07：義理ほどつらないものはない

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7

The Repayment ‘Hardest to Bear’

‘Giri,’ runs the Japanese saying, is ‘hardest to bear.’ A person must
repay giri as he must repay gimu, but it is a series of obligations of a
different color. There is no possible English equivalent and of all the
strange categories of moral obligations which anthropologists find in
the culture of the world, it is one of the most curious. It is
specifically Japanese. Both chu and ko Japan shares with China and in
spite of the changes she has made in these concepts they have certain
family likeness to moral imperatives familiar in other Eastern nations.
But giri she owes to no Chinese Confucianism and to no Oriental
Buddhism. It is a Japanese category and it is not possible to understand
their courses of action without taking it into account. No Japanese can
talk about motivations or good repute or the dilemmas which confront men
and women in his home country without constantly speaking of giri.

To an Occidental, giri includes a most heterogeneous list of obligations
(see chart on p. 116) ranging from gratitude for an old kindness to the
duty of revenge. It is no wonder that the Japanese have not tried to
expound giri to Westerners; their own all-Japanese dictionaries can
hardly define it. One of these renders it—I translate:—‘righteous way;
the road human beings should follow; something one does unwillingly to
forestall apology to the world.’ This does not give a Westerner much
idea of it but the word ‘unwillingly’ points up a contrast with gimu.
Gimu, no matter how many difficult demands it makes upon a person, is at
least a group of duties he owes within the immediate circle of his
intimate family and to the Ruler who stands as a symbol for his country,
his way of life, and his patriotism. It is due to persons because of
strong ties drawn tight at his very birth. However unwilling specific
acts of compliance may be, gimu is never defined as ‘unwilling.’ But
‘repaying giri’ is full of malaise. The difficulties of being a debtor
are at their maximum in ‘the circle of giri.’

Giri has two quite distinct divisions. What I shall call ‘giri to the
world’—literally ‘repaying giri’—is one’s obligation to repay _on_ to
one’s fellows, and what I shall call ‘giri to one’s name’ is the duty of
keeping one’s name and reputation unspotted by any imputation, somewhat
after the fashion of German ‘honor.’ Giri to the world can roughly be
described as the fulfillment of contractual relations—as contrasted
with gimu which is felt as the fulfillment of intimate obligations to
which one is born. Thus giri includes all the duties one owes to one’s
in-law’s family; gimu, those to one’s own immediate family. The term for
father-in-law is father-in-giri; mother-in-law is mother-in-giri, and
brother- and sister-in-law are brother-in-giri and sister-in-giri. This
terminology is used either for spouse’s sibling or for sibling’s spouse.
Marriage in Japan is of course a contract between families and carrying
out these contractual obligations throughout life to the opposite family
is ‘working for giri.’ It is heaviest toward the generation which
arranged the contract—the parents—and heaviest of all on the young
wife toward her mother-in-law because, as the Japanese say, the bride
has gone to live in a house where she was not born. The husband’s
obligations to his parents-in-law are different, but they too are
dreaded, for he may have to lend them money if they are in distress and
must meet other contractual responsibilities. As one Japanese said, ‘If
a grown son does things for his own mother, it is because he loves her
and therefore it couldn’t be giri. You don’t work for giri when you act
from the heart.’ A person fulfills his duties to his in-laws
punctiliously, however, because at all costs he must avoid the dreaded
condemnation: ‘a man who does not know giri.’

