The state can shoot only a subject

LIVING QUESTIONS

Since the summer of 2019 I have been studying Japan's ancient history, mythology, folklore and archaeology as a single whole. Now a new stratum is steadily settling into place within me: Confucianism.

Since Confucius, Confucianism has been refined and tested in China for more than two thousand years, sometimes taking detours that lasted a millennium, and it has built up like layers of rock. At some point it crossed the sea to the Japanese archipelago, and there it quite literally transformed the Japanese.

Confucianism has many schools, of course, each with its own character. But unlike China, with its vast territory and its long history of changing dynasties, Japan is a small country, and an island one. In China, each change of dynasty moved the center of power across great stretches of geography. In Japan the movement was comparatively small, which means the margin of error in the philosophy of rule was smaller than in China.

If we look only at the imperial court and the shogunates, power in Japan moved only among what are now the Nara Basin, Kyoto, Kamakura and Tokyo, places no more than about 500 kilometers apart. So even when the political machinery of the shogunate moved east to the Kanto region, the emperor and the aristocracy stayed in Kyoto, because at that distance they could still be watched.

This is my own conjecture, but Confucianism may be better suited to growing in a small country like this. In a land as vast as China, schools are born one after another, clash, give rise to alternatives, and are taken up or discarded at a lively pace. In Japan, what was available was limited to "what came across the sea," so the choices were necessarily few. That limitation suited Japan.

In fact, when Confucianism made its first move into the spirit of the Japanese people at the start of the Edo period, what was adopted was not the whole Cheng-Zhu learning nurtured in Song-dynasty China but only the school of Zhu Xi, lifted out of it.

The Edo shogunate began in 1603, four centuries after Zhu Xi's death. I believe that time lag mattered. Had the teaching been imported as it appeared, it would not yet have been refined and tested on the Chinese side; it would still have been fresh. Something unsorted would probably not have touched Japanese hearts. Japan does not look for freshness. It loves the pain of creation, the work that someone, somewhere, agonized and struggled to bring into being. The test is whether it moves you. The rigor of a theory does not matter at all.

The particular school known in Japan as shushigaku, Zhu Xi learning, became the official philosophy of the shogunate. Japanese Confucians then appeared one after another, and schools arose teaching their own versions. They learned a great deal from Confucian scholars who had fled China, and the Japanese of that time were moved by Confucianism and studied it in earnest.

But at some point, certain Confucians began to feel that Zhu Xi learning was too heavy with reasoning and somehow short of life. Because they studied in earnest, they wanted the pulse of life, and they staked their lives on seeing where the essence of Confucianism lay. What they found at the end of that search was the school of Wang Yangming. Known in Japan as yomeigaku (陽明学), it moved the hearts of some of those Confucians and went on to become a spiritual foundation of the Japanese through the Edo, Meiji and Taisho periods and into the early Showa years.

I too am one of its heirs, taking Yangming learning into my daily life, studying it, and being moved by it.

Why, now of all times, do I put Confucianism, and Yangming learning above all, first? The reason goes back 160 years.

To serve the Western powers' aim of opening markets, Japan was cut off, from around 1868, from the lineage of East Asia and forcibly connected to the Western world, a world of a different context with which it had almost no historical ties. With the import of modern Western learning, Confucianism was pushed aside as an outdated moralism with no scientific basis, and after Japan's defeat in the Second World War, the occupation forces banned the moral education of the Japanese.

So postwar Japan lost Confucianism. This is not a question of the quality of modern Western learning. It is only that the Western attitude, with its devotion to precise data and classification, did not move the Japanese. To put it bluntly, the West did not suit Japan. That is how I see it. It is not a matter of good or bad. Something that did not fit was let in, and over the years it led all the way to the ruin of the people's spirit. That is my diagnosis today.

From the Edo period through Meiji, Taisho and the early Showa years, an educated Japanese person was someone who could read kanbun, classical Chinese. Today, apart from a few scholars, no one can. Confucianism is not something for a handful of specialists. It is something for people living their ordinary lives to learn. That has been cut off completely.

