Human Nature in the Japanese Myths
JOHN C. PELZEL
WHATfollows is an attempt to describe one traditional Japanese literary view of human nature, that pictured in the myth portions of the Kojiki and Nihongi. Though the quality seen in man is the main interest here, it has seemed desirable to describe also the myth’s view of his context- the nature ofthe world and ofmankind’s role in it.
These sourcestonstitute only one of the models that the basic literary’ tradition made available to later generations of Japanese. Buddhist and lay Chinese conceptions were in time absorbed, and in recent centuries ideas from the West, and we must assume that throughout history the native talent reworked the body of perceptions it had before it in varying ways. Nevertheless, the myths are the earliest repositories of this tradition, and in spite of many additions to Japanese eschatological literature and numerous fluctuations of fashion, the myths have not been rewritten, nor have they ceased to be well known and viewed with at least some measure of respect by even nioderatcly well-educated Japanese. They are thus the most persistent, and at least one of the basic, sources of native literary views on these matters.
The behavioral relevance of such a model is an interesting problem. One may wish to argue that a society’s basic literature offers cognitive limits and patterns according to which the native mind tends to build up its understanding of the world and of man. As values, the views of prestigious literature may be accepted by native individuals as proper judgments and can even affect the choices through which, in part, they form their own personalities. Nevertheless, and critical as the question of behavioral relevance undoubtedly is in many contexts, it is beyond the scope of the present paper, which will confine itself to the attempt to discern the mythic model itself. What the Kojiki and the Nihongi have to say about the cosmos and man was not set out in any self-conscious or reasoned statement. These books are art forms, a mixture of narrative legend and poetry. But in this they are characteristic of the main form of the Japanese literary tradition, which in this respect contrasts so sharply with the Chinese corpus as to merit a reminder.
The bulk of the respected literature of China has been a formal ethics, identified with individual professional philosophers, and a history deliberately written to illustrate the conclusions of the philosophers. Chinese literature is thus rational and intellectualized, as well as didactic. Its thrust, moreover, is such as to counsel agnosticism about the nature of the cosmos, earthly pragmatism about the role of man therein, and disinterest in most aspects of human nature except the moral. Japanese literature, by way of contrast, has from its beginnings in the myths taken forms-such as poetry, fiction, and the drama-which are best suited to an approach by intuition and imagination rather than reason. This literature has been much given, moreover, to questioning and picturing the place of individual men in a cosmos that includes, but that goes far beyond, earthly society. Certainly, then, what the Chinese and the Japanese sources have to say about man differ not alone in the traits of personality they discern or emphasize, but even more basically in the approach to the human condition that they illustrate. Chinese literature had faith in conscious moral will and exhorted man to be what he should be in one overwhelmingly important segment of life. Japanese literature instead had faith in intuition and described men in terms of the whole existence they were seen to lead.
The context and the events of life are thus basic to the interpretation of the Japanese myths, and their narrative accordingly deserves to be recapitulated here. In details, the stories of the two books under consideration vary slightly, but both were well known and had roughly equal prestige.’ The retelling that follows attempts to combine important elements from both tales, noting the textual divergence only when this seems to have a particular significance.
The myths fall into several cycles, most centering on certain major figures and events and roughly sequent to one another in terms of myth chronology. We may briefly divide this chronology into three myth eras, namely, Before the Creation of the Earth, the Creation of the Earth, and the Ordering of the Earth.
The Era before the Creation of the Earth
This first segment of the myths is extremely brief and, in contrast with what follows, aesthetically unrewarding. The story starts with heaven already in existence,* though we are told virtually nothing about it until the third and final era, and with the earth still a formless thing, floating about below heaven “medusalike,” “like drifting oil.” The first precursor of creation was the growth of a “thing like a reed shoot,” which in its turn gave rise to three or four (varying with the source) deities described as “single,” that is, each existing alone, at a different time, without discernible relation to the others, and, it may be added, without our learning anything about them other than their names.3 These were followed by four or five generations, each of which comprised a pair of gods, one male and one female, described as “brother and sister.” The last such pair, Izanagi (the brother) and Izanami, were the creator gods par excellence.
The Creation of the Earth
With this segment, the story comes to life. The creator siblings stood on the “floating bridge of heaven,” stirred the formlessness below with the “ heavenly jewel spear,” and watched the brine dripping from its point curdle into an island, Onogoro. Descending to it, they erected there the “pillar of the center of the land” and proceeded to the work of creation.
In part, they created as their exuviae, articles of their clothing, and so forth turned into progeny. But in part they created through normal mammalian sexual reproduction, which is given by far the greater attention in this cycle. As it turns out, they must discover or invent sexual reproduction, and they perform a ritual to accompany it, a marriage rite, as well.
Izanagi, as though casting about for a method of creation, asked his sister how her body was formed. She replied that in one place it was “not complete.” Noting that his own body at one point had “something left over,” he then proposed, “How would it be if we were to fill in the place on your body that is not complete with the spot on mine where something is left over, and so give birth to the land?” She replied simply, “That would be good.”
Izanagi likewise devised a ritual, which consisted in their circumambulating the pillar of the center of the land from opposite directions, he from the left and she from the right; on meeting on the other side, they would “perform the acts of the honeymoon chamber.”4 On the first attempt, however, the sister exclaimed first, on the far side of the pillar, “What a fine, lovely youth!” a forwardness which her brother considered a breach of the proper male-female relationship. He therefore had them perform the circumambulation again and exclaim on one another’s loveliness in the proper sequence. As a result of the breach of etiquette that had occurred, however, one of their children was born deformed.5
By sexual reproduction and something approaching parthenogenesis, therefore, the siblings created a large number of deities, many identifiable with the seas, islands, rivers, mountains, and vegetation of Japan and other (for example, the Sun Goddess) deities who came later to occupy key positions in heaven or in the process by which the created earth was put into order.
