Samurai and self-colonization in Japan
This is the first article I had ever written in English. Jan N. Pieterse invited me to present it in Amsterdam, in a conference titled: De-colonization of Imagination. It was finally included in the book De-colonization of Imagination: Culture, Knowledge and Power, Edited by Jan Nederveen Pieterse and Bhikhu Parekh, Zed Publishers, 1995.
1. Japan, colonized?
Decolonization of imagination -- what does it mean in a Japanese context? Before answering this question, perhaps I should define what I understand by the expression 'decolonization of imagination.' If we can talk about decolonization of imagination, there should be something like 'colonization of imagination.' What does it mean to 'colonize' imagination? What happens to someone or some culture when his or her imagination is 'colonized'? The first thing we can say about it would be that the phenomenon of colonization on this level involves our ways of seeing, thinking and talking about other people and cultures. In other words, this issue of colonization can be discussed in the realm of cultural representation and discourse. This doesn't mean we are always forced by some noticeable power to represent or talk of others in a certain way. On the contrary, forces to distort our images of others function most effectively when we are not aware of them, that is, when we feel ourselves free to see or think about the world. The domain of those forces is in the unconscious, and they reach very deep into our everyday life through the process of communication in families, school and social education as well as daily exposure to every field of mass media.
If we talk of colonization of imagination as colonization of culture in this sense, we can deal with it more or less separately from actual, political colonization which is operated under certain visible forces like military power, law or economic control. Compared to the painful history of this actual colonization, colonization of imagination might seem a more obscure, abstract matter, because theoretical study of the problem deals with representations and discourse instead of bare facts. It is true that, in cultural criticism, we cannot do without terms such as 'politics,' 'power,' 'institution' etc., but in many cases their use is metaphorical, not literal. Because of this, cultural criticism (especially in its postmodern or poststructuralist styles) is often regarded as having only indirect importance to the problem of colonization, or sometimes as merely playing with jargons. I believe it is perfectly wrong to see contemporary theories in this way. Cultural criticism is one of the most urgent tasks for these theories, and the most important point in cultural criticism is to change our ways of seeing and talking, not to characterize or describe them within an established frame. Many contemporary theories transgress any fixed realm of research, making use of various vocabularies of philosophy, linguistics, anthropology, psychoanalysis and so on, to invent new styles or textual strategies. The reason they have to do this is that objects of contemporary cultural analysis are, in principle, too complex to be dealt with by any single methodology. Every cultural imagery is complex because it is generated by an interplay of fundamentally different languages, different systems of representation. And that is the field where the argument about decolonization of imagination occurs.
I hope this prefatory argument will help introduce the current problem -- decolonization of imagination -- into a Japanese context. How does Japan stand in relation to the issue of colonization? As far as actual colonization is concerned, Japan's position is clear enough. Except for the case of American occupation after World War II, Japan has never been colonized. Japan was so quick to westernize itself that it avoided political colonization. In fact, it stood on the colonist side as one of the modern, imperialist states. In this respect, we can regard Japan as a part of the West in modern history. One might find colonist mentality even today in, say, Japan's economic 'invasion' into markets in other countries. And it is true that there still exists in Japan many institutional and psychological restrictions to keep its own people separated from foreigners. But I don't think it very useful to regard these cases as the same problems as of racial discrimination in the Western World. The basic relation to the other and the West, in contemporary Japanese society, is deeply involved with an inward process of cultural domination, and when we turn our eyes to the inner process of colonization, the situation doesn't turn out to be so simple. We will miss the point if we formulate the problem of cultural colonization in Japan as a simple problem of following the Western or American value system. By this I mean neither to say that it is wrong to see Japan's modernization as something realized by following or reproducing the West, nor to claim some original quality in Japanese culture. Rather, what I want to attack is the very opposition of reproduction and originality in cultural formation. Or better to say, even if modernization is done merely as reproduction, reproduction itself is no simple question. Reproduction, copy and repetition will (together with their doubtful opposition to originality) constitute a complex theoretical topic, and this becomes pertinent when we talk of colonization of culture.
