One of my… jobs? functions? roles?... I'm not quite sure what to call it – as literary jack-of-all-trades is reviewing what are generally referred to as "books on Japan." They are a mixed bag of light and heavy literature, readable and unreadable scholarship, on just about every subject under the sun, as long as it touches in some way on Japan, past, present or future. Together, these tomes (which now occupy a substantial portion of the garret in which I write this) constitute (yes, even the unreadable stuff) a unique education on Japan. I offer the selection of reviews included here as a sort of distilled version of that education, or if you prefer as a kind of service for anyone with an interest in Japan.
All reviews originally appeared in the IHT-Asahi Newspaper.
Mandarins. Stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa. Translated by Charles De Wolf. ISBN: 978-0-9778576-0-9. New York. Archipelago Books. 255pp.
Albert Camus said of Franz Kafka that his "whole art... consists in forcing the reader to reread." That applies as well to Ryunosuke Akutagawa. His stories are alive with the sense that there is more going on here than you understand. A first reading teases you with his depths, a second draws you in a little deeper, and so on, until you begin to suspect there is no bottom. What really did happen in the grove of his most famous story, In a Grove? The more we are told, the less we know about the murder committed there. Was a murder committed there?
For sheer taut intensity, there is nothing in this collection of 15 stories to match In a Grove, but even the lesser works of a fitfully great writer are of considerable interest. Akutagawa's brief life was devoted almost exclusively to the short story form, and before his suicide in 1927 at age 35 he produced about 150 of them, his settings varying from ancient Japan and China to the streets outside his study window. In one story he describes a room as having "a sense of antique newness..., an almost sepulchral splendor." That's the Akutagawa ambiance in a nutshell.
An Evening Conversation is a fine example of Akutagawa's plot-within-a-plot-within-a-plot structure. The story opens with six middle-aged men in desultory talk over drinks. The focus soon narrows to two of the six recalling a chance meeting with a geisha. It happened at an amusement park. The two men were on a merry-go-round. One of them caught the geisha's eye and she smiled at him---or rather not at him but at his companion---who parries the drunken ribbing that follows this revelation by insisting the geisha is not his mistress but the mistress of a friend of his, a haiku poet cum businessman---the ex-mistress, rather, for the poet's blood proved too chilly for the ardent geisha. The moral of the story (was Akutagawa thinking of himself as he wrote it?) is that men like the poet "understand Basho; they understand Tolstoy.... They understand Karl Marx. Yet what is the result? Of fierce love, the joy of fierce creativity, or fierce moral passion they are ignorant. All in all, they know nothing of the sheer intensity of spirit that can render this world sublime." Only the geisha knows it, and for her courage in dumping the wealthy poet and taking up with a disreputable balladeer she is, though we never meet her in the flesh, the tale's protagonist, embodying the ideal the author would have us all aim for.
Few of his male characters do, or can. Pallor is their characteristic complexion. In An Enlightened Husband, the sickly aristocratic main character rejects all arranged marriage proposals, determining to marry only for love. "Amour" is his supreme value. Does it exist? It seems to when he meets a woman and falls in love with her. They marry, but she soon betrays him. Then her lover betrays her. It is her husband, not the woman herself, who is devastated by this; as for the woman, she indifferently takes another lover, leaving the abandoned husband to muse in despair, "All my ideals had been ground to dust."
Characteristically, the story is told as a fading memory of events that took place decades earlier. The narrator is an intimate friend of the cuckolded husband's, his listener a casual acquaintance encountered, ironically, in a museum, where they have been admiring mid-19th-century art. Vanished worlds are best, Akutagawa seems to be saying---not because they were good when they existed but because they no longer do.
Akutagawa admires passion from a distance, but up close, in his hands, it is apt to turn murderous. Kesa and Morito is a medieval samurai melodrama in which Morito, unhinged by feelings he doesn't begin to understand, articulates his dilemma in anguished terms: "And now tonight, for the sake of this woman I do not love, I am setting forth to put to the sword a man I do not hate!"
Nowhere do the complexities of Akutagawa's imagination emerge to better effect than in The Death of a Disciple, another melodrama, this one set among poor Japanese Christians in 17th-century Nagasaki. Lorenzo, the saintly foundling raised by Japanese monks who took pity on him and gave him shelter, is sublime---we see that as soon as the tale opens; but the extent of his sublimity only becomes clear after his heroic death, and it is a thousand pities the reviewer is honor bound not to reveal surprise endings, for there are few better examples than this one of the author's vaunted instinct for the unexpected twist.
A sequence of apparently autobiographical short sketches gathered together under the title The Life of a Fool is prefaced in this edition by a letter from Akutagawa to his friend and fellow novelist Masao Kume. The letter is dated June 20, 1927, a month before Akutagawa's suicide with an overdose of Veronal. The letter reads, in part, "Strangely enough, though I am presently living in the unhappiest of happy circumstances [sic], I regret nothing. My great sorrow is only for those who have suffered the bad husband, the bad son, and the bad parent that I have been. And so I bid you farewell...."
Even if we didn't know the author's tragic circumstances, we would sense something of them in his work. Beauty is long ago and far away, love is more than most of us can handle; the imagination is vibrant but, of course, imaginary, while reality is coarse, and life crushes the life out of us. Reading Akutagawa is not always a happy experience, but it is invariably a rich one.
The Dog Shogun: The Personality and Policies of Tokugawa Tsunayoshi. By Beatrice M. Bodart-Bailey. ISBN: 978-0-8248-3030-4. Honolulu. University of Hawai'i Press. 378pp.
Mention the Dog Shogun to anyone with a passing knowledge of Japanese history and recognition will be instantaneous. Of course! The shogun with the mother complex who fell under the sway of her ignorant superstitions and protected dogs (having been born in the Year of the Dog) with such fanatical zeal that 300 people a day were executed for real or imagined offenses against them.
Or so it was said.
The debunking of a popular misconception – especially if it's one you happen to share - can make for a very satisfying read. History has got the fifth Tokugawa shogun all wrong, maintains Otsuma Women's University Japanese history professor Beatrice M. Bodart-Bailey. The contemporary source that generations of historians have relied on was a vengeful hoax. Far from being the cruel, murderous, borderline mad tyrant we thought we knew, Tsunayoshi (ruled 1680-1709) was "one of the most enlightened rulers of the Tokugawa period... [who,] without the use of military backing or financial reserves... succeeded in imprinting new standards of behavior upon the samurai."
If ever a class stood in need of new standards of behavior, the samurai of 17th-century Japan, warriors adrift in an unaccustomed and bewildering peace, did. Edo (today's Tokyo) was then a city of about a million people, half of them samurai - armed, restless and with little to do. Commoners they held in utter contempt. Cutting them down for a breach of etiquette, an unintended slight, was not a crime; it was a virtue. "Murder was a common occurrence," writes Bodart-Bailey, "the victims including officials and commoners, wives, lovers, mothers, and even children. For groups of young, unemployed samurai, killing was a sport..."
Tsunayoshi, born in 1646, came to power in a remarkably roundabout way. He was the son of the third shogun, Iemitsu, and an Edo castle serving woman, daughter of a Kyoto greengrocer. Humble mothers were not rare in Japanese ruling circles. The mother's lineage was considered of no importance. The significant bloodline was the father's; the mother was a womb, nothing more.
As a rule noble sons were quickly separated from lowly mothers; remarkably, Tsunayoshi was not. As a younger son conspicuously more vigorous and more intelligent than his elder brother, he needed above all, his father thought, to be taught humility; unhumbled, his energy and brains might upset an established order resting on primogeniture. He was thus left in the care of his mother. This was to have far-reaching consequences.
The mother, Keisho-in (1627-1705), merits a book in her own right. Tradition casts her as a simple-minded illiterate who infected Tsunayoshi with her own rank superstitions. Far from it, Bodart-Bailey shows. Learned in the Confucian classics and smarting from the injuries inflicted on her class, she instilled in the boy the one trait the warrior aristocracy of the day was least equipped to comprehend: compassion.
He was never intended for the shogunate, but his older brother died childless, and power dropped unexpectedly into his hands. He lost no time using it to effect what might be called a Compassion Revolution. His model was the ideal, mythical Confucian sage-ruler – autocratic but wholeheartedly devoted to the welfare of his people, down to the humblest of them. To the brutally harassed farmers Tsunayoshi granted a measure of protection and relief. He curbed the extravagance of the aristocracy. He dismissed incompetent officials from his retinue and appointed subordinates on the basis of expertise rather than hereditary entitlement. Above all, his "Laws of Compassion" sought to turn murder from a proud display of warrior prowess into a crime.
No wonder the samurai were disgruntled, and no wonder their diaries and memoirs vilify and caricature him. Less comprehensible, says Bodart-Bailey, is the uncritical use of these sources by later historians down to the present day. High school textbooks still peddle as fact the myth of the Dog Shogun's superstitious reverence for dogs because of the astral sign under which he was born.
Stray dogs were an awful problem in 18th-century Edo, Bodart-Bailey explains. Bred to pitches of fierceness by lordly samurai who used them for sword practice and routinely turned them loose when they proliferated beyond the bounds of convenience, they were a menace in the streets to defenseless commoners. Tsunayoshi's laws regarding the feeding and their proper burial of stray dogs were efforts – not notably successful – to tame the beasts and cope with the health hazards posed by their rotting corpses.
One contemporary scholar Bodart-Bailey cites calls the Laws of Compassion "the worst laws in the feudal history of mankind." Even today, it seems, nostalgia persists for the untrammeled rule of the sword in the spirit of the Hagakure, the basic text of what came to be known as Bushido, the "Way of the Warrior." Written in and of Tsunayoshi's time, the Hagakure says of it, "Thus I knew that men's spirit had weakened and that they had become the same as women, and the end of the world had come."
The "end of the world" was in fact the famous Genroku Period (1688-1704), whose cultural and commercial flowering made it the most prosperous era in all Japanese history up to the mid-20th century. A good word about the "Dog Shogun" who presided over it is long overdue.
***
School of Freedom . By Bunroku Shishi. Translated by Lynne E. Riggs. ISBN: 1-929280-40-8. Ann Arbor. Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan. 256pp.
"Get out!"
With that unexpected outburst, the spirited young Mrs. Minamimura launches herself and her slothful, hulking husband into the new postwar "freedom."
The year is 1950. Five years after its wrenching defeat, Japan is a nation transformed. Tradition has been swept aside. Self-restraint is "feudal." A new American-imposed Constitution offers freedom, human rights, personal fulfillment. The strange new words are on everyone's lips, spoken by older folk with bemusement, by youngsters with the kind of flamboyant nonchalance that proclaims rightful ownership. One elderly character in this delightful novel, wryly resigned to novelties beyond his comprehension, remarks to his wife, "After suffering a defeat like ours, people can't help but change. It's a revolutionary time for men and women. The only ones who won't change are people like you and me."
Komako Minamimura has ample grounds for frustration. She and her husband Iosuke are both from privileged backgrounds, but Iosuke's indolence, which might have passed unnoticed in more settled times, is grotesquely out of place in the postwar confusion, when survival depends on individual effort. The last straw is his torpid announcement one sultry May morning that he quit his news agency job a month before, and has since only been pretending to go to work. Being thrown out of the house does not unduly disconcert him; if anything, it is a relief to be shed of his brisk, competent wife who, perversely, seems to expect briskness and competence from him too.