Only the Kojiki and certain variants cited by the compilers of the Nihongi, but not the text of the Nihongi itself, tell a version of the common Old World tale of Orpheus and Eurydice in Hades. According to the Japanese version, Izanami was badly burned by the birth of the Fire God and died, going to the “world of darkness.” Mourning for her and wishing to persuade her to come back and continue the unfinished work of creation, Izanagi followed her, but when he met her he violated her order not to look at her and saw her in the corruption of her body. Frightened, he fled toward the upper world while she, in shame, sent avenging deities after him. He was able to trick them, however, and in the end took leave of his sister-wife at the Even Pass of Hades in enmity,
she threatening to strangle earthly people, and he boasting that he could easily replace such losses, building “1,500 parturition huts a day.” Back on earth, according to the Kojiki, he then saw other deities created from his exuviae, and according to both books he retired to a life of perpetual quiet on the islands of Japan.
The Ordering of the Earth
Much the longest and most circumstantial, this segment of the myths consists of several cycles depicting the events whereby the created earth was ordered into the particular life forms we know. Not only is it richer in detail than what goes before, there also is repeated variation between the two main texts, and numerous variants are cited by the compilers of the Nihongi.
The story begins with a cycle depicting the relations in heaven between the Sun Goddess, now ruling there on the authority of her parent(s), and her younger brother Susanoo (the meaning of whose name we do not know). Susanoo had from birth been a selfish, cruel, and unruly god, whose very presence “withered mountains and dried up rivers and seas” and encouraged the “sound of bad deities to be like flies in the fifth moon.” His parent(s) therefore had ordered him to proceed to the nether world (or the sea) to be its ruler where he could not harm the things of earth, but instead, at the start of this cycle, he had risen up to heaven.
His rising made so fierce a commotion it alerted and alarmed his sister, who wondered if he came “with good intentions” or to rob her of her kingdom. Fearing the latter, she dressed and armed herself like a man, gave a battle cry, and went to question him on the “redness of his heart,” i.e., his sincerity. He protested his innocence, saying he had only wished to bid his sister good-bye before leaving to take up his own realm far away. To test the purity of his intentions, however, brother and sister engaged in an ordeal which amounted to a symbolic act of incest. She chewed up his sword and spat out its pieces as children, while he did likewise with the jewels of her regalia. They then exchanged children, those treated as hers and as inheritors of her authority and ancestors of the imperial family being the sons her brother spat out from her regalia.
The result of the ordeal was accepted as vindication of his intentions, and he remained a visitor in heaven. However, he continued to perform acts which were aggressive and destructive-breaking down the dikes around his sister’s rice fields, letting a piebald colt loose in her fields at harvest time, defecating on the floor of her palace, and so forth. The Sun Goddess did not protest these acts, however, in each case finding an excuse for them that was acceptable to her. For example, she decided that in tearing down the dikes among her fields he had been moved by a helpful intent, impractical as it was in actuality, merely to increase the area that could be planted to rice, and she imagined that what looked like excrement on her floor was really nothing but vomit that he had
brought up during an otherwise forgivable bout of drunkenness.
Eventually, however, Susanoo broke a hole in her roof while she was weaving, and threw in the corpse of a piebald colt flayed backwards. She (or her maids) was so startled that she jumped up and wounded herself (or themselves) on the shuttle. Indignant at this personal outrage and harm, she withdrew into a cave, locked the door, and so reduced heaven to darkness. Thereupon, the Kojiki adds, the “voices of the myriad [evil?] deities were like the flies in the fifth moon as they swarmed, and myriad portents of woe all arose.”
The heavenly deities met together in a riverbed and consulted on how to end this intolerable situation. They collected a number of objects and performed various rituals, but they also did things to pique the Sun Goddess’s curiosity and vanity. Having birds fill the air with song, they also had a goddess perform a noisy dance so lewd (“pulling out the nipples of her breasts and pushing down her skirt-string to her private parts”) that they all laughed. Hearing the sounds of apparent revelry outside and wondering how the deities could make merry with herself absent and the world dark, the Sun Goddess stuck her head out to see what was happening. A mirror was immediately pushed up in front of her face, and she was told that it was a “deity more illustrious than” herself. Quite upset, she came out farther until she could be grasped and was implored by the deities not to deprive them of herself again. The heavenly deities then took upon themselves the judgement of Susanoo. Fining him for the pollution he had caused, they banished him from heaven, in effect voting for the continued rule of the Sun Goddess.
In the next cycle, Susanoo descended to earth, at a spot known historically as Izumo, and after saving the daughter of a pair of “earthly deities” from a monstrous dragon, produced from her a progeny that was to rule earth for a period, the principal descendant being the so-called Master of the Land. Susanoo himself then proceeded to the nether world he had for so long avoided.
At this point, the sources vary considerably. It is clear from all that the earth was still untamed. As one variant says, “This central land of reed-plains had always been waste and wild. The very rocks, trees, and herbs were all given to violence.” The text of the Nihongi notes that “earth had numerous deities which buzzed like flies. There were also trees and herbs, all of which could speak.” This subcelestial world had to be “constructed . . . for the sake of the visible race of man as well as for beasts . . . in order to do away with the calamities [that occur to] birds, beasts, and creeping things,” and all texts make it clear that the progeny of the Sun Goddess, who were eventually to rule Japan, did not want to take on so noisome a place until it had been made habitable.
However, the Kojiki and several of the variants cited by the compilers of the Nihongi have most of this taming task performed by the Master of the Land, earth-born scion of Susanoo, before the Sun Goddess’s emissaries descended, and tell a number of tales in which he exerted his humanizing influence on earth. The Nihongi itself, in contrast, gives very little space to Susanoo’s progeny and has the humanizing work performed by ministers of the Sun Goddess and the heavenly deities, thus implying the dereliction of Susanoo’s line. It is in this that the text of the Nihongi perhaps most clearly edits the record in a way ennobling to the imperial family, which claimed descent from the Sun Goddess. The tales told of the Master of the Land by the Kojiki and the variants add much that is of cultural interest, however, and because they also were available to all readers of the myths they will be recapitulated here.
