Medetai (Felicitations) and Omedetai (Naivete)
Everyone knows how much the Japanese enjoy festivals. The festivals were originally based on religious celebrations, but today people look for any excuse they can for fun and joviality. Weddings have been becoming more and more luxurious, and commemorative celebrations on the sixtieth birthday of distinguished Japanese personalities are also extremely popular. The things which are celebrated, then, are not limited to the gods or to heroes of ancient times. Anything will do. Anything is enough to set the Japanese off shouting, "Medetai, Medetai!" ("Felicitations!")
The word medetai originally applied to an event or an object that was worthy of devotion or adoration, and was uttered to express respect and praise for that event or object. Today it is used only to describe the happy, joyous feeling of the festival affairs.
In Japan, the most medetai time of all is the New Year. For the first three days of the New Year, the special New Year's sake (rice wine) flows abundantly, and everyone is bright and cheerful. "Sun becomes a god when it rises on the first day," goes the senryu (epigrammatic poem of 17 syllables). It is a fact of nature that the sun rises day after day in the eastern sky, but the Japanese consider that first sunrise of the year especially felicitous. On New Year's Day, people who normally never give a moment's thought to the gods are seen wearing their brightest kimono and flocking to the shrines in hordes. They offer their personal wishes for the coming year to the gods, snatch omikuji (sacred oracles) from a little wooden box, and scramble over one another to buy lucky "demon-banishing arrows." The whole scene illustrates the Japanese propensity to move around in crowds. They seem hardly able to find happiness outside a crowd.
In the olden days, people purified themselves on the first day of the New Year and dedicated the day to their determination to make a fresh start. In the expression "sunrise on" the first day," their dreams and hopes for the year ahead were carried up into the sky. When people wished the gods to answer their prayers, they would do penance by walking back and forth before the shrine a hundred times with an offering of prayers, then purify themselves by repeated ablutions, offering their spirits to the gods. Nowadays they just follow a crowd and visit a shrine on New Year's Day, clapping their haws once or twice and giving the bell rope a yank while they toss in a ¥ 100 coin in the hope that their prayers will be answered by the gods.
The Japanese celebrate the first day of the year as before, but nowadays it is less a religious celebration than a time when their simple-heartedness brims to overflowing. Whatever they choose to do, or wherever they choose to go, they choose together and do together. They go through the New Year's ritual as if it were just another seasonal fashion. Perhaps the progress of civilization and science has blunted the hearts of the Japanese a bit. For whatever reason, few people today wholeheartedly celebrate the New Year in the true meaning of medetai.
Another medetai time for the Japanese people is the cherry-blossom season. In early spring the people traditionally hold a sake party under the fully bloomed cherry trees. They drink, sing, dance, and have a good time. The tradition dates back to the Tokugawa period, when a certain Kuma-san (Mr. Bear) and Hachi-san (Mr. Eight) got the idea of making money in this jovial setting by selling sake. They brought a sake barrel into the fields where the people were having a party in celebration of the blossoms. While waiting for a customer to come and buy sake, Kuma-san got thirsty and told his partner, "I want a cup of sake.
Here, I'll pay you five mon for the cup." (The denominations then were mon and ryo instead of sen and yen.) Hachi-san pocketed the money, but soon after that he also wanted a drink. "Now let me have some sake," he said. "Here is the money for the cup." He returned the five mon he had just received from Kuma-san. In due course, Kuma-san got thirsty again and paid back the five mon for a cup of sake. Thus the exchange of the same money went on and on and the sale of sake continued. When these two omedetai (naive) chaps closed down for the day, only five mon and the empty sake barrel were left.
This anecdote is known as "Economy of Sake over the Cherry-Blossom Party" in Japan. Here we might think of the world economy emptying the oil barrel or depleting the mountains of natural resources. Is that, too, not omedetai?
The dictionary defines omedetai as the quality of a person "who is credulous to the point of being simple; easily fooled by others." The naiveté of the Japanese derives in part from their insularity—from the fact that they have lived for centuries in a self-enclosed circle of dependence.
Wherever Pearl Harbor was a surprise attack or a cleverly laid trap for the Japanese is still much debated, though almost 40 years have passed since the end of the war. In this regard, Shinoda Yujiro, professor at Sophia University, has stated, "Japan was drawn into a trap. . . . Roosevelt forced the Japanese to make the first strike in order to smash all opposition in Congress and from the American people. To this end, Japan served his purposes well" (Shimaguni to Nipponjin: The Japanese and Their Island Country). If Professor Shinoda's conclusion is justified, the Japanese truly were, in this case, tragically naive and foolish.
Wabi and Sabi
Wabi and sabi are two widely known emotional values in Japanese culture. They lie in exactly the opposite spiritual direction from medetai and omedetai. They describe the states of mind of a person who seeks to retire from society, who values solitude and loves quietness. His back firmly turned away from the expression of joyful communal feeling, the seeker of wabi and sabi pursues a transcendental life. It is said that neither word has a proper equivalent in any foreign language. To explain wabi and sabi as states of loneliness is erroneous. Their adjectival forms, wabishii and sabishii, which represent the road that leads to wabi and sabi, suggest a sort of "lonely sadness" and "isolated sadness," but those who have traveled that road and reached true wabi and sabi are not afflicted by loneliness. Rather, the experience a oneness with all that surrounds them.
The reader may be familiar with this feeling, but I would like to give a few examples. Here are two famous haiku (17-syllable poems with an element suggesting a season) by Issa (1763-1827) of the Tokugawa period:
Don't give up, little frog; Issa is here with you. Come and play with me, orphan sparrow!
Both of these haiku describe a solitary state of mind, but there is no element of loneliness in them. The transcendent figure of Issa, blended in with his surroundings, is magnificently alive in these poems. This is wabi and sabi, states of mind in which a solitary person preserves his identity and reveals it.