Taming the Gods

by Ian Buruma

  To most Chinese, the demise of charismatic rule must have come as a great relief. As a quasi-religious political ideology, Maoism is dead. But this loss, as well as the thorough destruction of older traditions, has left China with what many Chinese describe as a “spiritual vacuum.” There is nothing left to believe in, except the famous slogan of Deng Xiaoping that “to get rich is glorious.” Halfhearted attempts by the Communist Party to attach a higher meaning (and legitimacy) to its monopoly on power by resurrecting communist slogans and campaigns from the past are, on the whole, met with indifference and contempt.

  What is not dead, however, in official circles, is the notion that secular power must be justified by a moral ideology, a kind of official state cult. The ideology currently being revived under the auspices of the Communist Party of China is, perhaps faute de mieux, none other than Confucianism—this after years of official denunciation of the ancient sage. What is stressed, however, is not the idea of the right to rebel against unjust rulers but the late neo-Confucian idea of absolute obedience to authority, a version of Confucianism that is consciously anti-democratic.

  Contemporary China, in fact, is not at all devoid of spirituality. New cults, old folk beliefs, various forms of Christianity, some legal, some not, and Buddhist and Taoist sects, as well as all kinds of meditation and faith-healing groups, have sprung up like mushrooms after a rainstorm. The fact that Chinese citizens are not able to participate in politics, except in a very limited way in village elections, has made religion all the more popular. It is their only escape from pure materialism. Like imperial governments in the past, the communist government tries its best to keep all religious activity under its control. The Falungong, for example, a faith-healing, millenarian cult started by a charismatic meditation teacher, especially popular among elderly party cadres, seems harmless enough. But the government knows that it was precisely such cults that spread into rebellious movements in the past. And so it was crushed, in China at any rate.

  Even if one does not condone the government ban, let alone its cruel persecution of Falun Gong supporters, it is doubtful that political movements emanating from charismatic groups would offer the quickest route to a democratic transformation. They are more likely to result in yet another cycle of Chinese history, of millenarian hope, followed by oppression.

  Many Chinese Christians continue to argue, like Sun Yat-sen, that Christianity, with its stress on equality, charity, and duty to others, is the logical basis for democratic change. Some Christians even believe that China will be a democracy only once all Chinese have been converted to the Christian faith. It seems a dubious claim. To be sure, organized religion can assume a moral authority, to be mobilized against the authority of the state. This is particularly potent in a civilization where political authorities have traditionally sought to monopolize moral authority. But another religious revolt is hardly what China needs.

  If democratic change is to come to China, it would have to involve a split between religious authority and secular rule. One must be allowed to exist independently of the other. No religion, not Buddhism, Taoism, Christianity, or the moral belief in Confucian ethics, need stand in the way of Chinese democracy. It has not done so in Taiwan. Confucian ethics, in the sense of benevolence, loyalty, and self-restraint, could even be a help. But this means that the political masters of the Chinese republic must renounce their authoritarian claims on the moral and spiritual lives of its citizens. Much has already changed since the death of Mao, but in this respect the rulers of the one-party state are as traditional as the long line of emperors and Confucian mandarins that preceded them.

  Japan is a democracy, flawed, like all democracies, but a country with a free press, independent judges, and the right of all citizens to vote. Japanese like to claim that religion, in contrast to the Western world, plays only a minor role in Japanese life. What they mean is that Buddhism and Shinto, the majority religions in Japan, lack the dogmatic force of Christianity or Islam. Shinto, an amalgamation of nature-related rituals, does not have sacred texts of divine revelation. Most Japanese, when they marry or bury their kin, will pay deference to Buddhist or Shinto ceremonies, but that is often as far as religious practices go. Yet the claim that religion plays no part in Japanese politics would be wrong. One of the main contemporary political parties is tied to a Buddhist sect, and a political form of Shinto helped crush democratic aspirations in the past. Religion certainly played an important role in Japan’s response to superior Western might.

  Japan had a comparative advantage over the Chinese Empire when both were confronted with Western aggression in the middle of the nineteenth century. This was a matter of geography, as well as attitude, and the two were linked. Located on the farthest edge of the Asian continent—from the Western point of view, at any rate—Japan was spared the traumas of European colonial expansion. Also, Japan’s peripheral perspective did not allow Japanese the luxury of thinking that they inhabited the center of the world. At least since the seventh century, and probably before, Japanese were well aware that the dominant civilization lay overseas.

  This meant that Japanese had more time than other Asians to prepare for the Western waves that would sooner or later hit their rocky shores. After welcoming them at first, in the sixteenth century, the samurai government had little trouble cracking down on Catholic missionaries, as well as their Japanese converts, when they seemed to pose a threat to the political status quo. Once the Portuguese missionaries had been disposed of, Dutch traders, who had no interest in spreading God’s word, could be safely contained in Deshima, a cramped little island off the port of Nagasaki, when Japan closed its borders to further European visitors for more than two hundred years.

