Secrets of the Samurai - Oscar Ratti

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which spurred the bushi to act on the stage of history, were rooted in a firm belief in Japan’s divine origins, in the determination to confirm that belief by force of arms, even if it meant death, and in that code of behavior which demanded unquestioning obedience to the commands of one’s immediate superior, who constituted the link with the divine past and thus would know the ways in which to successfully fulfill the mission implicit in those distant origins. For centuries these truths, as well as the way of life they represented, were inculcated into the Japanese character, seeping down to all levels of society and coloring every stage of the national development. It was a process of relentless indoctrination from above, both conscious and unconscious, which began in earnest at the end of the Nara period, with the emergence of the warrior clans whose services proved invaluable (although ultimately costly) to the feuding clans of the court nobles (huge) and the emperor (tenno) during their bitter power struggles. The bushi brought with them their simple ideas of excellence, translated concretely into personal loyalty to one’s immediate superior, and a readiness to fight and die without the slightest hesitation. These ideas, according to generally accepted historical records, contrasted vividly with the highly sophisticated and introspective patterns of the culture of Nara.

      The contrast and resulting friction was ultimately resolved through force of arms. Many aristocratic clans were totally destroyed, and the few nobles who survived were deprived of any effective influence, being restricted to the representational precincts of the imperial court, together with the emperor. Also destroyed were the huge monasteries and libraries which contained the essence, the distillation of Heian culture: its scriptures, its records, and its works of art. By 1600, the slate had been almost wiped clean. From that point on, the Way of the Warrior flowed both brutally and subtly into the consciousness of the entire population: the farmer, a large portion of whose rice crop would be appropriated by the retainers of the local daimyo, or provincial lord, looking up from his hoeing to gaze at a group of samurai, their weapons glinting in the sun as they ran rhythmically alongside a palanquin bound for Edo; the chance traveler who paused by the side of the road, a silent witness to a duel, often to the death, between two swordsmen; the surging, excited populace at the festivals held at various times during the year, staring wide-eyed at the martial arts demonstrations which were often a focal point of such festivals. In thousands of incidents, both minor and of great social significance, the drama of a potentially lethal confrontation between one man and another was restaged again and again, until this particular form of human experience was burned almost indelibly into the Japanese soul.

      Actually, during the Tokugawa period, the traditions of the military class, under the guise of a continuation of ancient culture, so thoroughly conditioned the national character that Western observers of the age were led to describe the Japanese people as being “naturally addicted to wars.” The intensity of warfare and civil strife in Japan astounded even those observers who, it must be remembered, came from a Europe which was not at that time (nor had ever been) a haven of peace. Griffis, in a paper presented to the Asiatic Society of Japan in 1874, noted how endemic warfare had been in Japan, indicating that war was considered “normal” and peace the “exceptional condition of its inhabitants” (Griffis, 21). The same author also emphasized the contrast between the delight the Japanese took in calling their country the Land of Great Peace and, for example, the names of streets in Edo—names such as “Armor,” “Helmet,” “Arrow,” “Bow,” and “Quiver,” all related to implements of war. In his analysis of the Japanese character, Brinkley wrote as follows:

      Hidden beneath a passion for everything graceful and refined, there is a strong yearning for the pageant of war and for the dash of deadly onset; and just as the shogun sought to display before the eyes of the citizens of his capital a charming picture of a gentle peace, though its setting was a framework of vast military preparation, so the Japanese of every era has loved to turn from the fencing-school to the arbor, from the field of battle to the society of rockery and the cascade, delighting in the perils and struggles of the one as much as he admires the grace and repose of the other. (Brinkley2, 11)

      Did the military class succeed in completely saturating the national psyche with its particular interpretation of the national spirit (Yamato-damashii), in imposing its values upon the rest of the country, in freezing history at that stage of national development which historians identify as feudal? The answer to these questions can be provided only by a study of the post-Meiji history of Japan, beginning in 1868. This study should reveal whether the military tradition and the influence of the warrior class had been terminated or only curtailed with the restoration of power to the emperor. In this context, there seems to be general agreement among Japanese and Western historians that no nation could be expected to emerge unscathed from centuries of the relentless conditioning undergone by Japan during her feudal era. No one has expressed this point better than Reischauer.

      The two centuries of strictly enforced peace under the watchful eye and firm hand of the Edo government have left an indelible mark upon the people. The bellicose, adventurous Japanese of the sixteenth century became by the nineteenth century a docile people looking meekly to their rulers for all leadership and following without question all orders from above. (Reischauer1, 93-94)

      The people had become thoroughly conditioned to look “instinctively” to the military leaders of the land for guidance and to assume that, because of their position, these leaders “were always honest and sincere.” The same author concluded as follows: “Seven centuries of domination by the feudal military class has left patterns of thought and behavior which have not been easy to discard in recent times and which will not be easily erased even today” (Reischauer1, 55).

      The protagonist of that which Hearn considered “the whole of authentic Japanese history,” the warrior of feudal Japan, had achieved a position of such importance, therefore, that his influence was not (probably could not be) eliminated, even after the military dictatorship of the powerful feudal barons was officially abolished in 1868 and society had been given a wider and firmer base through a massive educational effort intended to provide the foundations for the expertise necessary in an industrialized and highly competitive era. However, in the uncanny way in which a firmly entrenched traditional power structure often manages to survive the dawn of a new day by assuming various disguises or, more frequently, by broadening its base of support among all classes of people so that more citizens begin to identify with it, so did the military class manage to survive in Japan. The power of the Tokugawa clan and their allies was severely curtailed by the efforts of other powerful clans of warriors, including the Choshu and Satsuma clans, which were to provide the “new” Japan with the nucleus of an Imperial Army and Navy destined for greater glories and greater disasters in the decades to follow. The Restoration was, in effect, a ritualistic “changing of the guard,” with waves of new warriors from the provinces advancing upon the capital where they jostled and finally dislodged the older, privileged class of warriors from their entrenched positions. Significantly, we are told by Yazaki (300) that the Kyakkan Rireki Mokuroku, or directory of government officials for the Council of State (Dajokan) held in 1867-68, listed the following percentages by lineage in its composition: 78.9% belonging to the warrior class, 18.1% to the higher class of daimyo, 1.8% to the ancient imperial court recently restored (along with the emperor) to power, and 0.7% to the commoners.

      It was this “new” leadership, then, which was to guide the nation in the liberated times of the modern age. In order to accomplish their task with the utmost efficiency, they embarked upon a fantastically intense effort to expand the traditional loyalty concept from the narrow confines of the clan to the wider horizon of the entire nation, enlarging the focus of unquestioning obedience to one’s immediate superior and feudal lord to include blind and absolute fealty to the emperor. Kurzman noted that “if a man would willingly die for his lord, a person of mortal heritage, they reasoned, then his loyalty to the Sovereign, descendant of the Sun Goddess, could be nurtured to similar extremes” (Kurzman, 41). Accordingly, after the Meiji Restoration:

      In classrooms and army barracks, the young Japanese was taught to glory in Japan’s military traditions. He came to believe that death on the battlefield for the emperor was the most glorious fate of man and to believe in the unique virtues of a vaguely defined “national structure” and an even more vague “Japanese spirit.” Together the government and army succeeded in a few decades in

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