The imperial family at home, in A Mirror of Japanese Nobility (Toyohara Chikanobu, 1887) Hiratsuka ignored the advice and republished her piece in a book. This time, it was banned immediately. But by now the ‘new woman’ genie was well and truly out of the bottle. Hiratsuka’s challenge to women, to free their creative spirits and face up to what an ‘unethical, unlawful and unreasonable marriage system’ was really asking of them, would steadily gain ground into the 1920s and beyond.
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If upper-middle-class literary women ended the Meiji era in a stronger position, it was a very different story for their sisters on the political left. Efforts by socialists to formally organize in 1901 had been frustrated by the police, who shut down the Social-Democratic Party within hours of it being launched. A second attempt, in 1906 – this time as the Japanese Socialist Party – lasted just a year, after which influential voices began to advocate a rejection of parliamentarianism in favour of direct action.
Such became the approach of a women’s rights activist by the name of Kanno Suga (or Sugako). She was first caught up in the ‘Red Flag Incident’ in June 1908, a relatively minor matter of protestors parading around with flags bearing the words ‘anarchism’ and ‘anarcho-communism’, but a useful opportunity for police to round some of them up and to demonstrate a hard line. Newspaper reporting of the trial did not take Kanno entirely seriously:
‘In the beginning, woman was the sun’: Amaterasu, the Sun Goddess, depicted in The Origins of Sacred Dance at the Heavenly Cave (Utagawa Toyokuni III, c.1856) above; Hiratsuka Raichō (1886–1971), pictured (below, far right) at a new year’s party for her Seitō group in 1913. To the [judge’s] question, ‘Is your objective anarchism?’ … Kanno Sugako said: ‘Yes, I am an anarchist rather than a socialist. My thoughts have progressed.’ In her stylish outfit of arrow-patterned silk kimono and loosely tied satin purple sash, she said this audacious thing …
Badly treated throughout her life by callous women and violent men, by the police, and by judges and journalists, Kanno found herself becoming involved in 1910 in a plot to rid Japan of the single most important symbol of what the country had become: the Emperor.
By this time, the theory was well advanced amongst anarchist converts like the factory worker and fellow plotter Miyashita Takichi that the emperor story was no more than a myth dreamed up by government-friendly ideologues and put about by state-trained schoolteachers. Alternative histories, treasonous in the extreme, cast the emperors of Japan down the ages as bloodsuckers, killers, thieves and the helpless puppets of shoguns.
Miyashita made and successfully tested a bomb, and after lots were drawn, the honour of throwing the first device fell to Kanno. All was set. But then Miyashita’s friend betrayed him to the police who, it turned out, already had their eye on Miyashita. Tin canisters and chemicals were discovered and soon Miyashita, Kanno and the other conspirators were rounded up. At a secret trial held in December 1910, Kanno referred to her intended victim casually by his personal name:
Emperor Mutsuhito, compared with other emperors in history, seems to be popular with the people and is a good individual. Although I feel sorry for him personally he is, as emperor, the chief person responsible for the exploitation of the people economically. Politically he is at the root of all the crimes being committed, and intellectually he is the fundamental cause of superstitious beliefs. A person in such a position, I concluded, must be killed.
The Emperor was destined to live on until his natural death in 1912, at which time the sheer scale of the public mourning seemed a powerful vindication of the role he had been given in the happy families system and in the official story of the nation more broadly. It was Kanno, along with eleven others, who were to be killed.
In the week after her death sentence was handed down, on 18 January 1911, Kanno wrote to friends, largely rejected the ministrations of the prison chaplain (though she had been a practising Christian for a number of years), and made requests of the director of prison instruction, a man by the name of Tanaka:
I described the kind of coffin I wanted made for me and how I wanted to be dressed after death. I was afraid that the supporters of the emperor and champions of patriotism might dig up my corpse and hack it to bits. I did not want to look too shabby when this happened.
