will of the household,--compels the observance of filial piety. Even
the conduct of a boy, who has passed the age of childhood, is
regulated not only by the family, but by the public. He must obey the
household; and he must also obey public opinion in regard to his
domestic relations. Any marked act of disrespect, inconsistent [90]
with filial piety, would be judged and rebuked by, all. When old
enough to begin work or study, a lad's daily conduct is observed and
criticised; and at the age when the household law first tightens
about him, he also commences to feel the pressure of common opinion.
On coming of age, he has to marry; and the idea of permitting him to
choose a wife for himself is quite out of the question: he is
expected to accept the companion selected for him. But should reasons
be found for humouring him in the event of an irresistible aversion,
then he must wait until another choice has been made by the family.
The community would not tolerate insubordination in such matters: one
example of filial revolt would constitute too dangerous a precedent.
When the young man at last becomes the head of a household, and
responsible for the conduct of its members, he is still constrained
by public sentiment to accept advice in his direction of domestic
affairs. He is not free to follow his own judgment, in certain
contingencies. For example, he is bound by custom to furnish help to
relatives; and he is obliged to accept arbitration in the event of
trouble with them. He is not permitted to think of his own wife and
children only,--such conduct would be deemed intolerably selfish: he
must be able to act, to outward seeming at least, as if uninfluenced
by paternal or marital affection in his public conduct. Even
supposing that, later in life, he should be [91] appointed to the
position of village or district headman, his right of action and
judgment would be under just as much restriction as before. Indeed,
the range of his personal freedom actually decreases in proportion to
his ascent in the social scale. Nominally he may rule as headman:
practically his authority is only lent to him by the commune, and it
will remain to him just so long as the commune pleases. For he is
elected to enforce the public will, not to impose his own,--to serve
the common interests, not to serve his own,--to maintain and confirm
custom, not to break with it. Thus, though appointed chief, he is
only the public servant, and the least free man in his native place.
Various documents translated and published by Professor Wigmore, in
his "Notes on Land Tenure and Local Institutions in Old Japan," give
a startling idea of the minute regulation of communal life in
country-districts during the period of the Tokujawa Shoguns. Much of
the regulation was certainly imposed by higher authority; but it is
likely that a considerable portion of the rules represented old local
custom. Such documents were called Kumi-cho or "Kumi*-enactments":
they established the rules of conduct to be observed by all the
members of a village-community, and their social interest is very
great. By personal inquiry I have learned that in various parts of
the country, rules much like those recorded in the Kumi-cho, are
still enforced by village custom. I select a few examples from
Professor Wigmore's translation:--
[*Down to the close of the feudal period, the mass of the population
throughout the country, in the great cities as well as in the
villages, was administratively ordered by groups of families, or
rather of households, called Kumi, or "companies." The general number
of households in a Kumi was five; but there were in some provinces
Kumi consisting of six, and of ten, households. The heads of the
households composing a Kumi elected one of their number as
chief,--who became the responsible representative of all the members
of the Kumi. The origin and history of the Kumi-system is obscure: a
similar system exists in China and in Korea. (Professor Wigmore's
reasons for doubting that the Japanese Kumi-system had a military
origin, appear to be cogent.) Certainly the system greatly
facilitated administration. To superior authority the Kumi was
responsible, not the single household.]
[92] "If there be any of our number who are unkind to parents, or
neglectful or disobedient, we will not conceal it or condone it, but
will report it ...."
"We shall require children to respect their parents, servants to obey
their masters, husbands and wives and brothers and sisters to live
together in harmony, and the younger people to revere and to cherish
their elders .... Each kumi [group of five households] shall
carefully watch over the conduct of its members, so as to prevent
wrongdoing."
"If any member of a kumi, whether farmer, merchant, or artizan, is
lazy, and does not attend properly to his business, the ban-gashira
[chief officer] will advise him, warn him, and lead him into better
ways. If the person does not listen to this advice, and becomes angry
and obstinate, he is to be reported to the toshiyori [village elder]
...."
"When men who are quarrelsome and who like to [93] indulge in late
hours away from home will not listen to admonition, we will report
them. If any other kumi neglects to do this, it will be part of our
duty to do it for them ...."
"All those who quarrel with their relatives, and refuse to listen to
their good advice, or disobey their parents, or are unkind to their
fellow-villagers, shall be reported [to the village officers] ...."
"Dancing, wrestling, and other public shows shall be forbidden.
Singing and dancing-girls and prostitutes shall not be allowed to
remain a single night in the mura [village]."
"Quarrels among the people shall be forbidden. In case of dispute
the matter shall be reported. If this is not done, all parties shall
be indiscriminately punished ...."
"Speaking disgraceful things of another man, or publicly posting him
as a bad man, even if he is so, is forbidden."
"Filial piety and faithful service to a master should be a matter of
course; but when there is any one who is especially faithful and
diligent in these things, we promise to report him ... for
recommendation to the government ...."
"As members of a kumi we will cultivate friendly feeling even more
than with our relatives, and will promote each other's happiness, as
well as share each other's griefs. If there is an unprincipled or
lawless person in a kumi, we will all share the responsibility for
him."*
[*"Notes on Land Tenure and Local Institutions in Old Japan"
(Transactions Asiatic Society of Japan, Vol. XIX, Part I) I have
chosen the quotations from different kumi-cho, and arranged them
illustratively.]
[94] The above are samples of the moral regulations only: there were
even more minute regulations about other duties.--for instance:--
"When a fire occurs, the people shall immediately hasten to the spot,
each bringing a bucketful of water, and shall endeavour, under
direction of the officers, to put the fire out .... Those who absent
themselves shall be deemed culpable.
"When a stranger comes to reside here, enquiries shall be made as to
the mura whence he came, and a surety shall be furnished by him ....
No traveller shall lodge, even for a single night, in a house other
than a public inn.
"News of robberies and night attacks shall be given by the ringing of
bells or otherwise; and all who hear shall join in pursuit, until the
offender is taken. Any one wilfully refraining, shall, on
investigation, be punished."
From these same Kumi-cho, it appears that no one could leave his
village even for a single night, without permission,--or take service
elsewhere, or marry in another province, or settle in another place.
Punishments were severe,--a terrible flogging being the common mode
of chastisement by the higher authority.... To-day, there are no such
punishments; and, legally, a man can go where he pleases. But as a
matter of fact he can nowhere do as he pleases; for individual
liberty is still largely restricted by the survival of communal
sentiment and old-fashioned custom. In any country community it would
be unwise to proclaim such a doctrine as that [95] a man has the
right to employ his leisure and his means as he may think proper. No
man's time or money or effort can be considered exclusively his
own,--nor even the body that his ghost inhabits. His right to live in
the community rests solely upon his willingness to serve the
community; and whoever may need his help or sympathy has the
privilege of demanding it. That "a man's house is his castle" cannot
be asserted in Japan--except in the case of some high potentate. No
ordinary person can shut his door to lock out the rest of the world.
Everybody's house must be open to visitors: to close its gates by day
would be regarded as an insult to the community,--sickness affording
no excuse. Only persons in very great authority have the right of
making themselves inaccessible. And to displease the community in
which one lives,--especially if the community be a rural one,--is a
serious matter. When a community is displeased, if acts as an
individual. It may consist of five hundred, a thousand, or several
thousand persons; but the thinking of all is the thinking of one. By
a single serious mistake a man may find himself suddenly placed in
solitary opposition to the common will,--isolated, and most
effectively ostracized. The silence and the softness of the hostility
only render it all the more alarming. This is the ordinary form of
punishment for a grave offence against custom: violence is rare, and
when resorted to is intended (except in [96] some extraordinary cases
presently to be noticed) as a mere correction, the punishment of a
blunder. In certain rough communities, blunders endangering life are
immediately punished by physical chastisement,--not in anger, but on
traditional principle. Once I witnessed at a fishing-settlement, a
chastisement of this kind. Men were killing tunny in the surf; the
work was bloody and dangerous; and in the midst of the excitement,
one of the fishermen struck his killing-spike into the head of a boy.
Everybody knew that it was a pure accident; but accidents involving
danger to life are rudely dealt with, and this blunderer was
instantly knocked senseless by the men nearest him,--then dragged out
of the surf and flung down on the sand to recover himself as best he
might. No word was said about the matter; and the killing went on as
before. Young fishermen, I am told, are roughly handled by their
fellows on board a ship, in the case of any error involving risk to
the vessel. But, as I have already observed, only stupidity is
punished in this fashion; and ostracism is much more dreaded than
violence. There is, indeed, only one yet heavier punishment than
ostracism--namely, banishment, either for a term of years or for
life.
Banishment must in old feudal times have been a very serious penalty;
it is a serious penalty even to-day, under the new order of things.
In former years the man expelled from his native place by the [97]
communal will--cast out from his home, his clan, his occupation
--found himself face to face with misery absolute. In another
community there would be no place for him, unless he happened to have
relatives there; and these would be obliged to consult with the local
authorities, and also with the officials of the fugitive's native
place, before venturing to harbour him. No stranger was suffered to
settle in another district than his own without official permission.
Old documents are extant which record the punishments inflicted upon
households for having given shelter to a stranger under pretence of
relationship. A banished man was homeless and friendless. He might be
a skilled craftsman; but the right to exercise his craft depended
upon the consent of the guild representing that craft in the place to
which he might go; and banished men were not received by the guilds.
He might try to become a servant; but the commune in which he sought
refuge would question the right of any master to employ a fugitive
and a stranger. His religious connexions could not serve him in the
least: the code of communal life was decided not by Buddhist, but by
Shinto ethics. Since the gods of his birthplace had cast him out, and
the gods of any other locality had nothing to do with his original
cult, there was no religious help for him. Besides, the mere fact of
his being a refugee was itself proof that he must have offended
against his own cult. [98] In any event no stranger could look for
sympathy among strangers. 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. Under the feudal system there was incomparably less
likelihood of sympathy for the stranger; and banishment signified
hunger, solitude, and privation unspeakable. For be it remembered
that the legal existence of the individual, at that period, ceased
entirely outside of his relation to the family and to the commune.
Everybody lived and worked for some household; every household for
some clan; outside of the household, and the related aggregate of
households, there was no life to be lived--except the life of
criminals, beggars, and pariahs. Save with official permission, one
could not even become a Buddhist monk. The very outcasts--such as the
Eta classes--formed self-governing communities, with traditions of
their own, and would not voluntarily accept strangers. So the
banished man was most often doomed to become a hinin,--one of that
wretched class of wandering pariahs who were officially termed
"not-men," and lived by beggary, or by the exercise of some vulgar
profession, such as that of ambulant musician or [99] mountebank. In
more ancient days a banished man could have sold himself into
slavery; but even this poor privilege seems to have been withdrawn
during the Tokugawa era.
We can scarcely imagine to-day the conditions of such banishment: to
find a Western parallel we must go back to ancient Greek and Roman
times long preceding the Empire. Banishment then signified religious
excommunication, and practically expulsion from all civilized
society,--since there yet existed no idea of human brotherhood, no
conception of any claim upon kindness except the claim of kinship.
The stranger was everywhere the enemy. Now in Japan, as in the Greek
city of old time, the religion of the tutelar god has always been the
religion of a group only, the cult of a community: it never became
even the religion of a province. The higher cults, on the other hand,
did not concern themselves with the individual: his religion was only
of the household and of the village or district; the cults of other
households and districts were entirely distinct; one could belong to
them only by adoption, and strangers, as a rule, were not adopted.
Without a household or a clan-cult, the individual was morally and
socially dead; for other cults and clans excluded him. When cast out
by the domestic cult that regulated his private life, and by the
local cult that ordered his life in relation to the community, he
simply ceased to exist in relation to human society.
[100] How small were the chances in past times for personality to
develop and assert itself may be imagined from the foregoing facts.
The individual was completely and pitilessly sacrificed to the
community. Even now the only safe rule of conduct in a Japanese
settlement is to act in all things according to local custom; for the
slightest divergence from rule will be observed with disfavour.
Privacy does not exist; nothing can be hidden; everybody's vices or
virtues are known to everybody else. Unusual behaviour is judged as a
departure from the traditional standard of conduct; all oddities are
condemned as departures from custom; and tradition and custom still
have the force of religious obligations. Indeed, they really are
religious and obligatory, not only by reason of their origin, but by
reason of their relation also to the public cult, which signifies the
worship of the past.
It is therefore easy to understand why Shinto never had a written
code of morals, and why its greatest scholars have declared that a
moral code is unnecessary. In that stage of religious evolution which
ancestor-worship represents, there can be no distinction between
religion and ethics, nor between ethics and custom. Government and
religion are the same; custom and law are identified. The ethics of
Shinto were all included in conformity to custom. The traditional
rules of the household, the traditional laws of the commune--these
were [101] the morals of Shinto: to obey them was religion; to
disobey them, impiety .... And, after all, the true significance of
any religious code, written or unwritten, lies in its expression of
social duty, its doctrine of the right and wrong of conduct, its
embodiment of a people's moral experience. Really the difference
between any modern ideal of conduct, such as the English, and the
patriarchal ideal, such as that of the early Greeks or of the
Japanese, would be found on examination to consist mainly in the
minute extension of the older conception to all details of individual
life. Assuredly the religion of Shinto needed no written commandment:
it was taught to everybody from childhood by precept and example, and
any person of ordinary intelligence could learn it. When a religion
is capable of rendering it dangerous for anybody to act outside of
rules, the framing of a code would be obviously superfluous. We
ourselves have no written code of conduct as regards the higher
social life, the exclusive circles of civilized existence, which are
not ruled merely by the Ten Commandments. The knowledge of what to do
in those zones, and of how to do it, can come only by training, by
experience, by observation, and by the intuitive recognition of the
reason of things.
And now to return to the question of the authority of the Shinto
priest as representative of communal [102] sentiment,--an authority
which I believe to have been always very great .... Striking proof
that the punishments inflicted by a community upon its erring members
were originally inflicted in the name of the tutelar god is furnished
by the fact that manifestations of communal displeasure still assume,
in various country districts, a religious character. I have witnessed
such manifestations, and I am assured that they still occur in most
of the provinces. But it is in remote country-towns or isolated
villages, where traditions have remained almost unchanged, that one
can best observe these survivals of antique custom. In such places
the conduct of every resident is closely watched and rigidly judged
by all the rest. Little, however, is said about misdemeanours of a
minor sort until the time of the great local Shinto festival,--the
annual festival of the tutelar god. It is then that the community
gives its warnings or inflicts its penalties: this at least in the
case of conduct offensive to local ethics. The god, on the occasion
of this festival, is supposed to visit the dwellings of his Ujiko;
and his portable shrine,--a weighty structure borne by thirty or
forty men,--is carried through the principal streets. The bearers are
supposed to act according to the will of the god,--to go
whithersoever his divine spirit directs them .... I may describe the
incidents of the procession as I saw it in a seacoast village, not
once, but several times.
[103] Before the procession a band of young men advance, leaping and
wildly dancing in circles: these young men clear the way; and it is
unsafe to pass near them, for they whirl about as if moved by frenzy
.... When I first saw such a band of dancers, I could imagine myself
watching some old Dionysiac revel;--their furious gyrations certainly
realized Greek accounts of the antique sacred frenzy. There were,
indeed, no Greek heads; but the bronzed lithe figures, naked save for
loin-cloth and sandals, and most sculpturesquely muscled, might well
have inspired some vase-design of dancing fauns. After these
god-possessed dancers--whose passage swept the streets clear,
scattering the crowd to right and left--came the virgin priestess,
white-robed and veiled, riding upon a horse, and followed by several
mounted priests in white garments and high black caps of ceremony.
Behind them advanced the ponderous shrine, swaying above: the heads
of its bearers like a junk in a storm. Scores of brawny arms were
pushing it to the right; other scores were pushing it to the left:
behind and before, also, there was furious pulling and pushing; and
the roar of voices uttering invocations made it impossible to hear
anything else. By immemorial custom the upper stories of all the
dwellings had been tightly closed: woe to the Peeping Tom who should
be detected, on such a day, in the impious act of looking down upon
the god!...
[104] Now the shrine-bearers, as I have said, are supposed to be
moved by the spirit of the god--(probably by his Rough Spirit; for
the Shinto god is multiple); and all this pushing and pulling and
swaying signifies only the deity's inspection of the dwellings on
either hand. He is looking about to see whether the hearts of his
worshippers are pure, and is deciding whether it will be necessary to
give a warning, or to inflict a penalty. His bearers will carry him
whithersoever he chooses to go--through solid walls if necessary. If
the shrine strikes against any house,--even against an awning
only,--that is a sign that the god is not pleased with the dwellers
in that house. If the shrine breaks part of the house, that is a
serious warning. But it may happen that the god wills to enter a
house,--breaking his way. Then woe to the inmates, unless they flee
at once through the back-door; and the wild procession, thundering
in, will wreck and rend and smash and splinter everything on the
premises before the god consents to proceed upon his round.
Upon enquiring into the reasons of two wreckings of which I witnessed
the results, I learned enough to assure me that from the communal
point of view, both aggressions were morally justifiable. In one case
a fraud had been practised; in the other, help had been refused to
the family of a drowned resident. Thus one offence had been legal;
the other only moral. A country community [105] will not hand over
its delinquents to the police except in case of incendiarism, murder,
theft, or other serious crime. It has a horror of law, and never
invokes it when the matter can be settled by any other means. This
was the rule also in ancient times, and the feudal government
encouraged its maintenance. But when the tutelar deity has been
displeased, he insists upon the punishment or disgrace of the
offender; and the offender's entire family, as by feudal custom, is
held responsible. The victim can invoke the new law, if he dares, and
bring the wreckers of his home into court, and recover damages, for
the modern police-courts are not ruled by Shinto. But only a very
rash man will invoke the new law against the communal judgment, for
that action in itself would be condemned as a gross breach of custom.
The community is always ready, through its council, to do justice in
cases where innocence can be proved. But if a man really guilty of
the faults charged to his account should try to avenge himself by
appeal to a non-religious law, then it were well for him to remove
himself and his family, as soon as possible thereafter, to some
far-away place.