To speak a word was to move the world

LIVING QUESTIONS

For several months now I have thought hard about writing. Some pieces I pour my whole heart into reach no one at all; others I thought were second-rate strike a chord. I cannot say why, and the same thing never happens twice.

I chose the Japan where I was born and raised as the object of my thought, and I have kept digging into it ever since. Looking back, what drives me may not be a simple wish to convey Japan so much as a wish to share the possibility that lives inside sorrow. In a Japan so visibly in decline, I see things worsen to the point of heartbreak every day. Above all, I have watched again and again as people lose their vitality and the life drains out of one workplace after another. The decline is quiet, like Vienna at the end of its century or Argentina in an earlier age, and it eats away at people. What I feel most keenly is that the Japanese, once gentle, lively and generous of heart, have turned into their opposite.

In that sense, as someone born in 1991, I am without question one of the key witnesses to a structural turning point in Japan. After its defeat in the Second World War, Japan was prized as a "bulwark against communism," and it drew the full benefit of that position throughout the 20th century. Leaving its defense to the United States, it could pour all its energy into economic growth. That arrangement powered the high-growth era, and it is the real reason Japan rose to such commanding heights.

People called it a "miraculous recovery," but it was a flower that had bloomed inside a distorted structure from the start. That structure was the Cold War. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991, the absolute condition on which the old system rested disappeared. Meanwhile Japan had entered its bubble economy after the Plaza Accord of 1985; the cracks appeared in 1991, and the bubble ended with the collapse of Yamaichi Securities in 1997. Born inside that interval, I have spent all 35 years of my life as a living witness to Japan's dramatic decline. I still see from that vantage today.

Now Japan has become the world's first super-aged society, and its condition is dire. I have watched the decline and the exhaustion in real time, and all the while I have lived with my homeland as the stage of my thought. The kokugaku (国学) scholar Norinaga Motoori once spoke of a sensibility he called mono no aware (もののあはれ), and no words name more exactly what I carry inside me.

To think Japan through and give it form. Doing that again and again has real value, and it also brings a great deal of suffering. Strangely, the sharper the resolution of the words becomes, the nearer the risk of losing the essence. The more deeply I understand Japan, the more clearly I see that the present-day Japan people talk about on the surface exists nowhere. Yet that nonexistent Japan is consumed in vast quantities in a world of fiction. This pain is what drives me to write.

"What on earth am I writing for?" "Why text, and not photographs or music?"

Many of the great figures I admire deliberately chose to leave no words behind. Why, then, do I use words? Most writers have been locked inside this maze at least once. But in that world of inner wandering, someone has disappeared: the reader.

Writing is an intensely private act, so the moment you drop your guard, the desire to have someone understand your thoughts takes hold. This desire is the source of a troublesome disease in writing, and it is always creeping closer. It can surface in the prose without the writer noticing, and at worst it takes over. You may believe you have not been touched, yet the disease is already eating at your organs.

While I was lost in that wandering, I came across a phrase last week: "Writing is a gift to the person who reads it." Those words were enough to shake me awake and pull my warped will back into line. And the only way to honor them is to keep changing.

Our age has made it normal to explain every success and every failure in words, learn from the explanation and turn it into a system. There is nothing wrong with that in itself. But once you are caught in it, writing always turns lazy. And the moment it turns lazy, the gift loses what is inside it, and the writer starts attending to the decoration that disguises the package.

Reality is always harsh and unforgiving, and only those who have gone to the edge of death and come back can move on. It is cold, and at times cruel, but it is a truth all the same. That is why there is nothing to do but carry the pain and keep changing. The writing, its content, its quality: none of them survives except by changing. None of us living now can stand entirely apart from the algorithm. The real problem may be that we keep moving at high speed around its edges. One wrong step and you fall into the abyss, but there is no way except to keep going.

To keep asking in a world without answers is hard. Yet if you know from the outset that there are no answers, it may be possible to live through that world. That is where I stand now, and all I am doing is putting it into practice by thinking with Japan as my object. Seeing it that way, I felt my shoulders loosen.

