はじめによんでください

06：万分の一の恩返し

池田光穂

6


                      Repaying One-Ten-Thousandth

_On_ Is A Debt and must be repaid, but in Japan all repayments are
regarded as falling into another category entirely. The Japanese find
our morals, which confuse these two categories in our ethics and in our
neutral words like obligation and duty, as strange as we would find
financial dealings in some tribe whose language did not separate
‘debtor’ from ‘creditor’ in money transactions. To them the primary and
ever-present indebtedness called _on_ is worlds apart from the active,
bowstring-taut repayment which is named in a whole series of other
concepts. A man’s indebtedness (_on_) is not virtue; his repayment is.
Virtue begins when he dedicates himself actively to the job of
gratitude.

It will help Americans to understand this matter of virtue in Japan if
we keep in mind the parallel with financial transactions and think of it
as having behind it the sanctions against defaulting which property
transactions have in America. Here we hold a man to his bond. We do not
count extenuating circumstances when a man takes what is not his. We do
not allow it to be a matter of impulse whether or not a man pays a debt
to a bank. And the debtor is just as responsible for the accrued
interest as he is for the original money he borrowed. Patriotism and
love of our families we regard as quite different from all this. Love,
with us, is a matter of the heart and is best when freely given.
Patriotism, in the sense of putting our country’s interests above
everything else, is regarded as rather quixotic or certainly as not
compatible with fallible human nature until the United States is
attacked by the armed forces of an enemy. Lacking the basic Japanese
postulate of great indebtedness automatically incurred by every man and
woman born, we think that a man should pity and help his needy parents,
should not beat his wife, and should provide for his children. But these
things are not quantitatively reckoned like a debt of money and they are
not rewarded as success in business is. In Japan they are regarded quite
as financial solvency is in America and the sanctions behind them are as
strong as they are in the United States behind being able to pay one’s
bills and the interest on one’s mortgage. They are not matters that must
be attended to only at crises such as a proclamation of war or the
serious illness of a parent; they are one’s constant shadow like a small
New York farmer’s worry about his mortgage or a Wall Street financier’s
as he watches the market climb when he has sold short.

                            SCHEMATIC TABLE OF
                JAPANESE OBLIGATIONS AND THEIR RECIPROCALS

I. _On_: obligations passively incurred. One ‘receives an _on_’; one
  ‘wears an _on_,’ i.e., _on_ are obligations from the point of view of
  the passive recipient.
     _ko on._ _On_ received from the Emperor.
     _oya on._ _On_ received from parents.
     _nushi no on._ _On_ received from one’s lord.
     _shi no on._ _On_ received from one’s teacher.
     _on_ received in all contacts in the course of one’s life.
            Note: All these persons from whom one receives _on_ become
  one’s _on-jin_, ‘_on_ man.’
II. Reciprocals of _on_. One ‘pays’ these debts, one ‘returns these
  obligations’ to the _on_ man, i.e., these are obligations regarded from
  the point of view of active repayment.
     A. _Gimu._  The fullest repayment of these obligations is still no
       more than partial and there is no time limit.
                _chu._ Duty to the Emperor, the law, Japan.
                _ko._ Duty to parents and ancestors (by implication, to
                  descendants).
                _nimmu._ Duty to one’s work.
     B. _Giri._  These debts are regarded as having to be repaid with
       mathematical equivalence to the favor received and there are time
       limits.
                1. _Giri_-to-the-world.
                     Duties to liege lord.
                     Duties to affinal family.
                     Duties to non-related persons due to _on_ received,
                       e.g., on a gift of money, on a favor, on work
                       contributed (as a ‘work party’).
                     Duties to persons not sufficiently closely related
                       (aunts, uncles, nephews, nieces) due to _on_
                       received not from them but from common ancestors.
                2. _Giri_-to-one’s-name. This is a Japanese version of
                  _die Ehre_.
                     One’s duty to ‘clear’ one’s reputation of insult or
                       imputation of failure, i.e., the duty of feuding or
                       vendetta. (N.B. This evening of scores is not
                       reckoned as aggression.)
                     One’s duty to admit no (professional) failure or
                       ignorance.
                     One’s duty to fulfill the Japanese proprieties, e.g.,
                       observing all respect behavior, not living above
                       one’s station in life, curbing all displays of
                       emotion on inappropriate occasions, etc.

