Japan: Past and Present

Front matter

PAST AND PRESENT

by

Edwin O. Reischauer

Geographic Background

Chapter I

Geographic Background

In the islands of Japan nature fashioned a favored spot where civilization could prosper and a people could develop into a strong and great nation. A happy combination of temperate climate, plentiful rainfall, fairly fertile soil, and reasonable proximity to other great homes of civilized man predestined the ultimate rise of the inhabitants of these islands to a place among the leading peoples of the world.

The four main islands of Japan, strung out in a great arc along the coast of East Asia, cover the same spread of latitude and the same general range of climate as the east coast of the United States. The northern island of Hokkaido parallels New England; the heart of the country from Tokyo west to the Inland Sea corresponds to North Carolina; and the southern island of Kyushu parallels Georgia.

Americans have often tended to overemphasize the smallness of Japan, contrasting it with the vast stretches of our own country, or to other geographic giants like Russia and China. A more reasonable comparison would be with the countries of western Europe. Japan is smaller than France or pre-war Germany but slightly

Japan superimposed at the same latitude on the East Coast of the United States

larger than the British Isles or Italy, the homes of the two greatest empires our Western world has ever seen.

Like Italy, Japan is a mountainous country. Throughout all four of the main islands are great stretches of towering mountains and jumbled hills. The combination of rugged coast line and precipitous mountainsides makes of the whole country one of the beauty spots of the world, but it leaves little land for the Japanese farmer, who finds only about twenty per cent of the land surface of his islands level enough for cultivation.

The mountains of Japan have pushed the Japanese out upon the seas, making them the greatest seafaring people of Asia. Sea lanes have been great highways within Japan; sea routes have beckoned the Japanese abroad; and the cold and warm sea currents which bathe the shores of the islands have always provided rich fishing grounds for the hardy Japanese fishermen.

Nature has been rather niggardly with Japan in mineral resources. Coal the islands have in some abundance, but few other sub-soil riches in significant quantities. The mountains of Japan, together with the heavy rainfall, have, however, given Japan one great asset in the modern world—water power, all the more important in a land comparatively poor in other respects.

Next to its favorable climate, the geographic factor of greatest importance in shaping the history of Japan has been the factor of isolation. Japan is a part of the Chinese zone of civilization, that zone in East Asia centering around China which has been dominated by the culture developed in ancient times on the plains of North China.

The Chinese sphere of civilization is itself the most isolated of the great spheres of early civilization, cut off from the centers of early culture in India, the Near East, and the Mediterranean world by the great land barrier of the mountain ranges and vast deserts of Central Asia, and the jungles and rugged terrain of Southeast Asia and the Malay Peninsula.

In this relatively isolated zone of Chinese civilization, Japan was in the past the most isolated area of all. Like England, Japan is an island country, but the straits between western Japan and Korea, the nearest continental land, are well over miles wide, many times the width of the Straits of Dover; and some miles of open sea stretch between Japan and China, the home of civilization in East Asia. In days of primitive navigation these water barriers were very broad, and made of Japan the most isolated of all the older countries of the world.

Culturally Japan is a daughter of Chinese civilization, much as the countries of northern Europe are daughters of Mediterranean culture. The story of the spread of Chinese civilization to the alien peoples of Japan during the first millennium after Christ is much like the story of the spread of Mediterranean civilization to the alien peoples of northern Europe during the same period. But the greater isolation of the Japanese from the home of their civilization and from all other peoples meant that in Japan the borrowed culture had more chance to develop along new and often unique lines, and to grow into distinctive patterns of civilization.

One popular concept is that the Japanese have never been anything more than a race of borrowers and imitators. The truth is quite the contrary. Although

Ancient centers of civilization in Asia and Europe

geographic isolation has made them very conscious of borrowings from abroad, it has also led them to develop one of the most distinctive cultures to be found in any civilized area of comparable size.

