はじめによんでください

04：明治維新

池田光穂

 4


                            The Meiji Reform

The Battlecry that ushered in the modern era in Japan was _Sonno joi_,
‘Restore the Emperor and expel the Barbarian.’ It was a slogan that
sought to keep Japan uncontaminated by the outside world and to restore
a golden age of the tenth century before there had been a ‘dual rule’ of
Emperor and Shogun. The Emperor’s court at Kyoto was reactionary in the
extreme. The victory of the Emperor’s party meant to his supporters the
humiliation and expulsion of foreigners. It meant reinstatement of
traditional ways of life in Japan. It meant that ‘reformers’ would have
no voice in affairs. The great Outside Lords, the daimyo of Japan’s
strongest fiefs who spearheaded the overthrow of the Shogunate, thought
of the Restoration as a way in which they, instead of the Tokugawa,
could rule Japan. They wanted a mere change of personnel. The farmers
wanted to keep more of the rice they raised but they hated ‘reforms.’
The samurai wanted to keep their pensions and be allowed to use their
swords for greater glory. The merchants, who financed the Restoration
forces, wanted to expand mercantilism but they never arraigned the
feudal system.

When the anti-Tokugawa forces triumphed and ‘dual rule’ was ended in
1868 by the Restoration of the Emperor, the victors were committed, by
Western standards, to a fiercely conservative isolationist policy. From
the first the regime followed the opposite course. It had been in power
hardly a year when it abolished the daimyo’s right of taxation in all
fiefs. It called in the land-registers and appropriated to itself the
peasants’ tax of ‘40 per cent to the daimyo.’ This expropriation was not
without compensation. The government allotted to each daimyo the
equivalent of half his normal income. At the same time also the
government freed the daimyo of the support of his samurai retainers and
of the expenses of public works. The samurai retainers, like the daimyo,
received pensions from the government. Within the next five years all
legal inequality among the classes was summarily abolished, insignia and
distinctive dress of caste and class were outlawed—even queues had to
be cut,—the outcasts were emancipated, the laws against alienation of
land withdrawn, the barriers that had separated fief from fief were
removed and Buddhism was disestablished. By 1876 the daimyo and samurai
pensions were commuted to lump sum payments which were to become due in
five to fifteen years. These payments were either large or small
according to the fixed income these individuals had drawn in Tokugawa
days and the money made it possible for them to start enterprises in the
new non-feudal economy. ‘It was the final stage in the sealing of that
peculiar union of merchants and financial princes with the feudal or
landed princes which was already evident in the Tokugawa period.’[1]

These remarkable reforms of the infant Meiji regime were not popular.
There was far more general enthusiasm for an invasion of Korea from 1871
to 1873 than for any of these measures. The Meiji government not only
persisted in its drastic course of reform, it killed the project of the
invasion. Its program was so strongly opposed to the wishes of a great
majority of those who had fought to establish it that by 1877 Saigo,
their greatest leader, had organized a full-scale rebellion against the
government. His army represented all the pro-feudal longings of Imperial
supporters which had from the first year of the Restoration been
betrayed by the Meiji regime. The government called up a non-samurai
voluntary army and defeated Saigo’s samurai. But the rebellion was an
indication of the extent of the dissatisfaction the regime aroused in
Japan.

The farmers’ dissatisfaction was equally marked. There were at least 190
agrarian revolts between 1868 and 1878, the first Meiji decade. In 1877
the new government made its first tardy moves to lessen the great tax
burden upon the peasants, and they had reason to feel that the regime
had failed them. The farmers objected in addition to the establishment
of schools, to conscription, to land surveys, to having to cut their
queues, to legal equality of the outcasts, to the drastic restrictions
on official Buddhism, to calendar reforms and to many other measures
which changed their settled ways of life.