The Japanese divide into distinct categories, each with its different
rules, those repayments on _on_ which are limitless both in amount and
in duration and those which are quantitatively equivalent and come due
on special occasions. The limitless repayments on indebtedness are
called _gimu_ and they say of it: ‘One never repays one ten-thousandth
of (this) _on_.’ One’s gimu groups together two different types of
obligations: repayment of one’s _on_ to parents, which is _ko_, and
repayment of one’s _on_ to the Emperor, which is _chu_. Both these
obligations of gimu are compulsory and are man’s universal lot; indeed
Japan’s elementary schooling is called ‘gimu education’ because no other
word so adequately renders the meaning of ‘required.’ The accidents of
life may modify the details of one’s gimu, but gimu is automatically
incumbent upon all men and is above all fortuitous circumstances.

Both forms of gimu are unconditional. In thus making these virtues
absolute Japan has departed from the Chinese concepts of duty to the
State and of filial piety. The Chinese ethical system has been
repeatedly adopted in Japan ever since the seventh century and chu and
ko are Chinese words. But the Chinese did not make these virtues
unconditional. China postulates an overriding virtue which is a
condition of loyalty and piety. It is usually translated ‘benevolence’
(_jen_) but it means almost everything Occidentals mean by good
interpersonal relations. A parent must have _jen_. If a ruler does not
have it it is righteous for his people to rebel against him. It is a
condition upon which one’s gift of loyalty is predicated. The Emperor’s
tenure and that of his officials depended on their doing jen. Chinese
ethics applies this touchstone in all human relations.

This Chinese ethical postulate was never accepted in Japan. The great
Japanese student, Kanichi Asakawa, speaking of this contrast in medieval
times, says: ‘In Japan these ideas were obviously incompatible with her
imperial sovereignty and were therefore never accepted in entirety even
as theories.’[1] In fact jen became in Japan an outlaw virtue and was
entirely demoted from the high estate it had in Chinese ethics. In Japan
it is pronounced _jin_ (it is written with the same character the
Chinese use) and ‘doing jin’ or its variant ‘doing jingi’ is very far
indeed from being a virtue required even in the highest quarters. It has
been so thoroughly banished from their ethical system that it means
something done outside the law. It may indeed be a praiseworthy act like
putting one’s name on a subscription list for public charity or granting
mercy to a criminal. But it is emphatically a work of supererogation. It
means that the act was not required of you.

‘Doing jingi’ is used in another sense of ‘outside the law,’ too; it is
used of virtue among gangsters. The honor among thieves of the raiding
and slashing swashbucklers of the Tokugawa period—they were one-sword
men as contrasted with the two-sworded swashbuckling samurai—was ‘doing
jingi’; when one of these outlaws asked shelter of another who was a
stranger, that stranger, as an insurance against future vengeance from
the petitioner’s gang, would grant it and thereby ‘do jingi.’ In modern
usage ‘doing jingi’ has fallen even lower. It occurs frequently in
discussions of punishable acts: ‘Common laborers,’ their newspapers say,
’still do jingi and they must be punished. Police should see to it that
jingi is stopped in the holes and corners where it flourishes in Japan.’
They mean of course the ‘honor among thieves’ which flourishes in
racketeering and gangsterdom. Especially the small labor contractor in
modern Japan is said to ‘do jingi’ when, like the Italian labor padrone
at American ports at the turn of the century, he enters into
outside-the-law relationships with unskilled laborers and gets rich off
farming them out at a profit. The degradation of the Chinese concept of
_jen_ could hardly go farther.[2] The Japanese, having entirely
reinterpreted and demoted the crucial virtue of the Chinese system and
put nothing else in its place that might make gimu conditional; filial
piety became in Japan a duty one had to fulfill even if it meant
condoning a parent’s vice and injustice. It could be abrogated only if
it came into conflict with one’s obligation to the Emperor, but
certainly not when one’s parent was unworthy or when he was destroying
one’s happiness.

