はじめによんでください

03：応分の場を占めること

池田光穂

3


                      Taking One’s Proper Station

Any Attempt to understand the Japanese must begin with their version of
what it means to ‘take one’s proper station.’ Their reliance upon order
and hierarchy and our faith in freedom and equality are poles apart and
it is hard for us to give hierarchy its just due as a possible social
mechanism. Japan’s confidence in hierarchy is basic in her whole notion
of man’s relation to his fellow man and of man’s relation to the State
and it is only by describing some of their national institutions like
the family, the State, religious and economic life that it is possible
for us to understand their view of life.

The Japanese have seen the whole problem of international relations in
terms of their version of hierarchy just as they have seen their
internal problems in the same light. For the last decade they have
pictured themselves as attaining the apex of that pyramid, and now that
this position belongs instead to the Western Nations, their view of
hierarchy just as certainly underlies their acceptance of the present
dispensation. Their international documents have constantly stated the
weight they attach to it. The preamble to the Tripartite Pact with
Germany and Italy which Japan signed in 1940 reads: ‘The Governments of
Japan, Germany and Italy consider it as the condition precedent to any
lasting peace that all nations of the world be given each its proper
station . . .’ and the Imperial Rescript given on the signing of the
Pact said the same thing again:

    To enhance our great righteousness in all the earth and to make
    of the world one household is the great injunction bequeathed by
    our Imperial Ancestors and we lay this to heart day and night.
    In the stupendous crisis now confronting the world it appears
    that war and confusion will be endlessly aggravated and mankind
    suffer incalculable disasters. We fervently hope that
    disturbances will cease and peace be restored as soon as
    possible. . . . We are therefore deeply gratified that this pact
    has been concluded between the Three Powers.

    The task of enabling each nation to find its proper place and
    all individuals to live in peace and security is of the greatest
    magnitude. It is unparalleled in history. This goal is still far
    distant. . . .

On the very day of the attack on Pearl Harbor, too, the Japanese envoys
handed to Secretary of State Cordell Hull a most explicit statement on
this point:

    It is the immutable policy of the Japanese Government . . . to
    enable each nation to find its proper place in the world. . . .
    The Japanese Government cannot tolerate the perpetuation of the
    present situation since it runs directly counter to Japan’s
    fundamental policy to enable each nation to enjoy its proper
    station in the world.

This Japanese memorandum was in response to Secretary Hull’s a few days
previous which had invoked American principles just as basic and honored
in the United States as hierarchy is in Japan. Secretary Hull enumerated
four: inviolability of sovereignty and of territorial integrity;
non-intervention in other nations’ internal affairs; reliance on
international co-operation and conciliation; and the principle of
equality. These are all major points in the American faith in equal and
inviolable rights and are the principles on which we believe daily life
should be based no less than international relations. Equality is the
highest, most moral American basis for hopes for a better world. It
means to us freedom from tyranny, from interference, and from unwanted
impositions. It means equality before the law and the right to better
one’s condition in life. It is the basis for the rights of man as they
are organized in the world we know. We uphold the virtue of equality
even when we violate it and we fight hierarchy with a righteous
indignation.

It has been so ever since America was a nation at all. Jefferson wrote
it into the Declaration of Independence, and the Bill of Rights
incorporated in the Constitution is based on it. These formal phrases of
the public documents of a new nation were important just because they
reflected a way of life that was taking shape in the daily living of men
and women on this continent, a way of life that was strange to
Europeans. One of the great documents of international reporting is the
volume a young Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville, wrote on this subject
of equality after he had visited the United States in the early
eighteen-thirties. He was an intelligent and sympathetic observer who
was able to see much good in this alien world of America. For it was
alien. The young de Tocqueville had been bred in the aristocratic
society of France which within the memory of still active and
influential men had first been jolted and shocked by the French
Revolution and then by the new and drastic laws of Napoleon. He was
generous in his appreciation of a strange new order of life in America
but he saw it through the eyes of a French aristocrat and his book was a
report to the Old World on things to come. The United States, he
believed, was an advance post of developments which would take place,
though with differences, in Europe also.

He reported therefore at length on this new world. Here people really
considered themselves the equals of others. Their social intercourse was
on a new and easy footing. They fell into conversation as man to man.
Americans did not care about the little attentions of a hierarchal
etiquette; they did not demand them as their due nor offer them to
others. They liked to say they owed nothing to any man. There was no
family here in the old aristocratic or Roman sense, and the social
hierarchy which had dominated the Old World was gone. These Americans
trusted equality as they trusted nothing else; even liberty, he said,
they often in practice let fly out of the window while they looked the
other way. But they lived equality.

It is invigorating for Americans to see their forebears through the eyes
of this stranger, writing about our way of life more than a century ago.
There have been many changes in our country but the main outlines have
not altered. We recognize, as we read, that America in 1830 was already
America as we know it. There have been, and there still are, those in
this country who, like Alexander Hamilton in Jefferson’s day, are in
favor of a more aristocratic ordering of society. But even the Hamiltons
recognize that our way of life in this country is not aristocratic.

When we stated to Japan therefore just before Pearl Harbor the high
moral bases on which the United States based her policy in the Pacific
we were voicing our most trusted principles. Every step in the direction
in which we pointed would according to our convictions improve a still
imperfect world. The Japanese, too, when they put their trust in ‘proper
station’ were turning to the rule of life which had been ingrained in
them by their own social experience. Inequality has been for centuries
the rule of their organized life at just those points where it is most
predictable and most accepted. Behavior that recognizes hierarchy is as
natural to them as breathing. It is not, however, a simple Occidental
authoritarianism. Both those who exercise control and those who are
under others’ control act in conformity to a tradition which is unlike
our own, and now that the Japanese have accepted the high hierarchal
place of American authority in their country it is even more necessary
for us to get the clearest possible idea of their conventions. Only so
can we picture to ourselves the way in which they are likely to act in
their present situation.

