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08：汚名をすすぐ

池田光穂

8


                          Clearing One’s Name

Giri to one’s name is the duty to keep one’s reputation unspotted. It is
a series of virtues—some of which seem to an Occidental to be
opposites, but which to the Japanese have a sufficient unity because
they are those duties which are not repayments on benefits received;
they are ‘outside the circle of _on_.’ They are those acts which keep
one’s reputation bright without reference to a specific previous
indebtedness to another person. They include therefore maintaining all
the miscellaneous etiquette requirements of ‘proper station,’ showing
stoicism in pain and defending one’s reputation in profession or craft.
Giri to one’s name also demands acts which remove a slur or an insult;
the slur darkens one’s good name and should be got rid of. It may be
necessary to take vengeance upon one’s detractor or it may be necessary
to commit suicide, and there are all sorts of possible courses of action
between these two extremes. But one does not shrug off lightly anything
that is compromising.

The Japanese do not have a separate term for what I call here
‘giri-to-one’s-name.’ They describe it simply as giri outside the circle
of _on_. That is the basis of classification, and not the fact that giri
to the world is an obligation to return kindnesses and that
giri-to-one’s-name prominently includes revenge. The fact that Western
languages separate the two into categories as opposite as gratitude and
revenge does not impress the Japanese. Why should one virtue not cover a
man’s behavior when he reacts to another’s benevolence and when he
reacts to his scorn or malevolence?

In Japan it does. A good man feels as strongly about insults as he does
about the benefits he has received. Either way it is virtuous to repay.
He does not separate the two, as we do, and call one aggression and one
non-aggression. To him aggression only begins outside ‘the circle of
giri’; so long as one is maintaining giri and clearing one’s name of
slurs, one is not guilty of aggression. One is evening scores. ‘The
world tips,’ they say, so long as an insult or slur or defeat is not
requited or eliminated. A good man must try to get the world back into
balance again. It is human virtue, not an all-too-human vice. Giri to
one’s name, and even the way it is linguistically combined in Japan with
gratitude and loyalty, has been a Western virtue in certain periods of
European history. It flourished mightily in the Renaissance, especially
in Italy, and it has much in common with _el valor Español_ in classic
Spain and with _die Ehre_ in Germany. Something very like it underlay
dueling in Europe a hundred years ago. Wherever this virtue of wiping
out stains on one’s honor has been in the ascendant, in Japan or in
Western nations, the very core of it has always been that it transcended
profit in any material sense. One was virtuous in proportion as one
offered up to ‘honor’ one’s possessions, one’s family, and one’s own
life. This is a part of its very definition and is the basis of the
claim that these countries always put forward that it is a ‘spiritual’
value. It certainly involves them in great material losses and can
hardly be justified on a profit-and-loss basis. In this lies the great
contrast between this version of honor and the cut-throat competition
and overt hostility that crops up in life in the United States; in
America it may be that no holds are barred in some political or
financial deal but it is a war to get or to hold some material
advantage. It is only in exceptional cases, as, for instance, in the
feuds of the Kentucky Mountains, where codes of honor prevail which fall
in the category of giri-to-one’s-name.

Giri to one’s name and all the hostility and watchful waiting that
accompany it in any culture, however, is not a virtue that is
characteristic of the Asiatic mainland. It is not, as the phrase goes,
Oriental. The Chinese do not have it, nor the Siamese, nor the Indians.
The Chinese regard all such sensitivity to insults and aspersions as a
trait of ‘small’ people—morally small. It is no part of their ideal of
nobility, as it is in Japan. Violence which is wrong when a man starts
it out of the blue does not become right in Chinese ethics when a man
indulges in it to requite an insult. They think it is rather ridiculous
to be so sensitive. Nor do they react to a slur by resolving by all that
is good and great to prove the aspersion baseless. The Siamese have no
place at all for this kind of sensitivity to insult. Like the Chinese
they set store by making their detractor ridiculous but they do not
imagine that their honor has been impugned. They say ‘The best way to
show an opponent up for a brute is to give in to him.’

The full significance of giri-to-one’s-name cannot be understood without
placing in context all the non-aggressive virtues which are included in
it in Japan. Vengeance is only one of the virtues it may require upon
occasion. It includes also plenty of quiet and temperate behavior. The
stoicism, the self-control that is required of a self-respecting
Japanese is part of his giri to his name. A woman may not cry out in
childbirth and a man should rise above pain and danger. When floods
sweep down upon the Japanese village each self-respecting person gathers
up the necessities he is to take with him and seeks higher ground. There
is no outcry, no running hither and thither, no panic. When the
equinoctial winds and rain come in hurricane strength there is similar
self-control. Such behavior is a part of the respect a person has for
himself in Japan even granted he may not live up to it. They think
American self-respect does not require self-control. There is _noblesse
oblige_ in this self-control in Japan and in feudal times more was
therefore required of the samurai than of the common people but the
virtue, though less exigent, was a rule of life among all classes. If
the samurai were required to go to extremes in rising above bodily pain,
the common people had to go to extremes in accepting the aggressions of
the armed samurai.

