The Enigma of Japanese Power (34 page)

In a world of competing realities appearances are crucial. Politicians who have been tainted by involvement or suspicion of involvement in scandals use election campaigns to ‘purify’ their status, a process referred to as
misogi
, after the Shinto purification ceremony. They use the word in their speeches, and even if they have claimed that they are not guilty they still talk about a period of
misogi
being over. In Japan, one can take responsibility for having created a suspicion of involvement.

The phrase ‘correct image’ (
tadashii imeeji
) is customarily used in referring to various kinds of whitewash job. A frequently used expression, ‘the adjustment of views’, means reaching agreement as to the nature of whatever is at hand. It indicates that ‘reality’ is seen as negotiable. And much of the ‘explaining’ of the ‘true situation’ that Japanese representatives love doing at international conferences, in mainstream publications and in a multitude of glossy subsidised magazines must be seen in this context. The power-holders are extremely eager to make sure that everyone ‘understands’ what has been agreed on.

Fairly often, rival segments of the Japanese élite decide that they must, for practical reasons, agree on an arbitrary interpretation of a situation at hand, which then becomes the official reality to which all will defer. This negotiated reality – which must not be mistaken for consensus – is very important in the absence of unambiguous political leadership and clear lines of command. It helps prevent the freewheeling chaos one would expect as the result of such political weaknesses. The cohesion among the administrators derives partly from a shared, tacitly agreed upon and arbitrary view of reality. Their common educational background and interwoven personal relations give them similar or identical frames of reference, influenced only minimally by individual assessments of a situation and existing quite separately from personal views of the world.

In their daily lives, the Japanese are very helpful to one another in minimising embarrassment, and will often make quite clear that what they have just said may not refer to factual reality. All one has to do is catch the signal. Foreigners are expected to do this also, for sometimes the excuses or ‘explanations’ given in international dealings are simply too crude to be taken seriously. To make things even easier, the Japanese have a relevant terminology:
tatemae
, or the way things are presented, ostensible motives, formal truth, the façade, pretence, the way things are supposed to be (often wrongly translated by Japanese as ‘principle’); and
honne
, or genuine motives, observed reality, the truth you know or sense.

This
honne–tatemae
dichotomy is constantly referred to, and it is usually considered an ethically neutral if not positive aspect of Japanese society. But it also provides a frame of reference in which many forms of deceit are socially sanctioned.
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The Japanese can be honest about their fakery to a degree that Westerners could not possibly be. They are allowed to pretend honesty without fear of being chided for dishonesty. To put it in the words of an anthropologically trained observer: ‘Truth and morality are . . . specific to the interaction at hand. . . . The Japanese tend to accept apparent contradictions as complementary facets of the same truth. They rarely insist on consistency and are inclined to refer to narrowly logical people as
rikutsuppoi
, that is, “reason-freaks”.’
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Because of their own institutionalised gap between true and surface motives, Japanese tend to be suspicious of the motives of foreigners and foreign countries. They are forever searching for a hidden
honne
behind any foreign analysis of Japanese circumstances or of bilateral relationships. The
tatemae–honne
dichotomy helps explain the assertion, often made before and during the Second World War, that Japan’s true intentions in Asia were never understood, whereas the West’s true motives were much more insidious than it let on.

Once, after I had written a newspaper story summing up misconceptions in both Japan and the Western world that were contributing to a widening conflict, a high Japanese official used the Kyodo news agency to publicise his belief that the article should be seen in the context of an alleged attempt by the European Community to discredit Japan. Similarly, an article of mine in a United States publication, analysing the effect of the absence of a coherent Japan policy in Washington and enumerating some of the characteristics of the System, prompted discreet queries about the possibility of my having conspired with certain US interests. My sin was that, after many years of friendly relations with Japan’s officials, I had not helped them hold up the
tatemae
to the world. The
honne
is strictly private, to be discussed and joked about over cups of sake.

Throughout the centuries, political arrangements have deprived the Japanese people of that intangible but very important cultural achievement: a free universe of discourse. I know Japanese who think very clearly and make intellectual discoveries, and there must have been many in history who obeyed the human urge towards philosophical speculation. But the crucial thing to remember is that each of them has had to create his own intellectual world. There was no grand intellectual tradition to hold all this speculation together, to serve as a framework of reference; no body of philosophical speculation that might be attacked or added to. Without a logically ordered hierarchy of abstractions, product of a long intellectual striving to grasp reality, the relevance, the weight, the proportion and the balance of competing evidence are only haphazardly perceived.

