The Japanese Spirit

by Yoshisaburo Okakura

It might perhaps interest you to know something of our prevailing idea of personal beauty, especially as, in such a homogeneous nation as the Japanese, ruled from time immemorial by one and the same line of dynasty, it may help us to make some vague conjectures as to the physical appearances of at least one of those continental tribes out of which our nation has been formed. The standard of beauty naturally fluctuates a little according to sex and locality. In a lady, for example, mildness and grace are, generally speaking, preferred to that strength or manliness of expression which would be thought more becoming in her brother. Tôkyô again does not put so much stress on the fleshiness of limbs and face as does Kyôto. But, as a whole, there is only one ideal throughout the Empire. So let me try to enumerate all the qualities usually considered necessary to make a beautiful woman. She is to possess a body not much exceeding five feet in height, with comparatively fair skin and proportionately well-developed limbs; a head covered with long, thick, and jet-black hair; an oval face with a straight nose, high and narrow; rather large eyes, with large deep-brown pupils and thick eyelashes; a small mouth, hiding behind its red, but not thin, lips, even rows of small white teeth; ears not altogether small; and long and thick eyebrows forming two horizontal but slightly curved lines, with a space left between them and the eyes. Of the four ways in which hair can grow round the upper edge of the forehead, viz., horned, square, round, and Fuji-shaped, one of the last two is preferred, a very high as well as a very low forehead being considered not attractive.

Such are, roughly speaking, the elements of Japanese female beauty. Eyes and eyebrows with the outer ends turning considerably upwards, with which your artists depict us, are due to those Japanese colour prints which strongly accentuate our dislike of the reverse, for straight eyes and eyebrows make a very bad impression on us, suggesting weakness, lasciviousness, and so on. It must also be understood that in Japan no such variety of types of beauty is to be met with as is noticed here in Europe. Blue eyes and blond hair, the charms of which we first learn to feel after a protracted stay among you, are regarded in a Japanese as something extraordinary in no favourable sense of the term! A girl with even a slight tendency to grey eyes or frizzly hair is looked upon as an unwelcome deviation from the national type.

If we now consider our mythology, with a view to tracing the continental home of the Yamato race, we find, to our disappointment, that our present knowledge is too scanty to allow us to arrive at a conclusion. Indeed, so long as the general science of mythology itself remains in that unsettled condition in which its youth obliges it to linger, and especially so long as the Indian and Chinese bodies of myths—by which our mythology is so unmistakably influenced—do not receive more serious systematic treatment, the recorded stories of the Japanese deities cannot be expected to supply us with much indication as to our continental home. One thing is certain about them, that they were not free from influences exerted by the different myths prevalent among the Chinese and the Indians at the time when they were written down in our earliest history, the Ko-ji-ki or Records of Ancient Matter, completed in A.D. 712. There is an excellent English translation of the book, with an admirable introduction and notes, by Mr. B.H. Chamberlain. According to this book, the original ethereal chaos with which the world began gradually congealed, and was finally divided into heaven and earth. The male and female principles now at work gave birth to several deities, until a pair of deities named Izanagi and Izanami, or the 'Male-who-invites' and the 'Female-who-invites,' were produced. They married, and produced first of all the islands of Japan big and small, and then different deities, until the birth of the Fire-God cost the divine mother her life. She subsequently retired to the Land of Darkness or Hades, where her sorrowful consort descended, Orpheus-like, in quest of his spouse. He failed to bring her back to the outer world, for, like the Greek musician, he broke his promise not to look at her in her more profound retirement. The result was disastrous. Izanagi barely escaped from his now furious wife, and on coming back to daylight he washed himself in a stream, in order to purify himself from the hideous sights and the pollution of the nether-world. This custom of lustration is, by the way, kept up to this day in the symbolic sprinkling of salt over persons returning from a funeral—salt representing pure water, as our name for it, 'the flower of the waves,' well indicates. Our love of cleanliness and of bathing might be also recognised in this early custom. Impurity, whether mental or corporal, has always been regarded as a great evil, and even as a sin.

Now one of the most important results of the purification of the god Izanagi was the birth of three important deities through the washing of his eyes and nose. The Moon-God and the Sun-Goddess emerged from his washing his right and left eyes, while Susanowo, their youngest brother, owed his existence to the washing of his nose; three illustrious children to whom the divine father trusted the dominion of night, day, and the seas.

The last-mentioned deity, whose name would mean in English 'Prince Impetuous,' lost his father's favour by his obstinate longing to see Izanami, the divine mother, in Hades, and was expelled from the father's presence. He eventually went up to heaven to pay a visit to his sister, the Sun-Goddess, whom he gravely offended by his monstrous outrages on her person, and who was consequently so angry that she shut herself up in a rocky chamber, thus causing darkness in the world outside. In accordance with the deliberate plans worked out by an assembly of a myriad gods, she was at last allured from her cavern by the sounds of wild merriment caused by the burlesque dancing of a female deity, and day reigned once more.

