Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation Part 11

FEUDAL INTEGRATION

It was under the later Tokugawa Shogun--during the period immediately preceding the modern regime--that j.a.panese civilization reached the limit of its development. No further evolution was possible, except through social reconstruction. The conditions of this integration chiefly represented the reinforcement and definition of conditions preexisting,--scarcely anything in the way of fundamental change.

More than ever before the old compulsory systems of cooperation were strengthened; more than ever before all details of ceremonial convention were insisted upon with merciless exact.i.tude. In preceding ages there had been more harshness; but at no previous period had there been less liberty. Nevertheless, the results of this increased restriction were not without ethical value: the time was yet far off at which personal liberty could prove a personal advantage; and the paternal coercion of the Tokugawa rule helped to develop and to accentuate much of what is most attractive in the national character.

Centuries of warfare had previously allowed small opportunity for the cultivation of the more delicate qualities of that character: the refinements, the [344] ingenuous kindliness, the joy in life that afterward lent so rare a charm to j.a.panese existence. But during two hundred years of peace, prosperity, and national isolation, the graceful and winning side of this human nature found chance to bloom; and the multiform restraints of law and custom then quickened and curiously shaped the blossoming,--as the gardener's untiring art evolves the flowers of the chrysanthemum into a hundred forms of fantastic beauty.... Though the general social tendency under pressure was toward rigidity, constraint left room, in special directions, for moral and aesthetic cultivation.

In order to understand the social condition, it will be necessary to consider the nature of the paternal rule in its legal aspects. To modern imagination the old j.a.panese laws may well seem intolerable; but their administration was really less uncompromising than that of our Western laws. Besides, although weighing heavily upon all cla.s.ses, from the highest to the lowest, the legal burden was proportioned to the respective strength of the bearers; the application of law being made less and less rigid as the social scale descended. In theory at least, from the earliest times, the poor and unfortunate had been considered as ent.i.tled to pity; and the duty of showing them all possible mercy was insisted upon in the oldest extant moral code of j.a.pan,--the Laws of Shotoku Tais.h.i.+. [345] But the most striking example of such discrimination appears in the Legacy of Iyeyasu, which represents the conception of justice in a time when society had become much more developed, its inst.i.tutions more firmly fixed, and all its bonds tightened. This stern and wise ruler, who declared that "the people are the foundation of the Empire," commanded leniency in dealing with the humble. He ordained that any lord, no matter what his rank, convicted of breaking laws "to the injury of the people," should be punished by the confiscation of his estates. Perhaps the humane spirit of the legislator is most strongly shown in his enactments regarding crime, as, for example, where he deals with the question of adultery--necessarily a crime of the first magnitude in any society based on ancestor-wors.h.i.+p. By the 50th article of the Legacy, the injured husband is confirmed in his ancient right to kill,--but with this important provision, that should he kill but one of the guilty parties, he must himself be held as guilty as either of them. Should the offenders be brought up for trial, Iyeyasu advises that, in the case of common people, particular deliberation be given to the matter: he remarks upon the weakness of human nature, and suggests that, among the young and simple-minded, some momentary impulse of pa.s.sion may lead to folly even when the parties are not naturally depraved. But in the next article, [346]

No. 51, he orders that no mercy whatever be shown to men and women of the upper cla.s.ses when convicted of the same crime. "These," he declares, "are expected to know better than to occasion disturbance by violating existing regulations; and such persons, breaking the laws by lewd trifling or illicit intercourse, shall at once be punished without deliberation or consultation.* [*That is to say, immediately put to death.] It is not the same in this case as in the case of farmers, artizans, and traders." ... Throughout the entire code, this tendency to tighten the bonds of law in the case of the military cla.s.ses, and to loosen them mercifully for the lower cla.s.ses, is equally visible. Iyeyasu strongly disapproved of unnecessary punishments; and held that the frequency of punishments was proof, not of the ill-conduct of subjects, but of the ill-conduct of officials. The 91st article of his code puts the matter thus plainly, even as regarded the Shogunate: "When punishments and executions abound in the Empire, it is a proof that the military ruler is without virtue and degenerate." He devised particular enactments to protect the peasantry and the poor from the cruelty or the rapacity of powerful lords. The great daimyo were strictly forbidden, when making their obligatory journeys to Yedo, "to disturb or hara.s.s the people at the post-houses," or suffer themselves "to be puffed up with military pride." [347] The private, not less than the public conduct of these great lords, was under Government surveillance; and they were actually liable to punishment for immorality! Concerning debauchery among them, the legislator remarked that "even though this can hardly be p.r.o.nounced insubordination," it should be judged and punished according to the degree in which it const.i.tutes a bad example for the lower cla.s.ses (Art. 88).* As to veritable insubordination there was no pardon: the severity of the law on this subject allowed of no exception or mitigation. The 53rd section of the Legacy proves this to have been regarded as the supreme crime: "The guilt of a va.s.sal murdering his suzerain is in principle the same as that of an arch-traitor to the Emperor. His immediate companions, his relations,--all even to his most distant connexions,--shall be cut off, hewn to atoms, root and fibre. The guilt of a va.s.sal only lifting his hand against his master, even though he does not a.s.sa.s.sinate him, is the same." In strong contrast to this grim ordinance is the spirit of all the regulations touching the administration of law among the lower cla.s.ses. Forgery, incendiarism, and poisoning were indeed crimes justifying the penalty of burning or crucifixion; but judges were instructed to act with as much leniency as circ.u.mstances permitted in the case of ordinary offences. "With regard to minute details affecting individuals of the inferior cla.s.ses," says the 73d article of the code, "learn the wide benevolence of Koso of the Han [Chinese] dynasty." It was further ordered that magistrates of the criminal and civil courts should be chosen only from "a cla.s.s of men who are upright and pure, distinguished for charity and benevolence." All magistrates were kept under close supervision, and their conduct regularly reported by government spies.

[*Though even daimyo were liable to suffer for debauchery, Iyeyasu did not believe in the expediency of attempting to suppress all vice by law. There is a strangely modern ring in his remarks upon this subject, in the 73d section of the Legacy: "Virtuous men have said, both in poetry and in cla.s.sic works, that houses of debauch, for women of pleasure and for street-walkers, are the worm-eaten spots of cities and towns. But these are necessary evils, and if they be forcibly abolished, men of unrighteous principles will become like ravelled thread, and there will be no end to daily punishments and floggings." In many castle-towns, however, such houses were never allowed--probably in view of the large military force, a.s.sembled in such towns, which had to be maintained under iron discipline.]

[348] Another humane aspect of Tokugawa legislation is furnished by its dictates in regard to the relations of the s.e.xes. Although concubinage was tolerated in the Samurai cla.s.s, for reasons relating to the continuance of the family-cult, Iyeyasu denounces the indulgence of the privilege for merely selfish reasons: "Silly and ignorant men neglect their true wives for the sake of a loved mistress, and thus disturb the most important relation.... Men so far sunk as this may always be known as Samurai without fidelity or sincerity." Celibacy, condemned by public [349] opinion,--except in the case of Buddhist priests,--was equally condemned by the code.

"One should not live alone after sixteen years of age," declares the legislator; "all mankind recognize marriage as the first law of nature." The childless man was obliged to adopt a son; and the 47th article of the Legacy ordained that the family estate of a person dying without male issue, and without having adopted a son, should be "forfeited without any regard to his relatives or connexions." This law, of course, was made in support of the ancestor-cult, the continuance of which it was deemed the paramount duty of each man to provide for; but the government regulations concerning adoption enabled everybody to fulfil the legal requirement, without difficulty.

Considering that this code which inculcated humanity, repressed moral laxity, prohibited celibacy, and rigorously maintained the family-cult, was drawn up in the time of the extirpation of the Jesuit missions, the position a.s.sumed in regard to religious freedom appears to us one of singular liberality. "High and low alike,"

proclaims the 31st article, "may follow their own inclinations with respect to religious tenets which have obtained down to the present time, except as regards the false and corrupt school [Roman Catholicism]. Religious disputes have ever proved the bane and misfortune of this Empire, and must be firmly, suppressed." ... But the seeming liberality of this article must not be misinterpreted: [350] the legislator who made so rigid an enactment in regard to the religion of the family was not the man to proclaim that any j.a.panese was free to abandon the faith of his race for an alien creed. One must carefully read the entire Legacy in order to understand Iyeyasu's real position,--which was simply this: that any man was free to adopt any religion tolerated by the State, in addition to his ancestor-cult. Iyeyasu was himself a member of the Jodo sect of Buddhism, and a friend of Buddhism in general. But he was first of all a s.h.i.+ntoist; and the third article of his code commands devotion to the Kami as the first of duties:--"Keep your heart pure; and so long as your body shall exist, be diligent in paying honour and veneration to the G.o.ds." That he placed the ancient cult above Buddhism should be evident from the text of the 52d article of the Legacy, in which he declares that no one should suffer himself to neglect the national faith because of a belief in any other form of religion. This text is of particular interest:

"My body, and the bodies of others, being born in the Empire of the G.o.ds, to accept unreservedly the teachings of other countries,--such as Confucian, Buddhist, or Taoist doctrines,--and to apply one's whole and undivided attention to them, would be, in short, to desert one's own master, and transfer one's loyalty to another. Is not this to forget the origin of one's being?"

[351] Of course the Shogun, professing to derive his authority from the descendant of the elder G.o.ds, could not with consistency have proclaimed the right of freedom to doubt those G.o.ds: his official religious duty permitted of no compromise. But the interest attaching to his opinions, as expressed in the Legacy, rests upon the fact that the Legacy was not a public, but a strictly private doc.u.ment, intended for the perusal and guidance of his successors only.

Altogether his religious position was much like that of the liberal j.a.panese statesman of to-day,--respect for whatever is good in Buddhism, qualified by the patriotic conviction that the first religious duty is to the cult of the ancestors, the ancient creed of the race.... Iyeyasu had preferences regarding Buddhism; but even in this he showed no narrowness. Though he wrote in his Legacy, "Let my posterity ever be of the honoured sect of Jodo," he greatly reverenced the high-priest of the Tendai temple, Yeizan, who had been one of his instructors, and obtained for him the highest court-office possible for a Buddhist priest to obtain, as well as the heads.h.i.+p of the Tendai sect. Moreover the Shogun visited Yeizan to make there official prayer for the prosperity of the country.

There is every reason to believe that within the territories of the Shogunate proper, comprising the greater part of the Empire, the administration of [352] ordinary criminal law was humane, and that the infliction of punishment was made, in the case of the common people, to depend largely upon circ.u.mstances. Needless severity was a crime before the higher military law, which, in such cases, made no distinctions of rank. Although the ring-leaders of a peasant-revolt, for example, would be sentenced to death, the lord through whose oppression the uprising was provoked, would be deprived of a part or the whole of his estates, or degraded in rank, or perhaps even sentenced to perform harakiri. Professor Wigmore, whose studies of j.a.panese law first shed light upon the subject, has given us an excellent review of the spirit of the ancient legal methods. He points out that the administration of law was never made impersonal in the modern sense; that unbending law did not, for the people at least, exist in relation to minor offences. The Anglo-Saxon idea of inflexible law is the idea of a justice impartial and pitiless as fire: whoever breaks the law must suffer the consequence, just as surely as the person who puts his hand into fire must experience pain. But in the administration of the old j.a.panese law, everything was taken into consideration: the condition of the offender, his intelligence, his degree of education, his previous conduct, his motives, suffering endured, provocation received, and so forth; and final judgment was decided by moral common sense rather than by legal enactment [353] or precedent. Friends and relatives were allowed to make plea for the offender, and to help him in whatever honest way they could. If a man were falsely accused, and proved innocent upon trial, he would not only be consoled by kind words, but, would probably receive substantial compensation; and it appears that judges were accustomed, at the end of important trials, to reward good conduct as well as to punish crime.* ... On the other hand, litigation was officially discouraged. Everything possible was done to prevent any cases from being taken into court, which could be settled or compromised by communal arbitration; and the people were taught to consider the court only as the last possible resort.

