Japan at Cross-Purposes

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EVEN a first visitor to Japan does not remain oblivious for long of the tensions concealed beneath the smooth surface of Japanese reticence and politeness. Lafcadio Hearn wrote a half-century ago that "the Japanese lives not by thought, by emotion, but by duty." The classical Japanese rules of obligation and duty, with their emphasis on codified tradition rather than individual decision, have been shaken deeply in the past ten years; but they still are potent, and the effort to live up to them in the new conditions created by Japan's first major defeat in history and first foreign occupation produces strains of its own. Little by little you come to feel that you are among a people possessing immense powers of self-control and at the same time existing singly and collectively close to the breaking point.

The breaking point comes when the obligations conflict. This is something which always threatens, for they pervade every phase of life--duty to the Emperor and the nation, to one's parents, to one's teachers, to one's reputation. When the conflict is irreconcilable there is a real nervous crisis. For the individual it may end in suicide; this does not as with us indicate despair but such a high degree of self-discipline and courage as to be in itself an act of virtue. For the nation, the only honorable exit from what seems a humiliating situation will not be national suicide, of course, but still an act of national desperation, a throw of the dice for revenge and glory unlimited or for ruin. This manner of paying the people's debt to Emperor and country may be imposed on the civilian authorities by fanatical nationalists in the armed forces, as in Manchuria in 1931, or it may be by choice of the dominant governing clique, as in the secret dispatch of the Japanese fleet to Pearl Harbor in 1941 while Ambassadors Kurusu and Nomura were still negotiating with Secretary Hull...