Solitude is no less liberating for Komako. A freelance seamstress, English teacher and translator, she had earned most of the couple's income in any case. She had been more mother than wife to the overgrown Iosuke, and now, with him off her hands, she is finally free to throw herself into her work (she is translating the memoirs of Eleanor Roosevelt) and maybe even, should the right man happen along, into a love affair.
But the freedom we look forward to and the freedom we experience are two different things. Komako prospers and is courted, but the men interested in her are dubious specimens. One is a boy of 20, 10 years Komako's junior, the supposed fiancé of a flashy postwar type of girl who rails against the "feudalism" of arranged marriages and wants no part of the one her parents have set up for her. Openly contemptuous of the vain, ineffectual "Candy Boy," she all but pushes him into Komako's arms, so that Komako scarcely knows how to get rid of him and his sickly romantic effusions. It is insult added to injury when the boy's mother brazenly accuses her of seducing him.
An older and more hopeful beau, married but living apart from his wife, is cultured and sensitive but, having ably enough set the stage for seduction with whisky and imported cigarettes, is paralyzed by indecision when Komako pretends to faint from inebriation. She watches him through half-closed eyes as he tries but cannot bring himself to kiss her, struggling against laughter and reflecting that "not once in her life had she seen a man look so ridiculous."
A third man, far from ridiculous, is on the contrary powerful and violent, a deserted husband out to avenge himself against wives in general. Freedom is all very well, the frightened Komako comes to feel, but a woman alone finds herself in very deep water.
What of Iosuke, meanwhile? We follow him through various degrees of homelessness, gaining as we go an unparalleled view of a ruined metropolis under piecemeal reconstruction. His first haven is a bomb shelter. A tramp he meets there befriends him and shows him the ropes – how to scavenge for butts and recyclable trash, how to negotiate the makeshift markets purveying cheap liquor and "postwar goulash" (piping hot stew made from leftovers salvaged from trash cans); how, in short, to live happily on your wits without compromising your "freedom" or "human right" to blissful idleness.
In a community of jerry-built shacks under a central Tokyo bridge, Iosuke finds his "Garden of Eden." The neighbors are "all kindred souls, as gentle and kindhearted as he himself." Here, Iosuke reflects, "was a group of individuals taking life as it came. No annoyances; no rent for house or land; no water bills;" best of all, no Komako bossing him around like an over-competent mother.
The life of a homeless man rises and falls with his luck - money found here is lost there; one chance encounter yields a helpful friend, another a treacherous enemy. Iosuke - bland, amiable inertia personified - does well enough for himself and is reasonably content, until catastrophe strikes and he ends up in prison. Flying to the rescue is – who else? – Komako. Husband and wife, temperamentally so different, have discovered at last that they need each other. We leave them wondering, with more optimism than pessimism, whether they can learn to love each other.
"School of Freedom" was first published as a serial novel in the Asahi Shimbun in 1950. How is it that so vibrant a book, peopled with such engaging characters in a setting of clear historical significance, failed to find a translator until now? Bunroku Shishi (1893-1969) deserves to be better known, and English-speaking readers will be grateful to Lynne E. Riggs for bringing him to our attention with this fine, flowing translation.
***
Selling Songs and Smiles: The Sex Trade in Heian and Kamakura Japan. By Janet R. Goodwin. ISBN: 9780-8248-3068-7. Honolulu. University of Hawai'i Press. 208pp.
Sex. What to make of it? Something animal and degraded, or something holy and uplifting? How to regard it – as high art, or low pleasure? How to approach it – as a sacred union, or as a commercial transaction?
It is astonishing how widely answers have varied, from time to time and culture to culture. To the first westerners in Japan after the forced opening of the nation in the mid-19th century ended 250 years of self-imposed isolation, the starkest evidence of "backwardness," and of the need for Christian missionaries to get promptly and energetically to work, was the tolerance, even celebration, of prostitution.
Those Victorian observers for whom all moral questions had been settled once and for all had no way of knowing, of course, what a long and complex history prostitution has in Japan, and how high it rose up the social scale. "Selling Songs and Smiles" would have shocked them. Today there's no question of shock, but it is interesting and surprising all the same to see prostitutes as active and respected members of society around the time of the 11th-century classic "Tale of Genji" – though the Tale, an erotic masterpiece, makes almost no mention of them.
Janet R. Goodwin, a scholar specializing in early medieval Japanese history, has unearthed some literary erotic gems roughly contemporaneous with "Genji" – written by noble courtiers who plainly knew from personal experience whereof they wrote. Their subject was the cohorts of "asobi," a noun derived from the verb "to play" and defined by Goodwin as "professional sexual entertainers who plied their trade along the river route from the capital [Kyoto] to points south and west."
"Their voices halt the clouds floating through the valleys," wrote the 12th-century courtier-poet Oe Masafusa, "and their tones drift with the wind blowing over the water. Passersby cannot help but forget their families."
By Oe's day the asobi were a solidly entrenched tradition, with centuries behind them. "The younger women melt men's hearts with rouge and powder and songs and smiles," a certain Oe Yukitoki had enthused two hundred years earlier. "Ah!... A tryst in a boat on the waves equals a lifetime of delightful encounters."
"Boat on the waves" is no metaphor. Small boats carrying asobi plied the Yodo River, then a main transportation route through present-day Kansai, making port stops along the way to offer on-board entertainment that, somewhat in the manner of the geisha closer to our own day, was as much musical and poetic as sexual.
"One bright moonlit night, a band of several of us want to head towards [the port of] Kaya and take our pleasure with asobi..." wrote courtier-poet Fujiwara Akihira (989-1066) in a letter to a friend, a government official named Minamoto. "How about it? A single lifetime is not so long – it passes in a blink. In one evening of delight, we'll forget that we must grow old."
Minamoto, though apparently a novice in such matters, did not need to have his arm twisted. Goodwin quotes his reply: "It's the blessing of a lifetime. Let's hop on a boat right away. What shall I give the asobi in payment? One or two fans to wear at their waists – I've made up my mind to join you."
Legendary origins of the asobi, ranging from royal to divine, suggest, however spurious the legends may be, that a woman of the time lost no social respect by devoting herself to prostitution. "In medieval Europe," writes Goodwin, "relations with a prostitute – assumed to be brief, for money, loveless and unsanctioned by the church – were opposed to the only orthodox form of sexual relations: monogamous marriage. In Heian and to some extent Kamakura Japan [794-1185 and 1192-1333 respectively], relations with sexual professionals may be considered the logical extension of the aristocracy's polygynous marriage system... Because marriage was a vaguely defined process rather than a fixed social institution, it was difficult to determine which sexual liaisons were acceptable and which were not."
Goodwin cites documentary evidence showing some of the highest statesmen in the land enjoyed the favors of the asobi – without any suggestion of mass outrage or orchestrated calls for their resignation. Why should there be? "People called the asobi immortals," wrote the irrepressible Oe Masafusa.
The Kamakura Period was a political, social and sexual watershed. Politically and socially, the military class supplanted the effete, aesthetic courtiers who had dominated the Heian Period. Sexually, as polygamy gave way to monogamy, prostitution and extra-marital relations in general were relegated to the social and moral periphery. For 250-odd years, sexual morality – the official version of it, anyway – was, to speak anachronistically, quasi-Victorian. Then came the pleasure quarters of the 17th-century and the geisha of the 19th and 20th, harking back to the asobi of old.
A 12th-century diarist – a young woman, as it happens – describes an encounter with itinerant asobi while traveling with her father in a remote district: "Everyone felt some sympathy for them. They sang some delightful songs for us, their incomparable voices soaring to the sky... When we watched them walk off and disappear into the terrifying mountains we all wept, thinking we had not heard enough."
There are passages in "Selling Songs and Smiles" in which we almost seem to hear those "incomparable voices." All in all, the book makes a fine introduction, to, as the author puts it, "the way sexual norms developed in a society very different from those in which we live."
***
Fertility and Pleasure: Ritual and Sexual Values in Tokugawa Japan. By William R. Lindsey. ISBN: 978-0-8248-3036-6. Honolulu. University of Hawai'i Press. 234 pp.
When the Edo Period (1603-1867) was still young, the Shinto priest Masuho Zanko (1655-1742) had a radiant vision of human sexuality. In William Lindsey's succinct summation, "Sexual activity between couples is part of yin and yang harmony, which is the primordial and sustaining energy of the cosmos." Men and women were equal. They worked together in the fields by day, and loved by night, their love mirroring the divine pro-creativity that in ages past had generated Japan and its myriad gods.
The reality, as Masuho well knew, was quite different. The outside world, in the form of Confucianism and Buddhism, had long before tainted the pristine Japanese order. An artificial Confucian hierarchy ranked men above and women below, while Buddhism sealed female inferiority with a religious clang. "Women," a Hosso text had it, "are messengers from hell, cut off from the seed of the Buddha."
The prevailing scholarly view casts the Edo Period as "a dark age for women," and to the modern eye, certainly, there is much to deplore. With few exceptions, a woman was either a wife or a prostitute. The more glamorous among the latter were styled courtesans, but the distinction is more between wretched slavery and gilded slavery than between bondage and freedom. As for wives, a contemporary guide to female moral conduct, heavy with Confucian overtones, had it that "a woman regards her husband as heaven. So as not to invite the punishment of heaven a wife must be careful not to disobey her husband."
Lindsey reminds us, however, that the modern eye is not the ideal instrument for taking the measure of premodern ways. Undeniably, few women today would tolerate the constraints of that distant time. The element an overly harsh modern assessment tends to ignore is ritual. It informed every aspect of Edo life. Edo sexuality, whether of the marriage bed or of the pleasure quarters, is scarcely comprehensible without it. Lindsey, assistant professor of religious studies at the University of Kansas, makes erotic ritual his theme.
Fertility and pleasure represent the opposite poles of Edo Period eros. We must go back at least to the early 16th century to see the "household partner" and the "play partner" joined in the person of the wife. The decisive date in the cleavage of these twin roles is 1589, when Toyotomi Hideoyoshi, then struggling to establish his unified rule over all of Japan, set up the first walled, licensed pleasure quarter in Kyoto. Within 50 years every city of any size had one. Three stood out as "glittering islands of style and panache in the dreary, gray seas of Confucian social order" – the Shimabara in Kyoto, the Shinmachi in Osaka, and the Yoshiwara in Edo.
Wife and courtesan had more in common, as Lindsey shows, than one might suppose. Both essentially surrendered their sexuality to ends other than personal ones – the wife to the production of heirs for her husband's household, the courtesan to the pleasure of her clients and the profit of her bordello. Both grounded their surrender in the same moral code, that of filial piety – the bride's obedience to her husband and in-laws bringing honor to the natal home she left behind, the courtesan's "erotic labor" representing financial relief for the family compelled by poverty to sell her in the first place.
Moreover – and this is central to Lindsey's thesis – both wife and courtesan entered their new homes and roles on the wings of ritual ceremonies that, by reenacting the cosmic drama and the individual's tiny but not insignificant part in it, would have blunted what to us seems most awful and demeaning in those respective roles, namely the servitude and utter lack of individual freedom.
The key ceremonies of the pleasure quarter - those marking a courtesan's debut, her first meeting with a client, her promotion to a more exalted rank–are eerie mirror images of the marriage ceremony. Common to both is the procession – the bride escorted in her palanquin to her new home and new identity; the courtesan, also under impressive escort, bound, for example, to a house of assignation where the client awaits. Common also is the quaffing of ritual sake, symbolizing fertility in the case of the bride, and "the playful uniting of a courtesan and client" in the case of the courtesan.
