Books: Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation

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[Transcriber's Note: Page numbers are retained in square brackets.]

JAPAN
AN ATTEMPT AT INTERPRETATION

BY LAFCADIO HEARN

1904

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. DIFFICULTIES.........................1

II. STRANGENESS AND CHARM................5

III. THE ANCIENT CULT....................21

IV. THE RELIGION OF THE HOME............33

V. THE JAPANESE FAMILY.................55

VI. THE COMMUNAL CULT...................81

VII. DEVELOPMENTS OF SHINTO.............107

VIII. WORSHIP AND PURIFICATION...........133

IX. THE RULE OF THE DEAD...............157

X. THE INTRODUCTION OF BUDDHISM.......183

XI. THE HIGHER BUDDHISM................207

XII. THE SOCIAL ORGANIZATION............229

XIII. THE RISE OF THE MILITARY POWER.....259

XIV. THE RELIGION OF LOYALTY............283

XV. THE JESUIT PERIL...................303

XVI. FEUDAL INTEGRATION.................343

XVII. THE SHINTO REVIVAL.................367

XVIII. SURVIVALS..........................381

XIX. MODERN RESTRAINTS..................395

XX. OFFICIAL EDUCATION.................419

XXI. INDUSTRIAL DANGER..................443

XXII. REFLECTIONS........................457

APPENDIX...........................481

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES..............487

INDEX..............................489

"Perhaps all very marked national characters can be traced back
to a time of rigid and pervading discipline"--WALTER BAGEHOT.

[1]
DIFFICULTIES

A thousand books have been written about Japan; but among
these,--setting aside artistic publications and works of a purely
special character,--the really precious volumes will be found to
number scarcely a score. This fact is due to the immense difficulty
of perceiving and comprehending what underlies the surface of
Japanese life. No work fully interpreting that life,--no work
picturing Japan within and without, historically and socially,
psychologically and ethically,--can be written for at least another
fifty years. So vast and intricate the subject that the united labour
of a generation of scholars could not exhaust it, and so difficult
that the number of scholars willing to devote their time to it must
always be small. Even among the Japanese themselves, no scientific
knowledge of their own history is yet possible; because the means of
obtaining that knowledge have not yet been prepared,--though
mountains of material have been collected. The want of any good
history upon a modern plan is but one of many discouraging wants.
Data for the study of sociology [2] are still inaccessible to the
Western investigator. The early state of the family and the clan; the
history of the differentiation of classes; the history of the
differentiation of political from religious law; the history of
restraints, and of their influence upon custom; the history of
regulative and cooperative conditions in the development of industry;
the history of ethics and aesthetics,--all these and many other
matters remain obscure.

This essay of mine can serve in one direction only as a contribution
to the Western knowledge of Japan. But this direction is not one of
the least important. Hitherto the subject of Japanese religion has
been written of chiefly by the sworn enemies of that religion: by
others it has been almost entirely ignored. Yet while it continues to
be ignored and misrepresented, no real knowledge of Japan is
possible. Any true comprehension of social conditions requires more
than a superficial acquaintance with religious conditions. Even the
industrial history of a people cannot be understood without some
knowledge of those religious traditions and customs which regulate
industrial life during the earlier stages of its development .... Or
take the subject of art. Art in Japan is so intimately associated
with religion that any attempt to study it without extensive
knowledge of the [3] beliefs which it reflects, were mere waste of
time. By art I do not mean only painting and sculpture, but every
kind of decoration, and most kinds of pictorial representation,--the
image on a boy's kite or a girl's battledore, not less than the
design upon a lacquered casket or enamelled vase,--the figures upon a
workman's towel not less than the pattern of the girdle of a
princess,--the shape of the paper-dog or the wooden rattle bought for
a baby, not less than the forms of those colossal Ni-O who guard the
gateways of Buddhist temples .... And surely there can never be any
just estimate made of Japanese literature, until a study of that
literature shall have been made by some scholar, not only able to
understand Japanese beliefs, but able also to sympathize with them to
at least the same extent that our great humanists can sympathize with
the religion of Euripides, of Pindar, and of Theocritus. Let us ask
ourselves how much of English or French or German or Italian
literature could be fully understood without the slightest knowledge
of the ancient and modern religions of the Occident. I do not refer
to distinctly religious creators,--to poets like Milton or
Dante,--but only to the fact that even one of Shakespeare's plays
must remain incomprehensible to a person knowing nothing either of
Christian beliefs or of the beliefs which preceded them. The real
mastery of any European tongue is impossible [4] without a knowledge
of European religion. The language of even the unlettered is full of
religious meaning: the proverbs and household-phrases of the poor,
the songs of the street, the speech of the workshop,--all are infused
with significations unimaginable by any one ignorant of the faith of
the people. Nobody knows this better than a man who has passed many
years in trying to teach English in Japan, to pupils whose faith is
utterly unlike our own, and whose ethics have been shaped by a
totally different social experience.