In one of their modern movies a mother comes upon some money her married
son, a village schoolmaster, has collected from the villagers to redeem
a young schoolgirl about to be sold by her parents to a house of
prostitution because they are starving in a rural famine. The
schoolmaster’s mother steals the money from her son although she is not
poor; she runs a respectable restaurant of her own. Her son knows that
she has taken it but he has to shoulder the blame himself. His wife
discovers the truth, leaves a suicide note taking all responsibility for
the loss of the money, and drowns herself and their baby. Publicity
follows but the mother’s part in the tragedy is not even called in
question. The son has fulfilled the law of filial piety and goes off
alone to Hokkaido to build his character so that he can strengthen
himself for like tests in coming years. He is a virtuous hero. My
Japanese companion vigorously protested my obvious American verdict that
the person responsible for the whole tragedy was the thieving mother.
Filial piety, he said, was often in conflict with other virtues. If the
hero had been wise enough, he might have found a way to reconcile them
without loss of self-respect. But it would have been no possible
occasion for self-respect if he blamed his mother even to himself.

Both novels and real life are full of the heavy duties of filial piety
after a young man is married. Except in ‘modan’ (modern) circles it is
taken for granted in respectable families that the parents select their
son’s wife, usually through the good offices of go-betweens. The family,
not the son, is chiefly concerned about the matter of a good selection,
not only because of the money transactions involved but because the wife
will be entered in the family genealogy and will perpetuate the family
line through her sons. It is the custom for the go-betweens to arrange a
seemingly casual meeting between the two young principals in the
presence of their parents but they do not converse. Sometimes the
parents choose to make for their son a marriage of convenience in which
case the girl’s father will profit financially and the boy’s parents by
alliance with a good family. Sometimes they choose to select the girl
for her personally acceptable qualities. The good son’s repayment of
parental _on_ does not allow him to question his parents’ decision.
After he is married his repayment continues. Especially if the son is
the family heir he will live with his parents and it is proverbial that
the mother-in-law does not like her daughter-in-law. She finds all
manner of fault with her, and she may send her away and break up the
marriage even when the young husband is happy with his wife and asks
nothing better than to live with her. Japanese novels and personal
histories are just as apt to stress the suffering of the husband as of
the wife. The husband of course is doing _ko_ in submitting to the
break-up of his marriage.

One ‘modan’ Japanese now in America took into her own rooms in Tokyo a
pregnant young wife whose mother-in-law had forced her to leave her
grieving young husband. She was sick and brokenhearted but she did not
blame her husband. Gradually she became interested in the baby she was
soon to bear. But when the child was born, the mother came accompanied
by her silent and submissive son to claim the baby. It belonged of
course to the husband’s family and the mother-in-law took it away. She
disposed of it immediately to a foster home.

All this is on occasion included in filial piety, and is proper
repayment of indebtedness to parents. In the United States all such
stories are taken as instances of outside interference with an
individual’s rightful happiness. Japan cannot consider this interference
as ‘outside’ because of her postulate of indebtedness. Such stories in
Japan, like our stories of honest men who pay off their creditors by
incredible personal hardships, are tales of the truly virtuous, of
persons who have earned their right to respect themselves, who have
proved themselves strong enough to accept proper personal frustrations.
Such frustrations, however virtuous, may naturally leave a residue of
resentment and it is well worth noting that the Asiatic proverb about
the Hateful Things, which in Burma, for instance, lists ‘fire, water,
thieves, governors and malicious men,’ in Japan itemizes ‘earthquake,
thunder and the Old Man (head of the house; the father).’

