by Will Durant
1657-1725: Arai Hakuseki
1697-1769: Mabuchi
1730-1801: Moto-ori Norinaga
CHRONOLOGY OF JAPANESE CIVILIZATION
5. The Essay:
Ca. 1000: Lady Sei Shonagon
1154-1216: Kamo no-Chomei
6. Philosophy:
1560-1619: Fujiwara Seigwa
1583-1657: Hayashi Razan
1608-48: Nakaye Toju
1630-1714: Kaibara Ekken
1619-91: Kumazawa Banzan
1627-1705: Ito Jinsai
1666-1728: Ogyu Sorai
1670-1736: Ito Togai
III. ART
1. Architecture:
Ca. 616: The temples of Horiuji
Ca. 1400: The palaces of Yoshimitsu
1543-90: Kano Yeitoku
Ca. 1630: The Mausoleum of Iyeyasu
2. Sculpture:
747: The Nara Daibutsu
774-835: Kobo Daishi
1180-1220: Unkei
1252: The Kamakura Daibutsu
1594-1634: Hidari Jingaro
3. Tottery:
Ca. 1229: Shirozemon
Ca. 1650: Kakiemon
Ca. 1655: Ninsei
1663-1743: Kenzan
Ca. 1664: Goto Saijiro
D. 1855: Zengoro Hozen
4. Fainting:
Ca.950: Kose no-Kanaoka
Ca. 1010: Takayoshi
Ca. 1017: Yeishin Sozu
1053-1140: Toba Sojo
1146-1205: Fujiwara Takanobu
Ca. 1250: Keion (?)
Ca. 1250: Tosa Gon-no-kumi
1351-1427: Cho Densu
Ca. 1400: Shubun
1420-1506: Sesshiu
D. 1490: Kano Masanobu
1476-1559: Kano Motonobu
Ca. 1600: Koyetsu
1578-1650: Iwasa Matabei
1602-74: Kano Tanyu
1618-94: Hishikawa Moronobu
1661-1716: Korin
1718-70: Harunobu
1733-95: Maruyami Okyo
1742-1814: Kiyonaga
1747-1821: Mori Zozen
1753-1806: Utamaro
Ca. 1790: Sharaku
1760-1849: Hokusai
1797-1858: Hiroshige
IV. THE NEW JAPAN
1853: Admiral Perry enters Uraga Bay
1854: Admiral Perry’s second visit
1854: Treaty of Kanagawa
1862: The Richardson Affair
1862: The bombardment of Kagoshima
1863: Ito and Inouye visit Europe
1868: Restoration of the imperial power
1868-1912: Meiji, Emperor
1870: Tokyo becomes the imperial capital
1871: Abolition of feudalism
1872: First Japanese railway
1877: The Satsuma Rebellion
1889: The new Constitution
1894: The War with China
1895: The annexation of Formosa
1902-22: The Anglo-Japanese Alliance
1904: The War with Russia
1910: The annexation of Korea
1912: End of the Meiji Era
1912-25: Taisho, Emperor
1914: Capture of Tsingtao
1915: The Twenty-one Demands
1917: The Lansing-Ishii Agreement
1922: The Washington Conference
1924: The restriction of Japanese immigration into America
1925: Hirohito, Emperor
1931: The invasion of Manchuria
1932: The attack at Shanghai
1935: Notice given to terminate Washington Agreement in 1936
CHAPTER XXVIII
The Makers of Japan
THE history of Japan is an unfinished drama in which three acts have been played. The first—barring the primitive and legendary centuries—is classical Buddhist Japan (522-1603 A.D.), suddenly civilized by China and Korea, refined and softened by religion, and creating the historic masterpieces of Japanese literature and art. The second is the feudal and peaceful Japan of the Tokugawa Shogunate (1603-1868), isolated and self-contained, seeking no alien territory and no external trade, content with agriculture and wedded to art and philosophy. The third act is modern Japan, opened up in 1853 by an American fleet, forced by conditions within and without into trade and industry, seeking foreign materials and markets, fighting wars of irrepressible expansion, imitating the imperialistic ardor and methods of the West, and threatening both the ascendancy of the white race and the peace of the world. By every historical precedent the next act will be war.
The Japanese have studied our civilization carefully, in order to absorb its values and surpass it. Perhaps we should be wise to study their civilization as patiently as they have studied ours, so that when the crisis comes that must issue either in war or understanding, we may be capable of understanding.
I. THE CHILDREN OF THE GODS
How Japan was created—The rôle of earthquakes
In the beginning, says the oldest of Japanese histories,1 were the gods Male and female they were born, and died, until at last two of them, Izanagi and Izanami, brother and sister, were commanded by the elder deities to create Japan. So they stood on the floating bridge of heaven, thrust down into the ocean a jeweled spear, and held it aloft in the sky. The drops that fell from the spear became the Sacred Islands. By watching the tadpoles in the water the gods learned the secret of copulation; Izanagi and Izanami mated, and gave birth to the Japanese race. From Izanagi’s left eye was born Amaterasu, Goddess of the Sun, and from her grandson Ninigi sprang in divine and unbroken lineage all the emperors of Dai Nippon. From that day until this there has been but one imperial dynasty in Japan.*
There were 4,223 drops from the jeweled spear, for there are that number of islands in the archipelago called Japan,† Six hundred of them are inhabited, but only five are of any considerable size. The largest-Hondo or Honshu—is 1,130 miles long, averages some 73 miles in width, and contains in its 81,000 square miles half the area of the islands. Their situation, like their recent history, resembles that of England: the surrounding seas have protected them from conquest, while their 13,000 miles of seacoast have made them a seafaring people, destined by geographical encouragement and commercial necessity to a widespread mastery of the seas. Warm winds and currents from the south mingle with the cool air of the mountain-tops to give Japan an English climate, rich in rain and cloudy days4 nourishing to short but rapid-running rivers, and propitious to vegetation and scenery. Here, outside the cities and the slums, half the land is an Eden in blossom-time; and the mountains are no tumbled heaps of rock and dirt, but artistic forms designed, like Fuji, in almost perfect lines.‡
Doubtless these isles were born of earthquakes rather than from dripping spears.6 No other land—except, perhaps, South America—has suffered so bitterly from convulsions of the soil. In the year 599 the earth shook and swallowed villages in its laughter; meteors fell and comets flashed, and snow whitened the streets in mid-July; drought and famine followed, and millions of Japanese died. In 1703 an earthquake killed 32,000 in Tokyo alone. In 1885 the capital was wrecked again; great clefts opened in the earth, and engulfed thousands; the dead were carried away in cartloads and buried en masse. In 1923 earthquake, tidal wave and fire took 100,000 lives in Tokyo, and 37,000 in Yokahama and nearby; Kamakura, so kind to Buddha, was almost totally destroyed,7 while the benign colossus of the Hindu saint survived shaken but unperturbed amid the ruins, as if to illustrate the chief lesson of history—that the gods can be silent in many languages. The people were for a moment puzzled by this abundance of disaster in a land divinely created and ruled; at last they explained the agitations as due to a large subterranean fish, which wriggled when its slumber was disturbed.8 They do not seem to have thought of abandoning this adventurous habitat; on the day after the last great quake the school-children used bits of broken plaster for pencils, and the tiles of their shattered homes for slates.9 The nation bore patiently these lashings of circumstance, and emerged from repeated ruin undisco
urageably industrious, and ominously brave.
II. PRIMITIVE JAPAN
Racial components—Early civilization—Religion—“Shinto”—Buddhism—The beginnings of art—The “Great Reform”
Japanese origins, like all others, are lost in the cosmic nebula of theory. Three elements appear to be mingled in the race: a primitive white strain through the “Ainus” who seem to have entered Japan from the region of the Amur River in neolithic times; a yellow, Mongol strain coming from or through Korea about the seventh century before Christ; and a brown-black, Malay and Indonesian strain filtering in from the islands of the south. Here, as elsewhere, a mingling of diverse stocks preceded by many hundreds of years the establishment of a new racial type speaking with a new voice and creating a new civilization. That the mixture is not yet complete may be seen in the contrast between the tall, slim, long-headed aristocrat and the short, stout, broad-headed common man.
Chinese annals of the fourth century describe the Japanese as “dwarfs,” and add that “they have neither oxen nor wild beasts; they tattoo their faces in patterns varying with their rank; they wear garments woven in one piece; they have spears, bows and arrows tipped with stone or iron. They wear no shoes, are law-abiding and polygamous, addicted to strong drink and long-lived. . . . The women smear their bodies with pink and scarlet” paint.11 “There is no theft,” these records state, “and litigation is infrequent”;12 civilization had hardly begun. Lafcadio Hearn, with uxorious clairvoyance, painted this early age as an Eden unsullied with exploitation or poverty; and Fenollosa pictured the peasantry as composed of independent soldier-gentlemen.13 Handicrafts came over from Korea in the third century A.D., and were soon organized into guilds.14 Beneath these free artisans was a considerable slave class, recruited from prisons and battlefields.15 Social organization was partly feudal, partly tribal; some peasants tilled the soil as vassals of landed barons, and each clan had its well-nigh sovereign head.16 Government was primitively loose and weak.
Animism and totemism, ancestor worship and sex worship17 satisfied the religious needs of the early Japanese. Spirits were everywhere—in the planets and stars of the sky, in the plants and insects of the field, in trees and beasts and men.18 Deities innumerable hovered over the home and its inmates, and danced in the flame and glow of the lamp.19 Divination was practised by burning the bones of a deer or the shell of a tortoise, and studying with expert aid the marks and lines produced by the fire; by this means, say the ancient Chinese chronicles, “they ascertain good and bad luck, and whether or not to undertake journeys and voyages.”20 The dead were feared and worshiped, for their ill will might generate much mischief in the world; to placate them precious objects were placed in their graves—for example, a sword in the case of a man, a mirror in the case of a woman; and prayers and delicacies were offered before their ancestral tablets every day.21 Human sacrifices were resorted to now and then to stop excessive rain or to ensure the stability of a building or a wall; and the retainers of a dead lord were occasionally buried with him to defend him in his epilogue.22
Out of ancestor worship came the oldest living religion of Japan. Shinto, the Way of the Gods, took three forms: the domestic cult of family ancestors, the communal cult of clan ancestors, and the state cult of the imperial ancestors and the founding gods. The divine progenitor of the imperial line was addressed with humble petitions, seven times a year, by the emperor or his representatives; and special prayers were offered up to him when the nation was embarking upon some particularly holy cause, like the taking of Shantung (1914).23 Shinto required no creed, no elaborate ritual, no moral code; it had no special priesthood, and no consoling doctrine of immortality and heaven; all that it asked of its devotees was an occasional pilgrimage, and pious reverence for one’s ancestors, the emperor, and the past. It was for a time superseded because it was too modest in its rewards and its demands.
In 522 Buddhism, which had entered China five hundred years before, passed over from the continent, and began a rapid conquest of Japan. Two elements met to give it victory: the religious needs of the people, and the political needs of the state. For it was not Buddha’s Buddhism that came, agnostic, pessimistic and puritan, dreaming of blissful extinction; it was the Mahayana Buddhism of gentle gods like Amida and Kwannon, of cheerful ceremonial, saving Bodhisattwas, and personal immortality. Better still, it inculcated, with irresistible grace, all those virtues of piety, peacefulness and obedience which make a people amenable to government; it gave to the oppressed such hopes and consolations as might reconcile them to content with their simple lot; it redeemed the prose and routine of a laborious life with the poetry of myth and prayer and the drama of colorful festival; and it offered to the people that unity of feeling and belief which statesmen have always welcomed as a source of social order and a pillar of national strength.
We do not know whether it was statesmanship or piety that brought victory to Buddhism in Japan. When, in 586 A.D., the Emperor Yomei died, the succession was contested in arms by two rival families, both of them politically devoted to the new creed. Prince Shotoku Taishi, who had been born, we are told, with a holy relic clasped in his infant hand, led the Buddhist faction to victory, established the Empress Suiko on the throne, and for twenty-nine years (592-621) ruled the Sacred Islands as Prince Imperial and Regent. He lavished funds upon Buddhist temples, encouraged and supported the Buddhist clergy, promulgated the Buddhist ethic in national decrees, and became in general the Ashoka of Japanese Buddhism. He patronized the arts and sciences, imported artists and artisans from Korea and China, wrote history, painted pictures, and supervised the building of the Horiuji Temple, the oldest extant masterpiece in the art history of Japan.
Despite the work of this versatile civilizer, and all the virtues inculcated or preached by Buddhism, another violent crisis came to Japan within a generation after Shotoku’s death. An ambitious aristocrat, Kamatari, arranged with Prince Naka a palace revolution that marked so definite a change in the political history of Nippon that native historians refer to it enthusiastically as the “Great Reform” (645). The heir-apparent was assassinated, a senile puppet was placed upon the throne, and Kamatari as chief minister, through Prince Naka as heir-apparent and then as Emperor Tenchi, reconstructed the Japanese government into an autocratic imperial power. The sovereign was elevated from the leadership of the principal clan to paramount authority over every official in Japan; all governors were to be appointed by him, all taxes paid directly to him, all the land of the realm was declared his. Japan graduated rapidly from a loose association of clans and semi-feudal chieftains into a closely-knit monarchical state.
III. THE IMPERIAL AGE
The emperors—The aristocracy—The influence of China—The Golden Age of Kyoto—Decadence
From that time onward the emperor enjoyed impressive titles. Sometimes he was called Tenshi, or “Son of Heaven”; usually Tenno, or “Heavenly King”; rarely Mikado, or “August Gateway.” He had the distinction of receiving a new appellation after his death, and of being known in history by an individual name quite different from that which he bore during his life. To ensure the continuity of the imperial line, the emperor was allowed to have as many wives or consorts as he desired; and the succession went not necessarily to his first son, but to any of his progeny who seemed to him, or to the Warwicks of the time, most likely to prove strongest, or weakest, on the throne. In the early days of the Kyoto period the emperors inclined to piety; some of them abdicated to become Buddhist monks, and one of them forbade fishing as an insult to Buddha.25 Yozei was a troublesome exception who illustrated the perils of active monarchy: he made people climb trees, and then shot them down with bow and arrow; he seized maidens in the street, tied them up with lute strings, and cast them into ponds; it pleased His Majesty to ride through the capital and to belabor the citizens with his whip; at last his subjects deposed him in an outbreak of political impiety rare in the history of Japan.26 In 794 the headquarters of the government were removed f
rom Nara to Nagaoka, and shortly thereafter to Kyoto (“Capital of Peace”); this remained the capital during those four centuries (794-1192) which most historians agree in calling the Golden Age of Japan. By 1190 Kyoto had a population of half a million, more than any European city of the time except Constantinople and Cordova.27 One part of the town was given over to the cottages and hovels of the populace, which seems to have lived cheerfully in its humble poverty; another part, discreetly secluded, contained the gardens and palaces of the aristocracy and the Imperial Family. The people of the court were appropriately called “Dwellers above the Clouds.”28 For here as elsewhere the progress of civilization and technology had brought an increase in social distinctions; the rough equality of pioneer days had given way to the inequality that comes inevitably when increasing wealth is distributed among men ac cording to their diverse capacity, character, and privilege. Great families arose like the Fujiwara, the Taira, the Minamoto and the Sugawara, who made and unmade emperors, and fought with one another in the lusty manner of the Italian Renaissance. Sugawara Michizane endeared himself to Japan by his patronage of literature, and is now worshiped as the God of Letters, in whose honor a school holiday is declared on the twenty-fifth day of every month; and the young Shogun Minamoto Sanetomo distinguished himself by composing on the morning before his assassination this simple stanza, in the chastest Japanese style:
If I should come no more,
Plum-tree beside my door,
Forget not thou the spring,
Faithfully blossoming.29
Under the enlightened Daigo (898-930), greatest of the emperors set up by the Fujiwara clan, Japan continued to absorb, and began to rival, the culture and luxury of China, then flourishing at its height under the T’ang. Having taken their religion from the Middle Kingdom, the Japanese proceeded to take from the same source their dress and their sports, their cooking and their writing, their poetry and their administrative methods, their music and their arts, their gardens and their architecture; even their handsome capitals, Nara and Kyoto, were laid out in imitation of Ch’ang-an.30 Japan imported Chinese culture a thousand years ago as it imported Europe and America in our own day: first with haste, then with discrimination; jealously maintaining its own spirit and character, zealously adapting the new ways to ancient and native ends.