Why Is Japan So Orderly? | Takahiro Mitsui, Project 2049 Vol.3Vol.3

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■ 1. LIVING QUESTIONS

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This week I published NO ONE DECIDED: Wa and the World’s Most Orderly Society on Kindle. The book’s theme, wa (和), is something unfathomable that has been talked about in Japan, for and against, in every possible way, chiefly since the latter half of the twentieth century. Some praise it as Japan’s virtue; others denounce it as the very thing that makes Japan suffocating. The argument has gone on for a long time, but I have always seen this habit of cutting the matter into good and evil as itself the problem.

Wang Yangming argued that to follow Heavenly Principle (天理) is good and to stir ki or qi (気) is evil. To stir ki is to set the private heart-mind to work, and it is exactly this that Confucius and Wang Yangming treated, across history, as the problem. Put plainly, the moment good and evil are lifted onto the same ground and argued as a duality, one is already wrong. That is what I learned from Wang Yangming.

Yet from the twentieth century to today, no one has grasped this in earnest, and the world and humanity sink ever deeper into confusion. In Wang Yangming’s Instructions for Practical Living, a book I love, he left words that pierce the very problem of our age. Confucianism from the Song dynasty onward, in particular, externalized the learning of the sage: it placed it at a height no one had ever reached, and held that tireless study could take one there. Wang Yangming cut straight through this. To look outside for answers, or to measure oneself against others, is not learning, he said, and still less is it the learning of the sage to go on hardening people and society in ever more complicated knowledge.

For him the learning of the sage is plain and clear. It “lies in returning to the original substance of the heart-mind that is common to all; knowledge and skill were not the issue.” Turning these words over, I find no age more preoccupied than ours with nothing but knowledge and technique. That the problem is not confined to the China that Confucianism then addressed, or to the Korea and Japan that came after, but is happening globally, on the scale of humanity, is, frankly, a terrifying failure. For we live in a world where no one knows what true learning is.

Japan is no different, and what visitors to Japan wonder about is, for the most part, the same. Why is Japan so clean and so safe? Why are the Japanese so polite? No one stands on the street corner keeping watch, and no one is forcing anyone, so why does everyone follow the rules? In a sense it is the most orderly society in the world, yet the Japanese themselves cannot actually explain where that order comes from.

Strip away the covering of the Japan we see, and what appears is, unexpectedly, a simple form. With American-style capitalism as its signboard, it is in reality the first country in the world to have fully realized socialism. Japan, that is, is neither a purely socialist state nor a capitalist one. The two have been joined in compromise, in a strange and curious shape.

Why, then, did this small country manage it, when no other country has ever achieved a perfect socialism? As America’s democratic socialist forces rise worldwide, I expect this question to draw attention again. So I decided to set out first the thought that underlies it, and published NO ONE DECIDED in English as well as in Japanese (the Japanese edition is titled Wa to Daiwa (和と大和)).

Why raise this distinctly Japanese problem for the English-speaking world as well? There are several reasons, but one is this. The more confused the world becomes, as it is today, the more the old common sense and the old systems begin to be dismantled and reassembled, and I want to transplant one thought into the world that lies beyond.

Say a foreigner visiting Japan asks the questions above, and the Japanese side brings out a worn, ready-made explanation. The answer is that Japanese people “read the air” (ask the Japanese around you, and you will find it so). That answer means there are invisible rules, unwritten rules. Beyond it, the explanation is peer pressure, social pressure, the strength of village society, and finally that Japan is a collectivist society. Every one of these, to be sure, sounds plausible.

But I have kept questioning the very ground from which this way of thinking arises. A phenomenon that everyone settles with “the air” or peer pressure is a communal agreement born of the fact that they all stand on the same ground, and even if no one is aware of it, the answer decides itself. But when one digs the problem down to its essence and tries to understand a people, that is not, in fact, an answer. As I kept pressing that point sharply, something unfathomable rose in my mind’s eye.

