Japanese ethics: Beyond good and evill

·期刊原文

Japanese ethics: Beyond good and evill

Wargo, Robert J.J.

Philosophy East & West

Vol. 40 No.4 1990.Oct Pp.499-509

Copyright by University of Hawaii Press

JAPANESE ETHICS: BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL

At the outset I should confess to an uneasiness over the
hubristic character of the title of this article, for it will
be impossible to cover all of Japanese ethics in this short
discussion, even in the most cursory manner. And yet I do
want to indicate that our considerations will, it is hoped,
shed light on some pervasive features of Japanese thinking on
ethical matters throughout history.

Traditionally discussions of Japanese ethics center on
notions such as on[a] (personal, often overarching
obligation), giri[b] (social or status obligation), ninno[c]
(human feeling), gimu[d] (legalistic obligation), and the
like. Often Buddhist concepts of karma and compassion or
Confucian notions of propriety and righteousness will also be
called upon to explain ethical practices in Japan now and in
the past. All of these, as well as a host of others including
more recently investigated concepts such as amae[e]
(dependency), are indeed important to a full understanding of
Japanese behavior in many contexts, but they do not get at
the heart of the issue in many instances. None of the
concepts above, even in combination, can give a clear
explanation for various incidents which have had important
consequences for Japan's international image--the 1987
Toshiba-COCOM Incident, for example. This is not because
these concepts, and others like them, are inapplicable to
Japan, for they most certainly do explain many Japanese
patterns of behavior. The difficulty with the concepts is not
their inapplicability to the society, but their sweep or, if
you will, their level in the ethical hierarchy. For all the
immense influence of both Confucianism and Buddhism on
Japanese culture, Japan is not fundamentally and primarily a
Confucian culture like China or a Buddhist culture like
Thailand. Nor is it a Western culture, despite the profound
impact the West has had on Japan for the past century or so.

To deny that Japan has been shaped and enriched by foreign
ideologies and institutions would be absurd, in the field of
ethics as well as in nearly every other field. Indeed, most
of the ethical writing of the Tokugawa[f] period (1603-1867)
was avowedly Confucian in tone, as was the tone of education
in modern Japan since the Meiji[g] period (1868-1912).
Without an understanding of the influence of Buddhist
thought, Japanese literature--for example, The Tale of
ginji[h], The Tale of the Heike[i], the No[j] drama, and
haiku[k]--sculpture, painting, gardens, and a whole host of
quintessentially Japanese art forms like the tea ceremony
would be totally incomprehensible.

Yet, for all this, it strikes me that the basic
weltanschauung is neither Confucian nor Buddhist, but, for
want of a better term, Shintoist. This Shintoist orientation
is like the root system of a tree that has been subjected to
massive pruning and shaping by external forces. It is the
shape and interlacing network of branches that excite one's
interest and admiration; but it is the roots--which store and
send back up vital nutrients--that underlie the dynamism of
growth and revitalize the cultural tree, which otherwise
would die from injury to its above-ground parts.

Confucianism became the more-or-less official social ethic of
the Tokugawa period, but not without some very serious
reservations. For example, in Japan filial piety was
superseded by loyalty to one's lord, and the Mandate of
Heaven, which gave the subordinate the right to rebel against
an unfit ruler, was rejected, as was the meritocracy of the
examination system (at least until the modern era). The
humanistic character of Confucian philosophy and the
hierarchical character of the social order it espoused fit in
quite well with the Japanese view of the world and were thus
enthusiastically adopted. But those features which did not
fit so well were soon rejected.

It is interesting, and quite instructive, to note that,
despite their overwhelming enthusiasm for things Chinese, the
Japanese were never really very taken with Taoism, even
though it was an integral part of the Chinese cultural weave.
Free-form Taoism was the counterbalance to the rigid
structures of Confucianism, the yin to the establishment's
yang. One might be tempted to conclude that Taoism was simply
too free-form and individualistic for the orderly Japanese,
but that would, I think, be a mistake. Taoism is inherently
no more free-form and individualistic than Zen' Buddhism.
Indeed, some would argue that Zen is essentially the way
Taoism manifested itself in a Buddhist context. Certainly
Chinese scholars who specialize in one have a tendency to be
very sympathetic to the other. In any case the similarities
are almost overwhelming.

This being the case one would expect that Zen would be as
unpopular in Japan as Taoism has been. Yet we know that this
is not so: Zen has become almost synonymous with Japanese
culture. It would be impossible, even without the excellent
writings of D. T. Suzuki, to think of the tea ceremony,
Japanese gardens, the martial arts, and a host of other
cultural phenomena without reference to Zen. Even today, many
of the economic behemoths that are at the core of Japan's
material success send their managers on Zen meditational
retreats.

Why, then, is there such a difference in terms of acceptance
in Japan? I suggest that it really comes down to the fact
that Taoism is very much concerned with the nature of
government, whereas Zen is not. Taoism represents an
alternative to the Confucian theory of government, and its
proselytizing would have meant conflict and confrontation in
the area of governance. Zen, however, concentrated on
individual enlightenment, and so it was not trying to play in
the same ball park as Confucianism. There was a neat division
of labor, a compartmentalization which precluded social
unrest. Social harmony as a value and the interpretation of
Taoism as something to be ignored lest it set in motion
forces which would be destructive if that value were not
brought into the society from the outside, but were part of
the framework to which external ideas and institutions had to
adjust if they were to be successfully transplanted into
Japan.

Note, too, that the forms of Buddhism which took strongest
root in Japan were the forms most congenial to the indigenous
faith and the basic parameters of the indigenous world view.
Even in the early stages there was a concerted effort to make
Buddhism more palatable to the Japanese by identifying the
various buddhas and bodhisattvas with Shinto[m] kami[n] in
what was known as Ryobu Shinto[o]. But for all that, it was
not until the proselytizing efforts of the Zen and Pure Land
sects in the thirteenth century that Buddhism really acquired
popular appeal. The rejection of abstruse scholasticism,
complicated ritual, and monastic isolation, together with an
emphasis on simple practice, greater attention to the here
and now, an acceptance of human fallibility, and the prospect
of universal salvation, made Buddhism more accessible to the
vast majority of the people. The vibrations of these sects
proved to be more in harmony with the deep-seated rhythms of
the land and the people than the more complicated forms which
had become part of the life-as-art orientation of the court
aristocracy in the Nara[p] (710-794) and Heian[q] (794-1185)
periods.

This is not to say that Buddhism did not greatly affect the
culture before the introduction of Zen. It certainly did. The
cultural life of the Heian period, especially among the
aristocrats was heavily indebted to Buddhism, especially in
the arts. There can be little doubt that, as Umehara
Takeshi(n1) asserts, Buddhism brought about an ethical,
psychological, and literary deepening of the Japanese
intellectual and cultural tradition through the introduction
of its systematic philosophical exploration of the human
condition. He is quite right, I think, when he says that the
intricate and profound explorations of the human condition in
The Tale of Genji cannot be understood without reference to
Buddhist thought. But that is not to say that Genji is a
Buddhist work. Quite to the contrary, Motoori Norinaga's[r]
emphasis on indigenous themes, as well as indigenous
ethico-aesthetic sentiments, is a masterful piece of literary
and cultural analysis. Norinaga may have gone too far in
attempting to exclude or render irrelevant all Buddhist
influence on the work, but it would be just as dangerous to
forget that the network of Buddhist concepts is an overlay
that has been integrated into an indigenous ethical and
aesthetic world view. Even the No dramas, for all of the
Buddhist language in them, seem to have more the quality of
Shintoistic exorcisms, albeit complex meditative ones, than
literary Buddhist sermons or morality plays.

What, then, is this basic core upon which later philosophic,
aesthetic, and social notions were based? It can be no other
than the cluster of concepts and attitudes that comprised the
indigenous faith of Shinto. It is not the codified set of
regulations and dogmas propounded in the nineteenth century
under the title of State Shinto, but rather the basic
attitudes toward the world that underlay the agriculturally
oriented religious practices from before the introduction of
Buddhism and which continue down to this day. Seldom having
been philosophically analyzed, Shinto philosophic categories
and values have not been given the attention they deserve in
efforts to elucidate the nature of Japanese ethical and
metaphysical values.