[*The following extracts from a sentence said to have been pa.s.sed by the famous judge, Ooka Tadasuke, at the close of a celebrated criminal trial, are ill.u.s.trative: "Musas.h.i.+ya Chobei and Goto Hans.h.i.+ro, these actions of yours are worthy of the highest praise: as a remuneration I award ten silver ryo to each of you.... Tami, you, for maintaining your brother, are to be commended: for this you are to receive the amount of five kwammon. Ko, daughter of Chohachi, you are obedient to your parents: in consideration of this, the sum of five silver ryo is awarded to you."--(See Dening's j.a.pan in Days of Yore.) The good old custom of rewarding notable cases of filial piety, courage, generosity, etc., though not now practised in the courts, is still maintained by the local governments. The rewards are small; but the public honour which they confer upon the recipient is very great.]

The general character of the Tokugawa rule can be to some degree inferred from the foregoing facts. It was in no sense a reign of terror that compelled peace and encouraged industry for two hundred and [354] fifty years. Though the national civilization was restrained, pruned, clipped in a thousand ways, it was at the same time cultivated, refined, and strengthened. The long peace established throughout the Empire what had never before existed,--a universal feeling of security. The individual was bound more than ever by law and custom; but he was also protected: he could move without anxiety to the length of his chains. Though coerced by his fellows, they helped him to bear the coercion cheerfully: everybody aided everybody else to fulfil the obligations and to support the burdens of communal life. Conditions tended, therefore, toward the general happiness as well as toward the general prosperity. There was not, in those years, any struggle for existence,--not at least in our modern meaning of the phrase. The requirements of life were easily satisfied; every man had a master to provide for him or to protect him; compet.i.tion was repressed or discouraged; there was no need for supreme effort of any sort,--no need for the straining of any faculty. Moreover, there was little or nothing to strive after: for the vast majority of the people, there were no prizes to win. Ranks and incomes were fixed; occupations were hereditary; and the desire to acc.u.mulate wealth must have been checked or numbed by those regulations which limited the rich man's right to use his money as he might please. Even a great lord--even the Shogun himself [355]

--could not do what he pleased. As for any common person,--farmer, craftsman, or shopkeeper,--he could not build a house as he liked, or furnish it as he liked, or procure for himself such articles of luxury as his taste might incline him to buy. The richest heimin, who attempted to indulge himself in any of these ways, would at once have been forcibly reminded that he must not attempt to imitate the habits, or to a.s.sume the privileges, of his betters. He could not even order certain kinds of things to be made for him. The artizans or artists who created objects of luxury, to gratify aesthetic taste, were little disposed to accept commissions from people of low rank: they worked for princes, or great lords, and could scarcely afford to take the risk of displeasing their patrons. Every man's pleasures were more or less regulated by his place in society, and to pa.s.s from a lower into a higher rank was no easy matter. Extraordinary men were sometimes able to do this, by attracting the favour of the great. But many perils attended upon such distinction; and the wisest policy for the heimin was to remain satisfied with his position, and try to find as much happiness in life as the law allowed.

Personal ambition being thus restrained, and the cost of existence reduced to a minimum much below our Western ideas of the necessary, there were really established conditions highly favourable to certain forms of culture, in despite of sumptuary [356] regulations. The national mind was obliged to seek solace for the monotony of existence, either in amus.e.m.e.nt or study. Tokugawa policy had left imagination partly free in the directions of literature and art--the cheaper art; and within those two directions repressed personality found means to utter itself, and fancy became creative. There was a certain amount of danger attendant upon even such intellectual indulgences; and much was dared. Aesthetic taste, however, mostly followed the line of least resistance. Observation concentrated itself upon the interest of everyday life,--upon incidents which might be watched from a window, or studied in a garden,--upon familiar aspects of nature in various seasons,--upon trees, flowers, birds, fishes, or reptiles,--upon insects and the ways of them, --upon all kinds of small details, delicate trifles, amusing curiosities. Then it was that the race-genius produced most of that queer bric-a-brac which still forms the delight of Western collectors. The painter, the ivory-carver, the decorator, were left almost untroubled in their production of fairy-pictures, exquisite grotesqueries, miracles of liliputian art in metal and enamel and lacquer-of-gold. In all such small matters they could feel free; and the results of that freedom are now treasured in the museums of Europe and America. It is true that most of the arts (nearly all of Chinese origin) were considerably developed before the Tokugawa era; but it was then that they [357] began to a.s.sume those inexpensive forms which placed aesthetic gratification within reach of the common people. Sumptuary legislation or rule might yet apply to the use and possession of costly production, but not to the enjoyment of form; and the beautiful, whether shaped in paper or in ivory, in clay or gold, is always a power for culture. It has been said that in a Greek city of the fourth century before Christ, every household utensil, even the most trifling object, was in respect of design an object of art; and the same fact is true, though in another and a stranger way, of all things in a j.a.panese home: even such articles of common use as a bronze candlestick, a bra.s.s lamp, an iron kettle, a paper lantern, a bamboo curtain, a wooden pillow, a wooden tray, will reveal to educated eyes a sense of beauty and fitness entirely unknown to Western cheap production. And it was especially during the Tokugawa period that this sense of beauty began to inform everything in common life. Then also was developed the art of ill.u.s.tration; then came into existence those wonderful colour-prints (the most beautiful made in any age or country) which are now so eagerly collected by wealthy dilettanti. Literature also ceased, like art, to be the enjoyment of the upper cla.s.ses only: it developed a mult.i.tude of popular forms.

