Not self-control but quiet fullness

LIVING QUESTIONS

Yesterday, 1 September, was nihyakutoka (二百十日), the two hundred and tenth day counted from risshun, the start of spring around 4 February; in the modern calendar this seasonal marker falls around 1 September each year. The ears of rice turn golden and the season of harvest finally arrives, so it can be read as a sign that autumn is coming. But since ancient times in Japan, this has been the season when wariness of one particular disaster runs highest: the typhoon.

City dwellers today have forgotten nihyakutoka, but it was and still is the time farmers fear most. The period has long been thought of as "the season of wind damage," an unlucky day for farmers. Typhoons strike at their very livelihood, so to protect the rice harvest, kazematsuri, wind festivals to calm the god of the wind, have been held across the country at this time of year.

Yet nihyakutoka too is becoming a thing of the past. Many typhoons have already reached the archipelago this year, and extreme downpours made worse by the concrete jungle, a great flaw in the structure of the modern city, have struck again and again. In the past month or so alone, disasters have followed one another across the country, from the Kumamoto earthquake to the torrential rains in Chiba and Fukui, and in the fierce heat many people lost their homes, cars and belongings.

The world is already in great turmoil, but this summer I felt keenly that the natural disasters and sudden emergencies that strike somewhere in Japan every year have become part of everyday life. With those scenes burned into my eyes, I have been steadily raising my own state of alert, in order to engrave once more the fact that Japan is a land of earthquakes.

Almost no foreign travelers are aware of this or prepared for it, but the Tokaido region where they move as tourists, Tokyo, Mount Fuji, Kyoto, Osaka, carries an extremely high risk of disaster and stands on a structure with extremely weak defenses. An earthquake striking directly beneath the Tokyo metropolitan area within the next thirty years, and a Nankai Trough megaquake that would devastate everything from Tokai across western Japan, are all but certain, and either could happen right now.

The Japanese are used to earthquakes, but foreign travelers would fall into violent panic, and since information in Japan comes almost only in Japanese, they are very likely to be left behind in an instant. I cannot believe that travelers today understand this risk.

But the same is true of the Japanese. When disaster strikes, the difference between those who prepared in ordinary times and those who did not decides their fate. The mindset Japan above all requires is to move through every situation assuming that "disaster could strike now."

In my own case, as I have reviewed my gear for research journeys year after year, I notice how much of it has come to deal with disasters and emergencies. Meanwhile, impractical things, the ones meant only for show, have naturally disappeared.

As a result, a single 24-liter backpack now holds everything for work, travel and survival, enough that I could "move house" with it alone. Behind this lies the thinking of those who came before me, cultivated in Japan, a land of earthquakes that also suffers greatly from floods and typhoons.

An individual cannot correct great currents or systems that have gone too far. But to cultivate, day by day, the readiness and the frame of mind to respond and decide at once, whatever situation you meet, is something an individual can do, and it should lead to survival.

I now believe that what the coming age needs is to complete a life with only "what you can carry in your hands," and at the same time I feel that the motive must be "to enjoy life."

Disaster preparation in Japan is always led by "fear." But preparing for disaster out of fear only lodges fear in objects and piles it up, and in the end fear leaves you unable to move. For someone like me, who studies Japan while traveling, what is truly needed is not a mansion or an expensive car. It is a backpack that holds all I need to live, and a smartphone, a laptop and a camera for research.

Preparation is needed most by those who truly mean to enjoy life, and for that reason they take every measure against a disaster that might strike now. I see many people who have the end and the means reversed, and then the quality of their lives only falls. It is precisely because earthquakes "may come at any time" that everyday readiness is required.

This month, wind and flood damage will come in earnest, one after another. The research journey that begins at the end of next week will be lighter than ever, yet prepared to get through whatever happens, whenever it happens. With the American and Japanese governments now pushing the blame for their fiscal problems onto each other, perhaps the preparations an individual can make are not limited to disasters...

JAPANESE THOUGHT

In shrine histories and in books on the right frame of mind, you sometimes come across the phrase ichirei shikon (一霊四魂), "one spirit, four souls." It is explained as a view of the soul the Japanese have held since antiquity: the human soul is made of one spirit, naohi (直霊), joined to heaven, and four souls, aramitama (荒魂), nigimitama (和魂), sakimitama (幸魂) and kushimitama (奇魂).

Today ichirei shikon is put to use in every sphere, but interestingly, the phrase itself does not appear in a single text before Meiji. Ichirei shikon, in other words, was generated when, through the structural turning point of Meiji, old concepts fused, were honed and were sublimated. And the history leading up to its generation is the history of Japan itself.