Japan for all its recent Westernization is still an aristocratic
society. Every greeting, every contact must indicate the kind and degree
of social distance between men. Every time a man says to another ‘Eat’
or ‘Sit down’ he uses different words if he is addressing someone
familiarly or is speaking to an inferior or to a superior. There is a
different ‘you’ that must be used in each case and the verbs have
different stems. The Japanese have, in other words, what is called a
‘respect language,’ as many other peoples do in the Pacific, and they
accompany it with proper bows and kneelings. All such behavior is
governed by meticulous rules and conventions; it is not merely necessary
to know to whom one bows but it is necessary to know how much one bows.
A bow that is right and proper to one host would be resented as an
insult by another who stood in a slightly different relationship to the
bower. And bows range all the way from kneeling with forehead lowered to
the hands placed flat upon the floor, to the mere inclination of head
and shoulders. One must learn, and learn early, how to suit the
obeisance to each particular case.

It is not merely class differences which must be constantly recognized
by appropriate behavior, though these are important. Sex and age, family
ties and previous dealings between two persons all enter into the
necessary calculations. Even between the same two persons different
degrees of respect will be called for on different occasions: a civilian
may be on familiar terms with another and not bow to him at all, but
when he wears a military uniform his friend in civilian clothes bows to
him. Observance of hierarchy is an art which requires the balancing of
innumerable factors, some of which in any particular case may cancel
each other out and some of which may be additive.

There are of course persons between whom there is relatively little
ceremony. In the United States these people are one’s own family circle.
We shed even the slight formalities of our etiquette when we come home
to the bosom of our family. In Japan it is precisely in the family where
respect rules are learned and meticulously observed. While the mother
still carries the baby strapped to her back she will push his head down
with her hand, and his first lessons as a toddler are to observe respect
behavior to his father or older brother. The wife bows to her husband,
the child bows to his father, younger brothers bow to elder brothers,
the sister bows to all her brothers of whatever age. It is no empty
gesture. It means that the one who bows acknowledges the right of the
other to have his way in things he might well prefer to manage himself,
and the one who receives the bow acknowledges in his turn certain
responsibilities incumbent upon his station. Hierarchy based on sex and
generation and primogeniture are part and parcel of family life.

Filial piety is, of course, a high ethical law which Japan shares with
China, and Chinese formulations of it were early adopted in Japan along
with Chinese Buddhism, Confucian ethics and secular Chinese culture in
the sixth and seventh centuries A.D. The character of filial piety,
however, was inevitably modified to suit the different structure of the
family in Japan. In China, even today, one owes loyalty to one’s vast
extended clan. It may number tens of thousands of people over whom it
has jurisdiction and from whom it receives support. Conditions differ in
different parts of that vast country but in large parts of China all
people in any village are members of the same clan. Among all of China’s
450,000,000 inhabitants there are only 470 surnames and all people with
the same surname count themselves in some degree clan-brothers. Over a
whole area all people may be exclusively of one clan and, in addition,
families living in far-away cities are their clan fellows. In populous
areas like Kwangtung all the clan members unite in keeping up great
clan-halls and on stated days they venerate as many as a thousand
ancestral tablets of dead clan members stemming from a common forebear.
Each clan owns property, lands and temples and has clan funds which are
used to pay for the education of any promising clan son. It keeps track
of dispersed members and publishes elaborate genealogies which are
brought up-to-date every decade or so to show the names of those who
have a right to share in its privileges. It has ancestral laws which
might even forbid them to surrender family criminals to the State if the
clan was not in agreement with the authorities. In Imperial times these
great communities of semi-autonomous clans were governed in the name of
the larger State as casually as possible by easy-going mandarinates
headed by rotating State appointees who were foreigners in the area.

All this was different in Japan. Until the middle of the nineteenth
century only noble families and warrior (_samurai_) families were
allowed to use surnames. Surnames were fundamental in the Chinese clan
system and without these, or some equivalent, clan organization cannot
develop. One of these equivalents in some tribes is keeping a genealogy.
But in Japan only the upper classes kept genealogies and even in these
they kept the record, as Daughters of the American Revolution do in the
United States, backward in time from the present living person, not
downward in time to include every contemporary who stemmed from an
original ancestor. It is a very different matter. Besides, Japan was a
feudal country. Loyalty was due, not to a great group of relatives, but
to a feudal lord. He was resident overlord, and the contrast with the
temporary bureaucratic mandarins of China, who were always strangers in
their districts, could not have been greater. What was important in
Japan was that one was of the fief of Satsuma or the fief of Hizen. A
man’s ties were to his fief.

Another way of institutionalizing clans is through the worship of remote
ancestors or of clan gods at shrines or holy places. This would have
been possible for the Japanese ‘common people’ even without surnames and
genealogies. But in Japan there is no cult of veneration of remote
ancestors and at the shrines where ‘common people’ worship all villagers
join together without having to prove their common ancestry. They are
called the ‘children’ of their shrine-god, but they are ‘children’
because they live in his territory. Such village worshipers are of
course related to each other as villagers in any part of the world are
after generations of fixed residence but they are not a tight clan group
descended from a common ancestor.

The reverence due to ancestors is paid at a quite different shrine in
the family living-room where only six or seven recent dead are honored.
Among all classes in Japan obeisance is done daily before this shrine
and food set out for parents and grandparents and close relatives
remembered in the flesh, who are represented in the shrine by little
miniature gravestones. Even in the cemetery the markers on the graves of
great-grandparents are no longer relettered and the identity even of the
third ancestral generation sinks rapidly into oblivion. Family ties in
Japan are whittled down almost to Occidental proportions and the French
family is perhaps the nearest equivalent.

‘Filial piety’ in Japan, therefore, is a matter within a limited
face-to-face family. It means taking one’s proper station according to
generation, sex, and age within a group which includes hardly more than
one’s father and father’s father, their brothers and their descendants.
Even in important houses, where larger groups may be included, the
family splits up into separate lines and younger sons establish branch
families. Within this narrow face-to-face group the rules that regulate
‘proper station’ are meticulous. There is strict subservience to elders
until they elect to go into formal retirement (_inkyo_). Even today a
father of grown sons, if his own father has not retired, puts through no
transaction without having it approved by the old grandfather. Parents
make and break their children’s marriages even when the children are
thirty and forty years old. The father as male head of the household is
served first at meals, goes first to the family bath, and receives with
a nod the deep bows of his family. There is a popular riddle in Japan
which might be translated into our conundrum form: ‘Why is a son who
wants to offer advice to his parents like a Buddhist priest who wants to
have hair on the top of his head?’ (Buddhist priests had a tonsure.) The
answer is, ‘However much he wants to do it, he can’t.’

Proper station means not only differences of generation but differences
of age. When the Japanese want to express utter confusion, they say that
something is ‘neither elder brother nor younger brother.’ It is like our
saying that something is neither fish nor fowl, for to the Japanese a
man should keep his character as elder brother as drastically as a fish
should stay in water. The eldest son is the heir. Travelers speak of
‘that air of responsibility which the eldest son so early acquires in
Japan.’ The eldest son shares to a high degree in the prerogatives of
the father. In the old days his younger brother would have been
inevitably dependent upon him in time; nowadays, especially in towns and
villages, it is he who will stay at home in the old rut while his
younger brothers will perhaps press forward and get more education and a
better income. But old habits of hierarchy are strong.

Even in political commentary today the traditional prerogatives of elder
brothers are vividly stated in discussions of Greater East Asia policy.
In the spring of 1942 a Lieutenant Colonel, speaking for the War Office,
said on the subject of the Co-prosperity Sphere: ‘Japan is their elder
brother and they are Japan’s younger brothers. This fact must be brought
home to the inhabitants of the occupied territories. Too much
consideration shown for the inhabitants might engender in their minds
the tendency to presume on Japan’s kindness with pernicious effects on
Japanese rule.’ The elder brother, in other words, decides what is good
for his younger brother and should not show ‘too much consideration’ in
enforcing it.

Whatever one’s age, one’s position in the hierarchy depends on whether
one is male or female. The Japanese woman walks behind her husband and
has a lower status. Even women who on occasions when they wear American
clothes walk alongside and precede him through a door, again fall to the
rear when they have donned their kimonos. The Japanese daughter of the
family must get along as best she can while the presents, the
attentions, and the money for education go to her brothers. Even when
higher schools were established for young women the prescribed courses
were heavily loaded with instruction in etiquette and bodily movement.
Serious intellectual training was not on a par with boys’, and one
principal of such a school, advocating for his upper middle class
students some instruction in European languages, based his
recommendation on the desirability of their being able to put their
husband’s books back in the bookcase right side up after they had dusted
them.

Nevertheless, the Japanese women have great freedom as compared to most
other Asiatic countries and this is not just a phase of Westernization.
There never was female foot-binding as in the Chinese upper classes, and
Indian women today exclaim over Japanese women going in and out of
shops, up and down the streets and never secreting themselves. Japanese
wives do the family shopping and carry the family purse. If money fails,
it is they who must select something from the household and carry it to
the pawnshop. A woman runs her servants, has great say in her children’s
marriages, and when she is a mother-in-law commonly runs her household
realm with as firm a hand as if she had never been, for half her life, a
nodding violet.

The prerogatives of generation, sex, and age in Japan are great. But
those who exercise these privileges act as trustees rather than as
arbitrary autocrats. The father or the elder brother is responsible for
the household, whether its members are living, dead, or yet unborn. He
must make weighty decisions and see that they are carried out. He does
not, however, have unconditional authority. He is expected to act
responsibly for the honor of the house. He recalls to his son and
younger brother the legacy of the family, both in material and in
spiritual things, and he challenges them to be worthy. Even if he is a
peasant he invokes _noblesse oblige_ to the family forebears, and if he
belongs to more exalted classes the weight of responsibility to the
house becomes heavier and heavier. The claims of the family come before
the claims of the individual.

In any affair of importance the head of a family of any standing calls a
family council at which the matter is debated. For a conference on a
betrothal, for instance, members of the family may come from distant
parts of Japan. The process of coming to a decision involves all the
imponderables of personality. A younger brother or a wife may sway the
verdict. The master of the house saddles himself with great difficulties
if he acts without regard for group opinion. Decisions, of course, may
be desperately unwelcome to the individual whose fate is being settled.
His elders, however, who have themselves submitted in their lifetimes to
decisions of family councils, are impregnable in demanding of their
juniors what they have bowed to in their day. The sanction behind their
demand is very different from that which, both in law and in custom,
gives the Prussian father arbitrary rights over his wife and children.
What is demanded is not for this reason less exacting in Japan, but the
effects are different. The Japanese do not learn in their home life to
value arbitrary authority, and the habit of submitting to it easily is
not fostered. Submission to the will of the family is demanded in the
name of a supreme value in which, however onerous its requirements, all
of them have a stake. It is demanded in the name of a common loyalty.