In one, the Master of the Land is pictured as at first the despised servant of his eighty lusty, aggressive, and selfish brothers, relegated by them to carrying their baggage while they go in pursuit of a desirable female. On the way, they met a hare which had lost its fur. The elder brothers, as a cruel joke, told it to bathe in sea water, but when it did and the water dried, its skin cracked and put it in great pain. The Master of the Land, feeling pity for it, told it to roll in pollen, which formed a soothing cloak, and the hare in gratitude promised him the hand of the princess. Angered because she therefore accepted him rather than themselves, the eighty brothers twice killed the Master of the Land, once by striking him with a searing hot stone and once by catching him in the fork of a split tree, but each time his own mother brought him back to life.
Going to the nether world, the Master of the Land married his half- sister, the daughter of his father, Susanoo. His cruel parent then submitted him to several tortures. Once confined to a pit of snakes and once in a house filled with centipedes and wasps, the son was in each case saved by a scarf, given him in secret by his wife, which served to ward off these loathsome creatures. Again, Susanoo shot an arrow into the moor and sent the Master of the Land to fetch it, but then set fire to the moor grass to kill him. The Master of the Land again was saved, this time by a mouse that showed him a hole in which to hide while the fire passed overhead and then showed him the location of the arrow, which he therefore was able to return to his father as ordered. In the end, Susanoo fellasleep while the Master of the Land was performing the filial task of picking lice out of his hair, which the son therefore tied to the rafters and, stealing his father’s sword, bows and arrows, and lute, fled with his own wife. Starting up, Susanoo was delayed long enough by his hair’s entanglement that the refugees were able to get past the Even Pass of Hades. Thereupon Susanoo, giving the accolade to success, called to the Master of the Land that he must become the ruler of the earth and put his eighty unruly elder brothers to death, which he did.
The Kojiki continues its special attention to the progeny of Susanoo, competitors-to-be of the imperial line, by picturing a series of love affairs the Master of the Land had with several women on earth after he had returned to it in the company of his wife. He took up again with the princess he had earlier won from his eighty elder brothers. Again, telling of his courtship of another girl, the myth is able to paint the type of scene that was to be popular in Heian literature at least three centuries later. The Master of the Land is shown standing all night outside her bedroom, rattling her locked door and imploring her to let him in, while she replies that she is, “like a drooping plant, my heart . . . a bird on a sandbank,” and that she will not let him in until the next night, when
she promises that his “arms white as rope of paper-mulberry bark shall softly pat [my] breast soft as the melting snow .”
Predictably, the wife of the Master of the Land became jealous and must have threatened to leave him, for he sang that if she indeed left, her “weeping shall. . . . rise as the mist of the morning shower.” She, trying then to appeal to his sympathy, offered him a drink and sang “[Thou], being a man, probably hast on the various island headlands that thou seest, and on every beach, . . . a Wife like the young herbs. But as for me, alas! being a woman, I have no man except thee. . . .”
In spite of this appeal, the Kojiki ends this cycle of amorous tales by listing the numerous progeny the Master of the Land subsequently had with still other girls.
The same sources that tell the story of Susanoo’s progeny on earth, moreover, ascribe to the Master of the Land a series of the humanizing tasks. It is said that “for the sake of the visible race of man as well as for beasts, [he and his helper] determined the method of healing diseases,” and also that they, “in order to do away with the calamities of birds, beasts, and creeping things, established means for their prevention and control.” Again, it is noted that whereas formerly “the very rocks, trees, and herbs were all given to violence,” the Master of the Land has “now reduced them to submission, and there is none that is not compliant. . . . It is I, and I alone, who now govern this land.”
In any event, there begins here the cycle of tales according to which, with only slight variations, all sources agree that in spite of the Master of the Land’s ministrations the earth was still not a suitable place, and tell of the steps by which the Sun Goddess’s descendants take over its control. Japan “is still painfully uproarious,” “violent and savage earthly deities are numerous,” and rocks and vegetation still have the power of speech. In sum, “that country . . . is a tumbledown land, hideous to look on,” and the Sun Goddess’s progeny refuse to descend to it as they are ordered until things have been put right there.
In consequence, when the Sun Goddess decided that the son her brother spat out from her regalia (or, in other versions, when another god decided that her grandson through that son) shall rule the earth, a congress of heavenly deities has first to be convened to decide which of the gods should be sent to make the land fit for the divine children. The emissaries so dispatched, it turned out, were not faithful, but instead curried favor with the ruling Master of the Land, settled down with earthly goddesses, and did not even report back to heaven. Ultimately, however, a pair of emissaries was found who asked the Master of the Land to stand down in favor ofthe heavenly line. Consulting his own son, the incumbent ruler decided not to resist the intercession and
“became concealed” forever in the shrine of Izumo, still one of the principal spots of state Shinto worship. In all versions, Ninigi no mikoto, grandson of the Sun Goddess, is the first of the heavenly line to descend and rule the earth, after the emissaries who received the submission of the Master of the Land pacified it and made it a fit place to live.
Among the heavenly grandchild’s first acts on earth was his mating with a beautiful girl. The Kojiki and some variants also say that he refused to mate as well with this girl’s ugly elder sister, and that because of this act of uncharity the emperors of Japan were doomed to be mortal. In all versions, Ninigi no mikoto made his wife pregnant in only one night and therefore expressed doubts that he could possibly be the father. Piqued, and submitting herself to an ordeal to prove his paternity, she set fire to her parturition hut and the children born therein were unharmed. At his death, the heavenly grandchild was the first of the long line of early emperors who were buried in the great kurguns, many of which are still known in western and central Japan.
