first of the new rice-crop, is still offered to the Sun-goddess by
the Emperor in person.]
Below the peasantry ranked the artizan-class (Shokunin), including
smiths, carpenters, weavers, potters,--all crafts, in short. Highest
among these were reckoned, as we might expect, the sword-smiths.
Sword-smiths not infrequently rose to dignities far beyond their
class: some had conferred upon them the high title of Kami, written
with the same character used in the title of a daimyo, who was
usually termed the Kami of his province or district. Naturally they
enjoyed the patronage of the highest,--emperors and Kuge. The Emperor
Go-Toba is known to have worked at sword-making in a smithy [246] of
his own. Religious rites were practised during the forging of a blade
down to modern times....
All the principal crafts had guilds; and, as a general rule, trades
were hereditary. There are good historical grounds for supposing that
the ancestors of the Shokunin were mostly Koreans and Chinese.
The commercial class (Akindo), including bankers, merchants,
shopkeepers, and traders of all kinds, was the lowest officially
recognized. The business of money-making was held in contempt by the
superior classes; and all methods of profiting by the purchase and
re-sale of the produce of labour were regarded as dishonourable. A
military aristocracy would naturally look down upon the
trading-classes; and there is generally, in militant societies, small
respect for the common forms of labour. But in Old Japan the
occupations of the farmer and the artizan were not despised: trade
alone appears to have been considered degrading,--and the
discrimination may have been partly a moral one. The relegation of
the mercantile class to the lowest place in the social scale must
have produced some curious results. However rich, for example, a
rice-dealer might be, he ranked below the carpenters or potters or
boat-builders whom he might employ,--unless it happened that his
family originally belonged to another class. In later times [247] the
Akindo included many persons of other than Akindo descent; and the
class thus virtually retrieved itself.
Of the four great classes of the nation--Samurai, Farmers, Artizans,
and Merchants (the Shi-No-Ko-Sho, as they were briefly called, after
the initial characters of the Chinese terms used to designate
them)--the last three were counted together under the general
appellation of Heimin, "common folk." ll heimin were subject to the
samurai; any samurai being privileged to kill the heimin showing him
disrespect. But the heimin were actually the nation: they alone
created the wealth of the country, produced the revenues, paid the
taxes, supported the nobility and military and clergy. As for the
clergy, the Buddhist (like the Shinto) priests, though forming a
class apart, ranked with the samurai, not with the heimin.
Outside of the three classes of commoners, and hopelessly below the
lowest of them, large classes of persons existed who were not
reckoned as Japanese, and scarcely accounted human beings. Officially
they were mentioned generically as chori, and were counted with the
peculiar numerals used in counting animals: ippiki, nihiki, sambiki,
etc. Even to-day they are commonly referred to, not as persons
(hito), but as "things" (mono). To English readers (chiefly through
Mr. Mitford's yet unrivalled Tales of Old [248] Japan) they are known
as Eta; but their appellations varied according to their callings.
They were pariah-people: Japanese writers have denied, upon
apparently good grounds, that the chori belong to the Japanese race.
Various tribes of these outcasts followed occupations in the monopoly
of which they were legally confirmed: they were well-diggers,
garden-sweepers, straw-workers, sandal-makers, according to local
privileges. One class was employed officially in the capacity of
torturers and executioners; another was employed as night-watchmen; a
third as grave-makers. But most of the Eta followed the business of
tanners and leather-dressers. They alone had the right to slaughter
and flay animals, to prepare various kinds of leather, and to
manufacture leather sandals, stirrup-straps, and drumheads,--the
making of drumheads being a lucrative occupation in a country where
drums were used in a hundred thousand temples. The Eta had their own
laws, and their own chiefs, who exercised powers of life and death.
They lived always in the suburbs or immediate neighbourhood of towns,
but only in separate settlements of their own. They could enter the
town to sell their wares, or to make purchases; but they could not
enter any shop, except the shop of a dealer in footgear.* [*This is
still the rule in certain parts of the country.] As professional
singers they were tolerated; but they were forbidden to enter any
house--so they could perform their music or sing [249] their songs
only in the street, or in a garden. Any occupations other than their
hereditary callings were strictly forbidden to them. Between the
lowest of the commercial classes and the Eta, the barrier was
impassable as any created by caste-tradition in India; and never was
Ghetto more separated from the rest of a European city by walls and
gates, than an Eta settlement from the rest of a Japanese town by
social prejudice. No Japanese would dream of entering an Eta
settlement unless obliged to do so in some official capacity.... At
the pretty little seaport of Mionoseki, I saw an Eta settlement,
forming one termination of the crescent of streets extending round
the bay. Mionoseki is certainly one of the most ancient towns in
Japan; and the Eta village attached to it must be very old. Even
to-day, no Japanese habitant of Mionoseki would think of walking
through that settlement, though its streets are continuations of the
other streets: children never pass the unmarked boundary; and the
very dogs will not cross the prejudice-line. For all that the
settlement is clean, well built,--with gardens, baths, and temples of
its own. It looks like any well-kept Japanese village. But for
perhaps a thousand years there has been no fellowship between the
people of those contiguous communities.... Nobody can now tell the
history of these outcast folk: the cause of their social
excommunication has long been forgotten.
