The Japanese Riddle

by HELEN MEARS

1

ACCORDING to dispatches from the various Far Eastern fronts, our troops are finding the Japanese soldier a difficult enemy, because they do not understand him. To understand the Japanese soldier they need first of all to know the society that produced him. Such knowledge is more essential in dealing with the Japanese than with any other sovereign people now in the war. The Chinese, for instance, are also an Oriental race with a civilization different from ours, yet we can feel at home in China even if we are quite ignorant of Chinese customs. In Japan we cannot feel at home unless we deliberately make the effort to understand Japanese behavior from the Japanese point of view. What are the patterns of Japanese behavior?

The Japanese are slaves to their own special habits, which differ widely from ours. So do their attitudes toward facts, toward authority, in human relations, toward money and possessions. Even our ideas of politeness are so different that although the Japanese at home have a reputation for being the politest people in the world, from an American point of view their politeness often seems simple rudeness.

This is the kind of thing that may happen to you when you are living in Japan: —

You are having lunch with a Japanese friend in a “modern style” restaurant, where the menu is printed in a kind of Japanese English. You order from the menu. The waitress suggests that something else is very nice, but you prefer your own choice and stick to it. An hour or more elapses. When the waitress finally returns, she brings you not what you ordered but what she suggested. Your Japanese friend accepts for you with courteous phrases, dismisses the waitress with bows and smiles, and gives you no explanation.

According to Japanese custom, it is rude ever to refuse a request directly. The waitress, in suggesting some other dish, was explaining that they did not have what was ordered. Since the foreigner, not understanding, persisted, she merely waited, knowing that in time hunger would persuade him to take what was given. The Japnese companion understood this but found it difficult to explain the mat ter to a foreigner. A Japanese, of course, would accept the waitress’s suggestion at once.

Or you are walking in the country with a Japanese interpreter, looking for a specific village for a specific purpose. You come to a crossroad and, not knowing which direction to take, you gesture toward one and ask, “Is this the right, road?” The interpreter at once bows and smiles and sets off down this road. An hour later you discover that you have been going in the wrong direction — and it is clear that the interpreter knew all the time it was wrong!

It is impolite in Japan ever to suggest that someone is wrong. Since the foreigner had seemed to choose one of two crossroads by gesturing toward it, the interpreter had no choice but to take that road. It was unthinkable that the interpreter should tell a foreigner he was mistaken.

Or you may be staying at a Japanese inn. For breakfast you have a treat — an egg. It is, however, served raw with some bitter seaweed. You would prefer it cooked and suggest that it be scrambled. You tell your Japanese companion, who has traveled in America and has had scrambled eggs. She explains to the maid. The maid bows and smiles and assents — and departs, leaving you with your egg raw.

The maid had never before encountered such an oddity as a scrambled egg and simply could not understand that anyone would want an egg prepared that way. It would have been rude of her to admit she did not understand, or to refuse to scramble the egg. So she merely agreed politely and forgot all about it.

Or you are at the Mitsui Bank, getting some money on your letter of credit. During the negotiations the letter is mislaid. You see a corps of clerks madly searching for it — in desk drawers, under desks, in wastepaper baskets — while you get more and more jittery. At last the head clerk summons you to a window. You expect him to reassure you and possibly to suggest that if it does not turn up, the bank will guarantee the loss. Instead, he leans toward you confidentially and in excellent English inquires, “Do you care for music?”

The Japanese solve unpleasantness by pretending the unpleasantness does not exist. It is rude ever to intrude your own feeling on anyone else. The Mitsui clerk was in a panic about the lost letter of credit, so it was necessary for him to behave as though the whole affair were of no importance.

Or you are sitting in at a weekly session of a “Men’s English-Study Club” in Tokyo. You mention tho “Manchurian Incident” unfavorably and everyone deplores it, explaining that the Japanese people are against the “incident” and favor “universal peace.” You think this is fine, until later on another foreigner present expresses sympathy with the Japanese military point of view, and at once the group agrees with him as warmly as it previously agreed with you.

When they came out for universal peace the members of the “Men’s English-Study Club” were obeying the rule of politeness which dictates that you must give the answer that will be pleasing to the questioner. A Japanese answers a question — even a question involving a statement of fact — by saying not what is so, but what he thinks the questioner would like to hear. When the second foreigner voiced a different point of view from the first, the Club politely agreed with him also.

