to the bottom, and Chinese over Japanese. In the eighteenth century, however, the ‘nativist’ kokugaku scholars reacted against this ‘Chinese hierarchy’ and, in fact, tried to invert it, placing waka and monogatari on the top. But they were prophets more than realists and, as Shirane points out, it was not until about a century later, with the rise of modern nationalism after Japan’s opening to the West,

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with the new emphasis on ‘national language’ and ‘national literature’, and with the defeat of China in the 1890s, that the ‘Chinese hierarchy’ was finally overturned. What followed was nothing less than a ‘rearrangement’ of the whole pre-modern canon according to modern notions of what constituted ‘literature’: imaginative literature, for instance, was now separated from history, religion, political science and philosophy. Most conspicuously, there was a sudden rise in the status of fiction under European influence, and this resulted in a higher evaluation of works such as Taketori monogatari, Japan’s ‘first novel’, and the fiction of Saikaku. The greatest of all Japanese fictional works, the Tale of Genji, which had been previously valued as a kind of handbook for poetry, was now ‘reread’ as both a ‘realistic’ and a ‘psychological’ novel. Shirane relates this mid-Meiji exercise in canon reformation directly to the general Meiji project of modernization and nation-building: ‘The construction of a national literature and of a national language was critical to the formation of a strong nation-state, particularly in the face of powerful Western nations, which represented a model for modernization’ (p. 14). Following the ‘evolutionary, Enlightenment model of history’, the new canon ‘stressed progress across time’, favouring medieval and Tokugawa texts over Heian ones, and treating the aristocratic literature of the earlier periods and the popular literature of the medieval and Tokugawa periods as ‘part of a single national literature’ (p. 14). In short, the Meiji government was into canon-making as much as it was into cannon-making. But there were ancient precedents for this too, as the first two chapters of the book show. The earliest surviving works of Japanese literature were products of an eighth-century imperial court that was trying to establish its own kind of ‘national identity’ distinct from that of its civilizational mentor, China. Most important from a political point of view were the Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters, 712) and the Nihon shoki (Chronicles of Japan, 720). As Kōnoshi Takamitsu points out in his essay on the process of ‘constructing imperial mythology’, ever since their compilation these two texts have been ‘constantly reconstructed and reinterpreted for the purpose of enforcing or maintaining the legitimacy of the emperor’ (p. 51). After 1868 they were ‘defined as the cultural foundation of both the folk and the nation’ in official government publications such as textbooks. In other words, as Kōnoshi writes, they became part of a discourse ‘constructed by a modern nation-state (kokumin kokka) whose ideological underpinning was the emperor system (tennōsei)’ (p. 51).

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What was new in Meiji conceptions of canon, however, was a more inclusive – dare one say more democratic? – sense of nationhood and national identity. Shinada Yoshikazu makes this clear in his essay on the Man’yōshū, subtitled ‘The Invention of a National Poetry Anthology’ (that is, of a so-called kokumin kashū). Shinada’s essay is a fascinating study of how views of the Man’yōshū changed over the centuries in accordance with currently fashionable theories, ideologies and worldviews. The prime example may be seen in the contrast between the traditional ‘aristocratic’ view of the work and its modern ‘democratic’ or ‘popularist’ counterpart. A recent high school kokugo textbook quoted by Shinada presents the now conventional view that: ‘The poets represented range from emperors to commoners, and the works in the collection are characterized by a simple and moving style’ (p. 32). Shinada argues convincingly that none of this is true: the Man’yōshū ‘was actually the product of the ruling class in the ancient period’ and this may be seen clearly in the often formal, complex, and allusive style of its poems: ‘Modern writers consequently could not hide their bewilderment when confronted with makura-kotoba (epithets), jo-kotoba (prefaces), and other rhetorical techniques of Man’yōshū poetry’ (36). An illiterate peasant could not have composed such literate poetry, and when the poems are attributed to such members of the ‘lower orders’ this is merely a literary convention, such as when, for poetic effect, a male court aristocrat adopted the voice of a homesick border guard or of a woman mourning for her lost lover. Indeed, such conventions are common in world literature. But the Meiji establishment was eager to retroactively create a truly ‘national’ literature in the modern sense (embracing all the ‘people’ or kokumin): ‘The poetry of the people was expected, first and foremost, to contribute to the spiritual unification of the nation’ (p. 35). Since a modern nation encompassed not merely the aristocracy but, theoretically at least, all of its citizens, the Man’yōshū was recast as the supreme poetic incarnation of an ancient Japanese national unity which, of course, had never existed (in the Nara and Heian periods, as the literature of those periods makes clear, aristocrats and commoners were seen as almost distinct human species). Meiji intellectuals longed for a ‘great national poet’ who would have the universal appeal of a Goethe or a Shakespeare: ‘This was more than a literary ambition: the creation of such a poet was considered an indispensable part of Japan’s efforts to vie with the Western powers’ (p. 35). Shinada thus concludes that: ‘In all likelihood, the perception of the Man’yōshū as a national poetry anthology was a form of

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psychological compensation for the absence of such a modern national poetry’ (p. 37). Other essays collected here include those of Tomi Suzuki on modern literary histories and women’s diary literature, Joshua Mostow on the Tales of Ise, Linda Chance on Tsurezuregusa and The Pillow Book, David Bialock on The Tale of the Heike, William Lee on Chikamatsu and dramatic literature in the Meiji period, Kurozumi Makoto on Kangaku, and a final essay by Haruo Shirane on curriculum and competing canons. All these essays are of uniformly high quality, well-argued and rich in historical detail, making this an indispensable reference work for the student of Japanese literary history. The specialist will perhaps not find a great deal here that is completely new, either in terms of theory or of information, but what is new – at least, in English – is to find all this material gathered together in one place, a new synthesis, one might say, that gives a comprehensive overview of the history of Japanese literary canon formation. This is a very useful thing to have and the book will no doubt remain the authoritative work on this subject for many years to come. As to whether these excellent literary-historical essays convince one of the validity of the ‘antifoundational’ canon theory Shirane propounds in his Introduction, my feelings are more ambivalent. Generally speaking, the notion of ‘invented tradition’ was a useful one when traditions were commonly and uncritically accepted as rock-solid, ageold ‘givens’ or as arising and evolving naturally over many centuries without conscious intervention or manipulation by elite power groups. As with all such ideas or metaphors once they become widely popularized, however, there is always the danger that this once-useful notion itself becomes too much of an idée fixe and is applied too simplistically or indiscriminately to all manner of cultural phenomena, no matter how diverse, hybrid or multifaceted. In the case of literary canon-making, in particular, there often seems to be a fine line between ‘inventing’, ‘creating’, ‘spontaneous popular acclaim’, and the almost countless other ways in which works are ‘canonized’ – as Shirane himself concedes at one point. As an exception to the now generally accepted view that canons are ‘the instruments of entrenched interests, reproducing the values or ideology of dominant groups’ (p. 15), he points to a more popular type of canon formation such as occurred in the medieval period, when Heian court culture and literary figures were popularized by traveling minstrels, artists and performers (p. 16). Actually, of course, such examples could be multiplied

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exponentially, because there are, in fact, many other kinds of canon formation, making the power politics subspecies of the ‘antifoundational’ theory of canon formation far too narrow and simplistic. More important, however, at least for anyone who still cherishes an old-fashioned love of literature, is the fact that these recent ‘antifoundational’ theories are based on a nihilistic view of language and literature, reflecting the general nihilism of post-structuralist thought. The doctrine that ‘canonicity is not a property of the work itself but of its transmission’ (to use John Guillory’s words as quoted by Shirane) is part of a general assault on the traditional view that a literary text possesses a certain artistic integrity or autonomy in itself and should be interpreted and valued, as much as possible, on its own terms. After the often-proclaimed ‘death of the author’, the literary text is now seen as a kind of free-floating semantic agent, a passive or neutral receptor for the ‘power discourses’ of various interest groups, an empty cipher open to any use or interpretation – perhaps even the literary equivalent of a whore whose favours may be cheaply bought by all. Shirane – who, I suspect, is a closet literature-lover himself – seems rather nervous about having let the wolf within the fold, and shies away from adopting such an extreme position: he cautiously acknowledges that a text is not an ‘empty box’: ‘Each text implies certain moral or aesthetic values and possesses certain formal characteristics’ (p. 2). No doubt creative writers everywhere will jump for joy on hearing the good news! At any rate, to return to the more ‘practical’ part of the book, the first obvious fact that emerges clearly from these studies of nine different cases of canon formation is that what we might call the ‘power politics dimension of canon-making’ comes far more into play with some works and writers than with others – exactly as common sense would lead us to expect. As anyone who has made even a cursory study of Japanese literary history knows, power politics had much to do with the creation and canonization of the first two major works of Japanese literature (using the word ‘literature’ in its broadest sense to include, for instance, historical and religious writing): the Kojiki and the Nihon shoki. On the other hand, it seems equally obvious that the Genji Monogatari (Tale of Genji, circa 1000) was canonized almost in spite of itself – that is, its canonical status as the ‘supreme work of Japanese literature’ often caused great offense to the political and cultural establishment: because it was written by a woman, because of its alleged ‘immorality’, because of its ‘mendacious’ fictionality (so offensive to orthodox Confucianism), because of its ‘insulting’ or ‘degrading’ references to

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the imperial family, etc. etc. Indeed, it is unfortunate – and perhaps significant – that, although there are many passing references to the Genji here, none of the essays focuses on the question of how such an ‘unorthodox’ work could have attained its status as the most canonical work of Japanese literature – if not, of course, by virtue of its sheer literary genius. Could this rather conspicuous omission be precisely because the Genji’s canonical status poses such a serious challenge to the ‘power politics’ theory of canon formation on which this book is supposedly based? Certainly I myself would not be convinced of the universal validity of the theory or of its unqualified applicability to Japanese literature unless the case of the Genji were taken thoroughly into account. But, in fact, I do not think that it would be possible to square the two: what the case of the Genji clearly shows is that the approbation of the political/cultural establishment is not the sine qua non of literary canonization, and that the aesthetic appreciation of fellow writers and of readers in general – including, in this case, generations of powerless female readers – can play a decisive role. In short, the power politics theory of canon formation, while obviously applicable to a limited number of cases, is inaccurate and simplistic when taken as a complete account of what is a diverse and complex process. In his recent brilliant study of twentieth-century political philosophers, The Reckless Mind, Mark Lilla pillories a certain all-too-common type of modern intellectual who seems to find it necessary to adopt narrow, extreme positions on a wide range of issues, positions often as offensive to common humanity as they are to common sense. Some of the still most venerated intellectuals of the twentieth century, from Heidegger and Benjamin to Foucault and Derrida, were among their number, men whose nihilism led them to political folly of the highest order – nothing less than the defence of anti-intellectual, anti-humanistic tyrannies in Germany, the Soviet Union and Iran. Was this the result of their straining after a reputation as ‘original thinkers’, or perhaps a mere delight in confounding ‘established opinion’? Or was it simply, and less flatteringly, the result of a rather limited power and range of thought? All this may seem to have nothing to do with the matter at hand, but the fact is that the currently popular theory of ‘canonicity’, as with other poststructuralist theories, descends directly from this same nihilistic school of thought. By wholeheartedly and unconditionally embracing such theories, perhaps without even knowing their provenance or thinking through all their implications, humanists are embracing their own death.

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This is not to deny that political factors do play a role, sometimes even a decisive role, in the establishment of national literary canons. I doubt that this would come as news to anyone who has studied literary history. But to reduce literary canon formation to a mere exercise in power politics is to deny the power of literature itself, a mysterious living power that can sway whole nations without any help from bureaucrats or politicians. In our own tradition, for instance, it would be absurd to claim that Shakespeare owes his canonical status merely to the fact that he was anointed by the ruling powers as ‘England’s national bard’. Shakespeare’s greatness as a poet, his unparalleled mastery of the English language, is obvious to any reader whose ears are not made of wood. In fact, looking at the historical record, I would say that Shakespeare was first ‘canonized’ by his fellow writers (remember Ben Jonson’s description of him as ‘not for an age, but for all time’), then by generations of readers and theatre-goers, and only much later (in the nineteenth century) was he made into a ‘national institution’ by the British establishment. In the Japanese context, much the same could be said of Murasaki Shikibu – she was ‘canonized’ by female admirers and by fellow writers long before she was adopted as a national icon by the male political establishment. Of course, it is true that in Japan the political and literary establishments sometimes closely coincided, but not always so (in recent times, for instance, one might contrast the Meiji and Taishō periods in this respect). Some major figures in Japanese literature were definite political outsiders. In the end, of course, it also depends on what one means by a ‘literary canon’. If one defines it narrowly as, for instance: ‘those texts chosen by governments to exemplify the national culture, especially as part of educational curricula’, then the ‘new canon theory’ will obviously hold up quite well. But I doubt that many literature-lovers would be satisfied with such a narrow definition. There is a more capacious and attractive alternative, that of all those ‘common readers’ who make up their own minds, as Virginia Woolf once urged them to do: After all, what laws can be laid down about books? The battle of Waterloo was certainly fought on a certain day; but is Hamlet a better play than Lear? Nobody can say. Each must decide that question for himself. To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries.1

Source: Nichibunken Japan Review 27 (2014), pp. 269–70.

17.

Haruo Shirane, Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons: Nature, Literature, and the Arts v

All of us who study Japan will no doubt have at least some vague idea of the all-important role the seasons play in so many different areas of Japanese culture. The great virtue of Haruo Shirane’s Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons is that it enables us, for the first time in English, to gain a comprehensive, systematic and authoritatively scholarly view of how very pervasive this seasonal culture is and has been since the Nara and Heian periods. The book’s central argument is also original and thought-provoking: that the supposedly close relation to nature and the seasons in waka and the manifold other arts, crafts and cultural practices influenced by that classical poetic tradition has actually been a relation not with nature-in-itself but with a man-made ‘secondary’ nature. This argument, sustained throughout the book, certainly provides an interesting new perspective from which to rethink the whole important issue of Japanese culture’s relation to nature. But I also think it is a deeply problematic argument, both from a philosophical and a literary-critical perspective. Philosophically it merely states a truism applicable to all poetry. From an ontological point of view, all poetic imagery of nature is secondary – or indeed, if one is a Platonist, tertiary, since Plato thought that even visible nature is but a shadow of reality. Therefore it makes no sense, philosophically at least, to single out any one particular poetic tradition as representing nature on a more ‘secondary’ level than any other poetic tradition. Is, for instance, Wordsworth’s daffodil more ‘primary’ than Basho’s frog? If that were a Zen kōan, one might answer: ‘Croak! Croak!’ 247

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Furthermore, even as a literary-critical term of convenience, ‘secondary nature’ is unsustainable in the long run – for instance, once we move from Heian to Muromachi and Edo poetry. Yes, Heian court poets like Ki no Tsurayuki and Fujiwara no Shunzei had a rather restrictive view of the aspects of nature that were appropriately ‘poetic’, and generally preferred to use natural imagery that was ‘graceful and elegant’ and gave rise to feelings of pleasure and harmony. But, as Shirane himself points out, one of the defining characteristics of later medieval and early modern poetry was precisely the breaking down of these restrictions. The puzzled reader might well ask, then: at what point does nature in this new poetry become primary rather than secondary? Are all those images of earthy, erotic, frightening, and inelegant nature so abundant in Edo haikai, which would certainly have offended the refined tastes of the Heian courtiers, not ‘real’ enough to be considered ‘primary’? Shirane does not address this question. Rather, doggedly determined to apply his term ‘secondary nature’ to the whole of the Japanese poetic tradition, he expands its meaning to include even poetic images of ‘nature in the raw’ (e.g., the clamorous sexual intercourse of cats) that would have made a Heian courtier’s hair stand on end. At one point he does admit that it ‘would be hard to call beer or a short-sleeved shirt [seasonal words in modern haiku] a form of secondary nature’ (p. 217). But he does not pursue the theoretical implications of this admission. Actually, there is an important larger literary-critical issue at stake here too, beyond even the history of Japanese poetry: our tendency to view and evaluate the literatures of the past through our own rather narrow lens of what might be called ‘modern realism’. What, after all, is ‘real’ or ‘primary’ nature, or, more to the point, poetic truth in the representation of nature? As Makoto Ueda has pointed out, poets such as Matsuo Bashō sought, in their hermetical retreat, ‘a reclusive life devoted to a quest for eternal truth in nature’.1 One wonders whether Shirane would nonetheless consider Bashō’s nature ‘secondary’, even in those famous late haiku pervaded by a tragic sense of nature’s loneliness and desolation? No doubt this is far from Shirane’s intention, but his central argument might give the impression, especially to those readers as yet unconvinced of the greatness of the Japanese poetic tradition, that much of the classical poetry is of ‘secondary’ status: precious, affected, artificial, and in general further removed from the truth or reality of nature than the poetry of other traditions. Widening his argument even further, he makes the provocative suggestion, in the final paragraph of

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the book, that the relatively poor record of the Japanese in protecting their environment may also have been because their supposed closeness to nature was only a closeness to secondary nature: ‘the extensive cultural seasonalization and the pervasive presence of secondary nature may have dulled the sense of urgency with regard to conservation and the need to save the environment’ (p. 219). Thus he generalizes what was, at most, an aesthetic prejudice of some Heian aristocrats into an all-pervasive tendency of Japanese culture, from ancient times to the present. Although in a uniquely negative form, this seems to me to verge on the kind of nihonjinron discourse about the ‘special relationship’ between the Japanese and nature that Shirane himself rightly calls into question earlier in this book.

