I’ve always though to read some of Lafcadio Hearn’s works. When you live in Japan for any sort of time and take an interest in the culture you’ll eventually hear of him as being the first “Japanophile.” I’m sure there were others but given his literary works, and that there were few ‘gaijin’ around back in the 1800’s he gets most of the credit.
I enjoy his descriptions of places that are still around to this day even though so much has changed. Japan went through World War II where much of Tokyo was destroyed in the firebombing and so I find it difficult to know just how much of his descriptions have changed. For the most part however I can relate as I’ve visited many of them.
I’m already on to his next book “Tales of Old Japan” so perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself with the paragraph above as those descriptions primarily belong to that book. In any case, here are my highlights.
“When you find, in four or five years more, that you cannot understand the Japanese at all, then you will begin to know something about them.”
This is well known to anyone who has experienced Japanese culture for some time. Two reasons come to mind, the second deriving from the first. They are from an island country that was isolated for a great part of history thus their culture is quite unique compared to other countries that had mixing of peoples. Therefore, they’re just not as ‘open’ as other cultures willing to engage. It seems you’re always kept at a distance. Over time the barriers break down somewhat but you’re never ‘fully in the club.’
The three forms of the Shintô worship of ancestors are the Domestic Cult, the Communal Cult, and the State Cult;–or, in other words, the worship of family ancestors, the worship of clan or tribal ancestors, and the worship of imperial ancestors. The first is the religion of the home; the second is the religion of the local divinity, or tutelar god; the third is the national religion.
No single fact in this connection is more significant than the fact that the ancient Japanese term for government–matsuri-goto–signifies liberally “matters of worship.” Later on we shall find that not only government, but almost everything in Japanese society, derives directly or indirectly from this ancestor-cult; and that in all matters the dead, rather than the living, have been the rulers of the nation and–the shapers of its destinies.
In Greece and in Italy it was an early custom to bury the family dead within the limits of the family estate; and the Greek and Roman laws of property grew out of this practice. Sometimes the dead were buried close to the house. The author of La Cité Antique cites, among other ancient texts bearing upon the subject, an interesting invocation from the tragedy of Helen, by Euripides:–“All hail! my father’s tomb! I buried thee, Proteus, at the place where men pass out, that I might often greet thee; and so, even as I go out and in, I, thy son Theoclymenus, call upon thee, father! . . .” But in ancient Japan, men fled from the neighbourhood of death. It was long the custom to abandon, either temporarily, or permanently, the house in which a death occurred; and we can scarcely suppose that, at any time, it was thought desirable to bury the dead close to the habitation of the surviving members of the household.
I was interested to see this because I see graves all over the countryside near family homes. I had to ask AI about this and yes, for Lafcadio, he was speaking more about urban/religious norms. In the countryside it wasn’t out of place to bury near the family home although regulations have changed. Most of those I see are called a “kotsutsubo,” a marker for ashes, not actual bodies. Therefore, that raises the question of how to know if those graves I’m passing have actual bodies or are “kotsutsubo?” Always something more to learn.
Let us now glance at the existing forms of this domestic cult,–the universal religion of Japan. In every home there is a shrine devoted to it. If the family profess only the Shintô belief, this shrine, or mitamaya[1] (“august-spirit-dwelling”),–tiny model of a Shintô temple,–is placed upon a shelf fixed against the wall of some inner chamber, at a height of about six feet from the floor. Such a shelf is called Mitama-San-no-tana, or–“Shelf of the august spirits.” In the shrine are placed thin tablets of white wood, inscribed with the names of the household dead. Such tablets are called by a name signifying “spirit-substitutes” (mitamashiro), or by a probably older name signifying “spirit-sticks.” . . . If the family worships its ancestors according to the Buddhist rite, the mortuary tablets are placed in the Buddhist household-shrine, or Butsudan, which usually occupies the upper shelf of an alcove in one of the inner apartments. Buddhist mortuary-tablets (with some exceptions) are called ihai,–a term signifying “soul-commemoration.” They are lacquered and gilded, usually having a carved lotos-flower as pedestal; and they do not, as a rule, bear the real, but only the religious and posthumous name of the dead.