Japanese scholarly debates tend to exist in an intellectual vacuum as tiny, self-contained universes of discourse. The academics who wage them have, moreover, such a dislike of being contradicted that they tend to cloud their contentions to a degree making refutation nearly impossible. Intellectuals are rarely asked to prove or disprove their hypotheses, and consequently are themselves not very good at critical evaluation. Maruyama Masao has observed that Japanese intellectuals adopt new domestic or foreign ideas in rapid succession: ‘New ideas of whatever origin win extremely quick victory over the intellectuals’; they make no conscious effort to test the new ideas against their established convictions.
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Radicalised students illustrate this tendency very well. They undergo intellectual and spiritual processes that are comparable to conversion experiences in other parts of the world. But they tend to repeat such experiences, and in the end little of anything seems to stick. Lasting intellectual commitment is extremely rare; not only is it not rewarded, it often conflicts with socio-political demands from the immediate environment. Many Westerners have had worthwhile conversations with Japanese, only to discover later that the conclusions reached seemed to have been totally forgotten.

At Japanese high schools, conflicting Western and Japanese ideas are treated side by side, without any effort to help the student resolve the confusion. School textbooks on political and historical subjects never suggest that there are desirable and undesirable systems of government.

Passions are absent. Judgments are missing. Students are introduced not to the uniqueness or vitality or clash of historical forces, only to a recital of their labels. Totalitarianism, capitalism, communism, and a host of other ‘isms’, including freedom and democracy (which are both ‘isms’ in Japanese), are mentioned but not examined in concrete detail.
⁷

The impression is left that the ‘isms’ are interchangeable and that all can claim our respect with equal validity.

The poverty of the Japanese intellectual tradition is reflected in that unenthusiastic institution, the Japanese university. Perhaps the most striking characteristic of Japanese students is their general apathy. It should not surprise anyone. My own experience of teaching at, among other places, Waseda University suggests that if students discover the excitement of intellectual pursuits at all, they discover it on their own. Inspiring teachers are rare. Just as at the high-school level, education in the sense of fostering and expanding the powers of the mind is almost nonexistent. If some Japanese university professors function as intellectual guides, they do so out of the goodness of their heart and not because it is expected of them. Many of the more gifted students go through phases of extreme nihilism.

An intellectual tradition that is ultimately independent of power arrangements, such as that of the West, not only permits some degree of intellectual control over political matters, but also promotes coherence in the face of new ideas. ‘’Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone,’ lamented John Donne when medieval theories of the working of the universe could no longer withstand the heretical hypotheses of a Copernicus or a Galileo; but he underestimated the force of the Greek tradition of logical thinking without which he himself would never have been concerned about coherence in the first place. Japanese intellectual life, continuously confronted with a great deal of novelty, is heir to no such tradition.

Although an unambiguous order rules social relationships, individual things and ideas coexist in a feast of incongruity that both baffles and amuses the outsider. Visitors to Japan realise almost immediately that they are among inveterate collectors of ideas, methods and gimmicks. I know coffee shops and other buildings done in a mixture of seven or nine different architectural styles. There are mandolin-playing clubs at universities. One more example among thousands of others: the Japanese have yodelling societies that give concerts (to which the Swiss cultural attaché is invited), with the yodellers lined up on the stage in Swiss costumes. Ideas, too, are imported
en masse
. Bookstores are crammed with works translated from English, German and French. The translations rather often fail to convey the spirit and purpose of the originals, though something of their new ideas undoubtedly seeps through.

No other people in history, perhaps, has been required to absorb such a plethora of new ideas as the Japanese were in the second half of the nineteenth century, following the Meiji restoration. A multitude of magazines and study clubs saw to their dissemination throughout a nation being remade. But the ideas, which took members of the former warrior élite and the new class of educated commoners by storm, were generally divorced from the context in which they belonged. The intellectuals who introduced them often made their selection with a practical purpose in mind. The outside world had become a bazaar where one could pick and choose religion, moral standards, art and political systems to be used as tools for modernisation, for strengthening the country, for catching up with other states.

