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09：「人間の楽しみ」の領域

池田光穂

9


                      The Circle of Human Feelings

An Ethical Code like Japan’s, which requires such extreme repayment of
obligations and such drastic renunciations, might consistently have
branded personal desire as an evil to be rooted out from the human
breast. This is the classical Buddhist doctrine and it is therefore
doubly surprising that the Japanese code is so hospitable to the
pleasures of the five senses. In spite of the fact that Japan is one of
the great Buddhist nations of the world, her ethics at this point
contrast sharply with the teachings of Gautama Buddha and of the holy
books of Buddhism. The Japanese do not condemn self-gratification. They
are not Puritans. They consider physical pleasures good and worthy of
cultivation. They are sought and valued. Nevertheless, they have to be
kept in their place. They must not intrude upon the serious affairs of
life.

Such a code keeps life at a particularly high tension. A Hindu finds it
far easier to see these consequences of Japanese acceptance of the
pleasures of the senses than an American does. Americans do not believe
that pleasures have to be learned; a man may refuse to indulge in
sensual pleasures, but he is resisting a known temptation. Pleasures,
however, are learned much as duties are. In many cultures the pleasures
themselves are not taught and it therefore becomes particularly easy for
people to devote themselves to self-sacrificing duty. Even physical
attraction between men and women has sometimes been minimized till it
hardly threatens the smooth course of family life, which in such
countries is based on quite other considerations. The Japanese make life
hard for themselves by cultivating physical pleasures and then setting
up a code in which these pleasures are the very things which must not be
indulged as a serious way of life. They cultivate the pleasures of the
flesh like fine arts, and then, when they are fully savored, they
sacrifice them to duty.

One of the best loved minor pleasures of the body in Japan is the hot
bath. For the poorest rice farmer and the meanest servant, just as much
as for the rich aristocrat, the daily soak in superlatively heated water
is a part of the routine of every late afternoon. The commonest tub is a
wooden barrel with a charcoal fire under it to keep the water heated to
110 degrees Fahrenheit and over. People wash and rinse themselves all
over before they get into the tub and then give themselves over to their
enjoyment of the warmth and relaxation of soaking. They sit in the bath
with their knees drawn up in fetal position, the water up to their
chins. They value the daily bath for cleanliness’ sake as Americans do,
but they add to this value a fine art of passive indulgence which is
hard to duplicate in the bathing habits of the rest of the world. The
older one is, they say, the more it grows on one.

There are all sorts of ways of minimizing the cost and trouble of
providing these baths, but baths they must have. In the cities and towns
there are great public baths like swimming pools where one may go and
soak and visit with one’s chance neighbor in the water. In the farm
villages several women will take turns preparing the bath in the
yard—it is no part of Japanese modesty to avoid the public gaze while
bathing—and their families will use it in turn. Always any family even
in fine homes go into the family tub in strict succession: the guest,
the grandfather, the father, the eldest son and so on down to the lowest
servant of the family. They come out lobster-red, and the family gathers
together to enjoy the most relaxed hour of the day before the evening
meal.

Just as the hot bath is so keenly appreciated a pleasure, so ‘hardening
oneself’ traditionally included the most excessive routine of cold
douches. This routine is often called ‘winter exercises’ or ‘the cold
austerity’ and is still done, but not in the old traditional form. That
called for going out before dawn to sit under waterfalls of cold
mountain streams. Even pouring freezing water over oneself on winter
nights in their unheated Japanese houses is no slight austerity and
Percival Lowell describes the custom as it existed in the
eighteen-nineties. Men who aspired to special powers of curing or
prophecy—but who did not then become priests—practiced the
cold-austerity before they went to bed and rose again at two A.M. to do
it again at the hour when ‘the gods were bathing.’ They repeated when
they rose in the morning and again at midday and at nightfall.[1] The
before-dawn austerity was particularly popular with people who were
merely in earnest about learning to play a musical instrument or to
prepare for some other secular career. To harden oneself, one may expose
oneself to any cold and it is regarded as particularly virtuous for
children practicing calligraphy to finish their practice periods with
their fingers numbed and chilblained. Modern elementary schools are
unheated and a great virtue is made of this for it hardens the children
for later difficulties of life. Westerners have been more impressed with
the constant colds and snotty noses which the custom certainly does
nothing to prevent.