Who, then, was this ‘government’ which undertook such drastic and
unpopular reforms? It was that ‘peculiar union’ in Japan of the lower
samurai and the merchant class which special Japanese institutions had
fostered even in feudal times. They were the samurai retainers who had
learned statecraft as chamberlains and stewards for the daimyos, who had
run the feudal monopolies in mines, textiles, pasteboards and the like.
They were merchants who had bought samurai status and spread knowledge
of productive techniques in that class. This samurai-merchant alliance
rapidly put to the fore able and self-confident administrators who drew
up the Meiji policies and planned their execution. The real problem,
however, is not from what class they came but how it happened that they
were so able and so realistic. Japan, just emerging from medievalism in
the last half of the nineteenth century and as weak then as Siam is
today, produced leaders able to conceive and to carry out one of the
most statesmanlike and successful jobs ever attempted in any nation. The
strength, and the weakness too, of these leaders was rooted in
traditional Japanese character and it is the chief object of this book
to discuss what that character was and is. Here we can only recognize
how the Meiji statesmen went about their undertaking.

They did not take their task to be an ideological revolution at all.
They treated it as a job. Their goal as they conceived it was to make
Japan into a country which must be reckoned with. They were not
iconoclasts. They did not revile and beggar the feudal class. They
tempted them with pensions large enough to lure them into eventual
support of the regime. They finally ameliorated the peasants’ condition;
their ten-year tardiness appears to have been due rather to the pitiful
condition of the early Meiji treasury than to a class rejection of
peasants’ claims upon the regime.

The energetic and resourceful statesmen who ran the Meiji government
rejected, however, all ideas of ending hierarchy in Japan. The
Restoration had simplified the hierarchal order by placing the Emperor
at its apex and eliminating the Shogun. The post-Restoration statesmen,
by abolishing the fiefs, eliminated the conflict between loyalty to
one’s own seigneur and to the State. These changes did not unseat
hierarchal habits. They gave them a new locus. ‘Their Excellencies,’ the
new leaders of Japan, even strengthened centralized rule in order to
impose their own workmanlike programs upon the people. They alternated
demands from above with gifts from above and in this way they managed to
survive. But they did not imagine that they had to cater to a public
opinion which might not want to reform the calendar or to establish
public schools or to outlaw discrimination against the outcasts.

One of these gifts from above was the Constitution of Japan, which was
given by the Emperor to his people in 1889. It gave the people a place
in the State and established the Diet. It was drawn up with great care
by Their Excellencies after critical study of the varied constitutions
of the Western World. The writers of it however, took ‘every possible
precaution to guard against popular interference and the invasion of
public opinion.’[2] The very bureau which drafted it was a part of the
Imperial Household Department and was therefore sacrosanct.

Meiji statesmen were quite conscious about their objective. During the
eighteen-eighties Prince Ito, framer of the Constitution, sent the
Marquis Kido to consult Herbert Spencer in England on the problems lying
ahead of Japan and after lengthy conversations Spencer wrote Ito his
judgments. On the subject of hierarchy Spencer wrote that Japan had in
her traditional arrangements an incomparable basis for national
well-being which should be maintained and fostered. Traditional
obligations to superiors, he said, and beyond all to the Emperor, were
Japan’s great opportunity. Japan could move forward solidly under its
‘superiors’ and defend itself against the difficulties inevitable in
more individualistic nations. The great Meiji statesmen were well
satisfied with this confirmation of their own convictions. They meant to
retain in the modern world the advantages of observing ‘proper station.’
They did not intend to undermine the habit of hierarchy.

In every field of activity, whether political or religious or economic,
the Meiji statesmen allocated the duties of ‘proper station’ between the
State and the people. Their whole scheme was so alien to arrangements in
the United States or England that we usually fail to recognize its basic
points. There was, of course, strong rule from above which did not have
to follow the lead of public opinion. This government was administered
by a top hierarchy and this could never include elected persons. At this
level the people could have no voice. In 1940 the top government
hierarchy consisted of those who had ‘access’ to the Emperor, those who
constituted his immediate advisors, and those whose high appointments
bore the privy seal. These last included Cabinet Ministers, prefectural
governors, judges, chiefs of national bureaus and other like responsible
officers. No elected official had any such status in the hierarchy and
it would have been out of the question for elected members of the Diet,
for instance, to have any voice in selecting or approving a Cabinet
Minister or head of the Bureau of Finance or of Transportation. The
elected Lower House of the Diet was a voice of the people which had the
not inconsiderable privilege of interrogating and criticizing the Higher
Officials, but it had no real voice in appointments or in decisions or
in budgetary matters and it did not initiate legislation. The Lower
House was even checked by a non-elected Upper House, half of them
nobility and another quarter Imperial appointees. Since its power to
approve legislation was about equal to that of the Lower House, a
further hierarchal check was provided.

