Buddhism old and new in the 1880s: traditionally robed Buddhist monks (left) and Inoue Enryō (right) Presenting himself now as a philosopher – a bias-free truth-seeker – Inoue set to work as one of his generation’s most influential teachers, preachers and propagandists. Until recently there hadn’t been a word in Japanese for ‘philosophy’. As with other imported forms of thought, such as liberté, old Chinese characters and Japanese words were being repurposed – in some cases new words created – to try to capture new concepts (or, rather, whatever influential thinkers, in the right place at the right time, claimed were the essence and true intent of those concepts). Western-style philosophy came to be called tetsugaku: an abbreviation of a Japanese phrase meaning ‘the science or study of seeking wisdom’. It was perfect for Inoue’s expansive needs – in contrast to ‘religion’, which, rendered now as shūkyō (‘the teaching of a (particular) school’), was lumbered with narrow, sectarian connotations that would prove difficult to dislodge across future decades.
Inoue’s pitch to the Japanese public was similar to that of other cultural nationalists across Asia at this point, not least neo-Hindu thinkers in India. They were determined to meet Western claims of intellectual supremacy with more than meek agreement or a feeble rearguard action in defence of their own ideas. The first rhetorical move was to laud the recent achievements of Western power and knowledge – before pointing out just how recent they were. The slow trudge of ‘Western thought’ across millennia could then be set alongside ancient Asian traditions that had reached the same, and then more profound conclusions far earlier and far less laboriously. In fact, in the time it had taken Westerners to acquire most of the truth, Asia’s leading lights had got hold of the whole shebang and their descendants had mislaid it, contaminating and confusing it with superstitions of all sorts.
It was at this point, for Inoue, that one of those new Western disciplines came in handy: psychology. Buddhism, he argued, thoroughly deserved much of what had been thrown at it in recent years in Japan. Many of its leaders really had been on the take, happy to let what Inoue called gumin – ‘benighted people’, or, less charitably, ‘stupid people’ – believe tall tales of ghouls and goblins, as long as they paid their taxes and forked out for Buddhist funerals.
But thanks to the insights of psychology, together with Inoue’s own brand new discipline of yōkaigaku – ‘monsterology’ – people could now be taught to distinguish between ‘true mystery’ and the entirely explicable pseudo-mysteries thrown up by over-active and under-educated imaginations. Valuable human faculties of awe, wonderment and non-rationality could be restored to their proper purpose: making that all-important leap from the point where science, philosophy and reason end, out into the Absolute.
Suggestibility, a misguidedly maligned human capacity, had its part to play. Of course, it had been abused by bad priests in the past. But it could also be honed for the good – as ‘faith’. Inoue was one of the first in Japan to write about the promise of psychotherapy here, as a means of generating faith and, in turn, both bodily and spiritual healing. At his new institution, ‘Philosophy Hall’, Inoue set about teaching modified forms of Buddhist rituals and prayers as a form of early psychotherapy. No longer intended to have any instrumental effect on the external world, they were designed instead to encourage and support people in developing the sort of trust and faithfulness that would help them restore contact with the Absolute.
It would also make them good citizens. Inoue’s goals dovetailed rather felicitously with those of Japan’s new leaders on this point, the latter needing a population of well-nourished bodies and well-balanced minds to help turn their blueprint for the nation into reality. Japan’s first psychiatrists earned government trust and money by helping to pull up the weeds – deviants, criminals and the uneducable – and to till the soil for the next generation. Inoue, for his part, took an official government list of harmful superstitions and added many more, demonstrating that false and true religion really were two entirely different beasts – and that true religion was crucial to the national interest. To hammer home that point, and give substance to his cherished slogan – gokoku airi: ‘defence of the nation through love of truth’ – Inoue turned his guns on what he claimed was modern Japan’s real religious curse: Christianity.
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One day in March 1865, a French Catholic priest was at home, staring out of the window at the cross atop his new church next door when he heard a commotion. A group of around a dozen Japanese women, men and children were rattling the doors of the small wooden church, trying to get in.