Every Japanese learns the habit of hierarchy first in the bosom of his
family and what he learns there he applies in wider fields of economic
life and of government. He learns that a person gives all deference to
those who outrank him in assigned ‘proper place,’ no matter whether or
not they are the really dominant persons in the group. Even a husband
who is dominated by his wife, or an elder brother who is dominated by a
younger brother, receives no less formal deference. Formal boundaries
between prerogatives are not broken down just because some other person
is operating behind the scenes. The façade is not changed to suit the
facts of dominance. It remains inviolable. There is even a certain
tactical advantage in operating without the trappings of formal status;
one is in that case less vulnerable. The Japanese learn, too, in their
family experience that the greatest weight that can be given to a
decision comes from the family conviction that it maintains the family
honor. The decision is not a decree enforced by an iron fist at the whim
of a tyrant who happens to be head of the family. He is more nearly a
trustee of a material and spiritual estate which is important to them
all and which demands of them all that they subordinate their personal
wills to its requirements. The Japanese repudiate the use of the mailed
fist, but they do not for that reason subordinate themselves any the
less to the demands of the family, nor do they for that reason give to
those with assigned status any less extreme deference. Hierarchy in the
family is maintained even though the family elders have little
opportunity to be strong-armed autocrats.

Such a bald statement of hierarchy in the Japanese family does not, when
Americans read it with their different standards of interpersonal
behavior, do justice to the acceptance of strong and sanctioned
emotional ties in Japanese families. There is very considerable
solidarity in the household and how they achieve it is one of the
subjects of this book. Meanwhile it is important in trying to understand
their demand for hierarchy in the wider fields of government and
economic life to recognize how thoroughly the habit is learned in the
bosom of the family.

The hierarchal arrangements of Japanese life have been as drastic in
relations between the classes as they have been in the family. In all
her national history Japan has been a strong class and caste society,
and a nation which has a centuries-long habit of caste arrangements has
certain strengths and certain weaknesses which are of the utmost
importance. In Japan caste has been the rule of life through all her
recorded history and even back in the seventh century A.D. she was
already adapting the ways of life she borrowed from casteless China to
suit her own hierarchal culture. In that era of the seventh and eighth
centuries, the Japanese Emperor and his court set themselves the task of
enriching Japan with the customs of the high civilization that had
greeted the amazed eyes of their envoys in the great kingdom of China.
They went about it with incomparable energy. Before that time Japan had
not even had a written language; in the seventh century she took the
ideographs of China and used them to write her own totally different
language. She had had a religion which named forty thousand gods who
presided over mountains and villages and gave people good fortune—a
folk religion which with all its subsequent changes has survived as
modern Shinto. In the seventh century, Japan adopted Buddhism wholesale
from China as a religion ‘excellent for protecting the State.’[1] She
had had no great permanent architecture, either public or private; the
Emperors built a new capital city, Nara, on the model of a Chinese
capital, and great ornate Buddhist temples and vast Buddhist monasteries
were erected in Japan after the Chinese pattern. The Emperors introduced
titles and ranks and laws their envoys reported to them from China. It
is difficult to find anywhere in the history of the world any other such
successfully planned importation of civilization by a sovereign nation.

Japan, however, from the very first, failed to reproduce China’s
casteless social organization. The official titles Japan adopted were in
China given to administrators who had passed the State examinations, but
in Japan they were given to hereditary nobles and feudal lords. They
became part of the caste arrangements of Japan. Japan was laid out in a
great number of semi-sovereign fiefs whose lords were constantly jealous
of each other’s powers, and the social arrangements that mattered were
those that had to do with the prerogatives of lords and vassals and
retainers. No matter how assiduously Japan imported civilization from
China she could not adopt ways of life which put in the place of her
hierarchy anything like China’s administrative bureaucracy or her system
of extended clans which united people from the most different walks of
life into one great clan. Nor did Japan adopt the Chinese idea of a
secular Emperor. The Japanese name for the Imperial House is ‘Those who
dwell above the clouds’ and only persons of this family can be Emperor.
Japan has never had a change of dynasty, as China so often had. The
Emperor was inviolable and his person was sacred. The Japanese Emperors
and their courts who introduced Chinese culture in Japan no doubt could
not even imagine what the Chinese arrangements were in these matters and
did not guess what changes they were making.

In spite of all Japan’s cultural importations from China, therefore,
this new civilization only paved the way for centuries of conflict as to
which of these hereditary lords and vassals was in control of the
country. Before the eighth century had ended the noble Fujiwara family
had seized dominance and had thrust the Emperor into the background.
When, as time went on, the Fujiwaras’ dominance was disputed by feudal
lords and the whole country plunged into civil war, one of these, the
famous Yoritomo Minamoto, vanquished all rivals and became actual ruler
of the country under an old military title, the Shogun, which in full
means literally ‘Barbarian-subduing Generalissimo.’ This title, as was
usual in Japan, Yoritomo made hereditary in the Minamoto family for as
long as his descendants could hold the other feudal lords in check. The
Emperor became an impotent figure. His chief importance was that the
Shogun still depended upon him for his ritual investiture. He had no
civil power. The actual power was held by a military camp, as it was
called, which tried to hold its dominance by armed force over unruly
fiefs. Each feudal lord, the _daimyo_, had his armed retainers, the
_samurai_, whose swords were at his disposal, and they were always ready
in periods of disorder to dispute the ‘proper place’ of a rival fief or
of the ruling Shogun.

In the sixteenth century civil war had become endemic. After decades of
disorder the great Ieyasu won out over all rivals and in 1603 became the
first Shogun of the House of Tokugawa. The Shogunate remained in
Ieyasu’s line for two centuries and a half and was ended only in 1868
when the ‘dual rule’ of Emperor and Shogun was abolished at the
beginning of the modern period. In many ways this long Tokugawa Era is
one of the most remarkable in history. It maintained an armed peace in
Japan up to the very last generation before it ended and it put into
effect a centralized administration that admirably served the Tokugawas’
purposes.

Ieyasu was faced with a most difficult problem and he did not choose an
easy solution. The lords of some of the strongest fiefs had been against
him in the civil war and had bowed to him only after a final disastrous
defeat. These were the so-called Outside Lords. These lords he left in
control of their fiefs and of their samurai, and indeed of all the
feudal lords of Japan they continued to have the greatest autonomy in
their domains. Nevertheless, he excluded them from the honor of being
his vassals and from all important functions. These important positions
were reserved for the Inside Lords, Ieyasu’s supporters in the civil
war. To maintain this difficult regime the Tokugawas relied upon a
strategy of keeping the feudal lords, the daimyos, from accumulating
power and of preventing any possible combination among them which might
threaten the Shogun’s control. Not only did the Tokugawas not abolish
the feudal scheme; for the purpose of maintaining peace in Japan and
dominance of the House of Tokugawa, they attempted to strengthen it and
make it more rigid.

Japanese feudal society was elaborately stratified and each man’s status
was fixed by inheritance. The Tokugawas solidified this system and
regulated the details of each caste’s daily behavior. Every family head
had to post on his doorway his class position and the required facts
about his hereditary status. The clothes he could wear, the foods he
could buy, and the kind of house he could legally live in were regulated
according to this inherited rank. Below the Imperial Family and the
court nobles, there were four Japanese castes ranked in hierarchal
order: the warriors (samurai), the farmers, the artisans, and the
merchants. Below these, again, were the outcasts. The most numerous and
famous of these outcasts were the Eta, workers in tabooed trades. They
were scavengers, buriers of the executed, skinners of dead animals and
tanners of hides. They were Japan’s untouchables, or, more exactly,
their uncountables, for even the mileage of roads through their villages
went uncounted as if the land and the inhabitants of the area did not
exist at all. They were desperately poor, and, though guaranteed the
exercise of their trades, they were outside the formal structure.

The merchants ranked just above the outcasts. However strange this seems
to Americans, it was highly realistic in a feudal society. A merchant
class is always disruptive of feudalism. As business men become
respected and prosperous, feudalism decays. When the Tokugawas, by the
most drastic laws any nation has ever enforced, decreed the isolation of
Japan in the seventeenth century, they cut the ground from under the
feet of the merchants. Japan had had an overseas trade all up and down
the coast of China and Korea and a class of traders had been inevitably
developing. The Tokugawas stopped all this by making it an offense
worthy of capital punishment to build or operate any boat larger than a
certain size. The small boats allowed could not cross to the continent
or carry loads of trade goods. Domestic trade was severely restricted,
too, by customs barriers which were set up on the borders of each fief
with strict rules against letting goods in or out. Other laws were
directed toward emphasizing the merchants’ low social position.
Sumptuary laws regulated the clothes they could wear, the umbrellas they
could carry, the amount they could spend for a wedding or a funeral.
They could not live in a samurai district. They had no legal protection
against the swords of the samurai, the privileged warriors. The Tokugawa
policy of keeping the merchants in inferior stations failed of course in
a money economy, and Japan at that period was run on a money economy.
But it was attempted.

The two classes which are appropriate to a stable feudalism, the
warriors and the farmers, the Tokugawa regime froze into rigid forms.
During the civil wars that were finally ended by Ieyasu, the great
war-lord, Hideyoshi, had already completed, by his famous ‘sword hunt,’
the separation of these two classes. He had disarmed the peasants and
given to the samurai the sole right to wear swords. The warriors could
no longer be farmers nor artisans nor merchants. Not even the lowest of
them could any longer legally be a producer; he was a member of a
parasitic class which drew its annual rice stipend from taxes levied
upon the peasants. The daimyo handled this rice and distributed to each
samurai retainer his allotted income. There was no question about where
the samurai had to look for support; he was wholly dependent upon his
lord. In earlier eras of Japanese history strong ties between the feudal
chief and his warriors had been forged in almost ceaseless war between
the fiefs; in the Tokugawa era of peace the ties became economic. For
the warrior-retainer, unlike his European counterpart, was not a
sub-seigneur owning his own land and serfs nor was he a soldier of
fortune. He was a pensioner on a set stipend which had been fixed for
his family line at the beginning of the Tokugawa Era. It was not large.
Japanese scholars have estimated that the average stipend of all samurai
was about what farmers were earning and that was certainly bare
subsistence.[2] Nothing could be more to the family’s disadvantage than
division of this stipend among heirs and in consequence the samurai
limited their families. Nothing could be more galling to them than
prestige dependent on wealth and display, so they laid great stress in
their code on the superior virtues of frugality.

