: fantastic optics II
著者（英） Nobuyoshi Saito
journal or
publication title
Doshisha studies in English
number 97
page range 1‑58
year 2016‑11
権利（英） The Literary Association, Doshisha University URL http://doi.org/10.14988/pa.2017.0000015348
— Fantastic Optics II
Nobuyoshi Saito
‘You can see it — at least you can on a clear day. Ah, no, you can’t now.’
― Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure
Introduction — What Do They See?
The comment by a disappointed foreign tourist visiting the shrines of Ise is quoted in Basil H. Chamberlain’s Handbook for Travellers in Japan: “There is nothing to see, and they won’t let you see it” (301). The experienced cicerone warns the prospective travelers, saying, “the interest of the trip to Ise is chiefly antiquarian,” to appreciate “the remarkable plainness of all Shinto architecture,” and adds that “the veneration in which the shrines of Ise are held is such that none but priests and Imperial personages are allowed to penetrate into the interior” (ibid.).
Here lie, it seems, all the major factors that go into constituting foreign visitors’ visions not only of the shrines of Ise, but of Japan as a whole. First, whether or not “there is nothing to see” depends upon the aptitude of the eye. An experienced, informed eye, antiquarian or otherwise, would see and appreciate some “remarkable” features of the seen; a poetic or visionary eye would find something invisible to substitute for nothing visible. Secondly, as the disappointed tourist complains that “they won’t let you see it,” one’s act of seeing, for instance, the sights of Japan is often accompanied by a
vague sense of someone else’s prior act of showing, the sense that there is something to see, but it has been hidden — occulted —, or that the very fact itself of the absence of anything to see has been concealed. And finally, the act of seeing, and concomitantly the thing seen, are an end product of a socio-cultural negotiation between the seer and the show-er, between “you”
and “they,” foreign observers and local authorities. The ability to “penetrate into the interior” is either granted by the authorities as a special privilege to an exceptional outsider, or earned by the outsider himself with a special gift
— academic training or artistic sensibility.
What is seen is the product of an encounter between subject and object.
The reality of the seen is constituted by the confrontation of subjectivity and objectivity, the eye and the thing. What is seen varies according to the abilities of the eye, first its sight or blindness, and then its modes of sight such as observation or dreaming, analytical notation or artistic creation. The seen varies also according to the qualities of the thing — whether the thing seen is visible or invisible, material or spiritual, real or illusory. And the locus of an encounter between subject and object is superintended by the mind located in the human world of phenomena as opposed to the noumenal world of essence, or Kantian Dings-an-sich. The thing reveals or conceals itself, as the mind apprehends or misapprehends. The reality of the seen is shown to be either a sight, a vision, or a spectacle; the act of seeing is regarded as either merely apprehending, penetrating, or fabricating.
The present paper discusses Lafcadio Hearn’s vision of Japan in relation to Basil H. Chamberlain’s and Percival Lowell’s. The emphasis will be not on Japan as a putative essence, but on the structure and formation of their visions. In fact, some preliminary remarks given above have been suggested by the titles of the major works on Japan by each. Basil Hall Chamberlain
(1850-1935) translated the oldest national quasi-history of Japan, The Kojiki, or Records of Ancient Matters (1882), published Things Japanese, being on Various Subjects Connected with Japan (1st edition, 1890 through the 6th in 1939), and, with W. B. Mason, A Handbook for Travellers in Japan, including the Whole Empire from Yezo to Formosa (1st ed. in 1891 through the 7th rev. ed. in 1903). Percival Lowell (1855-1916), famous for his later astronomical study of Mars, had written extensively upon Japan in such works as The Soul of the Far East (1888), Noto: An Unexplored Corner of Japan (1891), and Occult Japan, or The Way of the Gods (1895). His interest in Japan having been first aroused, as he acknowledges, by Chamberlain’s translation of the Kojiki and Lowell’s The Soul of the Far East, Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) published a series of books on Japan, starting with Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (1894), Out of the East (1895), Kokoro:
Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life (1896) through Gleanings in Buddha Fields (1897), Exotics and Retrospectives (1898), In Ghostly Japan (1899), Shadowings (1900), Kotto: being Japanese Curios, with Sundry Cobwebs (1902), Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things (1903), ending with Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation published posthumously in 1904. What “matters” and “things” were for Chamberlain, and what
“the soul” and the “occult” were for Lowell, are for Hearn “glimpses” and
“gleanings,” “hints and echoes,” “exotics and retrospectives,” the “ghostly”
and the “strange,” or an “interpretation.” Chamberlain’s handbook was intended to guide foreign travelers through Lowell’s unexplored corners or Hearn’s unfamiliar country by an ample supply of factual information.
The authoritative philologist of the ancient Japanese language would have objected to the use of modern Japanese words — kokoro, kotto, kwaidan
— as wilfully mystifying in book titles meant for English general readers.
While Lowell’s titles arouse the reader’s curiosity about some hidden truths and promise their eventual revelation — full exposure or opening up —, Hearn’s are intriguingly humble and hesitant, offering only “glimpses” and
“shadowings,” nothing more than “gleanings” or a tentative “interpretation”
of something “ghostly.”
Hearn was quite self-conscious about his own method of observing Japan – both seeing and writing about it. Five months before his arrival in Japan in April 1890, he wrote to William Patten, the art editor of Harper’s, as follows: “In attempting a book upon a country so well trodden as Japan, I could not hope — nor would I consider it prudent attempting, — to discover totally new things, but only to consider things in a totally new way, so far as possible” (Tinker, Lafcadio Hearn’s American Days, rpt. in Umemoto III, 328). After suggesting possible subjects such as “first impressions;
climate and scenery: the poetry of nature in Japan,” “home life and popular domestic religion,” “curiosities of legends and superstitions,” and “old popular melodies and songs,” among other things, he defines his “totally new way”: “A subject would be considered solely in the relation of personal experiences bearing upon it, from which relation anything bordering upon commonplace narrative would be carefully excluded. The studied aim would be to create, in the minds of the readers, a vivid impression of living in Japan, — not simply as an observer but as one taking part in the daily existence of the common people, and thinking with their thoughts” (III, 329, 330). His method was first to enter the mind of the common people, and to personally experience their life as it is being lived by them, and then to artistically recreate its impressions in the reader’s mind. His method was to be empathic and impressionistic; it was to see and show Japan by personally entering and recording the soul of the Japanese as they think their thoughts
and feel their feelings. And Hearn’s eye found a lot to see in Japan, perhaps even more than Chamberlain and Lowell had ever seen there.1
B. H. Chamberlain and the Thing
Chamberlain’s Handbook, in its chapter on the shrines of Ise in the third section on central Japan, gives the information first on the route from Tokyo to Yamada via Nagoya with distances between major stations on the way from Nagoya, and then the ticket prices for the performance of Ise Ondo and Kagura or local souvenirs on sale in Yamada. Reaching the shrines themselves, it gives a plan of the Geku, or “Outer Temple” along with factual information about the size of the shrine — “34 ft. in length by 19 ft. in width. Its floor, raised about 6 ft. from the ground, is supported on wooden posts planted in the earth. A balcony 3 ft. wide, which is approached by a flight of nine steps 15 ft. in width, runs right round the building” (309)
— or about the daily food offering to each deity — “four cups of water, sixteen saucers of rice, and four of salt, besides fish, birds, fruits, seaweed, and vegetables” (310). As for the reputed antiquity of the architecture, it duly notes that given the Sengyo, or “Transference,” “the immemorial antiquity of the Ise temples is therefore only the antiquity of a continuous tradition, not that of the actual edifices” (307). Then the chapter leaves the factual territory to approach the unascertainable. The sanctity of the Naiku, or
“Inner Temple,” derives from the presence of a mirror, an emblem of Ama- terasu the Sun-Goddess, which some Japanese say is itself a deity while others take it to be merely her image. The mirror itself can never be seen: “It is kept in a box of chamæcyparis wood, which rests on a low stand covered with a piece of white silk. The mirror itself is wrapped in a bag of brocade,
which is never opened or renewed; but when it begins to fall to pieces from age, another bag is put on, so that the actual covering consists of many layers. Over the whole is placed a sort of wooden cage with ornaments said to be of pure gold, over which again is thrown a cloth of coarse silk, falling to the floor on all sides. The coverings of the box are all that can be seen, when the doors are opened at the various festivals” (306). Thus something unseeable is present at the heart of the innermost sanctum. An attempt to see the unseeable was once made at the cost of life, as Chamberlain recalls with
“a melancholy historical interest” (307). On his visit to the Geku dedicated to the Goddess of Food, Arinori Mori, minister of education and “one of the foremost leaders of modern Japanese progress,” “lifted [the] curtain with his walking-stick in order to obtain a better view of the interior of the temple court,” and for this act he was assassinated later on the day of the promulgation of the Japanese constitution in 1889, popular sympathy going so markedly to the side of the assassin, Nishino Buntaro, a fanatic Shintoist (308-9).
