JAPANESE MILITARISM AND SAMURAI REVIVALISM IN MEIJI AND SHŌWA
by
LINDSEY COHICK
Senior Thesis for the SAS Honors Program
Submitted to the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures
8 May 2013
1
Japanese Militarism and Samurai Revivalism in Meiji and Shōwa
Lindsey Cohick
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
Chapter 1: Japan Now: Militarism and the Samurai in the Modern Imagination ............................2
Chapter 2: Japan Then: The Medieval Samurai and Kusunoki Masashige ...................................14
Chapter 3:
Samurai in a Time of Peace ..............................................................................................26
Intellectual Trends in Tokugawa .......................................................................................33
Terror and Rebellious Loyalism ........................................................................................38
Chapter 4:
The Modernization of the Samurai in Meiji .....................................................................44
The Rise of Militarism .......................................................................................................58
The Manifestation of Bushidō in the Imperial Soldier.......................................................68
Chapter 5: Japan’s Incomplete Defeat ...........................................................................................73
Works Cited ...................................................................................................................................82
2
CHAPTER 1
Japan Now: Militarism and the Samurai in the Modern Imagination
Recent news about Japan has highlighted rising tensions in the Senkaku Islands dispute
with China, although to the Chinese these islands are known as Diaoyu. In December, 2012,
Japan deployed their fighter jets after a Chinese government plane was spotted over the islands.
This marked the first time that aircraft were introduced into the quarrel, which has been ongoing
for decades but has become increasingly tense in the last five years. The Senkaku/Daioyu
islands are not the only islands in question, and China and Japan are not the only nations
involved in island disputes in East Asia,1 but this particular dispute is noteworthy in the context
of worsening relations between the two countries. In early February, 2013, Japan also accused
China of locking radar onto their Self-Defense Force (SDF) ships in the waters around
Senkaku/Diaoyu, to which, according to an article in the Japan Daily Press, China finally
admitted, albeit while downplaying the severity of the implications.2 Some view these actions in
the context of China’s recent change in leadership and the pressure for them, as the world’s
second largest economy, to take a tougher stance on foreign policy. China’s current
sociopolitical atmosphere undoubtedly plays a role in the island dispute and in the rising tension
between China and Japan, but there are other underlying factors, more deeply rooted in history,
that must also be taken into consideration.
1
Christian Le Mière, “Why Asia is arguing over its islands,” CNN, Sept. 3, 2012 (http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.
cnn.com/2012/09/03/why-asia-is-arguing-over-its-islands). Le Mière explains that Japan is also disputing claim to
the Kurils (with Russia), the Takeshima/Dokdo islands (with South Korea), and the abovementioned Senkaku/
Diaoyu islands (with China, as well as with Taiwan). Claim to the four major island groups of the South China Sea
are also disputed by China, Taiwan, Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Vietnam. These are not the only island
disputes in East Asia, but they are the most contentious.
2
Adam Westlake, “Chinese military finally admits to radar lock on Japanese SDF ships,” The Japan Daily Press,
March 18, 2013 (http://japandailypress.com/chinese-military-finally-admits-to-radar-lock-on-japanese-sdf-ships1825269)
3
On March 11, 2013, China neglected to send a representative to Japan’s commemoration
ceremony for the second anniversary of the Tōhoku Earthquake. South Korea also failed to
show, although they ascribed their absence to a “clerical error.” It should be noted that South
Korea and Japan also have the Takeshima/Dokdo islands in dispute, as well as historical tensions,
which tend to create an air of uneasiness between them. However, China’s absence at the
ceremony is more definitively interpreted as a snub largely in response to Japan’s generous
treatment of Taiwan for the occasion, and it has been described as “the latest in a number of
events that show the deteriorating ties between the two countries.”3 This deterioration is a result
of not only the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands dispute itself, but also the anti-Japanese riots that
erupted across major cities in China between August and September, 2012, in response to the
islands dispute. While the immediate cause of the riots and rampant anti-Japanese sentiment
may have been the quarrel over the islands, preexisting historical tensions, too, deserve some
attention. Christian Le Mière traces the origins of the islands disputes in East Asia to World War
II and says that they “exist, to some extent, as legacies of imperial Japan’s expansion through
East Asia in the first half of the 20th century . . . .” With regional economic growth as well as the
growth of the global economy, nations that were previously unable to defend their own
sovereignty on land, let alone at sea, now are rising to stake their claims.4 These claims have
been outlined by the United Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), of which
there have been three conferences in total, the most recent concluding in 1982.5 The law defines
3
Ida Torres, “Japan says China absence from tsunami ceremony ‘disappointing’,” The Japan Daily Press, 12 March
2013 (http://japandailypress.com/japan-says-china-absence-from-tsunami-ceremony-disappointing-1224995). On
the issue of Taiwan, Torres explains that Japan invited representatives from Taiwan to the ceremony, which China
saw as a violation of the 1972 Japan-China Joint Communique in which Japan stated that it recognized the People’s
Republic of China as the only legitimate government in China. Japan argued that its action was justified for the
occasion considering the large amount of support they received from Taiwan during the disaster.
4
Le Mière OL.
5
The first UNCLOS took place in the 1950s; the second in the 1960s, although the second one yielded no new
agreements.
4
the rights and jurisdictions of nations’ use of the seas, although it is somewhat unclear in the
extent to which it codifies customary laws; China and Japan both ratified it in 1996. Recently,
however, China has been trying to establish hegemony over its surrounding seas, such as the East
China Sea where the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands are located, by prohibiting the access of other
nations and denying them navigational freedom, despite having ratified the law that is supposed
to secure those very freedoms for said other nations. Ironically, China attempts its total takeover
of the seas under the U.N. laws themselves, by means of “mischievous interpretation” and
“clever lawyering” that “pokes holes in UNCLOS,” and thus undermines its purpose.6
Furthermore, these actions are in violation of the customary laws that governed the seas long
before UNCLOS. Japan maintains that the Senkaku Islands have been Japanese territory since at
least 1895, and that China never showed any indication of contesting Japan’s ownership or
desiring the islands until 1971, after it had been shown in 1968 that there might be gas and
petroleum reserves under the seabed near the islands.7 China, however, argues that the islands
were under Chinese sovereignty until the Japanese claimed them in the aftermath of First SinoJapanese War in 1895, and that following World War II they should rightfully have been
returned to China. Clearly, ideas about the islands dispute are, at least for the Chinese, wedded
to the historical memory of Japanese colonization. One journalist aptly writes, “China’s media
have portrayed the territorial dispute as an emotional touchpoint for Chinese people that evokes
memories of Japan's 1931-1945 occupation of parts of the mainland. Chinese textbooks,
television and films are full of portrayals vilifying the Japanese.”8 The governing Chinese
6
Blumenthal, Dan, and Michael Mazza, “Why to Forget UNCLOS,” The Diplomat Blogs, The Diplomat, 17 Feb.
2012, (http://thediplomat.com/flashpoints-blog/2012/02/17/why-to-forget-unclos/)
7
“Japan-China Relations: Current Situation of Senkaku Islands,” Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan,
(http://www.mofa.go.jp/region/asia-paci/senkaku/index.html)
8
Jones, Terril Yue, “China Submits to Wisdom of UNCLOS - in Dealing with Japan,” InterAksyon, 25 Jan. 2013
(http://www.interaksyon.com/article/53584/china-submits-to-wisdom-of-unclos---in-dealing-with-japan)
5
Communist Party leadership, rather than aiming towards reconciliation, amply exploits the past
for its own purposes; nationalist education in China is often wrapped up with anti-Japanese
propaganda; and attempts that have been made in Japan to reconcile with the past have often
been undermined by lingering nationalist sentiment and conservative party leadership.
The current Prime Minister of Japan, Abe Shinzō, does not exactly appear the ideal
candidate for repairing relations between the two nations, although his current stances seem more
pragmatic compared to his first 2006-2007 term, during which he stood on a staunchly
conservative platform. Having been elected as Prime Minister again in September 2012,
naturally relations with China are cause of great concern for him. In his rhetoric he emphasizes
calmness in his approach to China, and he claims to “pray for tranquillity in the seas of Asia
[sic].”9 However, other evidence seems to indicate that Abe is in fact quite pessimistic in his
view of the islands dispute and of relations with China in general. Rather than negotiating with
the Chinese, he seems intent on negotiating around them by strengthening ties with nations that
share Japan’s concerns, such as Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam. During his first term, he also
sought to strengthen alliances with the U.S., India, and Australia in order to form “a geostrategic
arc of containment of China,” according to one Abe critic.10 Abe has also criticized the Chinese
government for playing up its clashes with other nations to amass popular support, and he blames
their educational system for inculcating patriotism and “anti-Japanese sentiment.” Despite the
veracity of the statement, it seems hypocritical coming from a politician who has repeatedly
expressed the desire to infuse Japan’s educational system with more lessons of patriotism and
love for the country, the likes of which resemble educational reforms made in Japan in the 1930s
9
Shinzō Abe, “The Bounty of the Open Seas: Five New Principles for Japanese Diplomacy” (Jan 18, 2013). The
speech was supposed to be delivered in Jakarta on his Southeast Asian tour, but had to be cancelled when Abe’s trip
was cut short due to the crisis in Algeria in which seven Japanese nationals were killed.
6
Gavan McCormack, “Abe Days Are Here Again: Japan in the World,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol 10, Issue 52,
No. 1, 24 Sep. 2012, 26 March 2013 (http://www.japanfocus.org/-Gavan-McCormack/3873)
6
and 40s.11 Abe’s hardline policy towards China and arguably retrogressive views on education,
in combination with a number of his other policies and attitudes, set off red flags with those who
recall Japan’s disastrous militarist past.
Abe’s first term followed on the heels, in more ways than one, of Prime Minister
Koizumi Junichiro, who paid regular visits to the controversial Yasukuni Shrine every year on
August 15, the anniversary of Japan’s surrender. For this he fell under critical fire from
neighboring countries as well as from certain of his own citizens. When berated for it, he not
only refused to stop the visits, but went so far as to claim he did not understand why it was an
issue. At a New Year press conference, he is quoted to have said “that he could not understand
why Beijing and Seoul would ‘meddle with spiritual matters and turn them into diplomatic
issues.’”12 The issue, of course, was not that he was praying for the souls of his fallen
countrymen, but that he was doing it at a shrine where numerous war criminals, including classA criminals such as Tōjō Hideki, are commemorated. Those who took issue with Koizumi’s
attitude towards Yasukuni were not cheered by the thought of Abe’s replacing him, as Abe
seemed to think in much the same vein as his predecessor, who was his “diplomatic model.”13
Surprisingly, Abe avoided Yasukuni Shrine during his first stint as Prime Minister, but his
conservatism shined through in other ways, particularly in what Gavan McCormack describes as
“denialism (of war responsibility, notably for the comfort women and the Nanjing massacre) and
ultra-nationalism (the insistence on the need to rewrite Japan’s history and its textbooks so as to
make people proud and fill them with patriotic spirit).” Abe dressed up his retrogressive
7
Chico Harlan, “Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzō Abe: Chinese need for conflict is ‘deeply ingrained’,” The
Washington Post, 20 Feb 2013 (http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/japans-prime-minister-shinzo-abe-chineseneed-for-conflict-is-deeply-ingrained/2013/02/20/48adbc80-7a87-11e2-9a75-dab0201670da_story.html)
8
Qtd. in Kwan Weng Kin, “Koizumi’s Obstinacy Could Isolate Japan: Yasukuni and Asia,” The Asia-Pacific
Journal, 22 Jan. 2006, 26 March 2013 (http://www.japanfocus.org/-Kwan-Weng_Kin/1881)
13
Weng Kin OL.
7
rhetoric with a mission statement that announced his desire to seek a “recovery of independence”
(独立の回復, dokuritsu no kaifuku) for Japan. What this entailed was revising the pacifist
postwar constitution, transforming the SDF, and reforming education. These aspects of Japanese
government and society (constitution, military, and education), which had been instrumental in
the rise of militarism, were overhauled during the Occupation to remove the pervading
nationalistic tinge. During his first term, Abe essentially sought to undo these Occupation-era
reforms, perhaps not entirely, but enough to set off warning bells for the more liberal-minded. It
should be noted that Abe’s grandfather, Kishi Nobusuke, was a key architect of the Japanese
empire, a member of Tōjō Hideki’s wartime cabinet, later accused of exploiting Chinese workers
and labeled a Class-A war criminal. According to McCormack, Kishi embodied “the values”
that Abe wanted to bring back to Japan, a fact that indicated Abe’s revisionist tendencies as well
as an interest in the kind of militarist and nationalist ideals that typified imperial Japan. He
succeeded in reforming the Fundamental Law of Education by stripping it of representations of
“universal rights” and replacing them with ideas of “patriotism” and “love of country,” which
needed to be indoctrinated in Japanese students.14 In comparing the precise language of the old
law with the new, two scholars identify and comment on rhetorical changes and describe the new
law as containing a “mystic vision of nationality,” which sounds unnervingly reminiscent of
Japan’s image of nationality in the fascist era.15 Concerning constitutional revisions, Abe
singled out Article 9 (the renunciation of war) and Article 20 (separation of church and state)
specifically. A revision of the former would allow for broader military capabilities, essentially
“normalizing” the Japanese military, while a revision of the latter would legitimate the Prime
14
McCormack OL.
Adam Lebowitz and David McNeill, “Hammering Down the Educational Nail: Abe Revises the Fundamental law
of Education,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, 9 July 2007, 27 March 2013 (http://www.japanfocus.org/-AdamLebowitz/2468)
15
8
Minister’s visits to Yasukuni Shrine. In general, Abe supported the idea of “Shinto Politics,”
embodied by the Shinto Seiji Renmei or Shinto-Government Association, to which a great
number of Liberal-Democratic Party (LDP) rightwing leaders subscribe. The group strives for
the affiliation of Shintoism with the government, a definite throwback to State Shintoism of
Imperial Japan that helped legitimize the divinity of the emperor and the uniqueness of Japan.
McCormack quotes former Prime Minister Mori Yoshiro who proffered “the classic statement of
their position,” which ran that “Japan was ‘a land of the gods centered on the emperor.’”16
Granted, Abe never visited Yasukuni Shrine in 2006-2007, but as he reclaimed office five years
later, he expressed his regret at not visiting it during his first term. Before assuming presidency
of the LDP, he visited the shrine on August 15, 2012, and then again on October 17 while in his
official capacity, but before being elected Prime Minister. These actions, unsurprisingly,
angered China and South Korea, especially in light of the island disputes in which they were
embroiled with Japan. It remains to be seen whether Abe will continue his visits as Prime
Minister and risk relations with Japan’s Asian neighbors, or adhere to the more pragmatic
approach that he seems to have adopted in other areas.
Despite his more pragmatic attitude, however, Abe still seems intent on breaking from
Japan’s postwar democratic incarnation. In 2006, he trumpeted his plans to make a “beautiful”
Japan, and in 2012 this had shifted to a “new” Japan; either way, he desires a change from the
old. Of course, change is not necessarily bad; sometimes, change is needed to keep a nation
strong. Citizens just hope that their leaders achieve it without transgressing ethical boundaries.
With a conservative rightwing leader like Abe, it can be difficult to tell which direction his
leadership will take. As McCormack describes it, “Abe politics has long been stamped by the
contradiction between his fidelity to the US on the one hand and his commitment to a particular,
16
Qtd. in McCormack OL.
9
and incompatible, view of Japanese history and identity on the other.” His ideas for
transforming the military play into his goal of strengthening ties with the U.S., as the U.S. has
long since pushed for Japanese forces to be able to participate in “collective security” operations,
which means “fighting wars shoulder-to-shoulder with American forces.”17 To achieve this, the
constitution would necessarily have to be revised or reinterpreted to allow for a full-fledged army
beyond the SDF allowed for by Article 9 of the constitution. In other words, Abe desires to
transform the SDF into a National Army, or Kokubōgun (国防軍), using gun (軍), the Japanese
word implying an army or full military. This is a noticeable departure from Self-Defense Force,
Jieitai (自衛隊), which uses the word tai (隊), meaning troops, corps, or squad, rather than gun.
It might not seem unreasonable for a modern nation, especially one of Japan’s geopolitical and
economic standing, to have a full military. What is worrisome is that there are many signs that
indicate that Japan never had a clean break with its militarist past, such as the quarrels between
Japan and its East Asian neighbors, the disputes over historical memory (like the ongoing
debates about comfort women and forced labor camps), and the prevalence of conservative
ideology (represented by figures like Shinzō Abe) that allows for historical revisionism, as well
as outright denial, and an otherwise apathetic or insensitive attitude about Japan’s imperialist
past and the atrocities committed. On the opposite end of the spectrum from revision and denial,
there are even groups and individuals who glorify the past and look at imperial Japan as a
“golden age” when Japan was strong. In just the past ten years, there was an incident where the
Greater Japan Patriotic Party (大日本愛国党, Dai Nippon Aikokutō) arrived at the NHK station
“in a convoy of trucks and dressed in paramilitary uniform,” three days before a documentary on
comfort women was to be aired, demanding that the documentary be cut. “Such contingents of
17
McCormack OL.
10
trucks, equipped with loudspeakers blaring political messages and martial music, regularly
descend on individuals and institutions whose political views are deemed ‘unpatriotic’.”18 These
are not the only recent displays of violence in politics; throughout the latter half of the twentieth
century and into the twenty-first, there have been numerous instances of violence by the
nationalistic right-wingers against the more liberal-minded left, who are accused of being too
“soft” in foreign policy or “unpatriotic” when they raise questions about war responsibility.