Trace it to its source and the words for each of the four souls, the shikon (四魂), already appear in the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki, completed in the early eighth century. But the idea of naohi had not yet been put into words then. Naohi was first proposed far later, in Naobi no Mitama, a work by the kokugaku scholar Norinaga Motoori (1730–1801). All the materials, in other words, are taken from the classics, but it was in the comparatively recent period from the end of the shogunate into Meiji that these five were assembled into a single account of the human being. And ichirei shikon cannot be thought of apart from the greatest religion of modern Japan.

This time I will focus on aramitama in particular, because in the course of its shifting interpretation a new religious sensibility was born.

Let us begin with the oldest surviving sources. Surprisingly, for a concept held in such high regard, aramitama appears in the Kojiki only once, in the chapter on the reign of Emperor Chuai. After the legendary Empress Jingu, Chuai's consort, subdues Silla, she drives her staff into the king's gate and enshrines the aramitama of the three Sumiyoshi gods there as gods to guard the country. The three Sumiyoshi gods are enshrined at Sumiyoshi Taisha, a shrine of ancient history in what is now Osaka, and were guardian gods who held the sea. That is every use of aramitama in the Kojiki.

The clear split into a pair is found in the Nihon Shoki. In its account of the same Empress Jingu, the roles are written separately: the nigimitama of the Sumiyoshi gods stays close to the empress and protects her life, while the aramitama goes ahead as the vanguard and leads the warships. Here too appears the story of Amaterasu, the ancestral deity of the imperial house, ordering that her own aramitama be enshrined.

In the Kojiki aramitama stands alone; in the Nihon Shoki aramitama and nigimitama stand side by side as a pair, with the character of each soul clearly divided. The distribution of these uses already tells of a shift in thought in an early age.

What we learn from this is that the word aramitama was not born to quietly classify divine natures. It appears in order to describe how a god's power worked in the urgent situation of war. This is the most important point: it is an old word that refers not to "what a god is" but to "how a god was activated."

Sakimitama and kushimitama are different again. They appear not in the main text of the Nihon Shoki but in one of the variant accounts set beside it. There Onamuchi, who will become the god of Izumo Taisha, meets a god who comes lighting up the sea, learns that it is his own sakimitama and kushimitama, and enshrines it on Mount Miwa, in what is now Sakurai, Nara. Here they are set in an entirely different narrative logic: a god meeting his own double.

The dimension of aramitama and nigimitama and the dimension of sakimitama and kushimitama were, in other words, certainly different in antiquity. Or rather, though they belong to the same category of soul, it is suggested that aramitama lay in the oldest layer, and that the other three souls may have been developed later. What can at least be said is that the interpretation which lays two pairs of different dimensions on one plane and treats them as "four functions" is not found in the Kojiki or the Nihon Shoki. It was later ages that bound the four into one set.

Kokugaku, which arose in the Edo period, saw great possibility in this word. Norinaga discussed aramitama and nigimitama in Kojiki-den, the study he spent more than thirty years producing, and Moribe Tachibana (1781–1849), in Itsu no Chiwaki, put forward a reading of aramitama as 顕生魂, a soul that becomes manifest. What is happening here in terms of thought?

There is only one point of contention: whether to read ara (荒) as "raging."

If you read aramitama as "the raging soul," then enshrining it means calming a raging soul. That reading is certainly easy to understand, and because it is so easy, it spread far in error. But in the oldest layer, it was "the activation of a god's august power." So Moribe thought that ara was not roughness, as it is usually said to be, but "manifestation" itself.

This fork still deeply shapes the spiritual life of the Japanese. On the first reading, aramitama is a danger to be controlled; on the second, it is an activation to be awaited. The two are completely different. The reading of a single character, ara, is enough to change history. And because kokugaku scholars tried so many readings of the thought around ara, it could connect directly to the next current: religion. The one who bridged kokugaku and religion was Norinaga's successor, Atsutane Hirata.

Then, at the end of the shogunate, Chikaatsu Honda (1822–1889), of Atsutane Hirata's school, established "ichirei shikon." This was decisive.

The aramitama of the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki belonged to the side of the gods. It was written as a word by which humans described, after the fact, how a god had been activated, and it lived in a deeply predicative world in which people are kept alive by the gods. In ichirei shikon, however, aramitama is moved to the human side. It became one of four functions that a person holds within. In step with this shift, the age had moved into confrontation with Europe and America.

But here lies the problem. The moment this shift took place, aramitama could not avoid becoming an object of control, because what lies within you is either governed or runs wild. The scheme in which naohi rules the four souls appears here as the inevitable consequence of the move. The idea of ichirei shikon is, in other words, thoroughly modern and should be seen as a mutation peculiar to modernity. Yet it is not simply equal to modernity; it grasps something very deep in Japan.

The religious sensibility handed from Atsutane Hirata to Chikaatsu Honda was in time sublimated into what is called koshinto, ancient Shinto. From this lineage, religious figures of a new age were born one after another, and they still shape Japan in places no one sees. Foremost among them was Onisaburo Deguchi (1871–1948).