In the general introduction to the Handbook, Chamberlain discusses the unseeability of the Shinto religion in Japan mainly from a historical perspective. He first underlines the fact that the two major Japanese religions — the indigenous Shinto, and Buddhism imported from India via China and Korea — are “so thoroughly interfused in practice” (37) that it is difficult to see either one in its distinctive purity. He attributes the success of this interfusion over some twelve centuries to the adoption and absorption of the shallow Shinto naïveté by the deep Buddhist sagacity:
“The Shinto religion demands little more of its adherents than a visit to the local temple on the occasion of the annual festival, and does not profess to teach any theory of the destiny of man, or of moral duty, thus leaving the
greater part of the field free to the priests of Buddha, with their apparatus of theological dogma aided by splendid rites and gorgeous decorations”
(37). Shinto, a simple “compound of nature-worship and ancestor-worship,”
the latter including the worship of the Sun-Goddess as “the ancestress of the line of heaven-descended Mikados,” gives only a rudimentary moral teaching: you should only “follow your natural impulses, and obey the Mikado’s decrees” (38). Buddhism, on the other hand, with its elaborate doctrines of avatars and metempsychosis as well as its moral teaching of tolerance, found it easy to incorporate the Shintoist deities into the Buddhist pantheon, thus establishing “a mixed system, known as Ryobu Shinto or Shin-Butsu Konko” (40). Given the historical fact of continuance over more than a thousand years of this “apparently anomalous condition of things”
(37), any recent attempt to separate the two religions and to revive Shinto in its pristine purity is an attempt either at the impossible or at a politically motivated fraud. Under the new political pressure to prove the divine sovereignty of the reinstated Emperor after the revolution of 1868, “a school of enthusiastically patriotic literati” busied themselves with “re-discovering”
in historical documents the pure Shintoist Japan before the Buddhist contamination, and reviving it purified in the modernized Japan in the Meiji era. The result of these patriotic zealots’ efforts is sarcastically summarized by Chamberlain: “The temple of Hachiman in Kamakura has been despoiled of its chief beauty” for foreign visitors, and the style of “pure Shinto,” which is at least “unique, being one of the few things Japanese not borrowed from China,” is “severely simple” indeed (40).
Chamberlain’s descriptions of the shrines of Ise and assessment of Shinto in his Handbook are in fact heavily indebted to E. M. Satow’s two papers read at the Asiatic Society of Japan in 1874: “The Shintô Temples of Isé”
and “The Revival of Pure Shintô.” Chamberlain’s information on the route to Ise is only a slight modification of the table prepared by Satow (115), and the former’s measurements of the shrine of Geku are all lifted from the latter’s description of the Shôden, or chief shrine, of the Geku (121). Even Chamberlain’s discussion of the significance of the mirror or how it is kept concealed in the box under multiple coverings are almost verbatim quotation from Satow (134). Satow’s “The Revival of Pure Shintô” is a full-scale monograph on the development of Shinto revivalism, introducing the main works of four major theorists — Kada Azumamaro (1669-1736), Mabuchi [of Kamo] (1697-1769), Motoöri Norinaga (1730-1801), and Atsutane Hirata (1776-1843). Satow begins by defining “pure Shinto” and “revival”
as follows: “By ‘pure Shintô’ is meant the religious belief of the Japanese people previous to the introduction of Buddhism and the Confucian philosophy into Japan, and by its revival the attempt which a modern school of writers has made to eliminate these extraneous influences, and to present Shintô in its original form” (1). And he traces quite meticulously how all these revivalist theorists tackled with the issues involved, and “solved”
them, ingeniously or not, through their philological study of the original Japanese language in the Manyoshu, religious study of the original Japanese cosmology and religion in the Kojiki, and socio-political study of the original Japanese society as it is recorded in the Nihongi [or Nihon-Shoki].
Satow’s presentation is cool and detached, only quoting and summarizing the theorists’ books most of the time, and commenting on rare occasions, for example, that “The most remarkable point about this long tirade [by Motoöri] against China is that Japan was indebted to her for all the arts and sciences that make life better than nonentity for a complete system of government and laws, and even for the very system of writing which enabled
the writer to record this arrogant and spiteful feeling” (38), or that Hirata
“omits to give any explanation of the mystery [of a “Duality” or “Trinity” in Unity in his cosmology], probably because no explanation is possible” (86).
In his conclusion, Satow voices his skepticism of the theorists on the basis of
“historical criticism”: “It is, however, manifest that such of their conclusions as are founded on the alleged infallibility of the ancient records, or on any premisses [sic] which involve the miraculous or supernatural must for those very reasons be discredited; and the real nature and origin of Shintô must be decided by the usual canons of historical criticism” (97). He does approve the direction taken by the Japanese theorists — the philological and textual criticism of the Kojiki, Nihongi, and Manyoshu, the oldest existent Japanese histories and poems —, but concludes that their critical endeavors have not gone far enough: “By carrying out this programme, and following in the steps of the native scholars, it would be alone possible to check their work and at the same time to arrive at correct conclusions, for it is very clear that the last word has yet to be said on the subject of Shintô” (98).
Satow’s reading of his paper “The Shintô Temples of Isé” was followed by an exchange of views by the audience, starting with a comment by the president of the Asiatic Society that “he had earnestly endeavoured to find out what there was in [Shinto], but had long given it up, unable to find anything to reward his labor” (135). Satow agreed that “Shintoism contained no moral code” and referred to Motoöri’s view that “morals were invented by the Chinese because they were an immoral people, but in Japan there was no necessity for any system of morals, as every Japanese acted aright if he only consulted his own heart” (ibid.). Motoöri’s view virtually precluded the possibility of self-conscious moral judgment or questioning of right or wrong, and therefore, “Shintôism, as expounded by Motoöri, was nothing
else than an engine for reducing the people to a condition of mental slavery”
(ibid.). This comment by Satow, which belies his cautiously maintained air of objective neutrality in the paper itself, triggers the audience’s more outspoken comments on the essential hollowness of Shintoism as a religion, and on the political use made of that hollowness. Sir Harry Parkes joined in, saying that “Japanese in general seemed utterly at a loss to describe [what Shintoism was], but this circumstance was intelligible if what was once an indigenous faith had been turned in later days into a political engine. Under such circumstances its character as a religion would be lost” (136). Rev. Dr.
Brown categorically denied Shintoism any religious status, declaring that
“all the essentials of a religion are wanting in Shintôism…. Wherever it may have originated, it is, as a religion, hollow, empty and jejune beyond any other that is known among men” (137-38), and predicts that “the endeavour [by the Japanese government] to revive the interest in this would-be religion must end in entire failure” (138). Thus, the mystifying negative unseeability at the heart of Shintoism had been turned into a manifest positive proof of emptiness or void, which could only be covered up by political fraudulence.
Chamberlain’s Things Japanese (1st ed. 1890) had nothing new to add on the shrines of Ise or Shinto. The entry on Shinto states that “Shinto, often spoken of as a religion, is hardly entitled to that name. It has no set of dogmas, no sacred book, no moral code” (308), and that “there was not even a shadowy idea of any code of morals, or any systematization of the simple notions of the people concerning things unseen” (309), and quotes Satow at length in the latter half. The entry as a whole reads as nothing more than summaries, paraphrases, or simple repetitions of what had been read at the Asiatic Society or written in the Handbook, thereby raising a question about substantial authorship or originality. This situation, however, is quite
a natural one. In 1874 Chamberlain became a member of the Asiatic Society which had been created two years before, and Satow’s papers on Ise and Shinto were among the very first he heard read there. Chamberlain was the society’s secretary (1883-1888), and the president (1891-93), and in those capacities he was to “vulgarize” and publicize the Society’s achievements to a wider, non-member audience. Moreover, Chamberlain and Mason took over the Handbook (3rd ed. 1891) from the second edition (1883) by Satow and Hawes with a newly expanded introduction with Satow’s sections on Shinto and Buddhism. Chamberlain and Satow had been in quite close association and collaborative relationship not only in their academic capacities but also in their private life, until the latter’s departure from Japan to be a consulate general in Siam in 1884 (cf. Kusuya, esp. chaps III and VI, Section ii).
The strongest and most important bond between Chamberlain and Satow is their shared loyalty to what the latter called “the usual canons of historical criticism,” discussed only very briefly at the end of his “The Revival of Pure Shintô.” These “canons of historical criticism” represent a principle informing Chamberlain’s Things Japanese, and especially an important entry there on “History and Mythology.” The main body of the entry gives what it is expected to give — a general outline of Japanese history, starting with what the Kojiki and Nihongi “record” and then presenting major historical periods up to 1890, the year of the book’s publication. However, in the introductory and concluding remarks, Chamberlain makes clear his severe criticism against any impure mixture or adulteration – against a natural mixture of mythological fabulations and historical facts at the beginning of Japanese history, and against intentional distortions of historical facts for political manipulations. At the very beginning, Chamberlain declares
that “To the eye of the critical investigation, Japanese history, properly so- called, opens only in the latter part of the fifth or the beginning of the sixth century after Christ” (143), when the importation of the Chinese writing system into Japan first made possible historiography, and then history itself.
When the Kojiki and Nihongi tell about the “divine generations” as “the early history (so-called),” “it is absolutely impossible to separate the two [i.e.
history and mythology],” even though, Chamberlain emphasizes, historical
“criticism is not at all [such] a ‘Japanesey’ thing” (144). At the end of the entry, he reiterates, perhaps with the contemporary Shinto revivalists in mind, that “There seems little doubt that the ruling powers at any given time manipulated both the more ancient records and the records of their own age, in order to suit their private ends” (154). In the nineteenth century just as in the eighth, the scribes and historiographers were always subservient to those in power who ruled the nation, at least in the East: “A little reflection will show that such manipulations of history are likely to be the rule rather than the exception in Asiatic countries” (164). Therefore, “a critical history of Japan remains to be written,” and it can be written, if ever, only by the West:
“The love of truth for truth’s sake is not a general human characteristic, but one of the exceptional traits of the modern European mind, developed slowly by many causes, chiefly by those habits of accuracy which physical science does so much to foster” (164). Thus “the canons of historical criticism” are united with those of accuracy in physical science under the shared banner of truth exclusively within the modern European mind.
Precisely with that kind of mind, Chamberlain was determined to see “things Japanese.” Facts, and facts alone — anything else are mere words, tinseled fabrications or disingenuous manipulations, all so distinctively “Japanesey.”
Already in his translation of The Kojiki, or Records of Ancient Matters
published in 1882 as a supplement to Vol. X of The Transactions of the Asiatic Society, Chamberlain had exercised his historical criticism on a solid basis of philological criticism. In the translator’s introduction, he accepted the Kojiki as Japan’s “earliest authentic connected literary product” (i) and as “the oldest existing product of the Altaic mind” (lxxxi), in contrast to the Nihon-Gi, which is thoroughly Chinese in its philosophical speculations and moral precepts, its strong tendencies toward rationalization and systematization, and even in the language — Chinese — in which it was written. The task for Chamberlain as a critical philologist and historian was to defend the earliest Japan in its authenticity from others’ intentional or unintentional fables about the original pure Japan prior to any foreign contaminations, either Buddhist or Chinese. “The critical European investigator” (xi) confronts “the uncritical Oriental mind” (xxv) with its full array of “fanciful accounts” and “utterly groundless assertions”
(lxix). Chamberlain believes that “if the early history of Japan is not all true, no amount of make-believe can make it so. What we would like to do is to sift the true from the false” (lxxxi). Both in the Kojiki itself and its commentators there seems to be no serious attempt whatsoever at sifting the true from the false: there is “no break between the fabulous and the real,”
but only “the fact of continuity of the Japanese mythology and history”
(lix). The fact of the matter is that the facts recorded in these “records of ancient matters” and commentaries upon them are in the state of hopeless mixtures and inconsistencies (lxiv), with an “elaborate system of fictitious dates” and other “garblings of history” (li). Critical philology, on the other hand, definitively shows that the Japanese word kami, for instance, usually rendered “deity” in English, does not mean much more than “superior,”
“top” or “above,” including hair on the top of the head, so that “we must,
so to speak, bring [our notion of deity] down from the heights to which Western thought has raised it” (xix-xx), when we understand what is meant by the word kami. The “coincidences of sound and sense” in the Japanese and Chinese words for metal, army, or county, etc. prove that the Japanese words had been imported from the Chinese; the “radical affinity” of the Japanese and the Korean words for Buddha or temple proves that the former had been borrowed from the latter (lxxix-lxxx). What these philological investigations establish is that there was no “organized religion” — the putative pure original Japanese religion — in early Japan, but only “a bundle of miscellaneous superstitions rather than a co-ordinated system”
(lxii), or that Japanese philologists’ etymology for the word hotoke as “hito ki, human spirit” may be ingenious but is totally false (lxxx). A similar kind of criticism applies equally to the zealous Shinto theorists’ invention of the Japanese “Divine Characters” prior to the introduction of the Chinese ideographic writing system (xlviii) as well as to the modern Shintoists’
acceptance of what is recorded in ancient history as “literal truth” or their
“extremely comical” attempt to rationalize it through allegorical readings (lix). Chamberlain concludes that the fact and truth about the “matters”
recorded in the “records of ancient matters” are so hard to ascertain that “in the field of the critical investigation of documents there is an immense deal still to be done” (lxxxi).