On 25 January, just a few days after writing that she was ‘sacrificing my little body for a glimmer of hope’, Kanno mounted the scaffold. She sat down, and a white cloth was placed over her face. Two thin cords were looped around her neck. At some point before the floorboard supporting her was suddenly removed, she is said to have offered up her own version of that great, family-unifying cheer of 1889: ‘Ware shugi no tame shisu [‘We die for the cause’] – banzai!’
Part Two
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RESISTANCE IS FERTILE
(1900S TO 1930S)
5
Contesting the Cosmos
Winter 1465. A band of men, around 150 in all, gather in the cold near the top of a mountain – armed. Together they troop down the mountainside, enter the great city below, and put a group of its buildings to the torch.
Their letter of warning a week before had been full of accusations against the inhabitants of these buildings. Of duping the ‘ignorant’ and ‘lowly’ of the city. Of befouling the place with false ideas. It had to stop. Those ignorant and lowly types were, after all, their concern – in this life, from how they behaved to the taxes they paid, and in the next.
The men turn to leave, reassured by the promising spit and crackle of a fire taking hold, and content that the meaning of this act will not be missed: upstarts cannot be tolerated. Others around this city like to divide the world up, for the sake of comfort or convenience or their own careers: the seen kept separate from the unseen, politics from priestly affairs, military from moral leadership. But the men of the mountain know better, as do the vanquished pretenders whose HQ is beginning to collapse into the flames: this is a world in which gods, nature and human societies are all profoundly interconnected. To understand this, and to persuade others of the wide-ranging rights and prerogatives it gives you, is true power. And there can be no sharing it.
The attackers make their way back up Mount Hiei, returning to their temples and the daily round of Buddhist monastic life. Below, the odour of burned-out buildings, belonging to the rival Jōdo Shinshū sect, wafts through the city of Kyoto. Up here, the precious wood and stone, brass, silver and gold amidst which the monks live offer testament to centuries of successful persuasion and hard-won privilege, which they remain firmly resolved always to defend, against any and all enemies.
Theirs is a migrant religion made good. Buddhism arrived at the Yamato court from China and Korea in the mid-500s, just as the leaders of Japan’s fledgling national polity were busy weaving themselves into a compelling cosmic fabric that traced their origins back to the kami, or gods. While the emperor across the water in China fretted the possession and loss of the ‘mandate’ of heaven, the emperor here was a child of heaven. He was a god on earth.
Buddhism’s early advocates struggled to match this. Worries at court that the kami would take offence at Buddhism’s very presence in this land seemed to be confirmed when a series of natural disasters struck. A Buddhist image brought over from Korea was duly thrown into a canal. The temple that had housed it was destroyed.
But Buddhism clung on, its priests performing prayers and rituals in protective support of a sceptical court. Over time, the relationship developed into ōbō-buppō: imperial law and the Buddha’s Law are as inseparable – so the saying went – as the ‘wings of a bird’ or the ‘wheels on an axle’. Further afield, people took up popularized forms of Buddhist prayers and practices as an extra layer of insurance amidst the precarity of village life. In an unpredictable world, you covered your bases. And in an ultimately unknowable world, you didn’t expect to meet life’s biggest questions with anything but a judicious blend of partial answers.
Buddhism and Shinto grew steadily
closer as the centuries passed, their deities and places of worship mixing and mingling. Shinto’s stories and rituals focused on purity, on fertility of crop and creature, and on the life that courses through nature. Buddhism came to be valued for its insights into the world beyond, and for its ritual ability to mediate between the two. Buddhist ideas even found their way into a seventeen-article constitution created in the early 600s, for an entity now calling itself ‘Nihon’: the source of the sun. Marco Polo eventually brought the Chinese rendering of the name – ‘Jihpen’ – back to Europe.
