Hence the average Chinese has not taken passionately to Mohammedanism or Christianity; these offered him a heaven that Buddhism had already promised, but what he really wanted was a guarantee of happiness here. Most of the fifteen million Chinese Moslems are not really Chinese, but people of foreign origin or parentage.89 Christianity entered China with the Nestorians about 636 A.D. The Emperor Tai Tsung gave it a sympathetic hearing, and protected its preachers from persecution. In 781 the Nestorians of China raised a monument on which they recorded their appreciation of this enlightened tolerance, and their hope that Christianity would soon win the whole land.90 Since then Jesuit missionaries with heroic zeal and lofty learning, and Protestant missionaries backed with great American fortunes, have labored to realize the hope of the Nestorians. Today there are three million Christians in China; one per cent of the population has been converted in a thousand years.*
V. THE RULE OF MORALS
The high place of morals in Chinese society—The family—Children—Chastity—Prostitution—Premarital relations—Marriage and love—Monogamy and poly gamy—Concubinage—Divorce—A Chinese empress—The patriarchal male—The subjection of woman—The Chinese character
Confucianism and ancestor worship survived so many rivals and so many attacks, during twenty centuries, because they were felt to be indispensable to that intense and exalted moral tradition upon which China had founded its life. As these were the religious sanctions, so the family was the great vehicle, of this ethical heritage. From parents to children the moral code was handed down across the generations, and became the invisible government of Chinese society; a code so stable and strong that that society maintained its order and discipline through nearly all the vicissitudes of the unsteady state. “What the Chinese,” said Voltaire, “best know, cultivate the most, and have brought to the greatest perfection, is morality.”92 “By building the house on a sound foundation,” Confucius had said, “the world is made secure.”93
The Chinese proceeded on the assumption that the purpose of a moral code was to transform the chaos of sexual relations into an orderly institution for the rearing of children. The family’s reason for being lay in the child. There could not, from the viewpoint of China, be too many children: a nation was always subject to attack, and needed defenders; the soil was rich, and could support many millions; even if there should be a bitter struggle for existence in large families and crowded communities, the weakest would be eliminated, and the ablest would survive and multiply to be a support and an honor to their aging parents, and to tend the ancestral graves religiously. Ancestor worship forged an endless chain of reproduction, and gave it a double strength; the husband must beget sons not only to sacrifice to him after his death, but to continue the sacrifices to his ancestors. “There are three things which are unfilial,” said Mencius; “and the greatest of them is to have no posterity.”94
Sons were prayed for, and mothers were shamed forever if they had none; for sons could work better than girls in the fields, and could fight better in war; and a regulation not unconscious of this had long since decreed that only sons should be permitted to offer the ancestral sacrifice. Girls were a burden, for one had to rear them patiently only to see them go off, at maturity, to their husbands’ homes, to labor there, and beget laborers, for another family. If too many daughters came, and times were very hard, the infant girl might without sin be left exposed in the furrows, to be killed by the night’s frost or eaten by prowling swine.95 Such progeny as survived the hazards and ailments of childhood were brought up with the tenderest affection; example took the place of blows in their education; and occasionally they were exchanged for a while for the children of kindred families, so that they might not be spoiled by an indulgent love.96 The children were kept in the women’s division of the home, and seldom mingled with the adult males until the age of seven. Then the boys, if the family could afford it, were sent to school, and were severely separated from the girls; from the age of ten they would be limited in their choice of associates to men and courtesans; and the frequency of homosexuality and male prostitution sometimes made this choice unreal.97
Chastity was exalted and rigidly enforced in daughters, and was inculcated with such success that Chinese girls have been known to kill them selves because they believed that they had been dishonored by the accidental touch of a man.98 But no effort was made to maintain chastity in the unmarried man; on the contrary, it was considered normal and legitimate that he should visit brothels; sex (in the male) was an appetite like hunger, and might be indulged in without any other disgrace than that which would in any case attach to immoderation.99* The supply of women to meet these demands had long since been an established institution in China; the famous premier of T’si, Kuan Chung, had provided a lupanar where traders from other states might leave their gains before departing for their homes.101 Marco Polo described the courtesans of Kublai Khan’s capital as incredibly numerous and ravishingly beautiful. They were licensed, regulated and segregated; and the most beautiful of them were supplied without charge to the members of foreign embassies.102 In later times a special variety of charmers was developed, known as “sing-song girls,” who, if that were preferred, would provide educated conversation for young men or for respectable husbands entertaining guests. Such girls were often versed in literature and philosophy, as well as skilled in music and the dance.103
Premarital relations were so free for men, and premarital association with men was so restricted for respectable women, that small opportunity was given for the growth of romantic love. A literature of such tender affection appeared under the T’angs, and some indication of the sentiment may be found as far back as the sixth century before Christ in the legend of Wei Sheng, who, having promised to meet a girl under a bridge, waited vainly for her there, though the water rose above his head and drowned him.104 Doubtless Wei Sheng knew better than this, but it is significant that the poets thought that he might not. In general, however, love as a tender solicitude and attachment was more frequent between men than between the sexes; in this matter the Chinese agreed with the Greeks.105
Marriage had little to do with love; since its purpose was to bring healthy mates together for the rearing of abundant families, it could not, the Chinese thought, be left to the arbitrament of passion. Hence the sexes were kept apart while the parents sought eligible mates for their children. It was considered immoral for a man not to marry; celibacy was a crime against one’s ancestors, the state and the race, and was never quite condoned even in the case of the clergy. In the ancient days a special official was appointed to see to it that every man was married by the age of thirty, and every woman by twenty.106 With or without the help of professional intermediaries (mei-ren, “go-betweens”), parents arranged the betrothal of their children soon after puberty, sometimes before puberty, sometimes before birth.107 Certain endogamic and exogamic limits were placed on the choice: the mate had to be of a family long known to the match-seeking parents, and yet sufficiently distant in relationship to be outside the clan. The father of the boy usually sent a substantial present to the father of the girl, but the girl in her turn was expected to bring a considerable dowry, chiefly in the form of goods, to her husband; and gifts of some value were ordinarily exchanged between the families at the marriage. The girl was kept in strict seclusion until the wedding. Her future mate could not see her except by stratagem—though that was often managed; in many cases he saw her for the first time when he removed her veil in the wedding cermony. This was a complex and symbolic ritual, in which the essential matter was that the bridegroom should be sufficiently wined to guard against the chance of a criminal bashfulness on his part;108 as for the girl, she had been trained to be at once shy and obedient. After the marriage the bride lived with her husband in or near the house of his father; there she labored in servitude to her mate and his mother, until such time as the normal course of life and death liberated her from this slavery and left her ready to impose it upon the wives of her sons.
The poor were monogamous; but so eager was China for vigorous children that such men as could afford it were permitted by custom to take concubines, or “secondary wives.” Polygamy was looked upon as eugenic, on the ground that those who could bear its expense would on the average be the abler men in their communities. If the first wife remained childless she would in most cases urge her husband to take an additional mate, and would often adopt as her own the child of the concubine. There were many instances in which wives, anxious to keep their husbands home, suggested that they should marry the courtesans to whom they were giving their attention and their substance, and should bring them home as secondary wives.109 The wife of the Emperor Chuang-tchu was much praised in Chinese tradition because she was reported to have said: “I have never ceased to send people to all the neighboring towns to look for beautiful women in order that I might represent them as concubines to my lord.”110 Families rivaled one another in seeking the honor of providing a daughter for the royal harem. To guard the harem, and to attend to other duties at his court, the emperor was entitled to three thousand eunuchs. Most of these had been mutilated by their parents before the age of eight, in order to ensure their livelihood.111
In this paradise of the male the secondary wives were practically slaves, and the chief wife was merely the head of a reproductive establishment. Her prestige depended almost entirely on the number and sex of her children. Educated to accept her husband as a lord, she might win some modest happiness by falling quietly into the routine expected of her; and so adaptive is the human soul that the wife and husband, in these prearranged unions, seem to have lived in a peace no more violent than that which follows the happy endings of Western romantic love. The woman could be divorced for almost any cause, from barrenness to loquacity;112 she herself could never divorce her husband, but she might leave him and return to her parents—though this was a matter of rare resort. Divorce in any case was infrequent; partly because the lot of the divorced woman was too unpleasant to be thought of, partly because the Chinese were natural philosophers, and took suffering as the order of the day.
Very probably, in pre-Confucian times, the family had centered around the mother as the source of its existence and its authority. In the earliest period, as we have seen, the people “knew their mothers but not their fathers”; and the character for a man’s family name is still formed from the radical for “woman.”113 The word for “wife” meant “equal”; and the wife preserved her own name after marriage. As late as the third century of our era women held high administrative and executive positions in China, even to ruling the state;114 the “Dowager Empress” merely followed in the steps of that Empress Lu who ruled China so severely from 195 to 180 B.C. Lu, “hard and inflexible,” killed and poisoned her rivals and enemies with all the gusto of a Medicean; she chose and deposed kings, and had her husband’s favorite concubine shorn of ears and eyes and thrown into a latrine.115 Though hardly one in ten thousand Chinese were literate under the Manchus,116 education was customary among the women of the upper classes in ancient days; many of them wrote poetry; and Pan Chao, the gifted sister of the historian P’an Ku (ca. 100 A.D.), completed his history after his death, and won high recognition from the emperor.117
Probably the establishment of the feudal system in China reduced the political and economic status of woman, and brought with it an especially rigorous form of the patriarchal family. Usually all the male descendants, and their wives and children, lived with the oldest male; and though the family owned its land in common, it acknowledged the complete authority of the patriarch over both the family and its property. By the time of Confucius the power of the father was almost absolute: he could sell his wife or his children into servitude, though he did so only under great need; and if he wished he could put his children to death with no other restraint than public opinion.118 He ate his meals alone, not inviting either his wife or his children to table with him except on rare occasions. When he died his widow was expected to avoid remarriage; formerly she had been required to commit suttee in his honor, and cases of this occurred in China to the end of the nineteenth century.119 He was courteous to his wife, as to everybody, but he maintained a severe distance, almost a separation of caste, between himself and his wife and children. The women lived in distinct quarters of the home, and seldom mingled with the men; social life was exclusively male, except for promiscuous women. The man thought of his wife as the mother of his children; he honored her not for her beauty or her culture, but for her fertility, her industry and her obedience. In a celebrated treatise the Lady Pan Ho-pan, from the same elevation of aristocracy, wrote with edifying humility of the proper condition of women:
We occupy the last place in the human species, we are the weaker part of humanity; the basest functions are, and should be, our portion. . . . Rightly and justly does the Book of the Laws of the Sexes make use of these words: “If a woman has a husband after her own heart, it is for her whole life; if a woman has a husband against her heart, it is also for life.”120
And Fu Hsüan sang:
How sad it is to be a woman!
Nothing on earth is held so cheap.
Boys stand leaning at the door
Like gods fallen out of heaven.
Their hearts brave the Four Oceans,
The wind and dust of a thousand miles.
No one is glad when a girl is born:
By her the family sets no store.
When she grows up she hides in her room,
Afraid to look a man in the face.
No one cries when she leaves her home-
Sudden as clouds when the rain stops.
She bows her head and composes her face,
Her teeth are pressed on her red lips:
She bows and kneels countless times.121
Perhaps such quotations do injustice to the Chinese home. There was rank subjection in it, and quarrels were frequent between man and woman, and among the children; but there were also much kindness and affection, much mutual helpfulness, and constant cooperation in the busy functioning of a natural home. Though economically subordinate the woman enjoyed the franchise of the tongue, and might scold her man into fright or flight in the best Occidental style. The patriarchal family could not be democratic, much less egalitarian, because the state left to the family the task of maintaining social order; the home was at once a nursery, a school, a workshop and a government. The relaxation of family discipline in America has been made possible only by the economic unimportance of the urban home, and the appropriation of family functions by the school, the factory and the state.
The type of character produced by these domestic institutions has won the highest praise of many travelers. Allowing for the many exceptions that weaken every social generalization, the average Chinese was a model of filial obedience and devotion, of wholesome respect and willing care for the old.* He accepted patiently the character-forming precepts of the Li-chi or Book of Ceremonies, carried easily its heavy burden of etiquette, regulated every phase of his life with its rules of passionless courtesy, and acquired under it an ease and excellence of manners, a poise and dignity of bearing, unknown to his compeers of the West—so that a coolie carrying dung through the streets might show better breeding, and more self-respect, than the alien merchant who sold him opium. The Chinese learned the art of compromise, and graciously “saved the face” of his worsted enemy. He was occasionally violent in speech and always loquacious, often unclean and not invariably sober, given to gambling and gluttony,* to petty peculation and courteous mendacity;124 he worshiped the God of Wealth with too frank an idolatry,125 and was as hungry for gold as a caricatured American; he was capable occasionally of cruelty and brutality, and accumulating injustices sometimes provoked him to mass outbreaks of pillage and slaughter. But in nearly all cases he was peaceable and kindly, ready to help his neighbors, disdainful of criminals and warriors, thrifty and industrious, leisurely but steady at his work, simple and unassuming in his mode of life, and comparatively honest in commerce and finance. He was silent and patient under the whip of adversity, and took good and evil fortune alike with a wise humility; he bore bereavement and agony with fatalistic self-control, and showed little sympathy for those who suffered them audibly; he mourned long and loyally for his departed relatives, and (when all his compromises had failed to elude it) faced his own death with philosophic calm. He was as sensitive to beauty as he was insensitive to pain; he brightened his cities with colorful decoration, and adorned his life with the maturest art.
If we wish to understand this civilization we must forget for a moment the bitter chaos and helplessness into which it has been thrown by its own internal weakness and by contact with the superior guns and machines of the West; we must see it at any of its many apogees—under the Chou princes, or Ming Huang, or Hui Tsung, or K’ang-hsi. For in those quiet and beauty-loving days the Chinese represented without doubt the highest civilization and the ripest culture that Asia, or perhaps any continent, had yet achieved.
VI. A GOVERNMENT PRAISED BY VOLTAIRE126
The submergence of the individual—Self-government—The village and the province—The laxity of the law—The severity of punishment—The Emperor—The Censor—Administrative boards—Education for public office—Nomination by education—The examination system—Its defects—Its virtues
The most impressive aspect of this civilization was its system of government. If the ideal state is a combination of democracy and aristocracy, the Chinese have had it for more than a thousand years; if the best government is that which governs least, then the Chinese have had the best. Never has a government governed so many people, or governed them so little, or so long.
Not that individualism, or individual liberty, flourished in China; on the contrary, the concept of the individual was weak, and lost him in the groups to which he belonged. He was, first of all, a member of a family and a passing unit in a stream of life between his ancestors and his posterity; by law and custom he was responsible for the acts of the others of his household, and they were responsible for his. Usually he belonged to some secret society, and, in the town, to a guild; these limited his rights to do as he pleased. A web of ancient custom bound him, and a powerful public opinion threatened him with ostracism if he seriously violated the morals or traditions of the group. It was precisely the strength of these popular organizations, rising naturally out of the needs and voluntary cooperation of the people, that made it possible for China to maintain itself in order and stability despite the weakness of law and the state.
But within the framework of these spontaneous institutions of self-government the Chinese remained politically and economically free. The great distances that separated one city from another, and all of them from the imperial capital, the dividing effect of mountains, deserts, and unbridged or unnavigable streams, the lack of transport and quick communication, and the difficulty of supporting an army large enough to enforce some central will upon four hundred million people, compelled the state to leave to each district an almost complete autonomy.
The unit of local administration was the village, loosely ruled by the family heads under the eye of a “headman” named by the government; a group of villages gathered about a town constituted a hien, or county, of which there were some thirteen hundred in China; two or more hien, ruled together from a city, constituted a fu; two or more fu formed a tao, or circuit; two or more tao made a sheng, or province; and eighteen provinces, under the Manchus, made the empire. The state appointed a magistrate to act as administrator, tax-collector and judge in each hien; a chief officer for each fu and each tao; and a judge, a treasurer, a governor, and sometimes a viceroy, for each province.127 But these officials normally contented themselves with collecting taxes and “squeezes,” judging such cases as voluntary arbitration had failed to settle, and, for the rest, leaving the maintenance of order to custom, the family, the clan and the guild. Each province was a semi-independent state, free from imperial interference or central legislation so long as it paid its tax-allotment and kept the peace. Lack of facilities for communication made the central government more an idea than a reality. The patriotic emotions of the people were spent upon their districts and provinces, and seldom extended to the empire as a whole.
In this loose structure law was weak, unpopular, and diverse. The people preferred to be ruled by custom, and to settle their disputes by face-saving compromises out of court. They expressed their view of litigation by such pithy proverbs as “Sue a flea and catch a bite,” or “Win your lawsuit, lose your money.” In many towns of several thousand population years passed without a case coming into the courts.128 The laws had been codified under the T’ang emperors, but they dealt almost entirely with crime, and attempted no formulation of a civil code. Trials were simple, for no lawyer was allowed to argue a case in court, though licensed notaries might occasionally prepare, and read to the magistrate, a statement in behalf of a client.129 There were no juries, and there was scant protection in the law against the sudden seizure and secret retention of a person by the officers of the state. Suspects were finger-printed,130 and confessions were sometimes elicited by tortures slightly more physical than those now used for such purposes in the most enlightened cities. Punishment was severe, but hardly as barbarous as in most other countries of Asia; it began with cutting off the hair, and went on to flogging, banishment or death; if the criminal had exceptional merits or rank, he might be allowed to kill himself.131 There were generous commutations of sentences, and capital punishment could in normal times be imposed only by the emperor. Theoretically, as with us, all persons were equal before the law. These laws never availed to prevent brigandage on the highways or corruption in office and the courts, but they coöperated modestly with custom and the family to give China a degree of social order and personal security not equaled by any other nation before our century.132
Poised precariously above these teeming millions sat the emperor. In theory he ruled by divine right; he was the “Son of Heaven,” and represented the Supreme Being on earth.* By virtue of his godlike powers he ruled the seasons and commanded men to coordinate their lives with the divine order of the universe. His decrees were laws, and his judgments were the final court; he administered the state and was the head of its religion; he appointed all officials, examined the highest contestants for office, and chose his successor to the throne. Actually his powers were wholesomely limited by custom and law. He was expected to rule without contravening the regulations that had come down from the sacred past; he might at any moment be rebuked by a strange dignitary known as the Censor; he was in effect imprisoned by a ring of counsellors and commissioners whose advice it was usually expedient for him to accept; and if he ruled very unjustly or unwell he lost, by common custom and consent, the “mandate of Heaven,” and might be violently deposed without offense to religion or morality.