This wasn’t good. Land like this, Oura Hill in Nagasaki, had recently been granted to foreigners so that they could build places of worship. But the understanding was that they would keep their religion to themselves. No Japanese were allowed in such structures. Edicts against Christianity had long been plastered across wooden noticeboards up and down Japan. They were a legacy of the now-faltering Tokugawa regime in its early, state-building days – their creation and posting not just about banning something, but about demonstrating the power to ban something. This very church, dedicated all of four weeks ago, was established in memory of the twenty-six Christians who were executed for their faith not far from here in 1597, and whom the Catholic Church had recently recognized as saints.
It was therefore with a certain amount of trepidation that Fr Petitjean went out to meet the group. Even if they hadn’t come here with some act of anti-Christian or anti-foreigner vandalism on their minds, they could still be a danger. He kept the church doors locked for a reason: anyone found inside could end up in serious trouble with the authorities – and he along with them. But Petitjean sensed something unusual about this group. They didn’t seem to be a threat. Nor did they look like the usual tourist types, here for a look at the strange foreign architecture that had started to spring up around the Nagasaki hills (one of the most notable examples being the home of Thomas Glover: built a couple of years before and soon to become a base of operations for his tea sales, money-lending, arms-dealing and assistance to the founders of Mitsubishi, and later famed as the setting for Puccini’s Madama Butterfly).
So Petitjean decided to let them inside, and when he went to offer a prayer, he was surprised to find that three of the women followed him down the aisle to the altar. Kneeling down beside him, one of them leaned in and spoke, her voice low: ‘All of us share with you the same heart.’ Fr Petitjean could scarcely believe what he was hearing. He had discovered Japan’s legendary kakure kirishitan (hidden Christians). Or, rather, they had discovered him.
Tokugawa purges in the early 1600s had reduced a Japanese Christian community of 300,000 people or more – out of a national population of 15 million – officially to zero. People were made to recant, on pain of death. And in order to prove their change of heart, many were forced, each year, to step on copper plates featuring images of the Virgin Mary or Christ. Based on European Christian imagery, these were carefully crafted by apostates for maximum authenticity and emotional impact. The lucrative privilege of hosting this practice, known as fumi-e (picture-treading), and issuing the certificate that went with it, had been yet another Buddhist perk of the period.
But some of those who stepped on the plates followed it up later behind closed doors with conchirisan (from the Portuguese for ‘contrition’) and orashio (‘oratio’: prayers). They continued to worship in secret, often using Buddhist imagery as cover, so that over the years a fusion of Catholicism and Buddhism emerged that featured a forgiving motherly God based on the Virgin Mary. She was depicted with her son Jesus in images that looked, for the purposes of official scrutiny, like the Buddhist deity Kannon cradling a child in her arms. The first question the women at the altar asked Petitjean was: ‘Sancta Maria no go-zō wa doko?’ ‘Where is the statue of the Blessed Mary?’
A fumi-e ceremony (left) and a fumi-e plate of the Crucifixion, seventeenth century, worn from treading (right) Statue of ‘Maria Kannon’, seized in Nagasaki in
1856 Petitjean had heard stories about the kakure kirishitan, but no one knew whether any of their communities had survived into the modern era. It turned out that quite a few had, many of them with a thousand or more members each. Some began to visit Petitjean’s church, while he and other priests strayed well outside the boundaries of the treaty port – and the corresponding treaties – to meet and pray with them. Villagers began to build small chapels. Petitjean wrote them a catechism, using terms thought likely to be familiar. The kirishitan were advised that they could now, at long last, drop their pretence of loyalty to their local Buddhist temples.
It was all too soon. Some kirishitan refused to pay for the re-roofing of a temple. Others shunned the services of their local Buddhist priest for funerals. And in 1867 the local authorities, who had so far turned a blind eye to what was going on, finally snapped. Troops were sent in, property destroyed and large numbers of kirishitan were arrested and imprisoned.