No one could deny Japan's surprisingly fast development as a modern state since the Meiji period. And after the defeat in World War II, it has surprised the world again by its remarkable economic recovery. One tend to think there is a certain kind of secret in such toughness of the nation. Many books are published every year dealing with such a secret in Japan's miraculous success in the business world. Instead of talking of a secret, however, I see the whole situation under the hypothesis that Japan's strength was attained at the cost of a certain distortion in its cultural and psychological structure. In the course of rapid Westernization, Japan experienced radical change in its cultural system. The important thing is that this change was not felt to be something forced from outside. If Westernization was only an imposed factor in modern Japan, we could get the 'true' Japan only by eliminating such foreign factors. But westernization in Japan is not a process of intrusion of the other, but a kind of simulation done by Japanese themselves. In the process of simulation, information can be taken in without confronting any counterpart in another culture.
In short, colonization, at least in the normal sense of the word, has no place in the self-understanding of Japanese culture. But that is the very reason I am going to use this word to analyze the deep structure of Japanese cultural self. To make the point clearer, I present an exemplary response which will suggest how Japanese feel about their relation to the West. If you ask a Japanese if there is some colonized aspect in Japanese culture, a possible answer would be: 'Japan, colonized? Well, as we are very good at copying Western cultures, you know, there must be a lot of features which look like those of colonized culture. But that is the result of imitation, not colonization. And however western our culture may look, the core of our mind remains Japanese.'(1) What is missing in this kind of remark is the consciousness of cultural contradiction. In most Asian countries people feel some form of contradiction between the West and themselves. In most areas in Asia, the Western element was once imposed by actual colonization, but now in many cases it is so deeply established that one cannot easily get rid of it, while, on the other hand, one can never be free from the idea that there is a totally different stratum in one's self, which is rooted in one's own, traditional culture. Most countries which experienced colonization are more or less suffering from such double identity, or inconsistency of two cultures. But Japan seems to be an exception. Japanese have only faint consciousness of such doubleness. There is very little awareness of contradiction of different elements in this culture. Japanese appear not to suffer any cultural colonization. Coexistence of the Western and Japanese elements in one single culture is felt natural and harmonious. According to such naturalized view, there is no need to decolonize culture because there is no element of colonization in it.
What I wish to do in this chapter is to reconsider Japanese modernization against this kind of naturalization. In order to see the current cultural situation in another way, I am going to use the word colonization in an abnormal way, so that the cultural subject of modern Japan can be seen as the result of a hidden process of colonization. According to my image of Japanese culture, its calm outlook (often represented as oriental calmness, impersonality, unity with nature and so on) is created as the effect of incessant identification between the subject and an object, an outside 'other.' To put it in another way, suppose a certain complex and dynamic process does mediate the immediate character of Japanese cultural ideals. Harmonious coexistence of different cultural elements is, of course, not a lamentable thing in itself. In the case of modern Japan, however, it seems to me that there is a mechanism concealed under this outlook of harmonious coexistence. To bring this hidden mechanism into light, I am going to make use of the most popular cultural image for Japan: Samurai.
2. Function of cultural stereotypes
It may not sound very serious to mention a cultural stereotype such as Samurai when I talk of a hidden process of colonization in the Japanese mind. But seriousness may not help very much in the area I am approaching, because the function of stereotypes comes from their arbitrary and floating character. Instead of taking Samurai seriously, maybe I should ask if the Samurai himself is serious or not. At first sight, Samurai may look totally serious with his silence, bravery, loyalty, suppression of personal emotions, and of course that famous, ceremonious way of suicide. But for all that, the Samurai is not serious in the same sense as the modern Western subject is said to be serious. If the modern subject can be characterized by the rationality of action, Samurai belong to a value system quite different from that of goal seeking rational ethics. If modernity is defined by its separation of science, morality and art(2), the Samurai lives somewhere outside such separation. He does have an ethic, but not in the modern sense. It is something that works as aesthetics, religion and practical knowledge at the same time(3). So, if he is put within the world of modern capitalism the Samurai looks rather strange and funny. The more serious he is in his own way, the more comical the role he plays. But I think this non serious character of the sign Samurai helps to stabilize Japanese cultural identity, as well as to encourage this critical attempt of mine.