Modernization, Westernization, "civilization and enlightenment": Japan's severance and its connection to the West have gone by many names. But when the spiritual lineage that joined Japan to China and Korea was cut, I believe the most grievous event in its history took place. Confucianism is neither a philosophy nor a religion. It is a way of living.

And Japan, cut off from the East Asian lineage, went on to commit an outrage unthinkable in the Japan that came before: it invaded its neighbors, copied colonialism and imperialism from the Western world and arrogantly carried them out.

Today the Japanese have fallen into an abyss of confusion, with no road left to take, in despair. The reason is that they still refuse to look at what it meant to cut the chain passed down from their ancestors. That chain is history, culture and spirit, and it should be important and precious not only to the Japanese but to everyone.

That is why I now mean to study the history of Confucianism in Japan, and above all the lineage of Yangming learning, as thoroughly as I can, and to bring it to the world as a documentary record. So far I have shared Yangming learning only with friends around me, and every one of them has been deeply moved and is slowly falling under the spell of Confucianism.

In time this road will take me to China, the land that gave birth to Wang Yangming. It will be several years before I can present the results, but the journey is about to begin.

JAPANESE THOUGHT

This week I want to look at the state and thought through the three films I love most.

Just four years, from 1969 to 1973. In those four years, three films were made: Kiju Yoshida's Eros + Massacre, Heroic Purgatory and Coup d'État. I consider them the highest achievement in Japanese film history of "thought expressed as image." They are also, I believe, a record of what the historical thinkers Yoshida portrayed were fighting against. And they are the most accurate measure we have of what we have lost.

Eros + Massacre (1969) follows the Taisho-era anarchist Sakae Osugi and his relationships with his wife, his lover Ichiko Kamichika and another lover, Noe Ito, constantly bleeding them into the story of a university student in 1969. The real Osugi championed free love and was watched by the state as one of the most dangerous men of his time. But what was the free love he actually practiced?

It was an experiment in whether one can love without possessing. Could he love his wife and his lovers at once without making any of them his own? This was not mere free sex. If the root of domination lies in possession, then possession must first be driven out of love.

The point is that this is not the story of a man who wrote about thought. It is the story of a man who took thought into his own body and staked his entire life on an experiment. Osugi left writings, but they are not works of thought. He tried to render his very existence, his everyday life itself, as anarchism, and to live it. The experiment failed. Jealousy erupted from a love that was supposed to have renounced possession, and in November 1916, at the Hikage Chaya teahouse in Hayama, Kamichika, jealous of Ito, stabbed Osugi in the throat and left him gravely wounded.

At the same time, Osugi was pursuing the political version of the same logic: the revolutionary dream of a society without possession. In love and in society alike, he did not simply deny possession; he tried to bring possession itself to nothing within his own being, and he actually did it. Anyone can shout for an end to possession, and that is the same as doing nothing. Osugi took it into his body and carried it out with his life.

But just as his free love ended with a knife in his throat, his ideal of a society without possession also collapsed. On 16 September 1923, amid the chaos after the Great Kanto Earthquake, Osugi was murdered by Masahiko Amakasu of the military police, together with Noe Ito and his six-year-old nephew, and their bodies were thrown into a well. What does this shocking event tell us?

That reaching out a hand to another person brings the knife at the extreme of intimacy and brings massacre at the extreme of politics. Eros and massacre are not two separate stories. They are the two poles of a single hand reaching for another. More than forty years after Osugi's death, Yoshida alone saw this.

Anyone who has seen his films will remember that light: a painfully white, overexposed light that floods the screen and that you never forget once you have seen it. In film, light normally illuminates things and gives them outline. Yoshida's white light does the opposite. It eats away at the edges of bodies, erases their contours and bleaches the frame.

As I see it, Japan never put its gods outside the world or up in the heavens, so it has no "light of grace descending from above," and Yoshida made a light that reveals nothing and only takes form away. Light does not illuminate existence. It melts the certain self and certain history into white, as if they had never been there.

Perhaps neither the self nor history has ever really existed. That is where Yoshida's razor-sharp thought arrived. Put more boldly, modernity is not a symbol of progress. In truth, nothing has happened. The moment anyone tries to object that this cannot be so, a nameless anxiety welling up from within takes hold of them. Here lies the trap of modernity.

