The contradictions which all Westerners have described in Japanese character are intelligible from their child rearing. It produces a duality in their outlook on life, neither side of which can be ignored. From their experience of privilege and psychological ease in babyhood they retain through all the disciplines of later life the memory of an easier life when they ‘did not know shame.’ They do not have to paint a Heaven in the future; they have it in their past. They rephrase their childhood in their doctrine of the innate goodness of man, of the benevolence of their gods, and of the incomparable desirability of being a Japanese. It makes it easy for them to base their ethics on extreme interpretations of the ‘Buddha-seed’ in every man and of every man’s becoming a kami on death. It gives them assertiveness and a certain self-confidence. It underlies their frequent willingness to tackle any job, no matter how far above their ability it may seem to be. It underlies their readiness to pit their judgment even against their own Government, and to testify to it by suicide. On occasion, it gives them a capacity for mass megalomania.
Gradually, after they are six or seven, responsibility for circumspection and ‘knowing shame’ is put upon them and upheld by the most drastic of sanctions: that their own family will turn against them if they default. The pressure is not that of a Prussian discipline, but it is inescapable. In their early privileged period the ground has been prepared for this development both by the persistent inescapable training in nursery habits and posture, and by the parents’ teasing which threatens the child with rejection. These early experiences prepare the child to accept great restraints upon himself when he is told that ‘the world’ will laugh at him and reject him. He clamps down upon the impulses he expressed so freely in earlier life, not because they are evil but because they are now inappropriate. He is now entering upon serious life. As he is progressively denied the privileges of childhood he is granted the gratifications of greater and greater adulthood, but the experiences of that earlier period never truly fade out. In his philosophy of life he draws freely upon them. He goes back to them in his permissiveness about ‘human feelings.’ He re-experiences them all through his adulthood in his ‘free areas’ of life.
One striking continuity connects the earlier and the later period of the child’s life: the great importance of being accepted by his fellows. This, and not an absolute standard of virtue, is what is inculcated in him. In early childhood, his mother took him into her bed when he was old enough to ask, he counted the candies he and his brothers and sisters were given as a sign of how he ranked in his mother’s affection, he was quick to notice when he was passed over and he asked even his older sister, ‘Do you love me best?’ In the later period he is asked to forego more and more personal satisfactions, but the promised reward is that he will be approved and accepted by ‘the world.’ The punishment is that ‘the world’ will laugh at him. This is of course a sanction invoked in child training in most cultures, but it is exceptionally heavy in Japan. Rejection by ‘the world’ has been dramatized for the child by his parents’ teasing when they threatened to get rid of him. All his life ostracism is more dreaded than violence. He is allergic to threats of ridicule and rejection, even when he merely conjures them up in his own mind. Because there is little privacy in a Japanese community, too, it is no fantasy that ‘the world’ knows practically everything he does and can reject him if it disapproves. Even the construction of the Japanese house – the thin walls that permit the passage of sounds and which are pushed open during the day – makes private life extremely public for those who cannot afford a wall and garden.
Certain symbols the Japanese use help to make clear the two sides of their character which are based on the discontinuity of their child rearing. That side which is built up in the earliest period is the ‘self without shame,’ and they test how far they have kept it when they look at their own faces in the mirror. The mirror, they say, ‘reflects eternal purity.’ It does not foster vanity nor reflect the ‘interfering self.’ It reflects the depths of the soul. A person should see there his ‘self without shame.’
In the mirror he sees his own eyes as the ‘door’ of his soul, and this helps him to live as a ‘self without shame.’ He sees there the idealized parental image. There are descriptions of men who always carry a mirror with them for this purpose, and even of one who set up a special mirror in his household shrine in which to contemplate himself and examine his soul; he ‘enshrined himself’; he ‘worshipped himself.’ It was unusual, but it was only a small step to take, for all household Shinto shrines have mirrors on them as sacred objects. During the war the Japanese radio carried a special paean of approval for a classroom of girls who had bought themselves a mirror. There was no thought of its being a sign of vanity. It was described as a renewed dedication to calm purposes in the depths of their souls. Looking into it was an external observance which would testify to the virtue of their spirit.
Japanese feelings about the mirror are derived from the time before the ‘observing self’ was inculcated in the child. They do not see the ‘observing self’ in the looking glass. There their selves are spontaneously good as they were in childhood, without the mentor of ‘shame.’ The same symbolism they attribute to the mirror is the basis too of their ideas of ‘expert’ self-discipline, in which they train themselves with such persistence to eliminate the ‘observing self’ and get back the directness of early childhood.
In spite of all the influences their privileged early childhood has upon the Japanese, the restraints of the succeeding period when shame becomes the basis of virtue are not felt solely as deprivations. Self-sacrifice, as we have seen, is one of the Christian concepts they have often challenged; they repudiate the idea that they are sacrificing themselves. Even in extreme cases, the Japanese speak, instead, of’voluntary’ death in payment of chu or ko or giri, and this does not seem to them to fall in the category of self-sacrifice. Such a voluntary death, they say, achieves an object you yourself desire. Otherwise it would be a ‘dog’s death,’ which means to them a worthless death; it does not mean, as in English, death in the gutter. Less extreme courses of conduct, too, which in English are called self-sacrificing, in Japanese belong rather in the category of self-respect. Self-respect (jicho) always means restraint, and restraint is valuable just as self-respect is. Great things can only be achieved through self-restraint, and the American emphasis on freedom as a prerequisite for achievement has never seemed to them, with their different experiences, to be adequate. They accept as a principal tenet in their code the idea that through self-restraint they make their selves more valuable. How else could they control their dangerous selves, full of impulses that might break out and confound a proper life? As one Japanese expresses it: