Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation

Otherwise the regimentation of society resembled that of all antique civilizations of the militant type,—all action being both positively and negatively regulated. The household ruled the person; the five-family group; the household; the community, the group; the lord of the soil, the community; the Shogun, the lord. Over the whole body of the producing classes, two million samurai had power of life and death; over these samurai the daimyo held a like power; and the daimyo were subject to the Shogun. [252] Nominally the Shogun was subject to the Emperor, but not in fact: military usurpation disturbed and shifted the natural order of the higher responsibility. However, from the nobility downwards, the regulative discipline was much reinforced by this change in government. Among the producing classes there were countless combinations—guilds of all sorts; but these were only despotisms within despotisms—despotisms of the communistic order; each member being governed by the will of the rest; and enterprise, whether commercial or industrial, being impossible outside of some corporation…. We have already seen that the individual was bound to the commune—could not leave it without a permit, could not marry out of it. We have seen also that the stranger was a stranger in the old Greek and Roman sense,—that is to say an enemy, a hostis,—and could enter another community only by being religiously adopted into it.

Of course such a society had nothing in common with any modern form of Occidental civilization. It was a huge mass of clan-groups, loosely united under a duarchy, in which the military head was omnipotent, and the religious head only an object of [253] worship,—the living symbol of a cult. However this organization might outwardly resemble what we are accustomed to call feudalism, its structure was rather like that of ancient Egyptian or Peruvian society,—minus the priestly hierarchy. The supreme figure is not an Emperor in our meaning of the word,—not a king of kings and viceregent of heaven,—but a God incarnate, a race-divinity, an Inca descended from the Sun. About his sacred person, we see the tribes ranged in obeisance,—each tribe, nevertheless, maintaining its own ancestral cult; and the clans forming these tribes, and the communities forming these clans, and the households forming these communities, have all their separate cults; and out of the mass of these cults have been derived the customs and the laws. Yet everywhere the customs and the laws differ more or less, because of the variety of their origins: they have this only in common,—that they exact the most humble and implicit obedience, and regulate every detail of private and public life. Personality is wholly suppressed by coercion; and the coercion is chiefly from within, not from without,—the life of every individual being so ordered by the will of the rest as to render free action, free speaking, or free thinking, out of the question.

This means something incomparably harsher than the socialistic tyranny of early Greek society: it means religious communism doubled with a military despotism of [254] the most terrible kind. The individual did not legally exist,—except for punishment; and from the whole of the producing-classes, whether serfs or freemen, the most servile submission was ruthlessly exacted.

It is difficult to believe that any intelligent man of modern times could endure such conditions and live (except under the protection of some powerful ruler, as in the case of the English pilot Will Adams, created a samurai by Iyeyasu): the incessant and multiform constraint upon mental and moral life would of itself be enough to kill…. Those who write to-day about the extraordinary capacity of the Japanese for organization, and about the "democratic spirit" of the people as natural proof of their fitness for representative government in the Western sense, mistake appearances for realities. The truth is that the extraordinary capacity of the Japanese for communal organization, is the strongest possible evidence of their unfitness for any modern democratic form of government. Superficially the difference between Japanese social organization, and local self-government in the modern American, or the English colonial meaning of the term, appears slight; and we may justly admire the perfect self-discipline of a Japanese community. But the real difference between the two is fundamental, prodigious,—measurable only by thousands of years. It is the difference between compulsory and free [255] cooperation,—the difference between the most despotic form of communism, founded upon the most ancient form of religion, and the most highly evolved form of industrial union, with unlimited individual right of competition.

There exists a popular error to the effect that what we call communism and socialism in Western civilization are modern growths, representing aspiration toward some perfect form of democracy. As a matter of fact these movements represent reversion,—reversion toward the primitive conditions of human society. Under every form of ancient despotism we find exactly the same capacity of self-government among the people: it was manifested by the old Egyptians and Peruvians as well as by the early Greeks and Romans; it is exhibited to-day by Hindoo and Chinese communities; it may be studied in Siamese or Annamese villages quite as well as in Japan. It means a religious communistic despotism,—a supreme social tyranny suppressing personality, forbidding enterprise, and making competition a public offence. Such self-government also has its advantages: it was perfectly adapted to the requirements of Japanese life so long as the nation could remain isolated from the rest of the world. Yet it must be obvious that any society whose ethical traditions forbid the individual to profit at the cost of his fellow-men will be placed at an enormous disadvantage when forced into the [256] industrial struggle for existence against communities whose self-government permits of the greatest possible personal freedom, and the widest range of competitive enterprise.

We might suppose that perpetual and universal coercion, moral and physical, would have brought about a state of universal sameness,—a dismal uniformity and monotony in all life's manifestations. But such monotony existed only as to the life of the commune, not as to that of the race. The most wonderful variety characterized this quaint civilization, as it also characterized the old Greek civilization, and for precisely the same reasons. In every patriarchal civilization ruled by ancestor-worship, all tendency to absolute sameness, to general uniformity, is prevented by the character of the aggregate itself, which never becomes homogeneous and plastic. Every unit of that aggregate, each one of the multitude of petty despotisms composing it, most jealously guards its own particular traditions and customs, and remains self-sufficing. Hence results, sooner or later, incomparable variety of detail, small detail, artistic, industrial, architectural, mechanical. In Japan such differentiation and specialization was thus maintained, that you will hardly find in the whole country even two villages where the customs, industries, and methods of production are exactly the same…. The customs [257] of the fishing-villages will, perhaps, best illustrate what I mean. In every coast district the various fishing-settlements have their own traditional ways of constructing nets and boats, and their own particular methods of handling them.

Now, in the time of the great tidal-wave of 1896, when thirty thousand people perished, and scores of coast-villages were wrecked, large sums of money were collected in Kobe and elsewhere for the benefit of the survivors; and well-meaning foreigners attempted to supply the want of boats and fishing implements by purchasing quantities of locally made nets and boats, and sending them to the afflicted districts. But it was found that these presents were of no use to the men of the northern provinces, who had been accustomed to boats and nets of a totally different kind; and it was further discovered that every fishing-hamlet had special requirements of its own in this regard…. Now the differentiations of habit and custom, thus exhibited in the life of the fishing-communities, is paralleled in many crafts and callings. The way of building houses, and of roofing them, differs in almost every province, also the methods of agriculture and of horticulture, the manner of making wells, the methods of weaving and lacquering and pottery-making and tile-baking. Nearly every town and village of importance boasts of some special production, bearing the name of the place, and unlike anything made elsewhere…. [258] No doubt the ancestral cults helped to conserve and to develop such local specialization of industries: the craft-ancestors, the patron-gods of the guild, were supposed to desire that the work of their descendants and worshippers should maintain a particular character of its own.

Though individual enterprise was checked by communal regulation, the specialization of local production was encouraged by difference of cults. Family-conservatism or guild-conservatism would tolerate small improvements or modifications suggested by local experience, but would be wary, perhaps superstitious likewise, about accepting the results of strange experience.

Still, for the Japanese themselves, not the least pleasure of travel in Japan is the pleasure of studying the curious variety in local production,—the pleasure of finding the novel, the unexpected, the unimagined. Even those arts or industries of Old Japan, primarily borrowed from Korea or from China, appear to have developed and conserved innumerable queer forms under the influence of the numberless local cults.