The Censor was head of a board whose function it was to inspect all officials in the administration of their duties; and the emperor was not exempt from this supervision. Several times in the course of history the Censor has reproved the emperor himself. For example, the Censor Sung respectfully suggested to the Emperor Chia Ch’ing (1796-1821 A.D.) a moderation in his attachment to actors and strong drink. Chia Ch’ing summoned Sung to his presence, and angrily asked him what punishment was proper for so insolent an official. Sung answered, “Death by the slicing process.” Ordered to select a milder penalty, he answered, “Let me be beheaded.” Ordered to select a milder penalty, he recommended that he be strangled. The Emperor, impressed by his courage and disturbed by his propinquity, made him governor of the province of Ili.134
The imperial government had come to be a highly complex administrative machine. Nearest to the throne was the Grand Council, composed of four “Great Ministers,” usually headed by a prince of the royal blood; by custom it met daily, in the early hours of the morning, to determine the policies of the state. Superior in rank but inferior in influence was another group of advisers called the “Inner Cabinet.” The work of administration was headed by “Six Boards”: of Civil Office, of Revenue, of Ceremonies, of War, of Punishments, and of Works. There was a Colonial Office, for managing such distant territories as Mongolia, Sinkiang and Tibet; but there was no Foreign Office: China recognized no other nations as its equals, and made no provisions for dealing with them beyond arrangements for the reception of tribute-bearing embassies.
The weakness of the government lay in its limited revenues, its inadequate defenses, and its rejection of any instructive intercourse with the outside world. It taxed the land, monopolized the sale of salt, and impeded the development of commerce by levying, after 1852, a duty on the transit of goods along the main routes of the country; but the poverty of the people, the difficulty of collection, and the dishonesty of the collectors kept the national revenue at too low a point to finance the naval and military forces that might have saved China from invasion and shameful defeat.* Perhaps the basic defect was in the personnel of the government; the ability and honesty of its officials deteriorated throughout the nineteenth century, and left the nation essentially leaderless when half the wealth and power of the world were joining in an assault upon its independence, its resources and its institutions.
Nevertheless those officials had been chosen by the most unique, and all in all the most admirable, method ever developed for the selection of public servants. It was a method that would have interested Plato; and despite its failure and abandonment today it still endears China to the philosopher. Theoretically, the plan provided a perfect reconciliation of aristocracy and democracy: all men were to have an equal opportunity to make themselves fit for office, but office was to be open only to those who had made themselves fit. Practically, the method produced good results for a thousand years.
It began in the village schools—simple private institutions, often no more than a room in a cottage—where an individual teacher, out of his own meager remuneration, provided an elementary education for the sons of the prosperous; the poorer half of the population remained illiterate.137 These schools were not financed by the state, nor were they conducted by the clergy; education, like marriage, remained, in China, independent of religion, except in so far as Confucianism was its creed. Hours were long and discipline was severe in these modest schoolhouses: the children reported to the teacher at sunrise, studied with him till ten, had breakfast, resumed their studies till five, and then were free for the day. Vacations were few and brief: there were no lessons after noon in the summer, but to atone for this leisure to work in the fields there were school sessions in the winter evenings. The chief instruments of instruction were the writings of Confucius, the poetry of the T’ang, and a whip of clinging bamboo. The method was memory: day after day the young students learned by heart, and discussed with their teacher, the philosophy of K’ung the Master, until almost every word of it had sunk into their memories, and some of it into their hearts; China hoped that in this joyless and merciless way even a peasant lad might be turned into a philosopher and a gentleman. The graduate emerged with little information and much understanding, factually ignorant and mentally mature.*
It was on the basis of this education that China established—first tentatively under the Han, then definitely under the T’ang, dynasties—its system of examinations for public office. It is an evil for the people, said China, that its rulers should learn to rule by ruling; as far as possible they should learn to rule before ruling. It is an evil for the people that they should have no access to office, and that government should be the privilege of an hereditary few; but it is good for the people that office should be confined to those who have been prepared for it by ability and training. To offer to all men democratically an equal opportunity for such training, and to restrict office aristocratically to those who proved themselves best, was the solution that China proposed for the ancient and insoluble problem of government.
Therefore it periodically arranged, in each district, a public examination to which all males of any age were eligible. It tested the applicant in his memory and understanding of the writings of Confucius, in his knowledge of Chinese poetry and history, and in his capacity to write intelligently on the issues of moral and political life. Those who failed might study more and try again; those who succeeded received the degree of Hsiu ts’ai entitling them to membership in the literary class, and to possible appointment to minor local offices; but more important than this, they became eligible—either at once or after further preparation—for the triennial provincial examinations, which offered similar but harder tests. Those who failed here might try again, and many did, so that some men passed these tests after eighty years of living and studying, and not a few died in the midst of the examinations. Those who succeeded were eligible for appointment to minor positions in the national service; and at the same time they were admitted to a final and especially severe examination at Peking. There in the Examination Hall were ten thousand cells, in which the contestants, cribbed and confined, lived with their own food and bedding for three separate days, while they wrote essays or theses on subjects announced to them after their imprisonment. The cells were unheated, uncomfortable, ill-lighted and unsanitary; only the spirit mattered! Typical tests were the composition of a poem on the theme: “The sound of the oars, and the green of the hills and water”; and the writing of an essay on this passage from the Confucian Classics: “Tsang Tsze said, ‘To possess ability, and yet ask of those who do not; to know much, and yet inquire of those who know little; to possess, and yet appear not to possess; to be full, and yet appear empty.’” There was not a word in any of the tests about science, business or industry; the object was to reveal not knowledge but judgment and character. Those who survived the tests were at last eligible for the higher offices in the state.
The defects of the plan grew in the course of time. Though dishonesty in taking or judging the tests was sometimes punished with death, dishonesty found a way. The purchase of appointments became frequent and flagrant in the nineteenth century;138 an inferior officer, for example, sold twenty thousand forged diplomas before he was exposed.139 The form of the trial essay came to be a matter of custom, and students prepared themselves for it mechanically. The curriculum of studies tended to formalize culture and impede the progress of thought, for the ideas that circulated in it had been standardized for hundreds of years. The graduates became an official and intellectual bureaucracy, naturally arrogant and humanly selfish, occasionally despotic and often corrupt, and yet immune to public recall or control except through the desperate resort of the boycott or the strike. In short, the system had the faults that might be expected of any governmental structure conceived and operated by men. The faults of the system belonged to the men, not to the system; and no other had less.*
The merits of the system were abundant. Here were no manipulated nominations, no vulgar campaigns of misrepresentation and hypocrisy, no sham battles of twin parties, no noisy or corrupt elections, no ascent to office through a meretricious popularity. It was a democracy in the best sense of the term, as equality of opportunity for all in the competition for leadership and place; and it was an aristocracy in its finest form, as a government by the ablest men, democratically selected from every rank in every generation. By this system the national mind and ambition were turned in the direction of study, and the national heroes and models were men of culture rather than masters of wealth.* It was admirable that a society should make the experiment of being ruled, socially and politically, by men trained in philosophy and the humanities. It was an act of high tragedy when that system, and the entire civilization of which it formed the guiding part, were struck down and destroyed by the inexorable forces of evolution and history.
CHAPTER XXVII
Revolution and Renewal
I. THE WHITE PERIL
The conflict of Asia and Europe—The Portuguese—The Spanish—The Dutch—The English—The opium trade—The Opium Wars—The T’ai-p’ing Rebellion—The War with Japan—The attempt to dismember China—The “Open Door”—The Empress Dowager—The reforms of Kuang Hsu—His removal from power—The “Boxers”—The Indemnity
THOSE forces took the form of the Industrial Revolution. A Europe vitalized and rejuvenated by the discovery of mechanical power and its application to ever-multiplying machinery, found itself capable of producing goods more cheaply than any nation or continent that still relied on handicrafts; it was unable to dispose of all these machine products to its own population, because it paid its workers somewhat less than the full value of their labor; it was forced to seek foreign markets for the surplus, and was driven, by imperialist necessity, to conquer the world. Under the compulsions of invention and circumstance the nineteenth century became a world-wide drama of conflict between the old, mature and fatigued civilizations of handicraft Asia, and the young, jejune, and invigorated civilizations of industrial Europe.
The Commercial Revolution of Columbus’ time cleared the routes and prepared the way for the Industrial Revolution. Discoverers refound old lands, opened up new ports, and brought to the ancient cultures the novel products and ideas of the West. Early in the sixteenth century the adventurous Portuguese, having established themselves in India, captured Malacca, sailed around the Malay Peninsula, and arrived with their picturesque ships and terrible guns at Canton (1517). “Truculent and lawless, regarding all Eastern peoples as legitimate prey, they were little if any better than . . . pirates”;1 and the natives treated them as such. Their representatives were imprisoned, their demands for free trade were refused, and their settlements were periodically cleansed with massacres by the frightened and infuriated Chinese. But in return for their aid against other pirates, the Portuguese were rewarded in 1557 by receiving from Peking full liberty to settle in Macao, and to govern it as their own. There they built great opium factories, employing men, women and children; one factory alone paid to the Portuguese provincial government a revenue of $1,560,000 per year.2
Then came the Spanish, conquering the Philippines (1571), and setting themselves up in the Chinese island of Formosa; then the Dutch; then, in 1637, five English vessels sailed up the river to Canton, silenced with superior guns the batteries that opposed them, and disposed of their cargo.3 The Portuguese taught the Chinese to smoke and buy tobacco, and, early in the eighteenth century, began the importation of opium from India into China. The Chinese Government forbade its use by the people, but the habit became so widespread that the annual consumption of the drug in China had raised its import to 4,000 chests by the year 1795.* The Government prohibited its importation in that year, and reiterated the prohibition in 1800, appealing to importers and population alike against the weakening of national vitality by this powerful opiate. The trade proceeded briskly despite these discouragements; the Chinese were as anxious to buy as the Europeans were eager to sell, and the local officials gratefully pocketed the bribes connected with the trade.
In 1838 the Peking Government ordered the strict enforcement of the edict against the importation of opium, and a vigorous official, Lin Tzehsü, commanded the foreign importers at Canton to surrender such quantities as they held in their stores. When they refused he surrounded the foreign quarters, forced them to turn over to him 20,000 chests of the drug, and, in a kind of Canton Opium Party, destroyed the contents completely. The British withdrew to Hong Kong, and began the First “Opium War.” They protested that it was not an opium war; that their anger was rather at the insolent pride with which the Chinese Government had received—or refused to receive—their representatives, and at the impediments, in the form of severe taxation and corrupt courts, which Chinese law and custom had raised against an orderly import trade. They bombarded those cities of China which they could reach from the coast, and compelled peace by capturing control, at Chinkiang, of the Grand Canal. The Treaty of Nanking avoided all mention of opium, ceded the island of Hong Kong to the British, forced Chinese tariffs down to five per cent, opened five “treaty ports” (Canton, Amoy, Foochow, Ningpo and Shanghai) to foreign trade, levied upon China an indemnity to cover the cost of the war and the destroyed opium, and stipulated that British citizens in China, when accused of violating laws, should be tried and judged only by British courts.5 Other countries, including the United States and France, asked and obtained the application of these “extra-territorial rights” to their traders and nationals in China.
This war was the beginning of the disintegration of the ancient regime. The Government had lost “face” in its dealings with Europeans; it had first scorned, then defied, then yielded; and no courtly phrases could conceal the facts from educated natives or gloating foreigners. At once the authority of the Government was weakened wherever the news of its defeat penetrated, and forces that might have held their peace broke out now in open rebellion against Peking. In 1843 an enthusiast named Hung Hsiu-ch’üan, after a brief acquaintance with Protestantism, and some visions, came to the conclusion that he had been chosen by God to rid China of idolatry and convert it to Christianity. Beginning with this modest purpose, Hung finally led a movement to overthrow the Manchus and establish a new dynasty—the T’ai P’ing, or Great Peace. His followers, actuated partly by religious fanaticism, partly by desire to reform China on Western lines, fought valiantly, smashed idols, slaughtered Chinese, destroyed many old libraries and academies and the porcelain works at Ching-te-chen, captured Nanking, held it for twelve years (1853-65), marched on Peking while their leader wallowed in luxury and safety behind them, broke into disorder because of incompetent generalship, were defeated, and fell back into the indiscriminate ocean of Chinese humanity.6
In the midst of this dangerous T’ai-p’ing Rebellion the Government was called upon to defend itself against Europe in the Second “Opium War” (1856-60). Great Britain, supported in varying degrees by France and the United States, demanded the legalization of the opium traffic (which had continued, despite prohibitions, between the wars), access to more cities, and the honorable admission of Western envoys to the court at Peking. When the Chinese refused, the French and English captured Canton, sent its Viceroy in chains to India, took the forts at Tientsin, advanced upon the capital, and destroyed the Summer Palace in revenge for the torture and execution of Allied emissaries in Peking. The victors forced upon the defeated a treaty that opened ten new ports and the Yangtze River to foreign trade, arranged for the reception of European and American ministers and ambassadors on terms of equality with China, guaranteed toleration of missionaries and traders in every part of the country, removed missionaries from the jurisdiction of Chinese officials, further freed Western nationals from the operation of Chinese laws, ceded to Great Britain a strip of the mainland opposite Hong Kong, legalized the importation of opium, and charged China with an indemnity to pay for the cost of her tuition in Occidental ways.
Encouraged by their easy victories, the European nations proceeded to help themselves to one piece of China after another. Russia took the territory north of the Amur and east of the Ussuri River (1860); the French revenged the death of a missionary by appropriating Indo-China (1885); Japan pounced upon her neighbor and civilizer in a sudden war (1894), defeated her in a year, took Formosa, liberated Korea from China for later (1910) absorption by Japan, and charged China an indemnity of $170,-000,000 for causing so much trouble7 On condition that China pay an additional indemnity to Japan, Russia prevented Japan from also taking the Liaotung Peninsula, which three years later Russia took over and fortified as her own. The murder of two missionaries by Chinese enabled Germany to seize the peninsula of Shantung (1898). The realm of the once powerful government was divided into “spheres of influence,” in which one or another European power secured special privileges for mining and trade. Alarmed by the prospects of an actual partition, Japan, foreseeing her own later need of China, joined with America in a demand for an “Open Door”: that is, that while certain “spheres of interest” might be recognized, all nations should be allowed to trade in China on equal terms—tariffs and transport charges to be the same for all. To put herself in a proper position for bargaining in these matters, the United States took over the Philippines (1898), and declared by this act her intention to share in the struggle for Chinese trade.
Meanwhile another and simultaneous act of the drama was being played behind palace walls in Peking. When the Allies entered the capital in triumph at the close of the Second “Opium War” (1860), the young emperor, Hsien Feng, fled to Jehol; there, a year later, he died, leaving the throne to his five-year-old son. The secondary wife who had been the mother of this boy took the reins of empire in her own hands, and as Tz’u Hsi—known to the world as the “Dowager Empress”*—governed China ruthlessly, cynically and well for a generation. In her youth she had ruled by beauty; now she ruled by her wits and her will. When the son conveniently died on approaching his majority (1875), the Empress, careless of precedent and objection, placed another minor—Kuang Hsu—on the throne, and continued to rule. For a generation, with the help of clever statesmen like Li Hung-chang, the doughty Empress kept China at peace and won for it a certain respect from the predatory Powers. But the sudden invasion of China by Japan, and the rapid series of renewed spoliations by Europe after the triumph of the Japanese, caused a strong movement to rise in the capital in favor of imitating Japan’s imitation of the West—i.e., for organizing a large army, building railroads and factories, and striving to acquire the industrial wealth with which Japan and Europe had financed their victories. The Empress and her advisers opposed this tendency with all their influence, but it secretly won the adherence of Kuang Hsu, who had now been permitted to ascend the throne as emperor in his own right. Suddenly Kuang, without consulting “Old Buddha” (as her court called the Empress), issued to the Chinese people (1898) a series of astonishing decrees which, if they could have been accepted and enforced, would have advanced China vigorously and yet peaceably on the road to Westernization, and might have averted the fall of the dynasty and the collapse of the nation into chaos and misery. The young emperor ordered the establishment of a new system of schools, to teach not only the old Confucian Classics, but the scientific culture of the West; the translation into Chinese of all the important works of Occidental science, literature and technology; the encouragement of railroad building; and the reform of the army and the navy with a definite view to meeting the “crisis,” as he put it, “where we are beset on all sides by powerful neighbors who craftily seek advantage from us, and who are trying to combine together in overpowering us.”8 The Dowager Empress, shocked by what seemed to her the precipitate radicalism of these edicts, imprisoned Kuang Hsu in one of the imperial palaces, annulled his decrees, and made herself again the government of China.
A reaction now set in against all Western ideas, and the subtle Dowager diverted it amiably to her purposes. An organization known as the I Ho Ch’uan—literally “Righteous Harmony Fists,” historically the “Boxers”—had been formed by some rebels who wished to overthrow the Empress and her dynasty. She persuaded its leaders to turn the fury of their movement against invading foreigners rather than against herself. The Boxers accepted the mission, called for the expulsion of all aliens from China, and, in a frenzy of patriotic virtue, began to kill Christians indiscriminately in many sections of the country (1900). Allied soldiers again marched on Peking, this time to protect their nationals hiding in terror in the narrow quarters of the foreign Legations. The Empress and her court fled to Hsianfu, and the troops of England, France, Russia, Germany, Japan and the United States sacked the city, killed many Chinese in revenge, and looted or ruined valuable property.* The Allies imposed upon the broken Leviathan an indemnity of $330,000,000, to be collected by European control of Chinese import customs and the salt monopoly. Considerable portions of this indemnity were later remitted to China by the United States, Great Britain, Russia and Japan, usually with the stipulation that the remitted sums be spent in educating students from China in the universities of the remitting nation. It was a gesture of generosity, which proved more effective in the undoing of old China than almost any other single factor in this historic and tragic conflict of East and West.
II. THE DEATH OF A CIVILIZATION
The Indemnity students—Their Westernization—Their disintegrative effect in China—The rôle of the missionary—Sun Yat-sen, the Christian—His youthful adventures—His meeting with Li Hung-chang—His plans for a revolution—Their success—Yuan Shi-k’ai—The death of Sun Yat-sen—Chaos and pillage—Communism—“The north pacified”—Chiang Kai-shek—Japan in Manchuria—At Shanghai
These “indemnity students” and thousands of others now left China to explore the civilization of its conquerors. Many went to England, more to Germany, more to America, more to Japan; every year hundreds of them were graduated from the universities of America alone. They came at an early and impressionable age, before they had matured to the point of understanding the depth and values of their own national culture. They drank in with gratitude and admiration the novel education given in the science, methods, history and ideas of the West; they were amazed at the comforts and vigorous life they saw about them, the freedom of the Western individual, and the enfranchisement of the people. They studied Western philosophy, lost faith in the religion of their fathers, and enjoyed the position of respectable radicals encouraged by their educators and their new environment in their rebellion against all the elements in the civilization of their native land. Year by year thousands of such deracinated youths returned to China, fretted against the slow tempo and material backwardness of their country, and sowed in every city the seeds of inquiry and revolt.
An endless chain of circumstances helped them. For two generations the merchants and missionaries who had conquered China from the West had acted, willingly or not, as centers of foreign infection; they had lived in a style, and with such comforts and conveniences, as made the young Chinese about them anxious to adopt so promising a civilization; they had undermined, in an active minority, the religious faith that had supported the old moral code; they had set one generation against another by advocating the abandonment of ancestor worship; and though they preached a gentle Jesus meek and mild, they were protected in emergencies by guns whose size and efficacy offered the dominating lesson of Europe to the Orient. Christianity, which had been in its origin an uprising of the oppressed, became once more, in these Chinese converts, a ferment of revolution.
Among the converts was the leader of the Revolution. In 1866 a tenant farmer near Canton fathered a troublesome boy whom the world, with no conscious sarcasm, was to christen Sun Yat-sen—i.e., Sun, the Fairy of Tranquillity.10 Sun became so Christian that he defaced the images of the gods in the temple of his native village. An older brother, who had migrated to Hawaii, brought the boy to Honolulu and placed him in a school conducted by an Anglican bishop and offering a thoroughly Occidental education.11 Returning to China, Sun entered the British Medical College, and became its first Chinese graduate. Largely as a result of these studies he lost all religious faith;12 and at the same time the indignities to which he found himself and his fellow Chinese subjected at the foreign-controlled customs offices and in the foreign quarters of the treaty ports turned his thoughts to revolution. The inability of a corrupt and reactionary government to prevent the defeat of great China by little Japan, or the; commercial partition of the country by European powers, filled him with humiliation and resentment, and made him feel that the first step in the liberation of China must be the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty.
His first move was characteristic of his self-confidence, his idealism, and his simplicity. He boarded a steamer and traveled sixteen hundred miles north, at his own expense, to lay before Li Hung-chang, vice-regent of the Empress Dowager, his plans for reforming the country and restoring its prestige. Refused a hearing, Sun began a lifetime of adventure and wandering in the quest of funds for a Chinese revolution. He won the support of many mercantile guilds and powerful secret societies, whose leaders were envious of the imperial aristocracy, and longed for a government in which the new manufacturing and trading classes would play a rôle commensurate with their rising wealth. Then he traveled overseas to America and Europe, gathering modest sums from a million laundrymen and a thousand Chinese merchants. In London the Chinese Legation illegally arrested him, and was about to send him secretly to China in chains as a traitor to his government, when a missionary who had taught him in his youth aroused the British Government to rescue him. For fifteen years more he passed from city to city over the world, collecting all in all two and a half million dollars for the Revolution; and apparently he spent almost none of this money on himself. Suddenly, in the midst of his travels, a message informed him that the revolutionary forces had won the south, were winning the north, and had chosen him as Provisional President of the Chinese Republic. A few weeks later he landed in triumph at Hong Kong, where, twenty years back, he had been humiliated by the British officials of the port.
The Empress Dowager had died in 1908, having arranged the death of the imprisoned emperor Kuang Hsu the day before. She was succeeded by Kuang’s nephew, P’u Yi, now Emperor of Manchukuo. In the last years of the great Dowager and the first of her infant heir, many reforms in the direction of modernizing China were effected by the Government: railways were built, chiefly with foreign capital and under foreign management; examinations for public office were abandoned; a new system of schools was established, a National Assembly was called for 1910, and a nine-year program was laid down for the gradual establishment of a constitutional monarchy, culminating in universal suffrage growing step by step with universal education. The decree announcing this program added: “Any impetuosity shown in introducing these reforms will, in the end, be so much labor lost.”13 But the Revolution could not be halted by this deathbed repentance of an ailing dynasty. On February 12, 1912, the young Emperor, faced by revolt on every side and finding no army willing to defend him, abdicated; and the Regent, Prince Ch’un, issued one of the most characteristic edicts in Chinese history:
Today the people of the whole Empire have their minds bent upon a Republic. . . . The will of Providence is clear, and the people’s wishes are plain. How could I, for the sake of the glory and the honor of one family, thwart the desire of teeming millions? Wherefore I, with the Emperor, decide that the form of government in China shall be a constitutional republic, to comfort the longing of all within the Empire, and to act in harmony with the ancient sages, who regarded the throne as a public heritage.14
The Revolutionists behaved magnanimously to P’u Yi: they gave him his life, a comfortable palace, an ample annuity, and a concubine. The Manchus had come in like lions, and had gone out like lambs.
The new republic paid for its peaceful birth with a stormy life. Yuan Shi-kai, a diplomat of the old school, possessed an army that might have impeded the Revolution. He demanded the presidency as the price of his support; and Sun Yat-sen, only beginning to enjoy his office, yielded and retired magnificently to private life. Yuan, encouraged by strong financial groups native and foreign, plotted to make himself emperor and to found a new dynasty, on the ground that only in this way could the incipient break-up of China be stayed. Sun Yat-sen branded him as a traitor, and called upon his followers to renew the Revolution; but before the issue could come to battle Yuan took sick and died.
China has not known order or unity since. Sun Yat-sen proved too idealistic, too good an orator and too poor a statesman, to take the reins and guide his nation to peace. He passed from one plan and theory to another, offended his middle-class supporters by his apparent acceptance of communism, and retired to Canton to teach and inspire its youth and occasionally to rule its people.* China, left without a government that all sections would recognize, deprived of the unifying symbol of the monarchy, broken of its habit of obedience to custom and law, and weak in the patriotism that attaches the soul not to a district but to the country as a whole, fell into an intermittent war of north against south, of section against section, of property against hunger, of old against young. Adventurers organized armies, ruled as tuchuns over isolated provinces, levied their own taxes, raised their own opium,15 and sallied forth occasionally to annex new victims to their subject population. Industry and trade, taxed by one victorious general after another, fell into disorder and despair; bandits exacted tribute, stole and killed, and no organized force could control them. Men became soldiers or thieves lest they should starve, and ravaged the fields of men who, so despoiled, became soldiers or thieves lest they should starve. The savings of a lifetime or the modest stores of a thrifty family were, as often as not, appropriated by a general or looted by a robber band. In the province of Honan alone, in 1931, there were 400,000 bandits.16
In the midst of this chaos (1922) Russia sent two of its ablest diplomats, Karakhan and Joffe, with orders to bring China into the circle of the Communist Revolution. Karakhan prepared the way by surrendering Russia’s claims to “extra-territoriality,” and by signing a treaty that recognized the full authority and international status of the revolutionary government. The subtle Joffe found little difficulty in converting Sun Yat-sen to sympathy with communism, for Sun had been rebuffed by every other power. In an incredibly short time, with the help of seventy Soviet officers, a new Nationalist army was formed and trained. Under command of Sun’s former secretary Chiang Kai-shek, but guided largely by a Russian adviser, Michael Borodin, this army marched northward from Canton, conquered one city after another, and finally established its power in Peking.* In the moment of victory the victors divided; Chiang Kai-shek attacked the communist movement in Oriental style, and established a military dictatorship realistically responsive to the will of business and finance.
It is as difficult for a nation as for an individual to take no comfort from a neighbor’s misfortune. Japan, which in the plans of Sun Yat-sen, was to be the friend and ally of China against the West, and which had stimulated the Chinese revolt by her swift and successful imitation of Europe in industry, diplomacy and war, saw in the disorder and weakness of her ancient teacher an opportunity for solving the problems that had arisen out of her very success. For Japan could not discourage the growth of her population without endangering her capacity for self-defense against obviously possible aggression; she could not support an increasing population unless she developed industry and trade; she could not develop industry without importing iron, coal and other resources in which her own soil was deficient, nor could she develop trade profitably unless she had a large share in the only great market left free by the European colonization of the globe. But China was supposedly rich in iron and coal, and offered, at Japan’s door, potentially the greatest market in the world. What nation, faced with the apparent choice between returning to agriculture and subjection, or advancing to industrial imperialism and conquest, could have resisted the temptation to snatch the prizes of prostrate China while the other imperial vultures were tearing one another’s throats on the fields of France?
So Japan, soon after the outbreak of the Great War, declared herself at war with Germany, and pounced upon the Kiaochow territory which Germany had “leased” from China sixteen years before. Then she presented to the government of Yuan Shi-kai “Twenty-One Demands” which would have made China a political and economic colony of Japan; and only the protest of the United States and the boycott of Japanese goods in China under the leadership of its enraged students prevented these commands from being enforced. Students wept in the streets, or killed themselves, in shame at the humiliation of their country.17 The Japanese listened with cynical humor to the moral indignation of a Europe that had been gnawing at China for half a century, and waited patiently for another opportunity. It came when Europe and America were engulfed in the debacle of an imperialist industry that had depended upon foreign markets for the absorption of “surplus” products unpurchasable by their producers at home. Japan marched into Manchuria, set up the former emperor of China, P’u Yi, first as president, then as emperor, of the new state of Manchukuo, and by political alliance, economic penetration and military control, placed herself in a favored position for the exploitation of Manchuria’s natural resources, employable population and commercial possibilities. The European world, which had proposed a moratorium on robbery after it had gathered in all available spoils, joined America feebly in protests against this candid plunder, but prepared, as always, to accept victory as justification in the end.
The final humiliation came at Shanghai. Angered by the successful boycott of her goods, Japan landed her undefeated troops at the richest port in China, occupied and destroyed the district of Chapei, and demanded the restraint of the boycott associations by the Chinese Government. The Chinese defended themselves with a new heroism, and the Nineteenth Route Army from Canton, almost unaided, held the well-equipped forces of Japan at bay for two months. The Nanking Government offered a compromise, Japan withdrew from Shanghai, and China, nursing its wounds, resolved to build from the bottom a new and more vigorous civilization, capable of preserving and defending itself against a rapacious world.
III. BEGINNINGS OF A NEW ORDER
Change in the village—In the town—The factories—Commerce—Labor unions—Wages—The new government—Nationalism vs. Westernization—The dethronement of Confucius—The reaction against religion—The new morality—Marriage in transition—Birth control—Co-education—The “New Tide” in literature and philosophy—The new language of literature—Hu Shih—Elements of destruction—Elements of renewal
Once everything changed except the East; now there is nothing in the East that does not change. The most conservative nation in history has suddenly become, after Russia, the most radical, and is destroying with a will customs and institutions once held inviolate. It is not merely the end of a dynasty, as in 1644; it is the moulting of a civilization.
Change comes last and least to the village, for the slow sobriety of the soil does not encourage innovation; even the new generation must plant in order to reap. But now seven thousand miles of railroad traverse the countryside; and though a decade of chaos and native management has left them in bad repair, and war has conscripted them too often for its purposes, yet they bind the eastern villages with the cities of the coast, and daily bear their trickle of Western novelties into a million peasant homes. Here one may find such foreign-devilish importations as kerosene, kerosene lamps, matches, cigarettes, even American wheat; for sometimes, so poor is transport, it costs more to carry goods from the Chinese interior to the marine provinces than it does to bring them to these from Australia or the United States.18 It becomes clear that the economic growth of a civilization depends upon transportation. Twenty thousand miles of dirt roads have been built, over which, with Oriental irregularity, six thousand buses travel, always full. When the gasoline engine has bound these innumerable villages together it will have accomplished one of the greatest changes in Chinese history—the end of famine.
In the towns the triumph of the West goes on more rapidly. Handicrafts are dying under the competition of cheaply-transported machine-made goods from abroad; millions of artisans flounder about in unemployment, and are drawn into the jaws of the factories that foreign and domestic capital is building along the coast. The hand loom, still spinning in the village, is silent in the city; imported cotton and cotton cloths flood the country, and textile factories rise to induct impoverished Chinese into the novel serfdom of the mill. Great blast-furnaces burn at Hankow, as weird and horrible as any in the West. Canneries, bakeries, cement works, chemical works, breweries, distilleries, power works, glass works, shoe factories, paper mills, soap and candle factories, sugar refineries—all of them have now been planted on Chinese soil, and slowly transform the domestic artisan into a factory hand. The development of the new industries is retarded because investment hesitates in a world disordered by permanent revolution; it is obstructed further by the difficulty and costliness of transport, by the inadequacy of local raw materials, and by that amiable Chinese habit which places the family above every other loyalty, and turns every native office and factory into a nest of genial nepotism and incompetence.19 Commerce, too, is impeded by inland tariffs and coastal customs, and the universal demand for bribes or “squeeze”;20 but it is growing more, rapidly than industry, and plays the central rôle in the economic transformation of China.*
The new industries have destroyed the guilds, and have thrown into chaos the relations of employer and employee. The guilds had lived by regulating wages and prices through agreements between owners and workers whose products had no rivals in local trade; but as transport and commerce increased, and brought distant goods to compete in every town with the handiwork of the guilds, it was found impossible to control prices or to regulate wages without surrendering to the dictates of foreign competitors and capital. The guilds have therefore disintegrated and divided into chambers of commerce on the one side and labor unions on the other. The chambers discuss order, loyalty and economic liberty, and the workers discuss starvation. Strikes and boycotts are frequent, but they have been more successful in compelling foreign concessions to the Chinese Government than in raising the remuneration of labor. In 1928 the Department of Social Affairs of the Chinese Municipality of Shanghai computed the average weekly wage of the textile-mill workers as varying from $1.73 to $2.76 for men, and from $1.10 to $1.78 for women. In flour mills the male weekly average pay was $1.96; in cement mills $1.72; in glass works $1.84; in match-factories $2.11; among the skilled workers of the electric power plants, $3.10; in the machine shops, $3.24; among the printers, $4.5 523 The wealth enjoyed by the printers was doubtless due to their better organization, and the cost of suddenly replacing them. The first unions were formed in 1919; they grew in number and power until, in the days of Borodin, they proposed to take over the management of China; they were repressed ruthlessly after Chiang Kai-shek’s break with Russia; today the laws against them are severe, but they multiply nevertheless as the sole refuge of the workers against an industrial system that has only begun to pass labor legislation, and has not yet begun to enforce it.24 The bitter destitution of the city proletaires, working twelve hours a day, hovering on the margin of subsistence, and facing starvation if employment should fail, is worse than the ancient poverty of the village, where the poor could not see the rich, and accepted their lot as the natural and immemorial fate of mankind.
Perhaps some of these evils might have been avoided if the political transformation of eastern China had not been so rapid and complete. The mandarin aristocracy, though it had lost vitality and was dishonored with corruption, might have held the new industrial forces in check until China could accept them without chaos or slavery; and then the growth of industry would have generated year by year a new class that might have stepped peaceably into political power, as the manufacturers had displaced the landed aristocracy of England. But the new government found itself without an army, without experienced leaders, and without funds; the Kuomintang, or People’s Party, established to liberate a nation, found that it must stand by while foreign and domestic capital subjugated it; conceived in democrary and baptized with the blood of communism, it became dependent upon Shanghai bankers, abandoned democracy for dictatorship, and tried to destroy the unions.* For the Party depends upon the army, and the army upon money, and money upon loans; until the Army is strong enough to conquer China the Government cannot tax China; and until it can tax China the Government must take advice where it takes its funds. Even so it has accomplished much. It has brought back to China full control over her tariffs and—within the internationalism of finance—over her industries; it has organized, trained and equipped an Army which may some day be used against others than Chinese; it has enlarged the area that acknowledges its authority, and has reduced, in that area, the banditry that was stifling the nation’s economic life. It takes a day to make a revolution, and a generation to make a government.
The disunity of China reflects and follows from the division that lies in the Chinese soul. The most powerful feeling in China today is hatred of foreigners; the most powerful process in China today is imitation of foreigners. China knows that the West does not deserve this flattery, but China is forced by the very spirit and impetus of the times to give it, for the age offers to all nations the choice of industrialism or vassalage. So the Chinese of the eastern cities pass from fields to factories, from robes to trousers, from the simple melodies of the past to the saxophone symphonies of the West; they surrender their own fine taste in dress and furniture and art, adorn their walls with European paintings, and erect office buildings in the least attractive of American styles. Their women have ceased to compress their feet from north to south, and begin, in the superior manner of the Occident, to compress them from east to west. † Their philosophers abandon the unobtrusive and mannerly rationalism of Confucius, and take up with Renaissance enthusiasm the pugnacious rationalism of Moscow, London, Berlin, Paris and New York.
The dethronement of Confucius has something of the character of both the Renaissance and the Enlightenment; it is at once the overthrow of the Chinese Aristotle, and the rejection of the racial gods. For a time the new state persecuted Buddhism and the monastic orders; like the Revolutionists of France, the Chinese rebels were freethinkers without concealment, openly hostile to religion, and worshiping only reason. Confucianism tolerated the popular faiths on the assumption, presumably, that as long as there is poverty there will be gods; the Revolution, fondly believing that poverty can be destroyed, had no need of gods. Confucianism took agriculture and the family for granted, and formulated an ethic designed to maintain order and content within the circle of the home and the field; the Revolution is bound for industry, and needs a new morality to accord with urban and individual life. Confucianism endured because access to political office and scholarly occupations demanded a knowledge and acceptance of it; but the examinations are gone, and science takes the place of ethical and political philosophy in the schools; man is now to be moulded not to government but to industry. Confucianism was conservative, and checked the ideals of youth with the caution of old age; the Revolution is made of youth, and will have none of these ancient restraints; it smiles at the old sage’s warning that “he who thinks the old embankments useless and destroys them is sure to suffer from the desolation caused by overflowing water.”*27
The Revolution has, of course, put an end to official religion, and no sacrifice mounts any longer from the Altar of Heaven to the impersonal and silent T’ien. Ancestor worship is tolerated, but visibly decays; more and more the men tend to leave it to the women, who were once thought unfit to officiate at these sacred rites. Half of the Revolutionary leaders were educated in Christian schools; but the Revolution, despite the Methodism of Chiang Kai-shek, is unfavorable to any supernatural faith, and gives to its schoolbooks an atheistic tint.29 The new religion, which tries to fill the emotional void left by the departure of the gods, is nationalism, as in Russia it is communism. Meanwhile this creed does not satisfy all; many proletaires seek in the adventure of oracles and mediums a refuge from the prose of their daily toil; and the people of the village still find some solace from their poverty in the mystic quiet of the ancient shrines.
Shorn of its sanctions in government, religion and economic life, the traditional moral code, which seemed a generation ago unchangeable, disintegrates with geometrical acceleration. Next to the invasion of industry the most striking change in the China of today is the destruction of the old family system, and its replacement with an individualism that leaves every man free and alone to face the world. Loyalty to the family, on which the old order was founded, is superseded in theory by loyalty to the state; and as the novel loyalty has not yet graduated from theory into practice, the new society lacks a moral base. Agriculture favors the family because, before the coming of machinery, the land could most economically be tilled by a group united by blood and paternal authority; industry disrupts the family, because it offers its places and rewards to individuals rather than to groups, does not always offer them these rewards in the same place, and recognizes no obligation to aid the weak out of the resources of the strong; the natural communism of the family finds no support in the bitter competition of industry and trade. The younger generation, always irked by the authority of the old, takes with a will to the anonymity of the city and the individualism of the “job.” Perhaps the omnipotence of the father helped to precipitate the Revolution; the reactionary is always to blame for the excesses of the radical. So China has cut itself off from all roots, and no one knows whether it can sink new roots in time to save its cultural life.
The old marriage forms disappear with the authority of the family. The majority of marriages are still arranged by the parents, but in the city marriage by free choice of the young tends more and more to prevail. The individual considers himself free not only to mate as he pleases, but to make experiments in marriage which might shock the West. Nietzsche thought Asia right about women, and considered their subjection the only alternative to their unchecked ascendancy; but Asia is choosing Europe’s way, not Nietzsche’s. Polygamy diminishes, for the modern wife objects to a concubine. Divorce is uncommon, but the road to it is wider than ever before.* Co-education is the rule in the universities, and the free mingling of the sexes is usual in the cities. Women have established their own law and medical schools, even their own bank.31 Those of them that are members of the Party have received the franchise, and places have been found for them on the highest committees of both the Party and the Government.32 They have turned their backs upon infanticide, and are beginning to practise birth control,† Population has not noticeably increased since the Revolution; perhaps the vast tide of Chinese humanity has begun to ebb.33
Nevertheless fifty thousand new Chinese are born every day.34 They are destined to be new in every way: new in the cut of their clothes and their hair, new in education and occupation, in habits and manners, in religion and philosophy. The queue is gone, and so are the graceful manners of the older time; the hatreds of revolution have coarsened the spirit, and radicals find it hard to be courteous to conservatives.35 The phlegmatic quality of the ancient race is being changed by the speed of industry into something more expressive and volatile; these stolid faces conceal active and excitable souls. The love of peace that came to China after centuries of war is being broken down by the contemplation of national dismemberment and defeat; the schools are drilling every student into a soldier, and the general is a hero once more.
The whole world of education has been transformed. The schools have thrown Confucius out of the window, and taken science in. The rejection was not quite necessary for the admission, since the doctrine of Confucius accorded well with the spirit of science; but the conquest of the logical by the psychological is the warp and woof of history. Mathematics and mechanics are popular, for these can make machines; machines can make wealth and guns, and guns may preserve liberty. Medical education is progressing, largely as the result of the cosmopolitan beneficence of the Rockefeller fortune.* Despite the impoverishment of the country, new schools, high schools and colleges have multiplied rapidly, and the hope of Young China is that soon every child will receive a free education, and that democracy may be widened as education grows.
A revolution akin to that of the Renaissance has come to Chinese literature and philosophy. The importation of Western texts has had the fertilizing influence that Greek manuscripts had upon the Italian mind. And just as Italy, in her awakening, abandoned Latin to write in the vernacular, so China, under the leadership of the brilliant Hu Shih, has turned the popular “Mandarin” dialect into a literary language, the Pai Hua. Hu Shih took his literary fate in his hands by writing in this “plain language” a History of Chinese Philosophy (1919). His courage carried the day; half a thousand periodicals adopted Pai Hua, and it was made the official written language of the schools. Meanwhile the “Thousand Character Movement” sought to reduce the 40,000 characters of the scholars to some 1300 characters for common use. In these ways the Mandarin speech is being rapidly spread throughout the provinces; and perhaps within the century China will have one language, and be near to cultural unity again.
Under the stimulus of a popular language and an eager people, literature flourishes. Novels, poems, histories and plays become almost as numerous as the population. Newspapers and periodicals cover the land. The literature of the West is being translated en masse, and American motion pictures, expounded by a Chinese interpreter at the side of the screen, are delighting the profound and simple Chinese soul. Philosophy has returned to the great heretics of the past, has given them a new hearing and exposition, and has taken on all the vigor and radicalism of European thought in the sixteenth century. And as Italy, newly freed from ecclesiastical leading-strings, admired the secularism of the Greek mind, so the new China listens with especial eagerness to Western thinkers like John Dewey and Bertrand Russell, whose independence of all theology and respect for experience and experiment as the only logic, accord completely with the mood of a nation that is trying to have its Reformation, Renaissance, Enlightenment and Revolution in one generation.* Hu Shih scorns our praise of the “spiritual values” of Asia, and finds more spiritual worth in the reorganization of industry and government for the elimination of poverty than in all the “wisdom of the East.”37 He describes Confucius as “a very old man,” and suggests that a better perspective of Chinese thought would appear if the heretical schools of the fifth, fourth and third centuries B.C. were given their due place in Chinese history.38 Nevertheless, in the midst of the swirling “New Tide” of which he has been one of the most active leaders, he has kept sufficient sanity to see the value even of old men, and he has formulated the problem of his country perfectly:
It would surely be a great loss to mankind at large if the acceptance of this new civilization should take the form of abrupt displacement instead of organic assimilation, thereby causing the disappearance of the old civilization. The real problem, therefore, may be restated thus: How can we best assimilate modern civilization in such a manner as to make it congenial and congruous and continuous with the civilization of our own making?39
All the surface conditions of China today tempt the observer to conclude that China will not solve the problem. When one contemplates the desolation of China’s fields, blighted with drought or ruined with floods, the waste of her timber, the stupor of her exhausted peasants, the high mortality of her children, the unnerving toil of her factory-slaves, the disease-ridden slums and tax-ridden homes of her cities, her bribe-infested commerce and her foreign-dominated industry, the corruption of her government, the weakness of her defenses and the bitter factionalism of her people, one wonders for a moment whether China can ever be great again, whether she can once more consume her conquerors and live her own creative life. But under the surface, if we care to look, we may see the factors of convalescence and renewal. This soil, so vast in extent and so varied in form, is rich in the minerals that make a country industrially great; not as rich as Richtofen supposed, but almost certainly richer than the tentative surveys of our day have revealed; as industry moves inland it will come upon ores and fuels as unsuspected now as the mineral and fuel wealth of America was undreamed of a century ago. This nation, after three thousand years of grandeur and decay, of repeated deaths and resurrections, exhibits today all the physical and mental vitality that we find in its most creative periods; there is no people in the world more vigorous or more intelligent, no other people so adaptable to circumstance, so resistant to disease, so resilient after disaster and suffering, so trained by history to calm endurance and patient recovery. Imagination cannot describe the possibilities of a civilization mingling the physical, labor and mental resources of such a people with the technological equipment of modern industry. Very probably such wealth will be produced in China as even America has never known, and once again, as so often in the past, China will lead the world in luxury and the art of life.
No victory of arms, or tyranny of alien finance, can long suppress a nation so rich in resources and vitality. The invader will lose funds or patience before the loins of China will lose virility; within a century China will have absorbed and civilized her conquerors, and will have learned all the technique of what transiently bears the name of modern industry; roads and communications will give her unity, economy and thrift will give her funds, and a strong government will give her order and peace. Every chaos is a transition. In the end disorder cures and balances itself with dictatorship; old obstacles are roughly cleared away, and fresh growth is free. Revolution, like death and style, is the removal of rubbish, the surgery of the superfluous; it comes only when there are many things ready to die. China has died many times before; and many times she has been reborn.
B. JAPAN
Great Yamato (Japan) is a divine country. It is only our land whose foundations were first laid by the Divine Ancestor. It alone has been transmitted by the Sun Goddess to a long line of her descendants. There is nothing of this kind in foreign countries. Therefore it is called the Divine Land.
—Chikafusa Kitabatake, 1334, in Murdoch, History of Japan, i, 571.
CHRONOLOGY OF JAPANESE CIVILIZATION *
I. THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
1. Primitive Japan:
Ca. 660 B.C.: Entrance of the Mongols
Ca. 660-585 B.C.: Jimmu, Emperor (?)
412-53 A.D.: Inkyo, Emperor
522 A.D.: Buddhism enters Japan
592-621: Shotoku Taishi, Regent
593-628: Suiko, Empress
645: The Great Reform
2. Imperial Japan:
668-71: Tenchi Tenno, Emperor
690-702: Jito, Empress
697-707: Mommu, Emperor
702: The Taiho Code of Laws
710-94: The Heijo Epoch: Nara the capital
724-56: Shomu, Emperor
749-59, 765-70: Koken, Empress
794-1192: The Heian Epoch: Kyoto the capital
877-949: Yozei, Emperor
898-930: Daigo, Emperor
901-22: The Period of Engi
3. Feudal Japan:
1186-99: Yoritomo
1203-19: Minamoto Sanetomo
1200-1333: The Kamakura Bakufu
1199-1333: The Hojo Regency
1222-82: Nichiren, founder of the Lotus Sect
1291: Kublai Khan invades Japan
1318-39: Go Daigo, Emperor
1335-1573: The Ashikaga Shogunate
1387-95: Yoshimitsu
1436-80: Yoshimasa
1573-82: Nobunaga
1581-98: Hideyoshi
1592: Hideyoshi fails to conquer Korea
1597: Hideyoshi expels the priests
1600: Battle of Sekigahara
1603-1867: The Tokugawa Shogunate
1603-16: Iyeyasu
1605: Siege of Osaka
1614: Iyeyasu’s anti-Christian edict
1605-23: Hidetada
1623-51: Iyemitsu
1657: The great fire of Tokyo
1680-1709: Tsunayoshi
1688-1703: The period of Genroku
1709-12: Iyenobu
1716-45: Yoshimune
1721: Yoshimune codifies Japanese law
1787-1836: Iyenari
1853-8: Iyesada
1858-66: Iyemochi
1866-8: Keiki
II. LITERATURE
845-903: Sugawara Michizane, Patron of Letters
1. Poetry:
665-731: Tahito
D. 737: Hitomaro
724-56: Akahito
750: The Manyoshu
883-946: Tsurayaki
905: The Kokinshu
1118-90: Saigyo Hoshi
1234: The Hyaku-nin-isshu
1643-94: Matsura Basho
1703-75: Lady Kaga no-Chiyo
2. Drama:
1350-1650: The No plays
1653-1724: Chikamatsu Monzayemon
3. Fiction:
978-1031?: Lady Murasaki no-Shikibu
1001-4: The Genji Monogatari
1761-1816: Santo Kioden
1767-1848: Kyokutei Bakin
D. 1831: Jippensha Ikku
4. History and Scholarship:
712: The Kojiki
720: The Nihongi
1334: Kitabatake’s Jintoshotoki
1622-1704: Mitsu-kuni
1630: Hayashi Razan founds University of Tokyo
1657-1725: Arai Hakuseki
1697-1769: Mabuchi
1730-1801: Moto-ori Norinaga
CHRONOLOGY OF JAPANESE CIVILIZATION
5. The Essay:
Ca. 1000: Lady Sei Shonagon
1154-1216: Kamo no-Chomei
6. Philosophy:
1560-1619: Fujiwara Seigwa
1583-1657: Hayashi Razan
1608-48: Nakaye Toju
1630-1714: Kaibara Ekken
1619-91: Kumazawa Banzan
1627-1705: Ito Jinsai
1666-1728: Ogyu Sorai
1670-1736: Ito Togai
III. ART
1. Architecture:
Ca. 616: The temples of Horiuji
Ca. 1400: The palaces of Yoshimitsu
1543-90: Kano Yeitoku
Ca. 1630: The Mausoleum of Iyeyasu
2. Sculpture:
747: The Nara Daibutsu
774-835: Kobo Daishi
1180-1220: Unkei
1252: The Kamakura Daibutsu
1594-1634: Hidari Jingaro
3. Tottery:
Ca. 1229: Shirozemon
Ca. 1650: Kakiemon
Ca. 1655: Ninsei
1663-1743: Kenzan
Ca. 1664: Goto Saijiro
D. 1855: Zengoro Hozen
4. Fainting:
Ca.950: Kose no-Kanaoka
Ca. 1010: Takayoshi
Ca. 1017: Yeishin Sozu
1053-1140: Toba Sojo
1146-1205: Fujiwara Takanobu
Ca. 1250: Keion (?)
Ca. 1250: Tosa Gon-no-kumi
1351-1427: Cho Densu
Ca. 1400: Shubun
1420-1506: Sesshiu
D. 1490: Kano Masanobu
1476-1559: Kano Motonobu
Ca. 1600: Koyetsu
1578-1650: Iwasa Matabei
1602-74: Kano Tanyu
1618-94: Hishikawa Moronobu
1661-1716: Korin
1718-70: Harunobu
1733-95: Maruyami Okyo
1742-1814: Kiyonaga
1747-1821: Mori Zozen
1753-1806: Utamaro
Ca. 1790: Sharaku
1760-1849: Hokusai
1797-1858: Hiroshige
IV. THE NEW JAPAN
1853: Admiral Perry enters Uraga Bay
1854: Admiral Perry’s second visit
1854: Treaty of Kanagawa
1862: The Richardson Affair
1862: The bombardment of Kagoshima
1863: Ito and Inouye visit Europe
1868: Restoration of the imperial power
1868-1912: Meiji, Emperor
1870: Tokyo becomes the imperial capital
1871: Abolition of feudalism
1872: First Japanese railway
1877: The Satsuma Rebellion
1889: The new Constitution
1894: The War with China
1895: The annexation of Formosa
1902-22: The Anglo-Japanese Alliance
1904: The War with Russia
1910: The annexation of Korea
1912: End of the Meiji Era
1912-25: Taisho, Emperor
1914: Capture of Tsingtao
1915: The Twenty-one Demands
1917: The Lansing-Ishii Agreement
1922: The Washington Conference
1924: The restriction of Japanese immigration into America
1925: Hirohito, Emperor
1931: The invasion of Manchuria
1932: The attack at Shanghai
1935: Notice given to terminate Washington Agreement in 1936
CHAPTER XXVIII
The Makers of Japan
THE history of Japan is an unfinished drama in which three acts have been played. The first—barring the primitive and legendary centuries—is classical Buddhist Japan (522-1603 A.D.), suddenly civilized by China and Korea, refined and softened by religion, and creating the historic masterpieces of Japanese literature and art. The second is the feudal and peaceful Japan of the Tokugawa Shogunate (1603-1868), isolated and self-contained, seeking no alien territory and no external trade, content with agriculture and wedded to art and philosophy. The third act is modern Japan, opened up in 1853 by an American fleet, forced by conditions within and without into trade and industry, seeking foreign materials and markets, fighting wars of irrepressible expansion, imitating the imperialistic ardor and methods of the West, and threatening both the ascendancy of the white race and the peace of the world. By every historical precedent the next act will be war.
The Japanese have studied our civilization carefully, in order to absorb its values and surpass it. Perhaps we should be wise to study their civilization as patiently as they have studied ours, so that when the crisis comes that must issue either in war or understanding, we may be capable of understanding.
I. THE CHILDREN OF THE GODS
How Japan was created—The rôle of earthquakes
In the beginning, says the oldest of Japanese histories,1 were the gods Male and female they were born, and died, until at last two of them, Izanagi and Izanami, brother and sister, were commanded by the elder deities to create Japan. So they stood on the floating bridge of heaven, thrust down into the ocean a jeweled spear, and held it aloft in the sky. The drops that fell from the spear became the Sacred Islands. By watching the tadpoles in the water the gods learned the secret of copulation; Izanagi and Izanami mated, and gave birth to the Japanese race. From Izanagi’s left eye was born Amaterasu, Goddess of the Sun, and from her grandson Ninigi sprang in divine and unbroken lineage all the emperors of Dai Nippon. From that day until this there has been but one imperial dynasty in Japan.*
There were 4,223 drops from the jeweled spear, for there are that number of islands in the archipelago called Japan,† Six hundred of them are inhabited, but only five are of any considerable size. The largest-Hondo or Honshu—is 1,130 miles long, averages some 73 miles in width, and contains in its 81,000 square miles half the area of the islands. Their situation, like their recent history, resembles that of England: the surrounding seas have protected them from conquest, while their 13,000 miles of seacoast have made them a seafaring people, destined by geographical encouragement and commercial necessity to a widespread mastery of the seas. Warm winds and currents from the south mingle with the cool air of the mountain-tops to give Japan an English climate, rich in rain and cloudy days4 nourishing to short but rapid-running rivers, and propitious to vegetation and scenery. Here, outside the cities and the slums, half the land is an Eden in blossom-time; and the mountains are no tumbled heaps of rock and dirt, but artistic forms designed, like Fuji, in almost perfect lines.‡
Doubtless these isles were born of earthquakes rather than from dripping spears.6 No other land—except, perhaps, South America—has suffered so bitterly from convulsions of the soil. In the year 599 the earth shook and swallowed villages in its laughter; meteors fell and comets flashed, and snow whitened the streets in mid-July; drought and famine followed, and millions of Japanese died. In 1703 an earthquake killed 32,000 in Tokyo alone. In 1885 the capital was wrecked again; great clefts opened in the earth, and engulfed thousands; the dead were carried away in cartloads and buried en masse. In 1923 earthquake, tidal wave and fire took 100,000 lives in Tokyo, and 37,000 in Yokahama and nearby; Kamakura, so kind to Buddha, was almost totally destroyed,7 while the benign colossus of the Hindu saint survived shaken but unperturbed amid the ruins, as if to illustrate the chief lesson of history—that the gods can be silent in many languages. The people were for a moment puzzled by this abundance of disaster in a land divinely created and ruled; at last they explained the agitations as due to a large subterranean fish, which wriggled when its slumber was disturbed.8 They do not seem to have thought of abandoning this adventurous habitat; on the day after the last great quake the school-children used bits of broken plaster for pencils, and the tiles of their shattered homes for slates.9 The nation bore patiently these lashings of circumstance, and emerged from repeated ruin undiscourageably industrious, and ominously brave.
II. PRIMITIVE JAPAN
Racial components—Early civilization—Religion—“Shinto”—Buddhism—The beginnings of art—The “Great Reform”
Japanese origins, like all others, are lost in the cosmic nebula of theory. Three elements appear to be mingled in the race: a primitive white strain through the “Ainus” who seem to have entered Japan from the region of the Amur River in neolithic times; a yellow, Mongol strain coming from or through Korea about the seventh century before Christ; and a brown-black, Malay and Indonesian strain filtering in from the islands of the south. Here, as elsewhere, a mingling of diverse stocks preceded by many hundreds of years the establishment of a new racial type speaking with a new voice and creating a new civilization. That the mixture is not yet complete may be seen in the contrast between the tall, slim, long-headed aristocrat and the short, stout, broad-headed common man.
Chinese annals of the fourth century describe the Japanese as “dwarfs,” and add that “they have neither oxen nor wild beasts; they tattoo their faces in patterns varying with their rank; they wear garments woven in one piece; they have spears, bows and arrows tipped with stone or iron. They wear no shoes, are law-abiding and polygamous, addicted to strong drink and long-lived. . . . The women smear their bodies with pink and scarlet” paint.11 “There is no theft,” these records state, “and litigation is infrequent”;12 civilization had hardly begun. Lafcadio Hearn, with uxorious clairvoyance, painted this early age as an Eden unsullied with exploitation or poverty; and Fenollosa pictured the peasantry as composed of independent soldier-gentlemen.13 Handicrafts came over from Korea in the third century A.D., and were soon organized into guilds.14 Beneath these free artisans was a considerable slave class, recruited from prisons and battlefields.15 Social organization was partly feudal, partly tribal; some peasants tilled the soil as vassals of landed barons, and each clan had its well-nigh sovereign head.16 Government was primitively loose and weak.