Clearly, strains of ultra-nationalism and militarism that were characteristic of imperial Japan
were never fully rooted out following Japan’s surrender in World War II as they were, for
instance, in Germany.
Militarism has, in fact, been deeply ingrained in Japan’s culture since at least the feudal
times, beginning in 1185 with the rise of the samurai. In the modern imagination, the samurai is
something of a national symbol, and the tenets of bushidō (武士道, the “way of the warrior”),
such as loyalty, honor, and self-sacrifice, have in many ways become inextricably linked with
Japanese values in general. The affinity for the samurai in modern Japan can be seen plainly in
popular culture (in anime with titles like Samurai Champloo and Samurai 7 and video games like
Sengoku Basara, to name a few). On the darker side, the identification with warrior tradition
also became a convenient tool for militarists not once, but twice in the past two-hundred years of
Japanese history: The first was during the Meiji Restoration, when the samurai were roused
from a long period of peace and stability and put their swords again to use in acts of rebellious
loyalism to the emperor, against the Tokugawa bakufu; the second was during the Shōwa Period,
when the warrior was revived once again as the imperial soldier—the samurai in a modernized
18
Tessa Morris-Suzuki, “Free Speech – Silenced Voices: The Japanese Media, the Comfort Women Tribunal, and
the NHK Affair,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, 13 Aug. 2005, 27 March 2013 (http://www.japanfocus.org/-TessaMorris_Suzuki/2305)
11
form—and rallied to fight unto death for sovereign and country. However, the samurai as he has
come to exist in the modern imagination, from the 1900s to the present day, is a legacy rather
than a transplant of the traditional Japanese warrior, who existed in various forms over the course
of roughly eight hundred years prior. The samurai in the modern imagination is often a stalwart
paragon of steadfast loyalty who is ever-ready to sacrifice himself for the sake of his family, his
lord, or his country. He is strong and honorable; he is a noble hero. The samurai in history, as
he existed at the beginning in a time of intense internecine warfare, when the strongest (and the
craftiest) prevailed, in some ways resembles the modern conception, but in other, significant
ways, vastly differs from the idealized modern form.
12
CHAPTER 2
Japan Then: The Medieval Samurai and Kusunoki Masashige
The samurai began as bands of nomadic warriors in ancient Japan who coalesced into a
professional military class, the first in Japan’s known history. By the twelfth century, the Kyoto
aristocracy had become isolated in the capital and were absentee landlords in the provinces,
while the samurai, who dealt more directly with the people and had come to occupy the land,
ascended to positions of power by virtue of their military might. Historians identify 1185 as the
opening of the feudal era (beginning with the Kamakura period), by which time the samurai
status had become a hereditary one, and the class was grouped into households. Although the
aristocracy was in decline, the imperial institution never completely disappeared, and the
“Japanese medieval world was characterized by a dual power structure: the new samurai power
and the older emperor’s court.”19 Throughout the medieval period, the imperial court, which
maintained nominal authority, conferred the title of seii tai shogun (征夷大将軍, literally ‘Great
General Who Subdues the Barbarians’) on the strongest military leader. The samurai were
meant to govern with their military might and keep the peace throughout the country, although in
reality the samurai spent most of the medieval period vying for power, and the country was far
from peaceful. Thus, for much of Japan’s long history, the warrior dominated the political field,
and the warrior tradition, their codes and their beliefs, established deep roots in Japanese culture.
Eiko Ikegami, in The Taming of the Samurai, traces the origins of the samurai and the honor
culture that so defined them. The ideas of honor that developed in the medieval period that
would have lasting effects on the warrior tradition in Japan, all the way until the formation of the
19
Eiko Ikegami, The Taming of the Samurai: Honorific Individualism and the Making of Modern Japan,
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1995) 48.
13
modernized imperial army. Social scientists have evaluated the importance of honor and shame
in general in Japanese society, ever since Ruth Benedict coined the idea of Japan being a “shame
culture” (as opposed to a “guilt culture”) in her 1946 anthropological study, The Chrysanthemum
and the Sword, and the idea has become largely accepted that the constructs of honor and shame
have a pervasive influence on the Japanese psyche. However, the focus here will be on how
“elitist honor culture” (as Ikegami describes it) developed within the samurai class specifically,
and how it gave rise to the institutions of vassalage and ritualized suicide within samurai culture.
In medieval Japan, honor was organic, something amorphous that took on various forms
depending on the setting and the principle characters. Ikegami explains that there were generally
accepted ideas surrounding honor which determined overarching social codes, but on an
individual level the definition of honor was not always so concrete.20 The samurai who died
heroically in battle and the samurai who fled in the face of imminent defeat might both retain
their honor, depending on the circumstances that surrounded their actions. Later definitions of
honor, especially those developed in the twentieth century, would be much less ambiguous;
death in battle would be identified with honor while surrender guaranteed disgrace, regardless of
individual circumstances. Formed from a blend of collaborative and competitive energies, honor
was a driving force behind the transformation of Japan from a feudal society into a centralized
state. It was the same force that would transform Japan two more times in subsequent eras, first
with the violent uprisings of the rebellious loyalists during the Meiji Restoration and again with
the militarist takeover during the Shōwa Restoration, the definition of honor morphing at each
turn. According to Ikegami, “a cult of honor” only emerged with the “development of the
samurai class.”21 The facets of honor culture were manifold. First of all, honor defined a
20
21
Ikegami 8.
Ikegami 49.
14
samurai and made him part of the collective identity. Then, a samurai’s honor correlated with
his relations, his sovereignty, his household, and his martial skill: The more honorable a samurai
was, the more loyal were his vassals, the higher his status, the stronger his household, and the
greater his military prowess.22 The purpose of honor, according to Ikegami, was legitimization.
Prior to the rise of the samurai, the aristocracy attached a very serious taboo to blood and to
death, so the occupational killing and violence that comprised a warrior’s lifestyle would have
been a serious deviation from the predominant court culture that preceded it. Without the
legitimizing effect of the “honor cult,” warriors could have become outcasts, like the hinin (非人,
literally “nonhuman”). It is generally believed that the hinin emerged in Japan’s early history
due to the stigma attached to certain occupations that necessitated interaction with kegare (穢れ,
“defilements,” i.e. blood and death), such as executioners, undertakers, and butchers. Ikegami
explains that a certain class of hinin (called kiyome, 清め, “purifier,”) was organized under a law
enforcement branch in the city of Kyoto. Like the samurai, the details of the emergence of the
hinin before the tenth century are murky at best, but by the late eleventh century they were an
identifiable group. Some scholars debate that the hinin were not merely objects of shame, but
were also considered possessed of the power to combat dangerous pollutants. Even so, they
never attained the status level achieved by the samurai; rather, samurai and hinin remained
largely on opposite ends of the social spectrum, even though they engaged in similarly “unclean”
tasks. The difference, by Ikegami’s reckoning, was the successful and persuasive cultivation of
honor culture among the samurai. It was by military might that the samurai ascended to power; it
was by virtue of honor that they stayed there.
22
Ikegami 50.
15
The cult of honor produced two key institutions that would have extremely formative
effects on warrior tradition: vassalage and ritualized suicide. Vassalage, of course, is
characteristic of feudalism worldwide, but due to the samurai’s conception of honor, there arose
a particular samurai brand of vassalage. The samurai brand of ritualized suicide, later known as
seppuku (切腹, “disembowelment”) or hara-kiri, was what made the Japanese cult of honor
especially distinctive. With the ascendency of the samurai, loyalty ties between lord and retainer
grew to a level of importance that had not been seen in the preceding Heian period. Ikegami
describes court relationships as those of patron and client, “in which a sense of fealty was
extremely rare,” whereas “the samurai master-vassal relationship from the late twelfth century
incorporated the formation of strong and durable bonds that gave men the incentive to risk their
lives in battle.”23 It was partly due to these master-vassal relationships that the samurai rose to
power, because they were not merely independent relationships defined by domination and
subordination; they were highly organized mutual alliances in which both parties stood to gain.
Vassalage provided a hierarchical structure that allowed the samurai to rise from “military
servants of the Heian ruling elites into a dominant class in their own right.”24 Once established,
master-vassal relationships were strengthened by ideals of honor and loyalty. Samurai loyalty
would later achieve an almost mythic status, attached to legends of loyal warriors who famously
followed their lords into death and other such stories. Loyalty, like honor, is an abstract concept
that cannot be definitively defined, and the concepts of honor and loyalty for the samurai have
always been entwined. An honorable samurai commanded loyalty, and loyalty in itself was an
honorable quality. But despite its abstract nature, loyalty in the world of medieval samurai,
rather than mythical, was practical. As previously mentioned, fealty emerged along with the
23
24
Ikegami 78.
Ikegami 78.
16
vassalage system; it was the glue that held master-vassal relations together and helped the
samurai ascend to power. Such loyalty ties were meant to ensure constancy and trust between
masters and retainers and form a relationship on which they could depend in future interactions.
Further evidence of the practical nature of loyalty was that it could be bought and sold,
especially in times of war. A samurai did not always follow his master into death; if a samurai
master died or fell into disgrace, his followers might transfer their loyalties to a different leader.
The abstract nature of honor allowed for such switches, and sometimes survival was just as
honorable and loyal an action as death. Additionally, samurai often fought, not just for the sake
of honor and loyalty, but for the more tangible goal of receiving rewards from their masters.
This was evident, Ikegami explains, by the custom of decapitation. Taking money from and/or
making slaves out of captives was a rare practice among medieval samurai; rather than gold or
forced labor, they would take their defeated enemy’s head back to their masters as proof of their
victory, and their masters would reward them, usually with grants of land. “Thus, a glorious
victory resulted in increased wealth and self-esteem, and defeat most likely meant death. A
craving for glory and honor through triumph in warfare was wedded to calculated and ‘rational’
interests in the actions of the samurai.”25 So, more than mere metaphysical virtues, the honor
and loyalty that medieval samurai displayed in battle were part of the pursuit of self-interest.
Down the line, they would all but lose these practical applications and come to exist as merely
abstract warrior virtues.
A similar process occurred with the samurai’s conceptualization of honorable death.
Ideas about honorable death would become increasingly defined by the institution of ritual
suicide in the Kamakura Period (1184-1333), but prior to that samurai were already distinguished
by fearlessness in the face of death; the battlefield was where they planned to die. Ikegami cites
25
Ikegami 102.
17
one Kyoto aristocrat, Fujiwara Kanezane, who wrote of the samurai at the Battle of Uji (1180),
“They were not afraid of death, and did not show any sign of pleading for life.”26 This attitude
towards death was another mark of the samurai honor culture, but there was also pragmatism in
it. According to Karl Friday, the fates that defeated samurai commanders faced were to be
recruited, killed, or tortured for information, and that the “famous—and much overblown
instances in which samurai chose to kill themselves rather than be captured come from a desire
to avoid the last of these three alternatives.”27 In reading tales of the famous medieval samurai,
such as those found in Hiraoki Sato’s Legends of the Samurai, one finds many instances of
samurai running away, disguising themselves or only pretending to commit suicide in order to
escape, and yet only in some cases is their honor impugned. Sometimes retaining one’s honor
meant living to fight another day. However, Ikegami explains that already in the medieval
period there was “a growing tendency . . . to intensify and normatize the mythical status of selfwilled death.”28 In other words, although individual actions may have varied, the idea of
ritualized suicide was becoming integrated into samurai culture as an institution, and the form it
generally took was seppuku. With the ritualization of death during the late Kamakura Period,
being able to decide the terms of one’s own death became a matter of agency. Not only was
there a desire to avoid the possibility of torture at the hands of the enemy, as Friday indicates, but
there was also a desire to exert control over the terms of one’s death, to die honorably by one’s
own hand rather than dishonorably at the hands of the enemy. There came to be, as Ikegami
calls it, “an obsession with honorable and ‘beautiful’ death.”29 She tracks the progression of the
26
Qtd. in Ikegami 96.
Karl F. Friday, “Bushidó or Bull? A Medieval Historian’s Perspective on the Imperial Army and the Japanese
Warrior Tradition,” InYo: Journal of Alternative Perspectives, Mar. 2001 (http://ejmas.com/jalt/jaltart_friday_
0301.htm)
28
Ikegami 105.
29
Ikegami 103.
27
18
normalization of seppuku by looking at the samurai epics such as the Hōgen monogatari, the
Heike monogatari, and the Taiheiki.
The first recorded instance of seppuku is considered to be that of Minamoto no
Tametomo, who committed suicide by cutting his belly prior to an imminent defeat in the Hōgen
Rebellion of 1156, but the Heike monogatari provides evidence that thirty years later seppuku
was still not the norm.30 The Heike monogatari details many accounts of suicide, not always by
seppuku, such as that of a famous Taira general who committed suicide by drowning himself in
the sea, but not without taking two enemy warriors with him.31 (Some similarities might be
drawn between this and the suicide attacks committed by Japanese soldiers and kamikaze pilots
during World War II.) Beginning in the Kamakura Period, war literature reflects the apparent
increased usage of seppuku in battle, although the most revealing examples come from the early
fourteenth century when the Kamakura bakufu was in decline and Japan was plunged into a new
era of internecine warfare. Ikegami notes, “Unlike samurai of the later period, the medieval
samurai committed seppuku mainly on the battlefield, when it was obvious that they were on the
losing side.”32 She cites the case of General Hōjō Nakatoki, who fought for the Kamakura
shogunate against the forces of Emperor Go-Daigo and Ashikaga Takauji. When the general
saw that defeat was imminent, he gathered his troops (which had been reduced to about five
hundred in number) in a temple at Banba station, and after delivering an apology and a farewell,
he committed suicide by seppuku. Most of his men then followed him into death, also by
committing seppuku. Temple records corroborate the story by listing the names of 189 men,
most of them closely related to the general’s house, a fact which illustrates the importance of the
30
Ikegami 103.
Ikegami 104.
32
Ikegami 109.
31
19
household in loyalty ties.33 To show the transition to normalization of seppuku, Ikegami
compares the Heike monogatari (1180-1185), in which “warriors are presented as brave, strongwilled individuals who elect to kill themselves,” to the Taiheiki (late 1300s), in which seppuku is
the norm. Beyond the mere prevalence of seppuku as the mode of suicide, the Taiheiki reveals
“the ongoing institutionalization and mythification of ‘glorious’ self-willed death in its
description of samurai heroes.”34 Whether the stories of the late medieval period were accurate
or not, their dissemination helped cement the importance of honorable death and normalized the
institution of ritual suicide in samurai culture. During the Tokugawa period, the Taiheiki in
particular was a favorite samurai “classic” and was enjoyed even by Tokugawa Ieyasu himself.
Popular Japanese Buddhist sects, such as Pure Land and Zen Buddhism, also played a
legitimizing role in conceptions of violence and death—ironically, since Buddhism in its original
form proscribed killing of any kind. However, as Buddhism permeated society, the teachings
were adapted slightly so that warriors became the exception to the rule, and they were promised
salvation and the protection of Buddha which would override all of the negative karma they had
incurred by killing. The effective institutionalization of ritual suicide marked the “maturity” of
the samurai class, “which had successfully advocated the honorable status of their violence.”35
Out of this honor culture emerged several heroes, living incarnations of the samurai spirit.
One such hero was Kusunoki Masashige (1294-1336), whose story is recorded in the Taiheiki
and translated with commentary by Sato in Legends of the Samurai. Kusunoki fought for
Emperor Go-Daigo opposite the struggling Kamakura bakufu and was a “genius of guerilla
warfare,”36 a fact which seems incompatible with the modern imagining of the samurai spirit, but
33
Ikegami 109.
Ikegami 105.
35
Ikegami 112.
36
Hiraoki Sato, Legends of the Samurai (Woodstock, NY: Overlook, 1995) 157.
34
20
in fact never violated the medieval conception of honor. Kusunoki’s status as an honorable
warrior was attached to his strategical skills and his willingness to do whatever possible to
defend his station. When he is first summoned to serve the emperor, Kusunoki assures the
emperor, “Of course, since we are talking about war, please do not make up your mind by just
looking at a victory or defeat in a single battle. As long as you hear that Kusunoki – if only he –
is still alive, please assume that luck will eventually be with the imperial force.”37 The
implications of this are twofold. First, as previously implied, to a medieval samurai in the midst
of a war, defeat in a single battle did not automatically mean death; on the contrary, Kusunoki
vows to survive, whether he wins or loses, in order to fulfill his duty to the emperor. Second,
Kusunoki swears to fight on the emperor’s behalf, showing the importance of loyalty ties in the
world of the medieval samurai. Even though the emperor himself is not a samurai lord,
Kusunoki displays the type of fealty that characterized an honorable samurai. While defending
Akasaka Castle for the emperor, Kusunoki employs several clever strategies to ward off his
attackers, such as building a second wall around the castle’s first wall so that when the enemy
tried to scale it, the defenders cut it away and crushed those who had been climbing it. When the
enemy returns, deciding to tear down the wall this time instead of scaling it, Kusunoki’s men
pour boiling water onto their heads. Finally, the enemy decides to lay siege to the castle, and
Kusunoki, whose provisions are limited and swiftly dwindling, plans an escape. Even as he
claims that he “wouldn’t hesitate to give up [his] life if the time was right and the act was just,”
he says that “a courageous warrior is someone who takes precautions on an important occasion
and chooses to plot things out.” (He makes other similar statements throughout his tales,
sometimes quoting aphorisms, such as: “A good commander wins without fighting;”
37
Sato 160.
