The ubiquitous institution of the go-between is one of the more conspicuous ways in which the Japanese prevent direct confrontation of two persons who are in competition with each other. An intermediary is required in any situation where a man might feel shame if he fell short and consequently go-betweens serve on a great number of occasions – negotiating marriage, offering one’s services for hire, leaving a job and arranging countless everyday matters. This go-between reports to both parties, or in case of an important deal like a marriage each side employs its own intermediary and they negotiate the details between themselves before reporting to their side. By dealing in this way at second hand the principals need take no cognizance of claims and charges that would have to be resented in giri to their names if they were in direct communication. The go-between too gains prestige by acting in this official capacity, and gets the respect of the community by his successful manipulation. The chances of a peaceful arrangement are the greater because the go-between has an ego investment in smooth negotiations. The intermediary acts in the same way in feeling out an employer about a job for his client or in relaying to the employer the employee’s decision to leave his job.
Etiquette of all kinds is organized to obviate shame-causing situations which might call in question one’s giri to one’s name. These situations which are thus minimized go far beyond direct competition. The host, they think, should greet his guest with certain ritual welcoming and in his good clothes. Therefore anyone who finds a farmer in his work clothes at home may have to wait a bit. The farmer gives no sign of recognition until he has put on suitable clothes and arranged the proper courtesies. It makes no difference even if the host has to change his clothes in the room where the guest is waiting. He simply is not present until he is there in the proper guise. In the rural areas, too, boys may visit girls at night after the household is asleep and the girl is in bed. Girls can either accept or reject their advances, but the boy wears a towel bound about his face so that if he is rejected he need feel no shame next day. The disguise is not to prevent the girl from recognizing him; it is purely an ostrich technique so that he will not have to admit that he was shamed in his proper person. Etiquette requires too that as little cognizance as possible be taken of any project until success is assured. It is part of the duties of go-betweens arranging a marriage to bring the prospective bride and groom together before the contract is completed. Everything is done to make this a casual meeting for if the purpose of the introduction were avowed at this stage any breaking-off of the negotiations would threaten the honor of one family or of both. Since the young couple must each be escorted by one or both of their parents, and the go-betweens must be the hosts or hostesses, it is most properly arrange when they all ‘run into each other’ casually at the annual chrysanthemum show or at a cherry-blossom viewing or in a well-known park or place of recreation.
In all such ways, and in many more, the Japanese avoid occasions in which failure might be shameful. Though they lay such emphasis on the duty to clear one’s name of insult, in actual practice this leads them to arrange events so that insult need be felt as seldom as possible. This is in great contrast to many tribes of the Pacific Islands where clearing one’s name holds much the same pre-eminent place that it does in Japan.
Among these primitive gardening peoples of New Guinea and Melanesia the mainspring of tribal or personal action is the insult which it is necessary to resent. They cannot have a tribal feast without one village’s setting it in motion by saying that another village is so poor it cannot feed ten guests, it is so stingy it hides its taro and its coconuts, its leaders are so stupid they could not organize a feast if they tried. Then the challenged village clears its name by overwhelming all comers with its lavish display and hospitality. Marriage arrangements and financial transactions are set going in the same way. When they go on the warpath too the two sides have a tremendous insult exchange before they set their arrows to their bows. They handle the smallest matter as if it were an occasion that called for mortal fight. It is a great incentive to action and such tribes often have a great deal of vitality. But nobody has ever described them as courteous.
The Japanese on the contrary are paragons of politeness and this pre-eminent politeness is a measure of the lengths to which they have gone in limiting the occasions when it is necessary to clear one’s name. They retain as an incomparable goad to achievement the resentment insult occasions but they limit the situations where it is called for. It should occur only in specified situations or when traditional arrangements to eliminate it break down under pressure. Unquestionably the use of this goad in Japan contributed to the dominant position she was able to attain in the Far East and to her policy of Anglo-American war in the last decade. Many Occidental discussions of Japan’s sensitivity to insult and her eagerness to avenge herself, however, would be more appropriate to the insult-using tribes of New Guinea than they are to Japan, and many Westerners’ forecasts of how Japan would behave after defeat in this war were wide of the mark because they did not recognize the special Japanese limitations upon giri to one’s name.
The politeness of the Japanese should not lead Americans to minimize their sensitivity to slurs. Americans bandy personal remarks very lightly; it is a kind of game. It is hard for us to realize the deadly seriousness that attaches to light remarks in Japan. In his autobiography, published in America just as he wrote it in English, a Japanese artist, Yoshio Markino, has described vividly a perfectly proper Japanese reaction to what he interpreted as a sneer. When he wrote the book he had already lived most of his adult life in the United States and in Europe but he felt as strongly as if he were still living in his home town in rural Aichi. He was the youngest child of a landowner of good standing and had been most lovingly reared in a charming home. Toward the end of his childhood his mother died, and, not long after, his father became bankrupt and sold all his property to pay his debts. The family was broken up and Markino had not a sen to help him in realizing his ambitions. One of these ambitions was to learn English. He attached himself to a near-by mission school and did janitor work in order to learn the language. At eighteen he had still never been outside the round of a few provincial towns but he had made up his mind to go to America.