All of a sudden, the mist disappeared. Far off, on an expanse of greenery stretching out by the sea, sparkling under the hot rays of the sun, a handsome young man came in sight, wearing a yellow tunic and accompanied by a beautiful woman enveloped in a violet robe with long, billowing sleeves … She sat down in a marble seat in the shade of an olive tree. The peaceful sound of the orchestra came across the distant sea, its thin notes continuing without a pause. The whole hall trembled at the same time. In this darkness they were dreaming of Greece, which was all sweetness and light.
Living in London, Sōseki found that doubt and unease about the world, which had swirled relatively harmlessly around him back in Japan, now entered into him in the form of a profound culture shock and a deep challenge to his whole sense of self. ‘What is modernity doing to us Japanese?’ took on minute-by-awful-minute specificity as ‘what is London doing to me?’ A Japanese visitor calling on Sōseki around this time sent a telegram home about his visit. It read: ‘Natsume has gone mad.’
Sōseki only ever experienced partial relief from the anxiety that he felt almost constantly ‘in the pit of my stomach’. It came, he reported, when he finally found an authentic centre of gravity that was independent of borrowings, imports and the opinions of foreigners (crudely adopted by Japanese like ‘glued-on peacock feathers’), or the excessive demands of Japanese leaders. ‘What a horror,’ he said to Japanese students in 1914, ‘if we have to eat for the nation, wash our faces for the nation, go to the toilet for the nation!’ One should instead strive to be ‘self-centred’: centring one’s life and work clearly and firmly in oneself.
Sōseki warned his students not to try to avoid the stresses of modernization by centring their lives on themselves – a very different, and destructive, prospect. But he was too late. By the 1910s, a fad was emerging amongst highly educated young people for something called ‘self-awareness’, a trend marked by the intensive reading of poetry and philosophy while musing on one’s own growth and relationships. In 1916, a student at an elite school in Sendai, northern Japan, which Kosawa would shortly attend, wrote in anticipation of a ‘Taishō Restoration’ which would match Meiji’s external, materialistic revolution with an internal counterpart of ‘mind and spirit’. European Romantic and Idealist philosophy, sometimes read in the original German by students whose education focused heavily on foreign languages, provided much of the inspiration. Drunken boarding-school mah-jong sessions were punctuated by renditions of ‘De-kan-shō’ – a student song celebrating their obsession with Descartes, Kant and Schopenhauer.
Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916) Critics claimed that all this was in danger of fostering a fatal detachment from social and political realities, on the part of otherwise promising young men whose expensive educations were being subsidized by an expectant state. The journalist Tokutomi Sohō wrote of his regret that where the good of that state had once been the national religion, too many people were now losing or questioning their faith.
But this apparent exchange of a national life for an inner life, especially in this younger generation, was far more political than perhaps some of its critics realized. Young people especially were developing a set of broadly overlapping misgivings about life in Japan. They felt there had been too much talk of the state and of a supposed collective good, and they worried about the loss of personal autonomy and spiritual depth that full-steam-ahead public service threatened to demand. They had been encouraged to rely too much on the head, to the neglect of the heart: surely objectivity, rational thinking and specialization obscured as often as revealed life’s richness? And for all its pockets of innovation and patches of colour, urban life was still overwhelmingly characterized, for them, by cramped, mechanized drabness, with humans living at ever-closer quarters yet failing to generate between them much corresponding increase in happiness, empathy or solidarity. People’s discomfort, and desire to escape, could not be written off as laziness or degeneracy. These things were loaded with moral and political judgement – and brimming with dangerous potential.
*
While Japan had accepted plaudits abroad for the remarkable process of modernization that had brought it victory over Russia in 1905, and for its humane treatment of prisoners during the conflict, back at home around 12,000 people had been locked up in cages. This was a system dating back to the Tokugawa era: the confinement at home of people with mental illness, often outside the house and open to the elements.