Sleeping is another favored indulgence. It is one of the most
accomplished arts of the Japanese. They sleep with complete relaxation,
in any position, and under circumstances we regard as sheer
impossibilities. This has surprised many Western students of the
Japanese. Americans make insomnia almost a synonym for psychic
tenseness, and according to our standards there are high tensions in the
Japanese character. But they make child’s play of good sleeping. They go
to bed early, too, and it is hard to find another Oriental nation that
does that. The villagers, all asleep shortly after nightfall, are not
following our maxim of storing up energy for the morrow for they do not
have that kind of calculus. One Westerner, who knew them well, wrote:
‘When one goes to Japan one must cease to believe that it is a bounden
duty to prepare for work tomorrow by sleep and rest tonight. One is to
consider sleep apart from questions of recuperation, rest and
recreation.’ It should stand, just as a proposal to work should, too,
‘on its own legs, having no reference to any known fact of life or
death.’[2] Americans are used to rating sleeping as something one does
to keep up one’s strength and the first thought of most of us when we
wake up in the morning is to calculate how many hours we slept that
night. The length of our slumbers tells us how much energy and
efficiency we will have that day. The Japanese sleep for other reasons.
They like sleeping and when the coast is clear they gladly go to sleep.

By the same token they are ruthless in sacrificing sleep. A student
preparing for examinations works night and day, uncurbed by any notion
that sleep would equip him better for the test. In Army training, sleep
is simply something to sacrifice to discipline. Colonel Harold Doud,
attached to the Japanese Army from 1934 to 1935, tells of his
conversation with a Captain Teshima. During peacetime maneuvers the
troops ‘twice went three days and two nights without sleep except what
could be snatched during ten-minute halts and brief lulls in the
situation. Sometimes the men slept while walking. Our junior lieutenant
caused much amusement by marching squarely into a lumber pile on the
side of the road while sound asleep.’ When camp was finally struck,
still no one got a chance to sleep; they were all assigned to outpost
and patrol duty. ‘“But why not let some of them sleep?” I asked. “Oh
no!” he said. “That is not necessary. They already know how to sleep.
They need training in how to stay awake.”’[3] That puts the Japanese
view in a nutshell.

Eating, like warmth and sleeping, is both a relaxation freely enjoyed as
pleasure, and a discipline imposed for hardening. As a ritual of leisure
the Japanese indulge in endless course meals at which one teaspoonful of
food is brought in at a time and the food is praised as much for its
looks as for its flavor. But otherwise discipline is stressed. ‘Quick
eating, quick defecating, those together make one of the highest
Japanese virtues,’ Eckstein quotes a Japanese villager as saying.[4]
‘Eating is not regarded as an act of any importance. . . . Eating is
necessary to sustain life, _therefore_ it should be as brief a business
as possible. Children, especially boys, are not as in Europe, urged to
eat slowly but are encouraged to eat as quickly as possible’ (italics
mine).[5] In the monasteries of the Buddhist faith where priests are
under discipline, they ask in their grace before meals that they may
remember that food is just a medicine; the idea is that those who are
hardening themselves should ignore food as a pleasure and regard it only
as a necessity.

According to Japanese ideas, involuntary deprivation of food is an
especially good test of how ‘hardened’ one is. Like foregoing warmth and
sleeping, so, too, being without food is a chance to demonstrate that
one can ‘take it,’ and, like the samurai, ‘hold a toothpick between
one’s teeth.’ If one meets this test when one goes without food, one’s
strength is raised by one’s victory of the spirit, not lowered by the
lack of calories and vitamins. The Japanese do not recognize the
one-to-one correspondence which Americans postulate between body
nourishment and body strength. Therefore, Radio Tokyo could tell people
in raid shelters during the war that calisthenics would make hungry
people strong and vigorous again.