From here, the trilogy begins.

The next year, in Heroic Purgatory (1970), it reached its purest form. This film alone features no real people and no real events; it is wholly invented. Experimental to its core, it sharpens the state I described and exposes the fiction of modern "certainty."

The film begins with three times laid out in clear layers: 1952, 1970 and the still-unarrived 1980s. As you watch, the boundaries melt. The eras do not intersect; they dissolve. Who is whose father, who is a comrade and who a traitor, when any of this is happening: all of it disappears. When the self, relationships, history and events we believe to be certain have dissolved, what can we still call certain? That is the question Yoshida forced on us.

Time dissolves, relationships dissolve, persons dissolve. And in the final scene, at the far end of that dissolving, the words "Dead End" appear alone on the screen, and the film is over.

We usually say that history repeats itself. We say every day that the present looks just like the 1980s, or that those were the good old days. But perhaps nothing is repeating at all. Nor does history rhyme. I believe it is precisely in such plausible-sounding readings that the trap of modernity lies, set there to keep us from looking reality in the face. Phrases like "history repeats itself" or "history rhymes" are empty from the start. They say nothing, and they miss the point.

For the people who say them have simply assumed that "history" certainly exists. What would you think if history had never existed?

Repetition needs a first time and a second time. Something happens, ends, time passes, and something similar happens again. For that, you must be sure that time really flows, and that it builds up in layers. At the very least, you must believe that time runs in a line from past to present and from present to future.

Why does no one consider that there was no first time and no second? Perhaps, in the modern age, even thinking it is the most dangerous thing of all.

The same place simply appears again and again, and nothing really happens there. Then modernity is nothing but the endless reproduction of a Dead End, the first wasted stretch of years in human history in which nothing has happened. What, then, is everything we have called progress, civilization, revolution, the human, the self, the ego? Were these not names invented by people marking time in front of a dead end, so they could believe they were moving? "Dead End" is not the end of a story. It is an indictment of modernity itself. Dead End from beginning to end.

That is why Yoshida put "purgatory" in the title. Modernity is a purgatory, neither heaven nor hell, an age in which we flounder, unable to go either way.

At the end, the woman played by Mariko Okada sets out to shoot the creator of this purgatory and walks out of the frame. Yet she never says who that is, and the audience never learns.

This is not a cinematic device. It is an exposure of the very form that the target of violence takes in Japan. In the West, the one to be shot has a face, a name and an address. With an absolute installed high in the heavens and its earthly stand-in seated on the ground, people there can cry out, curse and kill. Nietzsche could declare God dead only because God had been put somewhere he could be killed.

But in Japan, what binds people, devours them and locks them in purgatory is not somewhere high and outside. It exists between people, nameless, seatless, faceless, simply as illusion. And illusion is not fiction. This is still not understood. For the Japanese, illusion is neither mere fiction nor a story. It has substance, and it is always changing shape. The Japanese know better than anyone that illusion has substance. That is why what has no body cannot be shot. And yet one cannot help shooting. Where, then, does the gun point? At whoever barely embodies that illusion in flesh: the comrade at your side. That is the trait Yoshida saw right after the fierce struggle against the US-Japan Security Treaty ended in utter defeat.

His films did in fact anticipate a terrible future. In the winter of 1972, two years after Heroic Purgatory, twelve members of the United Red Army were killed by their own comrades at a mountain base, beaten and left to die. Yoshida was not offering intellectual criticism. He was giving warning.

On 7 July 1973, Yoshida released the last film of the trilogy, Coup d'État.

It takes up the real-life thinker Ikki Kita and depicts the attempted coup by young army officers on 26 to 29 February 1936. But Yoshida was not trying to recreate history. He was carrying on the question he had raised in the previous film.

If the source of evil that ought to be shot exists nowhere it can be named, can it never be named? If so, who is the creator of purgatory the woman set out to shoot at the end of Heroic Purgatory? Yoshida believed that only one man had ever tried to name that creator. That man was Ikki Kita.