The way they feel about this duty to the in-law family is vividly clear
in the case of the ‘adopted husband,’ the man who is married after the
fashion of a woman. When a family has daughters and no sons the parents
choose a husband for one of their daughters in order to carry on the
family name. His name is erased from the register of his own family and
he takes his father-in-law’s name. He enters his wife’s home, is subject
‘in giri’ to his father- and mother-in-law, and when he dies is buried
in their burying ground. In all these acts he follows the exact pattern
of the woman in the usual marriage. The reasons for adopting a husband
for one’s daughter may not be simply the absence of a son of one’s own;
often it is a deal out of which both sides hope to gain. These are
called ‘political marriages.’ The girl’s family may be poor but of good
family and the boy may bring ready cash and in return move up in the
class hierarchy. Or the girl’s family may be wealthy and able to educate
the husband who in return for this benefit signs away his own family. Or
the girl’s father may in this way associate with himself a prospective
partner in his firm. In any case, an adopted husband’s giri is
especially heavy—as is proper because the act of changing a man’s name
to another family register is drastic in Japan. In feudal Japan he had
to prove himself in his new household by taking his adopted father’s
side in battle, even if it meant killing his own father. In modern Japan
the ‘political marriages’ involving adopted husbands invoke this strong
sanction of giri to tie the young man to his father-in-law’s business or
family fortunes with the heaviest bonds the Japanese can provide.
Especially in Meiji times this was sometimes advantageous to both
parties. But resentment at being an adopted husband is usually violent
and a common Japanese saying is ‘If you have three go of rice (about a
pint), never be an adopted husband.’ The Japanese say this resentment is
‘because of the gin.’ They do not say, as Americans probably would if we
had a like custom, ‘because it keeps him from playing a man’s rôle.’
Giri is hard enough anyway and ‘unwilling’ enough, so that ‘because of
the gin’ seems to the Japanese a sufficient statement of the burdensome
relation.

Not only duties to one’s in-laws are giri; duties even to uncles and
aunts and nephews and nieces are in the same category. The fact that in
Japan duties to even such relatively close relatives do not rank as
filial piety (ko) is one of the great differences in family relations
between Japan and China. In China, many such relatives, and much more
distant ones, would share pooled resources, but in Japan they are giri
or ‘contractual’ relatives. The Japanese point out that it often happens
that these persons have never personally done a favor (_on_) for the
person who is asked to come to their aid; in helping them he is repaying
_on_ to their common ancestors. This is the sanction behind caring for
one’s own children too—which of course is a gimu—but even though the
sanction is the same, assistance to these more distant relatives rates
as giri. When one has to help them, as when one helps one’s in-laws, one
says, ‘I am tangled with giri.’

The great traditional giri relationship which most Japanese think of
even before the relation with in-laws, is that of a retainer to his
liege lord and to his comrades at arms. It is the loyalty a man of honor
owes to his superior and to his fellows of his own class. This
obligation of giri is celebrated in a vast traditional literature. It is
identified as the virtue of the samurai. In old Japan, before the
unification of the country effected by the Tokugawas, it was often
considered a greater and dearer virtue even than chu, which was at that
time the obligation to the Shogun. When in the twelfth century a
Minamoto Shogun demanded of one of the daimyo the surrender of an enemy
lord he was sheltering, the daimyo wrote back a letter which is still
preserved. He was deeply resentful of the imputation upon his giri and
he refused to offend against it even in the name of chu. ‘Public
affairs,’ he wrote, ‘(are a thing) over which I have little personal
control but giri between men of honor is an eternal verity’ which
transcended the Shogun’s authority. He refused ‘to commit a faithless
act against his honored friends.’[1] This transcendent samurai virtue of
old Japan suffuses great numbers of historical folktales which are known
today all over Japan and are worked up into _noh_ dramas, _kabuki_
theater and _kagura_ dances.

One of the best-known of these is the tale of the huge invincible
_ronin_ (a lordless samurai who lives by his own wits), the hero Benkei
of the twelfth century. Entirely without resources but of miraculous
strength he terrorizes the monks when he takes shelter in the
monasteries and cuts down every passing samurai in order to make a
collection of their swords to pay for outfitting himself in feudal
fashion. Finally he challenges what appears to him to be a mere
youngster, a slight and foppish lord. But in him he meets his match and
discovers that the youth is the scion of the Minamotos who is scheming
to recover the Shogunate for his family. He is indeed that beloved
Japanese hero, Yoshitsune Minamoto. To him Benkei gives his passionate
giri and undertakes a hundred exploits in his cause. At last, however,
they have to escape with their followers from an overwhelming enemy
force. They disguise themselves as monkish pilgrims traveling over Japan
to collect subscriptions for a temple and to escape detection Yoshitsune
dresses as one of the troop while Benkei assumes its head-ship. They run
into a guard the enemy has set along their path and Benkei fabricates
for them a long list of temple ‘subscribers’ which he pretends to read
from his scroll. The enemy almost lets them pass. At the last moment,
however, their suspicions are aroused by the aristocratic grace of
Yoshitsune which he cannot conceal even in his disguise as an underling.
They call back the troop. Benkei immediately takes a step which
completely clears Yoshitsune from suspicion: he berates him on some
trivial issue and strikes him across the face. The enemy is convinced;
it is beyond possibility that if this pilgrim is Yoshitsune, one of his
retainers should lift his hand against him. It would be an unimaginable
breach of giri. Benkei’s impious act saves the lives of the little band.
As soon as they are in safe territory, Benkei throws himself at
Yoshitsune’s feet and asks him to slay him. His lord graciously offers
pardon.