21
“Advancing or retreating depends on the occasion,”38 and so on.) Thus, he declares that they
will let the enemy take the castle and make them believe that Kusunoki has committed suicide.
Then, having lulled the enemy into a false sense of security, he says he will come out and fight
once again; by alternating attacks and retreats, he plans to exhaust the enemy until he can defeat
them. He says, “This is how by preserving myself I plan to destroy the enemy,” to which his
men gave their full assent. The plan works, and when the enemy perceive that Kusunoki has
killed himself, they praise him, saying, “Poor fellow! . . . Though our enemy, he met his death
with dignity as a man of bow and arrow,” proving how the samurai perceived honor in selfwilled death.39 Furthermore, the fact that Kusunoki is fashioned a hero by the end of the story
shows an inherent contradiction, or perhaps merely the complexity, in the medieval construct of
honor, because for all the importance that they ascribed to self-willed death, faking such a death
brought no dishonor upon Kusunoki. On the contrary, it made him even more of a hero for
living to fight another day.
Another contradiction, or complexity, within the samurai conception of honor as
evidenced in Kusunoki’s tale is the fluidity of loyalty. As previously mentioned, unlike the
typical vision of the samurai as possessing unwavering loyalty, samurai, especially low-ranking
vassals, would often switch sides and transfer their loyalties from one master to another. The
story of General Hōjō Nakatoki, too, supports this idea when we consider that the men who
followed him into death were mostly those with close ties to his house. The other samurai who
went unrecorded likely fled before the final scene of the battle.40 To continue the story of
Kusunoki, once the bakufu took him for dead, they installed a lay priest, Yuasa Magoroku, as
constable of Akasaka Castle. (At this time, General Nakatoki’s story also intersects with
38
Sato 171.
Sato 165. The full account of the Siege of Akasaka Castle is found on pages 160-165.
40
Ikegami 108.
39
22
Kusunoki’s, as Nakatoki was appointed to one of the two Rokuhara offices in Kyoto in the
interim between Kusunoki’s attacks.) After Yuasa settles into Akasaka, Kusunoki assails the
castle and overwhelms the underprepared men who inhabited it. Yuasa surrenders, and it is said
that “Kusunoki added Yuasa’s men to his own, making a force of seven hundred horsemen,”
indicating the ease with which warriors could be swayed to one side or the other. The fact that
he did not kill these men probably means that they went willingly to his side. Thereafter, by
virtue of his honorable status, Kusunoki is able to amass followers and strengthen his power base.
Thus, within Kusunoki’s story alone, the multiple facets of loyalty are represented in the form of
Kusunoki himself on the one hand, a hero of high standing who is unfailingly loyal to his master,
the emperor; and in the form of lower-level samurai whose loyalties are more fluid, although
nowhere is it hinted that the latter are any less honorable for their inconstancy.
There is yet another metaphysical virtue that was valued by the samurai, which comes
through in the story of Kusunoki, and that is the emphasis on the spirit. In the Taiheiki, this
aspect is embodied by one of Kusunoki’s rivals, Utsunomiya, an Assistant Minister of Civil
Administration who is given the task by the Rokuhara officers to drive Kusunoki and his men out
of Tennō Temple. He proves to be a formidable samurai, whom Kusunoki does not take lightly
despite Utsunomiya’s apparently small force. Utsunomiya commits himself to battle despite
unfavorable odds, and even though he expresses his reservations about the size of his small force,
he tells the officers, “[E]ver since I left Kantō I have been of a mind to think nothing of my own
life in a time of crisis like this. At this moment I’m in no position to tell whether I can win or
lose in battle. So I will simply go out to engage in battle, even by myself.”41 This was the kind
of selfless commitment admired by warriors, and indicated the samurai mindset to die on the
battlefield. When Kusunoki’s men feel confident that they will be able to defeat Utsunomiya’s
41
Sato 169.
23
force, Kusunoki tells them, “Victory or defeat in battle doesn’t necessarily depend on the size of
the forces involved. The question is whether or not the officers and their men are united in their
minds.” He also praises Utsunomiya’s military prowess, and points out that his men are “the
soldiers of the Ki and Kiyohara clans” who “think of their own lives so lightly in a battlefield
that they regard them as less worthy than dust.”42 Warriors so committed were a force to be
reckoned with, no matter their size, and Kusunoki asserts that they were just the kind of warriors
who could overtake a larger force by their single-minded devotion and their readiness to die in
battle. Rather than face them head-on, the level-headed and tactical Kusunoki devises a strategy
that will break the spirits of Utsunomiya and his men and weaken their resolve to fight. This is
the surest way to defeat them with the least amount of loss. He does so by first tricking
Utsunomiya’s men into thinking that he had retreated and Utsunomiya had won, and then over
the course of the next four or five days, he tricks him again into thinking that Kusunoki actually
has him surrounded and is slowly closing in. Under this kind of pressure, “Utsunomiya’s
courage began to wear down, his spirit to fight to soften, and in the end a desire grew to just call
it off and retreat.” In the end, the men of the Ki and Kiyohara clans, their spirits broken, propose
to escape while still maintaining the honor they gained from their previous supposed victory.
When Utsunomiya and his men clear out of Tennō Temple, Kusunoki reclaims it. The
importance of this encounter, however, was not in the loss or gain of land (although it would
seem clear that Kusunoki succeeded in defending his position while Utsunomiya failed in driving
him out); rather, the importance was that both men retained their honor, and no lives were lost.
“There was not one man in the world who did not praise them as outstanding commanders of
deep insight and far-reaching planning.”43 Here, as elsewhere in Kusunoki’s story, honor is an
42
43
Sato 170-171.
Sato 173. The full account of Utsunomiya is found on pages 169-173.
24
abstract construct that does not necessarily rely on any physical gain, but relies on perceived
actions.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Kusunoki’s story ends with ritual suicide. In the end, he and his
brother, Masasue, find themselves, still in the service of the emperor, up against the rebel forces
of Ashikaga Takauji and his brother, Tadayoshi. Kusunoki’s forces are eventually reduced to a
mere seventy-three men, but rather than escaping, Kusunoki continues to fight, having already
resolved that this will be his last stand. When they can fight no more, he and his men retreat to a
house in a village north of the Minato River, where they all commit seppuku. It is noted that
Masashige and Masasue, rather than disemboweling themselves, “stabbed each other and died
side by side,” after vowing to return for seven lifetimes to “destroy the imperial enemy.”44 The
role of suicide in this story is telling, because it shows that self-willed death for medieval
samurai was a matter of agency; it was a display of control over their own deaths, and thus over
their own legacies. The significance lay not in the death itself, but in the moment surrounding
the death. It was important to choose the right moment, that is, the moment which would be the
most honorable. It was not a reckless throwing away of one’s life for the sake of a cause; what
mattered more was surviving in order to further contribute to the cause and build an illustrious
military career, so that when death finally came, most likely on the battlefield and possibly at
one’s own hand, there was honor in it. Kusunoki exemplifies the medieval way of thinking
because his career was not denoted by victory, but rather by a determination not to surrender
even in the face of defeat because he still had a duty to fulfill. Ironically, Kusunoki Masashige
would be revered in the years leading up to and during World War II as a symbol of unwavering
loyalty to the emperor and the embodiment of the samurai spirit, although the ideology that
would be attached to his image was in fact a propagandistic reconstruction of medieval samurai
44
Sato 187.
25
culture. Self-willed death in the minds of the imperial soldiers during World War II was a
departure from, or rather a perversion of the notion of honorable death as conceived by the
medieval samurai, who chose the moment of their death, as many young soldiers readily and
prematurely gave their lives, whether by committing suicide or engaging in suicide attacks in the
name of the emperor.
The ascendency of the samurai to a position of dominance over the land was achieved
through not only military prowess, but through the successful formation of a complex honor
culture which legitimated their authority. “Without the formulation of an honorific military
culture that cultivated differences in a way that persuaded the rest of the population that their
appetite for violence was honorable, the samurai might have remained the cultural inferiors of
the aristocracy, and they might have failed to attain their authority over the agricultural
population.”45 It was a culture that produced legendary heroes, such as Kusunoki Masashige,
those who vied for power and those who fought on another’s behalf. After the rise and fall of
several shogunates, Japan fell into the Warring States period, which was characterized by intense
internecine warfare between the most powerful samurai warlords of the time. The warring
finally ended when one warlord, Tokugawa Ieyasu, triumphed over all the rest and unified the
various states, or han, under the Tokugawa bakufu in 1603. This ushered in a period of relative
peace and stability, and the question became: What is a warrior to do in times of peace?
45
Ikegami 116.
26
CHAPTER 3
Samurai in a Time of Peace
Few would argue that an end to warfare is ever a bad thing, but it did leave the samurai in
a state of crisis in the new Tokugawa era. Even though their skills as professional warriors had
become virtually obsolete, they would remain a force to be reckoned with in Tokugawa society;
not only had they established themselves as the dominant class, but Tokugawa Ieyasu had frozen
the hierarchical system, locking the samurai at the top as administrators. So they soon adapted
their services to peacetime, and not only were they a military force as they had traditionally been,
but they became scholars and bureaucrats as well. The new government was a military
government, after all, and so it would only make sense that the samurai, as the new elite, would
fill the governmental positions. Their cult of honor coalesced into a strict code of ethics known
as bushidō, which would become increasingly cohesive in the Tokugawa period, along with
other aspects of samurai ethical culture which no longer had to do with war. In the preceding
centuries, the samurai had developed a complex honor culture as described by Eiko Ikegami,
characterized by the constructs of honor and loyalty and warrior spirit, as well as the institutions
of vassalage and ritual suicide. From the unification in 1603 onward, samurai, in their new
stations as scholars and politicians, began developing new philosophies that would not only
impact samurai culture and their ideas about honor, loyalty, and death, but would have farther
reaching implications for the country on a whole and the path it would take as it transitioned
from feudalism to the modern era.
Throughout the seventeenth century, samurai grappled with their changed role in society.
Key in revolutionizing the samurai’s identity at this time was Yamaga Sokō (1622-1685), a
27
prominent Confucian philosopher who wrote about the intellectual discipline of the samurai. He
expounded upon the idea of shidō, “the way of the samurai,” which became part of the literature
and thinking at the time about bushidō. Although bushidō has its roots in the pre-Tokugawa
samurai cult of honor, it became increasingly codified and complex after 1600 when samurai
began discoursing about the warrior’s purpose in society. Most samurai no longer owned land,
as they were given the option of owning land or retaining their status, and many chose the latter.
Thus, the “samurai aristocrat was not so much a loyal fighting man with landed interests to
defend, but a bureaucrat serving in cities, living apart from the land, and receiving a stipend for
his service.”46 This created a great deal of psychological disquiet for samurai, as reflected in
Yamaga Sokō’s writing when he makes the point that society depended on the skills of the
farmer, the artisan, and the merchant, classes which all developed concurrently and shared a
symbiotic existence. They were those who grew the food, those who manufactured goods, and
those who facilitated the buying and selling of both. “However, the samurai eats food without
growing it, uses utensils without manufacturing them, and profits without buying or selling.”
Sokō then demands, “What is the justification for this? . . . The samurai is one who does not
cultivate, does not manufacture, and does not engage in trade, but it cannot be that he has no
function at all as a samurai.”47 His answer: Samurai were meant to dedicate themselves to moral
and intellectual cultivation so that they might be fit for instructing the other classes and dealing
out punishment. The samurai, after all, were the only class allowed to retain their swords,
although it was meant as more of a status symbol than a weapon to be used. Sokō’s rationale
was that because the other classes, the farmers, the artisans, and the merchants, spent most of
46
Tetsuo Najita, Japan: The Intellectual Foundations of Modern Japanese Politics, (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1974) 22.
47
Yamaga Sokō, “YAMAGA SOKŌ: The Way of the Samurai,” handout, (History Seminar: Gender and Culture in
Modern Japan, Rutgers University: New Brunswick, Sept. 2012) 389-390.
28
their time working hard at their trades, they were unable to discipline themselves morally and
intellectually, and so needed the guidance of the samurai. In essence, the farmers, artisans, and
merchants were the cogs that kept society moving, while the samurai were the oil that ensured its
smooth functioning. This validated the samurai, not as warriors, but as scholars and leaders, and
gave them a sense of purpose that allowed them not only to survive, but to thrive in the new,
stabilized and more peaceful age. Their identification with honor and loyal service was adapted
to fit into the system of bureaucracy. Where previously a samurai’s code of ethics was
determined on an individual level, in the Tokugawa period samurai began thinking of their code
in relation to the bakufu. Though Japan had yet to become a nation, the Tokugawa bakufu was
the closest the government came to being centralized for the longest period of time during the
feudal era. It was not entirely centralized, as the shogun did not command each han individually,
but he developed loyalty ties with daimyō in each han to bring them under his authority.
Samurai at the lower levels still viewed their loyalty as owed to their individual masters,
although duty to the shogun ever inveighed on their conscience.
The shogun attempted to consolidate loyalties by redefining the samurai institution of
ritual suicide and following one’s lord into death, known as junshi (殉死) or oibara (追腹). The
attempt to proscribe junshi was first made by Mitsushige, lord of the Nabeshima fief, when he
heard that thirty-six retainers were planning on following their master, Yamagi Naohiro of the
Nabeshima clan, into death. In 1661, Mitsushige announced the proscription of junshi in
Nabeshima, stating that he was not aware of Yamagi ever having ordered his retainers to follow
him into death, and that to do so “would be useless.”48 It was more important and would be
more loyal an act to live to protect and serve Yamagi’s young son. When his plan succeeded,
48
Qtd. in Sato 289.
29
Mitsushige then went on to make the proscription legally binding, and two years later, in 1603,
the Tokugawa shogunate followed suit with amendments made to “The Regulations for Military
Houses.” They described the act of junshi, which was generally considered to be an immensely
loyal and honorable act, as “disloyal and useless.”49 Gradually, seppuku became used only in
executions for samurai issued by the shogun. The prohibition of unnecessary killing, even the
killing of the self, seemed only appropriate for a nation at peace. Daimyō, like Mitsushige, found
it agreeable because it meant that large groups of samurai in their domains were not periodically
killing themselves; the shogun saw an advantage in severing an important tie between masters
and retainers. By so redefining this aspect of ritual suicide, the relationship between masters and
vassals was also redefined. According to Ruth Benedict’s analysis, the shogunate was
attempting to elevate the general virtue of chū (忠), or loyalty to the shogun (and later to the
emperor) above the more personal virtue of giri (義理), or loyalty to one’s lord (as well as to
one’s family and oneself).50 The process of redefining the locus of loyalty would occur again,
later, when the Meiji leaders attempted to position the emperor as the object of absolute loyalty.
Their efforts would prove much more effective than that of the bakufu, who still had to contend
with local samurai for loyalty up until the end of the Tokugawa period. The abortive attempts of
the bakufu to officially redefine loyal action and ritualized suicide were seen most clearly in the
legendary Akō vendetta, or the Tale of the Forty-seven Rōnin.
The famous vendetta, which is still remembered today as a tale of loyalty and heroism by
some, a cautionary tale of the cyclical nature of violence by others, occurred around the turn of
49
Qtd. in Sato 290.
Benedict provides a lengthy explanation of the Japanese cultural precepts of obligation and reciprocation.
Obligations that are “passively incurred” are called on, and are received from the emperor, parents, teachers, etc.
Concepts of reciprocation, such as gimu, giri, and their respective subdivisions, are “obligations regarded from the
point of view of active payment.” In essence, gimu and giri equate to active duty. Of special importance to
Benedict’s study is chū, a type of gimu that is “[d]uty to the Emperor, the law, Japan.” 116.
50
30
the century in 1702. The cause for the vendetta actually took place two years prior, or so the
story goes, when Lord Asano Takuminokami Naganori supposedly attacked and wounded his
superior, Lord Kira Kōzukenosuke Yoshinaka. Some accounts indicate that Asano drew his
sword in anger after Kira humiliated him. According to Sato’s account in Legends of the
Samurai, Kira was reputed as “an arrogant and coercive bribe-taker who used his special
knowledge and position without any sense of embarrassment.”51 Even so, to draw one’s sword
in the shogun’s residence and attack a shogunate official was a serious offense, and Asano was
sentenced to death by seppuku. His castle in Akō was confiscated, and his retainers became
rōnin (浪人, “wandering” or “masterless samurai”). Forty-seven of his loyal retainers plotted to
avenge his death by killing Kira, although such an act would undoubtedly be censured by the
bakufu. Nevertheless, committed to their vision of loyalty to their master, the forty-seven rōnin,
under the leadership of the top retainer Ōishi Kuranosuke, plotted their revenge and two years
later, descended upon Kira’s home in the middle of the night. They killed him and carried his
head to Asano’s grave, a legacy of the tradition of decapitation, only now it was purely a sign of
loyalty with no expectation of reward. Far from being rewarded for their fealty, the forty-seven
rōnin were predictably sentenced to death by the shogun, Tokugawa Tsunayoshi (1646-1709),
fifty days after the vendetta. Revenge killing, although previously a legitimate act in defense of
one’s honor and duty, had no place in the more peaceful times of the Tokugawa period. “As a
result, the vengeance carried out by a highly disciplined group of men, in seeming defiance of
the government, shocked and won widespread admiration,” and the shogun’s sentence “provoked
profound indignation among the general populace,” as well as spurring debate among mostly
Confucian scholars.52 Only twelve days later the story was being dramatized in stories and plays,
51
52
Sato 305.
Sato 305.