Born in 1883 to a sake-brewing family on Sado Island, he lost his right eye as a young man, went to China to support the Xinhai Revolution, and in 1919, in Shanghai, finished An Outline Plan for the Reorganization of Japan. The book called for seizing power by a coup, suspending the constitution, declaring martial law, reinstating the emperor as the emperor of the people, and redistributing land and capital in his name.

It is usually read as a blueprint for radical national reconstruction. It is not. Most of what it says is decoration and in truth says nothing; the logic is built with great precision, but that is not where Kita's aim lay. When I understood this, I shuddered, as if I had grasped for the first time who Ikki Kita really was as a thinker.

Kita was the only person in this country who tried to seize an external absolute and set thought to fight it. He saw that what the Meiji government built when it declared modernity was not the true body of a state but a flimsy shack thrown up in a hurry. The emperor had been hoisted to the top of the state only to secure the real power of the Choshu-bred rulers who had seized control in the Meiji Restoration. So Kita tried to create, in this country, one center that could be named.

Turned around, this means his own thought would take the place of the state.

I believe Kita knew two things. One is that thought is not one's possession; thought is what enfolds the self. The other is that in this country illusion is not fiction but is always present, with substance. That is why the Kita of the film hardly ever leaves his house. He receives visitors, listens to them and waits. Yoshida pushed the men who acted firmly to the side and put at the center of the frame only the thinker who does not act. The thinker does not act. By not acting, he lets thought enfold people and extend itself through their bodies and minds. Kita was a medium, a priest.

And in his house, the sacred spoke. For about seven years, from 1929 until just before the February 26 Incident, his wife Suzuko went into trances while reciting the Lotus Sutra and delivered oracle after oracle, which Kita wrote down himself and kept on record.

This is what I want to point to. An absolute set outside the world, as in the West, can speak or fall silent. The sacred in Japan speaks beside you, right next to you. Far from refusing to answer, it answers a great deal. And this happens not in light shining down from heaven onto the earth but in the closed room of everyday life, where that light never reaches. A man who lived surrounded by an immanent sacred tried to place an external absolute at the top of the state, and was killed by that very top. I know of no diagram more exact, or more cruel.

On 26 February 1936, the young officers rose. Their banner was sonno tokan (尊皇討奸), "revere the emperor, strike down the wicked," an idea born in ancient China and widely used in Japan from the late Edo period. Put simply, its logic is that the top never errs; those at its side do. On that logic the officers killed the finance minister Korekiyo Takahashi, the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal Makoto Saito, a former prime minister and admiral, and General Jotaro Watanabe.

Yet they did not lay a finger on the top. They wanted, rather, to be taken up by the emperor. But the emperor himself, the one they believed to be the top, was furious at their coup and ordered it crushed. The absolute they had named refused to be named. This fact says something remarkable.

There is no absolute in this country.

That is what the February 26 Incident laid bare. The emperor is not the absolute of the modern state. This was the one point on which Kita was wrong. He certainly saw the emperor as the summit of the modern state, but in fact the state does not have the emperor at its summit. The moment you set up the absolute as an object, it stops being absolute. The incident exposed that fact. It is testimony that modernity never happened. The moment you name it, it falls into the relative.

On 14 August 1937, Kita was sentenced to death as the ringleader of the rebellion, and five days later, on 19 August, he was shot. What must not be overlooked is that Kita, a civilian, was tried by a "special court-martial" meant for soldiers, in closed session, with no defense counsel, in a single hearing with no right of appeal. A man who was not there, who in fact opposed individual acts of terror, was shot by the state as the source and summit of the uprising.

The trilogy Yoshida left behind is engraved with a truth almost too heavy to bear. Because it is so heavy, the trilogy has been spoken of for more than half a century as the very emblem of difficult cinema. But there is a serious thought in it.

The structure, first of all, is masterly. At the start stands Osugi, who took thought into his body and tried to break through the dead end with action; at the end, Kita, who set thought against the state and tried to shift the ground itself. Osugi with his body, Kita with his thought: opposite methods. Yet both were killed when the state took aim. Between them sits the film in which everything dissolves and only the words "Dead End" remain. At that moment the two thinkers become inseparable, and the true nature of the state is dragged into the light.

