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CHAPTER XII. THE EPIC AND THE TRAGIC

EPIC AND TRAGIC VISION

The deepest yearning towards authentic life is expressed both by epic and tragic

poetry. Both in the epic and in tragedy, poets have exerted the greatest efforts to reach

the absolute, to use the capacities of man to their limits. They portray man in his

greatness, in victory or in despair, beyond good and evil. Through this intense use of

man’s efforts, the epic and tragic poets want to explore the depths of truth, to carry to

the end his desperate inquiry into the meaning of life. Without the rational methods of

philosophy, but using all the means of reason and emotion and even the gifts of

prophecy which the gods granted to him, the poet tries to find in the drama of life the

answers for the eternal questions: What is this world? What is life and what is man?

What does man live for? What is truth? Which is the just law and which the correct

behaviour? What is right? Where does man go? What is death?

Epic and tragic vision are the two sides of tragic knowledge: they express man’s

greatness and poverty, strength and weakness. They portray man confronted with a

world like himself, made up of opposites, of contradictory forces that fight against one

another without hope of truce or victory1. Though aware of these contradictions, seeing

the enmity of the world in the light of absolute truth, heroic or tragic man will never

give up his greatness and accept his wretchedness: «Man goes infinitely beyond man.»

Man stands before the world, demanding from the world the things which it cannot give

him, his thirst for the absolute being eternally unquenched.

The wisdom brought by either epic and tragic experience is alike, in spite of the

victory attained in the first and the ruin suffered in the second. Because epic man,

though triumphant, is never content with his victory: his eternal yearning for higher

truth, for seeing deeper into the mysteries of life is in his heroic nature. Thus such

wisdom will be, in the words of Lukács, a wisdom of limits: man finds the limitations of

his nature and life.

1 Lucien Goldmann, «The Tragic Vision: The World», Moderns on Tragedy, ed. Lionel Abel, Fawcett, New York, 1967, p. 294.

Since Greek times epic poetry and tragedy have been considered the two peaks of

aesthetic expression. Aristotle, in his Poetics, was the first to pose with clarity the close

relationship between epic poetry and tragedy: they coincide in so far as both «are an

imitation of serious subjects in a lofty kind of verse»; they differ in that epic poetry is a

narrative made of a variety of episodes with dignity and grandeur, all constructed with

the organic unity of a living being, while tragedy is an imitation of an action that is

serious, has magnitude, and is complete in itself in a dramatic form composed of

incidents arousing pity or fear.

Boileau speaks of the divine greatness of tragedy (hauteur divine) and of the grand

air (un air plus grand encor) of epic poetry. Beyond the differences in form and content,

both epic poetry and tragedy reach the same fundamental knowledge about man. In this

tragic knowledge the attempt to endow life with meaning is the same, only in the issues

do they separate.

THE EPIC AND THE TRAGIC IN EASTERN AND WESTERN THOUGHT

While Western man has attained in epic and tragic genres the summits of his

grandeur, Eastern man never felt the earnestness for such kind of achievement, having

rather channelled his anguish towards the lyric and the mystic planes. Thus, while

Western literature finds in the epic and tragic fields its sublime moments, its greatest

works, Japanese literature is there at its lowest. Why this surprising contrast? It is

through fathoming these deep differences we can reach a better understanding of the

human content in both Japanese and Western literary thought and unearth a host of new

and fertile ideas and reflections on the nature of Eastern and Western civilizations.

Epic and tragic vision have given rise to the greatest Western literary symbols:

Prometheus, Hamlet, Don Quixote, Faust, Siegfried. These symbols spring up from the

wisdom contained in both epic and tragic knowledge – the knowledge that at any

moment the greatest enterprise can fail, and work undertaken stands the risk of not

being achieved. Man’s life, at every moment, is at the mercy of the smallest twist or

chance of fate. Yet in this precarious net of hazards we have to build our hopes.

The East has not the same acute consciousness of this tragic situation, because the

concept of time is different: time is a cyclical and eternally recurrent phenomenon. That

is why there are no great symbols in Eastern literatures. In Japan, probably the greatest

tragic symbol is Yoshitsune; but even Yoshitsune, though lively evoked in the

mediaeval chronicles and tales created by popular imagination, was never given the

stature of a great literary symbol, which could only be done by a great work of art.

THE EPIC POEM AND TRAGEDY AS EXPRESSIONS OF ACTION

Epic poetry and tragedy are essentially expressions of action: the first expresses

action in progress placed in the remoteness of the past; tragedy represents action real

and present. The spirit of epic poetry, writes Augustus von Schlegel, is clear self-

possession, while the essence of tragic representation is earnestness in the highest

degree2.

Both in epic poetry and in tragedy there is tension. In epic poetry, man is exalted

above reality; the hero dominates the world; his action creates a new order of things

which is expressed by a harmonious unity that is his will. In tragedy there is a collision

of independent and sovereign powers; reality is split and truth is divided; thus the tragic

hero is destroyed and falls to his doom. Tragic knowledge, Karl Jaspers adds, has two

forms. One uses myth in the epic form in order to accept as real a world of visual

images, and the other uses knowledge that asks searching questions about deity. Each of

these tragic forms in turn provides a way for man to overcome the tragic itself: the epic

is the root of every enlightenment with its philosophic interpretation of the world;

tragedy is the root of revealed religion3.

Both the epic and the tragic world are prolonged into a complex multiplicity of

meanings, heightened into far-reaching symbols, which correspond to the aspirations

and anxieties of a community. Both epic and tragic heroes transcend the plane of the

personal hero. But, though in both the tension touches the extremes of human capacity,

only the epic world constitutes an organic whole, a complete system of values. As

György Lukács says, what in tragedy is symbol becomes reality in the epic: the weight

of the bond of a destiny with the total. Great epic literature is but the utopia concretely

immanent of the historic moment4.

Great tragedy is a high point chosen in the evolution of the community expressed

in the light of historical consciousness. While tragedy originates in a conflict of values,

the epic constitutes a harmonious system of values, an organic whole from which no

particular element can be detached.

2 Augustus W. von Schlegel, A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, trans. John Black, third lecture, Dohn, London, 1846.3 Karl Jaspers, Tragedy Is not Enough, trans. Reiche Moore and Karl Deutsch, Gollancz, London, 1953.4 Lukács, La Théorie du Roman, chap. 3.

Collective ideals appear in classic epic and tragedy with the intervention of gods.

Gods, there, are not only social symbols, but also culminating expressions of human

power and spiritual values. In the epic they intervene as messengers of heaven or as

personifications of natural forces to help or to oppose desires of men; in tragedy they

appear bound to the decrees of destiny and struggling against fate, on a plane above

humanity. The constant presence of gods in classic epic and tragedy are evidence of the

elevated quality, the high sphere of thought, and the aspiration to sublimity contained in

these genres.

THE EPIC AND THE TRAGIC IN THE LIGHT OF BUDDHIST AND

CHRISTIAN THOUGHT

The tension in the tragic and the epic exaltation in which man overcomes tragedy

itself is unknown in Japanese literature, and alien to Eastern thought. In the East

tolerance and abstention from action are the dominant tones; the path leading to

enlightenment is in neither dominating reality nor splitting it. Enlightenment comes

from the Buddhist dissolution of self in the ocean of reality; not in superseding reality

but in accepting it as it is, in a universal passive communion. The doctrine of the

dharma teaches that all existence is impermanent and without substance. There is no

substratum, no identity, no individual whole that exists separate from the parts. There is

no ego, no soul.

Dogen, the patriarch of Soto Zen, wrote: «To study Buddhism is to study oneself.

To study oneself is to forget oneself. To forget oneself is to realize oneself in all things.

To realize oneself in all things is to divest one’s own mind and body.»

From this thought is not far the one expressed by the Japanese philosopher Kitaro

Nishida in A Study of Good: «Our true self is the basic substance of the universe and

when we know the true self we not only unite with the good of mankind, but we merge

with the basic substance of the universe and spiritually unite with the divine mind.»

Impermanence, the transience of human existence is the cause of suffering; there is

sorrow because all things pass away. Life is a stream becoming5. According to the

5 Kenneth Morgan, ed., The Path of the Buddha: Buddhism Interpreted by Buddhists, Ronald Press, New York, 1956. Furthermore, the belief in karma suppresses the sense of individualism, personal responsibility, and the value of action – which are at the very roots of the tragic and the epic. Note the following passage, quoted from Helen McCullough’s translation of Taiheiki (Columbia University Press, 1959, p. 25): «By this Karma-tie from an earlier life [says the warrior guardian of an aristocratic prisoner], this lay monk was chosen before all others to be your guardian. As though not devoid of mercy, I must say to you that your time is at hand; but indeed a person like myself is without power. Many days have I delayed, awaiting tidings of your pardon, but now urgently from the Kanto there has come a

Mahavagga whatever is subject to origination is also subject to destruction. The world

is fiction: only the Buddha is truth, said Prince Shotoku, the founder of Japanese

Buddhism. The world is delusion, everything is void. The voidness, said Nagarjuna, the

greatest of Buddhist philosophers, represents the truth of absolute and supreme

significance.

It must be added that before Buddhism was introduced into Japan early Shintoist

thinking considered man an integral part of the whole, as a «thinking reed», identified

with the other elements and forces of nature. In life, man lost his identity in the vast

bosom of Mother Nature; in death he was dissolved in the vague communion of the

ancestral spirits. Even today the Shinto prayer, according to Japanese authors, aims at

bringing man about unification with the ancestral spirits. In Japan, writes Hideki

Yukawa, climate is benign; nature, fertile, life, easy and pleasant: «There is little need

for adventure either in action or in thought.» All this explains why there are no epic

poems or tragedies in Japanese literature, and why even tragic themes in some passages

of Noh are expressed in lyric form.