In a final cycle, the two sons born to Ninigi no mikoto proved to have gifts for fishing and the sea, and hunting and the land. They decided to exchange tools and occupations for awhile, but soon became bored and the fisherman elder brother asked for his hooks back. The clumsy younger brother, however, had lost them, and though he made offers of restitution nothing would satisfy the overbearing elder brother except the return of the very hooks lost. The younger brother was in despair, but eventually made his way to the palace of the Sea God, at the bottom of the sea. Marrying the Sea God’s daughter and recovering the lost hooks, he returned to land with his wife and a jewel that gave him control of the tide, which he used to make his elder brother liege to him. One of the sons (or, according to a variant, one of the grandsons) of the younger brother and the daughter of the Sea God came to be known as Jimmu Tenno, taken by traditional Japanese historiography to have been the founder of the imperial Japanese family.
At this point, what the Japanese considered to be the mythic portion of the tales ends. Though much of what follo\vs in the Kojiki and Nihongi still smacks more of legend than of history, it is perhaps permissible to abandon the story here and turn to the attempt to analyze the myths.
Cosmology
On the whole, the cosmos pictured by the myth-makers is the earth the Japanese knew, and only the earth they knew. The features of the realm called “the land” are of course those of the Japanese islands, often given
the place names they still had in historical times, and only one or two remarks indicate even an awareness of other regions of the globe, including those parts of the nearby continent known to Japanese long before the dates at which the present texts of the Kojiki and Nihongi were compiled.
The homogeneity and familiarity of this mythic cosmos go far beyond this, however. Realms other than earth are indeed pictured-heaven, nether world(s), and a land beneath the sea-but only in the tale describing Izanami’s dark and physiologically corrupted hades is any of these shown as at all different from man’s own world. Certainly the High Plain of Heaven is nothing but the mold from which the earth was cast-a land of familiar vegetation, rivers, and mountains; of villagers subsisting by irrigated rice agriculture and making their clothing in weaving halls; of government by a ruler who is little more than the executive of concensuses reached in town meetings; of a religion of familiar ritual and pollution taboos; and of gods who feel the same joys and pains, and exhibit the same aptitudes, as individual men on earth do.
If the forms of the cosmos are thus almost everywhere the same, so too are the processes at work in it, those that men find in their own experiences to be natural. Most features of the environment, and most gods, are born by normal mammalian reproduction, discovered as even human children left to themselves can discover it. Most behavior conforms either to cultural conventions quite like those of men or to individual motivations understandable to the human reader.
There are some events that do not have this familiarity-the aboriginal generation of something “like a reed shoot,” the creation of certain beings by parthenogenesis, the resurrection of the Master of the Land, the “concealment” of some deities, the primeval mobility of plants and rocks, whatever force it may be that renders ordeals effective, and so forth. Yet many of these instances need not be considered unnatural. If immortality is natural for gods, then so is their “concealment,” which it is clear is only the process by which they change from one form of life to another. Izanami’s is the only such case in which the after life included physical change, but she continued to be active, even though in hades. In other examples, because the deity in question reappears later leading a normal life in heaven or the nether world, one must conclude that “concealment” amounted to no more than a physical transportation from one to another location. In still other instances, the “hidden” god in fact remains alive in this world, as the Master of the Land continues to farm his rice fields and to live with a retinue in his palace-shrine. He has merely, as the result of a spirit change, quite literally “hidden himself” from the eyes of others and taken on a role that no longer obtrudes itself on them. In the same vein, there is no suggestion, in the telling of the ordeal of Susanoo, that its efficacy needs to be guarded by supernatural, rather than human, means. It can be considered to be a form of the promise, a transaction between men, accepted or rejected in terms of the probity, the will, and the faith in one another of its human participants.
Other exceptions, unfamiliar to human experience as they may be, are presented as being irrelevant to men. The noisiness and aggression of plants and rocks was the state of affairs of antiquity, but had been corrected by the time the heavenly deities and their descendants came to occupy earth. Clearly also, the myth-makers treat the distinction between mammalian birth and parthenogenesis as immaterial. Even though the myths seem to have been compiled in part as a political apologia for the temporal supremacy of the imperial family, the two sources differ without comment on the form of birth, and the source of authority, of even the Sun Goddess. One has her created parthenogenetically and sent to rule heaven by her father alone; the other makes her the result of the mating of the creator siblings, and her rule take its legitimacy from the order of both these primal gods.
The earthly condition as men know it is thus presented by the myths as all but universal and, in any event, the only context men need seriously consider. Moreover, once the heavenly dynasty has taken possession of the world, there is little evidence that other regions of the cosmos can any longer even have much effect on men’s realm. In the past, it is true, the gods came from heaven, and all Japanese are their genealogical descendants. The main political emphasis of the myths was to establish the biological tie between the ruler of heaven and the rulers of earth, but the descent of noble Japanese families from other deities was also, within that context, accepted. By the beginning of recorded history, at the latest, very large segments-if indeed not all-of the Japanese people may well have been considered genealogically related to the gods, presumably through some form of adoption to the aristocratic lines if not biologically. Nevertheless, the myths tend to assure us that these physical links now have been broken, and give no evidence that the two realms are any longer in a position to affect each other very substantially.
Similarly, the main impression a reader receives of the nether world(s) is that it is significant only for those beings who must be excluded from the normal community-whether because of the kind of polluting physical accident that maimed Izanami, or for the qualities of personality that made Susanoo a source of constant trouble for those around him. There is here no suggestion that normal gods or men need expect this exile. Moreover, though hades can to a certain extent affect this world-as is clear from Izanami’s threat to destroy earth’s inhabitants-its impact also can be nullified from earth, for Izanagi maintains that he can easily repair her ravages. All things considered, the nether world(s) is merely a distant island, much like the major islands on which men and the gods live, where those who are beyond the social pale can live out their lives without harming their fellows.
In sum, the Japanese myths show few of the workings of a “metaphysical” imagination, and give a resounding priority and value to things of this world. Except for a very few, and surely Sinified exegeses, there is no suggestion of impersonal or unearthly processes, such as the Yin-Yang, karma, or even the absolute law of God, which have made much in the continental Asian cosmologies an engine amoral to and/or beyond the understanding of man.
Similarly, there is no hint that such cosmic forces as do exist can over power life as man proposes to live it. The gods do not have arbitrary powers; an earth-nurturing Izanagi can counteract an earth-threatening Izanami, and the heavenly deities were able to take control of earth only with the agreement of its previous masters. Even the imagery of the myths shows us little to fear or to marvel at. The only monsters appear in Izanami’s hades-but not in that of Susanoo-and in the form of the eight-headed eight-tailed dragon, a brief nightmare, easily detroyed. The godly captiousness of so humanistic a mythology as that of Greece-Zeus of the thunderbolt or Hera of the jealous eye-have no counterparts in the Japanese stories, where gods and events pursue a gentle and sociable, an almost homely, course. Only the Sun Goddess’s younger brother acts arbitrarily, and he is banished for behavior that
conforms more to that of the American Peck’s Bad Boy than to that of a devil.
The moral of the myths thus seems to be that life for men can be expected to follow courses that are almost wholly intelligible and actionable in earthly and human terms. More, one can expect them to run along a fairly even way, in sight of neither the abyss of frustration nor the mountain of miracle. One need not fear terror or hope for ecstasy of any ultimate proportions.
The Human World
It is tempting to say that the myths thus show the world to be “good,” and indeed in one very important sense they do. Nevertheless, it is a kind of “good” for which the English adjective is not an apt translation.
Except for those who are physically maimed, there is no different world with which to contrast our own. For the generality of men and gods, even the “nonworld” of death is not clearly pictured, individuals either disappearing from the narrative without explanation, being exiled to other worlds much like ours, or “concealing” themselves in a new form of our life. We may wish to assume that the strict pollution taboos we know surrounded death in early Japan led the myth-makers to avoid mention of any different kind of life after death; their silence then would not indicate that they also refused to admit of mortality. Certainly much later Japanese literature seems bemused by a fear of death. Yet such an interpretation is also arbitrary, and it seems as economical to conclude that the myth-makers quite simply denied death as a final or different state, that they saw life, essentially as we know it on earth, universal in time as it is in space. The preoccupation of later Japanese literature with the waste of death can be seen as a natural reaction of a people with the myth-fed faith in the hopefulness and permanency of life, who subsequently have had to take cognizance of the imported South Asian heresy-that life is pain and its end to be sought.
If there are no states other than those of our world and our life, we must conclude that at this point in Japanese history the idea of fundamental value alternatives-of “good” and “evil” as an elemental dualism-did not exist. On this basis, it is meaningless to characterize the mythic view of the things of our experience as merely “good.” Far more basically, they “are,” and are compatible with one another.
So existential a view does not, of course. preclude evaluation. The myths do judge a great many things positively or negatively and together with the verbal judgment justify appropriately cathectic behavior-avoidance or expiation of the ritually unclean, joyous mating with the beautiful girl, and so forth. There is no sense, however, of that massive concentration of “evil” at one point and time, and of “good” at another, which is so characteristic of Chinese thought and of the theory of the dynastic cycle on the continent. Instead. what is evaluated in the myths are particular states, individual events. and beings, which one runs into only at random. We shall do well, therefore, to interpret things so evaluated simply as items in the “is-ness” of life which are appreciably above or below the mean and average, rather than as things foreign to life. Even the “evil” Izanami and Susanoo are merely
banished to realms where they can live out more fully the particular characteristics that make them “evil” for most men. “Evil” thus is not destroyed. Indeed, to the extent that we are correct in our general understanding of this philosophy, the denial or destruction of evil, its removal from the cosmos of what “is,” would be inconceivable. One can think only to isolate its harmful effects from the rest of life.
It is congruent with this kind of evaluation. clewed as it is only to the standards of life, that the judgments of particular things handed down in the myths recognize no priority among all the possible types of “good” and “bad.” Rather than subordinating other cathexes to a metaphysical, or a moral, or any other single kind of good, the texts name what is valued in each case differently. isolating verbally now one, now another, kind of standard. Sometimes they call it by the catchall, as well as moral, terms “good” and “evil,” but as often they call it “lucky” or “unlucky,” “bright” or “dark,” “clean“ or “dirty,” “beautiful” or “ugly,” “good-hearted” or “evil-hearted,” and so forth. It seems most useful to interpret such terminology as the expression of a catholic and on the whole unbiased appreciation of the many kinds of value a thing can have to the lives of men, and thus basically to an appreciation of things in terms of their facilitation or inhibition of human life.
It is not strange to find in this world, where life is the only criterion of value, that the state of being is equivalent to the possession of spirit, that impersonal or will-less forces do not exist. Gods and men of course are spirit, but one of the most nearly central, and unique, elements of the myth story records that at an early date plants and what we call “inorganic” matter also had identical attributes of life and spirit. For many plants and features of the topography we are given the genealogy, facts of birth, and names that personify them. For all, we are assured that they once possessed the powers of speech, movement, and violence.
Their use of these attributes was as troublesome to life for men as was Susanoo’s behavior. The heroes of the Japanese myths therefore remedied this defect. Like many another cultural charter, therefore, the myths of Japan also celebrated the heroes of the significant process by which an aboriginal earth was made fit for men, and in the celebration validated a line of rulers and a system of rule.
Yet how enormously different are the Japanese and, for example, the Chinese myths in this regard! In the Chinese myths, physical nature is pictured as only a passive entity. It is troublesome for man because he still, at that early date, lacked the cultural artifacts to exploit its inertness for his own benefit. The continental heroes were therefore inventors of artifacts and custom-of ditches to drain the swamps, of plows to tear the grass-matted soil, of techniques for growing grain. The Chinese view thus assumed an absolute gulf of nature between man and even beasts, let alone the “lower” orders of life. Man adores man, and only man.
In the Japanese myths, in contrast, human culture much as it persisted well down into historical times is taken as already given, its origins of no interest, its celebration of no utility. The natural world has life and will that are all but identical with those of man, save that like Susanoo they often use these to antisocial ends. The task of the culture heroes was to make nature civil, removing from it the troublesome qualities of speech, mobility, and violence.