[250] Besides the Eta proper, there were pariahs called hinin,--a
name signifying "not-human-beings." Under this appellation were
included professional mendicants, wandering minstrels, actors,
certain classes of prostitutes, and persons outlawed by society. The
hinin had their own chiefs, and their own laws. Any person expelled
from a Japanese community might join the hinin; but that signified
good-by to the rest of humanity. The Government was too shrewd to
persecute the hinin. Their gipsy-existence saved a world of trouble.
It was unnecessary to keep petty offenders in jail, or to provide for
people incapable of earning an honest living, so long as these could
be driven into the hinin class. There the incorrigible, the vagrant,
the beggar, would be kept under discipline of a sort, and would
practically disappear from official cognizance. The killing of a
hinin was not considered murder, and was punished only by a fine.
The reader should now be able to form an approximately correct idea
of the character of the old Japanese society. But the ordination of
that society was much more complex than I have been able to
indicate,--so complex that volumes would be required to treat the
subject in detail. Once fully evolved, what we may still call Feudal
Japan, for want of a better name, presented most of the features of a
doubly-compound society of the militant type, with [251] certain
marked approaches toward the trebly-compound type. A striking
peculiarity, of course, is the absence of a true ecclesiastical
hierarchy,--due to the fact that Government never became dissociated
from religion. There was at one time a tendency on the part of
Buddhism to establish a religious hierarchy independent of central
authority; but there were two fatal obstacles in the way of such a
development. The first was the condition of Buddhism itself,--divided
into a number of sects, some bitterly opposed to others. The second
obstacle was the implacable hostility of the military clans, jealous
of any religious power capable of interfering, either directly or
indirectly, with their policy. So soon as the foreign religion began
to prove itself formidable in the world of action, ruthless measures
were decided; and the frightful massacres of priests by Nobunaga, in
the sixteenth century, ended the political aspirations of Buddhism in
Japan.
Otherwise the regimentation of society resembled that of all antique
civilizations of the militant type,--all action being both positively
and negatively regulated. The household ruled the person; the
five-family group; the household; the community, the group; the lord
of the soil, the community; the Shogun, the lord. Over the whole body
of the producing classes, two million samurai had power of life and
death; over these samurai the daimyo held a like power; and the
daimyo were subject to the Shogun. [252] Nominally the Shogun was
subject to the Emperor, but not in fact: military usurpation
disturbed and shifted the natural order of the higher responsibility.
However, from the nobility downwards, the regulative discipline was
much reinforced by this change in government. Among the producing
classes there were countless combinations--guilds of all sorts; but
these were only despotisms within despotisms--despotisms of the
communistic order; each member being governed by the will of the
rest; and enterprise, whether commercial or industrial, being
impossible outside of some corporation.... We have already seen that
the individual was bound to the commune--could not leave it without a
permit, could not marry out of it. We have seen also that the
stranger was a stranger in the old Greek and Roman sense,--that is to
say an enemy, a hostis,--and could enter another community only by
being religiously adopted into it. As regards exclusiveness,
therefore, the social conditions were like those of the early
European communities; but the militant conditions resembled rather
those of the great Asiatic empires.
Of course such a society had nothing in common with any modern form
of Occidental civilization. It was a huge mass of clan-groups,
loosely united under a duarchy, in which the military head was
omnipotent, and the religious head only an object of [253]
worship,--the living symbol of a cult. However this organization
might outwardly resemble what we are accustomed to call feudalism,
its structure was rather like that of ancient Egyptian or Peruvian
society,--minus the priestly hierarchy. The supreme figure is not an
Emperor in our meaning of the word,--not a king of kings and
viceregent of heaven,--but a God incarnate, a race-divinity, an Inca
descended from the Sun. About his sacred person, we see the tribes
ranged in obeisance,--each tribe, nevertheless, maintaining its own
ancestral cult; and the clans forming these tribes, and the
communities forming these clans, and the households forming these
communities, have all their separate cults; and out of the mass of
these cults have been derived the customs and the laws. Yet
everywhere the customs and the laws differ more or less, because of
the variety of their origins: they have this only in common,--that
they exact the most humble and implicit obedience, and regulate every
detail of private and public life. Personality is wholly suppressed
by coercion; and the coercion is chiefly from within, not from
without,--the life of every individual being so ordered by the will
of the rest as to render free action, free speaking, or free
thinking, out of the question. This means something incomparably
harsher than the socialistic tyranny of early Greek society: it means
religious communism doubled with a military despotism of [254] the
most terrible kind. The individual did not legally exist,--except
for punishment; and from the whole of the producing-classes, whether
serfs or freemen, the most servile submission was ruthlessly exacted.
It is difficult to believe that any intelligent man of modern times
could endure such conditions and live (except under the protection of
some powerful ruler, as in the case of the English pilot Will Adams,
created a samurai by Iyeyasu): the incessant and multiform constraint
upon mental and moral life would of itself be enough to kill....
Those who write to-day about the extraordinary capacity of the
Japanese for organization, and about the "democratic spirit" of the
people as natural proof of their fitness for representative
government in the Western sense, mistake appearances for realities.
The truth is that the extraordinary capacity of the Japanese for
communal organization, is the strongest possible evidence of their
unfitness for any modern democratic form of government. Superficially
the difference between Japanese social organization, and local
self-government in the modern American, or the English colonial
meaning of the term, appears slight; and we may justly admire the
perfect self-discipline of a Japanese community. But the real
difference between the two is fundamental, prodigious,--measurable
only by thousands of years. It is the difference between compulsory
and free [255] cooperation,--the difference between the most despotic
form of communism, founded upon the most ancient form of religion,
and the most highly evolved form of industrial union, with unlimited
individual right of competition.
There exists a popular error to the effect that what we call
communism and socialism in Western civilization are modern growths,
representing aspiration toward some perfect form of democracy. As a
matter of fact these movements represent reversion,--reversion toward
the primitive conditions of human society. Under every form of
ancient despotism we find exactly the same capacity of
self-government among the people: it was manifested by the old
Egyptians and Peruvians as well as by the early Greeks and Romans; it
is exhibited to-day by Hindoo and Chinese communities; it may be
studied in Siamese or Annamese villages quite as well as in Japan. It
means a religious communistic despotism,--a supreme social tyranny
suppressing personality, forbidding enterprise, and making
competition a public offence. Such self-government also has its
advantages: it was perfectly adapted to the requirements of Japanese
life so long as the nation could remain isolated from the rest of the
world. Yet it must be obvious that any society whose ethical
traditions forbid the individual to profit at the cost of his
fellow-men will be placed at an enormous disadvantage when forced
into the [256] industrial struggle for existence against communities
whose self-government permits of the greatest possible personal
freedom, and the widest range of competitive enterprise.
We might suppose that perpetual and universal coercion, moral and
physical, would have brought about a state of universal sameness,--a
dismal uniformity and monotony in all life's manifestations. But such
monotony existed only as to the life of the commune, not as to that
of the race. The most wonderful variety characterized this quaint
civilization, as it also characterized the old Greek civilization,
and for precisely the same reasons. In every patriarchal civilization
ruled by ancestor-worship, all tendency to absolute sameness, to
general uniformity, is prevented by the character of the aggregate
itself, which never becomes homogeneous and plastic. Every unit of
that aggregate, each one of the multitude of petty despotisms
composing it, most jealously guards its own particular traditions and
customs, and remains self-sufficing. Hence results, sooner or later,
incomparable variety of detail, small detail, artistic, industrial,
architectural, mechanical. In Japan such differentiation and
specialization was thus maintained, that you will hardly find in the
whole country even two villages where the customs, industries, and
methods of production are exactly the same.... The customs [257] of
the fishing-villages will, perhaps, best illustrate what I mean. In
every coast district the various fishing-settlements have their own
traditional ways of constructing nets and boats, and their own
particular methods of handling them. Now, in the time of the great
tidal-wave of 1896, when thirty thousand people perished, and scores
of coast-villages were wrecked, large sums of money were collected in
Kobe and elsewhere for the benefit of the survivors; and well-meaning
foreigners attempted to supply the want of boats and fishing
implements by purchasing quantities of locally made nets and boats,
and sending them to the afflicted districts. But it was found that
these presents were of no use to the men of the northern provinces,
who had been accustomed to boats and nets of a totally different
kind; and it was further discovered that every fishing-hamlet had
special requirements of its own in this regard.... Now the
differentiations of habit and custom, thus exhibited in the life of
the fishing-communities, is paralleled in many crafts and callings.
The way of building houses, and of roofing them, differs in almost
every province, also the methods of agriculture and of horticulture,
the manner of making wells, the methods of weaving and lacquering and
pottery-making and tile-baking. Nearly every town and village of
importance boasts of some special production, bearing the name of the
place, and unlike anything made elsewhere.... [258] No doubt the
ancestral cults helped to conserve and to develop such local
specialization of industries: the craft-ancestors, the patron-gods of
the guild, were supposed to desire that the work of their descendants
and worshippers should maintain a particular character of its own.
Though individual enterprise was checked by communal regulation, the
specialization of local production was encouraged by difference of
cults. Family-conservatism or guild-conservatism would tolerate small
improvements or modifications suggested by local experience, but
would be wary, perhaps superstitious likewise, about accepting the
results of strange experience.
Still, for the Japanese themselves, not the least pleasure of travel
in Japan is the pleasure of studying the curious variety in local
production,--the pleasure of finding the novel, the unexpected, the
unimagined. Even those arts or industries of Old Japan, primarily
borrowed from Korea or from China, appear to have developed and
conserved innumerable queer forms under the influence of the
numberless local cults.
[259]
THE RISE OF THE MILITARY POWER
Almost the whole of authentic Japanese history is comprised in one
vast episode: the rise and fall of the military power.... It has been
customary to speak of Japanese history as beginning with the
accession of Jimmu Tenno, alleged to have reigned from 660 to 585
B.C., and to have lived for one hundred and twenty-seven years.
Before the time of the Emperor Jimmu was the Age of the Gods,--the
period of mythology. But trustworthy history does not begin for a
thousand years after the accession of Jimmu Tenno; and the chronicles
of those thousand years must be regarded as little better than
fairy-tales. They contain records of fact; but fact and myth are so
interwoven that it is difficult to distinguish the one from the
other. We have legends, for example, of an alleged conquest of Korea
in the year 202 A.D., by the Empress Jingo; and it has been tolerably
well proved that no such conquest took place.* [*See Aston's paper,
Early Japanese History, in the translations of the Asiatic Society of
Japan.] The later records are somewhat less mythical than the
earlier. We have traditions apparently founded on [260] fact, of
Korean immigration in the time of the fifteenth ruler, the Emperor
Ojin; then later traditions, also founded on fact, of early Chinese
studies in Japan; then some vague accounts of a disturbed state of
society, which appears to have continued through the whole of the
fifth century. Buddhism was introduced in the middle of the century
following; and we have record of the fierce opposition offered to the
new creed by a Shinto faction, and of a miraculous victory won by the
help of the Four Deva Kings, at the prayer of Shotoku Taishi,--the
great founder of Buddhism, and regent of the Empress Suiko. With the
firm establishment of Buddhism in the reign of that Empress (593-628
A.D.), we reach the period of authentic history, and of the
thirty-third Japanese sovereign counting from Jimmu Tenno.
But although everything prior to the seventh century remains obscured
for us by the mists of fable, much can be inferred, even from the
half-mythical records, concerning social conditions during the reigns
of the first thirty-three Emperors and Empresses. It appears that the
early Mikado lived very simply--scarcely better, indeed, than their
subjects. The Shinto scholar Mabuchi tells us that they dwelt in huts
with mud walls and roofs of shingle; that they wore hempen clothes;
that they carried their swords in simple wooden scabbards, bound
round with the tendrils of a wild [261] vine; that they walked about
freely among the people; that they carried their own bows and arrows
when they went to hunt. But as society developed wealth and power,
this early simplicity disappeared, and the gradual introduction of
Chinese customs and etiquette effected great changes. The Empress
Suiko introduced Chinese court-ceremonies, and first established
among the nobility the Chinese grades of rank. Chinese luxury, as
well as Chinese learning, soon made its appearance at court; and
thereafter the imperial authority appears to have been less and less
directly exerted. The new ceremonialism must have rendered the
personal exercise of the multiform imperial functions more difficult
than before; and it is probable that the temptation to act more or
less by deputy would have been strong even in the case of an
energetic ruler. At all events we find that the real administration
of government began about this time to pass into the hands of
deputies,--all of whom were members of the great Kuge clan of the
Fujiwara.