A few moments before killing himself, Mishima wrote the following lines: ‘Within the narrowness of human life, I choose the path of eternity’. Hence the book’s title.
His death inspired Mr Pierre Pascal to write a haiku:
Northwards you must sweep!
Winds shall sow your revolt deep — the harvests we’ll reap!
The translator of several books by Julius Evola and the author of new editions of the Apocalypse and Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat (éd. Du coeur fidèle, Rome), Mr Pierre Pascal is a western man of letters and a ‘Japanese poet’. He has peppered Reverend Hanayama’s account with a host of remarks and commentaries through which he enlightens the readers and takes position himself. He writes:
To read and understand how honourable, vanquished men crossed the threshold of Eternity shall, for a brief moment, comfort many a profane soul. In this book, the last connoisseurs of stoicism shall find what they still dare seek.
At the naval base of Yokosuka, people still recite the following old saying:
Duty is heavier than a mountain, and death lighter than a feather.
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The Way of Deliverance: Three Years with the Condemned Japanese War Criminals, an account by Shinshō Hanayama. Guy Le Prat (5 rue des Grands-Augustins, 75006 Paris, France), 308 pages.
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The Eternal Japan
The Japanese example appears to disprove Kipling’s890 following words: ‘East is East, West is West, and the two will never meet.’
Indeed, Japan belongs neither to the West nor to the East. It is simply Japan — no more, no less.
In 1867, seventeen-year-old Meiji (Mutsu-Hito) ascends to the imperial throne in the Land of the Rising Sun. Europe discovers a world that had lived in isolation for an entire millennium, a world whose historical development, however, still displayed astounding similarities to its own.
The Japanese Middle Ages resemble the West’s feudal period. The civil wars that smeared it with blood are reminiscent of the rivalries between the great French, German and Italian feudatories. The shogun generalissimos, the true holders of authority, played an analogous role to that of Merovingian ‘palace mayors’.
The samurai era goes back to around 1160 AD, at a time when the Tairas and the Minamotos waged a merciless war against each other. Armed with daggers and short swords and covered in iron just like our knights, the samurai despise death. They progress towards the end of their tragic destiny and abide by an old motto — honour and loyalty.
The aristocratic spirit survives in Japan through a taste for geste and a sense for the useless, a virtue that lies beyond good and evil and considers the question of ‘reason’ — i.e. ‘what purpose does it all serve?’ — to be meaningless. The art of serving tea in five gestures and six expressions is still taught in schools, as is the art of gardening, wrapping and flower arrangement in bouquets. In the tea ceremony, the hand fan serves no purpose whatsoever yet is never forgotten.
To the Japanese, the centre of man’s sensibility is not located in his brain but in his entrails. And that is where the short sword of any man who takes his own life through seppuku (hara-kiri) is plunged. This conception of suicide is reminiscent of both European antiquity and the Stoics.
In Japan und die Japaner891 (Payot, 1937), Karl Haushofer892 writes:
The sacrifice made by a person in the name of a great principle, the state or the family is facilitated far more in a culture centred around an ancestral cult than in such a culture as ours, in which the individual plays the main role.
Author Yukio Mishima was once asked if he was faithful to his wife:
I am faithful to her because I am convinced that therein lies the means to preserve her beauty. It is certainly not a means to render her wiser, however.
The warrior who commits seppuku will not even be given access to some sort of Valhalla. He will have lost everything; save for his honour.
Self-domination prevails in Japan. The soul’s movements abide by carefully preestablished rules, and the Japanese language is poor in insults and swear words. As for politeness, it may seem exaggerated, yet it is permeated neither by embellishments nor metaphors. Poetry, which holds a prominent position not only in the literature but also the social life of the entire Far East, is of a purely descriptive nature and does not exude any idealism. It was not such a long time ago when young girls still had to beg the needles they had broken for forgiveness.