Romantic love is another ‘human feeling’ which the Japanese cultivate.
It is thoroughly at home in Japan, no matter how much it runs counter to
their forms of marriage and their obligations to the family. Their
novels are full of it, and, as in French literature, the principals are
already married. Double love-suicides are favorite themes in reading and
conversation. The tenth century _Tale of Genji_ is as elaborate a novel
of romantic love as any great novel any country in the world has ever
produced, and tales of the loves of the lords and the samurai of the
feudal period are of this same romantic sort. It is a chief theme of
their contemporary novels. The contrast with Chinese literature is very
great. The Chinese save themselves a great deal of trouble by
underplaying romantic love and erotic pleasures, and their family life
has consequently a remarkably even tenor.

Americans can, of course, understand the Japanese better than they can
the Chinese on this score but this understanding nevertheless goes only
a little way. We have many taboos on erotic pleasure which the Japanese
do not have. It is an area about which they are not moralistic and we
are. Sex, like any other ‘human feeling,’ they regard as thoroughly good
in its minor place in life. There is nothing evil about ‘human feelings’
and therefore no need to be moralistic about sex pleasures. They still
comment upon the fact that Americans and British consider pornographic
some of their cherished books of pictures and see the Yoshiwara—the
district of geisha girls and prostitutes—in such a lurid light. The
Japanese, even during early years of Western contact, were very
sensitive about this foreign criticism and passed laws to bring their
practices more nearly into conformity with Western standards. But no
legal regulations have been able to bridge the cultural differences.

Educated Japanese are thoroughly aware that English and Americans see
immorality and obscenity where they do not, but they are not as
conscious of the chasm between our conventional attitudes and their
tenet that ‘human feelings’ should not intrude upon serious affairs of
life. It is, however, a major source of our difficulty in understanding
Japanese attitudes about love and erotic pleasure. They fence off one
province which belongs to the wife from another which belongs to erotic
pleasure. Both provinces are equally open and aboveboard. The two are
not divided from each other as in American life by the fact that one is
what a man admits to the public and the other is surreptitious. They are
separate because one is in the circle of a man’s major obligations and
the other in the circle of minor relaxation. This way of mapping out
‘proper place’ to each area makes the two as separate for the ideal
father of a family as it does for the man about town. The Japanese set
up no ideal, as we do in the United States, which pictures love and
marriage as one and the same thing. We approve of love just in
proportion as it is the basis of one’s choice of a spouse. ‘Being in
love’ is our most approved reason for marriage. After marriage a
husband’s physical attraction to another woman is humiliating to his
wife because he bestows elsewhere something that rightly belongs to her.
The Japanese judge differently. In the choice of a spouse the young man
should bow to his parent’s choice and marry blind. He must observe great
formality in his relations with his wife. Even in the give and take of
family life their children do not see an erotically affectionate gesture
pass between them. ‘The real aim of marriage is regarded in this
country,’ as a contemporary Japanese says in one of their magazines, ‘as
the procreation of children and thereby to assure the continuity of the
family life. Any purpose other than this must simply serve to pervert
the true meaning of it.’

But this does not mean that a man remains virtuous by limiting himself
to such a life. If he can afford it he keeps a mistress. In strong
contrast to China he does not add to his family this woman who has
caught his fancy. If he did that, it would confuse the two areas of life
which should be kept separate. The girl may be a geisha, highly trained
in music and dance and massage and the arts of entertainment, or she may
be a prostitute. In any case he signs a contract with the house where
she is employed and this contract protects the girl from abandonment and
ensures her a financial return. He sets her up in an establishment of
her own. Only in highly exceptional cases when the girl has a child whom
the man wishes to bring up with his own children does he bring her into
his home, and then she is designated as one of the servants, not as a
concubine. The child calls the legal wife ‘mother,’ and ties between the
real mother and her child are not acknowledged. The whole Oriental
arrangement of polygamy, which is so pronounced a traditional pattern in
China, is thus quite un-Japanese. The Japanese keep family obligations
and ‘human feelings’ even spatially apart.

