This was possible, according to Mendel, because of the vagueness of the Meiji Constitution concerning “the location of political power”—a vagueness which the military, who had direct access to the throne, promptly exploited. They assumed “special privileges” and largely ignored the newly created civilian cabinet which was modeled upon Western systems of government. This independence of action in matters of governing was promptly dubbed “dual diplomacy,” and its effects were to haunt the members of the civilian cabinet, who were ultimately unable to steer into more peaceful channels of national development the singular dedication of the military to ideals of racially exclusive predominance. Members of the military class continued to hold fast to the pursuit of a goal whose attainment they believed their destiny and, by implication, the destiny of their country since time immemorial. Eventually, members of every class in Japan began to feel fully justified in calling that destiny their own. By the early part of the twentieth century, this process of military identification on a nationwide scale had grown to such an extent that the authorities had “even succeeded in convincing these descendants of peasants, who for almost three centuries had been denied the right to possess swords, that they were not a downtrodden class but members of a warrior race. Japanese political and military indoctrination was indeed thorough and spectacularly successful” (Reischauer1, 130).
It had also been successful during the Tokugawa period, when the military tradition inculcated from above had elicited the desired responses from below. Repeated attempts by innumerable commoners (heimin) throughout the entire feudal era to rise to the privileged level of the warrior were noted in many records. Although such ambitions were officially discouraged, the possibility of adoption into a military clan did exist—many wealthy merchants being willing to part with subtantial sums in exchange for the right to have the insignia of a warrior clan embroidered on their sleeves.
When the desired status itself was not accessible, anything resembling it, however remotely, would serve to fulfill most aspirations. All associations of commoners, whether farmers, merchants, or artisans (even the clergy), were organized according to the vertical pattern of the military class, a pattern which linked the ancient clan structure to the contemporary period, thus imparting to it an aura of antiquity which, in Japan (as in many other countries), made it divine.
Even before the Meiji Restoration, the military tradition had permeated the whole of Japanese life to the extent of having lost its primary identification with a single class. That it had become the sole tradition of every Japanese subject was proven by the fact that when the military class tried once again to seize power from the emperor, the armies of “sword-wielding samurai” were crushed on the battlefields by an imperial army whose ranks were filled with conscripts from every class, including many farmers. The crushing of one of these rebellions, after 1868, wrote Browne,
signified much more than the collapse of feudal opposition to the government and the new order. In the conflict the regular soldiers like Hidenori Tojo and the conscripts who had fought along with them had shown that the valor and martial skill which had made the samurai elite such formidable fighters could be found in all the levels of the nation. (Browne, 17)
Thereafter, bowing to expediency, the leaders of the military class gradually acknowledged that every Japanese subject was heir to the tradition they had considered their own for so many centuries, and began to exhort their fellow countrymen to think of Japan as a nation of warriors. At the same time, they discovered new and effective ways of translating that tradition into political patterns of conduct, which the nation adopted and applied with irresistible zeal in such countries as Manchuria, China, Malaysia, and the Philippines. These patterns endured without serious challenge until the surrender of Japan on September 2, 1945, when it became apparent that the defeat of the Japanese military effort had precipitated the collapse not only of a firm belief in a particular government policy, but actually of the entire moral universe of the Japanese nation. The identification between government policy, subject to the vagaries of political and military convenience, and the morality of the nation, which is of a more stable nature and has deeply rooted collective interests to promote and defend, had become so absolute in Japan that defeat on the battlefield left most Japanese “entirely disoriented” (Dore1, 162). It seemed incredible to them that such a fate could have befallen the heirs of a divine past, a nation tracing its origins back to the dawn of human history, or that the “way” (michi) of the race had not triumphed over all others, which, being foreign, had automatically been considered imperfect.
Today, surveys of many kinds—anthropological, sociological, political, and religious—have documented (and are continuing to follow) the astounding recovery of Japan from the disastrous effects of World War II. The positive side of their tradition helped the Japanese to “endure the unendurable” and to bravely face and survive the occupation, to close their depleted ranks and rebuild an industry in shambles, and to speedily reassume a position of prominence in the modern world. The military virtues of the past were applied to reconstruction with the intensity that had made the Japanese fearsome foes on the battlefield, making them, in turn, skillful and tireless competitors in world markets.
But the spirit of the bushi flickers restlessly in the dark recesses of the Japanese soul. Dore, in his study of city life in Japan, has noted in detail the tremendous difficulty encountered by the Japanese in attempting to shift their concept of morality and traditional values from the social ethic of the country, rooted in the feudal interpretation of reality as proposed and enforced by the bushi, to an individual morality based upon a personal interpretation of reality and a man’s individual responsibility within it. Even today, the life of a Japanese subject is dominated by society the way an enlisted man’s life is dominated by the army. Perhaps more than anywhere else in the world, the compactness of Japanese society, like the protective but monolithic embrace of a modern army (or of a military clan in days gone by), dictates from above and from without that which is to be believed, the ways in which relationships are to be structured, how individuals must behave in order to fulfill their obligations. Duties continue to be emphasized, while rights are muted and still seek concrete expression in new laws or customs and, above all, in a new spiritual conviction of the individual’s value and independence within the group, originating from deep within that individual’s being—a conviction which will sustain him when his group and its leaders, in their historical evolution, pass through the tragic crises which afflict all national groups. That spiritual certainty does not necessarily have to agree with the external dictates of the group, expressed in laws or customs, and may even be in opposition to pronouncements made in the name of the group by the individuals in power. In Japan, perhaps to a degree rarely encountered in other sophisticated cultures of the past or present, “morality is not summoned up from the depths of the individual” (Maruyama, 9), but is still to be sought elsewhere in society—thus being easily identified with and supplanted by external power. It must be added, in this context, however, that Japanese society is not (and has never been) alone in confronting this problem.
Classic tradition, hence the military tradition of the country, confronts the Japanese today. The artistic expressions of that tradition are quite revealing. The fearless retainer of a feudal lord, the much-heralded samurai, or the independent masterless warrior, the ronin, still cut their way through a maze of evil with slashing swords in kabuki and in countless adventure movies (chambara). Dore tells us that even today, in neighborhoods such as Shitayama-cho, salesmen appear in samurai garb and shout the virtue of their wares using the sharp jargon of the Tokugawa warriors. The martial pattern of the feudal tradition can still be detected by Western observers of the Japanese business world today in that particular relationship between the employer on one side, with his paternalistic but authoritarian attitude, and the employees in their orderly but feverishly dedicated ranks on the other. It is reflected in the formation of colossal industrial complexes which have elicited “both apprehension and envy” abroad, their combined power bearing a striking resemblance to the prewar cartels (zaibatsu). In this context, most analysts of Japanese industry, in fact, have come to realize that the element which worked exceedingly well for the Japanese was their time-honored “traditional approach” applied to industrial productivity.