Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation

by Lafcadio Hearn

What then will become of the ancient morality?—the ancient cult?

—In this moment the conditions are abnormal. But it seems certain that there will be, under normal conditions, a further gradual loosening of the old family-bonds; and this would bring about a further disintegration. By the testimony of the Japanese themselves, such disintegration was spreading rapidly among the upper and middle classes of the great cities, prior to the present war. Among the people of the agricultural districts, and even in the country towns, the old ethical order of things has yet been little affected. And there are other influences than legislative change or social necessity which are working for disintegration. Old beliefs have been rudely shaken by the introduction of larger knowledge: a new generation is being taught, in twenty-seven thousand primary schools, the rudiments of science and the modern conception of the universe. The [460] Buddhist cosmology, with its fantastic pictures of Mount Meru, has become a nursery-tale; the old Chinese nature-philosophy finds believers only among the little educated, or the survivors of the feudal era; and the youngest schoolboy has learned that the constellations are neither gods nor Buddhas, but far-off groups of suns. No longer can popular fancy picture the Milky Way as the River of Heaven; the legend of the Weaving-Maiden, and her waiting lover, and the Bridge of Birds, is now told only to children; and the young fisherman, though steering, like his fathers, by the light of stars, no longer discerns in the northern sky the form of Mioken Bosatsu.

Yet it were easy to misinterpret the weakening of a certain class of old beliefs, or the visible tendency to social change. Under any circumstances a religion decays slowly; and the most conservative forms of religion are the last to yield to disintegration. It were a grave mistake to suppose that the ancestor-cult has yet been appreciably affected by exterior influences of any kind, or to imagine that it continues to exist merely by force of hallowed custom, and not because the majority still believe. No religion—and least of all the religion of the dead—could thus suddenly lose its hold upon the affections of the race that evolved it. Even in other directions the new scepticism is superficial: it has not spread downwards into the core of things. There is indeed [470] a growing class of young men with whom scepticism of a certain sort is the fashion, and scorn of the past an affectation,—but even among these no word of disrespect concerning the religion of the home is ever heard. Protests against the old obligations of filial piety, complaints of the growing weight of the family yoke, are sometimes uttered; but the domestic cult is never spoken of lightly. As for the communal and other public forms of Shinto, the vigour of the old religion is sufficiently indicated by the continually increasing number of temples. In 1897 there were 191,962 Shinto temples; in 1901 there were 195,256.

It seems probable that such changes as must occur in the near future will be social rather than religious; and there is little reason to believe that these changes—however they may tend to weaken filial piety in sundry directions—will seriously affect the ancestor-cult itself. The weight of the family-bond, aggravated by the increasing difficulty and cost of life, may be more and more lightened for the individual; but no legislation can abolish the sentiment of duty to the dead. When that sentiment utterly fails, the heart of a nation will have ceased to beat. Belief in the old gods, as gods, may slowly pass; but Shinto may live on as the Religion of the Fatherland, a religion of heroes and patriots; and the likelihood of such future modification is indicated by the memorial character of many new temples.

[471]—It has been much asserted of late years (chiefly because of the profound impression made by Mr. Percival Lowell's Soul of the Far East) that Japan is desperately in need of a Gospel of Individualism; and many pious persons assume that the conversion of the country to Christianity would suffice to produce the Individualism. This assumption has nothing to rest on except the old superstition that national customs and habits and modes of feeling, slowly shaped in the course of thousands of years, can be suddenly transformed by a mere act of faith. Those further dissolutions of the old order which would render possible, under normal conditions, a higher social energy, can be safely brought about through industrialism only,—through the working of necessities that enforce competitive enterprise and commercial expansion. A long peace will be required for such healthy transformation; and it is not impossible that an independent and progressive Japan would then consider questions of religious change from the standpoint of political expediency. Observation and study abroad may have unduly impressed Japanese statesmen with the half-truth so forcibly uttered by Michelet,—that "money has a religion,"—that "capital is Protestant,"—that the power and wealth and intellectual energy of the world belong to the races who cast off the yoke of Rome, and freed themselves from the creed of the Middle [472] Ages.* A Japanese statesman is said to have lately declared that his countrymen were "rapidly drifting towards Christianity"! Newspaper reports of eminent utterances are not often trustworthy; but the report in this case is probably accurate, and the utterance intended to suggest possibilities. Since the declaration of the Anglo-Japanese alliance, there has been a remarkable softening in the attitude of safe conservatism which the government formerly maintained toward Western religion…. But as for the question whether the Japanese nation will ever adopt an alien creed under official encouragement, I think that the sociological answer is evident. Any understanding of the fundamental structure of society should make equally obvious the imprudence of attempting hasty transformations, and the impossibility of effecting them. For the present, at least, the religious question in Japan is a question of social integrity; and any efforts to precipitate the natural course of change can result only in provoking reaction and disorder. I believe that the time is far away at which Japan can venture to abandon the policy of [473] caution that has served her so well. I believe that the day on which she adopts a Western creed, her immemorial dynasty is doomed; and I cannot help fearing that whenever she yields to foreign capital the right to hold so much as one rood of her soil, she signs away her birthright beyond hope of recovery.