The most beautiful sort of elegance lies in suffering with a grin on one’s face — when announcing the passing of someone close, for instance. This tactfulness with regard to death is summarised in this haiku penned by Matsuo Bashō:
The sun has now dried
the tiny kimono sleeves
of the child that died.
In this regard, what springs to mind is a film depicting the battle of Waterloo in which Wellington, upon being informed of a friend’s death, simply says: ‘Sad, is it not?’. It is his expression that tells the whole story.
The Japanese climate is characterised by its sleep-inducing mildness. Devastating catastrophes do, however, occur — whether tidal waves, cyclones, or earthquakes. Similarly, within the profoundly introverted temperament of the Japanese, the smiles and courteous bowing sometimes make way for sudden outbursts of violence. Political assassinations are as frequent in Japan as the common manners are refined. And the Americans are far from having forgotten about Pearl Harbour — it is said that on that day, the myth of Mlle Chrysanthème893 suddenly collapsed. Mr Haushofer notes:
The dualism pervading Japan’s cultural history is expressed in this very manner, in the antithesis between a harmonious rhythm and the catastrophic disturbances arising from its territorial conditions.
Things are the same in Germany, where furor teutonicus894 goes hand in hand with Gemütlichkeit.895 This clearly accounts for certain affinities. In both Bonn and Tokyo, defeat + austerity = ‘economic miracle’. Indeed, the Japanese have always been considered the ‘Prussians of Asia’.
There are, however, no ‘miracles’ in economy. All that there is are cause-and-effect relationships. Just like all other Japanese achievements, the results recorded by the famous Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) must, above all else, be regarded as the consequence of a certain mental structure, of a mentality (one must not, for instance, be surprised at the fact that the felt pen was invented in a land where writing is the mother of all arts).
The Birth of the Japanese People
Where do the Japanese come from, then? There are none who know. During the prehistoric period (Jomon), Japan was solely inhabited by the Ainu people. Their name means ‘Men of the Bow’ (the word ‘Ainos’ is a derisive nickname meaning ‘son of a dog’ in Japanese. Indeed, according to legend, the Ainu people are said to have stemmed from the mating of a Japanese princess and a dog). Their physical chatacteristics — including their wavy black hair, matt white skin, the absence of a Mongolian fold, dolichocephaly, a straight or concave nose, and so on — are proof of their belonging to the ‘Caucasian’ racial group. Mr George Montadon896 writes that the Ainu people’s massive build ‘has turned them into an ideal representation of how one might imagine the least evolved descendant of a Palaeolithic primitive Europid’ (La civilisation aïnou et les cultures arctiques.897 Payot, 1937).
Other authors such as Renato Biasutti view the Ainu people as the descendants of a large and primitive Australo-Caucasoid group, one that allegedly gave birth to the Polynesians, the Ainu people and proto-Europeans.
The Japanese in the strict sense of the word only arrived at a much later point, surfacing in the central part of Japan during the 3rd century BC. From an ethnic perspective, they comprise a certain Mongoloid element which, in all likelihood, intermixed with Chinese and Korean genetic components, in addition to a Malay element resulting, in turn, from a crossbreeding of Mongoloid, Indonesian Europid and Melanesian Negrito groups.
The Ainu people were gradually subju
gated by the Yamato race, as part of a process that is rather reminiscent of the manner in which the Wends and other western Slavic tribes were absorbed by German settlers. Today, these ‘barbarians’ do not comprise more than 100,000 people scattered across Yeso island, the Kurile islands and the north of Hokkaido. They can, however, be traced using toponymy.