Filial piety does not, as in China, encompass the line of ancestors for
centuries back nor the vast proliferating living clan descended from
them. Japan’s veneration is of recent ancestors. A gravestone must be
relettered annually to keep its identity and when living persons no
longer remember an ancestor his grave is neglected. Nor are tablets for
them kept in the family shrine. The Japanese do not value piety except
to those remembered in the flesh and they concentrate on the here and
now. Many writers have commented on their lack of interest in
disembodied speculation or in forming images of objects not present, and
their version of filial piety serves as another instance of this when it
is contrasted with China’s. The greatest practical importance of their
version, however, is in the way it limits the obligations of ko among
living persons.

For filial piety, both in China and Japan, is far more than deference
and obedience to one’s own parents and forebears. All that care of the
child which Westerners phrase as being contingent on maternal instinct
and on paternal responsibility, they phrase as contingent on piety to
one’s ancestors. Japan is very explicit about it: one repays one’s debts
to one’s forebears by passing on to one’s children the care one oneself
received. There is no word to express ‘obligation of the father to his
children’ and all such duties are covered by ko to the parents and their
parents. Filial piety enjoins all the numerous responsibilities which
rest upon the head of a family to provide for his children, educate his
sons and younger brothers, see to the management of the estate, give
shelter to relatives who need it and a thousand similar everyday duties.
The drastic limitation of the institutionalized family in Japan sharply
limits the number of persons toward whom any man has this gimu. If a son
dies it is an obligation of filial piety to bear the burden of
supporting his widow and her children. So also is the occasional
providing of shelter to a widowed daughter and her family. But it is not
a gimu to take in a widowed niece; if one does so, one is fulfilling a
quite different obligation. It is gimu to rear and educate your own
children. But if one educates a nephew, it is customary to adopt him
legally as one’s own son; it is not a gimu if he retains the status of
nephew.

Filial piety does not require that assistance even to one’s immediate
needy relatives in the descending generations be given with deference
and loving-kindness. Young widows in the family are called ‘cold-rice
relatives,’ meaning that they eat rice when it is cold, are at the beck
and call of every member of the inner family, and must accept with deep
obedience any decisions about their affairs. They are poor relations,
along with their children, and when in particular cases they fare better
than this it is not because the head of the family owes them this better
treatment as a gimu. Nor is it a gimu incumbent upon brothers to carry
out their mutual obligations with warmth; men are often praised for
having fully lived up to obligations to a younger brother when it is
freely admitted that the two hate each other like poison.

Greatest antagonism is between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law. The
daughter-in-law comes into the household as a stranger. It is her duty
to learn how her mother-in-law likes to have things done and then to
learn to do them. In many cases the mother-in-law quite explicitly takes
the position that the young wife is not nearly good enough for her son
and in other cases it can be inferred that she has considerable
jealousy. But, as the Japanese saying goes, ‘The hated daughter-in-law
keeps on bearing beloved grandsons’ and ko is therefore always present.
The young daughter-in-law is on the surface endlessly submissive but
generation after generation these mild and charming creatures grow up
into mothers-in-law as exacting and as critical as their own
mothers-in-law were before them. They cannot express their aggressions
as young wives but they do not therefore become genuinely mild human
beings. In later life they turn, as it were, an accumulated weight of
resentment against their own daughters-in-law. Japanese girls today
openly talk about the great advantage of marrying a son who is not an
heir so that they will not have to live with a dominating mother-in-law.