Part of the reluctance, on the part of both foreign and
Japanese investigators, to examine Shinto may be a result of
the association of Shinto with the excesses of prewar
militaristic and chauvinistic fervor. Even when divorced from
the ideological and political superstructure imposed on it
because of the promulgation of State Shinto from the Meiji
through the early Showa[s] periods, the animistic faith has
not been generally looked to for insights into Japanese
society. Because it is animistic and avowedly nonsystematic,
Western scholars have had a tendency to regard it as a
primitive faith that has long since been superseded by other
more elaborate, philosophically articulated religions. For
many Japanese scholars, however, it seems fruitless to
investigate such intuitively obvious principles.

Basically I should like to argue that the animistic Shinto
view of the world and man's position in it gives rise to an
interpretation of the word "responsibility" which is
radically different from that which emerges from the
Judeo-Christian tradition.

In the Judeo-Christian tradition there is a double
bifurcation in the relationship linking God, man, and nature.
The first is that God is infinite while both man and nature
are finite. The second is that God and man are spiritual
beings (since man has a soul) and that nature, since it has
no soul, is simply material. This results in three distinct
orders of being: (1) infinite and spiritual; (2) finite,
combining spirit and matter; and (3) finite and material. Man
is given dominion over nature by reason of his soul, which is
his direct link to God. It is this soul, too, which gives
rise to the question of morality. There is no question of
morality in nature; even animals operate on essentially
mechanistic principles, a la Rene Descartes, or at least
naturalistic principles involving drives, deterministic
behavior patterns, or whatever. Reason is not an aspect of
nature.

Reason is, however, very important in the case of man. Man
has an intellect, which allows him to know what he should and
should not do, at least in most cases. He has the free will
to choose among a variety of patterns of action which his
intellect has delineated for him. To make the right or
correct choice is to choose that course of action of which
God would approve (the intellect is, of course, what allows
one to know what this is). To choose any other is to defy
God, that is, to sin. The point is that to commit a sin is to
commit an offense against God; even murder is sinful
primarily because it is an abrogation of God's law and only
secondarily because it is an offense against another human
being.

Note that to commit a sin, to be guilty, one has to know that
what one is doing is against the will of God (or at least to
believe that it is). One who is duped into pushing a button
which electrocutes an innocent victim cannot legally or
morally be held culpable if he had no way of knowing, or even
suspecting, that this action would have such a terrible
result. A second requirement for culpability is that the
person could have avoided inflicting the damage if he had so
chosen. Thus an engineer of a train that ran over someone
lying on the tracks would not be held culpable if the brakes
had failed to work through no fault of the engineer's (and if
he was paying attention, going the proper speed, and so
forth) . Culpability, that is, responsibility, requires
knowledge, volition, and capacity.

Now sins can be forgiven (by God) if the perpetrator repents,
that is, acknowledges the wrongfulness of his act and
sincerely vows not to do it again. Normally there will also
be some form of punishment or retribution exacted that is
deemed commensurate with the crime. The difference between
conventional laws such as traffic regulations and the moral
law is that that the latter is based on an absolute set of
values (God's eternal laws), which can be apprehended through
reason, whereas the former are mere conventions which are
useful for the orderly functioning of society and are based
on no absolute system of values.

Individual conscience is thus the focal point for moral
decision since it is there that the standards lie. To take
responsibility for a sin or a crime, then, is to acknowledge
that one knowingly and willingly committed a morally or
legally wrongful act and that one therefore deserves to be
punished. Whether or not one is religious, the major
considerations for judging ethical responsibility or
culpability remain the same. In very rough outline, then,
this is the metaphysical and ethical foundation for the
notion of sin and responsibility in the Judeo-Christian
tradition.

Shinto has a very different way of viewing things. First,
there is no absolute distinction between the divine, the
human, and the natural; rather, they form a continuum. The
term for the divine is kami, which is most often rendered in
English as "god," but which seems to have been used in the
sense of 'superior', 'that which has strange powers', 'that
which man cannot understand', 'miraculous', or 'awesome'.
Whenever there was something which inspired a sense of awe in
man because of its power or beauty, this was said to be a
kami or a place where a kami resided. Anything which had this
cosmic charisma was a kami, whether it was a rock, a
mountain, a man, or a phenomenon of nature; thus, for
example, Mt. Fuji was a kami, as were many historical figures
and the emperor. I have no doubt that had the Japanese lived
in North America, the giant redwoods of California, Niagara
Falls, and the Grand Canyon would all have been enshrined.