Animism and totemism, ancestor worship and sex worship17 satisfied the religious needs of the early Japanese. Spirits were everywhere—in the planets and stars of the sky, in the plants and insects of the field, in trees and beasts and men.18 Deities innumerable hovered over the home and its inmates, and danced in the flame and glow of the lamp.19 Divination was practised by burning the bones of a deer or the shell of a tortoise, and studying with expert aid the marks and lines produced by the fire; by this means, say the ancient Chinese chronicles, “they ascertain good and bad luck, and whether or not to undertake journeys and voyages.”20 The dead were feared and worshiped, for their ill will might generate much mischief in the world; to placate them precious objects were placed in their graves—for example, a sword in the case of a man, a mirror in the case of a woman; and prayers and delicacies were offered before their ancestral tablets every day.21 Human sacrifices were resorted to now and then to stop excessive rain or to ensure the stability of a building or a wall; and the retainers of a dead lord were occasionally buried with him to defend him in his epilogue.22
Out of ancestor worship came the oldest living religion of Japan. Shinto, the Way of the Gods, took three forms: the domestic cult of family ancestors, the communal cult of clan ancestors, and the state cult of the imperial ancestors and the founding gods. The divine progenitor of the imperial line was addressed with humble petitions, seven times a year, by the emperor or his representatives; and special prayers were offered up to him when the nation was embarking upon some particularly holy cause, like the taking of Shantung (1914).23 Shinto required no creed, no elaborate ritual, no moral code; it had no special priesthood, and no consoling doctrine of immortality and heaven; all that it asked of its devotees was an occasional pilgrimage, and pious reverence for one’s ancestors, the emperor, and the past. It was for a time superseded because it was too modest in its rewards and its demands.
In 522 Buddhism, which had entered China five hundred years before, passed over from the continent, and began a rapid conquest of Japan. Two elements met to give it victory: the religious needs of the people, and the political needs of the state. For it was not Buddha’s Buddhism that came, agnostic, pessimistic and puritan, dreaming of blissful extinction; it was the Mahayana Buddhism of gentle gods like Amida and Kwannon, of cheerful ceremonial, saving Bodhisattwas, and personal immortality. Better still, it inculcated, with irresistible grace, all those virtues of piety, peacefulness and obedience which make a people amenable to government; it gave to the oppressed such hopes and consolations as might reconcile them to content with their simple lot; it redeemed the prose and routine of a laborious life with the poetry of myth and prayer and the drama of colorful festival; and it offered to the people that unity of feeling and belief which statesmen have always welcomed as a source of social order and a pillar of national strength.
We do not know whether it was statesmanship or piety that brought victory to Buddhism in Japan. When, in 586 A.D., the Emperor Yomei died, the succession was contested in arms by two rival families, both of them politically devoted to the new creed. Prince Shotoku Taishi, who had been born, we are told, with a holy relic clasped in his infant hand, led the Buddhist faction to victory, established the Empress Suiko on the throne, and for twenty-nine years (592-621) ruled the Sacred Islands as Prince Imperial and Regent. He lavished funds upon Buddhist temples, encouraged and supported the Buddhist clergy, promulgated the Buddhist ethic in national decrees, and became in general the Ashoka of Japanese Buddhism. He patronized the arts and sciences, imported artists and artisans from Korea and China, wrote history, painted pictures, and supervised the building of the Horiuji Temple, the oldest extant masterpiece in the art history of Japan.
Despite the work of this versatile civilizer, and all the virtues inculcated or preached by Buddhism, another violent crisis came to Japan within a generation after Shotoku’s death. An ambitious aristocrat, Kamatari, arranged with Prince Naka a palace revolution that marked so definite a change in the political history of Nippon that native historians refer to it enthusiastically as the “Great Reform” (645). The heir-apparent was assassinated, a senile puppet was placed upon the throne, and Kamatari as chief minister, through Prince Naka as heir-apparent and then as Emperor Tenchi, reconstructed the Japanese government into an autocratic imperial power. The sovereign was elevated from the leadership of the principal clan to paramount authority over every official in Japan; all governors were to be appointed by him, all taxes paid directly to him, all the land of the realm was declared his. Japan graduated rapidly from a loose association of clans and semi-feudal chieftains into a closely-knit monarchical state.
III. THE IMPERIAL AGE
The emperors—The aristocracy—The influence of China—The Golden Age of Kyoto—Decadence
From that time onward the emperor enjoyed impressive titles. Sometimes he was called Tenshi, or “Son of Heaven”; usually Tenno, or “Heavenly King”; rarely Mikado, or “August Gateway.” He had the distinction of receiving a new appellation after his death, and of being known in history by an individual name quite different from that which he bore during his life. To ensure the continuity of the imperial line, the emperor was allowed to have as many wives or consorts as he desired; and the succession went not necessarily to his first son, but to any of his progeny who seemed to him, or to the Warwicks of the time, most likely to prove strongest, or weakest, on the throne. In the early days of the Kyoto period the emperors inclined to piety; some of them abdicated to become Buddhist monks, and one of them forbade fishing as an insult to Buddha.25 Yozei was a troublesome exception who illustrated the perils of active monarchy: he made people climb trees, and then shot them down with bow and arrow; he seized maidens in the street, tied them up with lute strings, and cast them into ponds; it pleased His Majesty to ride through the capital and to belabor the citizens with his whip; at last his subjects deposed him in an outbreak of political impiety rare in the history of Japan.26 In 794 the headquarters of the government were removed from Nara to Nagaoka, and shortly thereafter to Kyoto (“Capital of Peace”); this remained the capital during those four centuries (794-1192) which most historians agree in calling the Golden Age of Japan. By 1190 Kyoto had a population of half a million, more than any European city of the time except Constantinople and Cordova.27 One part of the town was given over to the cottages and hovels of the populace, which seems to have lived cheerfully in its humble poverty; another part, discreetly secluded, contained the gardens and palaces of the aristocracy and the Imperial Family. The people of the court were appropriately called “Dwellers above the Clouds.”28 For here as elsewhere the progress of civilization and technology had brought an increase in social distinctions; the rough equality of pioneer days had given way to the inequality that comes inevitably when increasing wealth is distributed among men ac cording to their diverse capacity, character, and privilege. Great families arose like the Fujiwara, the Taira, the Minamoto and the Sugawara, who made and unmade emperors, and fought with one another in the lusty manner of the Italian Renaissance. Sugawara Michizane endeared himself to Japan by his patronage of literature, and is now worshiped as the God of Letters, in whose honor a school holiday is declared on the twenty-fifth day of every month; and the young Shogun Minamoto Sanetomo distinguished himself by composing on the morning before his assassination this simple stanza, in the chastest Japanese style:
If I should come no more,
Plum-tree beside my door,
Forget not thou the spring,
Faithfully blossoming.29
Under the enlightened Daigo (898-930), greatest of the emperors set up by the Fujiwara clan, Japan continued to absorb, and began to rival, the culture and luxury of China, then flourishing at its height under the T’ang. Having taken their religion from the Middle Kingdom, the Japanese proceeded to take from the same source their dress and their sports, their cooking and their writing, their poetry and their administrative methods, their music and their arts, their gardens and their architecture; even their handsome capitals, Nara and Kyoto, were laid out in imitation of Ch’ang-an.30 Japan imported Chinese culture a thousand years ago as it imported Europe and America in our own day: first with haste, then with discrimination; jealously maintaining its own spirit and character, zealously adapting the new ways to ancient and native ends.
Stimulated by its great neighbor, and protected by orderly and continuous government, Japan now entered that Engi period (901-922) which is accounted the acme of the Golden Age.* Wealth accumulated, and was centered in a fashionable life of luxury, refinement and culture hardly equaled again until the courts of the Medici and the salons of the French Enlightenment. Kyoto became the Paris and Versailles of France, elegant in poetry and dress, practised in manners and arts, and setting for all the nation the standards of learning and taste. Every appetite was full and free; the cuisine invented novelties for the palate and heaped up feasts for gourmands and gourmets; and fornication or adultery was winked at as a very venial sin.32 Silks of fine texture clothed every lord and lady, and harmonies of color wavered on every sleeve. Music and the dance adorned the life of temple and court, and graced aristocratic homes attractively landscaped without, and luxuriously finished with interiors of bronze or pearl, ivory or gold, or wood most delicately carved.33 Literature flourished, and morals decayed.
Such epochs of glittering refinement tend to be brief, for they rest insecurely upon concentrated wealth that may at any moment be destroyed by the fluctuations of trade, the impatience of the exploited, or the fortunes of war. The extravagance of the court finally ruined the solvency of the state; the exaltation of culture above ability filled administrative posts with incompetent poetasters, under whose scented noses corruption multiplied unnoticed; at last offices were sold to the highest bidder.34 Crime rose among the poor as luxury mounted among the rich; brigands and pirates infested the roads and the seas, and preyed impartially upon the people and the emperor; tax-gatherers were robbed as they brought their revenues to the court. Gangs of bandits were organized in the provinces, and even in the capital itself; for a time Japan’s most notorious criminal, like ours, lived in open splendor, too powerful to be arrested or annoyed.35 The neglect of martial habits and virtues, or military organization and defense, left the government exposed to assault from any ruthless buccaneer. The great families raised their own armies, and began an epoch of civil war in which they contended chaotically for the right to name the emperor. The emperor himself was every day more helpless, while the heads of the clans became again almost independent lords. Once more history moved in its ancient oscillation between a powerful central government and a feudal decentralized regime.
IV. THE DICTATORS
The “shoguns”—The Kamakura “Bakufu”—The Hojo Regency—Kublai Khan’s invasion—The Ashikaga Shogunate—The three buccaneers
Tempted by this situation, a class of military dictators arose, who assumed full authority over various sections of the archipelago, and recognized the emperor merely as the divine façade of Japan, to be maintained at a minimum of expense. The peasants, no longer protected from bandits by imperial armies or police, paid taxes to the shoguns, or generals, instead of to the emperor, for only the shoguns were able to safeguard them from robbery.36 The feudal system triumphed in Japan for the same reason that it had triumphed in Europe: local sources of authority grew in power as a central and distant government failed to maintain security and order.
About the year 1192 a member of the Minamoto clan, Yoritomo, gathered about him an army of soldiers and vassals, and established an independent authority which, from its seat, acquired the name of the “Kamakura Bakufu.” The very word bakufu meant a military office, and indicated bluntly the nature of the new regime. The great Yoritomo died suddenly in 1198,* and was succeeded by his weakling sons; for, says a Japanese proverb, “the great man has no seed.”38 A rival family set up in 1199 the “Hojo Regency,” which for 134 years ruled the shoguns who ruled the emperors. Kublai Khan took advantage of this trinitarian government to attempt the conquest of Japan, for clever Koreans, fearful of it, had described it to him as desirably rich. Kublai ordered from his ship-builders so vast a fleet that Chinese poets represented the hills as mourning for their denuded forests.39 The Japanese, in heroic retrospect, reckoned the vessels at 70,000, but less patriotic historians are content with 3,500 ships and 100,000 men. This gigantic armada appeared off the coast of Japan late in the year 1291. The brave islanders sailed out to meet it in an improvised and comparatively tiny fleet; but, as in the case of a smaller but more famous Armada,† a “Great Wind,” renowned in thankful memory, arose, smashed the ships of the mighty Khan upon the rocks, drowned 70,000 of his sailors, and saved the others for a life of slavery in Japan.
The turn of the Hojos came in 1333. For they, too, had been poisoned by power, and hereditary rule had passed in time from scoundrels and geniuses to cowards and fools. Takatoki, last of the line, had a passion for dogs; he accepted them in lieu of taxes, and collected from four to five thousand of them; he kept them in kennels with gold and silver decorations, fed them on fish and fowl, and had them carried in palanquins to take the air. The contemporary emperor, Go Daigo, saw in the degeneration of his keepers an opportunity to reassert the imperial power. The Minamoto and Ashikaga clans rallied to him, and led his forces, after many defeats, to victory over the Regency. Takatoki and 870 of his vassals and generals retired to a temple, drank a last cup of sake, and committed hara-kiri. “This,” said one of them as he pulled out his intestines with his own hand, “gives a fine relish to the wine.”40
Ashikaga Takauji turned against the Emperor whom he had helped to restore, fought with successful stratagem and treachery the armies sent to subdue him, replaced Go Daigo with the puppet emperor Kogon, and set up at Kyoto that Ashikaga Shogunate which was to rule Japan through 250 years of chaos and intermittent civil war. It must be admitted that part of this disorder was due to the nobler side of the Ashikaga dictators—their love and patronage of art. Yoshimitsu, tired of strife, turned his hand to painting, and became not the least artist of his time; Yoshimasa befriended many painters, subsidized a dozen arts, and grew into so refined a connoisseur that the pieces selected by him and his associates are the most coveted prizes of collectors today.41 Meanwhile, however, the prosaic tasks of organization were neglected, and neither the rich shoguns nor the impoverished emperors seemed able to maintain public security or peace.
It was this very chaos and looseness of life, and the call of the nation for leaders who would give it order, that produced a trio of buccaneers famous in Japanese history. In their youth, says tradition, Nobunaga, Hideyoshi and Iyeyasu resolved together to restore unity to their country, and each took a solemn oath that he would obey as vassal whichever of the others should win the imperial consent to administer Japan.42 Nobunaga tried first, and failed; Hideyoshi tried second, and died just short of success; Iyeyasu bided his time, tried last of all, founded the Tokugawa Shogunate, and inaugurated one of the longest periods of peace, and one of the richest epochs of art, in human history.
V. GREAT MONKEY-FACE
The rise of Hideyoshi—The attack upon Korea—The conflict with Christianity
Queen Elizabeth and Akbar, as the Japanese would instructively put it, were contemporaries of the great Hideyoshi. He was a peasant’s son, known to his friends, and later to his subjects, as Sarumen Kanja—“Monkey-Face”; for not even Confucius could rival him in ugliness. Unable to discipline him, his parents sent him to a monastic school; but Hideyoshi made such fun of the Buddhist priests, and raised such turmoil and insurrections, that he was expelled. He was apprenticed to various trades, and was discharged thirty-seven times;43 he became a bandit, decided that more could be stolen by law than against it, joined the service of a Samurai (i.e., a “sword-bearing man”), saved his master’s life, and was thereafter allowed to carry a sword. He joined Nobunaga, helped him with brains as well as courage, and, when Nobunaga died (1582), took the lead of the lawless rebels who had set out to conquer their native land. Within three years Hideyoshi had made himself ruler of half the empire, had won the admiration of the impotent emperor, and felt strong enough to digest Korea and China. “With Korean troops,” he modestly announced to the Son of Heaven, “aided by your illustrious influence, I intend to bring the whole of China under my sway. When that is effected, the three countries (China, Korea and Japan) will be one. I shall do it as easily as a man rolls up a piece of matting and carries it away under his arm.”44 He tried hard; but a villainous Korean invented a metal war-boat—a pre-plagiarism of the Monitor and the Merrimac—and destroyed one after another of the troop-laden ships that Hideyoshi had dispatched to Korea (1592). Seventy-two vessels were sunk in one day, and the very sea ran blood; forty-eight other vessels were beached and deserted by the Japanese, and burned to the water by the victors. After an indecisive alternation of successes and defeats the attempt to conquer Korea and China was postponed until the twentieth century. Hideyoshi, said the Korean king, had tried to “measure the ocean in a cockle-shell.”45
Meanwhile Hideyoshi had settled down to enjoy and administer the Regency that he had established. He provided himself with three hundred concubines, but he bestowed a substantial sum upon the peasant wife whom he had long ago divorced. He looked up one of his old employers, and returned to him with interest the money that he had stolen from him in apprentice days. He did not dare ask the Emperor’s consent to his assumption of the title of Shogun; but his contemporaries gave him, in compensation, the name of Taiko, or “Great Sovereign,” which, by one of those strange verbal Odysseys that characterize philology, is now entering our language as tycoon. “Cunning and crafty beyond belief,” as a missionary described him,46 he subtly disarmed the people by ordering all metal weapons to be contributed as material for a colossal statue—the Daibutsu, or Great Buddha, of Kyoto. He appears to have had no religious beliefs, but he was not above making use of religion for the purposes of ambition or statesmanship.
Christianity had come to Japan in 1549 in the person of one of the first and noblest of Jesuits, St. Francis Xavier. The little community which he established grew so rapidly that within a generation after his coming there were seventy Jesuits and 150,000 converts in the empire.47 They were so numerous in Nagasaki that they made that trading port a Christian city, and persuaded its local ruler, Omura, to use direct action in spreading the new faith.48 “Within Nagasaki territory,” says Lafcadio Hearn, “Buddhism was totally suppressed—its priests being persecuted and driven away.”49 Alarmed at this spiritual invasion, and suspecting it of political designs, Hideyoshi sent a messenger to the Vice-Provincial of the Jesuits in Japan, armed with five peremptory questions:
1. Why, and by what authority, he (the Vice-Provincial) and his religieux (members of religious orders) constrained Hideyoshi’s subjects to become Christians?
2. Why they induced their disciples and their sectaries to overthrow temples?
3. Why they persecuted the Buddhist priests?
4. Why they and the other Portuguese ate animals useful to man, such as oxen and cows?
5. Why he allowed the merchants of his nation to buy Japanese and make slaves of them in the Indies?50
Not satisfied with the replies, Hideyoshi issued, in 1587, the following edict:
Having learned from our faithful councillors that foreign religieux have come into our realm, where they preach a law contrary to that of Japan, and that they have even had the audacity to destroy temples dedicated to our (native gods) Kami and Hotoke; although this outrage merits the severest punishment, wishing nevertheless to show them mercy, we order them under pain of death to quit Japan within twenty days. During that space no harm or hurt will come to them. But at the expiration of that term, we order that if any of them be found in our States, they shall be seized and punished as the greatest criminals.51
Amid all these alarms the great buccaneer found time to encourage artists, to take part in No plays, and to support Rikyu in making the tea ceremony a stimulant to Japanese pottery and an essential adornment of Japanese life. He died in 1598, having exacted from lyeyasu a promise to build a new capital at Yedo (now Tokyo), and to recognize Hideyoshi’s son Hideyori as heir to the Regency in Japan.
VI. THE GREAT SHOGUN
The accession of lyeyasu—His philosophy—lyeyasu and Christianity—Death of lyeyasu—The Tokugawa Shogunate
Hideyoshi being dead, lyeyasu pointed out that he had drawn the blood for his oath not from his finger or his gums, as the code of the Samurai required, but from a scratch behind his ear; hence the oath was not binding.52 He overwhelmed the forces of certain rival leaders at Sekigahara in a battle that left 40,000 dead. He tolerated Hideyori till his coming of age made him dangerous, and then suggested to him the wisdom of submission. Rebuked, he besieged the gigantic Castle of Osaka where Hideyori was established, captured it while the youth committed hara-kiri, and ensured his hold upon power by killing all of Hideyori’s children, legitimate and illegitimate. Then lyeyasu organized peace as ably and ruthlessly as he had organized war, and administered Japan so well that it was content to be ruled by his posterity and his principles for eight generations.
He was a man of his own ideas, and made his morals as he went along. When a very presentable woman came to him with the complaint that one of his officials had killed her husband in order to possess her, lyeyasu ordered the official to disembowel himself, and made the lady his concubine.53 Like Socrates he ranked wisdom as the only virtue, and charted some of its paths in that strange “Legacy,” or intellectual testament, which he bequeathed to his family at his death.
