Imagining Japan
The Japanese Tradition and its Modern Interpretation
Robert N. Bellah
Introduction:
The Japanese Difference
Understanding Japan has preoccupied Japanese intellectuals for centuries and Westerners ever since the discovery of Japan in the sixteenth century. In the recent past the effort to understand Japan, variously to imagine it, has become, if anything, more frenetic than ever.1 If one is overly influenced by the welter of popular publications coming from within or outside of Japan on this subject, then one will be tempted to adopt either the latest Japanese self-interpretation, which comes in several closely related versions, but which can be summarized under the common term nihonjinron (the discourse about the Japanese), or one of the several Western interpretations that emphasize the exotic nature of Japan or its formidable combination of "tradition" and "modernity," views that are closely related to "Orientalism." These usually turn out to be not two temptations but one, for both of them emphasize Japanese uniqueness, Japanese exceptionalism, or Japanese particularism.
Although much of this writing is superficial, it is not my point that either the Japanese or the Western versions are wholly mistaken. Much contained in them is undoubtedly true. Nor does the weakness of this literature derive only from the fact that it emphasizes uniqueness but lacks a comparative perspective. There often is a comparative perspective but comparisons are used only to show how different Japan is, and has always been, from everybody else. It will be one of the purposes of this Introduction to locate Japan within a comparative spectrum, and not outside it; for the Japanese, like all peoples, are indeed unique, but they represent a set of possibilities within the normal range of human culture and society.
Although I will discuss some of this recent literature in this Introduction, the essays collected in this volume are largely concerned with an earlier period. The Japanese or Western "discourse about the Japanese" of recent years has taken place within a relatively benign international atmosphere in which Japan is considered an advanced industrial society and accepted as such in a variety of international organizations. During the 1980s there was some talk in the West of the Japanese threat to dominate the world economy for its own exclusive advantage, but since the collapse of the Japanese bubble economy at the beginning of the 1990s, there has been much less talk of that sort. If anything, Japan has been treated as something of an economic basket case, which should get its act together in order to emerge from its economic doldrums. None of this is particularly frightening, though the pressures are real enough.
The period with which most of the chapters in this volume are concerned was much more ominous: the years before and after 1945, the defeat of Japan at the end of World War II and the first occupation of Japan by a foreign military power. In that period Japanese identity was a matter of life and death, and the ways in which Japan was imagined were strongly contested. Watsuji Tetsuro and Ienaga Saburo, the figures treated most extensively in this book (in Chapters 2 and 3, respectively), though they wrote about many of the same subjects, could hardly be more different in their assessment of the Japanese tradition. Much recent nihonjinron literature reiterates, often with less subtlety and insight, what Watsuji had already said in the 1930s and early 1940s and much of the criticism of it reiterates what Ienaga said in the late 1940s and the 1950s. Maruyama Masao, treated briefly in Chapter 4, which is devoted to him (I will have more to say about him later in this Introduction), enormously influential in the decades right after 1945 but largely ignored today, is perhaps the most penetrating mind to appear in twentieth-century Japan and has his own interpretation of the Japanese experience. The issues with which the essays collected in this book are concerned, then, are still very much on the table in Japan and the world today, but Japan has not produced intellectuals of the stature of Watsuji, Ienaga, and Maruyama in recent years.
Previous Work
Before I turn to the main task of this Introduction, namely, to develop a comparative framework adequate to make sense of Japan, it may be helpful for me to make a brief autobiographical digression, especially since many readers will think of me primarily as a student of American society and religion and have no knowledge of my prior interest in Japan. I might begin by mentioning the connection with Japan of one of my best-known contributions to American studies, namely, my 1967 essay, "Civil Religion in America."2 The first version of what was to become that essay was delivered as a Fulbright lecture in the Spring of 1961 during my Fulbright year in Japan, soon after the Inaugural Address of John F. Kennedy, which plays a significant role in the essay. It was not an effort to speak to an American audience, but rather to explain to the Japanese, who had been so sternly lectured to by the Occupation authorities on the critical importance of the separation of church and state, why no American president could be inaugurated without mentioning God in his inaugural address. So my first tentative approach to American studies was from the point of view of Japan, and some acute reviewers have seen an East Asian perspective in all my work on the United States, work that emphasizes informal thought and practice as much as legal and institutional structures.
My doctoral dissertation, which was completed in 1955 and published in 1957 as Tokugawa Religion, was an effort to think of Japan not as "different" or the "Other" in any absolute sense, but as sharing similarities and differences with other modern societies in a comparative framework.3 In the first chapter of the book I used two sets of what Talcott Parsons called "pattern variables," a scheme that he developed from Max Weber's typology of social action, to describe Japanese society as characterized by the pattern variables of particularism (as opposed to universalism) and achievement (as opposed to ascription). By particularism I meant that in Japan considerations of relational context usually took precedence over considerations of abstract and universal principle. And by achievement I argued that in Japan persons were evaluated more in terms of what they could do than of what status they occupied. The latter point was more controversial than the former in terms of the general understanding of Japan, particularly in the Tokugawa period when social status was of great importance. But I argued that in the actual practices of life achievement was highly valued. As an example I gave the instance of a peasant boy, Tomita Kokei, who, when starting off from his home to attend the Confucian school in Edo, heard footsteps and turned around to see his mother running after him. He asked what was the matter and she replied, "If you do not succeed you need not return home."4 Since I described American society as characterized by the pattern variables of universalism and achievement, I was arguing that Japan was at this most general level as similar to as it was different from my own society.
But my effort to characterize Japan in terms of sociological variables was only introductory to the main purpose of the book, which was to argue that, though there was nothing like the Protestant Reformation that could have inaugurated modernity in Japan, there were functional equivalents of aspects of Protestantism that made the Japanese more capable than most other non-Western societies of responding effectively to the challenge of modernization when it came. In this case, where I was extending Weber's argument on religion and capitalism beyond what he had written, I was not arguing for Japan's uniqueness, but for some basic similarities to the West.5 It was just concerning this point that Maruyama Masao believed I had gone too far. Maruyama, Japan's leading social scientist at the time, criticized me for eliding too easily the differences between Japan and the West and for being insufficiently aware of the negative aspects of the Japanese tradition, and of Tokugawa society in particular. I will return to some reconsiderations of the Tokugawa period below.
My view of Japan in comparative perspective was developed further in a series of lectures that I delivered at International Christian University in Tokyo in the spring of 1961 under the title "Values and Social Change in Modern Japan," in which I developed a more critical perspective on aspects of the Japanese tradition, partly in response to Maruyama.6 In those lectures I described a series of Japanese efforts to attain a transcendental perspective, beginning with Shotoku Taishi in the seventh century, continuing with the major figures of Kamakura Buddhism in the thirteenth century, especially Shinran and Dogen, touching on Tokugawa Confucians such as Ogyu Sorai, and concluding with Christians since the Meiji period, particularly Uchimura Kanzo. I pointed out how in each case the moment of transcendence was quickly submerged. The particularistic "ground bass" of Japanese society that I had described in Tokugawa Religion reasserted itself, soon drowning out the transcendental melody that had appeared in the upper register. I did not use the term nonaxial, which S.N. Eisenstadt would use in his book Japanese Civilization, but the germ of that idea was present in those lectures.7 Although a comparative framework is implied in all the essays contained in this book, none of them returns to a consideration of a basic framework for thinking about Japanese culture and society in a comparative perspective as did Tokugawa Religion and "Values and Social Change in Modern Japan."8 I want to use the rest of this Introduction to develop such a framework.
Modernity and its Precursors
In both popular and scholarly discourse the distinction between societies that are "modern" from those that are "traditional" is hard to avoid, yet the current usage of the modern/traditional dichotomy is so riddled with untenable and unexamined presuppositions that it is virtually useless. The stereotypical contrast of a rapidly changing modernity with a stagnant and unchanging traditional society, an idea that, unfortunately, owes more than a little to Max Weber, is surely wrong. But something about modernity makes it different from earlier social conditions, and it has been sociology's task from the beginning to try to explain what that something is. It would not be an exaggeration to say that sociology began as an effort to explain modernity to itself. In so doing it was necessary for the founders of sociology—certainly for Marx, Weber, and Durkheim—to think systematically about what came before modernity in order to understand how modern societies are different from all preceding ones. Weber's notion of a development from societies based on kinship and neighborhood, through societies organized by bureaucracy or feudalism, to modern capitalism was a version of a story told in different ways by Marx and Durkheim as well. Coming out of this sociological tradition, my own effort to situate modernity in relation to what preceded it was first set forth in my 1964 article on religious evolution.9
In my version, drawing directly from Weber, religion played an important role in the emergence of modernity. Weber began his study of religion in 1904 with his famous The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. It is clear, however, that we must consider not only that essay but the place of the Protestant ethic argument in Weber's work as a whole. He believed that ascetic Protestantism was an indispensable catalyst for the emergence of a new form of society that he called "modern capitalism"—but which he saw as a new kind of civilization, not just a new kind of economy. Although circumscribed markets had existed for millennia within what Randall Collins calls "agrarian-coercive societies," never before the Reformation in the West had ideological, political, and economic resources crystallized to form such a new kind of civilization.10 Once established, however, capitalism became a worldwide phenomenon, even though taking different forms in different civilizational areas. Thus Protestantism, though occurring in only one tradition, was, indirectly but crucially, an indispensable precondition for the cross-cultural emergence of modernity.
In searching for the root causes of modernity and why it arose first in the West, Weber embarked on the most ambitious set of comparative studies ever undertaken. In the course of his study of the great traditions he came to believe that religious events in the first millennium b.c. were of critical importance. Within each of the world religions that emerged at that time arose prophets or saviors who radically rationalized previous forms of what Weber tended to call "magical religion." In each case the emergent figure (Confucius, the Buddha, the Hebrew prophets, Socrates, Jesus) preached a systematic form of ethical conduct quite different from the diffuse ritual and sacramental practices that preceded them. By calling these new symbolic forms "rationalized" Weber was pointing to the fact that they were more coherent, more cognitively and ethically universalizing, more potentially self-critical (reflexive), and more disengaged from the existing society than what preceded them. Karl Jaspers, Weber's close friend and student, called the period of the emergence of these religions, the first millennium b.c., the "Axial Age."11 S.N. Eisenstadt speaks of the world religions as axial religions and of their related civilizations as axial civilizations.12 If one follows Weber's argument that religion is the indispensable catalyst for the emergence of modernity, as I do, then one can see that the axial religions, even though they emerged millennia before modernity, were its indispensable precondition.