Take, for example, things as basic as domestic architecture and the manner in which the Japanese live at home. The thick straw floor mats, the sliding paper panels in place of interior walls, the open, airy structure of the whole house, the recess for art objects, the charcoal heating braziers, the peculiar wooden and iron bathtubs, and the place of bathing in daily life as a means of relaxation at the end of a day’s work and, in winter, as a way of restoring a sense of warmth and well-being—all these and many other simple but fundamental features of home and daily life are unique to Japan and attest to an extremely distinctive culture rather than one of simple imitation.

Isolation has also made of the Japanese a highly self-conscious people, unaccustomed to dealing with foreigners individually or as a nation. The Japanese are always strongly conscious that they are Japanese and that all other peoples are foreigners. Isolation has made them painfully aware of their differences from other peoples and has filled them with an entirely irrational sense of superiority, which they are anxious to prove to themselves and to others. Isolation has made it difficult for them to understand the attitudes and actions of other peoples. In short, the factor of geographic isolation during the past two thousand years has helped fashion national traits which eventually, and almost inevitably, led Japan to political isolation and to crushing defeat in war.

The Early Japanese

Chapter II

The Early Japanese

Although the Japanese, like all other modern peoples, are the result of racial mixtures, they are essentially a Mongoloid people, closely related to their neighbors on the continent in Korea and China. According to popular theories the early Japanese came to their islands from the south by way of Formosa and the Ryukyu Islands, but archaeological evidence indicates clearly that most of the early Japanese came to Japan by way of Korea. Some originally may have come from more distant regions in northeastern Asia, and others may have come originally from the coastal areas of South China. There they may have been in contact with the peoples of Southeast Asia and the adjacent islands, which might explain the many close parallels between primitive Japanese institutions and those of the southern areas of the Far East.

Despite the basically Mongoloid origins of the Japanese, the first inhabitants of the islands seem to have been the ancestors of the modern Ainu, a people probably in part of proto-white stock; that is, a group which split off from the white race at such an early time that

Migrations to Japan in early times

not all the characteristics of the Caucasian type had as yet developed. The Ainu may once have inhabited all of Japan, but they possessed a neolithic culture inferior in many ways to the neolithic cultures of the early Mongoloid invaders of Japan. As a result they were gradually pushed eastward and northward through the Japanese chain of islands until they now exist only as a fast vanishing people living in primitive settlements in the more remote sections of the northern island of Hokkaido and in smaller islands even farther north.

The Ainu contributed little to Japanese culture, but they may have contributed considerably to Japanese physical characteristics, one of which is the relative hairiness of the Japanese when compared to other Mongoloid peoples. The bristling moustaches of the Japanese officers and business men may well be their Ainu legacy.

Bronze and iron probably first reached Japan about the first century of the Christian era, brought by a wave of Mongoloid invaders from Korea. These invaders clearly had close contacts with the semi-nomadic culture of the steppe lands of northeastern Asia. They were fighting men on horseback, carrying the long straight iron sword of northern Asia, and like the nomads of this region they buried their dead leaders in great mounds. One of their most common symbols was a semi-precious stone curved in the shape of a huge comma, and another was a round bronze mirror, usually considered to be the symbol of the sun. Similar curved jewels are common archaeological finds throughout Korea, and the bronze mirrors obviously were borrowed from the Chinese, showing that these people had already had some contact with the higher civilization of China before coming to Japan.

These invaders, with their superior bronze and iron civilization, soon became the dominant group among the varied peoples of early Japan. They were the founders of the historical Japanese state. Three of their most important possessions, the sword, the curved jewel, and the mirror, in time became the “Three Imperial Regalia,” which even today are the symbols of imperial authority.

The invaders from Korea were organized into petty clans. Chinese traders who visited western Japan around the year A.D. found the country divided into scores of small clan states, each ruled by a high priestess or a high priest. At about that time feminine rule, strongly implied in Japanese mythology, seems to have been giving way to masculine rule.