Everything in the world had a spirit (tamashii[t]) and even
speech, but some places or beings were loci for especially
intense concentrations of this spiritual or cosmic energy,
and this was called kami. This means that there is an
essential oneness about the universe; man is not above nature
but part of it, and consequently is able to live in friendly
intimacy with the gods who, too, are part of the whole. How
much this contributes to the strong egalitarian strand that
persists alongside the penchant for hierarchies in Japanese
society is not clear, but it bears some thought.

The relationship to the kami was very much a communal, rather
than an individual, affair, since the local objects of
worship were most likely nonpersonified powers that protected
the village, or the forces of nature essential to sustaining
the agricultural cycle. It was only at a later stage that
personalities were ascribed--and then only cursorily--or that
humans could be regarded as kami. In fact there seems to have
been little or no distinction between a man or object being a
kami and a man or object being respected as a kami because of
being possessed by a spirit or infused with a cosmic energy.

Thus the notion of the kami as lawgivers who must be obeyed
on pain of punishment did not arise. Rather both kami and men
participated in the natural order of things, which was seen
as a general progression from chaos to order. This
progression, the order of things, was very much a manifest
phenomenon to be discerned directly through perception and
intuition, rather than the result of hidden workings which
could only be grasped through the application of tortured
reasoning.

Although there was a distinction between the manifest and the
hidden, the emphasis was always on the apprehensible and the
immediate. There was very little reference to the world of
darkness after death except to note that it was there and
that it was man's fate to die as part of the natural order of
things. Umehara Takeshi(n2) argues that it was Buddhism which
first introduced a full-blooded concept of hell into Japan,
first as an element of a complex metaphysics and then as a
metaphor for the tortured mental state of those humans who
have not learned to free themselves from desire. Shinto, for
its part, never subscribed to the
"To-enter-heaven-travel-hell" course of meditative
self-reflection that seemed so much a part of Buddhism.

Shinto was thus basically optimistic in orientation and
focused on the present, concrete world of ordinary existence.
Man, and the world also, was inherently good. There was no
Manichean conflict of equally substantive forces of good and
evil, for moral evil was a temporary affliction that was to
be overcome, like a shadow that is dissipated by the
sunlight. There were, of course, calamities and misfortunes
to be avoided if at all possible, which could be called
evils. Some of these--death, for example--were in fact
unavoidable, but such evils, including possession and
harassment by malevolent spirits, were regared as
circumstances to be contended with as part of the conditions
of human existence.

There were no elaborate and systematic ethical proscriptions
since there was no absolute good or evil. What was counted as
good or evil depended very much on the specific conditions
obtaining as well as on the nature of the community to which
one belonged. This is not to say that all moral evaluations
were merely conventional or totally relative, but simply that
any attempt to spell out the distinctions in a tightly
reasoned system would fail.

What counted more than anything else were sincerity and
courtesy, which meant the eradication of selfish desire. A
man of pure heart would automatically act properly and
promote harmony in the community. The distinction
between>evil, proper and improper action, would be made by
the soul (tamashii) of man on the basis of intuition, which
could be strengthened and sharpened with the help of the
kami. It was as if there were a harmonic resonance between
the soul of man and the higher energy level of the deity,
which would produce greater clarity of vision in the former.

But, of course, one could not simply approach the kami,
sources of such immense spiritual power, without taking
proper precautions. To avoid insulting the kami or otherwise
causing a dissonance between the kami and oneself, with all
the dire consequences that might entail, the petitioner had
to purify his mind and body before coming into the sacred
precincts.

The importance of the rites of purification (misogi[u]) in
Shinto cannot be understated. The core concepts, both
metaphysically and ethically, are purity and pollution or
defilement (kegare[v]), not virtue and sin. The emphasis is
on brightness or purity, which is seen as a natural condition
rather than one which is only attained after a hard struggle
to conquer one's basic nature. One is supposed to make the
effort to avoid defilement; should one fail to avoid
defilement, it is then necessary to undergo rituals of
purification. Sin or moral guilt was not a feature of Shinto
belief, or at least not the outstanding feature, but
defilement very definitely was.

