Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (35 page)

While Winston Churchill was assuring the comatose Baldwin that Japan meant no harm, its economy was growing at a faster rate than any other nation, its population was rising by a million a year and its ruler was a god-king who was also insane. The old Emperor Meiji, under whom Japan had entered the modern world, had chosen his women carefully for their health as well as their beauty, and each evening would drop a silk handkerchief in front of the one who was to occupy his bed that night. But most of the children thus begotten were sickly nonetheless and no doctor was ever allowed to touch their divine persons. His heir Yoshihito, who reigned in theory until 1926, was clearly unbalanced. Though his regnal name, Taisho, signified ‘Great Righteousness’, he oscillated between storms of rage, in which he would lash at those around him with his riding-crop, and spasms of terror, dreading assassination. He sported a ferocious waxed moustache, in imitation of his idol, the Kaiser Wilhelm II, but he fell off his horse on parade, and when inspecting his soldiers sometimes struck and sometimes embraced them. On his last appearance before the Diet, he had rolled up his speech and, using it as a telescope, peered owlishly at the bobbing and bowing parliamentarians. After that he had been eased out in favour of his son Hirohito, known as Showa (’Enlightened Peace’), a timid creature interested in marine biology. He too feared assassins, as did all prominent male members of the family. The statesman Prince Ito had prudently married a sturdy tea-house girl who protected him from murderous samurai by stuffing him into the rubbish hole of his house and squatting on top (but they got him in the end).
¹

No western scholar who studies modern Japan can resist the feeling that it was a victim of the holistic principle whereby political events and moral tendencies have their consequences throughout the
world. Japan became infected with the relativism of the West, which induced a sinister hypertrophy of its own behavioural weaknesses and so cast itself into the very pit of twentieth-century horror. At the beginning of modern times Japan was a very remote country, in some respects closer to the society of ancient Egypt than to that of post-Renaissance Europe. The Emperor, or Tenno, was believed to be
ara-hito-gami
, ‘human, a person of the living present who rules over the land and its people and, at the same time, is a god’.
²
The first Tenno had begun his reign in 660
BC
, at the time of the Egyptian twenty-fifth dynasty, and the line had continued, sometimes by the use of adoption, for two and a half millennia. It was by far the oldest ruling house in the world, carrying with it, imprisoned in its dynastic amber, strange archaic continuities. In the sixteenth century Francis Xavier, the ‘apostle of the Indies’, had considered the Japanese he met to be ideal Christian converts by virtue of their tenacity and fortitude. But the internal disputes of the missionaries had led Japan to reject Christianity. In the second quarter of the seventeenth century it sealed itself off from the European world. It failed completely to absorb the notions of individual moral responsibility which were the gift of the Judaic and Christian tradition and retained strong vestiges of the collective accountability so characteristic of the antique world. In the 1850s, the West forced its way into this self-possessed society. A decade later, a large portion of the Japanese ruling class, fearing colonization or the fate of China, took a collective decision to carry out a revolution from above, adopt such western practices as were needful to independent survival, and turn itself into a powerful ‘modern’ nation. The so-called Meiji Restoration of 3 January 1868, which abolished the Shogunate or rule by palace major-domo and made the Emperor the actual sovereign, was pushed through with the deliberate object of making Japan
fukoku-kyohei
, ‘rich country, strong army’.

It is important to grasp that this decision by Japan to enter the modern world contained, from the start, an element of menace and was dictated as much by xenophobia as by admiration. The Japanese had always been adept at imitative absorption, but at a purely utilitarian level which, from a cultural viewpoint, was superficial. From her great innovatory neighbour, China, Japan had taken ceremonial, music, Confucian classics, Taoist sayings, types of Buddhist speculation, Tantric mysteries, Sung painting, Chinese verse-making and calendar-making. From the West, Japan now proceeded to take technology, medicine, administrative and business procedures, plus the dress thought appropriate for these new practices. But the social structure and ethical framework of Chinese civilization were largely rejected; and, while Japan displayed pragmatic
voracity in swallowing Western means, it showed little interest in Western ends: the ideals of classical antiquity or Renaissance humanism exercised little influence.
³

Indeed it is notable that Japan was attracted by modem novelty, not by ancient truth. In a sense the Japanese had always been modern-minded people: ‘modern since pre-history’.
⁴
They took aboard gimmickry and baubles, the technical and the meretricious, rather as a society woman adopts passing fashions. But their cultural matrix remained quite unaffected: the most characteristic cultural creations of Japan have no Chinese antecedents. Similarly, the Western importations from the mid-nineteenth century onwards left the social grammar of Japan quite untouched.
⁵

Nor did Japan’s long isolation imply serenity. Quite the contrary. Japan had none of China’s passivity and fatalistic decay. They were very different countries; wholly different peoples. The point has often been made that the Chinese live in the realm of space, the Japanese in time. China had developed, in the great northern plain where her civilization had its roots, a majestic, ordered cosmology, and was content to await its slow evolutions. It saw life in terms of repetitive cycles, like most oriental cultures. Japan was a collection of spidery, spinal islands, rather like ancient Greece, and was almost Western in its consciousness of linear development, hurrying from point to point with all deliberate speed. Japan had a concept of time and its urgency almost unique in non-Western cultures and consistent with a social stress of dynamism.
⁶
There was something restless, too, in Japan’s climate, as changeable and unpredictable as Britain’s, but far more violent. The islands are strung out from the sub-tropics to the sub-arctic; oriental monsoons and western cyclones play upon them simultaneously. As the German scholar Kurt Singer put it, ‘Relentlessly this archipelago is rocked with seismic shocks, invaded by storms, showered and pelted with rain, encircled by clouds and mists …. It is not space that rules this form of existence, but time, duration, spontaneous change, continuity of movement.’ The rapid succession of climatic extremes helps to explain, some Japanese believe, the violent oscillations in national conduct.
⁷

These national attributes, and the fact that the industrialization of Japan was imposed from above as the result of deliberate decisions by its élites, help to explain the astonishing rapidity of Japan’s progress. The movement was not a spontaneous reaction to market forces but an extraordinary national consensus, carried forward without any apparent dissenting voices. It thus had more in common with the state capitalism of pre-1914 Russia than the liberal capitalism of the West, though the class conflicts which tore Tsarist Russia
were absent. Under the Tenno and his court, the
gumbatsu
, or military chiefs, and the
zaibatsu
, or businessmen, worked in close harmony, in accordance with the ‘rich country-strong army’ programme. Within two generations huge industrial groups had emerged, Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Yasuda, Sumitomo, all closely linked to the Meiji government and the armed forces by subsidies and contracts. The 1914–18 war, which deprived Japan of traditional suppliers from Europe, and opened up new markets to her, accelerated her development towards self-sufficiency and industrial maturity. Steam tonnage rose from 1.5 to over 3 million tons. The index of manufacturing production, from an average of 160 in 1915–19, jumped to 313 in 1925–9, and in foreign trade the index (100 in 1913) moved to 126 in 1919 and 199 in 1929, with exports rising from 127 to 205 during the 1920s. By 1930 Japan had a population of 64 million, exactly twice what it had been at the beginning of the revolution-from-above in 1868, and it was already a major industrial power.
⁸

Comparing Japan’s revolutionary development with that of, say, Turkey – also imposed from above from 1908 onwards – it is easy to see the advantages of being an island kingdom, with natural frontiers, a homogeneous racial, religious and linguistic composition and, not least, a strong and ancient tradition of unity towards outsiders, none of which Turkey possessed.
⁹
Japan also had an important economic advantage which was often overlooked at the time (and since): a highly developed intermediate technology, with hundreds of thousands of skilled craftsmen and a tradition of workshop discipline going back many centuries.

Yet Japan had some fundamental weaknesses too, reflecting its archaism. Until 1945 it had no system of fixed law. It had maxims, behavioural codes, concepts of justice expressed in ideograms – exactly as in ancient Egypt. But it had no proper penal code; no system of statutory law; no judge-controlled code of common law either. The relationship between authority and those subject to it was hidden, often on important points. The constitution itself was uncertain. It did not impose a definite system of rights and duties. Prince Ito, who drew up the Meiji constitution, wrote a commentary on what it meant; but this book was a matter of dispute, and often out of official favour. The law was not sovereign. How could it be in a theocracy? But then – was Japan a theocracy? Ito thought it had been in the past, but no longer was; others took a different view. The matter was left ambiguous, as were many other legal and constitutional matters in Japan, until 1946, when the Emperor publicly announced that he was not a god. There was something vague and makeshift about the whole system of order in Japan. Honour, for
instance, was more important than hierarchy. It might sometimes be right to ignore the law (such as it was) and disobey a superior. But no one could quite tell until the occasion arose. Then a consensus would develop and the collective conscience would judge. Hence activist minorities, especially in the armed forces, were often able to defy their commanders, even the Emperor, and receive the endorsement of public opinion.
¹⁰