We must note that there is no suggestion that in doing so the heroes reduced physical nature to a lifeless and spiritless state, or made it into an order unworthy of man’s attention. The myths are filled with an appreciation of the flora and topographic features of the islands of Japan, and the message of the hero tale is that this world is a harmonious union of the life of man with the life of nature. One sees here, in other words, the first literary expression of that acute and comradely sensitivity to physical nature that has been a hallmark of the customs of Japanese life down to our own day. One feels that as early as the time at which the myths were told, the Japanese genius already had avoided Rilke’s “mistake of drawing too sharp distinctions” (Rilke 1939: “First Elegy,” line 81). This view persists, so that it is not strange for even a contemporaryJapanese novelist to say of his heroine, “Looking around her garden, a little gone to seed [after a week’s absence], . . . she felt that each of its plants and trees, each in its own language, was speaking to her” (Osaragi 1952:184-185).
Human Nature
There is as yet, in the myths, as little evidence of what Gilbert Murray called a “failure of nerve” about man’s capacity to achieve a satisfactory fate in this world as there was among the early Greeks. Nor need there be. The universe conforms to worldly and human experience and provides no more justification to the fatalist than it does to the Pollyanna. Events oscillate fairly evenly about a mean that for man as a whole is life-sustaining, and thus encourage neither pessimism nor optimism. In time, Buddhist and continental imports, with their visions of other worlds and idealized goals, would prepare the soil for those cliches about the “transiency” of life, “regret” for the unrequited, and okirame(“giving up”) the unattainable that were to be so characteristic of later Japanese literature. But one senses that in the mythic view it is the fate of mankind to succeed, with reasonable effort, in grappling with the very material problems of daily life, as indeed it is his unconsciously accepted goal.
Individual fates do differ, some men attaining more, others fewer, of those earthly experiences and attributes that are “good” or “bad” because they are above or below the mean. There is as yet, however, no hint of Buddhist or Chinese explanations of these differences in terms of karma or “hidden good and evil.’’ There is no picture of differences in individual fate so thoroughgoing as to impress one with the contrast between misery and blessedness.
We thus sense no ontological gulfs dividing men or gods into fundamentally different types. This is, of course, congruent with the myth’s view of the descent of all men from the gods. The most basic elements of man’s nature is his spirit-that bit of the godhead dwelling in each Japanese, derived from one primal common source, and thus in the most basic sense alike in all men. The myth-makers even extend their universalism in a way that is cross-culturally quite rare, for to them mankind shares his descent from the gods, and his nature as spirit, with all other things of this world. The way was thus open not only for that sense of kinship with nature which has continued to characterize the Japanese, but also for such modifications of imported concepts as the doctrine
which allowed Buddahood even to what continentals considered “lower” orders.’
It is also true that later, as Japanese came to have contact with other peoples, for whom a kindred descent from the gods could not be claimed, they were forced into that pervasive ethnocentrism so characteristic of many isolated tribal peoples-an ethnocentrism that cannot accord even human status to others. In somewhat the same vein, the emphasis in the myths on man’s nature as spirit would lead Japanese thinkers, from Shotoku Taishi to men of our own day, into almost compulsive attempts to try to define what it is that best describes the “Japanese spirit.” It even seemspossible to argue that the stress on success in attaining worldly “goods” inevitably validated that hierarchialism which has been so characteristic of Japanese social relations; he who succeeds knows no reason for tempering his satisfaction or for querying its rightness, just as he who falls behind finds no legitimation for his
resentment. The man who succeeds is patently, and in a most pervasive sense, “better” than the failure.
The assumptions of the myths about man’s fate and nature thus would conduce to particularisms that other peoples and times would find corrosive or petty. But the compilers of the myths wrote as if they were unaware of these possibilities, and we as well must admit the realuniversalisms at home here.
It is against this background of a common nature and fate for all created things that the myths were able effectively to concentrate their attention on individuality. Each actor has particular characteristics-of beauty or strength, of skill, of sociability, and so forth. We remember clearly the sympathy of the Master of the Land for the naked hare and his elder brothers’ cruel prankishness, the quickness of hand of the god who seized the Sun Goddess from her cave, the hunter and fisher sons of , the womanly pique of the Sun Goddess when she imagined that her neighbors could enjoy themselves even in her absence, Susanoo’s irascibility. These texts do not, it is true, draw so full and unique a picture of each character as the best modern fiction does. But the Sun Goddess and her brother come close enough, and as Kroeber (1951) has pointed out, the later literature of Japan approached that of the West more closely than most in this respect. The actors in the myths are pictured much as we think of the members of our own family or closest friends-alike, but in ways so fundamental as seldom to arouse awareness, all our interest being concentrated on the quite individual quirks by which each person is stereotyped for identification by his intimates.
It was above all the emotions of the actors that excited the interest of the myth-makers, and it thus seems possible to say that at the individual level human nature was defined heavily in emotional terms. The principal emotions portrayed, moreover, fall into two opposing sets-love for the other person and love for oneself. Susanoo concentrates into his character most of the extreme examples of the latter, but love for others is described repeatedly, for numerous actors, and in a variety of forms. One can only conclude that in the mythic view love for others is the more common quality of mankind, as it is unhesitatingly, with no apparent arriere-penses at all, judged “good.”
A quite uncomplex sexual love reappears again and again, and in terms that forced the Victorian sensibilitics of Chamberlain to render whole passages of the Kojiki into Latin. These are all cases, be it noted, of physical attraction at first sight, with immediate pleasurable copulation as their straightforward aim. To generalize the myth phraseology, when a boy and girl meet and are pleased with each other, almost his first remark is the simple “Let’s go to bed. How about it?” and very few refusals are recorded.
In this picture of sexual love, mutuality is obviously the standard. There is no suggestion of brutal initiatives, of sadism or rape, of neurosis, and if a person refuses it is simply because he finds the other unattractive. The myths even make it clear that it is improper to deny a person who proposes love his or her pleasure merely because the attraction is not reciprocated, for the emperors of Japan are not immortal, it is said, because the Sun Goddess’s grandson would not sleep with one goddess whom he found ugly. The aim of love is not merely to gain pleasure but, as important, to give it.