To ‘work for ko’ is not necessarily to achieve loving-kindness in the
family. In some cultures this is the crux of the moral law in the
extended family. But not in Japan. As one Japanese writer says, ‘Just
because he esteems the family highly, the Japanese has anything but a
high estimation of the individual members or of the family tie between
them.’[3] That is not always true, of course, but it gives the picture.
The emphasis is upon obligations and repaying the debt and the elders
take great responsibility upon themselves, but one of these
responsibilities is to see to it that those below them make the
requisite sacrifices. If they resent these, it makes little difference.
They must obey their elders’ decisions or they have failed in gimu.

The marked resentments between members of the family which are so
typical of filial piety in Japan are absent in the other great
obligation which like filial piety is a gimu: fealty to the Emperor.
Japanese statesmen planned well in secluding their Emperor as a Sacred
Chief and in removing him from the hurlyburly of life; only so in Japan
could he serve to unify all people in unambivalent service to the State.
It was not enough to make him a father to his people, for the father in
the household, despite all the obligations rendered him, was a figure of
whom one might have ‘anything but a high estimation.’ The Emperor had to
be a Sacred Father removed from all secular considerations. A man’s
fealty to him, chu, the supreme virtue, must become an ecstatic
contemplation of a fantasied Good Father untainted by contacts with the
world. Early Meiji statesmen wrote after they had visited the nations of
the Occident that in all these countries history was made by the
conflict between ruler and people and that this was unworthy of the
Spirit of Japan. They returned and wrote into the Constitution that the
Ruler was to ‘be sacred and inviolable’ and not reckoned responsible for
any acts of his Ministers. He was to serve as supreme symbol of Japanese
unity, not as responsible head of a State. Since the Emperor had not
served as an executive ruler for some seven centuries it was simple to
perpetuate his back-stage rôle. Meiji statesmen needed only to attach to
him, in the minds of all Japanese, that unconditional highest virtue,
chu. In feudal Japan chu had been obligation to the Secular Chief, the
Shogun, and its long history warned Meiji statesmen what it was
necessary to do in the new dispensation to accomplish their objective,
the spiritual unification of Japan. In those centuries the Shogun had
been Generalissimo and chief administrator and in spite of the chu that
was due him plots against his supremacy and against his life were
frequent. Fealty to him often came into conflict with obligations to
one’s own feudal overlord, and the higher loyalty frequently was less
compelling than the lower. Fealty to one’s own overlord was, after all,
based on face-to-face ties and fealty to the Shogun might well seem cold
in comparison. Retainers too fought in troubled times to unseat the
Shogun and to establish their own feudal lord in his place. The prophets
and leaders of the Meiji Restoration had for a century fought against
the Tokugawa Shogunate with the slogan that chu was due to the Emperor
secluded in the shadowy background, a figure whose lineaments every
person could draw for himself according to his own desires. The Meiji
Restoration was the victory for this party and it was precisely this
shifting of chu from Shogun to symbolic Emperor which justified the use
of the term ’restoration’ for the year 1868. The Emperor remained
secluded. He invested Their Excellencies with authority but he did not
himself run the government or the army or personally dictate policies.
The same sort of advisors, though they were better chosen, went on
running the government. The real upheaval was in the spiritual realm,
for chu became every man’s repayment to the Sacred Chief—high priest
and symbol of the unity and perpetuity of Japan.