This was the age of popular fiction, of cheap books, of popular drama, of storytelling for young and old.... We may certainly [358]

call the Tokugawa period the happiest in the long life of the nation.

The mere increase of population and of wealth would prove the fact, irrespective of the general interest awakened in matters literary and aesthetic. It was an age of popular enjoyment, also of general culture and social refinement.

Customs spread downward from the top of society. During the Tokugawa period, various diversions or accomplishments, formerly fas.h.i.+onable in upper circles only, became common property. Three of these were of a sort indicating a high degree of refinement: poetical contests, tea-ceremonies, and the complex art of flower-arrangement. All were introduced into j.a.panese society long before the Tokugawa regime;--the fas.h.i.+on of poetical compet.i.tions must be as old as j.a.panese authentic history. But it was under the Tokugawa Shogunate that such amus.e.m.e.nts and accomplishments became national. Then the tea-ceremonies were made a feature of female education throughout the country. Their elaborate character could be explained only by the help of many pictures; and it requires years of training and practice to graduate in the art of them. Yet the whole of this art, as to detail, signifies no more than the making and serving of a cup of tea. However, it is a real art--a most exquisite art. The actual making of the infusion is a matter of no consequence in itself: the supremely important matter is that the act be performed in the most perfect, [359] most polite, most graceful, most charming manner possible. Everything done--from the kindling of the charcoal fire to the presentation of the tea--must be done according to rules of supreme etiquette: rules requiring natural grace as well as great patience to fully master. Therefore a training in the tea-ceremonies is still held to be a training in politeness, in self-control, in delicacy,--a discipline in deportment.... Quite as elaborate is the art of arranging flowers. There are many different schools; but the object of each system is simply to display sprays of leaves and flowers in the most beautiful manner possible, and according to the irregular graces of Nature herself. This art also requires years to learn; and the teaching of it has a moral as well as an aesthetic value.

It was in this period also that etiquette was cultivated to its uttermost,--that politeness became diffused throughout all ranks, not merely as a fas.h.i.+on, but as an art. In all civilized societies of the militant type politeness becomes a national characteristic at an early period; and it must have been a common obligation among the j.a.panese, as their archaic tongue bears witness, before the historical epoch. Public enactments on the subject were made as early as the seventh century by the founder of j.a.panese Buddhism, the prince-regent, Shotoku Tais.h.i.+. "Ministers and functionaries," he proclaimed, [360] "should make decorous behaviour* their leading principle; for their leading principle of the government of the people consists in decorous behaviour. If the superiors do not behave with decorum, the inferiors are disorderly: if inferiors are wanting in proper behaviour, there must necessarily be offences. Therefore it is that when lord and va.s.sal behave with propriety, the distinctions of rank are not confused when the people behave with propriety, the government of the Commonwealth proceeds of itself." Something of the same old Chinese teaching we find reechoed, a thousand years later, in the Legacy of Iyeyasu: "The art of governing a country consists in the manifestation of due deference on the part of a suzerain to his va.s.sals. Know that if you turn your back upon this, you will be a.s.sa.s.sinated; and the Empire will be lost." We have already seen that etiquette was rigidly enforced upon all cla.s.ses by the military rule: for at least ten centuries before Iyeyasu, the nation had been disciplined in politeness, under the edge of the sword. But under the Tokugawa Shogunate politeness became particularly a popular characteristic,--a rule of conduct maintained by even the lowest cla.s.ses in their daily relations. Among the higher cla.s.ses it became the art of beauty in life. All the taste, the grace, the [361] nicety which then informed artistic production in precious material, equally informed every detail of speech and action. Courtesy was a moral and aesthetic study, carried to such incomparable perfection that every trace of the artificial disappeared. Grace and charm seemed to have become habit,--inherent qualities of the human fibre,--and doubtless, in the case of one s.e.x at least, did so become.

[*Or, "ceremony": the Chinese term used signifying everything relating to gentlemanly and upright conduct. The translation is Mr.

Aston's (see Vol. II, p, 130, of his translation of the Nihongi).]

For it has well been said that the most wonderful aesthetic products of j.a.pan are not its ivories, nor its bronzes, nor its porcelains, nor its swords, nor any of its marvels in metal or lacquer--but its women. Accepting as partly true the statement that woman everywhere is what man has made her, we might say that this statement is more true of the j.a.panese woman than of any other. Of course it required thousands and thousands of years to make her; but the period of which I am speaking beheld the work completed and perfected. Before this ethical creation, criticism should hold its breath; for there is here no single fault save the fault of a moral charm unsuited to any world of selfishness and struggle. It is the moral artist that now commands our praise,--the realizer of an ideal beyond Occidental reach. How frequently has it been a.s.serted that, as a moral being, the j.a.panese woman does not seem to belong to the same race as the j.a.panese man!

Considering that heredity is limited by s.e.x, there is reason in the a.s.sertion: the j.a.panese woman is an ethically different [362] being from the j.a.panese man. Perhaps no such type of woman will appear again in this world for a hundred thousand years: the conditions of industrial civilization will not admit of her existence. The type could not have been created in any society shaped on modern lines, nor in any society where the compet.i.tive struggle takes those unmoral forms with which we have become too familiar. Only a society under extraordinary regulation and regimentation,--a society in which all self-a.s.sertion was repressed, and self-sacrifice made a universal obligation,--a society in which personality was clipped like a hedge, permitted to bud and bloom from within, never from without,--in short, only a society founded upon ancestor-wors.h.i.+p, could have produced it. It has no more in common with the humanity of this twentieth century of ours--perhaps very much less--than has the life depicted upon old Greek vases. Its charm is the charm of a vanished world--a charm strange, alluring, indescribable as the perfume of some flower of which the species became extinct in our Occident before the modern languages were born. Transplanted successfully it cannot be: under a foreign sun its forms revert to something altogether different, its colours fade, its perfume pa.s.ses away. The j.a.panese woman can be known only in her own country,--the j.a.panese woman as prepared and perfected by the old-time education for that strange society in which the charm [363] of her moral being,--her delicacy, her supreme unselfishness, her child-like piety and trust, her exquisite tactful perception of all ways and means to make happiness about her,--can be comprehended and valued.