A feeling of clan solidarity and a belief in the importance of hereditary rights and authority were undoubtedly strong among these people, for these forces have been dominant throughout Japanese history and are still much alive in modern Japan. Probably the figure of the aristocrat soldier, the man on horseback, was already important in Japanese society, for this shadowy figure of early Japan survived the deluge of borrowed Chinese civilization, to emerge at a later day as the backbone of a feudal Japan.

The religion of the early Japanese was primarily a naïve nature worship which, probably under Chinese influence, later came to include a certain amount of ancestor worship. Nameless at first, it was later given the Chinese-sounding name of Shinto, “the way of the gods,” to distinguish it from the continental religion of Buddhism. Shinto was based on a simple feeling of awe in the presence of any surprising or awesome phenomenon pf nature—a waterfall, a mountain crag, a large tree, a peculiarly shaped stone, or even some lowly thing awesome only in its capacity for irritation, such as an insect. Anything awe inspiring was called kami, a word usually translated as “god” but basically meaning “above,” and by extension “superior.” This simple Shinto concept of deity should be borne in mind in trying to understand the deification in modern Japan of living emperors and of all Japanese soldiers who have died for their country.

Places where people often felt a sense of awe became cult places and eventually shrines. Today tens of thousands of such shrines dot the landscape of Japan. Some are now great institutions dating back to shadowy antiquity, others merely miniature edifices of stone or wood recently erected in front of an old oak tree or in a deep recess of a cave.

The underlying stream of Shinto today remains little changed since prehistoric times. Much has been done during the past 1,500 years to make an organized religion of this simple nature worship, and, more recently, by emphasizing the early mythology connected with Shinto, to employ it as a force for national solidarity and an inspiration for fanatical patriotism. But despite these imposed superstructures, the true basis of Shinto remains unchanged, a simple and naïve nature worship.

The possessors of the iron and bronze culture first crossed from Korea to northern Kyushu and western Honshu about the first century of the Christian era, but these migrations from Korea to Japan continued for several centuries longer. As their numbers in Japan increased, they pushed their way up the broad highway of the Inland Sea to the central portion of Japan, conquering and absorbing the earlier inhabitants as they went.

One of the clans which, according to its own misty traditions, moved up the Inland Sea from an earlier home in Kyushu, finally settled in the small Yamato Plain not far from the eastern end of the Inland Sea. There it grew and prospered, establishing offshoots in new areas and absorbing other clans, until it had won a vague suzerainty over all of central and western Japan and even over parts of southern Korea.

Japanese control over southern Korea is represented in traditional Japanese history as the result of a semi-miraculous conquest by a warrior empress. A more plausible explanation would be that clans in southern Korea, feeling themselves more akin to related clans which had earlier crossed to Japan, sought aid from the peoples of western Japan against new invaders from northern Korea. In any case, Japanese power in southern Korea was apparently at its height in the second half of the fourth century and gradually waned thereafter, coming to an end in the year 562.

The suzerainty of the Yamato clan within Japan did not extinguish the autonomous rights of the other clans, but the priest-chief of the Yamato group became the chief among clan chiefs, and the special cults of this clan became the principal cults of the whole land. In this way worship of the Sun Goddess, the mythologi progenitress of the chiefs of the Yamato clan, became the supreme cult of Japanese Shinto.

From the priest-chiefs of the Yamato clan, who gained supremacy over their fellow priest-chiefs during the third or fourth century, stemmed the Japanese imperial family. This was not so spectacular an origin as the direct descent from a Sun Goddess claimed in Japanese tradition. Nevertheless it was an origin of great antiquity when compared with the origins of other ruling families of the world. And the suzerainty of the Yamato clan was the start of the Japanese state itself, a loose association of clans under one supreme clan—scarcely the empire described in traditional Japanese history, but unmistakably the beginning of a new nation.