The pleasure quarters' "skewed imitation of marriage rites," Lindsey explains, was not meant as mockery "but rather to co-opt [the marriage rite's] normative meaning, turn it on its head, and drain all notions of fertility from relations between a courtesan and her clients."
To us today, the good life is inconceivable without what we call self-determination. In Edo Japan there was little of that; none for women. We would dismiss as stunted and unfulfilled a life that unfolds within a hierarchy whose primary virtues are obedience and the suppressing of personal desires. "Fertility and Passion" won't change your mind on that score. But it does help us see the Edo world through Edo eyes, and that is no small contribution to the scholarship of the period.
***
Japan's Underclass: Day Laborers and the Homeless. By Hideo Aoki. ISBN: 1-876843-24-1. Melbourne. Trans Pacific Press. 341pp .
Every major Japanese city has its "yoseba," where day laborers are recruited if they're lucky and housed after a fashion. The biggest four are Kamagasaki in Osaka (pop. 30,000), Sanya in Tokyo (10,000), Kotobukicho in Yokohama (6000) and Sasajima in Nagoya (5000).
To describe these settings as grim is to understate the case. They are horrible. Here gather the "urban underclass" – "the very lowest stratum... within the lower classes," people living in a sense "outside of society," though in its midst. Sociologist Hideo Aoki, director of the Urban Sociology Research Center in Hiroshima, describes the yoseba as "a world in which life and death exist side by side." Better to say, perhaps, a world in which the human and inhuman exist side by side. Death certainly makes its presence felt – the average life span is about 60 – but the basic struggle is less to stay alive than to stay human. It is strange to talk of heroism in such an environment, but the situation is so corrosive of human dignity that preserving a measure of it calls for a determination which at times really is nothing short of heroic.
The yoseba grew up amid the tumultuous economic growth of the 1960s. Earlier slums had been inhabited largely by families. The mass migration of single men from all over the country to where the roadwork and the factories were concentrated gave these quarters the character they have had, more or less, ever since – a character Aoki defines by invoking Marx's phrase, "fluid surplus population." "To be a (male) day laborer in a yoseba," Aoki explains, "means to have, as the basic conditions of one's existence, work which is (seen as) low-'skilled'; be either separated, divorced or unmarried but in any event have a family-less 'singleness' and a 'drifting-ness' born of constantly changing one's place of abode; be employed to do heavy physical labor; live an impoverished life; and be discriminated against by society."
The passage is quoted at some length partly for the glimpse it offers of yoseba life, partly as an indication of the quality of writing which characterizes this book, of which more presently.
In the yoseba's early period, its formative phase, the day-jobs available were split nearly evenly between construction and heavy industry. The manufacturing sector took a big hit during the oil shock of the 1970s. Since then, and especially during the bubble economy of the late '80s, the available employment was overwhelmingly in construction. When the bubble burst in the '90s, it was the construction industry's turn to reel. Government cutbacks in public works have pinched it further – with the result, Aoki shows, that yoseba denizens walk an increasingly thin tightrope between intermittent employment and utter destitution. Today, significant percentages of yoseba populations are homeless, a condition which makes the prevailing flophouse-style accommodation seem something to aspire to.
Japan 's homeless differ significantly from America's. First there is the numerical gap. As of 2003, 25,296 Japanese in 581 municipalities were officially recognized as homeless – compared to 60,000 in Los Angeles alone. The demographic gap is starker still. In Japan, unlike the U.S., the homeless tend to be ethnically homogenous, and among them "there seem to be no drug addicts; very few alcoholics; either no or very few de-institutionalized people; and almost no children..." One may sum up by saying they tend to be loners but sane; losers in the battle of life but unbowed. Aoki uncovers several moods among the yoseba denizens he interviews, but despair, while not absent, takes a back seat to defiance and stoic acceptance.
"Japan's Underclass" is so worthy in its aim of bringing light to a dark corner of the Japanese landscape that you want to say only good things about it. Sadly, the writing is turgid to the point, at times, of unreadability. You find yourself slogging through passages like this: "The structure of discrimination [in yoseba] is determined by the interaction between acts of discrimination and acts of counter-discrimination. Acts of counter-discrimination are responses to discrimination, and discrimination is (or can be) a response to acts of counter-discrimination. The totality of this type of interaction determines the structure of discrimination." That may well be true, but are we any the wiser?
There's no need to belabor the point. Aoki is at his best when (as he puts it) he "plunge[s] into Kamagasaki" and the other main yosebas, overcomes the underclass' natural hostility to researchers, makes friends with the laborers and the homeless, to some extent shares their lives, and listens to their tales. "I cannot use a tape recorder. I cannot even take notes. When I leave them, I rush to a public toilet and write things down."
In the brief sections where his subjects are permitted to speak for themselves, they come vividly to life. "During my first days in this park," says a 57-year-old woman, "I was so ashamed that I stayed in my tent all the time. I haven't contacted my daughter since I started sleeping rough. If I call from here, she'll hear the sound of cicadas."
We are reminded – as we periodically need to be – that the down and out weren't always that way, and that the distance between them and us, in these hyper-competitive times, is no greater than one disastrous stumble.
***
Frog in the Well: Portraits of Japan by Watanabe Kazan, 1793-1841. By Donald Keene. ISBN: 0-231-13826-1. New York. Columbia University Press. 289pp.
"Everyone admires" Watanabe Kazan, observes Donald Keene in his introduction to this splendid biography, "but not always for the same reasons." That posterity (Japanese posterity; Kazan has drawn oddly little notice from foreign Japan enthusiasts) should be so united in its high opinion of a man so riven by inner contradictions is puzzling – a good starting point for the contemplation of his life and times.
He was a man neither altogether of his time, nor altogether ahead of it. His patriotism was at war with his intelligence, his Confucian parochialism with his hunger for knowledge of the outside world, his contempt for the West with his admiration of it, his profoundly original artistic genius with the necessity imposed on him by poverty to paint the conventional faux-Chinese landscapes his patrons demanded, his administrative skill (when famine stalked the land in 1837 no one in his Izu Peninsula domain starved, owing largely to his prudent management) with a reckless and rebellious streak that perhaps sprang from his genius but helped seal his doom in a closed country ruled by despots who deemed criticism of the government an offense punishable by death.
There is no pinning him down, few pertinent adjectives whose opposites wouldn't apply equally well.
He was born in Edo (premodern Tokyo) in 1793, the son of an impoverished but high-ranking samurai from a remote and backward domain which Kazan seldom saw until his arrest and rustication towards the end of his life. Japan in his day had been closed to the outside world for nearly two centuries. The Dutch were the only Europeans with a presence in the country, and tiny though that presence was, Dutch traders and doctors stirred up tremendous (and subversive) intellectual excitement in the handful of Japanese who were in contact with them. Thus European learning came to be known as "rangaku" – Dutch studies.
Kazan himself never learned Dutch, but was an avid reader of translated Dutch scientific books, and an eager participant at conclaves where "Dutch" ideas were discussed. At one such gathering, Kazan learned of a Japanese government order, then already a decade old, to fire on any foreign ship that dared approach. In a fit of exasperation he went home and dashed off a draft of an essay in which he incautiously likened Japan to "a frog in a well." When later he was arrested on spurious charges, this unpublished essay, found among his belongings, was all the incriminating evidence the authorities needed. Spared the ultimate penalty, he was condemned instead to house arrest in perpetuity. Consumed with guilt, blaming himself for offending against an order whose doom he dimly foresaw but to which he felt himself inseparably attached, he died by his own hand in 1841, at age 48.
Kazan was a figure of tragic grandeur. Embodying the highest virtues of his own time and place, a model of filial piety and a paragon of selfless devotion to duty, he nonetheless felt Japan's self-enforced seclusion as a personal straitjacket. He was aware – obscurely, but more clearly than most of his countrymen – of a vast world beyond Japan's shores, and he craved to know more. "People [in the West] choose the profession they follow," he wrote enviously. "...They do not consider some professions as noble and others as base; they reserve their criticism for men who fail to realize their talents." And yet here he was, failing, as he thought, to realize his own artistic talents because his samurai birth committed him to the endless struggle to keep his domain's finances straight while a wastrel young lord squandered meager resources on his own expensive pleasures!
Kazan 's tortured psyche and expansive personality are endlessly absorbing. No less so – greater than the sum of their parts, so to speak – are his paintings, some of them reproduced in this book. Among the Edo street scenes recorded in "A Clean Sweep," an early (1818) collection of genre paintings, is one of a samurai father buying his little samurai son a goldfish from a goldfish seller. You observe the transaction, and suddenly you forget – papa's requisite two swords notwithstanding – that these people represent a way of life long dead and, to the modern mind, scarcely intelligible.
More remarkable still are the portraits. Prior to Kazan, Japanese portraiture was an essentially generic art – the classic example is the 12th-century Genji Scrolls, where, quite literally, anyone could be anyone. Kazan strove for something that seems so natural to us it's hard to appreciate how groundbreaking his work was in this regard – individuality. A Confucian scholar glares at someone or something in fierce disapproval; a seven-foot-tall giant samurai lowers his eyes in an apparent agony of self-consciousness; the artist's mother kneels erect, the very personification of the samurai woman who, in Keene's phrase, "has endured hardships and will not tolerate weakness in others."
Then, unforgettably, there is the unidentified smiling samurai. It is no mere smile that lights up his face; it is a positive grin. This is outrageous. Samurai were not supposed to smile. But spontaneity sometimes won out over breeding, and Kazan, as fascinated by the moment as by the grand sweep of things, considered this moment worth preserving. One likes to think of the smile as Kazan's own, displayed in the only manner open to him – incognito.
***
The Bamboo Sword and Other Samurai Tales. By Shuhei Fujisawa. Translated by Gavin Frew. ISBN: 4-7700-3005-3. Tokyo. Kodansha International. 253pp.
"A samurai's lot is a wretched one, he thought. It was not the first time he had felt that way."
Wretched indeed. His lord having committed suicide during the siege of Osaka Castle in 1615, Tanjuro Oguro is a ronin, a masterless samurai. Wife and two small daughters in tow, he tramps the countryside looking for work. He chops wood here, does roadwork there. A letter of recommendation he manages to obtain seems like a stroke of luck, but arriving at Unasaka Castle, he finds that the high official there to whom it is addressed is no longer hiring.
Where are we – in the dawning years of the Edo Period, or in post-modern Japan Inc. among the burned-out foot soldiers of the corporate rat race? It's his uncanny ability to link the two seemingly distant worlds that has endeared historical fiction writer Shuhei Fujisawa (1927-97) to legions of salaryman readers. In the eight short stories presented here, he is in fine form – and in Gavin Frew the writer has a translator worthy of him.
Weeks of privation pass. At last the high official summons Tanjuro. There is a job for him. If he does well he will be given a full-time post. A low-ranking samurai with a loose tongue has made remarks smacking of treason. His punishment: trial by combat. If he wins he goes free. If he loses he dies. Tanjuro is to be his opponent.
This is "The Bamboo Sword," the story that inspired the 2002 award-winning film "Tasogare Seibei" (The Twilight Samurai). The pivotal event, here as elsewhere in the book, is the fall of Osaka Castle. Peace settled over the land, and warriors had to come to terms with it. It was a profoundly difficult adjustment. "For men like Shinza, who had been raised in a climate of war, the monotony of the new era was almost intolerable."
"Shinza, the Samurai" is a nuisance and an anachronism – so much so that he is unable to find a husband for his lovely daughter Yoshie. His vile temper scares the young men away. One suitor who is not intimidated is his neighbor Heishiro - suave, courageous, but distinctly unmartial, and anyone who lived through the generation gap of the 1960s and '70s will be unable to repress a smile at the bizarre ways in which history repeats itself.