I have spoken only of her moral charm: it requires time for the unaccustomed foreign eye to discern the physical charm. Beauty, according to our Western standards, can scarcely be said to exist in this race,--or, shall we say that it has never yet been developed?

One seeks in vain for a facial angle satisfying Western aesthetic canons. It is seldom that one meets even with a fine example of that physical elegance,--that manifestation of the economy of force,--which we call grace, in the Greek meaning of the word. Yet there is charm--great charm--both of face and form: the charm of childhood--childhood with its every feature yet softly and vaguely outlined (efface, as a French artist would call it),--childhood before the limbs have fully lengthened,--slight and, dainty, with admirable little hands and feet. The eyes at first surprise us, by the strangeness of their lids, so unlike Aryan eyelids, and folding upon another plan. Yet they are often very charming; and a Western artist would not fail to appreciate the graceful terms, invented by j.a.panese or Chinese art, to designate particular beauties in the lines of the eyelids. Even if she cannot be called handsome, according to Western [364] standards, the j.a.panese woman must be confessed pretty,--pretty like a comely child; and if she be seldom graceful in the Occidental sense, she is at least in all her ways incomparably graceful: her every motion, gesture, or expression being, in its own Oriental manner, a perfect thing,--an act performed, or a look conferred, in the most easy, the most graceful, the most modest way possible. By ancient custom, she is not permitted to display her grace in the street: she must walk in a particular shrinking manner, turning her feet inward as she patters along upon her wooden sandals. But to watch her at home, where she is free to be comely,--merely to see her performing any household duty, or waiting upon guests, or arranging flowers, or playing with her children,--is an education in Far Eastern aesthetics for whoever has the head and the heart to learn.... But is she not, then, one may ask, an artificial product,--a forced growth of Oriental civilization? I would answer both "Yes" and "No." She is an artificial product in only the same evolutional sense that all character is an artificial product; and it required tens of centuries to mould her. She is not, on the other hand, an artificial type, because she has been particularly trained to be her true self at all times when circ.u.mstances allow,--or, in other words, to be delightfully natural.

The old-fas.h.i.+oned education of her s.e.x was directed to the development [365] of every quality essentially feminine, and to the suppression of the opposite quality. Kindliness, docility, sympathy, tenderness, daintiness--these and other attributes were cultivated into incomparable blossoming. "Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever: do n.o.ble things, not dream them, all day long"--those words of Kingsley really embody the central idea in her training. Of course the being, formed by such training only, must be protected by society; and by the old j.a.panese society she was protected.

Exceptions did not affect the rule. What I mean is that she was able to be purely herself, within certain limits of emotional etiquette, in all security. Her success in life was made to depend on her power to win affection by gentleness, obedience, kindliness;--not the affection merely of a husband, but of the husband's parents and grandparents, and brothers-in-law and sisters-in-law,--in short of all the members of a strange household. Thus to succeed required angelic goodness and patience; and the j.a.panese woman realized at least the ideal of a Buddhist angel. A being working only for others, thinking only for others, happy only in making pleasure for others,--a being incapable of unkindness, incapable of selfishness, incapable of acting contrary to her own inherited sense of right,--and in spite of this softness and gentleness ready, at any moment, to lay down her life, to [366] sacrifice everything at the call of duty: such was the character of the j.a.panese woman. Most strange may seem the combination, in this child-soul, of gentleness and force, tenderness and courage,--yet the explanation is not far to seek. Stronger within her than wifely affection or parental affection or even maternal affection,--stronger than any womanly emotion, was the moral conviction born of her great faith. This religious quality of character can be found among ourselves only within the shadow of cloisters, where it is cultivated at the expense of all else; and the j.a.panese woman has been therefore compared to a Sister of Charity.

But she had to be very much more than a Sister of Charity,--daughter-in-law and wife and mother, and to fulfil without reproach the multiform duties of her triple part. Rather might she be compared to the Greek type of n.o.ble woman,--to Antigone, to Alcestis.

With the j.a.panese woman, as formed by the ancient training, each act of life was an act of faith: her existence was a religion, her home a temple, her every word and thought ordered by the law of the cult of the dead.... This wonderful type is not extinct--though surely doomed to disappear. A human creature so shaped for the service of G.o.ds and men that every beat of her heart is duty, that every drop of her blood is moral feeling, were not less out of place in the future world of compet.i.tive selfishness, than an angel in h.e.l.l.

[367]

THE s.h.i.+NTO REVIVAL

The slow weakening of the Tokugawa Shogunate was due to causes not unlike those which had brought about the decline of previous regencies: the race degenerated during that long period of peace which its rule had inaugurated; the strong builders were succeeded by feebler and feebler men. Nevertheless the machinery of administration, astutely devised by Iyeyasu, and further perfected by Iyemitsu, worked so well that the enemies of the Shogunate could find no opportunity for a successful attack until foreign aggression unexpectedly came to their aid. The most dangerous enemies of the government were the great clans of Satsuma and Choshu. Iyeyasu had not ventured to weaken them beyond a certain point: the risks of the undertaking would have been great; and, on the other hand, the alliance of those clans was for the time being a matter of vast political importance. He only took measures to preserve a safe balance of power, placing between those formidable allies new lords.h.i.+ps in whose rulers he could put trust,--a trust based first upon interest, secondly upon kins.h.i.+p. But he always felt that danger to the Shogunate [368] might come from Satsuma and Choshu; and he left to his successors careful instructions about the policy to be followed in dealing with such possible enemies. He felt that his work was not perfect,--that certain outlying blocks of the structure had not been properly clamped to the rest. He could not do more in the direction of consolidation, simply because the material of society had not yet sufficiently evolved, had not yet become plastic enough, to permit of perfect and permanent cohesion. In order to effect that, it would have been necessary to dissolve the clans. But Iyeyasu did all that human foresight could have safely attempted under the circ.u.mstances; and no one was more keenly conscious than himself of the weak points in his wonderful organization.