I highlighted this because it is something I learned about on my recent trip to Japan. My in-laws have both the Kamidana and Butsudan. I knew vaguely what they were having looked them up but with AI I could understand much more and very quickly. It is like having a college professor in your pocket! Now, I not only know ‘what they are’ but could have a conversation about the rise of Shinto, when Buddhism arrived, if there was conflict, how the Japanese eventually incorporated them both, and what their functions are in current times. AI is astoundingly incredible and scary at the same time.
The belief that the dead need affection, that to neglect them is a cruelty, that their happiness depends upon duty, is a belief that has almost cast out the primitive fear of their displeasure. They are not thought of as dead: they are believed to remain among those who loved them. Unseen they guard the home, and watch over the welfare of its inmates: they hover nightly in the glow of the shrine-lamp; and the stirring of its flame is the motion of them. They dwell mostly within their lettered tablets;–sometimes they can animate a tablet,–change it into the substance of a human body, and return in that body to active life, in order to succour and console. From their shrine they observe and hear what happens in the house; they share the family joys and sorrows; they delight in the voices and the warmth of the life about them. They want affection; but the morning and the evening greetings of the family are enough to make them happy. They require nourishment; but the vapour of food contents them. They are exacting only as regards the daily fulfilment of duty. They were the givers of life, the givers of wealth, the makers and teachers of the present: they represent the past of the race, and all its sacrifices;–whatever the living possess is from them. Yet how little do they require in return! Scarcely more than to be thanked, as the founders and guardians of the home, in simple words like these:–“For aid received, by day and by night, accept, August Ones, our reverential gratitude.”
I like this idea and if nothing else find it rather poetic. I do believe the spirits are all around us but more of the dropping in sort rather than hanging around and guarding home sort. I assume they have other dimensions, other realities to divert themselves with and time is irrelevant. Obviously I have no idea really but that is what I can come up with from my learning and experiences. In any case, I do talk to friends/family who have passed away and will always say hello to my deceased Father-in-Law at the Butsudan in the morning as well as random times throughout the day.
I’ll only light incense on occasion as I don’t buy into the religious aspects of it and it gets sucked into the air purifier anyway. Less smoke is better for everyone in my opinion.
As for the Kamidana, I don’t pay it much attention.
The Buddhist dead are not called gods, but Buddhas (Hotoké),–which term, of course, expresses a pious hope, rather than a faith. The belief is that they are only on their way to some higher state of existence; and they should not be invoked or worshipped after the manner of the Shintô gods: prayers should be said for them, not, as a rule, to them.
This custom accounts for an amusing popular term often applied in jest to a second son, “Master Cold-Rice” (Hiaméshi-San); as the second son, having to wait until both infants and elders have been served, is not likely to find his portion desirably hot when it reaches him.
Once that the domestic ancestor-cult had become universally established, the question of marriage, as a duty of filial pity, could not be judiciously left to the will of the young people themselves. It was a matter to be decided by the family, not by the children; for mutual inclination could not be suffered to interfere with the requirements of the household religion. It was not a question of affection, but of religious duty; and to think otherwise was impious. Affection might and ought to spring up from the relation. But any affection powerful enough to endanger the cohesion of the family would be condemned. A wife might therefore be divorced because her husband had become too much attached to her; an adopted husband might be divorced because of his power to exercise, through affection, too great an influence upon the daughter of the house. Other causes would probably he found for the divorce in either case–but they would not be difficult to find.
The prosperity of the family depends, it is thought, upon the observance of filial piety, which is identified with obedience to the traditional rules of household conduct; and, in like manner, the prosperity of the commune is supposed to depend upon the observance of ancestral custom,–upon obedience to those unwritten laws of the district, which are taught to all from the time of their childhood.