Here I don't use Samurai seriously either. With this word I don't mean the warrior in the Japanese Feudal Age, either as an individual or as a social class. Instead, I choose Samurai to give some form to a complex representational mechanism which is at work in the relation of Japan to the West. It has only limited relation to the historical fact of what a Samurai really was. I don't know whether there existed a 'real' or 'true' Samurai. But I am quite sure that people like to imagine that there was (and still is?) such. In my view, the Samurai stands for the desire of cultural essentialism. People in the West have used that word to identify something or someone as typically Japanese. Sometimes this word even seems to be synonymous with what Japan is like. It is a privileged sign for the West to point to the very core or essence of the Japanese mind. But what do people imagine by this word? Like many other cultural stereotypes, it derives its totalizing effect from its vagueness, lack of distinct content. The Samurai slips out of the hands of criticism because it is too ambiguous to be criticized as a false image. In other words, it functions almost a pure signifier, which strongly provokes people's imagination by its very senselessness. In the world of advertisement or tourism, for example, Samurai can be associated with almost every aspect of Japan.
Strangely, this ambiguity has been seldom pointed out by Japanese themselves. On the contrary, Japanese seem to feel at home to find themselves represented in this stereotyped way. Or rather, they enjoy representing themselves as Samurai just as much as the West enjoys representing them that way. Samurai is an exotic image even for Japanese. But this exoticism is in some curious way tangled in people's self image. The sense of historical discontinuity is anesthetized. I am thinking of endless Samurai dramas broadcast every day on Japanese TV. They are very popular, but few watch them from historical interest. The Samurai in these dramas are by no means different from their modernized descendants except for their clothing and hairstyles. Their popularity comes from their contemporary character. Their way of thinking, feeling, and action in the society is very much like that of contemporary Japanese, and the society they live in is nothing but what we think the present Japanese society is, only situated in the Edo period. Office workers see their own struggle in business, problems of keeping good relations with their boss, desires to move upward in an organization and so on, in dramas situated some hundred years ago. It is as if the business world of the late capitalism were transplanted to the Feudal Age.
What one finds in these dramas is not so much historical continuity as an immediate fusion of different ages. What Samurai drama is showing everyday is not any past but something like an eternal present. Samurai function to negate historical incompatibility and identify the past with the present. But if the Samurai is a sign of blind historical consciousness, why do modern Japanese need it? Why should our imagination identify the modernized present with the premodern past. It may be that in such dramas, Samurai function as something to negate the radical transformation of culture caused by Westernization. They provide people with a fantasy that the world has not been changed by the impact of modernization. Samurai in these TV dramas serve as an image of the deep self of a Japanese office worker, who is often compared to a warrior in everyday conversation. The world of business is often described as a battlefield, in which a strong and loyal male subject of production is celebrated as a Samurai. Every month many business magazines feature success stories of business champions, comparing them to a Shogun in the Age of Strife, or even stories of a Shogun comparing him to an executive at Sony or Toyota. By imagining himself as a warrior, an office worker can avoid facing the difficult reality. In this sense, the Samurai serves as a sign to imply continuity with a premodern 'golden' age. The sign can represent the strength of the nation, but that strength is gained by forgetting cultural discontinuity, forgetting the peculiarly complex character of the Japanese self. I suppose the Samurai was generated as a kind of psychological defence against the strong modern subject of the West. It has played a certain role in the struggle to develop a strong ego (collective as well as individual) which could confront the West. It has been an unconscious self-image for the nation. In the course of integrating people in the islands, who were really of various different cultures and traditions, into a single nation it played a role similar to the modern Western self. In the process of modernization, however, this Samurai image had a far more ambivalent character. For Japanese modernists in the late 19th century, the values of historical Samurai were something to be abandoned because they belonged to the past. They felt it necessary to distance themselves from the past, and they looked at it in the same way colonists looked at a native culture. But at the same time, people found it hard to develop Japan into an industrialized Imperialist state without assuming a strong, independent, male subject in their mind, by which they could have national identity. Thus the Samurai was interpreted as something similar to the Western modern ego, in its individual, stoic and masculine character. This is not a simple act of recovering or maintaining the past. There was a identification with an 'other' in the process of constituting that self-identity, because it is through the eye of the other that Japan could make up its own self. The very core of the national identity was constituted through the internalized eye of the West.