The same “historical criticism” is the guiding principle in Things Japanese, which Chamberlain calls “a dictionary, not of words but of things” or “a guide-book, less to places than to subjects” (2). Things appear to him as subjects; things are not self-evident substances or realities in themselves, but subjects fashioned and maintained by words and places, by local opinions and customs. Things should be subjected to critical
investigation which alone can penetrate the layers of words and conventions, plausible legends and local traditions, to find truth. And this critical investigation should be par excellence a historical criticism, because things are subject to historical changes, and because those words and conventions are often created and sustained by secret motives of nostalgia and fantasy in Japanese as well as foreign observers. This is the reason why he repeatedly reminds his readers of the facts of historical changes in the introductory chapter to Things Japanese. He begins by referring to “the transition stage of modern Japan” (1) and ends by repeating that “Old Japan is dead, and the only decent thing to do with the corpse is to bury it” (8). His dictionary of things is in fact an “epitaph recording the many and extraordinary virtues of the deceased, — his virtues, but also his frailties” (ibid.) His historical criticism tries to “call things by their names” (8), and the first thing it finds in modern Japan is the death of the Old Japan. However, the modern Japanese turned out to be more ingenious, which provoked Chamberlain’s indignation so much as to urge him to “call things by their names” once again, pronouncing their “words” all fraudulent inventions. In 1911, the year he left Japan for good after thirty-eight years of stay, he published
“The Invention of a New Religion,” which later appeared as an appendix to the fifth revised edition of Things Japanese in 1927, and under the entry title “Bushido” in the sixth edition in 1939 (but suppressed in Japan). The newly invented Japanese religion which consists of “Mikado-worship and Japan-worship” is an ideological triumvirate of imperialism, the rejuvenate Shinto cult, and nationalism (9). The system has been devised and run by the official class and bureaucrats in order to “serve the interests of that class, and, incidentally the interests of the nation at large” (16), from the newly required bowing to the emperor’s picture in all schools, through the
official envoy sent to the shrines of Ise to report military victories, to a new creation of Bushido as “an institution of a code of rules” (14). The invention is quite a new one without a doubt, given “the sober facts” of history about the Japanese “cavalier” treatments of their sovereigns in the past including their depositions, assassinations and exiles, or that Bushido was “unknown until a decade or two ago!” (12, 13). The artificial “fabric of ideas” (12) of the new cult is woven in the shadows of the protective walls of the Japanese language, both spoken and written, Japanese officialdom, and the deceptive pose of hospitality in Japanese self-presentation — all impenetrable to the European investigators. Modern Westerners with “the disinterested love of truth for its own sake” (17) attempt to “let the sunlight of criticism into every nook and cranny of every subject” (26), but the Japanese official class thwarts them, well knowing that “the root of the faith it has planted needs darkness in which to grow and spread” (26). Chamberlain is understanding toward Rousseau’s philosophical “pseudo-history” about the natural state for the cause of individual freedom or toward the Jewish manipulation of oral tradition in order to construct a national polity upon the Yahwe worship (23-5), but he decidedly stands with Voltaire who “held religions to be the invention of priests” (5), and welcomes the Tertullianian honesty of an exceptional Japanese who privately confessed to Chamberlain, “we believe in it, although we know that it is not true” (27).
Percival Lowell and the Blank
If Chamberlain’s historical criticism found Japanese spirituality a mere invention, quite modern and politically motivated, the scientific investigation of Percival Lowell in his The Soul of the Far East (1888; vol.
III) proves the soul of the Far East to be a mere blank. He starts with a conclusive remark that “If with us [i.e. the Westerners] the I seems to be of the very essence of the soul, then the soul of the Far East may be said to be Impersonality” (15). The negative prefix im- indicates an absolute blank or emptiness. The “gradation of spirit” ranges between the Eastern void and the Western plenitude. Geographically, “America, Europe, the Levant, India, Japan, each is less personal than the one before” (ibid.), with America and Japan at the opposite extremities. Lowell, with a scientific mind and with a penchant to impatient abstract generalizations, does not hesitate to ascribe this “gradation of spirit” to “cosmic rather than to human causes” (ibid.).
This geographical gradation is also temporalized into ladders to climb for survival in the evolutionary process in time. And Lowell ends with a sinister warning and ultimatum for people in the Far East: “If these people continue in their old course, their earthly career is closed. Just as surely as morning passes into afternoon, so surely are these races of the Far East, if unchanged, destined to disappear before the advancing nations of the West” (226).
In the main body of the book, he illustrates the cosmic laws of evolution by tracing each of the peculiarities of the Far East as a lack or absence of substance essential for the Western plenitude. In the Japanese family, the oppression of all family members by the patriarch; in the Japanese system of adoption and abdication, the absence of the family as a living, organic social unit in face of an abstract notion of “the house”; in the Japanese language, the disuse of the personal pronouns “I” and “you” for the sake of a social etiquette of politeness, as well as the lack of gender in its nouns and the suspension of human agent and action until the end of sentence; in Japanese art, the neglect of scientific analysis in favor of aesthetic responses to the minute details on the surface, and the disregard of artists’ self-expression
in favor of vague self-dissolving assimilation with the whole natural world at large; in Japanese religion, the Shintoist complete silence on humanity and its afterlife, and the Buddhist categorical dismissal of humanity and denunciation of this world as illusion, mirage, deception and snare, its final goal being the entering of Nirvana by way of absolute self-abnegation.
The negative prefix in “impersonality” in the book’s first chapter
“Individuality” is nominalized — substantialized — into the noun “vacuity”
or “void” in the concluding chapter “Imagination.” Adoption in the Japanese familial system is extrapolated into the Japanese habit of adopting foreign ideas: “The less strong a man’s personality, the more prone is he to adopt the ideas of others, on the same principle that a void more easily admits a foreign body than does space that is already occupied; or as a blank piece of paper takes a dye more brilliantly for not being already tinted itself”
(219). The Buddhist ideal of self-abnegation will never lead to an ultimate enlightenment, but only to an exposure of an unnatural — even monstrous
— vacuity: “if by an impulse we cannot explain, we instinctively crave activity of mind, then the great gospel of Gautama touches us not; for to abandon self — egotism, that is, not selfishness – is the true vacuum which nature abhors” (225). The “impulse we cannot explain” is none other than imagination, which is not a mere artistic faculty for producing fictive images, but a fundamental law initiating and directing all activities of mind. It is the law of the mental world: “what spontaneous variation is to the material organism, imagination, apparently, is to the mental world” (196). It is “the divine impulse” creative of diversity out of homogeneity, individuality out of uniformity, distinctive personality out of the undifferentiated mass of the
“average.” It is a creative force behind “the shaping of the development”
(196). Without such a creative force, there could never be any movement at
all, any changes breaking through the stagnation of the mental world, any momentum for evolutionary process — development or growth — out of the void toward the Western plenitude. Devoid of the creative principle of imagination, the East is doomed to a certain death: “Their Nirvana is already being realized; already it has wrapped the Far East Asia in its winding sheet”
(226).
