Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation

by Lafcadio Hearn

[*At this festival the first new silk of the year, as well as the 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.