It has the effect of making the question “Who made Japan this way?” strike at nothing from the start. Its subject is not the emperor, not the government, not the occupation forces, not any particular leader. I came to think that this state of “there is no one” is the true identity of Japan, though I suspect it is not limited to Japan.

No one decided, and yet it is decided. No one commanded, and yet everyone obeys.

The mystery of Japan’s order lies here, and NO ONE DECIDED reads that mystery historically, from the standpoint of illusion. That unease no one can put into words, which everyone feels on visiting Japan. And “wa is not harmony.” I would be glad if this became a time for quietly diving toward the bottom of it.

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■ 2. JAPANESE THOUGHT

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This week’s subject is Amaterasu. She appears in the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki, was at some point placed as the ancestral deity of the imperial line, and is worshipped to this day as a great god. For all that she is known as the emperor’s ancestral deity, the story of what source her worship historically sprang from, and how it came to hold the absolute position it holds today, is, surprisingly, almost wholly unclear.

The shrine that stands today in Ise, in Mie Prefecture, is Kotaijingu, and people call it the Inner Shrine of Ise Jingu. But from the Meiji era onward, as State Shinto rose, the word “Jingu” was converted by political ideology into a name that means Ise Jingu. Shrines with Jingu in their names exist all over the country, yet call a shrine simply “Jingu” and what you mean is Kotaijingu. This is no ancient custom. It belongs entirely to the context of the State Shinto that began with Meiji. In that sense, Kotaijingu and Amaterasu can be called the shrine and the god who have followed the strangest fate in all of Japanese history.

The truth is that I myself had never taken much interest in Amaterasu. But in the course of my own investigations into myth and ancient history, she has slowly, faintly begun to show herself. For now it is only a premonition, but she may become one of my large themes of research.

Now. In the myths, Amaterasu is not portrayed as a god who exists with substance. She appears several times as the god who rules a place in the heavens called Takamagahara. Since the modern era, Takamagahara has increasingly been used to mean something like “the sanctuary of the gods,” and as a result a variety of theories about it have appeared down to the present. But what matters is not to pin it down. It is to grasp the kind of world in which it was spoken of.

What can at least be said is that the illusory sanctuary called Takamagahara and the illusory god called Amaterasu were joined at some point, and the belief in “Takamagahara, ruled by Amaterasu” was born. What matters here is that this belief did not historically spread across the whole Japanese archipelago. My own view is that a belief born in an extremely limited place spread over a long span of years, and that this is how it came to be the belief it is now.

And the myths do tell us why Amaterasu came to be worshipped in what is now Ise, in Mie. According to the record, when Emperor Sujin ruled Yamato, Amaterasu was not enshrined where Ise Jingu stands today. Unexpectedly, she was worshipped within the Yamato palace. Sujin is one of the ancient emperors whose existence is regarded as certain. His base is thought to have lain near the foot of Mount Miwa in Sakurai, Nara Prefecture, and around it stands an enormous burial mound handed down as his tomb. I have visited the place many times myself, and I feel that Sujin’s existence is real.

Mount Miwa, where Sujin set his palace, is still one of the foremost sacred grounds in Japan, a rare place that has been held up by many forms of faith. At its foot Sujin’s palace once stood, and rites were carried out there. But it was an age of one instability after another. War, famine and plague struck in turn, and the disaster killed half of the people Sujin governed.

In Yamato at that time, divination was used to learn the cause of such instability, and it is told that on this occasion an oracle came down to Sujin in a dream. Here, however, the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki part ways. As I told you last week, the gaps between their accounts carry the imprint of the hearts of people who were living, in essence, in different illusory worlds, and so they deserve close attention.

According to the Kojiki, when plague had nearly wiped out the people, the one who appeared in Sujin’s dream was a god named Omononushi. This Omononushi is the kunitsukami who is enshrined on Mount Miwa.

