| [ history ] in KIDS 글 쓴 이(By): artistry (호연지기) 날 짜 (Date): 1999년 7월 2일 금요일 오전 09시 12분 10초 제 목(Title): 코오진/부디즘,맑시즘,그리고 파시즘 Buddhism, Marxism, and Fascism--On Sakaguchi Ango and Takeda Taijun Kojin Karatani 1 It is a general tendency of modern Japanese thinkers to counterpose Buddhism against Western influences. While it is true that Japanese culture and thinking after roughly around the 7th to 8th centuries --the time when Chinese letters were introduced--cannot be scrutinized without stumbling into Buddhism, strange is the fact that even today Japanese consider Buddhism to be an adopted foreign idea. Watsuji Tetsuro has compared the Japanese reception of Buddhism to that of Christianity in the West. For the Germanic people, Christianity was undoubtedly a foreign idea; however, because non-Christian elements were thoroughly repressed during the process of its naturalization, it has never been considered as foreign. Therefore the reception took place gradually over a long period of time; in Japan, on the other hand, Buddhism took root and blossomed immediately after being transplanted. Watsuji explained this case as follows: "For this, we have to take account not only of the pacifist nature of Buddhism itself, but also of Japanese magnanimity toward religion. Japanese did not feel the necessity of abandoning their faith in indigenous Gods in order to become believers in Buddha. It is still conspicuous today that there was no contradiction in devotees having faith in both native Gods and Buddha. Some might say this is a lack of rigor in faith. Nevertheless, the Buddhistization of Japan did not cause a conversion that resulted in a total denial of non-Buddhist elements. Rather, it was the Japanese who appropriated Buddhism. It follows that throughout many centuries they have kept the margin that allowed them to consider Buddhism as a foreign idea, and during this long period, it turned into their own flesh and blood" (Watsuji Tetsuro, "Nihon ni okeru Bukkyo Shiso no Ishoku [The Transplantation of Buddhist Thoughts in Japan]") First of all, it is misleading to ascribe the peculiar reception to "the pacifist nature of Buddhism." For Buddhist scriptures, such as the Saddharma Pundarika Sutra, contain militant and exclusionist tendencies which have produced radicalist movements in Japan, past and present. Furthermore, from the moment of its inception in India, Buddhism was radicalist thought par excellence; transplanting it unequivocally required "a total denial of non-Buddhist elements." In India this tendency had to disappear. In China, where it developed into Zen [Dhyana] and Jodo [Sukhavati], it again faded away, leaving only some historical vestiges. In Thailand, Cambodia, Tibet, and Nepal, where Buddhism endures, it is internalized with strict precepts, and never treated as foreign. Why is it that in Japan in particular Buddhism is still a foreign idea? Second, it is also wrong to ascribe this situation to "Japanese magnanimity toward religion," or to Watsuji's statement that "it was Japanese who appropriated Buddhism." In various areas around the world, subjectivity was constructed, as it were, by being castrated by the world religions: Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism. In these places, it was never possible for people to think of world religions as being foreign to them because their subjects were formed by encounters with those religions. In Japan, it is not possible that there had already been a subject--the "Japanese"--that appropriated Buddhism, as Watsuji claimed. Rather, it might be said, because castration by Buddhism had been foreclosed, the Japanese subject had not been formed. No wonder Buddhism struck root immediately, without resistance. Accepting anything and everything is a form of exclusion. This is different from the tolerance seen in Europe, forged as it was by the Religious War. Under these circumstances and permeating everywhere, Buddhism remains foreign in Japan. After all, Watsuji's gesture of returning to ancient times was nothing but a justification of his own conversion and the post World War I situation. The Japanese, who accepted Westernization without resistance after the Meiji Restoration, began to seek Japanese culture as an authentic self-identity after their victory in the Russo-Japan War. But the simple contraposition of Buddhism, Confucianism, and the like against Western thought could not suffice. What was required was an empty locus where even Buddhism would be an adopted foreign idea, and any Western thought would be accepted as foreign: such a place of nothingness (Nishida Kitaro) must be self-identity itself. Watsuji wrote his essay at the time he was writing A Pilgrimage to Old Temples and Ancient Japanese Culture, that is, when he suddenly made a turn to Japanese things from his concerns for Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. To be precise, however, Watsuji did not reject Western thought; rather, totally accepting it, he treated it as foreign. In other words, Watsuji "appropriated" Western thought. In this sense, it might be said, he was just talking about himself while using various references. But it goes without saying that Watsuji cannot be deemed the representative of all Japanese modern thinkers. Buddhistization was not so constant and smooth in Japan as Watsuji claimed. Not only was Buddhism appropriated by way of foreclosure, but it assumed the power to force castration that penetrates foreclosure. To repeat, Buddhism is not an open-armed, tolerant religion; it was practical and even radicalist against the Indian caste society from which it derived. Buddhism sees every substance merely as a bundle of relations; but more than anything, it targets the idea of reincarnation, namely, the identity of the soul that transmigrates. Before Buddhism, the real misery of life in the caste system was regarded as the result of reincarnation, and ascetic practices were recommended in order to escape the vicious cycle. Many doctrines that are claimed to be Buddha's were in fact remnants of previous thought. What Buddha really attempted was to shift the individualistic will toward salvation to an acceptance of the practical relation with real others. To do this, he deconstructed the idea of an identical soul that reincarnates. I call this "deconstruction", because he criticized the ideas of the identical soul and life after death in such expressions as: "it neither is nor is not." Saying that the soul "is not" necessarily invokes another substance to be the premise. He rejected the obsession with the metaphysical question itself and attempted to reorient our concern toward practical ethics with regard to others. This is the reason he denied ascetic practices as a path to salvation from reincarnation. It was natural that early Buddhism was supported by merchants and women, the disdained classes. Buddhism gradually lost its power of practical reformation in India. Becoming preceptive (the Lesser Vehicle) on the one hand and profound theory (the Great Vehicle) on the other, it was slowly absorbed into the existing conventional religions and the caste system at the same time as it was becoming influential outside India: the Lesser Vehicle in South East Asia and the Great Vehicle in Tibet, China, Korea, and Japan. But when it was transplanted into non-Indian environments, where there had been no idea of reincarnation, Buddhism was ironically accepted as a reincarnation ideology--the very aspect that it had sought to deny. It is said that in China the idea of living again and again--the unbearable karma that Indians had attempted to abandon--was welcome in turn. Although it once was influential in China, Buddhism could not compete with the Confucianist hold, pervaded by the worshipping of the ancestral spirit and it was absorbed into an all-embracing neo-Confucianism. The same thing happened in Korea. In Japan it was not in ancient times as Watsuji stressed, but in the 12th and 13th centuries, via a Religious Reform, that Buddhism took deep root. It is said that Buddhism was first introduced in Japan in the 6th century. But it came to be institutionalized as a state religion only around the 7th and 8th centuries, because at that time it began to meet the requisites of a world religion: it could transcend tribal Gods on behalf of the Yamato Kingdom--the ancestor of Tenno--that had unified a multitude of tribes. It was therefore mainly a magical practice to rule and protect the state by religion [chingo-kokka]. If it had remained as such, no matter how profound a theory it produced, Buddhism in Japan would have disappeared as a religion. It took firm hold, in the true sense of the term, between the 12th and 13th centuries, in the age of Kamakura Bukkyo [Buddhism], when such great leaders as Honen, Shinran, Dogen, and Nichiren were active. They all studied in the Temple of Mt. Hiei, the state institution, but later abandoned the official discipline and began to propagate their own Buddhisms among the populace. Watsuji Tetsuro claimed that the Japanese interpretations of Buddhism formed around the 7th and 8th centuries later blossomed under Kamakura Buddhism. Suzuki Daisetsu argued that it was under these circumstances that Japanese spirituality [Nihonteki Rei-sei] was informed. Buddhism finally took root in Kamakura Buddhism, but not because it was Japanized, but because the radical thinking that had always already been conceived in Buddhist texts was able to be read in a new context. Far from Kyoto, Kamakura was a city where the first Samurai government was established. Buddhism revived when it was read free from conventions, an opportunity afforded in the transitional period from clan society (ruled by court nobles) to feudal society (ruled by samurai). Even though it appeared as a Japanization of Buddhism, Kamakura Buddhism was also a return to the origin of Buddhism. In this sense, the movement was analogous to the European Reformation. Simply said, Shinran, Dogen, and Nichiren each chose one good text out of others [senjaku] and purified the logic: Shinran (Jodo Shin-shu) totally rejected the will to salvation and urged a devotion to the Absolute (Amitabha); Dogen (Zen) considered the Transcendent as nothing and urged the devotee to "sit intently in contemplation;" Nichiren (Nichiren Shu) advocated a reformation of the state, grounded on Buddhism. These are not so contradictory as they might seem; in fact, in China these stances were different expedients of the same temple: Zen was for intellectuals, and Jodo for the general population. But in Kamakura Buddhism, these hierarchical divisions were diverted into conflicting sectarianism. As a result, Zen was accepted by the new ruling class--the samurais and the intellectuals--but did not spread among the populace. What is known as Japanese culture today was formed around Zen, the culture of the ruling class--as is always the case. Nevertheless, Buddhism's impetus was not restricted to this. Jodo Shin-shu and Nichiren-shu spread among the populace after the feudal system collapsed, and even caused peasant wars and the formation of autonomous city-states around the 15th and 16th centuries. To see this from an inverted view, a peasants' and citizens' revolution in this period could happen only in the guise of an egalitarian religious movement. This situation should also be seen from the perspective of the world situation after Columbus. In the latter half of the 16th century, the Jesuits spread to Western Japan. The role they played there was basically the same as the ones Jodo Shin-shu and Nichiren-shu had played in Eastern Japan. Furthermore, Francisco de Xavier, one of the founders of the Jesuits, had himself come to Japan as a missionary during the height of the struggle against Protestantism. It was until this time that Buddhism displayed its original radical power in Japan. The third player in this struggle was Oda Nobunaga, who attempted to establish absolute authority using guns and canons that by this time had been distributed all over Japan. In order to crush the forces of Jodo Shin-shu, which had formed an alliance with Sakai, an autonomous city, Nobunaga supported the Jesuits. But, after Jodo Shin-shu lost the war and the believers converted, Nobunaga's successor, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, began to oppress Christians. When Hideyoshi died, Tokugawa Ieyasu, who became the conqueror of all of Japan after his decisive victory at Sekigahara, devised various institutions to perpetuate his clanOs rule. Instead of constituting a European-type absolute monarchy by sweeping away feudal lords in collusion with urban bourgeoisie, like Nobunaga, he attempted to reconstruct the feudal system. However Tokugawa's feudal system was different from that of before the 15th century, when the king/subject relation assumed the form of a contract between independent forces. In contrast, Tokugawa's constitution fixed the king/subject relation as a caste structure, reinforced by the ideology of Chu-tzu school [Shushi Gaku] Confucianism. The Tokugawa clan chose not to be an absolute monarchy, and instead installed feudal lords [Daimyo] all over Japan; this system blocked their independent economic/military development and exhausted their wealth through such regulations as Daimyo's alternate-year residence in Edo [Sankin Kotai]. It also confined Tenno to Kyoto while officially revering the lineage so as to appropriate its authority. The Tokugawa constitution was strict in its policy of insulating the country [Sakoku], however, unlike Korea, it permitted commerce with a Protestant nation, Holland, and thereby augmented its knowledge of medicine. The prohibition of transcendence on all fronts, implemented as it was for Pax Tokugawa, worked well for its 250 year sovereignty. After the year 1600, that is, after the Sekigahara War, Alexandre Kojeve has characterized Japan as a "post-historical society" and its way of life "snobbism." (Alexandre Kojeve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, Lectures on The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. by James H. Nichols, Jr. , Cornell University Press, 1969, p. 161-162.) These qualities and refinements described by Kojeve, which nevertheless need further scrutiny for justification, could be considered as those which were formed by the Tokugawa constitution in its effort to avoid any extremity whatsoever in order to secure its permanence. It is not an exaggeration to say that all attributes categorized today as Japanese culture or the Japanese way of life were formed in this period. They are fundamentally different from the characteristics attributed to ancient times, the feudal age, and the 16th century Renaissance. The character of the Tokugawa constitution is most conspicuous in its religious policy. Tokugawa used Jodo Shin-shu--that sect that had once been oppressed and whose believers had been converted--as a means to crush another threat, Christianity. Under the law, everyone was obliged to belong to a parish system [danka] of either Jodo Shin-shu or Jodo-shu. Buddhism, that had once staged a civil/peasant war in the 16th century which expressed the individualOs transcendence and equality, and now came to be an administrative tool with which to bind the populace to the land; it vested people with a permanent address, a bind that remains after death. Thus Jodo Shin-shu expanded more than ever as an institution and became the major sect. Still today, a majority of Japanese belong to the parish system that began in the Tokugawa period, although they do not think of it so much as a religious practice. In Peasants'War in Germany, Engels described how the history of Germany was delayed two hundred years because of the betrayal of Martin Luther, the setback of the peasants' war, and the conflicting lords. Something similar was going on in Japan. In fact, four years before the constitution of Prussia in 1872, the Tokugawa regime was dissolved and a modern nation-state was established by Western feudal domains [Han] such as Satsuma and Choshu. Then Japan began constituting itself, using Prussia as a model. In modern Japan, Buddhism never regained the significance it had had in the 16th century. Right after the Meiji Restoration, two religious movements arose: the anti-Buddhist movement [Haibutsu Kishaku] by State Shintoism, and the permeation of Protestantism; neither was really powerful enough to threaten the ground of Buddhism centered on mores such as the funeral ceremony. There were a few Buddhist sects that attempted religious reforms in response to the situation, but they did not have enough internal energy to continue after the threats of Shinto and Christianity began to weaken. Jodo Shin-shu, turning into a hereditary institution, became attached to the Imperial Household, while Nichiren-shu, that had been oppressed during the Tokugawa period, began to advocate statism [Tennoism] and became a matrix of rightist and fascist movements. Religious passion remained only in the heretic cults deriving from Shintoism and Nichiren-shu. In this manner, mainstream Buddhism survived popularly mainly as a set of hereditary mores. But, in the 1910s, intellectuals began to find new significance in it again. In the Meiji period, Buddhism came to be reestablished by the mediation of the West in three senses. First of all, in order for Buddhism to be an academic discipline, scriptures had to be translated anew directly from Sanskrit, rather than from Chinese, as had been the case. Therefore, scholars had to study abroad--in Germany--where philological studies--from Friedrich Schlegel to Arthur Schopenhauer--were most advanced. Meiji intellectuals came to understand Buddhism in the European context and thus as an internal critique of Modern Western thought. In other words, Buddhism reentered Meiji intellectual discourse as detached from traditional mores and lives. Both Suzuki Daisetsu and Nishida Kitaro committed themselves to Zen only after they had been immersed in Western religion and philosophy. (For instance, Suzuki translated and introduced Swedenborg to Japan.) They chose Zen because it had historically been practiced among intellectuals--the samurai class--as opposed to Jodo Shin-shu; but more than anything, Zen appeared to them as the most anti-Christian and anti-West in that it considers the Transcendent as nothing. Second, Jodo Shin-shu was reappreciated by the intellectuals because of its similarity to Christianity--a fact that was not lost on Jesuit missionaries in the 16th century. Nevertheless, the reformation of Jodo Shin-shu was implemented in opposition to the permeation of Christianity among intellectuals by way of reading the text of Shinran--Tanni-sho--in the manner similar to Protestants' Bible reading. At the same time, Shinran's thought was received only as that which deals with apolitical problems of the inner self. "If even good people can die an easy and peaceful death, why not bad people? However, people always said that if even bad people could have an easy and peaceful death, what would you say about good people? This comment appears to be similar to the truth, but is against the principle of the 'salvation from without [tariki hongan].' For those who believe in ones' own efforts lack the spirit of 'from without,' and live against Amitabha's Original Vow. However, if and only if they overturn their belief in 'from within' and ask for 'from without,' they will die an easy and peaceful death and go to heaven." What Shinran