Only the upper-class can afford to keep mistresses, but most men have at
some time visited geishas or prostitutes. Such visits are not in the
least surreptitious. A man’s wife may dress and prepare him for his
evening of relaxation. The house he visits may send the bill to his wife
and she pays it as a matter of course. She may be unhappy about it but
that is her own affair. A visit to the geisha house is more expensive
than a visit to a prostitute but the payment a man makes for the
privilege of such an evening does not include the right to make her a
sexual partner. What he gets is the pleasure of being entertained by
beautifully dressed and punctiliously mannered girls who have been
meticulously trained for their rôle. To gain access to a particular
geisha, the man would have to become her patron and sign a contract
according to which she would become his mistress, or he would have to
captivate her by his charms so that she gave herself to him of her own
free will. An evening with geisha girls, however, is no asexual affair.
Their dances, their repartee, their songs, their gestures are
traditionally suggestive and carefully calculated to express all that an
upper-class wife’s may not. They are ‘in the circle of human feelings’
and give relief from ‘the circle of _ko_.’ There is no reason not to
indulge oneself but the two spheres belong apart.

Prostitutes live in licensed houses, and after an evening with a geisha
a man may visit a prostitute if he wishes. The fee is low and men with
little money have to content themselves with this form of relaxation and
forego geishas. The pictures of the girls of the house are displayed
outside and men commonly spend a long time quite publicly studying the
pictures and making their choices. These girls have a low status and
they are not put on a pinnacle as the geishas are. They are most of them
daughters of the poor who have been sold to the establishment by their
families when they were hard-pressed for money, and they are not trained
in geisha arts of entertainment. In earlier days, before Japan realized
Western disapproval of the custom and ended it, the girls themselves
used to sit in public showing their impassive faces to customers
choosing their human wares. Their photographs are a substitution.

One of these girls may be chosen by a man who becomes her exclusive
patron and sets her up as a mistress after making a contract with the
house. Such girls are protected by the terms of the agreement. A man
may, however, take a servant girl or salesgirl as a mistress without
signing a contract and these ‘voluntary mistresses’ are the ones who are
most defenseless. They are precisely those girls who are most likely to
have been in love with their partners, but they are outside all the
recognized circles of obligation. When the Japanese read our tales and
poems of young mourning women ‘with my baby on my knee’ abandoned by
their lovers, they identify these mothers of illegitimate children with
their ‘voluntary mistresses.’

Homosexual indulgences are also part of traditional ‘human feelings.’ In
Old Japan these were the sanctioned pleasures of men of high status such
as the samurai and the priests. In the Meiji period when Japan made so
many of her customs illegal in her effort to win the approval of
Westerners, she ruled that this custom should be punishable by law. It
still falls, however, among those ‘human feelings’ about which
moralistic attitudes are inappropriate. It must be kept in its proper
place and must not interfere with carrying on the family. Therefore the
danger of a man or a woman’s ‘becoming’ a homosexual, as the Western
phrase has it, is hardly conceived, though a man can choose to become a
male geisha professionally. The Japanese are especially shocked at adult
passive homosexuals in the United States. Adult men in Japan would seek
out boy partners, for adults consider the passive rôle to be beneath
their dignity. The Japanese draw their own lines as to what a man can do
and retain his self-respect, but they are not the ones we draw.

The Japanese are not moralistic about autoerotic pleasures, either. No
people have ever had such paraphernalia for the purpose. In this field,
too, the Japanese tried to forestall foreign condemnation by eliminating
some of the more obvious publicity these objects received, but they do
not themselves feel that they are instruments of evil. The strong
Western attitude against masturbation, even stronger in most of Europe
than in the United States, is deeply imprinted on our consciousness
before we are grown up. A boy hears the whispered words that it makes a
man crazy or that it makes him bald. His mother has been watchful when
he was a baby, and perhaps she has made a great issue of it and
physically punished him. Perhaps she tied his hands. Perhaps she told
him God would punish him. Japanese babies and Japanese children do not
have these experiences and as adults they cannot therefore reproduce our
attitudes. Autoeroticism is a pleasure about which they feel no guilt
and they think it is sufficiently controlled by assigning it to its
minor place in a decorous life.

Intoxication is another of the permissible ‘human feelings.’ The
Japanese consider our American total abstinence pledges as one of the
strange vagaries of the Occident. So too they regard our local
agitations to vote our home area dry. Drinking _sake_ is a pleasure no
man in his right mind would deny himself. But alcohol belongs among the
minor relaxations and no man in his right mind, either, would become
obsessed by it. According to their way of thinking one does not fear to
‘become’ a drunkard any more than one fears to ‘become’ a homosexual,
and it is true that the compulsive drunkard is not a social problem in
Japan. Alcohol is a pleasant relaxation and one’s family and even the
public does not consider a man repulsive when he is under the influence
of liquor. He is not likely to be violent and certainly nobody thinks he
is going to beat up his children. A crying jag is quite common and
relaxation of the strict rules of Japanese posture and gestures is
universal. At urban _sake_ parties men like to sit in each other’s laps.

Conventional Japanese strictly separate drinking from eating. As soon as
a man tastes rice at a village party where _sake_ is served it means
that he has stopped drinking. He has stepped over into another ‘circle’
and he keeps them separate. At home he may have _sake_ after his meal
but he does not eat and drink at the same time. He gives himself up in
turn to one or the other enjoyment.

These Japanese views on ‘human feelings’ have several consequences. It
cuts the ground out from under the Occidental philosophy of two powers,
the flesh and the spirit, continually fighting for supremacy in each
human life. In Japanese philosophy the flesh is not evil. Enjoying its
possible pleasures is no sin. The spirit and the body are not opposing
forces in the universe and the Japanese carry this tenet to a logical
conclusion: the world is not a battlefield between good and evil. Sir
George Sansom writes: ‘Throughout their history the Japanese seem to
have retained in some measure this incapacity to discern, or this
reluctance to grapple with, the problem of evil.’[6] They have in fact
constantly repudiated it as a view of life. They believe that man has
two souls, but they are not his good impulses fighting with his bad.
They are the ‘gentle’ soul and the ‘rough’ soul and there are occasions
in every man’s—and every nation’s—life when he should be ‘gentle’ and
when he should be ‘rough.’ One soul is not destined for hell and one for
heaven. They are both necessary and good on different occasions.

Even their gods are conspicuously good-evil in this same fashion. Their
most popular god is Susanowo, ‘His Swift Impetuous Male Augustness,’
brother of the Sun Goddess, whose outrageous behavior toward his sister
would in Western mythology identify him as a devil. His sister tries to
throw him out of her rooms because she suspects his motives in coming to
her. He behaves wantonly, scattering excrement over her dining hall
where she and her followers are celebrating the ceremony of the
First-fruits. He breaks down the divisions of the rice fields—a
terrible offense. As worst offense of all—and most enigmatic to a
Westerner—he flings into her chamber through a hole he makes in the
roof a piebald horse which he ‘had flayed with a backward flaying.’
Susanowo, for all these outrages, is tried by the gods, heavily fined
and banished from heaven to the Land of Darkness. But he remains a
favorite god of the Japanese pantheon and he duly receives his worship.
Such god-characters are common in world mythologies. In the higher
ethical religions, however, they have been excluded because a philosophy
of cosmic conflict between good and evil makes it more congenial to
separate supernatural beings into groups as different as black and
white.

The Japanese have always been extremely explicit in denying that virtue
consists in fighting evil. As their philosophers and religious teachers
have constantly said for centuries such a moral code is alien to Japan.
They are loud in proclaiming that this proves the moral superiority of
their own people. The Chinese, they say, had to have a moral code which
raised jen, just and benevolent behavior, to an absolute standard, by
applying which all men and acts could be found wanting if they fell
short. ‘A moral code was good for the Chinese whose inferior natures
required such artificial means of restraint.’ So wrote the great
eighteenth century Shintoist, Motoöri, and modern Buddhist teachers and
modern nationalistic leaders have written and spoken on the same theme.
Human nature in Japan, they say, is naturally good and to be trusted. It
does not need to fight an evil half of itself. It needs to cleanse the
windows of its soul and act with appropriateness on every different
occasion. If it has allowed itself to become ‘dirty,’ impurities are
readily removed and man’s essential goodness shines forth again.
Buddhist philosophy has gone farther in Japan than in any other nation
in teaching that every man is a potential Buddha and that rules of
virtue are not in the sacred writings but in what one uncovers within
one’s own enlightened and innocent soul. Why should one distrust what
one finds there? No evil is inherent in man’s soul. They have no
theology which cries with the Psalmist, ‘Behold, I was shapen in
iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me.’ They teach no doctrine
of the Fall of Man. ‘Human feelings’ are blessings which a man should
not condemn. Neither the philosopher nor the peasant does condemn them.

To American ears such doctrines seem to lead to a philosophy of
self-indulgence and license. The Japanese, however, as we have seen,
define the supreme task of life as fulfilling one’s obligations. They
fully accept the fact that repaying _on_ means sacrificing one’s
personal desires and pleasures. The idea that the pursuit of happiness
is a serious goal of life is to them an amazing and immoral doctrine.
Happiness is a relaxation in which one indulges when one can, but to
dignify it as something by which the State and family should be judged
is quite unthinkable. The fact that a man often suffers intensely in
living up to his obligations of chu and ko and giri is no more than they
expect. It makes life hard but they are prepared for that. They
constantly give up pleasures which they consider in no way evil. That
requires strength of will. But such strength is the most admired virtue
in Japan.

It is consistent with this Japanese position that the ‘happy ending’ is
so rare in their novels and plays. American popular audiences crave
solutions. They want to believe that people live happily ever after.
They want to know that people are rewarded for their virtue. If they
must weep at the end of a play, it must be because there was a flaw in
the hero’s character or because he was victimized by a bad social order.
But it is far pleasanter to have everything come out happily for the
hero. Japanese popular audiences sit dissolved in tears watching the
hero come to his tragic end and the lovely heroine slain because of a
turn of the wheel of fortune. Such plots are the high points of an
evening’s entertainment. They are what people go to the theater to see.
Even their modern movies are built on the theme of the sufferings of the
hero and the heroine. They are in love and give up their lovers. They
are happily married and one or the other commits suicide in the proper
performance of his duty. The wife who has devoted herself to rescuing
her husband’s career and arousing him to cultivate his great gifts as an
actor hides herself in the great city on the eve of his success to free
him for his new life and dies uncomplainingly in poverty on the day of
his great triumph. There need be no happy ending. Pity and sympathy for
the self-sacrificing hero and heroine has full right of way. Their
suffering is no judgment of God upon them. It shows that they fulfilled
their duty at all costs and allowed nothing—not abandonment or sickness
or death—to divert them from the true path.

Their modern war films are in the same tradition. Americans who see
these movies often say that they are the best pacifist propaganda they
ever saw. This is a characteristic American reaction because the movies
are wholly concerned with the sacrifice and suffering of war. They do
not play up military parades and bands and prideful showings of fleet
maneuvers or big guns. Whether they deal with the Russo-Japanese War or
the China Incident, they starkly insist upon the monotonous routine of
mud and marching, the sufferings of lowly fighting, the inconclusiveness
of campaigns. Their curtain scenes are not victory or even banzai
charges. They are overnight halts in some featureless Chinese town deep
in mud. Or they show maimed, halt and blind representatives of three
generations of a Japanese family, survivors of three wars. Or they show
the family at home, after the death of the soldier, mourning the loss of
husband and father and breadwinner and gathering themselves together to
go on without him. The stirring background of Anglo-American ‘Cavalcade’
movies is all absent. They do not even dramatize the theme of
rehabilitation of wounded veterans. Not even the purposes for which the
war was fought are mentioned. It is enough for the Japanese audience
that all the people on the screen have repaid _on_ with everything that
was in them, and these movies therefore in Japan were propaganda of the
militarists. Their sponsors knew that Japanese audiences were not
stirred by them to pacifism.

-----

[1] Lowell, Percival, _Occult Japan_, 1895, pp. 106-121.

[2] Watson, W. Petrie, _The Future of Japan_, 1907.

[3] _How the Jap Army Fights_, articles from the _Infantry Journal_
published as Penguin Books, 1942, pp 54-55.

[4] Eckstein, G., _In Peace Japan Breeds War_, 1943, p. 153.

[5] Nohara, K., _The True Face of Japan_. London, 1936, p. 140.

[6] Sansom, _op. cit._, 1931, p. 51.


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