The Samurai, then, is nothing but a modern invention. Samurai provided a homogeneous space of representation when Japan recognized itself and located itself in relation to the other. Once such a homogeneous space was established, it became very hard to imagine anything outside it. Samurai belong to a perspective restricting the imagination of modern Japan. In this sense, I resist the accepted idea that the Samurai is something like a core of the Japanese mind. Samurai as the archetype of Japanese spirit is nothing but an invention made as the result of the relation between Japan and the West for the last 120 years. And it was invented not only by Westerners but also by Japanese themselves. In contrast to the field of current international trading, Japan and the West have been and remain deeply cooperative in establishing this stereotyped view of Japan. Westerners use Samurai as a key word to interpret the behavior of Japanese, some of which appears too irrational to understand, like the eccentric suicide of the writer Yukio Mishima(4). On the other hand, it was Mishima himself who played the role of Samurai. Mishima, together with nationalistic and romantic thinkers in modern Japan, wrote and behaved as if we could restore Japan's native spirit by eliminating the 'imposed' Western or American cultural standard. This trend of thought was effective as a resistance to postwar Americanization and superficial democratization, in which trauma of defeat was fatally weakening the culture. But there is one question this nationalistic movement has always failed to ask: What if the innermost tradition is nothing but an image represented by the other? What if our desire to return to the original spirit is itself mediated by an alien element? What if we were born with mixed blood from the very first?
3. Mind as a Colony
If the Samurai is simply a distorted image imposed from outside, the strategy of criticism would be relatively simple. In that case, all we have to do is to show how the colonized culture has been misrepresented and distorted by the colonist, and what false images and stories have been made up in the process of colonization. Compared to that, criticism of the Samurai is faced with a certain ambiguity and instability, which is caused by the tricky character of the sign itself, as outlined above. The Samurai is neither inside nor outside of Japan. It is on the surface, or the interface connecting Japan to the other. It is like a semi-transparent mirror put between Japan and the West. By looking into it, one's reflection looks strangely doubled with that of the other beyond the mirror. For modern Japanese this may have been the main function of the sign. In other words, the Samurai has made it possible to imagine oneself as Japanese and Western at the same time. If we use Samurai as a name for such a representational system rather than a representation, we could say that the Samurai exempts one from, or makes one blind to, asking who one really is. It allows the subject to be ambiguous about his position to the other, or it enables one to speak as if there were no others. Protected by the Samurai's guard, Japanese culture can behave inside its own language, inside its closed community, without facing the fact that true contact remains closed.