means here is that while good people tend to appeal to their own power and free will (from within), bad people cannot do so and tend to rely on salvation from without (faith). But one thing to be noted is that at the time Shinran wrote those words, "bad people" were not necessarily bad according to today's moral code; they were those people whose jobs were deemed evil according to the precepts of the time. Therefore, his statement indicates that if wealthy people and upper class people who are exempted from evil (jobs) are saved, people who are forced to commit evil must be saved. Shinran preached among those people. For this reason, Jodo Shin-shu was able to engage in political movements. On the other hand, the figure of Shinran that was discovered by the literati of Meiji Japan, was a savior of the inner self with no socio-political concerns. This corresponds to the apolitical manner of interpreting the following phrases of the New Testament by Protestants of the time. They took them just as figures. "And as he sat at dinner in the house, many tax collectors and sinners came and were sitting with him and his disciples. When the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples. 'Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners'? But when he heard this, he said, 'Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means, 'I desire mercy, not sacrifice.' For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners." (The New Annotated Oxford Bible, Oxford University Press, The New Testament, The Call of Matthew: 9, 10; P. 12 NT.) "Then Jesus said to his disciples, 'Truly I tell you, it will be hard for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone to who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.'" (The New Annotated Oxford Bible, Oxford University Press, The New Testament, Parable of the laborers in the vineyard, 19, 23, P. 29 NT.) The similarity of Shinran's text to the New Testament was not limited to the insistence on the priority of faith; importantly they both sought to overturn the social structure and the related moral order. As various social contradictions were revealed in tandem to developing industrial capitalism, many Meiji Protestants inexorably converted to socialism as they found their inner faith less and less satisfactory. The reformists within Jodo Shin-shu were the same. In contrast, the 1930s' revival of Christianity and Buddhism among intellectuals was provoked, inversely, from the setback of and dropping out from Marxist movements. In this context, Christianity was more Catholicism, and Shinran came to be read via nuances of Catholicism, a religion that forgives the weakness and sinfulness of the self as they are. A Kyoto School philosopher, Miki Kiyoshi, wrote A Study on Pascal, while he was studying under Heideggar in Germany; after coming back to Japan, he was actively involved in Marxism, from which he later dropped out to turn to Shinran. Shinran in this context not only "saved" him and other drop-outs from the guilt and nihilism of conversion, but also hint at a tendency to return to Japan, to look inward. The third example, exemplified by Okakura Tenshin, was a stance to conceptualize Buddhism as art--both in Buddhist statues and in temple architecture. Not to mention that Buddhist statues and temples had been the objects of worship but not art, Okakura conceived of the Buddhist principle as a synthesizer of Eastern art--which was nevertheless totally irrelevant to religion. To see religious matters as art is already a humanist stance. Okakura discovered the history of the East in the form of art history as an expression of Geist; it was nothing but an application of Hegelian Aesthetics in the East. Furthermore, Okakura considered Japan a storage-house of the whole of Asian art history, as a principle of nothingness--"the place of nothingness" in Nishida's terms--that absorbs all the contradictory principles as an all-embracing receptacle. Even if the principle was spoken of using a Buddhist term, the Buddhism was nothing but Japan itself. (It was only after OkakuraOs death that this interpretation became politically influential.) Watsuji Tetsuro attended Okakura's lecture on "The History of Eastern Art" as a student and was moved by it. Starting his career as a scholar of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, Watsuji wrote A Reconstruction of Idol in 1918 at the age of twenty nine. There are double connotations in the title: reconstruction of the idol Nietzsche destroyed and reconstruction of Buddhist idols destroyed in Japan. The next year he wrote Pilgrimage to Old Temples and the year after, Ancient Culture of Japan. It should be noted that Watsuji's stance toward Buddhism was thoroughly aesthetic. His most influential work was the Pilgrimage, through which Japanese people rediscovered Buddhism as well as Japanese ancient history. The object of his reverence was old temples, not religion. The folklorist, Yanagida Kunio, stressed that ancient temples were rather colorful and flashy, whereas the objects Watsuji and his followers loved were aged and somber. It is akin to Western Romanticists, who projected their image of the medieval ages onto desolate old castles. As the Romanticists discovered their Catholicism, Japanese intellectuals discovered their Buddhism. But both are aesthetic constructs and have nothing to do with the real religious movements of the past. Romanticism was the first critique of modernity in the West, and all the critiques that followed tacitly belong to its paradigm. The same is true of Japan; what Japanese call the Buddhist tradition is a construct within the modern consciousness, and especially within an aesthetic imagination. The turn that Watsuji presented after World War I came to be called "Overcoming Modernity" in the late 1930s. In 1942, two years after the Pacific War broke out, a symposium under the same title took place. This was organized by the Literary Society [Bungakukai] group, lead by Kobayashi Hideo, with the participation of the Kyoto School group: i.e., Nishitani Keiji, et al, and the Japanese Romanticist [Nihon Romanha] group. Although these intellectuals are often confused as ideologues of fanatic reactionism, Tennoism, anti-alienism, and imperialism, the participants themselves were not, and were even in conflict with them. It is striking that there was even a Catholic theologist participating in the symposium. Yoshimitsu Yoshihiko believed that a new medievalism would make "Overcoming Modernity" possible. He distinguished medievalism from both Romantic reactionism and Western centrism. "The new medievalism is not based upon this or that individual moment in the medieval ages, but on the idea of metaphysical synthesis that was intended but not realized throughout the medieval ages. It attempts to pursue this synthesis, not in an impossible and meaningless retroversion to historical medieval ages, but as a task of the new age--it attempts to realize it more internally and subjectively as a 'new order.'" "Therefore, the Western problematic derived from cultures of the European Peninsula is, however valuable in itself, not my concern if it is detached from religious and metaphysical meaning. For in the face of God, both West and East are charged with existential problems in and of themselves; as facing one and the same source of love and truth, we have to live the way of mankind, the way of God, in the most serious manner, within the historical tradition of our native spirit. In this case, however, I would deny a certain relativism or humanism with respect to truth as some of us believe, and stress that a way of existence that can grasp and realize the Logos is determined within each historicity and sociality, as it were, as a providence." (Takeuchi Yoshimi, Kindai-no Chokoku [Overcoming Modernity]) Yoshimitsu maintained this kind of Catholicism while other participants invoked Japanesque lines of thinking such as Buddhism and Shintoism. Such a statement by a Catholic theologist was allowed at a time when the divination of Tenno was at its peak, for, aside from the alliance with Germany, Christianity and Buddhism shared the same structure despite their religious differences. In short, they both were the discovery of the Romanticist stance. What is spoken of in terms of Oriental and Buddhist discourses in Japan is always Romantic/aesthetic. The same can be said of Nishida Kitaro, the master thinker of the Kyoto School. A Marxist philosopher, Tosaka Jun, who died in prison in 1945, keenly pointed it out. "(. . .) Nishidian philosophy seems to have lost a touch of romanticist, aesthetic aspects recently, but it is rather because the romanticist, aesthetic method has been solidified; and more than anything, because it has been named "Nishidian Philosophy" by professor Souta. To repeat, Nishidian philosophy is not made of feudal and medieval methods, but of a modern, romantic essence. I have not seen anything more appropriate to guide the cultural consciousness of contemporary illuminati. The modern capitalist intelligence of our contemporaries sees in this philosophy a representative of its consciousness of cultural freedom. Thus Nishidian philosophy becomes a representative of cultural liberalism as opposed to politico-economic liberalism. Herein lies the secret of its popularity." (Tosaka Jun, Nihon Ideology [Japan Ideology]) In the same way, to define Nishidian philosophy as Buddhist is non-sensical, based upon the ignorance of the historicity of Buddhism. It was only after 1937 that Nishida himself began to call it "oriental" or "Buddhist." Up to that point, he had always intended to construct it using the terms of Western philosophy. In fact, his "place of nothingness" corresponds to Kant's "transcendental apperception." Kant defined it as a "work" that, though empirically nothing, synthesizes consciousness. Like Gottlieb Fichte, Nishida first considered the transcendental self as practical in his project to compose a world; but, in contradistinction to Fichte, he insisted on seeing it as the "place of nothingness" or the "work of nothingness." This is not a particularly Buddhist idea. For instance, what Heideggar called the "ontological difference between beings and Being" derived from the Kantian distinction between "empirical and transcendental." Heideggarian Being--that which is lost when transposed as beings--is empirically [ontisch] nothingness and furthermore, nothingness as a work. Nishida spoke of it as the "place of nothingness" or "absolute nothing." It was true, however, that Nishida finally began to call his philosophy Oriental. It was at the time when Japan was rushing headlong into war with China in the East, and when Heideggar committed himself to Nazism in the West. As Heideggar sided with the left faction of the Nazi party, the SA [Sturmabteilung] as opposed to the SS [Schutzstaffel], Nishida sided with the relatively liberal Navy as opposed to the militaristic Army. He attempted to philosophically ground the idea that the "Great East Asia Coprosperity Sphere" was a program to liberate Asia from Western colonial domination and thus not imperialism. Although he appeared to be rather reticent and passive in contrast to his disciples--the scholars of the Kyoto School--who behaved decoratively and opportunistically, Nishida's idea was undoubtedly the basis for their whole tendency. Nishida defined Tenno: "In the history of our nation, the Imperial Household has consistently been a being of nothingness, a self-identity of contradictories." (Nishida Kitaro, Nihon Bunka no Mondai [The Problematic of Japanese Culture])The important philosophical concepts such as "being of nothingness" (work of nothingness) and "self-identity of contradictories" finally came to connote the Tenno system. Nothing has so picturesquely and miserably endorsed the Althusserian notion of philosophy: an empty form without content. According to Nishida, the Imperial Household has existed as the being of nothingness behind the real political might that has taken power in turn, instead of taking power by itself. Furthermore, although the Meiji Constitution defined it as the equivalent of the absolute monarchy, it was supposed to be different from Chinese and Western monarchies; in the context of the "Great East Asia Coprosperity Sphere," Tenno as the being of nothingness should have existed like a transcendental apperception (or zero sign) that synthesized individual, autonomous Asian nations, instead of reigning over them like the Soviet Union. Not to mention that this reasoning was an attempt to change the interpretation--instead of the reality--of the Japanese Imperialist domination of Asia, to use MarxOs rhetoric. Nishida lectured privately to Tenno himself as follows: "although it is commonly thought that individualism and totalitarianism are contradictory, they both are past; not to mention that individualism is out of date, totalitarianism also is of the past. . . . The Japanese national body has developed through the mutual denial of individual and whole, with the Imperial Household as its center." (Nishida Kitaro, "Goshinko Soan [A Draft of the Lecture to Tenno]") As Nishida stressed, this logic is certainly different from the Hegelian dialectic that sublates the contradiction between individualism and totalitarianism. That is because the Buddhist logic is at work here: "neither is nor is not." Yet this cannot be deemed Buddhist through and through, because it was a totally different need that invoked this logic. The third form, that rejects both capitalism and socialism, is the very end of fascist thinking as counter-revolution, and gave new life to Buddhist logic. The Kyoto School that consisted of Nishida's disciples, Miki Kiyoshi et al, used this logic to deconstruct all the dichotomies of the Modern West; this was the philosophical core of what they called "Overcoming Modernity." Watsuji Tetsuro claimed that Buddhism was pacifist and inclusive. But if this logic is Buddhist, it is the very thing that catered to fascism. In the post war period, some Kyoto School philosophers--Nishitani Keiji in particular--tried to erase Nishida's political commitment as well as their own political involvement. After the historicity was erased, Nishida's philosophy was inexorably dehistoricized and revived as representative of Oriental thought. In fact, once the content of neither-nor logic like this is removed, it can be used in any context and has been politically useful. With respect to Heideggar, irrespective of the appreciation of his philosophy, no one today ignores his commitment to Nazism, while Nishida's work is consistently spoken of as an Oriental philosophy, totally depoliticized and abyssal, and, as such, circulates in the West. 2 Now I would like to take up Sakaguchi Ango's essay, "A Private View on Japanese Culture," and Takeda Taijun's book, Ssu-ma Ch'ien--The World of The Grand Scribes Records. Both of them were published at the time of the "Overcoming Modernity" symposium and conceived as a radical critique of it, though they did not necessarily target it directly. My point is to shed light on why the most radical and essential critics of "Overcoming" were these two who had experienced Buddhism institutionally and customarily; and how, in these unconventional thinkers, the radical core of Buddhist thinking was concretized. Sakaguchi's "A Private View. . ." criticizes A Rediscovery of Japanese Beauty by Bruno Taut, the architect who stayed in Japan between 1933 and 1936. A German Jew born in Konigsberg, Taut converted from Expressionism to Socialism; he came to Japan as a kind of refugee--to escape the Nazis he took the opportunity of being invited by Japanese modernist architects. What he wrote during his stay in Japan greatly impacted the Japanese situation, leaning toward Tenno fascism. He saw "pure structuralism, outstanding lucidity, purity of material, beauty of balance" in the Ise Shrine, the symbol of the statist ideology of the Tenno system, while denouncing Nikko Tosho-gu, a shrine dedicated to Tokugawa Ieyasu, as "dictator's kitsch" and "indigestible importation." Supposing he had intended to see these architectures as ahistorical art objects, it is still impossible to imagine that he was totally innocent of the distinct political implications these monuments represented. Taut simply distinguished between the foreign and the native, in contrast to common Orientalists, who distinguish between the Occidental and the Japanese. Thus he appreciated Katsura Annex Palace and Ise Shrine as representatives of "ur-Japanese culture," while disclaiming Nikko Tosho-gu as a motley assembly of imports from the Asian Continent and Japanese things. In Japan, the 1930s was the very moment when nationalist sentiment of returning to ancient Japan--before the arrival of Chinese civilization--was at its peak, evidenced by the fact that Motoori Norinaga, the Edo scholar of Kokugaku [the study of Japanese classical literature], was highly admired. Furthermore, in Germany, it was the time when ur-Germanic culture before Latinization was being praised. Therefore, it is bizarre that Taut, who escaped German nationalism, came to Japan to accelerate Japanese nationalism. Finally, we might be able to settle this by imagining his complicated situation: his political strategy might have focused on a totally different point. His intention was to criticize the Teikan [Imperial Crown] style--a mixture of 19th century Western and traditional Japanese architecture--that symbolized Japanese imperialism. This was what was expected by the Japanese architects who invited him. And his agenda was to criticize the traditionalism of the Teikan style by appreciating another tradition. In this sense, it was nothing but a dead-end strategy of cornered Modernism. As a result, however, it offered traditionalism a universal significance--that "even a foreign scholar/architect could appreciate". For this reason, his gesture was highly appreciated by those promoting the major trends of Japanese discourse represented by the "decline of the West" and "Overcoming Modernity." In a certain sense, this is similar to the way Roland Barthes' The Empire of Signs was appreciated in the 1980s Japanese Postmodern atmosphere as a new version of "Overcoming Modernity," irrespective of the way Barthes himself intended it in the French context. It was Sakaguchi Ango who criticized Taut most pointedly. "However, there was a distance between the two things that Taut could not even imagine: that he discovered Japan and its traditional beauty and that we, though losing sight of Japanese tradition, are factually Japanese. That is to say, Taut had to discover Japan, while we, whether or not we discover Japan, are just Japanese. Although we might have lost sight of our ancient culture, we can by no means lose sight of Japan. What is the Japanese spirit? There is no need for us to scrutinize such a problem. There is no way for Japan to come into existence by means of an explanation of the spirit, nor can the Japanese spirit be explained. Inasmuch as Japanese lives are healthy, Japan itself is healthy. Putting pairs of pants on our crooked short legs, wearing Western clothing, walking around with short steps, enjoying dancing, abandoning our traditional Tatami mats, lying on our backs with legs outstretched on cheap sets of sofas and tables and chairs, and being quite affected: that these appear to be comical to WesternersO eyes and that we are satisfied with the new way of life are totally unrelated. There is a fundamental difference between a WesternersO stance to take pity on us and laugh at us and our stance of having lives. Inasmuch as our way of life is based upon our own reasonable demands, their pity is simply frivolous." (Sakaguchi Ango, "Nihon Bunka Shikan [A Private View on Japanese Culture]") Of course, Sakaguchi does not mean that TautOs Japan was a sham and true Japan can be captured only by us Japanese. The real target of Sakaguchi's critique here was not Taut himself, who, about this time, died on his journey through Turkey, but Japanese intellectuals setting forth "Japanese ancient culture" or "Overcoming Modernity." From the beginning, a "culture" or "tradition" of a certain country is always and everywhere "discovered" by visiting foreigners or expatriates away from home. Culture or tradition is an empty representation that is discovered, totally irrespective of the life that we live in reality, and is, whether wished or not, transformed by the contemporary capitalist economy. To Sakaguchi, "beauty" is not something that looks beautiful, and neither does it exist in the place we consciously look for it. It must be the form in which only necessary things are placed in necessary places. "Only need--from beginning to end, consistently only need. And only the unique form required by the necessary substance produces beauty." (Sakaguchi Ango, "Nihon Bunka Shikan [A Private View on Japanese Culture]") "Everything is a substantial issue. Beauty for beautyOs sake is not honest, or, after all, untrue; it is simply empty. The empty thing never strikes us with truth, thus it makes no difference. No one will have any trouble, for instance, if Horyuji and Byodo-in are burned down. If necessary, make a parking lot where Horyuji is, by demolishing it. By doing such, the glorious culture and tradition of our nation will never fall." (Sakaguchi Ango, ONihon Bunka Shikan [A Private View on Japanese Culture]O) Nevertheless, Sakaguchi's need is not simply a practicalist one. He named three architectures he happened to run into as irresistibly impressive: Kosuge Prison, a dry ice factory, and a destroyer. "Why are these three things so beautiful? There is no artifice to make them beautiful. There is no single column, no single steel plate, added from an aesthetic stance. Only necessary things were put in necessary places. Out of all the unnecessary elements, unique forms required by mere necessity are realized." (Sakaguchi Ango, "Nihon Bunka Shikan [A Private View on Japanese Culture]") According to architectural historians, however, the Kosuge Prison--no longer extant--was widely admired as an example of modernist architecture. Though totally ignorant of architecture, Sakaguchi responded intuitively to the famous statement by the leader of the Bauhaus, Walter Gropius. "We want to produce a lucid organic architecture in which, without any disturbance of fictitious facade and trickery, radiates internal theory stripped bare. We want architecture that fits the world of machines, radios, and high speed automobiles, architecture whose function is evident in its form." Taut, who was involved in the Bauhaus to a certain extent, saw the "unique form required by necessity out of all the unnecessary elements" in the Katsura Annex Palace and Ise Shrine. Though he criticized Taut, Sakaguchi might have been unexpectedly close to him; but the historical condition that signified their discourses separated them definitively. It was not just the distance between Japan and the West that separated them. With respect to Taut's appreciation of the stone garden at Ryoan-ji and the garden of Shugaku-in Annex Palace, Sakaguchi responded: "What does the stone garden of Ryoan-ji try to express? What idea does it try to associate? Taut praised the black and white wallpaper of the study in Shugaku-in Annex Palace, and insisted that the sound of the waterfall was a form of expression. It is pitiful that he had to make his appreciation look plausible by conjuring up such a farfetched explanation. In all probability, the rinsen [typical Japanese garden with a pond, a well, a stream, and trees] or tea room is, as it were, an air castle constructed upon Zen hypotheses, like the Zen monks' satya. They ask: what is Buddha? They answer: it is a spatula to scrape off excrement. Placing a stone in a garden, they say, is both an excrement-scraping spatula and Buddha. If it is seen as Buddha, they are safe; but if it is seen as a spatula, that is their end. In reality, that a spatula to scrape off excrement is a spatula to scrape off excrement is much more persuasive than Zen codes." (Sakaguchi Ango, "Nihon Bunka Shikan [A Private View on Japanese Culture]") Two points should be added. When Sakaguchi wrote this, he was researching 16th century Christianity in Japan in the context of his larger concern about the total historicity of the 15th and 16th centuries. It was a general tendency in modernity that, while fascism advocated "Overcoming Modernity," leftists saw the possibility of an alternative "Overcoming Modernity" in the Renaissance, the entry of modernity that is not yet entrapped by the modern closure. At the time Gramsci wrote New Prince in jail and Bakhtin wrote Rabelais and His World under the Stalinist regime, in Japan Hanada Kiyoteru and Watanabe Kazuo were writing about the European Renaissance. And Sakaguchi saw an equivalent of the European Renaissance in 15th and 16th century Japan; it was a period when the feudal system in place since the Kamakura period as well as the value system of nobility culture since ancient times were radically overturned; however, there were no authentic records of the time in Japanese historiography. Sakaguchi, who was acquainted with many languages from Sanskrit to Latin, naturally looked into Christian materials. He was the first historian, though not officially, to break the cultural barrier in material research. A Jesuit missionary, Louis Frois (1532-97), went to Japan and wrote many documents on Japan at that time, for example, Japanese History. In his A Cultural Comparison between Japan and Europe (1585), there is an interesting description. "In Europe, fidelity is considered as the highest honor and value of an unmarried woman; the fidelity of an unviolated virgin. Japanese women do not honor virginity in the least. Even without it, they do not lose honor and can get married. (. . .) In Europe, an estate is shared by husband and wife. In Japan everyone owns his or her own share. Sometimes, a wife lends money to her husband at a high interest rate. (. . .) In Europe, divorcing one's wife is not only a sin but also the most dishonorable deed. In Japan, people can divorce as many times as they want. Wives are not dishonored by it, and can easily marry again. (. . .) In Europe, it is normally husbands who divorce their wives. In Japan, sometimes wives divorce their husbands. (. . .) In Europe, it is important to cage in and protect daughters and virgins; it is strictly practiced. In Japan, daughters go out wherever and as many days as they want. (. . .) In Europe, wives do not go out without their husbands' consent. Japanese women have the freedom to go where they want without informing their husbands. (. . .) In our culture, literacy is not common among women. Japanese women of nobility consider it as a measure of their value. (. . .) In Europe, women cook. In Japan, men cook. (. . .) In Europe, women's drinking wine is considered ill-mannered. In Japan, it is quite normal; women get drunk during festivals." Frois must have met people of various classes, hence Japanese women described here were not simply of a particular class. Still, as this "Europe" belonged to a particular historical situation, so did this "Japan." Unfortunately it is this "Japan" that was totally forgotten by Japanese after the experience of the Tokugawa Shogunite system that began in the 17th century. Furthermore, the Japanese feminist movement that began around the turn of the century identified a time of female superiority in the ancient matrilineal society--inspired by the same object of idealization as Kokugaku: as a result, the movement came to be entrapped by Tenno ideology in the 1930s. Had the movement been aware of this history, it would have managed to beat the trap. Taking the above description into account, we learn that what is deemed traditional in modern Japan is nothing but a construct after the 17th century Tokugawa Shogunite system, or even in modernity. Those who advocate "Overcoming Modernity" tend to resort to the distant past of medieval and ancient times; but the 15th and 16th centuries are neither modern nor pre-modern, or both at the same time. This time can be called the Renaissance--not only alluding to Europe but also to the universal possibility that has been lost in modernity. In this sense, what Sakaguchi aimed at in researching this time can be called another, alternative "Overcoming Modernity." Sakaguchi criticized Zen logic in reference to a public dispute between Francisco Xavier and a Zen monk. "That is to say that Zen has a code shared only within Zen, and plays a logical game based upon it. It is a world that is constituted only upon a mutually agreed-upon promise. For instance, to the question: 'what is Buddha?' they answer 'nothing' or 'an excrement-scraping spatula.' They pretend to share a deep truth based upon the same code, but it is only a pretense and who knows what they really understand. Therefore, in the face of secular, straight logic: either Buddha is Buddha or an excrement-scraping spatula is an excrement-scraping spatula, Zen logic is revealed as useless. In thinking about what and where is the power that can overturn the most straightforward logic, it exists only where practice and thought are united. Having this kind of practical life is, however, very difficult for the Zen sect. Lacking practice, it lives within an idealistic world produced by the imagination. Because they look for satya in the ideatic world, no Zen monk really knows his true potential even if he relies on his intelligence, and for this reason Zen monks feel threatened by the practical activism of Christian monks who stake all their might for their religion. Zen monks feel their own powerlessness and shabbiness. Thus many believers of Zen, even monks, converted to Christianity. This number was actually much higher than we usually imagine today." (Sakaguchi, "Europa teki Seikaku, Nippon teki Seikaku [European Characters, Japanese Characters]") Here Sakaguchi is not criticizing Zen logic from the stance of modern rationalism, though it might seem so. Neither is he stressing that Christianity is more rational than Zen. In his logic, "Buddha is Buddha; excrement-scraping spatula is excrement-scraping spatula" can be thrust before the doctrine of the Christian Trinity as its critique. That is to say, God is God, man is man; but why is a man Jesus God? In this case, however, Christian missionaries overpowered the Zen sect, not because of the rationality of their doctrine, but because the irrationality of their practice that drove them all the way to the Far East, thousands of miles away. Doesn't this show that to persist in rationality is only made possible by irrationality? In the 1930s, when anti-modern irrationalism was rampant, Sakaguchi persisted in being rational--which is different from rationalism. Husserl concluded his Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology written in the same period with a statement that humans can be rational only by willing to be rational. This will itself is not rational. For Sakaguchi, whether Christianity or Buddhism did not matter; there was no meaning in thinking that did not engage others realistically. But his point was not to scorn Zen monks who converted to Christianity after their public defeat. Rather he cherished this rare instance that could happen only in this period. And it was only in this period that Jesuits had such a potency that one of its originators, Francisco Xavier, dared to come to Japan. Afterward, the Jesuit order gradually lost its own motivation and power and became a conventional order, conspiring with state colonialism. As we have already seen, Buddhism, too, had a practico-ideological power during the Kamakura period. A personal experience also made Sakaguchi indifferent to ZenOs satya. When he was around twenty, for several years he was involved in the hard study and ascetic practice that is required to become a Buddhist monk. As a result, he suffered a nervous break-down and had to abandon Buddhism. Many years later, he referred to it self-mockingly. According to a recently discovered text, however, we should not take his reticence literally. When he was twenty years old, he was publishing a journal with other students who felt the need of renewing Buddhism. In a section dedicated to "Future Life in the Temple," all the members wrote their own opinions such as: "there is no value in today's corrupted monks" or "our motto for temple life is 'faith first'." But Sakaguchi wrote differently: "If there is any life peculiar to the temple, it is nothing but the ascetic life. Which, however, does not mean that we can forget a secular life driven by sexual and material desire. Monks tend to overvalue the ascetic life and forget that there are ethical laws and powers of salvation even in lives driven by carnal desire. There is no ground to believe that the ascetic life is ethically superior and with it comes faster salvation. In whatever way of life one chooses, according to oneOs belief, the bind of passion cannot be given up. Persisting in the look of an ascetic life is just too shameful. I think that restarting from a life based upon secular desire is the true way." ( Sakaguchi, "Kongo no Jiinseikatsu ni kansuru Shikou [A Private View on the Future Temple Life]") It may not necessarily be the case that Sakaguchi despaired of Buddhism. He had already advocated "restarting from a life based upon secular desire" at the time when he still intended to become a monk. Moving away from the ascetic life is a fall from the point of view of the monks' institution. But what about Buddha, who destroyed the long tradition that had intended to get out of reincarnation by ascetic practices and stoicism? It might be said that he, too, degenerated. Therefore, it can also be said that Sakaguchi became a true Buddhist at the point he departed from the Buddhist institution. He never wrote a positive comment about Buddhism; he could not be more incisive, especially toward satya or the pretentiousness of seasoned simplicity. Paradoxically, however, there was nothing more Buddhist than his criticism. Thus "fall" became his key word. What made him famous and became a best seller was in fact Theory of Decline, written after the War. Advocating "fall more," his statement did not contain a sense of "decadence," nor was it a reflection of postwar mass culture and lifestyle. For him, degeneration was a state of being exposed to otherness. He harshly criticized Nagai Kafu and called him a vulgar novelist. After the Taigyaku affair of 1911, when many socialists were executed for a suspected conspiracy to assassinate Tenno, Kafu declared that he would now live on as a Gesaku [comic literature of Edo] writer, inasmuch as he could not do anything about it as an intellectual because of his powerlessness. Partying with women in Asakusa's red-light district, he wrote about his decadent life. This decadence was appreciated after the Marxist movement collapsed in the 1930s, and Kafu was revived as a master. "Kafu was born to small honor and fortune. The circumstances--as well as his propensity to hate others' intervention--determined the last instance of his morality; he never dedicated himself to serious questions: what is the nature of human beings; what do they want and love. He did not even think of the simple fact that there are many other circumstances of life; and many ways of thinking come out of them; these thoughts are contradictory to his own circumstances and thinking." (Sakaguchi, "Tsuzoku Sakka, Nagai Kafu [A Vulgar Novelist, Nagai Kafu]") These sentences almost appear to be Marxist. But they were written after almost all Marxists had converted. What Sakaguchi wanted to stress was that Kafu's decadence was just a reflection of his self-consciousness; he never met the other, that is to say, he never degenerated. The same can be said of a multitude of converted Marxist novelists. They converted not simply because of the crackdown, but because their work did not conceive of the alterity of the proletariat, even if it conceived of the idea of proletariat. Shortly before writing "A Private View of Japanese Culture," Sakaguchi wrote an essay entitled "The Home of Literature" (1941). In his essay, the first narrative that he refers to is Charles Perrault's Little Red Riding Hood. Distinct from the famous narrative circulated for children, this version ends with a scene in which the wolf, disguised as a grandmother, eats the little girl who went into the forest to visit her grandmother, ill in bed. "In this, all of a sudden, we are thrust off and perplexed by the broken promise. But in this empty margin of sudden termination, by a sudden blow to the eye, don't we see a very tranquil and transparent home, a heartbreakingly tender home." "(. . .) that there is no moral itself is a moral, that there is no salvation itself is salvation. In this I see a home of literature or of a human being. Literature derives from this--I even think so. I do not mean that this amoral, jarring story is the only literature. Nay, I actually do not estimate this kind so highly. For although home is our cradle, adults' work should not be a going home. But I do not think that literature can exist without a consciousness/awareness of the home. I do not trust any moral and sociality of literature which does not grow out of the home. Even literary criticism." In Sakaguchi, not only the term "fall" but also "home" are inverted in their significations. Home for him does not assume an affinity, but a being thrust away by otherness. SakaguchiOs stance can be clarified in comparison with a philosopher who also used the term "home" as a keyword. That is to say, Heideggar. He who considered human (Dasein) as a being toward death (Sein tum Tode), called fall (Verfall) an escape to everyday life from being toward death. He also considered the whole philosophy after Socrates as a loss of home=Being. In this context, fall signifies a loss of home or common being (Mitsein). And the return to authenticity (Eigentlichkeit) from the fall meant Nazism. The Japanese version of the return was "Overcoming Modernity." For Sakaguchi, however, home is itself something that thrusts us away. It finds authenticity (Eigentlichkeit) of being there (Dasein) in being exposed to the other. Using the expression of Emmanuel Levinas, who criticized Heideggar, Sakaguchi imposed "ethics" on the basis of all thought. If one can say that Levinas' thinking came from Judaism, one can say that Sakaguchi's thinking came from Buddhism. In the 1930s, when many Japanese intellectuals turned from Western thought in general, including Marxism, to Japanese or Buddhist "emptiness" [sunya], Sakaguchi began his thinking with a denial of it. From the beginning, there was no possible way for Sakaguchi to be a straightforward modernist. In a strict sense, he never abandoned the epistemological function of emptiness. Emptiness--in the sense that everything is thrown in relationship and there is no substance--can never be an object of sentimental return. For emptiness decomposes all domains--beauty, knowledge, moral--which are institutionalized and hypostasized. While many received Buddhism aesthetically, for Sakaguchi it meant an ethical turn. By not once speaking of Buddhism positively, Sakaguchi persisted in the radicalism inherent in Buddhism. 