'Mutual Understanding'

‘The dire need for better ‘mutual understanding’ is frequently and enthusiastically endorsed. But wakatte kudasai means ‘please understand’ in the sense of ‘please accept my explanation, regardless of whether it has any basis in fact’. It connotes acceptance or tolerance. ‘Understanding’ in this Japanese context is another word for agreeing. True ‘understanding’ of people or things implies accepting them the way they are, as long as you are not strong enough to change them. If you have strength, the other party will show ‘understanding’ by a certain degree of adaptation to your wishes…Japanese are often well aware of the political connotation of ‘understanding’ in their usage; as a newspaper editor warned, the time is gone ‘when we were able to enjoy the often beautiful misunderstandings – and ignorance – of the foreigners’’.

Karel Van Wolferen - The Enigma of Japanese Power, 1989. pp.10-11

Samurai Loyalty

Today I browsed a short article published last year by Olivier Ansart, one of my own professors, regarding the changing interpretations of chu or ‘loyalty’ among 17^th and 18^th century samurai thinkers.

There was no consensus in moral discourse of just what chu consisted, though all interpretations involved a personal relationship between individuals (in this context between lord and retainer), differing however in scope, depth and intensity. The more emphatic crafters of bushido ideology (like Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Daidoji Yuzan, Izawa Banryu) maintained that chu required absolute obeisance, the samurai ‘belonging to his master, not himself’. Ogyu Sorai believed that such a condition was only suitable for ‘wives and concubines’, defining chu as ‘doing things for others as we would ourselves’.

Ansart presents several cases demonstrating debate over the application of the concept. Concerning the actions of the ancient Chinese Tang and Wu, who denouncing their kings as tyrants murdered them to found their own dynasties of Shang and Zhou, while Yamazaki Enzai could not conceive the possibility of a lord deserving of retribution, Kumazawa Banzan ‘argued that remonstrance and subsequent martyrdom was the only possible behaviour and manifestation of true loyalty’. Yamaga Soko and Hayashi Ranzan believed a wicked lord opened themselves to punishment and Sorai maintained the inevitability of leading family’s displacement. ‘They all accepted the idea of chu as devotion of a servant to his master, but diverged on visions of scope, the conditions and limitations of this devotion’.

Over these centuries, the idea of loyalty was challenged philosophically whilst also being effected by social pressures. Despite some resistance, it was apparent that chu was simply one element within a greater universal morality, thus in situations it necessarily vied with other moral and ethical obligations. That is, recognition of the conditionality of loyalty (e.g. as against the maintenance of personal honour, or need to place the good of the state / population above obedience to one’s lord). The question of ‘divided loyalties’, such as between father and lord, also largely remained unresolved.

The social conditions of the Tokugawa era significantly shaped people’s understanding of chu. With the Pax Tokugawa came a ‘quasi-unanimous exaltation of loyalty’, likely resulting from greater economic dependence of retainers on their daimyo, and daimyo (whose inheritance of their fief was contingent on an oath of loyalty) upon the shogun. ‘Chu became a mere moralistic veneer on a conduct that was largely imposed by rational self interest’. The emergence of a money economy further reshaped human relationships, coming to demonstrate the ubiquity of contractual relationships ‘based on mutual benefit and quest for profit’. Samurai were necessarily submerged in the commercial world of the chōnin and so naturally come to see themselves as offering a service in exchange for a salary. ‘The old concept of loyalty had been undermined by the facts of life in Tokugawa society’. Ansart, however, suggests that chu managed to survive by shifting to a connection that couldn’t be tested by the daily realities of ‘power relationships and shifting interests’ - to the imaginary relationship between subjects and the Emperor.

Adoration and Castration

A few weeks ago I read an article by Kinya Tsuruta, ‘The Images of Westerners in Modern Japanese Fiction: Adoration and Castration’ from a 1988 collection The Walls Within.

Tsuruta suggests that based in their general unfamiliarity with Westerners, early 20^th century Japanese authors tended to either demonize or idealize their white characters. Novelists would caricature physical features (eye colour/hair/odour), with the ‘implicit assumption that external appearance confers information about internal character’ – thus by emphasizing the physical differences between Westerners and Japanese, the point was made that Westerners were also unlike Japanese in modes of thought and behaviour, enhancing the perception of distance between the two. By dehumanizing / animalizing Westerners, readers more readily accepted unrealistic portrayals of unpredictable ‘discontinuous (sub-human) foreigners’. This wasn’t confined to negative images. In some women’s writing white men became the sincere, gentle and passionate ‘knights in shining armour with a ticket to a Western utopia’, unsurprisingly the positive depictions of men’s literature focused more on sexualized physical aspects of white women.

Tsuruta explores the inferiority complex found within postwar literature. Western models replaced Chinese not only in the realms of technology and administration, but also culture and aesthetics, and the typical Japanese body seemed especially far flung from the ideal of Greek statues, creating ‘a sense of physical inferiority unmitigated by Japan’s subsequent economic success’. The immediate postwar situation however meant that ordinary Japanese acquired first-hand experience in dealing with Westerners, and so literary treatment required more definite, realistic consideration, no longer utilizing these characters as ‘clever literary devices or vague symbols’.

Included was this interesting quote from Gregory Clark, “The Japanese are quite open to thoughts and cultures from outside, but they are closed to people from the outside. The French are the reverse; they are open to people but not to foreign cultures”.