Lowell repeats his thesis about the Far East in the form of a well-intended exhortation to the young Japanese law school students in “The Danger of Imitation” (1889; vol. I) and in a more rhetorical form of bemused irony in “The Fate of a Japanese Reformer” (1890; vol. I). Their topics are variations upon the theme of adoption — imitation in the former, and costume in the latter. According to “The Danger of Imitation,” the same scientific law of evolution operates in the physical and the mental worlds, and man, each in his full selfhood and distinctive individuality, is “the acme of evolution” (Lecture II, 3). Self in its plenitude is to be known as such for its imagination as a force creating things out of nothing, for its instinct moving from the known to the unknown. Therefore, cognates as the terms “imagination” and “imitation” may be to each other, ‘to originate [through imagination] is to become the father of a thought, to imitate only to adopt the idea another begot” (II, 3). The distinction between genuine parentage by imagination and mere adoption by imitation is generalized into a distinction between substance and shadow, between fullness and emptiness: “Thus to copy another is to be oneself an outline of vacuity; a something in appearance, a nothing in fact” (III, 1). The judgments based on the universal law of evolution leaves no doubt about the only possible way for the Japanese people and nation to achieve real manhood and nationhood:
“What is true of a man amongst men, is true of nations among themselves.
With them, too, there are two doors; there is the back door of imitation and the front door of imagination. By which approach are you resolved Japan shall make her entrance into the comity of the world?” (III, 3). In “The Fate of a Japanese Reformer,” on the other hand, Lowell underscores the fact that the national celebration of the promulgation of the Japanese constitution and the assassination of Arinori Mori took place on the same day, on the 11th of February, 1889. Lowell writes for crude rhetorical effects of satire and burlesque aimed at the laughable gap or ludicrous mixture detected in the masses’ new sartorial adoptions, the new governmental body politic, and the barely hidden fissure in the New Japan. The revolution of 1868, which brought about the restoration of the Emperor and the general introduction of foreign ideas, was a “great revolutionary somersault” “startlingly acrobatic”
(680). The resulting wholesale mixture of “pandemonium” and “pantomime”
(685) arouses in foreign observers like Lowell “a touch of humor very close to pathos[,] for the old system helped to do in buffoon duty to the new”
(687), and the masses parading “grotesquely masked,” with “Rabelaisian nonchalance, pranking it with pleasing buffoonery” (685, 687) — “clowns with pasteboard noses and stovepipe hats caricaturing from ineptitude their very original,” or men and girls cross-dressed, “their clothes, and their carriags comically at odds” (687). Under the farcical surface on the celebration day runs a serious schism at the heart of Japanese nationhood and national psyche. Mori, “the embodiment of the most advanced of the new ideas” (690), was assassinated by Buntaro Nishino of old samurai stock
“with the singleness of zeal of a fanatic” (691). Among the public, “beneath a surface of decorous disapproval ran an undercurrent of admiration and sympathy” for the assassin to the extent that “a veritable cult … raised him into a sort of demigod,” while Mori, with the posthumous honors conferred
by the Emperor, is equally assured, Lowell notes, of his “entrance to [the shrines of the immortal gods] in heaven” (693).
Lowell’s last book on Japan2 — Occult Japan or the Way of the Gods – was published in 1895 (vol. V), two years after his last visit to Japan, and a year after his embarkation on his famous Martian studies. Occult Japan is an expanded version of his “Esoteric Shinto” published in the Transactions of the Asiatic Society in 1893 (vol. I), now structurally revised through his reading of William James’ The Principle of Psychology as well as his contact with the American Society for Psychic Research (Strauss xvi).
“Esoteric Shinto” was framed with the theory of Japanese impersonality employed in The Soul of the Far East, but now it is expanded toward the neuro-psychic theory of mental blankness in Occult Japan. With the subtitle
“An Esoteric Study of Japanese Personality and Possession,” the book is structured as a minute observation of the phenomena followed by a scientific analysis according to the noumena. In other words, it is structured to provide the dramatic effect of a demystifying exposure of an occult phenomenon under the searchlight of scientific investigation. First, the phenomena — the Shintoist rituals of god-possession on the top of Ontaké the sacred mountain
— are observed in great detail, from the sacred status of the mountain, through the stages of pilgrimage-ascent and the pilgrim costumes, to the paraphernalia and procedures and the changing states of the one possessed.
The possession is described as a regulated process of depletion of self: “The one thing needful to insure divine possession is purity. If you are pure, that is, blank enough, you can easily give habitation to a god. Now some men are born blanker than others, but none are by nature quite blank enough for religious purposes…. Additional vacuity must somehow be acquired, the amount varying not only with the man, but with the rank of the god by
whom he desires to be possessed. To reach this state of inanity is the object of the austerities (gyo)” (106; cf. “Esoteric Shinto,” II, 159). This “religious”
ritual for self-obliteration or self-effacement is analyzed, in the noumenon part of Occult Japan, along with the hypnotic trance studied by William B.
Carpenter, Rudolph H. Lotze, and William James. Symptoms observable in both types of trance — the lowering of the heat of the cerebral hemispheres or the decrease of the molecular action of the cortical cells – are indications of an abnormal state of consciousness, which negatively define the normal state of consciousness: consciousness as “nerve-glow” (312), the life- principle as a mode of motion, a mental idea as an outcome of “the neural current of molecular change [which] passes up the nerves, and through the ganglia reaches at the last the cortical cells and excites a change there” (311).
For Lowell, motion is a noumenon of self: neural currents are consubstantial with the activities of the human mind; an idea is a mode of motion (307) and a force (313), and introspection is the thought of thinking which is different from simply thinking the thought (314-15); and “personality, or a man’s mental force upon his fellows” is a measure of “the mental energy of the man” (287). If these motions cease or are suppressed, it would lead to the loss of self, and “we should be simple automata, void of memory, and incapable of reasoning; nature’s puppets at sensation’s string” (316). The loss of self, voluntary or induced, the trance state aimed at in either religious possession or in modern hypnotism, “would undo what evolution has done, and return to us a primeval savage in the body of an end-of-the-century man” (378). The occult Japan having thus been explored and, as it were, autopsied, the next, almost logical step for Lowell to take, it would seem, was an exploration of “life and civilization” on the yet unexplored planet Mars.
Lowell’s “Ontaké” (1893; vol. I), a long narrative poem on Shintoist trance-practicing, differs significantly from the “Esoteric Shinto” or Occult Japan, which treats the same subject. In the poem Lowell, an observing
“foreigner” speaking in the first person, duly notes, as he did in the other two works, the process of gradual evacuation of the pilgrim’s self to become an empty receptacle for a god’s visitation. Yet he does not harp upon the vacuity of the pilgrim’s mind in trance, but rather envies his mystic vision: “And listening to these men [i.e. the two pilgrims] I envied them / Their boon of instant converse with their God; / Immediate knowledge for immediate need” (ll. 289-91). And the narrator has his own equally mystic vision — a vision of the emptiness of his own self, or the impersonality of the cosmic principle of evolution and of the heaven’s void. Individuality is an illusion within nature’s scheme of things: “All-cunning Nature whispering to each / The proud importance of his petty ‘I’ / And all she hopes of him in consequence / That thus beguiled, poor dupe, in bettering self / Each may help further all she cares for – type” (ll. 308-12). The law of evolution is a terrible god indifferent to the particles of life it hurls around endlessly: “This spirit ’t is — the spirit to evolve / However slow and plodding be its course, / And not the happy habits of routine — / Bespeaks for man relationship with God / … / This moving spirit animating all / That shows itself in never-ceasing change, / This life of life, which otherwise had been / Automaton, incapable of growth” (ll. 347-50, 356-59). In such cosmic vision, “consciousness forgets / Time, space and self, in concentration tranced” (ll. 360-61), and when the mind awakes, it finds nothing but “the heaven’s void”: “The purple shadow from the gulf had crept / To twilight bow spanning the heaven’s void / As earth hid earth; then one by one stole forth / The steady stars, and the great void grew vast” (ll. 380-83). In “Esoteric
Shinto” and Occult Japan the void was exclusively located in the “soul”
of the Far East, but now it is found in the very soul of the West before the inexorable god of evolution. However, Lowell did not develop, but simply disregarded, if not completely forgot, his own mystic-poetic vision of
“Ontaké.” He chose to remain a foreign observer of the East with an arsenal of the newest progressive ideas, enjoying his visit to the full, amusedly and bemusedly.