The impact of Christian doctrine on European tragic thought should not have had a

very different result from the effects of Buddhism on Japanese aesthetics. Christianity

introduced into the pagan world ideas of humility, peace and non-resistance. This meant

returning good for evil, together with the promise of a life after death in which suffering

and injustice would receive heavenly recompense. All the mundane conflicts would lose

meaning before the terrible problem of the soul’s salvation. With this new knowledge

based on forgiveness and charity, the old Greek tragic questions of sin, guilt, and

revenge disappear. However, the docility of the Christian doctrine did not penetrate

deeply into the heart of Western man. Violence and wars continued to spread. To the old

heritage of grudges borne by man one more was added, the impetus to crusade and fight

in the name of Christ. The tragic was not removed from human life, but the wages of sin

now required new scales and the fight of the soul acquired a new dimension, infinity.

Redemption and condemnation were projected on a plane of eternity; the fight within

man’s inner self became clearer and more desperate, since faith did not come to resolve

the great historical contradictions6.

command to destroy you. Please console yourself by remembering that all things are the results of deeds of previous lives.»6 Richard B. Sewall, «Tragedy and Christianity», The Vision of Tragedy, Yale University Press, 1962, chap. 5.

In these few lines we can see how differently Buddhism and Christianity influenced

the highest aesthetic expressions. Buddhism posed itself on the moral thought and

behaviour of the Japanese people, dominating nearly completely their intellectual life.

Christianity was brought to Europe after the flowering of the Greek and Roman

civilizations. The philosophy of Plato deeply influenced St. Augustine as Aristotle

influenced St. Thomas, and Latin learning has marked the life of the Catholic Church

until today.

Through these differences we can understand how Buddhism influenced the

evolution of Japanese thought and literature as a determining factor, while in the West,

together with the Christian influences, the heritage of Greek and Roman philosophical

and literary thought have influenced the development of literature and art, the weight of

the influences changing with the epochs. This should be kept in mind especially when

we consider literary forms which are more imbued with metaphysical thought, as are the

epic and tragedy7.

(Japanese and Western Literature, 235-239)

7 In his book Tragedy Is Not Enough Karl Jaspers mentions the following instances of tragic knowledge as they were expressed in artistic form:

a) Homer; the Edda and Icelandic sagas; heroic legends of all peoples from Europe to China.b) Greek tragedy: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, all later tragedy being dependent on, or

(through Seneca) inspired by, Greek tragedy.c) Modern tragedy represented by three national figures: Shakespeare, Calderón, Racine.d) Tragedy representing the ideals of German culture: Schiller and Lessing.e) Other poetry such as the Book of Job and several Indic dramas, though the latter are not entirely

tragic.f) Tragic knowledge of Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche.Such enumeration depends, of course, on personal taste; one could also add Dante, Camoëns, and Wagner.

CHAPTER XIV. THE TRAGIC SENSE OF LIFE

THE NATURE OF TRAGEDY

Miguel de Unamuno, in his well-known book The Tragic Sense of Life, did not

define clearly what this sense consists of. But he tries to explain it by an anecdote: A

pedant who saw Solon weeping for the death of his son asked him, «Why do you weep?

You know that it avails nothing.» The philosopher answered, «On account of that

precisely, because it avails nothing.» This tragic sense of life, which has behind it a

whole conception of life and the universe and a whole philosophy, «more or less

formulated, more or less conscious», is more pronounced in certain peoples and in

certain men. Unamuno mentions that among these men were Marcus Aurelius, Saint

Augustine, Pascal, Rousseau, Leopardi, Vigny, Kleist, Amiel, Quental, Kierkegaard.

Suffering is inevitable and there are misfortunes for which there is no consolation –

like the death of a son. This idea is common to Christianity and Buddhism, to both

Eastern and Western thought. But thereafter they separate: while the former accepts

suffering passively, the latter makes every effort to transcend it. In Western thought and

experience suffering is a probation of the great qualities of man and through it man can

elevate himself to higher levels of humanity. Oedipus, after having experienced the most

terrible sorrows of the Greek stage, acquires a magic power of good which spreads a

beneficial influence even after his death. A metaphysical consolation is left by every

great tragic work, says Nietzsche in his The Birth of Tragedy – the thought that life after

all and in spite of the variety of its appearances remains invariably powerful and full of

joy. It is surmounting suffering that makes the greatness of man, brings out his qualities

of courage, loyalty, and love. Even when man is destroyed by irresistible forces of evil

or by a decree of fate, his unbending will standing against adversity shows the freedom

of his mind. Thus from the chaos of the human heart, from the dark world of passion

and mystery, man lifts himself to the luminous consciousness of his condition: by his

sacrifice he redeems the faults of the community, quiets its anguish, and shows it the

road to a new life.

But to surpass suffering is not enough, man’s yearning aims higher – to surpass life

itself. «Man is perishable, but he perishes resisting and yearning for immortality.» This

vital yearning comes from the depth of human nature; there is no rational justification

for it. Reason does not offer a definite consolation to our suffering nor tell us the true

purpose of our life. From the depth of this abyss where sentimental desperation and

rational doubt meet and embrace each other, the tragic sense of life emerges. For

Unamuno the very essence of tragedy is in the combat of life with reason8.

Tragedy expresses essentially the conflict between man and his destiny, a conflict

in which the whole of society is involved, and thence the magnitude of it emerges. The

writing of tragedy itself is the artist’s way of taking action, of measuring himself with

destiny.

Destiny for the individual is represented by the ensemble of events affecting his life

and the profound impression left by those events on his soul; thus the tragic always

expresses a deep crisis between man and his world. Destiny is also in the making of

human nature itself, in the fact that life and death are one. The highest and purest of

human joys are never absolute, because disaster is hidden in the sombre shadow of

every moment.

Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms expresses a tragic quality in the scene of a

woman happily in love who dies giving birth to a child: the culmination of the intense

aspirations of love ends in destruction and despair, and a universal force crushes under

its irresistible power the innocent victim. The impression left by such events decides the

interpretation that man will make of the world and its events, as well as its influencing

the scale of values by which every man directs his life. As everyone’s scale of values is

different and frequently the individual scale of values opposes that of society, a conflict

will ensue, generating suffering and revolt. This conflict is not only between man and

society, but also within man himself, in the form of doubt, fear, and despair. What is

«good» for one man may be «evil» for another and for the society; the violence of this

conflict in its ultimate form may bring a man to ruin and death. Thus, this conflict of

values, which the tragic essentially is, represents an «opposition between to conflicting

goods» imposed by necessity. Eternal necessity and inward liberty are the two poles of

the tragic world – not mere natural necessity, but one which lies beyond the world of

sense in the abyss of infinitude, showing itself as an unfathomable power of destiny,

writes Schlegel.

Tragedy is not a conflict between duty and passion, but between two planes of

existence: one which is held to be of the highest value by the person who acts, and the

8 Miguel de Unamuno, Del Sentimiento Trágico de la Vida, Espasa Calpe, Buenos Aires, 1919. Unamuno quotes this passage of Étienne de Senancour: «Man is perishable. That is so; but let us perish resisting, and, if nothingness is reserved for us, let us not accept it as if it were just.» Mario J. Valdes, in his book Death in the Literature of Unamuno, notes that in Unamuno’s thought death makes life meaningful and authentic, and thus emphasizes the tragic quality of life.

other held of the highest value by those who do not act. Both planes are opposed and

each one denies the other’s validity9.

THE TRAGIC VISION AND MODERN MAN

This tremendous conflict and the suffering which it brings for the individual opens

his eyes to the arbitrary and changing ways of the world, the unreliability of men, the

inconstancy of human existence: it widens his outlook on life, provokes his search for a

meaning and a goal in life. Through the tragic, man can see the ways which lead to his

greatness and to his liberation. Through the catharsis of the soul he becomes purified of

guilt, fear, and everything that restrained his true sense of humanity.

The tragic vision reflects, of course, the conditions of the time and represents a

certain moment of culture. In Greece, tragedy reflected the opposition between the

values of the family and the values of the state. Some authors contend that after the

Greeks the tragic sense of life has been weakening, that the only modern tragedies are

tragedies about intellectuals – Hamlet and Faust –, tragedies of inaction: the intellectual,

instead of acting, just reasons.

Today’s society is too much divided, confused, and perplexed before a multiplicity

of possible ways and under a mass of events, sometimes catastrophic, provocative of

fear and awful suffering, but those in which we cannot see the unity and hidden

intention which the Greeks named fate.

We cannot see unity in the events of the modern world because the flux of things is

too rapid. No generation has lived in a world so impermanent as ours. And this lack of

permanence is also tragic. Death was before us, the ultimate cause that made life tragic.

Today the murder story and the scorn for humanity, exemplified in the cruelties of

modern political persecutions and technological wars, have numbed, by their excesses,

the horror of death. Man is becoming blunt to tragedy. Thus we risk losing the clear

conscience of human dignity, the sense of responsibility and the desire for freedom

which are present in tragedy.

THE TRAGIC AND THE COMIC

The sense of the tragic also penetrates comedy; without it comedy loses heart,

becomes brittle, it has animation but no life. Without the recognition of the truths of

9 Lionel Abel, ed., Moderns on Tragedy, Fawcett, New York, 1967.

comedy, tragedy becomes bleak and intolerable10. In both tragedy and comedy there is a

subversive attitude towards the accepted values and established order. They can only

exist when there is liberty.

As earnestness in highest degree is the essence of tragic representation, Augustus

von Schlegel writes, so is sport the essence of the comic: the characters and the

situations are worked up into a comic picture of real life and the frame of the society

and its ideals are fantastically painted in laughable colours. The disposition to mirth

spreads a pleasant feeling of happiness and joy and the critical spirit is sharpened.