Even now to take a wife from another province is condemned by local opinion (it was forbidden in feudal times): one is still expected to live, work, and marry in the place where one has been born,–though, in certain cases, and with the public approval of one’s own people, adoption into another community is tolerated.
I find this interesting from a generational perspective. People move, otherwise how did they get there in the first place? Over the centuries, there are wars, famine, economic upheaval etc. I suppose it is at times of peace and prosperity people are more apt to stay put (unless of course moving is strictly forbidden). In Japan the countrysides and small towns are emptying out with everyone moving to the big cities. Times change.
But in almost every garden, on the north side, there is a little Shintô shrine, facing what is called the Ki-Mon, or “Demon-Gate,”–that is to say, the direction from which, according to Chinese teaching, all evils come; and these little shrines, dedicated to various Shintô deities, are supposed to protect the home from evil spirits.
Yep, my in-laws have this too. I just checked and it is more northwest than straight north.
Excepting, perhaps, the division of the imperial house against itself in the twelfth century, the greatest danger that ever threatened Japanese national integrity was the introduction of Christianity by the Portuguese Jesuits. The nation saved itself only by ruthless measures, at the cost of incalculable suffering and of myriads of lives.
The more I read, the more I learn that Christianity is a way to subjugate other tribes, other peoples and making them subject to a new king in Rome which we call the Pope. Japan escaped this, the Philippines did not. Hence today Christians are just a spec in Japan where 93% of all Filipinos are Christian. I’ve always wondered what the spirits of those Filipino warriors who fought the Spanish must think with all their descendants following the enemy religion without question. This kind of lessens the idea that spirits are all around us as I’d think those Filipino warrior spirits would be enraged.
“Nobunaga now began to regret his previous policy in permitting the introduction of Christianity. He accordingly assembled his retainers, and said to them:–‘The conduct of these missionaries in persuading people to join them by giving money, does not please me. How would it be, think you, if we were to demolish Nambanji [The “Temple of the Southern Savages”–so the Portuguese church was called]?’
We read in the histories of the missions about converted daimyô burning thousands of Buddhist temples, destroying countless works of art, and slaughtering Buddhist priests;–and we find the Jesuit writers praising these crusades as evidence of holy zeal. At first the foreign faith had been only persuasive; afterwards, gathering power under Nobunaga’s encouragement, it became coercive and ferocious.
Iyéyasu must have heard of many matters likely to give him a most evil opinion of Roman Catholicism:–the story of the Spanish conquests in America, and the extermination of the West Indian races; the story of the persecutions in the Netherlands, and of the work of the Inquisition elsewhere; the story of the attempt of Philip II to conquer England, and of the loss of the two great [1. The entire proclamation, which is of considerable length, has been translated by Satow, and may be found in Vol. VI, part I, of the Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan.
Yes, for all the Christian ideals of peace and love history tells us that often Christians did the opposite. And we don’t even have to look at history, just read your current news. Those Christian ‘ideals’ of love thy neighbor don’t seem to square with current deportation policy or really any policy from the current President. At least I hope they’re not separating kids from their families anymore. I doubt Melania had a chance to wear her “I don’t really care do you?” jacket again.
Could that destruction have been accomplished, and a new Roman Catholic empire have been founded upon the ruins, the forces of that empire would have been used for the further extension of priestly tyranny, the spread of the Inquisition, the perpetual Jesuit warfare against freedom of conscience and human progress.
The truth is Catholicism has been a huge impediment to rational human progress. If we could weigh the entirety of positive and negative Christianity has brought to the world, I’d say the scale would be equally balanced.
Viewed from another standpoint than that of religious bias, and simply judged by its results, the Jesuit effort to Christianize Japan must be regarded as a crime against humanity, a labour of devastation, a calamity comparable only,–by reason of the misery and destruction which it wrought,–to an earthquake, a tidal-wave, a volcanic eruption.
