The most extreme aggressive action a modern Japanese takes against himself is suicide. Suicide, properly done, will, according to their tenets, clear his name and reinstate his memory. American condemnation of suicide makes self-destruction only a desperate submission to despair, but the Japanese respect for it allows it to be an honorable and purposeful act. In certain situations it is the most honorable course to take in girl to one’s name. The defaulting debtor on New Year’s Day, the official who kills himself to acknowledge that he assumes responsibility for some unfortunate occurrence, the lovers who seal their hopeless love in a double suicide, the patriot who protests the government’s postponement of war with China are all, like the boy who fails in an examination or the soldier avoiding capture, turning upon themselves a final violence. Some Japanese authorities say that this liability to suicide is new in Japan. It is not easy to judge, and statistics show that observers in recent years have often overestimated its frequency. There were proportionately more suicides in Denmark in the last century and more in pre-Nazi Germany than there have ever been in Japan. But this much is certain: the Japanese love the theme. They play up suicide as Americans play up crime and they have the same vicarious enjoyment of it. They choose to dwell on events of self-destruction instead of on destruction of others. They make of it, in Bacon’s phrase, their favorite ‘flagrant case.’ It meets some need that cannot be filled by dwelling on other acts.
Suicide is also more masochistic in modern Japan than it appears to have been in the historical tales of feudal times. In those stories a samurai committed suicide with his own hand at the command of the government to save himself from dishonorable execution, much as a Western enemy soldier would be shot instead of hanged, or he took this course to save himself the torture he expected if he fell into the enemy’s hands. A warrior was allowed harakiri much as a Prussian officer in disgrace was sometimes allowed to shoot himself in private. Those in authority left a bottle of whiskey and a pistol on a table in his room after he knew that he had no hope of saving his honor otherwise. For the Japanese samurai, taking his own life under such circumstances was only a choice of means; death was certain. In modem times suicide is a choice to die. A man turns violence upon himself, often instead of assassinating someone else. The act of suicide, which in feudal times was the final statement of a man’s courage and resolution, has become today a chosen self-destruction. During the last two generations, when Japanese have felt that ‘the world tips,’ that ‘both terms of the equation’ are not equivalent, that they need a ‘morning tub’ to wipe off defilements, they have increasingly destroyed themselves instead of others.
Even suicide as a final argument to win victory for one’s own side, though it occurs both in feudal and in modern times, has changed in this same direction. A famous story of Tokugawa days tells of the old tutor, high in the Shogunate council, who bared his body and placed his sword in readiness for immediate harakiri in the presence of the whole council and the Shogunate regent. The threat of suicide carried the day and he thereby insured the succession of his candidate to the position of Shogun. He got his way and there was no suicide. In Occidental terminology, the tutor had blackmailed the opposition. In modern times, however, such protest suicide is the act of a martyr not of a negotiator. It is carried out after one has failed or to put oneself on record as opposing some already signed agreement like the Naval Parity Act. It is staged so that only the completed act itself, and not the threat of suicide, can influence public opinion.
This growing tendency to strike at oneself when giri to one’s name is threatened need not involve such extreme steps as suicide. Aggressions directed inward may merely produce depression and lassitude and that typical Japanese boredom that was so prevalent in the educated class. There are good sociological reasons why this mood should have been widespread among this particular class for the intelligentsia was overcrowded and very insecurely placed in the hierarchy. Only a small proportion of them could satisfy their ambitions. In the nineteen-thirties, too, they were doubly vulnerable because the authorities feared they were thinking ‘dangerous thoughts’ and held them under suspicion. The Japanese intellectuals usually account for their frustration by complaints about the confusions of Westernization, but the explanation does not go far enough. The typical Japanese swing of mood is from intense dedication to intense boredom, and the psychic shipwreck which many intellectuals suffered was in the traditional Japanese manner. Many of them saved themselves from it, too, in the middle nineteen-thirties in traditional fashion: they embraced nationalistic goals and turned the attack outward again, away from their own breasts. In totalitarian aggression against outside nations they could ‘find themselves’ again. They saved themselves from a bad mood and felt a great new strength within them. They could not do it in personal relationships but they believed they could as a conquering nation.
Now that the outcome of the war has proved this confidence mistaken, lassitude is again a great psychic threat in Japan. They cannot easily cope with it, whatever their intentions. It goes very deep. ‘No bombs any more,’ one Japanese said in Tokyo; ‘the relief is wonderful. But we are not fighting any more and there is no purpose. Everyone is in a daze, not caring much how he does things. I am like that, my wife is like that and the people in the hospital All very slow about everything we do, dazed. People complain now that the government is slow cleaning up after the war and in providing relief, but I think the reason is that all the government officials felt the same way as we did.’ This listlessness is the kind of danger in Japan that it was in France after liberation. In Germany in the first six or eight months after surrender it was not a problem. In Japan it is. Americans can understand this reaction well enough but it seems almost unbelievable to us that it should go along with such friendliness to the conqueror. Almost immediately it was clear that the Japanese people accepted the defeat and all its consequences with extreme good will. Americans were welcomed with bows and smiles, with handwavings and shouts of greeting. These people were not sullen nor angry. They had, in the phrase the Emperor used in announcing surrender, ‘accepted the impossible.’ Why then did these people not set their national house in order? Under the terms of occupation, they were given the opportunity to do it; there was no village-by-village foreign occupation and the administration of affairs was in their hands. The whole nation seemed to smile and wave greeting rather than to manage their affairs. Yet this was the same nation which had accomplished miracles of rehabilitation in the early days of Meiji, which had prepared for military conquest with such energy in the nineteen-thirties and whose soldiers had fought with such abandon, island by island, throughout the Pacific.