Onisaburo received wisdom from Katsutate Nagasawa (1858–1940), Honda's disciple, took up ichirei shikon, and developed it in two great directions.

One was an extension into cosmology. In his vast Reikai Monogatari (Tales from the Spirit World), the sun hanging at the center of the sky is naohi, also called Onaohi (大直日神). That sun has the four souls in full, each of the four souls in turn has its own naohi, and each divides again into four souls. Every star, too, has its own one spirit and four souls. It is a vision in which not only the human soul but all things in the universe are made of this nested structure. A thoroughly Japanese idea.

The other was a system of descent through precepts. Here Onisaburo's own religious reading is engraved. When aramitama loses "shame," it becomes sokon (争魂), the soul of strife; when nigimitama loses "repentance," it becomes akkon (悪魂), the evil soul; when sakimitama loses "awe," it becomes gyakkon (逆魂), the rebel soul; when kushimitama loses "awakening," it becomes kyokon (狂魂), the mad soul; and one whose naohi has turned into magahi (曲霊), the twisted spirit, is called magatsu (曲津). Here ichirei shikon is drawn not as a table of categories but as a movement of falling or holding firm. With this, a person cannot relax for a single moment.

But Onisaburo's genius as a religious thinker shows most sharply in a limit he set on aramitama itself. He removed the usual definition of aramitama as violent and taught that the violent soul is aremitama (暴魂). In that moment, aramitama ceased to be the symbol of violence and ceased to be something to be softened and calmed by nigimitama. This was groundbreaking. Violence itself, in other words, is not aramitama. And he added:

Aramitama is "the heart of innin jicho." Innin jicho (陰忍自重) means bearing anger and pain in silence and not acting rashly. Innin (陰忍) is enduring the pain and anger in one's heart without letting them show; jicho (自重) is restraining one's conduct and not acting lightly.

This looks almost the opposite of the old aramitama. The aramitama that once led the warships as their vanguard and brought down curses was power in action itself. Redefining it as "innin jicho" comes close to reversing its meaning. But I see no reversal here. What he did was a displacement.

In Onisaburo's thought, naohi does not appear in ordinary times but is activated when something must be faced. Reading him, I feel the many fused currents of thought from the end of the shogunate and early Meiji flowing in, and he believed that the character of "waiting for activation" was clearly written on the side of naohi. So defining aramitama as innin jicho did not strip aramitama of activation. It is "a full power not yet released," the stage before activation.

Moribe saw aramitama as the working of manifestation; Onisaburo saw it as the self-restraint before activation. The two reach the same place in that both try to rescue aramitama from the mistaken idea that it is "a thing that rages."

What comes into view from all this is that the history of aramitama is not the handing down of a continuous tradition. It is a chain of shifts, in three layers, intricately fused: in the early eighth century, the manner of a god's activation; in kokugaku, an interpretation of its character; from koshinto into religion, a function of the human interior. And at every stage, a force has consistently worked to pull aramitama away from violence.

Why? Unless we look at this seriously, the true worth of koshinto will not come into view. What we really need to see here is not the details of religious history but the ground of thought beneath them.

From Meiji on, the Western view of the human being poured into Japan like a muddy torrent. The scheme of a subject, an agent, an ego and a will that governs the impulses within came crashing in all at once like an avalanche. Western accounts of the human stand on languages in which the subject rules the world. But Japanese is not made that way. I read it, then, like this: when something that did not fit was forced onto the Japanese archipelago for the convenience of colonialism, a great upheaval occurred in thought.

Norinaga Motoori, Moribe Tachibana and Atsutane Hirata did not live into Meiji; theirs was a generation that never knew the upheaval. But Chikaatsu Honda lived at the crossroads, and Onisaburo Deguchi, born in Meiji, was in the middle of the whirlpool. What they did, I believe, was a resistance: on the ground called koshinto, they answered the imported account of the interior, built on a subject. That is why they refused to fill in the inside of the human being with translated words, as the Westernizers of the day (the admirers of Europe and America) did, and instead rebuilt it from Japan, taking in words from the Kojiki, the Nihon Shoki and kokugaku as their material. Ichirei shikon is indeed a product of modernity, but at the same time it can be called "the last Japan," something not imported with modernity.

And Onisaburo made one last, decisive move. He did not turn aramitama, moved into the human interior, into "an impulse to be governed." He split off violence as aremitama and left aramitama as a power that waits, quietly full, for activation. Because his religious genius lay here, this sensibility still survives quietly today, even after defeat in the war.

Modernity made the inside of the human being an object of governance: managing emotions, suppressing impulses, measuring the self by the yardstick of productivity. But we have now reached the end of that road. What matters is that aramitama was read as something that does not fail to act but simply has not yet been released.

Since the modern era we have learned only the art of managing ourselves. But I feel that what will be asked of us next is the art of being quietly filled. Perhaps that is where the Japanese have something to contribute.