The tales of samurai stoicism are famous. They were forbidden to give
way to hunger but that was too trivial to mention. They were enjoined
when they were starving to pretend they had just eaten: they must pick
their teeth with a toothpick. ‘Baby birds,’ the maxim went, ‘cry for
their food but a samurai holds a toothpick between his teeth.’ In the
past war this became an Army maxim for the enlisted soldier. Nor must
they give way to pain. The Japanese attitude was like the boy soldier’s
rejoinder to Napoleon: ‘Wounded? Nay, sire, I’m killed.’ A samurai
should give no sign of suffering till he fell dead and he must bear pain
without wincing. It is told of Count Katsu who died in 1899 that when he
was a boy his testicles were torn by a dog. He was of samurai family but
his family had been reduced to beggary. While the doctor operated upon
him, his father held a sword to his nose. ‘If you utter one cry,’ he
told him, ‘you will die in a way that at least will not be shameful.’

Giri to one’s name also requires that one live according to one’s
station in life. If a man fails in this giri he has no right to respect
himself. This meant in Tokugawa times that he accepted as part of his
self-respect the detailed sumptuary laws which regulated practically
everything he wore or had or used. Americans are shocked to the core by
laws which define these things by inherited class position. Self-respect
in America is bound up with improving one’s status and fixed sumptuary
laws are a denial of the very basis of our society. We are horrified by
Tokugawa laws which stated that a farmer of one class could buy such and
such a doll for his child and the farmer of another class could buy a
different doll. In America, however, we get the same results by invoking
a different sanction. We accept with no criticism the fact that the
factory owner’s child has a set of electric trains and that the
sharecropper’s child contents itself with a corncob doll. We accept
differences in income and justify them. To earn a good salary is a part
of our system of self-respect. If dolls are regulated by income that is
no violation of our moral ideas. The person who has got rich buys better
dolls for his children. In Japan getting rich is under suspicion and
maintaining proper station is not. Even today the poor as well as the
rich invest their self-respect in observing the conventions of
hierarchy. It is a virtue alien to America, and the Frenchman, de
Tocqueville, pointed this out in the eighteen-thirties in his book
already quoted. Born himself in eighteenth century France, he knew and
loved the aristocratic way of life in spite of his generous comments
about the egalitarian United States. America, he said, in spite of its
virtues, lacked true dignity. ‘True dignity consists in always taking
one’s proper station, neither too high nor too low. And this is as much
within the reach of the peasant as of the prince.’ De Tocqueville would
have understood the Japanese attitude that class differences are not
themselves humiliating.

‘True dignity,’ in this day of objective study of cultures, is
recognized as something which different peoples can define differently,
just as they always define for themselves what is humiliating. Americans
who cry out today that Japan cannot be given self-respect until we
enforce our egalitarianism are guilty of ethnocentrism. If what these
Americans want is, as they say, a self-respecting Japan they will have
to recognize her bases for self-respect. We can recognize, as de
Tocqueville did, that this aristocratic ‘true dignity’ is passing from
the modern world and that a different and, we believe, a finer dignity
is taking its place. It will no doubt happen in Japan too. Meantime
Japan will have to rebuild her self-respect today on her own basis, not
on ours. And she will have to purify it in her own way.

Giri to one’s name is also living up to many sorts of commitments
besides those of proper station. A borrower may pledge his giri to his
name when he asks for a loan; a generation ago it was common to phrase
it that ‘I agree to be publicly laughed at if I fail to repay this sum.’
If he failed, he was not literally made a laughingstock; there were no
public pillories in Japan. But when the New Year came around, the date
on which debts must be paid off, the insolvent debtor might commit
suicide to ‘clear his name.’ New Year’s Eve still has its crop of
suicides who have taken this means to redeem their reputations.

All kinds of professional commitments involve giri to one’s name. The
Japanese requirements are often fantastic when particular circumstances
bring one into the public eye and criticism might be general. There are
for instance the long list of school principals who committed suicide
because fires in their schools—with which they had nothing to
do—threatened the picture of the Emperor which was hung in every
school. Teachers too have been burned to death dashing into burning
schools to rescue these pictures. By their deaths they showed how high
they held their giri to their names and their chu to the Emperor. There
are also famous stories of persons who were guilty of a slip of the
tongue in ceremonious public readings of one of the Imperial Rescripts,
either the one on Education or the one for Soldiers and Sailors, and who
have cleared their names by committing suicide. Within the reign of the
present Emperor, a man who had inadvertently named his son Hirohito—the
given name of the Emperor was never spoken in Japan—killed himself and
his child.

Giri to one’s name as a professional person is very exigent in Japan but
it need not be maintained by what an American understands as high
professional standards. The teacher says, ‘I cannot in giri to my name
as a teacher admit ignorance of it,’ and he means that if he does not
know to what species a frog belongs nevertheless he has to pretend he
does. If he teaches English on the basis of only a few years’ school
instruction, nevertheless he cannot admit that anyone might be able to
correct him. It is specifically to this kind of defensiveness that
‘giri-to-one’s-name as a teacher’ refers. The business man too, in giri
to his name as a business man, cannot let anyone know that his assets
are seriously depleted or that the plans he made for his organization
have failed. And the diplomat cannot in giri admit the failure of his
policy. In all such giri usages there is extreme identification of a man
with his work and any criticism of one’s acts or one’s competence
becomes automatically a criticism of one’s self.

These Japanese reactions to imputations of failure and inadequacy can be
duplicated over and over again in the United States. We all know persons
who are maddened by detraction. But we are seldom so defensive as the
Japanese. If a teacher does not know to what species a frog belongs, he
thinks it is better behavior to say so than to claim knowledge, even
though he might succumb to the temptation to hide his ignorance. If a
business man is dissatisfied with a policy he has promoted he thinks he
can put out a new and different directive. He does not consider that his
self-respect is conditional upon his maintaining that he was right all
along and that if he admitted he was wrong he should either resign or
retire. In Japan, however, this defensiveness goes very deep and it is
the part of wisdom—as it is also universal etiquette—not to tell a
person to his face in so many words that he has made a professional
error.