Life is like unto a long journey with a heavy burden. Let thy step be slow and steady, that thou stumble not. Persuade thyself that imperfection and inconvenience is the natural lot of mortals, and there will be no room for discontent, neither for despair. When ambitious desires arise in thy heart, recall the days of extremity thou hast passed through. Forbearance is the root of quietness and assurance forever. Look upon wrath as thy enemy. If thou knowest only what it is to conquer, and knowest not what it is to be defeated, woe unto thee; it will fare ill with thee. Find fault with thyself rather than with others.54
Having captured power by arms, he decided that Japan had no need of further war, and devoted himself to furthering the ways and virtues of peace. To win the Samurai from the habits of the sword he encouraged them to study literature and philosophy, and to contribute to the arts; and under the rule which he established, culture flourished in Japan and militarism decayed. “The people,” he wrote, “are the foundation of the Empire,”55 and he invoked the “special commiseration” of his successors for the “widower, the widowed, the orphaned and the lonely.” But he had no democratic predispositions: the greatest of all crimes, he thought, was insubordination; a “fellow” who stepped out of his rank was to be cut down on the spot; and the entire family of a rebel should be put to death.56 The feudal order, in his judgment, was the best that could be devised for actual human beings; it provided a rational balance between central and local power, it established a natural and hereditary system of social and economic organization, and it preserved the continuity of a society without subjecting it to despotic authority. It must be admitted that Iyeyasu organized the most perfect form of feudal government ever known.57
Like most statesmen he thought of religion chiefly as an organ of social discipline, and regretted that the variety of human beliefs canceled half this good by the disorder of hostile creeds. To his completely political mind the traditional faith of the Japanese people—a careless mixture of Shintoism and Buddhism—was an invaluable bond cementing the race into spiritual unity, moral order and patriotic devotion; and though at first he approached Christianity with the lenient eye and broad intelligence of Akbar, and refrained from enforcing against it the angry edicts of Hideyoshi, he was disturbed by its intolerance, its bitter denunciation of the native faith as idolatry, and the discord which its passionate dogmatism aroused not only between the converts and the nation, but among the neophytes themselves. Finally his resentment was stirred by the discovery that missionaries sometimes allowed themselves to be used as vanguards for conquerors, and were, here and there, conspiring against the Japanese state.58* In 1614 he forbade the practice or preaching of the Christian religion in Japan, and ordered all converts either to depart from the country or to renounce their new beliefs. Many priests evaded the decree, and some of them were arrested. None was executed during the lifetime of Iyeyasu; but after his death the fury of the bureaucrats was turned against the Christians, and a violent and brutal persecution ensued which practically stamped Christianity out of Japan. In 1638 the remaining Christians gathered to the number of 37,000 on the peninsula of Shimabara, fortified it, and made a last stand for the freedom of worship. Iyemitsu, grandson of Iyeyasu, sent a large armed force to subdue them. When, after a three months’ siege, their stronghold was taken, all but one hundred and five of the survivors were massacred in the streets.
Iyeyasu and Shakespeare were contemporaries in death. The doughty Shogun left his power to his son Hidetada, with a simple admonition: “Take care of the people. Strive to be virtuous. Never neglect to protect the country.” And to the nobles who stood at his deathbed he left advice in the best tradition of Confucius and Mencius: “My son has now come of age. I feel no anxiety for the future of the state. But should my successor commit any grave fault in his administration, do you administer affairs yourselves. The country is not the country of one man, but the country of the nation. If my descendants lose their power because of their misdeeds, I shall not regret it.”60
His descendants conducted themselves much better than monarchs can usually be expected to behave over a great length of time. Hidetada was a harmless mediocrity; Iyemitsu represented a stronger mood of the stock, and sternly suppressed a movement to restore to actual power the still reigning but not ruling emperors. Tsunayoshi lavished patronage upon men of letters, and on the great rival schools of painting, Kano and Tosa, that embellished the Genroku age (1688-1703). Yoshimune set himself to the ever-recurrent purpose of abolishing poverty, at the very time when his treasury faced an unusual deficit. He borrowed extensively from the merchant class, attacked the extravagance of the rich, and stoically reduced the expenditures of his government, even to the extent of dismissing the fifty fairest ladies of the court. He dressed in cotton cloth, slept on a peasant’s pallet, and dined on the simplest fare. He had a complaint box placed before the palace of the Supreme Court, and invited the people to submit criticisms of any governmental policy or official. When one Yamashita sent in a caustic indictment of his whole administration Yoshimune had the document read aloud in public, and rewarded the author for his candor with a substantial gift.61
It was the judgment of Lafcadio Hearn that “the Tokugawa period was the happiest in the long life of the nation.”62 History, though it can never quite know the past, inclines tentatively to the same conclusion. How could one, seeing Japan today, suspect that on those now excited islands, only a century ago, lived a people poor but content, enjoying a long epoch of peace under the rule of a military class, and pursuing in quiet isolation the highest aims of literature and art?
CHAPTER XXIX
The Political and Moral Foundations
A tentative approach
IF, NOW, we try to picture the Japan that died in 1853, we should remember that it may be as hard to understand, as it might be to fight, a people five thousand miles distant, and differing from us in color and language, government and religion, manners and morals, character and ideals, literature and art. Hearn was more intimate with Japan than any other Western writer of his time, and yet he spoke of “the immense difficulty of perceiving and comprehending what underlies the surface of Japanese life.”1 “Your information about us,” a genial Japanese essayist reminds the Occident, “is based on the meagre translations of our immense literature, if not on the unreliable anecdotes of passing travelers. . . . We Asiatics are often appalled by the curious web of facts and fancies which has been woven concerning us. We are pictured as living on the perfume of the lotus, if not on mice and cockroaches.”2 What follows, therefore, is a tentative approach—based upon the briefest direct acquaintance—to Japanese civilization and character; each student must correct it by long and personal experience. The first lesson of philosophy is that we may all be mistaken.
I. THE SAMURAI
The powerless emperor—The powers of the “shogun”—The sword of the “Samurai”—The code of the “Samurai”—“Hara-kiri”—The Forty-seven “Ronin”—A commuted sentence
Theoretically at the head of the nation was the divine emperor. The actually ruling house—the hereditary shogunate—allowed the emperor and his court $25,000 a year for maintaining the impressive and useful fiction of uninterrupted rule.* Many people of the court practised some domestic handicraft to sustain themselves: some made umbrellas, others made chopsticks, or toothpicks, or playing cards. The Tokugawa shoguns made it a principle to leave the emperor no authority whatever, to seclude him from the people, to surround him with women, and to weaken him with effeminacy and idleness. The imperial family yielded its powers gracefully, and contented itself with dictating the fashions of aristocratic dress.3
Meanwhile the shogun luxuriated in the slowly growing wealth of Japan, and assumed prerogatives normally belonging to the emperor. When he was borne through the streets in his ox-carriage or palanquin the police required every house along the route, and all the shutters of upper windows, to be closed; all fires were to be extinguished, all dogs and cats were to be locked up, and the people themselves were to kneel by the roadside with their heads upon their hands and their hands upon the ground.4 The shogun had a large personal retinue, including four jesters, and eight cultured ladies dedicated to entertain him without reserve.5 He was advised by a cabinet of twelve members: a “Great Senior,” five “Seniors” or ministers, and six “Sub-Elders” who formed a junior council. As in China, a Board of Censors supervised all administrative offices, and kept watch upon the feudal lords. These lords, or Daimyo (“Great Name”), formally acknowledged allegiance only to the emperor; and some of them, like the Shimadzu family that ruled Satsuma, successfully limited the shogun’s authority, and finally overthrew it.
Below the lords were the baronets, and below these the squires; and serving the lords were a million or more Samurai—sword-bearing guardsmen. The basic principle of Japanese feudal society was that every gentleman was a soldier, and every soldier a gentleman;6 here lay the sharpest difference between Japan and that pacific China which thought that every gentleman should be a scholar rather than a warrior. Though they loved, and partly formed themselves on, such swashbuckling novels as the Chinese Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the Samurai scorned mere learning, and called the literary savant a book-smelling sot.7 They had many privileges: they were exempt from taxation, received a regular stipend of rice from the baron whom they served, and performed no labor except occasionally to die for their country. They looked down upon love as a graceful game, and preferred Greek friendship; they made a business of gambling and brawling, and kept their swords in condition by paying the executioner to let them cut off condemned heads.8 His sword, in Iyeyasu’s famous phrase, was “the soul of the Samurai” and found remarkably frequent expression despite prolonged national peace. He had the right, according to Iyeyasu9, to cut down at once any member of the lower classes who offended him; and when his steel was new and he wished to make trial of it, he was as likely to try it on a beggar as on a dog.10 “A famous swordsman having obtained a new sword,” says Longford, “took up his place by the Nihon Bashi (the central bridge of Yedo) to await a chance of testing it. By and by a fat peasant came along, merrily drunk, and the swordsman dealt him the Nashi-wari (pear-splitter) so effectively that he cut him right through from the top of his head down to the fork. The peasant continued on his way, not knowing that anything had happened to him, till he stumbled against a coolie, and fell in two neatly severed pieces.”11 Of such trivial consequence is the difference, so troublesome to philosophers, between the One and the Many.
The Samurai had other graces than this jolly despatch with which they transformed time into eternity. They accepted a stern code of honor—Bushido* or the Way of the Knight—whose central theory was its definition of virtue: “the power of deciding upon a certain course of conduct in accordance with reason, without wavering; to die when it is right to die, to strike when it is right to strike.”12 They were tried by their own code, but it was more severe than the common law.13 They despised all material enterprise and gain, and refused to lend, borrow or count money; they seldom broke a promise, and they risked their lives readily for anyone who appealed to them for just aid. They made a principle of hard and frugal living; they limited themselves to one meal a day, and accustomed themselves to eat any food that came to hand, and to hold it. They bore all suffering silently, and suppressed every display of emotion; their women were taught to rejoice when informed that their husbands had been killed on the battlefield.14 They recognized no obligation except that of loyalty to their superiors; this was, in their code, a higher law than parental or filial love. It was a common thing for a Samurai to disembowel himself on the death of his lord, in order to serve and protect him in the other world. When the Shogun Iyemitsu was dying in 1651 he reminded his prime minister, Hotto, of this duty of junshi, or “following in death”; Hotto killed himself without a word, and several subordinates imitated him.15 When the Emperor Mutsuhito went to his ancestors in 1912 General Nogi and his wife committed suicide in loyalty to him.16 Not even the traditions of Rome’s finest soldiers bred greater courage, asceticism and self-control than were demanded by the code of the Samurai.
The final law of Bushido was hara-kiri—suicide by disembowelment. The occasions when this would be expected of a Samurai were almost beyond count, and the practice of it so frequent that little notice was taken of it. If a man of rank had been condemned to death he was allowed, as an expression of the emperor’s esteem, to cut through his abdomen from left to right and then down to the pelvis with the small sword which he always carried for this purpose. If he had been defeated in battle, or had been compelled to surrender, he was as like as not to rip open his belly. (Hara-kiri means belly-cutting; it is a vulgar word seldom used by the Japanese, who prefer to call it seppuku.) When, in 1895, Japan yielded to European pressure and abandoned Liaotung, forty military men committed hara-kiri in protest. During the war of 1905 many officers and men in the Japanese navy killed themselves rather than be captured by the Russians. If his superior did something offensive to him, the good Samurai might gash himself to death at his master’s gate. The art of seppuku—the precise ritual of ripping—was one of the first items in the education of Samurai youth; and the last tribute of affection that could be paid to a friend was to stand by him and cut off his head as soon as he had carved his paunch.17 Out of this training, and the traditions bound up with it, has come some part of the Japanese soldier’s comparative fearlessness of death.*
Murder, like suicide, was allowed occasionally to replace the law. Feudal Japan economized on policemen not only by having many bonzes, but by allowing the son or brother of a murdered man to take the law into his own hand; and this recognition of the right of revenge, though it begot half the novels and plays of Japanese literature, intercepted many crimes. The Samurai, however, usually felt called upon to commit hara-kiri after exercising this privilege of personal revenge. When the famous Fortyseven Ronin (“Wave Men”—i.e., unattached Samurai), to avenge a death, had cut off the head of Kotsuké no Suké with supreme courtesy and the most refined apologies, they retired in dignity to estates named by the Shogun, and neatly killed themselves (1703). Priests returned Kotsuké’s head to his retainers, who gave them this simple receipt:
Memorandum:
Item: One head.
Item: One paper parcel.
The above articles are acknowledged to have been received.
(Signed) Sayada Mogobai
Saito Kunai
This is probably the most famous and typical event in the history of Japan, and one of the most significant for the understanding of Japanese character. Its protagonists are still, in the popular view, heroes and saints; to this day pious hands deck their graves, and incense never ceases to rise before their resting place.19
Towards the end of Iyeyasu’s regency two brothers, Sakon and Naiki, twenty-four and seventeen years of age respectively, tried to kill him because of wrongs which they felt that he had inflicted upon their father. They were caught as they entered the camp, and were sentenced to death. Iyeyasu was so moved by their courage that he commuted their sentences to self-disembowelment; and in accord with the customs of the time he included their younger brother, the eight-year-old Hachimaro, in this merciful decree. The physician who attended the boys has left us a description of the scene:
When they were all seated in a row for final despatch, Sakon turned to the youngest and said—“Go thou first, for I wish to be sure that thou doest it right.” Upon the little one’s replying that, as he had never seen seppuku performed, he would like to see his brothers do it, and then he could follow them, the older brothers smiled between their tears:—“Well said, little fellow. So canst thou well boast of being our father’s child.” When they had placed him between them, Sakon thrust the dagger into the left side of his abdomen and said—“Look, brother! Dost understand now? Only, don’t push the dagger too far, lest thou fall back. Lean forward, rather, and keep thy knees well composed.” Naiki did likewise, and said to the boy—“Keep thine eyes open, or else thou mayst look like a dying woman. If thy dagger feels anything within and thy strength fails, take courage, and double thy effort to cut across.” The child looked from one to the other, and when both had expired, he calmly half denuded himself and followed the example set him on either hand.20
II. THE LAW
The first code—Group responsibility—Punishments
The legal system of Japan was a vigorous supplement to private assassination and revenge. It had its origins partly in the ancient usages of the people, partly in the Chinese codes of the seventh century; law accompanied religion in the migration of culture from China to Japan.21 Tenchi Tenno began the formulation of a system of laws which was completed and promulgated under the boy Emperor Mommu in 702. In the feudal epoch this and other codes of the imperial age fell into disuse, and each fief legislated independently; the Samurai recognized no law beyond the will and decrees of his Daimyo”22
Until 1721 it was the custom of Japan to hold the entire family responsible for the good behavior of each member, and, in most localities, to charge each family in a group of five with responsibility for all. The grown sons of an adult who had been condemned to be crucified or burned were executed with him, and his younger sons, on coming of age, were banished.23 Ordeal was used in medieval trials, and torture remained popular, in its milder forms, till modern times. The Japanese used the rack on some Christians, in vengeful imitation of the Inquisition; but more often their subtle minds were content to bind a man with ropes into a constrained position that became more agonizing with every minute.24 Whippings for trifling offenses were frequent, and death could be earned by any one of a great variety of crimes. The Emperor Shomu (724-56) abolished capital punishment and made compassion the rule of government; but crime increased after his death, and the Emperor Konin (770-81) not only restored the death penalty, but decreed that thieves should be publicly scourged until they died.25 Capital punishment also took the form of strangling, beheading, crucifixion, quartering, burning, or boiling in oil.26 Iyeyasu put an end to the old custom of pulling a condemned man in two between oxen, or binding him to a public post and inviting each passer-by to take a turn in cutting through him, from shoulder to crotch, with a saw.27 Iyeyasu laid it down that the frequent resort to severe punishments proved not the criminality of the people so much as the corruption and incompetence of the officials.28 Yoshimune was disgusted to find that the prisons of his time had no sanitary arrangements, and that among the prisoners were several whose trials, though begun sixteen years back, were still unfinished, so that the accusations against them were forgotten, and the witnesses were dead.29 This most enlightened of the shoguns reformed the prisons, improved and accelerated judicial procedure, abolished family responsibility, and labored sedulously for years to formulate the first unified code of Japanese feudal law (1721).