Lafcadio Hearn and the Ghost
In the preface to his first book on Japan, Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (1894), Hearn quotes Mitford from his “Tales of Old Japan” (1871): “The books which have been written of late years about Japan have either been compiled from official records, or have contained the sketchy impressions of passing travelers. Of the inner life of the Japanese the world at large knows but little: their religion, their superstitions, their way of thought, the hidden springs by which they move – all these are as yet mysteries” (V, vii). And Hearn adds, “This invisible life referred to by Mr. Mitford is the Unfamiliar Japan of which I have been able to obtain a few glimpses” (ibid.). This “inner life of the Japanese” eludes official records or passing travelers so much so that it remains mostly “invisible.” However, it is not that there is nothing visible but rather that there is something invisible. The “springs” by which the Japanese mind moves — religion, superstition, ways of thought — are all there, only hidden, making Japan mysteriously unfamiliar. It is possible, however, to obtain glimpses into the inner life of the Japanese, by means of two kinds of interiority. The inner life is to be sought not in the “Europeanized circles” of “intellectual Japan” centered in the nation’s capital, but among
“the great common people, who represent in Japan, as in all countries, the national virtues” (viii, ix) and who are to “be understood only by one who has long resided in the interior” (x). And it is to be discovered by those observers “fortunate and sympathetic enough to enter it” to the extent of
“doubt[ing] whether the course of our boasted western progress is really in the direction of moral development” (ix), not those with “the critical spirit of modernized Japan” under the influence of “foreign bigotry to destroy the simple, happy belief of the people” (xi). The common people as a genuine core of interiority of the race and the empathic imagination as a mental ability required for achieving true understanding – the inner life of the Japanese as object and the inner life of the Japanologist as subject – meet in mutual understanding of “the hidden springs” by which the human mind moves, such as religion, superstition, or ways of thought. Hearn approvingly quotes William Lecky on superstitions: “[Superstitions] often meet and gratify the inmost longings of the heart. They offer certainties where reason can only afford possibilities or probabilities. They supply conceptions on which the imagination loves to dwell. They sometimes impart even a new sanction to moral truths” (xi). Certainties of the heart, moral truths for the imagination, may appear illusory because invisible, or non-entities because intangible, but they are real substances of the “inner life” of the human mind. Hearn goes on to quote Lecky on illusions: “we owe more to our illusions than to our knowledge. The imagination, which is altogether constructive, probably contributes more to our happiness than the reason, which in the sphere of speculation is mainly critical and destructive” (ibid.). Thus Hearn’s “inner life” is different both from the outer life of Chamberlain’s things and from the nothingness of Lowell’s blank.
Something invisible is the substance of that “inner life,” and the imaginative
understanding, equally invisible, is required in order to obtain glimpses into it. The “inner life” of Japan Hearn will discover is to reveal, therefore, the
“soul” as much of Japan as of his own. It will be “a totally new way” of seeing Japan.
Following the advice of “a kind English professor,” obviously Chamberlain himself, to write down his evanescent first impressions, Hearn sets out to record his impressions of what he saw in “My First Day in the Orient” (V, 3). In fact, in his letter from Yokohama to Chamberlain on the second day after his arrival, he confesses he is “almost afraid to see”: “The little I have already seen of this marvelous country so far surpasses anticipation that I am almost afraid to see more for the moment:
impressions so multitudinous and so sharply novel come to me every day that the mind refuses to digest them. Everything seems enchanted now…”
(XV, 323). On his first day in Japan, he sees letters, a mountain, and a mirror. They all seem “enchanted” precisely because his observing eyes are enchanting, or, reversely, his eyes are enchanted because the things he sees are so enchanting. “My First Day” offers intimate “glimpses” into both the enchanting and the enchanted.
First he sees Chinese letterings on fluttering flags and swaying blue drapery. He does not understand the meanings of those letters, but knows they are “primitive hieroglyph[s] or ideograph[s]” — the carved or written marks of certain, as yet unknown, ideas and truths —, totally different from the Western phonetic alphabet, which is a set of “dull, inanimate symbols of vocal sounds” (V, 7). The letters impress him quite differently:
“an ideograph is a vivid picture: it lives; it speaks; it gesticulates. And the whole space of a Japanese street is full of such living characters – figures that cry out to the eyes, words that smile or grimace like faces” (ibid.).
Those “living characters” fill up the whole space called Japan; they show their faces fraught with inner meanings as yet unspoken. Those are “magical characters” (V, 6), showing “the strongly personal, animate, esoteric aspect of Japanese lettering” (V, 8). They give him a sense of “romance” and “the real sensation of being in the Orient, in this Far East so much read of, so long dreamed of, yet, as the eyes bear witness, heretofore all unknown” (V, 4).
Next he sees a mountain, Mt. Fuji, and this time it is his own magical characters and language that animate the inanimate thing: “And enormously high above the line of [great hills and serrated mountains] towers an apparition indescribably lovely — one solitary snowy cone, so filmily exquisite, so spiritually white, that but for its immemorially familiar outline, one would surely deem it a shape of cloud. Invisible its base remains, being the same delicious tint as the sky: only above the eternal snow-line its dreamy cone appears, seeming to hang, the ghost of a peak, between the luminous land and the luminous heaven — the sacred and matchless mountain, Fujiyama” (V, 16-7). The snowy cone becomes a spirit, the base disappears, the cone starts to dream, the peak floats in the mid-air like a ghost, and the mountain becomes an apparition. They only appear to do so owing to the effects of lighting: “the glorious light” of the day, the “pale clear blue” of sea and sky, the luminous land and heaven, — “the summer blue, and the white soft witchery of the Japanese sun” (V, 16, 17). Yet, at the same time, the scenery is etherealized and spiritualized through Hearn’s magical words: his impressionistic use of adjectives and adverbs, such as
“indescribably lovely,” “spiritually white,” “delicious,” and “sacred and matchless.” The peak becomes a ghost within, and precisely because of, his language which “describes” it; the magical, spiritualizing transfigurations are as much the “witchery” of his language as that of the Japanese sun.
Thus the natural scenery becomes a “living picture” (V, 17) in which Mt.
Fuji acquires, or is made to appear to possess, its “ghostly beauty” (ibid.).
Within his mind’s eyes, the apparition of a mountain meets the spirit of a verbal impressionist painter. A thing outside meets and fuses itself with a mind inside on the retina of this observer — seer — of the ghostly Japan.