Both tragedy and comedy draw their inspiration from the disorder and

disharmonies of the world, the former expressing them with earnestness and rising

moral indignation, the latter with detachment and exploration of their contradictions,

their ludicrous, laughable aspects.

In this emphasizing the poles of contradiction of man’s existence, this exploring the

shocking disharmonies of the world, both tragedy and comedy raise a challenge to the

conditions laid for man by the gods. Both tragedy and comedy are essentially

subversive.

THE TRAGIC CONFLICT IN EASTERN AND WESTERN THOUGHT

It is in the tragic conflict, in the rebellion against destiny expressed in extremes of

tension, that the fundamental difference between Western and Eastern thought lies.

Eastern thought found a plane of harmony between man and the universe. The ideal of

serenity of mind, of composure and restraint in action, has opened the way to quiet

contentment and spiritual peace. Experience has taught man to be superior to the

sufferings and horrors of life. Literature, for many centuries, has been impregnated with

this wisdom – more preoccupied with ideals of serenity and conservation of values,

avoiding the conflicts which originate the great crisis of the soul and consequent

destruction of values.

It is true that underneath the tragic lies a deep imperceptible harmony. Western man

had to dramatize his inner contradictions in order to throw the fullest light on the

sources of his anxiety and find spiritual rest. Eastern man could attain inner rest and

harmony with the world through meditation. Religion helps him to attain serenity; in

Buddhism there is no passion and no sacrifice of a god for the sake of man, as in

Christianity.

10 Richard B. Sewall, The Vision of Tragedy, Yale University Press, 1962, p. 1.

The Buddhist philosophy which deeply impregnates Japanese literature teaches that

the world is merely an illusion and proclaims as a highest ideal the escape from life and

even from the human condition itself. While Christianity embodies the idea of God

within a man and teaches the reintegration of an immortal soul into resurrected flesh,

Buddhism proclaims as its supreme ideal the annihilation of everything that is human,

the dissolution of man into naught. From the universal reality of suffering man can only

escape after a long period of purification – which might take millions of years and

efforts through successive reincarnations – by ascending into nothingness. One life is

therefore only a brief and transitory stage, and before such a perspective it seems

ludicrous to fight against fate. Man has to resign himself to suffering, and as the world

is illusory it does not seem important to change it by action. Thus Buddhism has

soothed the qualities of active courage, virile initiative and heroism. Everything is

mutable and unseizable, even truth, and the purest beauty is the most ephemeral.

We can see these principles exemplified in the two most outstanding forms of

Japanese drama: in the Noh plays and in the plays of Chikamatsu. A parallel between

Noh and Greek tragedy has never been made. It will be enough here to point out how

different is the spirit of the two11.

We can find in Noh the six constituent elements indicated by Aristotle for the

Greek tragedy: spectacle, melody, diction, character, thought, and plot. Aristotle

considered plot the very soul of tragedy. Plot in Noh is certainly not essential, but

neither is what Schopenhauer designated «character revelation» (the latent disposition

in the nature of a character).

In Noh, like in Greek tragedy, we have a chorus limited to the passive role of

commenting on the incidents and lamenting the misfortunes of the protagonist in a calm

attitude of lyrical meditation over the whole. This augments the dramatic rhythm,

conveys lyrically the tragic idea, and strengthens the unity of the play. If it is true,

though, that Greek tragedy sprang from the tragic chorus and was originally only chorus

(as Nietzsche affirms), it is certain that Noh sprang from dance. A Noh chorus sits

motionless, while a Greek tragedy’s chorus dances at certain passages. In some Greek

tragedies, like Medea and Antigone, the chorus, by changing sides, increases the

dramatic momentum.

There is a quality of artistic purity and simplicity which is common to Noh and to

Greek tragedy, especially before Sophocles added the third actor and introduced

11 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, Athenean, New York, 1968, p. 163 ff.

scenery. Noël Peri compared the role of the two main actors in Noh, the shite and the

waki, to the protagonist and deuteragonist of the Greek theatre12.

Suffering, guilt, expiation, and salvation take a prominent part in both these

theatrical forms, but there is a main difference in the nature of thought and emotion:

Noh develops no conflict; everything happens on the lyrical plane. Thus, Noh can be

called lyrical drama. We can see this difference clearly in comparing a scene in

Antigone, which Schlegel considered the «perfect exemplar of tragedy», with a scene in

the Noh drama Kagetsu. In Antigone, Haemon, resentful of his father Creon because he

condemned to death his bride Antigone, accuses him in hard words: «You desecrate by

trampling on Heaven’s honour.» At the end of the play, we are told, Haemon spits at his

father’s face and draws his sword against him in an outburst of rage. Sophocles wants to

overwhelm the audience with terror by a display of harrowing emotion.

Kagetsu is the story of a father from whom his young son was stolen. After a long

search, the father finds his son and they face each other for the first time after many

years of painful separation. The moment is of high, breathless emotion. How are they

going to express this emotion, by falling into each other’s arms? That would be

inconceivable by Japanese mediaeval rules of education which command restraint and

the hiding of inner feelings. Such a display would be incompatible with Noh technique.

The solution is a typical Japanese one: a third character in the play breaks the height of

emotion with this dryly witty question: «How does it happen that you, being a priest,

have got a son?» In these two images we can see the ocean that separates Western and

Eastern ways of expressing the heart of man.

The other Japanese plays which naturally suggest a parallel with Western tragedy

are those of Chikamatsu. Donald Keene holds that Chikamatsu’s plays are «the first

mature tragedies written about the common man»13. Strictly, they cannot be considered

tragedies, though in many passages they show a truly tragic sense of life. Chikamatsu is

a romantic; his emotive temperament, like an impetuous river, breaks all the barriers set

by Japanese tradition and education.

His masterpiece is the Love Suicide of Amijima, which is an example of a typical

Japanese play if we want to judge it by Western standards. The story can be summed up

thus: Jihei, a paper dealer, married Osan and became the father of two children. He was

passionately in love with the prostitute Koharu and made a suicide pact with her. Jihei’s

12 H. D. Kitto, Greek Tragedy: A Literary Study, Doubleday, New York, 1954.13 Donald Keene, Major Plays of Chikamatsu, Columbia University Press, 1961, p. 1.

brother and wife try to sever the relationship. In consequence Koharu breaks with Jihei,

who feels himself betrayed by her. Osan, the wife, fearing that Koharu would kill

herself on account of the letter she wrote imploring her to leave her husband, confesses

this to Jihei and decides to pawn her best kimonos to redeem Koharu from the brothel,

before she can be redeemed by Jihei’s rival, a rich man, whom Koharu hates. In the

meanwhile Osan’s father, an obstinate, narrow-minded old man, indignant with Jihei’s

liaison comes to take Osan away with him, in spite of the touching scene of his

grandchildren crying for their mother. Jihei, torn between pity for his wife and children

and his passion for Koharu, runs away with the prostitute. They decide to die in separate

places because they do not want people to think they committed a love suicide. He kills

her near the river (the narrator gives a detailed description of her painful agony). Then

Jihei kills himself on a nearby mountain. The murmur of prayers comes from the

temple. They die in the hope of being reborn on the same lotus, of climbing into the

Western Paradise to become a buddha.

Love Suicide of Amijima was written for the puppet theatre and built on the peculiar

social realities of the Osaka gay quarters at the beginning of the eighteenth century.

Chikamatsu has written fourteen plays classified as «love-suicide pieces», though in

some of these the suicide is not consummated. In most of these plays the protagonist is a

prostitute of the gay quarters of Osaka. Love Suicide of Amijima is embellished by

Chikamatsu with a religious aura. The title of the play itself suggests that the lovers will

be rewarded or saved by Heaven. It is interesting to note the observation of Donald

Shively that there is a strong trend towards the convention of the three unities in

Chikamatsu’s domestic plays, though it did not become a consciously sought

convention in the Japanese theatre.

Chikamatsu develops a particular concept of honour concerning his amorous

merchants and prostitutes: they committed suicide for love as the samurai did for the

sake of their lord. The concept of honour and sacrifice of the aristocratic class was

transferred to the new rising bourgeoisie. Thus Chikamatsu kept the illicit relations of

the lovers from seeming immoral, just as he kept suicides from being tragedies14.

Chikamatsu’s heroes are sacrificed to the morals of the society without any protest

or rebellion. Both Koharu and Jihei felt guilty about Jihei’s wife and children,

convinced as they were of the righteousness of social laws. They attributed their

misfortune to Buddhist predestination, to their karma. They accepted fate with the

14 Donald H. Shively, The Love Suicide at Amijima, Harvard University Press, 1963, p. 26.

evasive hope that their love and sacrifice would bring them to Buddhist Paradise. In

Chikamatsu’s suicide plays nobody is condemned; there is no place to expiate sins nor

to redeem guilt, because death is a means to salvation.

The conflict in the play is represented by Jihei’s duty towards his wife, Osan, and

children on the one hand, and his love for Koharu on the other. But the author does not

try to exhaust all the possible contradictions of the conflict; on the contrary, Osan and

Koharu act towards each other with extreme kindness and even self-sacrifice. Even in

the suicide the lovers are careful not to offend the social rules, by the expedient of dying

in different places.

There is in this play of Chikamatsu deep human emotion and delicate sensibility,

even though marred sometimes by his usual romantic excesses. But it never rises to the

force of tragedy: the characters, whose personality is not depicted very distinctly, never

rise above themselves, never attain that state of consciousness which impels man to

fight his destiny and become «a symbol of the ultimate relationship between man and

his fate».

CHARACTERISTIC JAPANESE ELEMENTS OF THE TRAGIC:

COMPASSION AND EVANESCENCE

In the transience of life and inconstancy of the world, Japanese literature has found

the main source of humanism. This humanism is expressed mainly by a sentiment of

compassion towards all living beings. Kindness to animals and even to inanimate

objects, the passing of time and the repetition of the seasons bringing death and rebirth

spreads a deep note of sadness in poetry, in the diary, in the novel. The moon, the

blossoms, the snow are, as we saw, a constant leitmotif. Sadness of human beings (sabi)

and sadness of things (mono no aware) is a kind of cosmic solidarity, flowing in a

profound emotion but generally declared in words which suggest restrained feelings,

timorous of falling into sentimentality. Pathos therefore is not grief, misery, or despair;

it is gentle, calm, passive, and refined. Refinement is the main characteristic of Japanese

beauty15. The artists avoid the expression of strong emotions and often refuse to get

interested in crude realities or even in people who work in low professions or are badly

dressed.

Zeami ranks imitation of all objects, whatever they may be, as the first rule of his

theory of art. He wrote that the actor can imitate in detail the poetic figure of a wood-

15 Ueda, Literary and Art Theories in Japan, p. 222.

cutter, a grass-mower, a charcoal-burner, a salt-water drawer, but not the people of

meaner occupations. Toraaki Okura confirms that when an actor performs a beggar’s or

a peasant’s role, he cannot appear in dirty rags: «The actor would look filthy if, when

imitating a man of low class, he wore a tattered garment on the stage.» Norinaga

Motoori expressed the same idea when he said that seeing a man suffer from disaster

gives a very different impression depending upon whether he is a noble courtier or a

lowly person: «Our sympathy would be particularly deep if we see a noble person

overwhelmed by disaster.»

In its evolution, Noh acting always avoided reproducing shabbiness or poverty. For

instance, the role of a peasant or a beggar would never be played by an actor in filthy

rags. This was never allowed by the elegant harmony of the Noh. By these limitations,

Zeami tried to elevate stylization and artistic symbolism. Thus he introduced the

concept of yugen (graceful, elegant beauty), suggested by Zeami’s image: a swan with a

flower in its bill. But the seed for superb yugen flowers lies not in delicate beauty, but in

deep, sombre beauty of tragic characters – the spirits of haunting women (such as Aoi

and Rokujo), women taken away by a ghost (Yugao), or women possessed by a

supernatural being (Ukifune). Thus, dramatic treatment never goes as far as the

development of the tragic content of the characters; it only projects the light of their

tragic fate.

AESTHETICISM AND DEHUMANIZATION

Japanese mediaeval theories required the hiding of human feelings; they proposed,

affirms Makoto Ueda, a complete dehumanization of the artist in his creative activity.

They advocate not only detachment but dissolution of the artist as a man. The artist

must dissolve completely into nature: it is not enough to admire the bamboo, one must

become a bamboo.

The tendency to dissolve into nature gradually weakens the individual quality of

human emotions and consequently their intrinsic value. Takeshi Umehara has made an

interesting study on the evolution of the expressions of Buddha as represented by

Japanese sculptors: while the social customs mould an impassive type of man, who

suppresses, under an armour of self-discipline, all exterior signs of emotion, Buddha’s

images in successive epochs change in their attitude towards man – from a sitting

position Buddha stands up, opens his arms, takes a step towards the believer.

Chamberlain, dispraising the traditional rigidity of Japanese life, speaks of the

court noble sitting with «his countenance impassable, his few gestures stiff as the starch

of his marvellous robes, his whole being hedged round with the prescription of an

elaborate and rigid etiquette», to this adding the despotism of the government, spies

swarming everywhere, solemn ceremonies making up for pleasures, the whole life

«swathed in formalism like a mummy in its grave-clothes»16.

This is an obvious exaggeration. It should not be forgotten that Japanese education

and social manners tended to form a stern character by teaching maintenance of a serene

composure and a tranquil mind. Confucianism helped to encourage people to subdue

their emotions, not to show anger or sorrow, to avoid tears. Self-control, among the

Japanese, provokes respect. Mental training, another form of self-control, is taught by

Zen, and practised through calligraphy, tea ceremony, flower arrangement, waterfall

ablution, fasting, and other forms of systematic training17.

The emphasis on balanced tranquillity of mind has cultivated among the Japanese a

particular ability to meet difficult situations and developed the virtue of facing any

difficulty with calmness and courage.

This inner harmony and the tendency to reach a complete union between man and

nature, which at his highest produces a feeling of serene happiness, has led to the

general appreciation of beauty and the mass cultivation of fine arts. The feeling for

beauty is apparent in every aspect of Japanese life.

This sense of beauty permeates the style of social life, through elaborate forms of

propriety and courtesy. Under these forms of human relationship lies a tendency to

respect the feelings of other men, in which Japanese thinkers have seen an influence of

Buddhist benevolence and compassion.

But even in the sophistication of the rules of etiquette, commonly practised by all

classes, we can see the predominant bend to aestheticism. This tendency has even been

pointed out in the expression of the Japanese language.

Tagore wrote that aestheticism is the Japanese dharma, or in Masaaki Kosaka’s

words, «aestheticism constitutes the core of the Japanese mind».

A SPECIAL AESTHETIC VOCABULARY

16 Basil Hall Chamberlain, Things Japanese, Being Notes on Various Subjects Connected with Japan, 5th

ed., Murray, London, 1905, p. 196.17 Hideo Kishimoto, «Some Japanese Cultural Traits and Religions», The Japanese Mind, ed. Charles Moore.

The suppression of deep emotion in art brought subdued feelings, discrete shades

of expression, and gentle, modest attitudes for which the writers found particular words:

wabi, sabi, karumi, shiori, shibui, yugen. The definition of these terms is extremely

vague, and every writer delights in adding new shades of meaning to them. Wabi could

be translated, for instance, as «beauty in poverty» or «splendid poverty»; Daisetsu

Suzuki defines if philosophically as «aloofness in the middle of multiplicities». Sabi

expresses the loneliness of man when confronted by the joyous beauty of nature, a

resigned solitude, a kind of contented sorrow. Karumi designates a combination of

surface simplicity and subtle contentment. In shiori, the feeling of loneliness emanated

from a poem is linked with style. Shibui means hidden refinement, austere beauty.

Yugen designates that beauty which at its highest point vanishes and fades, or «elegance,

calm profundity mixed with a feeling of evanescence», writes Zeami, who suggested it

by an image of blossoms on a crag. All this aesthetic vocabulary, for which it is

impossible to give definitions, emphasizes reserve, understatement, austere beauty, and

refined modesty18.

AESTHETICISM IN JAPANESE LIFE: THE FLORAL ART AND THE ART OF

TEA

Aestheticism is not only predominant in Japanese literature but also in Japanese

life. The outstanding examples are the floral art and the art of tea.

One could almost say that floral art (ikebana) provided a centre of daily life, writes

Makodo Ueda referring to the Japanese home. One of the main theorists of floral art,

Senno, in his essay Senden Sho (How to Arrange Ten-Thousand Flowers, 1542), insists

on the same ideas of simplicity and elegant sobriety. «With a spray of flowers, a bit of

water, one can evoke the vastness of rivers and mountains.» In the season of

chrysanthemums and gentians, he advises, flower arrangement should suggest the

desolation of a withered winter moor: thus flowers are not used for beauty, but for

inspiring an austere feeling of loneliness and desolation, for bringing us into the sad

atmosphere of winter, into the cycle of the seasons, into the universe. Senno goes as far

as indicating the proper flower arrangement for a war camp – crooked plants, branches

with torn leaves or dead branches should be avoided: he advises only «victory» plants.

18 Senichi Hisamatsu, The Vocabulary of Japanese Literary Aesthetics, Centre for East Asian Cultural Studies, Tokyo, 1963, p. 58.

The arrangement of flowers represents the innermost essence of nature, brings the artist

into cosmic truth and can open the way to enlightenment.

In the art of tea, cha-no-yu, the point of modesty is still more emphasized. Rikyu

(1522-1591), the greatest theorist of this art, taught that in the tearoom the ideal state of

mind is one of modesty and poverty, of simplicity that brings calm, complete inner

peace, and purity of a mind emptied of all earthly things. He stressed modesty so much

that he once broke the handle of a pot to make it look poor, for he preferred the

imperfect to the perfect.

As Japanese moved more towards aestheticism and quasi mysticism, they became

disinterested in the world of men and human actions, observes Tokoku Kitamura: «That

is why literature excels in elegance and refinement and has been deficient in seriousness

and sublimity; there is too much lyricism but no epic, no tragedy, nor comedy.»

RESTRAINT OF HUMAN EMOTIONS AND PARTICULAR ASPECTS OF

HUMOUR

To the predominant aesthetic trend of all Japanese literature can be attributed that

particular Asiatic skill for the delicate shades, the subtlety and refinement which finds

its culmination in extremely synthetic forms of poetry, in aristocratic dilettantism and

remoteness from coarse realities; on the other hand, we find the most exacerbated

artistic expressions of cruelty. In these two extremes, there is frequently an absence of

human warmth, of an uninhibited expression of human values and profound human

relationships, a lack of that human love that gives a living grandeur to the major

novelists of the nineteenth century in England, in France, in Germany and above all in

Russia. When we look at the panorama of Japanese literature we miss this generous

flow of human love. This does not mean that by nature the Japanese is less generous or

less ardent than his Western brother; but he is certainly more restrained, and is forced by

an education of many centuries to hide his feelings, to repress his emotions. The general

absence of individualism explains the lack of strong and original fictional characters.

The Japanese atmosphere is built in order to help this work of impersonalization: the

Japanese house is conceived to inspire calm and spiritual serenity with its vacant spaces

in which the only personal touch is represented by a small pot of flowers and a painting

hanging in the tokonoma; the flimsy paper doors impose a constant control of

movements, impede physical outbursts, as well as oblige a communal living in which

solitary thinking and concentration become impossible. There is little or no furniture.