III. THE TOILERS
Castes—An experiment in the nationalization of land—State fixing of wages—A famine—Handicrafts—Artisans and guilds
In the imperial age society had been divided into eight sei or castes; in the feudal epoch these were softened into four classes: Samurai, artisans, peasants, and merchants—the last being also, in social ranking, least. Beneath these classes was a large body of slaves, numbering some five per cent of the population, and composed of criminals, war-captives, or children seized and sold by kidnappers, or children sold into slavery by their parents.*30 Lower even than these slaves was a caste of pariahs known as Eta, considered despicable and unclean by Buddhist Japan because they acted as butchers, tanners and scavengers.32
The great bulk of the population (which numbered in Yoshimune’s days some thirty millions), was composed of peasant proprietors, intensively cultivating that one-eighth of Japan’s mountainous soil which lends itself to tillage.† In the Nara period the state nationalized the land, and rented it to the peasant for six years or, at most, till death; but the government discovered that men did not care to improve or properly care for land that might in a short time be assigned to others; and the experiment ended in a restoration of private ownership, with state provision of funds in the spring to finance the planting and reaping of the crops.33 Despite this aid, the life of the peasant was not one of degenerative ease. His farm was a tiny tract, for even in feudal days one square mile had to support two thousand men.34 He had to contribute annually to the state thirty days of forced labor, during which death by a spear-thrust might be the penalty of a moment’s idleness. ‡35 The government took from him, in taxes and levies of many kinds, 6% of his product in the seventh century, 72% in the twelfth, and 40% in the nineteenth.37 His tools were of the simplest sort; his clothing was poor and slight in the winter, and usually nothing at all in the summer; his furniture was a rice-pot, a few bowls, and some chopsticks; his home was a hut so flimsy that half a week sufficed to build it.38 Every now and then earthquakes leveled his cottage, or famine emptied his frame. If he worked for another man his wages, like all wages in Tokugawa Japan, were fixed by the government;39 but this did not prevent them from being cruelly low. In one of the most famous works of Japanese literature—Kamo Chomei’s Hojoki—the author describes, as crowded into the eight years between 1177 and 1185, an earthquake, a famine, and a fire that almost destroyed Kyoto.* His eyewitness account of the famine of 1181 is one of the classic examples of Japanese prose:
In all the provinces people left their lands and sought other parts, or, forgetting their homes, went to live among the hills. All kinds of prayers were begun, and even religious practices which were unusual in ordinary times were revived, but to no purpose whatever. . . . The inhabitants of the capital offered to sacrifice their valuables of all kinds, one after another (for food), but nobody cared to look at them. . . . Beggars swarmed by the roadsides, and our ears were filled with the sound of their lamentations. . . . Everybody was dying of hunger; and as time went on our condition became as desperate as that of the fish in the small pool of the story. At last even respectable-looking people wearing hats, and with their feet covered, might be seen begging importunately from door to door. Sometimes, while you wondered how such utterly wretched creatures could walk at all, they fell down before your eyes. By garden walls or on the roadsides countless persons died of famine, and as their bodies were not removed, the world was filled with evil odors. As their bodies changed there were many sights which the eyes could not endure to see. . . . People who had no means pulled down their houses and sold the materials in the market. It was said that a load for one man was not enough to provide him with sustenance for a single day. It was strange to see, among this firewood, pieces adorned in places with vermilion, or silver, or gold leaf. . . . Another very pitiable thing was that when there were a man and a woman who were strongly attached to each other, the one whose love was the greater, and whose devotion was the more profound, always died first. The reason was that they put themselves last, and, whether man or woman, gave up to the dearly beloved one anything which they might chance to have begged. As a matter of course, parents died before their children. Again, infants might be seen clinging to the breast of their mother, not knowing that she was already dead. . . . The number of those who died in central Kyoto during the fourth and fifth months alone was 42,300.40
Contrast with this brutal interlude in the growth of the soil Kaempfer’s bright picture of Japanese handicrafts as he saw them in the Kyoto of 1691:
Kyoto is the great magazine of all Japanese manufactures and commodities, and the chief mercantile town in the Empire. There is scarce a house in this large capital where there is not something made or sold. Here they refine copper, coin money, print books, weave the richest stuffs with gold and silver flowers. The best and scarcest dyes, the most artful carvings, all sorts of musical instruments, pictures, japanned cabinets, all sorts of things wrought in gold and other metals, particularly in steel, as the best tempered blades and other arms, are made here in the utmost perfection, as art also the richest dresses, and after the best fashion; all sorts of toys, puppets moving their heads of themselves, and numberless other things too numerous to be mentioned here. In short, there is nothing that can be thought of but what may be found at Kyoto, and nothing, though ever so neatly wrought, can be imported from abroad but what some artist or other in this capital will undertake to imitate. . . . There are but few houses in all the chief streets where there is not something to be sold, and for my part I could not help admiring whence they can have customers enough for such an immense quantity of goods.41
All the arts and industries of China had long since been imported into Japan; and as today Japan begins to excel her Western instructors in economy and efficiency of mechanical production,42 so during the Tokugawa Shogunate her handicraftsmen began to rival, and sometimes to excel, the Chinese and Koreans from whom they had learned their art. Most of the work, in the manner of medieval Europe, was done in the home by families who passed down their occupation and their skill from father to son, and often took the name of their craft; and, again as in our Middle Ages, great guilds were formed, not so much of simple workers as of masters who mercilessly exploited the artisans, and zealously restricted the admission of new members to the guilds.43 One of the most powerful of the guilds was that of the money-changers, who accepted deposits, issued vouchers and promissory notes, made loans to commerce, industry and government, and (by 1636) performed all the major functions of finance.44 Rich merchants and financiers rose to prominence in the cities, and began to look with jealous eye upon the exclusive political power of a feudal aristocracy that angered them by scorning the pursuit of gold. Slowly, throughout the Tokugawa era, the mercantile wealth of the nation grew, until at last it was ready to coöperate with American gifts and European guns in bursting the shell of the old Japan.
IV. THE PEOPLE
Stature—Cosmetics—Costume—Diet—Etiquette—“Sake”—The tea ceremony—The flower ceremony—Love of nature-Gardens—Homes
This most important people in the contemporary political world is modest in stature, averaging five feet three-and-a-half inches for the men, four feet ten-and-a-half inches for the women. One of their great warriors, Tamura Maro, was described as “a man of very fine figure, . . . five feet five inches tall.”45 Some dieticians believe that this brevity is due to insufficiency of lime in the Japanese diet, due in turn to lack of milk, and this to the expensiveness of grazing areas in so crowded a land;46 but such a theory, like everything in dietetics, must be looked upon as highly hypothetical. The women seem fragile and weak, but probably their energy, like that of the men, is one of nervous courage rather than of physical strength, and cannot be seen outside of emergencies. Their beauty is a matter of expression and carriage as well as of feature; their dainty grace is a typical product of Japanese art.
Cosmetics are popular and ancient in Japan as elsewhere; even in the early days of Kyoto’s leadership every male of quality rouged his cheeks, powdered his face, sprinkled his clothes with perfume, and carried a mirror with him wherever he went.47 Powder has been for centuries the female complexion of Japan; the Lady Sei Shonagon, in her Pillow Sketches (ca. 991 A.D.), says demurely: “I bent my head down and hid my face with my sleeve at the risk of brushing off my powder and appearing with a spotted face.”48 Fashionable ladies rouged their cheeks, colored their nails, and occasionally gilded the lower lip; to complete their toilette sixteen articles were required in the seventeenth century, and twenty in the eighteenth. They recognized fifteen styles of front hair and twelve styles of back hair; they shaved their eyebrows, painted “crescent moons” or other forms in their place, or substituted for them two little black spots high up on the forehead, to match their artificially blackened teeth. To construct the architecture of a woman’s hair was a task that took from two to six hours of expert labor. In the Heian epoch the majority of the men shaved the crown of the head, gathered the rest in a queue, and laid the queue athwart the crown so as to divide it into equal halves. Beards, though sparse, were a necessity; those who had none by nature wore false ones, and a pair of tweezers for the care of the beard was furnished to every guest at any fashionable house.49
Japanese costume, in the Nara age, imitated the Chinese, with tunic and trousers covered by a tight robe. In the Kyoto period the robe became looser and multiple; men as well as women wore from two to twenty superimposed robes, whose colors were determined by the rank of the wearer, and provided many prismatic displays at the edges of the sleeves. At one time the lady’s sleeves reached below her knees, and bore, each of them, a little bell that tinkled as she walked. On days when the streets were wet from rain or snow they walked on wooden slippers raised by wooden cleats an inch or so above the earth. In the Tokugawa era dress became so extravagant that the shoguns, careless of history, tried to check it by sumptuary laws; silk-lined and embroidered breeches and socks were outlawed, beards were forbidden, certain ways of wearing the hair were proscribed, and at times the police were instructed to arrest anyone wearing fine garments in the street. Occasionally these laws were obeyed; for the most part they were circumvented by the ingenuity of human folly.50 In time the rage for plural robes abated, and the Japanese became one of the most simply, modestly and tastefully dressed of peoples.
Nor did they yield to any other nation in habits of cleanliness. Among those who could afford it clothes were changed three times a day; and poor as well as rich bathed the body daily.51* In the villages the people bathed in tubs outside their doors in summer, while gossiping industriously with their neighbors.52 Hot baths at no degrees Fahrenheit were used as a method of keeping warm in winter. Diet was simple and wholesome until luxury came; the early Chinese descriptions of the Japanese noted that “they are a long-lived race, and persons who have reached one hundred years are very common.”54 The staple food of the people was rice, to which were added fish, vegetables, sea-weed, fruit and meat according to income. Meat was a rare dish except among the aristocracy and the soldiery. On a regimen of rice, a little fish and no meat, the coolie developed good lungs and tough muscles, and could run from fifty to eighty miles in twenty-four hours without distress; when he added meat he lost this capacity.55* The emperors of the Kyoto period made pious efforts to enforce Buddhist dietary laws by forbidding the slaughter or eating of animals; but when the people found that the priests themselves clandestinely violated these laws, they took to meat as a delicacy, and used it to excess whenever their means permitted.57
To the Japanese, as to the Chinese and the French, fine cooking was an essential grace of civilization. Its practitioners, like artists and philosophers, divided into warring schools, and fought one another with recipes. Table manners became at least as important as religion; elaborate enactments prescribed the order and quantity of bites, and the posture of the body at each stage of the meal. Ladies were forbidden to make a sound while eating or drinking; but men were expected to indicate their appreciation of a host’s generosity by a little grateful belching.58 The diners sat on one or two heels on mats, at a table raised but a few inches above the floor; or the food might be laid upon the mat, without any table at all. Usually the meal was begun with a hot drink of rice-wine; for had not the poet Tahito declared, far back in the seventh century, that sake was the one solution for all the problems of life?
That which the seven sages sought,
Those men of olden times,
Was sake, beyond all doubt.
Instead of holding forth
Wisely, with grave mien,
How much better to drink sake
To get drunk, and to shout aloud.
Since it is true
That death comes at last for all,
Let us be joyful
While we are alive.
Even the jewel that sparkles in the night
Is less to us than the uplifting of the heart
Which comes by drinking sake.59
More sacred than sake, to the aristocracy, was tea. This gracious remedy for the tastelessness of boiled water was introduced from China into Japan, unsuccessfully in 805, successfully in 1191. At first the people shunned the leaf as a poison, and would have nothing to do with it; but when a few cups of the outlandish beverage quickly cleared the head of a shogun who had drunk too much sake the night before, the Japanese recognized the utility of tea. Its costliness added to its charm: tiny jars of it were given as precious gifts, even to reward warriors for mighty deeds of valor, and the fortunate possessors gathered their friends about them to share the royal drink. The Japanese made a graceful and complex ceremony out of tea-drinking, and Rikyu-established for it six inviolable rules that raised it to a cult. The signal bidding the guests to enter the tea pavilion, said Rikyu, must be given by wooden clappers; the ablution bowl must be kept constantly filled with pure water; any guest conscious of inadequacy or inelegance in the furniture or the surroundings must leave at once, and as quietly as possible; no trivial gossip was to be indulged in, but only matters of noble and serious import were to be discussed; no word of deceit or flattery should pass any lip; and the affair should not last beyond four hours. No tea-pot was used at such Cha-no-yu (“hot water for tea”) reunions; powdered tea was placed in a cup of choice design, hot water was added, and the cup was passed from guest to guest, each wiping its rim carefully with a napkin. When the last drinker had consumed the last drop the cup was passed around again, to be critically examined as a work of ceramic art.60 In this way the tea-ceremony stimulated the potters to produce ever lovelier cups and bowls, and helped to form the manners of the Japanese into tranquillity, courtesy and charm.*
Flowers, too, became a cult in Japan, and the same Rikyu who formulated the ritual of tea valued his flowers as much as his cups. When he heard that Hideyoshi was coming to see his famous collection of chrysanthemums, Rikyu destroyed all the blossoms in his garden but one, so that this might shine unrivaled before the terrible shogun*62 The art of flower-arrangement grew step by step with “Teaism” in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and became in the seventeenth an independent devotion. “Flower-masters” arose who taught men and women how flowers should be grown in the garden and placed in the home; it was not enough, they said, to admire the blossoms, but one must learn to see as much loveliness in the leaf, the bough or the stalk as in the flower, as much beauty in one flower as in a thousand; and one must arrange them with a view not merely to color but to grouping and line.64 Tea, flowers, poetry, and the dance became requisites of womanhood among the aristocracy of Japan.
Flowers are the religion of the Japanese; they worship them with sacrificial fervor and national accord. They watch for the blossoms appropriate to each season; and when, for a week or two in early April, the cherry-tree blooms, all Japan seems to leave its work to gaze at it, or even to make pilgrimages to places where the miracle is most abundant and complete.† The cherry-tree is cultivated not for any fruit but for its blossom—the emblem of the faithful warrior ready to die for his country at the moment of his fullest life.65 Criminals en route to execution will sometimes ask for a flower.66 The Lady Chiyo, in a famous poem, tells of a girl who came to draw water from a well, but, finding bucket and rope entwined with con-volvuli, went elsewhere for water rather than break the tendrils.67 “The heart of man,” says Tsurayuki, “can never be understood; but in my native village the flowers give forth their perfume as before.”68 These simple lines are among the greatest of Japanese poems, for they express in perfect and irreducible form a profound characteristic of a race, and one of the rare conclusions of philosophy. Never has another people shown such love of nature as one finds in Japan; nowhere else have men and women accepted so completely all natural moods of earth, sky and sea; nowhere else have men so carefully cultivated gardens, or nourished plants in their growth, or tended them in the home. Japan did not have to wait for a Rousseau or a Wordsworth to tell it that mountains were sublime, or that lakes might be beautiful. There is hardly a dwelling in Japan without a vase of flowers in it, and hardly a poem in Japanese literature without a landscape in its lines. As Oscar Wilde thought that England should not fight France because the French wrote perfect prose, so America might seek peace to the end with a nation that thirsts for beauty almost as passionately as it hungers for power.
The art of gardening was imported from China along with Buddhism and tea; but here again the Japanese transformed creatively what they had absorbed through imitation. They found an esthetic value in asymmetry, a new charm in the surprises of unhackneyed forms; they dwarfed trees and shrubs by confining their roots in pots, and with impish humor and tyrannical affection trained them into shapes that might within a garden wall represent the wind-twisted trees of stormy Japan; they searched the craters of their volcanoes and the most precipitous shores of their seas to find rocks fused into metal by hidden fires, or moulded by patient breakers into quaint and gnarled forms; they dug little lakes, channeled roving rivulets, and crossed them with bridges that seemed to spring from the natural growth of the woods; and through all these varied formations they wore, with imperceptible design, footpaths that would lead now to startling novelties and now to cool and silent retreats.
Where space and means allowed they attached their homes to their gardens rather than their gardens to their homes. Their houses were frail but pretty; earthquakes made tall buildings dangerous, but the carpenter and woodworker knew how to bind eaves, gables and lattices into a dwelling ascetically simple, esthetically perfect, and architecturally unique. Here were no curtains, sofas, beds, tables or chairs, no obtrusive display of the dweller’s wealth and luxury, no museum of pictures, statuary or bric-a-brac; but in some alcove a blossoming branch, on the wall a silk or paper painting or specimen of calligraphy, on the matted floor a cushion fronted by a lectern and flanked by a bookcase on one side and an arm-rest on the other, and, hidden in a cupboard, mattresses and coverings to be spread on the floor when the time should come to sleep. Within such modest quarters, or in the peasant’s fragile hut, the Japanese family lived, and through all storms of war and revolution, of political corruption and religious strife, carried on the life and civilization of the Sacred Isles.
V. THE FAMILY
The paternal autocrat—The status of woman—Children—Sexual morality—The “geisha”—Love
For the real source of social order, in the Orient even more than in the West, was the family; and the omnipotence of the father, in Japan as throughout the East, expressed not a backward condition of society but a preference for familial rather than political government. The individual was less important in the East than in the Occident because the state was weaker, and required a strongly organized and disciplined family to take the place of a far-reaching and pervasive central authority. Freedom was conceived in terms of the family rather than of the individual; for (the family being the economic unit of production as well as the social unit of order) success or failure, survival or death, came not to the separate person but to the family. The power of the father was tyrannical, but it had the painless grace of seeming natural, necessary, and human. He could dismiss a son-in-law or a daughter-in-law from the patriarchal household, while keeping the grandchildren with him; he could kill a child convicted of unchastity or a serious crime; he could sell his children into slavery or prostitution;* and he could divorce his wife with a word.70 If he was a simple commoner he was expected to be monogamous; but if he belonged to the higher classes he was entitled to keep concubines, and no notice was to be taken of his occasional infidelities.71 When Christianity entered Japan, native writers complained that it disturbed the peace of families by insinuating that concubinage and adultery were sins.72
As in China, the position of woman was higher in the earlier than in the later stages of the civilization. Six empresses appear among the rulers of the imperial age; and at Kyoto women played an important, indeed a leading, rôle in the social and literary life of the nation. In that heyday of Japanese culture, if we may hazard hypotheses in such esoteric fields, the wives outstripped their husbands in adultery, and sold their virtue for an epigram.73 The Lady Sei Shonagon describes a youth about to send a love-note to his mistress, but interrupting it to make love to a passing girl; and this amiable essayist adds: “I wonder if, when this lover sent his letter, tied with a dewy spray of hagi flower, his messenger hesitated to present it to the lady because she also had a guest?”74 Under the influence of feudal militarism, and in the natural and historical alternation of laxity and restraint, the Chinese theory of the subjection of woman to man won a wide influence, “society” became predominantly male, and women were dedicated to the “Three Obediences”—to father, husband and son. Education, except in etiquette, was rarely wasted upon them, and fidelity was exacted on penalty of death. If a husband caught his wife in adultery he was authorized to kill her and her paramour at once; to which the subtle Iyeyasu added that if he killed the woman but spared the man he was himself to be put to death.76 The philosopher Ekken advised the husband to divorce his wife if she talked too loudly or too long; but if the husband happened to be dissolute and brutal, said Ekken, the wife should treat him with doubled kindness and gentleness. Under this rigorous and long-continued training the Japanese woman became the most industrious, faithful and obedient of wives, and harassed travelers began to wonder whether a system that had produced such gracious results should not be adopted in the West.77
Contrary to the most ancient and sacred customs of Oriental society, fertility was not encouraged in Samurai Japan. As the population grew the little islands felt themselves crowded, and it became a matter of good repute in a Samurai not to marry before thirty, and not to have more children than two.78 Nevertheless every man was expected to marry and beget children. If his wife proved barren he could divorce her; and if she gave him only daughters he was admonished to adopt a son, lest his name and property perish; for daughters could not inherit.79 Children were trained in the Chinese virtues and literature of filial piety, for on this, as the source of family order, rested the discipline and security of the state. The Empress Koken, in the eighth century, ordered every Japanese household to provide itself with a copy of the “Classic of Filial Piety,” and every student in the provincial schools or the universities was required to become a master of it. Except for the Samurai, whose loyalty to his lord was his highest obligation, filial piety was the basic and supreme virtue of the Japanese; even his relation to the emperor was to be one of filial affection and obedience. Until the West came, with its disruptive ideas of individual freedom, this cardinal virtue constituted nearly all the moral code of the commoner in Japan. The conversion of the islands to Christianity was made almost impossible by the Biblical command that a man should leave his father and his mother and cleave to his wife,80
Other virtues than obedience and loyalty were less emphasized than in contemporary Europe. Chastity was desirable, and some higher-class women killed themselves when their virginity was threatened;81 but a single lapse was not synonymous with ruin. The most famous of Japanese novels, the Genji Monogatari, is an epic of aristocratic seduction; and the most famous of Japanese essays, the Pillow Sketches of the Lady Sei Shonagon, reads in places like a treatise on the etiquette of sin.82 The desires of the flesh were looked upon as natural, like hunger and thirst, and thousands of men, many of them respectable husbands, crowded, at night, the Yoshiwara, or “Flower District,” of Tokyo. There, in the most orderly disorderly houses in the world, fifteen thousand trained and licensed courtesans sat of an evening behind their lattices, gorgeously attired and powder-white, ready to provide song, dance and venery for unmated or ill-mated men.83
The best educated of the courtesans were the geisha girls, whose very name indicated that they were persons (sha) capable of an artistic performance (gei). Like the hetairai of Greece they affected literature as well as love, and seasoned their promiscuity with poetry. The Shogun Iyenari (1787-1836), who had already (1791) forbidden mixed bathing as occasionally encouraging immorality,84 issued a rigorous edict against the geisha in 1822, describing her as “a female singer who, magnificently appareled, hires herself out to amuse guests at restaurants, ostensibly by dancing and singing, but really by practices of a very different character.”85 These women were henceforth to be classed as prostitutes, along with those “numberless wenches” who, in Kaempfer’s day, filled every tea-shop in the village and every inn on the road.86 Nevertheless, parties and families continued to invite the geisha to provide entertainment at social affairs; finishing schools were established where older geisha trained young apprentices in their varied arts; and periodically, at the Kaburenjo, teachers and pupils served ceremonial tea, and gave a public performance of their more presentable accomplishments. Parents hard put to support their daughters sometimes, with their manipulated “consent,” apprenticed them to the geisha for a consideration; and a thousand Japanese novels have told tales of girls who sold themselves to the trade to save their families from starvation.87
These customs, however startling, do not differ essentially from the habits and institutions of the Occident, except perhaps in candor, refinement and grace. The vast majority of Japanese girls, we are assured, remained as chaste as the virgins of the West.88 Despite such frank arrangements the Japanese managed to live lives of comparative order and decency, and though they did not often allow love to determine marriage for life, they were capable of the tenderest affection for the objects of their desire. Instances are frequent, in the current history as well as in the imaginative literature of Japan, where young men and women have killed themselves in the hope of enjoying in eternity the unity forbidden them by their parents on earth.89 Love is not the major theme of Japanese poetry, but here and there its note is struck with unmatched simplicity, sincerity and depth.
