Masahiro Yasuoka on the Village Worthy as Thief of Virtue｜How the Model Citizen Who Never Makes Waves Corrodes Society

Masahiro Yasuoka, the Confucian scholar who worked behind the scenes of postwar politics and business as a fixer and wielded influence in every direction, is the figure in Japanese history I admire most. He left a great many words that read as though he had seen this confused age coming.

Yasuoka diagnosed the sickness of the world in his day through a series of contrasts, setting smooth dealing against loyalty and good faith, pushing ahead against integrity, craftiness against plain honesty, the letter of the law against moral reasoning, outward appearances against the workings of the heart, and conformity against unbending principle. Through these pairs, he showed how far the modern heart had decayed, and he concluded that the decay ends in a turmoil in which people wander between life and death.

Since the Meiji era, the Japanese have had no occasion to be taught Confucianism, so all this may sound abstruse. Its real meaning, though, is simple and clear, and studying Confucianism is indispensable if we are to regain our composure. So this time, I will go through it in words we can all understand.

Here is what he wrote.

The trouble with the customs of today is that people strive for smooth dealing and make light of loyalty and good faith. They prize pushing ahead and scorn integrity, value craftiness and slight plain honesty. They carp at the letter of the law and pass over moral reasoning, debate outward appearances and forget the workings of the heart, esteem conformity and look down on the unbending. These habits have long been ingrained. The village worthy is truly the thief of virtue. Of those who stand above others today, the only worry is that they lack sincerity. If one sets out to revive the customs of the age from a sincere heart, all under heaven will surely answer in sympathy.

Masahiro Yasuoka, Denshuroku (Instructions for Practical Living)

“Striving for smooth dealing and making light of loyalty and good faith” describes people who think only of getting on in the world and lose the sincerity and good faith with which one meets another person in earnest. In pursuing too far the ability to be liked by everyone and to pass muster anywhere, they become adept at handling problems in general, while the devotion that commits itself wholeheartedly to a particular person or conviction, and the good faith that does not easily bend, grow thin.

For many people, the worship of academic credentials and the hunger for stability may be hard to escape, but lean too far that way and the resolve to give a lifetime to a single work never arises. Trying to please everyone certainly wins general approval, yet the price of never offending anyone is never truly engaging with anyone. Live too broadly and too shallowly, and the loyalty that gives itself deeply to one person withers away. In a stable age this might pass. The teaching, however, is that the moment we enter a period of turmoil in which the old rules no longer hold, such people lose their footing and find, before they know it, that no one is left around them.

We who are living through the real arrival of AI and an automated society are the very people who most need to take these words to heart. Smooth dealing will largely be taken over by AI and automation, and unless human beings turn toward a life of loyalty and good faith, we risk falling into what Yuval Noah Harari, the historian known for Sapiens and other books, calls the “useless class.” The way out begins with facing just one person. That is exactly what the modern age, in its pursuit of efficiency alone, has neglected, and the price has been that people who give themselves wholly for the sake of a single other have all but disappeared.

Next comes “prizing pushing ahead and scorning integrity.” Pushing ahead here does not mean healthy initiative. It means maneuvering to exploit another person’s unguarded moment, and Yasuoka is pointing to the problem of such maneuvering being ranked above integrity. The phrase “pure and spotless” is fast becoming a dead expression, and we now live in a state where many people brush others aside to seize advantage for themselves alone. This is the logic of “as long as I’m all right,” a self-centered way of living that strikes giving to others off the list of options altogether.

This condition is at its fiercest today, and it inevitably sets people dragging one another down. Mutual distrust spreads until no one can trust anyone, and both the individual’s life and the nation’s future fall into decline. People say it cannot be helped, that outwitting others is the price of social survival, but strip away integrity and what is left of a human being? What matters, though, is that no one is pure and spotless from birth to death. Integrity begins at the moment one resolves to live that way, and it means living by the aspiration to remain pure and spotless until the day one dies. That is what it truly means to live.

Next is “valuing craftiness and slighting plain honesty.” Kenko [儇狡] means cunning. Shrewdness and the sly cleverness of outwitting others are all that is prized, while plain honesty, which is to say living honestly with oneself, is treated lightly. The saying that honesty only makes a fool of you is an old one, but we have now reached its extreme. What is more, honesty today has been converted into honesty toward society, a kind of loyalty to it, and people who try to be thoroughly sincere and truthful with themselves are rare. Honesty is not something performed for society or for others. It has to be an inner matter, a question of one’s own self.