A great gulf separated the samurai from the other three classes: the
farmers, the artisans and the merchants. These last three were ‘common
people.’ The samurai were not. The swords the samurai wore as their
prerogative and sign of caste were not mere decorations. They had the
right to use them on the common people. They had traditionally done so
before Tokugawa times and the laws of Ieyasu merely sanctioned old
customs when they decreed: ‘Common people who behave unbecomingly to the
samurai or who do not show respect to their superiors may be cut down on
the spot.’ It was no part of Ieyasu’s design that mutual dependence
should be built up between common people and the samurai retainers. His
policy was based on strict hierarchal regulations. Both classes headed
up to the daimyo and reckoned directly with him; they were on different
stairways, as it were. Up and down each stairway there was law and
regulation and control and reciprocity. Between the people on two
stairways there was merely distance. The separateness of the two classes
was necessarily bridged by circumstances over and over again but it was
not a part of the system.

During the Tokugawa Era samurai retainers were not mere sword-swingers.
They became increasingly the stewards of their overlords’ estates and
specialists in peaceful arts like the classical drama and the tea
ceremony. All protocol lay in their sphere and the daimyo’s intrigues
were carried out by their skilled manipulations. Two hundred years of
peace is a long time and mere individual sword-swinging had its limits.
Just as the merchants, in spite of the caste regulations, developed a
way of life that gave high place to urbane and artistic and pleasurable
pursuits, so the samurai, in spite of their ready swords, developed arts
of peace.

The farmers, in spite of their legal defenselessness against the
samurai, the heavy levies of rice made upon them and all the
restrictions imposed upon them, had certain securities guaranteed them.
They were guaranteed the possession of their farms and to have land
gives a man prestige in Japan. Under the Tokugawa regime, land could not
be permanently alienated and this law was a guarantee for the individual
cultivator, not, as in European feudalism, for the feudal lord. The
farmer had a permanent right to something which he valued supremely and
he appears to have worked his land with the same diligence and
unstinting care with which his descendants cultivate their rice fields
today. Nevertheless, he was the Atlas who supported the whole parasitic
upper-class of about two million persons, including the government of
the Shogun, the establishments of the daimyo and the stipends of the
samurai retainers. He was taxed in kind, that is, he paid to the daimyo
a percentage of his crops. Whereas in Siam, another wet-rice country,
the traditional tax is 10 per cent, in Tokugawa Japan it was 40 per
cent. But in reality it was higher than this. In some fiefs it was 80
per cent and always there was corvée or work requisitions, which bore
down on the strength and time of the farmer. Like the samurai, the
farmers also limited their families and the population of the whole of
Japan stood at almost the same figure during all the Tokugawa centuries.
For an Asiatic country during a long period of peace these static
population figures tell a great deal about the regime. It was Spartan in
its restrictions, both on the tax-supported retainers and on the
producing class, but between each dependent and his superior, it was
relatively dependable. A man knew his obligations, his prerogatives and
his station and if these were infringed upon the poorest might protest.

The farmers, even in the direst poverty, carried their protests not only
to the feudal lord but to the Shogunate authorities. There were at least
a thousand of these revolts during the two and a half Tokugawa
centuries. They were not occasioned by the traditional heavy rule of ‘40
per cent to the prince and 60 per cent to the cultivators’; they were
all protests against additional levies. When conditions were no longer
bearable, the farmers might march in great numbers against their
overlords but the procedure of petition and judgment was orderly. The
farmers drew up formal petitions for redress which they submitted to the
daimyo’s chamberlain. When this petition was intercepted or the daimyo
took no notice of their complaints they sent their representatives to
the capital to present their written complaints to the Shogunate. In
famous cases they could insure its delivery only by inserting it into
some high official’s palanquin as he rode through the streets of the
capital. But, no matter what risks the farmers took in delivering the
petition, it was then investigated by the Shogunate authorities and
about half of the judgments were in favor of the peasants.[3]

Japan’s requirements of law and order were not satisfied, however, with
the Shogunate’s judgment on the farmers’ claims. Their complaints might
be just and it might be advisable for the State to honor them, but the
peasant leaders had transgressed the strict law of hierarchy. Regardless
of any decision in their favor, they had broken the essential law of
their allegiance and this could not be overlooked. They were therefore
condemned to death. The righteousness of their cause had nothing to do
with the matter. Even the peasants accepted this inevitability. The
condemned men were their heroes and the people came in numbers to the
execution where the leaders were boiled in oil or beheaded or crucified,
but at the execution the crowds did not riot. This was law and order.
They might afterward build the dead men shrines and honor them as
martyrs, but they accepted the execution as part and parcel of the
hierarchal laws by which they lived.

The Tokugawa Shoguns, in short, attempted to solidify the caste
structure within each fief and to make each class dependent on the
feudal lord. The daimyo stood at the apex of the hierarchy in each fief
and he was allowed to exercise his prerogatives over his dependents. The
Shogun’s great administrative problem was to control the daimyo. In
every way he prevented them from forming alliances or from carrying out
schemes of aggression. Passport and customs officials were maintained at
the frontiers of the fiefs to keep strict watch for ‘outgoing women and
incoming guns’ lest any daimyo try to send his women away and smuggle
arms in. No daimyo could contract a marriage without the Shogun’s
permission lest it might lead to a dangerous political alliance. Trade
between the fiefs was hindered even to the extent of allowing bridges to
become impassable. The Shogun’s spies too kept him well informed on the
daimyo’s expenditures and if the feudal coffers were filling up, the
Shogun required him to undertake expensive public works to bring him in
line again. Most famous regulation of all was that the daimyo live half
of each year in the capital and, even when he returned to his fief for
his residence there, he had to leave his wife behind him in Yedo (Tokyo)
as a hostage in the hands of the Shoguns. In all these ways the
administration made certain that it maintain the upper hand and enforce
its dominant position in the hierarchy.