Hence, the “living picture” lives on in the “forgotten memories of picture books” (ibid.). Perception and remembrance are the same act of “seeing”
an image before the mind’s eye. One may stop remembering things in the past and begin perceiving things in space. However, when one wakes from remembering as if from dreaming, and “the delusion vanished,” one still finds oneself within the realm of “the romance of reality” (ibid.). For Hearn, the “seer” of Japan, the romance persists both in time and in space, and that is the reality of the Japan he “sees.”
And finally he sees a mirror. He first wants to see an image of Buddha at a tera, but “the shrine of Buddha” is closed, and he only sees “a darkness behind the shrine and altar — whether recess or inner sanctuary [he]
cannot distinguish” (V, 19). Instead, he learns from a student priest that Buddhists believe that “all beings are only dreaming in this fleeting world of unhappiness” and that “the soul always was — always will be” (V, 21, 22). Then he goes to a miya, “a [Shinto] shrine of the gods of the more ancient faith of the land.” He sees a torii, a Shinto symbol, with its “mystical suggestiveness as a gateway” and its “grace of an animated ideograph” (V, 24), but finds a small inner temple “all closed up,” remembering having
“read so much about the disappointing vacuity of Shinto temples” (V, 25). Instead, he sees a miniature landscape in bonsai works as well as a panorama view of the whole city from a belvedere — “all visible in one delicious view — blue-penciled in a beauty of ghostly haze indescribable”
(V, 26). He tries another tera, and this time he is led into “the dimness of an inner sanctuary” by the priest who slides back “screen after screen” to pour in light, and he, looking for “the image of the Deity or Spirit” (V, 29), sees:
“— only a mirror, a round, pale disk of polished metal, and my own face therein, and behind this mockery of me a phantom of the far sea” (ibid.). He sees nothing but what looks back at him — himself — , initiating endlessly revolving exchanges between the seer and the seen, resolving the outer and the inner worlds into each other. “Only a mirror!” he cries out, and asks,
“Symbolizing what? Illusion? Or that the Universe exists for us solely as the reflection of our own souls? Or the old Chinese teaching that we must seek the Buddha only in our own hearts?” (V, 29), and he answers: “I am beginning to wonder whether I shall ever be able to discover that which I seek — outside of myself! That is, outside of my own imagination” (V, 30). In a sense, the physical world objectively out there is absorbed into the prison of the inner, subjective world of the mind, but this also indicates that the whole inner world is evaporating and melting out into the outer world it dreams of beyond itself. The inner and the outer mutually dream of each other, seeking endlessly “the romance of reality.” This is precisely for Hearn the realm of the ghostly, his own ghostly country. Almost intentionally he blurs the distinction between the tera and the miya, the Buddhist temples and the Shintoist shrines, in order to delineate the vast region of the ghostly – the spiritual and the sacred. And his vision – his eyes and mind – dyes this region of the ghostly with a holy coloring of blue: “a charm perhaps due rather to softest lucidity than to any positive tone — an atmospheric limpidity extraordinary, with only a suggestion of blue in it, through which the most distant objects appear focused with amazing sharpness” (V, 4). Or rather, all in elfish blue: “Elfish everything seems; for everything as well as
everybody is small, and queer, and mysterious: the little houses under their blue roofs, the little shop-fronts hung with blue, and the smiling little people in their blue costumes” (V, 5) — just like ideographs on “dark blue drapery”
or “the ghost of a peak” amid “pale clear blue.”
In 1893, one year before the publication of Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, Hearn had a little controversy, in correspondence, with Chamberlain over the use of Japanese words in English texts — not in ideographs, but in phonetically transcribed forms, such as tera, miya, or kwaidan. The controversy started with Chamberlain’s objections: “I do not like the use of Japanese words except whey they represent an idea for which there is no English equivalent…. If the reader does not understand such a word as gwaikokujin (and what an ugly-looking word it is, with its w’s and its k’s!), his pleasure in reading the sentence is spoilt” (More Letters, 67-68). The ugliness comes from incomprehension forced upon the English reader, and, conversely, the beauty would come from the clarity of an idea correctly conveyed and completely understood. Chamberlain goes on to emphasize that “in reality the letters do nothing, the connection of ideas, the images spontaneously evoked, do everything” (Letters, 21). The letters should not do anything except helping the spontaneous evocation of ideas or conceptual images, and guaranteeing a smooth connection from one idea on to the next. That is to say, the letters should never have a murky ponderousness or materialistic opacity, but should be nothing, disappearing into the lucidity of their complete service to the master-ideas. Hearn, on the other hand, insisted from “the artistic, the romantic side,” upon the physique of the letters and sounds: “For me words have colour, form, character; they have faces, ports, manners, gesticulations; they have moods, humours, eccentricities; — they have tints, tones, personalities” (XV, 430). He likens an unknown word
to a stranger with a strange appearance, and says that “he is interesting BECAUSE he is unintelligible” (ibid.). From the standpoint of a verbal artist, a word-painter, who is “the dreamer of dreams / To whom what is and what seems / Is often one and the same,” Hearn declares he can “see the colour of words, the tints of words, the secret ghostly motions of words” (XV, 431). In response, Chamberlain compares words to musical notes whose significances depend on their relative positions on a scale, their associations with other notes in the harmonious unity of a musical piece, concluding that
“words from an unknown language belong to no scale, and therefore either sound out of tune, or else are misinterpreted, — their phonetic significance, I mean, is misinterpreted, quite apart from the question of intelligibility or unintelligibility to the logical mind” (More Letters, 71-72). Chamberlain’s logical mind naturally loves a well-regulated, harmonious system of relational positions and associations under “the rule [— grammar —] of euphony” (ibid.). After all, he remains understanding and respectful, if not totally admiring, toward Hearn’s artistic talents and practices, and this is a significant contrast to his criticism of Lowell’s shallow understanding and indulgence in superficial style. He writes to Hearn that while “you can manage words as if they were fairies and you their king,” the “two defects – excessive simplicity of thought which sums up under one or two abstractions phenomena that are vastly too complex for such cavalier treatment, and excessive elaborateness of style – are exercising their Nemesis on [Lowell].
He has come to take words for things; he deals in alliteration and jeux- de-mots, sacrifices sense to style, with the usual result that the style itself is bad…. All that appeals to him nowadays are artifices of style” (More Letters, 72, 81-2). What differentiates Lowell’s jeux-de-mots and Hearn’s ideographs for Chamberlain is his own, humble sense of the “phenomena
that are vastly too complex” — that is, the Japan that he and the two others try to see in their own ways.3
The second stanza of a poem entitled “Fuji the Sacred Mountain” runs as follows: “A simple perfect cone, its peak snow-white / Throned in mid-air, its base obliterate / In morning mists, first born of day from night, / Fuji, the peerless, dawns upon our sight / As these ’twixt sea and sky, in matchless state / The Land of Sunrise greets the sunrise light!” The poem is not by Hearn, but by Lowell (I, n.pag.). It is easy to see that the poem’s inspiration has been derived from the banal rhetoric in the last line, and that it undercuts beforehand any real significance of the mountain when it “dawns upon our sight.” That it has dawned upon Lowell’s sight in a ridiculous, farcical light is amply shown in his “The Fate of a Japanese Reformer” discussed above. The Japanese reformer, “the embodiment of the new Western ideas,”
was assassinated by a fanatic worshipper of the Old Japan symbolized by the sacred mountain. The reforming surface has been destroyed by the recalcitrant and reactionary depth of the national psyche, throwing Japan into a ludicrous nationwide farce. Hearn’s “A Conservative” in Kokoro (1895) traces a similar “fate of a Japanese reformer” in a totally opposite direction.