Omononushi delivers an oracle. The calamity, it says, was brought about by the god’s own heart, and if a man named Otataneko were made to worship Omononushi, the curse would ease and the land would be settled. Sujin, having received the message, found Otataneko and had him worship Omononushi on Mount Miwa. Otataneko, incidentally, is said to have been found in what is now Yao, in Osaka Prefecture.

With that as the axis, Sujin carried out the various measures as the oracle directed, and the plague stopped and the land began to settle. What matters here is that what the Kojiki portrays in Sujin’s reign is a tale of pacifying the gods of the land, and that Amaterasu does not appear in it. The Kojiki tells this one version. The Nihon Shoki, however, records that the year before this event, another important matter had been shaking the palace.

And here it is Amaterasu who moves. In the previous year, the record says, Sujin’s rule wavered, the people lost their footing, and some even rose in rebellion. In effect, it suggests that another power had risen in Yamato and shaken Sujin’s realm. Yet the Nihon Shoki places the cause at a surprising angle: the worship of the gods.

In the sacred space of the great hall within the palace at that time, two gods were enshrined side by side: Amaterasu and Yamato no Okunitama. Yamato no Okunitama is also a kunitsukami, but the name carries “Yamato,” and it carries “Okunitama” too, the soul of a great land. From this we can tell that this god was the very spirit of the country called Yamato.

In other words, until Sujin’s time the gods were worshipped just as they were, within the palace. But Sujin began to fear the force of the gods and could no longer find peace living alongside them. And so the great decision was made to move the gods outside the palace.

What matters is that Sujin entrusted Amaterasu to Toyosukiirihime and Yamato no Okunitama to Nunakiirihime. It suggests that in the ancient world the moving of the gods was an undertaking carried out by princesses. Both women are placed as daughters of Sujin.

Toyosukiirihime moved Amaterasu to a place away from the palace, a village in Yamato called Kasanui, and had a shrine built there to worship her. Kasanui lies within the grounds of Omiwa Shrine, which stands on Mount Miwa today. The next record is the important one. Yamato no Okunitama was entrusted to Nunakiirihime, but her hair fell out, her body wasted away, and she was unable to worship the god and failed. Moving Amaterasu outside and worshipping her succeeded, so to speak, while Yamato no Okunitama failed. What on earth is this telling us?

Unfortunately, the myth keeps silent on this. The following year, as in the Kojiki, the oracle of Omononushi comes down (though here it is not in Sujin’s dream), and with the rites performed by Otataneko the land is at last settled.

What I want you to keep in mind here is where Amaterasu was originally meant to be. According to the Age of the Gods volume of the Nihon Shoki, Amaterasu gave a mirror to the heavenly descendants (the descendants of the amatsukami, of whom Amaterasu is the representative) and commanded: “To look upon this mirror is the same as looking upon Amaterasu. Share one floor with it, share one hall, and worship it.” The emperors, in the line of the heavenly descendants, and Amaterasu were thus under the same roof from ancient times. That was the form of the ancestral deity as the myth decreed it. And so, strangely, it turns out that the emperor himself broke that decree.

Think of the present and it becomes sharper still. The emperor now lives in the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, while Amaterasu, the ancestral deity, is worshipped in Kotaijingu, a place far away. Amaterasu, sent outside in Sujin’s reign, never again lived under one roof with an emperor. There is one exception: the Daijosai. I will write about that on another occasion.

Even from this much, one can faintly see that Sujin’s reign was an important time in which the relation between the emperor and the gods changed in kind. At the same time, the figures of Toyosukiirihime and Nunakiirihime convey the source from which today’s shrine maidens descend.

So how deeply does this one myth I have introduced today bear on the ancient history of Amaterasu? The key lies in the two priestesses who are told of as Sujin’s daughters and who were entrusted with the mission of taking the gods outside the palace and worshipping them. What we should look at here is the mother of the princesses. The mother of Nunakiirihime, who failed in the worship of Yamato no Okunitama, was a woman named Oamahime. The mother of Nunakiirihime, whose name means “the great princess of the Ama,” and Owari, the province next to Ise from which she came.

Next week, we move closer to the real Amaterasu.