by Ian Buruma
Honzo’s kind of prudence is anathema to the true Japanese hero. He only manages to redeem himself near the end of the play, by deliberately provoking his own death at the hands of one of the loyal retainers. All is then finally forgiven as he chokes out his last words: ‘I held [Hangan] back because I thought he wouldn’t have to commit seppuku if his enemy did not die. My calculations went too far. It was the worst mistake of my life …’12
The contrast between the hot-headed rebels who murdered cabinet ministers in 1936 and the officers who opposed them follows the same pattern: the rebels belonged to the so-called Tendoha, the ‘Imperial Way Faction’, and the more prudent staff officers were part of the Toseiha, the ‘New Control Faction’. Members of the latter group belonged to the old military establishment and many of them favoured diplomacy and politics rather than direct action; while the officers who staged the coup, who, one must add, often felt left out of army politics,13 behaved exactly according to Sato Tadao’s description of the young child screaming to be heard.
Direct action, as opposed to calculating diplomacy, was also the difference between the heroic Yoshitsune and his supposedly evil brother Yoritomo: in fact Yoritomo was one of the ablest politicians in Japanese history,14 achieving far more than his impetuous brother, but that was precisely his crime – politics are by definition polluted by the calculating ways of society.
Makoto, writes Singer in Mirror, Sword and Jewel: A Study in Japanese Characteristics, ‘spells readiness to discard everything that might hinder a man from acting wholeheartedly on the pure and unpredictable impulses that spring from the secret centre of his being.’ This way of thinking is a synthesis of Shintoist purity, Zen and the philosophy of Wang Yang Ming, the sixteenth-century founder of the Idealist School of Confucianism, which advocates ‘taking the leap from knowledge into action’. This school of thought was much in vogue during the Edo period and it served as an inspiration for many suicidal fanatics, including Mishima Yukio.15
This emphasis on blind, emotional action points to one of the most significant paradoxes underlying Japanese culture: namely that a highly conformist people obsessed with etiquette and social propriety should ideally be swayed by their innermost emotions. But then it may not be so paradoxical after all, for it is precisely this tendency that makes restraint and good manners such a necessity.
It does put giri and other social obligations in an interesting light. For while giri is ostensibly part of a social system to keep the wilder and more unpredictable emotions in check, it can just as easily be employed as an excuse to give them free rein. After all, any amount of fanaticism can be excused in the name of giri, particularly as rationality is not only not a necessity, but not even really desirable.
It is, however, private inclination restrained to bursting point that provides the real tension in Japanese drama. The consummate Japanese hero, admired even more than the honest hot-heads, never breaks out wildly immediately. Of course he is not calculating like Honzo, for he would dearly love to act at once, but somehow he manages for a while to keep the lid on his emotions. Heroes, especially on the Kabuki stage, are a little like hissing and puffing pressure cookers, and it is at the final breaking point, when they simply cannot take it any more, that the audience applauds. It is the period of enduring the unendurable that makes the final act of revenge so cathartic.
Gaman, meaning perseverance, endurance or sufferance, is as much a virtue as makoto. Thus the real heroes of ‘Chushingura’ are the retainers, especially their leader Oboshi Yuranosuke. In one of the highlights of the play he pretends to be a dissolute and drunken reveller in a Kyoto brothel and his sword is ‘rusty as a red sardine’. He even eats raw fish on the anniversary of his master’s death, an act of blasphemy and extreme disrespect.16 And all this when he is in fact thinking constantly of revenge. One is also reminded of Benkei, disguised as a monk, beating his master, Yoshitsune, at the road-block. That, like Yuranosuke ignoring his Lord’s anniversary, is a show of true gaman.
The way in which the impatient ronin have to be patient, the humiliations they have to endure, in short the gaman they have to bear before their final act of violence is the true substance of the play. It is their suffering that moves the audience more than anything else: the twitching mouths, the squinting eyes, the stifled growls show the barely contained hysteria. The initial assassination attempt by Hangan (though not his suicide, which is a big scene) is a mere interlude, while the final revenge is little more than a coda.
In a similar way, one of the most extraordinary and violent books about the 1936 incident, Patriotism (Yukoku) by Mishima Yukio,17 does not even describe the incident itself. It is about the gaman of a man who did not take part. His closest friends did, and he is compelled by duty as an officer to take action against them. This Lieutenant Takeyama Shinji cannot bring himself to do: he is caught in an awkward giri–ninjo bind: duty versus personal feelings. He certainly cannot let them be executed, while staying alive himself. And so the only proper thing to do is to die a traditional warrior’s death by cutting his stomach open. The inner conflict of the Lieutenant can only be resolved by personal sacrifice. The rest of the story is a graphic description of the preparation and execution of his ceremonial death, followed by the suicide of his faithful wife.
Death in this rather histrionic tale is directly linked to sex, as it was in Mishima’s own life.18 Just before his suicide, the handsome young Lieutenant, looking ‘majestic in military uniform’ with his ‘dark and wide-gazing eyes [conveying] the clear integrity of youth’ makes love to his wife for the last time. But just before that, lying on his mattress waiting for her, he muses about the meaning of it all:
Was it death he was now waiting for? Or a wild ecstasy of the senses? The two seemed to overlap, almost as if the object of his bodily desire was death itself. But, however that might be, it was certain that never before had the Lieutenant tasted such total freedom.19
The combination of sex and death is hardly typically Japanese. Moreover, this passage could be read more as an example of the author’s rather idiosyncratic psychodrama than as an analysis of Japanese thought. And yet, whatever one might think of the man and his works, Mishima did have a way, albeit a very theatrical one, of putting his finger on aspects of his culture which many of his countrymen prefer to ignore.
It could be said, in fact, that sex and death are the only purely individual acts allowed in a rigidly collective society. We have argued that sex was a kind of quest for freedom during the Edo period – though at the cost of slavery for many young women – and how it is still used as a form of subversion. Death also has a significance that it lacks in the West: it is a release from the dictatorship of the group, while at the same time preserving it. (The same goes for many communist countries, with their high suicide rates, but their governments have not yet been clever enough to institutionalize voluntary death as a virtue.) Death, in other words, may be the ultimate freedom and the pinnacle of purity, but it is also the final and most important debt to pay.
10
Yakuza and Nihilist
The death cult is at its height in the modern gangster film, which is in many respects a continuation of the Chushingura mentality. But here too, one must be careful to keep myth and reality apart. The yakuza (gangsters) in the cinema are creatures of the popular imagination, just as the samurai of the Kabuki theatre were, and they bear little resemblance to real members of Japan’s highly organized criminal fraternity. This is not always apparent, because real mobsters in Japan are among the greatest fans of this cinematic genre, often imitating the style of movie yakuza, proving Oscar Wilde’s point about nature mimicking art. (I should also add that one of the main producers of yakuza films is the son1 of a powerful gang-land boss – killed recently by a rival gang – which might have added even further to the romantic image of the criminal underworld.)
Like so much in modern Japan, the cult of the gangster has its roots in the Edo period. The word yakuza refers to the lowest numbers
in a popular card game. It was the name for gamblers, outlaws, thieves and other petty criminals who drifted around the larger cities and seaports in those days. They did not belong to any specific class, not even the eta, the religiously polluted outcasts who lived off animal slaughter and leatherwork (Buddhism forbids the taking of animal life). Some of them were no doubt samurai who had fallen on bad times.
At the same time the Tokugawa government controlled the huge population in the cities by appointing neighbourhood chiefs, rather like village headmen. These men had to command enough respect to be able to keep order. Very often they were firemen or builders, the typical macho occupations of their day. The former in particular had a reputation for derring-do and fierce independence. In the popular imagination these local macho men, called kyokyaku, became rather larger than life. Like Robin Hood they had the image of fighting the rich and powerful to help the poor and weak. Banzuin Chobei, the man who helped the bishonen Shirai Gompachi in his distress, is a typical example of a kyokyaku glamorized on the Kabuki stage.
During the nineteenth century society became increasingly unstable and corrupt and many of these macho chiefs became involved in gambling and crime until they were virtually indistinguishable from ordinary yakuza. But the Robin Hood reputation remained and thus grew the myth of the noble gangster, the yakuza with the strict code of honour, vaguely based on the Way of the Samurai. The fantastic exploits of such local heroes as Kunisada Chuji and Shimizu no Jirocho became popular subjects for plays, story-tellers and later the cinema.
The modern film yakuza has another predecessor: the super samurai, who is equally caught up in the nobility of his cause. Though the two types have much in common, there are basic differences too. Paradoxically, the samurai heroes are in some ways less traditional, less essentially Japanese than the yakuza. They owe much to American Westerns and even to those swashbuckling Errol Flynn vehicles which were highly influential in the early Japanese cinema.
Like the noble drifters of the Wild West, many super samurai move from town to town helping the locals out of trouble, ‘punishing evil and rewarding the good’. Their morality is strongly Confucian and deeply rooted in the hierarchical structure of Edo society. A good example of the genre is a series called ‘The Bored Bannerman of the Shogun’ (‘Hatamoto Taikutsu Otoko’). The hero is so bored that he throws a stone up in the air and sets off in the direction where it lands. He always travels incognito, so nobody can guess his high rank.
Like John Wayne or Gary Cooper, he always finds some kind of nasty business to clear up. In one film he runs into a gang of Chinese smugglers conniving with corrupt Japanese dignitaries. He overpowers the gang, tells one of the female prisoners to jump into the sea ‘to join her loved one for eternity’, and finally scares the corrupt officials half to death by revealing his true identity. This showing of the colours is a climactic moment. As soon as the metamorphosis of the lonely drifter into the shogun’s retainer takes place, the villains fall on their knees, hammering their heads on the grounds, frothing at the mouth, making terrified, whimpering sounds.
The audience is satisfied in two ways: the noble samurai is a larger than life father-figure, descending straight from Heaven, like a deus ex machina, to deliver the common folk from the villains. But at the same time, he is one of them, until the last revealing moment. We rarely see him in surroundings appropriate to his station in life; he is always disguised as an ordinary townsman, displaying all the habits of that class.2
These samurai heroes serve an important function. They are reassuring because they demonstrate the basic benevolence of the social order. After having shown that they can be ordinary people, they re-establish the natural hierarchy. They appeal to a deep strain of conservatism in the Japanese people who would rather go through purgatory than upset the social order.
Though the super samurai has by now all but disappeared from the cinema, he can still be seen nightly on television, often several times in different guises. Very popular, for instance, is Toyama Kinshiro, the judge sporting a plebeian tattoo on his shoulders. Or Mito Komon, a kindly nobleman with a white beard, who always ends each episode with a hearty laugh, after revealing his true identity like a benign trickster.
The idealized samurai, whether as a fatherly superman or a suicidal scapegoat, has been an anachronism for centuries. But, as Ivan Morris has pointed out, most Japanese heroes are anachronistic. As with all forms of hero worship, the reason must be sought with the worshippers. Not only do most people fear social disorder, but there has always existed a strong belief that the past was somehow better and purer than the present (the same was true in traditional China). People seem to be forever gazing back nostalgically at paradise lost: a paradise in which ‘men were men and women were women’, and in which values were clear and simple. Heroes are by definition reactionary, fighting with their backs against the walls of history.
This stereotype goes back to the earliest Japanese heroes: to Totoribe no Yorozu, for example. His claim to fame was his willingness to die for a lost cause. This, as we have seen before, is not unusual. Neither is the fact that he slit his throat with a dagger after losing the battle against the Soga clan in A.D. 587. The Soga warriors, who consequently became the archetypal villains of early Japanese history, were in the context of their times ‘progressives’. It was they who introduced Buddhism, that foreign creed, as the official religion of the Japanese court. Yorozu was a retainer of the Monobe clan; they were the ‘reactionaries’ in charge of policing dissent and presiding over Shinto ceremonies, thus obviously hostile to novelties such as Buddhism. They were, in short, fighting for a world that was fast slipping away. The very hopelessness of their fight made it seem more noble, because it was more sincere.
A similar situation existed in the middle of the nineteenth century when the anti-Tokugawa factions fought to topple a corrupt and severely weakened government, hoping to reinstate the emperor as the head of a ‘modern’ state. Many popular heroes who are still celebrated in films, novels and comics were not on the rebel side, however, but, on the contrary, were fighting for the Tokugawa Shogun, the ultimate loser. Some were out-and-out reactionaries, such as Kondo Isamu, who was a member of the highly repressive state police, just as the Monobes had been more than a thousand years before.
Once the new government was established in 1868 its only member to become a really popular hero was Saigo Takamori, who is celebrated for fighting the very government he helped to create. The reason? He loathed the new ‘Western’ ways of the commercial and political establishment.
This brings us finally to the yakuza: they, in the myth at least, are clearly fighting a rearguard action against the corrupt modern age. At no time in Japanese history has the advance of modernity been as swift and perhaps as devastating as it was after the Second World War, particular in the booming 1960s. The samurai had by that time receded too far back into the past to be credible any more, at least to young people who went to the cinema. In the cinema, though not on television, the yakuza took over the super samurai role as defenders of the faith, becoming the noble outlaws of modern Japan.
Like popular genre films everywhere, yakuza movies are bound to strict patterns. Given the ceremonial nature of so many things Japanese, they are even more ritualistic than similar fare in the West. The important thing about these films is not the story itself, which is basically always the same, but the style, the etiquette even. The life of the noble film yakuza – to a certain extent based on reality – is as much governed by elaborate rules of conduct as that of a seventeenth-century samurai. And the yakuza film, like Kabuki plays, is a vehicle for actors to display their skills in dramatizing these rules.
I do not use the word ritualistic lightly, for that is really what yakuza films are: rituals in a tightly knit world based on a mythical and idealized past. The ritual is also intimately connected with death.3 In spirit the yakuza film is closer to the Spanish bullfight than the American gangster movie, from which it has borrowed certain, mostly s
artorial, trappings. The bullfight is a ceremony in which the death of the brave bull functions as a kind of purification. The yakuza hero whose death is as inevitable as the bull’s, serves much the same purpose.
In a typical yakuza film the sequence of events is more or less as follows. In the very first shot we are shown a glimpse of Japanese paradise where tradition still rules supreme: a religious festival, for example, in an old quarter of Tokyo. We hear the piercing sounds of festival flutes and the irregular beat of drums, almost drowned by the rhythmic shouts of young men carrying the neighbourhood shrine on their shoulders. Everyone is dressed traditionally, of course, in happi-coats, now so popular with tourists, or kimonos.
Then, suddenly, a large foreign car – usually of American make – disturbs the scene, loudly honking its horn and dispersing the happy matsuri throng. In the car we see a fat man in a loud Western suit, smoking a big cigar. We immediately realize that he is the villain in the piece. The theme has been established: paradise invaded by the modern world.4
There are variations on this, but the meaning is always the same. One well-known film starts with the burning of all the ceremonical attributes of an old gang about to break up: the old world has come to an end. This is followed by a succession of shots of big steel and glass buildings, smoking factories and oil refineries: the bad new world is about to begin.
In the next scene the gang of good, noble yakuza, all immaculate in happi-coats bearing the gang’s insignia, is helping the good local people in some worthy, traditional activity: setting up a street market, for instance, or organizing a festival. And once again peace is shattered by the bad men, dressed in flashy foreign suits, aloha shirts and sun-glasses. They kick over the stalls and rough up a few cowering tradesmen. One of the good men intervenes and beats up the bullies. Being natural cowards, they run away, but not before shouting something like: ‘We won’t forget this!’