Some preliminary notes on portrayals of death in Japan

武士道と云うは死ぬことゝ見附けたり。
二つ一つの場にて早く死ぬ方に片附くばかりなり。
The Way of the Warrior is death.
When faced with a choice between life and death, promptly choose death.

This is the famous opening of Yamamoto Tsunemoto's Hagakure, a self-styled guide to bushidō.

The "Way of the Warrior" was, as Cameron Hurst (go, Penn!) points out, largely an anachronistic, ahistorical construction introduced into common parlance that has been propagated by the work of Morioka native Nitobe Inazo (my first apartment was down the street from his birthplace, and the rumor is that his wife was an Earlham graduate—she definitely was a Quaker) in his book, Bushidō, the entire text of which can be found online or summarized as "justice, courage, benevolence, veracity, honr, and loyalty." Hurst notes "that the 'trustworthy, loyal, helpfu, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent' moral standards of the Boy Scouts are fully consistent with Nitobe's ethics, suggesting the full application of them would have made one a damn fine Tokugawa samurai." (Hurst, 1990)

Still, Nitobe's idea had its precedents, and Yamamoto's rant is one of them. Yamamoto was himself a samurai unable to follow his master into death with ritual suicide. He lived in peaceful times and probably lamented his inability to act as the "real" warriors of old did. His didactic diatribe seems to have been motivated by a nostalgia for the heroes of old.

Which leads one to wonder, what were they really like?

Well, allow me to introduce a pet theory about history. I call it the "deru kugi" approach, in deference to the widely quoted Japanese proverb that first opened my eyes to the issues surrounding the construction of cultural memory.

First you need to know the proverb and its standard interpretation:
出る釘は打たれる ("The nail that sticks up is pounded")

This adage is often referenced as evidence of Japan's conformist nature and the repression of individuality (always assumed to be a negative in this context).

But there's no evidence that this is an endorsement of the beating down of indvidualism. It could just as easily be a factual observation (which in that case is probably more universal than most Americans, at least, are comfortable admitting). It could also be seen as cultural criticism—a lament against this painful reality.

But even more importantly, you have to wonder what the need for such a proverb would be anyway. I mean, if this is a truism, whether it is critical or not is less interesting than whether there's any point at all in saying it. In that critical sense, it fails the "So what?" test. We all know that individualism is violently repressed. Thanks for flogging the dead horse (or pounding the flush nail, or whatever).

It might just as easily be argued that the whole problem is that there are too damned many nails sticking up all over the place. This brings the whole proverb into an entirely different light: suddenly it becomes prescriptive rather than descriptive.

Consider that, contrary to the contemporary misunderstanding of Zen (a painful example given that I also subsrcibed to an entirely silly interpretation of Zen for many years) as a somehow pure rejection of the oppression of rational thought in search of detached enlightment, Zen was quickly incorporated into the apparatus of Japanese state power and served to inculcate the warrior class with (or strengthen the pre-existing) irrational disregard for their own lives and idealization of loyalty and death in service as the ultimate goal to be obtained. How better to create "mindless" killing machines able to "kill with inner peace--and die with inner calm." Which brings us back to bushidō...

But before we trace that circuitous route in its entirety, I want to emphasize my point about nails. Japan is full of wildly individualistic and eccentric people. Take my wife, please. This doesn't necessarily make it any different from anywhere else, but it does indicate that any aspirants to hegemony and control would have a bugger of a time repressing the general pandemonium of strong individuals that make up Japanese society. Again, nothing special here.

So, what happens when this lens is applied to the "Way of the Warrior?" I'd like to examine the "Tale(s) of the Heike" (Heike Monogatari) and other war(rrior) narratives to root out their conflicted and negotiated visions of death, particularly as they relate to the warrior and as they inform later interpretations.

More on this as it comes to me.