Our Oriental Heritage

  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