Japan therefore ensured that those who held high government posts remain
Their Excellencies,’ but this does not mean that there was not
self-government in its ‘proper place.’ In all Asiatic nations, under
whatever regime, authority from above always reaches down and meets in
some middle ground local self-government rising from below. The
differences between different countries all concern matters of how far
up democratic accountability reaches, how many or few its
responsibilities are and whether local leadership remains responsive to
the whole community or is pre-empted by local magnates to the
disadvantage of the people. Tokugawa Japan had, like China, tiny units
of five to ten families, called in recent times the _tonari gumi_, which
were the smallest responsible units of the population. The head of this
group of neighboring families assumed leadership in their own affairs,
was responsible for their good behavior, had to turn in reports of any
doubtful acts and surrender any wanted individual to the government.
Meiji statesmen at first abolished these, but they were later restored
and called the _tonari gumi_. In the towns and cities the government has
sometimes actively fostered them, but they seldom function today in
villages. The hamlet (_buraku_) units are more important. The buraku
were not abolished nor were they incorporated as units in the
government. They were an area in which the State did not function. These
hamlets of fifteen or so houses continue even today to function in an
organized fashion through their annually rotating headmen, who ‘look
after hamlet property, supervise hamlet aid given to families in the
event of a death or a fire, decide the proper days for co-operative work
in agriculture, housebuilding or road repair, and announce by ringing
the fire bell or beating two blocks together in a certain rhythm the
local holidays and rest days.’[3] These headmen are not responsible, as
in some Asiatic nations, also for collecting the State taxes in their
community and they do not therefore have to carry this onus. Their
position is quite unambivalent; they function in the area of democratic
responsibility.

Modern civil government in Japan officially recognizes local
administration of cities, towns and villages. Elected ‘elders’ choose a
responsible headman who serves as the representative of the community in
all dealings with the State, which is represented by the prefectural and
national governments. In the villages the headman is an old resident, a
member of a land-owning farm family. He serves at a financial loss but
the prestige is considerable. He and the elders are responsible for
village finances, public health, maintenance of the schools and
especially for property records and individual dossiers. The village
office is a busy place; it has charge of the spending of the State’s
appropriation for primary school education for all children and of the
raising and spending of its own much larger local share of school
expenses, management and rent of village-owned property, land
improvement and afforestation, and records of all property transactions,
which become legal only when they are properly entered at this office.
It must also keep an up-to-date record of residence, marital status,
birth of children, adoption, any encounter with the law and other facts
on each individual who still maintains official residence in the
community, besides a family record which shows similar data about one’s
family. Any such information is forwarded from any part of Japan to
one’s official home office and is entered on one’s dossier. Whenever one
applies for a position or is tried before a judge or in any way is asked
for identification, one writes one’s home community office or visits it
and obtains a copy to submit to the interested person. One does not face
lightly the possibility of having a bad entry inscribed on one’s own or
one’s family’s dossier.

The city, town, and village therefore has considerable responsibility.
It is a community responsibility. Even in the nineteen-twenties, when
Japan had national political parties, which in any country means an
alternation of tenure between ‘ins’ and ‘outs,’ local administration
generally remained untouched by this development and was directed by
elders acting for the whole community. In three respects, however, local
administrations do not have autonomy; all judges are nationally
appointed, all police and school teachers are employees of the State.
Since most civil cases in Japan are still settled by arbitration or
through go-betweens, the courts of law figure very little in local
administration. Police are more important. Police have to be on hand at
public meetings but these duties are intermittent and most of their time
is devoted to keeping the personal and property records. The State may
transfer policemen frequently from one post to another so that they may
remain outsiders without local ties. School teachers also are
transferred. The State regulates every detail of the schools, and, as in
France, every school in the country is studying on the same day the same
lesson from the same textbook. Every school goes through the same
calisthenics to the same radio broadcast at the same hour of the
morning. The community does not have local autonomy over schools or
police or courts of justice.