History repeating itself is in fact the story's theme, or one of its themes. In Korea with Hideyoshi Toyotomi's invading army in 1592, Shinza rescued a wounded Korean girl only to have her snatched by a pimp. Now, 30 years later, a similar pimping operation is afoot in the domain. Shinza's lightning sword and Heishiro's quick wits together bring the matter to a triumphant conclusion, at which Shinza at last acknowledges Heishiro as a suitable husband for the charming, mischievous Yoshie – who, incidentally, is one among several proofs of Fujisawa's ability to create living female as well as male characters.
"A Passing Shower" opens with a burglar sheltering from the night rain under the eaves of a shrine. He is about to break into a nearby house, but vexatious interruptions keep occurring. A young couple happens by, the girl worried she may be pregnant. Then two men appear, and their argument turns into a murderous fight. The third intrusion is by a sick abandoned young wife and her small daughter. Furious at first, the burglar slowly softens. He hadn't always been a burglar. Once he had been a solid citizen, with a wife, a job and future prospects. The misfortune that undid him was a grim education in sympathy, latent until it found its object. We leave him escorting the forlorn pair home, carrying the sick woman on his back and holding the little girl's hand.
Quarreling couples, master swordsmen grown middle-aged and paunchy, neighborhood rakes, samurai children – so acutely has Fujisawa imagined and individualized his characters that we seem to be in their company, to know them as familiarly as we know the office workers, store clerks, and cellphone-addicted children of our own environment. In "Out of Luck," the one overtly humorous tale in the collection, a group of amoral young idlers hang out in an Edo bar, bragging of their past amorous conquests and looking out for future ones. Abruptly a grinning giant of a man flings open the door, collars the most outrageous of the braggarts, introduces himself as the father of the girl whose seduction the astonished lout had been recounting, and claims him for a son-in-law. There is no escape, and soon the young man is working like a slave for the hulking rice merchant. The happy ending is delightful, and no less thought-provoking than the sober endings of most of the other stories. A thoroughly rewarding read all around. (2005)
***
For All My Walking: Free-Verse Haiku of Taneda Santoka, with Excerpts from His Diary. Translated by Burton Watson. ISBN: 0-231-12517-8. New York. Columbia University Press. 113pp.
Taneda Santoka, modern heir to Basho the wandering poet and Ryokan the begging poet, was, in marked contrast to both of them, a profoundly unhappy man. He sang his unhappiness in verse ("No help/ for the likes of me/ I go on walking") and recorded it his diary ("I hate begging. I hate wandering. Most of all, I hate having to do things I hate!").
Translator Burton Watson, in his introduction to this collection, attributes Santoka's posthumous popularity in part to the sympathy evoked by his lonely, tragic, mis-spent life. Without poetry, he would have been a drunk and a tramp. With it, he was a drunk, a tramp and a poet. That last makes all the difference - to posterity, at least. His contemporaries, a small coterie of admirers aside, seem to have had little use for him.
Born in Yamaguchi Prefecture in 1882, he was 10 when his mother committed suicide by throwing herself down a well. So abrupt a banishment from childhood innocence seems to have permanently unhinged Santoka, unfitting him for normal adulthood.
He enrolled in the literature faculty at Waseda University, but left without a degree. An arranged marriage produced a son but collapsed soon afterwards. He drifted from place to place, from job to menial job. In 1924, in Kumamoto, he was nearly run over by a streetcar. Accounts of the incident vary, some describing it as a suicide attempt, others as a drunken accident. One version has an annoyed passenger leaping off the streetcar, collaring the inebriated vagabond and dragging him off to a Zen temple - where, a year later, he was ordained a priest.
It was then he began his walking trips - "journeys," writes Watson, "in which he tramped literally thousands of miles through the Japanese countryside." He wore the traditional garb of a mendicant monk but was attached to no temple, and begging, though a traditional religious discipline, seems for him to have been no more than a bleak, desperate necessity. The Zen monk-poet Ryokan (1758-1831) versified charmingly of "violets and dandelions all jumbled together" in his begging bowl. Santoka's curt "Even in / my iron begging bowl/ hailstones" seems a bitterly ironic rejoinder.
Ryokan wrote: "Taking my time, I go begging for food - / how wide, how boundless this Dharma world!" No boundless Dharma world comes through in this 1932 diary entry of Santoka's - just a world of hard times getting harder: "In my own case, until two or three years ago I could beg at fifteen or sixteen houses and my iron begging bowl would be full of rice. Nowadays, though, I have to stop at thirty houses before I get filled up."
Basho, walking poet of an earlier age (1644-94), naturally comes to mind in any contemplation of Santoka's life. The contrast could hardly be more stark. Basho wrote of hardships as though they were joys and of joys as though they were ecstasy. None of that for Santoka, or not much. "Nearly run over/ by a car/ cold cold road ." "Drizzly rain/ only one road/ to go by." "Cook it alone/ eat it alone/ New Year's soup."
Not that he doesn't have his effervescent moods - "Mornings are good!/ leaves fallen/ leaves yet to fall" - but they are few, and his joy generally has a mordant tinge: "After all/ alone is best/ weeds."
He wrote what is called "free verse haiku," discarding the traditional 5-7-5 structure and eschewing, when he felt like it, the customary seasonal theme. "Haiku that don't seem haiku-like at all - nowadays that's the kind I'm after," he wrote in his diary in 1936.
Sometimes, on first reading, the results hardly seem like poetry of any kind: "The crow at New Year's/ caw-caw." It almost begs the reader for a sarcastic dismissal. But - it comes back to you, that "caw-caw;" it echoes in your mind, until you find yourself wondering: Why such a harsh, grating, mocking accompaniment to New Year's, a festive time of friendly gatherings and hopeful future plans? In fact, can there be a more poignant evocation of hopelessness and loneliness?
Santoka's loneliness was crushing. Basho, on his journeys, had friends and disciples everywhere who were only too pleased to entertain him. Santoka had no one, and spent his nights at cheap inns, often drinking himself to sleep. "For someone always on the move like myself, lack of sleep is fatal."
"I wish I had my own bed somewhere," he confided to his diary in 1932. He was soon to acquire one. That same year he settled into a hermitage not far from where he was born. Other walking trips followed, but his last years were, relatively speaking, the most anchored of his life. He died in 1940 - in his sleep.
"Autumn wind/ for all my walking - / for all my walking - " The poet seemed to feel he had little enough to show for all his walking. We, his readers, know better. (2003)
The Thought War: Japanese Imperial Propaganda. By Barak Kushner. ISBN: 10:0-8248-2920-4. Honolulu. University of Hawai'i Press. 242pp.
Americans explained Japan's remarkable wartime social cohesion in their own characteristically patronizing way: The docile masses, terrorized, brainwashed and slavishly devoted to their god-emperor, were putty in the hands of a brutal and unscrupulous military. In fact, Japanese propaganda was a lot more subtle than was then – or is now – appreciated. Such is the thesis of Barak Kushner's provocative new book.
"Wartime Japanese propaganda," writes Kushner, "permitted a very small nation, situated on the periphery of the Pacific Ocean, to threaten a western hegemony, disrupt Asia, dislocate millions and destroy millions more. These are not facts that can be ignored."
Indeed not. And three other facts Kushner raises are equally striking. One: Massive as the Japanese propaganda effort was, there was no counterpart here to Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda czar, bestriding the apparatus. Two: Intellectuals fled Nazi Germany and fascist Italy in droves. No comparable brain drain hobbled Japan's war effort. The Japanese intelligentsia stayed home, and were well represented in the propaganda machine. Three: Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia and Mussolini's Italy, the wartime totalitarian states with which Japan is often compared, were energized by vigorous and fanatic personality cults. Japan in this respect is the odd man out. Emperor-worship was of course a fact, but an abstract one, and the emperor figured little, Kushner notes, in Japanese propaganda.
What did figure, first and foremost, was "modernization." This was the overall theme, and it was intellectually respectable. Japan was a demonstrably "modern" country, the only one in Asia. It was a "civilizing force," the natural leader of a pan-Asian modernity drive.
Stalinist, Nazi and fascist propaganda depended on force above and, in the sense that its messages could scarcely withstand intelligent scrutiny, intellectual self-suppression below. Japanese propaganda was different. It was credible. Japan had modernized; Japan was more advanced than its Asian neighbors.
True, of course, the Japanese police, secret and otherwise, were a baleful presence, but to Kushner that hardly accounts for the relative lack of anti-war sentiment, compared to elsewhere in the totalitarian sphere. Japan's was what one Japanese historian memorably called "grassroots fascism." Kushner cites a magazine opinion poll conducted in January 1940, "an overwhelming two-thirds of [whose] urban respondents suggested that social controls should be further strengthened to help support Japan's aims in China... Almost two years before the war with America began and several years after the invasion of China, the Japanese public supported measures that limited its own ability to oppose the war."
If modernization was the end, what means could not be justified in its name, particularly if one's definition of modernity has no room in it for human rights and democracy? Certainly Japan's had no room for democracy. "What kind of ideology is democracy?" demanded wartime writer Takumi Sato. "It is an ideology that bases itself in the individual... If one promotes this idea, we will end up with a society wherein women and men are equals, the old and young, adults and children, all are treated as separate individuals. This will lead to conflict."
Sato was one of numerous well-known writers who willingly became war propagandists. They were known as the Pen Platoon and included some of the brightest literary lights of the time.
Entertainers were similarly biddable – partly no doubt because they saw which side their bread was being buttered on, but also because modernization was a sufficiently appealing goal to justify tailoring their art to the government's definition of "healthy entertainment" - entertainment that "helped unify the Japanese population." Latitudes were narrower than a population that values freedom for its own sake would willingly tolerate, but government admonitions directed at performers who "made a display of their eccentricity" seem to have been generally taken in stride. Proof that there were no very hard feelings on either side is the fact that "Japanese comedians who had supported the war project continued to work in the mainstream and met little criticism or difficulty in the postwar era."
This applies, Kushner stresses, throughout the Japanese propaganda system. Writers, advertisers, educators, performers who lent their talents to the war effort found themselves welcome in postwar mainstream society, where they continued in their former capacities. Such purging as there was occurred on a very small scale, generally confined to the highest levels of government.
The point is an important one to Kushner, for the wartime propaganda effort, he argues, did not end with the war. It persisted through the Occupation, with "modernization" still its central theme, and it persists now, promoting a conservative resurgence calling for an "antimasochistic" view of history. Will the "patriotism" the government is seeking to enshrine in the Basic Education Law turn out to be just another exercise in propaganda?
“Kannani” and “Document of Flames”: Two Japanese Colonial Novels. By Yuasa Katsuei. Translated by Mark Driscoll. ISBN: 0-8223-3517-4. Durham, NC. Duke University Press. 193pp.
Born in Japan in 1910 and raised in occupied Korea, Katsuei Yuasa went on to become, as translator Mark Driscoll informs us, “the most well-known [Japanese] novelist of colonial daily life.” Few non-Japanese readers today are likely to have heard of him. His exclusion from the postwar “canon” of Japanese literature is the subject of the angry, almost vituperative essay with which Driscoll, Assistant Professor of Japanese and International Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, concludes this volume.
This is not the place to weigh the merits of Driscoll’s hypothesis of a quasi-conspiracy to neglect wartime Japanese colonial literature. His main point, that Yuasa deserves to be read, is amply borne out by the two short novels he resurrects. They are superb. Through them we learn, almost experience, what it felt like to grow up, love, hate, and struggle with adversity in this particular time and place, triumphing now only to be crushed later – or, being crushed now only to triumph later.
