THE self-disciplines of one culture are always likely to seem irrelevancies to observers from another country. The disciplinary techniques themselves are clear enough, but why go to all the trouble? Why voluntarily hang yourself from hooks, or concentrate on your navel, or never spend your capital? Why concentrate on one of these austerities and demand no control at all over some impulses which to the outsider are truly important and in need of training? When the observer belongs to a country which does not teach technical methods of self-discipline and is set down in the midst of a people who place great reliance upon them, the possibility of misunderstanding is at its height.
In the United States technical and traditional methods of self-discipline are relatively undeveloped. The American assumption is that a man, having sized up what is possible in his personal life, will discipline himself, if that is necessary, to attain a chosen goal. Whether he does or not, depends on his ambition, or his conscience, or his ‘instinct of workmanship,’ as Veblen called it. He may accept a Stoic regime in order to play on a football team, or give up all relaxations to train himself as a musician, or to make a success of his business. He may eschew evil and frivolity because of his conscience. But in the United States self-discipline itself, as a technical training, is not a thing to learn like arithmetic quite apart from its application in a particular instance. Such techniques, when they do occur in the United States, are taught by certain European cult-leaders or by Swamis who teach inventions made in India. Even the religious self-disciplines of meditation and prayer, as they were taught and practiced by Saint Theresa or Saint John of the Cross, have barely survived in the United States.
The Japanese assumption, however, is that a boy taking his middle-school examinations, or a man playing in a fencing match, or a person merely living the life of an aristocrat, needs a self-training quite apart from learning the specific things that will be required of him when he is tested. No matter what facts he has crammed for his examination, no matter how expert his sword thrusts, no matter how meticulous his punctilio, he needs to lay aside his books and his sword and his public appearances and undergo a special kind of training. Not all Japanese submit to esoteric training, of course, but, even for those who do not, the phraseology and the practice of self-discipline have a recognized place in life. Japanese of all classes judge themselves and others in terms of a whole set of concepts which depend upon their notion of generalized technical self-control and self-governance.
Their concepts of self-discipline can be schematically divided into those which give competence and those which give something more. This something more I shall call expertness. The two are divided in Japan and aim at accomplishing a different result in the human psyche and have a different rationale and are recognized by different signs. Many instances of the first type, self-disciplinary competence, have already been described. The Army officer who said of his men who had been engaged in peacetime maneuvers for sixty hours with only ten-minute opportunities for sleep, that ‘they know how to sleep; they need training in how to stay awake,’ was, in spite of what seem to us extreme demands, aiming only at competent behavior. He was stating a well-accepted principle of Japanese psychic economy that the will should be supreme over the almost infinitely teachable body and that the body itself does not have laws of well-being which a man ignores at his own cost. The whole Japanese theory of ‘human feelings’ rests on this assumption. When it is a matter of the really serious affairs of life, the demands of the body, no matter how essential to health, no matter how approved and cultivated as things apart, should be drastically subordinated. No matter at what price of self-discipline, a man should manifest the Japanese Spirit.
It does violence, however, to Japanese assumptions to phrase their position in this way. For ‘at the price of whatever self-discipline’ means in ordinary American usage almost the same thing as ‘at the price of whatever self-sacrifice.’ Often too it means ‘at the price of whatever personal frustration.’ The American theory of discipline – whether imposed from the outside or introjected as a censoring conscience – is that from childhood men and women have to be socialized by discipline, either freely accepted or imposed by authority. This is a frustration. The individual resents this curtailment of his wishes. He has to sacrifice, and inevitable aggressive emotions are awakened within him. This view is not only that of many professional psychologists in America. It is also the philosophy within which each generation is brought up by parents in the home, and the psychologists’ analysis has therefore a great deal of truth in our own society. A child ‘has to’ be put to bed at a certain hour, and he learns from his parents’ attitude that going to bed is a frustration. In countless homes he shows his resentment in a nightly battle royal He is already a young indoctrinated American who regards sleeping as something a person ‘has to’ do and he kicks against the pricks. His mother rules, too, that there are certain things he ‘has to’ eat. It may be oatmeal or spinach or bread or orange juice, but the American child learns to raise a protest against foods he ‘has to’ eat. Food that is ‘good for’ him he concludes is not food that tastes good. This is an American convention that is foreign in Japan, as it is also in some Western nations like Greece. In the United States, becoming adult means emancipation from food frustrations. A grown-up person can eat the food that tastes good instead of the food that is good for him.