In my 1964 article I proposed a simplified way of looking at the shape of religious evolution. I argued that whereas tribal and archaic religions were primarily this-worldly in orientation, which is what Weber, perhaps unwisely, meant by the word magical, the axial religions were world-rejecting (and thus, for Weber, crucially, magic-rejecting), although they differed as to whether this rejection was to be worked out within the world (ethically), or as far as possible outside the world (mystically). It was the leverage of axial religion in a transcendental reference point, outside the world so to speak, that made it possible to criticize and in principle to revise the fundamental social and political premises of existing societies. Whereas in tribal and archaic societies self and society were seen as embedded in the natural cosmos, the axial religions and philosophies made it possible in principle for the self to become disembedded from society and society from the given world of nature. It should be remembered, however, that in its radical consistency axial religion was never more than the religion of a minority; the majority continued to entertain beliefs and practices continuous with archaic or even tribal religion, which is what Weber meant by the return to the garden of magic.
With the Protestant Reformation the belief in a radically transcendent God had dramatic this-worldly consequences: the consistent demands of an axial ethic were to be expected from everyone and in every sphere of daily life. An entirely new degree of disembeddedness of self from society and society from nature became possible. But in the subsequent development of modernity, though the this-worldly dimension remained dominant, its transcendental basis became transformed into immanentism, thus returning the modern world in a much different way to the this-worldly immanentism of preaxial times. The new form of immanentism, however, did not lead to a reembeddedness of self and society in the cosmos but rather to ever-increasing degrees of differentiation and disembeddedness. Weber clearly observed this transition, but viewed it almost entirely negatively. The modern world of rationalization would run on its own bureaucratic and economic energies without any transcendental sanction, would become an iron cage.13 Thus, although Weber was the modernization theorist par excellence, his was a dark view, not at all a triumphalist one, of where modernity is heading.
Let me try to place Japan within this evolutionary framework. In Japanese Civilization S.N. Eisenstadt speaks of Japan as a nonaxial civilization. It is not that Japan has not been exposed to axial religions and civilizations. Since at least the seventh century Japan has been deeply influenced by Buddhist and Confucian ideas, as well as by Indian and particularly Chinese civilization. And since the sixteenth century Japan has been influenced by Christianity and Western civilization. But in the face of these religious and civilizational influences the Japanese have not rejected their preaxial civilizational premises; instead they have continuously revised them without abandoning them. Outside cultural influences have been appreciated and understood with intelligence and sensitivity, but then used to bolster the nonaxial premises of Japanese society rather than to challenge them.
Because the Japanese have been aware of axial principles, have understood them thoroughly, and yet have rejected them, preferring instead to adapt them to the reformulation of their own archaic heritage, and because they have done so with dynamism and an openness to change so that they have not been "traditional" in the pejorative sense of the term, Eisenstadt argues that they should be called nonaxial rather than preaxial. Yet there is one sense in which Japanese civilization can be called preaxial. The underlying premises of Japanese society, though they can be reformulated with great sophistication, cannot be challenged. They are off the board, so to speak, when it comes to serious discussion of fundamental change. When in my essay "Values and Social Change in Modern Japan" I spoke of the Japanese "ground bass," I was referring to this preaxial element in Japanese culture; when I spoke of the "tradition of submerged transcendence," I was referring to the presence of axial traditions in Japan—Buddhist, Confucian, Christian, Marxist—that never quite succeeded in replacing the preaxial premises of Japanese culture. This is a first approximation in placing Japan in a comparative framework, one that relies heavily on Eisenstadt, but it needs more specificity.
The Formation of an Archaic State
The treatment of Japan so far in terms of cultural, and even specifically religious, traditions could be criticized as too "culturalogical," that is, as treating culture as an autonomous causal variable rather than as one always embedded in social structures and, more particularly, structures of power. Although Eisenstadt's Japanese Civilization has far more to say about structures of power than I have so far mentioned, it will be helpful to turn to another extremely valuable analysis of the Japanese case, Johann Arnason's Social Theory and Japanese Experience, to reflect on the ways in which power and culture have interacted in Japanese history from the beginning.14 Arnason suggests that it is key to understanding the Japanese case to see that it was in a process of state building when it first emerged on the historical stage. What preliterate Japan, that is Japan before the sixth century a.d., was like can only be reconstructed from archaeology and later, often problematic, written accounts. It appears that Japan had been divided into a large number of what can probably be called chieftainships (the Chinese records referred to them as "kingdoms" because that is how they thought of peripheral peoples), who were gradually being united by a paramount chieftainship located in the Yamato region of central Japan. Sometime, probably not long before the sixth century, this paramount chieftainship developed into an early state, something that could be compared to the state created by King Kamehameha I in the Hawaiian Islands at the end of the eighteenth century.15
Finally by the seventh and eighth centuries, when the evidence, though still problematic, becomes much more extensive, what one can observe is the conscious creation of an archaic state, using resources from the considerably more advanced civilization of the Chinese mainland to do so. By an early state I mean a paramount chieftainship that is just moving beyond a tribal confederation to establish a centralized government. The fact that even in the seventh century there was no fixed capital suggests just how tenuous this early state really was. It was not until 710 that a "permanent" capital was established at Nara (though it was only seventy-five years before it was abandoned for another capital). But it was from the rather fragile early state structure of the sixth century that the effort to establish a full-scale archaic state began. The effort is associated with the name of Shotoku Taishi (Prince Shotoku, 574-622). He sent large-scale embassies to China in 607, 608, and 614. These ambassadorial visits involved much more than diplomacy. Buddhist monks, scholars, artists, and artisans studied for a year or even several years, bringing back a wide range of material and ideal cultural artifacts on their return to Japan. Undoubtedly elements of Chinese culture had been imported from China or the Korean peninsula for centuries—rice agriculture had been spreading in Japan since several centuries before the Christian era—and Buddhism, which was probably not unknown even earlier, was officially received at the Yamato court in 552, but the kind of systematic importation that took place under Shotoku's regency was unusual. Many simple societies in history have acquired the culture of more advanced neighbors but in almost every such case it has been because they had been conquered by such a neighbor. It has often been remarked that Japan's deliberate self-transformation without the experience of conquest was repeated in the late nineteenth century when it was not Chinese but Western culture that was imported on a grand scale.
It is important to note that the transformation of Japan in the seventh and eighth centuries was in considerable part a response to changes in China, namely, the unification of the country after four centuries of disunity, first under the brief Sui Dynasty in 589, followed soon thereafter by the long-lasting T'ang dynasty beginning in 618. Although it is tempting to think of Japan as an "insular" culture developing in its own way relatively independent of the rest of the world, this has never been true. Significant changes in mainland East Asia, usually China, and later in the world at large, have always had important repercussions in Japan.
Stanley Tambiah, working primarily on Southeast Asia, has developed the idea of a "galactic polity" that helps to understand what was going on in East Asia at the time.16 An empire such as the T'ang focuses on an exemplary center, with regional administrations replicating the center. Military and political control in such premodern empires was seldom intense, but even when physical control of peripheral areas weakened, the influence of the exemplary center often persisted. The Sui and the early T'ang, for example, invaded Korea in an effort to make it a Chinese province. They were finally militarily unsuccessful, but the effort produced a unified Korea under the domination of the kingdom of Silla, which forced the T'ang to accept it as a tributary but autonomous state, at the same time that it undertook an internal restructuring on the T'ang model. Vietnam was administered by China through most of the T'ang Dynasty, directly if loosely, and here too a Chinese model of state and society was imposed that long outlasted direct Chinese control.17 Neither the Sui nor the T'ang ever attempted an invasion of Japan, though Japanese contingents were involved with one or another Korean kingdom during the struggles with the T'ang. But the powerful exemplary influence of T'ang China, felt in Central Asia in the west and Manchuria in the north as well as in Korea and Vietnam, had a major impact on Japan. This would not be the last time that changes on the mainland would have profound consequences for Japan.
I want to emphasize that the state being established was not an axial state that the contemporary Sui and T'ang Chinese models would have suggested—the resources for that degree of transformation simply did not exist in Japan—but an archaic state, typologically similar to that of the Shang Chinese state of the second millennium b.c. There are two indices, one structural, one cultural, that I would use to suggest why the new Japanese state that emerged in the seventh and eighth centuries was archaic and not axial. On the structural side, although a centralized state on the Chinese model was established, with a bureaucracy that administered land and tax registers and a conscript army, the hold of the great aristocratic lineages (the descendants of earlier tribal chieftains) was not broken. The Chinese idea of a bureaucracy staffed on the basis of merit as measured by an examination system never took hold. Bureaucratic offices were soon appropriated by lineages as their permanent possessions. The old uji (clan) system was undoubtedly reconstructed, but the principle of lineage was never broken through.
On the more cultural side, the radical (axial) implications of the Chinese conception of monarchy were rejected. Some notion of aristocratic descent from the gods was undoubtedly ancient in Japan as it was in many early societies, and the status of lineages could be judged by the status of the gods from whom they claimed descent in the polytheistic pantheon. That the Yamato chief claimed descent from the sun goddess was an expression of this kind of archaic logic. The Chinese notion that the emperor is the son of heaven could be apparently seamlessly adopted in Japan, but with one major problem. It is exactly what made the Chinese case axial that a polytheistic pantheon had been replaced by an emphasis on a heaven that judged rulers according to ethical standards and could transfer "the mandate of heaven" in cases where the ruler failed to live up to such standards. To replace 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.
Another aspect of the archaic quality of the Japanese state that was taking shape in this early period was the survival and reorganization of the preexisting religious cult. While in rural areas quite ancient cults have survived in all the advanced civilizations, in early Japan there was an effort to preserve and rationalize the older religious forms that would considerably later be referred to by the Sinified name of Shinto (the way of the Gods). Although in remote parts of the country early forms of ritual practice have survived for millennia, what would later be known as Shinto was a dynamic reformulation of indigenous beliefs and practices occurring as part of the state building of the seventh and eighth centuries and should not be confused with some timeless past before the introduction of Chinese influences. Indeed Chinese influences were essential in the reformulation of the native tradition. The two primary documents of Shinto, the Kojiki of 712 and the Nihongi of 720, were modeled on Chinese dynastic histories, even though they began with an account of the age of the gods. Undoubtedly the form they took was itself partially influenced by ideological considerations with respect to the Yamato ruling family and other aristocratic lineages and was thus part of the state-building process. In short, autochthonous and Chinese culture existed in a dynamic relationship in the newly forming archaic state and neither can be fully understood without the other.18
Buddhism is indeed one of the great axial religions, emphasizing the tension between the existing world and ultimate reality, one of the key marks of axial religion, as strongly as any known religious tradition ever has, but we must not imagine that the statues, texts, and rituals that were being gradually introduced to Japan at this early period added up to any such entity as we would envisage with the modern term "Buddhism." Although the transcendental Buddhist beliefs may have been appreciated by some Japanese intellectuals, as the remark attributed to Shotoku that "the world is a lie; only the Buddha is true" would indicate, the primary meaning of Buddhist beliefs and practices in early Japan was not axial but archaic. It was the magical power associated with Buddhist artifacts and rituals that was most desired, and it was Buddhist devotion as providing good fortune for the ruling house and the aristocratic lineages that brought it into favor.
During the Nara period (roughly the eighth century) six schools or lineages of Mahayana teaching were established, each with one or more temple-monasteries devoted to its study. For a long time, these were referred to by scholars as the six Nara sects (shu). It is now generally accepted that shu cannot be translated as "sect" except perhaps in Tokugawa and recent times. The translation "schools" is not entirely adequate either, but at least it gives the notion that these were nonexclusive teaching traditions—a monk could be inducted into more than one—and being trained in one did not mean lack of knowledge and interest in others. The newly emerging Japanese state in the Nara period was modeled on T'ang China; its fundamental ideology was Confucian. Confucian texts provided the basis for the education of officials, court ritual was largely Confucian, and the emperor was conceived of as the son of heaven in Confucian terms (an idea thought to be perfectly consistent with continued belief in his descent from the sun goddess). Yet the idea of the mandate of heaven was rejected. Confucianism explained natural disasters and military setbacks as caused by the failure of imperial virtue, and if they became serious enough, as justification for a change of dynasty. Because this possibility was not open to the Japanese, they turned to the Buddhists for alternative explanations of such disasters. Thus the temples could provide defense against the occurrence of such untoward events; and when they did occur, they provided both explanations of them in terms of the acts of evil spirits or demons and propitiatory rituals to mitigate their consequences.19 In accordance with T'ang precedent, Buddhist monks and nuns were regulated by state law, with ordinations strictly limited to authorized ordination platforms, only one of which was in Nara. While state control of ordination and the necessity to provide spiritual assistance to the state did limit the independence of the monastic community, or sangha, still the Nara schools developed considerable sophistication in their traditions and provided support for serious Buddhist practice for monks and a growing number of lay followers as well.
Early in the ninth century after the capital had been moved to Heian-kyo (present-day Kyoto), an entirely new form of Buddhism that would become pervasive for many centuries was introduced by the monk Kukai after he had returned from China in 806. In Japanese Buddhist studies this is called Esoteric Buddhism, but is also known as Vajrayana Buddhism or Tantric Buddhism, best known today from its Tibetan form. Ryuichi Abé in an important recent study has argued that Kukai should not be seen in the first instance as the "founder of the Shingon school," though he was later considered to be such, but as the person who introduced a whole new form of Buddhism, Esoteric Buddhism, which saw itself as a new "vehicle" (yana), that is, the Vajrayana, that included and superseded Mahayana, just as Mahayana had included and superseded Hinayana.20 That Kukai could have succeeded in this enterprise virtually single-handedly is a tribute to his stature both as a thinker and as a monastic politician. He persuaded the six Nara schools to accept the legitimacy of his new teaching and begin the process of integrating it with their older Mahayana traditions and he persuaded the imperial court to integrate Esoteric ritual at the heart of its annual ritual cycle.
One must not neglect to mention the other figure normally paired with Kukai, Saicho, who had returned from China in 805 and who really was, quite self-consciously, the founder of the Tendai school.21 Saicho had studied Esoteric Buddhism in China but had not reached nearly so advanced a stage as Kukai, with whom he studied after his return to Japan. Doctrinally Saicho was intermediate between the older Nara schools and Kukai because he believed that Tendai, focusing on the Lotus Sutra, was the only true Mahayana teaching and that the older sects (all of whom acknowledged the importance of the Lotus Sutra) were virtually Hinayana teachings. Without ever giving up its stress on the Lotus Sutra, Tendai did become in later centuries a major channel for the dissemination of Esoteric Buddhism. Institutionally, however, it was Tendai that insisted on its separate identity. Although a tradition tracing its origin to Kukai did develop as the Shingon school, Shingon, which is really another way of saying Esoteric Buddhism, permeated all subsequent teaching traditions. The spread of Esoteric Buddhism and its fusion with Exoteric teachings led to important institutional changes.
Kukai's teaching, as Abé has shown, brought a whole new level of Buddhist practice and embodiment into Japan. In this teaching Vairocana (Dainichi, "Great Sun") Buddha was the Buddha's dharma body. Unlike the humanly incarnated Buddha, Sakyamuni, or the heavenly Buddhas such as Amida, Vairocana Buddha did not use "skillful means," or teachings adapted to the condition of the believers, but rather taught the unmediated truth through every element in the universe. Indeed the universe was seen as a form of writing, a supreme mantra, although it required the appropriate practice to be able to "read" it. Kukai's Esoteric Buddhism can be seen both as a new level of doctrinal sophistication and as a reappropriation of an archaic form of spirituality.
Thomas Kasulis has described Kukai as "philosophizing in the archaic."22 Kasulis's point is that while philosophy is usually seen as antithetical to myth, as holding up the mythical to critical inspection, Kukai used Buddhist philosophy to defend an archaic structure of thought. At one point Kasulis speaks of Kukai as engaging in the "philosophizing of the archaic," which seems to be a good description of a long line of Japanese thinkers.23 They have used the materials of an axial tradition (in this case Buddhist, but in many cases Confucian as well), to justify a nonaxial position, often in a way that shows them thoroughly at home in the axial way of thinking. This might be called using the axial to overcome the axial, just as some Japanese thinkers early in World War II sought to "overcome the modern."
At the core of both Shingon and Tendai traditions is hongaku (original enlightenment) thought, namely, the idea that all beings are already enlightened and their only task is to realize it.24 This position was not an unusual one in the tradition of Mahayana Buddhism in China and it became even more widespread in Japan, but it is one that comes close to affirming the world as it is rather than holding it in tension with ultimate reality, thus undermining the axial core of Buddhist thought. As Ienaga Saburo puts it, the essential Buddhist logic of negation was overridden (this point is further discussed below in Chapter 2).
It might be noted that Confucianism and Buddhism, for opposite reasons, lent themselves to an archaic reinterpretation. As has often been noted, among the axial religions and philosophies, Confucianism has the heaviest "archaic mortgage," to use Eric Voegelin's term, in that it emphasizes the sacredness of kinship to an extraordinary degree, as well as respect for the authority of rulers. What makes Confucianism axial is the recognition of a transcendent heaven exercising a moral judgment over the rulers of this world. But ignoring that element of the teaching, as Japanese Confucians normally did, left most of the remaining Confucian views quite consistent with a particularistic archaic ethic. Buddhism, by contrast, pushed world-denial further than any other axial tradition. But it pushed it so far that in one important Mahayana teaching, namely, the idea that samsara (this world of suffering) is nirvana (enlightened release from this world), which was meant as a paradoxical declaration calling on the believers to open themselves to the possibility of enlightenment, could easily turn into a teaching of world acceptance consonant with an archaic worldview.
What is impressive about seventh- and eighth-century Japan was the degree of creativity and innovation displayed at both the structural and the cultural level. New institutions were set up wholesale, including a legal system based on Chinese models that would long endure, though not unchanged. Not only were the major traditions of continental thought, Buddhist, Confucian, even Taoist, thoroughly explored, but also the tradition of native myth and ritual was profoundly reconstructed. If Japan remained, as, given the materials at hand, it probably had to remain, archaic in terms of its underlying social and cultural premises, then it was an extremely dynamic archaism, indeed a newly constructed archaism, that was at issue.25 Far from a continuous "native" culture simply absorbing new cultural imports without being affected by them, the entire structural and cultural package of Nara and early Heian Japan was newly created from the ground up, using native and foreign materials to be sure, but reorganizing everything to form a distinctly new pattern.
One further feature of the Japanese pattern that became evident from early in the period of the great transformation was a system of rule that Maruyama Masao calls the basso ostinato of Japanese politics, using a musical metaphor similar to but more restricted in meaning than my use of ground bass.26 This is a pattern of thinking of government always from the point of view of those serving from below rather than from the point of view of those ruling from above. This could be interpreted as an archaic feature indicating that the governing function has not yet been clearly differentiated from the rest of society, though if this is the case it points to a pattern that is even prearchaic. The result in which Maruyama is interested is the tendency in different ways but at almost every period of Japanese history for effective rule to devolve to levels below, sometimes well below, those in titular authority. This pattern is clearest in the case of the imperial family itself, which, except perhaps briefly in the late seventh century, almost never ruled directly, but always through those who "served" it, who held the real power.27 Two consequences of this pattern are evident. One is the difficulty of placing responsibility for political actions or, in certain circumstances, finding anyone who will take responsibility for action when it is needed. Another was the impossibility of applying the mandate of heaven theory of responsible government to the highest levels of authority who practically never had themselves taken significant action. If the theory could be applied at all it had to be applied to the effective rather than the titular rulers. While this pattern created difficulties at many points in Japanese history, and was clearly frustrating to Maruyama who wanted to establish the idea of responsible constitutional government in Japan, it was also highly flexible and even dynamic, encouraging initiative from below rather than the stagnation of authority from above. So, as usual in Japan, what might be thought of as "primitive" has had powerful creative and innovative potentialities.
Military Rule
Arnason refers to the creation of an archaic state from the seventh to the ninth centuries, with the help of Chinese models adapted for Japanese use, as an example of primary state formation.28 The last official embassy to China was sent in 838. All contact was not lost, but the Japanese government felt official embassies were no longer safe in a period when the power of the T'ang Dynasty was collapsing. The end of official embassies was symptomatic of the fact that the period of intense institution building with the help of Chinese models was over.
What followed has been interpreted as the disintegration of the centralized state on the Chinese model and the resurgence of particularistic Japanese patterns. While this is not entirely wrong, more recent interpretations have stressed the spread of new social and cultural forms from the originally quite limited area of the old Yamato heartland to the rest of the archipelago. Growth in the agricultural economy, in part stimulated by the opening up of new lands for rice cultivation, went hand in hand with the slow but continuous increase of trade. Provincial elites nominally holding title from the imperial court were becoming ever more independent and relying on their own military power for protection.