“Kannani” (1934) and “Document of Flames” (1935) are set primarily in Korea in the years following World War One – a time characterized, contrary to later generalizations casting Japanese colonial rule as unremittingly harsh, by a “shift,” says Driscoll, “from the iron fist of military rule (1905-1919) to the velvet glove of a more open, liberal policy... (1919-1931).”
The protagonist of “Kannani” is 12-year-old Ryuji, whose father lost his factory job in Japan and emigrated to Korea as a policeman. Having lived poor in Japan, the family is astonished at how comparatively easy life is for Japanese in Korea – if only, frets the mother, they aren’t swept up in anti-Japanese riots! The family is installed on the estate of a Korean count, in whose private retinue Ryuji’s father finds himself.
Kannani is the count’s gatekeeper’s pert 14-year-old daughter. The two children grow attached to each other. Watching a wedding procession, they learn that the groom paid 50 yen for the bride. “Hey, Ryuji!” says Kannani, “would you buy me for 50 yen?” “Sure I would,” is Ryuji’s gallant response.
There are obstacles. Ryuji’s Japanese classmates harass him over his Korean “sweetheart.” Kannani’s father, having been dispossessed by Japanese colonists, is not happy over her choice of a playmate. Ryuji protests: “Japanese don’t do bad things, because we’re subjects of the emperor...”
“You know, my dad’s right,” says Kannani. “I don’t like any Japanese... But still, I really like you.” Having studied the Monroe Doctrine in school, she somehow convinces herself that U.S. President Woodrow Wilson will soon fly to Korea in an airplane and set Korea free.
This delightful (and doomed) innocence has no place in “Document of Flames.” Here raw human suffering – raw *female* suffering – is the dominant motif, and men, whether Korean or Japanese, are little better than beasts, not because male human nature is beastly but because the absolute power the social systems of the time gave them corrupted them absolutely.
Tokiko, the central character, is brutally cast off by her husband on the pretext of her inability to conceive a child. With her five-year-old adopted daughter she flees to Korea. Why Korea? Because, poor woman, she saw it in a dream, “that beautiful, dreamy island behind the fog.”
“No matter what,” she vows, “I’ll try my hardest until I shatter into a million pieces.” She does try, and she does shatter. She labors as a street vendor, a dockworker, a prostitute, a small-town geisha – until finally, quite fortuitously, she finds herself the heiress of a colonial Japanese landlord. Prosperous at last, she discovers her latent talents as a businesswoman, only to be undone by the financial crisis of 1927. We see all this through the eyes of Tokiko’s daughter, Nuiko, whom we leave active in nascent leftist circles back in Japan.
This book has so much to give that it seems almost ungrateful to identify a flaw, but there is one. Driscoll’s pen is a blunt instrument. Of course, it’s possible the original Japanese prose is as flat and void of nuance as the English, but Yuasa seems to deserve the benefit of the doubt. When, for example, a 14-year-old Korean girl circa 1920 expresses her dislike of something by saying it sucks, or her delight by exclaiming “Isn’t that awesome?”, we can only wonder where the translator thinks he is taking us – to Teensville USA circa 2005?
That said, “Kannani” and “Document of Flames” will enormously enrich the ongoing controversy over Japan’s prewar conduct in Asia and its present-day consequences. (2005)
***
***
Zhuangzi: Basic Writings. Translated by Burton Watson. ISBN: 0-231-12959-9. New York. Columbia University Press. 163pp.
In his preface to this baffling, anarchic, often impenetrable and yet strangely illuminating work of third-century BC Chinese poetic mysticism, translator Burton Watson introduces a ninth-century AD poet-official who, in banishment and disgrace, celebrated in a poem the comfort he drew from the book known as the Zhuangzi:
“Consulting Zhuangzi, I find where I belong:/ surely my home is there in Not-Even-Anything land.”
“Not-Even-Anything land” is where the Zhuangzi takes us, all right. Here there are no categories or conventions – no good and evil, no time and space, no success and failure, no favor and disgrace, no sense and nonsense. There is instead freedom from all these things. There is freedom, period.
Don’t subject the Zhuangzi “to rational and systematic analysis,” Watson advises. We are fortunate to be forewarned. Otherwise we might give up in despair after the first paragraph - which begins: “In the northern darkness there is a fish and his name is Kun. The Kun is so huge I don’t know how many thousand li he measures. He changes and becomes a bird whose name is Peng. The back of the Peng measures I don’t know how many thousand li across...”
The paragraph’s incomprehensibility and its incomprehensible beauty are typical of the work as a whole. “If the Way is made clear,” says the Zhuangzi, “it is not the Way.” So there.
The Zhuangzi is attributed to a Daoist sage named Zhuang Zhou, who flourished (if he existed at all) in the 4th century BC. Long overshadowed by the more popular (and somewhat more accessible) Daodejing of Laozi, who lived perhaps a century earlier, the Zhuangzi first came into its own in the 3rd century AD, a time of upheaval in which the dispassionate, commonsensical, officially sanctioned doctrines of Confucius had little to say to a traumatized population. Zhuang Zhou’s “torch of chaos and doubt” seemed more to the point – to them then as to us today.
His torch casts light sometimes; at other times it casts darkness. Sometimes it deepens our understanding, sometimes our bewilderment - which may be good for us, for what, finally, is there to understand in Not-Even-Anything Land? That there is nothing to understand? “The Way has never known boundaries,” and besides, “Your life has a limit but knowledge has none. If you use what is limited to pursue what has no limit, you will be in danger.”
So never mind trying to understand; the effort will only tie you up in knots. Instead, “Leap into the boundless and make it your home!”
Easier said than done, and besides, does he mean what he says? “Now I have just said something. But I don’t know whether what I have said has really said something or whether it hasn’t said something.”
What we have here, says Watson in his indispensable introduction, is “one of the fiercest and most dazzling assaults ever made not only upon man’s conventional system of values, but upon his conventional concepts of time, space, reality, and causation as well.”
Further, “In Zhuangzi’s view, the man who has freed himself from conventional standards of judgment can no longer be made to suffer, for he refuses to recognize poverty as any less desirable than affluence, to recognize death as any less desirable than life.”
There is an unmistakable touch of Buddhism in that theme – except that Zhuang Zhou lived hundreds of years before Buddhism’s introduction into China. The inspired nonsense of the style suggests Zen – centuries before Zen was conceived. Here and there we even catch echoes of Christianity, 300 years before Christ: “The petty man of Heaven is a gentleman among men; the gentleman among men is the petty man of heaven.”
The riches of the Zhuangzi are inexhaustible – and exhausting too, for Zhuang Zhou’s is no easy mind to keep pace with. Added to the obscurity of his thoughts are the textual obscurities common to ancient writing. “Mutilated” passages and “tentative” translations abound – which are, however, no more perplexing (at least to this reader) than the intact passages.
Prepare, then, for a most perplexing experience. Perhaps perplexity is a kind of antechamber to boundlessness, and we must cross it and come out whole if we are to make boundlessness our home, as we are invited to do. Think of Zhuang Zhou himself, uncertain on awakening as to whether he is Zhuang Zhou who has dreamed he is a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he is Zhuang Zhou. It doesn’t seem to matter much to him. Maybe it shouldn’t to us either. (2003)
***
My Friend Hitler and Other Plays of Yukio Mishima. Translated by Hiroaki Sato. ISBN 0-231-12633-6. New York. Columbia University Press. 316pp.
Yukio Mishima was a phenomenon, a genius. His life, his death, his literary output, his forceful and extraordinary character - from whatever angle you regard him, he astonishes. When he committed ritual suicide in 1970, he had 102 books to his credit. He was 45.
His restless imagination and prodigious learning drove him into every form of writing there is. He wrote novels, short stories, poems, essays, criticism, noh plays, kabuki plays, Western-style plays, film scripts. His work is enigmatic and controversial and will probably always elude clear understanding, but on one point at least there is general, awed agreement: he dwelt in spheres where greatness reigned.
The five plays presented here are new to English-speaking readers. The settings - metaphors, despite their exoticism, of the author's own time and place - range from ancient Japan to Nazi Germany, via early-modern Japan and ancient Cambodia. Their themes are pure Mishima: the taint of corruption, the eros of death, the flabby, rotten ugliness of life lived as we live it today, drugged by democratic, demythologized materialism and shrinking in undignified terror from the razor's edge over the abyss of the true beauty which is self-destruction.
In the play "Rokumeikan," set in 1886, a hitman declares, "I... love to see blood. I'd say that it's wasteful to normally wrap under the skin something that is prettier than maple leaves and blossoms." In "The Decline and Fall of the House of Suzaku," a young man departing for a wartime assignment that will mean certain and futile death declaims of "the sea, having loaded the tablecloth spread like blue waves with golden tableware of death and despair and glory..." In "My Friend Hitler," Ernst Roehm, commander of his friend Hitler's brown-shirted storm troopers, abruptly turns poet: "The army is paradise for men... It's only in the army that men's faces become beautiful... Young animal pride and holiness fill their thick chests thrust out against the morning wind. Their polished guns and boots tell of the fresh thirst of awakened steel and blood."
Where Mishima takes us, we breathe hothouse air. His plots are part myth, part history, part tabloid cut-and-paste. In "Rokumeikan," a political assassination plot gets tragi-comically entangled in a politician's wife's ancient love affair and climaxes in a duel between father and son. The son wins - he dies. In "Suzaku," all the family brides must die, sacrifices to the jealousy of the family's guardian goddess. "Hitler" offers up another serving of mass death - the 1934 Nazi party purge.
A stiffer challenge than these plays to the universal respect Mishima inspires would be hard to conceive. Their wooden, artificial dialogue is not poetry, it's bombast. Their characters are not human beings but puppets. Blood, imaginary and real, flows in rivers. There is blood everywhere - except in the characters' veins.
In one of two essays included in this volume, Mishima speaks movingly of his love for kabuki. Are these then kabuki plays, and is the sacrifice of realism for artifice a conscious artistic device? You might think so, if there was anything artistic in the effect, but there is not. When the young heir to the Suzaku house rages, "[My mother] tried to trample upon my courage on the eve of my departure, wound the pride of the Suzaku house, and envelope [sic] my future with the most cowardly notoriety," the reader is not so much throbbing with emotion as suppressing an inclination to laugh. Likewise when Roehm responds to another character's fear of being tortured by Hitler with, "Who's going to treat you so badly, worrywart, cowardly you?"
Of course the translator can be blamed for a lot of what's wrong here. He has chosen literal accuracy at the expense of natural English. At its most disastrous, that choice yields lines like, "I feel as if my cheekbones were being slapped with a bag packed with the placer gold of despair and glory."
But the deeper problem is with Mishima himself. Genius though he was, he suffered, in my view, from one crushing disability: he didn't believe a word of the philosophy he imposed on himself, a philosophy of glorious self-sacrifice for a nation begotten by gods. Instead of belief, he had a *desire* to believe, a desire so urgent he fed it his art in the feverish hope of igniting sincerity in himself. When that failed, he fed it his life. In vain. Sincerity cannot be willed. "My Friend Hitler and Other Plays" shows Mishima's insincerity at its stilted and oppressive worst. (2003)
***
Under an Imperial Sun. By Faye Yuan Kleeman. ISBN: 0-8248-2592-6. Honolulu. University of Hawai'i Press. 317pp.