3 A novelist, Takeda Taijun, is distinguished from Sakaguchi in that he was one of many intellectuals who participated in the Marxist movement of the 1930s and later converted. Takeda was, however, unique in two respects: he was born in a temple and became a monk for a limited period of time and he was a scholar of Chinese literature. He even taught Chinese literature at Hokkaido University before he became a full-time novelist. Nonetheless, one fact is often omitted because of these unique characteristics--the fact that for him, Marxism was significant. Buddhism and Chinese literature--both of the disciplines that marked his singularity--assumed similar status in Modern Japan. As I have mentioned earlier in the essay, Buddhism was part of the Tokugawa constitution; and, after the Meiji Restoration, monks were allowed to get married and become a kind of landowner with hereditary temple estates. Takeda was the son of a priest who was simultaneously a leader of a religious sect, a big landowner, and a university professor. Although Buddhism came to be praised in intellectual discourses of the 1930s, nobody studied it scholastically except for monks' sons. We learn this from the fact that when Sakaguchi Ango enrolled at Toyo University to study Buddhism in 1926, he was the only one among 16 new students who was not a monkOs child. For Takeda, Buddhism was not an idea, but an actual institution and a way of life. In other words, it was not something that those who intended to be intellectual were supposed to approach. The same was true of Chinese literature. While before the Meiji Restoration, Chinese studies and literature had been norms for Japanese intellectuals, afterwards Western disciplines replaced Chinese ones. Especially after the Sino-Japanese War, Chinese things came to be considered worn-out, passe, dull, and objects to be despised, thus not to be taken seriously by men of modern knowledge. After the Meiji Restoration, Chinese studies barely survived within the modern university system, and then only as an extension of previous Sinology. Takeda chose these two domains of knowledge alienated in Japanese modern epistemology. In his novel, A Man of Strange Appearance, he wrote about his choice: "I became a monk only because I was born lacking the spirit of independence. Besides, at that time, there was nothing particular I wanted to do. It was not that I determined that path with my full intention, nor was I hit by the transience of the world. I just chose the easiest way. (. . .) As a child of a fishmonger becomes a fishmonger and a child of a landowner becomes a landowner, I became a professional monk." He also explained that he chose Chinese literature for his major in college only because he had bad grades and no other choice. Not to mention that he exhibited reticence about the choices he had made. But what this reticence hides is not his self-confidence or pride, but the significance of Marxist experience. This becomes evident by taking his statement on Buddhism into account. "Nagarjuna's "emptiness view" [kugan] was a solid and supreme system of thought, achieved by the natural science of the time. It is an incomparably calm and distanced natural dialectic; the populace would have hard time approaching it, for it does not have a device to attract attention by appealing to the feelings of transience or sorrow. In Japan there is an obsession with lineage (i.e., the line of emperors for ages eternal [bansei ikkei]) and changing times. But imagine Buddhism, which began to criticize dogmas by grasping the cosmos spatially, measuring it physicochemically. In comparison, Heike Story-esque exclamations are just a confusion of those who are weak and narrow-minded." (Takeda, Seisei Ruten [Lives in Vicissitudes]) It is evident that Takeda grasps Buddhism as something totally different from the one familiar to Japanese history. But this understanding is not necessarily a result of his scholastic research of Buddhism. Takeda obviously sees Buddhist epistemology as a dialectical materialism. It was after he was arrested and converted that he began the ascetic training to be a monk. However, counter to his many contemporaries who turned from Marxism to Buddhism, Takeda sought Marxism in Buddhism. The same can be said of his Chinese literature. He approached it only because he was a leftist. Without this motivation, it would be unfathomable as to why he chose it. In fact Japanese Sinology became up to date and actual thanks to Takeda and Takeuchi Yoshimi, his friend and a specialist of Lu Hsun. Takeda's Ssu-ma Ch'ien--the World of The Grand Scribe's Records (1942) was one of Japanese modernity's great achievements. This book addresses issues far beyond the domain of Sinology. It is one of the most essential and radical criticisms written in 20th century Japan. "Ssu-ma Ch'ien was a man who exhibited his shame by living"--so Takeda begins. Ssu-ma Ch'ien was an historian/scribe of the Han dynasty. When he was charged with betrayal by the emperor and had to choose either the death penalty or castration, he chose the latter so that he could live to finish his Grand Scribe's Records. It is possible to say that Takeda identified with Ssu-ma Ch'ien, who, having dropped out from the leftist movement, and relying on his father's temple that is nothing but a landowner, was forced to be a soldier and invade China--the country he loved. Takeda was nevertheless different from Dazai Osamu, who was also a landowner's son who participated in leftism and converted from it, and wrote about his own feeling of guilt, anxiety, and irony. For it was the structure of The Grand Scribe's Records and not a psychology of Ssu-ma Ch'ien that Takeda was involved in. Yet the feeling of shame persisted at the core of Takeda's writing. Speaking of Ssu-ma Ch'ien's shame, Takeda is not simply saying that his penalty was disgraceful, he is really saying that writing itself is a shameful thing. For whatever purposes one writes, whatever one writes, writing is simply to exhibit one's shame by living. That is to say that writing cannot be justified in whatsoever sense, and only upon this premise, is writing possible. Takeda's shame was not that he had to be a monk; it was rather that he who had dropped out from the Marxist movement even tried to write afterward. In Japan, Marxism shocked intellectuals in a way no foreign religion had ever done. Christians in the Meiji era converted with composure, but the conversion from Marxism caused intellectuals to approach religion in turn. Shinran and the Bible came to be read widely because of this. Why did Takeda insist on shame instead of sin? The American anthropologist, Ruth Benedict, wrote The Chrysanthemum and the Sword based upon her research of Japanese Americans in concentration camps, conducted for the future policy in occupying Japan. In the book, she insists that while Western culture is based on guilt, Japanese is based on shame; while guilt is internal, shame is external. Generally speaking, her comment seems right, but we should note that the feeling of guilt often erases the shame that occurs in the relation with the other, by deeply internalizing it. In other words, the former erases the relation with the other itself. It is important that there is salvation for the feeling of guilt, but not for shame. In a novel of TakedaOs there is a dialogue between two people: one is an older intellectual who, suffering from the feeling of guilt, believes in his going to hell; and "I," who experienced ascetic discipline. Both can be deemed converts from the leftist movement. "Are you, professor, going to hell?" "Yes. I am in dread." "Is that really so?" "Really so," he answered energetically. "I am full of guilt, though you may not know. Truly dreadful it is. But it is the truth." "I cannot believe that you go to hell." "Yes. To hell," as if brushing off my wet sympathy, he grinned like a victor. But in fact I was in the least sympathetic. Out of a cross-tempered mind or a prophetic confidence--I dared not let a person like him go to hell so easily--I insisted that he would not go to hell. "Professor, you will go to heaven." "Heaven?" the scholar frowned, full of displeasure. "Whatever you say, professor, you will go to heaven." "Why so?" "Because every human being is destined to go to heaven." For an instant, he held his breath. (Takeda, Igyo no Mono) What the "I" intends here is a "cross-tempered" critique of the feeling of guilt accompanied by narcissism. That "I dared not let a person like him go to hell so easily" means that I dared not let his shame transform into his guilt so easily. What Takeda calls shame is an individual being in a real relation with the other, being exposed to the other. And from this being there is no salvation. This is reminiscent of a comment made around the same time by Jean-Paul Sartre in Camera: "Hell is other people." This stance is unexpectedly close to what Sakaguchi called "fall." Ostensibly choosing Buddhism, Takeda denied intellectuals' inclination toward religion. It is possible, as with Sakaguchi, that Takeda's critical stance is that of the true Buddhist. For instance, what Shinran meant was not that every human being is destined to go to heaven, but that there is no human evil that is not forgiven by Amitabha's salvation. On the other hand, the haughtiness of the professor