The problem in Japanese culture is not crass authoritarianism. The father is a person who treats his young children with a respect and fondness which has seemed to almost all Western observers to be exceptional in Occidental experience. Because the Japanese child takes for granted certain kinds of real comradeship with his father and is overtly proud of him, the father’s simple change of voice can make the child carry out his wishes. But the father is no martinet to his young children, and adolescence is not a period of revolt against parental authority. Rather it is a period when children become the responsible and obedient representatives of their family before the judging eyes of the world. They show respect to their fathers, as the Japan say, ‘for the practice,’ ‘for the training,’ that is, as a respect-object he is a depersonalized symbol of hierarchy and of the proper conduct of life.
This attitude which is learned by the child in his earliest experiences with his father becomes a pattern throughout Japanese society. Men who are accorded the highest marks of respect because of their hierarchal position do not characteristically themselves wield arbitrary power. The officials who head the hierarchy do not typically exercise the actual authority. From the Emperor down, advisers and hidden forces work in the background. One of the most accurate descriptions of this aspect of Japanese society was given by the leader of one of the super-patriotic societies of the type of the Black Dragon to a Tokyo English-newspaper reporter in the early 1930s. ‘Society,’ he said, meaning of course Japan, ‘is a triangle controlled by a pin in one corner.’ The triangle, in other words, lies on the table for all to see. The pin is invisible. Sometimes the triangle lies to the right, sometimes to the left. It swings on a pivot which never a vows itself. Everything is done, as Westerners so often say, ‘with mirrors.’ Every effort is made to minimize the appearance of arbitrary authority, and to make every act appear to be a gesture of loyalty to the status-symbol who is so constantly divorced from real exercise of power. When the Japanese do identify a source of unmasked power, they regard it, as they have always regarded the moneylender and the narikin, as exploitive and as unworthy of their system.
The Japanese, viewing their world in this way, can stage revolts against exploitation and injustice without ever becoming revolutionists. They do not offer to tear the fabric of their world in pieces. They can institute the most thoroughgoing changes, as they did in the Meiji era, without casting any aspersion upon the system. They called it a Restoration, a ‘dipping back’ into the past. They are not revolutionists, and Western writers who have based their hopes upon ideological mass movements in Japan, who during the war magnified the Japanese underground and looked to it for leadership in capitulation, and who since VJ-Day have prophesied the triumph of radical policies at the polls, have gravely misunderstood the situation. They have been wrong in the prophecies they have made. The conservative Premier, Baron Shidehara, spoke more accurately for the Japanese when he formed his cabinet in October, 1945:
The Government of the new Japan has a democratic form which respects the will of the people . In our country from olden days the Emperor made his will the will of the people. This is the spirit of Emperor Meiji’s Constitution, and the democratic government I am speaking of can be considered truly a manifestation of this spirit.
Such a phrasing of democracy seems less than nothing to American readers, but there is no doubt that Japan can more readily extend the area of civil liberties and build up the welfare of her people on the basis of such an identification than on the basis of Occidental ideology.
Japan will, of course, experiment with Western political mechanics of democracy, but the Western arrangements will not be trusted tools with which to fashion a better world, as they are in the United States. Popular elections and the legislative authority of elected persons will create as many difficulties as they solve. When such difficulties develop, Japan will modify the methods upon which we rely to achieve democracy. Then American voices will be raised to say that the war has been fought in vain. We believe in the rightness of our tools. At best, however, popular elections will be peripheral to Japanese reconstruction as a peaceful nation for a long time to come. Japan has not changed so fundamentally since the 1890s, when she first experimented with elections, that some of the old difficulties Lafcadio Hearn described then will not be likely to recur:
There was really no personal animosity in those furious election contests which cost so many lives; there was scarcely any personal antagonism in those parliamentary debates of which the violence astonished strangers. The political struggles were not really between individuals but between clan interests or party interests; and the devoted followers of each clan or party understood the new politics only as a new kind of war – a war of loyalty to be fought for the leader’s sake.
In more recent elections in the nineteen-twenties, villagers used to say before they cast their ballots, ‘My neck is washed dean for the sword,’ a phrase which identified the contest with the old attacks of the privileged samurai upon the common people. All the connotations of elections in Japan will differ even today from those in the United States, and this will be true quite apart from whether Japan is or is not pursuing dangerous aggressive policies.