For more than two hundred years the Satsuma and Choshu clans, and several others ready to league with them, submitted to the discipline of the Tokugawa rule. But they chafed under it, and watched for a chance to break the yoke. All the while this chance was being slowly created for them--not by any political changes, but by the patient toil of j.a.panese men of letters. Three among these--the greatest scholars that j.a.pan ever produced--especially prepared the way, by their intellectual labours, for the abolition of the Shogunate. They were s.h.i.+nto scholars; and they represented the not unnatural reaction of native conservatism against the [309] long tyranny of alien ideas and alien beliefs,--against the literature and philosophy and bureaucracy of China,--against the preponderant influence upon education of the foreign religion of Buddhism. To all this they opposed the old native literature of j.a.pan, the ancient poetry, the ancient cult, the early traditions and rites of s.h.i.+nto. The names of these three remarkable men were Mabuchi (1697-1769), Motowori (1730-1801), and Hirata (1776-1843). Their efforts actually resulted in the disestablishment of Buddhism, and in the great s.h.i.+nto revival of 1871.

The intellectual revolution made by these scholars could have been prepared only during a long era of peace, and by men enjoying the protection and patronage of members of the ruling cla.s.s. By a strange chance, it was the house of Tokugawa itself which first gave to literature such encouragement and aid as made possible the labours of the s.h.i.+nto scholars. Iyeyasu had been a lover of learning; and had devoted the later years of his life--pa.s.sed in retirement at s.h.i.+dzuoka--to the collection of ancient books and ma.n.u.scripts. He bequeathed his j.a.panese books to his eighth son, the Prince of Owari; and his Chinese books to another son, the Prince of Kishu. The Prince of Owari himself composed several works upon j.a.panese early literature. Other descendants of Iyeyasu, inherited the great [370]

Shogun's love of letters: one of his grandsons, Mitsukuni, the second Prince of Mito (1622-1700), compiled, with the aid of various scholars, the first, important history of j.a.pan,--the Dai-Nihon-s.h.i.+, in 240 books. Also he compiled a work of 500 volumes upon the ceremonies and the etiquette of the Imperial Court, and set aside from his revenues a sum equal to about 30,000 pounds per annum, to cover the cost of publis.h.i.+ng the splendid productions.... Under the patronage of great lords like these--collectors of libraries--there gradually developed a new school of men-of-letters: men who turned away from Chinese literature to the study of the j.a.panese cla.s.sics.

They reedited the ancient poetry and chronicles; they republished the sacred records, with ample commentaries. They produced whole libraries of works upon religious, historical, and philological subjects; they made grammars and dictionaries; they wrote treatises on the art of poetry, on popular errors, on the nature of the G.o.ds, on government, on the manners and customs of ancient days.... The foundations of this new scholars.h.i.+p were laid by two s.h.i.+nto priests,--Kada and Mabuchi.

The high patrons of learning never suspected the possible results of those researches which they had encouraged and aided. The study of the ancient records, the study of j.a.panese literature, the study of the early political and religious conditions, [371] naturally led men to consider the history of those foreign literary influences which had well-nigh stifled native learning, and to consider also the history of the foreign creed which had overwhelmed the religion of the ancestral G.o.ds. Chinese ethics, Chinese ceremonial, and Chinese Buddhism had reduced the ancient faith to the state of a minor belief--almost to the state of a superst.i.tion. "The s.h.i.+nto G.o.ds,"

exclaimed one of the scholars of the new school, "have become the servants of the Buddhas!" But those s.h.i.+nto G.o.ds were the ancestors of the race,--the fathers of its emperors and princes,--and their degradation could not but involve the degradation of the imperial tradition. Already, indeed, the emperors had been deprived not only of their immemorial rights and privileges, but of their revenues: many had been deposed and banished and insulted. Just as the G.o.ds had been admitted only as inferior personages to the Buddhist pantheon, so their living descendants were now permitted to reign only as the dependants of military usurpers. By sacred law the whole soil of the empire belonged to the Heavenly Sovereign: yet there had been great poverty at times in the imperial palace; and the revenues, allotted for the maintenance of the Mikado, had often been insufficient to relieve his family from want. a.s.suredly all this was wrong. The Shogunate had indeed established peace and inaugurated prosperity; but who could forget that [372] it had originated in a military usurpation of imperial rights? Only by the restoration of the Son of Heaven to his ancient position of power, and by the relegation of the military chiefs to their proper state of subordination, could the best interests of the nation be really served....

All this was thought and felt and strongly suggested; but not all of it was openly proclaimed. To have publicly preached against the military government as a usurpation would have been to invite destruction. The s.h.i.+nto scholars dared only so much as the politics and the temper of their time seemed to permit,--though they closely approached the danger-line. By the end of the eighteenth century, however, their teaching had created a strong party in favour of the official revival of the ancient religion, the restoration of the Mikado to supreme power, and the repression, if not suppression, of the military power. Yet it was not until the year 1841 that the Shogunate took alarm, and proclaimed its disquiet by banis.h.i.+ng from the capital the great scholar Hirata, and forbidding him to write anything more. Not long afterwards he died. But he had been able to teach for forty years; he had written and published several hundred volumes; and the school of which he was the last and greatest theologian already exerted far-reaching influence. The restive lords of Choshu, Satsuma, Tosa, and Hizen were watching and waiting. They perceived [373] the worth of the new ideas to their own policy; they encouraged the new s.h.i.+ntoism; they felt that a time was coming when they could hope to shake off the domination of the Tokugawa. And their opportunity came at last with the advent to j.a.pan of Commodore Perry's fleet.