Source: Journal of Japanese Studies 39: 1 (Winter 2013), pp. 138–42.

18.

Steven Heine and Dale S. Wright (eds.), Zen Masters v

Zen masters have had rather bad press of late, what with the series of sex scandals at American Zen centres and the shocking revelations in some recent histories about the fascism, militarism, and even rabid anti-Semitism of some of the leading Zen masters of twentieth-century Japan. Official apologies have been issued, public mea culpas have been uttered – it has all made Zen begin to look suspiciously like an ordinary run-of-the-mill religion and the claims of Zen masters to moral and spiritual superiority seem as spurious as those of any garden-variety cult guru. This is especially significant because, as Steven Heine and Dale Wright point out in their preface, from the very beginning Zen made much of its masters: ‘In contrast to most other forms of Buddhism, sacred literature in Chan or Zen consists of religious biographies, or stories about the lives of Zen masters’ (p. v). These biographies, which emerged first in late Tang and early Song China, ‘valorised’ the masters to such an extent that they ‘created, in effect, a new kind of Buddhism, and a novel image of enlightenment that held inspirational power for centuries’ (p. v). Masters are so important to Zen because of its leading idea of the transmission of enlightenment ‘from mind to mind’, from master to student. Thus, the religious authority of any particular school of Zen, its ‘seal of authenticity’, depends to a very large degree on the authenticity of its masters’ ‘enlightenment’. One issue that inevitably arises in any scholarly study of this sort is the difficulty of distinguishing between ‘the master of hagiographic 250

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legend’ and what might be called the ‘real-life person’ or perhaps ‘the master of historical reality’. Although it is obviously far more difficult to distinguish between the two when one is dealing with someone who lived, say, in the eighth rather than in the twentieth century, a number of the authors here in fact attempt this daunting task and do a very convincing job of it. Mario Poceski’s chapter, for instance, is exemplary in this respect. Dealing with the major Chan Master Baizhang Huaihai (J. Hyakujō Ekai, 749–814), Poceski identifies ‘three key hagiographic transmutations of Baizhang’s religious persona: paradigmatic Chan iconoclast, patron saint of Chan monasticism, and sophisticated teacher of Chan doctrine and contemplative practice’ (p. 4). Basically, Poceski finds, through careful analysis of the earliest Tang sources, that only the third hagiographic image has any solid basis in historical reality. The other two are clearly latter-day fabrications by Song Rinzai Zen writers eager to prove the originality and independence of their own school that was putatively descended from this master of the ‘golden age of Zen’. What Poceski regards as the iconoclastic approach to Zen, as manifested especially in the many ‘encounter dialogue stories’ that feature a questioning student and an enigmatic master, did not fully emerge until the Song dynasty, about 150 years after Baizhang’s death. Thus, there is an obvious disparity between the actual Baizhang and Song-period hagiographical depictions of him (p. 21). Interestingly, the ‘earliest sources’ of the Tang dynasty tell us that the ‘historical’ Baizhang was much more conventionally devoted to scriptural study as a necessary component of Zen practice. He was more of a conventional Buddhist scholar than a sutra-burning iconoclast. Nonetheless, the ‘encounter dialogue stories embody a unique iconoclastic ethos that by the early Song period came to be portrayed as a central element of Chan spirituality’ (p. 11). Such ‘depictions of Chan iconoclasm were canonized’ and greatly influenced later constructions of Zen throughout East Asia (p. 11). Furthermore, as Poceski rightly points out, ‘The popular images of Chan iconoclasts found especially receptive audiences in the West, ever since they were first introduced by D. T. Suzuki (1870–1966) during the early twentieth century as a crucial component in his repackaging of Zen for Westerners’ (p. 11). Albert Welter, in his chapter on another Tang master, Yongming Yanshou (904–75, J. Yōmyō Enju), also finds a significant gap between Tang realities and Song imaginings, showing how images of the master changed to suit the changing nature of Zen in each new age or sect: ‘As he became a leading figure within Song Buddhist circles, his image

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began to take on the shape of the communities that honoured him. As these communities changed, so did the image of Yanshou’ (p. 61). In Chan circles, for instance, ‘Yanshou was cast as a paradigmatic Chan monk, composing enlightenment verses and responding to questions from students with enigmatic replies’ (p. 61). But, among Pure Land practitioners, ‘Yanshou became the consummate advocate of Pure Land teaching and practice’ (p. 61). Given the increasingly sectarian nature of Song Buddhism, inevitably there was conflict between the Zen and Pure Land sects about the true identity of Yanshou – both sides wanting to claim him. Welter, however, argues that the Tang master himself was above such sectarian squabbles; he ‘married’ Zen with orthodox Mahayana Buddhism, and thus: ‘Whenever a divorce occurred, Yanshou’s reputation suffered’ (p. 84). Regarding the gap between Tang realities and Song imaginings, a very interesting point is made by Miriam L. Levering in her study of Dahui Zonggao (J. Daie Sōkō, 1089–1163), a Song master famous for his systematization of kōan study (in Japan he was the major influence on Hakuin Ekaku [1686–1769], founder of modern Rinzai Zen). Levering finds that, whereas the Song image of Tang masters exaggerates their rough manners and caricatures them to emphasize their power and originality, recently deceased Song masters, on the other hand, are presented more realistically. They possess ‘the refined manner and sophistication to which their literati contemporaries aspired’ (p. 98). She argues that Song accounts of Song Zen masters were more realistic than their accounts of Tang masters because the former were almost contemporary: ‘Freedom to shape Dahui’s image was thus more limited’ – especially because he had also made an effort to shape his own public image as a rather conventional ‘perfect monk’ in his sermons and writings (p. 110). Taigen Dan Leighton takes a different approach in his chapter on another Tang master, Dongshan Shouchu (J. Tōzan Ryōkai, 807–69), considered cofounder of the Caodong or Sōtō sect. Rather than trying to distinguish between the ‘real’ and the ‘legendary’ Dongshan, and rather than ‘analysing the historicity of the material attributed to Dongshan’, Leighton treats the sayings and written works attributed to Dongshan ‘as exemplary of Chan lore’, especially the ‘teaching of suchness’ in his most famous putative work, Hōkyō zanmai (The jewel mirror samadhi) (p. 33). This is, of course, a perfectly legitimate approach, especially when it is carried out as skilfully as Leighton does here. His chapter provides a lucid insight into the poetic and philosophic genius

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of Zen and reminds us of why we are interested in these ‘Zen masters’ in the first place, regardless of their ambiguous historicity. The ‘identity tensions’ apparent among Song Zen writers in relation to their Tang Zen predecessors reappear in a somewhat different form in Japan. In Steven Heine’s fascinating chapter on Dōgen, he finds that the great founder of the Japanese Sōtō sect suffered from a kind of anxiety of influence, the tension between the need to prove one’s ‘authentic lineage’ by reference to earlier masters and the need to prove one’s own originality by distinguishing oneself from those earlier masters – often by surprisingly vituperative attacks on them. As Heine shows vividly, this tension is painfully obvious in Dōgen. In this respect, Zen masters have something in common with poets, those other explorers of the unconscious, and each has to negotiate his own version of Bashō’s fūeki ryukō (immutability and fluidity or, more freely, tradition and fashion) or T.S. Eliot’s ‘tradition and the individual talent’. The theme of the excellence of ‘Zen scholarship’, which comes up in a number of chapters here and will perhaps surprise readers more familiar with the iconoclastic ‘book-burning’ side of Zen, is continued by David Riggs in his study of the prodigious Tokugawa scholar Menzan Zuihō (1683–1769), who was definitely not a sutra burner. Riggs argues convincingly that Menzan should be regarded as far more than a mere interpreter of Dōgen: ‘in many regards he was as much a revolutionary as a conservator’ (p. 148). More particularly, he did not hesitate to ‘fill in areas that Dōgen left blank and to decide ambiguities in Dōgen’s work by interpreting the texts to which Dōgen would have had access’ (p. 148). This was all part of his major life project of returning Sōtō Zen to the original words and vision of its founder, which had been lost sight of over the centuries since his death. In other words, in reviving Dōgen (under the slogan fukko), Menzan also creatively reinterpreted and extended the master’s teachings and monastic rules – especially as contained in his masterwork, the miscellaneous collection Shōbōgenzō (Treasury of the eye of the true dharma, circa 1230s–40s), on which Menzan conducted intensive research and analysis. In this, he was a typical Tokugawa intellectual, returning to the ancient, original texts or authorities – just as did the Kogaku Confucian scholars. Because he based his argument for ‘authentic Dōgen Zen’ on such thoroughgoing textual analysis of the founder’s words, ‘his influence is seen throughout the practices and teaching of the school to this day’ (p. 151). When we enter modern times with the last four chapters of this book, we seem to be suddenly in a different territory – and almost a

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different book. The hint of ‘realism’ that was detected in Song portrayals of contemporary Zen masters has now swelled into the dominant tone, and hagiography has little chance of surviving the cold winds of modernity. We are now in the realm of Friedrich Nietzsche’s ‘human, all too human’. The effect may seem discordant at first, but in my view this juxtaposition of ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ views of Zen masters is one of the most powerfully thought-provoking aspects of this book. The modern masters’ ‘flaws’ take a variety of forms, from Shaku Sōen’s militarist imperialism to Hisamatsu Shin’ichi’s absurdly impractical idealism – and some would say hypocrisy – to Taizan Maezumi’s alcoholism and womanizing. Some of the authors here take a rather lenient view of these various transgressions, on the grounds that Zen masters are, after all, merely human beings and, in the case of Shaku Sōen especially, must be understood in their own historical context. Fair enough. But the important question for me and, in terms of the topic of this book, the question I would have liked to see more directly addressed, is: what bearing does all this have on Zen’s transcendentally high claims for its masters as ‘enlightened buddhas’, as perfect paragons of wisdom and compassion? What then is enlightenment, what is its moral and social value – and, indeed, what then is a Zen master? In other words, what are the implications of this recent ‘humanization of the masters’ for our understanding of Zen and especially for our understanding of Zen satori? In the book’s final chapter, Sor-Ching Low provides an illuminating perspective on this issue of what might be called ‘human reality versus hagiography in the modern world’. He points to the conflict between Western-style humanism and Asian-style formal hagiography in representations of the late Korean master Seung Sahn – both by himself and by others. Seung Sahn was torn between his desire to appeal to his American students as the ‘funky Zen master’ and his desire to be taken seriously within the Korean Zen establishment as a ‘great master’ of the most distinguished genealogy and worthy of the ancient tradition of Korean Zen (p. 280). In short, his need to be seen as a ‘regular guy’ in the United States clashed with his need to be seen as a traditional ‘enlightened master’ in Korea. For, as Low points out, enlightened masters have a ‘quasi-divine status’ in the ‘religious and cultural imagination of Buddhist Asia’ (p. 280). Alan Watts, one of the wittiest early writers on Zen in the United States, liked to distinguish between ‘beat Zen’ and ‘square Zen’. We ‘serious’ Zen students tended to be self-righteously dismissive of his

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advocacy of the former – surely it would lead to a superficial American version of what was a profound and ancient Asian spiritual tradition? Nowadays we might think that Watts had a point after all. Perhaps there is something to be said for the ‘beat’ approach to Zen in the American sociocultural context. After the recent scandals, there has in fact been a movement to establish a less hierarchical, less male-chauvinist, less feudalistic style of American Zen in which there may no longer even be any room for people who call themselves ‘Zen master’. But this immediately begs the kōan-like question: will this ‘masterless’ Zen still be Zen?

Bibliography of Roy Starrs Publications

BOOKS

When the Tsunami Came to Shore: Culture and Disaster in Japan. Boston & Leiden: Brill, 2014. Rethinking Japanese Modernism. Leiden: Brill, 2012. Modernism and Japanese Culture. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Politics and Religion in Modern Japan: Red Sun, White Lotus. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Japanese Cultural Nationalism: At Home and in the Asia Pacific. London: Global Oriental and Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004. Nations Under Siege: Globalization and Nationalism in Asia. New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2002. Asian Nationalism in an Age of Globalization. London: Routledge/Curzon, 2001. Soundings in Time: The Fictive Art of Kawabata Yasunari. London: Routledge/ Curzon, 1998. An Artless Art: The Zen Aesthetic of Shiga Naoya. London: Routledge/Curzon, 1998. Japan and Korea: Contemporary Studies (co-edited with Bjarke Frellesvig). Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 1997. Cultural Encounters: China, Japan and the West (co-edited with S. Clausen and A. Wedell-Wedellsborg). Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 1995. Deadly Dialectics: Sex, Violence and Nihilism in the World of Yukio Mishima. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press and London: Curzon Press, 1994. BOOK CHAPTERS

‘D. T. Suzuki’s Theory of Inspiration and the Challenges of Cross-Cultural Transmission’. In Beyond Zen: D.T. Suzuki and the Modern Transformation of Buddhism, John Breen, Sueki Fumihiko and Yamada Shōji, eds. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2022. Suzuki Daisetsu no reikanron: Bunka o koeta dentatsu ni idomu. In Suzuki Daisetsu: Zen o koete, Yamada Shoji & J. Breen eds. Kyoto: Shibunkaku, 2020. ‘Mishima, Bowie and the Anti-Metaphysics of the Mask’, in Masks: Bowie and Artists of Artifice, J. Curcio, ed. Bristol, U.K.: Intellect Books, 2020.