“Carping at the letter of the law and passing over moral reasoning” means that everyone is skilled at appearing to criticize the legal system and appearing to discuss society, while the essential question of what is actually good goes ignored. Even now, it is common to see so-called intellectuals heaping up poorly grounded opinions in the mass media and on social media, and now that the individual’s voice carries so much further, the same can happen to anyone. What has dropped out of all this is responsibility for the future, and the will to create it.

Take the prewar years. The intellectuals who praised militarism and endorsed the lies announced by Imperial General Headquarters were loudly denouncing the “demonic beasts of America and Britain,” yet immediately after the Jewel Voice Broadcast, in which Emperor Hirohito announced the surrender, they declared that they had been deceived and began loudly proclaiming themselves “pro-American and pro-British” and champions of “democracy.” The student movement of the late 1960s followed the same course. Right after their defeat in the University of Tokyo Conflict, the movement’s emblematic battle, the students treated their whole struggle as though it had never happened, announced the very next day that they were going to get jobs, and became, quite literally, the engine that installed in society the very evil they had supposedly been fighting. The same thing will happen this time. The day will surely come when those who now hold forth with great influence say, “We were deceived.”

“Debating outward appearances and forgetting the workings of the heart” means that only how things look and how they are presented gets discussed, while the question of what spirit actually moves a person is never raised. Self-branding designed to attract attention belongs to this category. Whether a person is facing themselves honestly, and from there what ideals they hold and how they live, goes entirely unasked.

“Esteeming conformity and looking down on the unbending” means that only falling in with the mood of the room is honored, while anyone who holds to principle, even at the cost of turning everyone into an enemy and standing alone, is treated as a nuisance. Kenkai [狷介], unbending integrity, is a fine word. It names the attitude of guarding the resolve one has reached at the far end of reflection on oneself, and of acting on it. This is “true freedom” in the Confucian sense, and until the Edo period and the early Meiji years, Japan had a fair number of people of such character. That is Japan’s own, original definition of freedom.

Having laid all this out, Yasuoka brings in a line that comes from the Analects, the sacred text of Confucianism, and closes with “the village worthy is the thief of virtue.” The village worthy, Kyogen [郷愿], is the model citizen who does nothing wrong, never ruffles feathers, is liked by society, and lives a smooth and agreeable life. By “model citizen” I mean someone who wants so badly to be good that they slide into hypocrisy. Such people are prized by society, especially in an age of bureaucracy, but because they shoulder no responsibility and take nothing on, problems are always put off until later.

Because they make not rocking the boat the highest good, the very standard of good and evil is hollowed out in a bureaucratic society where their influence runs strong. This is why Confucius taught that virtue, the supreme human good that Confucianism has valued above all since his own day, is stolen by the model citizens. Put another way, it is a teaching more than two thousand years old. Obvious evil can be guarded against, but the real problem is the hypocrite wearing a good person’s face, who eats away at the whole without ever arousing suspicion until, in the end, everything is bound to collapse.

Yasuoka then sums up. “As urgent matters of the present, there are moreover three ills, the gross abuse of titles and offices, the gross carelessness of appointments, and the gross haste for results.” Meiki no tairan [名器の太濫], the gross abuse of titles and offices, is the outrageous irresponsibility of bureaucrats and officials. Senyo no taikotsu [選用の太忽], the gross carelessness of appointments, is the miserable makeshift staffing of nations, companies and organizations. Kyuko no taisoku [求効の太速], the gross haste for results, is the excessive demand for quick returns. Through these three ills, those at the top grow corrupt, and people’s hearts grow desolate. The character 太 here signifies excess.

We are living through turbulent times, and for the sake of the future it is essential that we learn a great deal from Confucianism, that the Japanese take back responsibility once more, and that each of us lives our life to the full. From the obvious standpoint that Japan is not the West and the Japanese are not Westerners, I have consistently criticized the modernization, which is to say Westernization, that has gone on since Meiji. I believe the mission entrusted to the Japanese is to hand modernity back to the West. In other words, as the five centuries of hegemony that began with the Age of Discovery draw to a close, and the West, afraid of giving up its privileges, loses its footing, might it not be the Japanese who tell the West that the curtain has come down on modernity?

Rather than Western ideas that remain unfamiliar to us, we would do far better to learn from Confucianism, which is familiar and can move us deeply. That will be the first step toward the revival of the Japanese, and the path by which, over the coming decades, we arrive at a restoration in the latter half of the twenty-first century.

The will and the feelings of those who lived their lives to the full, with all their hearts, and fought on to their last breath never die out. They dwell in the world, and when a successor eventually appears, they take possession of that person. History is not what documents record. It has been nurtured by the inheritance of this “invisible” will.