The Japanese government at all points thus greatly differs from the
American, where elected persons carry the highest executive and
legislative responsibility and local control is exercised through local
direction of police and police-courts. It does not, however, differ
formally from the governmental set-up of such thoroughly Occidental
nations as Holland and Belgium. In Holland, for instance, as in Japan,
the Queen’s Ministry drafts all proposed laws; the Diet has in practice
not initiated legislation. The Dutch Crown legally appoints even mayors
of towns and cities and thus its formal right reaches further down into
local areas of concern than it did in Japan before 1940; this is true
even though in practice the Dutch Crown usually approves a local
nomination. The direct responsibility to the Crown of the police and of
the courts is also Dutch. Though, in Holland, schools may be set up at
will by any sectarian group, the Japanese school system is duplicated in
France. Local responsibility for canals, polders and local improvements,
also, is a duty of the community as a whole in Holland, not of a mayor
and officials politically elected.

The true difference between the Japanese form of government and such
cases in Western Europe lies not in form but in functioning. The
Japanese rely on old habits of deference set up in their past experience
and formalized in their ethical system and in their etiquette. The State
can depend upon it that, when their Excellencies function in their
‘proper place,’ their prerogatives will be respected, not because the
policy is approved but because it is wrong in Japan to override
boundaries between prerogatives. At the topmost level of policy ‘popular
opinion’ is out of place. The government asks only ‘popular support.’
When the State stakes out its own official field in the area of local
concern, also, its jurisdiction is accepted with deference. The State,
in all its domestic functions, is not a necessary evil as it is so
generally felt to be in the United States. The State comes nearer, in
Japanese eyes, to being the supreme good.

The State, moreover, is meticulous in recognizing ‘proper place’ for the
will of the people. In areas of legitimate popular jurisdiction it is
not too much to say that the Japanese State has had to woo the people
even for their own good. The State agricultural extension agent can act
with about as little authoritarianism in improving old methods of
agriculture as his counterpart can in Idaho. The State official
advocating State-guaranteed farmers’ credit associations or farmers’
co-operatives for buying and selling must hold long-drawn-out
round-tables with the local notables and then abide by their decision.
Local affairs require local management. The Japanese way of life
allocates proper authority and defines its proper sphere. It gives much
greater deference—and therefore freedom of action—to ‘superiors’ than
Western cultures do, but they too must keep their station. Japan’s motto
is: Everything in its place.

In the field of religion the Meiji statesmen made much more bizarre
formal arrangements than in government. They were however carrying out
the same Japanese motto. The State took as its realm a worship that
specifically upholds the symbols of national unity and superiority, and
in all the rest it left freedom of worship to the individual. This area
of national jurisdiction was State Shinto. Since it was concerned with
proper respect to national symbols, as saluting the flag is in the
United States, State Shinto was, they said, ‘no religion.’ Japan
therefore could require it of all citizens without violating the
Occidental dogma of religious freedom any more than the United States
violates it in requiring a salute to the Stars and Stripes. It was a
mere sign of allegiance. Because it was ‘not religion,’ Japan could
teach it in the schools without risk of Occidental criticism. State
Shinto in the schools becomes the history of Japan from the age of the
gods and the veneration of the Emperor, ‘ruler from ages eternal.’ It
was State-supported, State-regulated. All other areas of religion, even
denominational or cult Shinto, to say nothing of Buddhist and Christian
sects, were left to individual initiative much as in the United States.
The two areas were even administratively and financially separated;
State Shinto was in the charge of its own bureau in the Home Office and
its priests and ceremonies and shrines were supported by the State. Cult
Shinto and Buddhist and Christian sects were the concern of a Bureau of
Religion in the Department of Education and were supported by voluntary
contributions of members.