257

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‘Japan’s Perennial New Man: The Liberal and Fascist Incarnations of Masamichi Rōyama’. In The ‘New Man’ in Radical Right Ideology and Practice, 1919–45, Matthew Feldman et al, eds. London: Bloomsbury, 2018. ‘Japanese Poetry and the Aesthetics of Disaster’. In New Essays in Japanese Aesthetics, Minh, N., ed. Lexington: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017. ‘La estética Zen de Muga (Ni-Ego) en el proyecto Renga de Octavio Paz’. In Rogelio Guedea, editor, Países en tránsito: estudios de literatura comparada. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2016. ‘Cultural Responses to Disaster in Japan’. In When the Tsunami Came to Shore: Culture and Disaster in Japan, Roy Starrs, ed. Boston & Leiden: Brill, 2014. ‘The Kojiki’. In The Literary Encyclopedia. http://www.litencyc.com/, 2014. ‘Japanese Modernism Reconsidered’. In Rethinking Japanese Modernism, Roy Starrs, ed. Leiden: Brill, 2012. ‘From Mishima to Aum’. In Politics and Religion in Modern Japan: Red Sun, White Lotus, Roy Starrs, ed. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. ‘Politics and Religion in Japan’. In Politics and Religion in Modern Japan: Red Sun, White Lotus, Roy Starrs, ed. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. ‘Prince Shōtoku and Japan’s “China complex”’. In Cultural Interactions and Interpretations in a Global Age, Ji Fengyuan, Lin Jinghua, and Susan Bouterey, eds. Christchurch: Canterbury University Press, 2011. ‘Shiga Naoya’. In The Literary Encyclopedia. http://www.litencyc.com/, 2010. ‘Nashonarisuto toshite no Rafukadio Haan’. In Haan no hito to shuhen, Hirakawa Sukehiro, ed. Tokyo: Shinyosha, 2009. Masatomo [Monkey and Crabs]; Ichiriki [Katatasu muri (snail)]; [Okami to uchikubi (A wolf with a chopped human head)]. In Beloved: Works from the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, R. Notman & L. Cullen, eds. Dunedin, New Zealand: Dunedin Public Art Gallery, 2009. ‘Ink Traces of the Dancing Calligraphers: Zen-ei Sho in Japan Today’. In Performing Japan: Contemporary Expressions of Cultural Identity, Henry Johnson and Jerry C. Jaffe, eds. London, Global Oriental and Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008. ‘Yasunari Kawabata’. In The Literary Encyclopedia. http://www.litencyc.com/, 2008. ‘Yukio Mishima’. In The Literary Encyclopedia. http://www.litencyc.com/, 2008. ‘Shinto Versus Buddhism in the Late Work of Mishima Yukio’. In Ethnic Identities and Linguistic Expressions: Languages, Literatures and Cultural Interaction in an Age of Globalization, Ken Henshall and Xiao Hong, eds. Beijing: Peoples Press, 2006. ‘An artless art, a selfless self: Naoya Shiga’. In Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. New York/London: Thomson Gale, 2006. ‘The Kojiki as Japanese National Narrative’. In Asian Pasts, Asian Futures, Edwina Palmer, ed. London: Global Oriental, 2005.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

259

‘The Road to Violent Action: Mishima Yukio’. In Fascism: Critical Concepts in Political Science, volume 5 (Postwar Fascisms), edited by Roger Griffin with Matthew Feldman. London; New York: Routledge. (Part of the Routledge Major Work series.) 2004. ‘Japan’. In Encyclopedia of the Victorian Era, edited by James Adams et al. Danbury, Conn: Grolier Academic Reference, 2004. ‘Australia and New Zealand’. In Encyclopedia of the Victorian Era, edited by James Adams et al. Danbury, Conn: Grolier Academic Reference, 2004. ‘Introduction’. In Japanese Cultural Nationalism: At Home and in the Asia Pacific, Roy Starrs, ed. London, Global Oriental and Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004, pp. 1–19. ‘Nation and Region in the Work of Dazai Osamu’. In Japanese Cultural Nationalism: At Home and in the Asia Pacific, Roy Starrs, ed. London, Global Oriental and Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004. ‘Naoya Shiga’. In Reference Guide to World Literature, edited by Sara and Tom Pendergast. London; New York: St. James Press; 3rd edition, November 2002. ‘Introduction’. In Nations Under Siege: Globalization and Nationalism in Asia. Roy Starrs, ed. New York, Palgrave/Macmillan, 2002. ‘Between Greece and India: Mishima as Cultural Pilgrim’. In Nostalgic Journeys: Literary Pilgrimages Between Japan and the West, Susan Fisher, ed. Vancouver: U.B.C. Institute of Asian Research, 2001. ‘The Sea of Fertility as a National-Historical Novel’. In Asian Nationalism in an Age of Globaliztion. Roy Starrs, ed. London, Curzon Press, 2001. ‘Introduction’. In Asian Nationalism in an Age of Globaliztion. Roy Starrs, ed. London, Curzon Press, 2001. ‘Indo to Girisha no aida de: Bunka-teki junreisha toshite no Mishima Yukio’. In Sekai no naka no Mishima Yukio. Inoue Takashi, ed. Tokyo: Bensei Publishers, 2001. ‘In Search of the Great Meiji Novel: From Ukigumo to Yoake mae’. In Coloniality, postcoloniality and modernity in Japan. V. Mackie, A. Skoutarides, A. Tokita, eds. Clayton: Monash Asia Institute, 2000. ‘Writing the National Narrative: Changing Attitudes Towards Nation-Building Among Japanese Writers, 1900–1930’. In Japan’s Competing Modernities: Issues in Culture and Democracy, 1900–1930. S. Minichiello, ed. Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press, 1998. ‘Narcissus in winter: Sleeping Beauties and the Kawabata male in old age’. In Florilegeum Japonicum. B. Frellesvig and C.M. Hermansen, eds. Copenhagen, Akademisk Forlag, 1996. ‘The anti-narrative impulse in Kawabata and the renga’. In Modulations in Tradition: Japan and Korea in a Changing World. M. Mervio, ed. Tampere: University of Tampere Press, 1993. ‘The novelist as grand architect: Yukio Mishima’s Sea of Fertility and Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy’. In Nature and Identity in Canadian and Japanese

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Literature. K. Tsuruta and T. Goosen, eds. Toronto: University of TorontoYork University Joint Centre for Asia Pacific Studies, 1988. ‘Kawabata and renga: the strategies of anti-narrative’. In Japanese Studies in Canada. B. Saint-Jacques and M. Soga, eds. Ottawa: Canadian Asian Studies Association, 1985. ‘Time and anti-time in Kawabata’s Yama no oto and Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu’. In An International and Comparative Perspective on Kawabata Yasunari. K. Tsuruta, ed. Vancouver: Institute of Asian Research, 1986. ‘Idai naru sekkeisha toshite no shōsetsuka’. In Sakura to kaede. K. Tsuruta and A. Asai, eds. Tokyo, Bungei Hirobasha, 1985. ‘Yama no oto to Ushinawareta toki o motomete ni okeru jikan to hanjikan’. In Kawabata Yasunari Yama no oto kenkyū. S. Hirakawa and K. Tsuruta, eds. Tokyo, Meiji Shoin, 1985. ACADEMIC JOURNAL ARTICLES

‘Renga: A European Poem and its Japanese Model’. Comparative Literature Studies (May 2017). ‘Politics and Religion in Japan’. In Religion Compass, 3/4 (2009). ‘A Devil of a Job: Mishima and the Masochistic Drive’. In Angelaki: The Journal of Theoretical Humanities 14: 3 (December 2009). ‘Lafcadio Hearn as Japanese Nationalist’. In Nichibunken Japan Review 18 (2006). ‘Japan, Asia, and Globalization’. In The Japan Foundation Newsletter, Vol. XXVIII, Nos. 3–4 (June 2001). ‘Nation and Tradition in Postwar Shōwa Fiction’. The New Zealand Journal of East Asian Studies. June (1997). ‘Nietzschean dialectics in the novels of Mishima Yukio’. Nachrichten Der Gesellschaft für Natur-und Völkerkunde Ostasiens 149–150 (1991). ‘John F. Howes, Japanologist’. B.C. Asian Review, 3/4 (1990). ‘Mishima Yukio as a philosophic novelist’. B.C. Asian Review 1 (1987). BOOK REVIEWS

Michihiro Ama, The Awakening of Modern Japanese Fiction: Path Literature and an Interpretation of Buddhism. The Eastern Buddhist, vol. 50 (2022). J. W. Treat, Kindai Nihon bungaku no seisui. Nihon Kenkyū 62 (2021). J. W. Treat, The rise and fall of modern Japanese literature. Japan Review 34 (2019). Alex Bates, The Culture of the Quake: The Great Kantō Earthquake and Taishō Japan. Journal of Japanese Studies 44: 1 (2018). ‘The Fortunes of Pan-Asianism: Past, Present and Future’ (review article). Journal of World History 29: 2 (January 2018).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

261

Mark R. Mullins and Koichi Nakano (eds.), Disasters and Social Crisis in Contemporary Japan: Political, Religious, and Sociocultural Responses. Japanese Studies 37: 2 (2017). Paula Arai, Bringing Zen Home: The Healing Heart of Japanese Women’s Rituals, New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 17: 2 (2015). Irene de Angelis, The Japanese Effect in Contemporary Irish Poetry, New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 6: 1 (2014). Haruo Shirane, Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons: Nature, Literature, and the Arts. Japan Review 27 (2014). Steven Heine and Dale S. Wright (eds.), Zen Masters, The Journal of Japanese Studies 39: 1 (2013). Kenneth J. Ruoff, Imperial Japan at its zenith: The wartime celebration of the empire’s 2,600th anniversary. Pacific Affairs 85: 3 (2012). Victoria Lyon Bestor and Theodore C. Bestor (eds.), Routledge handbook of Japanese culture and society. Asia Pacific World 3: 1 (2012). Alisa Freedman, Tokyo in transit: Japanese culture on the rails and road. Japanese Language & Literature 46: 1 (2012). Alan Tansman, The Aesthetics of Japanese Fascism, in The Journal of Japanese Studies 37:1 (2011). Walter Skya, Japan’s Holy War: The Ideology of Radical Shinto Ultranationalism, in The Journal of Church and State (Oxford University Press, 2009). William J Tyler (ed.), Modanizumu: Modernist Fiction from Japan 1913–1938, Japanese Studies, (November 2008). Andre Gingrich & Marcus Banks (eds.), Neo-Nationalism in Europe and Beyond: Perspectives from Social Anthropology, Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology, (March 2007). Kerri Sakamoto, One Hundred Million Hearts. Canadian Literature 185 (Summer 2005). Doug Slaymaker, Confluences: Postwar France and Japan. The Journal of Japanese Studies 30: 2 (Summer 2004). Seiji M. Lippit, Topographies of Japanese Modernism, Asian Studies Review 27: 4 (2003). Cécile Sakai, Kawabata, le clair-obscur: Essai sur une écriture de l’ambiguïté. Journal of Japanese Studies 29: 1 (Winter 2003). Hugh Cortazzi (ed.), Japan Experiences: Fifty Years, One Hundred Views – PostWar Japan Through British Eyes. Asia Pacific Viewpoint 44: 1 (April 2003). Jason Tomes, Balfour and Foreign Policy: The International Thought of a Conservative Statesman. New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 2: 2 (December 2002). ‘Japanese Literature as a Modern Invention’. Review Article of Haruo Shirane and Tomi Suzuki, eds., Inventing the Classics: Modernity, National Identity, and Japanese Literature, New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 4: 1 (June 2002).

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Akhil Bakshi, Silk Road on Wheels. New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 3: 2 (June 2002). Sandra Buckley (ed.), Encyclopedia of Contemporary Japanese Culture. New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 4: 2 (2002). Yasuhiro Nakasone, The Making of the New Japan: Reclaiming the Political Mainstream. New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies III: 1 (2001). Rebecca L. Copeland, Lost Leaves: Women Writers of Meiji Japan. New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies III: 1 (2001). Christopher Seeley, A History of Writing in Japan. New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies III: 1 (2001). Makoto Ueda, Light Verse from the Floating World: An Anthology of Premodern Japanese Senryu. New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies II: 2 (2000). Furui Yoshikichi, Child of Darkness: Yōko and Other Stories. The Journal of Asian Studies 58: 1 (1999). Kenneth G. Henshall, A History of Japan: From Stone Age to Superpower. New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies I: 1 (1999). Yuichi Nagashima, Objective Description of the Self: The Literary Theory of Iwano Hōmei. New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies VI: 2 (1998). Izumi Kyōka, Japanese Gothic Tales. Monumenta Nipponica 51: 4 (Winter, 1996). Ninomiya Masayuki, La pensée de Kobayashi Hideo: Un intellectuel japonais au tournant de l’histoire. Monumenta Nipponica 50: 4 (Winter, 1995). Anthony Hood Chambers, The Secret Window: Ideal Worlds in Tanizaki’s Fiction. Monumenta Nipponica 50: 3 (Autumn, 1995). Michele Marra, Representations of Power: The Literary Politics of Medieval Japan. The Journal of Asian Studies 53: 3 (August 1994). Michele Marra, The Aesthetics of Discontent: Politics and Reclusion in Medieval Japanese Literature. Journal of Asian and African Studies 28: 3 (July– October 1993). Yukio Mishima, Acts of Worship. The Journal of Asian Studies 1990–08, Vol. 49 (3). David Gurr, The Voice of the Crane. The Globe and Mail (Toronto) September 2, 1989. George Woodcock, Caves in the Desert: Travels in China. The Globe and Mail (Toronto), December 10, 1988. Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Childhood Years: A Memoir. The Globe and Mail, Saturday, September 3, 1988. Endō Shūsaku, Scandal. The Globe and Mail, Saturday, May 21, 1988. C. W. Nichol, Harpoon: A Novel. The Globe and Mail (Toronto), 23 May 1987. Francis Mathy, Shiga Naoya. Pacific Affairs, 1975–10–01, Vol.48 (3). Lennard Bickel, This Accursed Land. Johan Jacobsen, Alaskan Voyage 1881– 1883. Thomas McGuire, 99 Days on the Yukon. Harold Horwood, Bartlett, The Great Canadian Explorer. The Vancouver Sun, Jan 6, 1978. George Ryga, Ballad of a Stonepicker. The Vancouver Sun, Apr 1, 1977.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

263

Jay Robert Nash, Hustlers and Con Men: An Anecdotal History of the Confidence Man and His Games. The Vancouver Sun, Dec 10, 1976. Agnes Newton Keith, Before the Blossoms Fall: Life and Death in Japan. The Vancouver Sun, September 12, 1975. James Clavell, Shogun: A Novel of Japan. The Vancouver Sun, Friday, August 29, 1975. Victor von Hagen, The Golden Man: The Quest for El Dorado. The Vancouver Sun, Aug 22, 1975. Donald Fraser, Class Warfare. The Vancouver Sun, Mar 7, 1975. Ueda Akinari, Ugetsu Monogatari: Tales of Moonlight and Rain. The Vancouver Sun, Feb 7, 1975. Pablo Neruda, Selected Poems. The Globe Magazine, Toronto, Jan 2, 1971. Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The Globe Magazine, Toronto, Dec 25, 1970. Giorgio Bassani, The Heron. The Globe Magazine, Toronto, Oct 31, 1970. Yasunari Kawabata, The Sound of the Mountain. The Globe Magazine, Toronto, Aug 22, 1970. Frances Strauss Macmillan, Where Did the Justice Go? The Globe Magazine, Toronto, Aug 15, 1970. Jean Genet, Funeral Rites. The Globe Magazine, Toronto, Aug 8, 1970. Katherine Anne Porter, Collected Essays and Occasional Writings. The Globe and Mail, Jul 11, 1970. Felicien Marceau, Ciphers that we are. The Globe and Mail, May 9, 1970. Hermann Hesse, Deep and lucidly into the soul, The Globe and Mail, Apr 25, 1970. Thomas Rose, ed., Violence in America. The Globe and Mail, Mar 28, 1970. Paul Bullock ed., Watts: The Aftermath, By the People of Watts. Feb 21, 1970. Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. The Province (Vancouver) May 16, 1969. Raymond Spence, Nothing Black but a Cadillac. The Province (Vancouver) Apr 18, 1969. Claire Martin, In an Iron Glove. The Province (Vancouver) Feb 21, 1969. Barney Rosset and Mike Topp, eds., Evergreen Review Reader 1957–1966. The Province (Vancouver) Jan 31, 1969. Andy Warhol, a. The Province (Vancouver) Jan 10, 1969. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, A Review of Obsolete Communism: The Left-Wing Alternative. The Province (Vancouver) Dec 27, 1968. Lord Montgomery, A History of Warfare. The Province (Vancouver) Dec 6, 1968. Tom Wolfe, The Pump House Gang. The Province (Vancouver) Oct 25, 1968. Georg Buchner, Woyzeck. The Ubyssey (Vancouver) Oct 11, 1968. Joe Rosenblatt, Winter of The Luna Moth. The Ubyssey (Vancouver) Oct. 4, 1968. Roger Prentis, translator, Three Cuban Poets; Greydon Moore, Billy Barker. The Ubyssey (Vancouver) March 29, 1968.