These old tales of times when giri was from the heart and had no taint
of resentment are modern Japan’s daydream of a golden age. In those
days, the tales tell them, there was no ‘unwillingness’ in giri. If
there was conflict with chu, a man could honorably stick by giri. Giri
then was a loved face-to-face relation dressed in all the feudal
trimmings. To ‘know giri’ meant to be loyal for life to a lord who cared
for his retainers in return. To ‘repay giri’ meant to offer even one’s
life to the lord to whom one owed everything.

This is, of course, a fantasy. Feudal history in Japan tells of plenty
of retainers whose loyalty was bought by the daimyo on the opposite side
of the battle. Still more important, as we shall see in the next
chapter, any slur the lord cast upon his retainer could properly and
traditionally make the retainer leave his service and even enter into
negotiations with the enemy. Japan celebrates the vengeance theme with
as much delight as she celebrates loyalty to the death. And they were
both giri; loyalty was giri to one’s lord and vengeance for an insult
was giri-to-one’s-name. In Japan they are two sides to the same shield.

Nevertheless the old tales of loyalty are pleasant daydreams to the
Japanese today for now ‘repaying giri’ is no longer loyalty to one’s
legitimate chieftain but is fulfilling all sorts of obligations to all
sorts of people. Today’s constantly used phrases are full of resentment
and of emphasis on the pressure of public opinion which compels a person
to do giri against his wishes. They say, ‘I am arranging this marriage
merely for giri’; ‘merely because of giri I was forced to give him the
job’; ‘I must see him merely for giri.’ They constantly talk of being
‘tangled with giri,’ a phrase the dictionary translates as ‘I am obliged
to it.’ They say, ‘He forced me with giri,’ ‘he cornered me with giri,’
and these, like the other usages, mean that someone has argued the
speaker into an act he did not want or intend by raising some issue of
payment due upon an _on_. In peasant villages, in transactions in small
shops, in high circles of the Zaibatsu and in the Cabinet of Japan,
people are ‘forced with giri’ and ‘cornered with giri.’ A suitor may do
this by taxing his prospective father-in-law with some old relationship
or transaction between the two families or a man may use this same
weapon to get a peasant’s land. The man who is being ‘cornered’ will
himself feel he must comply; he says, ‘If I do not hold the shoulder of
my _on_-man (man from whom I received _on_), my giri is in bad repute.’
All these usages carry the implication of unwillingness and of
compliance for ‘mere decency’s sake,’ as the Japanese dictionary phrases
it.

The rules of giri are strictly rules of required repayment; they are not
a set of moral rules like the Ten Commandments. When a man is forced
with giri, it is assumed that he may have to override his sense of
justice and they often say, ‘I could not do right (_gi_) because of
giri.’ Nor do the rules of giri have anything to do with loving your
neighbor as yourself; they do not dictate that a man shall act
generously out of the spontaneity of his heart. A man must do giri, they
say, because, ‘if he does not, people will call him “a person who does
not know giri” and he will be shamed before the world.’ It is what
people will say that makes it so necessary to comply. Indeed, ‘giri to
the world’ often appears in English translation as ‘conformity to public
opinion,’ and the dictionary translates ‘It can’t be helped because it
is giri to the world’ as ‘People will not accept any other course of
action.’