[5]

STRANGENESS AND CHARM

The majority of the first impressions of Japan recorded by travellers
are pleasurable impressions. Indeed, there must be something lacking,
or something very harsh, in the nature to which Japan can make no
emotional appeal. The appeal itself is the clue to a problem; and
that problem is the character of a race and of its civilization.

My own first impressions of Japan,--Japan as seen in the white
sunshine of a perfect spring day,--had doubtless much in common with
the average of such experiences. I remember especially the wonder and
the delight of the vision. The wonder and the delight have never
passed away: they are often revived for me even now, by some chance
happening, after fourteen years of sojourn. But the reason of these
feelings was difficult to learn,--or at least to guess; for I cannot
yet claim to know much about Japan .... Long ago the best and dearest
Japanese friend I ever had said to me, a little before his death:
"When you find, in four or five years more, that you cannot
understand the Japanese at [6] all, then you will begin to know
something about them." After having realized the truth of my friend's
prediction,--after having discovered that I cannot understand the
Japanese at all,--I feel better qualified to attempt this essay.

As first perceived, the outward strangeness of things in Japan
produces (in certain minds, at least) a queer thrill impossible to
describe,--a feeling of weirdness which comes to us only with the
perception of the totally unfamiliar. You find yourself moving
through queer small streets full of odd small people, wearing robes
and sandals of extraordinary shapes; and you can scarcely distinguish
the sexes at sight. The houses are constructed and furnished in ways
alien to all your experience; and you are astonished to find that you
cannot conceive the use or meaning of numberless things on display in
the shops. Food-stuffs of unimaginable derivation; utensils of
enigmatic forms; emblems incomprehensible of some mysterious belief;
strange masks and toys that commemorate legends of gods or demons;
odd figures, too, of the gods themselves, with monstrous ears and
smiling faces,--all these you may perceive as you wander about;
though you must also notice telegraph-poles and type-writers,
electric lamps and sewing machines. Everywhere on signs and hangings,
and on the backs of people passing by, you will observe wonderful
Chinese [7] characters; and the wizardry of all these texts makes the
dominant tone of the spectacle.

Further acquaintance with this fantastic world will in nowise
diminish the sense of strangeness evoked by the first vision of it.
You will soon observe that even the physical actions of the people
are unfamiliar,--that their work is done in ways the opposite of
Western ways. Tools are of surprising shapes, and are handled after
surprising methods: the blacksmith squats at his anvil, wielding a
hammer such as no Western smith could use without long practice; the
carpenter pulls, instead of pushing, his extraordinary plane and saw.
Always the left is the right side, and the right side the wrong; and
keys must be turned, to open or close a lock, in what we are
accustomed to think the wrong direction. Mr. Percival Lowell has
truthfully observed that the Japanese speak backwards, read
backwards, write backwards,--and that this is "only the abc of their
contrariety." For the habit of writing backwards there are obvious
evolutional reasons; and the requirements of Japanese calligraphy
sufficiently explain why the artist pushes his brush or pencil
instead of pulling it. But why, instead of putting the thread through
the eye of the needle, should the Japanese maiden slip the eye of the
needle over the point of the thread? Perhaps the most remarkable, out
of a hundred possible examples of antipodal action, is furnished by
the Japanese art of fencing. The [8] swordsman, delivering his blow
with both hands, does not pull the blade towards him in the moment of
striking, but pushes it from him. He uses it, indeed, as other
Asiatics do, not on the principle of the wedge, but of the saw; yet
there is a pushing motion where we should expect a pulling motion in
the stroke .... These and other forms of unfamiliar action are
strange enough to suggest the notion of a humanity even physically as
little related to us as might be the population of another
planet,--the notion of some anatomical unlikeness. No such
unlikeness, however, appears to exist; and all this oppositeness
probably implies, not so much the outcome of a human experience
entirely independent of Aryan experience, as the outcome of an
experience evolutionally younger than our own.

