第3章 Taking One's Proper Station 各得其所
ANY ATTEMPT to understand the Japanese must begin with their version of what it means to“take one's proper station”. Their reliance upon order and hierarchy and our faith in freedom and equality are poles apart and it is hard for us to give hierarchy its just due as a possible social mechanism. Japan's confidence in hierarchy is basic in her whole notion of man's relation to his fellow man and of man's relation to the State and it is only by describing some of their national institutions like the family, the State, religious and economic life that it is possible for us to understand their view of life.
The Japanese have seen the whole problem of international relations in terms of their version of hierarchy just as they have seen their internal problems in the same light. For the last decade they have pictured themselves as attaining the apex of that pyramid, and now that this position belongs instead to the Western Nations, their view of hierarchy just as certainly underlies their acceptance of the present dispensation. Their international documents have constantly stated the weight they attach to it. The preamble to the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy which Japan signed in 1940 reads:“The Governments of Japan, Germany and Italy consider it as the condition precedent to any lasting peace that all nations of the world be given each its proper station…”and the Imperial Rescript given on the signing of the Pact said the same thing again:
To enhance our great righteousness in all the earth and to make of the world one household is the great injunction bequeathed by our Imperial Ancestors and we lay this to heart day and night. In the stupendous crisis now confronting the world it appears that war and confusion will be endlessly aggravated and mankind suffer incalculable disasters. We fervently hope that disturbances will cease and peace be restored as soon as possible… We are therefore deeply gratified that this pact has been concluded between the Three Powers.
The task of enabling each nation to find its proper place and all individuals to live in peace and security is of the greatest magnitude. It is unparalleled in history. This goal is still far distant….
On the very day of the attack on Pearl Harbor, too, the Japanese envoys handed to Secretary of State Cordell Hull a most explicit statement on this point.
It is the immutable policy of the Japanese Government…. to enable each nation to find its proper place in the world….The Japanese Government cannot tolerate the perpetuation of the present situation since it runs directly counter to Japan's fundamental policy to enable each nation to enjoy its proper station in the world.
This Japanese memorandum was in response to Secretary Hull's a few days previous which had invoked American principles just as basic and honored in the United States as hierarchy is in Japan. Secretary Hull enumerated four: inviolability of sovereignty and of territorial integrity; nonintervention in other nations’internal affairs; reliance on international co-operation and conciliation; and the principle of equality. These are all major points in the American faith in equal and inviolable rights and are the principles on which we believe daily life should be based no less than international relations. Equality is the highest, most moral American basis for hopes for a better world. It means to us freedom from tyranny, from interference, and from unwanted impositions. It means equality before the law and the right to better one's ondition in life. It is the basis for the rights of man as they are organized in the world we know. We uphold the virtue of equality even when we violate it and we fight hierarchy with a righteous indignation.
It has been so ever since America was a nation at all. Jefferson wrote it into the Declaration of Independence, and the Bill of Rights incorporated in the Constitution is based on it. These formal phrases of the public documents of a new nation were important just because they reflected a way of life that was taking shape in the daily living of men and women on this continent, a way of life that was strange to Europeans. One of the great documents of international reporting is the volume a young Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville, wrote on this subject of equality after he had visited the United States in the early eighteen-thirties. He was an intelligent and sympathetic observer who was able to see much good in this alien world of America. For it was alien. The young de Tocqueville had been bred in the aristocratic society of France which within the memory of still active and influential men had first been jolted and shocked by the French Revolution and then by the new and drastic 1aws of Napoleon. He was generous in his appreciation of a strange new order of life in America but he saw it through the eyes of a French aristocrat and his book was a report to the Old World on things to come. The United States, he believed, was an advance post of developments which would take place, though with differences. in Europe also.