In all these incidents the difficulty was caused by the clash of Japanese custom with American. A Japanese would have understood at once what was meant in each case and there would have been no difficulty. Such incidents, however, once we have calmed down enough to study them, tell us much about Japanese behavior. All exhibit the effort of the Japanese, inside the frame of their own customs, to avoid unpleasantness in human relations. They do this by evading reality. They avoid argument by assenting; they do not assert their opinion against another’s; they ignore unpleasant facts; they deal not with an objective situation but with an imaginary situation — a situation that exists in their own minds because it has been put there by education based on a centuries-long conditioning process.

This evasion of reality, this ability to live in a make-believe world, is an inescapable behavior pattern of the Japanese. It can be found at the bottom of their social relations, their economic life, and their political life. Today it even operates to confound international relations.

2

THE Japanese solve their problems of human relations by pretending that, as individuals, they have no feelings, desires, emotions, or ideas. There is no room in Japan for individual spontaneity or temperament: they have therefore trained themselves to behave as if such things do not exist. Seventytwo million Japanese live in a space about the size of California. As a result the average Japanese is accustomed to cramped quarters and to a complete lack of privacy. The average Japanese family of five lives in a single room that would be close quarters for one adult American. In the cities the small houses are packed closely together; and in summer each family lives in view of its neighbors, since the paper walls are seldom closed. A Japanese almost never does anything alone: he travels with a group, takes his recreation at some neighborhood festival, and even bathes with his neighbors at the public bath.

To make human relations endurable under these conditions of crowding and lack of privacy the Japanese have developed a civilization that represses the individual in both body and mind. The Japanese begins his life tightly strapped in a kind of harness dangling from the back of his mother, and he spends the rest of it in as little space as possible. He learns to sit cross-legged or to squat or kneel, absolutely motionless, for hours at a stretch, and to sleep in any position.

He also learns to live according to rule. He does not behave the way he chooses, but in the way society has decided will prevent friction. How he says good morning to his wife, what he has for lunch, how he sits on the mats, how his wife opens and closes a door, how she prepares breakfast, even how he commits suicide, are not acts of personal preference; they are reflexes, habits learned as a child — easily learned since they have been national practice for centuries.

In the ordinary round of daily life you will never hear a Japanese admit that he is hungry or tired or uncomfortable. He will never express personal pleasure or irritation. He accepts whatever comes, bows, smiles, utters the correct courtesy phrases with the imperturbability of an automaton. The Japanese is repressed socially. He is taught that he is not an individual but a member of a family — a private family and a national family. There is no informal social life, no free meeting between young men and young women. Marriages are arranged by families, and the wife literally belongs to her husband. A Japanese woman has no legal existence except as a daughter, wife, or mother. As a small child at home a Japanese girl is taught “etiquette” — the rules of correct behavior that will govern her relations with her husband as well as with her neighbors and those in authority. She is taught frugality, loyalty, and obedience.

In pre-modern Japan education of women was forbidden on the theory that a woman who was encouraged to think was likely to “question the authority of her elders.” Although today Japanese girls are required to go to school, the basis of the education they receive in the compulsory primary grades is still character building, the family system, and the national mythology. Little girls learn that it is their lot in life to be obedient daughters, good wives, and wise mothers. They are taught that they belong to their fathers because they belong to the Divine Emperor who is descended from the Sun Goddess and therefore is the father of the Japanese people.

The Japanese is repressed intellectually. Thinking is discouraged; there is a government bureau whose function is thought-control. There is no tradition in Japan of discussion of ideas or exchange of opinion. Average Japanese tell each other not what they think or what is so, but what they think will give pleasure or prevent friction. Even the university students, who represent the vanguard of Westernization, have great difficulty in getting over this inhibition. The emphasis in education is practical, and vocational schools are numerous. The masses of the people do not have to bother to discuss national or international politics. Their leaders tell them what they ought to know.

3

THE Japanese solves his economic problems by pretending he doesn’t have any. The average Japanese has a minimum of money and possessions. He has no furniture in his minute house. He sits on the mats and leaves his street shoes outside to save wear and tear. His diet is extremely restricted. For heat and cooking he uses a small charcoal brazier. Even running cold water is a luxury. He owns nothing but a few clothes, bedding, and a few utensils for cooking and laundry. The Japanese evades his material poverty by pretending both that he does not care for wealth and that he has it.

The Japanese is taught to believe that one should not be interested in material rewards or possessions — that money is vulgar. The Mitsui clerk who tried to hide his distress at a mislaid letter of credit by discussing “culture” was illustrating how ingrained in national custom the ancient Japanese rules still are. Even in a bank one must not admit any crass concern about money. The pre-modern Japanese society put “tradesmen and moneylenders” at the bottom of the social scale, and in Japan today the average Japanese is uncomfortable when he is dealing with money. He wants it, of course, but at the same time he has been trained to feel he ought not to want it, that it is un-Japanese to want it; so he pretends not to be interested.

