Boys, however, have not yet, when they have learned jicho and giri-to-the-world, acquired all that is incumbent upon an adult Japanese male. ‘From the age of ten,’ Japanese say, ‘he learns giri-to-his-name.’ They mean of course that he learns that it is a virtue to resent insult. He must learn the rules too: when to close with the adversary and when to take indirect means to clear his honor. I do not think they mean that the boy has to learn the aggressiveness that the insult behavior implies; boys who have been allowed in early childhood so much aggressiveness toward their mothers and who have fought out with their age mates so many kinds of slurs and counterclaims, hardly have to learn to be aggressive when they are ten. But the code of giri-to-one’s-name, when boys are included under its provisions in their teens, channels their aggressiveness into accepted forms and provides them with specified ways of dealing with it. As we have seen, the Japanese often turn this aggressiveness against themselves instead of using violence against others. Even school boys are no exception.
For those boys who continue their schooling beyond the six-year elementary school – some 15 per cent of the population, though the proportion in the male population is larger – the time when they are becoming responsible for giri-to-their-name falls when they are suddenly exposed to the fierce competition of middle-school entrance examinations and the competitive ranking of every student in every subject. There is no gradual experience which leads up to this, for competition is ‘minimized almost to the vanishing point in elementary school and at home. The sudden new experience helps to make rivalry bitter and preoccupying. Competition for place and suspicion of favoritism are rife. This competition, however, does not figure so largely in the life stories as does the middle-school convention of older boys tormenting the lower classmen. The upper classes of middle-school order the younger classes about and put them through various kinds of hazing. They make them do silly and humiliating stunts. Resentments are extremely common, for Japanese boys do not take such things in a spirit of fun. A younger boy who has been made to grovel before an upper-classman and run servile errands hates his tormentor and plans revenge. The fact that the revenge has to be postponed makes it all the more absorbing. It is giri-to-his-name and he regards it as a virtue. Sometimes he is able, through family pull, to get the tormentor discharged from a job years later. Sometimes he perfects himself in jujitsu or sword play and publicly humiliates him on a city street after they have both left school. But unless he sometime evens the score he has that ‘feeling of something left undone’ which is the core of the Japanese insult contest.
For those boys who do not go on to middle school, the same kind of experience may come in their Army training. In peacetime one boy in four was drafted, and the hazing of first-year recruits by second-year recruits was even more extreme than in the middle and upper schools. It had nothing to do with officers in the Army, and only exceptionally even with non-commissioned officers. The first article of the Japanese code was that any appeal to officers caused one to lose face. It was fought out among the recruits. The officers accepted it as a method of ‘hardening’ troops but they were not involved. Second-year men passed on to the first-years the resentments they had accumulated the year before and proved their ‘hardness’ by their ingenuity in devising humiliations. The draftees have often been described as coming out of their Army training with changed personalities, as ‘true jingo nationalists,’ but the change is not so much because they are taught any theory of the totalitarian state and certainly not because of any inculcation of chu to the Emperor. The experience of being put through humiliating stunts is much more important. Young men trained in family life in the Japanese manner and deadly serious about their amour-propre may easily become brutalized in such a situation. They cannot stand ridicule. What they interpret as rejection may make them good torturers in their turn.
These modern Japanese situations in middle school and in the Army take their character, of course, from old Japanese customs about ridicule and insult. The middle and upper schools and the Army did not create the Japanese reaction to them. It is easy to see that the traditional code of giri-to-one’s-name makes hazing practices rankle more bitterly in Japan than they do in America. It is also consistent with old patterns that the fact that each hazed group will pass on the punishment in time to a victim group does not prevent a boy’s preoccupation with settling scores with his actual tormentor. Scapegoating is not the constantly recurring folkway in Japan that it is in many Western nations. In Poland, for instance, where new apprentices and even young harvesters are severely hazed, resentment is not vented against the hazers, but upon the next crop of apprentices and harvesters. Japanese boys will also have this satisfaction, of course, but they are primarily concerned with the immediate insult contest. The tormented ‘feel good’ when they are able to settle scores with the tormentors.
In the reconstruction of Japan those leaders who have their country’s future at heart would do well to pay particular attention to hazing and the custom of making boys do silly stunts in the post-adolescent schools and in the Army. They would do well to emphasize school spirit, even the ‘old school tie,’ in order to break down the upper-under classmen distinctions. In the Army they would do well to forbid hazing. Even though the second-year recruits should insist on Spartan discipline in their relations with the first-years, as Japanese officers of all ranks did, such insistence is no insult in Japan. The hazing behavior is. If no older boy in school or Army could with impunity make a younger one wag his tail like a dog or perform like a cicada or stand on his head while the others ate, it would be a change more effective in the re-education of Japan than denials of the Emperor’s divinity or elimination of nationalistic material from textbooks.