In the preface to the book, Hearn makes sure that the title kokoro (heart)
“signifies also mind, in the emotional sense; spirit; resolve; sentiment;
affection; and inner meaning – just as we say in English, ‘the heart of things’’’ (VII, 264), and he places Mt. Fuji at the heart of Japanese inner life.
Hearn’s conservative character is modeled on his close friend, Nobushige Amenomiya (1858-1906). He was a son of a samurai in Fukui, learned Western languages and sciences, became a Christian, traveled extensively in the West, and returned to Japan now a conservative and a patriot (cf. The Koizumi Yakumo Jiten, 19-20). The conservative returns from the New to
the Old, and the turning point is his personal observation of the realities of Western civilization putatively based on Christian faith: “And he hated it — hated its tremendous and perfectly calculated mechanism; hated its utilitarian stability; hated its conventions, its greed, its blind cruelty, its huge hypocrisy, the foulness of its want and the insolence of its wealth. Morally, it was monstrous; conventionally, it was brutal…. It was all one great wolfish struggle” (VII, 418). The struggle was a fundamental one between Western intellectual knowledge and Japanese emotional ideals. And Hearn concludes that “Western superiority is not ethical. It lay in forces of intellect developed through suffering incalculable, and used for the destruction of the weak by the strong” (418-19). To seek superiority not in intellect but in emotions, not in materialistic wealth but in moral rectitude, not in egoistical possessiveness but in selfless communality — that is the way to overcome and go beyond Western civilization in the moral evolution of the human race. Such moral superiority is what Mt. Fuji symbolizes when Hearn’s conservative returns to see the peak: “the first sight of Fuji at dawn is not to be forgotten in this life or the next” (420). He is repeatedly told by the official on board to look “higher up — much higher!” (VII, 421), beyond the self, the present, and even the living: “everything dimmed: he saw neither Fuji above, nor the nearing hills below… nor anything of the modern Japan;
he saw the Old, … he saw the faces of the dead”; being “startled from long- closed cells of memory” he saw himself as a child at his father’s house, and
“once more he felt the light touch of his mother’s hand guiding his little steps to the place of morning worship, before the household shrine, before the tablets of the ancestors” (VII, 422). He does not see Fuji, because it has made itself invisible, melting into his father’s house and his mother’s hand, and into the household shrine of long dead ancestors. This is what he sees as
an ethical goal for the further moral reformation and evolution of the human race.
While Lowell went from Mt. Fuji to the peak of Ontaké, the center of Shinto practice of divine possession, to see the occult Japan, Hearn went to Kitzuki in Izumo, the most ancient shrine in the most holy ground in Japan, the country of gods. By a special favor granted by Takanori Senke, the chief priest of Kitzuki, he became “the first European ever permitted to enter into the Oho-yashiro” or “the dwelling of the God” (V, 223). He sees, but “within are visible only some of the ordinary emblems of Shinto, and the exterior of that Holy of Holies into which none may look” (221). He does see a mirror, but it is not “the shintai, or body of the deity” (228), but only one of the quaint relics displayed on a low bench along with jewels, a Chinese flute, swords, helmets and arrows (228-29). He meditates upon the reputed vacuity of Shinto, and concludes that “Shinto has no philosophy, no code of ethics, no metaphysics; and yet, by its very immateriality, it can resist the invasion of Occidental religious thought as no other Orient faith can” (242- 43). But the absence does not mean void nor does immateriality deny reality, as misguided scholars have thought. Rather, “the reality of Shinto lives not in books, nor in rites, nor in commandments, but in the national heart, of which it is the highest emotional religious expression, immortal and ever young. For underlying all the surface crop of quaint superstitions and artless myths and fantastic magic there thrills a mighty spiritual force, the whole soul of a race with all its impulses and powers and intuitions” (243). The soul of a race is to be sought in the depth of “the national heart,” not on the surface of decipherable documents or intelligible statements. Hearn’s own self, which has been confined within a solipsistic universe symbolized by the mirror he has seen in a temple in Yokohama, is now liberated, melting
into “the national heart” of the Japanese people. Within Hearn’s mind has been completed a spiritual volte-face, as it were, from the convergence into Western selfhood and egohood to the divergence toward Oriental collectivity and communality. The similar mental revolution takes place in “A Living God” in Gleanings in Buddha Fields (1897), first in terms of architectural space, and then in terms of spiritual space. He re-envisions the notorious emptiness of Shinto architecture as ghostliness. The Shinto miya or yashiro, shrine or temple, is empty, “containing in its perpetual dusk nothing more substantial than symbols or tokens, the latter probably of paper,” but precisely for that reason “the emptiness behind the visored front is more suggestive than anything material could possibly be” (VIII, 4, 5). In fact, it has suggested to “millions of people during thousands of years” that those buildings are sacred because they are “tenanted by viewless conscious personalities” of their “great dead” (5). Hence, he proposes to call the Shinto miya not a “temple” or “shrine” but “a haunted room, a spirit-chamber, a ghost-house” (4). It is a place devoid of anything visible, but it is inhabited by something invisible, and that something invisible is real: “there are ever so many realities which can neither be seen nor heard nor felt, but which exist as forces – tremendous forces” (5), tremendous enough to move “the national heart” of forty million people. He dares to imagine himself to be that something invisible inhabiting his ghost-house. He, “only a vibration
— a motion invisible as of ether or of magnetism,” could make apparition sometimes in a “shadow-body, in the likeness of [his] former visible self”
(6) — in short, he himself could be “a living god,” as he actually is all the time in his essential spiritual status as a ghost. As a living god, he would permeate the world, he would be omnipresent and eternal as the universe itself: “As air to the bird, as water to the fish, so would all substance be
permeable to the essence of me…. Power above life and power over death would be mine – and the power of self-extension, and the power of self- multiplication, and the power of being in all places at one and the same moment” (6). Sacrilegious ravings, yes, but it is the price he is willing to pay in order to spiritualize the world as well as himself against Western influences, against its evil trinity of rationalism, egotism, and materialism.
In fact, Hearn had often written upon ghostly sightings years before he came to Japan. For instance, in “Some Strange Experience: the Reminiscences of a Ghost-Seer” (Cincinnati Commercial, Sept. 26, 1875), he reported about a female ghost-seer with “large dark eyes, as though she were ever watching the motions of somebody who cast no shadow and was invisible to all others” (American Writings 615). She told him about a series of ghosts she had seen, including the one she saw reflected in the mirror —
“the figure, tall, silent and white, but [with] no face or head visible” (624)
—. Her witness is preceded by Hearn’s editorial note that “To the weird earnestness of the story-teller, the melody of her low, soft voice, and the enthralling charm of her conversation, we can not attempt to do justice; nor shall we ever undertake to report her own mysterious narrative word for word, but only to convey to the reader those impressions of it which linger in the writer’s memory” (615). His report is in fact an attempt at recreating the “impressions” he had while listening to the story told by the seer. If the ghostly inhabits “a ghost-house,” this “ghost-house” is here specifically a verbal space of story-telling and listening, and re-telling. In “A Ghost Story”
(Times Democrat, July 20, 1884), Hearn retells a newspaper article in The Daily Telegraph about a Lieut.-Col. Jones in the British army stationed in Burma, who saw, not in a dream but in reality while talking with his comrades at a home party, an open coffin with his sick sister in it on the very