Family life does not leave on the home the impress of their particular habits or distinct

needs, generations having passed there without leaving a sign of their individual

affirmation. Between the placid evenness of the plain and the volcanic explosion of the

summit, there is repression of all manifestations: that «unspeakable absence of

sympathy» which made Lafcadio Hearn suffer so much and pains every foreigner in

Japan.

This repression of human emotion is reflected in various aspects of Japanese

literature. We spoke of the restrained manifestations of human affection. But it is also

evident in the quality of irony and social satire. Here, again, we find the subdued

shades, the veiled allusions, the subtle traits of distinct Japanese wit: a kind of wit so

particular and so original that it brought into existence a peculiar form of humorous

verse, the senryu. There is a sharp intellectual wit in Sei Shonagon, a tender, kind wit in

Soseki Natsume, a tolerant wit, sympathetic with men’s folly in Masuji Ibuse. But these

never go beyond soft tints and brief allusions. There is no Japanese work built on comic

strength, sailing freely on the gushing stream of humour. (Even Shank’s Mare, so fertile

in anecdote and humorous incident is weak in construction and so artistically aimless

that it sometimes becomes tiring and repetitive.) At the other extreme, there is the

grotesque, in which Japanese literature is particularly rich. The evident proof of these

limitations is the absence of comedy and tragedy19.

LACK OF COMEDY

As we have seen, Japanese literature has no tragedy. Neither does it have what we

call comedy. There is a broad form of farce, kyogen, which, in Chamberlain’s words, is

a mere outline sketch «of some little drollery». The literary value of these sketches is

little or none; they don’t deserve a place of their own in literature. The kyogen are

played in the intermission between Noh plays in order to relieve tension. Kyogen

players display a highly elaborated art of mime. The aristocratic and sophisticated

action of the actors lessens the comic salt, as the laughter it provokes, according to

Toraaki Okura, must never destroy the elegant and noble austere mood of the Noh.

In the field of comedy, a glaring example is the lack of comic works on triangular

themes of love, which has inspired some of the best Western comedies and novels,

especially in France. In Japan the sentiment of love is contained in reasonable limits,

both in its serious and comic aspects. Here, as in painting all human feelings, the

19 Nakamura, Japanese Fiction in the Meiji Era, p. 15.

Japanese writer uses only medium tints. When the writer does decide on the strong

colours, he goes into the bloody extremes of double suicide – so frequent in some

epochs that it received a particular designation, shinju (sincerity of heart). The nihilist

tendency, so strongly marked through influences of Buddhist thought, did not allow the

rise of tragedy. The limitations originating in social conduct and the inclination to

dissolve the self into nature are the main explanation for the serious lack of comedy and

tragedy, which Japanese thinkers were the first to point out.

JAPANESE AND WESTERN HUMANISM

We have stressed the tendency to restrain emotion, which has influenced the

evolution of Japanese literature since a warrior class took power and imposed their stoic

morality. Before that, Heian literature is impressively free and outspoken compared with

that which came after it. The Tale of Genji is imbued with a deep feeling of Buddhist

humanism; suffering flows there like a sombre, deep river on whose still-water banks

the lotuses of compassion bloom. With the decadence of the samurai class in the

Genroku era, the best writers preferred the lively aspects of the social scene to the

traditional, aristocratic ones; they become interested not only in the rising merchant

class but also in the poor people. Thus a new breath of humanism blew into Japanese

literature.

But it was with the opening of Japanese literature to Western influences that its

writers became conscious of a new value of man and began to express man’s problems

with revolutionary enthusiasm. Toson Shimazaki’s Hakai (The Breaking of the

Commandment, 1906) is the first important novel inspired by deep humanist intention.

It is the story of a young teacher belonging to the caste of the Eta, who were proscribed

from Japanese society. Ushimatsu, the teacher, confesses his shameful origin against his

father’s command. Thus he purified himself of lies and hypocrisy and challenged

society, proclaiming that the value of man is in himself.

All the great Meiji writers profited from the lesson of Western humanism. Some of

them, like Soseki Natsume and Ogai Mori, were influenced by the West during part of

their lives, but at the end they returned to their old fold: each had a Japanese death.

Others, like Akutagawa and Osamu Dazai, suffered from such anguish in their

discordant mixture of Eastern and Western feelings and thoughts that they ended

shattered by contradictions in suicide.

The humanitarianism of the neo-romantics of the Shirakaba (White Birch) school,

whose leader was Saneatsu Mushanokoji, a fervent admirer of Tolstoy, accumulated

more sentimentalism than true humanism.

Among today’s writers we note still an aesthetic bias, sometimes represented by an

excessive concentration on form or a preference for exploration of the peculiar and the

strange. We seldom find real, live characters capable of human sympathy in depth.

Indeed, creative imagination is not very developed in Japanese literature and most

modern writers limit themselves to realistically portraying the Japanese as he is today,

with his inhibitions, remains of feudal morality, ideas of restrained behaviour,

impassivity, and self-control, which are probably excellent qualities for an orderly and

affluent society but can supply no matter for a literature inspired by a wide breath of

humanism.

The Western tragic sense of life has not impressed Japanese literature except for

two authors, Osamu Dazai and mainly Fumiko Hayashi – again a Japanese woman

exceeds Japanese men in the building of a world of deep human emotions.

At this point, we should remember that we cannot pretend to measure the Japanese

humanism by Western standards and ways: Japanese people can find deep feeling in the

brief and subtle movement of the sleeves of a Noh actor on the stage; a fierce Japanese

warrior can see the divine trees and lakes of Paradise in a few flowers arranged with

sublime simplicity in a rustic flowerpot. Genji’s father-in-law for example, though badly

disposed towards Genji, wept openly when he saw him dancing «very quietly a

fragment of the sleeve-turning passage of the Wave Dance». The most famous theme of

all Japanese drama is Chushingura (the story of forty-seven ronin), treated by

playwrights from Chikamatsu and Izumo Takeda to Jiro Osaragi, who recently gave us a

modern version. The faithful retainers of a feudal lord have spurned their parents,

wives, and children only to be free to avenge the death of their lord. This Japanese

concept of justice based on loyalty and devotion to one’s lord is the reverse of the

Chinese principle of filial piety and duty towards one’s parents; it is also inconceivable

in Western ethics and incomprehensible to a Western spectator, who will never be

moved by it like a Japanese will.

Japanese and Western humanism use different forms of expression. Western

humanism is always expressed with eloquence, and in the epic and in tragedy we find

its highest examples. On the other hand, in Japanese literature we find the highest and

most beautiful expressions of humanism in restraint. To be clear, I will give two

characteristic examples. In the impressive Tanizaki novel Shunkinsho (The Story of

Shunkin), the lover of the blind, beautiful, enigmatic teacher of the samisen, Sasuke,

blinds himself because he wants to be like her, to give her the greatest proof of love, to

attain with her a state of absolute love. It is difficult to imagine greater proof of

complete dedication of a man to a woman. In Shichiro Fukazawa’s novel Narayama

Bushi Ko (On the Narayama Ballad), the mother, O-Rin, taken to a mountain by her son

to die because she is too old and useless to their poor home, gives her son, at the

moment he is abandoning her to her lonely death, a little packet with rice balls that she

had carefully cooked for that moment. Again, here, there is the most selfless love, the

absolute dedication of one human being to another. In both cases humanism is

expressed by methods which are opposite to the usual Western ones: there is a dry stark,

synthetic expression of humanism, touching the limits of human pain, confounding

itself with cruelty. Its pungency and strength are overwhelming. Pathos comes from an

absence of words, from an insupportable silence; the symbol and the gesture attain

unutterable significance.

After reflection, this naked, dry humanism, so peculiar to Japanese literature, may

have greater force than the Western forms of humanism. Its nature, though, makes it

improper for use in tragedy: it is too condensed, too brief to produce dramatic effects.

This does not mean that it may not attain the same, or even greater, depths, but its

expression, and the profound spring it comes from, are fundamentally different from

those of the West. Besides, Japanese forms of humanism show a tendency towards

aestheticism.

And aestheticism can never make up for the lack of humanism, as Japanese

literature shows when in periods of extreme formal perfection it falls into hollow

repetition and aimless skill. But it should not be forgotten that aestheticism, the

prevalent trait of Japanese culture, is responsible for some very fine literary and artistic

works and for the constant aspiration of beauty which encompasses beauty and charm in

Japanese life. In cinema, Japan has found the way to adapt old aesthetic canons for the

creation of the most modern and highest expressions of the art.

THE CONCEPT OF LIFE AND DEATH

What in Japanese culture is fluid and nebulous and in Western culture is profound

and immense is the concept of life and consciousness of the value of death20. It is not in

the divergent concepts of sin that one of the greatest differences between East and West

lies; it is in something deeper, of which the extent of sin depends: the reverence for life

and the value of death. In the philosophy of Western man, formed by twenty centuries

of Christian influence, death is the measure of all things, the absolute, ultimate measure.

Death is the tragic limit; it confers to life the highest of values because there is but one

life: man has no chances to try to save or redeem himself in future reincarnations. In the

East (China, Korea, Japan) death is synonymous with nothingness. In the unfathomable

distance between these two opposites live all the great creations of Western and Eastern

literature and art.

The sorrow of loss is deeper in the West; the joy of a never-to-be-repeated

enlightenment is higher when it is attained. To reach happiness is more difficult, as the

way to perfection is steeper and more painful. It is easy to be happy for a Shintoist; his

gods are easy to satisfy and do not demand much from men. The Christian God

demands from man more than he can reach. Hence the tension of Western man and his

anxiety to attain absolute perfection.