At no point do the myths picture sexual love as in conflict with social “goods,” or as conditioned by the requirements of society. Kinsmen are not shown as having anything to do with one another’s marriages, let alone love affairs, and there is no suggestion that the community need judge sexual relations. This emphasis on the absolute goodness and individual autonomy in judgment of the bond of pleasurable love is carried even to the point of an uncritical portrayal of what we, and at least historical generations of Japanese, were to consider brother-sister incest. The creator deities are of course full brother and sister. Though the relationship between the Sun Goddess and her brother may be considered to have been masked by the only symbolic form of their incest, the Master of the Land married his half-sister without attracting the myth-makers’ condemnation. As late as the reign of the Emperor
Ingyo, what the traditional Japanese view treats as history records the union of Crown Prince Karu with his full sister, and though they are punished by the exile of one (or both) of them, their relationship is described with some sympathy as a case of true love (Aston 1896:323 325).
It scems quite clear that this presentation of sexual love as something that does, and should, well naturally and undenied from the hearts of two people has remained the basic norm of the Japanese people to our time. In Heian literature, upper-class manners are shown as more complex, and in the upper class of the Tokugawa some currency was given to the imported Chinese convention that sexual love is legitimate only when harnessed, through the arranged marriage, to the machine of family politics. But by and large, the view of the myths that sexual love is an unconditional good, subject only to the mutual wills of those who share it, has continued to exert a strong appeal in the literature and the daily customs of the Japanese. Yobai, the visit of a youth to his girl’s bedroom, is first acted out by the Master of the Land, and the curiously aroused mutuality (if not the constraint) of the modern geisha and her customer would not seem out of place if described in the myths. Even where the family-haunted conventions of China at last reduced the Japanese spirit, the values first celebrated in the myths have tempered them, for in Japan the principals play a far larger role in the marriage arrangement, just as their wishes help account for the great prevalence even into modern times of the naien, or common-law marriage.
Sexual love, however, is only one of a variety of gentle loves that characterize the relation of men or gods in the story. In a real sense, one can argue that it is love between individuals that begets all communal and societal morality. The Master of the Land, it will be recalled, helped the hare; he likewise determined the methods of healing diseases “for the sake of the visible race of man as well as for beasts.” The bond between parents and children is never pictured as other than one of love, and the unilateral social obligation of filial piety that was so obtrusive in Chinese thought about this key bond never put down deep roots in Japan. Above all, the mechanism through which harmony is achieved and maintained within the social community can only be described as the working out of a steady mutuality among not merely the rights but, more important, the sensibilities of its members.
No doubt the formal social institutions of the village of the gods-the town meeting with its decisions reached by consensus, the obvious limitation on the ability of the Sun Goddess to make important decisions arbitrarily-were such as externally to constrain the individual to cooperation with his fellows, without any necessary commitment of his will to this end. No doubt also the form of the myths, as a creation of art rather than of reason, inhibited their statement of social duty in terms of abstract moral principles, and the absence of such statements is not evidence that these principles were not also operative. Nevertheless, even in later ages Japanese were not attracted to the Chinese habit of trying to produce moral behavior through conscious obedience to abstract principles. Moreover, in ciri-a duty to a specific person-and in the compulsions ascribed to ninj6, as in the legal importance given confession, the Japanese have shown an interest in morality as a matter of the emotional commitment of the individual to others. It seems not inappropriate, therefore, to interpret the myths in the same terms, as a portrayal of morality achieved, or denied, in the personal relations of individuals.
Where behavior takes the form shown by Susanoo it is ‘‘evil.” He makes loud noises that frighten others and acts impulsively, without the warning that would at least save their being startled. He tricks people, promising to be considerate but breaking his word, perhaps with intent to do so from the outset. He does not shrink from inflicting physical harm on others or from harming them through their possessions. Yet there is no suggestion that his behavior results from either long plotting or a perverted pleasure in harm for its own sake, as there is little evidence that he aims through his actions to gain any special material rights for himself. In other words, he is either a complete egoist or an emotional cripple. Needing only to express himself, he makes the freedom to do so his goal, so that in the end he admires his son for having exploited the same freedom to thwart him. He cannot, or will not,
empathize with the pain his actions bring to others. He shows no capacity whatsoever to give, or to receive, consideration.
The quality of the Sun Goddess is not morally upright in any self- conscious sense. Rather, she shows understanding of how to mold herself with the people around her in a harmony that still does not deny the individuality of each. It seems no accident that she is typically termed “bright,” a sign perhaps more of her humane than her astral attributes. She does not obtrude herself markedly on the lives of others, on the whole seeming to live and let live. When she acts as heaven’s chatelaine, she asks more than she orders the behavior of others, letting herself be guided in major things by the consensus of the gods and gaining her ends by persuasion. She overlooks or forgives small errors and accepts their consequences, willing to give her brother and her recreant messengers to earth every benefit of the doubt. Yet she is not cowardly, and when she suspects her brother of evil she is willing to fight if need be. Nor does she lose the sense of the inner borders of her own individuality, for when her brother has clearly violated her trust she withdraws from society, sick at a world in which she can no longer maintain a minimal dignity. She is lured out of this withdrawal only by the firm evidence that her fellow gods are lonely without her, and are willing to act to change that world back to the one of reciprocal emotional trust that alone she can abide.
It thus does not seem amiss to say that morality lies in the total sympathy of one person for another, in the desire to give, not humanitarian “rights,” but human fulfillment, even as he receives the same common and essential gift. In a real sense, morality derives from the forms of love.
Against this background, we should perhaps restate the myth’s evaluation even of sexual love. It is not merely that they show no sense of “wrongness” attaching to this act and thus reduce it to the level of the behavior of the human animal. Instead, wherever man and woman want one another it is a “good” to take and give this pleasure, and perhaps even the most nearly idealistic of all rapports. One needs some such interpretation to explain the enduring romanticism of the Japanese literary treatment of this relation.