Oh! that the white waves far out
On the Sea of Ise
Were but flowers,
That I might gather them
And bring them as a gift to my love.90
And, again with characteristic mingling of nature and feeling, the great Tsurayuki tells in four lines the story of his rejected love:
Naught is so fleeting as the cherry-flower,
You say . . . yet I remember well the hour
When life’s bloom withered at one spoken word—
And not a breath of wind had stirred.91
VI. THE SAINTS
Religion in Japan—The transformation of Buddhism—The priests—Sceptics
That same devotion which speaks in patriotism and love, in affection for parents, children, mate and fatherland, inevitably sought in the universe as a whole some central power to which it might attach itself in loyalty, and through which it might derive some value and significance larger than one person, and more lasting than one life. The Japanese are only a moderately religious people—not profoundly and overwhelmingly religious like the Hindus, nor passionately and fanatically religious like the tortured saints of medieval Catholicism or the warring saints of the Reformation; and yet they are distinctly more given to piety and prayer, and a happy-ending philosophy, than their sceptical cousins across the Yellow Sea.
Buddhism came from its founder a cloud of pessimistic exhortation, inviting men to death; but under the skies of Japan it was soon transformed into a cult of protecting deities, pleasant ceremonies, joyful festivals, Rousseauian pilgrimages, and a consoling paradise. It is true that there were hells too in Japanese Buddhism—indeed, one hundred and twenty-eight of them, designed for every purpose and enemy. There was a world of demons as well as of saints, and a personal Devil (Oni) with horns, flat nose, claws and fangs; he lived in some dark, northeastern realm, to which he would, now and then, lure women to give him pleasure, or men to provide him with proteins.92 But on the other hand there were Bodhisattwas ready to transfer to human beings a portion of the grace they had accumulated by many incarnations of virtuous living; and there were gracious deities, like Our Lady Kwannon and the Christlike Jizo, who were the very essence of divine tenderness. Worship was only partly by prayer at the household altars and the temple shrines; a large part of it consisted of merry processions in which religion was subordinated to gayety, and piety took the form of feminine fashion-displays and masculine revelry. The more serious devotee might cleanse his spirit by praying for a quarter of an hour under a waterfall in the depth of winter; or he might go on pilgrimages from shrine to shrine of his sect, meanwhile feasting his soul on the beauty of his native land. For the Japanese could choose among many varieties of Buddhism: he might seek self-realization and bliss through the quiet practices of Zen (“meditation”); he might follow the fiery Nichiren into the Lotus Sect, and find salvation through learning the “Lotus Law”; he might join the Spirit Sect, and fast and pray until Buddha appeared to him in the flesh; he might be comforted by the Sect of the Pure Land, and be saved by faith alone; or he might find his way in patient pilgrimage to the monastery of Koyasan, and attain paradise by being buried in ground made holy by the bones of Kobo Daishi, the great scholar, saint and artist who, in the ninth century, had founded Shingon, the Sect of the True Word.
All in all, Japanese Buddhism was one of the pleasantest of man’s myths. It conquered Japan peacefully, and complaisantly found room, within its theology and its pantheon, for the doctrines and deities of Shinto: Buddha was amalgamated with Amaterasu, and a modest place was set apart, in Buddhist temples, for a Shinto shrine. The Buddhist priests of the earlier centuries were men of devotion, learning and kindliness, who profoundly influenced and advanced Japanese letters and arts; some of them were great painters or sculptors, and some were scholars whose painstaking translation of Buddhist and Chinese literature proved a fertile stimulus to the cultural development of Japan. Success, however, ruined the later priests; many became lazy and greedy (note the jolly caricatures so often made of them by Japanese carvers in ivory or wood); and some traveled so far from Buddha as to organize their own armies for the establishment or maintenance of political power.93 Since they were providing the first necessity of life—a consolatory hope—their industry flourished even when others decayed; their wealth grew from century to century, while the poverty of the people remained.94 The priests assured the faithful that a man of forty could purchase another decade of life by paying forty temples to say masses in his name; at fifty he could buy ten years more by engaging fifty temples; at sixty years sixty temples—and so till, through insufficient piety, he died.*95 Under the Tokugawa regime the monks drank bibulously, kept mistresses candidly, practised pederasty, † and sold the cozier places in the hierarchy to the highest bidders.96
During the eighteenth century Buddhism seems to have lost its hold upon the nation; the shoguns went over to Confucianism, Mabuchi and Moto-ori led a movement for the restoration of Shinto, and scholars like Ichikawa and Arai Hakuseki attempted a rationalist critique of religious belief. Ichikawa argued boldly that verbal tradition could never be quite as trustworthy as written record; that writing had not come to Japan until almost a thousand years after the supposed origin of the islands and their inhabitants from the spear-drops and loins of the gods; that the claim of the imperial family to divine origin was merely a political device; and that if the ancestors of men were not human beings they were much more likely to have been animals than gods.99 The civilization of the old Japan, like so many others, had begun with religion and was ending with philosophy.
VII. THE THINKERS
Confucius reaches Japan—A critic of religion—The religion of scholarship—Kaibara Ekken—On education—On pleasure—The rival schools—A Japanese Spinoza—Ito Jinsai—Ito Togai—Ogyu Sorai—The war of the scholars—Mabuchi—Moto-ori
Philosophy, like religion, came to Japan from China. And as Buddhism had reached Nippon six hundred years after its entrance into the Middle Flowery People’s Kingdom, so philosophy, in the form of Sung Confucianism, awoke to consciousness in Japan almost four hundred years after China had given it a second birth. About the middle of the sixteenth century a scion of Japan’s most famous family, Fujiwara Seigwa, discontent with the knowledge that he had received as a monk, and having heard of great sages in China, resolved to go and study there. Intercourse with China having been forbidden in 1552, the young priest made plans to cross the water in a smuggling vessel. While waiting in an inn at the port he overheard a student reading aloud, in Japanese, from a Chinese volume on Confucius. Seigwa was overjoyed to find that the book was Chu Hsi’s commentary on “The Great Learning.” “This,” he exclaimed, “is what I have so long desired.” By sedulous searching he obtained a copy of this and other products of Sung philosophy, and became so absorbed in their discussions that he forgot to go to China. Within a few years he had gathered about him a group of young scholars, who looked upon the Chinese philosophers as the revelation of a brave new world of secular thought. Iyeyasu heard of these developments, and asked Seigwa to come and expound to him the Confucian classics; but the proud priest, preferring the quiet of his study, sent a brilliant pupil in his place. Nevertheless the more active-minded youths of his time made a pathway to his door, and his lectures attracted so much attention that the Buddhist monks of Kyoto complained, saying it was an outrage that anyone but an orthodox and practising priest should deliver public lectures or teach the people.100 The matter was simplified by Seigwa’s sudden death (1619).
The pupil whom he had sent to Iyeyasu soon outranked him in fame and influence. The first Tokugawa shoguns took a fancy to Hayashi Razan, and made him their counsellor and the formulator of their public pronouncements. Iyemitsu set a fashion for the nobility by attending Hayashi’s lectures in 1630; and soon the young Confucian had so filled his hearers with enthusiasm for Chinese philosophy that he had no trouble in winning them from both Buddhism and Christianity to the simple moral creed bequeathed to the Far East by the sage of Shantung. Christian theology, he told them, was a medley of incredible fancies, while Buddhism was a degenerative doctrine that threatened to weaken the fibre and morale of the Japanese nation. “You priests,” said Razan, “maintain that this world is impermanent and ephemeral. By your enchantments you cause people to forget the social relations; you make an end of all the duties and all the proprieties. Then you proclaim: ‘Man’s path is full of sins; leave your father and mother, leave your master, leave your children, and seek for salvation.’ Now I tell you that I have studied much; but I have nowhere found that there was a path for a man apart from loyalty to one’s lord, and of filial piety towards one’s parents.”101 Hayashi was enjoying an old age of quiet renown when the great fire of Tokyo, in 1657, included him among its hundred thousand casualties. His disciples ran to warn him of the danger, but he merely nodded his head, and turned back to his book. When the flames were actually around him he ordered a palanquin, and was carried away in it while still reading his book. Like countless others, he passed that night under the stars; and three days later he died of the cold that he had caught during the conflagration.
Nature sought to atone for his death by giving Japan, in the following year, one of the most enthusiastic of Confucians. Muro Kyuso chose as his patron deity the God of Learning. Before Michizane’s shrine he spent, in his youth, an entire night in prayer; and then he dedicated himself to knowledge with youthful resolutions strangely akin to those of his contemporary, Spinoza.*
I will arise every morning at six o’clock and retire each evening at twelve o’clock.
Except when prevented by guests, sickness or other unavoidable circumstances, I will not be idle. . . .
I will not speak falsehoods.
I will avoid useless words, even with inferiors.
I will be temperate in eating and drinking.
If lustful desires arise I will destroy them at once, without nourishing them at all.
Wandering thought destroys the value of reading. I will be careful to guard against lack of concentration, and over-haste.
I will seek self-culture, not allowing my mind to be disturbed by the desire for fame or gain.
Engraving these rules on my heart I will attempt to follow them. The gods be my witness.102
Nevertheless, Kyuso did not preach a scholastic seclusion, but with the broad-mindedness of a Goethe directed character into the stream of the world:
Seclusion is one method, and is good; but a superior man rejoices when his friends come. A man polishes himself by association with others. Every man who desires learning should seek to be polished in this way. But if he shuts himself away from everything and everybody, he is guilty of violating the great way. . . . The Way of the Sages is not sundered from matters of everyday life. . . . Though the Buddhists withdraw themselves from human relations, cutting out the relation of master and subject, parent and child, they are not able to cut out love from themselves. . . . It is selfishness to seek happiness in the future world. . . . Think not that God is something distant, but seek for him in your own hearts; for the heart is the abode of God.103
The most attractive of these early Japanese Confucians is not usually classed among the philosophers, for like Goethe and Emerson he had the skill to phrase his wisdom gracefully, and jealous literature claims him for her own. Like Aristotle Kaibara Ekken was the son of a physician, and passed from medicine to a cautious empirical philosophy. Despite a busy public career, including many official posts, he found time to become the greatest scholar of his day. His books numbered more than a hundred, and made him known throughout Japan; for they were written not in Chinese (then the language of his fellow philosophers) but in such simple Japanese that any literate person might understand them. Despite his learning and renown he had, along with the vanity of every writer, the humility of every sage. Once, says tradition, a passenger on a vessel plying along the Japanese coast undertook to lecture to his fellow travelers on the ethics of Confucius. At first every one attended with typical Japanese curiosity and eagerness to learn; but as the speaker went on his audience, finding him a bore who had no nose for distinguishing a live fact from a dead one, melted swiftly away, until only one listener remained. This solitary auditor, however, followed the discourse with such devout concentration that the lecturer, having finished, inquired his name. “Kaibara Ekken,” was the quiet reply. The orator was abashed to discover that for an hour or more he had been attempting to instruct in Confucianism the most celebrated Confucian master of the age.104
Ekken’s philosophy was as free from theology as K’ung’s, and clung agnostically to the earth. “Foolish men, while doing crooked things, offer their prayers to questionable gods, striving to obtain happiness.”105 With him philosophy was an effort to unify experience into wisdom, and desire into character; and it seemed to him more pressing and important to unify character than to unify knowledge. He speaks with strangely contemporary pertinence:
The aim of learning is not merely to widen knowledge but to form character. Its object is to make us true men, rather than learned men. . . . The moral teaching which was regarded as the trunk of all learning in the schools of the olden days is hardly studied in our schools today, because of the numerous branches of study required. No longer do men deem it worth while to listen to the teachings of the hoary sages of the past. Consequently the amiable relations between master and servant, superior and inferior, older and younger are sacrificed on the altar of the god called “Individual Right.” . . . The chief reason why the teachings of the sages are not more appreciated by the people is because scholars endeavor to show off their learning, rather than to make it their endeavor to live up to the teachings of the sages.106
The young men of his time seem to have reproved him for his conservatism, for he flings at them a lesson which every vigorous generation has to relearn.
Children, you may think an old man’s words wearisome; yet, when your father or grandfather teaches, do not turn your head away, but listen. Though you may think the tradition of your family stupid, do not break it into pieces, for it is the embodiment of the wisdom of your fathers.107
Perhaps he deserved reproof, for the most famous of his books, the Onna Daikaku, or “The Great Learning for Women,” had a strong reactionary influence on the position of women in Japan. But he was no gloomy preacher intent on finding sin in every delight; he knew that one task of the educator is to teach us how to enjoy our environment, as well as (if we can) to understand and control it.
Do not let a day slip by without enjoyment. . . . Do not allow yourself to be tormented by the stupidity of others. . . . Remember that from its earliest beginnings the world has never been free from fools. . . . Let us not then distress ourselves, nor lose our pleasure, even though our own children, brothers and relations, happen to be selfish, ignoring our best efforts to make them otherwise. . . . Sake is the beautiful gift of Heaven. Drunk in small quantities it expands the heart, lifts the downcast spirit, drowns cares, and improves the health. Thus it helps a man and also his friends to enjoy pleasures. But he who drinks too much loses his respectability, becomes over-talkative, and utters abusive words like a madman. . . . Enjoy sake by drinking just enough to give you a slight exhilaration, and thus enjoy seeing flowers when they are just bursting into bloom. To drink too much and spoil this great gift of Heaven is foolish.108
Like most philosophers, he found the last refuge of his happiness in nature.
If we make our heart the fountain-head of pleasure, our eyes and ears the gates of pleasure, and keep away base desires, then our pleasure shall be plentiful; for we can then become the master of mountains, water, moon and flowers. We do not need to ask any man for them, neither, to obtain them, need we pay a single sen; they have no specified owner. Those who can enjoy the beauty in the Heaven above and the Earth beneath need not envy the luxury of the rich, for they are richer than the richest. . . . The scenery is constantly changing. No two mornings or two evenings are quite alike. . . . At this moment one feels as if all the beauty of the world had gone. But then the snow begins to fall, and one awakens the next morning to find the village and the mountains transformed into silver, while the once bare trees seem alive with flowers. . . . Winter resembles the night’s sleep, which restores our strength and energy. . . .
Loving flowers, I rise early;
Loving the moon, I retire late. . . .
Men come and go like passing streams;
But the moon remains throughout the ages.109
In Japan, even more than in China, the influence of Confucius on philosophic thought overwhelmed all the resistance of unplaced rebels on the one hand, and mystic idealists on the other. The Shushi school of Seigwa, Razan and Ekken took its name from Chu Hsi, and followed his orthodox and conservative interpretation of the Chinese classics. For a time it was opposed by the Oyomei school, which took its lead from Wang Yangming,* known to Nippon as Oyomei. Like Wang, the Japanese philosophers of Oyomei sought to deduce right and wrong from the conscience of the individual rather than from the traditions of society and the teachings of the ancient sages. “I had for many years been a devout believer in Shushi says Nakaye Toju (1608-48), “when, by the mercy of Heaven, the collected works of Oyomei were brought for the first time to Japan. Had it not been for the aid of their teaching, my life would have been empty and barren.”110 So Nakaye devoted himself to expounding an idealist monism, in which the world was a unity of ki and ri—of things (or “modes”) and reason or law. God and this unity were one; the world of things was his body, the universal law was his soul.111 Like Spinoza, Wang Yang-ming and the Scholastics of Europe, Nakaye accepted this universal law with a kind of amor dei intellectualis, and accounted good and evil as human terms and prejudices describing no objective entities; and, again strangely like Spinoza, he found a certain immortality in the contemplative union of the individual spirit with the timeless laws or reason of the world.
Man’s mind is the mind of the sensible world, but we have another mind which is called conscience. This is reason itself, and does not belong to form (or “mode”). It is infinite and eternal. As our conscience is one with (the divine or universal) reason, it has no beginning or end. If we act in accord with (such) reason or conscience, we are ourselves the incarnations of the infinite and eternal, and have eternal life.112
Nakaye was a man of saintly sincerity, but his philosophy pleased neither the people nor the government. The Shogunate trembled at the notion that every man might judge for himself what was right and what was wrong. When another exponent of Oyomei, Kumazawa Banzan, passed from metaphysics to politics, and criticized the ignorance and idleness of the Samurai, an order was sent out for his arrest. Kumazawa, recognizing the importance of the heels as especially philosophical organs, fled to the mountains, and passed most of his remaining years in sylvan obscurity.113 In 1795 an edict went forth against the further teaching of the Oyomei philosophy; and so docile was the mind of Japan that from that time on Oyomei concealed itself within the phrases of Confucianism, or entered as a modest component into that military Zen which, by a typical paradox of history, transformed the pacific faith of Buddha into the inspiration of patriotic warriors.
As Japanese scholarship developed, and became directly acquainted with the writings of Confucius rather than merely with his Sung interpreters, men like Ito Jinsai and Ogyu Sorai established the Classical School of Japanese thought, which insisted on going over the heads of all commentators to the great K’ung himself. Ito Jinsai’s family did not agree with him about the value of Confucius; they taunted him with the impracticability of his studies, and predicted that he would die in poverty. “Scholarship,” they told him, “belongs to the Chinese. It is useless in Japan. Even though you obtain it you cannot sell it. Far better become a physician and make money.” The young student listened without hearing; he forgot the rank and wealth of his family, put aside all material ambition, gave his house and property to a younger brother, and went to live in solitude so that he might study without distraction. He was handsome, and was sometimes mistaken for a prince; but he dressed like a peasant and shunned the public eye. “Jinsai,” says a Japanese historian,
was very poor, so poor that at the end of the year he could not make New Year’s rice cakes; but he was very calm about it. His wife came, and kneeling down before him said: “I will do the housework under any circumstances; but there is one thing that is unbearable. Our boy Genso does not understand the meaning of our poverty; he envies the neighbor’s children their rice cakes. I scold him, but my heart is torn in two.” Jinsai continued to pore over his books without making any reply. Then, taking off his garnet ring, he handed it to his wife, as much as to say, “Sell this, and buy some rice cakes.”114
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