A Japanese Mirror

by Ian Buruma

  But the end inevitably comes, albeit a little later. Yoshitsune is surrounded by the enemy at Ōsho in the north-east. Even Benkei’s ferocious fighting cannot keep them off for ever. In one version of the story Benkei stands nailed to the door, transfixed by enemy arrows. But his figure is so awesome that nobody dares approach him, until his corpse falls over by itself. In another version he rips his stomach open and tosses his entrails into the faces of the attackers as a gesture of utter contempt.

  After this Yoshitsune calmly disembowels himself, ‘plunging his sword into his body below the left breast, thrusting it in so far that the blade almost emerged through his back’.23 His wife, and his seven-day-old daughter are then killed by a faithful retainer called Kanefusa.

  The beauty of the tale is that the passive hero falls like a cherry blossom in full bloom, although, if we are to believe a curious legend, he later reappears in a kind of resurrection as no-one less than Ghengis Khan. As Ivan Morris pointed out, ‘he increasingly came to fit into an archetypal pattern of the mythical hero whose destruction guarantees the survival and stability of society’.24 This is a prerequisite of most youthful Japanese heroes.

  Yoshitsune reminds one of Adonis, that other flute-playing bishonen killed in the prime of his youth. Both are scapegoats, young and pure of heart, dying and coming alive again in an endless cycle of life and death; symbols of the crops as well as of human birth and mortality. According to one theory the cult of Adonis was actually a death cult;25 the same could be said of Yoshitsune.

  In their tendency not to distinguish between fact and fiction – in historiography, that is – it is typical of the Japanese to have projected this universal myth on to a historical figure. It is equally typical that a man, who, according to a contemporary witness, was a ‘small, pale youth with crooked teeth and bulging eyes’, would in legend become an incomparable beauty. Anyone dying such a poignant death just had to be as perfect as a cherry blossom.

  8

  The Hard School

  The road to manhood is a hard one. This hardness is dramatized in most cultures by an initiation of some sort, usually involving a test or quest; anything from killing a lion to finding the Holy Grail. In Europe this reached its aesthetic pinnacle with the exploits of legendary medieval knights such as Parsifal.

  In Japan the loss of childhood purity is as traumatic as it is anywhere else, and the test of manhood, not to mention the infinite variety of Grails, is an endless source of myth and drama. As in most places, the main requirements for passing the tests are blind perseverance and a victory of mind over body. Both are considered to be particularly great virtues by the Japanese who like to claim a unique spirituality as their cultural heritage.

  The nearest thing the Japanese have to the European knight-errant is the type of roaming samurai polishing his swordsmanship and soul by beautifully executed murder. One such seeker recently became world famous: Miyamoto Musashi, artist, killer and mystic. Not only are Musashi’s exploits rendered in many versions on television, in comic-books and films, but he has become something of a cult figure in the U.S., where it is said that businessmen read his martial pontifications (The Book of the Five Rings) in order to penetrate inscrutable Oriental business practices.

  About the real Musashi we know little, except that he was born around 1584. The rest is legend. There are many, sometimes wildly conflicting, versions of his life, a Musashi to suit all tastes, as it were. It will suffice to describe here a kind of composite Musashi as he appears in contemporary films and comic-books. As such he still remains the archetypal young hero seeking to overcome the hurdles on his way to manhood.

  Like many Japanese tough guys, Musashi lost both his parents at an early age. And like Yoshitsune, he displayed a talent for murder very soon after: when he was thirteen, to be exact. At that tender age he managed to beat a warrior to death with a stick. He further earned his spurs as a typical Japanese hero by fighting on the losing side in the battle of Sekigahara in 1600 when Ieyasu succeeded Hideyoshi as shogun. The rest of his life was spent mostly on the road as a free-spirited drifter, with a penchant for sleeping in caves and peasant huts.

  He can not have been very prepossessing in the flesh, for, most uncharacteristically for a Japanese, he refused to take a bath lest he be caught without his sword. Equally unusual was the fact that he never married. In fact – and this is not so unusual with Japanese heroes – he was something of a misogynist, for ever fighting off the advances of women who threatened to pollute the purity of his quest. In one famous scene, repeated in every version of his life, he conquers his natural desire for an attractive woman by standing stark naked under an ice-cold waterfall.