This ambiguous doubleness of the Japanese subject is reflected in many aspects of the culture. It is also the case with academic discourse. In Japanese academic discourse, especially that in the studies based on Western ideas, the speaker's position is always very unstable. As the speaker's position to the West is seldom stated, we never know whether he or she speaks as a Western subject or as someone who feels uneasy with the Western way of thought. Sometimes it even seems that it is this ambiguity that activates academic discourse. And this situation can be generalized. Modern Japanese are basically living in an imaginary identification with the West. Visitors to Japan might wonder why many mannequins in show windows and heroes and heroines in comic books must have Caucasian faces, blue eyes and blond hair. A more interesting example for this doubled cultural identity is a famous theater in which young girls play the opera of French Revolution, with blond wigs and specialized makeup to make them look like Western males. Am I going too far if I say the theoretical subject in Japanese academic discourse is like those girls? The subject is almost pervertedly disguised, but totally innocent(5). What makes this possible is the representational space we called Samurai above, and the innocence is also the Samurai's innocence. There occurs no contradiction between the appearance and the truth, because they are merged into the same thing in the Samurai. The Samurai appears here as a political guiltlessness.
In another aspect, the paradoxical effect of the Samurai opens and closes at the same time the space of information in modern Japan. Today, most Japanese are informed so little of colonization. It is not because there is powerful censorship or explicit control to violate freedom of speech. Of course there does exist some control upon information, mainly through the great influence of mass media. This control is anonymous and collective. It affects people's imagination not so much by selecting or distorting the contents, as manipulating the form of information. Japan lacks the distribution of heterogeneous and multiple information. Information is excessively uniform and politically neutralized so that people can hardly be aware of another angle to look at a situation. The amount of information itself is great, but every alien element is eliminated from it. An average high school student can learn a lot of facts about history from a textbook, but facts are only one kind of information, information on the first level. They are not given any information on the second level, knowledge of how to interpret facts, because authors are afraid of being regarded as ideological and dangerous. Neutralized description in authorized textbooks completely lacks this secondary information. No matter how many books are published we cannot say that information is plentiful, if the same thing is written in all the books. And this doesn't necessarily mean only the publication of textbooks. It is, to some extent, the case with general publication, as well as the general structure of information in Japan.
As a result of my experience of working as a teacher, I have wanted to give a name to such a closed, uniform condition of a cultural system. Invitation to speak in the conference 'Decolonization of Imagination' in 1991 gave me the chance to consider this together with the theme of colonization. As opposed to the general feeling that Japan today has nothing to do with colonization, I tried to present an idea of internalized colonization, and its comical agent: the Samurai. The point of this idea is that, instead of being exempted from actual colonization, Japan has colonized itself. And in the course of modernization, the drastic transformation of culture, Japanese have played the role of the colonist and of the colonized at the same time. What is basic in this process is the fusion of the subject and the object of domination. That has made the structure of this culture unbelievably complex, and this is why Japanese cannot simply adopt a critical position against represented images of themselves and even appear to act as an accomplice of such representation. Here works a certain implicit mechanism. By creating a completely superficial sign, by sharing a pure signifier, the difference between the subject and the object is eliminated. If you ask what is the dominant ideology in Japan, I would answer that it is what can be called an ideology of non-difference.
I know that internalized colonization is an abnormal expression. Colony means usually a distant area, so it might sound strange to relate it to something within one's own culture. As mentioned before, the cultural image of Samurai was formed by Japanese creating an imaginary distance from their own culture, treating it as if it were a colony. But if this expansion of the meaning is allowed, there is still something misleading in the formulation of internalized colonization. it sounds as if the process of colonization is repeated within a culture, in which we are divided into either the colonist or the colonized. It is partly true that the whole culture can be divided into these opposing camps. But what I refer to here by this term is a deeper structural element in which the colonist and the colonized are mutually involved, in which normal social criticism has no power. Here I don't mean to insist there are (or aren't) colonists in Japan. What I suggest here is that every Japanese is a colonist of his own mind. And this has greatly speeded modernization in Japan, by avoiding discrepancies in the course of radical cultural change. But this process of colonization is not exercised by any conscious personal subject. Rather, it is through an absence of such a subject that such self-colonization become possible.