But the warriors and the court were not the only major institutional players in medieval Japan. A third "influential party" (kenmon) was the great shrine/temple complexes that grew up in Japan from early Heian times.29 The erosion of the T'ang model of the Japanese state during the long centuries of the Heian period (roughly ninth to twelfth centuries) was nowhere more evident than in the religious institutions. Effective legal control of monks and nuns did not last much beyond the ninth century. As the shrine/temple complexes grew in wealth and power, high offices within them were monopolized by the offspring of aristocratic lineages who were promoted much more rapidly than the normal course of study would allow. As land holdings increased and military might supplied by "armed monks" (seldom ordained monks, but retainers of the complexes) grew, these institutions became virtually states within a state.
Allan Grapard has given us a superb study of one of the largest and most powerful of these complexes, the Kasuga Shrine/Kofukuji Temple complex in Nara.30 Grapard emphasizes the degree of interpenetration of "Shinto" and Buddhist elements, each requiring the other to make sense, in what he calls a combinative rather than a syncretic pattern. The shrine dates back to the eighth century and its deities were ancestral or tutelary deities of the Fujiwara family, the most powerful of the aristocratic lineages, closely related by marriage to the imperial line. Kofukuji served as a memorial temple for the spirits of departed members of the Fujiwara family. The temple continued to be one of the main centers of the Hosso school of Nara Buddhism, but permeated with Esoteric teachings as well. By the Kamakura period the complex had become the biggest landholder in Japan, effectively controlling Yamato Province, the heartland of the ancient dynasty. Naturally the abbot was normally a Fujiwara. Though ostensibly devoted to the imperial lineage through its reverence for the Fujiwara family so closely related to it, the complex had become a power so great that neither the court nor rising military groups could easily impose their will on it.31
Although great religious complexes such as the Kasuga Shrine/Kofukuji Temple could be seen simply as exploiters of peasant labor because of the land rents upon which they depended, they did, in turn, supply the populace of the province with cultural meaning through a grand ritual cycle and religious understandings of time and place. The idea of a Pure Land was brought down to earth through the notion that the shrine/temple complex was itself a "Pure Land in this world" (gense-jodo). According to Grapard, Kasuga was seen as "a sort of paradise on earth," a vision appearing in "the texts, paintings, rituals, and theatrical performance created at the multiplex over centuries."32
With the growth of the shrine/temple complexes and the pervasive influence of Esoteric Buddhism, the understanding of the imperial institution shifted gradually from a Confucian to a Buddhist one. In the Nara period the essentially Confucian state used Buddhism and its already associated native forms of worship to bolster its power. By the eleventh and twelfth centuries the idea of "the oneness of kingly law and Buddhist law" (buppo obo ichinyo) had developed, an idea that gave equal weight to both sides of the equation. Indeed the kingly law and the Buddhist law were said to be like the two wheels of a cart or the two wings of a bird: one could not survive without the other. Such was the degree to which the amalgam of Exoteric and Esoteric Buddhism ( the so-called kenmitsu-taisei, with its closely associated "Shinto" components very much part of the picture) had enveloped Japanese society by medieval times.33
As military power on the peripheries grew, especially in the northeast in the Kanto region, the area around present-day Tokyo, the possibility of a new locus of power appeared, leading to what Arnason, whose views on primary state formation we have found helpful above, calls "secondary state formation." In 1185 the process of secondary state formation was actualized in the founding of the Kamakura shogunate, a system of military rule that in some respects is comparable to European feudalism, with its headquarters in Kamakura, far from the old capital of Kyoto. But the imperial court in Kyoto was not displaced; it continued to wield some degree of power and a considerable degree of influence. Thus the primary state formation was not abandoned, but continued in reduced circumstances alongside the new secondary state formation. Although the Japanese case was in many ways unique, it has more similarities to the West than to China. In China the primary state formation, which was completed under the Ch'in and Han although it was recreated several times with significant innovations, remained faithful to its original pattern until the twentieth century, and no secondary state formation occurred. But in the West, after the fall of the Roman Empire, the rise of feudalism was an example of secondary state formation, that is, not the creation of a state from tribal beginnings, even though tribal peoples were involved, but the formation of new states after the collapse of, but to some degree on the basis of, an old one. And though the Roman emperor and his court did not survive in the West as the emperor did in Japan, the shadow of the older empire remained in the form of the Catholic Church with its monarchical leader, the pope, residing, significantly enough, in the old imperial capital, and wielding, if not power, then more than a little influence.
The Kamakura shogunate added new structures to the old state forms rather than replacing them, developing in the warrior (bushi) class a consciousness of its own importance and its right to a significant share of the agricultural surplus. I cannot here give the Kamakura regime the attention it deserves but can only comment on two significant moments that occurred during it. One of these was its successful defense of Japan against the attempted Mongol invasions of 1274 and 1281, successful in considerable part due to typhoons that destroyed the enemy ships, but nonetheless mobilizing the country in its own defense and thus contributing to its sense of common identity. The other is the emergence during the thirteenth century of the founders of several new Buddhist movements that would dominate popular Buddhism ever after.34 These new forms of Buddhism both recovered the radical "logic of negation," to use Ienaga's term, of original Buddhism and opened the door to new ways in which world denial could be collapsed into world affirmation.35 The most significant thing about the "new" forms of Buddhism was their emphasis on exclusive practices such as reciting the name of Amida Buddha or the title of the Lotus Sutra or "just sitting" in Zen meditation.36 These exclusive practices in some cases broke through the Esoteric/Exoteric system characteristic of earlier forms of Japanese Buddhism, though the capacity of the older forms to reappear even in the "new" sects should not be underestimated.
The whole subject of Kamakura Buddhism has been revolutionized since the following Chapter 1 was written.37 The new work particularly stresses that "old Buddhism," that is the Nara and Heian schools, continued to be vital and productive, participating in their own way in the new trends of the Kamakura period, and that the movements we think of as "new" were responding in complex ways to long-standing tendencies and problems in the older traditions. The use of the term "reformation," particularly if it carries Protestant Christian overtones, has been strongly criticized. In Chapter 1 I use the term reformation in a generic sense, indicating that Kamakura Buddhism is in no significant way parallel to the Protestant Reformation. Japan's relative geographical isolation—the Tsushima Strait is much wider than the Straits of Dover—protected it from foreign conquest and may have contributed to the capacity of the archaic religious tradition to resist radical reformation. In any case the Japanese state was not shattered by foreign conquest and the moment of religious transcendental insight, though not without significant consequences, never resulted in radical reform.
The very extent to which the Japanese economy was growing in both the Kamakura and its successor Ashikaga shogunates contributed to the increasing centrifugal tendencies, as outlying feudal lords became strong enough to assert their independent power, and the jerry-rigged combination of primary and secondary state formations proved incapable of maintaining centralized control. By the early sixteenth century the country was more or less continuously at war, and the period is referred to, on the analogy with pre-Ch'in China, as the Period of the Warring States (Sengoku Jidai). The result of these incessant wars was the emergence of three successive unifiers at the end of the sixteenth century—Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu. In 1600 the third, Ieyasu, founded a military regime of unprecedented strength and stability, lasting unchallenged until the confrontation with the West in the mid-nineteenth century. It is worth considering for a moment the radical implications of Nobunaga's assault on the inherited institutional pattern.
Nobunaga used a term for the realm, tenka (literally, all under heaven), which had been used by the Ashikaga shoguns, but he gave it a radical twist. In Chinese terms, the tenka included ruler and people and legitimated the ruler by the at least tacit acceptance of the people. Nobunaga identified the tenka with his own person and with his sheer military power, taking as his motto tenka fubu, which Neil McMullin translates as "Rule the Realm by Force."38 Not only did Nobunaga eliminate the last of the Ashikaga shoguns, but it was not clear by the time of his early death whether he might not have eliminated the imperial court as well. Unlike his two successors, he based his legitimacy on himself, not on some assumed delegation from above. Although he did not live to make clear the ultimate shape he would have given the polity, he did carry out one transformation of epic proportions: the destruction of the independent power of Buddhism. Even in the late sixteenth century when Sengoku daimyo had built up centers of regional power greater than ever before, some of the great shrine/temple complexes could still rival them. In addition, the followers of the Honganji school of Jodo Shinshu had created a new form of military power, founded more on the alliance (ikki) of independent farmers and local samurai than on the landed estates of the temple complexes. In any case, when Nobunaga set out to unify the country he faced three great opponents, the other daimyo, the shrine/temple complexes, and the Honganji federations. The fact that two of these were Buddhist organizations indicates how powerful Buddhism still was. While Nobunaga succeeded in reducing most of the daimyo, he utterly destroyed his Buddhist opponents. His military success against them was by far not the only reason for the subsequent decline of Buddhism from its formerly central influence on Japanese culture, but it was a significant factor in that decline.39 In any case after Nobunaga burned the great temple complex on Mt. Hiei and slaughtered all its inhabitants it was clear that the era of "kingly law and Buddhist law" was over. Whatever tenka was and whatever form it would take in Nobunaga's successors it was something very different from what had existed before. As one court noble lamented after the destruction of Mt. Hiei, "the bird has lost a wing, the cart a wheel."40
According to Herman Ooms in his book Tokugawa Ideology, all three unifiers sought religious legitimation independent of the imperial court, even though Hideyoshi and Ieyasu accepted court office.41 Nobunaga and Hideyoshi each claimed divine status for himself, Nobunaga perhaps going the farthest, constructing a palace designed as a microcosm of the universe with himself at the pinnacle and with quarters for the emperor when he was to come to pay tribute to Nobunaga. Nobunaga's self-divinization was cut short by an early death, but Hideyoshi lived long enough to see his own cult flourishing throughout the country. Ieyasu was deified only after his death. There is nothing surprising in the divinization of human beings in an archaic culture—one has only to think of divinized heroes in ancient Greece or the divinization of rulers in the Hellenistic and Roman Empires. And the divinization of human beings has continued up to the twentieth century: remember the great shrine to the Meiji emperor in Tokyo, but also the shrine to the spirit of General Nogi, who, with his wife, committed ritual suicide on the day of the Meiji emperor's funeral in 1912. What is surprising is not so much the self-divinization of the great unifiers as the fact that they toyed with the idea of surpassing or at least rivaling the emperor.
It is a tribute to the mystique of the imperial line that it survived at all in the Period of Warring States, for its resources were extremely limited and it was treated with little respect by the rival warlords. Yet even the greatest of them hesitated to replace the imperial line. In thinking about the relation of culture and power it is worth remembering that sheer naked military power has probably never been exercised in Japan so directly as by the three great unifiers. Their military control was so absolute that it would have been no problem for them to abolish the imperial house. The survival of the imperial line in such a situation can only be seen as a triumph of powerless culture in the face of military power of doubtful cultural legitimacy.