The traditional Japanese ethics, when man fails, requires his self-sacrifice, his stoic

death by hara-kiri. But when Western man fails, his duty is to rise again, and to fight

again against his own weakness, against the temptation of foundering into an easy,

though courageous, death: life is the only value, the only true possession of man, before

he disappears into the infinite silence. Life is action, and action is a means of

affirmation of being. To find the origins and the final ain to action, Greek tragedy

explored piety and horror to the last extremity. Thus was affirmed the dignity of man,

and his personality and humanity exalted. Before God, the ultimate value, is man.

This was the substratum of Greek thought to which Christianity added a new

element: infinity. This is also the substratum of Western civilization, which still prevails

even in Russian literature today. (When we talk in this book about Christian ideas, we

never mean a religious confession, but a civilizational substratum accumulated during

twenty centuries of Christian influence.) This exploration of the tragic opposition

between life and death gave Western literature a depth and vastnesses to which Japanese

literature offers nothing similar.20 The difficulty of the Japanese in understanding the Western concept of death, the living quality of death as it has inspired Rilke and impressed Unamuno, can be seen in Seiichi Hatano’s Time and Eternity (trans. Ichiro Suzuki, Ministry of Education, Tokyo, 1963, chap. 2).

To those who find these conclusions pessimistic, consider the sober assessment

made by the first English historian of Japanese literature, W. G. Aston:

It is the literature of a brave, courteous, light-hearted, pleasure-loving people,

sentimental rather passionate, witty and humorous, of nimble apprehension, but

not profound; ingenious and inventive, but hardly capable of high intellectual

achievements, with a turn for neatness and elegance, but seldom or never rising to

sublimity.21

The assessment made by Chamberlain was still more pessimistic:

Sum total: what Japanese literature most lacks is genius. It lacks thought,

logical grasp, depth, breadth, and many-sidedness. It is too timorous, too narrow

to compass great things. Perhaps the Court atmosphere and the predominantly

feminine influence in which it was nursed for the first few centuries of its

existence stifled it, or else the fault may have lain with the Chinese formalism in

which it grew up. But we suspect that there was some original sin of weakness as

well. Otherwise the clash of India and China with old mythological Japan, of

Buddhism with Shinto, of imperialism with feudalism, and of all with Catholicism

in the sixteenth century and with Dutch ideas a little later, would have produced

more important results. If Japan has given us no music, so also has she given us

no immortal verse, neither do her authors atone for lack of substance by any

special beauties of form. But Japanese literature has occasional graces, and is full

of incidental scientific interest. The intrepid searcher of facts and ‘curious’ will,

therefore, be rewarded if he has the courage to devote to it the study of many

years.22

Despite some truth contained in these two judgements, they omit important

achievements and valuable aspects of Japanese literature. At the time of Aston and

Chamberlain, great Japanese works were not yet sufficiently known or evaluated by the

light of modern criticism. It is enough to mention how much Tanizaki’s and Arthur

Waley’s work endeared The Tale of Genji to Japanese and foreign readers and critics.

21 W. G. Aston, A History of Japanese Literature, Heinemann, London, 1899, p. 4.22 Chamberlain, Things Japanese, pp. 295-296.

However, the assessment made by Karl Florenz is, as always, much better balanced

and deeper:

The Japanese character tends generally more towards humorism than towards

seriousness (Ernst). The occasional melancholic atmosphere is, I believe, not even

truly Japanese but rather inoculated into the gay, green scion of Japanese soul

through Chinese and Buddhist influence.23

The insular position and political independence of Japan, mentioned by Aston (to

which Japanese literature owes retaining its native originality and character), the

formalism referred to by Chamberlain, and the gay beauty of the land and the carefree

lightness of existence of which Florenz speaks are no doubt the main factors accounting

for the limitations in the tragic sense of life.

We could end here with the conclusion of Florenz in his history of Japanese

literature – so far the best written in a Western language: «The Japanese spirit will work

vigorously to free itself from all that is conventional, obsolete, unfruitful and such

endeavour will not fail to bring in the future splendid results.»

Japanese literature is not only freeing itself gradually from what is obsolete and

unfruitful but is even discarding some of its traditional sources of inspiration and

fundamental characteristics. The poetic meaning of the change of the seasons, which

marked so deeply Japanese poetry and prose, is fading away; lyricism, the central tone

of Japanese literature – a delicate lyricism tinged with melancholy, renunciation, and an

oppressive feeling of evanescence of all things – is giving place to a dramatic approach

to the problems of man, with which Japanese writers always preferred to deal in

nebulous terms rather than challenge.

These are changes brought by the impact of modern life, with its mechanicism, its

cogent moral problems, and immense social implications which can no longer be

escaped. Japanese man can no more enjoy the blissful pleasures of feeling one with, and

dissolved in, the serene beauty of nature, because he is more and more separated from

nature by the brutal wave of industrialization, by the effort of intense technical

competition.

The evolution from an absorbing lyricism, from the dissolution of man in nature,

by which, as we saw, the absence of epic and tragic works is largely explained, towards

23 Karl Florenz, Geschichte der Japanischen Literatur, Amelangs, Leipzig, 1906, p. 626.

a concentration on the powers of man, is producing completely new traits in Japanese

culture.

The individual begins to stand in the family and the social group, becoming the

centre of the act of literary and artistic creation. In painting, man dominates the

landscape and in literature his inner struggles become the absorbing subject of fiction

and poetry in modern form. We are in the presence of an artistic redemption of man – a

full man created anew, standing solitary before a world stripped of its lyrical charms and

traditional benevolence, a world to be conquered by man’s effort and painfully rebuilt in

beauty and purity.

This is the new humanism beyond the Kawabatan phase of harmonization of

modernity and tradition, the humanism announced by the writers and artists of the

youngest generations.

The transition from the lyrical world, which began in the Meiji era, towards a

dramatic and tragic world is near its completion. It is to be expected, after this cycle is

complete, that powerful Japanese works animated by an epic and tragic breadth will

appear24.24 The thesis that Japanese literature has no true epic or tragic works seems not to raise much controversy, but there are many writers who defend the existence of literary works built on the comic vein, based especially on the existence of kyogen and senryu. R. H. Blyth, in his most interesting book, Oriental Humour, is the champion of this thesis.Nobody denies that Japanese character and life are full of humour. The Zen priest Ikkyu in the fifteenth century was the centre of numerous anecdotes and outrageous stories, and was called the founder of «mad poetry». There is a rich popular literature, sometimes wittily illustrated, in which are the comical story books kokkeibon and the short witty story books hanashibon and sharebon. Shokusanjin, in the second half of the eighteenth century, is celebrated for this kind of literature. The first collection of humorous stories was edited by a priest named Sakuden in 1623. Such collections multiplied afterwards, and from 1772 until 1880 ninety collections were published. They continued to appear not only in Japanese but also in Chinese. Japanese storytellers continue today to stir audiences of yose theatres with waves of laughter. The old comic art is nourished by the rich vein of humour, gaiety, and drollery of the mass of the people.In poetry and belles-lettres, when laughter is admitted it is reduced to soft tones and gentle insinuations. Though not so averse to laughter as Chinese literature in which, as R. H. Blyth states, «humour is rather latent and suppressed», Japanese literature has never fully explored the vein of comic creation. This does not mean, of course, that there are not many humorous remarks in many Japanese writers, from Sei Shonagon to Akiyuki Nozaka.Kyogen are not real comedy or farce. «Kyogen», writes Michael Revon, «were buffooneries without importance, which do not deserve even a place in literature, except as an annex to the Noh plays. Among the two hundred sixty extant Kyogen plays we would try in vain to find a true comedy. They are brief fantasies, composed in a vulgar prose and with a nearly infantile spirit» (Anthologie de la Littérature Japonaise, Delagrave, Paris, 1919, p. 312).As for senryu, the humour about which he is so enthusiastic, Blyth says «Japanese humour is at its best, is most Japanese, in senryu». It will be enough to note that most of these brief humorous poems require explanation before the meaning and flavour are evident. In senryu, humour has perhaps less a literary than a philosophical character. Its extreme condensation makes it penetrable only after reflection. Senryu has a nature similar to a Zen koan. It is known how much the value of laughter has been enhanced by Japanese Zen masters; we can read about cases in which enlightenment was caused only by laughter. Daisetsu Suzuki, the last great Zen philosopher, in his later years «was often seen laughing good humouredly and innocently. He attached must interest to laughing, especially ‘Zen laughter’. For him laughing was also the ‘boiling out’ of absolute affirmation» (The Eastern Buddhist, vol. 2, no. 1, August 1967, p. 53). This

(Japanese and Western Literature, 255-273)

digression provides further proof that the Japanese, though being a witty and humorous people, have no comic literary works.

CHAPTER XVI. ORIGINALITY OF JAPANESE CULTURE

CHINESE INFLUENCE AND JAPANESE CULTURAL INDIVIDUALITY

There is no other country either in the East or in the West which has developed its

own particular tradition and national character like that of Japan. «Here is a racial

group», writes Nyozekan Hasegawa, «which has succeeded for a period of thousands of

years within the same era and under the same line of rulers, in perpetuating without any

revolutionary changes and in developing without interruption a civilization that has

remained steadfastly the same in essence as in origin». At the same time no other

country has shown «the same readiness to welcome contacts with other peoples and

other faiths»25.

It is know that Japan received from China the art of writing in the fifth century;

through China and Korea Buddhism came in the sixth century. Painting, sculpture, and

architecture, music, and court dance also came from China. During the seventh and

eighth centuries many scholars and artists were exchanged between Japan and China. At

this time the T’ang dynasty, which began in 618, was at its peak (between 650 and 680).