This centrality of the purity-pollution pair of concepts has
some important consequences for the world view and its
ethical perspective, which, I suggest, are relevant even
today. To get some idea of what those consequences are, one
need only look at a list of things considered to be
pollutants: disease, injury or death, the blood from wounds,
sexual intercourse, menstruation, childbirth, and antisocial
acts such as murder and adultery. While this is by no means
an exhaustive list, it should be obvious that most of these
would not qualify as sins or crimes anywhere except in Bishop
Butler's Erehwon. One wants to say that often one cannot help
contracting a disease or being injured, and certainly one
cannot avoid dying--suicide yes, but not dying. One could, of
course, avoid childbirth and even sexual intercourse (which
would neatly solve the childbirth problem), and there are, in
fact, certain individuals who do. But making this a universal
practice would hardly be a prescription for the longevity of
the race.

How can one be blamed for not avoiding what is impossible to
avoid? The answer is, of course, that one cannot. Shinto does
not ascribe blame to someone who has become defiled through
action or contact with a pollutant; blame has no point in
these contexts. This does not mean, however, that the
pollution or defilement is overlooked because it was not
deliberately acquired. When one is defiled, no matter whether
it be through one's own volition or whether one was an
'innocent victim', one remains defiled (and therefore a
social pariah) until one has undergone a purification
treatment. The logic is familiar enough to us all. If someone
dumps a bucket of mud and filth over you as you innocently
walk down the street, I may sympathize with you, but I most
assuredly will not invite you to come to my dinner party
without your cleaning up first. Someone raised in the
Judeo-Christian tradition will protest that this logic may be
appropriate for this sort of case, but that it is not
appropriate to the moral sphere, precisely because it
precludes blaming. Morality, he will go on, requires
responsibility and the ascription of praise or blame.

Yet that is precisely the point at issue. Such an ascription
of praise or blame is only relevant if one uses a framework
which links questions of morality to voluntary obedience or
defiance of moral principles of behavior, whether divinely
given or discoverable through reason. For Shinto, however,
the reasoning given above is applicable to the deepest and
most significant levels of human intercourse, since
purity-pollution provides the most fundamental metaphysical
and ethical axis.

Rites of purification thus become a central concern in
Shinto, since they alone can restore an individual to the
condition of purity required to make him fit to stand in the
presence of the kami and to participate in human society.
This stress on rites of purification has very likely
reinforced the fondness for water and bathing for which the
Japanese are so well known. And in all likelihood it has been
a not inconsiderable force in strengthening the Japanese
penchant for formalism and ritual apologies. This emphasis on
ritual also makes it easier to understand how the Japanese
could so enthusiastically adopt a social ethic such as
Confucianism, even with its prudish overtones.

In order to prevent the rituals from degenerating into empty
formalism, a great deal of weight was put on sincerity of
intention as a requirement for the efficacy of the
purification ritual. Extolling purity of heart over the
specific content of actions continues down to this day, even
in the public arena. It was purity of heart which was
supposed to have been the chief source of strength for the
members of the Special Attack Forces (kamikaze[w]) in World
War II, and it makes it easier to understand the practice of
seppuku[x] or harakiri[y] (ritual suicide) as a purification
ritual that was also a test for purity of intention (at least
for those who used it to admonish their lords). Cynics might
be forgiven for concluding that in the political arena, at
any rate, formalism seems to be by far the more prevalent, if
not effective, strategy.

The rites of purification were not simply a matter for the
individual, however. Shinto was always tied up with the
traditions of the community, and the local shrine served as a
focus for the unity of the community. The solidarity of the
community was of prime importance, and the worth of an
individual was derived from the contribution he made to that
solidarity. The basis for behavior, then, was not individual
conscience, but authority and tradition. The community was
not thought of as a collection of atomistic individuals;
rather it was the individual that was thought of as a
composite of his personality, the traditions of his family,
and the heritage of the community. Thus egoism was not
tolerated, and one was expected to exhibit resolute fidelity
to the community as well as valor in the prosecution of the
community's interests.