Beginning in the 7th century AD, the Japanese population lived in complete isolation (after borrowing its writing notions, statal structures and a part of its philosophy from China). What resulted from this isolation was a remarkable sort of ethnic homogeneity, despite the population’s mixed origin. In this regard, this is what Montadon wrote in 1933:
The value of the Japanese somatic group is a future value rather than a past one. Shaped by various contributions (Ainu, Tunguzian, North-Mongolian, Chinese and Indonesian), it is a type that remains in formation and will only assert itself in future. (La race, les races898 . Payot)
Group Psychology
Percival Lowell899 once stated that impersonality is the very soul of the Far East — in Japan, the word ‘individual’ has a privative meaning. This impersonality is, however, of the active kind. Mr Raymond Charles writes:
No national morality has ever surpassed the Japanese one in its glorification of energy. Driven to the point of sacrifice, the tenacity of one’s efforts is considered, in itself, inspiringly pure. And what this virtue of ideals does on a practical level is polarise and concentrate to the desired degree the determination and self-sacrifice of an entire people.
Japanese psychology is group psychology. Business is dealt with by several people at once, and it is sometimes very hard to determine who the decision-makers actually are. Although this uniformity tends to trouble the European mind, it also accounts for how easily and quickly the Japanese adapt to new situations. The Meiji era is an example of this — back then, the entire Japanese people broke with a certain part of their past in a most disciplined fashion and without any regret.
A bus stops at the Avenue de l’Opéra in Paris; thirty Japanese tourists get off, dressed in white shirts and black jackets and carrying cameras in their sling bags. They enter a shop and check out a few shelves. A short dialogue and quick debate ensue, after which they all leave the shop with the very same purchased item.
On 26th January, 1948, a man appeared in a branch of the Imperial Bank (Teikoku Ginkō) in Tokyo, claiming to be an employee of the Ministry of Public Health. Having asked the manager to gather his staff, he gave each of them a cup and made them take ‘an anti-dysentery vaccine’. He specified that it was necessary to swallow the liquid quickly, ‘because the product blackens the teeth’. Sixteen employees, in addition to the manager, emptied their cups in one gulp. No sooner had they done so than they fell to the floor — the potion actually contained potassium cyanide. The murderer then took money from the cash register and calmly left the premises.
In Japanese companies, decisions always meet three basic criteria: they all require a certain amount of time before they can be taken; they are virtually never made by one single person; no one can be blamed for a mistake that occurs in the decision-making process.
One begins by eliminating all proposals likely to encounter strong opposition. Once a strategy has been chosen, meetings are held to clarify each person’s position. The conclusions that are drawn give birth to a written project, which is then submitted to each department manager for approval before being presented to the board of directors.
Such a procedure is only possible because the risk of having someone block the project is precluded, with the people involved preferring to make concessions whenever a compromise allows them to reach a decision more easily (the exercise of democracy requires the relative mental homogeneity of all participants, as well as a spontaneous desire to give public interest priority over the triumph of one’s personal opinion. In a heterogeneous society, or one in which the individualistic principle prevails, democracy is practically impossible).
With 18% of available incomes, net of tax (compared to 7% in the case of the USA), Japan enjoys the world’s highest private savings rate. Social security, however, is entirely absent there, as are family benefits. And although paid leave is available, it is considered ‘inappropriate’ to make full use of it.
When a Japanese man introduces himself, he first points out his place of employment. He defines himself through his social activity, meaning through what he does in life rather than the sole fact of being alive. There are hardly any tramps in Japan, and tips are rarely given. A beggar is regarded as being unworthy of help, precisely because he begs in the street. In the past, samurais had every right to simply chop off a beggar’s head.
Likewise, individual rights take a backseat to collective ones, and economic imperatives are in no way subordinate to social factors. Furthermore, increases in productivity are almost always superior to salary increases.
Until recent years, employment mobility and the circulation of elites were virtually inexistent in Japan. Today, one still joins a firm the way one previously entered a clan and, at a later point, the army. Desertions are inadmissible. Each major company has its own flag and anthem. Every morning, the following words are, for instance, sung before the entire staff at Matsushita:900
Grow, industry, grow, grow, grow!
Harmony and sincerity!
Matsushita Electric.
Only when the anthem has been sung does everyone start working.