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Gerard Bessette, Incubation. The Province (Vancouver) May 19, 1967. Gertrude Schwebell, translator, Contemporary German Poetry. The Ubyssey (Vancouver) Feb. 9, 1968. Red Lane, The Collected Poems of Red Lane. The Ubyssey (Vancouver) Feb. 9, 1968. George Jonas, The Absolute Smile. The Ubyssey (Vancouver) Nov. 24, 1967. Alfred Purdy, North of Summer. The Ubyssey (Vancouver) Sept. 22, 1967. Students of San Francisco State College, To Make a Difference. The Ubyssey (Vancouver) March 10, 1967. Patrick Lane, Letters from the Savage Mind. The Ubyssey (Vancouver) Nov. 25, 1966. Ralph Gustafson, Sift in an Hourglass. The Ubyssey (Vancouver) Nov 10, 1966. Robert Huff, The Course. The Ubyssey (Vancouver) Nov. 4, 1966. CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS

‘Mishima’s Nietzsche’. In Proceedings of the 33rd International Congress of Asian and North African Studies. Toronto, University of Toronto Press (1990) pp. 212–226. JOURNALISM

‘More than self interest driving Japan’s stance — academic’. (Adrian Seconi interview with Roy Starrs). Otago Daily Times, Thursday, 3 June 2021. ‘The Tokyo gas attack was Japan’s 9/11’. Fair Observer (11 July 2018). ‘Zen, Japan and the Art of Democracy’. The New Statesman, 4 July 2011. ‘Amateur Theatre Shows Its Weakness Again in Coward’. The Province (Vancouver) Thu, May 22, 1969. ‘Last night’s premiere: Vagabond Playhouse’s choice [Noel Coward] an impossible task’. The Province (Vancouver) May 21, 1969. ‘Theatre in Crisis: Save Metro by All Means – but save it from mediocrity, too’. The Province (Vancouver) Apr 25, 1969. ‘Drama Festival Awards: BCDA Ends Strong – with a Striptease’. The Province (Vancouver) Apr 14, 1969. ‘A New Pied Piper of Drama’, The Province (Vancouver) Apr 18, 1969. ‘Drama Festival: One-Act Plays Produce Evening of Light Comedy’. The Province (Vancouver) Apr 10, 1969. ‘Ryga on Grass and Wild Strawberries’. The Province (Vancouver) 3 April 1969. ‘DDF Week: “Couple” Doesn’t Equal Vaudeville Heritage’. The Province (Vancouver) Mar 22, 1969. ‘DDF Week: Festival Climbs a Tree – and Starts to Swing’. The Province (Vancouver) Mar 21, 1969.

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265

‘Drama: Whodunit isn’t – nobody excited’. The Province (Vancouver) Mar 17, 1969. ‘Drama: Strange Story of a Play Called Pratt’. The Province (Vancouver) Mar 14, 1969. Interview with Alan Watts. The Ubyssey, Vancouver: March 7, 1969. ‘Movies: Why They’re Putting War Game in the Cathedral’. The Province (Vancouver) Wed, Feb 26, 1969. ‘The Arts in Canada: even sport now takes second place to culture here’. The Province (Vancouver) Jan 30, 1969. ‘A Rock Satire Dramatizes Contemporary Violence’. The Province (Vancouver) Wed, Jan 29, 1969. ‘A New Theatre Project That Makes School Come Alive’. The Province (Vancouver) Tue, Jan 28, 1969. ‘Art: An Expert Sets the Scene For New York 13 – An Interview with Henry Geldzahler’. The Province (Vancouver) Jan 22, 1969. ‘Drama: Why They’re Putting Alice in the Alley’. The Province (Vancouver) Jan 24, 1969. ‘Architecture: An Adventure in Building a City with Young Ideas’. The Province (Vancouver) Jan 3, 1969. ‘At the Playhouse: A Show that Will Transform the City’. The Province (Vancouver) Dec 20, 1968. ‘The Making of a Beautiful City: Interview with City Planner Dr. Peter Oberlander’. The Province (Vancouver) Dec 13, 1968. ‘Ritual Explained’. The Vancouver Sun, Sat, Feb 24, 1968.

Notes v

(All Japanese books are published in Tokyo unless otherwise noted.)

INTRODUCTION 1

2

Quoted in John Nathan, Japan Unbound: A Volatile Nation’s Quest for Pride and Purpose. Boston/New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004, pp. 250–251. Sources of Japanese Tradition, Volume 1, compiled by Wm. Theodore De Bary, Donald Keene, and Ryusaku Tsunoda. New York: Columbia University Press, 1958, p. 5.

1. POLITICS AND RELIGION IN JAPAN 1

2 3

4

5

6

7

8 9 10 11

Japan Times Online, ‘Mori’s “divine nation” remark spurs outrage’, The Japan Times, May 17th, 2000, https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2000/05/17/national/moris-divine-nationremark-spurs-outrage. Ibid. Klaus Antoni, ‘Shintō and kokutai: Religious Ideology in the Japanese Context’, in Religion and National Identity in the Japanese Context, pp. 263–87, edited by Klaus Antoni, Hiroshi Kubota, Johann Nawrocki and Michael Wachutka (Munster, Germany: Lit Verlag, 2002), p. 274. See, for instance, G. McCormack, ‘New Tunes for an Old Song: Nationalism and Identity in Post-Cold War Japan’, in Nations Under Siege: Globalization and Nationalism in Asia, pp. 137–67, edited by R. Starrs (New York: Palgrave, 2002), p. 156. Haruo Shirane, Introduction, in Inventing the Classics: Modernity, National Identity, and Japanese Literature, pp. 1–27, edited by Haruo Shirane and Tomi Suzuki (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000), p. 20. Philip Seaton, ‘Pledge Fulfilled: Prime Minister Koizumi, Yasukuni and the Japanese Media’, in Yasukuni, the War Dead, and the Struggle for Japan’s Past, pp. 163–88, edited by J. Breen (New York: Columbia UP, 2008), p. 164. Franziska Seraphim, War Memory and Social Politics in Japan, 1945–2005 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006), p. 245. Seaton, p. 172. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 172–73. Hitler is reported to have asked: ‘Why didn’t we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good?’, quoted in Brian Victoria, Zen War Stories (London: Routledge Curzon, 2003), p. viii, from Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich, (London: Macmillan, 1970), p. 96. 267

268

12

13 14 15 16

17

18

19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

34 35

36

37

38

THE PARADOXES OF JAPAN’S CULTURAL IDENTITY

For an excellent description of this ancient and mysterious rite, see Robert Ellwood, Introducing Japanese Religion (New York: Routledge, 2008), pp. 23–25. John Breen, ‘Between God and Man’, History Today 48 (1998), p. 3. Ibid., pp. 3–4. Ibid., p. 4. Felicia Bock, ‘The Great Feast of the Enthronement’, Monumenta Nipponica 45: 1 (Spring, 1990), p. 37. Eric Seizelet, ‘La démocratie Japonaise à l’heure de la transition monarchique’, Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire 31 (1991), p. 41. Walter Skya, ‘The Emperor, Shintō Ultranationalism and Mass Mobilization’, in Religion and National Identity in the Japanese Context, pp. 235–48, edited by Klaus Antoni, Hiroshi Kubota, Johann Nawrocki and Michael Wachutka (Munster, Germany: Lit Verlag, 2002), p. 247. Many authors in the past have argued against the notion of a ‘Japanese fascism’, urging the particularity or uniqueness of Japanese history and political culture. But a number of recent in-depth studies of the issue (e.g., James W. Heisig and John C. Maraldo, (eds.), Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School, and the Question of Nationalism (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1995); E. Bruce Reynolds, Japan in the Fascist Era (New York: Palgrave, 2004); Alan Tansman, The Culture of Japanese Fascism (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2009) have shown that the totalitarian ultranationalism of 1930s and 1940s Japan was different enough from earlier forms of Japanese nationalism, and close enough to the totalitarian ultranationalism of its allies, Nazi Germany and fascist Italy – including in its political use of religion and myth – to be properly regarded as part of the ‘international fascist movement’ that was somehow a product of the early twentieth-century Zeitgeist. Skya (2002), p. 247. Skya, Japan’s Holy War: The Ideology of Radical Shintō Ultranationalism (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2009). Helen Hardacre, Shintō and the State, 1868–1988 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989), p. 3. Ibid., p. 5. Ibid. Ibid., p. 7. Ibid., p. 8. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p. 9. Ibid., p. 158. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Kevin Doak, ‘A Religious Perspective on the Yasukuni Shrine Controversy’, in Yasukuni, the War Dead, and the Struggle for Japan’s Past, pp. 47–69, edited by J. Breen (New York: Columbia UP, 2008), p. 52. Joseph M. Kitagawa, Religion in Japanese History (New York: Columbia UP, 1990), p. 26. Ibid., p. 34. In the last sentence, Kitagawa is quoting Hajime Nakamura, Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples: India, China, Tibet, Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1964), p. 455. For a discussion of the issue in a larger Asian context, see Thomas Borchert, ‘Buddhism, Politics, and Nationalism in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries’, Religion Compass 1: 5 (2007), pp. 529–46. See Alan G. Grapard, ‘Religious Practices’, The Cambridge History of Japan, Volume 2, Heian Japan, pp. 517–75 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1999), pp. 528–31. See Mark Teenuwen and Bernhard Scheid, ‘Tracing Shintō in the History of Kami Worship’, Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 29: 3–4 (2002).

NOTES

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49

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51 52 53 54

55

56 57

58 59 60 61

62

63

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James C. Dobbins, ‘Kuroda Toshio and His Scholarship’, Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 23: 3–4 (1996), p. 217. Martin Collcutt, Five Mountains: The Rinzai Zen Monastic Institution in Medieval Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1981), p. 103. Ibid. Ibid., p. 99. See Fumio Tamamuro, ‘Local Society and the Temple-Parishioner Relationship within the Bakufu’s Governance Structure’, Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 28: 3–4 (2001), pp. 261–92. Heisig and Maraldo, p. vii. Quoted in Christopher Ives, ‘Ethical Pitfalls in Imperial Zen and Nishida Philosophy: Ichikawa Hakugen’s Critique’, in Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School, and the Question of Nationalism, pp. 16–39, edited by James W. Heisig and John C. Maraldo (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1995), p. 34. Ibid., p. 27. Ibid., p. 38. Robert H. Sharf, ‘Whose Zen? Zen Nationalism Revisited’, in Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School, and the Question of Nationalism, pp. 16–39, edited by James W. Heisig and John C. Maraldo (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1995), p. 48. Kiyohide Kirita, ‘DT Suzuki on Society and the State’, in Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School, and the Question of Nationalism, pp. 52–74, edited by James W. Heisig and John C. Maraldo (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1995), p. 61. John C. Maraldo, ‘Questioning Nationalism Now and Then: A Critical Approach to Zen and the Kyoto School’, in Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School, and the Question of Nationalism, pp. 52–74, edited by James W. Heisig and John C. Maraldo (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1995), pp. 351–56. Victoria, pp. 66–91. Ibid., p. 83. Ibid. See, for instance, Michael Downing, Shoes Outside the Door: Desire, Devotion, and Excess at San Francisco Zen Center (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2001). Seikō Hirata, ‘Zen Buddhist Attitudes to War’, in Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School, and the Question of Nationalism, pp. 3–15, edited by James W. Heisig and John C. Maraldo (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1995). See Ives (1995). But even in the West there were some significant exceptions. American Zen teacher Bernie Glassman, for instance, argues that, since Yasutani Rōshi was an anti-Semite and a rabid Japanese ethnic nationalist, then obviously such prejudices are, in fact, compatible with enlightenment (see Victoria, 2006, xi). Daisetz T. Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1970), p. 63. See Victoria (2006), pp. 148–49. Ibid., p. 212. Noriaki Hakamaya, ‘Critical Philosophy versus Topical Philosophy’, in Pruning the Bodhi Tree: The Storm over Critical Buddhism, pp. 56–80, edited by Jamie Hubbard and Paul L. Swanson (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1997), p. 60. Hajime Nakamura, Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples: India, China, Tibet, Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1964), p. 387. See Kimio Itō, ‘The Invention of Wa and the Transformation of the Image of Prince Shōtoku in Modern Japan’, in Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan, pp. 37–47, edited by Stephen Vlastos (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). Hakamaya, p. 60. Stewart McFarlane, ‘Nature and Buddha-nature: The Ecological Dimensions of East Asian Buddhism Critically Considered’, Digital International Buddhism Organization, n.d., http://

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kr.buddhism.org/zen/koan/stewart_mcfarlane.htm. The implications of the term ‘Ekayana’ are both sectarian, implying that ‘Mahayana Buddhism’ is the ‘one true vehicle’ superior to all earlier forms of Buddhism, and philosophic, implying that in this ‘one, final version of Buddhism’, as Carl Bielefeldt writes, ‘all beings were metaphysically grounded in the cosmic body of the Buddha’ (The One Vehicle and the Three Jewels: On Japanese Sectarianism and Some Ecumenical Alternatives’, Buddhist-Christian Studies 10 (1990), p. 12). ‘Nihonjinron’ (literally, ‘theories or theoretical writings about the Japanese) are popular essayistic works that purport to reveal the secrets of Japanese psychology or national character and are notorious for ill-founded essentialist and nationalistic claims about the superiority and absolute uniqueness of a monolithically conceived ‘Japanese culture’. Takeshi Umehara, quoted in Hakamaya, pp. 339–40. Ibid., p. 340. For an efficient and dramatic journalistic account of the incident, see D.W. Brackett, Holy Terror: Armageddon in Tokyo (New York: Weatherhill, 1996), which also provides some analysis of the group’s background and ideology. Ian Reader, Religious Violence in Contemporary Japan: The Case of Aum Shinrikyō (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2000), p. 249. Haruki Murakami, Underground, trans. Alfred Birnbaum and Philip Gabriel (New York: Vintage, 2000), p. 237. Ibid. Mark R. Mullins, ‘The Legal and Political Fallout of the Aum Affair’, in Religion and Social Crisis in Japan: Understanding Japanese Society through the Aum Affair, pp. 71–86, edited by Robert J. Kisala and Mark R. Mullins (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2001), p. 77. Ibid., p. 85. Ibid., p. 86.

