無常と姥捨：老いと共同体をめぐる日本の思索Mujo and Ubasute: Japanese Reflections on Aging and Community

When we speak of the spiritual culture of the Japanese, the concept of mujo (無常, impermanence) cannot be avoided. Mujo comes from a Buddhist truth: everything changes, and nothing remains. Originally it named a stark recognition of reality. The Japanese, however, took this Buddhist idea inward, not as a cold ending or rupture, but as a sense of beauty and even salvation. Let us look at the thought that lives there, with a contemporary eye.

A representative example is the cherry blossoms of spring, a symbol of Japanese culture. Their beauty lies less in blooming than in how quickly they scatter. When petals drift quietly on the wind right after full bloom and fall to the ground, we feel a kind of reassurance and acceptance. This is entirely different from the longing for “eternal life.” It rests on a view of life and death in which the present is dear precisely because it ends. The Japanese view of life and death once began with thinking about death. Indeed, each spring I find myself gazing blankly at the falling blossoms, and I feel that the sensibility of my ancestors is breathing there, unmistakably.

This sensibility appears strongly in classical literature too, which shows how long this spiritual culture has been cultivated. In Murasaki Shikibu’s famous The Tale of Genji, the glorious life of Hikaru Genji is gradually covered over by decline and parting. What matters is that his fall is never drawn as a “tragedy.” Here, perhaps, lies a great difference from the values of Western culture. Personally, I believe there is no tragedy in Japanese culture. How, then, did the Japanese of old understand a process we might call tragic? It is wrapped in mono no aware (もののあはれ), the feeling that everything changes, and the acceptance of it. We could call it a culture that affirms not “happiness that lasts forever” but “the beauty of a moment’s brilliance and its disappearance,” and I think it is among our most essential sensibilities.

The influence of this sensitivity to mujo on the Japanese view of life and death is immeasurable. We mourn death, yet we actively sense a natural cycle and meaning in it, and we accept it. This attitude was fundamentally compatible with the doctrine of reincarnation that spread after Buddhism arrived, and its traces remain strongly in Japanese funeral rites and the culture of memorial offerings. But I cannot overlook that a major movement in the ancient Japanese view of life and death came before Buddhist influence, and I will look into that separately from the standpoint of ancient history. Either way, there is philosophical depth in an attitude that does not try to conquer death, that holds the existence of death to be what makes the brilliance of life stand out, and that lives by accepting death first. By accepting death, life stands out vividly. From that grew the foundation of the cultural spirit called iki (粋).

For this reason, clinging to life, or trying to live without restraint, was what the Japanese of old held most in contempt. It shows plainly in the attitude of modern Japanese who have come to ask, “What does it mean to live?” Yet this question never suited the Japanese to begin with, and so no struggle will ever turn up an answer. The reason is that the question itself has never existed in our spirit, historically. The discontinuity of life that arises from thinking about death and accepting it was an essential element of Japanese culture, but it is now entirely forgotten, and people have come to hate and fear death. This decay of the cultural spirit, as it might be called, ironically coarsens living itself, and I believe a problem lies hidden here: the outline of life is being lost.

In modern society especially, great value is still placed on continuing, maintaining, and going on succeeding. From the standpoint of the essence of mujo, however, none of this is permanent. What will happen in the next moment is often unknown today, so these ideals, contrary to their original intent, breed an excessive attachment to life and make people suffer. In short, values have inverted, and people fall into states of “doing nothing” and “not wanting to change,” which in the end worsens their lives. First, think about death thoroughly, and accept it even when no answer is found. Everything begins there. That truth, which the Japanese nurtured over thousands of years, has been cut off in the present.

This is an extreme example, but in the villages of old Japan there was a custom called ubasute (姥捨). It has been handed down in countless legends, appearing as early as Konjaku Monogatari (1120) and Uji Shui Monogatari (1212-1221), and retold in changing forms in folktales across the country as ubasuteyama (姥捨山). Ubasuteyama is the tale of a son abandoning his aged mother on a mountain, and the custom is said to have been widely practiced to protect the survival of the village. By modern sensibilities, ubasute is of course seen as cruel and inhumane in Japan too. But we must not overlook that behind the long retelling of this story lie a deep sensitivity to death and aging and the anguish of a community.

What matters is that the ubasuteyama legends are not mere stories of contempt for the old. In many versions, the son, on his way to abandon his mother on the mountain, is saved by her wisdom and love. She breaks off tree branches along the way and leaves them as markers so that he will not lose the path home, or she prays for her son until her last moment. These scenes are not the simple, cruel story of discarding someone who is no longer useful. They are a mirror that confronts us with the fundamental questions of what aging is and what living is, and for the son they were also a rite of passage, demanding the resolve to get past this and live on in village society.

The word ubasuteyama is said to come from Mount Kamuriki (冠着山) in Chikuma, Nagano Prefecture. Interestingly, this place has long been known as a famous spot for beautiful moon viewing, and obasute no tsuki (姨捨の月), the moon of Ubasuteyama, has been sung in waka since ancient times. The poet Basho also expressed deep feeling for this landscape in Sarashina Kiko. What is striking is that Ubasuteyama, which should be a place of abandoning, is at the same time sung as a symbol of beautiful scenery.

Here a distinctly Japanese aesthetic shows strongly: the idea that beauty dwells in sorrow. It was a place where people were abandoned, and yet the moon that rises there is precious, and a kind of sublimity lives in the loneliness. Profanity and reverence, despair and hope live together here. I think this is a microcosm of the Japanese view of life and death, and a philosophical theme from which there is still much to learn today. What I want to note further is the logic of the community behind this legend.

As a premise, Japanese villages were cut off by harsh mountains until after the war. Amid frequent famine and severe cold, the sacrifice of the old as a means of reducing the mouths to feed was less a tragedy than a decision on which the survival of the whole community depended. In other words, there was a view that went beyond the individual life toward keeping the family and the village alive. This is hard to consider, but it is a very important problem. By not thinking seriously about it, the Japanese have often tilted in a bad, totalitarian direction. A clear example is the logic of conduct in Japan during the Second World War.

At that time the concept of wa (和) was revered. But this wa was not a virtue. It came from a sophistry that the runaway army brought out to indoctrinate the people, claiming that individual lives are rightly sacrificed for Japan, which was regarded as one whole community. Imprinting on the people this state of wa, so easy for a few to govern, eventually produced devices such as the kamikaze units. Even after the war, in the process of high economic growth, the wa of the militarist era was reused for governance as the foundation of Japanese society, and it became routine to exclude those who disturbed wa. It is the worst of logics: if you do not follow the code of “wa = Japanese society,” get out of Japanese society. And it remains deeply rooted even now. In the villages of old, one could cross the mountains and survive. Now “Japanese society = Japan,” so those excluded have no choice but suicide or flight abroad. This has been a serious problem throughout the postwar period, yet in the interest of keeping society intact it has never been seriously debated.

There is room to consider these points further, but for me, rethinking the significance of the ubasuteyama legend may become a driving force to break down this foolish control of the people. Perhaps the story was handed down for so long not to shun aging but so that we would not forget what aging is and what the weight of a life is. Modern Japan faces a super-aged society, a first in the world, yet these very questions are now deemed meaningless and pushed aside, and everyone has come to know nothing about living except clinging to life. That, I feel, is what has blocked growth and led to the great decline of the present. Seen as a whole, in a structure where everyone is forced to cling to their own gain, a society has taken shape that no longer has room, in any generation, to think about the future of the next.

From abroad, the stereotype of Japan as a wealthy country still seems firmly rooted, but the truth is the opposite. Travel around the country and it is obvious at a glance that this is fiction. It is not an extreme collapse but a slow decline, a distinctly Japanese kind of decline, and in recent years it has grown severe enough that the whole nation can gradually sense it. Yet it has already passed beyond anyone’s ability to handle, and fear of death has grown, strengthening a self-interested tendency for each person to try to live alone. This is tied to the loss of Japanese culture and of hospitality, and from my research trip around the regions this time I felt once more how deeply the culture has thinned.

Amid these hardships, what the Japanese culture of old teaches is the view that there is true value and beauty even in endings and in breaking. Perhaps that is the softness of heart with which to live life affirmatively, even in a harsh reality.