Why did this absence of the subject accelerate modernization, internalize colonization, and help prevent actual colonization? Let me explain this as a story. When Japan was faced with a totally different cultural system, the modern Western world, in the middle of the 19th Century, it knew it was useless to resist and keep itself closed. So Japan opened itself to the world, and set about the task of building itself into a modernized state as soon as possible. The problem was that the mental structure and cultural system were completely different from those of the West. In particular, Japan has no such thing as the integrated modern ego of the West. But it would take many decades or even centuries to build up such a thing by itself. In order to grow into a modern state in a short period, it was more effective to give up striving to become the strong subject, and cultivate instead an amorphous subject and ambiguous identity. The strong self-image of the Samurai was invented, but it was invented as a dummy to confront the Western subject. It is a mask to cover the absence of the subject. From the standpoint of consciousness, such an operation might be repudiated as a form of self-deception. If we see a whole cultural system as an organism, however, this can be thought as a strategy to survive in a difficult environment. As a result, the absence of the self turned out to be a solution for the task of achieving the modernization of society, to some extent even more effective than the original modernization in the West, because it was unnecessary to face difficulties caused by the opposition of the individual and the society.
4. Samurai Discourse
With the expansion of economic activities, Japan is now having more and more chances to be faced with real others in the world, with other criteria of other cultures, instead of represented pictures of them. This is happening both outside (by expanding business abroad) and inside (with increasing foreign residents) the country. But the Japanese way of communication so far doesn't turn out to be very effective in this new situation. The tendency of Japanese to stick to the rules of their own community, trust in tacit agreement, and avoid expression of personal feelings -- all the characteristics of the Samurai -- makes it difficult to communicate with others in the current internationalized situation. Samurai characteristics are often praised for their refinement from an aesthetic point of view, but aesthetic refinement alone doesn't work in the effort to develop relations with people with completely different cultural standards. The present time may be the first historical stage for modern Japan to open its fundamentally inward oriented community. In other words, Japanese are coming to an end of the homogeneous space of representation, the dead end of simulated modernization apparent since the Meiji period. This means a true crisis for the Samurai, and now is the time for him to say something about its own plight.
The Samurai speaks out most clearly in political discourse, though eloquence is inconsistent with his ethic of keeping silence and enduring without words. Cynically speaking, by speaking out the Samurai is no longer a Samurai. Anyway, in 1989, a small book was published that seems to challenge Japanese to abandon shyness and to get out of the years of trauma caused by the unconditional surrender in the Second World War. I think this book tells us how Japanese, after achieving industrial success, feel about the world in the late 1980. The book encourages people to overcome their collective inferiority complex by saying 'No' to the superior, the United States. It has provoked various political disputes both in Japan and in the United States. In Japan it had sold more than one million copies by the beginning of 1991, largely thanks to its controversial title, The Japan That Can Say No(6). What does this title exactly mean? It says that Japan otherwise cannot resist the stronger partner, even when it really wants to. This title takes for granted that Japan has its own distinct subjectivity, and free utterance is only suppressed by an exterior power. It simplifies the problem and reduces it to the question of having the manly courage to express one's will. This way of encouragement seems to belong rather to the American mind than to the Samurai ethic. The Samurai functions by simplifying the situation and seeing Japan as a single personality.