In feudal society, merchants were a necessary evil. Craftsmen, peasants and warriors gathered more public esteem than anyone else. At the beginning of the 20th century, the members of 400,000 samurai families found themselves compelled to seek new ways of earning their living and turned to commerce and the industry. They thus infused the latter with the qualities and values of their own caste. This fact accounts for the shushin-koyo, the Japanese practice of permanent employment. Mr Hubert Brochier901 states:
New employees can be confident that they will not be dismissed unless they have made a particularly serious mistake or the company faces exceptional circumstances. They themselves will not, on the other hand, seek to leave their current company in order to find a better-paid job elsewhere. Such an ambition is, in fact, foreign to them and the very idea of gaining a personal advantage by moving from one company to another remains unfathomable to the average Japanese employee. (Le miracle économique japonais.902 Calmann-Lévy, 1970)
The term oya-ko, meaning ‘parents and children’, applies to all relations within a Japanese business; it would, however, be too easy to speak of paternalism. Indeed, the hierarchical system is not founded on any kind of authoritarianism. Just like in a feudal contract, the absolute respect enjoyed by senior members, managers and the elderly demands, in return, both benevolence and protection. Mr Brochier adds:
The devotion displayed by workers is both the expression of a vital sort of solidarity and a reflection of the Japanese blind abnegation towards all the social groups that they belong to — the family, the clan, the village, or the national community.
In Japan, companies are in charge of some tasks which, in France, are assigned to various social organisms (and, in the US, to individual initiative). They thus provide dormitories and accommodation, medical equipment, hotels, holiday homes, general knowledge courses, music lessons, and flower arrangement courses. Further guarantees are only necessary in countries where ageing individuals are left to fend for themselves and thus find themselves threatened. In Japan, no one is left to take care of themselves, as the Japanese constitute one single whole.
Tokyo residents are crammed into flats whose average size ranges from thirty-five to forty square metres. This density is tolerated rather well. Whether in the household903 or at work, the word ‘crammed’ lacks the unpleasant connotation given to it in the West. Japanese people are actually fond of human contact. In Living Japan (Doubleday & Co., New York, 1959), Donald Keene904 reminds his readers that the word ‘privacy’ cannot be translated into Japanese.
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In the past, what this lack of privacy fostered was ‘private espionage’. ‘Neighbourhood associations’ used to serve as auxiliaries to the police force. As for Tokugawa Ieyasu,905 this is what he decreed in the 16th century: ‘Anything out of the ordinary must be reported to the authorities’.
Nowadays, information flow has become one of Japan’s main assets. Books and newspapers enjoy record-breaking print runs, and the Japanese give out their business cards all day long. Cities are built around railway stations and it is crossroads, rather than streets, that are given a name.
One encounters all these characteristic aspects of the Japanese mentality in the religions of the ancient Empire of the Rising Sun.
Shintoism is the most ancient and most authentic religion in Japan. It is a pagan cult involving the worship of one’s ancestors and the spirits of the dead, who continue to dwell among the living. It justifies the Japanese taste for sacrifice and especially Japanese national pride. The goddess Amaterasu is not an abstract and impersonal divinity but actually Mikado’s ancestor. Banned in 1945, the Shinto cult resurfaced more vigorously than ever upon the end of the Occupation.
Buddhism accessed Japan around the 6th century BC, having arrived from India through China and Korea. It did, however, undergo some profound transformations. After struggling against one another, the two cults merged. It is not unusual for someone to opt for a Buddhist burial rite despite having ‘lived the Shinto way’.
Originally, Buddhism was a doctrine of renouncement. Indeed, according to Buddha, one is expected to kill any thirst for existence within oneself, thus attaining the state of Nirvana, which represents the annihilation of any and all personalised life. Such a conception is, to some extent, encountered in Japan, but was greatly modified by the bonze Nichiren,906 who emphasised its ethical aspects — honesty, courage, and disinterest. It is not life itself that is bad, says Nichiren. It is, instead, man’s spirit that must ceaselessly be remodelled (‘What must be changed in man is the very structure of his desires’).
Controversies and Viewpoints Page 37
