But what have we in Japan? We have a monarchy with a "constitutional" form of government. The monarch is said to have held his power from the beginning of time. He is literally regarded as a descendant of the gods who created Japan,—which was then the world entire. The myth of his origin would not be very different from any other myth of the origins of rulers, were it not for the recent developments in the history of Japan. At the time of the restoration of the previous emperor to power, it was decided by the rebellious daimyo that the long-neglected mikado, he who for hundreds of years had had absolutely no say in the government of his lands, should be restored to power. That is to say, because there was no one daimyo who could himself take the leadership and become shogun, they determined to rule with the tenno as nominal leader, but themselves as the real rulers. Other than in the superstitious reverence of the ignorant masses for the symbol of the tenno—whose person they had never seen—that lowly illustrious one might just as well have been non-existent for all the say he had in his country's affairs. So far, the situation might not be different from that in England, but England's Parliament is in the control of the Commons, while Japan's Diet—both upper and lower houses—is at the mercy of the cabinet, which, though ostensibly responsible to the emperor, is actually in the control of the genro and the military and naval clans. The worship of the emperor, on the other hand, is made part of the political function, the better to cow the masses into reverential obedience to the wishes of the actual rulers.
JAPAN'S FIRST REACTION TO FOREIGN INFLUENCE
SECOND STAGE IN WESTERNIZATION
Some of my students leaving Kobe for a cross-country hike
The basis for this theocratical grip on the people is Shintoism. With the Restoration in 1868, Shintoism, that ancestor-worshiping cult, was revived as the spiritual core of the new empire; Buddhism was sent packing, and all the cunning of pseudo-historians was resorted to to bolster up this effete and primitive national ideal.
"Let them worship their old emperor," say some, largely those with a love of pageantry in their unconscious. And no one could raise an argument against this if that was where it ended. If it merely meant the binding together in a communal nationalism the thought and devotion of the people, it would be a desirable performance. But the natural result of an artificially stimulated nationalism based on a myth and a deception is that it becomes proselytic in its tendencies. It is not satisfied with its native influence, but begins to reach out. In other words, it takes upon itself the duty of making the entire world one, just as religion and democracy seek to convert the world. And Shintoism is a short step to Pan-Asianism. Pan-Asianism is the logical consequence of Shintoism.
What is Shintoism? In this connection, none is more authoritative than Basil Hall Chamberlain, Emeritus Professor of Japanese and Philology at the Imperial University of Tokyo, and author of numerous scientific works on Japan. In "The Invention of a New Religion" he says (page 6):
Agnostic Japan is teaching us at this very hour how religions are sometimes manufactured for a special end—to observe practical worldly purposes.
Mikado-worship and Japan-worship—for that is the new Japanese religion—is, of course, no spontaneously generated phenomenon. Every manufacture presupposes a material out of which it is made, every present a past on which it rests. But the twentieth-century Japanese religion of loyalty and patriotism is quite new, for in it pre-existing ideas have been sifted, altered, freshly compounded, turned to new uses, and have found a new center of gravity.... Shinto, a primitive nature cult, which had fallen into discredit, was taken out of its cupboard and dusted.