This sensitivity is especially conspicuous in situations where one
person has lost out to another. It may be only that another person has
been preferred for a job or that the person concerned has failed in a
competitive examination. The loser ‘wears a shame’ for such failures,
and, though this shame is in some cases a strong incentive to greater
efforts, in many others it is a dangerous depressant. He loses
confidence and becomes melancholy or angry or both. His efforts are
stymied. It is especially important for Americans to recognize that
competition in Japan thus does not have the same degree of socially
desirable effects that it does in our own scheme of life. We rely
strongly on competition as a ‘good thing.’ Psychological tests show that
competition stimulates us to our best work. Performance goes up under
this stimulus; when we are given something to do all by ourselves we
fall short of the record we make when there are competitors present. In
Japan, however, their tests show just the opposite. It is especially
marked after childhood is ended, for Japanese children are more playful
about competition and not so worried about it. With young men and
adults, however, performance deteriorated with competition. Subjects who
had made good progress, reduced their mistakes and gained speed when
they were working by themselves, began to make mistakes and were far
slower when a competitor was introduced. They did best when they were
measuring their improvement against their own record, not when they were
measuring themselves against others. The Japanese experimenters rightly
analyzed the reason for this poor record in competitive situations.
Their subjects, they said, when the project became competitive, became
principally interested in the danger that they might be defeated, and
the work suffered. They felt the competition so keenly as an aggression
that they turned their attention to their relation to the aggressor
instead of concentrating on the job in hand.[1]

The students examined in these tests tended to be influenced most by the
possible shame of failing. Like a teacher or a business man living up to
his giri to his professional name they are stung by their giri to their
name as students. Student teams who lost in competitive games, too, went
to great lengths in abandoning themselves to this shame of failure.
Crews might throw themselves down in their boats beside their oars and
weep and bewail themselves. Defeated baseball teams might gather in a
huddle and cry aloud. In the United States we would say they were bad
losers. We have an etiquette that expects them to say that the better
team won. It is proper for the defeated to shake hands with the victors.
No matter how much we hate to be beaten we scorn people who make an
emotional crisis out of it.

The Japanese have always been inventive in devising ways of avoiding
direct competition. Their elementary schools minimize it beyond what
Americans would think possible. Their teachers are instructed that each
child must be taught to better his own record and that he should not be
given opportunities to compare himself with others. In their grade
schools they do not even keep any students back to repeat a grade and
all children who enter together go through their entire elementary
education together. Their report cards grade children in elementary
schools on marks for conduct but not on their school work: when really
competitive situations are unavoidable, as in entrance examinations to
the middle schools, the tension is understandably great. Every teacher
has stories of the boys who when they know they have failed commit
suicide.

This minimizing of direct competition goes all through Japanese life. An
ethic that is based on _on_ has small place for competition whereas the
American categorical imperative is upon making good in competition with
one’s fellows. Their whole system of hierarchy with all its detailed
rules of class minimizes direct competition. The family system minimizes
it too for the father and son are not institutionally in competition as
they are in America: it is possible for them to reject each other but
not for them to compete. Japanese comment with amazement on the American
family where the father and the son compete both for the use of the
family car and for the attention of the mother-wife.

The ubiquitous institution of the go-between is one of the more
conspicuous ways in which the Japanese prevent direct confrontation of
two persons who are in competition with each other. An intermediary is
required in any situation where a man might feel shame if he fell short
and consequently go-betweens serve on a great number of
occasions—negotiating marriage, offering one’s services for hire,
leaving a job and arranging countless everyday matters. This go-between
reports to both parties, or in case of an important deal like a marriage
each side employs its own intermediary and they negotiate the details
between themselves before reporting to their side. By dealing in this
way at second hand the principals need take no cognizance of claims and
charges that would have to be resented in giri to their names if they
were in direct communication. The go-between too gains prestige by
acting in this official capacity, and gets the respect of the community
by his successful manipulation. The chances of a peaceful arrangement
are the greater because the go-between has an ego investment in smooth
negotiations. The intermediary acts in the same way in feeling out an
employer about a job for his client or in relaying to the employer the
employee’s decision to leave his job.

Etiquette of all kinds is organized to obviate shame-causing situations
which might call in question one’s giri to one’s name. These situations
which are thus minimized go far beyond direct competition. The host,
they think, should greet his guest with certain ritual welcoming and in
his good clothes. Therefore anyone who finds a farmer in his work
clothes at home may have to wait a bit. The farmer gives no sign of
recognition until he has put on suitable clothes and arranged the proper
courtesies. It makes no difference even if the host has to change his
clothes in the room where the guest is waiting. He simply is not present
until he is there in the proper guise. In the rural areas, too, boys may
visit girls at night after the household is asleep and the girl is in
bed. Girls can either accept or reject their advances, but the boy wears
a towel bound about his face so that if he is rejected he need feel no
shame next day. The disguise is not to prevent the girl from recognizing
him; it is purely an ostrich technique so that he will not have to admit
that he was shamed in his proper person. Etiquette requires too that as
little cognizance as possible be taken of any project until success is
assured. It is part of the duties of go-betweens arranging a marriage to
bring the prospective bride and groom together before the contract is
completed. Everything is done to make this a casual meeting for if the
purpose of the introduction were avowed at this stage any breaking-off
of the negotiations would threaten the honor of one family or of both.
Since the young couple must each be escorted by one or both of their
parents, and the go-betweens must be the hosts or hostesses, it is most
properly arranged when they all ‘run into each other’ casually at the
annual chrysanthemum show or at a cherry-blossom viewing or in a
well-known park or place of recreation.

