日本社会の曖昧な領域The Ambiguous Zones of Japanese Society

If you have stayed in Japan for a long time, you have likely encountered a unique social structure possessing a vast and ambiguous realm that refuses to be neatly divided. I call this an ambiguous realm because its form creates a sense of wrongness distinct from the state as understood in the Western world, and within it, an incomprehensible invisible something is fused. Because it is an invisible something, it naturally cannot be fully identified by modern dissection and thus feels like a monster. The problem is that unless you were born and raised in Japan or have lived firmly in Japanese society for at least three years, this invisible something remains a presence you cannot touch. And despite being an untouchable invisible something, its fusion with other elements makes it impossible to extract as a specific entity. This trouble is easily relabeled and cut down as "village society," but that amounts to saying nothing, and discussing this type of problem is certainly not easy. Yet it is important to examine the reality of this mysterious Japanese system that goes beyond strange to sometimes feel terrifying. This is because the errors inherent in the origin of modernity appear there explicitly.

One who could be said to have gently approached this problem is Yamamoto Shichihei, who exposed the troublesome issues held by the Japanese community in his 1977 work The Study of 'Kuki' (invisible conformity pressure) about fifty years ago. However, his work merely presented the invisible existence of invisible conformity pressure as a force influencing Japanese behavior and decision-making. He notes in ambiguous terms that invisible conformity pressure is a monster possessing truly great absolute power and might be a kind of supernatural ability, or that if we do not grasp the true nature of this thing called invisible conformity pressure, we will have no idea what might happen in the future, but his argument actually contains a rudimentary defect. This lies in the fact that the root of his point, that the behavior and decisions of the subject are swayed by invisible conformity pressure, is narrated on the premise that a subject exists. In other words, Yamamoto Shichihei holds absolutely no doubt regarding the absence of the subject problem in Japan.

In fact, what is placed at the root of his argument is a unique assertion called Rinzaikan-teki Haaku [臨在感的把握] or a grasp based on a sense of presence. Simply put, this is a state where empathy toward a certain object becomes powerful and absolute to the point where it cannot be considered mere empathy. It argues that the intensity of empathy rises, and eventually one loses even the sensation that one is empathizing with the object, and this defines speech and action. This object includes various ideologies such as the Second World War, the postwar leftist movement, or the Anpo protests. In his view, the Japanese are regarded as losing the human subject through immersion in the object, but a subject concept fitting the Western context does not exist in Japan. The fact that this subject problem does not exist does not indicate negativity or primitiveness. It means that although such a problem itself does not exist in Japan, this type of problem possesses a standpoint disguised as a universal of the world.

To put it differently, there is no need to perceive the object as a subject-object relationship, nor to perceive it as an object or objective existence. This is an inevitability born from the linguistic structure of Japanese, but Yamamoto Shichihei, like the majority of scholars since Meiji, does not consider the viewpoint that his own language itself has a structure completely different from English or German. Therefore, he assumes the individual subject is determined by a mysterious monster called invisible conformity pressure. But if one discusses invisible conformity pressure from this mistaken premise, the standpoint remains shifted as it proceeds, and ultimately the distance becomes too great to touch the structure of Japan. In other words, a reverse action occurs where one moves away from the structure of Japan while intending to discuss it.

Certainly, the argument of Yamamoto Shichihei in that book can be called insightful. Especially for the foolish people who want to think universally that Japanese is the same as Western languages, it holds an impact leading to enlightenment. In fact, even now as fifty years have passed since publication, the book is frequently praised and used often in critiques of Japan within Japan. But when viewed from the perspective of language structure that a subject cannot exist in the existence called Japanese itself, the viewpoint of Yamamoto Shichihei vanishes all too simply. Therefore, it becomes visible that this type of problem will absolutely never reach a solution with only a gentle approach like that of Yamamoto Shichihei. The only thing we can extract from Yamamoto Shichihei, who is excellent in his pointing out, is limited to the ambiguous point that invisible conformity pressure exists above decision-making in Japan. This alone is persuasive, but on the other hand, the existence of invisible conformity pressure acting on a community is surely not limited to Japan. It is self-evident that there is no country where such a thing does not exist. There is merely a difference in intensity. In contrast, the familiar theory that Japanese empathy toward an object is too strong compared to Westerners amounts to saying almost nothing. Above all, he himself does not realize the fact that the concept he advocated as a grasp based on a sense of presence actually claims there is no subject problem in the Japanese. This is because the very character of the Japanese subject achieving total immersion in the object clearly indicates that neither subject nor object exists in Japan in the first place. In other words, he seems to be talking about the structure of Japan but is saying almost nothing.

That said, it is a fact that the argument of Yamamoto Shichihei appears to hold persuasion. Conversely, the problem is why people feel as if Yamamoto Shichihei exposed the structure of Japan. That is not because he spoke the truth, but because they can sense the truth squirming in the realm where his basis shifted. Here, the viewpoints indispensable for grasping the structure of Japan are Kinsei [禁制] (prohibition) and Mokkei [黙契] (tacit pact). Yamamoto Shichihei argues that the phenomenon of the individual losing the subject due to invisible conformity pressure, and invisible conformity pressure determining everything, became prominent after the modern era and especially since Showa (1926-1989). I agree with this, but what must be seen beyond that is that while Japan claims to be a constitutional state in the modern nation, its framework is maintained by codified rules such as laws and the constitution and institutions. However, these originate almost without exception from things transplanted from the West by the people who occupied key posts in the new government after the Meiji Restoration of 1868. To speak simply of Kinsei, it is a coercive force where one is punished if one breaks this. Kinsei becomes prominent in this aspect of the constitutional state, but the troublesome thing is that the problem of a different phase called Mokkei is left fused here.

To define the true nature of Mokkei plainly, it is the law of the living community. Mokkei is not codified but is a norm and unwritten law tacitly protected by members belonging to a specific living community. In other words, everyone living in that community knows it without need for codification. Unlike Kinsei, no state punishment is handed down when breaking Mokkei, but it appears in the form of erasure and exclusion from the specific living community. In Japan, Murahachibu (village ostracism) typically corresponds to this. Both Kinsei and Mokkei can transform depending on the era and place, but what requires caution is that when directing our gaze limited to the post-modern period, this Kinsei is set in a phase estranged from the indigenous, while Mokkei is an extension of the indigenous. In other words, Kinsei and Mokkei are deployed in the modern era by different movements. One cannot see through the structure of Japan if one confuses these two phases.

Kinsei uses as material the imports that the politicians and bureaucrats of the Meiji government brought in from Western frameworks. Certainly, efforts were likely made to tailor it to a form suitable for Japan, but it was built independently in a phase that is difficult to call indigenous at all. Above all, what this implies is extremely grave. This is because in the history since Meiji, which is the modernization of Japan, it suggests the fact that Kinsei, which is the foundation of a constitutional state, was actually estranged from the indigenous senses of the Japanese from the beginning. Kinsei without indigenousness always means occupation. In other words, when the Meiji government built a constitutional state, a movement arose where some Japanese rulers occupied other Japanese.

Another troublesome thing is that the locations where the Japanese of that time studied abroad to learn the systems of modernization were not a specific single country but were dispersed among the UK, France, Germany, the US, Russia, and others. It is quite complicated, but it was built in a form that mixed various bases anyway, such as politics and parliamentary systems based on the UK, the constitution based on Germany, and laws initially based on the UK and midway based on Germany. However, the problem arising here is that the character of Kinsei in the modern state differed in the Western countries of origin. For example, in the modern states of Western countries, Kinsei could be deployed while its indigenousness was expanded and guaranteed to some extent during the establishment process, but because the modernization of Japan was deployed in the form of a shoddy hut gathering imports together, it could ignore the method itself of transferring the Kinsei of the state through the expansion of indigenousness. At this time, a fissure was born in the heart of the Japanese by the construction of Kinsei, and the soil was prepared for the manifestation of special problems in the structure of Japan that are unlikely to occur in Western constitutional states. In other words, I believe the greatest problem in the structure of Japan lies in the establishment of Kinsei itself, which ignored indigenousness. This is because the enactment of Kinsei in this Japanese method gave room for a certain something to survive in an almost complete form in a different phase. That is Mokkei, and it can be said that this Mokkei possesses a character that was likely not considered in the process of the modern state in Western countries.