The Shogun was not, of course, the final keystone in this arch for he
held sway as the appointee of the Emperor. The Emperor with his court of
hereditary nobles (_kuge_) was isolated in Kyoto and was without actual
power. The Emperor’s financial resources were less than those of even
lesser daimyos and the very ceremonies of the court were strictly
circumscribed by Shogunate regulations. Not even the most powerful
Tokugawa Shoguns, however, took any steps to do away with this dual rule
of Emperor and actual ruler. It was no new thing in Japan. Since the
twelfth century a Generalissimo (Shogun) had ruled the country in the
name of a throne shorn of actual authority. In some centuries division
of function had gone so far that the real power which the shadowy
Emperor delegated to a hereditary secular chief was exercised in turn by
a hereditary advisor of that chief. There has always been delegation
upon delegation of original authority. Even in the last and desperate
days of the Tokugawa regime, Commodore Perry did not suspect the
existence of an Emperor in the background and our first envoy, Townsend
Harris, who negotiated the first commercial treaty with Japan in 1858,
had to discover for himself that there was an Emperor.

The truth is that Japan’s conception of her Emperor is one that is found
over and over among the islands of the Pacific. He is the Sacred Chief
who may or may not take part in administration. In some Pacific islands
he did and in some he delegated his authority. But always his person was
sacred. Among New Zealand tribes the Sacred Chief was so sacrosanct that
he might not feed himself and even the spoon with which he was fed must
not be allowed to touch his sacred teeth. He had to be carried when he
went abroad, for any land upon which he set his sacred foot became
automatically so holy that it must pass into the Sacred Chief’s
possession. His head was particularly sacrosanct and no man could touch
it. His words reached the tribal gods. In some Pacific islands, like
Samoa and Tonga, the Sacred Chief did not descend into the arena of
life. A Secular Chief performed all the duties of State. James Wilson,
who visited the island of Tonga in the Eastern Pacific at the end of the
eighteenth century, wrote that its government ‘resembles most the
government of Japan where the sacred majesty is a sort of state prisoner
to the captain-general.’[4] The Tongan Sacred Chiefs were isolated from
public affairs, but they performed ritual duties. They had to receive
the first fruits of the gardens and conduct a ceremony before any man
could eat of them. When the Sacred Chief died, his death was announced
by the phrase, ‘The heavens are void.’ He was buried with ceremony in a
great royal tomb. But he took no part in administration.

The Emperor, even when he was politically impotent and ‘a sort of State
prisoner to the Captain-general,’ filled, according to Japanese
definitions, a ‘proper station’ in the hierarchy. The Emperor’s active
participation in mundane affairs was to them no measure of his status.
His court at Kyoto was a value they preserved all through the long
centuries of the rule of the Barbarian-subduing Generalissimos. His
functions were superfluous only from a Western point of view. The
Japanese, who at every point were accustomed to rigorous definition of
hierarchal rôle, looked at the matter differently.

The extreme explicitness of the Japanese hierarchal system in feudal
times, from outcast to Emperor, has left its strong impress on modern
Japan. After all, the feudal regime was legally ended only about
seventy-five years ago, and strong national habits do not pass away
within one man’s lifetime. Japanese statesmen of the modern period, too,
laid their careful plans, as we shall see in the next chapter, to
preserve a great deal of the system in spite of radical alterations in
their country’s objectives. The Japanese, more than any other sovereign
nation, have been conditioned to a world where the smallest details of
conduct are mapped and status is assigned. During two centuries when law
and order were maintained in such a world with an iron hand, the
Japanese learned to identify this meticulously plotted hierarchy with
safety and security. So long as they stayed within known boundaries, and
so long as they fulfilled known obligations, they could trust their
world. Banditry was controlled. Civil war between the daimyo was
prevented. If subjects could prove that others had overstepped their
rights, they could appeal as the farmers did when they were exploited.
It was personally dangerous but it was approved. The best of the
Tokugawa Shoguns even had a Complaint Box into which any citizen could
drop his protest, and the Shogun alone had a key to his box. There were
genuine guarantees in Japan that aggressions would be rectified if they
were acts that were not allowed on the existing map of conduct. One
trusted the map and was safe only when one followed it. One showed one’s
courage, one’s integrity in conforming to it, not in modifying it or in
revolting against it. Within its stated limits, it was a known and, in
their eyes, a dependable world. Its rules were not abstract ethical
principles of a decalogue but tiny specifications of what was due in
this situation and what was due in that situation; what was due if one
were a samurai and what was due if one were a common man; what was
proper to elder brother and what was proper to younger brother.

The Japanese did not become a mild and submissive people under this
system, as some nations have under a strong-handed hierarchal regime. It
is important to recognize that certain guarantees were given to each
class. Even the outcasts were guaranteed a monopoly of their special
trades and their self-governing bodies were recognized by the
authorities. Restrictions upon each class were great but there were
order and security too.

The caste restrictions also had a certain flexibility they do not have,
for instance, in India: Japanese customs provided several explicit
techniques for manipulating the system without doing violence to the
accepted ways. A man could change his caste status in several ways. When
money lenders and merchants became wealthy, as they inevitably did under
Japan’s money economy, the rich used various traditional devices to
infiltrate the upper classes. They became ‘land owners’ by the use of
liens and rents. It is true that the peasants’ land was inalienable but
farm rents were excessively high in Japan and it was profitable to leave
the peasants on their land. Money lenders settled on the land and
collected their rents, and such ‘ownership’ of land gave prestige as
well as profit in Japan. Their children married samurai. They became
gentry.