Though this book was primarily intended for Japanese readers, it provoked sensation also in the United States, because it criticizes the United States as unfair. It is not my intention here to decide if the authors are right in this matter, or to what extent they are right. I do agree with them on many points, but now we are dealing with the paradoxical dimension of basic cultural structure, something that can be seen only by bracketing straightforward judgement. Instead, I would like to call your attention to another reason the book appeals to the West: it implies a certain way of representing Japan to the West, the perspective basically rooted in the West, that is to assume some 'real' or 'true' tradition in the Japanese mentality which survives all the cultural and social transformation caused by modernization. In this sense this book was implicitly written for the Westerner, including the Western self in the Japanese mind. To that type of utterance, I give the name of Samurai discourse. I define Samurai discourse as that generated by Japanese, whey they desire to be an agent of the West, while, at the same time, they have to appeal to a 'genuine' Japanese tradition. As an agent of the other, the Samurai often projects and repeats his relation to his superior in his followers' relation to him. 'Genuineness' of a cultural tradition is, as I have already argued, a fiction created through the eyes of the other. The Samurai is a modernist promoting Westernization and a nationalist conserving the tradition, and he speaks English, the ability praised as a symbol of intelligence and power in this country. Thus, to Japanese he appears as a representative of the West, while to Westerners he embodies a native Japanese tradition. This doubled motion is the very core of Japanese modernization so far. The dominant tone of this book is embodied in suggestions such as 'Don't hesitate any more. Trust yourself and speak your mind clearly!' This sounds in some strange way similar to a suggestion which English teachers often give to shy Japanese students. The enlightening voice of this book comes from the common fact that the authors play the role of the Westerner in the position of educating Japanese, while, on the other hand, they claim that Japanese don't have to follow the West any more. The book confronts the West (the United States), representing the nation as one which the authors hope, is not going to be subordinate any longer, trusting talents that it has by nature.
This book as a whole can be read as a statement that it is necessary now to recover the original tradition of the Japanese spirit, which is strong and harmonious at the same time. It implies that such a 'true' tradition exists, but has been distorted by some 'wrong' process of history. I can say this type of political discourse is not new at all. In the 1930s, when Japan developed more and more antagonistic relations with the West, many arguments appeared suggesting that the nation must overcome modernity by returning to its original self. In that movement, the Westernization of mind of the Meiji Restoration was attacked from the standpoint of a 'genuine' Japanese tradition, and this culminated in the worship of the Emperor as a living god. Some might think it symptomatic to see, 60 years later, political discourse claiming to overcome dependency upon United States, appealing to some 'original' tradition of Japanese spirit. In my view, however, this pre-war project of overcoming modernity, as well as its contemporary counterpart, has its own truth. It is wrong to associate every nationalistic movement with war and aggression. The truth of nationalism consists in opening the possibility of reconsidering modernization from an angle different from the one imported from outside. But in Samurai discourse, the paradigm in which Japan is opposed to the West is itself a borrowed one, because it assumes an identical Japanese subject, which is fundamentally commensurate with the Western subject. This basic function of the Samurai remains the same, even when, instead of the Imperial system, technological achievement is celebrated as a symbol to enhance the national identity.
In the opening sentences of The Japan That Can Say No, the author expresses his worry that Japanese today have brains too large for their weak body to support, and he compares this 'monstrous' figure to that of ET in the Steven Spielburg film. (This was not criticized as another case of racial discrimination since ET is not a representative of a race.) It is interesting that he chooses an extra-terrestrial as an image of a holder of a highly advanced technology. For by calling it 'monstrous,' he perhaps unconsciously admits that contemporary Japan may appear to the West as alien and monstrous. Am I going too far if I say this reveals that he (as well as many Japanese in leading positions) looks at recent technological development with fear, just as do many in the West? In any case, strength, as he contrasts it with intelligence here, seems at first sight to be physical strength. He wishes Japanese had won more in the recent Olympic Games. But on the next page, the reader is told that the main strength of the nation consists not in its physical strength but in its highly developed technology. But technology is achieved only by 'large brains,' and this remarkable contradiction makes me suspect that technology is chosen as a substitute for some more clearly masculine symbol of power, such as military power. Another equally interesting point is that he especially admires technological progress in the fields of integrated circuits or superconductivity, where precision, purity and refinement are required more than in any other field of industry. This high technology is praised as something more than just a complicated know-how. It is, he argues, an embodiment of the nation's spirit, and as such, something valuable in itself. Strength appears here in an almost artistic form, just as the sword of the Samurai is praised as a work of art, though it is actually a weapon intended to kill. This aestheticization of strength is another side of Samurai discourse, and the artistic, fetishistic character of technology/strength also appears in later passages, when we find the excellence of Japanese technology compared to the artistic achievements found in traditional arts which show the taste of high culture. Since the Samurai is an ideal self for the modern Japanese, there is always a longing for the refined culture of the aristocracy.