He reported therefore at length on this new world. Here people really considered themselves the equals of others. Their social intercourse was on a new and easy footing. They fell into conversation as man to man. Americans did not care about the little attentions of a hierarchal etiquette; they did not demand them as their due nor offer them to others. They liked to say they owed nothing to any man. There was no family here in the old aristocratic or Roman sense, and the social hierarchy which had dominated the Old World was gone. These Americans trusted equality as they trusted nothing else; even liberty, he said, they often in practice let fly out of the window while they looked the other way. But they lived equality.
It is invigorating for Americans to see their forebears through the eyes of this stranger, writing about our way of life more than a century ago. There have been many changes in our country but the main outlines have not altered. We recognize, as we read, that America in 1830 was already America as we know it. There have been, and there still are, those in this country who, like Alexander Hamilton in Jefferson's day, are in favor of a more aristocratic ordering of society. But even the Hamiltons recognize that our way of life in this country is not aristocratic.
When we stated to Japan therefore just before Pearl Harbor the high moral bases on which the United States based her policy in the Pacific we were voicing our most trusted principles. Every step in the direction in which we pointed would according to our convictions improve a still imperfect world. The Japanese, too, when they put their trust in“proper station”were turning to the rule of life which had been ingrained in them by their own social experience. Inequality has been for centuries the rule of their organized life at just those points where it is most predictable and most accepted. Behavior that recognizes hierarchy is as natural to them as breathing. It is not, however, a simple Occidental authoritarianism. Both those who exercise control and those who are under others’control act in conformity to a tradition which is unlike our own, and now that the Japanese have accepted the high hierarchal place of American authority in their country, it is even more necessary for us to get the clearest possible idea of their conventions. Only so can we picture to ourselves the way in which they are likely to act in their present situation.
Japan for all its recent Westernization is still an aristocratic society. Every greeting, every contact must indicate the kind and degree of social distance between men. Every time a man says to another“Eat”or“Sit down”he uses different words if he is addressing someone familiarly or is speaking to an inferior or to a superior. There is a different“you”that must be used in each case and the verbs have different stems. The Japanese have, in other words, what is called a“respect language,”as many other peoples do in the Pacific, and they accompany it with proper bows and kneelings. All such behavior is governed by meticulous rules and conventions; it is not merely necessary to know to whom one bows but it is necessary to know how much one bows. A bow that is right and proper to one host would be resented as an insult by another who stood in a slightly different relationship to the bower. And bows range all the way from kneeling with forehead lowered to the hands placed flat upon the floor, to the mere inclination of head and shoulders. One must learn, and learn early, how to suit the obeisance to each particular case.
It is not merely class differences which must be constantly recognized by appropriate behavior, though these are important. Sex and age, family ties and previous dealings between two persons all enter into the necessary calculations. Even between the same two persons different degrees of respect will be called for on different occasions: a civilian may be on familiar terms with another and not bow to him at all, but when he wears a military uniform his friend in civilian clothes bows to him. Observance of hierarchy is an art which requires the balancing of innumerable factors, some of which in any particular case may cancel each other out and some of which may be additive.
There are of course persons between whom there is relatively little ceremony. In the United States these people are one's own family circle. We shed even the slight formalities of our etiquette when we come home to the bosom of our family. In Japan it is precisely in the family where respect rules are learned and meticulously observed. While the mother still carries the baby strapped to her back she will push his head down with her hand, and his first lessons as a toddler are to observe respect behavior to his father or older brother. The wife bows to her husband, the child bows to his father, younger brothers bow to elder brothers, the sister bows to all her brothers of whatever age. It is no empty gesture. It means that the one who bows acknowledges the right of the other to have his way in things he might well prefer to manage himself, and the one who receives the bow acknowledges in his turn certain responsibilities incumbent upon his station. Hierarchy based on sex and generation and primogeniture are part and parcel of family life.
Filial piety is, of course, a high ethical law which Japan shares with China, and Chinese formulations of it were early adopted in Japan along with Chinese Buddhism, Confucian ethics and secular Chinese culture in the sixth and seventh centuries A. D. The character of filial piety, however, was inevitably modified to suit the different structure of the family in Japan. In China, even today, one owes loyalty to one's vast extended clan. It may number tens of thousands of people over whom it has jurisdiction and from whom it receives support. Conditions differ in different parts of that vast country but in large parts of China all people in any village are members of the same clan. Among all of China's 450, 000, 000 inhabitants there are only 470 surnames and all people with the same surname count themselves in some degree clan-brothers. Over a whole area all people may be exclusively of one clan and, in addition, families living in far-away cities are their clan fellows. In populous areas like Kwangtung all the clan members unite in keeping up great clan-halls and on stated days they venerate as many as a thousand ancestral tablets of dead clan members stemming from a common forebear. Each clan owns property, lands and temples and has clan funds which are used to pay for the education of any promising clan son. It keeps track of dispersed members and publishes elaborate genealogies which are brought up to date every decade or so to show the names of those who have a right to share in its privileges. It has ancestral laws which might even forbid them to surrender family criminals to the State if the clan was not in agreement with the authorities. In Imperial times these great communities of semi-autonomous clans were governed in the name of the larger State as casually as possible by easy-going mandarinates headed by rotating State appointees who were foreigners in the area.
All this was different in Japan. Until the middle of the nineteenth century only noble families and warrior (samurai) families were allowed to use surnames. Surnames were fundamental in the Chinese clan system and without these, or some equivalent, clan organization cannot develop. One of these equivalents in some tribes is keeping a genealogy. But in Japan only the upper classes kept genealogies and even in these they kept the record, as Daughters of the American Revolution do in the United States, backward in time from the present living person, not downward in time to include every contemporary who stemmed from an original ancestor. It is a very different matter. Besides, Japan was a feudal country. Loyalty was due, not to a great group of relatives, but to a feudal lord. He was resident overlord, and the contrast with the temporary bureaucratic mandarins of China, who were always strangers in their districts, could not have been greater. What was important in Japan was that one was of the fief of Satsuma or the fief of Hizen. A man's ties were to his fief.
Another way of institutionalizing clans is through the worship of remote ancestors or of clan gods at shrines or holy places. This would have been possible for the Japanese“common people”even without surnames and genealogies. But in Japan there is no cult of veneration of remote ancestors and at the shrines where“common people”worship all villagers join together without having to prove their common ancestry. They are called the“children”of their shrine-god, but they are“children”because they live in his territory. Such village worshipers are of course related to each other as villagers in any part of the world are after generations of fixed residence but they are not a tight clan group descended from a common ancestor.
The reverence due to ancestors is paid at a quite different shrine in the family living room where only six or seven recent dead are honored. Among all classes in Japan obeisance is done daily before this shrine and food set out for parents and grandparents and close relatives remembered in the flesh, who are represented in the shrine by little miniature gravestones. Even in the cemetery the markers on the graves of greatgrandparents are no longer relettered and the identity even of the third ancestral generation sinks rapidly into oblivion. Family ties in Japan are whittled down almost to Occidental proportions and the French family is perhaps the nearest equivalent.
“Filial piety”in Japan, therefore, is a matter within a limited face-to-face family. It means taking one's proper station according to generation, sex, and age within a group which includes hardly more than one's father and father's father, their brother and their descendants. Even in important houses, where larger groups may be included, the family splits up into separate lines and younger sons establish branch families. Within this narrow face-to-face group the rules that regulate“proper station”are meticulous. There is strict subservience to elders until they elect to go into formal retirement (inkyo). Even today a father of grown sons, if his own father has not retired, puts through no transaction without having it approved by the old grandfather. Parents make and break their children's marriages even when the children are thirty and forty years old. The father as male head of the household is served first at meals, goes first to the family bath, and receives with a nod the deep bows of his family. There is a popular riddle in Japan which might be translated into our conundrum form:“Why is a son who wants to offer advice to his parents like a Buddhist priest who wants to have hair on the top of his head?”(Buddhist priests had a tonsure. ) The answer is,“However much he wants to do it. He can't.”