Tell this to any Christian today and they would get very angry. The majority (thinking primarily of mega churches where they get all worked up) most likely don’t even realize Japan isn’t a Christian country. That is how much credence I give those stupid mega churches. Then we might ask if they think all Japanese are going to hell. Many will say yes and the smarter ones give a non-answer full of “Jesus loves everyone” and other such nonsense.
In 1572 the Portuguese presumed to ask for the whole town of Nagasaki, as a gift to their church,–with power of jurisdiction over the same; threatening, in case of refusal, to establish themselves elsewhere. The daimyô, Ômura, at first demurred, but eventually yielded; and Nagasaki then became Christian territory, directly governed by the Church. Very soon the fathers began to prove the character of their creed by furious attacks upon the local religion. They set fire to the great Buddhist temple, Jinguji, and attributed the fire to the–wrath of God,”–after which act, by the zeal of their converts, some eighty other temples, in or about Nagasaki, were burnt. Within Nagasaki territory Buddhism was totally suppressed,–its priests being persecuted and driven away. In the province of Bungo the Jesuit persecution of Buddhism was far more violent, and conducted upon an extensive scale.
in 1693 Pope Clement X1 definitively prohibited converts from practising the ancestral rites under any form whatsoever. . . . All the efforts of all the missions in the Far East have ever since then failed to advance the cause of Christianity. The sociological reason is plain.
For it is an error to suppose that this Japanese society has yet arrived even at such a condition as Roman society presented in the second or third century of our era. Rather it remains at a stage resembling that of a Greek or Latin society many centuries before Christ. The introduction of railroads, telegraphs, modern arms of precision, modern applied science of all kinds, has not yet sufficed to change the fundamental order of things, Superficial disintegrations are rapidly proceeding; new structures are forming; but the social condition still remains much like that which, in southern Europe, long preceded the introduction of Christianity.
Unlike that subtler and incomparably more humane creed of India, which had learned the secret of missionary-success a thousand years before Loyola, the religion of the Jesuits could never have adapted itself to the social conditions of Japan; and by the fact of this incapacity the fate of the missions was really decided in advance. The intolerance, the intrigues, the savage persecutions carried on,–all the treacheries and cruelties of the Jesuits,–may simply be considered as the manifestations of such incapacity; while the repressive measures taken by Iyéyasu and his successors signify sociologically no more than the national perception of supreme danger.
Japanese art, of Buddhist origin, is especially an art of religious suggestion,–not merely as regards painting and sculpture, but likewise as regards decoration, and almost every product of æsthetic taste. There is something of religious feeling associated even with the Japanese delight in trees and flowers, the charm of gardens, the love of nature and of nature’s voices,–with all the poetry of existence, in short. Most assuredly the Jesuits and their allies would have ended all this, every detail of it, without the slightest qualm.
“Virtuous men have said, both in poetry and in classic works, that houses of debauch, for women of pleasure and for street-walkers, are the worm-eaten spots of cities and towns. But these are necessary evils, and if they be forcibly abolished, men of unrighteous principles will become like ravelled thread, and there will be no end to daily punishments and floggings.”
Considering that this code which inculcated humanity, repressed moral laxity, prohibited celibacy, and rigorously maintained the family-cult, was drawn up in the time of the extirpation of the Jesuit missions, the position assumed in regard to religious freedom appears to us one of singular liberality. “High and low alike,” proclaims the 31st article, “may follow their own inclinations with respect to religious tenets which have obtained down to the present time, except as regards the false and corrupt school [Roman Catholicism]. Religious disputes have ever proved the bane and misfortune of this Empire, and must be firmly, suppressed.” . . . But the seeming liberality of this article must not be misinterpreted: the legislator who made so rigid an enactment in regard to the religion of the family was not the man to proclaim that any Japanese was free to abandon the faith of his race for an alien creed. One must carefully read the entire Legacy in order to understand Iyéyasu’s real position,–which was simply this: that any man was free to adopt any religion tolerated by the State, in addition to his ancestor-cult.
