和の変様と絶対服従：見えない日本的全体主義The Transformation of Wa into Absolute Obedience

This article looks at how wa (和), a concept that can almost be called equivalent to “Japanese totalitarianism,” was used as a philosophy of the regime to control the people, and how that reaches into the present. Japanese totalitarianism seems to me to have, at its root, a nature quite different from that of other countries, and I believe that presenting wa, which is indispensable to any insight from this angle, will help readers understand.

First, wa is not a new concept of recent years; its history reaches far back. Since ancient times wa has been regarded as a Japanese virtue, and the oldest source is the first article of the Seventeen-Article Constitution set down by Prince Shotoku (聖徳太子, 574-622): “Harmony is to be valued” (和を以て貴しと為す). It teaches that not quarreling, and working together, is the most precious thing. Why did Prince Shotoku write this? As we have seen several times in Shitsurae, it was an age of fierce struggle over the acceptance of Buddhism. This passage can therefore be placed in the age when Japan’s first totalitarian tendency was put forward, together with Soga no Umako, the leading ideologue of the pro-Buddhist camp and the power behind the throne of Empress Suiko.

As an old concept, though, wa was originally an extremely mild ideal, aiming to avoid confrontation and keep order and harmony through talk. The wa of today has changed into something that can be called passive conformity, “not making waves in society” by way of sontaku (忖度) and reading the kuki (空気), and this is where it differs fundamentally. Wa had its roots in a principle of active cooperation based on mutual respect, but it came to mean simply suppressing oneself and following others. Here lies the difficulty of understanding Japanese totalitarianism.

The key change came in the Edo period, when Confucianism was accepted, but for clarity I will focus on the period after the Meiji Restoration. In the building of the modern state, the concept of wa was gradually reworked by those in power into a convenient means of rule. Among the most important was the Great Teaching Proclamation (大教宣布の詔), issued in the 1870s as part of the State Shinto (国家神道) policy. Put plainly, it showed the people the attitude of “absolute obedience to the Emperor.” At the time this was expressed with the word zuijun (随順), a word whose origin also goes back to the age of myth.

In short, wa, which had steadily transformed through the Edo period, was taken up by the Meiji government as it laid the foundations of the modern state. Under the guise of a traditional value, it in effect stressed obedience to the Emperor as national morality. This bears directly on the conduct of the Japanese people in the Second World War.

This transformation of wa seeped into the people over the years and finally reached its peak before the war. In 1937 the government compiled Kokutai no Hongi (Cardinal Principles of the National Polity), which placed extreme weight on wa as the essence of the Japanese spirit. It set “Japanese wa” apart as different in kind from the cooperation and compromise of Western-style individualist societies, and it is notable that it preached “a great wa in which each person exists within the whole with an allotted place, and the whole is kept as one through conduct that fits that place.” In other words, it asserted that people in Japan were not independent individuals but parts of a whole, and that true harmony is realized only when each submits to his or her role. This thought did not exist in Japan originally, but from this age to today it has become the spiritual foundation of the Japanese. The spirit of the Japanese is therefore very different before and after the birth of this ideology.

In the logic of those in power, Western-style individualist society was regarded as a cause of evil that falls into a war of all against all, and it is symbolic that they denied that true wa could exist there. Here wa became the ethical pillar that justified the unity of the state, and it was bent into an ideology demanding absolute obedience and self-sacrifice from the people.

When this change was fully put into place in the state system, it turned into the logic of absolute obedience. In the Pacific War especially, the Japanese military (mainly the army) advocated a “total war system” (総力戦体制) against the United States, pushed it to the extreme as a real principle of rule, and ran out of control. Of this great turning point, the sociologist Yasushi Yamanouchi (山之内靖, 1933-2014), discussing Japanese society under total war after the war, pointed out that it “tried to integrate the whole people under the slogan of the fateful unity of the national community.”

Readers may not be familiar with the total war system. It forcibly swept away the social conflicts that modern Japanese society had carried within it, such as class struggle and partisan strife, and rationalized and integrated the whole of society under the single aim of waging war. As proof, the National Mobilization Law (国家総動員法) was enacted in 1938. Under it, political parties inconvenient to those in power were dissolved or merged, labor unions were placed fully under state control, and every aspect of the people’s lives was subordinated to wartime mobilization. But because it was hard to control the people by such violent means alone, the army leaders who glorified militarization reworked the wa that had come down from ancient times to suit themselves. In the name of an idealized wa, they suppressed and excluded internal diversity, and demanded absolute service (obedience) to the state and the Emperor from individuals and subgroups.

This was not the wa of the traditional community but a one-sided wa forced from above by the state, and it can be called the first completed form of Japanese totalitarianism. In the first place, wa in the traditional Japanese community did not stand in relation to a unified concept such as a united Japan or a single-ethnicity Japanese people. It was nurtured in countless scattered village communities. Because that would not realize their ideal of rule, those in power erased this historical reality and made it as if it had never existed. The representative ideology of this fixed the enthronement of the first emperor, Emperor Jimmu (神武天皇), the origin of the imperial line, at 660 BCE, and on that basis taught that Japan has a history of about 2,600 years and that its ruler, the emperor, is the longest-lived absolute presence in the world. As Yamanouchi points out, under this system Japanese society was remade into a kind of huge functional body that was “system-integrated.”

