The Japanese Spirit

by Yoshisaburo Okakura

'Whoso takes the world's life on him and his own
lays down,
He, dying so, lives.'

Might not these lines explain, when duly extended, the subtle feeling that lurks behind our apparently incomprehensible custom of speaking with the departed over the altar? The present deification, is, like your custom of erecting monuments to men of merit, a way of making the best part of a man's career legible to the coming generations. The numberless shrines you now find scattered all over Japan are only so many chapters written in unmistakable characters of the lessons our beloved and revered heroes and good men have left us for our edification and amelioration. It is in the sunny space within the simple railing of these Shinto shrines, where the smiling presence of the patron spirit of a deified forefather or a great man is so clearly felt, that our childhood has played for tens of centuries its games of innocent joy. Monthly and yearly festivals are observed within the divine enclosure of a guardian god, when a whole community under his protection let themselves go in good-natured laughter and gleeful mirth before the favouring eyes of their divine patron. How different is this jovial feeling from that gloomy sensation with which we approach a Buddhist temple, recalling death and the misery of life from every corner of its mysterious interior. Such seriousness has never been congenial to the gay Japanese mind with its strong love of openness and light. Until death stares us right in the face, we do not care to be religious in the ordinary sense of the term. True, we say and think that we believe in death, but all the while this so-called death is nothing else than a new life in this present world of ours led in a supernatural way. For instance, when the father of a Japanese family begins a journey of any length, the raised part of his room will be made sacred to his memory during his temporary absence; his family will gather in front of it and think of him, expressing their devotion and love in words and gifts in kind. In the hundreds of thousands of families that have some one or other of their members fighting for the nation in this dreadful war with Russia, there will not be even one solitary house where the mother, wife, or sister is not practising this simple rite of endearment for the beloved and absent member of the family. And if he die on the field, the mental attitude of the poor bereaved towards the never-returning does not show any substantial difference. The temporarily departed will now be regarded as the forever departed, but not as lost or passed away. His essential self is ever present, only not visible. Daily offerings and salutations continue in exactly the same way as when he was absent for a time. Even in the mind of the modern Japanese with its extremely agnostic tendencies, there is still one corner sacred to this inherited feeling. You could sooner convince an ordinary European of the non-existence of a personal God. When it gets dusk every bird knows whither to wing its way home. Even so with us all when the night of Death spreads its dark folds over our mortal mind!

But ask a modern Japanese of ordinary education in the broad daylight of life, if he believes in a God in the Christian sense; or in Buddha as the creator; or in the Shinto deities; or else in any other personal agency or agencies, as originating and presiding over the universe; and you would immediately get an answer in the negative in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred. Do you ask why? First, because our school education throughout its whole course has, ever since its re-establishment thirty-five years ago, been altogether free from any teaching of a denominational nature. The ethical foundations necessary for the building up of character are imparted through an adequate commentary on the moral sayings and maxims derived mostly from Chinese classics. Secondly, because the little knowledge about natural science which we obtain at school seems to make it impossible to anchor our rational selves on anything other than an impersonal law. Thirdly, because we do not see any convincing reason why morals should be based on the teaching of a special denomination, in face of the fact that we can be upright and brave without the help of a creed with a God or deities at its other end. So, for the average mind of the educated Japanese something like modern scientific agnosticism, with a strong tendency towards the materialistic monism of recent times, is just what pleases and satisfies it most.

If not so definitely thought out, and if expressed with much less learned terminology, the thought among our educated classes as regards supernatural agencies has during the past three centuries been much the same. The Confucian warning against meddling with things supernatural, the atheistic views and hermit-like conduct of the adherents of Laoism, and the higher Buddhism, all contributed towards the consolidation of this mental attitude with a conscious or unconscious belief in the existing spirit-world. Except for the philosophy which they knew how to utilise for their practical purposes, the educated felt no charm in religion. The lower form of Buddhism with its pantheon has been held as something only for the aged and the weak. For the execution of the religious rites, at funerals or on other occasions (except in the rare instances when some families for a special reason of their own preferred the Shintoist form), we have unanimously drawn on the Buddhist priesthood, just in the same way as you go to your family doctor or attorney in case of a bodily or legal complication, knowing well that religion as we have understood it is something as much outside the pale of the layman as medicine and law.

