Ivan I Morris - The nobility of failure: Tragic heroes in the history of Japan

The Nobility of Failure

Tragic Heroes in the History of Japan

Ivan Morris

With a new preface by Juliet Winters Carpenter

Kurodahan Press 2014

Contents

Preface Juliet Winters Carpenter

Dedication and Acknowledgements

Introduction

Yamato Takeru th Century

Oh, Lone Pine Tree! Oh, My Brother!

Yorozu 6th Century

The Emperors Shield

Arima no Miko 7th Century

The Melancholy Prince

Sugawara no Michizane 9th and 10th Centuries

The Deity of Failures

Minamoto no Yoshitsune 12th Century

Victory through Defeat

Kusunoki Masashige 14th Century

Seven Lives for the Nation

Amakusa Shir 17th Century

The Japanese Messiah

shio Heihachir 19th Century

Save the People!

Saig Takamori 19th Century

The Apotheosis of Saig the Great

The Kamikaze Fighters 20th Century

If Only We Might Fall...

Notes

Bibliography

Contributors

Copyright

Maps

Japan (less Hokkaido)

Yamato Takerus Eastern Expedition

The Triumphant Campaigns of Minamoto no Yoshitsune

The Satsuma Rebellion

Preface

Years ago, I was sitting in a chapel on Doshisha campus at an entrance ceremony for new faculty and staff, listening to a Japanese pastor explain the essence of Christianity to people who would have to be supportive of it during their tenure at Doshisha, a university built on Christian principles. Something about love thy neighbor or turn the other cheek may have come up, but what I remember most vividly is that he described Christianity as a makeikusa a lost cause or losing battle. Though stunned by the pastors approach, at the same time, having read Ivan Morriss The Nobility of Failure , I was able to see how his words would strike a chord deep in the Japanese psyche. The invitation to join a worthy but unwinnable battleindeed, to give everything one has to it, knowing full well the outcome is doomedwould hardly appeal to a Westerner; but the faces in that chapel were transfixed. Not for the first time, I was grateful for the insights of this remarkable book.

Different as American and Japanese cultures and traditions may be, the admiration for heroic figures runs strong and deep on both sides of the Pacific. With characteristic erudition, eloquence, and occasionally wry humor, Ivan Morris lays out the Japanese preference for tragic or failed heroesthose who die for a lost cause, making up in sincerity and purity of purpose what they dismally lack in crowning success. He does this by telling the stories of ten men (or groups of menthe last chapter is about World War IIs doomed kamikaze pilots), all of whom made grand efforts that ended in colossal failure. Perversely (to the Western mind), their failure itself, the more total and abject the better, is what has endeared them to the Japanese. Legends of valor have sprung up around them; many of these heroes have taken on mythic proportions.

Of course failure in and of itself is not particularly noble, even in Japanese tradition. Many of these heroes are warriors; some are diehard traditionalists and others are daring rebels; still others are innocent victims. Often alone, often betrayed, they are eager for death, embracing their fate. What makes their lives (perhaps more significantly, their deaths) special is the honor, integrity, and strength of spirit they display as they follow their hard but chosen path to its inevitable end.

Morris tells each story with compelling sympathy, combining a historians search for context with a novelists eye for characterization and the telling detail. The stories begin in the misty past and proceed down the centuries to World War II. We are introduced to a romantic legendary hero who, after an ill-starred encounter with a malignant deity, dies alone in a field; an obscure warrior who, fighting in vain to keep out the foreign faith of Buddhism, chooses death rather than capture and is mourned only by his dog; a teenaged prince falsely accused of treason and strangled by his cousin; a government official and scholar who dies in lonely exile on a trumped-up charge, attended by a plum tree that uprooted itself and flew all the way to Kyushu to accompany its unfortunate master; a brilliant young military strategist who becomes a fugitive from his own brother and is forced to commit suicide by harakiri; a failed loyalist martyr who comes to epitomize devotion to the emperor, inspiring the later kamikaze martyrs; the teenaged leader of a failed Christian rebellion that ended in a horrific holocaust and the virtual eradication of Christianity from Japan; a quixotic samurai-philosopher who sought to rectify injustice and feed the starving, a noble enterprise that, as writer Mishima Yukio noted, ended in total failure; a defeated rebel samurai who ended his own life under the stigma of traitor, only to undergo posthumous apotheosis as the grand hero of the Meiji Restoration; and thousands of young pilots who volunteered to fly off to certain death in hopes of ending their lives in a blaze of glory, however useless.

Along the way, Morris includes a wealth of background drawn from firsthand accounts, contemporary documents, songs, and literary works ranging from poetry to kabuki and No. His explanations and analyses are thorough and engaging as well as incisive, making the book equally accessible for the general reader and the veteran Japanophile. Notes alone take up a good third of the book. Some of the most memorable parts of the text are poems and diary excerpts as, from first to last, Japanese warriors have expressed their deepest feelings in verse or highly charged prose. Here, from the first chapter, are lines written by Yamato Takeru as he faces a forlorn death:

On the Cape of Otsu

Directly facing Owari,

There you stand,

Oh, lone pine tree!

Oh, my brother!

Were you a man,

Oh, lonely pine,

I would gird you with a sword

I would give you robes to wear.

Oh, lone pine tree!

Oh, my brother!

And here is Saigo Takamori, defiant and ready to risk all for his country:

I am a boat cast on the rough water

For my countrys sake

If the winds blow, let them blow!

If the waves rise, let them rise!

The final chapter closes with a 31-syllable poem on the evanescence of life, written by the very man who organized the kamikaze attacks in the Philippines and sent so many young pilots to their deaths:

Today in flower,

Tomorrow scattered by the wind

Such is our blossom life.

How can we think its fragrance lasts forever?

In the end, does Morris succeed in making the Japanese predilection for failed heroes understandable to the Western mind, with its fixation on success? I think yes, he doesor perhaps I should say he comes as close as anyone could. Certainly the West is unlikely to emulate Japan on this score anytime soon. Morris dryly calls the Japanese preference for sad endings, heroes who never make it home, a departure from the monotony of mankinds central ideas. Yet he is never disrespectful, and illuminates the Japanese perspective with clarity, subtlety, and depth. He understands Japanese affection for the men he has singled out, at one point even tellingly referring to them as my heroes. It is good to remember that Morris was motivated to write the book partly, as he admits, to shed light on the sensational death of another failed hero, his friend Mishima, in 1972, just three years earlier. What lends even greater poignancy is the fact that he himself was to die of cancer in 1976, barely a year after the books publication.