9
A Comment on Guidebooks on Japan

When we arrived in Montreal in 1979, my son began to attend a high school, where he was given a textbook on history called The Story of Modern Nations, written in 1958 and used for the ninth and tenth grades. The textbook included a chapter on Japan, which contained the following summary of Japanese cultural history:

Japan has no great literature. No one has dared to write anything that might offend the upper classes. The literature of Japan has always followed fixed forms, just as the lives of the people themselves have been regulated by their rulers. The poetry of the Japanese shows their rigid observance of rules and patterns, as well as the love of making small, dainty things. The forms came originally from China and have been much the same for a thousand years. Almost the only poems are the tanka, a five-line poem of only thirty-one syllables, and an even smaller poem, the hokku (hok’koo), in three lines with only seventeen syllables. Often the poet describes only a small detail of a scene or a mood, but if he is accomplished he may suggest much more by these details. Japanese women excel in these small poems, in which each word is the ‘leaf of an idea’ which is supposed to suggest more than the word itself.¹¹³

The textbook goes on to make several other assertions about Japan which were factually wrong even in 1958. The above summary would be insufficient to explain The Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki of the Heian Period, a work unparalleled in Chinese or European literature, and the egalitarian social thought of And Sheki in the middle of the Edo Period, whose work was highly esteemed by E.H.Norman, a Canadian historian, and which preceded that of J.J.Rousseau.

These factual inadequacies aside, the comparative perspective of the book seems to me to be useful. It could have gone further and described Japan’s hasty imitation of Commodore Perry’s forcible opening of the country in the relationship with Korea in the early Meiji Period. The imitation has been carried out in such a variety of ways that Japan serves as a useful mirror for Western civilization itself. In the prosperity of the sixties and seventies, Japanese enterprise successfully adapted Western technological innovations in such a way that they profited more than the countries of their origin. At the same time, Japan discarded the dual wage structure that characterized the Japanese economy up to the 1960s. Group cohesiveness arising out of self-containment contributed to Japan’s success in the competition with the industry of other developed nations.

A different interpretation may be made of this cultural trend. A Mexican anthropologist, Ricardo d’Amare, tells of a Swedish engineer whose faith in Europe was shattered by what he saw on his trip to Japan. He had been raised in the belief that European civilization was like a magnificent tapestry, science and art embedded in love and a religious upbringing. In Japan he found odd techniques and beliefs of obviously European lineage combined piecemeal and functioning efficiently at a low cost. The people did not seem versed in the humanistic culture of Europe, but they none the less accomplished time-saving jobs in a way that was expedient enough. This Swedish engineer succumbed to a nervous breakdown. Perhaps he was an unusually susceptible character, but even so his story exemplifies a way of looking at Japanese culture which is humiliating to Europeans, and in being humiliating it teaches them something.

In mid-February 1978, a test was given to 61 sixth-formers in Hertfordshire in England as a prelude to a one-day conference on Japan. A clear majority agreed that religion still dominates the daily life of most Japanese, a claim which is hard to reconcile with the many surveys which reveal the Japanese as one of the most avowedly agnostic peoples in the world (which will, in my opinion,

42 Illustrations from a guidebook on Japan, showing the Japanese love of bathing and the custom of exchanging gifts

necessitate re-examination of the concept of religion in contemporary society). Twenty-five students believed that Japanese export success was based on the low wages paid to Japanese workers. In fact, the wages of Japanese industrial workers surpassed those of their British counterparts by about 1968–1970. Regarding Japan’s problems there was substantial agreement, with over-population coming top of the list (20), followed by lack of resources (11) and lack of land (8). Only four students named pollution. The test revealed a good deal of confusion between Japan and pre-modern China, as the children expected to see rickshaws, sampans and bound feet in contemporary Japan. Although the British children described scattered images of both

43 An image of the Japanese as portrayed by the Malaysian cartoonist Lat

industrialized and pre-industrial Japan, they did see the disjunction between the view of Japan as a traditional, poor, backward country and of Japan as a provider of modern industrial goods. They saw a need to emphasize that such products can only be manufactured by skilled and educated workers. Such implications aside, these children hit upon the main problem in understanding modern Japanese culture—that is, to recognize the disjunction between highly industrialized culture and traditional culture and to look for some plausible explanation.