As I have said throughout Shitsurae, I see the dating of Emperor Jimmu’s enthronement as arbitrary, and I take it, on the basis of my own study, that even at that time neither a unified Japan nor a single-ethnicity Japanese people existed. So when I met Yamanouchi’s argument, I was deeply moved. There may be no age harder to discuss than this one, but Yamanouchi traced the course of this ideology in detail and, drawing on his own experience, warned that it must never be repeated.

Yet one trait of Japanese society is that a decision, once made, is hard to change. Once such an ideology has permeated, the majority, seen at the scale of the nation, takes this premise to be the true picture of Japan and tends to set aside every other account as heresy. Combined, these traits made Japanese totalitarianism a truly serious problem more in the postwar period than in wartime.

The militarist regime of Japan did collapse with the defeat in 1945, and under the new constitution drawn up under American leadership, democracy and individual rights came to be proclaimed. But these were superficial and had almost no effect on the spirit of the nation. Many commentators who fail to see this layering tend to think that the structure of Japanese totalitarianism behind the beautified wa was cut off, but this view is completely wrong. I believe Japanese totalitarianism reached its highest level of precision in the postwar period.

As a superficial Western-style democracy was rapidly imprinted as the new ideology after the war, a great many commentators took wartime Japanese totalitarianism to be over. It was Yasushi Yamanouchi who raised the banner against this. He sharply pointed out that the prosperous social base of the postwar was not born suddenly from the break of defeat but was largely formed within the wartime system of total mobilization. In fact, during the occupation, though things like the dissolution of the zaibatsu happened for a time (and were later restored), the old governing machinery and elite were preserved, and joined with the new order of rule to shape the social structure of postwar Japan. Rising here under a secret understanding with the United States was Nobusuke Kishi (岸信介, 1896-1987), a war criminal who should by rights have been sentenced to death at the Tokyo Trials. He was known in Manchukuo as the “emperor of the night” (the head of the opium interests), served as prime minister from 1957 to 1960, and was the grandfather of former prime minister Shinzo Abe, who was assassinated.

The logic of control that used prewar wa has been publicly denied, but in fact it has lived on in the depths of society, changing form. Surprisingly, it has not been cleared away even now, and looking at Japan lately I feel it is being strengthened instead. To my eyes, contemporary Japan is therefore quite unsettling. Something wholly unlike the surface peace fills the land, and it seems a sign that a great change in a bad direction is coming.

In postwar Japan, the idea of wa with its militarist shadow was no longer proclaimed openly as a state ideology as before. But the norm at its core, which puts the group before the individual and holds that not disturbing order and unity is good, has if anything deepened firmly at the level of society. People seemed to have gained freedom under democracy and rights, yet an excessive concern to get along smoothly, without friction with others, remained deeply rooted. So the control device of wa, though no longer the forceful coercion of the past, seeped into society in soft forms such as invisible pressure to conform and self-censorship.

To put it plainly, the postwar wa that appears in an invisible form is more of a problem than the visible prewar and wartime wa. I take this as “the new wa = invisible Japanese totalitarianism.” In the postwar years, entangled with high economic growth, it spread widely through corporate culture, school education, and social norms, and today it has been deployed as an invisible principle of rule at its highest degree. Yamanouchi’s warning about the future has come true in the worst form, and contemporary Japan has already completely lost its capacity for self-purification. This is only my own conjecture, but Japan will probably head quickly once more toward a state that imitates the prewar.

The concept of wa was originally a precious wisdom by which people build a peaceful order through dialogue and mutual concession, and it was one of the fine qualities the Japanese inherently held. From the Edo period through the modern era, however, the ideal was used by those in power and turned into a regime ideology, and was finally bent into the logic of absolute obedience of Japanese totalitarianism. Before and during the war, wa became an ideological device that forced unconditional unity with, and sacrifice for, the state, and after the war the structure was not dismantled but, changing form, kept flowing beneath society. It does harm in many ways, such as the sense of difficulty in living that Japanese people feel and the abandonment of thought, and it has formed a contemporary Japanese society in which many find it hard to use their real strength.

Because it is not an overt ideology, it is hard for people in other countries to decipher. And precisely because it has permeated deeply in invisible forms such as habit and kuki, it is a bond all the harder to notice, and the control is so complete that even the Japanese themselves cannot explain it. As a result, Japan has become a strange structure that can be governed with those in power doing nothing, with no need for an absolute leader or state management of the people through the latest technology as in other countries. This makes analysis harder still, and I feel that the points made by commentators at home and abroad miss the mark entirely.

Born and living in Japan, I find it truly painful to see every day the many Japanese who have been deployed as parts in this Japanese totalitarianism, with no chance to use their fine inherent abilities, left to wear down and meet their deaths. I feel a strong fury at the sight. In another country, the ground might be ripe for revolution, but looking calmly at this historical side, the next revolution in Japan is not yet timely. The few of us, myself included, who believe in the original possibility of Japan’s true wa each carry out our mission and prepare for the great turning point to come.

Many leaders in other countries admire this Japanese totalitarianism, but in fact it was nurtured by Japan’s history and culture over a long time, so in practice setting up the same system elsewhere is impossible. With this in mind, I hope readers who visit Japan will look at the form Japanese totalitarianism takes everywhere. Looking quietly, you will understand that it is not a good future. Unfortunately, history repeats itself.