In the eighth century, Chinese influence in Japan reached its zenith. Nearly everything

was copied – the form of government, legal institutions, educational system,

architecture, planning of the capital city, arts, literature, dress, decor, and so forth. From

the ninth century relations with China became less frequent. Between the tenth and the

twelfth centuries, for three hundred years, the flowing of culture from China to Japan

was practically nonexistent26.

In spite of these vast and rich contributions which have so much widened Japanese

cultural horizons, it is remarkable that there was no definite influence of Chinese

literature on the Japanese great writers. There were many Japanese authors who wrote

in direct imitation of Chinese models, some of them very highly valued in their day, but

all their works are now completely dead27. The beauty of Japanese poetry and fiction, as

well as Japanese art in general, owes practically nothing to foreign inspiration, though

motives and themes were sometimes borrowed28.

It is during the period of seclusion, in the Heian era, that Japanese literature shows

its greatest works. As mentioned before, the greatest works of Japanese literature, The 25 Hasegawa, The Japanese Character, p. 8. See also James Clark Moloney, Understanding the Japanese Mind, Tuttle, Tokyo, 1966.26 George Sansom, A History of Japan, 3 vols., Cresset Press, London, 1958-64, vol. 1.27 Keene, Japanese Literature, p. 85.28 Ingram Bryan, The Literature of Japan, Butterworth, London, 1929, p. 234.

Tale of Genji and The Pillow Book, were written as a reaction against the then prevailing

Chinese influence. The substantial poetry and scenic art of Noh, one of the wonders of

world theatre, has no counterpart in any other country. The novels of Ihara Saikaku, the

greatest novelist after Murasaki, and the plays of Chikamatsu were exclusively inspired

by the life of the seventeenth-century Japanese bourgeoisie. In poetry, from the

Manyoshu to the poets who write haiku today, the uniqueness in form and content is

undeniable.

ORIGINALITY OF JAPANESE ART

In the field of art, the greatest Japanese sculpture is that of eighth-century Nara,

when the grace of the distant Hellas added its beautiful smile to the serenity of the East.

In the second great period of sculpture, the fifteenth century, the art is marked by a

particular Japanese sense of force and realism.

In the field of painting, it was about the twelfth century when some very original

styles came into being. They are beautifully exemplified in the scrolls of The Tale of

Genji attributed to Fujiwara no Takayoshi. His work is remarkable for its fine contours,

intense colours, and charming sense of decor. All of this is expressed in the gorgeous

dresses and on the screens, suggesting well the calm, sumptuous atmosphere of the

court life. Other examples are the works of the Tosa school: freer, richer in details of

daily life. A third example is the brush drawings with caricatures in the figures of

rabbits and frogs, drawn with such a lively shape and humour that they still make us

laugh today.

None of these styles of painting owes anything to the Chinese. In spite of the

number of Chinese paintings collected in the palaces and monasteries and their being

overrated by the Japanese, the Japanese genius found independent means of artistic

expression.

The universality and profound humanity of thirteenth-century Yamato-e painting –

with its realism describing the life of the poor in street and field scenes – has been

celebrated by foreign critics.

Sinicism in fifteenth-century painting has been overestimated by the Japanese but

rather disregarded by some Western critics. Some of these critics even look with

indifference on the works of Sesshu (1420-1506) because he followed the Chinese

school, in spite of the fact that he became so famous in China that the emperor asked

him to decorate his palace in Peking. Ernest Fenollosa considers the style of Sesshu

unique and central in the whole range of Asiatic art, and holds Sesshu as «the greatest

master of straight line and angle in the whole range of world’s art»29.

Sesshu brought to perfection the new style of black and white (suiboku) introduced

into Japan from China. The painting of manners and customs shows a particular aspect

of Japanese genius – its gift for realist detail and love of very stylized forms, rich

colour, and a sumptuous harmony stressed by rich backgrounds in gold. A particular

category of this painting is represented by the namban byobu, the folding screens

depicting Portuguese sailors and merchants in everyday scenes in the port of Nagasaki.

They show in the background Portuguese caravels, stretches of blue sea, or interiors of

Japanese houses. These screens were painted at a time when the persecutions of

Christians were rigorously carried on, after the death of Hideyoshi, and the painters

probably were not Christians. Painting in oils with European techniques would have

been dangerous, and would have caused suspicions that the artist was a Christian.

Nevertheless, such techniques were permitted for painting the «southern barbarians»

(namban) as long as they were treated with humour and ridicule, in amazing caricatures

that sometimes show biting verve and fine stylization30.

With Korin (1658-1716), Japanese painting again found individual expression.

Korin has created a marvellous synthesis of an abundant variety of artistic traditions

which animated the end of the seventeenth century. He has an unmistakable personal

style. Like the writers of the Genroku period, Korin is attracted by the joie de vivre, the

full beauty of forms and colours, the refinement, the amazing atmosphere of his time.

Later, after the second half of the seventeenth century, if we consider the school of

ukiyo-e, its lively democratic atmosphere, the city and the countryside, the work of the

poor people – the carpenter and the goldsmith in their workshops, the actor on a gaudy

stage, the courtesan bathing or progressing on the street wrapped in a gorgeous kimono

and followed by a colourful procession, the shopkeeper at the door calling his clients, in

other words, all the aspects of the life of the people in a burst of liveliness and colour,

through a new conception of line and space – we are again before a strong and original

creation, a most interesting contribution to world painting.

Hokusai was the greatest in this trend, and a genius in the world of painting. His

tremendous, restless personality was marked from his early years, when he was

29 Ernest F. Fenollosa, Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art, vol. 2, Dover, New York, 1963, p. 81. See also Pageant of Japanese Art, Painting, vol. 2, Toto Bunka, Tokyo, 1962, p. 10.30 Jean Buhot, Encyclopédie de la Pléiade, vol. 1, Histoire de l’Art. Remis Inglis Hall published a translation in Anchor Books, New York, 1967.

«forbidden to publish useless books» until an advanced age. He moved his home ninety-

three times and changed his name almost as many. The originality of Hokusai’s art has

been greatly admired in the West. «The Storm», «The Clearing», and a few other of his

paintings are recognized by Europeans as «singularly authoritative forerunners of the

major discoveries of impressionism, such as knowledge that colour does not exist alone,

but as creation of light»31.

Hiroshige, probably greater in landscape, comes next to Hokusai in pictures of

manners which catch vividly the multiple manifestations of life. Important indeed was

the lesson that the ukiyo-e painters taught the impressionists. Hiroshige taught them how

to obtain new effects from black and neutral tones, and Kiyonaga’s strong contrasts of

black and white were adopted by Toulouse-Lautrec. The oil painting made by van Gogh

of a Japanese woman in a direct and amusing imitation of a beauty by Utamaro shows

how much the new techniques of ukiyo-e surprised the impressionists.

The asymmetrical composition, the use of black as a real colour and the interplay

with white and grey, the dramatic silhouette of facial expressions, the skilful use of

empty spaces, the intense sense of reality in spite of its disregard for realism – all these

were novelties to the French painters. After the universal exhibition in 1878, Japanese

art helped the French painters to renew their inspiration and their visual habits32.

Thus the Japanese influence, with its freshness, purity, and elegance of image,

aided the impressionists to remove the feeling of nature from a heavy load of

intellectual and sentimental meanings that was hiding the true beauty of things, and help

stagnant Western painting out of its classic reality and rigid rules of perspective. The

Japanese emphasis on the decorative enhanced the simplification achieved by the

impressionists.

In architecture Japan shows, on one hand, masterpieces of naturalness and

prehistoric simplicity in the pure Japanese creation of the Shinto shrines at Ise and

Izumo; on the other hand, there are beautiful temples and monasteries at Nara and

Kyoto inspired by Chinese models. In our days Japan is building, according to a concept

of its own, a new architecture in which the traditional forms embrace felicitously the

concepts and needs of the modern world. The immense and ugly vastness of the world’s

biggest metropolis, Tokyo, shows some of the most harmonious and original buildings

created by mass civilization.31 Ibid., p. 291.32 Henri Focillon, Hokusaï, Alcan, Paris, 1914, p. 5. See also Louis Gonse, L’Art Japonais, Gründ, Paris, 1926.

Through this brief outline we can see that the great Japanese master never accepted

the inflexible realism of China. There is always a distinct idealistic stylization even if in

some cases it has become simple decorative art. To this stream of original creations

should be added the impressive originality of popular Japanese arts which have been

found by some critics to be «even more valuable than everything else they copied from

the Chinese». It should be mentioned also that Japanese cinema has also shown an

undeniable individuality.

GENUINE JAPANESE CREATION

Apart from literature and the arts, in the realm of science Japanese contribution was

remarkable only in the field of algebra when they took up the forgotten Sung

mathematics and brought it to a culmination in the last quarter of the seventeenth

century. Japan’s economic «miracle» is certainly a creation of her spirit, performed

against many consecrated rules of classic Western economy and also against American

experts’ theories and advice33.

Though Japanese have received a great part of their ideas from abroad – and this is

true of any country – it would be erroneous and unfair to think that they limited

themselves to copying and reproducing foreign ideas. When we look at Japanese

cultural life, we see that the great creations of Japanese spirit show no direct influence

from abroad. As we have seen with Buddhism, the Japanese have a great gift for

simplifying complex systems of ideas and for reducing them to the essential principles

by employing the well-known Japanese capacity for assimilation. Nearly every activity

pursued to a higher level in Japan has a Chinese or foreign antecedent; yet it rarely is

wholly imitative, and sometimes surpasses its prototype in quality and pattern, writes A.

L. Kroeber. This same process is happening today with things which originated in the

West from clock-making to shipbuilding or electronic instruments.