2. THE KOJIKI AS JAPAN’S NATIONAL NARRATIVE 1 2 3 4

5 6 7 8 9

10 11 12

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See the previous essay. Donald Philippi, Kojiki (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1968), p. 41. Ibid., 40. The central place accorded to a female divinity in the Japanese imperial mythology might seem paradoxical in such a notoriously patriarchal, male-centred institution (and, more generally, in such a male-dominated society and culture as that of ‘traditional’ Japan) but actually it becomes quite understandable when placed within a world mythological context. ‘Sacred’ roles are often assigned to women in societies that are patriarchal and even misogynist: ancient Greece might serve as the ‘classical’ example. As Michael Grant has pointed out, the one public role allowed women in ancient Greece, too, was in religious rituals, where their function was to propitiate the ‘disruptive aspect of the divine world, channeling it, through officially approved festivals, into respectability’ (Grant, The Classical Greeks (London: Phoenix, 1997), pp. 280–81). Cited in Philippi, p. 120, note 1. See Philippi, p. 399. Ibid., p. 207. Ibid., p. 380. For an excellent recent account of the historicity of the ‘Great King’ Yūryaku see Joan R. Piggott, The Emergence of Japanese Kingship (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997), pp. 44–65. Piggott, p. 65. Ibid. W.G. Aston, Nihongi: Chronicles of Japan from the Earliest Times to A.D. 697 (Rutland & Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle, 1972), Book 1, p. 336. Piggott, p. 65.

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Ibid. Ibid. Aston, p. 390. Ibid. Philippi, p. 381. For an account of this myth see Christoper Seeley, A History of Writing in Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2000), pp. 3–4. Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

3. PRINCE SHŌTOKU AND JAPAN’S ‘CHINA COMPLEX’ 1 2

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Ōe Kenzaburō, Nobel Prize acceptance speech, 1994. Atsuko Ueda, Concealment of Politics, Politics of Concealment: The Production of ‘Literature’ in Meiji Japan (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2007), pp. 90–91. Ibid., p. 91. Ibid. Ueda is referring to Hashikawa’s essay, ‘Fukuzawa Yukichi no Chūgoku bunmeiron’ (Fukuzawa Yukichi on Chinese Civilization’, 1968), in his Kindai Nihon to Chūgoku (Modern Japan and China) Chikuma shobō, 1986. The Dictionary of Buddhist Folklore (Tokyo: Shinjinbutsu-ōrai-sha, 1993), for instance, notes that he is ‘said to be the founder of Japanese Buddhism’ (Nihon bukkyō no so). Bukkyō minzoku jiten (Tokyo: Shinjinbutsu-ōrai-sha, 1993), p. 200. Shinran. Blum 2002, p. 385. Quoted in The Oxford History of the Classical World, p. 826. ‘Gibbon’s work has also been criticized for its aggressively scathing view of Christianity as laid down in chapters XV and XVI … More specifically, Gibbon’s blasphemous chapters excoriated the church for two deeply wounding transgressions: displacing the glory and grandeur of ancient Rome (supplanting in an unnecessarily destructive way the great culture that preceded it’); and reexposing the church’s dirty laundry (for the outrage of [practicing] religious intolerance and warfare’)’. Satō Masahide, Shōtoku Taishi no buppō, p. 3. John S. Brownlee, Japanese Historians and the National Myths, 1600–1945: The Age of the Gods and Emperor Jinmu (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1997), p. 21. Quoted in Itō Kimio, ‘The Invention of Wa and the Transformation of the Image of Prince Shōtoku in Modern Japan’, in Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan, edited by Stephen Vlastos (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. 41. Ibid., p. 42. This is a ‘pastiche summary’ of a number of Tokugawa nativist arguments against Buddhism in general and Prince Shōtoku in particular. Takamitsu Kōnoshi, ‘Constructing Imperial Mythology: Kojiki and Nihon shoki’, in Inventing the Classics: Modernity, National Identity, and Japanese Literature, pp. 51–70, edited by Haruo Shirane and Tomi Suzuki (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000), p. 67. Quoted in Itō, p. 39. Ibid. Such as the possible revision of the hated ‘extraterritoriality’ treaties, a humiliating symbol of Japan’s inferior status in the nineteenth-century world. Quoted in Itō, p. 39. Ibid. In Sources of Japanese Tradition: 1600 to 2000, edited by De Bary, Wm. Theodore, Donald Keene, and Ryusaku Tsunoda (New York: Columbia UP, 2005), p. 42. Quoted in Itō, p. 39.

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In Sources of Japanese Tradition, p. 42. Sources of Japanese Tradition, p. 42. Joan Piggott argues that this was a deliberate assertion of the Japanese ruler’s independence, since to accept the Chinese ruler as superior would have been to surrender Japan’s claim to overlordship of some parts of the Korean peninsula. A quite convincing argument. Piggott, ‘Emergence of Japanese Kingship’, in Sources of Japanese Tradition, pp. 21–25, edited by William Theodore DeBary, Donald Keene, and Ryusaku Tsunoda (New York: Columbia UP, 1958), p. 81. Sukehiro Hirakawa, Japan’s Love-Hate Relationship with the West (Folkestone: Global Oriental, 2005), pp. 3–4. Ibid. Atsuko Sakaki, Obsession. Ōe Kenzaburō, Japan the Ambiguous and Myself.

4. JAPAN’S PERENNIAL NEW MAN: THE LIBERAL AND FASCIST INCARNATIONS OF MASAMICHI RŌYAMA 1

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William Miles Fletcher III, The Search for a New Order: Intellectuals and Fascism in Prewar Japan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), p. 1. Quoted in Fletcher, p. 11. See Henry De Witt Smith’s ‘The Origins of Student Radicalism in Japan’, Journal of Contemporary History 5: 1 (1970): pp. 87–103, for a detailed account of their political activities. Marius Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan (Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 2000), p. 542. Ibid., p. 544. Fletcher, p. 11. Ibid. Smith, p. 87. Ibid. Fletcher, p. 12. Ibid., p. 5. Eri Hotta, Pan-Asianism and Japan’s War 1931–1945 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 171. Alan Tansman, The Aesthetics of Japanese Fascism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), p. 14. Quoted in Fletcher, pp. 12–13. Ibid., p. 13. G.D.H. Cole too, in his later work, declared his preference for the authoritarian states of the day over the capitalist liberal democracies – the Oxford don even going so far as to say, in 1941, that he would prefer to see Hitler or Stalin in charge of Europe rather than ‘see an attempt to restore the pre-war States to their futile and uncreative independence and their petty economic nationalism under capitalist domination’ (Cole, Europe, Russia and the Future, (London: Victor Gollancz, 1941), p. 104). It seems that Rōyama was not the only distinguished academic susceptible to ‘losing his head’ in wartime! Fletcher, pp. 14–15. J. Victor Koschmann, ‘Constructing destiny: Rōyama Masamichi and Asian regionalism in wartime Japan’, in Pan-Asianism in Modern Japanese History: Colonialism, Regionalism and Borders, edited by Sven Saaler and J. Victor Koschmann (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 188. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p. 194. Jung-Sun Han, ‘Rationalizing the Orient: The “East Asia Cooperative Community” in Prewar Japan’, Monumenta Nipponica 60: 4 (2005), p. 90.

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Quoted in Hotta, p. 165. Quoted in Han, p. 502. On Fukuzawa as a pioneer of both Japanese modernism and of modern Japan’s patronizing attitude towards the rest of Asia, see my Modernism and Japanese Culture (Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 19–33. Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 1. Han, p. 505. Griffin, p. 351. W.G. Beasley, The Rise of Modern Japan (London: Phoenix, 2001), p. 206. Quoted in Han, p. 505. Quoted in Ibid. Masamichi Rōyama, Foreign Policy of Japan: 1914–1939 (Tokyo: The Japanese Council, Institute of Pacific Relations, 1941), pp. 169–170. Koschmann, p. 188–89. Yasuo Yuasa, ‘The Encounter of Modern Japanese Philosophy with Heidegger’, in Heidegger and Asian Thought, edited by Graham Parkes (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1987), p. 164. Koschmann, p. 190. Ibid., p. 197. Fletcher, p. 4. Koschmann, p. 198. Rōyama, along with Masao Maruyama, became a leading member of the Peace Problems Discussion Circle (Heiwa mondai danwakai), which in December 1950 issued a statement advocating unarmed neutrality and opposing Japan’s close postwar alliance with the U.S. on the grounds that, in the emerging postwar bipolar world order, this could lead to entanglement in American wars; see Koschmann, p. 198. Masao Maruyama, Thought and Behavior in Modern Japanese Politics (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1969), p. 241 and p. 382. Tsunao Imamura, Gabanansu no tankyuu: Rōyama Masamichi o yomu (Tokyo: Keisō shobo, 2009), pp. i–ii; Ken Yonehara, Nihon seiji shisō (Tokyo: Minerva shobo, 2007), pp. 184–222. Herbert P. Bix, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), p. 585. When Mayor Hitoshi Motoshima mildly suggested that Emperor Hirohito must share some responsibility for the war, he was shot by a member of the Spiritual Justice School, one of the many small neo-fascist groups that exist in Japan today. Though seriously injured, the mayor recovered. See Sanger, ‘Mayor Who Faulted Hirohito Is Shot’, New York Times, January 19, 1990. Seok-Won Lee, ‘Asianism after Asianism: Rōyama Masamichi and the Making of a Postwar Asian Order’, The Journal of Northeast Asian History 12: 2 (2015), p. 67. Abe claims that he may have become a ‘conservative’ politician because of his resentment at the fact that his grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, a member of Tōjō’s wartime cabinet, was a suspected Class A war criminal. Politics in Japan is, and always has been, a family affair. See Reiji Yoshida, ‘Formed in childhood, roots of Abe’s conservatism go deep’, The Japan Times, December 26, 2012. Narusawa Muneo, ‘Abe Shinzo: Japan’s New Prime Minister A Far-Right Denier Of History’, Asia-Pacific Journal 11: 1 (January 7, 2013). Just as I finished writing this essay, news arrived that Abe has finally realized a major long-term goal of the Japanese right wing: to revise (or ‘reinterpret) the postwar ‘peace constitution’ so as to allow the Japanese military to fight overseas in defense of its allies. See Ayako Mie, ‘Security Laws Usher In New Era For Pacifist Japan: “War Legislation” Raises Regional, Public Fears Amid Lack of Diet Opposition’, The Japan Times, March 29, 2016. At the same time, U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump was urging Japan to ‘defend itself ’ by ‘going nuclear’ if necessary.

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5. FROM MISHIMA TO AUM: RELIGIOPOLITICAL VIOLENCE IN LATE TWENTIETH-CENTURY JAPAN 1

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Mishima Yukio, ‘Yang-Ming Thought as Revolutionary Philosophy’, trans. Harris Martin. The Japan Interpreter vii: 1 (Winter, 1971), p. 85. For an efficient and dramatic journalistic account of the incident, see D.W. Brackett, Holy Terror: Armageddon in Tokyo (New York: Weatherhill, 1996), which also provides some analysis of the group’s background and ideology. The primary source for this account, the historicity of which is still debated, is Japan’s oldest extant official history, the Nihon shoki (Chronicle of Japan, 720). On the Korean origins of the Soga, see Michael Como, Shotoku: Ethnicity, Ritual and Violence in the Japanese Buddhist Tradition (New York: Oxford UP, 2008). See Harry D. Harootunian, Things Seen and Unseen: Discourse and Idealogy in Tokugawa Nativism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), and Robert Bellah, Tokugawa Religion (New York: Free Press, 1985). Quoted in The Oxford History of the Classical World, p. 826. Satō Masahide, Shōtoku Taishi no buppō (Kōdansha, 2004), p. 3. Itō Kimio, ‘The Invention of Wa and the Transformation of the Image of Prince Shōtoku in Modern Japan’, in Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan, edited by Stephen Vlastos (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. 41. Ibid. See Walter Skya, Japan’s Holy War: The Ideology of Radical Shinto Ultranationalism (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2009). Ibid., p. 152. Ibid., p. 201. On this still rather sensitive issue, see, for instance, Brian Victoria’s two ground-breaking studies, Zen at War (London; New York: Routledge Curzon, 1997) and Zen War Stories (London; New York: Routledge Curzon, 2003), and James W. Heisig & John C. Maraldo (editors), Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School, and the Question of Nationalism (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1995). Marius B. Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2000), p. 351. Hane Mikiso, Japan: A Short History (Oxford: Oneworld, 2000), p. 89. The term ‘Hindu’ is of modern coinage but is used retrospectively to encompass a myriad of Indian religious traditions that are now identified as generically related in doctrine and practice. Buddhism distinguishes itself from this Hindu tradition in a number of ways; nonetheless, many Buddhist doctrines and practices are clearly of Hindu origin. Indeed, as Mishima was to discover, the doctrine of reincarnation sits far more comfortably with a Hindu than with a Buddhist worldview. Takeda Katsuhiko and Mishima Yukio. Bungaku wa kūkyo ka, in Mishima Yukio (Tokyo: Kawade, 1975), p. 144. Ibid. Mishima Yukio, Mishima Yukio zenshū (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1973–76), vol. 19 (1973), p. 70; hereafter MYZ. All translations mine unless otherwise specified. Ibid., p. 78. Ibid., p. 114. For a full analysis of Mishima’s extensive fictional use of Nietzsche’s ideas of active and passive nihilism, see Roy Starrs, Deadly Dialectics: Sex, Violence and Nihilism in the World of Yukio Mishima (London: Curzon Press and Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1994). See Nagashima Yoichi (ed.), Return to Japan from Pilgrimage to West (Aarhus: Aarhus UP, 2001). Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, translated by Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1967), p. 18. Ibid.

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Mishima Yukio, Runaway Horses, translated by Michael Gallagher (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975), p. 242. Ibid., pp. 240–241. MYZ vol. 19 (1973), p. 29. Nietzsche, p. 21. MYZ vol. 33 (1973), p. 397. Mishima Yukio, On Hagakure, translated by Kathryn Sparling (Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle, 1978), p. 99. Henry Scott Stokes, The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima (New York: Ballantine, 1974), p. 6. MYZ vol. 18 (1973), p. 589. Ibid., p. 787. I. Reader, Religious Violence in Contemporary Japan: the Case of Aum Shinrikyō (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2000), p. 249. Murakami 2000, p. 237. Ibid. Brackett, pp. 102–3. Mishima Yukio, ‘Yang-Ming Thought as Revolutionary Philosophy’, translated by Harris Martin. The Japan Interpreter vii: 1 (Winter, 1971), p. 74. Reader, pp. 66–67. Umberto Eco, ‘Ur-Fascism’, The New York Review of Books (June 22, 1995), p. 7. Brackett, pp. 107–8. Doak, p. 187. Sheldon Garon, ‘State Suppression of New Religions in Prewar Japan and Its Lessons for Today’, JPRI Critique II: 7 (July 1995). Umehara Takeshi (ed.), Nihirizumu, (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1968), p. 24. Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning Under Mussolini and Hitler (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 98. MYZ vol. 19, p. 29. Emilio Gentile ‘The Sacralisation of Politics: Definitions, Interpretations and Reflections on the Question of Secular Religion and Totalitarianism’, translated by Robert Mallet, in Totalitarian Movements and Political Religion 1: 1 (Summer 2000), p. 18. Griffin, pp. 276–7. Hermann Rauschning, The Revolution of Nihilism (New York: Arno Press, 1972), p. 27. Mishima Yukio, ‘Shin fasshizumu ron’, in Shōsetsuka no kyūka, (Shinchōsha, 1982), p. 174. Ibid., p. 175. Ibid., p. 174. Skya (2009), p. 201. Mishima (1971), p. 74. John Nathan, Japan Unbound: A Volatile Nation’s Quest for Pride and Purpose (Boston/New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), p. 134. Ibid., p. 131. J.D. Bellringer, From Modernity to Postmodernity (Twickenham, U.K.: Halovine Video, 1999). Reader, pp. 84–88, also for a description of Aum’s elaborate hierarchical system of ‘spiritual ranks’. On the influence of science-fiction cartoons and comic books on Aum see Reader, p. 109 and pp. 185–7. Ibid., p. 66. Ibid., p. 79. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 89–90. Brackett, pp. 62. Reader, pp. 66–67. Ibid., p. 195. Ibid.