The emphasis given here to morality as emotional rapport between individuals comports poorly with the frequent contemporary view that Japan’s is a “shame culture.” If such a culture is one in which improper behavior is frequently prevented or punished by the negative reactions of other persons, the description ofJapan in these terms isapt. As every Japanese child soon learns, if he errs in propriety or fails in an effort, he will be “laughed at,” and ridicule, however gently applied by Western or Chinese standards, is unbearable. Likewise, if he sins deeply or repeatedly against others, he will be “abandoned,” emotional as well as material support being withdrawn from him.
Nevertheless, it is nonsense to squeeze one’s description of morality down to only negative sanctions against improper behavior. It is surely as much the habit of modern Japanese as it was that of their ancestors as portrayed in the myths to engage for the most part in proper acts, impelled thereto by positive sanctions-again, in the myths, to gain and earn consideration for themselves as sentient beings, as well as to give that consideration, and not merely by the fear of losing it.
The myths make it seem as clearly partial to claim that the main sanctions, whether negative or positive, are those imposed by other persons. Susanoo was not judged in terms of whether he did objective good or evil, and not even according to the opinion of the other gods on his actions. He was judged, rather, according to his own intentions-his will or “heart”-to do good or evil to others. The point of his ordeal is that it seemed to confirm his profession that his heart was “clean,” and his sister was willing for a long time thereafter to forbear from judging what was in fact his disruptive behavior. She overlooked the harm he caused the fields as due to his ignorance of the field economy. She assumed that he was drunk when he vomited behind her chair; the seat of the moral will lies in that part of the mind that is given a vacation in drunkenness, and even today Japanese law and custom consider it not only forgivable but “good” that an individual give himself this holiday occasionally.
Susanoo ultimately was judged “evil” only when the Sun Goddess and her neighbors came to understand that he either wanted to visit evil upon them or was incapable in his own heart of distinguishing good from evil, crimes so polluting that he must pay an expiatory fine and be banished. The basic sanction to morality is thus the individual’s own conscience, his compassion that not only, as Mencius put it, “cannot bear to see the sufferings of others,” but wishes them joy.
Much of this view of the matter is still built deeply into the Japanese legal system. Its emphasis is not on whether an objective crime has or has not been committed, and not on restoring equity or punishing the offender, but on gaining from him that self-realization and repentance that is the true meaning of the confession so sought at every legal level (von Mehren 1963:426-427). The myths seem already to have contributed to this system the view that social evil is the failure, as good is the common success, of the individual will to be compassionate with others.
Notes
1. One man, 0 no Yasumaro, was the key amanuensis for both books, which were completed in A.D. 712 (the Kojiki) and in 720 (the Nihongi). Neither book is represented as other than a compilation from thcn-estant sources, not now identifiable but apparently consisting primarily of the archives of various noble families (including the imperial family) and oral traditions and documents, many of the latter having themselves been written down from oral tradition. Both compilations were made at imperial order, at a time when the throne was coming into a position to assert the cultural supremacy of the centralized state over the feudalism or tribalism of the noble families and at a tirnc when Chinesc inlluence over the lives and thought of the upper class was rapidly increasing.
The Kojiki is said to be the transcript of a record dictated to Yasuniaro by one Hieda no Are, a person famous for the ability to memorize, though twenty-five years after he (or she) had been set to the task of committing at least some part of the extant sources to memory. The Nihongi is represented as having been compiled entirely from then-existent documents by Yasumaro and Prince Toneri. The forms of the books we have are consistent with the origins imputed to them. The Kojiki is a smoothly flowing narrative in colloquial Japanese, though transliterated by Chinese characters used phonetically, whereas the Nihongi is written in the Chinese language itself, which was used then for all official documents, and includes quotations as well as numerous variants from the differing sources said to have been used.
The question has been raised of whether the Kojiki we have is not a much later forgery. In evidence against this view, the book shows very few of those Chinese influences which were at the time of its reputed compilation only becoming known in Japan, but which were soon to become an inseparable part of the intellectual furniture of later generations of Japanese. Moreover, the Kojiki also is said to preserve many archaic Japanese linguistic usages which were not known to later generations. Thus, most authorities believe the Kojiki to be what it pretends to be. Probably equally authentic, the Nihongi, however, contains many more usages and ideas derived from the continent, and thus represents a further stage of that cultural fusion which was becoming fashionable during the generation and a half that the compilers say separated the original of these texts. The English translations used and quoted here are, for the Kojiki, Basil Hall Chamberlain’s “Kojiki, Records of Ancient Matters” (1882), and for the Nihongi, W. G. Aston’s Nihongi, Chronicles ofJapanfrom the Earliest Times to A. D. 697 (1896). The Japanese text of the Kojiki used is that of Kurano Kenji, Kojiki taisei (1957).
2. The Nihongi states baldly that heaven emerged before earth as a “united body” out of an original chaos, “like an egg which was of obscurely defined limits and contained germs,” but all commentators consider this a Sinified exegesis.
3. The Kojiki lists three “singlc gods” in existence in heaven prior to the appearance of the reed shoot, but none is given any prominence.
4. The text of the Kojiki is slightly less euphemistic than that of the Nihongi. The term here translated “acts of the honeymoon chamber” is glossed by Kurano (1957:53) as having meant “to exchange glances and consummate a marriage.”
5. The Kojiki and a variant cited in the Nihongi, but not the text of the Nihongi itself, state that Izanagi and Izanami were commanded to their task of creating the earth by the “heavenly deities” and took counsel with them to discover, through their divination, the breach that had produced the deformed child. I have omitted these evidences of a complete and guiding heaven, however, for it is not shown as deeply involved in the creation ofearth.
6. At least this is one interpretation that can be made of the evidence on the family system of the day. See Ariga Kizaemon, “Nihon kodai kazoku” (1948: 103-150).
7. See Nakamura ([1960] 1964: chap. 34, esp. 356-360).