The young rebel samurai who seized power the following year took an even harder line at first. To them, international diplomatic sponsorship of freedom of religion looked very much like covert support for Christian missionary activity – which was, in turn, the thin end of a colonial wedge: even the most rudimentary reading of recent history suggested that after the Bible comes the sword. Christianity was, in any case, a clear ideological threat to the new state, and the story its leaders wanted to tell about the Emperor. As one official put it, there was no room in Japan for ‘a second son of God’.
So just three days after the 1868 order to separate out Buddhism from Shinto, a second order was issued. Tokugawa-style wooden noticeboards, informing people of the continued prohibition of ‘the evil sect of Christianity’, were renewed. Christianity ended up sharing space on them with such apparently commensurate corruptions as murder and arson.
The inevitable Western diplomatic outcry achieved no more than a slight rewording of the notices. ‘Christianity’ and a generalized category of ‘evil sects’ now appeared in two separate sentences, linked by association rather than by syntax. Meanwhile, thousands of kirishitan in south-western Japan were hauled from their homes and deported to other parts of the country. Only by 1873 was the new government sufficiently secure, and coming under sufficiently sustained pressure from foreign governments and domestic liberals, to relax its treatment of Christianity. The noticeboards came down, and the deportees came home.
This soon looked like a mistake. During the 1870s and early 1880s, advocates for Christianity seemed to gain ground. Everywhere you looked, elite men and women who had lost the war of 1868–9, and their daimyō to the subsequent swapping of domains for prefectures, were off in search of a new lord. Many found one thanks to the preaching of Western missionaries and other Western teachers. Recalcitrant villagers had been one thing; the prospect on the horizon now was altogether different: the fusing of national with personal crises, and the rise as a result of Christian samurai.
For young men especially, raised on a Neo-Confucian diet that emphasized the virtue of personal sacrifice for a greater goal, post-1868 Japan could feel one day like a world of unimaginable opportunity and another like a ‘moral void’, as one convert to Christianity put it. Coming into contact, at just this point, with the purposeful Puritanism of American Civil War veterans teaching at English-language schools ended up becoming an ‘education’ in the widest possible sense.
Men like Captain Leroy L. Janes at the Kumamoto Yōgakkō (School for Western Learning) and William S. Clark at Sapporo Nōgakkō (Agricultural College) had not set out to be missionaries. But these were small schools, where it was hard to separate out ideas from the people who espoused them, and where probing both teaching and teacher for their ultimate source of coherence and values led inevitably to God and the Bible. Conversions, when they came, could be highly emotional affairs, sometimes bubbling up and over as young men watched their teachers pray.
Once again, the descending and ascending of mountains came to be associated with the making of grand cosmic statements. In 1875, a group of thirty-five young men influenced by Janes’s Bible classes and his revivalist spirit climbed up Mount Hanaoka, outside Kumamoto, and there pledged themselves to Christianity. Their relatives shared none of their enthusiasm. The mother of one threatened to kill herself when she found out what had happened. The father of another talked about beheading his son. A third student was thrown into solitary confinement. Janes’s school was shut down.
And yet the Kumamoto converts understood their embrace of Christianity as the fulfilment of Japanese ethics, not their repudiation. The boys on the mountaintop pledged themselves to Christianity and to Japan, sharing Inoue’s conviction that faith was essential to the nation’s future. When converts in Yokohama issued a ‘statement of faith’ in 1872, they mixed material from the ‘Basis of the Evangelical Alliance’ (a Protestant ecumenical document of the era) with articles rooted in their samurai backgrounds: filial piety, submission to teachers and respect for authorities, along with a rejection of selfishness and physical pleasure.
High-profile Christians of the early 1900s like Uchimura Kanzō and Ebina Danjō talked openly about Christianity as a new form of bushidō, the ‘way of the warrior’. This was to be a new, ‘sanctified bushidō’ or ‘baptized bushidō’. In fact, the whole Meiji-era reinvention and popularization of bushidō, largely for foreign export, owed a great deal both to American Christianity and to the ethos of the British public school. Nitobe Inazō, the author of Bushidō: The Soul of Japan (1900), was himself a Christian convert, an alumnus of William S. Clark’s Sapporo school.