This is because Japan possesses a history where the Kinsei of the Shogunate and domains by the strong Tokugawa Shogun family, which lasted about 300 years, was deployed independently and unrelated to Western trends. But remarkably, the indigenous Kinsei in the Shogunate and domains of the Edo period was arbitrarily ignored by the strong policy of the Meiji government, which was a total denial of the Shogunate, and a construction method was adopted to import and incorporate completely non-indigenous Western Kinsei as material to fill that void. Also, when incorporating Western Kinsei into a position to be codified in the Japanese modern state structure, the historical reality that those forms of Kinsei were formed accompanying an indigenous context in Western countries was ignored and mixed uniquely under the strange philosophy of the modern state. Please note that the Edo period Kinsei which was once codified inevitably became invisible at this time. And it is important that the Edo period Kinsei was merely made invisible by the Meiji government side and was not discarded. A distorted structure had already arisen here, but once this happens, the destination where the Edo period Kinsei flows must be toward the living community.

In the village communities that existed countlessly across Japan at the time, the Kinsei of the Shogunate and domains did not hold very strong validity throughout the Edo period due to special geographical conditions. As a result, the indigenous Mokkei of their own living communities was emphasized above all else for them, rather than the Kinsei of the Shogunate administration. The aforementioned Murahachibu exists as a typical example, but this is a matter of life and death for villagers more than the Kinsei of the Shogunate and domains. Furthermore, since the indigenous Mokkei of the village community is equal to a syncretic form of indigenousness in a place of a scale of several thousand years and is simultaneously something that can hold uniqueness for each place, it cannot be discussed sweepingly. However, when a unified government was formally established in Tokyo after the modern era, the Kinsei of the Shogunate and domains of the Edo period lost its place to go and moved to blend with the Mokkei of the village living community. Moreover, although Japanese village communities existed countlessly, the Meiji government was pressed by the need to establish a modern state as rapidly as possible to develop a unitary Japanese people and confront the Western powers, so it conducted a violent measure to make the plurality held by these village communities invisible and collect them broadly with only the remaining residue. Those who especially led this forced unification were the folklorist Yanagita Kunio, the linguist Tokieda Motoki, and the constitutional scholar Minobe Tatsukichi. Here, it becomes visible that a unitary village, a unitary language, and a unitary philosophy from the state are designed via modern scholarship. At this time, the pluralistic world that Japan held abundantly was completely ignored from their perspective. Yanagita Kunio, who was a bureaucrat, deployed a nasty violence where he ignored the pluralistic world despite walking the villages across the country with his own feet and actually seeing it there. The origin of Japanese modern scholarship was born by some sloppy scholars and bureaucrats who did not look at Japan itself like this.

At this time, an opportunity was born for two foreign objects of different phases called the Kinsei of the Shogunate and domains and the Mokkei of the living community to blend in the Japanese village community, which was alienated from the place and abstracted in the state, but this was established because the Edo period Kinsei had the Japanese indigenous as a source. In other words, modern Japan falls into a strange structure here, but the problem lies even deeper. This is because even at the stage where Western Kinsei was established one after another as laws, the constitution, and institutions in the Japan dimension as a state, the unified state of that time did not have the power to exert influence to the corners of the Japanese archipelago. Considering that the dynamics of indigenous village communities were strong in Japan with considerable intensity until the late 1960s, it is understood that they were even stronger in the Meiji era. Therefore, this means it became the soil where two heterogeneous foreign objects called Edo period Kinsei and the indigenous Mokkei of the village community blended, and the Mokkei of the modern village community was established. It is the socialist forces and cults that later kept an eye on this abstracted existence called the modern village community and deployed anti-government movements. But the point that its content has become extremely complex with the abstracted thing of indigenous Mokkei, the Kinsei of the Shogunate and domains of the Edo period, and furthermore the Mokkei unique to the indigenous, is overlooked.

What is understood from the structure of Japan simplified here is that if one sets upper and lower levels in the system structure, the structure of the Japanese system is likely inverted when compared to the system of the country where the reader was born and raised. In a normal modern state, no matter how high a philosophy is premised, Kinsei such as laws, the constitution, and institutions will be positioned at the top of the state system. However, in the case of Japan, the constitutional state exists in name only, and Mokkei is deployed at the top of the state system while Kinsei is deployed below it. As I have touched upon several times in Shitsurae, the reason it became this strange structure is that although the modern state of Japan is modeled on the West formally, that is actually nothing more than a mask toward the world of that time, and the domestic governance system itself adopts the Zhu Xi system of the Edo period just as it is. In other words, the rulers of the Meiji government ostensibly performed a total denial of the Edo period disguised as feudalism and claimed freedom and equality, pushing forward Westernization there on the premise of the image of a new modern state, but the system itself which is the root of the content uses the governance principle of the Edo period just as it is. This double standard is greatly involved in the creation of modern Japan. The structure of Japan becomes even harder to grasp because Yamagata Aritomo, who was especially a powerful figure of the Meiji government and from the Choshu domain, directly transplanted the Zhu Xi system into the bureaucratic system of modern Japan. Therefore, the Japanese bureaucratic system wears the mask of Western state formation, but its reality is the Zhu Xi system that realized the governance of 300 years.