The misconceptions of British schoolchildren regarding Japan are often duplicated in Western guidebooks. The Japan Handbook by Richard Tames,¹¹⁴ from which I have just quoted these former examples of the English conception of Japan, begins with ignorance and proceeds by further examining this ignorance, a variant of the Socratic method. Most of the misleading guidebooks to Japan give either a one-sided picture of traditional Japanese culture or a factually false account of the merging of the traditional and the industrial sides. Tokyo (Mitsuaki Usami and Cheung Hong-Chung, 1978),¹¹⁵ for instance, gives a colourful picture of the star festival of 7 July, and of streets full of people in traditional dress for the summer Nebuta Festival. It represents Tokyo as a festival city. In fact only a very small percentage of Tokyo’s citizens are descendants of residents of the old city, Edo, and most of the inhabitants of Tokyo have no connection with the local festivals today. The city is characterized by its uprootedness. The colourful festival photographed in this guidebook is a commercial embellishment of one of the shopping centres. The Nebuta Festival march is actually a local custom of northern Japan and in Tokyo is a commercial advertisement. Thus Tokyo does not provide a true picture of Tokyo life. The picture is tailored to suit the preconceived ideas of overseas tourists and to offer what they would like to see in Tokyo. It might be classed as a product of exoticism.

Products of exoticism spring also from the Japanese themselves. The Postwar Period in Literature (1979),¹¹⁶ a book of conversations between Ayukawa Nobuo and Yoshimoto Takaaki, the two foremost poets in postwar Japan, refers to the last stage of the literary output of Mishima Yukio. Yoshimoto speaks of Mishima as a writer of genius who succumbed in his last years to the temptation of exporting to the world literature market. Japanese culture offers a readily exportable product in the cult of the samurai which culminated in kamikaze attacks and harakiri. Kat Shichi, a critic radically opposed to Yoshimoto, says in The Age of Transformation (1979)¹¹⁷ that the Buddhism depicted in the last of Mishima’s novels, the Sea of Fertility, is a Buddhism designed for tourists from overseas. It has little relation to the Buddhism that has been part of Japanese life for 1,500 years. The exoticism of Mishima’s later works explains his popularity in Europe and North America.

Inadequate guidebooks try to satisfy the preconceived ideas of tourists instead of refuting them. More adequate guidebooks try to draw tourists’ attention towards the people of the country who do not speak the language in which the guidebook is written, an approach seldom taken even by the Japanologists of super states such as the Soviet Union and the U.S.A. To take a metaphor from the performing arts, in the harmonious dialogue between the guest god and the local god, it is more important to decipher the silent grimace and halting speech of the local god than the fluent, universalistic statement of the guest god. One can attempt to decipher the silence and faltering speech without attaining a mastery of Japanese. Even with an adequate knowledge of the Japanese language, one may fail to decipher the clues given in this faltering speech, if one is satisfied with the preconceived ideas of a universalization already achieved.

Where there is a disjunction between industrialization and tradition, there are many issues on which the guest god and the local god are engaged in dialogue. The guest god may not necessarily stand for industrialization and the local god may not necessarily stand for traditional culture. Although the central government has tended to promote industrialization, there have also been attempts to take over traditional culture and to change it into the form acceptable to the ruling elite and also to guests from the super powers.

Of the many issues, I will point to three which inadequate guidebooks tend to overlook. One is the disjunction between pollution and The Book of Seasons. Pollution is one of the gravest problems of which Japanese are conscious today. That comes naturally from the fact that Japan is a heavily industrialized, small island country. Most citizens are sympathetic to the anti-pollution movement, whether or not they actively participate. In the mind of contemporary Japanese there remains a picture of a time when the seasons could be enjoyed. This is the ideal of The Book of Seasons, compiled by Takizawa Bakin (1767–1848) in the late Edo Period, which gave guidelines for the composition of 17-syllable poems on various seasonal subjects.¹¹⁸ It is a calendar compiled in the form of an aesthetic dictionary, which classifies the subjects of poetry since the Nara Period. The use of seasonal subjects in poetry has existed since these early times, and became widely popular even among the lower classes in the Edo Period. The Book of Seasons thus represents a cult of the common man in that any man with a rudimentary knowledge of the Japanese language can produce a poem by following its guidelines. It is a way of enjoying what each season brings, an ideal which has taken on a new meaning in the era of pollution since the 1960s.