In all such ways, and in many more, the Japanese avoid occasions in
which failure might be shameful. Though they lay such emphasis on the
duty to clear one’s name of insult, in actual practice this leads them
to arrange events so that insult need be felt as seldom as possible.
This is in great contrast to many tribes of the Pacific Islands where
clearing one’s name holds much the same pre-eminent place that it does
in Japan.

Among these primitive gardening peoples of New Guinea and Melanesia the
mainspring of tribal or personal action is the insult which it is
necessary to resent. They cannot have a tribal feast without one
village’s setting it in motion by saying that another village is so poor
it cannot feed ten guests, it is so stingy it hides its taro and its
coconuts, its leaders are so stupid they could not organize a feast if
they tried. Then the challenged village clears its name by overwhelming
all comers with its lavish display and hospitality. Marriage
arrangements and financial transactions are set going in the same way.
When they go on the warpath too the two sides have a tremendous insult
exchange before they set their arrows to their bows. They handle the
smallest matter as if it were an occasion that called for mortal fight.
It is a great incentive to action and such tribes often have a great
deal of vitality. But nobody has ever described them as courteous.

The Japanese on the contrary are paragons of politeness and this
pre-eminent politeness is a measure of the lengths to which they have
gone in limiting the occasions when it is necessary to clear one’s name.
They retain as an incomparable goad to achievement the resentment insult
occasions but they limit the situations where it is called for. It
should occur only in specified situations or when traditional
arrangements to eliminate it break down under pressure. Unquestionably
the use of this goad in Japan contributed to the dominant position she
was able to attain in the Far East and to her policy of Anglo-American
war in the last decade. Many Occidental discussions of Japan’s
sensitivity to insult and her eagerness to avenge herself, however,
would be more appropriate to the insult-using tribes of New Guinea than
they are to Japan, and many Westerners’ forecasts of how Japan would
behave after defeat in this war were wide of the mark because they did
not recognize the special Japanese limitations upon giri-to-one’s-name.

The politeness of the Japanese should not lead Americans to minimize
their sensitivity to slurs. Americans bandy personal remarks very
lightly; it is a kind of game. It is hard for us to realize the deadly
seriousness that attaches to light remarks in Japan. In his
autobiography, published in America just as he wrote it in English, a
Japanese artist, Yoshio Markino, has described vividly a perfectly
proper Japanese reaction to what he interpreted as a sneer. When he
wrote the book he had already lived most of his adult life in the United
States and in Europe but he felt as strongly as if he were still living
in his home town in rural Aichi. He was the youngest child of a
landowner of good standing and had been most lovingly reared in a
charming home. Toward the end of his childhood his mother died, and, not
long after, his father became bankrupt and sold all his property to pay
his debts. The family was broken up and Markino had not a sen to help
him in realizing his ambitions. One of these ambitions was to learn
English. He attached himself to a near-by mission school and did janitor
work in order to learn the language. At eighteen he had still never been
outside the round of a few provincial towns but he had made up his mind
to go to America.

    I visited upon one of the missionaries to whom I had more
    confidence than any other. I told him my intention to go to
    America in hope that he might be able to give me some useful
    information. To my great disappointment he exclaimed, ‘What,
    _You_ are intending to go to America?’ His wife was in the same
    room, and they both _sneered_ at me! At the moment I felt as if
    all the blood in my head went down to my feet! I stood on the
    same point for a few seconds in silence, then came back to my
    room without saying ‘goodbye.’ I said to myself, ‘Everything is
    quite finished.’

    On the next morning I ran away. Now I want to write the reason.
    I always believe that _insincerity_ is the greatest crime in
    this world, and nothing could be more insincere than to sneer!

    I always forgive the other’s anger, because it is the human
    nature to get into bad temper. I generally forgive if one tells
    me a lie, because the human nature is very weak and very often
    one cannot have a steady mind to face the difficulty and tell
    all the truth. I also forgive if one makes any foundless rumor
    or gossip against me, because it is a very easy temptation when
    some others persuade in that way.

    Even murderers I may forgive according to their condition. But
    about sneering, there is no excuse. Because one cannot sneer at
    innocent people without intentional insincerity.

    Let me give you my own definition of two words. Murderer: one
    who assassinates some human _flesh_. Sneerer: one who
    assassinates others’ SOUL and _heart_.

    Soul and heart are far dearer than the flesh, therefore sneering
    is the worst crime. Indeed, that missionary and his wife tried
    to assassinate my _soul_ and _heart_, and I had a great pain in
    my heart, which cried out, ‘Why you?’[2]

The next morning he departed with his entire possessions tied in a
handkerchief.

He had been ‘assassinated,’ as he felt, by the missionary’s incredulity
about a penniless provincial boy’s going to the United States to become
an artist. His name was besmirched until he had cleared it by carrying
out his purpose and after the missionary’s ‘sneer’ he had no alternative
but to leave the place and prove his ability to get to America. In
English it reads curiously that he charges the missionary with
‘insincerity’; the American’s exclamation seems to us quite ‘sincere’ in
our sense of the word. But he is using the word in its Japanese meaning
and they regularly deny sincerity to anyone who belittles any person
whom he does not wish to provoke to aggression. Such a sneer is wanton
and proves ‘insincerity.’

