WHAT TO DO WITH THE JAPANESE?

New Zealand Listener, Volume 9, Issue 233, 10 December 1943, Page 4

WHAT TO DO WITH THE JAPANESE?

"First catch your hare=but study Mrs. Beeton, too, to know what to turn him into when you catch him."" So counsels A.M_E. in this article for **The Listener .""

UADALCANAL .. . New Georgia . . . Vella Lavella w#... Tarawa ... Makin... we are on the way to Tokio. But when we arrive what shall we do with the Japanese? Europe’s postsurrender needs, psychological and economic, we can, in the main, understand: first food, then freedom to the local democratic forces to reconstruct their various national lives within some federal frame. But Japan we do not understand at all, Precisely the same facts about it mean one thing to one "authority," the direct opposite to another. "The Japanese will crack under bombing," declares A emphatically, "since their cities are so flimsy that every earthquake-eruption fires them and knocks them flat." "The Japanese will not crack under bombing," asseverates B, "since their cities are so flimsy that every earthquake-eruption bombards them worse than we ever couldand yet they carry on!" In short, to win the Pacific peace we need to start studying now the set-up and psychology of those eighty million folk whose future the Pacific victory will cast upon

cur unskilled hands. If the Japanese do not behave like human beings (not like the ones we know, that is) and if their political, economic and social organisation remains to us mysterious and bizarre (as it certainly does), we shall have to take a course in understanding them if we want to get them to cooperate in their own re-organisation. What Makes Japan Japanese The ingredients that make Japan are Poverty, Isolation, Shinto, Feudalism, Humiliation, Aggression, and Desperation. But the poverty that has made Japan Japanese is not simply the lack -of physical resources. It is that lack accepted and made the basis of a civilisation. Land crops were not sufficient. Therefore, the people grew seaweeds also. Home fires or public-house parlours were too expensive. Therefore, they made clubs of community bathhouses and went to bed warm after an hour’s soak and gossip with 20 neighbours in a scalding wooden vat. Compare the stone palace of Versailles, rich in painted ceilings, carpeted floors, walls of mirrors and windows, furnishings carved and

upholstered; with the Imperial Palace at, Kyoto built simply of paper and unpainted wood. Compare with the two worlds of rich and poor elsewhere the GodEmperor squatting on the same cushion as his subjects in the same bamboo-and-paper room eating from the same bowl the same raw fish and rice. (Only quality is better). Then think of the attitudes that this single-standard, povertybased civilisation would engender — independ-

ence of material conditions, sense of togetherness, lack of personalism, and so on. Tribal Isolation The extent of Japan’s tribal isolation from the main stream of humahity is hardly realised by those who know how many decades and centuries she has rotated on her own axis, self-sealed away from humanity until forcibly dragged into world trade in 1853. While most of mankind’s cultures have tended right through history to flow together, the Japanese civilisation has canalised itself away from the broadening river, and has tended to accentuate its own special features. We see this charmingly in- dress and manners. We meet it bafflingly in thought and language. How can a man think with the rest of the world who all his life has spoken like this: "This period at having-arrived, Buddhism that say thing as-for, merely low-class le’s believing place that having-become, middleclass thence-upwards in as-for, its reason dis-cerning-are people being-few, religion that if-one-says,* funeral-rite’s time only in employ thing’s manner in think.’"’ That is the literal translation of a Japanese sentence of which the English meaning is: "At the present day, Buddhism has sunk into being the belief of the lower classes only. Few people in the middle and upper classes understand its raison d’etre, most of them fancying that religion is a thing which comes into play only at funeral services." Not the least of official Japan’s grievances against China is the Chinese ability to present their case before the world with disarming ease and lucidity, _while Japanese specialists in English stumble over simple sentences and give their thoughts clean away" when they attempt any fine nuance of meaning (e.g., "China incident’). But then the Chinese think like other peoples. After -centuries of self-elaborating isolation, the Japanese do not, The Shinto Outlook The third ingredient in Japanese life is Shinto. We Westerners think of Shinto in its political aspects, and marvel how professors of history and \ (continued on next page)