Japanese students returned from trips to the Asian mainland loaded with the latest scriptural and ritual learning, alongside ideas about art and architecture that began to revolutionize Japan’s landscape. Low thatched houses found themselves in the shade of towering new multi-storey temples of heavy wood topped with cascading tiles, their cavernous interiors housing precious paintings and awesome statues.
By 1465, then, there was much for the warrior monks of Mount Hiei’s large and powerful Tendai sect, founded back in the early 800s, to celebrate. But there was also much to lose: extensive territories, money, a certain hold on the imaginations and consciences of the devoted, and ready access to political power down in the city below and out across the plains beyond. Defending it all was an impossibly complex task. There was preaching and prayer, monastic ritual and sutra study; education in the community and work in government posts; funerals; oversight of the people and produce of temple lands; and the running of various side ventures, from commerce to combat to the incineration of rival infrastructure.
The appearance over the last two hundred years or so of new, self-consciously reformist sects like Jōdo Shinshū had made all this much harder. But the far greater setback for Tendai, and a lesson to all religious communities in Japan, was yet to come. Where Tendai’s warrior monks descended Mount Hiei to deliver their particular form of justice, just over a century later, in 1571, a much-feared military leader ascended it to administer his. Sick and tired of religious organizations overplaying their hand in the politics of a war-ravaged country, which he was struggling to reunify, Oda Nobunaga led a samurai army hacking and burning its way through all that the monks had built. Several thousands died. Hundreds of temples were razed to the ground.
It seemed that for all their accomplishments across ten centuries in the realms of art, the spirit and realpolitik, the basic calculus had not changed for Japan’s Buddhist sects. They continued to depend for survival on political and public support that was hard won, easily lost, full of temptation and often complicated to reconcile with the values they espoused – of compassion and the avoidance of attachment to the pleasures and pains of the material world. Such was the baggage that they would carry with them into a brutally competitive and profoundly uncertain modern era.
*
In 1885, a student at Tokyo University decided to bite the hand that fed him. Inoue Enryō turned his back on the people who had funded his education, and on the profession of his father, who had fully expected his son to follow in his footsteps as a Buddhist temple priest once he completed his studies. As one of a tiny first generation of Japanese to attend a university – Tokyo, the first and most prestigious of them, had only opened its doors eight years previously – Inoue could be forgiven a little unpredictability and self-indulgence. It was natural that an ambitious young person discovering all that a university and a booming city had to offer should develop a certain distance from – even a little contempt for – his provincial origins. But in fact nothing of the sort was going on here. Inoue was abandoning his father’s world in order to save it.
That world had been through a tough few years. Buddhism had survived Japan’s sixteenth-century unification process, and had gone on to enjoy great privilege as part of the Pax Tokugawa from 1603. But its various sects struggled once that regime hit the rocks in the 1860s. There had been signs earlier on of trouble to come: resentment of Buddhist power and privilege; nativist ideologues harping on Buddhism’s ‘immigrant’ status in Japan – manifestly, claimed one, the product of an ‘inferior Indian mind’. Then, as the intellectual cheerleaders of the new Japan cast around for reasons why their country faced a gargantuan game of catch-up with the West, their attention came to rest on the economic and imaginative stranglehold of Buddhism on the Japanese population.
The pages of new, elite journals were heavy with rueful reflection. Western nations had been busy these last centuries developing technologies so advanced that they struck some Japanese as bordering on the magical. They had fashioned a global order so tightly contoured to their own interests that for a while it seemed that the best Japan could hope for was to get off a little more lightly than China when it came time to be gobbled up into one or more foreign empires. Meanwhile, in Japan those same centuries had been largely squandered by Buddhist leaders accumulating and violently defending vast wealth, fomenting intrigue and conflict, hoovering up people’s tax money and perpetuating – with flat-out cosmological lies – popular ignorance and ignominy.
Payback time, for gross disservices to the nation, had finally arrived. With a revitalized Shinto providing a cultic support system for the new state – from foundational stories to its prize symbol, the Emperor himself – there was little need any more for Buddhism. So a policy was announced in 1868 that reversed the trend of a millennium: shimbutsu bunri – the separation out of Shinto and Buddhism.