For the proper conduct of our daily life as members of society, the body of Confucian morality resting on the tripod of loyalty, filial piety, and honesty, has been the only standard which high and low have alike recognised. These ethical ideals, when embraced by that formidable warrior caste who played such an important part in feudal Japan, form the code of unwritten morality known among us as Bushido, which means the Path of the Samurai. This last word, which has found its way into your language, is the substantival derivative from the verb samurau (to serve), and, like its English counterpart 'knight' (Old English cniht), has raised itself from its original sense of a retainer (cp. German Knecht) to the meaning in which it is now used. To be a Samurai in the true sense of the word has been the highest aspiration of a Japanese. Your term 'gentleman,' when understood in its best sense, would convey to you an approximate idea if you added a dash of soldier blood to it. Rectitude, courage, benevolence, politeness, veracity, loyalty, and a predominating sense of honour—these are the chief colours with which a novelist in the days of yore used to paint an ideal Samurai; and his list of desirable qualities was not considered complete without a well-developed body and an expression of the face that was manly but in no way brutal. No special stress was at first laid on the cultivation of thinking power and book-learning, though they were not altogether discouraged; it was thought that these accomplishments might develop other qualities detrimental to the principal character, such as sophistry or pedantry. To have good sense enough to keep his name honourable, and to act instead of talking cleverly, was the chief ambition of a Samurai.

But this view gradually became obscured. It lost its fearful rigidity in course of time, as the world became more and more sure of a lasting peace. Literature and music have gradually added softening touches to its somewhat brusque features.

It must, however, be always remembered that the keynote of Bushido was from the very beginning an indomitable sense of honour. This was all in all to the mind of the Samurai, whose sword at his side reminded him at every movement of the importance of his good name. The care with which he preserved it reached in some cases to a pathetic extreme; he preferred, for example, an instant suicide to a reputation on which doubt had been cast, however falsely. The very custom of seppuku (better known as hara-kiri), a form of suicide not known in early Japan,[17] is an outcome of this love of an unstained name, originating, in my opinion, in the metaphorical use of the word hara (abdomen), which was the supposed organ for the begetting of ideas. In consequence of this curious localisation of the thinking faculty, the word hara came to denote at the same time intention or idea. Therefore, in cutting open (kiru) his abdomen, a person whose motives had come to be suspected meant to show that his inside was free from any trace of ideas not worthy of a Samurai. This explanation is, I think, amply sustained by the constant use to this very day of the word hara in the sense of one's ideas.

So Bushido, as you will now see, was itself but a manifestation of those same forces already at work in the formation of Japanese thought, like Buddhism, Confucianism, etc. But as it has played a most important part in the development of modern Japan, I thought it more proper to consider it as an independent factor in the history of our civilisation. Had it not been for this all-daring spirit of Bushido, Japan would never have been able to make the gigantic progress which she has been achieving in these last forty years. As soon as our ports were flung open to the reception of Western culture, Samurai, now deeply conscious of their new mission, took leave of those stern but faithful friends, their beloved swords, not without much reluctance, even as did Sir Bedivere, in order to take up the more peaceful pen, which they were determined to wield with the same knightly spirit. It is, in short, Bushido that has urged our Japan on for the last three centuries, and will continue to urge her on, on forever, onward to her ideals of the true, the good, and the beautiful. Look to the spot where every Japanese sabre and every Japanese bayonet is at present pointing with its icy edge of determined patriotism in the dreary fields of Manchuria, or think of the intrepid heroes on our men-of-war and our torpedo-boats amid blinding snowstorms and the glare of hostile searchlights, and your eyes will invariably end at the magic Path of the Samurai.

Having thus far followed my enumeration of the various factors in the formation of the present thought in Japan, some of you might perhaps be curious to know what Christianity has contributed towards the general stock of modern Japanese mentality.

It must surely have exercised a very healthy influence on our mind since its re-introduction at the beginning of the present Meiji period. Some have indeed gone so far as to say that we owe the whole success we have up to now achieved in this remarkable war to the holy inspiration we drew from the teaching of Jesus Christ.