  In a way he was a nihilist, or nihirisuto. In this he was like many macho heroes in Japan. Entirely without social ties, he lived for himself alone. But to be a true nihirisuto one must be a cynical adult. And Musashi spent most of his life as an ageless adolescent seeking the Way. His story is the story of an education. Yes, he broke all the rules of polite society, but only to attain his single-minded goal: enlightenment through the Way of the Sword.

  The Way of the Sword involved much killing, to be sure. But it was all in a good cause, for it was more than simply an efficient method of murder; it was, above all, a spiritual way of murder. Musashi and many heroes following in his footsteps were exponents of what the Japanese call seishinshugi, meaning the victory of spirit over material things. It helps if this spirit is Japanese. The term is not really used for foreigners who, one can only assume, lack such a thing. Another expression often used in this context is konjo, also meaning spirit, but more in the sense of overcoming hardship. Gutsu (guts) is also common. A well known Japanese boxer even appropriated it as his name: ‘Gutsu’ Ishimatsu. (The name Ishimatsu, incidentally, was taken from a historical figure called Mori no Ishimatsu, an outlaw blessed with a great deal of gutsu.)

  The stories, films and comics about heroic seekers, starting with Musashi, are called konjo mono, spirit things. Seishinshugi or konjo often involves a Zen-like suppression of reason and personal feelings, a blind devotion to direct action and an infinite capacity for hardship and pain. The education of Musashi is in fact a form of Zen training. Unfortunately the suppression of one’s own – no doubt illusory – feelings means a total disregard for other people’s feelings too, resulting in a kind of supreme selfishness. It must be said, however, that most of Musashi’s victims were fellow seekers.

  The most famous of these was a young boy called Sasaki Kojiro. In one comic-book version Kojiro is depicted as a typical bishonen, who spends as much time challenging Musashi to duels as he does snuggling up to him in bed.1 In a film version of this story Kojiro is played by Takakura Ken, sporting a splendid pony-tail, and Musashi is played by a specialist (in 1955 when the film was made) in pure, young heroes, Nakamura Kinnosuke.2

  We are shown how Musashi gradually learns the mystique of murder, or how to be spiritual while hacking the other man down. Kojiro’s weakness is that he does not understand all this. He is too eager, too cocky, too … unspiritual. ‘All that counts is the strength of the sword’, he claims. His master, watching Musashi, replies: ‘It is not the sword that must be polished but the soul.’

  When Musashi goes off, alone, to the island where their final duel is to take place, he is held back by his faithful female admirer, who follows him wherever he goes. He brushes her off as if she were a troublesome fly: ‘The sword knows no pity,’ he growls, ‘the Way of the Warrior is hard.’

  The battle on Ganryu island is swift. Musashi cracks his opponent’s skull with one swoop of the long sword that he had cut out of an oar on his way to the island. On the way back home he stares at his hands, covered in blood, and thinks of all the people he has killed. In a moment of disgust he throws his sword overboard. From then on he will fight duels only with a wooden sword. He has seen the light at last. The end of his quest is in sight: the more one wins, the more futile it all seems – or, as a samurai master in a Kurosawa film put it: The
most skilful sword never leaves its sheath.’3

  Images of Musashi vary a great deal. In the last scene of one film we see him running towards us from a mountain of corpses, jumping with joy at his murderous skills, shouting: ‘Lock, Mummy, I’ve won!’ Although this may be a penetrating insight into the pathology of the adolescent mind and arguably the closest to the real truth of the matter, it is far from typical.

  The usual Musashi is an introspective brooder, a kind of samurai Hamlet, agonizing about his life. The cause of his mental anguish is, I think, also the key to understanding his timeless popularity. His selfish brutality can be ascribed perhaps to the especially brutal times he lived through – the sixteenth century was a period of constant war. And the philosophical musing that sells so many books in the USA serves to justify his often bizarre violence.