An occasion that could have posed a severe threat to the imperial line is reported by Ooms on the basis of "soft" evidence, namely, that one of Ieyasu's closest advisors suggested in 1615 that the imperial family be confined to Ise, the shrine of the sun goddess, where it would perform only ritual duties, and Ieyasu would take the title of son of heaven, on an equal level with the emperor.42 That Ieyasu, while severely limiting the prestige and influence of the imperial family, not only did not take that advice but apparently never considered simply extirpating the imperial line speaks volumes about the Japanese pattern.
Another kind of rival to the unification of Japan under warrior rule came from religious groups. It is well known that the unification of the country was accompanied by the persecution of Christian converts, a persecution that was begun by Hideyoshi and completed by the first three Tokugawa shoguns, ending with the brutal repression of the Shimabara rebellion of Christian peasants in Western Kyushu in 1637-38. It is less well known that Pure Land and Nichiren sects that had descended from the Kamakura period and had become well entrenched in several parts of the country were also persecuted by the unifiers. Nobunaga had been particularly brutal in putting down the Honganji federations, peasant groups organized on the basis of their fervent Pure Land belief and who refused to admit the legitimacy of any rulers other than the emperor or the leaders of their own sect. Some extreme followers of the teachings of Nichiren refused to accept the legitimacy of any rule other than that of the Buddha.43 If Pure Land and Nichiren followers were suspect for nurturing a loyalty to authorities beyond this world, so especially were Christians, and though the Pure Land sects and (most of ) the Nichiren sects could be brought to heel, Christianity had to be destroyed.44 Archaic culture is remarkably tolerant of religious diversity except when its own basic premises are called in question. Axial religions can be tolerated so long as they downplay their radical implications, and especially when they can accommodate themselves to the archaic pattern, as Christians later would learn to do, but when they attempt to realize their axial principles or even seem to, particularly in the political sphere, persecution has been severe on more than one occasion.
Tokugawa Japan
The Tokugawa shoguns completed what Nobunaga and Hideyoshi had begun: the pacification of the country, the confiscation of weapons from the peasantry, the carrying out of land surveys for purposes of taxation and other measures that guaranteed a degree of central control not evident in Japan since the seventh century. A two-level system of government was established with the center of the main island controlled by the Tokugawa house, its branch lineages or its direct vassals, and with the feudal lords who had submitted only after Ieyasu's final victory in 1600 confined to more distant parts of the country and required to keep their wives and children in Edo (modern-day Tokyo), the Tokugawa capital, and spend alternate years there themselves. The Tokugawa regime also outlawed firearms, which had begun to be used after the Europeans had taught the Japanese how to make them at the end of the sixteenth century, a ban unmatched elsewhere in the world.
The stability of the complex and not very intensive system of Tokugawa rule was due in part to internal pacification, which precluded internal challenges, and to the remoteness and isolation of the country. Japan's isolation has been, until recently, attributed to a policy of national seclusion (sakoku), which was believed to have been initiated by Tokugawa edicts in the 1630s restricting Japanese trade to the Dutch and the Chinese at the port of Nagasaki and prohibiting contact with all other foreigners. In fact, however, what the decrees did was to prohibit contact only with the Spanish and Portuguese, and that because of their connection with unwanted missionaries, not because of a desire to restrict trade. Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi has shown conclusively that Japan's isolation from foreign trade in the seventeenth century was due largely to the Dutch control of the seas in East Asian waters and their unwillingness to share Japanese trade with others, not with any actions of the Japanese. He shows that the first serious statement of a general policy of isolation (sakoku) came only in 1793 from the hand of Matsudaira Sadanobu, then the effective head of the Tokugawa government, and was not officially promulgated as Tokugawa policy until the Expulsion Edict of 1825.45 In short, it was rising anxiety about foreign contact at the end of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that led the Japanese to project back to the early years of the Tokugawa regime a previously nonexistent policy of exclusion, instead of realizing that Japan's relative isolation had come about de facto for reasons beyond Japan's control.
It is only worth dwelling on the lateness of the closed-country policy as official doctrine because it is one indication that the Tokugawa period was not stagnant as once assumed, but rather full of vital and creative initiatives in many fields. Peace and stability allowed for continuous economic growth in agriculture and trade, increasing urbanization, and the rise of literacy beyond the level then current in any Western country. The Japanese economy had reached an early modern level of mercantile capitalism comparable to the West before the Industrial Revolution, and through the export of silver and copper (largely to China) played a significant role in the world economy during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.46 Although Japan rejected firearms (until toward the end of the Tokugawa period when self-defense became an issue), it did not reject other Western technological advances. Dutch studies (Rangaku) kept the Japanese abreast of developments in the West in science and medicine through the one Western language that was available to them.
How to think of the Tokugawa state in comparative terms has not been easy and has produced no general consensus. "Centralized feudalism," which approaches being a contradiction in terms, nonetheless makes a certain sense, although the government was not completely centralized and feudalism survived in only a very diluted sense: there were feudal lords (daimyo) who held fiefs, but most samurai were not landholders but officeholders. One of the other options sometimes suggested, "absolutism," does not apply to the Tokugawa state in any strong sense. Perhaps the most accurate way of characterizing the Tokugawa polity would be to call it, in Weberian terms, a somewhat decentralized patrimonial bureaucracy. Tokugawa rule was, on the whole, indirect; the shogunate issued instructions for just about every social unit in the country—family, temple, village, guild, feudal domain—but allowed a great deal of autonomy to them, including the responsibility of self-policing.47 The "social capital" of modern Japan owes more than a little to this Tokugawa pattern of delegated authority, which allowed a great deal of initiative from below.
Given how advanced Japan was in many respects, behind the West in economic development, but certainly not far behind at the moment of the opening of the country, it might seem awkward to insist, as I do, that Japanese culture and society in the Tokugawa period can still be characterized as nonaxial, with a powerful archaic ground bass. The capacity to use the axial against the axial, while continuing to be strongly creative and innovative, is evident in the intellectual and religious life of the period. Again I would like to turn to Herman Ooms's remarkable book Tokugawa Ideology to clarify something central about the role of thought in Tokugawa political life. Ooms has shown that the idea that Ieyasu or any of the early Tokugawa shoguns established Neo-Confucianism, as taught by Fujiwara Seika and Hayashi Razan, as an official orthodoxy is simply false and has become the accepted view only because the self-aggrandizing retrospective account of the Hayashi school has been taken as fact. Actually there would not be anything like an official orthodoxy until Matsudaira Sadanobu's (1758-1829) Ban on Heterodoxy of 1790 (the same Matsudaira who first made the sakoku policy official).48 What served to legitimate the new Tokugawa regime, and what was uppermost in the minds of the early shoguns and their closest advisors, was not ideas, but ritual.
Ooms describes a number of ways in which the early Tokugawa shoguns used ritual to give themselves legitimacy, but I will mention only one, the worship of the divinized spirit of Ieyasu at the newly created shrine complex at Nikko, a shrine given the same status as the great shrine of the sun goddess at Ise by imperial decree. The Nikko cult was not intended to appeal to the general populace, though in late Tokugawa times it did attract commoner worshipers. It was above all a political cult for the warrior class, that is, the feudal lords and house retainers of the Tokugawa. But the imperial family was required to send an annual mission to Nikko, while the Tokugawa family sent no comparable mission to Ise. Ooms argues that the intention was to establish a parallel triangle of Nikko, Edo, and the Tokugawa house to the triangle of Ise, Kyoto, and the imperial house. The imperial court was not eliminated, but it was isolated and ignored, while the glories of the shogunate were displayed in Edo and Nikko.49 Ritual is one of the most basic elements in human culture and is absent in no society. But axial civilizations base themselves above all on the word, the written word, the book, even though they never abandon ritual entirely. That the early Tokugawa shoguns, in creating the structure of their symbolic legitimacy, were much more concerned with ritual than with any verbal orthodoxy is evidence that archaism survived even in the dynamic society that Japan was becoming.
Ooms describes in detail the first comprehensive effort to give a literate defense of the Tokugawa regime, beginning only in the late seventeenth century, that of Yamazaki Ansai (1618-82), with its combination of Neo-Confucianism and Shinto. Ooms believes that Ansai's elaborate system was prototypical of all subsequent Japanese nationalist ideologies, but he points out that Ansai was neither authorized nor encouraged by the political authorities to produce his synthesis, nor did it have any status as an official ideology.50 Ansai, though he was thoroughly at home in Neo-Confucian texts as few of his contemporary scholars were, "erased," as Ooms puts it, that aspect of Confucianism that would justify replacing an immoral overlord, instead arguing that "rulers, whether virtuous or depraved, had to be served with blind loyalty."51 The nonaxial presuppositions of the most articulate of early Tokugawa ideologists are thus evident.
Although it could not be said that there was a free market in ideas in the Tokugawa period—there were clear limits to what could be said, and some of them are discussed below in Chapter 5—the range of possibilities was still considerable, and Tokugawa interest in thought control minimal. A wide range of Confucian schools flourished, some of them intensely critical of the supposed Neo-Confucian orthodoxy. The Buddhist establishment, which had been the guardian of intellectual life in pre-Tokugawa times, and out of which all the early Tokugawa thinkers came, including Confucians and Shintoists, soon lost its monopoly on intellectual production and on the whole produced only mediocre thinkers through most of the period. Confucianism and Shinto, by contrast, produced original thinkers with widespread influence.
Perhaps the greatest Confucian scholar of the period, Ogyu Sorai (1666-1728), was anything but orthodox. Stimulated by contemporary Chinese philology, Sorai wanted to return to the original Confucian texts, of which he was a great master, and avoid what were to him the distortions of Neo-Confucianism. His position was historicist, as Tetsuo Najita has emphasized, and practical, taking the existing social order as his starting point and avoiding metaphysics on the one hand or institutions that had no current practical meaning, such as the imperial house, on the other.52 He took as his model the human creation of social order by the ancient kings, as described in the early Confucian texts, but believed that rulers had to deal with the social reality that they found in existence and not attempt to recreate any preexisting ideal order. In so doing they were to nurture the potentialities of the people so that the variety of social types could realize themselves in a good social order. His iconoclasm and admiration for things Chinese earned him criticism ever after from those who thought like Yamazaki Ansai. He was singled out for attack in Sadanobu's Ban on Heterodoxy, and he was the only major Tokugawa scholar not to receive honors from the Japanese government after the Meiji Restoration, but during his own lifetime he was not bothered and even served as an advisor to the regime.53 He was the focus of lifelong interest for Maruyama Masao.