Because of Japan’s official position on the subject one cannot speak of
State Shinto as a vast Established Church, but one can at least call it
a vast Establishment. There were over 110,000 shrines ranging all the
way from the great Ise Shrine, temple of the Sun Goddess, to small local
shrines which the officiating priest cleans up for the occasion of a
special ceremony. The national hierarchy of priests paralleled the
political and the lines of authority ran from the lowest priest through
the district and prefectural priests to their priestly Excellencies at
the top. They performed ceremonies for the people rather than conducting
worship by the people, and there was in State Shinto nothing paralleling
our familiar church-going. Priests of State Shinto—since it was no
religion—were forbidden by law to teach any dogma and there could be no
church services as Westerners understand them. Instead, on the frequent
days of rites official representatives of the community came and stood
before the priest while he purified them by waving before them a wand
with hemp and paper streamers. He opened the door of the inner shrine
and called down the gods, with a high-pitched cry, to come to partake of
a ceremonial meal. The priest prayed and each participant in order of
rank presented with deep obeisance that omnipresent object in old and
new Japan: a twig of their sacred tree with pendant strips of white
paper. The priest then sent back the gods with another cry and closed
the doors of the inner shrine. On the festival days of State Shinto the
Emperor in his turn observed rites for the people and government offices
were closed. But these holidays were not great popular fête-days like
the ceremonies in honor of local shrines or even Buddhist holidays. Both
of these are in the ‘free’ area outside of State Shinto.

In this area the Japanese people carry on the great sects and fête-days
which are close to their hearts. Buddhism remains the religion of the
great mass of the people and the various sects with their different
teachings and founding prophets are vigorous and omnipresent. Even
Shinto has its great cults which stand outside of State Shinto. Some
were strongholds of pure nationalism even before the government in the
nineteen-thirties took up the same position, some are faith-healing
sects often compared to Christian Science, some hold by Confucian
tenets, some have specialized in trance states and pilgrimages to sacred
mountain shrines. Most of the popular fête-days, too, have been left
outside of State Shinto. The people on such days throng to the shrines.
Each person purifies himself by rinsing out his mouth and he summons the
god to descend by pulling a bell rope or clapping his hands. He bows in
veneration, sends back the god by another pull of the bell cord or
clapping of hands, and goes off for the main business of the day which
is buying knickknacks and tidbits from the vendors who have set up their
stalls, watching wrestling matches or exorcism or _kagura_ dances, which
are liberally enlivened by clowns, and generally enjoying the great
throng. An Englishman who had lived in Japan quoted William Blake’s
verse which he always remembered on Japanese fête-days:

           If at the church they would give us some ale,
           And a pleasant fire our souls to regale,
           We’d sing and we’d pray all the livelong day,
           Nor ever once wish from the church to stray.

Except for those few who have professionally dedicated themselves to
religious austerities, religion is not austere in Japan. The Japanese
are also addicted to religious pilgrimages and these too are greatly
enjoyed holidays.

Meiji statesmen, therefore, carefully marked out the area of State
functioning in government and of State Shinto in the field of religion.
They left other areas to the people but they ensured to themselves as
top officials of the new hierarchy dominance in matters which in their
eyes directly concerned the State. In setting up the Armed Forces they
had a similar problem. They rejected, as in other fields, the old caste
system but in the Army they went farther than in civilian life. They
outlawed in the Armed Services even the respect language of Japan,
though in actual practice old usage of course persists. The Army also
promoted to officer’s rank on the basis of merit, not of family, to a
degree which could hardly be put into effect in other fields. Its
reputation among Japanese in this respect is high and apparently
deservedly so. It was certainly the best means available by which to
enlist popular support for the new Army. Companies and platoons, too,
were formed from neighbors of the same region and peacetime military
service was spent at posts close to one’s home. This meant not only that
local ties were conserved but that every man who went through Army
training spent two years during which the relationship between officers
and men, between second-year men and first-year men, superseded that
between samurai and farmers or between rich and poor. The Army
functioned in many ways as a democratic leveler and it was in many ways
a true people’s army. Whereas the Army in most other nations is depended
upon as the strong arm to defend the status quo, in Japan the Army’s
sympathy with the small peasant has lined it up in repeated protests
against the great financiers and industrialists.