If one can grasp at a minimum the viewpoint that the governance principle of the Edo period was dragged into modern Japan here, it becomes visible why the Mokkei of the living community was deployed at the top of the modern system of Japan rather than Kinsei. That is because the nature of the Mokkei of the abstract village community of this modern Japan is the indigenous of the Edo period as mentioned above, and moreover, the Kinsei of the Edo period itself flows in directly and is fused. In other words, even if the central government side abstracted the village community, that is after all nothing more than universal common sense in a closed room for the people of a mere single district of Tokyo (Kasumigaseki, Chiyoda Ward) and does not reach the universal common sense for the village communities of various places in Japan covered widely by mountain ranges. And since the latter is the majority of Japan at the time, inevitably this duplication of double standards cannot avoid maintaining Mokkei as the superior concept that people living in the living communities of villages must protect. This narrates the inconvenient fact that the state system of the Meiji government advocating modernization was actually just a world of only some people in the closed room of Kasumigaseki and was unrelated to the people indigenous to the places of village communities throughout Japan, but this structure is exactly the same even now. Needless to say, what is important for the villagers of a village community in Nagano Prefecture is the indigenous Mokkei of the village rather than the closed Imperial Diet of Kasumigaseki, and what they feared most was not the legal punishment of the state but Murahachibu, which is erasure and exclusion from the living community of the village. For them, the constitution established by the Meiji government does not matter, nor does observing the law matter. Because there is nothing other than this Mokkei that is most serious in actual life.

The gap generated here is, in other words, a gap at the point when the modern state of Japan was founded and can be called the most serious one. From this viewpoint, if I reflect on the history of Japan which achieved modernization first outside the West, I assert that modernization is something closed to a part of the West and it is absolutely impossible to expand it as a universal. In other words, even if one directs the export of modernization to the outside of the realm called the West, it will always fail. It is self-evident if one looks at the current miserable state where Japan is greeting an outrageous decline in just 160 years while appearing to have succeeded temporarily in modernization, but this has demonstrated the cold hard fact that the ideal called modernization does not possess global strength. China, which followed this, is heading to the same path with a time lag, and even if one says next is India or next is Africa, it is self-evident that they will reach the same decline in several decades if one considers the time lag. This is because the characteristic in the modern lies in ignoring the place, but it exposes the arrogance of the precondition that thoroughly rejects indigenousness. For me, witnessing the complete decline of my mother country, it is self-evident that the modern is not universal, and much less is the modern attitude of believing that the correct answer or universal in a category closed to a part of the realm is also the correct answer outside that realm a verification that it was fundamentally mistaken. In other words, the decline of Japan today is the best model narrating the fact that the modern had failed from the beginning. The ideals and philosophies of the world and humanity deployed from this viewpoint will definitely head toward a desperate situation reversed from expectations. This fact means that the universal does not exist in the position where many people are thinking.

Therefore, we who try to go forward cannot escape from facing this problem called the modern. In a sense, based on these things, to search for where the truth lies means we can only reach it by a method developed from thinking completely different from before. This time, I concentrated on exposing the modern defects in the structure of Japan roughly, but this gap eventually responded to the current where industrialization rose from the regions to the cities, becoming the main cause bringing about violent confusion, and there the establishment of the military clique state and the influx to urban areas after the war were deployed while various factors intertwined. In other words, although it is a problem that cannot be presented unless one dives considerably deep, the structure of Japan has been abstracted and narrated too shortsightedly. Despite being a projection of the modern itself originally. Also, the cause for the public order of Japan seeming good is not because the Kinsei of the state is functioning, but because Japanese people are living with Mokkei as the superior even now. To rephrase, they violate laws and the constitution if it is to protect Mokkei, but since public order maintenance is done by Mokkei, it reverses when an earthquake or the like occurs and Mokkei vanishes temporarily.

Ending the modern is something achieved by the collaboration of each part of the world not limited to Japan. Will you process this as a unique circumstance of a mere other country, or will you make it a weapon to think earnestly about your own country? The will for that selection will likely rise globally from now on.