JAPANESE THOUGHT

This week I want to look at "the transformation of words," and to come close to the minds of the kokugaku scholars, who held that words are a power that shapes reality.

First, the way these Edo-period scholars looked at their homeland can be summed up like this. Their critique rested on one premise: the foreign strata that had lain over Japan for more than a thousand years. In their day this meant Buddhism, which arose in India and came by way of China, and Daoism and Confucianism, which arose in China itself. Beneath that hard, thick membrane of foreign thought, a lost Japan revealed itself to them.

What, then, did the arrival of kokugaku mean in the long course of Japanese history? In my view, the great work they set out to do was not simply to reject foreign thought. It was to cut through the thick film laid over Japan from outside and to redefine the "true Japan" sleeping beneath it. Where they excelled was in seeing what that film actually was. It separated the native Japan lying "underground" from the foreign thought spread over the "surface," and it was made of "the transformation of words."

Language is not merely a means of communication. It is the very skeleton of a mind: it decides how the people who live inside it perceive the world, cut it into parts, and bring body and mind into resonance with it. As foreign concepts poured in and covered over the native sensibility, the words that belonged to Japan were forced through a decisive transformation. To shine a light back down the history of that transformation and recover the resonance and power that words once had: the kokugaku scholars were convinced that this was the only way to restore a lost spirituality.

The starting point was Keichu (1640–1701). He is remembered as the founder of kokugaku, but he began as a monk of the Shingon school, in the lineage of Kukai (774–835). This fact matters a great deal. At the base of the Shingon school lay the thought of shingon (真言), the Japanese rendering of the Sanskrit mantra. Kokugaku, in other words, is a philosophy of words. Shingon was understood as "the true words of the buddhas and bodhisattvas," and to voice those sounds was a practice that made one's own body and mind one with the buddha.

Behind this was Kukai's conviction that words do not explain; they have the power to transform existence itself. Keichu inherited that shingon thought deeply, and his greatness lay in turning his gaze from "the words of the buddha" to "the old words of Japan." The project he pursued all his life was to restore the Japanese of the Heian period, the age in which Kukai lived. He believed that if he could recover the words of Kukai's time, they would give him the power to recover the lost world of Japan.

In Waji Shoransho he put kana spelling in order, and in the same work he first used the name gojuonzu, "the table of fifty sounds," which leads to the Japanese we use today. In its preface he set out an idea of his own: that shinji, the true thing, is shingon, the true word, and that this is shinshin, the true heart. In English the point is hard to see. In Japanese it is plain.

The three words are written 真事, 真言 and 真心. Each begins with the character shin (真), which in the Shingon lineage can be read as "the buddha." Then come ji (事), gon (言) and shin (心). Keichu does not define these separately; for him they are one. Each character also has two readings in Japan. The on reading is the pronunciation that came from China, and every reading I have given so far is an on reading. The kun reading is the sound of the word that already existed in Japan. Read that way, 真 is ma, 事 is koto, 言 is koto and 心 is kokoro. What matters for the Japanese thought of words is the two koto.

Why do the two koto matter? The answer lies in ancient Japanese, and it came to light through Keichu's rigorous study of the classics. Working on the language of Kukai's era, Keichu came to see the two koto as the single most important concept of ancient Japanese. What he discovered was that the two koto had once been undivided. This fact, simple as it looks, would become the core of the whole current of thought that ran through kokugaku.

Keichu also joined the great compilation project led by Mitsukuni Tokugawa (1628–1700) of the Mito domain, and over 15 years he completed a commentary on the Man'yoshu. Compiled between the late seventh and the late eighth century, the Man'yoshu is the oldest surviving anthology of Japanese poetry, and the age it belongs to is sometimes called the Man'yo period. It mattered so much as an object of study because the words in it were alive. They were the memory of ancestors who had woven the thought of words into song.

A comparison with the chronicles makes this clear. A chronicle prizes facts and narrative, so it inevitably grows dull and carries little life. The words carved into a chronicle hold no thought. The words of a poetry anthology are alive, and the anthology is itself a book of thought, the spirit of its age set down in words. The moment Keichu finished that great work, the search for the true word, carried out by a single monk, joined the search for the words of the Man'yo age, and the foundation of kokugaku was laid as a kind of archaeology of thought. The ascetic Shingon endeavor to become one with the buddha, alive since Kukai, was turned by his heir Keichu into an intellectual endeavor to become one with ancient Japan. The weight of this can hardly be overstated.

The search for words that Keichu opened passed in time to Norinaga Motoori (1730–1801), and with him it bore fruit as a single system of thought. Building on what his predecessors had refined, Norinaga spent more than 30 years reading his way into the Kojiki, which no one had yet deciphered, and at last completed Kojiki-den. Kokugaku had begun by grasping the thought of words from the poems of the Man'yoshu; now it was carried into myth. Making that connection took many years.

Here the earlier question returns. Many people assume the Kojiki is just another chronicle. It is not. It is a book of thought. The Nihon Shoki, made in the same period, is a chronicle, built faithfully on the Chinese method of its time. Its words are dead, and I feel the dullness of a book that simply lines up events. The words of the Kojiki are alive, and something dwells in them. Norinaga took that nameless "something" to be the gods. To read the Kojiki was therefore to read the gods, and at the same time to try to restore the world of the gods of ancient Japan. I think of the Kojiki as a world in which ancient Japan was sealed away.

Norinaga's greatest achievement was to give system to the three layers of ancient Japan: kogo (古言), koi (古意) and kodo (古道). Laid out as before, in the on reading 古 is ko, and the rest are go (言), i (意) and do (道). Ko points to ancient Japan; go is words, i is thought, and do is the way of restoring ancient Japan. In the kun reading they become furukoto, inishie-kokoro and furumichi, and drawn out of them come koto (言), kokoro (意) and michi (道), the most important concepts of ancient Japan.

Kogo is not interpreting the characters of the classics as knowledge. It is grasping with body and mind "the resonance at the moment a word takes effect," an attitude that is deeply Japanese. Koi is catching that resonance and living again the rich feeling of a Japan before Buddhism and Confucianism covered it over; this is the sensibility Norinaga famously called mono no aware. And kodo is, having taken these into yourself, living in keeping with the worldview of the myths.

This way of doing research with body and mind is nothing other than the ascetic training of the Shingon school that began with Kukai. Norinaga then went further. He gave the sounds of Japanese a privileged place, held that the fifty sounds themselves were divine, and made the bold claim that everything in the universe is spoken through them. More striking still, holding that every pure sound between heaven and earth is contained in the fifty, he called the voiced and contracted sounds that fall outside them muddled and improper. He saw those sounds as imports from the continent. His position, then, was an intellectual rampart built to defend the native resonance of Japanese against foreign tongues.

What Norinaga stressed above all was that koto (言) and koto (事) had once shared a single root. I touched on this with Keichu, but why does it matter so much that the two were undivided? Both are pronounced koto, yet 言 is the word and 事 is reality. In ancient Japan, a word was not a mere sign. It was the power that formed reality itself.

To speak a word was to move the world.

This unity of the two koto, made explicit here, became the philosophical ground of kotodama (言霊), the belief that the divine dwells in words.

Everything so far bears on a historical question: why did Japan go for so long without a culture of writing? Next door, China had cultivated writing for thousands of years, and under its influence the Korean peninsula had a written culture from early on. Japan alone did not. Writing had very likely reached it, but an invisible psychological wall refused it. In the age before writing, people communed with the gods through the vibration of sound and believed the gods dwelt in that resonance itself. That is why they were so wary of fixing the gods in place with foreign letters. I believe the ancient Japanese felt that their world was made of a vibration older than words.

As history drew closer to the modern age, this way of thinking changed shape and became the prototype of a great current of thought. But in the modern era, what the kokugaku scholars had fought for lost its meaning entirely, and people built once more a world that prizes the written word. At that moment, something was lost from us as human beings. What it is has not changed, then or now. I cannot help feeling that the kokugaku scholars are quietly telling us so.