‘Even murderers I may forgive according to their condition. But about
sneering there is no excuse.’ Since it is not proper to ‘forgive,’ one
possible reaction to a slur is revenge. Markino cleared his name by
getting to America but revenge ranks high in Japanese tradition as a
‘good thing’ under circumstances of insult or defeat. Japanese who write
books for Western readers have sometimes used vivid figures of speech to
describe the Japanese attitudes about revenge. Inazo Nitobe, one of the
most benevolent men in Japan, writing in 1900, says: ‘In revenge there
is something that satisfies one’s sense of justice. Our sense of revenge
is as exact as our mathematical faculty and until both terms of the
equation are satisfied we cannot get over the sense of something left
undone.’[3] Yoshisaburo Okakura in a book on _The Life and Thought of
Japan_ uses a particularly Japanese custom as a parallel:

    Many of the so-called mental peculiarities of the Japanese owe
    their origin to the love of purity and its complementary hatred
    of defilement. But, pray, how could it be otherwise, being
    trained, as we actually are, to look upon slights inflicted,
    either on our family honour or on the national pride, as so many
    defilements and wounds that would not be clean and heal up
    again, unless by a thorough washing through vindication? You may
    consider the cases of vendetta so often met with in the public
    and private life of Japan, merely as a kind of morning tub which
    a people take with whom love of cleanliness has grown into a
    passion.[4]

And he continues, saying that thus the Japanese ‘live clean, undefiled
lives which seem as serene and beautiful as a cherry tree in full
bloom.’ This ‘morning tub,’ in other words, washes off dirt other people
have thrown at you and you cannot be virtuous as long as any of it
sticks to you. The Japanese have no ethic which teaches that a man
cannot be insulted unless he thinks he is and that it is only ‘what
comes out of a man’ that defiles him, not what is said or done against
him.

Japanese tradition keeps constantly before the public this ideal of a
‘morning bath’ of vendetta. Countless incidents and hero tales, of which
the most popular is the historical _Tale of the Forty-Seven Ronin_, are
known to everybody. They are read in their school books and played in
the theater, made up into contemporary movies, and printed in popular
publications. They are a part of the living culture of Japan today.

Many of these tales are about sensitivity to casual failures. For
instance, a daimyo called on three of his retainers to name the maker of
a certain fine sword. They disagreed and when experts were called in it
was found that Nagoya Sanza had been the only one who had correctly
identified it as a Muramasa blade. The ones who were wrong took it as an
insult and set out to kill Sanza. One of them found Sanza asleep and
stabbed him with Sanza’s own sword. Sanza, however, lived, and his
attacker thereafter dedicated himself to his revenge. In the end he
succeeded in killing him and his giri was satisfied.

Other tales are about the necessity of avenging oneself upon one’s lord.
Giri meant in Japanese ethics equally the retainer’s loyalty to his lord
to the death, and his right-about-face of extravagant enmity when he
felt himself insulted. A good example is from the stories about Ieyasu,
the first Tokugawa Shogun. It was reported to one of his retainers that
Ieyasu had said of him, ‘He is the sort of fellow who will die of a
fishbone stuck in his throat.’ The imputation that he would die in an
undignified manner was not to be borne, and the retainer vowed that this
was something he would not forget in life or death. Ieyasu was at the
time unifying the country from the new capital Yedo (Tokyo) and was not
yet secure from his enemies. The retainer made overtures to the hostile
lords, offering to set fire to Yedo from within and lay it waste. Thus
his giri would be satisfied and he would be avenged upon Ieyasu. Most
Occidental discussions of Japanese loyalty are thoroughly unrealistic
because they do not recognize that giri is not merely loyalty; it is
also a virtue that under certain circumstances enjoins treachery. As
they say, ‘A man who is beaten becomes a rebel.’ So does a man who is
insulted.

These two themes from the historical tales—revenge upon someone who has
been right when you were wrong, and revenge for a slur, even from one’s
lord—are commonplaces in the best-known literature of Japan, and they
have many variations. When one examines contemporary life-histories and
novels and events, it is clear that, however much the Japanese
appreciate revenge in their traditions, stories of vengeance are today
certainly as rare as in Western nations, perhaps rarer. This does not
mean that obsessions about one’s honor have grown less but rather that
the reaction to failures and slurs is more and more often defensive
instead of offensive. People take the shame as seriously as ever, but it
more and more often paralyzes their energies instead of starting a
fight. The direct attack of vengeance was more possible in lawless
pre-Meiji days. In the modern era law and order and the difficulties of
managing a more interdependent economy have sent revenge underground or
directed it against one’s own breast. A man may take a private revenge
against his enemy by playing a trick upon him which he never
avows—somewhat after the fashion of the old story of the host who
served his enemy with excrement which could not be detected in the
delicious food and asked no more than to know he had done it. The guest
never knew. But even this kind of underground aggression is rarer today
than turning it against oneself. There one has two choices: to use it as
a goad to drive oneself to the ‘impossible,’ or to let it eat out one’s
heart.