  But even in relative isolation, Japanese had a curiosity about other countries that often goes with the fear of provinciality, of being left out on the fringes. In this respect, too, they were not at all like the Chinese. By the time the Chinese Empire was humiliated in the Opium Wars, educated Japanese knew that China was no longer the great power it had once been. For the Chinese to adapt to the new world, where the balance of power had shifted so far in favor of the West, they would have to go through a cosmic change, as it were, upsetting the core of what it meant to be Chinese. The Japanese, on the margin of Chinese civilization, could simply look for the center elsewhere.

  Largely through the heroic efforts of “Dutch scholars,” who learned to read medical, scientific, and geographical texts in the Dutch language, Japanese knew more about the West than most Asians. One such scholar, reading a biography of Napoleon in Dutch, was so taken by the word for freedom, Vrijheit, that he softly intoned it whenever he got drunk.

  The other factor that stood in the way of change in China was the concentration of power in the imperial government. Modernizing China called for a revolution, which again was more than a political shift. Bringing the imperial system to an end involved a breakdown of all the traditional institutions that gave legitimacy to political rule in China. There were reformists, such as Kang Youwei, who advocated a more moderate solution, hoping to paper over the transition with a constitutional monarchy. But they never had a chance. Once the Qing Dynasty broke down, without a new emperor to take over the dragon throne, it was like pulling a thread from a tattered old scarf; the whole system, with all its philosophical and religious underpinnings, came apart.

  Again, Japan had a comparative advantage. After Prince Shotoku, patron of Buddhism in Japan, installed a Chinese-style political system in the seventh century, power was concentrated in the imperial court for several hundred years. But the authority of the court, located in Kyoto, was gradually eroded by regional samurai warlords and Buddhist clergy. By the twelfth century, after many bloody conflicts, the most powerful warrior clan established a government by shoguns, military strongmen, who left most cultural and religious duties to the emperors in Kyoto but kept worldly power for themselves. The most successful warrior clan of all, the Tokugawas, who ruled Japan between 1603 and 1867, furt
her weakened the imperial court by shifting the base of political power to Edo, present-day Tokyo.

  But even the authority of the Tokugawa shoguns was far from absolute. They still had to contend with regional samurai lords, whose relations with Edo were a matter of negotiation. Buddhist orders, especially Nichiren, also tried to protect their autonomy from the state, ultimately without success. And the imperial court, though much diminished, still had to be respected, if only because it was the emperor’s blessing that gave legitimacy to the military rulers.

  What this meant, in effect, was that Japan had fashioned a kind of separation between religious and worldly authority. The emperor became a revered spiritual figure, in charge of rites and ceremonies, while the shogun represented secular power. This arrangement was not entirely straightforward, in that the founder of the Junta, Tokugawa Ieyasu, was buried in a lavish temple complex north of Edo and was given divine status, like the Roman emperors.

  Still, the separation of powers made it easier for Japan to make the necessary changes in the late nineteenth century to modernize the country and stave off foreign predators. There had already been sporadic uprisings in the countryside advocating the revival of imperial authority. As in China, such rebellions had a strong religious tinge. They never had a hope of succeeding until the 1850s, when the arrival of the American “black ships,” commanded by Commodore Matthew C. Perry and armed with fearsome cannon, made the Tokugawa shogunate look tired, feeble, and clueless, rather like the Qing court during the Opium Wars. As a result, Japan, too, had a revolution of sorts, but not one that did away with the entire system and all its cultural underpinnings. Instead, provincial samurai, backed by city merchants, toppled the Tokugawa shogun and “restored” the emperor as the central ruler of Japan. They used a highly traditional institution to make a political revolution look like a restoration, as though the new Japan, with its modern, Western-style armed forces, political parties, factories, and new bureaucratic and industrial elites, dressed in European clothes, were actually returning to a truer, older, more traditional society.

  In truth, however, much of this tradition was not only invented, as was the case in nineteenth-century European monarchies as well, but inspired by Western models. The Meiji emperor in Tokyo was partly a godlike Japanese mikado, partly a Napoleonic figure on horseback, and partly a German-style Kaiser. Instead of fighting unwinnable wars against the Western powers, which is what the Chinese opted for, the nineteenth-century Japanese elite, nativists as well as reformists, decided to learn as much as they could from the powerful foreigners in order to stand up to them. This meant, in their pretty much unanimous view, that Japan had to acquire an empire of its own, in Taiwan, Korea, and Micronesia. It also meant that Japan needed a Kaiser in modern military dress, as commander in chief (in name at least) of the army and navy, and it meant that Japan needed a state religion.

  In 1825, a patriotic scholar named Aizawa Seishisai wrote a famous polemical tract titled New Theses. Since this was still more than a decade before the Opium Wars, and thirty years before the arrival of Commodore Perry, Aizawa’s fear of Western power was ideological more than military. After analyzing the source of Western imperial might, he concluded that Christianity was the key. Western rulers were able to unify their nations and command loyalty from their citizens because they had Christianity as a state religion. Japan, he decided, needed a state religion of its own, that is, in his phrase, “unity between religion and government” (saisei itchi), personified by an imperial ruler. The state, he believed, was more than a collection of political institutions; it was a spiritual community, a kokutai, “national essence.”19

  Since Aizawa was a nativist who had shifted his cultural focus from the Asian continent to Japan as the new center of Asian civilization, Buddhism clearly would not do. “The practitioners of this doctrine,” he wrote, “sought to transform our Divine Land into another India, to convert innocent subjects of our Middle Kingdom into followers of the Indian barbarians. When transformed by barbarism within, how can ‘what is essential to a nation’ (kokutai) remain intact?”20

  Although even the Japanese nativists were still steeped in Confucian thinking, Confucianism, if it can be called a religion at all, was not adequate as a national faith for the Japanese kokutai either. But Japanese nationalists did praise the efficacy of Christianity in Confucian, or at least traditional Chinese, terms. Christianity in Europe (as opposed to the debased forms brought to Asia by missionaries) was, in the words of Yokoi Shonan (in 1856), “based on the Will of Heaven; its main doctrines follow the rules of ethical behavior. . . . [I]t is a religion that combines government and edification.”21

  What was needed, then, was a purely Japanese faith. Shinto, or Way of the Gods, seemed best able to answer this need. It was certainly Japanese. For the common people, Shinto was actually not a religion, in the sense of having a doctrine, but a set of ceremonies and rites, often regional in nature, to do with fertility, good harvests, clement weather, and so on. Anything natural could be sacred: rivers, rocks, Mount Fuji. But the way nineteenth-century nationalists pressed Shinto into national service was something new.

  Part of the emperor’s duties had always been to worship Amaterasu, the Sun Goddess, as his divine ancestor. She now became a Japanese equivalent to the Christian God. (In the view of some thinkers, she also proved the superiority of Japanese science, since the Japanese had known long before Copernicus that the earth revolved around the sun.) And now the emperor, more than being a custodian of tradition, in the way of his ancestors, became the divine focus of an official cult, which was more or less a modern invention, along with steamships, conscript armies, and a new constitution.

  In one sense, the Japanese, who had separated religious and secular authority in the past, inaugurated their modern age by putting them together again. But this, too, was not straightforward. The emperor’s powers were subject to a certain degree of ambiguity, and so was the use of religion, including Shinto. Before the emperor bestowed the constitution to his subjects on February 11, 1889, the anniversary of the date on which Jinmu, Japan’s mythical first emperor, was believed to have founded the imperial line, he informed the spirits of his imperial ancestors of the event in the privacy of his palace shrine. But the constitution, drafted by men who had a good grasp of European laws, was a secular document that gave a privileged section of the population the right to vote. It also guaranteed freedom of religion and did not purport to reflect any particular faith. Yet it mentioned the “unbroken line” of the emperor’s ancestry, going all the way back to the Sun Goddess. In the Imperial Rescript on Education, promulgated in the following year, loyalty to the heirs of this unbroken line was presented as the very basis of the kokutai.

  This clearly showed an official bias toward Shinto. Yet it was argued, often to the chagrin of Shinto priests, that this in no way confused religious with secular affairs, since Shintoist worship of the imperial bloodlines was not a matter of faith but a national custom—culture, that is, not religion. And so, when Japanese Christians were accused of disloyalty to their nation because they worshiped a foreign deity, this was done from a quasi-secular perspective. The famous Christian thinker Uchimura Kanzo, for instance, was harshly attacked for failing to bow in reverence to the Imperial Rescript on Education and accused of lèse majesté. “The meaning of the Rescript,” wrote the philosopher Inoue Tetsujiro, “is nationalism. But Christianity lacks nationalism.” Worse, Christians “do not differentiate between their ruler and the rulers of other countries and hold what are tantamount to cosmic beliefs. For those reasons Christianity is fundamentally at odds with the spirit of the Rescript.”22 In times of nationalistic fervor, Japanese Christians were often forced to choose between their God and the emperor. The wrong answer could lead to severe punishment.

  The emperor’s constitutional status was also cloudy. In line with Western modernity, he was a constitutional monarch who should leave governing to his secular government. But Ito Hirobumi, one of the great
Meiji period oligarchs, made it clear that because “imperial sovereignty is the cornerstone of our constitution, our system is not based on the European idea in force in some European countries of joint rule of the king and his people.”23 And in the Imperial Precepts to Soldiers and Sailors of 1882, it is made very clear that members of the armed forces owe their absolute loyalty to the emperor, as their commander in chief, who relies on his soldiers and sailors “as our Limbs.” That is to say, their obedience to the emperor took precedence over loyalty toward any elected government. The imperial cult, then, undermined democratic aspirations, held by many Japanese, from the start.

  The ambiguity of the emperor’s constitutional role did not matter greatly as long as the leading figures of the Meiji Restoration of the 1860s, the so-called oligarchs, were alive to make the most important political decisions. Ito Hirobumi and his fellow restorationists, men from provincial samurai clans in southwest Japan, were the real powers behind the imperial throne and the partly elected government. Once the oligarchs were gone, however, no one was able to stop the military nationalists, State Shinto ideologues, and militant anti-liberals. It was only in the 1930s that religious emperor worship came fully into its own, and a “holy war” was unleashed on the Asian continent to protect the kokutai and “bring all corners of the world under one imperial roof.”