These ideas about sleep and food, however, are small in comparison with the whole Occidental concept of self-sacrifice. It is standard Western doctrine that patents make great sacrifices for their children, wives sacrifice their careers for their husbands, husbands sacrifice their freedom to become breadwinners. It is hard for Americans to conceive that in some societies men and women do not recognize the necessity of self-sacrifice. It is nevertheless true. In such societies people say that parents naturally find their children delightful, that women prefer marriage to any other course, and that a man earning his family’s support is pursuing his favorite occupation as a hunter or a gardener. Why talk of self-sacrifice? When society stresses these interpretations and allows people to live according to them, the notion of self-sacrifice may hardly be recognized.
In other cultures all those things a person does for other people at such ‘sacrifice’ in the United States are considered as reciprocal exchanges. They are either investments which will later be repaid or they are returns for value already received. In such countries even the relations between father and son may be treated in this way, and what the father does for the son during the boy’s early life, the son will do for the father during the old man’s later life and after his death. Every business relation too is a folk contract, which, while it often ensures equivalence in kind, just as commonly binds one party to protect and the other to serve. If the benefits on both sides are regarded as advantages, neither party regards his duties as a sacrifice.
The sanction behind services to others in Japan is of course reciprocity, both in kind and in hierarchal exchange of complementary responsibilities. The moral position of self-sacrifice is therefore very different from that in the United States. The Japanese have always objected specifically to the teachings of Christian missionaries about sacrifice. They argue that a good man should not think of what he does for others as frustrating to himself. ‘When we do the things you call self-sacrifice,’ a Japanese said to me, ‘it is because we wish to give or because it is good to give. We are not sorry for ourselves. No matter how many things we actually give up for others, we do not think that this giving elevates us spiritually or that we should be ‘‘rewarded" for it.’ A people who have organized their lives around such elaborate reciprocal obligations as the Japanese naturally find self-sacrifice irrelevant. They push themselves to the limit to fulfill extreme obligations, but the traditional sanction of reciprocity prevents them from feeling the self-pity and self-righteousness that arises so easily in more individualistic and competitive countries.
Americans, in order to understand ordinary self-disciplinary practices in Japan, therefore, have to do a kind of surgical operation on our idea of ‘self-discipline.’ We have to cut away the accretions of ‘self-sacrifice’ and ‘frustration’ that have clustered around the concept in our culture. In Japan one disciplines oneself to be a good player, and the Japanese attitude is that one undergoes the training with no more consciousness of sacrifice than a man who plays bridge. Of course the training is strict, but that is inherent in the nature of things. The young child is born happy but without the capacity to ‘savor life.’ Only through mental training (or self-discipline; shuyo) can a man or woman gain the power to live fully and to ‘get the taste’ of life. The phrase is usually translated ‘only so can he enjoy life.’ Self-discipline ‘builds up the belly (the seat of control)’; it enlarges life.