Technology is not the only ground on which this book intends to restore Japan's self-confidence. The co-author, Akio Morita, the president of Sony, emphasizes the universality of the idea of company as a family. He attributes the success of his company to the sense of community that is shared by employees even in a factory in a foreign country, and he emphasizes the merit of this idea by comparing it with the American way of treating employees, in which little effort is made to develop loyalty to the company itself. In the Japanese way of organizing people as a harmonious community, both employers and employees are said to share a common fate. He says this idea should be universally acceptable. This includes, certainly, a kind of idealization and sentimentalism, but it is not groundless. The idea of the company as a family might be called an illusion, but as a matter of fact, this illusion works quite effectively in the Japanese social context. It is also derived from what can be called the ideal of harmonious coexistence, a crucial part of the Samurai ethic. In principle, harmony in human relationship can never be called a bad thing. Nevertheless, in Japan, what is called 'harmony' often has the effect of suppressing individual initiative and thinking, and other result inhibits open communication. The central function of the idea is to assimilate the reality to the ideal: by sharing a common illusion individuals can endure hardship.
Why do I call this book an example of Samurai discourse, though I basically agree with the suggestion that Japan become more open minded? It is not because of any expressed ideas or opinions, but because of the basic standpoint of the utterance. The book addresses readers from the position of the double identity I mentioned before. The authors are speaking as the Japanese and the Western subject at the same time, without any feeling of contradiction. This arises not from the authors' particular fault, but from a certain basic structure of the Japanese subject of speech. As mentioned before, this basic structure is not limited to the recent best-selling book, but is shared by academic discourse as well as dancing girls with Western makeup on the stage. And I don't want to say something is fundamentally wrong with it. It has worked for Japan, at least so far. This doubleness may be possible simply because Japan is situated far from the West. Japan has acted as a member of the West, though it is not in the West. The geographical distance might have helped create the internal colonization discussed here, and Samurai discourse may be seen as the end product of the situation. But when Japan faces the real other, and when it comes to critically theorizing about this situation, Samurai discourse is distinctly weak, because it looks at Japan with the eyes of the West, and in so doing fails to grasp the central issue in the relation of Japan to the West. A book such as The Japan That Can Say No can encourage people to speak their minds clearly to the West and assert that Japan's exclusiveness is the main weak spot it has to get over. In reality, however, it is this very peculiar exclusiveness that enabled and accelerated Japan's modernization. Japan's real power has been derived from its distorted acceptance of Western cultures, the translated, secondary character of its own culture and the only halfway enlightened structure of its self. In short, Japan has been effectively modernized because its modernization has always been strongly modified one, which may sometimes look superficial, fake and kitsch. This brought an unprecedented complexity in cultural and socio-political life in the country. What we need now is not a single-step political decision or change of attitude, but an attempt to create a new discourse to cope with this complexity.
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Notes
(1)This is based on a discussion I had with my university students.
(2)See Jurgen Habermas, "Modernity -- An Incomplete Project," in The Anti-Aesthetic, ed. by Hal Foster (Bay Press, 1983).
(3)A classical example of the introduction of the Samurai ethic to the West can be seen in Inazo Nitobe, Bushido -- The soul of Japan (Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1969).
(4)About Mishima's own presentation of the Samurai ethic, see: Mishima on Hagakure -- The Samurai Ethic and Modern Japan, trans. by Kathryn Sparling (Penguin Books, 1977).
(5)About such a innocent character found in many aspects of Japanese Culture, see: Ian Buruma, A Japanese Mirror -- Heroes and Villains of Japanese Culture (Penguin Books, 1984).
(6)Akio Morita and Shintaro Ishihara, 'No' to ieru Nihon, (Kobunsha, Tokyo, 1989).