The vulnerability of the Japanese to failures and slurs and rejections
makes it all too easy for them to harry themselves instead of others.
Their novels describe over and over again the dead end of melancholy
alternating with outbursts of anger in which educated Japanese have so
often lost themselves in the last decades. The protagonists of these
stories are bored—bored with the round of life, bored with their
families, bored with the city, bored with the country. But it is not the
boredom of reaching for the stars, where all effort seems trivial
compared with a great goal pictured in their mind’s eye. It is not a
boredom born of the contrast between reality and the ideal. When the
Japanese have a vision of a great mission they lose their boredom. They
lose it completely and absolutely, no matter how distant the goal. Their
particular kind of ennui is the sickness of an over-vulnerable people.
They turn inward upon themselves their fear of rejection and they are
stymied. The picture of boredom in the Japanese novel is quite a
different state of mind from that with which we are familiar in the
Russian novel where the contrast between the real and the ideal worlds
is basic in all the tedium their heroes experience. Sir George Sansom
has said that the Japanese lack this sense of a contrast between the
real and the ideal. He is not speaking of how this underlies their
boredom but of how they formulate their philosophy and their general
attitude toward life. Certainly this contrast with basic Occidental
notions goes far beyond the particular case in point here, but it has
special relevance to their besetting depressions. Japan ranks with
Russia as a nation given to depicting boredom in her novels and the
contrast with the United States is marked. American novels do not do
much with the theme. Our novelists trace the misery of their characters
to a character-deficiency or to the buffets of a cruel world; they very
seldom depict pure and simple ennui. Personal maladjustment must have a
cause, a build-up, and rouse the reader’s moral condemnation of some
flaw in the hero or heroine, or of some evil in the social order. Japan
also has her proletarian novels protesting desperate economic conditions
in the cities and terrible happenings on commercial fishing boats, but
their character novels uncover a world where people’s emotions most
often come to them, so one author says, like drifting chlorine gas.
Neither the character nor the author thinks it necessary to analyze the
circumstances or the hero’s life history to account for the cloud. It
goes and it comes. People are vulnerable. They have turned inward the
aggression their old heroes used to visit upon their enemies and their
depression appears to them to have no explicit causes. They may seize
upon some incident as its source, but the incident leaves a curious
impression of being hardly more than a symbol.

The most extreme aggressive action a modern Japanese takes against
himself is suicide. Suicide, properly done, will, according to their
tenets, clear his name and reinstate his memory. American condemnation
of suicide makes self-destruction only a desperate submission to
despair, but the Japanese respect for it allows it to be an honorable
and purposeful act. In certain situations it is the most honorable
course to take in giri-to-one’s-name. The defaulting debtor on New
Year’s Day, the official who kills himself to acknowledge that he
assumes responsibility for some unfortunate occurrence, the lovers who
seal their hopeless love in a double suicide, the patriot who protests
the government’s postponement of war with China are all, like the boy
who fails in an examination or the soldier avoiding capture, turning
upon themselves a final violence. Some Japanese authorities say that
this liability to suicide is new in Japan. It is not easy to judge, and
statistics show that observers in recent years have often overestimated
its frequency. There were proportionately more suicides in Denmark in
the last century and more in pre-Nazi Germany than there have ever been
in Japan. But this much is certain: the Japanese love the theme. They
play up suicide as Americans play up crime and they have the same
vicarious enjoyment of it. They choose to dwell on events of
self-destruction instead of on destruction of others. They make of it,
in Bacon’s phrase, their favorite ‘flagrant case.’ It meets some need
that cannot be filled by dwelling on other acts.

Suicide is also more masochistic in modern Japan than it appears to have
been in the historical tales of feudal times. In those stories a samurai
committed suicide with his own hand at the command of the government to
save himself from dishonorable execution, much as a Western enemy
soldier would be shot instead of hanged, or he took this course to save
himself the torture he expected if he fell into the enemy’s hands. A
warrior was allowed _harakiri_ much as a Prussian officer in disgrace
was sometimes allowed to shoot himself in private. Those in authority
left a bottle of whiskey and a pistol on a table in his room after he
knew that he had no hope of saving his honor otherwise. For the Japanese
samurai, taking his own life under such circumstances was only a choice
of means; death was certain. In modern times suicide is a choice to die.
A man turns violence upon himself, often instead of assassinating
someone else. The act of suicide, which in feudal times was the final
statement of a man’s courage and resolution, has become today a chosen
self-destruction. During the last two generations, when Japanese have
felt that ‘the world tips,’ that ‘both terms of the equation’ are not
equivalent, that they need a ‘morning tub’ to wipe off defilements, they
have increasingly destroyed themselves instead of others.

Even suicide as a final argument to win victory for one’s own side,
though it occurs both in feudal and in modern times, has changed in this
same direction. A famous story of Tokugawa days tells of the old tutor,
high in the Shogunate council, who bared his body and placed his sword
in readiness for immediate harakiri in the presence of the whole council
and the Shogunate regent. The threat of suicide carried the day and he
thereby insured the succession of his candidate to the position of
Shogun. He got his way and there was no suicide. In Occidental
terminology, the tutor had blackmailed the opposition. In modern times,
however, such protest suicide is the act of a martyr not of a
negotiator. It is carried out after one has failed or to put oneself on
record as opposing some already signed agreement like the Naval Parity
Act. It is staged so that only the completed act itself, and not the
threat of suicide, can influence public opinion.