Tokyo University’s Kure Shūzō, a student of Inoue Enryō and famed as Japan’s father of psychiatry, helped to produce a damning report on the system in 1918. He declared the mentally ill ‘unlucky to have been born in Japan’, a shocking turn of phrase given decades of political effort to build up the country’s image. The government offered a belated promise to recognize mental illness as a medical rather than a law-and-order problem, and to construct proper treatment facilities in every prefecture.
In the meantime, Kure and his colleagues discovered, families were continuing to take sick relatives to Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines, where forms of treatment were being offered – albeit often in appalling conditions – that Kure recognized as paralleling contemporary Western forms of care. The practice of bathing under waterfalls resembled hydrotherapy, while the use of prayers and incantations could be understood as a form of psychotherapy.
Matching psychiatrists’ scepticism about politicians and their promises was public scepticism about psychiatrists. Many feared being labelled with a diagnosis that might affect their family and future prospects, given uncertainty about whether mental illness could be inherited. There was a feeling, too, that psychiatrists were more interested in chopping up brains in university labs, or in warehousing (for profit) people who had become unwelcome in their own homes, than they were in listening to the problems that everyday life was beginning to throw up.
Starting in the early 1900s, philosophy, science, comparative religion and raw entrepreneurship – intellectual and commercial – came together to fill the gap left by public mistrust (and, in some cases, simple lack of awareness) of psychiatry. A range of new physical and psychological therapies emerged, offering to treat people via idioms they could readily understand. They were expansively holistic, discovering cosmic significance in personal complaints – the ultimate in the intimate.
Much was made of usefully flexible concepts like kokoro and seishin. ‘Kokoro’ (心) could mean ‘heart’, ‘self’, ‘personality’ or the ‘heart of things’. ‘Seishin’ enjoyed an even richer strategic malleability, thanks to two kanji (精 [sei] and 神 [shin]) that hinted broadly at purity, mind, soul, gods and energy. Highly diverse ideas ended up sharing some of the same popular constituent parts, one borrowing from another its air of mystique or scientific credibility. The ‘Japanese spirit’, much talked about in the wake of the war with Russia, was nihon seishin. Spiritualism, idealism or spiritual effort might all be rendered as seishin shugi. One’s inner, emotional currents were seishin teki. Psychiatrists called themselves seishinkai (doctors of seishin) while Kosawa’s beloved discipline was seishin bunseki (seishin-analysis).
One of the first therapeutic pioneers was a man called Kuwabara Toshirō. He graduated from hypnotizing his maid at the age of thirteen – a feat the boy is said to have repeated on the poor woman more than a hundred evenings in a row – to publishing a bestselling book, Seishin Reidō, in 1903–4. The book laid out a technique, known as seishin-reidō-jutsu (‘the art of the excellent movement of the mind’) that seemed to give the Japanese public exactly what they wanted: physical and psychological healing that sounded modern and cutting-edge, featured a folksy first-person approach and an empathetic understanding of people in their suffering, and which was embedded in a quasi-philosophical account of the world. Hypnotism worked, Kuwabara claimed, by bringing the human psyche or individual seishin into tune with the greater universal seishin, or Mind, of which it was a part – and which has been known throughout history by many names: Brahma, God, Truth, Nirva
na.
Within a few short years as many as 30,000 people in Japan had taken to calling themselves reijutsuka (spiritual practitioners). Medical doctors began to worry that if any old amateur could get away with practising a technique like hypnotism, then the reputation – and lucrative exclusivity – of their own profession, to which hypnotism evidently belonged, would surely suffer. They petitioned the government, who were only too happy to support Westernized professionals against what looked like quackery tinged with old-school superstition. The use of hypnotism ‘without due cause’ was included on a list of minor offences in 1908, alongside fortune-telling, exorcism, spells and incantations.