Yet that experience has been one of no mean order. Its
manifestations do not merely startle: they also delight. The delicate
perfection of workmanship, the light strength and grace of objects,
the power manifest to obtain the best results with the least
material, the achieving of mechanical ends by the simplest possible
means, the comprehension of irregularity as aesthetic value, the
shapeliness and perfect taste of everything, the sense displayed of
harmony in tints or colours,--all this must convince you at once that
our Occident has much to learn from this remote civilization, not
only in matters of art and taste, but in matters likewise of [9]
economy and utility. It is no barbarian fancy that appeals to you in
those amazing porcelains, those astonishing embroideries, those
wonders of lacquer and ivory and bronze, which educate imagination in
unfamiliar ways. No: these are the products of a civilization which
became, within its own limits, so exquisite that none but an artist
is capable of judging its manufactures,--a civilization that can be
termed imperfect only by those who would also term imperfect the
Greek civilization of three thousand years ago.

But the underlying strangeness of this world,--the psychological
strangeness,--is much more startling than the visible and
superficial. You begin to suspect the range of it after having
discovered that no adult Occidental can perfectly master the
language. East and West the fundamental parts of human nature--the
emotional bases of it--are much the same: the mental difference
between a Japanese and a European child is mainly potential. But with
growth the difference rapidly develops and widens, till it becomes,
in adult life, inexpressible. The whole of the Japanese mental
superstructure evolves into forms having nothing in common with
Western psychological development: the expression of thought becomes
regulated, and the expression of emotion inhibited in ways that
bewilder and astound. The ideas of this people are not our [10]
ideas; their sentiments are not our sentiments their ethical life
represents for us regions of thought and emotion yet unexplored, or
perhaps long forgotten. Any one of their ordinary phrases, translated
into Western speech, makes hopeless nonsense; and the literal
rendering into Japanese of the simplest English sentence would
scarcely be comprehended by any Japanese who had never studied a
European tongue. Could you learn all the words in a Japanese
dictionary, your acquisition would not help you in the least to make
yourself understood in speaking, unless you had learned also to think
like a Japanese,--that is to say, to think backwards, to think
upside-down and inside-out, to think in directions totally foreign to
Aryan habit. Experience in the acquisition of European languages can
help you to learn Japanese about as much as it could help you to
acquire the language spoken by the inhabitants of Mars. To be able to
use the Japanese tongue as a Japanese uses it, one would need to be
born again, and to have one's mind completely reconstructed, from the
foundation upwards. It is possible that a person of European
parentage, born in Japan, and accustomed from infancy to use the
vernacular, might retain in after-life that instinctive knowledge
which could alone enable him to adapt his mental relations to the
relations of any Japanese environment. There is actually an
Englishman named Black, born in Japan, whose proficiency [11] in the
language is proved by the fact that he is able to earn a fair income
as a professional storyteller (hanashika). But this is an
extraordinary case .... As for the literary language, I need only
observe that to make acquaintance with it requires very much more
than a knowledge of several thousand Chinese characters. It is safe
to say that no Occidental can undertake to render at sight any
literary text laid before him--indeed the number of native scholars
able to do so is very small;--and although the learning displayed in
this direction by various Europeans may justly compel our admiration,
the work of none could have been given to the world without Japanese
help.