Social and business life in Japan are full of small devices for seeming to ignore money. When you buy food from a roadside vender he will usually decline payment. The polite thing is to thank him for his generosity and leave the money hidden under the bowl. Life is also full of small devices for doing without money. At a wedding, for instance, it is the custom for the bride and groom to go through the form of exchanging gifts. But instead of exchanging real gifts, each makes out a list of presents and they merely exchange the lists.

The Japanese need less money than any other people of comparable importance in world affairs, because they are largely living in a world that is still almost half agricultural and three-fourths primitive in its lack of modern tools and conveniences. They use seaweed for food, soap, fertilizer — and get foreign exchange from it as well, since it is an important export product for biological laboratories. The farmer uses his rice straw for a half-dozen different purposes—thatch for his roof, sandals, rope, raincoats, mats, barrels. The small tradesman does not use expensive paper and cord to wrap up his wares when a cornucopia of bamboo leaf will do, and the housewife coöperates by always carrying a colored handkerchief in which to tie her bundles. The Japanese waste nothing. To save materials, they have made a cult of smallness and produce everything under the sun on a miniature scale, from art objects and houses and toys to airplanes and submarines.

The Japanese pretends that he has wealth — that is, variety and freedom of choice — by playing an elaborate game of make-believe. For instance, the Japanese diet is extremely limited and monotonous. But the Japanese, in their formal dinners, give themselves an illusion of variety by elaborate service, and decoration, and poetic names. They insist that “food is art”— that what you eat is of less importance than the way it is served, the way it looks, and the poetic or moral ideas each dish can symbolize. A Japanese can celebrate every family and national holiday throughout his life by eating a flavorless candy made from soybeans. By calling the candy by a special name for each occasion, and serving it with some different garnish of flower petals or bamboo or maple leaves, he can pretend that he has something special and different each time.

This ingrained frugality, this ability to “do without” and remain contented, this capacity to be satisfied with imaginary satisfactions in place of real satisfactions — these are all recognizable behavior patterns of the Japanese. They have been of the utmost importance in building up the military machine of “Japan the Great Power.”

4

THE Japanese get along politically by pretending that their emperor is a god and that he is ruling the country. In practice the rulers are the representatives of big business and the military, but the decisions they reach, if the decisions affect the life of the nation as a whole, are given out as “imperial rescripts”—laws pronounced by the emperor — and as such these have the force of divine decree for the people.

The people worship the emperor as high priest of the national religion, Shinto, and as a symbol for their divine islands. To have such a symbol as titular center of the political state gives the Japanese incredible unity. The people are emotionally devoted to their islands. Their love of country, however, is normally not so much patriotism as nature worship, a literal worship of the land itself. In times of crisis, propaganda can turn this love of country into fanatic nationalism.

The Japanese solve their international problems by pretending that they are as powerful as they care to be. They claim that their empire is over 2600 years old, but this is a mythological empire, founded by a god in the Age of Gods, The real Empire is actually about fifty years old, for the Japanese controlled no territories outside their own small islands until the end of the nineteenth century.

The Japanese have no “glorious imperial past” to refer to. Mussolini could exhort his tired people to new efforts by recalling the splendors of ancient Rome, but the Japanese have no such history behind them. Japanese pre-modern empire-building was limited to the confines of their own small islands; and their national heroes are all of a strange, improbable sort, whose exploits usually include some touch of the supernatural. To bolster national morale, therefore, the Japanese must refer to his glorious mythological past.

The Japanese are told that the blood of heroes courses through their veins—not mere human heroes, but gods who conquered their enemies by waving magic swords, under the protection of the Sun Goddess. The Sacred Sword of the Sun Goddess is enshrined in Japan today, and the peasant soldiers are told that this sword will make them invincible against actual enemies, as in the mythological age it made the descendants of gods invincible against their mythological foes.

The Japanese character and civilization have always been a riddle. There seems to be no connection at all between what the individual Japanese is like in his own country and what the nation is like in its international relations, particularly in recent years. At home the individual seems unambitious, unenergetic, easily led, a slave to custom: yet in their national activities the Japanese have appeared to be ruthlessly aggressive, efficient, remarkably adaptable. Actually this state of affairs is not so contradictory as it seems.

The more unenergetic as individuals the people of a country are, the easier it is to regiment them. Japan’s pre-modern civilization was a controlled society with only a subsistence standard of living. In the modern period it developed into the first totalitarian state. An aggressive leadership was able to apply machine technology and Western organization to build up a modern export industry and a modern military machine by using the regimented society and low standard of living as the foundation to support it.