Among the popular classes, Ishida Baigan, the founder of the Shingaku movement which I studied in Tokugawa Religion, was only one of many who were opening up new possibilities of social and cultural life in the midst of the Tokugawa period. Tetsuo Najita has studied the Kaitokudo Academy, a merchant school in Osaka, that carried on lively debates about all kinds of issues of the day.54 More recently he has studied the Tekijuku, another Osaka academy, but this one devoted to Dutch studies (Rangaku), and has written about one of its leading figures, Ogata Koan. What Najita found of interest was Koan's self-confidence in the face of Western learning. His interest was in medicine, and in that field there was much new information to be studied and translations to be made. But on matters of hygiene, exercise, and diet, where the Japanese were already aware of what was necessary, he could ignore his Western sources. In short, Koan studied Dutch books not in order to become Westernized or even to become modernized, but just because they contained useful information that was relevant in a vital and growing society.55 Many other examples of creativity from middle and late Tokugawa times could be given. The great printmaker Hokusai lived a long and productive life. Perhaps his most productive period was in his eighties, when, under the sponsorship of a wealthy farmer, he moved to a mountain village in Nagano and painted some of his greatest works, calling himself "the mad old painter."56
What these examples illustrate is that in the midst of the period of the closed country (sakoku) there was a remarkable spirit of open country (kaikoku). What was important was not the source of the ideas—whether they came from India or China or the West—but how they could help in thinking through the problems of the day—scientific, economic, social, or spiritual. We might almost say that although figures such as I have been describing lived under the repressive and closed Tokugawa regime, they were surrounded by the spirit of kaikokushugi (openness).
In short, the Tokugawa government, while quite capable of exercising brutal force when it wanted to, relied more on an implicit public acceptance of the social order than on the enforcement of an official ideology. I am not arguing that the lower classes, particularly the peasants, were not oppressed in Tokugawa times. Barrington Moore, in a review of four important books on peasant revolts in the Tokugawa period, holds that "on the basis of the evidence in these books, the peasants under the Tokugawa shogunate appear as the most oppressed and exploited in any agrarian society known to me."57 Nonetheless the degree and extent of violent rebellion was significantly less than in comparable agrarian societies. Part of the reason was localism: revolts in one area seldom spread to other regions. But a significant factor was the belief in the minds of the peasants that what they wanted was not to overthrow the regime, but to have it act on the principle of "benevolent rule" that it claimed to embody. Indeed, the Bakufu (the term used for the Tokugawa military government), while punishing rebel leaders with death, frequently also punished feudal lords or officials in whose jurisdiction rebellions had occurred, blaming them for the conditions leading to such violence.
Another indication of the unusual nature of Tokugawa rule is the fact that mass pilgrimages to Ise on several occasions during the Tokugawa period occurred with a minimum of social disruption. While in ordinary years some 300,000 to 400,000 pilgrims visited Ise, in the great periodic pilgrimage years called okage-mairi many times those numbers were involved. In 1705 as many as 3,620,000 individuals visited Ise, and in 1830 more than 5,000,000 people came. In most agrarian societies the movement of such large numbers of people would have led to serious social disorder and breakdown, yet no such disruption occurred in Japan. We can account for this in part because the government and the wealthier classes, instead of trying to prevent the pilgrimage, supplied aid to the pilgrims in varying degrees, and in part because the thoughts of the pilgrims were devoted either to the idea that worldly blessings would result from making the pilgrimage, or just to the enjoyment of a holiday from ordinary employment. Nonetheless Helen Hardacre notes of the Ise cult that "a connection between the deities enshrined there and the imperial court was generally known," so the Ise pilgrimage kept the existence of the imperial institution alive in popular consciousness.58 In many respects the ee-ja-nai-ka and yonaoshi movements at the end of the Tokugawa period expressed more a hope for the fulfillment of the ethical ideals of the people rather than a desire for revolution.59
With this background in mind, I think we can understand why a movement such as Shingaku, founded by Ishida Baigan, which in Tokugawa Religion I compared to Protestantism in terms of its social function, was neither suppressed nor did it cause great social and ideological conflict. The Bakufu had developed a vigorous religious policy in the seventeenth century, one aimed at outlawing any religious group that explicitly or implicitly questioned Bakufu authority. This policy was aimed mainly at Christians but also at any Buddhist group that attempted to maintain independence of Bakufu authority. One of the Nichiren sects, the Fujufuse, which was particularly recalcitrant to Bakufu authority, was outlawed repeatedly in the seventeenth century, and after the suppression edict of 1663 it was vigorously rooted out.60 But the suppression of religious groups beyond the pale did not mean that everyone had to accept a single orthodoxy, for the Bakufu favored no particular group, insisting only that people belong to one of the "normal" religious sects, that is, those that accepted Bakufu authority. Thus there was no equivalent to an established Catholic Church with doctrinal orthodoxy that movements such as Shingaku had to confront, and such new movements, though eliciting snide comments from older groups, led to no social conflict.
The decline of Buddhism as a creative force in the Tokugawa period has led some to describe it as a period of secularization. Such a description not only overlooks the religious dimension of the vigorous Confucian schools that were flourishing then but also fails to account for the resurgence of Shinto, especially in the form of Kokugaku, which has been translated literally as National Learning, or more loosely as Nativism. Kokugaku has been seen as an ideology supporting the Bakufu or as one covertly opposing it. I believe, however, that the Kokugaku thinkers, especially Hirata Atsutane and some of his students, were attempting to give a religious interpretation to the Japanese tradition that they were trying to recover. They were offering another version of what they took to be authentically Japanese: the idealized village. Kokugaku's appeal in late Tokugawa times to rich peasants in particular suggests their concern with recovering a communal ethic in a period when economic forces were disrupting the rural village. They were more concerned with the recovery of collective solidarity under the aegis of the Shinto gods than with matters of political authority, although at the end of the period they were drawn into the political disturbance leading to the Meiji Restoration.
Although the Tokugawa state was weak and decentralized, under its aegis something like a modern national consciousness was developing.61 This was in part the result of the great development of education in the period and the accompanying growth of literacy.62 The Shinto revival illustrated by the rise of Kokugaku propagated a religio-aesthetic idea of Japanese identity rather than a political one, but one with latent political implications. More obviously political was the kind of fusion of Confucianism and Shinto in the thought of Yamazaki Ansai, but which was more fully worked out toward the end of the period in the writings of the Mito school. The Mito domain was ruled by one of the major collateral houses of the Tokugawa family and the work of the school it sponsored was not conceived of as subversive but rather as supportive to the status quo. Nonetheless, the emphasis of the Mito school on a national polity (kokutai) at whose head was an imperial house that had ruled for ages eternal and that gave Japan its uniqueness and superiority to all other nations would in the last years of the shogunate lead to radical political consequences. Thus the openness of the Tokugawa thought world—no other non-Western society had as good a knowledge of the West as Japan in the eighteenth century, even including the Ottoman Empire which was right next door to Europe—was combined with an increasing particularism as Japan became more self-conscious of its difference from the rest of the world.63
We have already noted that the increasing unwanted contacts with the West due to the growth of world commerce in late Tokugawa times had caused alarm in high quarters and the formalization for the first time of a policy of sakoku (closed country). The defeat of China by the British in the Opium War of 1839-42 and the subsequent infringements on Chinese sovereignty were profoundly alarming to the Japanese as they indicated that the East Asian "world system," with China at its center, which the Japanese had taken for granted, however ambivalently, since the seventh century, was now at an end. Internal difficulties, including widespread peasant unrest, were not lacking in the last years of the Tokugawa regime, but it was the changing impingement of the world on Japan and the struggle over how to respond to it that sparked the regime crisis known as the end of the Bakufu (bakumatsu), beginning with Perry's arrival in 1853 and ending with the Meiji Restoration of 1868. What occurred in this period was the loss of control by the Tokugawa center and the temporary breakup of Japan into its constituent feudal domains.
The Revolutionary Restoration
Explaining the Meiji Ishin (literally, Restoration) of 1868 has been a major industry for students of Japanese history at home and abroad. My interpretation is based on a wide, but not universal, consensus nicely summarized by Johann Arnason.64 The breakdown of the Tokugawa regime in the Bakumatsu period (1853-68) led to a confrontation of three significant sets of actors: the Tokugawa house, including some of its branch lines, the Imperial Court in Kyoto, newly thrust on the scene due to the growing importance of the emperor in late Tokugawa thought, and several powerful "outside" domains whose lords had been defeated by Tokugawa Ieyasu in 1600, but which remained large and prosperous. Chief among the latter were the domains of Satsuma and Choshu, both in the Southwest, far from Edo. These two domains had, in the Bakumatsu period, been taken over by reforming groups of middle samurai whose efforts to modernize, fiscally and militarily, proved more effective than similar efforts mounted by the Bakufu itself. Pledging allegiance to the emperor and defeating Tokugawa troops in the field, the leaders of these two domains entered Edo, which they renamed Tokyo (the eastern capital), establishing the emperor in the old Tokugawa castle and proclaiming the restoration of central rule under the imperial aegis.65 What happened was that one group of samurai (from two outer domains, though including a few samurai from other domains and even a couple of court nobles) replaced another group (Tokugawa retainers) at the political center and proclaimed the restoration of an imperial rule that had never in any literal sense existed. This simple description has serious implications. Fundamentally, the restoration involved a shift in power between political actors within the old regime; it did not involve the mobilization of social classes, nor was it the result of popular protest. In the classical Western sense, modeled on the French Revolution, it was not a revolution. Its consequences were, however, revolutionary, more so than many revolutions that more closely conform to the classical model.66
In order to escape our temptation to think about revolution primarily with the example of the French Revolution in mind, let us turn to recent efforts to theorize revolutions in a comparative perspective to get a better sense of the extent to which the Meiji Ishin can be considered a revolution. Randall Collins summarizes recent research in finding three factors that result in the state breakdown now considered to be the precondition for revolution: "(1) state fiscal strain, (2) intra-elite conflict that paralyzes the government, and (3) popular revolt."67 State fiscal strain had characterized the Tokugawa Bakufu for decades, though it was undoubtedly worsening in the Bakumatsu period. Intraelite conflict was clearly central to the weakening of Tokugawa control. Popular revolt is much more problematic: peasant uprisings were endemic during the Tokugawa period and increased in its final years; there were significant outbreaks of urban disturbances, as well as mass phenomena that suggested signs of widespread unease; yet none of these directly threatened Tokugawa rule, nor were they a major cause of state breakdown. A highly significant causal element in Japan, which Collins notes but recognizes that it lies outside the comparative model, was the real and perceived threat of Western power. It was the slow and inefficient response of the Tokugawa Bakufu to this threat, caused by its decentralized and cumbersome administrative system and its inability to marshal material resources, that opened the door to the intraelite conflict, which eventuated in its fall. It is the lack of a popular revolt, or significant popular participation in the overthrow of the Bakufu, that has led to the notion that the Meiji Ishin was a "revolution from above" and therefore perhaps not radical in its consequences. But if we turn to Collins's definition of a revolution in terms of its results rather than its causes we will see just how revolutionary the Ishin in fact was: "wholesale transformation of the ruling elite accompanied by political and economic restructuring."68
With a couple of intermediary steps along the way, in 1871, only three years after the Restoration, the feudal domains were abolished and replaced by prefectures that, like those in postrevolutionary France, did not follow the boundaries of preexisting feudal domains. Also in 1871 the ban on intermarriage between samurai and commoners was lifted, the beginning of several steps that would lead to the abolition of all the old Tokugawa class distinctions. Universal primary education was proclaimed in 1872 and universal conscription in 1873. Thus a centuries-old feudal system was quickly dismantled with only a modicum of opposition, the most serious of which was a rebellion of disgruntled former samurai in Satsuma in 1877.