Non-medical hypnotists swiftly rebranded themselves as seishin ryōhōka, psychotherapists, some of whom aimed to cure the mind itself, while others promised to use the power of the mind to cure the body. For people looking to train in these new techniques, correspondence and short-stay courses were offered by institutions modelled on the traditional Iemoto system whereby precious skills were passed down through a familial or quasi-familial lineage. One of those destined to become known around the world was that of Usui Mikao. He opened a reiki – spiritual energy – healing clinic in Tokyo in 1922, and soon began to train others, first by passing the reiki ability on through direct touch and then establishing an organization capable of facilitating training on a much wider scale.
Though one of the great reiki missionaries to the West was a Hawaiian woman by the name of Hawayo Takata, within Japan therapy was for the most part men’s work. Whether a therapist focused on familial, professional or more general social problems thrown up by new living and working environments (popular diagnoses soon included taijinkyōfushō: fear of interpersonal relations), it was widely thought that to be effective a practitioner had to be socially and educationally superior to the client. This would be conducive to the kinds of faith and trust that theorists like Inoue Enryō claimed were key components in healing.
But faith and trust in what – or whom? Many of these therapies seemed premised on a patient or client trustfully abandoning a malfunctioning, solitary self and story to something greater, whether a professional practitioner or ‘Mind’ itself. In a modern society shaped by its leaders to be deeply hierarchical – across politics, industry and education, and human relationships in general – how was one to distinguish therapeutic self-abandonment from simple conformity to authority or a particular set of values?
The problem was clear in another future Japanese therapeutic export to the West: Morita therapy, geared especially towards people suffering from nerves. Its founder was Morita Shōma, a one-time student of Kure Shūzō and a colleague of Akutagawa’s psychiatrist confidante Saitō Mokichi. Morita started out in 1919 by inviting his first client to live with him in his family home, where he personally modelled for her the proper way to live and work and relate. Morita therapy soon evolved into a more structured, hospital-based cure, in which a number of Western therapies were combined and underpinned by a philosophical approach to life rooted in East Asian traditions. Patients moved from complete bed rest through to light and then heavier work, learning along the way how to operate in the world by accepting reality just as it is – arugamama – rather than seeking to push it around all the time (an attitude held largely responsible for their original troubles). But charismatic guidance, tinged with social and even moral superiority, remained a core part of the therapy. One of Morita’s later clients described him as Christ-like. Ohtsuki Kenji, Kosawa’s great rival, sometimes operated in a not dissimilar way, inviting young male clients to stay at his country home with him and his wife. He and the client would go for long walks, Ohtsuki standing in for the strong and attentive father that the client had never had.
How, in these sorts of situations, was a person to distinguish between liberation from troubling circumstances and merely their exchange for new ones, urged on them by intimately influential figures? A danger seemed to be looming, of ‘great escapes’ from modern predicaments leading merely into fresh forms of captivity.
*
One day a whole family went into the fields. In the evening, when they were about to return home, they found a woman crouching beside the river, smiling. The next day during the noon break the same thing happened again. This happened day after day, and gradually the rumour spread that someone from the village was visiting the woman at night. At first, the visits were only when her husband was away driving packhorses to the seaside. Later, the visits were made even when she was sleeping beside her husband.
Over time, it became evident that the visitor must be a kappa [a mischievous and deadly water spirit], and so the husband’s mother went and slept at the wife’s side. But late at night, when she heard the wife laughing and knew that the visitor had come, she found it impossible to move her body. There was nothing anyone could do …
When kappa-children are born, they are hacked into pieces, put into small wine casks and buried in the ground. They are grotesque.
What were modern readers to think of such a story? It didn’t matter. ‘Thinking’ was quite beside the point. The pioneering folklorist Yanagita Kunio promised readers of Tōno no Monogatari (The Legends of Tōno) (1910) that he had written these stories down ‘just as I felt them’, when they were recounted to him by a resident of the rural town of Tōno. Sceptical about how far a reliance on logic alone was getting people in seeking to apprehend the world, Yanagita rendered the word for ‘logic’ as rojikku in his writing, the better to emphasize its foreignness and its questionable utility for Japan. Just as some Japanese Christians derided Western missionaries as bata kusai – stinking of butter – so, for Yanagita, the arteries of contemporary Japanese inquiry were becoming clogged with gakusha kusai koto – things that ‘stink of the scholar’.
