Uchimura Kanzo, a famous Japanese Christian, once talked of his love for the two J's. One of these J's was Jesus and the other was Japan. Let us hear what he said: "Jesus and Japan. My belief doesn't have one central circle as a core. It is made up of two half-circles. These two strengthen each other; Jesus strengthens my love for Japan, and purifies it. Japan assures my love for Jesus, and provides a strong base for me to love Jesus." In other words, his religious belief and his patriotism are tied together and reinforce each other. Patriotism is love of the country handed down to us by our forefathers; accordingly, it includes love directed toward our ancestors. This beautiful double structure makes up the belief of Mr. Uchimura.
More than a few Japanese industrialists have successfully combined religious faith and love for their company. Many companies consciously model their policy or motto after the Buddhist or Christian spirit. One manufacturer of precision measuring instruments has incorporated the Buddhist ideal of wa (harmony) into its policy and is using it to put a very special kind of management into practice. Every month, workers attend a special Ancestor Ceremony. The liturgy of this service proceeds from unison singing of the company song, to an offering of flowers and votive lights, to a chant of praise to the Buddha. It is followed by a complete Buddhist service with offerings of in cense, nembutsu (an invocation), a sermon, and hymns for the deceased parents of company employees. The ceremony is carried out at every plant of the company and is attended by workers who have no connection with Jodo-shu Buddhism—by Christians and by other non-Buddhists who work for the company.
Thus the Ancestor Ceremony appeals to a common feeling. It is interesting to note that this ceremony, translated into the appropriate languages, is also held at the company's overseas branches in America, West Germany, and Singapore, and at its factories in Brazil. Even non-Japanese are willing to join in the Buddhist-style service. Apparently, the idea of "honoring the ancestors" is quite inoffensive, and in the form of a musical liturgy it is an enjoyable event even for Christians or non-Japanese employees. So factory workers in Brazil are singing Buddhist hymns in Portuguese!
The Japanese have such a pliant and multifaceted religious consciousness that, to the outside observer, they may indeed appear to be without religious faith. However, the Japanese people have a unique ability to embrace and absorb a wide variety of religious systems. Just as the Shinto gods and the buddhas of India and China were dissolved into the congregation of ancient Japanese ancestors, so Christianity may end up as a part of Japanese polytheism. The Japanese can worship two gods at the same time without any feeling of contradiction.
On January 1, 1981, I received hundreds of New Year's greeting cards, as many a Japanese did. (Approximately 2.9 million greeting cards were mailed celebrating that New Year's Day.) One of them was from an ardent Christian. (See Figure 3.)
At the top of the card is written the traditional celebrating word "Gashun"—"Gratitude for Spring." This phrase for the New Year is quite common in Japan. But looking closely at it, we find that it is based on the lunar calendar (in which the New Year begins in early spring) and has a little flavor of Shintoism. Below that phrase, the writer has added an excerpt from the Gospel of St. John, Chapter 6: "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life." Below the Gospel, she expresses her political opinion for the year: "The voice for the revision of the constitution—to its detriment—is becoming larger. However, we should discuss not only Article 9 but also the Emperor system (*)."
(*) "In contrast to the ambiguous role of the Emperor under the old constitution, in which all power was believed to stem from him and his divinity was supported by the whole cult of "State Shinto," the postwar constitution of 1947 defined the Emperor as "the symbol of the state and of the unity of the people." Thus "State Shinto" was abolished, and the present Emperor system is a symbolic one.
She can say anything, of course, under the right of free speech, but in Japan negative comments about the Emperor system usually come from the left.
One may be puzzled to note that the card includes three features: Shintoism, Christianity, and a seemingly pro-communist attitude. Very few Japanese themselves are aware of such a mixture in their daily life. Yet the phenomenon is not unusual in Japan.
In summary, the Japanese have created a double structure in their religious life and possess a great deal of flexibility that permits them to move back and forth between the poles. This is why I have titled the section "Pragmatic Religion."
The Rank-Conscious Society
The Tokugawa period was the age of politics. Under Tokugawa rule, political unity and control were effected for the first time in Japanese history, and a rigid social order was devised to regulate the people. During 260 years of undisturbed peace, unparalleled in world history, the Tokugawa samurai developed a bureaucracy and gained increased administrative capability, for they had to rule the fiefs and the feudal citizens in peace. Thus they were no longer warriors but rather bureaucrats of a kind. The center of the samurai bureaucracy was in Edo (Osaka prospered as the center of merchant activities). To strengthen its feudalistic control, the Tokugawa Bakufu enforced a rigid hierarchy of shi-no-ko-sho: the samurai (shi) at the top, followed by the peasants (no), the craftsmen (ko), and the merchants (sho) at the bottom. The peasants were ranked second because the samurai believed that agriculture was the only true source of wealth and measured their salaries in bushels of rice. The merchants were ranked at the bottom because they were considered to produce nothing but to gain huge profits simply by trading the products of others. The boast of the samurai was that they were indifferent to money, the symbol of materialism. They looked down on the merchants.
The term "samurai" actually stands for a complicated hierarchy with shogun at the top, followed by daimyo (feudal lords) and their subordinates (ordinary samurai). From shogun to ashigaru (the bottom rank of samurai), there were approximately 20 hierarchical ranks. Even at the daimyo level there was an upper class and a lower class. The same was true of peasants, craftsmen, and merchants; many different status levels divided them into hierarchical strata. Within any given hierarchy, people were further classified by age. The feudalistic administration even set up a class below the merchant stratum—the lowest group, called the "outcast." It has long since vanished in Japan.
All these hierarchical orders in Japanese society were maintained in hereditary fashion until the Meiji Restoration (1868). It was natural for a Japanese to adjust his interpersonal relations in accordance with the various levels of hierarchy he encountered. Honorific words developed in abundance because everyone had to deal cautiously with superiors and cut his way through the rank-conscious jungle. Whenever two people met in the course of daily events, they had to decide on the spur of the moment who was superior and who was inferior. The superior could puff himself up and make much of his position while the inferior was expected to crouch down in humility and subservience. This art of adjusting the self in response to a social superior or inferior was important in the Tokugawa period. The best defensive skill of the inferior was to "hold the tongue." But in order to communicate his will or intention he had to express himself somehow, so he spoke in vague words. Even for the superior, the ideal communications technique in this rank-conscious society was indirection, or euphemistic language.