Kimono And Bowler Hat

(continued from previous page) biology can gravely assign divine origins to their race. The more practical Chinese, for their part, snicker at students praying for examination passes ("like peasants") before the Sacred Horse at Nara or some similar fetish. But these things are not Shinto. They are only indications of how deeply conditioned the people are in the Shinto outlook. Shinto itself is indefinable. We may call it perhaps "Love of the Living Land"-not in the sense of a farmer’s affection for the useful Good Earth, but as an artist’s' mystic enthralment with "God in Nature." But the worshipper does not think of the Beautiful Land as in any way distinct from its human institutions or of himself as apart from them either. For the individual Japanese

is not in our sense an individual at all. "But for Buddhism, and more latterly some Christian influence, personality, as we know it, would not exist in Japan," said one observer to me. From this child-of-nature worship-attitude in daily life spring most of the things that are so delightful in Japan-simplicities, beauties, courtesies, and cleanliness. But from it, too, come their childish immaturity, their dependent loyalty to priestking and leader, and their unswerving obedience, miscalled "fanaticism." Tied into this is feudalism. Sitting in a cinema among factory hands transported by the "Samurai Serial" into the magic Middle Ages of knighterrantry (Japanese style), I felt my host, the young Professor of Economics with whom I had outside argued "bloc economy" and "exchange control," lean over and remark, "My grandfather was a Samurai." Think out the implication of that casual statement. It means, transferred to British milieu, that your own father whose thought and way of life you know so well, was brought up by. Owain Tudor, or Glyndowr, or Robin Hood! It means that Errol Flynn’s film might have happened to your mother’s mother! It means that all. that worldso fantastic to us-of "honour," mortal combat, and derring-do, is still the thought-atmosphere of Japanese who sweat in steel-yards or fire torpedoes. Factory Feudalism It means, too, that hidden under the outward clang and smoke of factories, Japanese economic organisation remains basically feudal still. The Houses of Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Sumitomo, and Yasuda are lordships, fiefs, principalities of industry and investment. Their factory worker is either a peasant girl

indentured for a period so that her earnings may eke out what income remains when her family’s three-acre farm has paid its rents and dues-all Japanese "expansion" has been financed out of the silent peasant-or else he is an artisan born in the factory village, schooled, apprenticed, and married there, and destined at the end’ of a serflike but secure and probably not unhappy life, to die there after passing to simpler jobs in his old age. The smaller — concern also, which may be a "Kabushiki | Kaisha" (a Company Ltd.) without, is — similarly a family or feudal territory within. Its’business "executive" leads a double life. Spinning down several stories by lift from his swivel-chaired, concrete office, he boards a Detroit bus . (whose uniformed girl conductor calls

"okay" or "a’righ’"-i.e., "proceed" or "keep backing" — to the Technical-School-taught driver) but, arrived at his home door, he sheds Westernism with the department store suit that he drops on the mat floor for his kneeling wife to fold away until next morning’s siren. The New Factor But poverty, isolation, Shinto, and Feudalism are all age-old factors in the Japanese life-pattern. The new factor is Humiliation. It arrived with Commander Perry and the U.S.M.C. in 1853. (Yes, the Marines have taken Tokyo already), For then Japan’s superior civilisation (as she deemed it), had to bow to the strength of outer "barbarians." Outraged to an extent that we, accustomed to the world’s rough-and-tumble, cannot imagine, the Japanese leaders set themselves to humiliate their humiliators by proving that the Divine .and Cultured Race could walk away from opposition even in those worthless (but power-giving) pursuits that the outsiders valued. Did the barbarians value sport? Very well, Japanese athletes should lead the world. Was science important? Japanese discoverers should become household names. And especially, since wealth and power were valued above all else, Japan should gain. trade and empire above them all. Result: in one long lifetime a shut-in peasant state has, been turned into a literate, techno--logically skilled, industrial, mercantile, and-at the present moment-enor-! mously wealthy and extensive world ‘Imperialism, However, its authors had not foreseen everything. They had not suspected, for example, that industrialisation would double their population, leaving the new (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) forty million to exist on the precarious margin between cost of imported raw materials and the price of the same exported in processed form. And they had not foreseen the League of Nations, For just as Japan was indeed outclassing her teachers in the pursuit of wealth and power-underselling all others with her exports, and completing the conquest of the nearby lands occupied by the Western Powers — her established rivals robbed her of tirumph by changing the rules of the game. Across her paths of trade they built tariff walls. Across her road to empire they pointed their guns. So Humiliation became megalomania, and megalomania became a mad readiness for self-immolation as long as vengeance was inflicted. And that is where we are. Whether. the Japanese spirit will collapse under — stress, there is no saying: or whether the Japanese mind will be ready for the substitution of Shinto-feudalism by the Shinto-socialism which (nearly all observers agree), is psychologically, its only possible alternative. But the essential thing is that we recognise what the problem of Japan is: whether a people that has been for centuries moving steadily away from the main current of the world into tribal isolation, can be reintegrated into mankind. ----- EEE