Introduction

Our red-toothed, red-clawed world, attuned to the struggle for survival and dominance, reveres success, and its typical heroes are men and women whose cause has triumphed. Their victory is never without travail, and often its price is the hero's life. Yet, whether he survives to bask in the glory of his achievements like a Mohammed, a Marlborough, or a Washington, or proudly dies in action like a Nelson or a Saint Joan, the effort and sacrifice will, in the most pragmatic sense, have been worthwhile.

Japan, too, has its successful heroes, from the founding emperor, Jimmu, who (according to legend) subdued the barbarians in 660 B.C. and established an imperial dynasty that has reigned until this day, through the Forty-Seven Rōnin, who died in the proud knowledge that they had avenged their lord's disgrace, to Admiral Tōgō ("the Nelson of Japan"), who in the Russo-Japanese War showed that the little island kingdom in the Pacific could defeat a major Western power, and more recently scientific geniuses like Yukawa and Noguchi, whose discoveries confirm that the Japanese can also match foreigners in peaceful, practical ways.

There is another type of hero in the complex Japanese tradition, a man whose career usually belongs to a period of unrest and warfare and represents the very antithesis of an ethos of accomplishment. He is the man whose single-minded sincerity will not allow him to make the manoeuvres and compromises that are so often needed for mundane success. During the early years his courage and verve may propel him rapidly upwards, but he is wedded to the losing side and will ineluctably be cast down. Flinging himself after his painful destiny, he defies the dictates of convention and common sense, until eventually he is worsted by his enemy, the "successful survivor," who by his ruthlessly realistic politics manages to impose a new, more stable order on the world. Faced with defeat, the hero will typically take his own life in order to avoid the indignity of capture, vindicate his honour, and make a final assertion of his sincerity. His death is no temporary setback which will be redeemed by his followers, but represents an irrevocable collapse of the cause he has championed: in practical terms the struggle has been useless and, in many instances, counter-productive.

While it is true that Western history also includes great men who have ultimately been unable to compass their aims, if indeed they become established as heroes it is only despite their debacle. Napoleon's panegyrists rarely dwell on the period after Waterloo, whereas if he belonged to the Japanese tradition his cataclysm and its bitter aftermath would be central to the heroic legend.

This predilection for heroes who were unable to achieve their concrete objectives can teach us much about Japanese values and sensibility—and indirectly about our own as well. In a predominantly conformist society, whose members are overawed by authority and precedent, rash, defiant, emotionally honest men like Yoshitsune and Takamori have a particular appeal. The submissive majority, while bearing its discontents in safe silence, can find vicarious satisfaction in identifying itself emotionally with these individuals who waged their forlorn struggle against overwhelming odds; and the fact that all their efforts are crowned with failure lends them a pathos which characterizes the general vanity of human endeavour and makes them the most loved and evocative of heroes.

Even we in our success-worshipping culture can recognize the nobility and poignancy of those eager, outrageous, uncalculating men whose purity of purpose doomed them to a hard journey leading ultimately to disaster. While historical heroes in the West are mostly winners and while we have no strong tradition of empathy with historic failures, our literature ever since the Iliad and Oedipus Rex has accustomed us to the concept of the "hero as loser"; and especially in recent times there has been a tendency to respect those individuals who cannot or will not bow to the bitch-goddess Success. "Now all the truth is out," writes Yeats to a friend whose struggle has come to nothing:

Be secret and take defeat

From any brazen throat....

Bred to a harder thing

Than Triumph, turn away

And like a laughing string

Whereon mad fingers play

Amid a place of stone

Be secret and exult,

Because of all things known

That is most difficult.

The men who appear in this book belong to many different centuries and social systems and conform to no single pattern of behaviour or ideals; yet they were all "bred to a harder thing" and, taken together, they suggest the varieties of worldly defeat, the dignity it can bestow, and the reasons for its particular evocative appeal in the Japanese tradition.