Japan’s only philosopher of some international repute, Nishida Kitaro, remembered how in lectures at Tokyo Imperial University in 1914 his German-trained teacher, Dr Raphael Koeber, inveighed against the half-baked theories of Japanese intellectuals. As Koeber put it: ‘These scholars import only the flowers which amaze people, without trying to transplant the roots. As a result we have people who are greatly admired for bringing the flowers, but we cannot find the plants that should be producing them.’
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The medley of translations from French, German and English, the tumult of opinion which the opened floodgates had let in, produced no widely persuasive approach to life based on a set of consistent ideas. The more serious thinkers, having once begun to question the validity of their traditional learning, tended to react so vehemently that they sometimes lost their intellectual bearings completely. A rare exception was the liberal scholar Yoshino Sakuzo (1878–1933), who achieved an integrated view of society and had independent, realistic ideas about the direction in which the Japanese political system ought to be developed.

It became a habit among Japanese intellectuals to argue interminably about minor points of categorisation. Questions such as whether the Sino-Japanese War was a ‘nationalist’ or an ‘imperialist’ war can still excite some of them. Before and again after the Second World War, the community of Japanese Marxists was torn by a controversy as to whether or not Japanese society was still a ‘feudal’ one – since, if it were, this would necessitate a quick run through the bourgeois stage before a socialist revolution could take place. This grand debate divided a considerable part of the academic world into a
koza
and a
rono
faction, the latter believing that capitalism had already created enough of a working class to prepare for the proletarian take-over.
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Often, one Western idea would be seized on to criticise and counteract another, without any attempt to relate either of them to Japanese experience. For all practical purposes, most of the gorging on abstract Western learning that occurred from the Meiji period until the surging nationalism of the 1930s has left the Japanese heirs to a farrago of disjointed, ill-digested bits and pieces of knowledge.

Some post-war Japanese intellectuals such as political theorist Maruyama Masao and his followers seem to be bothered by the continued refusal to apply universal principles by which the political process and individual purposes can be judged; they refer to the lack of such principles as the cause of many shortcomings in Japanese life. More nationalistically inclined Japanese may, however, consider the ‘flexibility’of Japanese thought a virtue. Prime Minister Nakasone appeared proud of it when, in an interview on national television in August 1984, he implied that it has given the Japanese a great advantage over Westerners. He used the occasion to explain that Japanese are polytheistic, since, as individuals, they can accept Buddhism simultaneously with Shinto and Christianity, which makes Japanese thinking more tolerant than that of ’monotheistic Westerners’. It clearly did not occur to him that simultaneous acceptance of beliefs that are ultimately incompatible is for all practical purposes the same as believing in none of them.

Such examples do not encourage an understanding among the public that one cannot have one’s cake and eat it too. Edward Seidensticker remarks that

student thought, when elucidation is requested . . . tends to show an eclecticism that really cancels it out as thought. One enquirer asked a selected group of students what ideologies they thought themselves under the influence of. She offered this choice: ‘Marxism . . . non-Marxist socialism . . . liberalism . . . humanism . . . pragmatism . . . anarchism . . . nihilism . . . Existentialism . . . nationalism . . . idealism . . . hedonism . . . ideology-free . . . others.’ About half of the 47 students who described themselves as activists were content with Marxism alone. Three opted for liberalism and one for humanism, and all the rest professed adherence to multiple and frequently conflicting ideologies. Two of the subjects checked ten different items, and one checked every item on the list except ‘others’. Perhaps in other political cultures this would have an element of humour about it, but not in Japan. Nowhere do disparate ideologies rest more comfortably side by side than in the head of a Japanese, and the total effect, of course, is of a raging anti-intellectualism.
¹⁰

The avoidance of the distinctions and dichotomies considered essential by the religious and philosophical traditions of Mesopotamia, Persia, India, the West and China has been praised by the Japanese as quintessentially Japanese. The refusal to distinguish good from bad, for instance, was idealised as far back as the eighteenth century by one of Japan’s greatest classical scholars, Motoori Norinaga, who contrasted native Shinto with the foreign creeds: ‘The way of the gods does not contain a single argument that annoyingly evaluates things in terms of good or evil, right and wrong like the Confucian and the Buddhist Ways. It is opulent, big-hearted and refined.’
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This alleged absence of any fundamental duality in traditional Japanese thought is extolled even today. Contemporary theorists on the national character proudly proclaim that Japanese prefer to live with intellectual ambiguity.
¹²
The well-known populariser of Zen in the West, Suzuki Daisetz – who made a fortune with some forty books in English explaining truths ‘that cannot be captured in writing’ – never tired of pointing out the shortcomings of Western ‘dualistic logic’. Actually, the historical function of Japanese Zen, which thrived among the warrior class, was to lower the resistance of the individual against the blind obedience expected of him, as can be gathered from the common Zen imagery of ‘destroying’ or ‘extinguishing’ the mind.
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