31
like the well-known fictionalized account, Chūshingura. Today, there are even movies
recounting the famous story, and people daily visit Sengaku-ji, the shrine in modern-day Tokyo
where Asano was buried and his loyal retainers memorialized. Clearly, the ideas of heroism,
loyalty, and honor exemplified by the story of the Akō vendetta still resonate with the modern
Japanese.
At the time, the vendetta raised questions about the concepts of loyalty and the definition
of bushidō. Yamamoto Tsunetomo (1659-1721), a retainer in Nabeshima who wrote prolifically
about the samurai code and is most famous for his work, Hagakure, reproached the forty-seven
rōnin for their behavior, which he felt was inappropriate. He felt that, first of all, they should
have committed seppuku the moment after they delivered Kira’s head to Asano’s grave (that is,
they should have immediately followed their lord into death after completing their revenge), and
that second of all, they erred in waiting so long to carry out the vendetta. His rationale was: “It
would have been a matter of grave regret indeed if Kira had died in the meantime, of illness, for
example.”53 Tsunetomo supported the idea of junshi, even though it had already been proscribed
by the time he was writing, and believed strongly that “[t]he way of the warrior . . . is to die.”54
He explained that a warrior should be in a constant state of preparedness for death, that the
willingness to follow one’s lord into death was a sign of honor as well as loyalty, and a lack of
willingness signified cowardice. He admonished the samurai who switched allegiances as soon
as their current lord died or retired. This was, of course, a common and not entirely dishonorable
practice in the centuries before the Tokugawa period, but by the time thinkers such as Tsunetomo
were discoursing on the nature of warrior ethics in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such
a show of disloyalty to one’s master had become disgraceful. The proscription of junshi made
53
54
Sato 296.
Sato 287.
32
loyalty as Tsunetomo defined it more difficult, of course, but the mentality remained, as
evidenced by the case of the Forty-seven Rōnin. Tsunetomo also promoted the ethic of “singleminded determination.” He wrote, “An accomplished warrior doesn’t think whether he’s going
to win or lose, but dashes into the place of death with single-minded determination.”55 Sato
notes that Tsunetomo was not alone in his extreme thinking, but found fellow adherents to his
philosophy in the likes of Yamaga Sokō, and that the actions of later militarists, such as General
Nogi Maresuke (who committed seppuku following the death of Emperor Meiji in 1912), are
traced to Tsunetomo’s thinking. According to Tsunetomo, “The way of the warrior has no use
for loyalty or filial devotion; it is simply frantic death. Within the frantic death itself are both
loyalty and filial devotion combined.”56 He also asserted that a loyal subject never surrendered,
which he validated by evoking the memory of Kusunoki Masashige, attributing to him the quote:
“Surrendering is something a samurai never does, be it for deceiving the enemy or for the
emperor.”57 Of course, even if Kusunoki did actually say these words, his actions as they appear
in historical texts such as the Taiheiki contradict the idea that a samurai never surrenders or
deceives his enemy; on the contrary, Kusunoki faked his own suicide for the very purpose of
deceiving his enemies. He was famous, not for rushing headlong into battle with single-minded
determination, but for his calm reserve and his strategical genius. Already in the Tokugawa
period we see the kind of historical manipulation that would be endemic in the twentieth century
and instrumental in the rise of militarism in the 1930s and 40s. Tsunetomo’s interpretation of
bushidō, in particular his ideas about loyal action as death in battle and resistance to surrender,
would become important in imperial military thinking, and would make the imperial soldiers
some of the most fearsome the modern world had ever seen.
55
Sato 298.
Sato 301.
57
Sato 303.
56
33
Although Tsunetomo’s ideas seem extreme and, as Sato describes them, “bizarre,” they
are really a legacy of the view of death developed by earlier samurai. Ever since the twelfth
century when samurai culture first began to develop, honor had been linked to preparedness to
die on the battlefield, fearlessness in the face of death, and loyalty to one’s lord, increasingly
viewed in the form of acts of junshi. Tsunetomo’s philosophies about the way of the warrior
expanded upon and further codified the concepts of honor and death as first conceived by earlier
samurai. Although the definitions of loyalty and the specifications of honor would continue to
evolve into the twentieth century, the connections to death and self-sacrifice would remain.
Intellectual Trends in Tokugawa
Where Buddhism had previously prevailed as the leading philosophy among the samurai,
the first half of the Tokugawa period saw the return of Confucianism, or more specifically the
rise of Neo-Confucianism. Tetsuo Najita, in his book Japan: The Intellectual Foundations of
Modern Japanese Politics, describes two important Tokugawa-era Neo-Confucianists, Yamazaki
Ansai (1619-1682) and Ogyū Sorai (1666-1728), both, unsurprisingly, from samurai families.
Najita later shows how both had lasting effects on Japanese philosophy that were felt through the
twentieth century, and bore a significant influence on the later developments of rebellious
loyalism and militant nationalism in ways neither man probably could have imagined.
Yamazaki’s ideas are characterized by two main points: that history and socio-political
institutions are fixed metaphysical norms and that personality is the dynamic factor that
approximates goodness within them. Not only did Yamazaki’s system of thought legitimize the
bakufu, but for the samurai it confirmed their “ethic of devoted service.”58 More importantly,
this idea of socio-political structures as metaphysical norms, when applied to the imperial
58
Najita 37.
34
institution, created a “psychological identification with the monarchy as a normative symbol of
loyalty.”59 Even after the failure of Emperor Go-Daigo to regain authority between the
Kamakura and Ashikaga shogunates, the imperial household had never disappeared; it only
faded into the background. Tokugawa-era philosophies saw a resurgence of interest in the
imperial institution, which would culminate towards the end of the Tokugawa period and play a
part in the fall of the bakufu once and for all. The image of the emperor presented by Yamazaki
is significant in that it recognized the emperor as being outside the political sphere in a way that,
rather than undermining it, legitimized it. Yamazaki recognized that for much of Japanese
history the imperial institution had been removed from the political structure, but because of this,
it “symbolized, by its inactivity, the normative constant for active self-development.”60 The
second philosopher, Ogyū Sorai, stood opposite Yamazaki in many ways. His philosophy tended
away from the internal capacity of men to create goodness within fixed norms and denied that
history and socio-political structures were metaphysically constant. To him, the dynamic factor
was political constructs, which could be changed through the efforts of men to reflect goodness.
His idea of loyalty impinged on the fact of structures not being fixed, and the “loyal servitor” is
“one who seeks to make structures responsive to changing social needs.”61 Furthermore, Ogyū
maintained that bureaucracy was necessary to social existence, so his philosophy, like
Yamazaki’s, legitimated the bakufu. Ironically, a philosopher who came slightly after these two,
Yamagata Daini (1725-1767), reworked both of their philosophies into a critique of the bakufu,
his criticism emanating from an observed disconnect between what had become an impoverished
countryside and a wealthy samurai elite. He drew on Ogyū’s idea that structures were not
timeless in order to strip the bakufu of its legitimacy, while maintaining Yamazaki’s idea that the
59
Najita 33.
Najita 33.
61
Najita 38.
60
35
imperial institution was fixed outside of the realm of politics. The tectonic plates beneath the
Japanese political structure begin to shift. Essentially, while “structures could be unmade and
remade, as Ogyū taught,” the imperial institution remained separate, as “a referent point of a
metaphysical ‘value’ outside of the structured confines of ‘action.’”62 Thus did the imperial
institution remain pure, untouchable, and worthy of loyalty, while the bakufu began to crumble
under the weight of its own failings, which would be exacerbated later by the arrival of U.S.
Commodore Perry in the mid-1800s and the intrusion of the West. But even before Perry
appeared, Tokugawa society was starting to strain from problems of its own making, such as the
issue of a static social order. The merchants, who were at the bottom of the hierarchy, were
growing richer while the samurai, at the top, were becoming impoverished elites, as they were
not allowed to conduct business and had to forgo owning land to maintain their status. Some
merchants and samurai sought to marry their sons and daughters into each other’s families, so the
merchants would benefit socially while the samurai benefitted financially. Even so, unrest
spread across the land; the samurai grew restless and increasingly unsure. As this occurred, the
philosophical trends took a turn for the idealistic, seeking an escape or a solution to social issues,
and eventually manifested as rebellious loyalism and “restorationism.”
Even as the sociopolitical atmosphere changed in the latter half of the Tokugawa period,
the medieval value of “true loyalty” retained great importance to the samurai. However, it was
in this said latter half that loyalty gained real intellectual and political significance. As debates
and disputes raged on, both within and without the government, the definition of loyal action
constantly hung in the balance. On the inside of the bakufu was the Mito school of thought,
derived from the han of the same name which was tasked with compiling a history of Japan.
Beyond mere scribing and archiving, it eventually developed into an academic fief that attracted
62
Najita 40.
36
scholars who propagated pragmatic and utilitarian philosophies, and somewhat ironically became
known for criticisms against the bakufu. Aizawa Seishisai (1782-1863), one of Mito’s leading
writers, criticized the bakufu for its rigidity and ineffectiveness and claimed that the samurai
were not obsolete, but rather they were not being allowed to act to their fullest potential. He
placed an emphasis on loyal service, which everyone needed to contribute, and desired that the
bakufu legitimize itself by strengthening ties with the imperial institution. After almost two
hundred years of stasis, those within the bakufu were calling for substantial change that
demanded greater loyalty and a restoration of the emperor. For Aizawa, his intention was not to
dismantle the government, but rather to improve it; however, through his criticisms and the
actions of other dissatisfied daimyō, cracks were made that would only widen with time and
eventually cause the bakufu to crumble. One of the philosophies that grew up outside the bakufu
was Ōyōmei idealism, based on the teachings of Wang Yang-Ming (1472-1529). Najita
describes Ōyōmei idealism as “a philosophy about the ultimate essence of the cosmos.”63
Ōyōmei idealism was marked by an emphasis on spirituality at the expense of reason. Thinkers
of this school, such as Nakae Tōju (1608-1648) and Kaibara Ekken (1630-1714), both from
samurai backgrounds, sought spiritual autonomy free from the narrow limitations of rationality
and reason. Within Ōyōmei idealism there was a principle of action, which emphasized a
disregard for conventional reason and perception, especially at ambiguous “critical points” in
one’s life and in society. At these points, “one must reach deeply into his spiritual self and
commit himself decisively to a course of action because he believes that course to be right, not
because it might be advantageous.”64 This concept breathed new life into the idea of loyal action,
and revitalized the samurai’s long latent warrior spirit; it was the difference between loyal
63
64
Najita 52.
Najita 53.
37
service (to the bureaucracy, as a politician or a scholar) and loyal action (for a cause, generally
marked by radicalism and violence). As Najita explains it, “virtually every samurai” was
exposed to Ōyōmei idealism, regardless of their intellectual affiliation, and they internalized its
message about loyal action, implicit in which was the rejection of existing politics. The figure
that most embodied these philosophies was Ōshio Heichachirō (1793-1837), a low-ranking
samurai who grasped the iconoclastic tendencies in Ōyōmei idealism and used them to actively
reject present institutions under which the common people were suffering. He sparked revolt on
behalf of oppressed and starving citizens and led the Osaka rebellion in 1837, becoming not only
a cultural hero but a symbol of idealism and loyal action.65 His vision, the keystone of which
was total rejection of the bakufu, became widespread. His idea of “save the people” (救民,
kyūmin), was eventually reworked as “protect the country” (攘夷, jōi, literally “expel the
foreigners,” as in 尊皇攘夷, sonnō jōi, “revere the emperor, expel the barbarians”—a famous
Meiji-era slogan that would have an echo in Shōwa-era militarism). Developing concurrently
with Ōyōmei idealism was kokugaku (国学), or “national studies,” which Najita describes as “a
historical concept of the distinctiveness of Japanese culture.”66 While Ōyōmei idealism had
Ōshio as a bannerman, kokugaku had Motoori Norinaga (1730-1801), who combined the ideas of
Ogyū Sorai and a lesser-known scholar and Buddhist priest, Keichū (1640-1701) in order “to
affirm unequivocally the uniqueness of Japanese culture.”67 Scholars of kokugaku liked to trace
the inception of Japanese society to ancient times, to what they considered the golden age of
Japanese culture and literature, when works like The Tale of Genji and the Man’yōshū were
65
Najita further details Ōshio’s activism in his essay, “Ōshio Heichachirō (1793-1837),” in Albert M. Craig and
Donald H. Shively, eds., Personality in Japanese History (Berkley: University of California Press, 1970), pp. 15579.
66
Najita 52.
67
Najita 56.
38
produced. They rejected Chinese influences, and looked to Japanese history that predated the
importation of Confucianism and Buddhism to find the “true” Japanese spirit; for Japanese
religion, they looked to Shintoism. Motoori especially was pivotal in the move towards Shintō
revivalism, which was identified as the “native” Japanese religion, apart from Buddhism. And it
was this renewed interest in Shintoism as part of a newfound sense of national essence that
finally, after almost seven-hundred years of feudalism, helped restore the emperor to power.
Terror and Rebellious Loyalism
The sharp rise in nationalism, unsurprisingly, occurred concurrently with the arrival of
U.S. Commodore Matthew C. Perry in 1853 and the forcing open of Japan’s ports with gunboat
diplomacy. Domains which had been largely individual became suddenly conscious of a
national identity, sharpened in contrast to the West, and the imperial loyalists who virulently
opposed Western influence picked up the banner of jōi, “expel the barbarians.” This precept was
wedded to that of sonnō, “revere the emperor,” and the combined idea of “revering the emperor,
expelling the barbarian” (sonnō jōi) became the battle cry of imperial loyalist rebels, who rose up
in defense of the nation. Many of them severed ties with their fiefs and became rōnin, masterless
samurai, functioning largely as individuals without any real sense of organization. They are still
cut as heroic figures in the popular imagination today. More accurately, Najita writes,
“Opportunists and adventurers at their worst, they were also idealists and literate radicals. In
their literature of the period and in historical accounts, therefore, they are often described as
shishi, activists with true inner convictions.”68 Many were students of Ōyōmei; others studied
Dutch and English with the aim of “knowing the enemy.” Still others seem to have been
anarchists whose vision of rebellion was characterized by terrorism and violence. The figure
68
Najita 60.
39
who stands out in history as an ideal shishi (志士, which significantly includes the character shi,
士, or “samurai”) is Yoshida Shōin (1830-1859), a rebel samurai from Chōshū who was “perhaps
the greatest single inspiration to activists in this period.” Yoshida read Yamagata Daini’s
criticism of the bakufu and sought to expand the work of Ōshio Heichachirō. The ideal qualities
represented by Yoshida Shōin included complete self-dedication; vilification of the present and
the immediate past; a belief in strengthening the country through a “restoration” of cultural
essence; a view of the bakufu as insincere and ineffective against the West; and maintaining the
belief that the previous definition of loyal action, which had been service to the bureaucracy, no
longer applied.69 Loyal action became action against the bakufu and for the emperor, who had
ascended to the point of symbolizing the spirit of Japan; thus was loyal action defined as “revere
the emperor, expel the barbarian” and generally marked by acts of violence. Of course, there
were those who stood apart from or opposite the rebel samurai, Western scholars and bakufu
sympathizers who lived in constant fear of falling victim to acts of violence and terror by shishi
activists. The bakufu made an effort to stem the tide of rebellion in the Ansei Purge of 18581859. They hunted down and executed twelve loyalists, including Yoshida Shōin; more than one
hundred were arrested. But rather than discouraging the activists, it roused them to further
rebellion and legitimized violent action as part of the political process. In 1860, the loyalists
retaliated by assassinating Ii Naosuke, the bakufu’s highest-ranking bureaucratic official, an
“unprecedented act” that “staggered the bakufu.”70 In his autobiography, Fukuzawa Yukichi, a
prominent Western scholar, makes ample reference to the turbulence of these times. At the time
of Ii’s assassination, Fukuzawa had been on his first mission to America. Still, the news reached
him, and Fukuzawa notes, “For a year now, previous to this time, the slogan gradually had been
69
70
Najita 61.
Najita 64.
40
gaining currency: ‘Expel the foreigners!’ . . . Any person who showed, by any will or deed, any
favor towards admitting foreigners into Japan—indeed, any person who had any interest in
foreign affairs—was liable to be set upon by the unrelenting rōnin.”71 Upon returning to Japan,
he describes there being “almost daily assassinations” and claims that Japan “had become a
fearful place to live in.” And then: “Militarism ran wild in this period before and after 1863.
People in general were concerned with nothing so much as showing off the old warrior spirit.”72
Later, he talks in depth of the psychological terror visited upon him by living under the “shadow
of assassination.”73 Of course, Fukuzawa escaped the restoration unscathed, unlike certain
unlucky others, and lived to recount it in his old age.
The samurai, who had spent the last two centuries reconciling their warrior past with a
peaceful present by becoming bureaucrats and intellectuals, found reason once again to take up
their swords. This time it was not necessarily in defense of their lords, but in defense of the
emperor and the national essence, as defined by Tokugawa-era schools of thought like Ōyōmei
idealism and kokugaku, and now further contrasted against the barbarians from the West. In this
sense the samurai had been “revived,” or roused to militaristic action after a period of relative
latency. By this point, the samurai had evolved far beyond their medieval predecessors who
fought in territorial wars and measured their success by the number of enemy heads they
amassed. But the late feudal samurai and their predecessors were still linked by a deep-seated
honor culture, now described as shidō or bushidō, and this culture was still marked by the values
of loyalty and self-sacrifice, although the definitions of each had changed to adapt to a new age.