Very soon, Japanese Christian leaders were emerging. For all the romance of those early, intimate encounters with a Janes or a Clark, many of the foreign missionaries in Japan were markedly less popular. They were bata-kusai: they ‘stank of butter’. In other words, they understood Christian conversion in terms of the wholesale adoption of Western lifestyles and mores, which some wag had managed to connect with a fondness for dairy products.
Instead, as with counterparts across modern Asia and Africa, Japanese Christians insisted that the gospels went beyond culture and were as open to being understood through Japanese matrices as through Greek or Roman, British or Indian ones. What was more, if the people shipped over to Japan by various missionary societies were anything to go by, then Western Christianity was in trouble: sorely lacking in precisely the sort of selfless bushidō spirit that Japan’s new Christians believed themselves to possess. It was therefore not a question of passive acceptance of Christianity by Japan, but of Japan turning Christianity into something better.
For Uchimura Kanzō, who led moves to insulate Japanese Christianity from what he regarded as utterly irrelevant foreign denominationalism, the Apostle Paul himself had been a ‘true samurai’: independent, money-hating and loyal. With a blend of doubt and sneering disdain reminiscent of that used by cultural nationalists like Inoue Enryō, Uchimura observed:
In matters of electricity, dentistry, cattle-breeding, horse-raising, and swine-keeping, we can and may learn from Americans; but in matters of fine art, high philosophy and spiritual religion … is it not a shame to modern Japanese to be taught and led … by essentially materialistic, this-worldly Americans?
Protestant Christian numbers in Japan rose from just fifty-nine in 1873 to more than 30,000 two decades later. That figure would treble again by the time the Meiji Emperor was laid to rest in 1912. But as the 1880s wore on, the unequal treaties remained in place and ‘dancing cabinet’-style antics were less tolerated, public opinion became increasingly critical of – in some quarters, actively hostile towards – Western power and culture. Pressure was growing for a more coherent, demanding and exclusive form of Japanese identity to be worked out and asserted. More and more across the coming decades, Buddhists and Christians alike would find themselves facing the same questions. What does your religion do for this country? And which comes first?
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Anyone with access to an up-to-date map coul
d see why such questions about identity and loyalty mattered. A new wave of Western imperialism was crashing over Africa in the 1880s, engulfing parts of Asia too – from Burma to Vietnam – and might soon be lapping at Japan’s still rather quaintly defended shores. Russia was building a Trans-Siberian railway across to Vladivostock, which Yamagata Aritomo confidently predicted would soon turn into a push south into the Korean peninsula. Russia had always wanted a warm-water port, and this was one obvious way of getting it – albeit thousands of miles from where it would have been most useful. Hawkish on Japan’s internal and external security, Yamagata Aritomo had fought in the Boshin War and led troops against the rebellious Saigō Takamori. In 1890, during a speech to the new Japanese Diet, he famously described Korea as a dagger pointed at Japan’s heart. Governance on the peninsula was weak, and China was in no state to prop it up. Western powers were circling. If Japan didn’t take control, then some other country soon would – most likely Russia.
As far as Yamagata was concerned, talk of ‘international cooperation’ was for the birds, and for professional diplomats. What Japan really needed was strong borders and a ‘line of advantage’ beyond them. That line clearly put the Korean peninsula within Japan’s natural orbit. And yet foreign powers whose own reach stretched thousands of miles around the globe seemed conspicuously unwilling to allow Japan just a few hundred miles of extra-territorial influence.
A short conflict with China in 1894–5, over Korea, was easily won by Japan. But almost immediately the Russians, together with Germany and France, intervened to deprive the Japanese of some of the tastiest morsels offered up during peace talks. These included the Liaotung Peninsula, a small but strategically valuable portion of Manchuria, in north-east China. Japanese diplomats looked on helplessly as this ‘triple intervention’, supposedly made for the ‘peace of Asia’, resulted in a European feeding frenzy upon a weakened China – including the forced leasing to Russia of the very peninsula the Japanese had just been forced to give back. Construction work soon began on precisely the sort of rail links running south from eastern Russia that Yamagata expected and feared.
Japan Story Page 11