"I can speak for my own case; I am certain that I have completely turned into a Japanese. Is it that difficult to be a Japanese? I do not think so.... Is one not a Japanese when one cannot help but be moved when one kowtows before the Yasukuni Shrine?" - from "Volunteer Soldier" by Zhou Jimpo (1941)
The impassioned speaker is a young Taiwanese character in a long-forgotten Taiwanese novel, its postwar oblivion proof that one generation's moral fervor feeds the next generation's moral opprobrium.
Taiwan was Japan's first overseas colony, its gateway to the South. Long before official annexation in 1895, Japan, barely emerged from the pristine, pre-industrial isolation of the Tokugawa years (1600-1867), was asserting its regional hegemony in imitation of the expansionist Western powers that now represented "civilization" - issuing official policy papers like one of 1875 titled "The Essentials of Managing the Barbarians."
The South, writes Faye Yuan Kleeman, associate professor of East Asian languages and culture at the University of Colorado, was Japan's alter-ego, "primitive," "savage," "idyllic," simultaneously an escape from civilization and a field for its self-imposed civilizing mission. Japan's half-century of colonial activity spawned a vast and complex literature, now largely neglected, on both sides of the colonial divide, colonized and colonizer alike having been moved - sometimes by repulsion, sometimes by exaltation - to capture the experience in narrative prose.
It is fortunate for us they did, because nothing communicates better than contemporary literature the "feel" of an age - what it felt like to be alive in times, places and circumstances radically different from our own. That is the premise of "Under an Imperial Sun." Kleeman dusts off some old books to expose truths that are perpetually new.
Among the books is a novel called "The Barbarians." Its author, Taku Oshika (1898-1959), had lived in Taiwan briefly as a child. Published in 1935, "The Barbarians" depicts a major tribal uprising that had convulsed Taiwan in 1920. The Japanese protagonist, cutting off the head of a rebel, is "enthralled," writes Kleeman, "by the sense of liberation this act brings him." If civilization is a liberation from barbarism, the reverse is no less true, and the hero's ecstatic descent into savagery is Oshika's veiled challenge (challenges had to be veiled to get past the censorship) to official platitudes about "civiliz[ing] the aborigines and transform[ing] them into good Japanese."
For that was the stated goal, and though, as the historian Marius Jansen has noted, "there were no Japanese Kiplings" to articulate the Oriental equivalent of the white man's burden, it was pursued, Kleeman implies, by officials whose errors are attributable more to shortsightedness - and few individuals rise above the shortsightedness of their age - than to insincerity.
There is, for example, the colonial educator Shuji Izawa (1851-1917), who established in Taipei in 1895 the first Japanese-language school outside Japan. Izawa's goal was clear. "So far," he wrote, "Taiwan has been conquered with military force. However, it is still a big question whether we can make them obedient from the bottom of their hearts and truly become part of Japan for ten million years."
Today we call that bombast; in the context of his own time, contrasted for example with Dutch colonizers who forbade native Indonesians to learn the Dutch language, Izawa unexpectedly emerges as something of a liberal. Among the products of his educational system are those young Taiwanese of the next generation, portrayed in Zhou Jimpo's "Volunteer Soldier," whose highest aspiration is "to embody the heart of Yamato."
But the heart of Yamato was more ambiguous than many young eager Taiwanese - or their Japanese counterparts, for that matter - knew. Accompanying the military brigades overseas were the so-called "pen brigades," writers who fanned out in droves over the expanding Japanese empire, producing mostly the propaganda expected of them but also, slipping it in through the cracks, some genuine literature, most noteably Atsushi Nakajima's "Light, Wind and Dreams" (1942)and Fumiko Hayashi's "Drifting Clouds" (1949). Nakajima's novel is a fictionalized biogrpahy of his hero, Robert Louis Stevenson, whose anti-colonialism he shared. Hayashi's is outwardly apolotical, but her heroine's bitter reflections on her lover's emotional collapse following Japan's defeat suggest how little the author thought of the men who had taken upon themselves the task of "civilizing" South Asia.
Hayashi, notes Kleeman, "was not a stranger to colonialism." She had travelled extensively in occupied Asia, and was "the first Japanese woman to enter Nanjing after the massacre." Less naive than Zhou's infatuated protagonist, she produced a novel that in effect answers the Taiwanese youth's rhetorical question about whether it is "that difficult to be a Japanese."
Yes, she said. It is that difficult. (2003)
***
Kuhaku & Other Accounts from Japan. Edited by Bruce Rutledge. ISBN: 0-9741995-0-8. Seattle, Tokyo. Chin Music Press. 223pp.
A foreign resident of Tokyo is being spied on. "No, I'm not being paranoid. They're watching." One garbage day her landlady at last let the cat out of the bag. She, the foreigner, had been incorrectly dividing her burnable and non-burnable trash. How did the landlady, know? Because garbage bags are transparent. Why did the landlady care? Not out of concern for the environment, the foreigner is convinced, but out of "a Japanese love of the system - *any* system." Whenever the foreigner slipped up, the landlady would secretly scoop up the foreigner's trash and take custody of it, discreetly disposing of it on the next appropriate garbage day.
The vignette "Garbage" is fairly representative of what you'll find in "Kuhaku." The title means vacuum, which the book fills with a diverting grab-bag of experiences, encounters and impressions, some better digested than others, showing what this country does to the people, foreign and native, who live here.
Fourteen "essays and accounts" and two short stories by 10 writers are our guides through what one contributor calls "Japan's eerily sterile urban landscapes." In one "account" a young woman is groped by a drunk salaryman and, somewhat to her own surprise, goes berserk, pummelling the numbskull with such violence that she frighten herself, if not her hopelessly dazed assailant. Later she reflects on the episode. An experienced traveller, she had been pawed in other locales without letting it get to her. Why, this time, the explosive fury? Her answer: "I think I was so angry because in Japan I just don't have much opportunity to get angry. People just don't do it.... Everything's calm; everyone's calm."
Calm! That hardly seems the best word for the surface tranquility spread like gauze over some of the most tightly-strung nerves on the planet. An essay titled "That Floating Feeling" captures the paradox well. It opens with a charming tableau: a young mother watching animal programs on TV with her two small children. The mood of domestic contentment is abruptly punctured: "From the time I found out that I was expecting to the time I gave birth, there was not a single day of joy." The child was resented for interrupting a career, the husband resented for causing the pregnancy. The foreign lover was a solace but soon left Japan. The woman found herself falling into bottomless despair, her marriage an all-too-typical solitary confinement for two. That didn't last, the couple reached an understanding, the second pregnancy was easier, and the essay ends on a hopeful note - with, however, an ominous undertone which seems to say, "Don't congratulate them just yet."
In "Life with a Bilingual Dog" we find ourselves at a "pet pension," a resort for pets - mostly dogs - and their owners. Children accorded the fussy coddling these dogs receive would end up incurably neurotic. What psychological effect it has on the dogs is unknown. For the Christmas talent show the Japanese dogs put on a flawless obedience show. The author-foreigner's dog fares less well, but does have one enviable attribute - he is bilingual, responding (when he feels like it) to commands in English and Japanese.
A colorful assortment of characters, Japanese and foreign, cluster round a rural Kyoto Zen temple in "Tokudaiji Days." A party-loving Londoner named Mike is "temple-sitting" while the regular caretaker, an American neo-hippy, vacations in Europe. The climactic party at the temple is a sort of enlightened barbeque graced with Mountain Mist sake. Among the revellers is one Gerald Hogan, an Oklahoman by birth and now, after 43 years in Japan, an elderly Zen priest residing at a nearby hermitage. "I feel close to God when I'm good and drunk," he declares. So, it seems, do they all - except the pretentious Martin, visiting from a New Hampshire "Zen ranch" where, apparently, Zen practice is more austere. The story, like many in the book, rambles down more byways than are strictly necessary, but the patient reader is rewarded by the spectacle of Martin's most un-Zenlike ego getting the rude deflation it deserves.
In his preface, editor Bruce Rutledge explains his dismissal of an initial notion to write a book of essays about Japan: "Who needs the views of another lanky Westerner?"
Instead he would engage contributors to describe their various experiences in Japan: "reportage trumping armchair analysis."
The result, in his assessment, is an "imperfect,democratic book." That's exactly what "Kuhaku" is, its democratic imperfections adding up to a pleasingly light and illuminating read.
***
The Lone Samurai: The Life of Miyamoto Musashi. By William Scott Wilson. ISBN: 4-7700-2942-X. Tokyo. Kodansha International. 287pp.
A stumbling block in many a Westerner's Zen education is the notion of the Way of the Sword as a path to religious Enlightenment. To those of us for whom the sword is first and foremost, if not first and last, a murderous weapon, the "sword of life" is a difficult concept to grasp. It demands that we think of life not as the opposite of death, vulnerable to a fatal thrust of the blade, but as arising in its transcendent sense only with the full and ready acceptance that each breath may be our last. The true swordsman, in short, is master less of a technique than of a state of mind. This state of mind has many names. The one favored by Miyamoto Musashi, reputedly the greatest swordsman in Japanese history, was Emptiness.
Death in 1645 at age 61 hardly ended Musashi's career. He passed from life into legend. If kabuki, novels, movies, and TV keep a hero alive, he is with us still.
He was more than a swordsman. He was an artist, a master of almost all the arts of his time - painting, calligraphy, gardening, even urban planning. In an age when most swordsmen were illiterate, he wrote books on Zen swordsmanship that are studied to this day. He believed all the arts flowed into one another. His paintings, he said, were exercises in martial art, and when you look at his marvellous monochrome "Shrike on a Withered Branch," you get an idea of what he meant. "In the single, unhesitating swordlike stroke of the branch and the concentrated stare of the shrike into the void," writes William Scott Wilson, his biographer, "the viewer feels as though he is looking directly into the spirit of swordsmanship itself."
He was born Bennosuke Hirata in a village in central Japan - the exact location is disputed - in 1584. His father was himself a master swordsman who, irked one day by an overly precocious remark from eight-year-old Bennosuke, attacked the child with a dagger. Bennosuke dodged and fled, never to return. He moved in with a priest-uncle, who must have found the youngster a handful. At 12 Bennosuke challenged a *shugyohsa*, an itinerant swordsman, in a particularly impudent manner. The uncle intervened, to no avail. The match was fought; when it was over the boy stood triumphant over his opponent's dead body. Three years later, in 1599, he left home to begin "the homeless, ascetic life of a shugyosha, a life that he would continue in one form or another until his final years."
A turning-point in Japanese history was the Battle of Sekigahara, which in 1600 inaugurated the Tokugawa shogunate. Musashi was there. He fought bravely, but on the wrong side. He seems the fated outsider. He never had a family, claimed never to have had a teacher, was bereft of political backing, and as he lay dying he composed a testament to his disciples which he titled "The Way of Walking Alone." "Respect the gods and buddhas," he advised, "but do not rely on them."
Relying on himself alone, he roamed the country, fighting 60 duels before the age of 30 and winning all of them. Many were fights to the death. A favorite psychological trick was arriving late to rattle a waiting opponent. Once, to the utter discomfiture of an adversary who thought he had Musashi figured out, he arrived early.
So much for the young Musashi. Maturity seems to have deepened his character, and it is to his later years that we owe the evolution from fighter-swordsman to swordsman-artist. His sword bouts became demonstrations in which opponents were defeated without being harmed. The "Kyoto Renaissance" (1550-1650) was in full flower, a recrudescence of traditional Japanese and Chinese arts - tea ceremony, ink wash painting, calligraphy, ceramics, wood sculpture and so on, in which Musashi partook eagerly. "Touch upon all of the arts," he taught his disciples.
Two years of intense meditation in a cave near Kumamoto lay behind the culminating literary work of his career, "The Book of Five Rings." "See to it," he wrote in it, "that you temper yourself with one thousand days of practice, and refine yourself with ten thousand days of training." Enlightenment, notes Wilson, was for Musashi not a matter of instant satori; it demanded unremitting discipline.
"In the end," writes Wilson, "we cannot fully know Musashi's character." That is the trouble with "The Lone Samurai," as it tends to be with all biographies of individuals known better to legend than to history. Fortunately, even an incomplete knowledge of so extraordinary a man is a good deal, and Wilson, a noted translator of works related to the martial arts ("Five Rings" among them), helps us to approach the elusive Emptiness at the heart of Musashi's wisdom.
***
Orienting Arthur Waley. By John Walter de Gruchy. ISBN: 0-8248-2567-5. Honolulu. University of Hawaii Press. 208pp.
Everybody knows how the West opened Japan. Less well known is how Japan opened the West. If the Japanese were awed by the American "black ships" in 1853-54, the West was no less awed, in the decades that followed, by Japanese art. Nothing like it had ever been seen before - the sophisticated pictures, the exquisite statuary, the delicate pottery. Clearly these "hitherto unknown barbarians" (as one British collector of Japanese prints put it) broke the barbarian mold. Japan's was the first non-European culture to win European and American admiration.
Admiration seems too feeble a word for what at times bordered on frenzy. In Japan, gushed Western enthusiasts, every craftsman was an artist, every educated person a poet. Though materially poor, the Japanese had inner virtues more precious than gold and belching factories. To them, observed a George Bernard Shaw character, "work is play and play is life." At the podium of the Japan Society of London, founded in 1892, no praise was too extravagant. Japanese women, "trained to the bliss of self-abnegation," were "probably happier than ours." Bushido, the Way of the Warrior, could teach the decadent British Empire a thing or two, because "Bushido has made of the Japanese the most patriotic race in the world." Even prisons were "cheerful." In short, summed up one member, "can we find one single deficiency in this people? The ideal is made visible..."
Humbug, of course - and yet oddly moving, this naive late 19th- and early 20th-century homage from a civilization whose own superiority had for so long been an unquestioned, unquestionable, perfectly evident certainty.
In 1925 there occurred one of the most extraordinary events in modern Western literature: the publication in Britain, to rave reviews, of the first installment of a very long novel about an amorous, rather effeminate aesthete who flourished in the closed, static world of ancient Japan's royal court. What a singular hero for a nation still reeling from its bloody immersion in modernity, in the form of the most destructive war the world had yet seen!
It was the translator rather than the long-dead author who rode the book's success to celebrity. His name was Arthur Waley, a scholar of Chinese and Japanese employed by the British Museum as Assistant Keeper in the Sub-Department of Oriental Prints and Drawings. The novel in question was a thousand-year-old Japanese romance until then all but unknown outside its homeland. What would Murasaki Shikibu have thought of the revetting of her "Tale of Genji" in the form of a modern English novel?
It is Waley - not Genji, not Murasaki - who is the subject of this intriguing study by John Walter de Gruchy, a professor of English literature at Kagoshima Immaculate Heart College. That's interesting in itself - translators are generally left to labor in obscurity. In explaining his unusual focus, de Gruchy makes a bold claim: "I shall argue that translation is as much an act of creation as original writing."
Whether generally true or not, in the case of Genji it seems plausible. Consider how different the three existing English versions are from one another. Waley's was the first - the first complete one, at least - and, as de Gruchy explains, fidelity to the original was not his main concern: "It is certainly true that Waley 'appropriated' the Genji, and in translating it was more faithful to what he believed were the exotic and erotic demands of Western readers (himself included) than to the author, Murasaki Shikibu."
Waley's liberties with the text provoked Edward Seidensticker nearly half a century later to produce his purportedly more accurate rendition. The third version, by Royall Tyler, appeared in 2001. Genji, resurrected by Waley, remains very much alive.
Waley was born Arthur David Schloss in Tunbridge Wells, England, in 1889. It was, de Gruchy contends, his Jewish heritage - his inescapable "otherness" - that helped turn Schloss (Waley was his mother's maiden name, adopted by the family in 1914 amid anti-German hysteria) into an Orientalist. Another contributing factor was his homosexuality. Was "feminine" Japan Waley's sexual significant other? Was Genji?
Waley's mastery of both Japanese and Chinese is the more astounding in that he was apparently self-taught. Astounding? Nonsense, he shrugged. Classical Japanese, he observed, "has an easy grammar and limited vocabulary;a few months should suffice for the mastering of it."
Waley's "Genji" consists of six volumes, the last emerging in 1933 while Japan was perpetrating most un-Genji-like aggression in China. Disgusted with Japan's new face, Waley abandoned Japanese literature for 16 years.
He spent the war years as a censor in the Japanese section of the Ministry of Information, churning out propaganda pamphlets highlighting Japanese atrocities. One can only guess at the anguish this must have caused him. (2003)
The Last Samurai:The Life and Battles of Saigo Takamori. ISBN: 0-471-08970-2. Hoboken, NJ. John Wiley and Sons. 265pp.
The last samurai was not Lord Katsumoto or Ken Watanabe, the Academy Award nominee who plays him in the movie that coincidentally shares this book's title. The historical last samurai was Saigo Takamori, a figure so odd, complex and enigmatic that one can only wonder why Hollywood rejected him in favor of a fictional cardboard cutout whose only stereotype-transcending feature is his unaccountable ability to bond with Tom Cruise in flawlessly grammatical English.
Saigo's life defies coherent summary. He is a mass of unresolved contradictions. His heroic aspirations clashed with his yearning for retirement and simplicity, his humility with his arrogance, his equable nature with his fierce temper, his reformist leanings with his innate conservatism. Fittingly perhaps, the last samurai's last battle was a reactionary rebellion against the revolutionary government he had been instrumental in creating. It was "Japan's bloodiest conflict in more than 300 years," casualties numbering some 4000 soldiers on each side.
Saigo's cause, pitting samurai swords, samurai honor and samurai prerogatives against a bureaucratic government's conscript army of peasant soldiers and massed artillery, was hopeless from the start, as he seems to have known, and yet - the most bewildering paradox of all - his crushing defeat embodied a soaring victory. From death in disgrace he rose to become the greatest of heroes in a Japan whose subsequent hyper-materialism turned it into everything he most fervently, self-righteously and, for once, consistently despised. Resurrection myths attended his demise. The popular imagination saw him as a comet, as Mars, as a buddha attaining Nirvana. The government which had branded him a traitor shrewdly resolved to enlist rather than fight this vast inspirational force. In 1889, 12 years after his death on the battlefield, Saigo was pardoned and restored to imperial rank.
He was born in 1827 in the Satsuma domain of southern Kyushu, a region so remote its dialect scarcely passed for Japanese in Edo, soon to become Tokyo, 1000 km away. The son of a low-ranking samurai-clerk, he grew up in the poorer quarters of the castle town of Kagoshima, where the streets bore names like Cat Shit Alley. Probe though he does, author Mark Ravina discerns no premonitory signs in Saigo's childhood of future greatness. A diligent student in the domain school, he learned domain history, Confucian precepts and the military arts. He was a boy among boys, no more, no less - until, in 1854, fate brought him to the personal attention of domain lord Nariakira Shimazu.
What Nariakira saw in this awkward, undistinguished youth that prompted him to nurture and promote him far beyond his hereditary station is one of the enduring Saigo mysteries. Whatever it was, by 1854 Saigo stood high enough in the lord's favor to be part of Nariaki's grand procession to Edo. There he encountered, among much else to overwhelm a young bumpkin fresh from the provinces, "Mito learning," firebrand scholarship embodying "the radical concept of Japan as the land of the gods."
It was an idea whose revolutionary implications went far beyond what the conservative Mito domain scholars who framed it had in mind. If Japan was the land of the gods, why was the divine emperor languishing impotently under the thumb of the by no means divine shogun, whose helplessness against the Western barbarian incursion - Saigo actually saw the infamous "black ships" in Kanagawa on his way to Edo - was only too pathetically evident?
Too reflective to join the most extreme anti-shogun terrorist factions, Saigo, whose contempt for the shogunate waxed with time, worked behind the scenes, forging political alliances and cultivating personal virtue. It was his virtue, as the neo-Confucians of his day understood the word, that made him impressive, investing him with a stature far above that of shrewder and arguably more intelligent men than himself.
What did Saigo's virtue consist of? In a word, selflessness. His indifference to death, sincere though it was, does not distinguish him from the many men and women of his time who held life "lighter than a feather." More striking by far is his indifference to personal glory, wealth, fame, happiness. There is a monkish quality about him, an incorruptibility, which set him appealingly apart from the venal politicians of his own day, as it does from those of ours.
An anguished survivor of an attempted suicide at 30, Saigo harbored the conviction all the rest of his life that he had been preserved for a great destiny. Alas, he was never clear as to what his destiny was, where his greatness lay. The reformist Meiji government he was instrumental in forging did not please him. It was effective but not virtuous. His rebellion was a doomed, futile, horribly destructive fight for virtue.
Saigo is an infinitely more interesting character than the hollow Lord Katsumoto. Unfortunately Ravina, assistant professor of Japanese history at Emory University in Atlanta, is too mired in the minutiae of tortuous negotiations and shifting alliances to do Saigo justice as a living, breathing, noble, flawed human being. The necessary touch lies somewhere between Hollywood moviemaking and dry though, in this case, admirably thorough scholarship. (2004)
***
Imagining Japan: The Japanese Tradition and its Modern Interpretation. By Robert N. Bellah. ISBN: 0-520-23598-3. Berkeley. University of California Press. 254pp.
"How does it happen that the nation with the highest average economic growth rate for the last hundred years is also the only complex society with a Bronze Age monarchy, where the emperor until recently was believed to be the lineal descendant of the sun goddess...?"
That question, posed explicitly in the eighth and final essay of this remarkable volume, animates the whole of it, and University of California sociologist Robert Bellah's reflections on the theme - and on others - breathe new life into the weary domain of "Japan studies."
He begins with the assertion, controversial in some quarters, that Japan is not unique, except in the sense that all cultures are. But a kind of uniqueness, at least among advanced societies, is implicit in Bellah's question. Probing it takes us back to the first millenium BC, the millenium of Confucius, the Buddha, the Hebrew prophets, Socrates and Jesus. These were the founders of what came to be known as "axial" systems - ethical rather than magical, universal rather than tribal, world-transcending rather than world-bound. Following Max Weber, Bellah sees the axial religions as a pre-condition of modernity.
But Japan, though modern, is not an axial society. Its rejection of axial principles is one of the unifying features of its history. "To replace [the emperor's] divine descent by an ethical notion of the mandate of heaven would have been for the Japanese to move from an archaic to an axial conception of rule. Such a move, though available ever since Confucian doctrines were first understood, was never made."
Axial influence - Confucian, Buddhist, Christian - has of course been present since very early times, "appreciated and understood with intelligence and sensitivity, but then," writes Bellah, "used to bolster the nonaxial premises of Japanese society rather than to challenge them."