Shrines and temples would no longer share sacred ground. Deities would no longer do double duty – buddhas and bodhisattvas had been regarded as kami, kami as emanations of buddhas and bodhisattvas. Buddhist temples would lose their cherished and lucrative Tokugawa prerogative of registering local births, marriages and deaths. And people’s taxes would be pumped instead into a revitalized and reordered Shinto infrastructure.
Worse was to come. Such was the anger against Buddhism in some quarters – much of it stoked by people with vested career interests in Shinto – that shimbutsu bunri morphed, in the early 1870s, into haibutsu kishaku: ‘Abolish Buddhism, destroy Shakyamuni!’ (the historical Buddha). Buddhist temples were attacked and looted of sutras and other precious objects, some of which found their way into the hands of grateful Western museum curators. Statues were decapitated, lands confiscated, and tens of thousands of temples closed or destroyed. Many thousands of monks and nuns were forced out of the religious life and into the mundane world of marriage and meat-eating.
Jōdo Shinshū (or ‘Shin’) had by this time long-since recovered from the fire of 1465 and had become the country’s largest Buddhist organization. Its two branches, Eastern and Western, were quick to try to mollify the country’s modernizing leaders after 1868: loaning money, building roads, providing army chaplains and supporting the steady expansion of Japanese influence in Asia by sending missionaries to the mainland, from Pusan to Shanghai.
Just about weathering the haibutsu kishaku storm, Shin leaders felt secure enough by the mid-1870s to withdraw from the government’s much-mocked ‘Great Promulgation Campaign’ once it became clear that its real aim was the promotion of Shinto as a state religion. Seeing a culture war on the horizon, with education likely to be a major battleground, they instead rushed to set up their own schools, dormitories and universities, where they could whisper into the ears of promising young intellectuals and future leaders.
Inoue Enryō, born in a Shin temple in 1858, was a product of these hasty efforts to once again try to secure Buddhism’s place in Japan. He was the first person to be sent by Shin’s Eastern branch to acquire a cutting-edge education at Tokyo University. And where older Buddhists hoped to survive the new age by clubbing together, cleaning up their collective act and encouraging the development of a better class of Buddhist priest, Inoue set out to embrace – even to shape – the whole spirit of that age.
Everything, Inoue saw, was suddenly up for debate. A full-on contest for the cosmos was brewing, spanning questions of truth, salvation, knowledge, the role of government and the fate of nati
ons, as well as the worth and mission of the Japanese people both historically and into the future. A mere priest was ill-equipped for this fight – ordained back in 1871, Inoue now claimed to feel ‘ashamed’ of appearing in public with his shaved head and his rosary beads, which he associated with bigotry and gullibility.
Instead, while studying at Tokyo University he found that the big questions of life had become the preserve of a range of intellectual disciplines recently imported in modern form from the West, including the natural sciences. Their questing empiricism and nation-building pragmatism was clearly the future. And their newness to most Japanese, combined with what looked like inherent flexibility and porous borders between disciplines – especially those that touched on the complexities of the human inner life – meant that there was room for someone of an entrepreneurial cast of mind to come along and steer them towards his own purposes.
Inoue’s first step was to sort these disciplines into a hierarchy. The natural sciences were unrivalled in their capacity to examine the phenomenal, relative realm – the ‘concrete objects’ of the world. But they were ultimately transcended by philosophy, part of whose job it was to set the parameters for what counts as ‘science’ in the first place: what makes for legitimate objects and methods of inquiry. But neither science nor philosophy were of much use when it came to investigating the ‘intangible truth’: what Inoue variously called risō (the Ideal), shin’nyo (thus-ness, or such-ness), and zettai (the Absolute). To get at this, Inoue claimed, one needed Buddhism.
Japan Story Page 10