What does this mean? I believe what the state feared was not their arguments but the very possibility that the ground might move.

The state has been described in many ways, but in my own terms it is this: an apparatus that can grasp only subjects. Family registers, taxation, conscription and criminal law are all built on the question "who?" Every act must have an agent, and no punishment can fall unless the agent is identified. Law is the technique of reducing events to a subject. Here the modern structure that presupposes the subject comes into view.

Japanese, however, has no subject. What has really moved people does not come from a subject. It arises from place, spreads through countless hands, and appears as something everyone somehow already thinks. No one started it, no one decided it, and yet it moves. The state can sense this as a threat but cannot grasp it, because it has no grammar for perceiving a world without subjects.

So the state translates. It always pins what came from place on a single subject. It picks out an individual with a name, a face and an address, and assigns the whole to that person. It converts the thing into a shape that can be shot, and then it shoots. Its sights first found Osugi, and then the far less visible Kita. The two events of prewar Japan were not mere upheavals. They were the moments when an illusion that had begun to take on the substance of a state identified and destroyed the two men who had seen what it really was. This is deeply Japanese, and it is a crucial point. Osugi was certainly killed by Amakasu. But that is exactly an event with a subject, and the essence does not lie there.

What is frightening is that this translation is false and yet effective. Modernity needs a subject as its absolute condition, and if you shoot the subject, the thought appears to stop. It has not stopped. The state simply declares that it has, because otherwise modernity could not prolong its life. Worse still, those trying to bring the state down also go looking for a subject.

So did the young officers who named the "wicked men at the emperor's side," so did those who lynched comrades in the mountain lodge, so did those who shot the comrade next to them. The state creates a subject and shoots it; revolution cannot create one and turns inward. They are two faces of the same absence. The final proof came after the war, when the emperor renounced his divinity. The occupation forces, who thought in subjects, never noticed, but whether the emperor is a god or a man, the illusion called the state, the true summit, has survived without so much as a tremor.

As far as I know, the only ones who saw this were Kiju Yoshida in cinema and Takaaki Yoshimoto in thought. That, I believe, is why Yoshida dissolved time. Throughout the trilogy he pushed his characters to the very edges of the frame and let them be cut off without a second thought. Film techniques grounded in the subject always set up a protagonist as the subject of the visual grammar and build the image around that center. Even the rule of thirds, used so often in film, works only because there is a central subject.

And to film a man who tried to create a center, Yoshida chose compositions with no center. I know of no other case where content and form coincide so cruelly. Stand in that dissolved position, and Osugi in Taisho, the young officers and Kita in Showa, the mountain base of 1972 and we ourselves this week all stand side by side, in no layers at all. Nothing is repeating. Not once, and nothing at all, has happened.

Surely everyone will want to object. But no one can, because every word spoken in objection becomes more testimony that nothing has happened.

Osugi with his body and Kita with his thought both tried to move that ground, and both were shot. To be shot means they had reached it. What the state fears most is not a large opposing majority. It is the one who changes the ground. Where, then, do we stand? Not where we become a subject and are shot, but on the side of place.

Change in Japan has come not by shooting but by filling. So it was when writing arrived, and when the teaching of the Buddha arrived. No one started it, no one decided it, and at some point the place itself had become something else. Our work, then, should be not to name but to fill.

Sit once more, in silence, before what you do not understand. The idea that we must assert everything is purely the logic of modernity, and it only throws away whatever chance we have of getting out. Modernism or postmodernism, modernity has in fact already entered a permanent state. Some 80 years have passed since the end of the Second World War, and humanity has not moved modernity an inch. If anything, modernity has lifted off into a more advanced dimension that people cannot even perceive.

To truly leave this state, the peoples whose languages speak through the subject and the peoples whose languages speak through the predicate would have to work together as equals in the true sense. But modernity will never allow that equal partnership. So it always creates rank and division. However ideal the ideologies people preach, equality will never be achieved.

Is the purgatory of modernity eternal, or will a time come to leave it? There is one more thing: Yoshida paired purgatory with Eroica, the Third Symphony whose title page Beethoven tore up in rage when Napoleon, the liberator, took the imperial throne.

Humanity has very little time left.