The requirements of life were easily satisfied; every man had a master to provide for him or to protect him; competition was repressed or discouraged; there was no need for supreme effort of any sort,–no need for the straining of any faculty. Moreover, there was little or nothing to strive after: for the vast majority of the people, there were no prizes to win. Ranks and incomes were fixed; occupations were hereditary; and the desire to accumulate wealth must have been checked or numbed by those regulations which limited the rich man’s right to use his money as he might please. Even a great lord–even the Shôgun himself–could not do what he pleased.
Therefore a training in the tea-ceremonies is still held to be a training in politeness, in self-control, in delicacy,–a discipline in deportment.
The Japanese woman can be known only in her own country,–the Japanese woman as prepared and perfected by the old-time education for that strange society in which the charm of her moral being,–her delicacy, her supreme unselfishness, her child-like piety and trust, her exquisite tactful perception of all ways and means to make happiness about her,–can be comprehended and valued.
[……]
Even if she cannot be called handsome, according to Western standards, the Japanese woman must be confessed pretty,–pretty like a comely child; and if she be seldom graceful in the Occidental sense, she is at least in all her ways incomparably graceful: her every motion, gesture, or expression being, in its own Oriental manner, a perfect thing,–an act performed, or a look conferred, in the most easy, the most graceful, the most modest way possible.
I’ve always found the Japanese woman to be the most graceful in the world. Unlike Lafadio, I also find them the most beautiful. Yes, somewhat childish at times but this is greatly preferential to the overbearing “it’s all about me” attitude I’ve encountered in Western societies. And yes, of course, I’m speaking in generalities, the general characteristics at a societal scale. Yes, everyone is different and has their strengths and weaknesses. So without getting myself into a quagmire of explanation for the general public, I’ll just address my sons, as though it were a private chat.
Boys: Marry a Japanese woman. There is a saying (from Japan): Chinese food, Japanese wife, American house. 中華料理、日本の妻、アメリカの家.
– There is truth to this saying. Many will understand and many will not and get angry. Let them be angry, they are angry most of the time anyway, most likely because the didn’t follow the saying. 🙂
Herbert Spencer has shown that the great value to society of ecclesiastical institutions lies in their power to give cohesion to the mass,–to strengthen rule by enforcing obedience to custom, and by opposing innovations likely to supply any element of disintegration. In other words, the value of a religion, from the sociological standpoint, lies in its conservatism.
In the gardens of certain Buddhist temples there are trees which have been famous for centuries,–trees trained and clipped into extraordinary shapes. Some have the form of dragons; others have the form of pagodas, ships, umbrellas. Supposing that one of these trees were abandoned to its own natural tendencies, it would eventually lose the queer shape so long imposed upon it; but the outline would not be altered for a considerable time, as the new leafage would at first unfold only in the direction of least resistance: that is to say, within limits originally established by the shears and the pruning-knife. By sword and law the old Japanese society had been pruned and clipped, bent and bound, just like such a tree; and after the reconstructions of the Meiji period,–after the abolition of the daimiates, and the suppression of the military class, it still maintained its former shape, just as the tree would continue to do when first abandoned by the gardener. Though delivered from the bonds of feudal law, released from the shears of military rule, the great bulk of the social structure preserved its ancient aspect; and the rare spectacle bewildered and delighted and deluded the Western observer. Here indeed was Elf-land,–the strange, the beautiful, the grotesque, the very mysterious,–totally unlike aught of strange and attractive ever beheld elsewhere. It was not a world of the nineteenth century after Christ, but a world of many centuries before Christ: yet this fact–the wonder of wonders–remained unrecognized; and it remains unrecognized by most people even to this day.
Now it is not unjust to say that this moral code of the kurumaya exemplifies an unwritten law which has been always imposed, in varying forms, upon every class of workers in Japan: “You must not try, without special authorization, to pass your fellows.” . . . La carrière est ouverte aux talents–mais la concurrence est defendue!
男児志を立てて郷関を出づ。学もし成らずんば死すとも帰らず。 The young man, having made a firm resolve, leaves his native home. If he fail to acquire learning, then, even though he die, he must never return.
The new combinations of capital have actually reëstablished servitude, under harsher forms than ever were imagined under the feudal era; the misery of the women and children subjected to that servitude is a public scandal, and proves strange possibilities of cruelty on the part of a people once renowned for kindness,–kindness even to animals. There is now a humane outcry for reform; and earnest efforts have been made, and will be made, to secure legislation for the protection of operatives. But, as might be expected, these efforts have been hitherto strongly opposed by manufacturing companies and syndicates with the declaration that any Government interference with factory management will greatly hamper, if not cripple, enterprise, and hinder competition with foreign industry. Less than twenty years ago the very same arguments were used in England to oppose the efforts then being made to improve the condition of the industrial classes; and that opposition was challenged by Professor Huxley in a noble address, which every Japanese legislator would do well to read to-day.
The hatred of Western religion in China and adjacent countries is undoubtedly due to the needless and implacable attacks which have been made upon the ancestor-cult. To demand of a Chinese or an Annamese that he cast away or destroy his ancestral tablets is not less irrational and inhuman than it would be to demand of an Englishman or a Frenchman that he destroy his mother’s tombstone in proof of his devotion to Christianity.
Herbert Spencer died on the morning of December 8th, 1903 (while this book was in course of preparation); and the letter, addressed to Baron Kanéko Kentarô, under circumstances with which the public have already been made familiar, was published in the London Times of January 18th, 1904.
[……]
To your remaining question respecting the intermarriage of foreigners and Japanese, which you say is “now very much agitated among our scholars and politicians” and which you say is “one of the most difficult problems,” my reply is that, as rationally answered, there is no difficulty at all. It should be positively forbidden. It is not at root a question of social philosophy. It is at root a question of biology. There is abundant proof, alike furnished by the intermarriages of human races and by the interbreeding of animals, that when the varieties mingled diverge beyond a certain slight degree the result is inevitably a bad one in the long run. I have myself been in the habit of looking at the evidence bearing on this matter for many years past, and my conviction is based on numerous facts derived from numerous sources. This conviction I have within the last half-hour verified, for I happen to be staying in the country with a gentleman who is well known and has had much experience respecting the interbreeding of cattle; and he has just, on inquiry, fully confirmed my belief that when, say of the different varieties of sheep, there is an interbreeding of those which are widely unlike, the result, especially in the second generation, is a bad one–there arise an incalculable mixture of traits, and what may be called a chaotic constitution. And the same thing happens among human beings–the Eurasians in India, the half-breeds in America, show this. The physiological basis of this experience appears to be that any one variety of creature in course of many generations acquires a certain constitutional adaptation to its particular form of life, and every other variety similarly acquires its own special adaptation. The consequence is that, if you mix the constitution of two widely divergent varieties which have severally become adapted to widely divergent modes of life, you get a constitution which is adapted to the mode of life of neither–a constitution which will not work properly, because it is not fitted for any set of conditions whatever. By all means, therefore, peremptorily interdict marriages of Japanese with foreigners.
Nonsense of course. What he doesn’t realize is that he is the product of interbreeding throughout the millennia. This is nothing more than ignorant racism. Did he think his people just sprang out of the ground one day all of them having the same ‘pure’ blood.” The answer is most likely yes, with very vague understanding of the past.
He could not rely on the scientific advancements, DNA testing and better understanding of the movement of peoples in the past. It would be fun to give him a DNA test and see African or Jewish percentages in his overall makeup.
The unfortunate fact is there is a flavor of ‘purity’ seen in current USA policy. “Blood and Soil” they say. And these are people that have the advantage of DNA science. But, Republicans don’t believe in science so it is easy just to ignore the fact that there is no “pure blood.” Just take a DNA test and you can see for yourself.
Summary
I got off on a bit of a tangent there but it is good to point out the parallels between history and current affairs. They say history doesnt’ repeat itself but is certainly does rhyme. Indeed!