In fact, the definitions were still evolving in the late Tokugawa period; samurai were especially
71
Fukuzawa Yukichi, The Autobiography of Fukuzawa Yukichi, trans. Eiichi Kiyooka, (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2007) 121-122.
72
Fukuzawa 163.
73
Fukuzawa 225.
41
concerned with the definition of loyalty as it related to acts of rebellion. Whether loyalty was
characterized by the suppression of rebellion or by the act of rebellion was a cause of contention
in every han, as well as a cause for further violence and infighting. Even after the rebel samurai
triumphed and the bakufu crumbled, this debate continued to rage. The inheritors of the new
government were the samurai who had essentially legitimized the idea of loyalty as rebellion; for
them the concern became how to redefine loyalty once again so that they might prevent the
possibility of future rebellion against the new government. Najita poses the following questions
that faced the samurai, poised on the cusp of the new age: “How might loyalism as rebellion be
restructured to render further rebellion treasonous; how might society best be mobilized to meet
the Western threat; and can a set of structures be devised that might last into the future as a
creative achievement of restorationism?”74
74
Najita 67.
42
CHAPTER 4
The Modernization of the Samurai
In 1868, the imperial rule was restored with the enthronement of Emperor Meiji in Tokyo,
previously Edo; the Tokugawa feudal order, under the Imperial Charter Oath, was dissolved; and
imperial loyalists, primarily from the outlying domains of Satsuma and Chōshū, took the reins of
the government. As with the unification in 1603, sweeping sociopolitical changes overtook the
nation, such as the dissolution of class distinctions—which meant the abolition of the samurai
class—and the former samurai elite had to reinvent itself once again. Intense disagreement set
off a series of rebellions from 1874 to 1878 that culminated in the Satsuma Rebellion, led by
Saigō Takamori, who fell in the Battle of Shiroyama in 1877. All of the rebellions ultimately
failed, and with the death of Saigō (considered by most to be the last Tokugawa loyalist) the age
of the samurai was over. By the time of his death, samurai were already being denounced by the
government as “hereditary idlers (sesshū zashoku).” In their place, the Meiji leaders wanted to
form a conscript army because they viewed an elite warrior class as incompatible with “the ideal
of equal service to the emperor.”75
Although the new leaders were former rebel samurai who had campaigned under the
banner of sonnō jōi, the Meiji government was quick to adopt Western teachings and
technologies in order to recreate Japan in the image of Western nations. They looked to the West,
especially, for building their new political structure. The reasons for this, as described by Albert
Craig, were that Japanese leaders saw the West as more advanced, more prestigious, and sought
to be respected and accepted as their equal by showing that they could rise to the same level. As
75
Mark J. Ravina, “The Apocryphal Suicide of Saigō Takamori: Samurai, Seppuku, and the Politics of Legend,” The
Journal of Asian Studies, Vol 69, Issue 03 (2010) 701.
43
for their political structure, they aimed to form a representative government, especially when
they considered “the specter of the French Revolution or the backwardness of Russia as the fate
of regimes that were too autocratic.”76 And even though the class system had been dismantled,
there still existed the samurai elite who were educated, politically savvy, and wanted to
participate in the new government. But the new leaders were not without their disagreements; on
the contrary, the Meiji period was marked by political and intellectual pluralism, which made the
formulation of a new government a slow and, in the end, hard-won process. Two of the main
characters in this story were Itō Hirobumi, in the pragmatist camp, and Yamagata Aritomo, a
militarist. The first step towards creating the government was to write up a constitution, and Itō
took the initiative and toured Europe from 1882 to 1883 in search of a fitting constitutional
theory on which to base it. Ultimately, he settled on a German model in large part because, of all
the Western nations, Germany most resembled Japan in its recent history. Germany, like Japan,
had recently emerged from a medieval world of divided principalities (similar to the Tokugawaera han), and its constitution had been written specifically to address the needs of a recently
unified nation. Still, Itō shrewdly waited to actually draft the constitution until Japan had
bureaucratic structures in place, so that the constitution could serve a legitimizing purpose; “its
function was to ‘absolutize’ political constructs after questions of power had been settled and not
to create new competitive power relations.”77 Thus, it was not until 1889 that the Meiji
constitution came into being, and although it was based on a German model, it was structured
around the familiar hierarchical principle of the Tokugawa period. The de jure locus of power
was the emperor, and while many of the ideas put forth in the constitution were progressive and
76
77
Edwin O. Reischauer and Albert M. Craig, Japan (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989) 167.
Najita 83.
44
democratic, the language used to describe the emperor was, in retrospect, regrettably
nationalistic.
During this time, the emperor was more than just restored; he was reconstructed. Japan
was newly a nation, and needed a national identity with which to identify. The process had
begun in Tokugawa with the rise of kokugaku, and it became official in Meiji, with the
construction of the Meiji constitution that was filled with references to the emperor as “sacred
and inviolable” and “ancient.” It was once believed by scholars of Japan that the cult of the
emperor derived from his claim to divinity and the resurrection of Shintoism as a state religion; a
closer look at the constitution and at history in recent scholarship reveals that there is more to the
story. First of all, though the Meiji leaders may have, to varying degrees, bought into their own
myth, there is no denying the political agenda at work beneath it. They used the imperial
institution to legitimize their own positions in government, exploiting “imperial prerogatives” as
“bulwarks behind which the oligarchs could take refuge from the rising popular demands for a
share in political power.”78 Itō cleverly devised a government where the emperor was the
highest authority, while still being, as had been true of the imperial figure for centuries, outside
the real mechanisms of government. Secondly, the Meiji leaders achieved this not by
emphasizing the emperor’s divinity so much as the fact that he was descended from an unbroken
line of rulers that reached back into Japan’s ancient history. According to Shintō, the emperor
was descended from the sun goddess, Amaterasu, and a popular theory during and immediately
after the war was that the emperor derived his absolute authority from this claim to divinity.
However, Ruth Benedict debunks the theory her anthropological study about Japan, writing, “Far
more important in transferring chu to the Emperor was the unbroken dynasty of a single imperial
78
Reischauer and Craig, 173.
45
house during the whole history of Japan.”79 Thus it was not so much the emperor’s claim to
divinity that made him the absolute authority, although that did play a part; rather, it was his
status as a symbol of Japan’s unique and continuous history. The phrase “the Imperial Founder
of Our House and Our other Imperial Ancestors” is repeated throughout the opening sections of
the constitution, emphasizing not just the emperor but those who came before him; the first line
of the preamble tells readers that the emperor has, “by virtue of the glories of Our Ancestors,
ascended the throne of a lineal succession unbroken for ages eternal; . . . ”80 In essence, the
emperor became central to Japan’s cultural and national identity, and his law became absolute.
The raw materials needed for commanding this kind of loyalty already existed. For centuries,
loyalty had been cultivated within the samurai honor culture. First, there was the loyalty to one’s
lord; then, there was loyalty to the shogun; now, there was loyalty to the emperor. The shifts
were not without their difficulties, but the loyalty to the emperor was commanded in a way that
loyalty to the shogun had never achieved because Meiji leaders had modern institutions at their
disposal that the bakufu did not. These included the constitution itself, as well as the advantages
of industrialization and a system of national education, which made indoctrination of official
ideologies not only possible, but immensely efficient. It was through indoctrination that new
ideas about old samurai concepts of loyalty, honor, and self-sacrifice would be codified and
disseminated for a new generation of warrior-citizens. These new warriors may have no longer
been hereditary samurai elite, but through governmental and social mechanisms that promulgated
ideology, bushidō would carry on, particularly in the lessons for the military.
For the indoctrination of the military, there was the Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and
Sailors, which emphasized in its adherents such virtues as valor and righteousness, but above all,
79
Benedict 127.
Hanover Historical Texts Project, “The Constitution of the Empire of Japan (1889),” Hanover College
(http://history.hanover.edu/texts/1889con.html)
80
46
unfailing loyalty to the emperor, all the while perpetuating the mythic historical narrative of
Japan. It preceded the constitution, written in 1882 at the behest of Yamagata Aritomo, who was
Itō’s principle rival within the Meiji oligarchy. He was more conservative, a military figure, who
designed the system of military conscription and looked unfavorably upon “[p]arty opposition
and protest,” which, in his eyes, “differed little from rebellious disturbances” as outlined by the
constitution.81 It was Yamagata who formulated the idea that the military should be separate
from the civil government and only answerable to the emperor, a governmental structure that
would later facilitate the domination of the military during the Shōwa period. For now, there
were no such imminent threats, and the rescript unequivocally confirmed the emperor’s supreme
command over the military.82 The rescript reads, “The supreme command of Our forces is in
Our hands, and although We may entrust subordinate commands to our subjects, yet the ultimate
authority We Ourself shall hold and never delegate to any subject.”83 Ruth Benedict describes
the rescripts, not only the one to soldiers and sailors but also the Imperial Rescript on Education
(1890), as “the true Holy Writ of Japan.” The rescripts were read, memorized, and recited with
an almost religious energy; there are reports that men who misread the rescript would commit
suicide from the shame.84 In the Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors, Benedict saw “an official
attempt” to reduce the more private concept of duty to one’s country, family, and self (giri) and
to elevate the status of duty to the emperor (chū).85 The Meiji leaders wanted to refashion giri
and chū in terms of “Higher Law” (chū) and “Lower Law” (giri), wherein the Higher would
incorporate the Lower, and so fulfilling one’s duty to the emperor meant ipso facto fulfilling all
81
Najita 104.
Reischauer and Craig 175.
83
Arthur E. Tiedemann, “Reading No. 5: Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors, 1882,” Modern Japan: A Brief
History (Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand, 1955) 109.
84
Tiedemann 108. Benedict also alludes to this in The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, 151.
85
Benedict 210.
82
47
other duties in life. It was a means of prioritizing loyalty to the emperor above all else, including
loyalty to one’s family and even to oneself. What the Meiji government attempted by
emphasizing chū over giri was to dissolve the line between public and private spheres. Giri may
encompass one’s duty to the world, but it also represents duty to those within one’s private
sphere, such as the family and the self. Chū represents duty to the country and to the emperor: in
other words, the public sphere. Benedict quotes a line from the rescript that “warns its hearers
not to be like heroes of old who died in dishonor because, ‘losing sight of the true path of public
duty, they kept faith in private relations’ [italics hers].”86 The first precept of the rescript, she
says, describes “the supreme virtue” as the fulfillment of chū, or loyalty to the emperor.
“Therefore, neither be led astray by current opinions nor meddle in politics, but with singleness
do chu, remembering that gi (righteousness) is weightier than a mountain while death is lighter
than a feather [italics hers].”87 In so defining the soldier, the rescript disassociated soldiers from
politics, effectively treating them as non-citizens, and demanded of them a single-minded focus
to fulfill their duty to the emperor, even unto death. The military rescript significantly departed
from the samurai tradition in certain aspects, such as in this conception of loyalty. Although
loyalty in itself was important to medieval samurai, their private loyalties to their lords were
often more important than loyalty to the shogun or the emperor. The Meiji government
reconstructed the idea of loyalty by dissolving personal loyalty ties and proselytizing absolute
loyalty to the emperor. In the new, modernized Japan, where the soldiers were not elite samurai
but a conscript army, this seemed to work. As previously mentioned, the emperor was revered
for being a national symbol of Japan’s unique and continuous history. Imperial authority was
legitimized by the idea of kokutai, or national essence, of which the emperor was representative.
86
87
Benedict 210.
“Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors,” qtd. in Benedict 213.
48
Especially against the backdrop of insecurity about the West and a desire to command respect
abroad, owing loyalty to the emperor seemed an appealing ideal. The modernized warrior
therefore was just as typified by loyalty as the medieval samurai, but that loyalty had a new
center of focus: the emperor. Furthermore, this new brand of loyalty did not spring from a
mutually beneficial contract; it sprang from nationalism. Many of the other virtues extolled by
the military rescript were also reminiscent of Tokugawa-era bushidō, such as decorum, valor,
faithfulness, and frugality. Together with loyalty these comprised the five articles of “the Grand
Way of Heaven and Earth and the universal law of humanity.”88 Clearly, these precepts,
however reminiscent of Tokugawa-era bushidō, were no longer an honor code for an elite
warrior class. As Karl Friday puts it, “The abolition of the samurai class . . . marked not the end
of bushidó, but the point of its spread to the whole of the Japanese population.”89 Ironically,
however, the language of the rescript does its utmost to write off Japan’s medieval past because
during the feudal times the imperial institution was weak. In describing the ascendency of the
samurai class and their seven centuries of domination, the rescript says, “Although these results
followed from changes in the state of society and were beyond human control, they were deeply
to be deplored, since they were contrary to the fundamental character of Our Empire and to the
law of Our Imperial Ancestors.”90 Having denounced Japan’s feudal past as a fluke in an
otherwise pristine historical narrative about an unbroken line of emperors, the rescript repeatedly
connects all of its virtues directly to Japan’s “ancient times.” For example, taking the virtue of
valor: “Ever since the ancient times valour has in our country been held in high esteem, and
without it Our subjects would be unworthy of their name. How then may the soldier and sailor,
whose profession it is to confront the enemy in battle, forget even for one instant to be
88
Tiedemann 112.
Friday OL.
90
Tiedemann 109.
89
49
valiant?”91 This sounds a lot more as if it were derived from the medieval times than from the
ancient times, as the samurai were the first professional warrior class in Japan, and they were the
ones who valued courage and bravery as they were necessary in battle. But the rescript
painstakingly tries to avoid making that connection.
This tendency to denounce Japan’s feudal history did nothing to stem the rise in
popularity of bushidō during the Meiji period. Mark J. Ravina, in his essay about the legend of
Saigō Takamori’s suicide, analyzes the ascendency of the cult of bushidō by searching the
National Diet Library’s Modern Digital Library for Meiji-era texts that cite the word bushidō.
He notes a substantial “boom” for the popularization of bushidō throughout the early 1900s,
explaining that although it did not appear in the database before 1893, it began appearing in the
1890s at a rate of about once per year. After 1901 the rate of its appearance increased tenfold.
He admits that the rise is partly attributable to “general growth in the publishing industry and to
increased interest in military affairs during the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars.”92 But
even as citations for the word “military” (軍事, gunji) also increased, it nowhere near paralleled
the steep rise in popularity of the word bushidō. Ruth Benedict denounced the practice that
seemed popular in her time of using bushidō as an encompassing term for describing Japanese
culture. She dismissed bushidō as a propagandistic term in nationalist rhetoric, and claimed that
it was a modern invention that could not accurately convey all of the complexities and
ambiguities of Japanese culture and the Japanese code of ethics.93 And she was not wrong on
many of these points, because bushidō was used by nationalist leaders in their propaganda, and
their conception of bushidō was in many ways a modern invention (or innovation). Karl Friday
91
Tiedemann 111.
Mark J. Ravina, “The Apocryphal Suicide of Saigō Takamori: Samurai, Seppuku, and the Politics of Legend,” The
Journal of Asian Studies 69.03 (2010) 702.
93
Benedict 175.
92
50
corroborates these ideas in his essay, “Bushidó or Bull,” when he says that the concept of
bushidō as promoted by early modern and modern writers was actually incompatible with the
behavioral norms of medieval samurai. Bushidō in the Meiji period was “at best only
superficially derived” from the “way of the warrior” of the Tokugawa period,94 which itself was
already a reconstruction of the original samurai honor culture in the preceding era of internecine
warfare. In essence, the principles of bushidō that Meiji-era writers admired and sought to
emulate were really a product of nostalgia for the supposed “golden age” of samurai. They
stripped the narratives of legendary samurai of their historical relativity, choosing to ignore the
fact that loyalty ties between samurai were not always unwavering, that they were in truth
changeable and contingent on mutual advantage. Samurai did not always die in honorably in
battle or commit seppuku before defeat; oftentimes they retreated or escaped, and if they were
captured in defeat, they likely would have joined sides with the victor. Honor in pre-Tokugawa
Japan was an abstract concept, and bushidō was only a vague notion, if the term was used at all.
That is not to say that there were no honorable men in wartime or that they had no notion of a
code of ethics; rather, it is that the concept of honor differed from the conception of it in the
Meiji period, and even in the Tokugawa period. Clearly, Meiji writers had plenty of material to
fuel their imaginations; they had a base from which they constructed their ideas about bushidō
and honor, while glossing over the aspects that seemed less appealing. Ravina aptly and
succinctly summarizes this process of innovating on perceived traditions when he calls it
“modern bushidō.” This process of innovating on tradition is not unique to Japan, and in this
case, as in many such cases, what matters is not so much whether the conception of a supposed
historical tradition was historically accurate, but how these conceptions had a formative effect on
the time in which they were promulgated. The issue of historical accuracy does matter in the
94
Friday OL.
51
sense that its claim to history is what legitimized bushidō in the minds of the Japanese in Meiji,
and even in Tokugawa. Because bushidō, like the emperor, was seen to be passed down through
history, it became a part of Japan’s national identity. Even if modern bushidō was not identical
to a medieval samurai code of ethics (if such a thing existed), that it was perceived to be a timehonored cultural tradition, from Kusunoki Masashige to Tokugawa Ieyasu to Saigō Takamori,
made it important. The samurai class had been abolished, but the Japanese in the new era saw
themselves as the inheritors of a long and cherished legacy, something that substantiated their
culture and unified them as a nation; this was what made Japan unique in the tide of Western
influence, and made it strong enough to resist Western colonization. Bushidō, as a perceived
warrior tradition, became especially popular in light of the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese
Wars, as Ravina mentions. Positivity towards war in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries made Japan a fertile ground where modern bushidō could grow into a militarist
doctrine that, in the fascist era of the 1930s and 40s, would rise to fever-pitch.