  But the real issue is Musashi’s dilemma, the Gordian knot of his quest, so to speak, which is still valid in modern Japan: how to reconcile self-effacement and Zen with self-aggrandisement and the sword.3 If one takes away Zen and the sword, neither of which plays much of a role in modern Japanese life, one is still left with a paradox every Japanese adolescent has to face: how to be an achiever, which is what is expected, particularly by one’s family, and a self-effacing conformist at the same time? Or, to put it in another way, how to be a winner in a society that discourages individual assertion?

  One cannot fight without getting blood on one’s hands. One cannot be a winner in this world without being tainted by it; without losing one’s purity. What then is the answer? Blind, unthinking action based on pure instinct, like a finely tuned animal? Or fighting with a wooden sword, perhaps? Or dropping out of society altogether? The nature of Japanese society makes this dilemma especially dramatic, but every adolescent in the world has to face it. Hamlet and Musashi simply express themselves in different ways.

  Let us look at another, more recent example of a struggling adolescent: Sugata Sanshiro, the hero of Kurosawa Akira’s very first film – and of his second, made a year later, too. This film is in many ways the prototype of all his later films, for like ‘Ikiru’, ‘High and Low’, ‘Red Beard’ and most other Kurosawa pictures, it is about a spiritual transformation, about the Test.

  The story of Sugata Sanshiro closely resembles Miyamoto Musashi, for it too revolves around the spiritual side of a martial art; judo this time. And again we see the initiation of a boy into manhood. Like Musashi, Sugata is naturally gifted and soon after joining his master who, like Musashi’s, lives in a temple – his business, after all, concerns the spirit – he becomes an invincible fighter. But the master is not satisfied. Sugata might know all the tricks, but not the true Way; or, as he puts it in typically vague terms: ‘the Way of loyalty and love. It is the ultimate truth and only through it can a man face death.’ In the manner of a Zen koan (a deliberately absurd question attempting to bypass logic) the master orders his pupil to die. ‘Die!’

  Without blinking Sugata jumps into the pond behind the temple, where he spends the entire night staring at the moon, hanging on to a wooden post for dear life. It is his initiation. At dawn his spiritual crisis comes to an end: he has seen the ultimate truth in the beauty of nature. Wildly excited he jumps out of the pond to tell his master the good news.

  He is now on his way to becoming a man. But how to remain pure in a man’s world? This dilemma soon comes to the test. The father of the girl he loves challenges him to a fight. His first reaction is to opt out. Then he decides to accept but to lose on purpose. Both solutions are perfectly decent, but are they pure? Are they not examples of just the kind of deceitfulness that pollutes the adult world? The spiritual human being must be innocent, says the master; and to be innocent means rejecting the calculating decency of society. To remain pure he has no choice but to choose direct action and he proceeds to throw his opponent like a sack of potatoes.

  This kind of character-building is quite different from the old-fashioned British way. A gentleman is a good loser, affecting a studied nonchalance to what is after all only a game, old boy. To the likes of Musashi and Sanshiro being a good loser is not only unnecessary, it is utterly contemptible, for it shows a lack of purity.

  The Japanese ideal raises another question: assuming that ‘loyalty and love’ include compassion for others, how can this be reconciled to the Zen idea of direct, unthinking action? The answer is perhaps that it does not include compassion, at least not the Christian ideal of principled, indiscriminate compassion. One is compassionate when one feels compassionate not when out of principle one ought to feel compassionate, for this would seem to be emotionally dishonest. (Reality, one often feels, is less ideal; compassion in Japan, as in most countries, is often directly related to what one can get in return.)

  A recent, highly controversial example of this way of thinking is the Japanese attitude to refugees, particularly from South-East Asia. The government has been consistently reluctant, to put it mildly, to help the refugees. And the almost total indifference of the majority of Japanese leaves this policy entirely unchallenged. Only after tremendous pressure, mostly from Western nations, has a handful of ‘boat people’ been admitted with rather bad grace to Japan. Both the government and the press – not normally pro-government – have complained about this unwelcome pressure and they are probably quite genuine in their lack of understanding of what all the fuss is about. The distress of foreigners, and despised Asians at that, is simply too far removed from daily Japanese reality for people to feel any real compassion.