Another traditional manipulation of the caste system was through the
custom of adoption. It provided a way of ‘buying’ samurai status. As
merchants became richer in spite of all Tokugawa restrictions, they
arranged for their sons’ adoption into samurai families. In Japan one
seldom adopts a son; one adopts a husband for one’s daughter. He is
known as an ‘adopted husband.’ He becomes the heir of his father-in-law.
He pays a high price, for his name is stricken from his own family
register and entered on his wife’s. He takes her name and goes to live
with his mother-in-law. But if the price is high, the advantages are
also great. For the prosperous merchant’s descendants become samurai and
the impoverished samurai’s family gets an alliance with wealth. No
violence is done to the caste system which remains just what it always
was. But the system has been manipulated to provide upper-class status
for the wealthy.

Japan therefore did not require castes to marry only among themselves.
There were approved arrangements which allowed intermarriage among them.
The resulting infiltration of prosperous traders into the lower samurai
class played a large part in furthering one of the greatest contrasts
between Western Europe and Japan. When feudalism broke down in Europe it
was due to the pressure of a growing and increasingly powerful middle
class and this class dominated the modern industrial period. In Japan no
such strong middle class arose. The merchants and money lenders ‘bought’
upper-class status by sanctioned methods. Merchants and lower samurai
became allies. It is a curious and surprising thing to point out that at
the time when feudalism was in its death throes in both civilizations,
Japan sanctioned class mobility to a greater degree than continental
Europe did, but no evidence for such a statement could be more
convincing than the lack of any sign of a class war between aristocracy
and bourgeoisie.

It is easy to point out that the common cause made by these two classes
was mutually advantageous in Japan, but it would have been mutually
advantageous in France too. It was advantageous in Western Europe in
those individual instances where it occurred. But class rigidity was
strong in Europe and the conflict of classes led in France to the
expropriation of the aristocracy. In Japan they drew closer together.
The alliance that overthrew the effete Shogunate was an alliance between
the merchant-financiers and the samurai retainers. The modern era in
Japan preserved the aristocratic system. It could hardly have happened
without Japan’s sanctioned techniques for class mobility.

If the Japanese loved and trusted their meticulously explicit map of
behavior, they had a certain justification. It guaranteed security so
long as one followed the rules; it allowed protests against unauthorized
aggressions and it could be manipulated to one’s own advantage. It
required the fulfillment of reciprocal obligations. When the Tokugawa
regime crumbled in the first half of the nineteenth century, no group in
the nation was in favor of tearing up the map. There was no French
Revolution. There was not even an 1848. Yet the times were desperate.
From the common people to the Shogunate, every class had fallen into
debt to the money lenders and merchants. The mere numbers of the
non-productive classes and the scale of customary official expenditures
had proved insupportable. The daimyo as the grip of poverty tightened
upon them were unable to pay the fixed stipends to their samurai
retainers and the whole network of feudal ties became a mockery. They
tried to keep afloat by increasing the already heavy taxes upon the
peasants. These were collected years in advance and the farmers were
reduced to extreme want. The Shogunate too was bankrupt and could do
little to keep the status quo. Japan was in dire domestic extremity by
1853 when Admiral Perry appeared with his men of war. His forced entry
was followed in 1858 by a trade treaty with the United States which
Japan was in no position to refuse.

The cry that went up from Japan, however, was _Isshin_—to dig back into
the past, to restore. It was the opposite of revolutionary. It was not
even progressive. Joined with the cry ‘Restore the Emperor’ was the
equally popular cry ‘Expel the Barbarians.’ The nation supported the
program of going back to a golden age of isolation and the few leaders
who saw how impossible such a course would be were assassinated for
their pains. There seemed not the slightest likelihood that this
non-revolutionary country of Japan would alter its course to conform to
any Occidental patterns, still less that in fifty years it would compete
with Western nations on their own grounds. Nevertheless, that is what
happened. Japan used her own strengths, which were not at all the
Occidental strengths, to achieve a goal which no powerful high-placed
group and no popular opinion in Japan demanded. No Westerner in the
eighteen-sixties would have believed if he had seen the future in a
crystal ball. There seemed to be no cloud the size of a man’s hand on
the horizon to indicate the tumult of activity which swept Japan during
the next decades. Nevertheless, the impossible happened. Japan’s
backward and hierarchy-ridden population swung to a new course and held
it.

-----

[1] Quoted from a contemporary chronicle of the Nara period by Sir
George Sansom, _Japan: A Short Cultural History_, p. 131.

[2] Quoted by Herbert Norman, _Japan’s Emergence as a Modern State_, p.
17, n. 12.

[3] Borton, Hugh, _Peasant Uprisings in Japan of the Tokugawa Period_,
Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, 2nd Series, 16 (1938).

[4] Wilson, James, _A missionary voyage to the Southern Pacific Ocean
performed in the years 1796, 1797 and 1798 in the ship Duff_. London,
1799, p. 384. Quoted by Edward Winslow Gifford, Tongan Society. Bernice
P. Bishop Museum, Bulletin 61. Hawaii, 1929.


Copyright Mitzub'ixi Quq Chi'j, 2015

For all undergraduate students!!!, you do not paste but [re]think my message.

Remind Wittgenstein's phrase, "I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble of thinking. But, if possible, to stimulate someone to thoughts of his own," - Ludwig Wittgenstein