On the adulteration of Japan's oldest religion
Primitive Shinto is one of the loveliest religions in the world. It's beautiful in its simplicity — defenseless too, as it proved, against the nativists and nationalists who warped it into 18th-, 19th- and 20th-century xenophobia. Rudimentary, vague, undefined, undefinable, Shinto for centuries didn't even ...
Tracing the decline of a beautiful Japan
Two irreconcilable views of patriotism were given their classic expressions by two Englishmen: Lord Byron, the poet (1788-1824), and Dr. Johnson, the lexicographer and jack-of-all-literary-trades (1709-84). Byron said, "He who loves not his country can love nothing." And Johnson: "Patriotism is the last refuge ...
Government's affinity to the universe, religion
Supposing we think of the universe this way: there is Heaven and there is Earth; nothing else — no other worlds, no gods. "Heaven" is roughly analogous to what we moderns call "Nature." Heaven's laws, however, unlike Nature's, are moral, not physical. Two substances pervade ...
The sloughing of Japan's corporate skin goes on
"Man is born free and is everywhere in chains." No 18th-century Japanese thinker could have written that. It is amusing to imagine one even reading it. What emotion would it have called forth? Outrage? Blank incomprehension? Born free? A revolutionary notion! "The Social Contract" (1762) is the ...
Why didn't Japan have a revolution like France's?
Why wasn't there a revolution in Japan like the one in France? The suffering was as great in 18th-century Japan as in the realm of ill-fated King Louis XVI, the government here as callous and incompetent as the government there. How did Japan's old ...