The Coming of Chinese Civilization

Chapter III

The Coming of Chinese Civilization

The peoples of northern Europe have always been conscious of their double heritage—their primitive Teutonic ancestry and the cultural legacy of ancient Greece and Rome. Similarly, the Japanese have a double historical heritage—the primitive stock of early Japan and the civilization of China. As in northern Europe, true history only started for Japan when the broad stream of a highly developed civilization reached its shores and, in a new geographic setting, combined with the simple native traditions of a primitive people to form a new culture, derived directly from the old civilization but differentiated from it by new geographic and racial ingredients.

The people who formed the early Yamato state in Japan had long had some contact with Chinese civilization, as may be seen from their early use of the Chinese bronze mirror. Fresh immigrants from Korea continued to bring to Japan the arts and sciences of the continent, and some knowledge of writing probably penetrated to the Japanese from China at a relatively early date. However, the first borrowings from China were made unconsciously and very slowly. Not until the second half of the sixth century did the Japanese become fully conscious of the advantages of the superior continental civilization and the desirability of learning more about it. The result was a sudden acceleration in the rate at which elements of Chinese culture were imported into the islands and absorbed by the Japanese.

Why this spurt in the long process of learning from China should have come at just this moment in Japanese history is not easy to determine. The Japanese people may have reached a level of cultural attainment and political organization then, which for the first time permitted more rapid and more conscious learning from abroad. And the renewed vigor displayed by Chinese culture at that time may have facilitated the process.

China’s history as a highly civilized part of the world reaches back to the second millennium before Christ. Its first great period as a colossal military empire came during the period of Rome’s greatness, roughly from about B.C. to A.D. An era of political disunion and disruption followed, and came to an end only in the second half of the sixth century, when a new and greater Chinese empire emerged from the chaos of three centuries of civil wars and barbarian invasions. The new Chinese empire was far richer and stronger than the first. In fact, during the seventh and eighth centuries China was, with little doubt, the richest and most powerful land in the whole world. This period was known by the dynastic name of T’ang, a period of unprecedented grandeur and might, and of brilliant cultural attainments. It is small wonder that the primi Japanese in their isolated island country felt the reflected glory of the new Chinese empire and awoke to a new awareness of the great land across the sea.

The start of the heavy flow of Chinese influence to Japan is usually dated about 552, the year when the Buddhist religion is said to have been officially introduced to the Yamato clan by a missionary from a kingdom in southern Korea. Actually, Buddhism had probably entered Japan even earlier, but this incident affords a convenient date to mark the time when the Japanese first started consciously to learn from the Chinese.

During the next few centuries Buddhism served as an important vehicle for the transmission of Chinese culture to Japan. Buddhism is by origin an Indian religion. It had slowly spread to China and had won a place of importance in Chinese culture during the troubled era between the two great empires. It was a vigorous missionary religion at that time, and missionary zeal carried it beyond China to Korea and from there to Japan. Korean, Chinese, and even occasional Indian priests came to Japan from the sixth to eighth centuries. In turn, scores of Japanese converts went to China to learn more of the new faith. Returning from the continent, these Japanese student priests, even more than foreign missionary teachers, took the lead in transmitting to Japan the new religion and many other aspects of Chinese civilization. They were the true pioneers in planting and nurturing in Japan the borrowed culture of China.

In the second half of the sixth century Buddhism and other new influences from abroad so affected the Yamato clan that clashes broke out between factions favoring the acceptance of Buddhism and other continental ideas and opposition groups which resisted the new religion and all change. The victory of the pro-Buddhist faction in about 587 cleared the way for a more rapid importation and acceptance of Chinese ideas and knowledge, and under the able leadership of the crown prince, Shotoku, many startling reforms were undertaken.

One of the most important innovations of Prince Shotoku was the sending of a large official embassy to China in the year 607. This embassy, and many others following its precedent during the next two centuries, played a vital role in the great period of learning from China. Although their immediate political significance was slight, and the economic importance of the exchange of goods carried on under their auspices was limited, the cultural influence of the embassies was tremendous. The Japanese leaders, showing extraordinary wisdom for a people only just emerging into the light of civilization, carefully chose promising young scholars and artists to accompany the embassies in order to study at the sources of knowledge in China. These young men, selected for their knowledge of Chinese literature, philosophy, history, or Buddhist theology and ritual, or for their skill in the arts of painting, poetry, or music, studied in China during the year of the embassy’s stay, and some remained in China for a decade or two between embassies. Upon their return to Japan, they became leaders in their respective fields, the men most responsible for the successful transmission to this isolated land of the science, arts, and ideals of the great continental civilization.

Early routes between Japan and China

Students who had returned from China formed an important element in a clique at the Yamato court which seized power through a carefully engineered coup in 645. From that time on the Yamato state was definitely committed to a policy of trying to create in Japan a small replica of China, a miniature T’ang in the forested islands on the eastern fringes of the civilized world.

With the glory of China before their eyes, it was little wonder that the Japanese made this attempt. Other petty states in Korea, Manchuria, and on the southwestern borders of China, dazzled by the grandeur and might of T’ang, were making the same attempt. Truly amazing, however, were the zeal and energy with which the Japanese approached the problem, displaying an enthusiasm for learning which promised great things for their remote and backward land.

Under the influence of Chinese ideas, the Japanese for the first time conceived the idea of the Yamato state as an empire, and at that, an empire on an equal footing with China. Prince Shotoku even dared to phrase a letter to the Chinese emperor as coming from the Emperor of the Rising Sun to the Emperor of the Setting Sun. With the new imperial concept, the ruler of the Yamato state for the first time assumed the dignity and majesty of an emperor. The priest-chief of the clan became in theory all-powerful, an absolute monarch in the Chinese tradition. But he did not lose his original role as high priest. He retained a dual position. Even today the Japanese emperor is in theory the Shinto high priest of ancient Yamato tradition, and at the same time the all-powerful secular ruler of Chinese tradition.

Possibly also under the influence of Chinese social concepts and of the Chinese prejudice against ruling empresses, the ancient custom of rule by women came to a definite end in Japan in the first half of the eighth century, after an unfortunate incident between a ruling empress and a Buddhist priest. Only many centuries later, long after the imperial line had become politically insignificant, did women again appear on the throne. Japanese women, who in the earliest times had enjoyed a position of social and political dominance over men, gradually sank to a status of complete subservience to them. Their rights and influence in early feudal society seem still to have been considerable, but in time even these rights were lost, as the women of Japan became socially and intellectually mere handmaids of the dominant male population.

Below the emperor the Japanese created a complex central government patterned after the tremendous centralized administration of T’ang China, one of the most highly developed and complex governments the world has ever seen. Under a Supreme Council of State, with its Prime Minister and Ministers of the Left and Right, were eight ministries, in concept not unlike the departments of our own government. Under the ministries in turn came scores of bureaus and other offices.

This organization was fantastically over developed for the needs of a small and loosely organized state, still close to a primitive clan society. Naturally much of the central government was little more than a paper organization which functioned, if at all, far differently from the Chinese prototypes. But the wonder is not that the Japanese fell short of complete success in creating a Chinese type of central government in Yamato. The surprising thing is that they had the ambition and energy to undertake such a gigantic and grandiose task, and that they already had sufficient understanding of the principles and mastery of the mechanism of Chinese government to create a fair semblance of its complex central administration.

One gains some idea of the scope of the undertaking and the degree of success achieved by considering the capital cities founded by the Japanese as part of their attempt to transform Japan into a little T’ang. In earlier ages there had been no cities, towns, nor even any semi-permanent buildings. Now the Japanese attempted to build a capital city comparable to Ch’ang-an, the great capital of T’ang, a metropolis of close to one million population and very probably the greatest city in the world at that time.

Ch’ang-an was a great rectangle in shape, some five miles by six miles, surrounded by massive walls. A magnificent palace stood at the northern end of the city and broad straight thoroughfares divided it neatly in checkerboard fashion. The first Japanese imitation of Ch’ang-an was undertaken in the year 710 near the modern town of Nara in the Yamato plain. The Japanese naturally reduced the scale, allowing the new capital an area of some two and a half by three miles. They failed to build the customary Chinese city wall, and the population of the capital was so far short of the goal that the western half of the city was never built up at all; but broad thoroughfares were laid out, and stately tile-roofed Buddhist temples and probably imposing palaces and residences were constructed. Even today several of these Buddhist temples still stand, the oldest wooden structures in the world and the finest remaining examples of Far Eastern architecture of the T’ang epoch.

Toward the end of the eighth century, the Japanese court, possibly with a view to escaping the increasing influence of the great Buddhist temples which ringed the Nara capital, decided to abandon this first city and

Plan of ancient Kyoto

build a new capital. In 794 this second city was laid out at Kyoto, a few miles north of Nara. Again the scale was grandiose, a rectangle some three by three and a half miles, and again the Chinese city wall and the western half of the city never materialized. But this second capital never disappeared, as did the first. It survived the vicissitudes of the ages, remaining the imperial capital of Japan until 1868, and the checkerboard pattern of the principal streets of Kyoto today still reflects accurately the Chinese-style city laid out over 1,000 years ago.

The creation of a central government in Japan based on Chinese models was an easier task than the creation of the Chinese type of provincial administration. Clan spirit and clan autonomy were still too strong to tolerate the direct rule of all parts of the land by a bureaucracy dispatched to the provincial centers from the court. But the Japanese at least created the outward forms of the Chinese provincial system. The land was divided into prefectures and sub-prefectures, and over these were placed officials with high-sounding titles. Since most of these provincial posts, however, were given to local aristocrats, control from the central government remained vague and probably subject to the tolerance of local leaders.

Perhaps the most daring step taken by the Japanese was an attempt to adopt the Chinese system of land­ ownership and taxation. In early T’ang China, agricultural land was in theory nationalized and distributed equally among the peasants, so that each adult tax-paying male could carry an equal share of the taxes. This he paid partly in produce and partly in labor, or in military service, which was considered a form of labor for the state.

Even in well-organized China, with its highly trained bureaucracy, this cumbersome system worked imperfectly, tending to break down completely every few decades. The Japanese wrote the system into elaborate law codes drawn up on Chinese models. To put it into practice in clan-ridden Japan was a different matter. For a century or so, the system did operate after a fashion in the capital area and in localities held directly by the Yamato clan, but in more remote parts of the country it was a dead letter from the start.

Closely connected with the Chinese tax system was the huge peasant conscript army it provided. China, with its long frontiers and warlike nomad neighbors to the north, needed such large levies, but they were quite meaningless in isolated Japan. A so-called army was created from peasant conscripts of the capital areas where the tax system was in force, but these peasant soldiers never constituted anything more than labor gangs. Despite the creation on paper of a foot-soldier army, the aristocrat on horseback remained the true Japanese fighting man.

The process of learning and borrowing from China was of course not limited to the political field. In fact, what the Japanese were learning at this time in cultural and intellectual fields had much more prolonged influence in Japan than did the borrowed political institutions. The latter for the most part decayed rapidly, and eventually disappeared in all but name, but many of the religious concepts, artistic skills, and literary forms learned during these centuries, far from losing their original vigor, developed and helped form the basic cultural patterns of later ages.

After the triumph of the pro-Buddhist faction at the Yamato court in the second half of the sixth century, this continental religion enjoyed the uninterrupted favor of the central government. Splendid temples were erected at government expense; impressive Buddhist ceremonies were sponsored by the court and the noble families. Many a Japanese emperor retired from the heavy burdens of his dual secular and religious role to the more peaceful life of the Buddhist monk. As was the case with so much else in the newly imported continental culture, the influence of Buddhism was still weak in the provinces, but in the capital district the new religion was supreme, and enjoyed official favor far greater than that afforded even the native cults of Shinto.