The ease with which chu was transferred to the Emperor was aided of
course by the traditional folklore that the Imperial House was descended
from the Sun Goddess. But this folkloristic claim to divinity was not so
crucial as Westerners thought it was. Certainly Japanese intellectuals
who entirely rejected these claims did not therefore question chu to the
Emperor, and even the mass of the populace who accepted divine birth did
not mean by that what Westerners would mean. _Kami_, the word rendered
as ‘god,’ means literally ‘head,’ i.e., pinnacle of the hierarchy. The
Japanese do not fix a great gulf between human and divine as Occidentals
do, and any Japanese becomes kami after death. Chu in the feudal eras
had been due to heads of the hierarchy who had no divine qualifications.
Far more important in transferring chu to the Emperor was the unbroken
dynasty of a single imperial house during the whole history of Japan. It
is idle for Westerners to complain that this continuity was a hoax
because the rules of succession did not conform to those of the royal
families of England or of Germany. The rules were Japan’s rules and
according to her rules the succession had been unbroken ‘from ages
eternal.’ Japan was no China with thirty-six different dynasties in
recorded history. She was a country which, in all the changes she had
embraced, had never torn her social fabric in shreds; the pattern had
been permanent. It was this argument, and not divine ancestry, which the
anti-Tokugawa forces exploited during the hundred years before the
Restoration. They said that chu, which was due him who stood at the apex
of the hierarchy, was due the Emperor alone. They built him up as high
priest of the nation and that rôle does not necessarily mean divinity.
It was more crucial than descent from a goddess.

Every effort has been made in modern Japan to personalize chu and to
direct it specifically to the figure of the Emperor himself. The first
Emperor after the Restoration was an individual of consequence and
dignity and during his long reign he easily became a personal symbol to
his subjects. His infrequent public appearances were staged with all the
appurtenances of worship. No murmur rose from the assembled multitudes
as they bowed before him. They did not raise their eyes to gaze upon
him. Windows were shuttered everywhere above the first story for no man
might look down from a height upon the Emperor. His contacts with his
high counselors were similarly hierarchal. It was not said that he
summoned his administrators; a few specially privileged Excellencies
‘had access’ to him. Rescripts were not issued on controversial
political issues; they were on ethics or thrift or they were designed as
landmarks to indicate an issue closed and hence to reassure his people.
When he was on his deathbed all Japan became a temple where devotees
devoted themselves to intercession in his behalf.

The Emperor was in all these ways made into a symbol which was placed
beyond all reach of domestic controversy. Just as loyalty to the Stars
and Stripes is above and beyond all party politics so the Emperor was
‘inviolable.’ We surround our handling of the flag with a degree of
ritual which we regard as completely inappropriate for any human being.
The Japanese, however, capitalized to the hilt on the humanness of their
supreme symbol. They could love and he could respond. They were moved to
ecstasy that he ‘turned his thoughts to them.’ They dedicated their
lives to ‘ease his heart.’ In a culture based as fully as Japan’s has
been on personal ties, the Emperor was a symbol of loyalty far
surpassing a flag. Teachers in training were flunked if they phrased
man’s highest duty as love of country; it had to be phrased as repayment
to the Emperor in person.

Chu provides a double system of subject-Emperor relationship. The
subject faces upward directly to the Emperor without intermediaries; he
personally ‘eases his heart’ by his actions. The subject receiving the
commands of the Emperor, however, hears these orders relayed through all
the intermediaries that stand between them. ‘He speaks for the Emperor’
is a phrase that invokes chu and is probably a more powerful sanction
than any other modern State can invoke. Lory describes an incident of
peacetime Army maneuvers when an officer took a regiment out with orders
not to drink from their canteens without his permission. Japanese Army
training placed great emphasis on ability to march fifty and sixty miles
without intermission under difficult conditions. On this day twenty men
fell by the way from thirst and exhaustion. Five died. When their
canteens were examined they were found to be untouched. ‘The officer had
given the command. He spoke for the Emperor.’[4]