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See, for instance, his story, ‘Patriotism’ (Yūkoku). For a Lacanian interpretation of Mishima’s ‘extreme psychology’, see Roy Starrs, ‘A Devil of a Job: Mishima and the Masochistic Drive’, in Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 14: 3 (2009), pp. 85–99. The remarkable charismatic power Asahara exercised over his followers is made evident by the documentary entitled simply, ‘A’, filmed by Mori Tatsuya about six months after the subway attack, featuring interviews with members who avoided prison and who, still loyal to Asahara, are trying to keep the sect alive. ‘A’ shows how extraordinarily devoted his followers were to their ‘sonshi’. ‘A’ attempts to de-demonize Aum – and not just as another proof of the ‘banality of evil;’ these young people really are innocent and sincere spiritual seekers in a society that often seems determinedly anti-spiritual. Perhaps the most telling line in the documentary comes from one hapless young follower who says: ‘The master (sonshi) was the only person I could tell my troubles to’.

6. JAPANESE POETRY AND THE AESTHETICS OF DISASTER 1

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Jeffrey Angles, ‘These Things Here and Now: Poetry in the Wake of 3/11’, in Roy Starrs, ed., When the Tsunami Came to Shore: Culture and Disaster in Japan (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2014), p. 114. Ibid. Ibid., p. 119. Ibid. For a more in-depth discussion of the ethics and aesthetics of Hemingway’s style, and its relation to Japanese aesthetics, see Roy Starrs, An Artless Art: The Zen Aesthetic of Shiga Naoya (London: Routledge/Curzon, 1998), pp. 75–83. Ibid. W.B. Yeats, Preface to the Oxford Book of Modern Verse (Oxford UP, 1936), p. xv. Leith Morton, ‘The Great Tokyo Earthquake of 1923 and Poetry’, in When the Tsunami Came to Shore: Culture and Disaster in Japan, edited by Roy Starrs (Leiden and Boston: Brill, forthcoming 2014), pp. 272–298. Ibid. Translated by Jeffrey Angles, in When the Tsunami Came to Shore, p. 127. Janice Brown, ‘The “Silenced Nexus”: Female Mediation in Modern Japanese Literature of Disaster’, in When the Tsunami Came to Shore: Culture and Disaster in Japan, edited by Roy Starrs (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2014), pp. 318–44. Richard Bowring, review of Haruo Shirane, Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons: Nature, Literature, and the Arts, in The Journal of Japanese Studies 39: 2 (Summer 2013), pp. 427–430. Quoted in William Theodore de Bary, Donald Keene, George Tanabe, and Paul Varley, eds., Sources of Japanese Tradition: from earliest times through the sixteenth century, second edition, vol. 1 (New York: Columbia UP, 2001), p. 51. Haruo Shirane, Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons: Nature, Literature, and the Arts (New York: Columbia UP, 2012), p. 8. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 8–9. Ibid., p. 12. Ibid., p. 11. Ibid., p. 14. As paraphrased by Angles, p. 126. Translated by Angles, pp. 126–27. Translated by Angles, p. 126.

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Translated by Angles, p. 127. For an index of the classical poetic lexicon, see Shirane, pp. 271–87. Translated by Donald Keene in Anthology of Japanese Literature (New York: Grove Press, 1960), p. 197. Dōgen Kigen, Guidelines for Studying the Way, http://terebess.hu/english/dogen3.html My translation. Tadao Ando, ‘What is Wabi-Sabi?’, http://nobleharbor.com/tea/chado/WhatIsWabi-Sabi. htm. Makoto Ueda, Matsuo Bashō (New York: Twayne, 1970), pp. 50–51. My translation. Ueda (1970), p. 156. Ibid. Ibid., p. 66. The Letters of John Keats, edited by H. Buxton Forman (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2011), p. 57. Makoto Ueda, Literary and Art Theories in Japan (Cleveland: Western Reserve University, 1957), p. 150. Ibid. My translation. Ueda (1957), p. 151. My translation. My translation. John Keats, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, available online at http://www.bartleby.com/101/625.html.

7. IN SEARCH OF THE GREAT MEIJI NOVEL: FROM UKIGUMO TO YOAKE MAE 1

2

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Tsubouchi Shoyo, ‘The essence of the novel’, translated by Donald Keene, in Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology (New York: Grove Press, 1960), p. 57. Donald Keene, Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature in the Modern Era (Fiction) (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984), p. 359. Mori Ōgai, Youth and Other Stories, edited by J. Thomas Rimer. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1977b), p. 222. Ōgai, The Incident at Sakai and Other Stories, edited by David Dilworth and J. Thomas Rimer (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1977a), p. 66. Marvin Marcus, Paragons of the Ordinary: The Biographical Literature of Mori Ōgai (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1993). Donald Keene, Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature in the Modern Era (Fiction) (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984), p. 375. Natsume Sōseki, Kokoro, translated by Edwin McClellan (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1957), p. 246. Ibid., p. 246. Ibid., p. 245. Sōseki, And Then, translated by Norma Moore Field (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1978), pp. 60–61. Ibid., p. 72. For a thorough account of the Taishō generation’s response to General Nogi’s suicide as one of the defining events of their youth, see Yanagida Izumi, Katsumoto Seiichiro and Ino Kenji (eds.), Zadankai: Taishō bungaku shi (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1965), pp. 4–7. See Arima Tatsuo, The Failure of Freedom: A Portrait Japanese Intellectuals (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1969).

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Edward Seidensticker, Kafo the Scribbler: The Life and Writings of Nagai Kafo, 1879–1959 (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1968), p. 46. Arima. Kono, Toshiro, Miyoshi Yukio, Takemori Tenyu and Hiraoka Toshio (eds.), 1972). Akutagawa, Rylinosuke, Tales Grotesque and Curious, translated by Glenn Shaw (Tokyo: Hokuseido, 1930), p. 40; I have slightly modified Shaw’s translation. Ōe Kenzaburō, Japan, the Ambigious, and Myself (Kodansha, 1995); see also Kawabata Yasunari, Japan, the Beautiful, and Myself (Kodansha, 1969). Alan Tansman. Translated into English as Naomi by Anthony H. Chambers (1990). The story is recounted by Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, In Praise of Shadows, translated by Thomas J. Harper (New Haven: Leete’s Island Books, 1977), p. 48. For reasons of space, I confine myself to dealing with major writers here and do not deal with the Marxist writers, despite their undoubted historical importance: the movement produced no major creative writers, although it did make a significant contribution to the development of literary theory in Japan. For a fuller account, see my Soundings in Time: The Fictive Art of Kawabata Yasunari (London: Routledge, 1998). Ernest Renan, ‘What is a Nation?’ in Nation and Narration, edited by Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 19. Shimazaki Tōson, Before the Dawn, translated by William E Naff (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1987), p. xi. Ibid., p. 84. Edward Fowler, The Rhetoric of Confession: Shi-shōsetsu in Early Twentieth-Century Japanese Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. ix. Masao Miyoshi, Off Center: Power and Culture Relations between Japan and the United States (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991), pp. 22–50; James A. Fujii, Complicit Fictions: The Subject in Modern Japanese Prose Narrative (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1993), p. 14. Edwin McClellan, ‘Tōson and the autobiographical novel’, in Tradition and Modernisation in Japanese Culture, edited by Donald Shively (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1976), p. 348.

8. NATION AND REGION IN THE WORK OF DAZAI OSAMU 1

2

3 4 5 6

7 8 9 10

11

Donald Keene, Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature of the Modern Era (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1984), p. 1104, note 50. Keene’s source is Sōma Shōichi, Dazai Osamu to Ibuse Masuji (Hirosaki: Tsugaru shobō, 1972), p. 25. Osamu Dazai, Tsugaru, translated by James Westerhoven (Aomori: Access 21, 1998), p. 49. Ibid., p. 50. Ibid., pp. 16–17. Ibid., pp. 99–100. Quoted in Phyllis I. Lyons, The Saga of Dazai Osamu: A Critical Study with Translations (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1985), p. 149. Ibid., pp. 37–38. Ibid., p. 38. Ibid., p. 145. For an English translation of the story see Osamu Dazai, Self Portraits: Tales from the life of Japan’s great decadent romantic, translated by Ralph F. McCarthy (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1991), pp. 189–195. Lyons, p. 270.

NOTES

279

9. INK TRACES OF THE DANCING CALLIGRAPHERS: ZEN-EI SHO IN JAPAN TODAY 1

2

3 4

5

6

7 8 9

10

11 12

13

14

15

See Carl Jung, Psychology and the East (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1978). Interestingly, it was to Jung that some of the abstract expressionists turned (Pollock in particular) for their own leading ideas about the ‘unconscious’. The relation of Confucianism to the calligraphic arts is of less interest to me because my focus is on avant-garde calligraphy and the cursive tradition from which it descends. As a social and moral philosophy, Confucianism tends to emphasize ri (intellectual wisdom, reason, Logos, the Apollonian principle of order) more than ki (body-wisdom, gut-power, the Dionysian life-force) and thus tends to favour a more conservative, symmetrical, formal ‘block’ style of calligraphy and painting, a style that properly manifests the conservative, disciplined, circumspect, upright character of the traditional Confucian gentleman. Exhibit at the Seattle Art Museum, September 25 – November 23, 1980. This is not meant to imply that the heightened emotional or mental states represented in Western expressionism are always negative: there were also significant strands of innocent, sunny lyricism in both German and American expressionism. But in the two postwar periods when these movements flourished – after the First and Second World Wars – the emotions expressed were often angry, anxious, and violent, for understandable reasons. And, more to the point, the Western expressionist works, whether negative or positive in mood, did not possess the serene impersonality of Zen art. Alexandra Munroe, Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994), p. 94. The Zen bokuseki style, which might legitimately be regarded as the ancestor of zen’ei sho, originated during the Muromachi period (1338–1573) as part of a general flowering of Zen culture. The style is characterized by bold, dynamic, free-wheeling brushstrokes and by characters writ large for dramatic effect – often just one or two or a few characters that record a Zen keyword (e.g., mu, nothingness) or a pithy and paradoxical saying (e.g., ‘When you meet the Buddha, kill him’.). D.T. Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1970), p. 17. See Munroe, p. 129. Much of my discussion of the techniques, teaching methods, and ideology of the ‘arts of the brush’ is based on my own ‘field work’ as a student of the calligrapher Ibata Shotei in Kyoto from 1972 to 1974. I thank Ibata-sensei for his patient teaching. Morita, for instance, saw the dragon as a symbol of East Asian nondualism: the unity of man and nature, and often used it as ‘the theme of explosive acts of brushwork’ (Munroe, p. 87). Munroe, p. 129. Quoted in Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s (New Haven: Yale UP), p. 122. The inaugural issue of Bokubi featured Franz Kline’s black-and-white ‘calligraphic’ work Hoboken on its cover. Quoted in Holmberg, ‘Dragon knows Dragon: The Encounter between Avant-Garde Calligraphy and Abstract Expressionism’ (Boston University senior thesis, 1998), n.p. It is understandable that, when art historians look for the closest parallels to East Asian calligraphy – especially avant-garde calligraphy – in Western art, they usually point to the abstract expressionists of the 1940s and ‘50s. But it seems to me that there are some much larger affinities between the East Asian calligraphic aesthetic and Western modernism in general: a central part of modernism’s program, from its very beginnings in nineteenth-century Impressionism, was a renewed focus on the expressive or calligraphic line. Indeed, when the artists we now consider the first true moderns first appeared in 1860s Paris, they were dismissed by critics as mere sketchers rather than painters. See Ross King, The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade That Gave the World Impressionism (New York: Walker & Company, 2006).

280

16

17 18

19

20

21 22 23 24 25

26

27

28

THE PARADOXES OF JAPAN’S CULTURAL IDENTITY

See Bert Winther-Tamaki, Art in the Encounter of Nations: Japanese and American Artists in the Early Postwar Years (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001). Munroe, p. 22. A fascinating and thorough account of this important episode in Japanese-Western cultural relations is given in Winther-Tamaki, Art in the Encounter of Nations. For an excellent analysis of the issues involved in this debate, especially in terms of Japanese and American cultural nationalism, see Winther-Tamaki, Art in the Encounter of Nations. Much of the detail of my discussion of Morita Shiryū and the issue of mojisei is taken from the section on Morita in Chapter 3, pp. 74–89. I am also indebted to Ryan Holmberg for allowing me to read his exemplary senior thesis, ‘Dragon knows Dragon: The Encounter between Avant-Garde Calligraphy and Abstract Expressionism’ (Boston University, 1998). And, of course, the seminal essay collection edited by Alexandra Monroe, Japanese Art After 1945: Scream against the Sky (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994). Morita was an intelligent, sophisticated art critic and his ‘middle-ground’ stance was subtle and nuanced – I do not want to misrepresent or oversimplify it here. In an editorial he wrote for Bokubi in 1951, for instance, he argues that: ‘As long as sho is our medium, we must use characters and look to literature for our material’. But he also warns: ‘We must ask ourselves if we have not been too distracted by the meaning of the characters and the literary context of texts, and thus forgotten the formal quality [zōkei-sei] of sho – the fundamental element that makes sho genuinely sho and art’. Thus, he tried to strike an intelligent balance between moji-sei and zōkei-sei, recognizing the necessity of both but also emphasizing that calligraphy would lose its status as an art if calligraphers ceased to play with form. This editorial is reprinted (in translation) in Munroe, Japanese Art After 1945, p. 373. Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, quoted in Holmberg, endnote 4, Introduction. Holmberg, endnote 4, Introduction. Ibid. Suzuki, p. 17. Reiki Newsletter (The International House of Reiki: downloaded from http://shop.reiki/ articles/shodo.html). Craig Young, earpollution profiles – womad, issue 1.09, September 1999. Downloaded from http://www.earpollution.com/sept99/profiles/womad3.html. Shotei Ibata, ‘Japanese Modern Art of Sho Painting’, Art and Australia 9: 3 (Summer 1971), pp. 234–35. Ibid., pp. 236–37.