The pre-modern Japanese developed a special civilization that was based on an economy of scarcity. This civilization adapted itself to the special conditions of their small, steamy, mountainous, poverty-stricken islands. They accepted the conditions of crowded poverty and set about making such conditions livable by evolving various devices designed to restrict individual initiative, on the one hand, and on the other, to create an illusion of harmony, an illusion of space, an illusion of extravagance.

This civilization carried over into the modern age. And because the individuals were content with non-material rewards and satisfactions, the new wealth that came to Japan in the modern age could be absorbed by export industry and the military machine.

5

WHAT does all this tell us about the Japanese as soldiers, military strategists, and empire-builders? It suggests, at least, that Japan the World Menace is to a large extent an illusion. The Japanese is no aggressive superman who will put the world in his kimono sleeve. For the purpose of all-out war his civilization and character gave him certain initial advantages, but the same factors may prove to be a source of weakness

As a soldier the Japanese peasant has certain great natural advantages. He is frugal by generations of conditioning, so that it is cheap to equip and to feed him. He is the camel of the human race; he can go farther and longer on little food than most people. He is not used to physical comforts and conveniences, and except under actual combat conditions will find life at the front no worse than at home. Communal army life is merely his normal way. The periods of inaction behind the lines or on an inactive front, which are often a problem of morale for the energetic American, are for him periods of pleasant respite from activity.

The Japanese is disciplined to give unquestioning obedience to any superior. He has been taught from childhood that to fight for the Emperor is glorious, and he has had some sort of military drill, off and on, all through his life. He has been systematically “hopped up” with propaganda that appeals to race pride (the mythological heritage) and anxiety for his “divine islands.” Moreover, inside Japan, when the repressed individual departs from strict politeness, the result is usually extraordinary violence. A Japanese on the warpath is a man who has been released from the rigors of the strictest possible discipline and who knows no middle way. Behind the ruthlessness of his attacks is the energy of years of pent-up repressions.

If these are advantages to the Japanese military, they are also potential disadvantages. Individual frugality has made possible national extravagance, but in the long run the frugality must backfire on the individual. For instance, the Japanese diet has been an advantageous factor, but the diet is a lowenergy diet, adapted for the use of people living in a society that makes few if any demands for spurts of energy. How long this diet can sustain men on a continuously active front is still an unanswered question.

The Japanese is not used to physical comforts but he is used to a routinized life and emotional stability. He is using up an accumulation of limited physical and emotional energy. Once the Japanese are definitely on the defensive, under a continual pounding, it would be surprising if their morale did not collapse like a pricked balloon.

Discipline makes the Japanese an obedient soldier. It also makes him incapable of individual leadership and unadaptable to sudden changes of plan. As a strategist the Japanese can use successfully only techniques that belong to his normal behavior. Surprise, of course, is his outstanding military technique. He has always used it, and has won most of his successes with it. His jujitsu is based on it. Jujitsu is the technique by which a small man can throw a larger one by surprise and by making the large man’s strength work against him. In the present war the Japanese have used the jujitsu technique successfully, both by surprise attacks and by forcing jungle fighting where our superior equipment worked against us by hampering speed and maneuverability, while the Japanese poverty of equipment was an advantage.

But surprise as a technique is good only so long as it works. It would be sensible for us to accept surprise as a normal pattern of Japanese military activities and be eternally on our guard against it, instead of each time crying “Treachery!” and then acting as though we expected it never to happen again.

The strength and weakness of the Japanese as empire-builders come from the same source — the concentration of their culture and character. This concentration makes them fanatic, unified, strong in war as long as they have the offensive and can call the turns. It makes them unadaptable, unequal to rapid shifts in plan, unstable emotionally when frustrated. It makes them little to be feared as empire-builders, for they are still much too insular and unschooled in the psychology of other peoples to organize into a paying proposition territories they take in war — even if they could hold them. There is also their lack of basic wealth and capital to finance their empire-building, but that is another story.

The Japanese military, however, will not be stopped from action by facts. They will not recognize the impossible. They will hide from an uncomfortable reality by pretending that it is not there. The gamble of their attacks against Singapore and Pearl Harbor is a fine example of the lack of realism in their military activities. Their successes on those occasions were due less to Japanese prowess than to the failure of the United Nations to be on the job. This situation has already been somewhat remedied. The next time the Japanese military dive for a wall, pretending it is not there, they may hit a real wall and smash themselves against it.