Kurt Singer - The life of ancient Japan selected contemporary texts illustrating social life and ideals before the era of seclusion

THE LIFE OF ANCIENT JAPAN

Author of
Mirror, Sword and Jewel
A Study of Japanese Characteristics
[Japan Library Classic Paperbacks, 1997]

BY
KURT SINGER

First published in 1939 by
Iwanami Shoten, Tokyo-Kanda

First published by
JAPAN LIBRARY

Published by Routledge in 2014

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

THE LIFE OF ANCIENT JAPAN
SELECTED CONTEMPORARY TEXTS
ILLUSTRATING SOCIAL LIFE AND IDEALS
BEFORE THE ERA OF SECLUSION

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A CIP catalogue entry for this book
is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-9033-5001-0

TABLE OF CONTENTS

FROM THE CHRONICLES OF JAPAN (NIHONGI)

ASHIKAGA AND MOMOYAMA PERIODS
(A. D. 13921568)

THERE is scarcely a country, Greece and Italy excepted, on which a greater number of books continues to be written, year by year, than the bow-shaped series of volcanic islands, emerald forests and garden-like fields that faces the eastern edge of the Eurasian continent. If in spite of this, Japan has retained the reputation of being inscrutable, elusive, and even mysterious, the reason ought to be sought in the very nature of this nation rather than in the geographic peculiarities of its environment. For all great nations seem to have wandered and warred till they found a soil congenial to their most profound aspirations, only the weaker tribes being obliged to live where others allowed, and to conform to the dictates of environment. There have been many island states in the history of our globe, from the Greek archipelago, Crete and Sicily to Britain, Ireland, Madagascar and Tahiti, but none of them, not even England, developed and refined that sense of shyness and reserve, that tendency to hide from profane looks and draw fences around themselves which has characterized the Japanese from their earliest days. These qualities may have been strengthened by an atmosphere which seems to delight in enveloping things and men with a humid, though faintly lustrous veil of clouds, mist, and rains. But these external stimuli must have met with similarly directed inclinations of a race of conquerors, essentially aristocratically minded, and therefore opposed to easy familiarity; small groups of warriors perpetually endangered by foreign invasions, actual and potential, and even more by the disruptive forces of their own ambitious kith and kin. These people were scattered over a number of islands, every one of which is again divided by mountain ranges into a set of island-like districts, and they lived and enjoyed a perilous existence which made them stronger and still more secretive.

Traits and tendencies of this order are in the strictest sense ultimate data of sociological analysis. It has been a far-reaching error of nineteenth century science to believe that any organic structure, in the realm of nature as of social life, could be explained by pointing to those external conditions under which it has grown or decayed. For, if these conditions have been able to strengthen or to limit a specific form of life, the reason must be sought not only in the character of its environment, but also in its own tendencies and structural peculiarities, its entelechy as we may call it with Goethe. The student of social history has to respect these phenomena as religiously as the student of physics has learned, by a long and laborious process, to respect the data of the senses. But even if the sociologist gives up any attempt to transcend the limits set to his enquiry, his field remains appallingthe vast domain stretching between the innermost sphere where a nation wishes to converse with its own gods and demons, undisturbed by intruders not sharing their spiritual life, and the promiscuous and ambiguous surface of everyday life open to all. Much has been done in this intermediate sphere since the first Europeans came to Japan, but still more remains, and in no province of research more than that of social history.

The purpose of the present book is to facilitate these studies, by presenting a co-ordinated number of texts dating from the epochs in which the foundations of Japanese civi ization were laid.

It is only seldom observed that knowledge of social and economic conditions and processes is much more difficult to convey than that of literary, artistic, religious or political subjects. The history of poetry, music, sculpture or philosophy, of empires and churches, deal with works, ideas, and deeds which are easily conceived as a whole and which have a strong hold on the imagination of the reader, even infusing him with some feeling of its nature before the task of the writer has begun. It is different with the topics of social sciences. Here, the student has to build up his picture out of a vast mass of small details, handed down in documents and reports, the selection of which has been largely determined not by their intrinsic value but by accidental causes at work throughout the vicissitudes of history. Usually, these sources speak with an uncertain voice, and many of their best teachings are to be gained only by applying indirect methods. Moreover, even if they should allow the creation of something resembling a miniature or a fresco painting, the reader has a right to remain unsatisfied until this picture is shown not only in its static aspects, but in motion. This motion is again of a kind less easy to realize than that of state actions and great spiritual movements, being necessarily slow, ambiguous, complex and elusive. Such difficulties, inherent in the subject matter, should account for the fact that the art of the social and economic historian has been so slow to develop and that masterpieces are still extremely rare: if the names of A. de Tocqueville, Fustel de Coulanges, Sir Henry Maine, Jakob Burckhardt, Sir William Ashley, and Georg Friedrich Knapp are told, very few can be added to the list of classical authors in this domain. It must even be recorded that social science, in progressing along the lines followed during the last generations, is apt to withdraw from, rather than move nearer to the approach made by these classics. Many additions have been made to unwieldy masses of materials unearthed, or discovered in archives, and classified; but there has been no corresponding growth of synoptic vision and power of plastic representation. Perhaps these dangers are especially great in a country like Japan where the later stages of Buddhist and Confucian traditions have for centuries weakened that sense of the symbolic, which enables men to grasp the many in the one and the one in the many, and where native scholarship has been for a long time identical with an accumulation of knowledge similar to that of the great polyhistors and antiquarians of the 17th and 18th century in Europe.

Where science fails, however, a more powerful charm may come to aid: poetry and art. Instead, therefore, of giving a colourless or oversimplified summary of general or cultural histories of Japan wh ch are easily accessible to every Western reader and which ought to be consulted by him wherever our texts are compelled to leave blank areas, this introductory volume prefers to present a selection of pages taken from the classical literature of Japan, which accompanied by a number of legal texts and some pictorial illustrations may better aid in giving a living picture of what Japan has been and of the aspirations of her formative epochs.