A graduate of Tokyo Imperial University, Yanagita resigned from the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce in 1919 having seen at first hand government attempts to remake rural Japan in the interests of the state. First, the countryside’s economic needs were subordinated to those of urban heavy industry, then its culture was steadily destroyed: old customs and practices were outlawed as magical or superstitious, to be replaced by the moralizing of imperial rescripts and of bureaucratic diktats from the Home Ministry in Tokyo. Shrines across the country were being merged, as local gods were dragooned into the service of a national system of State Shinto, focused on the Emperor and his imperial line.
With the alien corruptions of the modern city thus steadily making their way outwards into the countryside, like an ink-stain spreading across a map, one had, thought Yanagita, to draw on the saving wisdom of rural Japan while one still could. Inoue Enryō had looked at the countryside and seen gumin, stupid people. Japan’s political leaders, it seemed, saw kokumin, a citizenry – tax-paying human resources on tap. Yanagita, instead, fancied that he saw jōmin, Japan’s ‘ordinary, abiding people’, enviably immersed in nature.
Here were people who knew the limitations of attempting to describe the world objectively as though one somehow transcended it – trying to push and poke it, in the sorts of ways that had driven Morita Shōma’s patients to collapse. To really understand life, you didn’t try to describe it – you told stories about it. Of the seen and unseen intersecting: kami, goblin-like kappa and tengu (‘heavenly dogs’, a blend of the human and bird-like) rubbing shoulders with rich men, mad men and mountain women; of strange monkeys, wolves, foxes, spirits of the ancestors and deer who travel and mediate between worlds.
These were precisely the sorts of phenomena of which Inoue, with his yōkaigaku (‘monsterology’) hoped to help cleanse Japan. For Yanagita, they were the means of learning a different way of living. Where a client of Morita or Ohtsuki might be encouraged to closely observe their therapist, Yanagita advised readers to pay attention to and imbibe for themselves the kokoro no hataraki – the ‘workings of the heart’ – of the people of rural Japan, as revealed in the ‘feel’ of their stories. One would discover, Yanagita claimed, a ‘consciousness
of daily life’ radically different from the one that far-off city existences now encouraged.
That urban consciousness seemed, to its critics, to be defined by the ticking of a clock. Ever-improving modes of production created a far-reaching impression of strict linearity about the world: of today surpassing yesterday; of the past as relevant and valuable chiefly as the necessary foundation for the present. People would soon forget that there was any other way to live. Modernity started out looming above you as epic buildings. Then it got under your nails as the debris of the industrial city, and into your head as the rhythms and logic of your new work life. It found its way into your home, too, in the form of altered relationships and routines, new clothes and furnishings. Finally, it wormed its way into your heart, until you could no longer remember what you possessed and were before.
Many Japanese thinkers of Yanagita’s generation were looking for ways of redeeming what the German philosopher Martin Heidegger worried was a ‘levelled-down’ time emerging as part of modern life around the world: mere ‘now’-points, evenly spanned, public, incessant – banal. The philosopher Miki Kiyoshi sought salvation in a ‘foundational experience’ of the world: some intuition or relationship or point of reference that would serve as an anchor, giving shape and bringing real meaning to the passage of time. Others placed their faith in high culture: its space and spaciousness could soothe minds addled and segmented by office deadlines, by rushed and noisy café conversations, and by a consumer culture that was constantly renewing itself. Still others, Yanagita amongst them, sought out parts and peoples of Japan not yet ensnared by moment-after-moment modern chronos, where life’s rhythms were instead still set by kairos – a sense of the ‘right’ or the ‘fitting’ moment. These were communal, cooperative lives, defined and enriched by place and ritual, by seasons cycling and ancestors circling – returning to watch over their descendants.
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