This growing tendency to strike at oneself when giri to one’s name is
threatened need not involve such extreme steps as suicide. Aggressions
directed inward may merely produce depression and lassitude and that
typical Japanese boredom that was so prevalent in the educated class.
There are good sociological reasons why this mood should have been
widespread among this particular class for the intelligentsia was
overcrowded and very insecurely placed in the hierarchy. Only a small
proportion of them could satisfy their ambitions. In the
nineteen-thirties, too, they were doubly vulnerable because the
authorities feared they were thinking ‘dangerous thoughts’ and held them
under suspicion. The Japanese intellectuals usually account for their
frustration by complaints about the confusions of Westernization, but
the explanation does not go far enough. The typical Japanese swing of
mood is from intense dedication to intense boredom, and the psychic
shipwreck which many intellectuals suffered was in the traditional
Japanese manner. Many of them saved themselves from it, too, in the
middle nineteen-thirties in traditional fashion: they embraced
nationalistic goals and turned the attack outward again, away from their
own breasts. In totalitarian aggression against outside nations they
could ‘find themselves’ again. They saved themselves from a bad mood and
felt a great new strength within them. They could not do it in personal
relationships but they believed they could as a conquering nation.

Now that the outcome of the war has proved this confidence mistaken,
lassitude is again a great psychic threat in Japan. They cannot easily
cope with it, whatever their intentions. It goes very deep. ‘No bombs
any more,’ one Japanese said in Tokyo; ‘the relief is wonderful. But we
are not fighting any more and there is no purpose. Everyone is in a
daze, not caring much how he does things. I am like that, my wife is
like that and the people in the hospital. All very slow about everything
we do, dazed. People complain now that the government is slow cleaning
up after the war and in providing relief, but I think the reason is that
all the government officials felt the same way as we did.’ This
listlessness is the kind of danger in Japan that it was in France after
liberation. In Germany in the first six or eight months after surrender
it was not a problem. In Japan it is. Americans can understand this
reaction well enough but it seems almost unbelievable to us that it
should go along with such friendliness to the conqueror. Almost
immediately it was clear that the Japanese people accepted the defeat
and all its consequences with extreme good will. Americans were welcomed
with bows and smiles, with handwavings and shouts of greeting. These
people were not sullen nor angry. They had, in the phrase the Emperor
used in announcing surrender, ‘accepted the impossible.’ Why then did
these people not set their national house in order? Under the terms of
occupation, they were given the opportunity to do it; there was no
village-by-village foreign occupation and the administration of affairs
was in their hands. The whole nation seemed to smile and wave greeting
rather than to manage their affairs. Yet this was the same nation which
had accomplished miracles of rehabilitation in the early days of Meiji,
which had prepared for military conquest with such energy in the
nineteen-thirties and whose soldiers had fought with such abandon,
island by island, throughout the Pacific.

They are indeed the same people. They are reacting in character. The
swing of mood that is natural to them is between intense effort and a
lassitude that is sheer marking time. The Japanese at the present moment
are chiefly conscious of defending their good name in defeat and they
feel they can do this by being friendly. As a corollary, many feel they
can do it most safely by being dependent. And it is an easy step to
feeling that effort is suspect and that it is better to mark time.
Lassitude spreads.

Yet the Japanese do not enjoy ennui. To ‘rouse oneself from lassitude,’
to ‘rouse others from lassitude’ is a constant call to the better life
in Japan, and it was often on the lips of their broadcasters even in
wartime. They campaign against their passivity in their own way. Their
newspapers in the spring of 1946 keep talking about what a blot it is on
the honor of Japan that ‘with the eyes of the whole world upon us,’ they
have not cleaned up the shambles of bombing and have not got certain
public utilities into operation. They complain about the lassitude of
the homeless families who congregate to sleep at night in the railway
stations where the Americans see them in their misery. The Japanese
understand such appeals to their good name. They hope too that as a
nation they will be able to put forward utmost efforts again in the
future to work for a respected place in the United Nations Organization.
That would be working for honor again, but in a new direction. If there
is peace among the Great Powers in the future, Japan could take this
road to self-respect.

For in Japan the constant goal is honor. It is necessary to command
respect. The means one uses to that end are tools one takes up and then
lays aside as circumstances dictate. When situations change, the
Japanese can change their bearings and set themselves on a new course.
Changing does not appear to them the moral issue that it does to
Westerners. We go in for ‘principles,’ for convictions on ideological
matters. When we lose, we are still of the same mind. Defeated Europeans
everywhere banded together in underground movements. Except for a few
diehards, the Japanese do not need to organize resistance movements and
underground opposition to the occupying forces of the American Army.
They feel no moral necessity to hold to the old line. From the first
months, single Americans traveled safely on the sardine-packed trams to
out-of-the-way corners of the country and were greeted with courtesy by
erstwhile nationalistic officials. There have been no vendettas. When
our jeeps drive through the villages the roads are lined with children
shouting ‘Hello’ and ‘Good-bye,’ and the mother waves her baby’s hand to
the American soldier when he is too small to do it by himself.