Japanese statesmen may not have approved of all the consequences of
building up a people’s army but it was not at this level where they saw
fit to ensure Army supremacy in the hierarchy. That objective they made
sure of by arrangements in the very highest spheres. They did not write
these arrangements into the Constitution but continued as customary
procedure the already recognized independence of the High Command from
the civil government. The Ministers of the Army and the Navy, in
contrast for instance to the head of the Foreign Office and domestic
bureaus, had direct access to the Emperor himself and could therefore
use his name in forcing through their measures. They did not need to
inform or consult their civilian colleagues of the Cabinet. In addition
the Armed Services held a whip hand over any Cabinet. They could prevent
the formation of a Cabinet they distrusted by the simple expedient of
refusing to release generals and admirals to hold military portfolios in
the Cabinet. Without such high officers of the active service to fill
the positions of Army and Navy Ministers there could be no cabinet; no
civilians or retired officers could hold these posts. Similarly, if the
Armed Services were displeased at any act of the Ministry, they could
cause its dissolution by recalling their Cabinet representatives. On
this highest policy level the top military hierarchy made sure that it
need brook no interference. If it needed any further guarantees it had
one in the Constitution: ‘If the Diet fails to approve the budget
submitted, the budget of the previous year is automatically available to
the Government for the current year.’ The exploit of the Army in
occupying Manchuria when the Foreign Office had promised that the Army
would not take this step was only one of the instances when the Army
hierarchy successfully supported its commanders in the field in the
absence of agreed Cabinet policy. As in other fields, so with the Army:
where hierarchal privileges are concerned the Japanese tend to accept
all the consequences, not because of agreement about the policy but
because they do not countenance overriding boundaries between
prerogatives.

In the field of industrial development Japan pursued a course which is
unparalleled in any Western nation. Again their Excellencies arranged
the game and set the rules. They not only planned, they built and
financed on government money the industries they decided they needed. A
State bureaucracy organized and ran them. Foreign technicians were
imported and Japanese were sent to learn abroad. Then when, as they
said, these industries were ‘well organized and business was
prosperous,’ the government disposed of them to private firms. They were
sold gradually at ‘ridiculously low prices’[4] to a chosen financial
oligarchy, the famous Zaibatsu, chiefly the Mitsui and Mitsubishi
families. Her statesmen judged that industrial development was too
important to Japan to be entrusted to laws of supply and demand or to
free enterprise. But this policy was in no way due to socialistic dogma;
it was precisely the Zaibatsu who reaped the advantages. What Japan
accomplished was that with the minimum of fumbling and wastage the
industries she deemed necessary were established.

Japan was by these means able to revise ‘the normal order of the
starting point and succeeding stages of capitalist production.’[5]
Instead of beginning with the production of consumer goods and light
industry, she first undertook key heavy industries. Arsenals, shipyards,
iron works, construction of railroads had priority and were rapidly
brought to a high stage of technical efficiency. Not all of these were
released to private hands and vast military industries remained under
government bureaucracy and were financed by special government accounts.

In this whole field of the industries to which the government gave
priority, the small trader or the non-bureaucratic manager had no
‘proper place.’ Only the State and the great trusted and politically
favored financial houses operated in this area. But as in other fields
of Japanese life there was a free area in industry too. These were the
‘left-over’ industries which operated with minimum capitalization and
maximum utilization of cheap labor. These light industries could exist
without modern technology and they do. They function through what we
used to call in the United States home sweat-shops. A small-time
manufacturer buys the raw material, lets it out to a family or a small
shop with four or five workers, takes it back again, repeats by letting
it out again for another step in processing and at last sells the
product to the merchant or exporter. In the nineteen-thirties no less
than 53 per cent of all persons industrially employed in Japan were
working in this way in shops and homes having less than five workers.[6]
Many of these workers are protected by old paternalistic customs of
apprenticeship and many are mothers who in Japan’s great cities sit in
their own homes over their piecework with their babies strapped on their
backs.

This duality of Japanese industry is quite as important in Japanese ways
of life as duality in the field of government or religion. It is as if,
when Japanese statesmen decided that they needed an aristocracy of
finance to match their hierarchies in other fields, they built up for
them the strategic industries, selected the politically favored merchant
houses and affiliated them in their ‘proper stations’ with the other
hierarchies. It was no part of their plan for government to cut loose
from these great financial houses and the Zaibatsu profited by a kind of
continued paternalism which gave them not only profit but high place. It
was inevitable, granted old Japanese attitudes toward profit and money,
that a financial aristocracy should fall under attack from the people,
but the government did what it could to build it up according to
accepted ideas of hierarchy. It did not entirely succeed, for the
Zaibatsu has been under attack from the so-called Young Officers’ groups
of the Army and from rural areas. But it still remains true that the
greatest bitterness of Japanese public opinion is turned not against the
Zaibatsu but against the _narikin_. Narikin is often translated ‘nouveau
riche’ but that does not do justice to the Japanese feeling. In the
United States nouveau riche are strictly ‘newcomers’; they are laughable
because they are gauche and have not had time to acquire the proper
polish. This liability, however, is balanced by the heartwarming asset
that they have come up from the log cabin, they have risen from driving
a mule to controlling oil millions. But in Japan a narikin is a term
taken from Japanese chess and means a pawn promoted to queen. It is a
pawn rampaging about the board as a ‘big shot.’ It has no hierarchal
right to do any such thing. The narikin is believed to have obtained his
wealth by defrauding or exploiting others and the bitterness directed
toward him is as far as possible from the attitude in the United States
toward the ‘home boy who makes good.’ Japan provided a place in her
hierarchy for great wealth and kept an alliance with it; when wealth is
achieved in the field outside, Japanese public opinion is bitter against
it.

The Japanese, therefore, order their world with constant reference to
hierarchy. In the family and in personal relations, age, generation,
sex, and class dictate proper behavior. In government, religion, the
Army, and industry, areas are carefully separated into hierarchies where
neither the higher nor the lower may without penalty overstep their
prerogatives. As long as ‘proper station’ is maintained the Japanese
carry on without protest. They feel safe. They are of course often not
‘safe’ in the sense that their best good is protected but they are
‘safe’ because they have accepted hierarchy as legitimate. It is as
characteristic of their judgment on life as trust in equality and free
enterprise is of the American way of life.

Japan’s nemesis came when she tried to export her formula for ‘safety.’
In her own country hierarchy fitted popular imagination because it had
moulded it. Ambitions could only be such as could take shape in that
kind of a world. But it was a fatal commodity for export. Other nations
resented Japan’s grandiloquent claims as an impertinence and worse.
Japan’s officers and troops, however, in each occupied country continued
to be shocked that the inhabitants did not welcome them. Was Japan not
offering them a place, however lowly, in a hierarchy and was not
hierarchy desirable even for those on the lower steps of it? Their War
Services continued to get out series of war films which figured China’s
‘love’ for Japan under the image of desperate and disordered Chinese
girls who found happiness by falling in love with a Japanese soldier or
a Japanese engineer. It was a far cry from the Nazi version of conquest
yet it was no more successful in the long run. They could not exact from
other nations what they had exacted of themselves. It was their mistake
that they thought they could. They did not recognize that the system of
Japanese morality which had fitted them to ‘accept their proper station’
was something they could not count on elsewhere. Other nations did not
have it. It is a genuine product of Japan. Her writers take this system
of ethics so much for granted that they do not describe it and a
description of it is necessary before one can understand the Japanese.

-----

[1] Norman, p. 96.

[2] Quoted from a Japanese authority who bases his remarks on statements
by Baron Kaneko who was one of the drafters. See Norman, _ibid._, p. 93.

[3] Embree, John F., _The Japanese Nation_, p. 88.

[4] Norman, _op. cit._, p. 131. This discussion is based on the
illuminating analysis given by Norman.

[5] _Ibid._, p. 125.

[6] Professor Uyeda, quoted by Miriam S. Farley, _Pigmy Factories_. Far
Eastern Survey, VI (1937), p. 2.


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