In civil administration chu sanctions everything from death to taxes.
The tax collector, the policeman, the local conscription officials are
instrumentalities through which a subject renders chu. The Japanese
point of view is that obeying the law is repayment upon their highest
indebtedness, their ko-on. The contrast with folkways in the United
States could hardly be more marked. To Americans any new laws, from
street stop-lights to income taxes, are resented all over the country as
interferences with individual liberty in one’s own affairs. Federal
regulations are doubly suspect for they interfere also with the freedom
of the individual state to make its own laws. It is felt that they are
put over on the people by Washington bureaucrats and many citizens
regard the loudest outcry against these laws as less than what is
rightly due to their self-respect. The Japanese judge therefore that we
are a lawless people. We judge that they are a submissive people with no
ideas of democracy. It would be truer to say that the citizen’s
self-respect, in the two countries, is tied up with different attitudes;
in our country it depends on his management of his own affairs and in
Japan it depends on repaying what he owes to accredited benefactors.
Both arrangements have their own difficulties: ours is that it is
difficult to get regulations accepted even when they are to the
advantage of the whole country, and theirs is that, in any language, it
is difficult to be in debt to such a degree that one’s whole life is
shadowed by it. Every Japanese has probably at some point invented ways
of living within the law and yet circumventing what is asked of him.
They also admire certain forms of violence and direct action and private
revenge which Americans do not. But these qualifications, and any others
that can be urged, still do not bring in question the hold that chu has
upon the Japanese.

When Japan capitulated on August 14, 1945, the world had an almost
unbelievable demonstration of its working. Many Westerners with
experience and knowledge of Japan had held that it would be impossible
for her to surrender; it would be naïve, they insisted, to imagine that
her armies scattered over Asia and the Pacific Islands would peacefully
yield up their arms. Many of Japan’s armed forces had suffered no local
defeat and they were convinced of the righteousness of their cause. The
home islands, too, were full of bitter-enders and an occupying army, its
advance guard being necessarily small, would run the risk of massacre
when it moved beyond range of naval guns. During the war the Japanese
had stopped at nothing and they are a warlike people. Such American
analysts reckoned without chu. The Emperor spoke and the war ceased.
Before his voice went upon the radio bitter opponents had thrown a
cordon around the palace and tried to prevent the proclamation. But,
once read, it was accepted. No field commander in Manchuria or Java, no
Tojo in Japan, put himself in opposition. Our troops landed at the
airfields and were greeted with courtesy. Foreign correspondents, as one
of them wrote, might land in the morning fingering their small arms but
by noon they had put these aside and by evening they were shopping for
trinkets. The Japanese were now ‘easing the Emperor’s heart’ by
following the ways of peace; a week earlier it had been by dedicating
themselves to repulse the barbarian even with bamboo spears.

There was no mystery about it except to those Westerners who could not
grant how various are the emotions that sway men’s conduct. Some had
proclaimed that there was no alternative to practical extermination.
Some had proclaimed that Japan could save itself only if the liberals
seized power and overthrew the government. Either of these analyses made
sense in terms of a Western nation fighting an all-out and popularly
supported war. They were wrong, however, because they attributed to
Japan courses of action which are essentially Occidental. Some Western
prophets still thought after months of peaceful occupation that all was
lost because no Western-type revolution had occurred or because ‘the
Japanese did not know they were defeated.’ This is good Occidental
social philosophy based on Occidental standards of what is right and
proper. But Japan is not the Occident. She did not use that last
strength of Occidental nations: revolution. Nor did she use sullen
sabotage against the enemy’s occupying army. She used her own strength:
the ability to demand of herself as chu the enormous price of
unconditional surrender before her fighting power was broken. In her own
eyes this enormous payment nevertheless bought something she supremely
valued: the right to say that it was the Emperor who had given the order
even if that order was capitulation. Even in defeat the highest law was
still chu.

-----

[1] _Documents of Iriki_, 1929, p. 380, n. 19.

[2] When the Japanese use the phrase ‘knowing jin,’ they are somewhat
closer to Chinese usage. Buddhists exhort people to ‘know jin’ and this
means to be merciful and benevolent. But, as the all-Japanese dictionary
says, ‘knowing jin refers to ideal man rather than to acts.’

[3] Nohara, K., _The True Face of Japan_. London, 1936, p. 45.

[4] Lory, Hillis, _Japan’s Military Masters_, 1943, p. 40.


Copyleft, CC, Mitzub'ixi Quq Chi'j, 1996-2099

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

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