The now repenting offender was driven down from heaven, and he wandered about the earth. It was during this wandering that in Idzumo he, like Perseus, rescued a beautiful young maid from an eight-headed serpent. He won her hand and lived very happily with her ever after.

In the meantime the state of things in the 'High Plain of Heaven' ripened to the point that the Sun-Goddess began to think of sending her august child to govern the 'Luxuriant-Reed-Plain-Land-of-Fresh-Rice-Ears,' that is to say, Japan. Messages were previously sent to pacify the land for the reception of the divine ruler. This took much time, during which a grandson was born to the Sun-Goddess, and in the end it was this grandson who was designated to come down to earth instead of his father. On his departure a formal command to descend and rule the land now placed under his care was accompanied by the present of a mirror, a sword, and a string of crescent-shaped jewels. These treasures, still preserved in our imperial household as regalia, are generally interpreted to mean the three virtues of wisdom, courage, and mercy—necessary qualities for a perfect ruler. It was on the high peak of Mount Takachiho that the divine ruler descended to earth. He settled down in the country until his great-grandson, known in history as Emperor Jimmu, founded the empire and began that unique line of rulers who have governed the 'Land of the Gods' for more than two thousand years, the present emperor being the hundred and twenty-first link in the eternal chain.

Such is, in brief, the story about my country before it was brought under the rule of one central governing body. Subjected to scientific scrutiny the whole tale presents many gaps in logical sequence. It betrays, besides, traces of an intermingling of the early beliefs of other nations. Still, it must be said that the divine origin of our emperors has invested their throne with the double halo of temporal and of spiritual power from the earliest days of their ascendancy; and the people, themselves the descendants of those patriarchs who served under the banners of Emperor Jimmu, or else of those who early learned to bow themselves down before the divine conqueror, have looked up to this throne with an ever-growing reverence and pride.

In primitive Japan, as in every other primitive human society, ancestor-worship was the first form of belief. Each family had its own departed spirits of forefathers to whom was dedicated a daily homage of simple words and offerings in kind. The guardian ghosts demanded of their living descendants that they should be good and brave in their own way. As these families of the same race and language gathered themselves around the strongest of them all, imbued with a firm belief in its divine origin, they contributed in their turn their own myths to the imperial ones, thus eventually forming and consolidating a national cult; and it was but natural that the people's heart should come in course of time to re-echo in harmony with the keynote struck by the one through whom the gods breathe eternal life. The whole nation is bound by that sacred tie of common belief and common thought. Here lies the great gap that separates, for example, the Chinese cult of fatalism from our Path of Gods as a moral force. The Chinese have believed from the earliest times in one supreme god whom they called the Divine Presider (Shang-ti) or the August Heaven (Hwang-t'ien or simply T'ien), who, according to their notion, carefully selects a fit person from among swarming mankind to be the temporary ruler of his fellow-countrymen, but only for so long as it pleases the god to let him occupy the throne. At the expiration of a certain period, the heavenly mission (T'ien-ming) is transferred through bloodshed and national disaster to another mortal, who exercises the earthly rule until he or his descendants incur the disfavour of the 'Heaven above.' To this day the Chinese word for revolution means the 'renovation of missions' (kweh-ming). This fatalistic idea, which is but a natural outcome of the almost too democratic nature of the people of the Celestial Empire and of the frequent changes of dynasties it has had to go through, is almost unknown in our island home in its gravest aspects; more than that, ever since its introduction into Japan, this idea, along with the Indian doctrine of pitiless fate, has gradually taught us to offer a more resigned and determined service to our respective superiors who culminate in the divine person of the Emperor himself. This is well illustrated by the fact that no attempt at the formal occupation of the throne has ever been made, even on the part of those powerful Shoguns who were the real rulers of our country; they knew full well how dangerous and fatal for themselves it would be to tamper with that hinge on which the nation's religious life turns. Only once in our long history is there an example of an unsuccessful attempt (and it is the highest treason a Japanese subject can think of), when a Buddhist monk named Dôkyô, encouraged by the undue devotion of the ruling empress, tried to ascend the throne by means of the recognition of the higher temporal rank of the Buddhist priesthood over the imperial ministry of the native cult. This imminent danger was averted by the bold and resolute patriotism of a Shinto priest, Wake-no-Kiyomaro, who, in Luther-like defiance of all peril and personal risks, declared fearlessly, in the very presence of the haughty and menacing head of the Buddhist Church, the divine will, 'Japan is to know no emperor except in the person of the divine descendants of the Sun-Goddess!'

Turning now to the question of language, we must confess that the linguistic affinities of Japanese are as little cleared up as the other problems we have been considering. The only thing we know about the Japanese language amounts to this: it belongs, morphologically speaking, to the so-called agglutinative languages, e.g., those which express their grammatical functions by the addition of etymologically independent elements—prefixes and suffixes—to the unchangeable roots or base forms. Genealogically, to follow the classification expounded by Friedrich Müller in his Grundriss der Sprachwissenschaft, who based his system on Haeckel's division of the human race by the nature and particularly the section of the hair, Japanese is one of the languages or groups of languages spoken by the Mongolian race.