It is in this ‘circle of giri’ that the parallel with American sanctions
on paying money one has borrowed helps us most to understand the
Japanese attitude. We do not consider that a man has to pay back the
favor of a letter received or a gift given or of a timely word spoken
with the stringency that is necessary in keeping up his payments of
interest and his repayment of a bank loan. In these financial dealings
bankruptcy is the penalty for failure—a heavy penalty. The Japanese,
however, regard a man as bankrupt when he fails in repaying giri and
every contact in life is likely to incur giri in some way or other. This
means keeping an account of little words and acts Americans throw
lightly about with no thought of incurring obligations. It means walking
warily in a complicated world.

There is another parallel between Japanese ideas of giri to the world
and American ideas of repaying money. Repayment of giri is thought of as
repayment of an exact equivalent. In this giri is quite unlike gimu,
which can never be even approximately satisfied no matter what one does.
But giri is not unlimited. To American eyes the repayments are
fantastically out of proportion to the original favor but that is not
the way the Japanese see it. We think their gift-giving is fantastic
too, when twice a year every household wraps up something in ceremonious
fashion as return on a gift received six months earlier, or when the
family of one’s maidservant brings gifts through the years as a return
on the favor of hiring her. But the Japanese taboo returning gifts with
larger gifts. It is no part of one’s honor to return ‘pure velvet.’ One
of the most disparaging things one can say about a gift is that the
giver has ‘repaid a minnow with a sea bream (a large fish).’ So too in
repaying giri.

Whenever possible written records are kept of the network of exchanges,
whether they are of work or of goods. In the villages some of these are
kept by the headman, some by one of the work-party, some are family and
personal records. For a funeral it is customary to bring ‘incense
money.’ Relatives may also bring colored cloth for funeral banners. The
neighbors come to help, the women in the kitchen and the men in digging
the grave and making the coffin. In the village of Suye Mura the headman
made up the book in which these things were recorded. It was a valued
record in the family of the deceased for it showed the tributes of their
neighbors. It is also a list which shows those names to which the family
owes reciprocal tributes which will be honored when a death occurs in
other families. These are long-term reciprocities. There are also
short-term exchanges at any village funeral just as at any kind of
feast. The helpers who make the coffin are fed and they therefore bring
a measure of rice to the bereaved family as part payment on their food.
This rice too is entered in the headman’s record. For most feasts also
the guest brings some rice-wine in part payment for the party drinks.
Whether the occasion is birth or death, a rice-transplanting, a
housebuilding or a social party, the exchange of giri is carefully noted
for future repayment.

The Japanese have another convention about giri which parallels Western
conventions about money repayment. If repayment is delayed beyond due
term it increases as if it drew interest. Doctor Eckstein tells a story
of this in his dealings with the Japanese manufacturer who financed his
trip to Japan to gather material for his biography of Noguchi. Doctor
Eckstein returned to the United States to write the book and eventually
sent the manuscript to Japan. He received no acknowledgement and no
letters. He was naturally troubled for fear something in the volume
might have offended the Japanese, but his letters remained unanswered.
Some years later the manufacturer telephoned him. He was in the United
States, and shortly afterward he arrived at Doctor Eckstein’s home
bringing with him dozens of Japanese cherry trees. The gift was lavish.
Just because it had been held in abeyance so long it was proper that it
should be handsome. ‘Surely,’ his benefactor said to Doctor Eckstein,
‘you would not have wanted me to repay you _quickly_.’

A man who is ‘cornered with giri’ is often forced into repayments of
debts which have grown with time. A man may apply for assistance to a
small merchant because he is the nephew of a teacher the merchant had as
a boy. Since as a young man, the student had been unable to repay his
giri to his teacher, the debt has accumulated during the passing years
and the merchant has to give ‘unwillingly to forestall apology to the
world.’

-----

[1] Quoted by Kanichi Asakawa, _Documents of Iriki_, 1929.

文献

Benedict, Ruth／The Chrysanthemum and the Sword／Tokyo: Tuttle Pub.／ISBN 978-4805306710
ルース・ベネディクト／菊と刀（角田安正訳）／光文社（光文社古典新訳文庫K-Cへ-1-1）／ISBN 978-4334-7516-92

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