The ideology of the “way of the warrior” spread throughout Japan in various ways.
Ravina cites Carol Gluck, who referenced the “minkan ideologues,” that is, “journalists,
intellectuals, and public figures who produced a disproportionate amount of ‘public opinion’
(yoron) of the period.”95 One such ideologue was Inoue Tetsujirō (1856-1944), a Meiji-era
philosopher who traced the origins of bushidō back to Yamaga Sokō, who idealized the “brave
self-sacrifice” of the forty-seven rōnin of the Akō Vendetta, and to Yoshida Shōin, a disciple of
Yamaga who further refined bushidō ideology. Inoue’s ideas about bushidō were later
incorporated into the 1937 Kokutai no Hongi (Cardinal Principles of Our National Policy) and
further legitimized by support received from Tōjō Hideki.96 Another influential scholar was
95
96
Qtd. in Ravina 702.
Ravina 703.
52
Shigeno Yatsusugu (1826-1910) who, along with his coauthor Kasuka Hiroshi, traced the origins
of bushidō to Japanese creation myths, which implied that it was more than a warrior code: it
was a national ideology. Ravina writes, “What is remarkable about the sudden explosion of
bushidō studies is how political rivals contested the meaning of bushidō, but not its importance
as a uniquely Japanese corpus of thought.”97 And it was this idea, that bushidō was “uniquely
Japanese,” that caused it to carry so much weight and be so influential on imperial military
ideology, despite the skepticism of Benedict and Friday. Ravina goes on the cite the work of
Nitobe Inazō, a Christian convert and author of Bushido: Soul of Japan, which was first
published in 1900, had gone through eight editions in Japanese by 1905, and, contrary to
Benedict’s later assessment, holds bushidō to be a national ideology that embodies, as the title
suggests, the very soul of Japan.
At the time of the first edition of Nitobe’s book in 1900, Japan had just won the First
Sino-Japanese War. In the forward to the 2002 edition, George M. Oshiro writes that Bushido
became an international bestseller, thanks in part to the hospitable environment of the RussoJapanese War (1904-105).98 Oshiro cites the work of Japanese historian, Martin Collcutt, who
says that in the 1930s “Nitobe’s Bushido was read . . . by many young Japanese conscripts going
into battle.”99 So not only was it influential in the beginning of the twentieth century, but it
continued to have relevance for soldiers in the 1930s and 40s, when militarism was decidedly
more radical and more fanatical than it had been in 1905. To begin his exploration of bushidō,
Nitobe describes various schools of teaching that have played an important role in moral
education throughout Japan’s history, from imported Buddhism, to native Shintoism, to the
teachings of the Chinese philosophers Confucius, Mencius, and Wan Yang-Ming (or Ōyōmei).
97
Ravina 704.
George M. Oshiro, forward, Bushido, by Inazo Nitobe (Japan: Kodansha International Ltd., 2002) 12.
99
Oshiro 15.
98
53
However, he sets these teachings apart from bushidō. He claims that their influences on bushidō
were “few and simple”100 and that they mainly provided the intellectual environment that
allowed bushidō to grow and thrive in the violent days of feudalism. Thus, bushidō is a product
of feudalism more than anything else. Nitobe compares it to the Western concept of “chivalry”
and frequently interchanges it with “Precepts of Knighthood.” In this way, he confirms the idea
that bushidō is a moral code born of the warrior class, for the warrior class, and the virtues it
extols reflect that. He lists a number of virtues, ranging from loyalty, honor, and valor, to
benevolence, righteousness, and mercy. However, with the rise of militarism in the twentieth
century, certain virtues were highlighted, while others seemed to have gotten left by the wayside.
The virtues that are obviously associated with the warrior, as described by Nitobe, would
have to be those of rectitude (righteousness) and justice, courage, honor, and loyalty. Honor and
loyalty in particular harken back to what Ikegami described as the samurai’s “cult of honor”;
Nitobe merely took them and redefined them for the modern age, although he presents them as
timeless precepts. He describes the sense of shame (which is the inverse of honor) as “one of the
earliest to be cherished in juvenile education” and states that appealing to a delinquent child’s
sense of shame was the surest way to make him behave. “Such a recourse to his honour touched
the most sensitive spot in the child’s heart, as though it had been nursed on honour while he was
in his mother’s womb; . . .”101 In order to achieve fame or defend his honor, a samurai would
even readily lay down his life—the samurai ideal of self-willed death. Likewise, he should also
be ready to die for the sake of loyalty. Loyalty, as the Japanese conceive it, he says, “may find
few admirers elsewhere, not because our conception is wrong, but because it is, I am afraid,
100
101
Inazo Nitobe, Bushido, (Japan: Kodansha International Ltd., 2002) 44.
Nitobe 79-80.
54
forgotten, and also because we carry it to a degree not reached in any other country.”102 Here he
alludes to Japanese uniqueness. And although by his time the definition of loyalty had been
contended and transformed, as previously mentioned, to suit varying political atmospheres,
Nitobe makes no explicit mention of this, and his discussion flows seamlessly between
exemplifying loyalty to one’s master and loyalty to one’s sovereign or state. Nitobe’s thinking
is actually rather ahistorical, and he describes the state almost as a timeless construct: “Since
Bushido . . . conceived the state as antedating the individual—the latter being born into the
former as part and parcel thereof,—he must live and die for it or for the incumbent of its
legitimate authority.”103 Because bushidō and the samurai ethic of loyalty are tied to the state,
the state must necessarily be as old, even if the state was actually very new. Nitobe also says
that loyalty is connected with a warrior’s conscience, and that it is not a warrior’s duty to follow
blindly but to believe in what he is fighting for, otherwise it is not true loyalty. “Bushido did not
require us to make our conscience the slave of any lord or king.”104 History shows that the idea
of conscience in the 1930s and 40s would become increasingly muddied with the tidal wave of
militarist indoctrination and nationalist frenzy that swept the country. Nitobe also expounds
upon other, lesser known virtues in bushidō that would seem to have suffered the same fate as
conscience in the fascist era. These virtues were benevolence, politeness, veracity and sincerity.
These virtues, namely benevolence, seem to have been glossed over in the rhetoric of the
twentieth century, while other virtues of bushidō, the ones that were more useful for militarism,
were emphasized. “Benevolence to the weak, the downtrodden, or the vanquished, was ever
extolled as particularly becoming to a samurai.”105 In speaking of politeness, Nitobe also
102
Nitobe 86.
Nitobe 89.
104
Nitobe 91.
105
Nitobe 60.
103
55
describes the samurai’s capacity for sympathy. “Its requirement is that we should weep with
those that weep and rejoice with those that rejoice.”106 Something else to consider is that Nitobe
was a Christian convert, and there may have been some ideological bleed between his religion
and his ideas about bushidō, or he may have been attempting to make them more compatible to
one another. The point remains that Nitobe’s version of bushidō displayed a duality of
militaristic virtues, as well as virtues of mercy and benevolence. These, too, were part of honor.
These kinds of ideas also made bushidō more amenable to everyday people, not just to the
warriors, and fortified Nitobe’s assertion that bushidō was not just a warrior code of ethics but a
national ideology. Near the end of his treatise, Nitobe actually (ironically, considering his
subject was originally a warrior code) advocates for peace, and says that even though military
governments are not meant to last, the spirit of bushidō will always endure. Samurai values will
live on in the hearts of the Japanese people. Even as the need for warriors fades, the warrior’s
virtues will remain, intrinsic to the Japanese people. In Nitobe’s own words: “Scratch a Japanese
of the most advanced ideas, and he will show a samurai.”107
Nitobe’s idealistic interpretation of bushidō was certainly powerful, as idealism tends to
be, and helped transform what was once a code of ethics for samurai elite into a cultural heritage
for all Japanese people. With a touch of dry humor, Friday says that “had they not been
cremated, Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Daidóji Yúzan, Yamaga Sokó, and other early modern figures
who wrote about the idea of a code of conduct for samurai would probably have rolled over in
their graves when they heard this.” These men and others like them, despite their differences,
shared the idea that bushidō was a code of ethics meant to distinguish samurai from the rabble.
106
107
Nitobe 69.
Nitobe 152.
56
“The idea that bushidó values were simply Japanese values would have appalled them.”108 The
Meiji-era view of bushidō was a product of writers like Nitobe, and it emerged necessarily in
response to the fact that the role of the warrior had changed. Bushidō was adapted for a new era
the same way it had been adapted by the likes of Yamamoto Tsunetomo and Yamaga Sokō in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to conform to the transformed position of the samurai in
early Tokugawa society. By the Meiji period, the samurai class may have been abolished, but
the samurai tradition lived on in the modernized warrior. Because the imperial army was formed
by conscripting men from the common class, it was necessary for bushidō to be relatable to the
common man; not just to an elite, but to the masses—to the nation. And although Nitobe and
other writers liked to spin it as a set of general Japanese values, at the end of the day it was still
“a martial doctrine,” evidenced by the way it gained in popularity at the same time as Japan
emerged victorious from the Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895) and then again from the RussoJapanese War (1904-1905).
As Ravina writes, “Both events focused attention on the military as
an emblem of Japanese national pride and accomplishment.” Ironically, but somewhat
unsurprisingly, Japan’s “success in modern warfare” created a resurgence of interest in
traditional martial arts techniques.109 Cultivating bushidō became important especially in light of
the belief that Japan had triumphed over Russia, in part, due to a superiority of spirit. There
came to be a belief that a superior fighting spirit could compensate for a shortage of material
resources and manpower, an idea that was reminiscent of the story of Kusunoki Masashige, who
cautioned his men not to become overconfident if their enemy had a smaller force, since it was
fighting spirit that would determine the outcome. It was an idea that would propel Japan forward
into an era of militarism and, ultimately, fascism. Early on, this emphasis on “spiritual
108
109
Friday OL.
Ravina 705.
57
ascendency” brought to the military’s attention a glaring issue: that conscripts from urbanized
areas were “morally suspect” compared to their rural counterparts, largely because they were
“better educated and thus less malleable” due to the nationwide educational system. The
solution was that “the army had to become ‘the school of the people’ and shape the character of
the Japanese populace.”110 In other words, there needed to be widespread indoctrination of the
urban and rural citizenry by the military. Though there were installed new institutions, such as
the Imperial Military Reserve Association (Teikoku zaigo gunjinkai), the susceptibleness to
militarism that had been stirred up by the successful war efforts around the turn of the century
gradually died down, and laid dormant beneath the turning wheels of liberalism and partisan
politics that dominated for a short while in the era of the so-called Taishō Democracy.
The Meiji period drew to a close in 1912 not only with the death of Emperor Meiji, but
also with the self-willed death of General Nogi Maresuke, who committed seppuku following the
emperor’s passing. Nothing could emblematize the development of modern bushidō more than
this act of junshi. While it might seem anachronistic, it actually showed how militarists had
come to reconstruct bushidō in the modern era, with the emperor now situated in the place that
was, during the feudal period, occupied by one’s lord. It also showed how ideas of an honorable
death had endured, even after acts of junshi had been outlawed during the Tokugawa period.
Rather than a relic of a medieval past, bushidō was still very much a living tradition, and its
tenets of loyalty, bravery, and an honorable death would continue to have a formative effect on
military ideology in the years to come.
110
Ravina705.
58
The Rise of Militarism
The Taishō period (1912-1926) was a liberal interwar period marked by the rise of party
politics. Two main contributors of the time were Hara Kei (1856-1921), a politician who
majorly impacted the ascendency of party politics, and Minobe Tatsukichi (1873-1948), a
prominent constitutional theorist who coined the “emperor-organ theory.” Hara Kei sought to
define “loyal action” to mean “partisan action,” and though there were those who didn’t agree,
the government became increasingly factionalized until there were two discernible sides: Hara’s
Seiyūkai party and the “anti-Seiyūkai,” which represented various rival coalitions at different
times against the Seiyūkai. Minobe Tatsukichi was an important scholar and professor of law at
Tokyo University, who, like Hara Kei, supported the idea of representative bodies and party
politics.111 In 1912 he published a paper that coined the “emperor-organ theory,” that is, a
doctrine which asserts that the “State,” or kokutai, is the supreme political body and the emperor
is only an organ of the state, rather than an entity outside of it.112 In 1918, Hara Kei became the
first man from a “common” background to be elected Prime Minister, and as party and
parliamentary politics advanced within the constitutional framework, it seemed that the country
was developing along the trajectory expected of modern nations. The development was violently
disrupted, however, in 1921 when Hara Kei was assassinated by an ultra-rightest. This event led
to a backlash against competitive partisan politics that had been brewing all the while in other
parts of the government, “among bureaucrats, the military, and intellectual leadership.” These
groups had seen the surge of political parties and private interest groups as “an indefensible
luxury” for a newly formed nation that was still struggling with its cultural autonomy, “reflective
111
Najita 107-109.
Takashi Tachibana, “The Aftermath of the Emperor-Organ Incident: The Tōdai Faculty of Law 天皇機関説事件
の余波ー東大法学部,” The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, Trans. Richard M. Minear, Vol. 11, Issue 9, No. 1,
30 Mar. 2013, 4 Mar. 2013 (http://www.japanfocus.org/-richard-minear/3904)
112
59
of a crass insensitivity to the wishes and needs of the people.”113 This backlash gave rise to
popular nationalism, similar to the popular rights movement in Meiji. Nationalist thought in the
Taishō era was characterized by terms such as “Japanism” (日本主義, nihonshugi), “people-ism”
(民族主義, minzokushugi), and “national essentialism” (国粋主義, kokusuishugi), and activists
criticized the “apparently mindless adulation of Western ideas and goods.”114 They saw the
nation, the government, and the emperor as institutions that belonged to the people, individuals
who were all endowed with the natural capacity (or liberty) to contribute their loyal service and
creative energies. Popular nationalists saw the Meiji Restoration as an abortive attempt at
creating the Japanese state, and they initiated the Shōwa Restoration as a means of setting the
nation, which had gone astray in recent years, back on the correct path. They harkened back to
Tokugawa-era idealism, found in Ōyōmei thought, and recalled such figures as Ōshio
Heichachirō and Saigō Takamori as symbols of loyal and rebellious action. In many ways, it
was as if the spirit of the samurai from the end of the Tokugawa period was rising again.
Integral to the popular nationalists’ debate was, as always, the imperial institution; “the emperor
was redefined from a distant religious figure to a popular institution, a constant spiritual presence
accessible to and, indeed, spiritually coincidental with everyone.”115 There was a desire
throughout the movement to “return to Asia,” in which a rejection of Western influence was
implicit, and which provided the foundations for Japan’s expansionist policy in the 30s and 40s.
All in all, the popular nationalist movement was a rejection of Japan’s so-called modernity,
which activists viewed as degrading to the people and wholly unsuccessful. This gave rise to
113
Najita 114.
Najita 115.
115
Najita 117.
114
60
militant protest against the legal system and swiftly transformed into a new restorationist
movement called the Shōwa Restoration.
Like the Meiji Restoration, the Shōwa Restoration was preceded by a marked increase in
violent acts of terror against political opponents—that is, liberal-minded non-militarists—and a
resurgence of militarism. The military, unchecked by civil government and seemingly under the
auspices of the emperor, ascended to a position of power in the government and in society. It
was, in essence, the second instance of samurai revivalism. After years of formulating modern
bushidō concurrently with kokutai, loyalty to the state and to the emperor had become
inextricably linked with the idea of honor. As in the early feudal period, honor had a
legitimizing effect on the actions of the militarists in the twentieth century. Not only that, but
since bushidō had been established as a national ideology with a long historical tradition, the
military and military-minded were already in a position to command respect. As Najita writes,
radical restorationists “could not easily be treated with impunity, it being public knowledge that
their loyalty to the emperor and nation was impeccable and that military men ensconced in high
positions within the established order itself shared some of their discontents.”116 The
international situation also spurred on the desire for restoration and support for military action:
there was the recent World War I and planning for the future possibility of total war; the belief in
an impending conflict with the West; discriminatory actions of the U.S. against Japanese
immigrants; and the expansion of Soviet influence on the Asian continent, particularly into China.
The rising tensions and insecurities that surrounded these events provided a suitable atmosphere
for the ascendency of militarism in Japan, and there arose two distinct militarist factions: the
Imperial Way Faction (皇道派, Kōdōha) and the Control Faction (統制派, Tōseiha). Members
116
Najita 127.
61
of the Imperial Way Faction were diehards with a belief in “self-sacrifice against insurmountable
opposition, against the powerful establishment itself; in short, to stand for one’s belief unto
death.”117 Militantly nationalist, grounded in religiosity and tradition, they resorted to acts of
violence and terror during the early 1930s in a way that was highly reminiscent of the shishi
terrorists prior to the Meiji Restoration. They cut down a number of important leaders in the
governmental elite, such as Hamaguchi Yuko and Inoue Junnosuke (November 2, 1930); Inukai
Tsuyoshi (May 15, 1932); and Saito Makoto and Takahashi Korekiyo in the February 26
Incident of 1936, which was the culmination of violence committed by the Imperial Way Faction.
In his article, “Japan, the United States, and the Road to World War II in the Pacific,”
Richard J. Smethurst focuses specifically on Takahashi Korekiyo, who was a financial minister
and then Prime Minister of Japan opposed to militarism. As Smethurst points out, when
reflecting on Japan’s road to war in the early twentieth century, not much attention is usually
paid to the dissenting voices, those who spoke out against the country’s increasing militarism.