The events of that time are well known, and need not here be dwelt upon at any length. Suffice to say that after the Shogunate had been terrified into making commercial treaties with the United States and other powers, and practically compelled to open sundry ports to foreign trade, great discontent arose and was fomented as much as possible by the enemies of the military government. Meanwhile the Shogunate had ascertained for itself the impossibility of resisting foreign aggression: it was fairly well informed as to the strength of Western countries. The imperial court was nowise informed; and the Shogunate naturally dreaded to furnish the information. To acknowledge incapacity to resist Occidental aggression would be to invite the ruin of the Tokugawa house; to resist, on the other hand, would be to invite the destruction of the Empire. The enemies of the Shogunate then persuaded the imperial court to order the expulsion of the foreigners; and this order--which, it must be remembered, was essentially a religious order, emanating from the source of all acknowledged authority--placed the military government in a serious dilemma. [374] It tried to effect by diplomacy what it could not accomplish by force; but while it was negotiating for the withdrawal of the foreign' settlers, matters were suddenly forced to a crisis by the Prince of Choshu, who fired upon various s.h.i.+ps belonging to the foreign powers. This action provoked the bombardment of s.h.i.+monoseki, and the demand of an indemnity of three million dollars. The Shogun Iyemochi attempted to chastise the daimyo of Choshu for this act of hostility; but the attempt only proved the weakness of the military government. Iyemochi died soon after this defeat; and his successor Hitotsubas.h.i.+ had no chance to do anything,--for the now evident feebleness of the Shogunate gave its enemies courage to strike a fatal blow. Pressure was brought upon the imperial court to proclaim the abolition of the Shogunate; and the Shogunate was abolished by decree. Hitotsubas.h.i.+ submitted; and the Tokugawa regime thus came to an end,--although its more devoted followers warred for two years afterwards, against hopeless odds, to reestablish it. In 1867 the entire administration was reorganized; the supreme power, both military and civil, being restored to the Mikado. Soon afterward the s.h.i.+nto cult, officially revived in its primal simplicity, was declared the Religion of State; and Buddhism was disendowed. Thus the Empire was reestablished upon the ancient lines; and all that the literary party had [375] hoped for seemed to be realized--except one thing....

Be it here observed that the adherents of the literary party wanted to go much further than the great founders of the new s.h.i.+ntoism had dreamed of going. These later enthusiasts were not satisfied with the abolition of the Shogunate, the restoration of imperial power, and the revival of the ancient cult: they wanted a return of all society to the simplicity of primitive times; they desired that all foreign influence should be got rid of, and that the official ceremonies, the future education, the future literature, the ethics, the laws, should be purely j.a.panese. They were not even satisfied with the disendowment of Buddhism: there was a vigorous proposal made for its total suppression! And all this would have signified, in more ways than one, a social retrogression towards barbarism. The great scholars had never proposed to cast away Buddhism and all Chinese learning; they had only insisted that the native religion and culture should have precedence. But the new literary party desired what would have been equivalent to the destruction of a thousand years'

experience. Happily the clansmen who had broken down the Shogunate saw both past and future in another light. They understood that the national existence was in peril, and that resistance to foreign pressure would be hopeless. Satsuma had witnessed the bombardment of Kagos.h.i.+ma in [376] 1863; Choshu, the bombardment of s.h.i.+monoseki in 1864. Evidently the only chance of being able to face Western power would be through the patient study of Western science; and the survival of the Empire depended upon the Europeanization of society.

By 1871 the daimiates were abolished; in 1873 the edicts against Christianity were withdrawn; in 1876 the wearing of swords was prohibited. The samurai, as a military body, were suppressed; and all cla.s.ses were declared thenceforward equal before the law. New codes were compiled; a new army and navy organized; a new police system established; a new system of education introduced at Government expense; and a new const.i.tution promised. Finally, in 1891, the first j.a.panese parliament (strictly speaking) was convoked. By that time the entire framework of society had been remodelled, so far as laws could remodel it, upon a European pattern. The nation had fairly entered upon its third period of integration. The clan had been legally dissolved; the family was no longer the legal unit of society: by the new const.i.tution the individual had been recognized.

When we consider the history of some vast and sudden political change in its details only,--the factors of the movement, the combinations of immediate cause and effect, the influences of strong personality, the conditions impelling individual action, [377]--then the transformation is apt to appear to us the work and the triumph of a few superior minds. We forget, perhaps, that those minds themselves were the product of their epoch, and that every such rapid change must represent the working of a national or race-instinct quite as much as the operation of individual intelligence. The events of the Meiji reconstruction strangely ill.u.s.trate the action of such instinct in the face of peril,--the readjustment of internal relations to sudden changes of environment. The nation had found its old political system powerless before the new conditions; and it transformed that system. It had found its military organization incapable of defending it; and it reconstructed that organization. It had found its educational system useless in the presence of unforeseen necessities; and it replaced that system,--simultaneously crippling the power of Buddhism, which might otherwise have offered serious opposition to the new developments required. And in that hour of greatest danger the national instinct turned back at once to the moral experience upon which it could best rely,--the experience embodied in its ancient cult, the religion of unquestioning obedience. Relying upon s.h.i.+nto tradition, the people rallied about their ruler, descendant of the ancient G.o.ds, and awaited his will with unconquerable zeal of faith. By strict obedience to his commands the peril might be averted,--never otherwise: this was [378] the national conviction.

