A narrative forms around the 'divine country'

Does a nation have a soul?

There is a strain of thinking that attributes one to Japan. Its name is Yamato-damashii — Yamato, an ancient name for Japan, tamashii, meaning soul or spirit.

Down the centuries, Yamato-damashii acquired sinister and bellicose connotations, climaxing in the conviction held in World War II that naked Japanese spirit would triumph over American military might. But its first known articulation, anything but warlike, occurs in “The Tale of Genji,” an 11th-century romantic novel. Genji, defending his determination to give his young son an irreproachably classical but oppressively dull Chinese education — though the boy would rise effortlessly through the ranks on the strength of high birth alone — says, “No, the safe thing is to give him a good fund of knowledge. It is when there is a fund of Chinese learning that the Japanese spirit (Yamato-damashii) is respected in the world.”

Genji could never have foreseen the evolution in store for Yamato-damashii. Two new concepts transformed it: reverence for Japan as a uniquely “divine country,” and reverence for death by the sword.

For 400 years — roughly between the 13th and 17th centuries — civil war raged, forging a “way of the warrior” whose bluntest evocation occurs in an 18th-century treatise known as the “Hagakure”: “Bushido (the way of the warrior) is realized in the presence of death. This means choosing death whenever there is a choice between life and death. There is no other reasoning.” This was written a century into the peace that characterized the Edo Period (1603-1867). The author, a samurai named Yamamoto Tsunetomo (1659-1716), evidently found peace deadly. Life was life only in the face of violent death.

The divine country myth was shaped for modern times by nativist scholar Motoori Norinaga (1730-1801). “Our august country,” he wrote, “is the august country of the Sun Goddess Amaterasu Omikami. It is the beautiful and magnificent august country superior to all other countries.... In the past the realm was governed peacefully without incident. So, unlike in other countries, there was not the least trace of anything bothersome or troubling. But then writings came over from China” — the Buddhist and Confucianist writings so admired by Genji’s generation. They tainted the purity of worship the native Shinto gods had inspired — selfless, unquestioning, unstinting regardless of good or evil fortune, joyous in its acceptance of either, for the doings of gods “cannot be understood with ordinary human reason.”

Reason is limited, divinity boundless — incomprehensible but approachable by means of poetry — simple, native, pure Japanese poetry. At its simplest, most naive and therefore best, native poetry — which to Norinaga means ancient poetry — evokes mono no aware — the deep “pathos of things,” the emotion at the core of the uncorrupted Japanese soul. By it and through it, mortals worship the unfathomable gods.

The nativist seeds sown by Norinaga germinated quietly underground, overlaid by the official Confucianism that ruled Edo Japan under the Tokugawa shoguns. The country was officially closed: no foreigners in, no Japanese out, on pain of death. Foreign ships, meanwhile — Russian, British, American — began in the late-18th century paying unwanted visits, seeking trade, demanding supplies, occasionally firing guns. Japanese technology, military and industrial, was two centuries out of date. What defense could it mount? None that wouldn’t crumble if things got serious. Some Japanese saw this. They were few in number and stymied by a law that made criticism of the shogunate a capital offense. One of them was the artist and Confucian scholar Watanabe Kazan (1793-1841). An incautious essay — unpublished but no matter — written in a burst of anguish over the doom he saw hanging over Japan, got him arrested under that very law. The year was 1837. Watanabe had four years left to live; Tokugawa Japan, 30.

The tortured complexity of Watanabe’s character was the subject of last month’s column. Confucianist to the core, he was stirred all the same by emotions Tokugawa Confucianism rejected and even criminalized. His restlessness drew him to rangaku (Dutch studies), meaning such Western learning as seeped through official barriers from the handful of Dutch traders permitted limited operations from their base on Deshima Island off Nagasaki.

What he heard suggested immense happenings in a vast world of which Japanese were permitted to know nothing. Was this right? Was it healthy? True, foreigners were, as Confucianism taught, “barbarians.” On the other hand, these same barbarians “use their profound knowledge of astronomy and geography to diffuse their learning throughout the world and to enrich their own countries. In this respect, too, China is surely not their equal.”

Barbarian they may be, but can they be ignored, or driven off when they come calling? “Although my fears may be groundless,” he wrote, “I cannot endure the thought that our country may seem in the eyes of Westerners like so much meat left lying by the wayside. How could a ravenous tiger or a thirsting wolf not notice it?”

Prison was excruciating — humiliating to his samurai pride and a severe drain on his already precarious health. He was permitted some latitude, however. Provided with pen and ink, he drew sketches and wrote letters. One sketch is of himself being manhandled by his jailers. A letter to a friend expresses his intense filial piety — the Confucian virtue of virtues. “I cannot forget my aged mother for one instant,” he wrote. “At night in dreams I often call to my mother, and my cellmates laugh at me....”

Narrowly escaping the death penalty, he was instead rusticated — banished to his rural, impoverished domain of Tahara, in today’s Aichi Prefecture. There he spent his final years, with his mother who was so dear to him, and his wife and children, who seem to have been less so.

His soul was shattered. Was life something to cling to merely for its own sake? A barbarian might think so; a true Japanese could not. His continued existence was a humiliation not only to himself but to his domain lord, and his mother. Only one honorable course was open to him: ritual disembowelment.

His mother, viewing the body after it was done, was horrified. He seemed to have merely slit his throat. “For shame!” she is said to have cried out. “That’s how a woman kills herself!” Closer inspection showed the truth — at which, “a smile crossed her grieving face, and she declared, ‘You are truly a son of mine.’”

This is Yamato-damashii incarnate. The next generation was to embody it in new, more distinctly nativist forms.

This is the second of three parts on Yamato-damashii. Michael Hoffman’s latest book is “Cipangu, Golden Cipangu: Essays in Japanese History.”