War and religion together form a second neglected problem. The image of war in the past and in the future is closely tied to the religious consciousness of the Japanese. Up to 1945, war meant victory and profit to the Japanese. Since then, it has meant hardship, humiliation and loss, although overseas wars such as the Korean and Vietnam wars have brought profit to Japan. The problem of how to avert another war involving the Japanese has been a part of the social consciousness of the common citizen even in the current era of prosperity. The revision of the present constitution in order to restore the right to wage war has never gained popular support. The spectacular ten-year growth of the Skagakkai from one remaining believer, Toda Jsei, to more than one million and a position as the third political force in parliament in 1980 may be attributed to the death of its leader Makiguchi Tsunesabur in prison during the war. There has been a movement toward the resurrection of state Shinto which has provided the ideological basis for the military expansion of Japan since the Meiji era. The progress of this movement in the near future will be a touchstone to the development of Japanese religious consciousness, which has centred on the preservation of the memory of war.

These two issues suggest that a fruitful project for the 1980s¹¹⁹ would be a re-examination of the Edo Period, an era of zero growth, and of how the norms of that period could be reformulated in conditions of growth.

There are problems that cannot be subsumed under that heading. In the Tames guidebook, British children note that Japan is a country where people speak the Japanese language. This is an insight into the cultural trait which I call self-containment. The defeat of 1945 and subsequent occupation made the Japanese conscious, for the first time in their history, of a third problem, the non-Japanese living in their country. The importance of the literature written in the Japanese language by Koreans resident in Japan gained unprecedented recognition in postwar Japan.¹²⁰ The Japanese became conscious of the social discrimination suffered by the 60,000 Koreans living in Japan, and of the value of maintaining the postwar declaration of non-belligerency. Their presence has made us conscious of the value of our constitution. The issues which arise from this problem elude the eye of the super state and of Japanologists bred in the ideology of such a super state.¹²¹

The relationship between the Japanese and the cultures of other countries has posed problems which were considered some time ago. How to apply The Book of Seasons to life in occupied territories in the South Sea islands was a matter of controversy among the haiku poets of the war years. Nagata Hidejir (1876– 1943), formerly Mayor of Tokyo and Minister of Communication, argued that each place in the world has its own book of seasons.¹²² Since he was an important adviser to the military administration of Singapore, his opinion obviously carried political weight. In 1918 the nationalist Ashizu Kjir strongly protested against the erection in Korea of a Shinto shrine with the founding goddess of Japan (Amaterasu mikami) as the object of worship.¹²³ He wrote, in an open letter to the government, that the Japanese Shinto tradition was to venerate the gods of each locality, and that a shrine built in Korea should therefore be dedicated to the gods of Korea. This, he argued, was the Japanese way. This way of thinking which was part of orthodox Japanese tradition, was not favoured by those in power in the prewar and war years, but was afforded new value in the 1960s. One of the main problems of the age of prosperity is to check the formless development of our national life. The Book of Seasons, with its cult of the common man, offers an ideal of the simple life which we must seek anew in the future post-growth period. In the meantime, we will seek, through various forms of greed and self-esteem, a more natural safeguard against the resurrection of militarism which seems to be favoured by the super state. Contemporary comic books, songs and Great River Dramas on television offer various signs of greed and self-regard. We must develop an adequate and reliable inconography to decipher these signs. On this topic also, most guidebooks and Japanologists in the U.S.A. and the Soviet Union are silent.

In respect to literature, the writers—such as Ibuse Masuji and Nakano Shigeharu who are important in the Japanese context but regarded as a insignificant in Europe—should be paid more attention.¹²⁴