While the Chinese invented silk, paper, book printing, gunpowder, paper-money,

porcelain, playing cards, and other things, Japan can claim as her original contribution

to world civilization only the revolving stage and the folding fan, in addition to the arts

of gardens and flower arrangement. As we generally tend to compare Japan with the

33 At the end of the American occupation, Joseph Dodge left to the Japanese government seventeen fundamental rules which could not be violated without the risk of ruining the national economy. The Japanese government went against more than half of those rules of classic economy, and yet attained the greatest rate of economic growth in the world (Consider Japan, by correspondents of The Economist, London, 1963, chap. 1; G. C. Allen, Japan’s Economic Expansion, Oxford University Press, London, 1965).

West, these individual Japanese contributions to civilization seem small when put beside

Chinese and European creations. But we forget that, individually considered, not many

countries can show achievements comparable to Japan’s. No country in Europe

independently created its own system of writing, its own religion, or its art. On the other

hand, Europe is a very particular case within the phenomena of civilizations: currents of

ideas crossed the small continent easily, spreading over an immense variety of national

conditions and aptitudes; and it is as if every particular stream of ideas had fecundated

the peculiar disposition of each nation so that, historically, a florescence of civilization

blooms first in Greece, to be revived in Rome and in Italy. The craving for adventure

and discovery and the epic ideas of Italian Renaissance passed on to Portugal, giving

rise to the great sea travels and to the greatest modern epic poem. Literary types and

ideas from the Spanish «golden century» inspired the eighteenth-century French

playwrights, and the great French and English novelists have inspired the great

generation of Russian writers of last century. The tide seems to have waned here to rise

there, with new force and splendour. These complex phenomena of cultural fecundation

still remain to be clearly explained.

Japan, due to her insularity, could never experience such an enrichening surge.

Neither was there a similar sharing by the Asian countries of the continent that were

closed in by autocratic governments, hostile to international intercourse.

Japan owes the progress of her culture to her capacity to assimilate, fostered over a

long period of history. The national personality shows traits for conciliation and

progress which prevailed over exclusionist tendencies, says Nyozekan Hasegawa in his

important book The Japanese Character: «Although the Japanese in practice created

their own culture via inspiration from foreign cultures, they themselves constituted from

early times a powerful entity in their own right, both as a nation and as a people.»34

Examples are here cited to explain how that which was adopted from foreign

origins was transformed into genuine native forms, into purely Japanese tradition

through the uninterrupted maintenance of Japanese spirit and sensibility. Thus, the

continental manner of reading Buddhist scriptures gave rise to the characteristic

chanting of Noh; the purely continental gagaku was transformed into the music of the

Noh, and these in turn gave rise to Kabuki. The first Japanese imitations of continental

buildings, such as the Horyu-ji, show results finer than the Chinese originals, though the

34 Hasegawa, The Japanese Character. See also Arthur Waley, The Originality of Japanese Civilization, Kokusai Bunka Shinkokai, Tokyo, 1941.

Imperial Palace in Kyoto is far from displaying the richness and splendour of the

emperor’s palace in Peking. This is because in Japan there prevailed a tradition of

simplicity even at the centre of political power, and also because this power did not

dispose of a large supply of slave labour such as existed in China, India, Europe, and

North Africa, where the temple of Karnak took nearly seven centuries to build.

Another important trait in the evolution of Japanese culture is, in the words of

Hasegawa, «that it is truly national in the sense that it is of the whole people». It

developed in towns unlike those in China and the West: the Japanese aristocracy, as

intelligentsia, spread the culture to the lowest classes. Even today, the practice of

writing poetry or conducting the tea ceremony is carried out by members of all classes.

The woodblock print, ukiyo-e, was created specifically to bring the works of the great

painters within the price range of the masses.

To all this is added another historical characteristic – economic evenness. The

government generally avoided economic extremes, such as unequal amassing of wealth

through excessive expansion of the economy. Thus there has been neither extreme

wealth nor extreme poverty: the traditional type of cultural expression in Japan is the

opposite of the trend on the mainland of both East and West, says Hasegawa, in that the

greater the power and wealth becomes, the greater is the emphasis on ideals of plainness

and modesty. For this, Japan is certainly the most original country in world history, if

we consider that such policies seem to be characteristic of the ruling classes through the

centuries. This preference for simplicity and modesty, this love for simple things like

insects, stones, dwarf trees, in an Orient which displays pageantry and splendour beside

abject poverty, still persists today in Japan35.

THE SENSE OF INFERIORITY TOWARDS THE WEST AS A CHALLENGING

FORCE

After the opening of Japan in the Meiji era, a frequent expression of a sense of

inferiority was shown by Japanese writers and politicians. The first man who tried to

build a bridge between Japan and the West, Yukichi Fukuzawa, felt the overwhelming

Western superiority. In the West he recognized two main advantages: «a learning based

in mathematics and reason, and a spirit of independence.» Moreover, he adds: «The 35 The highest example of Japanese simplicity is Shinto architecture. Shinto shrines existed long before Buddhism came to Japan. We may conclude that the artistic temperament of the Japanese which led them to place their religious buildings in harmony with nature was indigenous. Shinto architecture is an authentic expression of Japan’s original religious and aesthetic sensibilities (Sidney Lewis Gulick, The East and the West: A Study of their Psychic and Cultural Characteristics, Tuttle, Tokyo, 1963).

West reached the stage of specialization after more than one hundred years; if Japan

tries to reach the same level in half the time, by physical and mental exertion, the result

will be nervous collapse.» It is curious that a few years ago Bertrand Russell attributed

the nervousness and hesitation he noticed in Japanese people to the too rapid transition

into industrial living and the modern mass organization in which all individuality is

smothered.

Katsuichiro Kamei refers to a sense of inferiority before Western science in Asian

thought. «My ignorance and indifference to China and India did not trouble me in the

least», he writes, «and I was constantly fascinated by Europe». Kojiro Serizawa

explains further: «Foreigners say that Japanese are arrogant. This arrogance disguises

most of the time a complex of inferiority.»

The early Meiji writers, like Shimei Futabatei and Kafu Nagai, felt the shallowness

of Japanese literature when compared with Western literature. Futabanei became so

deeply conscious of this difference through his knowledge of Russian literature that he

decided to abandon literature in desperation. This feeling of the acute differences in

quality between Western and Japanese literature is as strong for modern Japanese

writers as it was for Futabatei. Koichi Isoda, Futabatei’s biographer, who is also a

novelist and playwright, has developed this theme in his recent novel Nise no Guzo (A

False Idol) as well as in essays about the Japanese realist novel, which had both a great

influence on today’s fiction and criticism.

Another contemporary novelist and playwright, Saneatsu Mushanokoji, in his novel

Ai to Shi (Love and Death) describes the feeling of young Japanese in Paris. He was

impressed by finding Europeans everywhere who, he felt, despised him. He wrote:

I will never fall behind them in beauty of mind. But it is not so desirable to

see a Japanese among Western people. In my opinion this may partly be due to the

clothes which he wears, but I feel that I cannot boast of the complexion and

physical constitution of Japanese people, however hard I may try.

We have already referred to Shusaku Endo’s novel Studying Abroad. The hero of

this novel, a Japanese teacher of French who goes to Paris, at his contact with the

brilliant Western civilization faces a crisis and is depressed by an inferiority complex.

He has a terrible psychological shock, falls sick, and has to go to a hospital. There he

finds his friend, an architect, afflicted by the same inferiority complex and suffering

from the same illness.

However surprising it may be, it is in this feeling of inferiority that the Japanese

people found the energy and determination to challenge the West. Instead of remaining

aloof behind pretensions of cultural superiority over the West, like the Chinese, the

Japanese decided to surpass the West in the proper Western field – and this is one of the

reasons for the amazing Japanese technological and economic progress. But in spite of

such progress it seems that the inferiority complex persists.

This source of inner conflict will end only when the Japanese realize that there is

today only one culture – a universal culture to which all the peoples of the world

contribute with their national creations. At the same time, the Japanese will become

conscious of the value of their own national culture. Kitaro Nishida, who was a follower

of Zen Buddhism and studied Western philosophy, devoted his life to the work of

adding Western philosophy to Japanese life, in a supreme effort to find a new way for

both Eastern and Western man. Nishida hoped for a new civilization based on new

morals, created by a common effort of Christianity and Buddhism. The same was

thought by Tokoku Kitamura in his attempt to reconcile East and West, insisting on the

retention of the best of native Japanese culture and its integration into the modern

synthesis.

We mentioned several times before the coexistence in Japanese culture of the

classic and the modern. This, of course, is a trait we can find in every country. But in no

other country is the dichotomy so pronounced, provoking such a strong intellectual

impact and showing such a wide span of time between the old and the new.

We can see today in the Shinto shrines sacred dances contemporary of the cult of

Osiris, which in the country of their origin, China, have disappeared long ago. And we

can also see in Japan the fastest trains in the world. The vast range between these two

opposites is a source of creative imagination. It keeps in Japanese life a fine sense of

style, in man’s spirit a dignity, pride, and nobility which the modern forms of sociability

and publicity have not yet spoilt.

This unique trait of Japanese culture must be emphasized because it is a source of

inspiration for the arts and a source of courage and self-assurance for every Japanese. In

the arts, in literature, and in theatre it is responsible for the two trends, traditional and

modern. In ordinary life, it brings old practices like the arts of tea and flower

arrangement into the most modernized homes and offices. Japan keeps the oldest

architecture in the world together with the newest. Thus Japanese receive stimuli from a

remote past and also from the most modern present, which in some aspects has

overtaken even the United States. The existence of these contrasts can of course be of

immense worth for artistic and literary creation, in the hands of great artists capable of

achieving a harmonious fusion of the disparate values.

(Japanese and Western Literature, 290-298)

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