And the imperial order was simply that the nation should strive by study to make itself, as far as possible, the intellectual equal of its enemies. How faithfully that command was obeyed,--how well the old moral discipline of the race served it in the period of that supreme emergency,--I need scarcely say. j.a.pan, by right of self-acquired strength, has entered into the circle of the modern civilized powers,--formidable by her new military organization, respectable through her achievements in the domain of practical science. And the force to effect this astonis.h.i.+ng self-improvement, within the time of thirty years, she owes a.s.suredly to the moral habit derived from her ancient cult,--the religion of the ancestors.

To fairly measure the feat, we should remember that j.a.pan was evolutionally younger than any modern European nation, by at least twenty-seven hundred years, when she went to school! ...

Herbert Spencer has shown that the great value to society of ecclesiastical inst.i.tutions lies in their power to give cohesion to the ma.s.s,--to strengthen rule by enforcing obedience to custom, and by opposing innovations likely to supply any element of disintegration. In other words, the value of a religion, from the sociological standpoint, lies in its conservatism. Various writers have alleged that the [379] j.a.panese national religion proved itself weak by incapacity to resist the overwhelming influence of Buddhism.

I cannot help thinking that the entire social history of j.a.pan yields proof to the contrary. Though Buddhism did for a long period appear to have almost entirely absorbed s.h.i.+nto, by the acknowledgment of the s.h.i.+nto scholars themselves; though Buddhist emperors reigned who neglected or despised the cult of their ancestors; though Buddhism directed, during ten centuries, the education of the nation, s.h.i.+nto remained all the while so very much alive that it was able not only to dispossess its rival at last, but to save the country from foreign domination. To a.s.sert that the s.h.i.+nto revival signified no more than a stroke of policy imagined by a group of statesmen, is to ignore all the antecedents of the event. No such change could have been wrought by mere decree had not the national sentiment welcomed it....

Moreover, there are three important facts to be remembered in regard to the former Buddhist predomination: (1) Buddhism conserved the family-cult, modifying the forms of the rite; (2) Buddhism never really supplanted the Ujigami cults, but maintained them; (3) Buddhism never interfered with the imperial cult. Now these three forms of ancestor-wors.h.i.+p,--the domestic, the communal, and the national,--const.i.tute all that is vital in s.h.i.+nto. No single essential of the ancient faith had ever been weakened, [380] much less abolished, under the long pressure of Buddhism.

The Supreme Cult is not now the State Religion by request of the chiefs of s.h.i.+nto, it is not even officially cla.s.sed as a religion. Obvious reasons of state policy decided this course.

Having fulfilled its grand task, s.h.i.+nto abdicated. But as representing all those traditions which appeal to race-feeling, to the sentiment of duty, to the pa.s.sion of loyalty, and the love of country, it yet remains an immense force, a power to which appeal will not be vainly made in another hour of national peril.

[381]

SURVIVALS

In the gardens of certain Buddhist temples there are trees which have been famous for centuries,--trees trained and clipped into extraordinary shapes. Some have the form of dragons; others have the form of paG.o.das, s.h.i.+ps, umbrellas. Supposing that one of these trees were abandoned to its own natural tendencies, it would eventually lose the queer shape so long imposed upon it; but the outline would not be altered for a considerable time, as the new leaf.a.ge would at first unfold only in the direction of least resistance: that is to say, within limits originally established by the shears and the pruning-knife. By sword and law the old j.a.panese society had been pruned and clipped, bent and bound, just like such a tree; and after the reconstructions of the Meiji period,--after the abolition of the daimiates, and the suppression of the military cla.s.s, it still maintained its former shape, just as the tree would continue to do when first abandoned by the gardener. Though delivered from the bonds of feudal law, released from the shears of military rule, the great bulk of the social structure preserved its ancient [382] aspect; and the rare spectacle bewildered and delighted and deluded the Western observer. Here indeed was Elf-land,--the strange, the beautiful, the grotesque, the very mysterious,--totally unlike aught of strange and attractive ever beheld elsewhere. It was not a world of the nineteenth century after Christ, but a world of many centuries before Christ: yet this fact--the wonder of wonders--remained unrecognized; and it remains unrecognized by most people even to this day.

Fortunate indeed were those privileged to enter this astonis.h.i.+ng fairyland thirty odd years ago, before the period of superficial change, and to observe the unfamiliar aspects of its life: the universal urbanity, the smiling silence of crowds, the patient deliberation of toil, the absence of misery and struggle. Even yet, in those remoter districts where alien influence has wrought but little change, the charm of the old existence lingers and amazes; and the ordinary traveller can little understand what it means. That all are polite, that n.o.body quarrels, that everybody smiles, that pain and sorrow remain invisible, that the new police have nothing to do, would seem to prove a morally superior humanity. But for the trained sociologist it would prove something different, and suggest something very terrible. It would prove to him that this society had been moulded under immense coercion, and that the coercion must have been exerted uninterruptedly [383] for thousands of years. He would immediately perceive that ethics and custom had not yet become dissociated, and that the conduct of each person was regulated by the will of the rest. He would know that personality could not develop in such a social medium,--that no individual superiority dare a.s.sert itself, that no compet.i.tion would be tolerated. He would understand that the outward charm of this life--its softness, its smiling silence as of dreams--signified the rule of the dead. He would recognize that between those minds and the minds of his own epoch no kins.h.i.+p of thought, no community of sentiment, no sympathy whatever could exist,--that the separating gulf was not to be measured by thousands of leagues, but only by thousands of years,--that the psychological interval was hopeless as the distance from planet to planet. Yet this knowledge probably would not--certainly should not--blind him to the intrinsic charm of things. Not to feel the beauty of this archaic life is to prove oneself insensible to all beauty. Even that Greek world, for which our scholars and poets profess such loving admiration, must have been in many ways a world of the same kind, whose daily mental existence no modern mind could share.

Now that the great social tree, so wonderfully clipped and cared for during many centuries, [384] is losing its fantastic shape, let us try to see how much of the original design can still be traced.