This absence of absolute lines between right and wrong, legality and illegality, law and disorder, made Japan peculiarly vulnerable to the relativism bred in the West after the First World War. But the weakness went back further. When in 1868 Japan turned to Europe for pragmatic guidance it looked for norms of international behaviour as well as technology. What did it find? Bismarckian Realpolitik. Thereafter came the scramble for Africa, the arms-race, the ferocity of Ludendorff’s war-machine and the cult of power through violence, culminating in Lenin’s triumphant
putsch.

The Japanese observed that European behaviour, however atrocious, was always internally justified by reference to some set of beliefs. Hence, to fortify themselves in a stern, competitive world, they refurbished their own ideologies, in accordance with what they perceived to be European principles of utility. This involved, in effect, inventing a state religion and a ruling morality, known as Shinto and bushido. Hitherto, in religious matters the Japanese had been syncretistic: they took elements of imported cults and used them for particular purposes – Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, even Christianity – without regard for logic or consistency. It is true that Shinto was first mentioned in Japanese annals as early as the reign of Yomei Tenno (585–587
AD
). It signified god in a pagan sense, going back to ancestral sun-gods and sun-goddesses, the primitive worship of ancestors and the idea of divine rulers. As such it was far less sophisticated than Buddhism and the other imperial religions of the Orient and it was only one of many elements in Japanese religious culture. But it was specifically and wholly Japanese, and therefore capable of being married to national aspirations. Hence with the Meiji Revolution a conscious decision was taken to turn it into a state religion. In 1875 it was officially separated from Buddhism and codified. In 1900 Shinto shrines were placed under the Ministry of the Interior. Regular emperor-worship was established, especially in the armed forces, and from the 1920s onwards a national code of ethics,
kokumin dotoku
, was taught in all the schools. With each Japanese military victory or imperial advance (the defeat of Russia in 1904–5 was a case in point) the state religion was consolidated and elaborated, and it is significant that the process culminated in 1941, when Japan joined the Second
World War and instituted private, popular and public religious ceremonies for the entire nation. Shinto, in brief, was transformed from a primitive, obsolescent and minority cult into an endorsement of a modern, totalitarian state, and so by a peculiarly odious irony, religion, which should have served to resist the secular horrors of the age, was used to sanctify them.

Nor was this all. Shinto, as the religion of expansionist nationalism, was deliberately underpinned by a refurbished and militarized version of the old code of knightly chivalry, bushido. In the early years of the century, bushido was defined by a Samurai professor, Dr Inazo Nitobe, as ‘to be contented with one’s position in life, to accept the natal irreversible status and to cultivate oneself within that allotted station, to be loyal to the master of the family, to value one’s ancestors, to train oneself in the military arts by cultivation and by discipline of one’s mind and body’.
¹¹
But until the twentieth century there were few references of any kind to bushido. Some doubted its very existence. Professor Hall Chamberlain, in an essay
The Invention of a New Religion
, published in 1912, wrote: ‘Bushido, as an institution or a code of rules, has never existed. The accounts given of it have been fabricated out of whole cloth, chiefly for foreign consumption …. Bushido was unknown until a decade or so ago.’
¹²
It
may have been a series of religious exercises, accessible to very few. At all events in the 1920s it was popularized as a code of military honour, identified with extreme nationalism and militarism, and became the justification for the most grotesque practices, first the murder of individuals, later mass-cruelty and slaughter. The ‘knights of bushido’ were the militant leadership of totalitarian Shintoism, the equivalent, in this oriental setting, of the ‘vanguard élite
s’
of Lenin and Mussolini, the blackshirts and brownshirts and Chekists of Europe. They embodied the ‘commanding moral force of [this] country … the totality of the moral instincts of the Japanese race’, according to Nitobe.
¹³
Here was a concept, superficially moralistic in tone, wholly relativistic in fact, which was dangerously akin to what Lenin termed ‘the revolutionary conscience’ and Hitler the ‘higher morality of the party’.