But as the outward strangeness of Japan proves to be full of beauty,
so the inward strangeness appears to have its charm,--an ethical
charm reflected in the common life of the people. The attractive
aspects of that life do not indeed imply, to the ordinary observer, a
psychological differentiation measurable by scores of centuries: only
a scientific mind, like that of Mr. Percival Lowell, immediately
perceives the problem presented. The less gifted stranger, if
naturally sympathetic, is merely pleased and puzzled, and tries to
explain, by his own experience of happy life on the other side of the
world, the social conditions that charm him. Let us suppose that he
has the good fortune of being able to [12] live for six months or a
year in some old-fashioned town of the interior. From the beginning
of this sojourn he call scarcely fail to be impressed by the apparent
kindliness and joyousness of the existence about him. In the
relations of the people to each other, as well as in all their
relations to himself, he will find a constant amenity, a tact, a
good-nature such as he will elsewhere have met with only in the
friendship of exclusive circles. Everybody greets everybody with
happy looks and pleasant words; faces are always smiling; the
commonest incidents of everyday life are transfigured by a courtesy
at once so artless and so faultless that it appears to spring
directly from the heart, without any teaching. Under all
circumstances a certain outward cheerfulness never falls: no matter
what troubles may come,--storm or fire, flood or earthquake,--the
laughter of greeting voices, the bright smile and graceful bow, the
kindly inquiry and the wish to please, continue to make existence
beautiful. Religion brings no gloom into this sunshine: before the
Buddhas and the gods folk smile as they pray; the temple-courts are
playgrounds for the children; and within the enclosure of the great
public shrines--which are places of festivity rather than of
solemnity--dancing-platforms are erected. Family existence would seem
to be everywhere characterized by gentleness: there is no visible
quarrelling, no loud harshness, no tears and reproaches. Cruelty,
even [13] to animals, appears to be unknown: one sees farmers, coming
to town, trudging patiently beside their horses or oxen, aiding their
dumb companions to bear the burden, and using no whips or goads.
Drivers or pullers of carts will turn out of their way, under the
most provoking circumstances, rather than overrun a lazy dog or a
stupid chicken .... For no inconsiderable time one may live in the
midst of appearances like these, and perceive nothing to spoil the
pleasure of the experience.

Of course the conditions of which I speak are now passing away; but
they are still to be found in the remoter districts. I have lived in
districts where no case of theft had occurred for hundreds of
years,--where the newly-built prisons of Meiji remained empty and
useless,--where the people left their doors unfastened by night as
well as by day. These facts are familiar to every Japanese. In such a
district, you might recognize that the kindness shown to you, as a
stranger, is the consequence of official command; but how explain the
goodness of the people to each other? When you discover no harshness,
no rudeness, no dishonesty, no breaking of laws, and learn that this
social condition has been the same for centuries, you are tempted to
believe that you have entered into the domain of a morally superior
humanity. All this soft urbanity, impeccable honesty, ingenuous
kindliness of speech and act, you might naturally interpret [14] as
conduct directed by perfect goodness of heart. And the simplicity
that delights you is no simplicity of barbarism. Here every one has
been taught; every one knows how to write and speak beautifully, how
to compose poetry, how to behave politely; there is everywhere
cleanliness and good taste; interiors are bright and pure; the daily
use of the hot bath is universal. How refuse to be charmed by a
civilization in which every relation appears to be governed by
altruism, every action directed by duty, and every object shaped by
art? You cannot help being delighted by such conditions, or feeling
indignant at hearing them denounced as "heathen." And according to
the degree of altruism within yourself, these good folk will be able,
without any apparent effort, to make you happy. The mere sensation of
the milieu is a placid happiness: it is like the sensation of a dream
in which people greet us exactly as we like to be greeted, and say to
us all that we like to hear, and do for us all that we wish to have
done,--people moving soundlessly through spaces of perfect repose,
all bathed in vapoury light. Yes--for no little time these fairy-folk
can give you all the soft bliss of sleep. But sooner or later, if you
dwell long with them, your contentment will prove to have much in
common with the happiness of dreams. You will never forget the
dream,--never; but it will lift at last, like those vapours of spring
which lend preternatural [15] loveliness to a Japanese landscape in
the forenoon of radiant days. Really you are happy because you have
entered bodily into Fairyland,--into a world that is not, and never
could be your own. You have been transported out of your own
century--over spaces enormous of perished time--into an era
forgotten, into a vanished age,--back to something ancient as Egypt
or Nineveh. That is the secret of the strangeness and beauty of
things,--the secret of the thrill they give,--the secret of the
elfish charm of the people and their ways. Fortunate mortal! the tide
of Time has turned for you! But remember that here all is
enchantment,--that you have fallen under the spell of the dead,--that
the lights and the colours and the voices must fade away at last into
emptiness and silence.