10. MISHIMA, BOWIE AND THE ANTI-METAPHYSICS OF THE MASK 1 2

3

4

5

6

7

Brecht himself owned the Noh ‘demon’ mask he writes of here. Translated by Hoffman Hays. Donald Richie, quoted in Naoki Inose, Persona: A Biography of Yukio Mishima (Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press, 2012), p. 168. ‘Oshima, it is said, had Mishima in mind as the model of Capt. Yonoi, the young, intense, homosexual, sword-brandishing commandant of the prison camp’. (Inose, Persona, p. 391). See Mehdi Derfoufi, ‘Embodying Stardom, Representing Otherness: David Bowie in ‘Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence’ ’. In Eoin Devereux, Aileen Dillane, and Martin J. Power (eds.), David Bowie: Critical Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2015), p. 164. Mishima, Letter to Hayashi Fumio on November 4, 1947. Quoted in Inose, Persona: A Biography of Yukio Mishima, p. 168. See Roy Starrs, Deadly Dialectics: Sex, Violence, and Nihilism in the World of Yukio Mishima (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1994), p. 194. Henrik Ibsen, Peer Gynt, translated by Michael Meyer (New York: Doubleday, 1963), pp. 133–4.

NOTES

8

9 10 11

12

13 14

15 16

17 18 19 20 21

22 23 24

25

26 27

28

29

30

31 32

33 34 35

281

Kunio Komparu, The Noh Theater: Principles and Perspectives (New York: Weatherhill, 1983), p. 230. John Nathan, Mishima: A Biography (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974), p. 199. For a more extended discussion of this issue, see my Deadly Dialectics, pp. 36–40. Simon Frith, Music for Pleasure: Essays in the Sociology of Pop (New York: Routledge, 1988), p. 167. Shelton Waldrep, The Aesthetics of Self-Invention: Oscar Wilde to David Bowie (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), p. 142. Ibid., p. 145. One male ex-lover, for instance, tells of how quickly he got bored with Mishima’s autoerotic ‘role-playing’ game of imagining himself committing seppuku: ‘I was impressed the first time we did this. Mishima got hard at once and as he died he came. Without touching himself at all. I had never seen anyone do that before. I didn’t find the role-playing at all arousing and wanted him to fuck me, but he didn’t want to …’ Quoted in Christopher Ross, Mishima’s Sword: Travels in Search of a Samurai Legend (New York: HarperPerennial, 2006), pp. 193–94. See Nathan, pp. 146. Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask, translated by Meredith Weatherby (New York: New Directions, 1958), p. 252. My translation. Mishima Yukio Zenshū (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1973–76), vol. 3, p. 350. Ibid., p. 173. Ibid. Ibid., p. 192. My translation. Moriyasu Masafumi, ‘Kamen no kokuhaku ron’, in Mishima Yukio Kenkyū, edited by Hasegawa Izumi et al (Tokyo: Ubun shoin, 1970), p. 241. Ibid., p. 244. Ibid. My translation. Noguchi Takehiko, Mishima Yukio no sekai (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1968), pp. 117–18. My translation. Miyoshi Yukio, ‘Mishima Yukio no sakuhin o yomu’, in Kokubungaku kaishaku to kyōzai no kenkyū (July 1981), p. 10. Masao Miyoshi, Accomplices of Silence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), p. 155. Masao Miyoshi sees Mishima’s snobbery as fundamental to his worldview, and argues that his novels are ‘damaged’ because of his ‘aloofness’ or ‘distance’ from ‘ordinary people’. ‘And that distance, we must remember, is the design-specified foreground of Mishima’s literary architecture, which is to add one structure after another in the next twenty years [i.e., after the Confessions]’. Miyoshi, Accomplices, pp. 156–57. Chris O’Leary, ‘Heat’, on Pushing Ahead of the Dame: David Bowie, song by song, https:// bowiesongs.wordpress.com/2016/10/12/heat/ (last accessed January 2022). Yukio Mishima, The Decay of the Angel, translated by Edward G. Seidensticker (New York: Pocket Books, 1975), p. 249. Mishima, Spring Snow, translated by Michael Gallagher (New York: Pocket Books, 1975), pp. 22–4. Mishima, The Decay of the Angel, pp. 243–45. The reincarnation motif, which Mishima uses to tie his four novels together, is also alluded to in the first verse of ‘Heat’ by the reference to the ‘peacock in the snow’, an image dreamt by Kiyoaki that presages his rebirth in Thailand. According to the Abbess’ Yuishiki Buddhist doctrine, what is reincarnated is not a personal self but an impersonal karmic force, a muga no nagare or ‘flow of no-self ’ – as if the reborn empty self merely puts on a new mask. Mishima, The Decay of the Angel, p. 246. My translation. Mishima Yukio Zenshū (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1973–76), vol. 19, p. 647. Ibid.

282

THE PARADOXES OF JAPAN’S CULTURAL IDENTITY

11. D.T. SUZUKI’S THEORY OF INSPIRATION AND THE CHALLENGES OF CROSS-CULTURAL TRANSMISSION 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

Jeschke, ‘Interview with Gary Snyder’, December 23, 1994. Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture, p. 247. Ibid., p. 248. Ibid., p. 237. Ibid., p. 236. Whitman, ‘Song of Myself ’. Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture, pp. 221 and 219. Ibid., p. 227. Ibid., p. 242. Ibid., pp. 242–43. Ibid., p. 221. Ibid., p. 262. Ibid., pp. 250–51. Ibid., pp. 219–220. Ibid., p. 225. Ibid., p. 226. Ibid. Ibid., p. 241–42. Ibid., p. 243. Odin, ‘Beauty as Ecstasy’, p. 47. Ibid. Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture, p. 218. Ibid. Ibid., p. 220. Ueda, Matsuo Bashō, p. 68. Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture, p. 221. Suzuki, Introduction to Zen Buddhism, p. 41. Ibid., p. 42. Kapleau, Three Pillars of Zen, p. 96. Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture, p. 222. Ibid., p. 225. Ibid., p. 219. Ibid., p. 241. Shinkei, Murmured Conversations, p. 167. Ramirez-Christensen, in Shinkei, Murmured Conversations, p. 169. Shinkei, Murmured Conversations, p. 153. Snyder, ‘On The Road with D.T. Suzuki’, p. 208. Ibid., p. 209. Hobbs, ‘Motherwell’s Opens’, p. 57. Ibid. Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture, p. 262. Ibid. Ibid., p. 264. Ibid., p. 262. Ibid., p. 265. Ibid. Ibid., p. 266. Aston, Grammar of the Japanese Written Language, p. 203. Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture, p. 243.

NOTES

50 51 52 53

54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62

283

Ibid., p. 244. Ibid., pp. 247–48. Ibid., p. 243. Paz, On Poets and Others, 68. Keats’ ‘negative capability’ is a passive state of openness and impersonality, a kind of secular version of the ‘cloud of unknowing’ advocated by an anonymous medieval English mystic. The Japanese haiku master Bashō’s ideal of ‘impersonality’ also seems to refer to a comparable state of creative receptivity. Keats explained his idea in a letter to his brothers George and Tom written on December 22, 1817. Keats, letter to Richard Woodhouse, October 27, 1818. Rimbaud, Letter of May 15, 1871. Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, pp. 4–5. Quoted in Lloyd, Mallarmé, p. 55. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, p. 39. Ibid., 42. Maritain, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, pp. 143–44. Ibid. Anonymous, The Cloud of Unknowing.

15. ALAN TANSMAN, THE AESTHETICS OF JAPANESE FASCISM 1

Susan Sontag, Under the Sign of Saturn (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1980), p. 96.

16. JAPANESE LITERATURE AS A MODERN INVENTION: A REVIEW OF HARUO SHIRANE AND TOMI SUZUKI (EDS.), INVENTING THE CLASSICS: MODERNITY, NATIONAL IDENTITY, AND JAPANESE LITERATURE 1

Virginia Woolf, ‘How Should One Read a Book?’, in The Common Reader, Second Series (London, 1932).

17. HARUO SHIRANE, JAPAN AND THE CULTURE OF THE FOUR SEASONS: NATURE, LITERATURE, AND THE ARTS 1

Makoto Ueda. Bashō and His Interpreters: Selected Hokku with Commentary. Stanford University Press, 1991, p. 4.

Index v

A Abe Michinobu, 122 Abe Shinzō, 273 Adams, Will, xxv Aizawa Seishisai, 71 Ajanta Caves, 72 Akihito, Emperor, 5, 6, 7 Akiya Einosuke, 19 Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, 125–126, 129– 131,148, 234, 236 Amaterasu, xxix, 24, 25, 26, 84 America/American, xiii, xvi, xvii, xxii, xxiii, xxv, xxvii, xxx, xxxi, 4, 5, 14, 49, 51, 52, 56, 57, 59, 61, 77, 79, 96, 116, 126, 143, 157, 158, 159, 160, 162, 181, 185, 193, 194, 204, 209, 225, 250, 254, 255, 263, 269, 273, 279, 280 Andō Shōeki, 71 Andō Tadao, 111, 277 Angles, Jeffrey, 101–103, 276, 277 Anouilh, Jean, 226 Antoni, Klaus, 3, 267, 268 Aomori Prefecture, 144, 278 Aquinas, Thomas, 111 Arima Tatsuo, 128, 224, 277, 278 Arishima Takeo, 229 Arnold, Matthew, 239 Asahara Shōkō, 64–97, 276 Ashikaga Tadayoshi, 11 Aston, William George, xxvi, 30, 40, 211, 270, 271, 282 Asuka era, 4, 34, 35, 36, 40, 41 Augustine, St., 183 Aum Shinrikyō, 17–18, 64–97, 270, 275 Austin, James, xxiii Australia, xiii, 171, 259, 280 B Baizhang Huaihai, 251 Barthes, Roland, 221

Bashō, 110–114, 135, 161, 168, 201–211, 247–248, 253, 277, 282, 283 Bates, Alex, vi, 228–232, 260 Baudelaire, Charles, 129, 132, 212, 283 Beasley, W.G., 54, 273 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 172 Benares, 72, 74, 75 Benedict, Ruth, 77 Benjamin, Walter, 245 Berlin, 186 Berger, Peter, 85 Bhabha, Homi K., 33, 278 Bialock, David, 243 Bix, Herbert, 59, 273 Blake, William, 110, 162 Bloom, Harold, xxx Blum, Mark L. 37, 271 Blyth, R.H., 195–196 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 140 Bock, Felicia, 7, 268 Bodhidharma, xv Bourdieu, Paul, 239 Bowie, David, vi, 174–192, 257, 280, 281 Bowring, Richard, 106, 276 Brackett, D.W., 93, 270, 274, 275 Brecht, Bertolt, 174, 280 Breen, John, xxiv, 6, 9, 193, 257, 267, 268 Britain, xxvii, xxviii, xxxi–xxxii, 45, 50, 51, 52, 89, 175 Brown, Janice, 105, 276 Brownlee, John, 38, 271 Bucke, Richard, 203 Butler, Judith, 179 C Cage, John, 195 Calcutta, 72 Camus, Albert, 222, 226 Canada, xxi, 260, 265 Carlyle, Thomas, 161 285

286

Cervantes, Miguel de, 140 Cézanne, Paul, 163 Chamberlain, Basil Hall, xxvi Chance, Linda, 243 Chiang Kai–shek, Generalissimo, 54 Chikamatsu Monzaemon, 243 Chiyo, 205–206 Clavell, James, xxv–xxvi, 263 Cohen, Leonard, xxii, 208 Cole, G.D.H., 50, 272 Collcutt, Martin, 11, 269 Confucius, 106 Cromwell, Oliver, xxviii D Dahui Zonggao, 252 Daisen, Mount, 237 Daitokuji, xxiii Dalby, Liza, xxv Darwin, Australia, xiii Dazai Osamu, v, xix, 142–151 de Beauvoir, Simone, 222, 227 Derrida, Jacques, 177, 245 Dickens, Charles, 129 Doak, Kevin, 9, 83, 224–225, 268, 275 Dobbins, James C., 10–11, 269 Dōgen Zenji, 111, 152, 170, 253, 277 Dongshan Shouchu, 252 Dover Straight, xxxi Dreyfus, Alfred, 127 Duara, Prasenjit, 31, 271 Duras, Marguerite, 226 E E.U., xxxi Eco, Umberto, 82, 92, 275 Eliot, T.S., 113, 161, 212, 226, 253, 283 Elliot, W. Y., 56 Endō Shūsaku, 224, 225, 262 England, xxi, xxvi–xxxi, 129, 246 Ethiopia, 52 Eurasia, xxvii F Fletcher, William Miles, 44, 46, 48, 50, 57, 272, 273 Foucault, Michel, 26, 245 Fowler, Edward, 139–141, 278 France, vi, 221–227, 261, 263 Freud, Sigmund, 97, 134, 158, 177, 183, 194, 200, 203, 206 Frith, Simon , 179–180, 281 Fuji, Mount, 105

INDEX

Fujii, James, 139, 278 Fujiwara no Shunzei , 248 Fujiwara no Teika, 106, 207 Fukunaga Takehiko, 223 Fukuoka, xiii–xv Fukushima, 102, 108 Fukuzawa Yukichi, 54, 271, 273 Futabatei Shimei, 118, 124, 143 G Garon, Sheldon, 84, 275 Gemmei, Empress, 23 Gentile, Emilio, 85, 275 Gibbon, Edward, 38, 67, 271 Giraudoux, Jean, 226 Goebbels, Joseph, 6 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, xvii, 242 Gogol, Nikolai, 118 Goldberg, Natalie, 208 Goncharov, Ivan, 118 Greece, 75, 97, 104, 179, 259, 270 Griffin, Roger, 54, 85–86, 235, 259, 273, 275 Guillory, John, 244 H Hakamaya Noriaki, 16–17, 269, 270 Hakuin Ekaku, 252 Han Jung–Sun, 52, 56, 272 Hane Mikiso, 72, 274 Hara Takashi, 46 Hardacre, Helen, 7–8, 268 Hasegawa Izumi, xxiv, 281 Hasegawa Saburō, 158 Hashikawa Bunzō, 34 Hayashi Razan, 38, 67 Hearn, Lafcadio, xxvi, 260 Hegel, G.W.F., xviii, xxi, 196 Heidegger, Martin, 12, 57, 245, 273 Heine, Steven, vi, 250–255, 261 Heisei, Emperor, 81, 89 Heisig, James, 12, 238, 268, 269, 274 Hemingway, Ernest, 103, 267 Henry VIII, xxix, xxxi Heraclitus, 111 Herder, Johann Gottfried von, xiv, xx, 106 Hidai Nankoku, 158 Hideyoshi, 149–150 Hilferding, Rudolf, 51 Hirakawa Sukehiro, xxiv, 41, 258, 260, 272 Hirata Atsutane, 38, 67, 71, 76, 138 Hirata Seikō, 14, 269 Hirohito, Emperor, 3, 7, 59, 273 Hirosaki, 146, 278