This right-about-face of the Japanese in defeat is hard for Americans to
take at face value. It is nothing we could do. It is even harder for us
to understand than the change of attitude in their prisoners of war in
our internment camps. For the prisoners regarded themselves as dead to
Japan, and we judged that we really did not know what ‘dead’ men might
be capable of. Very few of those Westerners who knew Japan predicted
that the same change of front characteristic of the prisoners of war
might be found in Japan, too, after the defeat. Most of them believed
that Japan ‘knew only victory or defeat,’ and that defeat would be in
her eyes an insult to be avenged by continued desperate violence. Some
believed that the national characteristics of the Japanese forbade their
acceptance of any terms of peace. Such students of Japan had not
understood giri. They had singled out, from among all the alternative
procedures that give one an honorable name, the one conspicuous
traditional technique of vengeance and aggression. They did not allow
for the Japanese habit of taking another tack. They confused Japanese
ethics of aggression with European forms, according to which any person
or nation who fights has first to be convinced of the eternal
righteousness of its cause and draw strength from reservoirs of hatred
or of moral indignation.

The Japanese derive their aggression in a different way. They need
terribly to be respected in the world. They saw that military might had
earned respect for great nations and they embarked on a course to equal
them. They had to out-Herod Herod because their resources were slight
and their technology was primitive. When they failed in their great
effort, it meant to them that aggression was not the road to honor after
all. Giri had always meant equally the use of aggression or the
observance of respect relations, and in defeat the Japanese turned from
one to the other, apparently with no sense of psychic violence to
themselves. The goal is still their good name.

Japan has behaved in similar fashion on other occasions in her history
and it has always been confusing to Westerners. The curtain had hardly
risen after Japan’s long feudal isolation when in 1862 an Englishman
named Richardson was murdered in Satsuma. The fief of Satsuma was a
hotbed of agitation against the white barbarians, and Satsuma samurai
were known as the most arrogant and warlike of all Japan. The British
sent a punitive expedition and bombarded Kagoshima, an important Satsuma
port. The Japanese had made firearms all through the Tokugawa Era, but
they were copied from antique Portuguese guns, and Kagoshima was of
course no match for British warships. The consequences of this
bombardment, however, were surprising. Satsuma, instead of vowing
eternal vengeance upon the British, sought British friendship. They had
seen the greatness of their opponents and they sought to learn from
them. They entered into trade relations with them and in the following
year they established a college in Satsuma where, as a contemporary
Japanese wrote, ‘The mysteries of Occidental science and learning were
taught. . . . The friendship which had sprung out of the Namamuga Affair
continued to grow.’[5] The Namamuga Affair was Britain’s punitive
expedition against them and the bombardment of their port.

This was not an isolated case. The other fief which vied with Satsuma as
the most warlike and virulent haters of foreigners was Choshu. Both
fiefs were leaders in fomenting the restoration of the Emperor. The
officially powerless court of the Emperor issued an imperial rescript
naming the date of May 11, 1863, at which time the Shogun was directed
to have expelled all barbarians from the soil of Japan. The Shogunate
ignored the order but not Choshu. It opened fire from its forts upon
Western merchant ships passing off its coast through the Strait of
Shimonoseki. The Japanese guns and ammunition were too primitive to
injure the ships but to teach Choshu a lesson an international Western
war squadron soon demolished the forts. The same strange consequences of
bombardment followed as in Satsuma, and this in spite of the fact that
the Western powers demanded an indemnity of three million dollars. As
Norman says of the Satsuma and Choshu incidents, ‘Whatever the
complexity of motive behind the volte-face executed by these leading
anti-foreign clans, one cannot but respect the realism and equanimity
which this action attests.’[6]

This kind of situational realism is the bright face of Japanese
giri-to-one’s-name. Like the moon, giri has its bright face and its dark
face. It was its dark aspect which made Japan take events like the
American Exclusion Act and the Naval Parity Treaty as such extravagant
national insults and which goaded her to her disastrous war program. It
is its bright aspect which made possible the good will with which she
accepted the consequences of surrender in 1945. Japan is still acting in
character.

Modern Japanese writers and publicists have made a selection from among
the obligations of giri and presented them to Westerners as the cult of
_bushido_, literally The Way of the Samurai. This has been misleading
for several reasons. Bushido is a modern official term which has not the
deep folk-feeling behind it that ‘cornered with giri,’ ‘merely for
giri,’ ‘working strongly for giri’ have in Japan. Nor does it cover the
complexities and the ambivalences of giri. It is a publicist’s
inspiration. Besides, it became a slogan of the nationalists and
militarists and the concept is discredited with the discrediting of
those leaders. That will by no means mean that the Japanese will no
longer ‘know giri.’ It is more important than ever for Westerners to
understand what giri means in Japan. The identification of bushido with
the Samurai was also a source of misunderstanding. Giri is a virtue
common to all classes. Like all other obligations and disciplines in
Japan giri is ‘heavier’ as one goes up the social scale but it is
required at all levels of society. At least the Japanese think it is
heavier for the samurai. A non-Japanese observer is just as likely to
feel that giri requires most of the common people because the rewards
for conforming seem to him less. To the Japanese it is sufficient reward
to be respected in his world and ‘a man who does not know giri’ is still
a ‘miserable wretch.’ He is scorned and ostracized by his fellows.

-----

[1] For a summary see _The Japanese: Character and Morale_
(mimeographed). Prepared by Ladislas Farago for the Committee for
National Morale, 9 East 89th Street, New York City.

[2] Markino, Yoshio, _When I was a Child_, 1912, pp. 159-160. Italics in
the original.

[3] Nitobe, Inazo, _Bushido, The Soul of Japan_, 1900, p. 83.

[4] Okakura, Yoshisaburo, _The Life and Thought of Japan_. London, 1913,
p. 17.

[5] Norman, E. H., _op. cit._, pp. 44-45, and n. 85.

[6] _Op. cit._, p. 45.


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