* * * * * *

Some of us, at least, have often wished that it were possible to live
for a season in the beautiful vanished world of Greek culture.
Inspired by our first acquaintance with the charm of Greek art and
thought, this wish comes to us even before we are capable of
imagining the true conditions of the antique civilization. If the
wish could be realized, we should certainly find it impossible to
accommodate ourselves to those conditions,--not so much because of
the difficulty of learning the environment, as because of the much
greater difficulty of feeling just as people used to feel some thirty
centuries [16] ago. In spite of all that has been done for Greek
studies since the Renaissance, we are still unable to understand many
aspects of the old Greek life: no modern mind can really feel, for
example, those sentiments and emotions to which the great tragedy of
Oedipus made appeal. Nevertheless we are much in advance of our
forefathers of the eighteenth century, as regards the knowledge of
Greek civilization. In the time of the French revolution, it was
thought possible to reestablish in France the conditions of a Greek
republic, and to educate children according to the system of Sparta.
To-day we are well aware that no mind developed by modern
civilization could find happiness under any of those socialistic
despotisms which existed in all the cities of the ancient world
before the Roman conquest. We could no more mingle with the old Greek
life, if it were resurrected for us,--no more become a part of
it,--than we could change our mental identities. But how much would
we not give for the delight of beholding it,--for the joy of
attending one festival in Corinth, or of witnessing the Pan-Hellenic
games? ... And yet, to witness the revival of some perished Greek
civilization,--to walk about the very Crotona of Pythagoras,--to
wander through the Syracuse of Theocritus,--were not any more of a
privilege than is the opportunity actually afforded us to study
Japanese life. Indeed, from the evolutional [17] point of view, it
were less of a privilege,--since Japan offers us the living spectacle
of conditions older, and psychologically much farther away from us,
than those of any Greek period with which art and literature have
made us closely acquainted.

The reader scarcely needs to be reminded that a civilization less
evolved than our own, and intellectually remote from us, is not on
that account to be regarded as necessarily inferior in all respects.
Hellenic civilization at its best represented an early stage of
sociological evolution; yet the arts which it developed still furnish
our supreme and unapproachable ideals of beauty. So, too, this much
more archaic civilization of Old Japan attained an average of
aesthetic and moral culture well worthy of our wonder and praise.
Only a shallow mind--a very shallow mind--will pronounce the best of
that culture inferior. But Japanese civilization is peculiar to a
degree for which there is perhaps no Western parallel, since it
offers us the spectacle of many successive layers of alien culture
superimposed above the simple indigenous basis, and forming a very
bewilderment of complexity. Most of this alien culture is Chinese,
and bears but an indirect relation to the real subject of these
studies. The peculiar and surprising fact is that, in spite of all
superimposition, the original character of the people and of their
society should still remain recognizable. [18] The wonder of Japan is
not to be sought in the countless borrowings with which she has
clothed herself,--much as a princess of the olden time would don
twelve ceremonial robes, of divers colours and qualities, folded one
upon the other so as to show their many-tinted edges at throat and
sleeves and skirt;--no, the real wonder is the Wearer. For the
interest of the costume is much less in its beauty of form and tint
than in its significance as idea,--as representing something of the
mind that devised or adopted it. And the supreme interest of the
old--Japanese civilization lies in what it expresses of the
race-character,--that character which yet remains essentially
unchanged by all the changes of Meiji.

"Suggests" were perhaps a better word than "expresses," for this
race-character is rather to be divined than recognized. Our
comprehension of it might be helped by some definite knowledge of
origins; but such knowledge we do not yet possess. Ethnologists are
agreed that the Japanese race has been formed by a mingling of
peoples, and that the dominant element is Mongolian; but this
dominant element is represented in two very different types,--one
slender and almost feminine of aspect; the other, squat and powerful.
Chinese and Korean elements are known to exist in the populations of
certain districts; and, there appears to have been a large infusion
of Aino blood. Whether there be [19] any Malay or Polynesian element
also has not been decided. Thus much only can be safely
affirmed,--that the race, like all good races, is a mixed one; and
that the peoples who originally united to form it have been so
blended together as to develop, under long social discipline, a
tolerably uniform type of character. This character, though
immediately recognizable in some of Its aspects, presents us with
many enigmas that are very difficult to explain.

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