  I do not wish to suggest that the Japanese people are mean or merciless. On the contrary, when it directly concerns someone near and dear, they show great compassion. But, unlike many Europeans, most Japanese lack the taste for revelling in shows of compassion for those with whom they do not feel in any way involved. In Japan this is called honest. Others might call it a lack of empathy. Both are true.

  In the case of Sugata Sanshiro and fellow hard men, love and loyalty mean the same thing. It is the love one feels for the Master or the leader. It is expressed in obedience and sacrifice. Thus it is highly personal and anti-individualistic at the same time.

  The suppression of rational thought, as propagated by Zen heroes, tends to make people more than usually self-centred. The rational mind considered to be impure by the likes of Musashi and Sugata, is thought in the West to act as a censor of impulsive emotions, which might be unreliable, and thus dangerous. Although the final purpose of a certain kind of much-admired nihilism in Japan is to do away with emotions altogether, the Japanese are far from that goal. Perhaps more than most people, the Japanese, on the whole, are ruled by their emotions. When a Westerner tries to argue his case, he will say, often in desperation: ‘But, don’t you see what I mean?’ His Japanese counterpart, only just able to keep his anger in check behind a rapidly collapsing wall of etiquette, will say: ‘But, don’t you see what I feel?’ One appeals to a common sense of logic, the other to his own heart.

  Not everybody is equally inclined to submit to the spiritual tests of manhood. In Japan, as everywhere else, there is a Papageno to every Tamino. In fact the sensuous Papagenos who cannot be bothered with the spiritual rigours of seishinshugi are probably the vast majority in Japan. There is an interesting distinction in the Japanese language between the two types: the koha, the hard school, and the nanpa, the soft school. Musashi and Sanshiro are of course very much part of the koha.

  Typical characteristics of the koha are stoicizumu (stoicism), meaning a fondness for hardship and a horror of sex, and purity coupled with a fierce, temper. The koha hero has to prove his manhood over and over again in fights. The nanpa is of course the direct opposite of all this: its members lack spirit, hate fights and like girls. Unlike the koha heroes, the soft school is rarely celebrated in popular culture. The ideal school is the hard school, which is imbued with an odd kind of nationalism.

  There is, for example, a boys’ comic called I Am a Kamikaze, featuring a young, very koha hero named Yamato Shinko. Yamato
is also the classical name for Japan (after the original Kingdom), often used jingoistically, as in Yamato no tamashii, the spirit of Yamato.

  Young Yamato has all the right requisites for his heroic role. To start with he is diminutive: spirit makes up for size – Japanese spirit versus foreign brawn. He also has large, flashing eyes under his bushy eyebrows, glittering with youthful integrity. He is utterly without humour – a joking koha hero is as rare as a laughing samurai. He is short-tempered, of course, and stoic to a fault, pure in his emotions and single-minded in his cause … in short, he is the perfect image of the romantic suicide pilot.

  Actually, our hero himself is not. His father was. But to his chagrin and disgrace, he crashed his plane without getting killed. So, to make up for his shame, he wants to make a perfect man out of his son. The comic strip is about Yamato’s education, just as the stories of Musashi and Sugata Sanshiro are about theirs.

  It is unusual for one’s father to be one’s master as well. But Yamato’s father is adept at the same bullying techniques for which spiritual masters are known. He hits his son on the head with bamboo swords, he ties him to a pier during a howling storm, he throws him off a speeding truck, in short, anything short of pushing bamboo splinters under his nails. Yamato, being a spiritual lad, is duly grateful for this parental guidance.

  The main test of his strength is not staving off his father’s attacks, but those of an older boy called Wada, who seems perfect in every way: handsome, big, clever and strong. His spirit leaves something to be desired, however, for he cheats at school and he tends to hide behind the criminal back of his father, the local gangster boss. Unfortunately he is stronger than Yamato, who loses every fight. But, far from being a ‘good loser’, he remembers his father’s lesson: ‘Once a Japanese man decides to do something, he carries it out to the bitter end, at all costs.’ This reminds one of a popular song about kamikaze fighters: