nearly the whole period of authentic history, down to modern times,
and closes with the second period of national integration. The first
period had been reached when the clans first accepted the leadership
of the chief of the greatest clan,--thereafter revered as the
Heavenly Sovereign, Supreme Pontiff, Supreme Arbiter, Supreme
Commander, and Supreme Magistrate. How long a time was required for
this primal integration, under a patriarchal monarchy, we cannot
know; but we have learned that the later integration, under a
duarchy, occupied considerably more than a thousand years.... Now the
extraordinary fact to note is that, during all those centuries, the
imperial [280] cult was carefully maintained by even the enemies of
the Mikado; the only legitimate ruler being, in national belief, the
Tenshi, "Son of Heaven,"--the Tenno, "Heavenly King." Through every
period of disorder the Offspring of the Sun was the object of
national worship, and his palace the temple of the national faith.
Great captains might coerce the imperial will; but they styled
themselves, none the less, the worshippers and slaves of the
incarnate deity; and they would no more have thought of trying to
occupy his throne, than they would have thought of trying to abolish
all religion by decree. Once only, by the arbitrary folly of the
Ashikaga shogun, the imperial cult had been seriously interfered
with; and the social earthquake consequent upon that division of the
imperial house, apprised the usurpers of the enormity of their
blunder.... Only the integrity of the imperial succession, the
uninterrupted maintenance of the imperial worship, made it possible
even for Iyeyasu to clamp together the indissoluble units of society.
Herbert Spencer has taught the student of sociology to recognize that
religious dynasties have extraordinary powers of longevity, because
they possess extraordinary power to resist change; whereas military
dynasties, depending for their perpetuity upon the individual
character of their sovereigns, are particularly liable to
disintegration. The immense duration of the Japanese imperial
dynasty, as contrasted [281] with the history of the various
shogunates and regencies representing a merely military domination,
illustrates this teaching in a most remarkable way. Back through
twenty-five hundred years we can follow the line of the imperial
succession, till it vanishes out of sight into the mystery of the
past. Here we have evidence of that extreme power of resisting all
changes which is inherently characteristic of religious conservatism;
on the other hand, the history of shogunates and regencies proves the
tendency to disintegration of institutions having no religious
foundation, and therefore no religious power of cohesion. The
remarkable duration of the Fujiwara rule, as compared with others,
may perhaps be accounted for by the fact that the Fujiwara
represented a religious, rather than a military, aristocracy. Even
the marvellous military structure devised by Iyeyasu had begun to
decay before alien aggression precipitated its inevitable collapse.
[283]
THE RELIGION OF LOYALTY
"Militant societies," says the author of the Principles of Sociology,
"must have a patriotism which regards the triumph of their society as
the supreme end of action; they must possess the loyalty whence flows
obedience to authority,--and, that they may be obedient, they must
have abundant faith." The history of the Japanese people strongly
exemplifies these truths. Among no other people has loyalty ever
assumed more impressive and extraordinary forms; and among no other
people has obedience ever been nourished by a more abundant
faith,--that faith derived from the cult of the ancestors.
The reader will understand how filial piety--the domestic religion of
obedience--widens in range with social evolution, and eventually
differentiates both into that political obedience required by the
community, and that military obedience exacted by the
war-lord,--obedience implying not only submission, but affectionate
submission,--not merely the sense of obligation, but the sentiment of
duty. In its origin such dutiful obedience is essentially religious;
and, as expressed in loyalty, it retains the [284] religious
character,--becomes the constant manifestation of a religion of
self-sacrifice. Loyalty is developed early in the history of a
militant people; and we find touching examples of it in the earliest
Japanese chronicles. We find also terrible ones,--stories of
self-immolation.
To his divinely descended lord, the retainer owed everything--in
fact, not less than in theory: goods, household, liberty, and life.
Any or all of these he was expected to yield up without a murmur, on
demand, for the sake of the lord. And duty to the lord, like the duty
to the family ancestor, did not cease with death. As the ghosts of
parents were to be supplied with food by their living children, so
the spirit of the lord was to be worshipfully served by those who,
during his lifetime, owed him direct obedience. It could not be
permitted that the spirit of--the ruler should enter unattended into
the world of shadows: some, at least, of those who served him living
were bound to follow him in death. Thus in early societies arose the
custom of human sacrifices,--sacrifices at first obligatory,
afterwards voluntary. In Japan, as stated in a former chapter, they
remained an indispensable feature of great funerals, up to the first
century, when images of baked clay were first substituted for the
official victims. I have already mentioned how, after this abolition
of obligatory [285] junshi, or following of one's lord in death, the
practice of voluntary junshi continued up to the sixteenth century,
when it actually became a military fashion. At the death of a daimyo
it was then common for fifteen or twenty of his retainers to
disembowel themselves. Iyeyasu determined to put an end to this
custom of suicide, which is thus considered in the 76th article of
his celebrated Legacy:--
"Although it is undoubtedly the ancient custom for a vassal to follow
his Lord in death, there is not the slightest reason in the practice.
Confucius has ridiculed the making of Yo [effigies buried with the
dead]. These practices are strictly forbidden, more especially to
primary retainers, but to secondary retainers likewise, even of the
lowest rank. He is the reverse of a faithful servant who disregards
this prohibition. His posterity shall be impoverished by the
confiscation of his property, as a warning for those who disobey the
laws."
Iyeyasu's command ended the practice of junshi among his own vassals;
but it continued, or revived again, after his death. In 1664 the
shogunate issued an edict proclaiming that the family of any person
performing junshi should be punished; and the shogunate was in
earnest. When this edict was disobeyed by one Uyemon no Hyoge, who
disembowelled himself at the death of his lord, Okudaira Tadamasa,
the government promptly confiscated the lands of the family of the
suicide, executed two of [286] his sons, and sent the rest of the
household into exile. Though cases of junshi have occurred even
within this present era of Meiji, the determined attitude of the
Tokugawa government so far checked the practice that even the most
fervid loyalty latterly made its sacrifices through religion, as a
rule. Instead of performing harakiri, the retainer shaved his head at
the death of his lord, and became a Buddhist monk.
The custom of junshi represents but one aspect of Japanese loyalty:
there were other customs equally, if not even more, significant,--for
example, the custom of military suicide, not as junshi, but as a
self-inflicted penalty exacted by the traditions of samurai
discipline. Against harakiri, as punitive suicide, there was no
legislative enactment, for obvious reasons. It would seem that this
form of self-destruction was not known to the Japanese in early ages;
it may have been introduced from China, with other military customs.
The ancient Japanese usually performed suicide by strangulation, as
the Nihongi bears witness. It was the military class that established
the harakiri as a custom and privilege. Previously, the chiefs of a
routed army, or the defenders of a castle taken by storm, would thus
end themselves to avoid falling into the enemy's hands,--a custom
which continued into the present era. About the close of the
fifteenth century, the [287] military custom of permitting any
samurai to perform harakiri, instead of subjecting him to the shame
of execution, appears to have been generally established. Afterwards
it became the recognized duty of a samurai to kill himself at the
word of command. All samurai were subject to this disciplinary law,
even lords of provinces; and in samurai families, children of both
sexes were trained how to perform suicide whenever personal honour or
the will of a liege-lord, might require it.... Women, I should
observe, did not perform harakiri, but jigai,--that is to say,
piercing the throat with a dagger so as to sever the arteries by a
single thrust-and-cut movement.... The particulars of the harakiri
ceremony have become so well known through Mitford's translation of
Japanese texts on the subject, that I need not touch upon them. The
important fact to remember is that honour and loyalty required the
samurai man or woman to be ready at any moment to perform
self-destruction by the sword. As for the warrior, any breach of
trust (voluntary or involuntary), failure to execute a difficult
mission, a clumsy mistake, and even a look of displeasure from one's
liege, were sufficient reasons for harakiri, or, as the aristocrats
preferred to call it, by the Chinese term, seppuku. Among the highest
class of retainers, it was also a duty to make protest against
misconduct on the part of their lord by performing seppuku, when all
other means of bringing him to reason had [288] failed,--which heroic
custom has been made the subject of several popular dramas founded
upon fact. In the case of married women of the samurai
class,--directly responsible to their husbands, not to the
lord,--jigai was resorted to most often as a means of preserving
honour in time of war, though it was sometimes performed merely as a
sacrifice of loyalty to the spirit of the husband, after his untimely
death.* [*The Japanese moralist Yekken wrote 'A woman has no feudal
lord: she must reverence and obey her husband.'] In the case of girls
it was not uncommon for other reasons,--samurai maidens often
entering into the service of noble households, where the cruelty of
intrigue might easily bring about a suicide, or where loyalty to the
wife of the lord might exact it. For the samurai maiden in service
was bound by loyalty to her mistress not less closely than the
warrior to the lord; and the heroines of Japanese feudalism were
many.
In the early ages it appears to have been the custom for the wives of
officials condemned to death to kill themselves the ancient
chronicles are full of examples. But this custom is perhaps to be
partly accounted for by the ancient law, which held the household of
the offender equally responsible with him for the offence,
independently of the facts in the case. However, it was certainly
also common enough for a bereaved wife to perform suicide, not
through despair, but through the wish to follow her [289] husband
into the other world, and there to wait upon him as in life.
Instances of female suicide, representing the old ideal of duty to a
dead husband, have occurred in recent times. Such suicides are
usually performed according to the feudal rules,--the woman robing
herself in white for the occasion. At the time of the late war with
China there occurred in Tokyo one remarkable suicide of this kind;
the victim being the wife of Lieutenant Asada, who had fallen in
battle. She was only twenty-one. On hearing of her husband's death,
she at once began to make preparations for her own,--writing letters
of farewell to her relatives, putting her affairs in order, and
carefully cleaning the house, according to old-time rule. Thereafter
she donned her death-robe; laid mattings down opposite to the alcove
in the guest-room; placed her husband's portrait in the alcove, and
set offerings before it. When everything had been arranged, she
seated herself before the portrait, took up her dagger, and with a
single skilful thrust divided the arteries of her throat.
Besides the duty of suicide for the sake of preserving honour, there
was also, for the samurai woman, the duty of suicide as a moral
protest. I have already said that among the highest class of
retainers it was thought a moral duty to perform harakiri as a
remonstrance against shameless conduct on the part of one's lord,
when all other means of persuasion [290] had been tried in vain.
Among samurai women--taught to consider their husbands as their
lords, in the feudal meaning of the term--it was held a moral
obligation to perform jigai, by way of protest, against disgraceful
behaviour upon the part of a husband who would not listen to advice
or reproof. The ideal of wifely duty which impelled such sacrifice
still survives; and more than one recent example might be cited of a
generous life thus laid down in rebuke of some moral wrong. Perhaps
the most touching instance occurred in 1892, at the time of the
district elections in Nagano prefecture. A rich voter named Ishijima,
after having publicly pledged himself to aid in the election of a
certain candidate, transferred his support to the rival candidate. On
learning of this breach of promise, the wife of Ishijima, robed
herself in white, and performed jigai after the old samurai manner.
The grave of this brave woman is still decorated with flowers by the
people of the district; and incense is burned before her tomb.
To kill oneself at command--a duty which no loyal samurai would have
dreamed of calling in question--appears to us much less difficult
than another duty, also fully accepted: the sacrifice of children,
wife, and household for the sake of the lord. Much of Japanese
popular tragedy is devoted to incidents of such sacrifice made by
retainers or [291] dependents of daimyo,--men or women who gave their
children to death in order to save the children of their masters.*
[*See, for a good example, the translation of the drama Terakoya,
published, with admirable illustrations, by T. Hasegawa (Tokyo).] Nor
have we any reason to suppose that the facts have been exaggerated in
these dramatic compositions, most of which are based upon feudal
history. The incidents, of course, have been rearranged and expanded
to meet theatrical requirements; but the general pictures thus given
of the ancient society are probably even less grim than the vanished
reality. The people still love these tragedies; and the foreign
critic of their dramatic literature is wont to point out only the
blood-spots, and to comment upon them as evidence of a public taste
for gory spectacles,--as proof of some innate ferocity in the race.
Rather, I think, is this love of the old tragedy proof of what
foreign critics try always to ignore as--much as possible,--the
deeply religious character of the people. These plays continue to
give delight,--not because of their horror, but because of their
moral teaching,--because of their exposition of the duty of sacrifice
and courage, the religion of loyalty. They represent the martyrdoms
of feudal society for its noblest ideals.
All down through that society, in varying forms, the same spirit--of
loyalty had its manifestations. As the samurai to his liege-lord, so
the apprentice was bound to the patron, and the clerk to the [292]
merchant. Everywhere there was trust, because everywhere there
existed the like sentiment of mutual duty between servant and master.
Each industry and occupation had its religion of loyalty,--requiring,
on the one side, absolute obedience and sacrifice at need; and on the
other, kindliness and aid. And the rule of the dead was over all.
Not less ancient than the duty of dying for parent or lord was the
social obligation to avenge the killing of either. Even before the
beginnings of settled society, this duty is recognized. The oldest
chronicles of Japan teem with instances of obligatory vengeance.
Confucian ethics more than affirmed the obligation,--forbidding a man
to live "under the same heaven" with the slayer of his lord, or
parent, or brother; and fixing all the degrees of kinship, or other
relationship, within which the duty of vengeance was to be considered
imperative. Confucian ethics, it will be remembered, became at an
early date the ethics of the Japanese ruling-classes, and so remained
down to recent times. The whole Confucian system, as I have remarked
elsewhere, was founded upon ancestor-worship, and represented
scarcely more than an amplification and elaboration of filial piety:
it was therefore in complete accord with Japanese moral experience.
As the military power developed in Japan, the Chinese code of
vengeance became universally accepted; and it was sustained [293] by
law as well as by custom in later ages. Iyeyasu himself maintained
it--exacting only that preliminary notice of an intended vendetta
should be given in writing to the district criminal court. The text
of his article on the subject is interesting:--
"In respect to avenging injury done to master or father, it is
acknowledged by the Wise and Virtuous [Confucius] that you and the
injurer cannot live together under the canopy of heaven. A person
harbouring such vengeance shall give notice in writing to the
criminal court; and although no check or hindrance may be offered to
the carrying out of his design within the period allowed for that
purpose, it is forbidden that the chastisement of an enemy be
attended with riot. Fellows who neglect to give notice of their
intended revenge are like wolves of pretext:* their punishment or
pardon should depend upon the circumstances of the case."
[*Or "hypocritical wolves."--that is to say brutal murderers seeking
to excuse their crime on the pretext justifiable vengeance. (The
translation is by Lowder.)]
Kindred, as well as parents; teachers, as well as lords, were to be
revenged. A considerable proportion of popular romance and drama is
devoted to the subject of vengeance taken by women; and, as a matter
of fact, women, and even children, sometimes became avengers when
there were no men of a wronged family left to perform the duty.
Apprentices avenged their masters; and even sworn friends were bound
to avenge each other.
[294] Why the duty of vengeance was not confined to the circle of
natural kinship is explicable, of course, by the peculiar
organization of society. We have seen that the patriarchal family was
a religious corporation; and that the family-bond was not the bond of
natural affection, but the bond of the cult. We have also seen that
the relation of the household to the community, and of the community
to the clan, and of the clan to the tribe, was equally a religious
relation. As a necessary consequence, the earlier customs of
vengeance were regulated by the bond of the family, communal, or
tribal cult, as well as by the bond of blood; and with the
introduction of Chinese ethics, and the development of militant
conditions, the idea of revenge as duty took a wider range. The son
or the brother by adoption was in respect of obligation the same as
the son or brother by blood; and the teacher stood to his pupil in
the relation of father to child. To strike one's natural parent was a
crime punishable by death: to strike one's teacher was, before the
law, an equal offence. This notion of the teacher's claim to filial
reverence was of Chinese importation: an extension of the duty of
filial piety to "the father of the mind." There were other such
extensions; and the origin of all, Chinese or Japanese, may be traced
alike to ancestor-worship.
Now, what has never been properly insisted upon, in any of the books
treating of ancient [295] Japanese customs, is the originally
religious significance of the kataki-uchi. That a religious origin
can be found for all customs of vendetta established in early
societies is, of course, well known; but a peculiar interest attaches
to the Japanese vendetta in view of the fact that it conserved its
religious character unchanged down to the present era. The
kataki-uchi was essentially an act of propitiation, as is proved by
the rite with which it terminated,--the placing of the enemy's head
upon the tomb of the person avenged, as an offering of atonement. And
one of the most impressive features of this rite, as formerly
practised, was the delivery of an address to the ghost of the person
avenged. Sometimes the address was only spoken; sometimes it was also
written, and the manuscript left upon the tomb.
There is probably none of my readers unacquainted with Mitford's
ever-delightful Tales of Old Japan, and his translation of the true
story of the "Forty-Seven Ronins." But I doubt whether many persons
have noticed the significance of the washing of Kira
Kotsuke-no-Suke's severed head, or the significance of the address
inscribed to their dead lord by the brave men who had so long waited
and watched for the chance to avenge him. This address, of which I
quote Mitford's translation, was laid upon the tomb of the Lord
Asano. It is still preserved at the temple called Sengakuji:--
[296] "The fifteenth year of Genroku [17031, the twelfth month, the
fifteenth day.--We have come this day to do homage here: forty-seven
men in all, from Oishi Kuranosuke down to the foot-soldier Terasaka
Kichiyemon,--all cheerfully about to lay down our lives on your
behalf. We reverently announce this to the honoured spirit of our
dead master. On the fourteenth day of the third month of last year,
our honoured master was pleased to attack Kira Kotsuke-no-Suke, for
what reason we know not. Our honoured master put an end to his own
life; but Kira Kotsuke-no-Suke lived. Although we fear that after the
decree issued by the Government, this plot of ours will be
displeasing to our honoured master, still we, who have eaten of your
food, could not without blushing repeat the verse, "Thou shalt not
live under the same heaven, nor tread the same earth with the enemy
of thy father or lord," nor could we have dared to leave hell [Hades]
and present ourselves before you in Paradise, unless we had carried
out the vengeance which you began. Every day that we waited seemed as
three autumns to us. Verily we have trodden the snow for one day,
nay, for two days, and have tasted food but once. The old and
decrepit, the sick and the ailing, have come forth gladly to lay down
their lives. Men might laugh at us, as at grasshoppers trusting in
the strength of their arms, and thus shame our honoured lord; but we
could not halt in our deed of vengeance. Having taken counsel
together last night, we have escorted my Lord Kotsuke-no-Suke hither
to your tomb. This dirk, by which our honoured lord set great store
last year, and entrusted to our care, we now bring back. If your
noble spirit be now present before this tomb, we pray you, as a [297]
sign, to take the dirk, and, striking the head of your enemy with it
a second time, to dispel your hatred forever. This is the respectful
statement of forty-seven men."