That may well because there were few who did speak out against it, mostly because those who
did met with violence and assassination; the rest defected to the other side, or kept silent. Until
his death, Takahashi bravely propagated his views, and for the most part would not be cowed
(which is especially remarkable considering he had risen to the position of Prime Minister after
Hara Kei’s assassination in 1921). Smethurst writes, “Takahashi in 1931-1936 had fought the
military constantly: at budget-making time and in between, because he thought that the military’s
quest for political autonomy and economic autarky courted disaster.”118 Remaining outside the
nationalistic and propagandistic bubble, he scoffed at the military leaders who believed that
Japan could defeat the United States in a war. Takahashi knew that Japan relied heavily on
117
Najita 129.
Richard J. Smethurst, “Japan, the United States, and the Road to World War II in the Pacific,” The Asia-Pacific
Journal, Vol 10, Issue 37, No. 4, 10 Sep. 2012, 19 Sep. 2012 (http://japanfocus.org/-Richard_J_-Smethurst/3825)
118
62
money and resources from America and Britain, and that to make enemies out of them would be
suicide; he strongly advocated a policy of cooperation with the Western powers. His views
succeeded for a short time, thanks to the prevailing antiwar sentiments of the 1920s, but beneath
a veneer of cooperation a larger storm was brewing. The true intentions of the militarists became
evident in September of 1931 with the invasion of Manchuria, which had been devised and
executed by military officials and was widely lauded at home. Smethurst describes the causes of
the positive public response in terms of “latent nationalism, resentment over America’s treatment
of Japanese immigrants, the increasingly unified British and American resistance to Japanese
actions in China, and the suffering of many Japanese during the depression[.]”119 The
combination of foreign pressures and shifting internal sentiment created an atmosphere largely
hostile to figures like Takahashi, who remained steadfastly opposed to the rising militarism.
Aside from Korekiyo and the previously mentioned leaders who fell victim to assassination,
countless others were harassed and threatened by the militarists. There was backlash against
intellectuals such as Minobe Tatsukichi, who was denounced in 1935-1936 for his “emperororgan theory.” Not only was he denounced in the public eye by journalists, in particular by the
highly conservative editor Minoda Muneki (1894-1946),120 but he was also torn down in the
house of peers,121 which showed how deeply militarist right-wing, anti-intellectual sentiment had
penetrated. Minobe was one among a group of anti-militarist professors at Tokyo University
who were criticized for their “anti-kokutai” attitudes. In Minoda’s journal, Genri Nihon, he
constantly named those professors and condemned them as “enemies of the state.” Just five days
before the February 26 Incident, on February 21, 1936, Minobe was physically attacked by rightwingers who shot him in his own home (fortunately, he was taken to the hospital and survived).
119
Smethurst OL.
Takashi OL.
121
Najita 113.
120
63
During the February 26 Incident, the police, unable to guarantee the safety of the Tokyo
University professors, warned them to hide. “Even the police were worried about the safety of
the professors, so at this time people knew you couldn’t get away with spouting anti-rightist,
anti-military words. So even though the [February 26] incident happened, everyone kept
silent.”122 Eventually, as part of educational reform, Minobe’s books were banned and the
emperor-organ theory was stricken from university courses on constitutional law. There was one,
Kawai Eijiro, an outspoken anti-rightest in the Tokyo University Faculty of Law, who didn’t
keep silent and, furthermore, criticized those who did. He wrote of the intellectual class, “how
powerless we are in the face of this violence! But in this sense of powerlessness lurks a
dangerous psychology of praising violence. This is the hotbed that breeds fascism.”123 Kawai
anticipated the path that Japanese history would take in the subsequent years, as militarist
influence and nationalist frenzy consumed the nation.
The success of militarism could not be attributed entirely to violent and terroristic groups
like the Imperial Way Faction. There was another, the Control Faction, led by General Nagata
Tetsuzan (1884-1935), that ultimately came into power. They rejected terrorist plots and opted
instead for a more pragmatic and subterranean approach that involved “the manipulation of
political institutions and formation of convenient alliances with expansion-minded industrialists
and bureaucratic factions, known variously as ‘new bureaucrats’ and ‘reform bureaucrats,’” so
that they might “achieve the ultimate end of a total national mobilization under the aegis of the
military.”124 These methods proved to be highly efficient. Nagata was assassinated on August
14, 1935, by another military activist, Aizawa Saburō, who didn’t agree with the more pragmatic
methods of the Control Faction (he killed Nagata by stabbing him with a sword, which illustrates
122
Takashi OL.
Qtd. in Takashi OL.
124
Najita 134.
123
64
the assassin’s traditional ideals about the warrior spirit). But Nagata’s death did little to stem the
growth of his ideas, which had already gained traction and were progressing to preeminence. A
notable follower of the Control Faction was Tōjō Hideki, Imperial Army general and Prime
Minister of Japan for most of World War II. The Control Faction lacked the religious fanaticism
of the Imperial Way Faction, and asked only for an “uncomplicated patriotic loyalty to the
Japanese nation.” They achieved success because their actions bore an appearance of being legal,
and they were able to infiltrate the constitutional framework and redefine it to suit their
purposes.125 Militarist doctrine thus pervaded the nation, even down to the middle school level.
An article from Asahi Shinbun, translated and adapted by Adam Lebowitz, shows the state of
education in the 1930s and 40s with the aid of photographs. The article mentions educational
reform that aimed at imbuing children with wartime ideology, in order to “polish and perfect
(rensei) the individual’s sense of national duty.” They attempted this by adapting curriculums to
include martial arts training, drilling, recitations, and ritual displays of fealty to the emperor.
Significantly, the author writes, “Playtime was senso-gokko, ‘make-believe warfare’, such as
making toy guns and engaging in battles. Children’s magazines dedicated themselves to the
promotion of militaristic mentality through articles celebrating the military and pictorials of
tanks, battleships, and other weapons.” Ando Mineo, speaking in 2007 at the age of 81, was a
student during the war, and he recalls, “There was pride that, although we were not real soldiers,
we were the youngest members of the Imperial Army.” When Japan began to militarize in the
1930s, previously closed military training schools were reopened, and the one in Osaka was
relocated to the former residence of Kusunoki Masashige. By this time, Kusunoki, like many
legendary samurai heroes, was being remembered and revered as an icon of the warrior spirit.
Kusunoki, especially, “epitomized the highest standards of fealty” for his loyalty to Emperor Go125
Najita 135.
65
Daigo in the struggle against the Kamakura bakufu, as well as for his honorable death by
committing seppuku in battle. These schools aimed at “cultivating the warrior spirit,” that is,
inculcating the tenets of modern bushidō in their modernized samurai warriors. Students were
even trained in how to use the obviously obsolete katana, the sword that had come to symbolize
the samurai by the Tokugawa period.126 There were also reports of imperial soldiers who used
swords to behead Chinese captives, such as that of the two Japanese soldiers in Nanjing who had
a competition to see who could be the first to behead one hundred Chinese soldiers.127 The
symbol of the samurai had become a tool used to terrorize the Chinese prisoners of war. This
anachronistic nod to the samurai made clear the way in which the samurai had been integrated
into the modern imagination by the time of World War II, and the way in which bushidō had not
only come to represent a code of ethics, but also a military ideology and a national symbol.
Modern bushidō had come to mean loyalty, self-sacrifice, and the Japanese spirit. This was the
kind of bushidō that caused Benedict to denounce the ideology and Friday to reject its close
relation to medieval warrior ethos. This was the bushidō that emphasized fearlessness before
death, drawing on the samurai institution of seppuku and the ideal of laying down one’s life on
the battlefield in the service of the emperor.
Evidence of how far the role of the samurai had changed, while still deriving legitimation
from a transcendental pseudo-historical link with medieval warrior predecessors, can be found in
the Kokutai no Hongi (國體の本義, “Cardinal Principles of the National Essence”). Published
on March 30, 1937, the Kokutai no Hongi sought to define, as the title suggests, the underlying
principles of the Japanese national essence and was used as a political and ideological tool by
126
“‘Little Citizens’ and ‘Star Pupils’: Military Middle Schools in Wartime Japan,” The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan
Focus, Trans. Adam Lebowitz, 13 Oct. 2007, 03 Feb. 2013 (http://www.japanfocus.org/-Adam-Lebowitz/2545)
127
Chris Hogg, “Victory for Japan's War Critics,” BBC News, 23 Aug. 2005 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asiapacific/4176272.stm)
66
Shōwa-era militarists. In his editor’s introduction to the text, Robert King Hall says that in
postwar thinking, parallels were inevitably drawn between the Kokutai no Hongi and Adolf
Hitler’s Mein Kampf, but the two were actually very different. The Kokutai no Hongi comprised
official national policy and ideology, while Mein Kampf detailed the personal philosophies of its
author. By Hall’s reckoning, the philosophies of Mein Kampf that mythologized the origins of
German culture were never fully internalized: “Few, if any, of [Hitler’s] more important
followers paid more than perfunctory lip service to this mythology.”128 On the other hand, the
philosophies of the Kokutai no Hongi, which proclaimed the sanctity of the nation’s origins,
cultural essence, and imperial institution, were genuinely accepted by the majority of the
Japanese people, including, to some extent, the authors of militarist propaganda themselves. The
Kokutai no Hongi, in the manner of proper propaganda, was widely distributed among schools
and universities, both public and private, and the sales figures from the start of publication until
1943 reach into the millions (1,900,000, according to Hall). “Teaching staffs were compelled to
form self-study groups to read and discuss the material contained in the Kokutai no Hongi. It
was constantly referred to in public speeches and was quoted in the ceremonies of national
holidays and school assemblies.”129 Included in its messages about national essence was a
section on bushidō, which not only illustrates how bushidō had been thoroughly integrated into
the Japanese national identity, but also how the imperial soldier was viewed as an embodiment of
samurai virtues.
The Kokutai no Hongi seems to draw on Nitobe when it describes bushidō as “an
outstanding characteristic of our national morality,” reiterating the idea that bushidō had evolved
from a code of ethics for elite samurai into a moral code for the whole nation. Just as Nitobe
128
Robert King Hall, editor’s introduction, Kokutai No Hongi: Cardinal Principles of the National Entity of Japan,
trans. by John Owen Gauntlett (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1949) 8.
129
Hall 10-11.
67
described bushidō as separate from other philosophies (significantly non-Japanese in origin),
such as Buddhism and Confucianism, the Kokutai no Hongi also describes bushidō as
transcending these other philosophies and signifying a way of thinking that is uniquely Japanese.
It emphasizes the “indebtedness” of servants to their masters, that is, the profound sense of duty
that the Japanese feel towards their hierarchical superiors, especially towards the supreme
authority, the emperor; and also the “spirit of self-effacement and of meeting death with a perfect
calmness.”130 Willingness to die, in a way reminiscent of Yamamoto Tsunetomo, is praised as a
virtue, while by the same token an aversion to death in favor of life is condemned as selfish and a
source of disgrace for warriors. Unlike in the Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors, which
sought to dissociate military values from the medieval samurai, the same values as they appear in
the Kokutai no Hongi are validated precisely by evoking the feudal past and promoting a view of
the Japanese warrior tradition as part of an unbroken chain of history. The Kokutai no Hongi
also cites Tokugawa-era samurai, such as Yamaga Sokō and Yoshida Shōin, who “perfected”
bushidō by stripping it of its medieval trappings. “It is this same Bushidō that shed itself of the
outdated feudalism at the time of the Meiji Restoration, increased in splendor, became the Way
of loyalty and patriotism, and has evolved before us as the spirit of the Imperial Forces.”131
In this way, the Kokutai no Hongi neatly represents the evolution of the warrior tradition
in Japan from the feudal times into the twentieth century; or rather, how this evolution was
imagined by the Japanese in the wartime era. It is has been thoroughly shown that modern
bushidō was a departure, in many ways, from the medieval honor code in which it supposedly
had its origins. But this fact is less important for a discussion of the imperial soldier than
130
John Owen Gauntlett, trans, Kokutai No Hongi: Cardinal Principles of the National Entity of Japan, ed. Robert
K. Hall (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1949) 145.
131
Gauntlett 145-146.
68
looking at just how bushidō, as constructed by modern writers and thinkers from Meiji to Shōwa,
impacted the actions of the Japanese fighting men in World War II.
The Manifestation of Bushidō in the Imperial Soldier
Perhaps what startled and bewildered Western, in particular American, troops the most
about the Japanese soldiers was their readiness and willingness to lay down their lives. If a
Japanese soldier found himself compromised, a common response was to kill himself, especially
if he could take some of the enemy with him. Stories of the kamikaze pilots and their suicidal
missions have achieved worldwide renown. To a Westerner, such willful self-sacrifice seemed
astounding, at once impressive and appalling, but in the Japanese imagination it seemed a matter
of course, especially during the fascist era when showing obeisance to the emperor was indicated
as the highest measure of virtue. Ruth Benedict viewed suicide as a means of clearing one’s
name to be a larger trend in general Japanese society, but the fact remained that soldiers
necessarily had to be ready to make the ultimate sacrifice for sovereign and country. Not only
was it an integral part of modern bushidō, but soldiers were also compelled to die before
surrender due to the no-surrender policy. In a hopeless situation, imperial soldiers would engage
in a mass suicide attack or else commit suicide by their own hand. It could be argued that the
aversion to surrender was a legacy of older samurai traditions and can be found in the stories of
the legendary samurai, but as Karl Friday points out, the circumstances that medieval samurai
faced in the case of defeat were significantly different, perhaps too different to draw a parallel.
Death was also a popular theme for Tokugawa-era samurai, such as Yamamoto Tsunetomo, who
wrote in Hagakure, “The way of the warrior, I’ve found, is to die. In a situation with a choice,
69
you can only choose at once to die.”132 His views, extremist though they may have been, were
often extolled by imperial army leaders and had an impact on the imperial soldiers’ ideas about
honorable death. Fearlessness before death was also commended in the Rescript to Soldiers and
Sailors, which told its readers to “bear in mind that duty is weightier than a mountain, while
death is lighter than a feather.”133 So to say that the readiness of imperial soldiers to commit
suicide and to accept death before surrender has nothing to do with bushidō would be a false
statement; at the very least, it was rooted in modern bushidō. The no-surrender policy, too, was
derived from the dual idea of shame in surrender and honor in death. The great irony of it was
that, due to the Third Geneva Convention of 1929 that outlined the parameters for humanitarian
protection of war prisoners, Japanese soldiers who were taken prisoner were often treated better
in Allied prisons than they were in their own military camps. Significantly, Japan did not sign
the treaty. Whether or not they were treated better hardly made a difference, however, when
soldiers feared the stigma associated with capture upon returning home, if they made it home.
“Honor was bound up with fighting to the death. . . . Even if he were taken prisoner when he was
wounded and unconscious, he ‘could not hold up his head in Japan’ again; he was disgraced; he
was ‘dead’ to his former life.”134 Thus was duty “weightier than a mountain” and death “lighter
than a feather.” Benedict provides some staggering statistics to show the effect of this
indoctrination: in the North Burma campaign, there were 142 Japanese soldiers captured and
17,166 dead, which narrows down to a ratio of 1:120. Furthermore, most of the captured soldiers
had been wounded or unconscious and unable to resist. Even in a case where a significant
number of Japanese soldiers surrendered, the ratio was still 1:5, compared to Western armies
132
Sato 287.
Tiedemann 110.
134
Benedict 38.
133
70
among which surrenders to deaths were generally 4:1.135 Another effect of this indoctrination
was that Japanese soldiers held in contempt the Allied soldiers that became their prisoners. In
Japanese eyes, American prisoners of war “were disgraced by the mere fact of surrender”; they
had “suffered ignominy and it was bitter to [the Japanese] that the Americans did not know it.”136
In the Western imagination, this kind of stalwart resistance to surrender seems fanatical and
some might even call it insane, even in war’s extenuating circumstances, but “[t]he shame of
surrender was burned deeply into the consciousness of the Japanese.”137 Loyalty unto death and
the shame of surrender may have been virtues derived from bushidō, but the forms they took
during World War II were extreme; they were repackaged and presented in a way that suited the
militarists’ agenda. In the fascist era, self-sacrifice became a supreme expression of loyalty to
the nation and to the emperor, which meant also to one’s family and oneself. It was also a
supreme manifestation of the Japanese spirit.
The Japanese spirit, as described by Benedict, was really the fuel for the militarist
machine. By harnessing this spirit, the Japanese believed they could achieve anything, such as
expelling Westerners from Asia (a ghost of Meiji past) and uniting the nations into one Greater
East Asia. No imperial cause can stay afloat without a mission, and this was Japan’s. Having
burgeoned into an industrial and military power, arguably the strongest nation in East Asia at the
time, Japan felt that its duty was to “raise [its] backward younger brother China.” Thus equipped
with purpose, militarist propaganda preached that the Japanese only needed the strength of spirit
to realize said purpose. Benedict qualifies that it is not as though the Japanese were completely
unconscious of the materiality of war; they just viewed materiality differently from Western
nations. Material armament was important, but “ships and guns were just the outward show of
135
Benedict 38-39.
Benedict 39.
137
Benedict 39-40.
136
71
the undying Japanese Spirit. They were symbols much as the sword of the samurai had been a
symbol of his virtue.”138 Japan believed that superior spirit, not superior resources, would win
the war, and it was at this target that the propaganda largely aimed. Just as the will could
overcome the “infinitely teachable body,” the spirit could make up for material shortcomings.