[*No inferences can be safely drawn from the apparent attitude of the government towards religious bodies in Japan. Of late years the seeming policy has been to encourage the less tolerant forms of Western religion. In curious contrast to this attitude is the non-toleration of Freemasonry. Strictly speaking, Freemasonry is not allowed in Japan—although, since the abolition of exterritoriality, the foreign lodges at the open ports have been permitted (or rather, suffered) to exist upon certain conditions. A Japanese in Europe or America is free to become a Mason; but he cannot become a Mason in Japan, where the proceedings of all societies must remain open to official surveillance.]

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With a few general remarks upon the religion of the Far East, in its relation to Occidental aggressions, this attempt at interpretation may fitly conclude.

—All the societies of the Far East are founded, like that of Japan, upon ancestor-worship. This ancient religion, in various forms, represents their moral experience; and it offers everywhere to the introduction of Christianity, as now intolerantly preached, obstacles of the most serious kind. Attacks upon it must seem, to those whose lives are directed by it, the greatest of outrages and the most unpardonable of crimes. A religion for which every member of a community believes it his duty to die at call, is a religion for which he will fight. His patience with attacks upon it will depend upon the degree of his intelligence and the nature of his training. All the races of the Far East have not the intelligence of the Japanese, nor have they been equally well trained, under ages of military discipline, to adapt their conduct to circumstances. For [474] the Chinese peasant, in especial, attacks upon his religion are intolerable. His cult remains the most precious of his possessions, and his supreme guide in all matters of social right and wrong. The East has been tolerant of all creeds which do not assault the foundations of its societies; and if Western missions had been wise enough to leave those foundations alone,—to deal with the ancestor-cult as Buddhism did, and to show the same spirit of tolerance in other directions,—the introduction of Christianity upon a very extensive scale should have proved a matter of no difficulty. That the result would have been a Christianity differing considerably from Western Christianity is obvious,—the structure of Far-Eastern society not admitting of sudden transformations;—but the essentials of doctrine might have been widely propagated, without exciting social antagonism, much less race-hatred. To-day it is probably impossible to undo what the sterile labour of intolerance has already done. The hatred of Western religion in China and adjacent countries is undoubtedly due to the needless and implacable attacks which have been made upon the ancestor-cult. To demand of a Chinese or an Annamese that he cast away or destroy his ancestral tablets is not less irrational and inhuman than it would be to demand of an Englishman or a Frenchman that he destroy his mother's tombstone in proof of his devotion to Christianity. [475] Nay, it is much more inhuman,—for the European attaches to the funeral monument no such idea of sacredness as that which attaches, in Eastern belief, to the simple tablet inscribed with the name of the dead parent. From old time these attacks upon the domestic faith of docile and peaceful communities have provoked massacres; and, if persisted in, they will continue to provoke massacres while the people have strength left to strike. How foreign religious aggression is answered by native religious aggression; and how Christian military power avenges the foreign victims with tenfold slaughter and strong robbery, need not here be recorded. It has not been in these years only that ancestor-worshipping peoples have been slaughtered, impoverished, or subjugated in revenge for the uprisings that missionary intolerance provokes. But while Western trade and commerce directly gain by these revenges, Western public opinion will suffer no discussion of the right of provocation or the justice of retaliation. The less tolerant religious bodies call it a wickedness even to raise the question of moral right; and against the impartial observer, who dares to lift his voice in protest, fanaticism turns as ferociously as if he were proved an enemy of the human race.

From the sociological point of view the whole missionary system, irrespective of sect and creed, represents the skirmishing-force of Western civilization in its general attack upon all civilizations of the [476] ancient type,—the first line in the forward movement of the strongest and most highly evolved societies upon the weaker and less evolved. The conscious work of these fighters is that of preachers and teachers; their unconscious work is that of sappers and destroyers. The subjugation of weak races has been aided by their work to a degree little imagined; and by no other conceivable means could it have been accomplished so quickly and so surely. For destruction they labour unknowingly, like a force of nature. Yet Christianity does not appreciably expand. They perish; and they really lay down their lives, with more than the courage of soldiers, not, as they hope, to assist the spread of that doctrine which the East must still of necessity refuse, but to help industrial enterprise and Occidental aggrandizement. The real and avowed object of missions is defeated by persistent indifference to sociological truths; and the martyrdoms and sacrifices are utilized by Christian nations for ends essentially opposed to the spirit of Christianity.