INDEX

Hiroshima, xiii, xxiii, xxiv Hirshfeld, Magnus, 182–183 Hisamatsu Shin’ichi, 254 Hitler, Adolf, 6, 52, 69, 86, 88, 128, 233, 267, 272, 273, 275 Hobbs, Robert, 209, 282 Hollywood, xxvi, 121 Holmberg, Ryan, 166–168, 279, 280 Hong Kong, xiii Hori, Victor, xxiii Hotta Eri, 49, 272, 273 Howes, John, xxiv, 260 Hozumi Yatsuka, 69 Hurvitz, Leon, xxiv Huxley, Aldous, 197 I Ibata Shotei, 168, 171, 279, 280 Ibsen, Henrik, 177, 280 IchikawaHakugen, 13, 14 Ihara Saikaku, 180 Iida Shotarō, xxiv Imamura Tsunao, 58 Inari the fox god, xv–xvi India, 72–76, 79, 92–93, 95, 119, 141, 206, 274n15 Iran, 245 Ishiguro, Kazuo, 141 Ishikawa Jun, 123 Isogae Hideo, xxiv Italy, 52–53, 57, 76–77, 85, 128, 143, 145, 233–234, 268n18 Itō Kimio, 39, 41, 68, 269n63 Ives, Christopher, 12–13 Izanagi and Izanami, 26–27 Izumo, 25, 26 J James, William, 194, 197 Jansen, Marius, 46, 72 Jonson, Ben, 246 Joyce, James, 109, 134 Jung, Carl, 154, 158, 194, 200, 203, 206, 279n1 K Kada no Azumamaro, 71 Kaidō Masugi, 76 Kakehi Katsuhiko, 69 Kamakura, xviii–xix Kamo no Chōmei, 111 Kamo no Mabuchi 67, 135 Kanagi, 147

287

Kandinsky, Wassily, 160, 163, 167 Kannon Bodhisattva, 133 Kansai, 132–133, 169 Kantō, 102, 104, 132, 228–232 Kapleau, Philip, xxii, 13, 204 Karlsson, Mats, 228 Kasumigaseki, 65, 81, 96 Katō Shūichi, 221, 222–223, 224, 229 Kawabata Yasunari, xvii, xxiv, 75, 131, 132, 133–135, 148, 150, 231, –232, 234, 237 Kawaji Ryūkō, 104 Keats, John, 112, 114, 157, 212, 213, 283n53 Kenzō, Emperor, 28 Ki no Tsurayuki, 248 Kikuchi Kann, 229 Kinkakuji, 70 Kipling, Rudyard, 197 Kiso, Lord, 146 Kitagawa, Joseph, 10 Kline, Franz, 157–158, 165, 209, 279n13 Kobayashi Hideo, 217–220, 222, 234, 236 Kobayashi Yoshinori, 90 Kobe, xxiv, 18, 80 Kobori Nanrei Rōshi, xxiii Koizumi Jun’ichirō, 9 Kojève, Alexandre, 221 Konoe Fumimaro, Prince, 53 Kōnoshi Takamitsu, 39, 241, 271 Korea, 6, 40, 66, 141, 230, 254, 272n23, 274n3 Korea Strait, xxxi Koschmann, J. Victor, 51, 56–57 Kōtoku Shūsui, 119, 127, 128 Kumazawa Banzan, 38 Kunio Komparu, 178 Kuroda Toshio 10–11. Kuroko Kazuo, 225 Kurosawa, Akira, 140 Kurozumi Makoto, 243 Kyoto, xviii, xxiii–xxiv, 12, 16, 48, 107, 111, 112, 146, 161, 169, 202, 218, 279n9 L Lacan, Jacques, 97, 221, 276n68 Lee, William, 243 Leighton, Taigen Dan, 252–253 Lermontov, Mikhail, 118 Levering, Miriam L., 252 Lilla, Mark, 245 Dalby, Liza, xxv London, xxi, 52 Loti, Pierre, 221

288

INDEX

M MacArthur, Douglas, 59–60 MacDonald, Ramsay, 45 Machiavelli, 59 Maezumi Taizan, 254 Malabar Hill, 119 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 212 Manchuria, xvi, xxviii, 41, 52, 53–54 Maraldo, John, 12, 238, 268n18, 275n12 Maritain, Jacques, 213 Maruyama Masao, 58, 273n39 Marxism, xviii, 45, 47, 128–129, 134, 150, 223, 229, 230, 278n22 Mathy, Jean–Philippe, 221–222 Matsuda, Matt, 221–222 Matsumoto Shirō, 16 Matsuo, Bashō, 161, 248 Maugham, Somerset, 132 Maupassant, Guy de, 222 McCarthy era, 162 McClellan, Edwin, 139–140 McFarlane, Stewart, 17 Meiji era, xx, 7–8, 33, 35, 39–40, 41, 42, 46, 68, 69, 71–72, 77, 82, 83, 88, 95–96, 115–141, 142, 222, 241, 242, 243, 246 Meiji, Emperor, 83, 88, 115, 120, 137–138 Menzan Zuihō, 253 Miki Kiyoshi, 57 Mill, John Stuart, 51 Miner, Earl, xxiv Mishima Yukio, vii, ix–x, xvii–xviii, 63–98, 119, 175–192, 234, 274n15 and n21, 276n68, 280n3, 281n14, n27, and n32 Mitchell, David, xxv Miyazawa Kenji, 151 Miyoshi Masao, 139, 185 Miyoshi Yukio, 184 Mizutani Masaru, 104 Mo, Timothy, 141 Molière, 226 Mondrian, Piet, 163, 167 Mononobe clan, 37, 39, 66, 67, 68 Mori Arimasa, 224 Mori Ōgai, 117, 119, 130, 137 Mori Tatsuya, 276n69 Mori Yoshirō, Prime Minister, 3–5, 90, 186 Morita Shiryū 158–159, 161, 163, 164–165, 168, 279n10, 280n19 and n20 Moriyasu Masafumi, 184 Morton, Leith, 104, 228–229 Mosley, Oswald, 51 Mostow, Joshua, 243 Motherwell, Robert, 209

Motoori Norinaga, 27, 31, 67, 71, 135, 220 Munch, Edvard, 155 Munroe, Alexandra, 155–156, 161, 279n10, 280n20 Murakami Haruki, 18–19, 80–81, 96, 270, 275 Murasaki Shikibu, xxv, 246 Muromachi era, xix, 207, 248, 279n6 Mussolini, Benito, 69, 83 N Naff, William E., 137 Nagai Kafū, 127, 128–129 Nagasaki, 60 Nagata Mikihiko, 230 Nakamura Hajime, 16, 268n35 Nakamura Shin’ichirō, 223 Nakasone, Prime Minister, 89 Napoleon, 116 Nara, 10, 20, 27, 71, 75, 107, 191, 242, 247 Nathan, John, 90, 178 Natsume Sōseki, xvii, 119, 123 New South Wales, 171 Nichiren, 10, 16, 19, 36 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 75, 76, 77, 78, 85, 129, 176–177, 182, 254, 274n21 Ninken, Emperor, 28 Ninomiya Masayuki, 217–220 Nishida Kitarō, xv, xviii, 12–13, 27, 202 Nishikawa Nagao, 223 Nitobe Inazō, 130 Nogi, General, 120, 121, 123, 126, 129, 277n12 Noguchi Takehiko xxiv, 184 Noma Hiroshi, 223 Nuremberg, 59 O O’Leary, Chris, 188 O’Neill, Eugene, 176–177, 178 Oda Nobunaga, 37 Odin, Steve, 202 Ōe Kenzaburō, xvi–xvii, xviii, xxiv, 33, 42, 131, 151, 223, 225 Oke, Prince, 28, 29 Orwell, George, 55 Oshima Nagisa, 175–176, 280n3 P Pacific region, 15, 52, 54, 55, 56, 57, 61, 64, 67, 68, 71, 75, 77, 90, 127, 135, 185, 186 Paglia, Camille, 179

INDEX

Palmer, Edwina 20 Paz, Octavio, 212 Pearl Harbor, 56, 218 Pegg, Nicholas, 187 Philippi, Donald, 30 Piggott, Joan, 29, 270n9, 272n23 Plato, 49, 247 Poceski, Mario, 251 Poggioli, Renato, 166 Pollock, Jackson 158, 164, 209, 279n1 R Rabelais, François, 140 Ramirez–Christensen, Esperanza, 207 Rauschning, Hermann, 86 Reader, Ian, 18, 80, 92, 93–94, 275n58 Reagan, Ronald, 89 Renan, Ernest, 134 Riefenstahl, Leni, 233 Riggs, David, 253 Rimbaud, Arthur, 212 Rimer, J. Thomas, 226 Rinzai xxii, 70–71, 196, 201, 205, 251, 252 Rolland, Romain, 222 Ros, Edmundo, xxi Rousseau, Jean–Jacques, 181, 183 Rōyama Masamichi, 44–62, 272n16, 273n39 Rushdie, Salman, 141 Russia, xxviii, 46–47, 49, 69, 116, 118, 125 Ryōkōin, xxiii Ryū Shintarō, 57 S Saigyō, 207, 208 Saikaku, 180, 241 Sakaguchi Ango, 85, 223 Sakaki Atsuko, 42 Sakamoto Ryūichi, 175–176 Sakuzō Yoshino, 46 Sano Kesami, 230 Sartre, Jean–Paul, 74, 222, 223–224, 225, 226 Sasaki Jōshū Rōshi, xxii Sasaki, Ruth Fuller, xxiii Satan, 25 Satō Masahide, 38, 67 Sato, Hiroaki, 225–226 Satoh, Ernest, xxvi Satomi Ton, 229 Sawaya, Nathan, 187 Schencking, Charles, 228 Seaton, Phillip, 5, 6

289

Seattle, 154 Seidensticker, Edward, xxiv Seitz, William, 159 Seizelet, Eric, 7 Seki Etsushi, 105, 108, 114 Sen no Rikyū, 149–150 Senda Koreya, 226 Seok–Won Lee, 60 Seraphim, Franziska, 6 Sesshū, 158 Seung Sahn, 254 Shakespeare, William, xxix, 122, 242, 246 Shaku Sōen, 254 Shibue Chūsai, 122 Shimabara, 66 Shimazaki Tōson, 115, 117, 118, 135–138, 139, 141 Shinada Yoshikazu, 242 Shinkei, 206, 207–208 Shinran, 36 Shirane Haruo, 4, 106–107, 239–244, 247, 248, 249, 277n25 Shiva, 82, 93–94, 96 Shōtoku, Prince, xvi, 9, 10, 11, 12, 16–17, 33–43, 48, 66, 67–68, 106 Shōwa era, xvii, 53, 57, 89–90, 115, 121, 128, 131–132 Siberia, 22 Skya, Walter, 7, 48–49, 68–69, 87–88 Slaymaker, Doug, 221, 224, 227 Smith, Henry De Witt, 47, 273n3 Snyder, Gary, 193, 208 Socrates, 121 Soga clan, 35, 37, 38, 39, 40, 66, 67, 68, 274n3 Soga no Umako, 35, 38 Sōgi, 208 Sōka Gakkai, 8, 19, 95 Sontag, Susan, 233, 234 Sor–Ching Low, 254 Soviet Union, 51, 245 Stevens, Wallace, 109 Strindberg, August, 129, 130 Sui court, 35, 41–42 Suiko, Empress, 29, 35, 38, 42 Sun Yat–sen, 47 Sung dynasty, 70 Susanoō, 25–26, 107 Sushun, Emperor, 38 Suzuki Sadami, xxiv Suzuki Tomi, 239, 243 Suzuki Daisetz (aka, D.T. Suzuki), xv, xxiii, 12–15, 156, 170, 173, 193–214, 251

290

INDEX

Swift, Jonathan, 130 Sydney, Australia, xiii T Taipei, xiii Taishō era, 45–46, 68, 69, 119, 124, 125– 130, 131, 132, 133, 136, 137, 222, 228, 229, 232, 235, 246, 277n12 Taishō, Emperor. 45–46 Takahashi Shinkichi, 208 Takahashi Tetsuya, 6 Takiguchi Shūzō, 225 Tanikawa Shuntarō, 101–102 Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, xvii, 75, 125, 126, 128–129, 131–132, 133–134, 135, 278n21 Tansman, Alan, 49, 132, 233–238, 268n18, 278n19 Tayama Katai, 229, 231 Temmu, Emperor, 23 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 209 Thailand, 71, 72, 281n32 Thatcher, Margarite, 89 Tobey, Mark, 157 Tōjō Hideki, 59, 135, 273n45 Tokugawa era, xxv, xxxi, 11, 31, 37, 38, 40, 42, 67–68, 71, 122, 123, 128, 135, 137–138, 220, 241, 253, 271n13 Tokyo, xix, 18, 46, 59, 63, 64, 79, 80, 81, 96, 97, 104, 142–143, 144, 145–146, 147, 148, 151, 186, 228, 229, 230, 231 Tokyo War Crimes Trials, xxx, 5, 6, 59 Tolstoy, Leo, xxvi, 116, 117, 118, 126, 136, 137, 141 Toronto, xxv Trump, President, 186, 273n46 Tsubouchi Shōyō, 115, 116 Tsugaru, 143–151 Tsuruta Kinya, xxiv Turgenev, Ivan, 118 U Ueda Atsuko, 33–34, 271n4 Ueda Makoto, xxiv, 112–113, 204, 248 Ueda Sōkyū, 158 Uesugi Shinkichi, 69 Umehara Takeshi, 17, 84–85, 270n67, 275n44 United Kingdom, xxi, xxix, xxxi United States, 60, 84, 254, 278n28 Urashima Tarō, 58–59

V Valéry, Paul, 222 Van Gogh, Vincent, 153 Vancouver, xxii, xxiv, xxv Verne, Jules, 222 Victoria, Brian, 13–14, 16, 238, 267n11, 274n12 Vidal, Gore, 180 Visconti, Tony, 187 Vogel, Ezra, 89 W Wagō Ryōichi, 102–103, 105 Waldrep, Shelton, 180, 281n12 Waley, Arthur, xxvi Wang Yangming, 63, 274n1, 275n38 Washington, 52, Watanabe Kazutami, 224 Watsuji Tetsurō, 106 Watts, Alan, xxv, 254–255 Weisenfeld, Gennifer, 228 Welter, Albert, 251–252 West, the (hemisphere) xvi, xvii, xix, xx, xxii– xxiii, xxvi, xxviii–xxix, xxx, 4–5, 7, 10, 12, 13–15, 23, 33, 34, 35, 40, 41, 42, 43, 47–49, 52–53, 54, 56, 57, 58–59, 68, 69, 72, 75–77, 78, 85, 88, 94, 115, 116–117, 120, 121, 124–125, 126, 128–129, 130, 132–134, 137, 138, 139–141, 143, 144, 152, 153, 154, 155, 157–167, 169, 170–173, 175, 176, 177, 179, 182, 183, 193–195, 197, 199, 203, 206, 208–214, 217, 218, 220, 223–227, 238, 240–241, 242, 251, 254, 269n57, 279n4 and n15, 280n18 Whitman, Walt, 197, 282n6 Wilde, Oscar, 129, 174, 176, 180, 182, 281n12 Williams, Mark, vii, ix–xi Winther–Tamaki, Bert, 159, 162, 280n16, 280n18, 280n19 Woolf, Virginia, 246, 283n1 Wordsworth, William, 105, 210, 247 Wright, Dale S., 250 Y Yamanote, 230 Yamato, xxx, 20, 21–22, 24–26, 27, 29, 30, 76, 142 Yang–di, Emperor, 41 Yasuda Yojūrō, 235, 236, 237 Yasukuni Shrine, 5–6, 7, 8, 9, 60, 91, 267n6, 268n33

INDEX

Yasumaro, 23, 24 Yasutani Haku’un, 13–14, 269n57 Yeats, W. B., 104, 173, 176, 276n7 Yokomitsu Riichi, 225 Yonehara, Ken, 58, 273n41 Yongming Yanshou, 251–52 Yoshioka Minoru, 225 Yourcenar, Marguerite, 226

Yuasa Yasuo, 57, 273n34 Yūryaku, Emperor, 28–31, 270n9 Yūshūkan, 5, 60 Z Zola, Émile, 127, 222, 224 Zolbrod, Leon, xxiv

291