Certain offenses, even if committed by individuals, could
produce enough pollutants to defile and bring wrath on the
entire community. Communal purification would be necessary in
such cases to wipe away the defilement. As one might expect,
this often meant that the head of the community, as
representative of the whole, would have to undergo a rite of
purification to remove the defilement on the whole. This
would be sufficient to purge the community of the stain it
had incurred, and the efficacy of the ritual would in no way
depend on whether or not the official penitent had actually
been the one who generated the pollution in the first place.

I would submit that the actions of the Japanese in handling
the Toshiba/ COCOM case constituted a rite of purification in
the sense just described. Toshipa Machine Tool had been
suspected of selling to the Russians advanced machining tools
which had been prohibited for export to the communist bloc.
Toshiba and the Japanese government stoutly denied the
charges until a material witness surfaced whose testimony
clinched the case. For a long time the Japanese government
and the company temporized, as if by not formally recognizing
that anything had happened they could avoid the issue long
enough for it to blow over. A stain does not exist if one
does not notice that it is there, does it? Stonewalling is a
standard practice in the public sphere in Japan--witness the
responses of the politicians to charges of bribery in the
Recruit scandal, which occupied so much of the Japanese
public's attention recently.

Once it was perceived that the angry reaction in the United
States was more virulent and long-lasting than anything they
had anticipated and that they would not be able to ignore the
issue, the Japanese decided some dramatic action would have
to be taken. Naturally MITI could not in any way allow itself
to be involved lest it defile the government as a whole.
Instead it was decided to have the chief officers of Toshiba
Machine Tool and the parent company, Toshiba Electric, atone
for the offense. In resigning they were accepting
responsibility for the stain on the honor of their
organizations, but they steadfastly refused to admit to
having had anything to do with the illicit transactions or
even having any knowledge of them. For the Japanese this was
a dramatic, perhaps even ultimate, act of atonement and
purification. The heads of both the company involved and its
parent firm had sacrificed themselves for the good of their
organization.

Naturally the Americans did not quite see it that way. To
many of them, the resignation of the top brass was proof that
the plot to betray the United States had been directed by, or
at least known to, the top echelon of the Toshiba group. If
they were not involved, why did they resign--so went the
reasoning. By the same token, if they really were not
involved, then their resignations were meaningless, since
from the American point of view only when those who planned
and perpetrated the crime were punished would justice be
done. Moreover, the U.S. insisted on reimbursement for
damages and legal restraints to ensure that this would not
happen again. Many Japanese were flabbergasted by these
demands, for as far as they were concerned, everything that
needed to be done to restore honor had been done. They would
naturally erect institutional safeguards to ensure that this
could not happen again. The motive would, however, be more
practical than moral: they simply do not want to be put in
such a position again. They want to avoid occasions of
possible defilement. All perfectly right and proper in Shinto
terms.

It seems to me that the basic Shinto conceptual framework has
not been destroyed. Quite to the contrary, it is a strong and
vibrant force even today. Of course the Shinto framework
cannot be used to explain all, or perhaps even most, of the
phenomena that constitute modern Japan, but I believe it can
be an extremely useful and even indispensable tool in one's
analytic toolbox. Think, for example, of the steadfast
refusal of the Japanese government to allow any official
apology for Japan's actions abroad in the 1930s and 1940s, or
even to discuss the matter. Should such an admission be made,
it would mean that a tremendous, perhaps indelible, stain on
the honor of the whole nation would have been recognized.
This woud demand a commensurate rite of purification, and
that thought alone is enough to make many Japanese break into
a cold sweat. The logic would seem to demand that the
emperor, who is the source of national unity, be the one to
undergo the rite. But it is one thing to lose a company
president or chairman--such men are, after all, only
transient, elected functionaries. It is quite another to
contemplate the loss of one whose family has ruled Japan for
so long that he has become the symbol of the soul of the
nation.

The question that remains is whether the passing away of the
Showa Emperor has opened the door to a solution of this moral
dilemma or whether it has ensured that no solution will ever
be found.

NOTES

(n1.) Takeshi Umehara, Jigoku no shiso (Tokyo: Shueisha,
1981), p. 39 passim.

(n2.) Ibid., pp. 73ff.

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