Even if they were lacking in resources, if they displayed the Japanese spirit and stuck it out until
the end, they would ultimately triumph. This also helps to explain why Japanese soldiers were
such bitter-enders. The kamikaze pilots “who flew their midget planes in a suicidal crash into
our warships” were the perfect example of “an endless text for the superiority of the spiritual
over the material.”139 Matter was transient, the spirit everlasting; death was lighter than a feather,
duty weightier than a mountain; the tangible was fleeting, the intangible undying. This theme
echoed throughout the militarists’ rhetoric. Herein laid the source of fanaticism; this was the
essence of the religiosity that tinged national sentiment. The swelling tide of militarism drowned
out, through assassinations and scare tactics, the voices of anti-war protestors and pragmatists
who prophesied that Japan was going down a dangerous road. There were those such as
Takahashi Korekiyo who warned that should Japan make enemies out of the Western nations,
they would be doomed to fail. Despite Japan’s legitimate grievances with the West, war with
China and the United States just was not feasible. In 1937, China had seven times the population
of Japan, while the U.S. had five times the GNP and nine times the manufacturing output.
Furthermore, the U.S. had better technology and more access to raw materials. In short, “Japan
undertook wars in China and against the United States that it could not win.”140 Yet, with the
belief in the Japanese spirit, soldiers and civilians alike found the strength to carry on even as
their situation in the war grew increasingly desperate, and it was not until the devastation rained
138
Benedict 21, 23.
Benedict 24.
140
Smethurst OL.
139
72
down by the atomic bombs that they finally surrendered. Part of it arose from the pressure that
“‘the eyes of the world were upon them.’ Therefore they must show the full spirit of Japan.”141
There was a need to prove themselves and stand up to the Western powers, in particular Britain
and the U.S. Benedict cites the statement of General Araki Sadao which read that Japan’s “true
mission” was “to spread and glorify the Imperial way to the end of the Four Seas. Inadequacy of
strength is not our worry. Why should we worry about that which is material?”142 Of course,
Benedict follows up by clarifying that Japan did worry, like any nation preparing for war, and
that they increasingly devoted their national income to build up the military and the navy. Yet as
they mobilized the nation for a war that they ultimately could not win, they continually professed
the power of the Japanese spirit and claimed that their soldiers could fight even if they were
armed with nothing but bamboo spears.143 It was a fearsome mentality, to be sure, which was
not to be taken lightly, just as Kusunoki Masashige cautioned his troops in the Taiheiki.
Ultimately, however, even the tireless Japanese spirit broke, nor could the pillars of bushidō hold
them up beneath the devastation of the atomic bombs, and on August 15, 1945, the emperor
announced the surrender of the Empire of Japan.
141
Benedict 28.
Qtd. in Benedict 22-23.
143
Benedict references this wartime adage about fighting with “bamboo spears” at various points throughout her
book, such as on page 26 and again on 131. The phrase came to symbolize the Japan’s fighting spirit, harkening
back to the samurai.
142
73
Conclusion
Japan’s Incomplete Defeat
Once the emperor decreed the surrender, the war for Japan officially ceased. Americans
were surprised at the apparent ease with which the Japanese gave up the fight. Both Ruth
Benedict in Chrysanthemum and John Dower in Embracing Defeat describe the apparent ease
with which the Japanese initially accepted the Americans; where the Americans expected “a
traumatic confrontation with fanatical emperor worshippers” upon arrival, they were instead
greeted by “women who called ‘yoo hoo’ to the first troops landing on the beaches in full battle
gear, and men who bowed and asked what it was the conquerors wished.”144 Benedict explains
that this surprising response was not actually all that surprising when one considers that, to the
Japanese, the emperor’s word was absolute. When he declared surrender, naturally the Japanese
embraced it wholeheartedly, and thus were able to welcome the Americans. Dower, however,
offers a more insightful and convincing explanation: the Japanese acceptance of surrender, to the
extent that they accepted it, had more to do with war exhaustion and disillusionment than with
fealty to the emperor. There were also those who opposed surrender despite the emperor’s
wishes, mostly military officers and their supporters, from whom the emperor and his aides had
to hide the declaration of surrender prior to its broadcast. Even after it was successfully
delivered, the emperor feared upheaval from the Japanese people—the emperor himself doubted
the tenet of absolute loyalty in which Benedict placed so much stock. But no attempts at
resisting or reversing the surrender ever came to fruition, a fact that in itself illustrates the
variegation of Japanese responses to defeat. Sorrowful Japanese, burdened by a sense of having
failed the emperor, kneeled in the Tokyo ruins before the imperial palace, an image which came
144
John Dower, Embracing Defeat, (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1999) 24.
74
to define the Japanese reaction to capitulation. In fact, this was not the most common response;
others included “anguish, regret, bereavement, anger at having been deceived, sudden emptiness
and loss of purpose,” as well as relief.145 Some soldiers committed suicide, while the majority
displayed a surprising amount of self-serving pragmatism and returned home, only to receive a
cold and at times hateful welcome, not unlike what the American Vietnam War veterans would
experience thirty years later. Essentially, the Japanese response to surrender cannot be
characterized in so few terms as used by Ruth Benedict. In fact, there was no one “response,”
but rather a spectrum of responses that ranged from anger and opposition to relief that the
horrendous war was finally over.
Following the surrender, the question became what to do with the emperor and other
leaders, and what the nature of the occupation would be. There were already the examples of
Germany and Italy from which to draw, but the Japanese occupation would go in a decidedly
different direction. The sixth point in the Potsdam Proclamation of 1945 (also known as the
Proclamation Defining Terms for Japanese Surrender) read: “There must be eliminated for all
time the authority and influence of those who have deceived and misled the people of Japan into
embarking on world conquest, for we insist that a new order of peace, security and justice will be
impossible until irresponsible militarism is driven from the world.” And yet, the reality of it was
that much of the Japanese government was left intact by the U.S. occupation forces. The U.S.
had a vested interest in Japan and they decided that using the existing administration would be
more helpful for meeting their own ends. A statement from U.S. General Hilldring went: “By
cleaning up and using the Japanese Government machinery as a tool we are saving our time and
our manpower and our resources. In other words, we are requiring the Japanese to do their own
145
Dower 39.
75
house-cleaning, but we are providing the specifications.”146 Thus, the imperial structure was left
alone; the emperor had to renounce his godhood, but otherwise remained untouched. According
to Benedict, retaining the emperor, as well as other Japanese officials, had been a good move on
the part of the U.S. As General Hilldring also stated, retaining the Japanese governmental
machines was helpful for the U.S. in a country where the language and the customs were
markedly different from their own. “General MacArthur’s administration of Japan [was],
therefore, quite unlike that of Germany or Italy.”147 However, other sources indicate that this
handling was far from wise or adept on the part of the Americans. It is true that it facilitated the
ease with which the Americans were able to control the country, but there were other, farther
reaching ramifications that Benedict glossed over in the final chapter of her study. It could have
been that she was merely limited by the scope of the time in which she was writing, or that her
opinion was colored by bias for the U.S. government; whatever the case, the consequences of
Japan’s incomplete defeat warrant further consideration.
Although the Japanese may have welcomed the Americans during the occupation with
courtesy and generosity, it does not mean that they did so without any “psychic violence to
themselves,” as Benedict suggests, or that the nationalist and militarist factions had been
completely stamped out. On the contrary, the American occupation, in some ways, enabled the
continuation of these factions and laid the foundations for the historical amnesia with which
Japan still struggles today. One of the major failings of the occupation was that the Asian
nations that suffered under Japanese imperialism were given no role; “[t]hey became invisible,”
and “the crimes that had been committed against Asian peoples through colonization as well as
146
147
Qtd. in Benedict 299
Benedict 298.
76
war were all the more easily put out of mind.”148 Unlike Germany, Japan did not suffer a total
defeat. In Germany, Nazism is illegal and patriotism is almost a taboo. Historical memory
concerning World War II and the Holocaust is exhaustively taught and discussed in schools, and
there are numerous Holocaust and WWII memorials in Berlin and in other places in the country.
Because of Germany’s successful reconciliation with the past, its relations with nations that
suffered under Nazism have stabilized once again, the tensions mostly, if not entirely dissolved.
Japan, on the other hand, underwent a process unlike that of Germany and Italy after their
surrender. Japan’s defeat was devastating, but not as total, and administrative and ideological
overhauls were largely left in the hands of the extant government. For this reason they retained
much of their wartime administration, most importantly the emperor, and while Benedict viewed
this as a positive, it had the unintended consequence of allowing an underlying current of war-era
nationalism, which was closely tied to the imperial institution, to endure. In order to use the
emperor, the American occupiers had to absolve him of war responsibility. Dower aptly
expresses why, exactly, this was problematic when he poses the question: “If the man in whose
name imperial Japan had conducted foreign and military policy for twenty years was not held
accountable for the initiation or conduct of the war, why should anyone expect ordinary people
to dwell on such matters, or to think seriously about their own personal responsibility?”149 Najita
addresses similar concerns in the final chapter of his book, stating quite plainly that the postwar
political changes were not “extensive enough” and that “reform has been reduced to mechanical
distributions of wealth and power among narrow interest elites and has not been focused on the
real human needs of society.”150 Thirty years after the war, Japan was still grappling with
democratic political ideology; from a Western standpoint, it would have appeared that Japan had
148
Dower 27.
Dower 28.
150
Najita 146.
149
77
democratic political structures firmly in place, but beneath it the ideals of modern democracy, at
least from Najita’s point of view, had not yet been achieved. Evidence of this struggle arose in
figures such as Mishima Yukio (1925-1970), a radical rightwing novelist who longed for “the
revival of traditional radicalism” and, like his militarist predecessors, exalted historical figures
like Ōshio Heichachirō as reminders of revolution and rebellious loyalism. Mishima’s story ends,
unsurprisingly, with a ritual suicide on November 25, 1970. Further evidence can be found in
the tensions that remain between Japan, China, and Korea, in ongoing debates over historical
memory and responsibility and in still existing nationalist rhetoric in politics by conservative
leaders. Another area where worrisome nationalist ideals shine through is in popular media, such
as manga and anime. Due to its seemingly nonserious nature, some people might write off
popular media as having little or nothing to do with serious sociopolitical thinking. In fact,
popular media is sometimes the best way to analyze a nation’s sociopolitical trends, as it tends
not to be inhibited by the pressures of actual politics, and it more closely reflects the real
thoughts and feelings of not only the creators, but also of the consumers, who most likely
sympathize with the views expressed.
One of the mediums through which the Japanese attempt to reconcile with the imperial
past is manga. In her article, “Three Views of the Rising Sun, Obliquely: Keiji Nakazawa’s Abomb, Osamu Tezuka’s Adolf, and Yoshinori Kobayashi’s Apologia,” Sheng-Mei Ma aptly uses
the metaphor of the rising sun to describe the ways in which these three postwar manga writers
reflect on Japan during World War II. She says that, in their various works, they choose to look
at Japan’s wartime actions the same way one would look at the sun; that is, indirectly. “After all,
any gaze into the sun results in a turning away, lest blindness or madness set in.”151 Although
151
Sheng-Mei Ma, “Three Views of the Rising Sun, Obliquely,” Mechademia, Vol. 4, (University of Minnesota
Press: 2009) 183.
78
Nakazawa and Tezuka stand on the leftist end of the political spectrum and Kobayashi on the
right, they share in common their failure to be frank and direct about Japanese wartime activities
and atrocities. All three exemplify the selective memory that is all too pervasive in Japan in the
postwar era. Furthermore, they point to the abortive uprooting of nationalistic and militaristic
ideologies that gave rise to fascism in Japan in the first half of the twentieth century.
To begin, Ma looks at Nakazawa’s manga Barefoot Gen (1973-1974, Hadashi no gen)
and Tezuka’s Adolf (1983-1985, Adorufu ni tsugu). Protagonists in both series are from the
antiwar minority and are portrayed as victims of the prevailing conservative, right-wing ideology.
Barefoot Gen tells the story of a pacifistic family that is torn apart by the atomic bombing of
Hiroshima, and shows in graphic albeit crude, cartoonish detail the gruesome horrors caused by
the bomb. The Japanese as victims are made even more sympathetic when told through the eyes
of an antiwar character, the boy protagonist Nakaoka Gen. Not only does the manga highlight
the suffering of the Japanese people, but it promotes a feeling of hope through the metaphor of
wheat as a symbol for survival and through the motif of death and rebirth. As Ma describes it,
Gen possesses an “undaunted spirit, forever resourceful and of good cheer, particularly after the
father, the oldest daughter Eiko, and Gen’s younger brother Shinji are consumed by the
conflagration in the wake of the bomb.” However, Ma still maintains that the prevailing theme is
“the grotesquerie and agony of survival.”152 Nobody can fault Nakazawa for wanting to portray
the horrors of the atomic bombing on Hiroshima, and the suffering of the Japanese during that
time should never be downplayed or forgotten. However, where some criticism is due, and
where Ma does find fault with Nakazawa, is where he fails to deliver any representation of
Japanese aggression. “Indeed, there is no representation at all of Japanese oppression of its
152
Ma 186.
79
colonies other than one Korean character forced into hard labor in Japan.”153 Similarly, Tezuka’s
manga Adolf steers clear of acknowledging Japan’s historical responsibility. Instead, he creates a
fantastical story centered around Adolf Hitler and two other men (a half-Aryan Japanese and a
German-Jew) of the name Adolf, whose fates become intertwined throughout the struggle either
to hide or to expose Hitler’s Jewish heritage. The narrator is a Japanese newspaper reporter,
Tōge Sōhei, who comes to possess the documents of Hitler’s birth, which Japanese and German
secret agents, including the half-Aryan Adolf Kaufman, try to wrest from him. “Tōge . . . risks
everything to protect the documents, which he repeatedly claims would ‘bring down Hitler.’”154
While Ma admits to Tezuka’s “mastery of the medium” and to his “power as a comic artist,” she
ultimately criticizes him, for not only does he neglect the issue of Japanese wartime atrocities by
centering his story on Hitler and the European theater, but he commemorates the sacrifices of
Japanese citizens in the character of Tōge. Like Nakazawa’s manga, Tezuka’s historical
narrative is imbalanced. A writer is free to portray the suffering and sacrifice of the Japanese
people during World War II, but he must also confront Japan’s atrocities and acts of aggression,
or else face criticism for such an oversight.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, Yoshinori Kobayashi not only fails to confront
Japan’s military past, but he distorts and glorifies it with rightwing fervor. Ma discusses his
manga Taiwanron (2000, On Taiwan) specifically, in which he represents the Japanese
colonization of Taiwan as “benevolent.” He also describes the Taiwanese comfort women as
“volunteers.” Ma writes, “Undoubtedly, Kobayashi is the spokesperson for Japanese discontent
over postwar liberal democracy, indulging in the golden past of Japanese colonialism,
153
154
Ma 184.
Ma 189.
80
perpetuating a revisionism of the war.”155 This discontent derives largely from a sense of guilt,
or as Najita would describe it, a sense of failure. Members of the right decry taking historical
responsibility as “masochistic” indoctrination and injurious to national pride. Although it
sparked intense protest in Taiwan upon its publication there in 2001, Taiwanron is still backed
by some pro-Japan Taiwanese. These Taiwanese, along with Kobayashi himself, are evidence
that Japan’s defeat in World War II was incomplete. Militarily, they were trounced; officially,
they surrendered. However, their enemies failed to uproot the deep-seated militarist ideology
that evolved into the Japanese brand fascism of World War II. Although Japan is largely
pacifistic nowadays, echoes of nationalism and militarism sound just beneath the surface. They
are contained within the pages of Kobayashi’s manga. Less obvious, but just as dangerous, are
the failures of antiwar leftists to take responsibility for Japanese aggression and atrocities,
because not acknowledging it is tantamount to saying that it never happened. Furthermore,
highlighting the suffering and sacrifices of the Japanese people without balancing it with
recognition of Japan’s dark past, as Nakazawa and Tezuka did, propagates the kind of selective
memory or historical amnesia that could take the country down that path all over again, without
them ever knowing it.
In reality, it is more likely that Japan will not take the same path it took in the 1930s and
40s. Najita writes in the 1970s that, despite the lingering strains of radical nationalism and
imperialist nostalgia, “there has not been, and it is doubtful that there will be, a sustained
resurgence of the radicalism that [Mishima Yukio] idealized.”156 However, this does not mean
that the existence of nationalist and militarist sentiment in Japan is not a cause for concern. If
peace in East Asia is ever to be achieved, one of the major steps that needs to be taken is Japan’s
155
156
Ma 192.
Najita 147.
81
full reconciliation with its past, which involves extinguishing the type of conservative thinking
that is characterized by historical revisionism and, in some cases, outright denial of aspects of
Japan’s dark past. It is doubtful that LDP leaders like Shinzō Abe will be effective towards this
end. But if Japan were to fully come to terms with the past and deliver a satisfactory apology,
the existing tensions between it and neighboring Asian nations, in particular China and Japan,
might disappear. At this point, however, there may be no such thing as a satisfactory apology;
Japan has tried to apologize numerous times in the past, but the attempts were undermined by
continued evidence of revisionism and denialism. Additionally, the Chinese Communist Party
leadership capitalizes on anti-Japanese sentiment to bolster their agenda, especially as it concerns
the islands dispute and gaining hegemony over the China Seas. Because reconciliation is a
collaborative effort, lack of commitment on both sides might mean that these tensions, which
still exist even almost seventy years after the war, will continue to exist indefinitely into the
future.
82
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