Japanese Confucianism presents a clear example. The Nara and Tokugawa periods (710-784 and 1603-1867 respectively) were both distinctively (though differently) Confucian in outlook, but it was Confucianism minus the mandate of heaven, the transcendent ethic by which a ruler lacking in virtue could be ethically overthrown. Japan's nonaxial morality "fused" what axial morality separated - deity and ruler, state and individual. In Japan there was no "ultimate principle" above the emperor. Here is one factor, suggests Bellah, behind Japan's relatively smooth transition to radical militarism in the 1930s, in contrast to the mass arrests and state-sponsored murder required to turn Germany Nazi.
Throughout Japanese history individuals arose whose thinking was axial in contrast to, if not outright defiance of, their native environment. First among them, very far ahead of his time, was the 7th-century Prince Shotoku. His precept, "The world is false; only the Buddha is true," inspired and comforted later kindred spirits, from Shinran (1173-1262), for whom sin is so pervasive that salvation is impossible without the saving grace of Amidha Buddha, to the 20th-century scholar Saburo Ienaga (1913-2002), whose personal "Copernican Revolution" - his insight as a teenager that "what is" is not necessarily "what ought to be" - eventually turned his wartime stance of passive non-cooperation into one of resolute social activism, the best-known instance being his dogged and ultimately successful court battle with the government over textbook censorship.
Worthy counterpoint to Ienaga is the philosopher Tetsuro Watsuji (1889-1960), militarism's most distinguished apologist. Bellah's discussion of him is scholarship raised to the level of art - the study of a first-rate mind defending a system that posterity would almost unanimously condemn as odious. For Watsuji, nonaxiality is a higher rather than a lower form of culture - primitive, yes; "but he believed that Japan's primitiveness was the seed of its vitality, its sense of living community..."
The ancient Japanese "grasped the absolute in reverence for the Emperor." The universal religions - Christianity, Islam, Buddhism - are for Watsuji fundamentally flawed in their identification of the absolute with particular gods or religious forms. "This led to intolerance, persecution, and religious wars..." Western individualism is for him an extension of Hobbes' "war of all against all." His scathing criticism of it will make a sensitive Western reader squirm, for here are unsavory truths to be digested.
The cogency, even beauty of Watsuji's writing shatters against its historical consequences. Sixty years after the war, reconstructed and ultra-modernized, Japan remains, in Bellah's view, at least subliminally nonaxial. But "in respect to axiality," he says, "... I would place Japan and the United States in the same boat... If the Japanese are in some sense preaxial, the Americans are in some sense postaxial" - the Japanese inhabiting the primordial land of the gods, the Americans the neo-promised land, morally unchallengeable, in their own minds, as they battle the forces of evil.
"In short," the author sums up, "Japan and the United States, perhaps the two most dynamic societies in today's world, rest on deeply problematic premises..." A rethinking of both premises "may be an essential step toward avoiding catastrophe."
(2002)
***
The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan. By Christopher Benfey. ISBN: 0-375-50327-7. New York. Random House. 332pp
America first "opened" Japan, then discovered it. The opening was an abrupt, no-nonsense affair, gunboat diplomacy against a stubborn but helpless old-world backwater. That was in 1854. The discovery was a more gradual unfolding. Arguably it is unfolding still. But its "great wave" rose and crested during the half-century or so of ferment known in Japan as the Meiji Era (1868-1912) and in America as the Gilded Age.
"The great wave" is Christopher Benfey's overarching metaphor. Derived from a Hokusai print of the early 1830s showing a gullet-like ocean wave seemingly about to consume three tiny fishing boats, it serves here to symbolize the churning flux, modernity's most characteristic feature, that Japan and America, the oddest of odd couples, were destined to confront together.
It symbolizes too the play of insatiable imaginations and free minds who animate Benfey's book - eccentric artists and savants for whom one stray thought leads to another and to another still and to another beyond that. New Englanders for the most part, familiar with the sea, they saw in old Japan, or thought they did, something corresponding to their own peculiar cast of mind, something missing in the single-minded capitalism of Gilded Age America - the void, perhaps.
"Hurrah for the coast of Japan!" cried the young Herman Melville, future author of Moby Dick. Why "hurrah"? Because Japan, still unopened, had expelled the Christian missionaries - banes, thought Melville, of free spirits everywhere.
An intriguing coincidence, portentous of much to follow, occurred in early January 1841. On Jan. 3 Melville left the port of Fairhaven, Mass. on the whaling adventure that was to inspire Moby Dick. Two days later, a 14-year-old Japanese boy named Manjiro left Shikoku on a fishing boat. The boat was driven by a storm to the open sea. The crew was marooned on an island and eventually rescued by an American whaler, whose captain adopted Manjiro as his son and brought him home - to Fairhaven, Mass.
"John" Manjiro's subsequent career on both sides of the Pacific had many ups and downs, but his major historic role was, in defiance of a law making leaving or entering Japan a capital offense, to return (on a whaler), and then to describe to his awestruck countrymen the technological wonders of America - steamships, for example. That was in 1851, the year Moby Dick appeared and two years before the first incursion by Commodore Matthew Perry's "black ships."
Such is the prologue to the main body of Benfey's story. The towering figure in the narrative proper is Edward Sylvester Morse, introduced in a chapter modestly titled "A Collector of Seashells." Morse is the father of Japanese archaeology and spiritual godfather to Benfey's motley cast of American Japan-discoverers - among them the astronomer Percival Lowell, who went on from a 10-year exploration of Japan to "discover" life on Mars; the artist John La Farge, America's first Taoist; journalist Mabel Todd, editor of the posthumous poems of Emily Dickinson and the first woman to climb to the top of Mount Fuji; and of course Lafcadio Hearn, the most restless and haunted of them all, who found in Japan a home at last, among "forty millions of the most lovable people in the universe."
To describe Morse simply as an archaeologist - or simply as anything - is to miss the essence of the man. He grew up in Maine in the 1850s. Seashells were his boyhood passion. From them he graduated to snails. A paper he wrote for a scientific journal attracted attention. Louis Agassiz, the great naturalist and fervent anti-Darwinist, recruited him to help disprove the new Theory of Evolution. Agassiz put the young Morse to work studying the fossils of brachiopods, shelled marine organisms he was confident would confirm the Biblical version of Creation.
In fact the opposite happened - Morse became a convinced Darwinist. He went to Japan in 1877 to pursue his study of brachiopods, which were abundant there. The day after his arrival, on a train from Yokohama to Tokyo, he noticed from the window a cockleshell lying on an embankment. He recognized it at once as evidence of a prehistoric kitchen midden. He began his excavation within days - and that's how he became the father of Japanese archaeology.
Meiji Japan was on a learning binge. Education took up one-third of the government budget. Western educators, Morse among them, were hired to teach at Tokyo Imperial University and elsewhere. Noting his students' eager response to Darwinism, Morse concluded that Buddhism was more compatible with evolution than Christianity.
And so, one thing leading to another, the teacher became a student - America's first student of Japan.
Shell-shaped ceramics led him to an interest in pottery, which drew him into the tea ceremony. He was the first foreigner to study Noh chants. He wrote a book on Japanese houses, whose spare and frail structure ("architecture of absence") he was the first Westerner to appreciate - a refreshing contrast, he thought, to America's "abject enslavement to tawdry upholstery."
Back home in Massachusetts, he became director of the Peabody Academy of Science, stocking it with Japanese artifacts. "Good Darwinian that he was," writes Benfey, "Morse wished to preserve the fossil records of a vanishing civilization."
So it was with the other discoverers Benfey chronicles, their minds always alert, always open to a fresh perspective. They sought an alternative to the very modernity Japan was chasing - sought it in the very traditions Japan was jettisoning. La Farge, the artist, came to Japan and discovered Taoism; Lowell, the astronomer, "the impersonal view of life." (Lowell's post-Japan quest for Martians, and his lifelong conviction that he had found them, remind us of the intellectual perils awaiting bold thinkers.) Hearn had his Japanese epiphany in New Orleans, at the Cotton Centennial Exposition of 1884-5. The garish lighting of the fair repelled him, and he sought refuge, first in the comparative gloom of the Japanese exhibit, and then, for the last 14 years of his life, in Japan itself, where the mysterious and infinitely suggestive gloom, to his dismay, was thinning fast.
Was the pessimism justified? Is Japanese civilization dead?
"Reports of its demise turned out to be exaggerated," Benfey replies in an email interview, "but when Morse was in Japan, during the late 1870s, there was a real danger that traditional Japanese culture would be extinguished. It is one of the charms of the story I tell that Japanese and American preservationists worked hand in hand to prevent the extinction they feared. And now many Japanese go to
Boston to see the treasures of their own culture.
"I felt," he continues, "that my travelers were often making imaginative connections that our current division of disciplines tends to prevent. So Morse could go from collecting seashells to collecting the designs of Japanese
houses (the protective shells of humans) with a kind of fluidity lost to us. I wanted my writing to have something of this flexibility, too."
It does. (2003)
***
Yoshimasa and the Silver Pavilion: The Creation of the Soul of Japan. By Donald Keene. ISBN: 0-231-13056-2. New York. Columbia University Press. 194pp.
A worse shogun than Ashikaga Yoshimasa (1436-1490) this country surely never had. His ineptitude, acknowledged even by himself, helped make of 15th-century Japan a wasteland of destruction, starvation and despair. His indifference to the suffering he caused or couldn't be bothered stirring himself to prevent was total. He was not wantonly cruel as his father, the shogun Yoshinori, had been. It was just that his mind was elsewhere. Where? On art and architecture, tea ceremony and poetry. He was an aesthete. He loved beauty above all things. Oddly enough, this cold, feckless man was no mere dilettente. He knew the arts he cultivated, and a measure of how well he cultivated them is the fact that today, 500 years later, they are the arts most closely identified with "the soul of Japan."
The dizzying anomaly between Yoshimasa the bumbling ruler and Yoshimasa the cultural innovator is the central theme of Donald Keene's fine study. Supposing Yoshimasa had been an active leader of courage and vision. The famines of the early 1460s would have been less devastating and the Onin War, a meaningless armed brawl (1467-77) that destroyed Kyoto utterly, would never have happened. On the other hand, writes Keene, "The Higashiyama era (1483-1490) was one of the most brilliant periods of Japanese cultural history, and the guiding spirit was the same Yoshimasa who had been a failure in everything else he did."
He was a reluctant shogun, appointed at age 7 to succeed an older brother who died at 10. He was 13 when he officially assumed his title in 1449. His father Yoshinori had been murdered, and Ashikaga power, peaking under the boy's revered grandfather Yoshimitsu (1358-1408), was already in decline. As a child Yoshimasa preferred poetry to sports. Politics and war interested him not at all. As he grew to manhood, "Yoshimasa aspired to become not an invincible general but a second Genji" - the first being the romantic hero of a classic 11th-century novel. "Handsome, sensitive, and seemingly irresistible to women, he was well qualified for the role. His tastes were those of an aristocrat rather than of a samurai."
Palaces were his first passion. He designed them, supervised their construction, and blithely ordered them moved when the original setting palled. "His wishes were obeyed, despite the cost." The cost was enormous, weighing most heavily on a peasantry already crushed by famine and disease. Keene quotes from a contemporary chronicle; the year is 1461: "Two-thirds of the people died of starvation, and skeletons filled the streets. Nobody passed but was moved to pity. But [Yoshimasa] had built the Palace of Flowers in the second month of [1459] and doted on the place. Every day he employed people to create [gardens with] mountains, water, plants, and trees, laying out streams and stones. Showing no pity for those who suffered from hunger, he made plans to build still another palace..."
The climax of this compulsive and heedless building spree was the famous Ginkakuji in Kyoto's Higashiyama hills, and the reader is left to ponder whether the suggestive simplicity of this p