considers his evil as transcendent. In Takeda's case, his religiosity cannot be accessed without a consideration of its rapport with Marxism. In fact Takeda converted from Marxism. But in what sense? Or we have to ask: what was the Marxism of the time? Marxists of the time defined Asia as remaining in an underdeveloped historical stage. In The Philosophy of History, Hegel considered both China and India as in earlier stages of Geist. "The English, or rather the East Indian Company, are the lords of the land; for it is the necessary fate of Asiatic Empires to be subjected to Europeans; and China will, some day or another, be obliged to submit to this fate." (Hegel, The Philosophy of History, translated by J. Sibree, 1991, Prometheus Books, P. 142-143.) No matter how we argue against Eurocentrism, this was the reality. In Marxism as well, the Hegelian notions of chronological development and Eurocentrism were taken over. The difference was that Marxists intended to liberate Asia from backwardness and Western domination. Within the Japanese Marxist movement that was faithful to Commintern's order, Takeda must have always felt antipathy toward the idea of Western-centrist emancipation. Converts from Marxism turned toward nihilism or religion. Otherwise, there was the third path: transforming the Hegel-Marxist theory of historical development and considering the emancipation of Asia as the historical task of the Japanese Empire. Such logic of justifying Japanese imperialism was only made possible by the former Marxists. It is likely that Takeda not only objected to it, but also sought to criticize Hegelianism surviving in the substratum of Marxism. The method Takeda followed was not an analysis of The Grand Scribes Records from the infrastructure of the time. Rather, he attempted to grasp within The Records a stance that is contradictory to the Hegelian-Marxist notion of history/world and that could relativize it. This premise also led Takeda to grasp history spatially and discover a system of heterogeneous relations without a center--by depriving the meaning/idea/end of world history. "The emphasis of The Basic Annals is not only on Hsiang Yu, nor only on the Primogenitor of Han, but on the movement between these conflicting elements. If not for Hsiang Yu, 'The Basic Annals of the Primogenitor of Han' could not exist; the value of other conflicting individuals would disappear. What is at stake here is not the relationship between king and subjects, but between the center of the world and surrounding political figures; between two essentially contradictory individuals. Searching into these relationalities deepens the content of The Basic Annals step by step." Such a structuralist reading is, in the terms of Takeda's previous quotation, Buddhist. Buddhism was not a stance--as commonly believed--to feel "the sorrow of things" [monono aware] in the transience of Oall things flowing and nothing permanentO [shogyo mujo], or to transcend historical reality by considering every substance as empty. It is "to criticize dogmas by grasping the cosmos spatially, measuring it physicochemically." It is to place the dogma about the world--the existent Hegel-Marxist idea itself--within the historical space the dogma can never transcend. But wasnOt this the very stance Marx took in writing Capital? He, for instance, stated in the introduction: "To prevent possible misunderstandings, let me say this. I do not by any means depict the capitalist and the landowner in rosy colors. But individuals are dealt with here only in so far as they are the personifications of economic categories, the bearers [Trager] of particular class-relations and interests. My standpoint, from which the development of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history, can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he remains, socially speaking, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them." ( Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1, Translated by Ben Fowkes, Penguin Books, 1976, P. 92.) Marxists blame individual capitalists and landowners for being responsible for society. Not to mention that most of the Marxists of the time, including Takeda, were from wealthy families. Considering the privileged status as sin, they participated in the movement--which, however, was just to "subjectively raise [themselves] above social relations." Then, when they dropped out from the movement, they subjectively felt it as sin and looked for salvation from it. What Takeda meant in this context was that there is no responsibility of individuals, except that every one of them is within social relations--which itself is the shame that can never be erased. That is to say, in the case of Takeda, he grasped the Marxian stance of Onatural historyO under the name of Buddhism in the process of dropping out of the Marxist political movement. In the world of The Grand Scribe's Records, there is neither an idea nor personage that transcends this world. Although Confucianism was the only study and religion granted by the state when Ssu-ma Ch'ien wrote The Records, Confucius is thoroughly relativized in the book--though not by any higher transcendent meaning. For this reason, the world of The Grand Scribe's Records is a world of relations in which the outside does not exist and cannot be transcended. What Takeda calls "the world of The Grand Scribe's Records" is a world without a center, or even a multi-centered world; it is a chaos where every centrality, no matter what, is constantly bound to collapse. Finally, his view of the world was a critique of the "Great East Asia Coprosperity Sphere" project, implying, as it was, the inevitability of the fall of the Japanese Empire. Ssu-ma Ch'ien, the World of The Grand Scribe's Records was quietly published in 1942, away from the orchestration by the former leftists of "Overcoming Modernity," who sought to subjectively raise themselves over the real relation of capital and Japanese relation with other Asian nations. At the time, few could understand the book's intention; and even after the War, the book was overlooked by the returning dominant tendency of the prewar scheme: stereotypical Marxism and in counterposition, the existentialist moment. Takeda became a novelist, but this could not have happened if he had not faced the fall and chaos in Shanghai in real life. Many post-war novelists were more or less those who had similar experiences on the continent, but what made Takeda singular was, after all, his recognition of the world of The Grand Scribes Records. His novels, which I cannot scrutinize here, intended to see an equivalent of the world of The Grand Scribes Records in the postwar paradigm. But there was a hitch in Takeda's attempt. That is, the postwar world came to form a structurally dichotomous equilibrium between the US and the USSR--the world with center(s). Deriving from postwar chaos, literature was meanwhile rearranged in the static discursive structure, and finally consolidated as the problematic of "politics and literature." In this paradigm, Takeda's insistence on a world without center was on the one hand an object of awe, but on the other hand, his work ended up being shelved as incomplete. The incompleteness was an outcome of his peculiar attitude toward ecriture, which can be categorized neither by Western nor Japanese literature. This is also evident in the essay on The Grand ScribeOs Records. In this book, there is undoubtedly a strange richness that cannot be found in today's historiography or historical novel. This is not because an individual is depicted nor because totality is depicted; the secret lies in the structure of The Grand Scribe's Records Takeda revealed. "What is at stake here is not the destiny of an individual, but the human nexus that forms the center. Viewing the center of the world three-dimensionally and dealing with a law at work, The Grand Scribe's Records clearly shows us how the individual characters are historically important. It is at this moment that rage, laughter, courage, angst, wisdom--these personal emotions, senses of moral, and potencies vividly surface one by one on the plane of historical relief." (Takeda, Shibasen, Shiki no Sekai) The human inventory in The Grand Scribe's Records is consistent through and through with concrete reality, while it is, unlike modern realism, a system of signs tightly textured by reciprocity between characters as well as between difference and identity. Perhaps the same can be said of Takeda's novels. Long pieces of Takeda's are written like The Grand Scribes Records. For this reason, they appeared odd to those who were used to Modern Western novels or even those who welcomed Sartre's postwar works. Today the postwar world no longer persists, that is, the polar structure between the US and USSR is gone. Instead, mega competition within a homogeneous market economy has begun. Simultaneously, triggered by omnipresent nationalism and the consolidation of the European Community, world wide bloc economies have been formed--thus the ongoing ideological reformation. In this situation, Takeda's work has begun to surface with a newly charged significance. Japanese postmodernism, that which appeared on the one hand as a "return to Japan," and on the other hand as internationalism akin to the "Great East Asia Coprosperity Sphere," completely erased the postwar literature represented by Takeda. But Takeda's Ssu-ma Ch'ien--The World of The Grand Scribe's Records has foreseen the decomposition not only of the postwar world, but also, sooner or later, of the succeeding world order. Draft Translation by Sabu Kohso ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - Return to Colloquium �� �後後� �짯後� �後� �碻碻碻� �碻碻� �� �� ┛┗ �� �� �� �� |