The remarkable degree of acceptance of the new regime, undoubtedly linked to its legitimation by a restored emperor, and the self-confidence of its leadership are indicated by the absence of most of the top leaders for nearly two years in a round-the-world mission to visit the major countries of the world, particularly the United States and Europe, from 1871 to 1873. Referred to as the Iwakura Embassy because it was headed by the court noble Iwakura Tomomi, the mission was well balanced in its contingents from Satsuma and Choshu. What the group learned from the West was quickly put to good use on its return as the Meiji leadership embarked on a rapid process of state-building and economic development. But the most significant steps in dismantling the feudal regime were undertaken before the return of the embassy from abroad. The model was surely drawn in major part from the West, but it should be pointed out that educated Japanese long knew of the Chinese model of a centralized empire with no hereditary distinctions in status. There was a not insignificant sense in which the Meiji leadership completed the primary Japanese state-building program of the seventh and eighth centuries, just as it began the new process of creating a modern nation-state. At last a centralized state would be ruled by a bureaucracy based on merit and not on hereditary lineage, even if the examinations that were to determine that merit were based on modern civil service examinations, not the examination system of imperial China. Nonetheless the Meiji state, though primarily modeled on the modern West, had a whiff of T'ang China about it, not least in the imperial ambitions that accompanied it almost from the very beginning.
Thus the military regime came to an end. Or did it? The Tokugawa system was certainly destroyed, but was the regime of military rule that began with the Kamakura shogunate really at an end? Or was the "secondary state" that began then able to reinvent itself in only somewhat attenuated form? When we say "they" destroyed the Tokugawa system, who do we mean by "they"? We mean a remarkably enterprising group of middle-level samurai drawn largely from Satsuma and Choshu who would monopolize control of the Japanese government for decades to come. Could we not say that what had happened is that two major domains who were on the losing side in 1600 finally managed to oust the Tokugawa house and take control themselves? After all it was the combined forces of Satsuma and Choshu who won the final battle against the Bakufu. To the victor belongs the spoils. Of course not literally, for the domains of Satsuma and Choshu were abolished as totally as was the Tokugawa regime, and the feudal lords of those domains were no more in evidence than was the ex-shogun. But what came to be known as the Meiji oligarchs, or, in Japanese, the genro, not only drew quite significantly from their roots in the victorious domains but also on new forms of institutionalization that developed in the Meiji period. Choshu men dominated the army leadership and Satsuma men dominated the navy leadership. Not only did Choshu and Satsuma leaders provide all but two of the prime ministers for thirty years after the beginning of the cabinet system in 1885, but they included the Choshu general Yamagata Aritomo, the most powerful of the genro over the long run, and the Satsuma admiral Yamamoto Gonnohyoe.69 In the Meiji Constitution, promulgated in 1890, the army and navy were to report directly to the emperor, on the model of the German constitution, and not to the prime minister or the cabinet. Independent access to the emperor and the sanction of imperial approval, however obtained, gave the Japanese military a capacity to influence government decisions that would prove catastrophic in the 1930s. In an important sense "military rule" did not end in 1868 but only in 1945.70
Yet, to the extent that modern institutions based on Western models were massively introduced in the Meiji period—from a modern state bureaucracy, to a modern university system, to modern mass media—can we at last say that axial principles were institutionalized in Japan and that we can no longer refer to it as a nonaxial society? Even our suggestion that the T'ang model had finally been fully implemented would suggest as much. To the extent that axial cultures are based on universalistic principles we can say that in the Meiji period Japan incorporated significant elements of axial culture. But so had it done since the seventh century. The question is, were the basic value premises of Japanese society revolutionized along with so many of its institutions? I will argue, somewhat hesitantly, that nonaxial premises survived, though reformulated and in a complex mixture with axial principles, but with the nonaxial premises still retaining primacy.
First of all, it is important to emphasize just how significantly universalistic principles were institutionalized in modern Japan, beginning in the Meiji period. Universal education and universal conscription were clear indications that the hereditary status system had been abolished. Universalistic criteria of merit became the basis for employment in both public and private organizations of any size. A legal system and an impartial judiciary are primary indications that universalistic criteria had great importance. Religious toleration was promulgated and a small but influential number of Japanese became Christians and asserted the importance of universalistic religious principles. Free publication of newspapers, magazines, and books, with only sporadic censorship, made universalistic philosophical and political principles available to a large literate public. In all these spheres, even in the legal system, we will have to make important qualifications, but the axial principles and institutions that had been present to some degree since the seventh century were enormously enlarged in the Meiji and subsequent periods in modern Japan. How then can we argue that the Meiji Restoration/Revolution, though it led to the creation of a radically new society, still led to one that remained nonaxial in its fundamental premises?
Any form of nationalism that makes the primordial identities of blood and soil its basis will conflict with axial premises. This is obvious in the extreme case of Nazi Germany where all universalistic principles of religion, philosophy, and politics were subordinated to the notion of German racial superiority, but more moderate forms of nationalism also create tensions with universalistic principles. Nationalism in the sense of an effort to create a common consciousness of national identity among all members of Japanese society had already appeared in late Tokugawa times and was a major aspect of state building in the Meiji period. Nationalism is a significant phase in the development of all modern nations, though possibly a transient one, but each such nation differs in the nature of the primordial identities upon which it draws and the degree to which such identities will conflict with axial principles. It is the self-understanding of the Japanese nation and the particular conception of the relation between nation and people that will help us see why axial principles were subordinated to nonaxial ones even in modern Japan.
The Charter Oath of the Meiji Emperor, issued in April 1868, is generally taken to express the progressive side of the new regime. Article One of the oath promised "deliberative assemblies" and that "all matters [will be] decided by public discussion." Article Five said that "knowledge shall be sought throughout the world so as to strengthen the foundations of imperial rule." Article Two, in its inclusiveness, can also be seen as progressive: "All classes, high and low, shall unite in vigorously carrying out the administration of affairs of state."71 This can be interpreted as an indication of the leveling of social status, of the fact that samurai were now reduced to the status of commoners. Yet this article, and even more clearly later defining statements of the new regime, implied not that samurai had been reduced to the status of commoners but that commoners had been raised to the status of samurai. Already in the Bakumatsu period the Choshu domain had used commoner troops alongside samurai. Universal conscription meant that the loyalty once expected of samurai, as expressed in the samurai code of bushido, was now expected of all Japanese in the military service. The Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors of 1882, issued in the name of the emperor but expressing the sentiments of General Yamagata, said, "Soldiers and Sailors, We are your supreme Commander-in-Chief. Our relations with you will be most intimate when We rely upon you as Our limbs and you look up to Us as your head. Whether We are able to guard the Empire, and so prove Ourself worthy of Heaven's blessings and repay the benevolence of Our Ancestors, depends upon the faithful discharge of your duties as soldiers and sailors."72 Although military service had a central symbolic meaning in the definition of the obligations of subjects to ruler, the Meiji leaders sought to define all Japanese as "loyal followers" of the emperor. The Imperial Rescript on Education issued in 1890, the year the Meiji Constitution came into effect, was read in a solemn ritual in every school in Japan until 1945. It called on "Our subjects . . .should emergency arise, [to] offer yourselves courageously to the State; and thus guard and maintain the prosperity of Our Imperial Throne coeval with heaven and earth."73
The process of generalizing the role of the samurai to all Japanese was already well underway in the Tokugawa period. In the eighteenth century Ishida Baigan had argued:
The samurai, farmers, artisans and merchants are of assistance in governing the empire. . . . The governing of the four classes is the role of the ruler. Assisting the ruler is the role of the four classes. The samurai is the retainer (shin [vassal or follower in a lord-follower relationship])who has rank from of old. The farmer is the retainer of the countryside. The merchant and artisan are the retainers of the town. To assist the ruler, as retainers, is the Way of the retainer.74
Although Baigan did not foresee the abolition of the class system, he was concerned to give the nonsamurai classes the dignity and value of samurai in offering service to the ruler. His sentiments were far from unique among spokesmen for the commoner classes in the Tokugawa period.
This line of thinking did not lead to the idea of citizens who rule and are ruled in turn, who elect representatives to govern them and hold them responsible. There were such ideas in Meiji Japan and they attained a wide hearing, but it was precisely the intention of the oligarchs to head off the effective institutionalization of such ideas and to make sure that the Japanese saw themselves as subjects—responsible, active, subjects serving the state, to be sure—but not sovereign citizens in whose hands decisions of state ultimately lie. Here we find the Meiji version of Maruyama's basso ostinato: the pattern of thinking of government always from the point of view of those serving from below rather than from the point of view of those ruling from above. In this pattern, since everyone was responsible, no one was, least of all the emperor, who lived "above the clouds" and whose mind was not to be disturbed by those who served him. It was the purpose of the oligarchs in designing the Meiji state to see that those who served best, namely, themselves and those like them, would have the real power, accountable only to the emperor. In this conception there was a fusion of people and state: society was not something different from government, which could hold it accountable. As a result the state encompassed society, but also the other way around, so that the source of initiative and responsibility was never clear. At moments this pattern could produce paralysis, but it could also be dynamic and creative when able people from below took the lead in "serving." By contrast, in a system where no one was ultimately responsible, destructive initiatives by effective leaders could prove extremely difficult to stop, a defect not unique to the Japanese political system.
Emperor and Constitution
If state and society were fused in a way not possible in axial civilizations, there was another fusion that was even more indicative of the nonaxial premises of Japanese society: the fusion of deity and ruler, the divine king, the emperor as a living kami (Shinto god). Such ideas lie deep in Japanese history, but they were resuscitated and reformulated in quite striking and highly self-conscious ways in the Meiji period. The idea of "inventing tradition" has been applied to Japan. If this is taken to mean the invention of tradition out of whole cloth then it is surely mistaken. If it is taken to mean the radical reformulation of elements of tradition to meet new needs it surely applies to the so-called Meiji emperor system.75
Ito Hirobumi, probably the most influential of all the oligarchs with the possible exception of Yamagata, was primarily responsible for drafting the Meiji Constitution. Ito was conscious of the fact that religion provided a firm foundation for civic responsibility in Western nations, but he believed that no comparable religion existed in Japan. It was thus that he turned to the emperor as the foundation of the new regime:
In Japan the power of religion is slight, and there is none that could serve as the axis [alternatively pivot, foundation, or cornerstone] of the state. Buddhism, when it flourished, was able to unite people of all classes, but it is today in a state of decline. Shinto, though it is based on and perpetuates the teachings of our ancestors, as a religion lacks the power to move the hearts of men. In Japan, it is only the imperial house that can become the axis of the state. It is with this point in mind that we have placed so high a value on imperial authority and endeavored to restrict it as little as possible.76
Although the whole idea of a constitution as the basis of a modern nation-state was drawn from Western prototypes, and most of the articles in the Meiji Constitution resemble some Western model or other, the Prussian Constitution of 1850 being the most influential, it was still essential to guard against the idea that the constitution made the people sovereign, or even the idea that it implied, in Ito's words, "the joint rule of the king and the people."77 The constitution was given by the emperor to the people and the day chosen for its promulgation, February 11, 1889, was the anniversary of the supposed ascension to rule of the Emperor Jimmu, the sun goddess's grandson, in 660 b.c. February 11, kigensetsu or National Foundation Day, had already become a national holiday in 1873. The glamour of the ritual occasion, which probably for most Japanese overwhelmed the content of the document, should not let us forget that, in spite of all its limitations, it did create a parliament with the all-important power of controlling the budget. Grudgingly or not, the oligarchs had granted to the people a significant right to participate in their own government. But what they gave with one hand they did their best to take back with the other.
The primary way in which they limited the effectiveness of parliamentary rule was to reserve significant powers to the emperor, to whom they had access and who they could always get to issue a special rescript when parliament resisted their wishes. We will need to consider further the extraordinary measures they took to elevate the emperor to the center of national consciousness. But also significant in limiting parliamentary power was the effort of the oligarchs to discredit, even before the constitution was put into effect, the politicians who would be elected to the new parliament. Agitation for the fulfillment of the Charter Oath's promise of "deliberative assemblies" had already appeared in the 1870s, largely coming from disaffected former samurai, but gradually drawing on broader popular support. This agitation grew into a significant movement in the early 1880s under the banner of Freedom and People's Rights (jiyu minken). In response to the growing opposition to the arbitrary rule of the Choshu -Satsuma oligarchs (the hanbatsu, or domain faction) the promise of a constitution by 1890 was forthcoming from the leadership in 1881. But the oligarchs lashed back at their critics by denouncing those who used politics to pursue their own selfish interests. Although the opposition idealized the noble statesman who pursued the good of the people, the example of the members of local assemblies elected in the 1880s was not inspiring. They were described in the popular press as "self-seeking, toadying, and corrupt," and if future Diet members were to resemble them they would not be worthy of respect. The oligarchs could speak in the name of "his Majesty the emperor's government," but politicians were often viewed as merely selfish. The very notion of genuine leaders as those who "serve" rather than as those who "represent" was inimical to respect for politicians. Thus it was not only the calculated scorn of the oligarchs but also popular opinion orchestrated by the press that made the role of politicians difficult. Politicians as such are often suspect in modern societies, but the particularly dark cloud that hung over them in Meiji Japan has not dissipated to the present day. It was the military who exemplified "service," or even the bureaucrats who did so in lesser degree, who had prestige, rather than those who were seen to represent mere partisan interest.78
From the very beginning of the Meiji period the new leaders ostentatiously used the emperor to justify the new regime. The "imperial progress" of the emperor from Kyoto to Tokyo in 1868 was unprecedented, since the emperor had not left Kyoto and its environs for centuries. This was only the beginning of many such imperial tours during the first two decades of the period. For many Japanese, more accustomed to think in terms of their own local village or district than of "Japan," this was a powerful symbolic assertion of a larger identity.79 During these same years the government, carrying out the ideas of a Shinto revival that had long been circulating in the Tokugawa period, began the process of separating Shinto shrines from the Buddhist temples with which they had long been associated, of refurbishing shrines that had suffered neglect, and, above all, of tying Shinto worship directly into national consciousness with the emperor at its center.
It is, however, no accident that the Meiji leadership undertook a new and even more dramatic effort to emphasize the centrality of the emperor in the years leading up to the promulgation of the new constitution. The city of Tokyo as an urban environment and even the living quarters of the emperor had been neglected in the early Meiji years, but in the late 1880s major changes were undertaken. A grand imperial palace, combining Japanese and Western elements, was built in the precincts of the old Tokugawa castle in the center of the city, including an impressive throne room for ceremonial occasions. The plaza in front of the palace was cleared so that large crowds could assemble for major events. The first great ceremony in which all these elements came together was the promulgation of the constitution in 1889. The earlier imperial tours, though novel as such, had used traditional palanquins for transporting the emperor, who remained secluded behind curtains, so that it was his aura rather than his person that was on display. The new ceremonial pattern, inaugurated by the promulgation of the constitution, was directly influenced by the patterns of national celebration that had been created or re-created as part of the state-building process in Europe. Thus for the first time the emperor and empress left the palace grounds in a European-style carriage with clear windows so that the crowd could view them directly.80 Transportation and communication had advanced to the degree that all Japanese could participate almost simultaneously in the events occurring in the center.
The success of what can only be called the imperial cult was not spontaneous but highly orchestrated, even if the Japanese public seems to have taken to it willingly. Educational and military institutions provided ready resources for mobilization. Thousands of schoolchildren, many of them coming from far away, could be assembled in the imperial plaza for great occasions, and soldiers and sailors could be assembled for impressive military reviews. Although the regime did not neglect verbal articulation, as the several key imperial rescripts and the preamble to the constitution as well as the nationalistic textbooks in the schools indicate, still, just as in the early days of the Tokugawa shogunate, it would seem that ritual had priority over texts in implementing the new vision. And what the ritual affirmed, at the very moment when the people were being given some capacity to participate in their own government, was the fusion of divinity, government, and people, with the emperor symbolizing all three.
Perhaps nowhere was the combination of a strong assertion of that fusion with some acceptance of Western standards of the rights of citizens to be found more clearly than in the policy toward religion as it developed in the 1890s. The Restoration of 1868 had been accompanied by a utopian effort to make Shinto the sole religion of the nation, an effort that involved the persecution of Buddhism and the reaffirmation of the ban on Christianity. This effort was quickly abandoned as intensely unpopular both at home and abroad, but central control of major Shinto shrines and their reorientation toward a focus on the emperor continued. The Meiji Constitution guaranteed the freedom of religion, as all modern constitutions should, but in somewhat equivocal form. According to Article 28, "Japanese subjects shall, within limits not prejudicial to peace and order, and not antagonistic to their duties as subjects, enjoy freedom of religious belief."81 Interpreters of this article were quick to point out that it was not contradicted by state support for Shinto shrines because "Shinto is not a religion," but rather an expression of patriotic devotion. While this defense was in a sense specious—shrines did carry out functions such as weddings and funerals that would normally be called religious—in another sense it was justified. The word "religion" in Japanese, shukyo, is a translation of the Western term dating only to the Meiji period. To this day the term "religion" smells of Christianity, or perhaps of Buddhism as well—that is, of religions based on personal and private "belief." Shinto, being an archaic religion, had little in the way of belief—often those worshipping at a shrine had no idea who the deity was, nor did it matter—but largely involved ritual practice as an expression of group belonging. Where religion is fused with people and state the Western category does not work very well. Christianity and Buddhism are religions that are in principle differentiated from the state—they involve membership in specifically religious communities—even though not always separated from the state. Shinto is in principle not capable even of differentiation, for it has no basis of membership different from the social groups—nation, village, family—in which it is embedded.82
As in other modern nation-states, but with its own special twist, the assertion of national identity was directed outward as well as inward. An emperor implies an empire, and modern Japan came of age in the era of high imperialism. Rapid state building was not only defensive, though it was surely that in an age of predatory Western imperialism; it sought not only to resist but also to rival the other empires. It is remarkable how early the urge for overseas expansion appeared, almost from the beginning of the new regime and before major Western influence. The knowledge that China was no longer effectively the "central country" left a vacuum that at least some samurai imaginations found it easy to fill. Indeed the oligarchs had to restrain the zealots from foreign aggression in the early years in order not to precipitate Western intervention to which they could not yet effectively respond. The idea that Japan could become the center of a galactic polity in East Asia, deriving from archaic roots as well as modern stimulus, began to be realized as a result of the acquisitions that followed the war with China in 1894-95 and with Russia in 1904-05. The thought that all Japanese were now the equivalent of samurai and the projection of Japanese power abroad gave the Meiji emperor system a military cast symbolized by the fact that, as Takashi Fujitani puts it, the emperor came down from above the clouds to appear as a human being, one clothed in modern military uniform and riding on a white horse, an appearance, however, that only strengthened his symbolic centrality.83
If nonaxial symbolism, the fusion of divinity, state, and society, was characteristic of the most general level of Meiji self-understanding, in spite of the prominence of universalistic criteria in many intermediate institutions, it must also be pointed out that particularism flourished at the base and in the pores of those very institutions as well. The civil code of 1898 enshrined a samurai-like patriarchal conception of the family and injunctions to embody filial piety regularly accompanied injunctions to be loyal to the emperor. Quasi-familial patterns and "small emperor systems" emerged in many sectors of Japanese life, not least in the bureaucracies and schools that were the main carriers of universalistic criteria. The idea of a "family state" was not focused only on the nation as a whole, but permeated all its constituent bodies.
Although relative freedom of publication made it possible to disseminate universalistic conceptions in religion, philosophy, and politics, many who took advantage of this freedom did so to bolster the ideology of imperial Japan rather than to question it. Official rhetoric was moderate compared to what some of the extreme proponents of Japanism were arguing. In its official form, emperor-system nationalism was usually coupled with support for "civilization" and "progress" as essential elements in the process whereby Japan was to take its rightful place among the nations, whereas extremists were tempted to oppose everything Western root and branch. In short, as in Tokugawa times, "orthodoxy" was less a set of dogmatic beliefs uniformly enforced than a general sense of what is "normal" in Japan. What was abnormal,