Proper station means not only differences of generation but differences of age. When the Japanese want to express utter confusion, they say that something is“neither elder brother nor younger brother”. It is like our saying that something is neither fish nor fowl, for to the Japanese a man should keep his character as elder brother as drastically as a fish should stay in water. The eldest son is the heir. Travelers speak of“that air of responsibility which the eldest son so early acquires in Japan.”The eldest son shares to a high degree in the prerogatives of the father. In the old days his younger brother would have been inevitably dependent upon him in time; nowadays, especially in towns and villages, it is he who will stay at home in the old rut while his younger brothers will perhaps press forward and get more education and a better income. But old habits of hierarchy are strong.
Even in political commentary today the traditional prerogatives of elder brothers are vividly stated in discussions of Greater East Asia policy. In the spring of 1942 a Lieutenant Colonel, speaking for the War Office, said on the subject of the Coprosperity Sphere:“Japan is their elder brother and they are Japan's younger brothers. This fact must be brought home to the inhabitants of the occupied territories. Too much consideration shown for the inhabitants might engender in their minds the tendency to presume on Japan's kindness with pernicious effects on Japanese rule.”The elder brother, in other words, decides what is good for his younger brother and should not show“too much consideration”in enforcing it.
Whatever one's age, one's position in the hierarchy depends on whether one is male or female. The Japanese woman walks behind her husband and has a lower status. Even women who on occasions when they wear American clothes walk alongside and precede him through a door, again fall to the rear when they have donned their kimonos. The Japanese daughter of the family must get along as best she can while the presents, the attentions, and the money for education go to her brothers. Even when higher schools were established for young women the prescribed courses were heavily loaded with instruction in etiquette and bodily movement. Serious intellectual training was not on a par with boys', and one principal of such a school, advocating for his upper middle class students some instruction in European languages, based his recommendation on the desirability of their being able to put their husband's books back in the bookcase right side up after they had dusted them.
Nevertheless, the Japanese women have great freedom as compared to most other Asiatic countries and this is not just a phase of Westernization. There never was female foot-binding as in the Chinese upper classes, and Indian women today exclaim over Japanese women going in and out of shops, up and down the streets and never secreting themselves. Japanese wives do the family shopping and carry the family purse. If money fails, it is they who must select something from the household and carry it to the pawnshop. A woman runs her servants, has great say in her children's marriages, and when she is a mother-in-law commonly runs her household realm with as firm a hand as if she had never been, for half her life, a nodding violet.
The prerogatives of generation, sex, and age in Japan are great. But those who exercise these privileges act as trustees rather than as arbitrary autocrats. The father or the elder brother is responsible for the household, whether its members are living, dead, or yet unborn. He must make weighty decisions and see that they are carried out. He does not, however, have unconditional authority. He is expected to act responsibly for the honor of the house. He recalls to his son and younger brother the legacy of the family, both in material and in spiritual things, and he challenges them to be worthy. Even if he is a peasant he invokes noblesse oblige to the family forebears,and if he belongs to more exalted classes the weight of responsibility to the house becomes heavier and heavier. The claims of the family come before the claims of the individual.
In any affair of importance the head of a family of any standing calls a family council at which the matter is debated. For a conference on a betrothal, for instance, members of the family may come from distant parts of Japan. The process of coming to a decision involves all the imponderables of personality. A younger brother or a wife may sway the verdict. The master of the house saddles himself with great difficulties if he acts without regard for group opinion. Decisions, of course, may be desperately unwelcome to the individual whose fate is being settled. His elders, however, who have themselves submitted in their 1ifetimes to decisions of family councils, are impregnable in demanding of their juniors what they have bowed to in their day. The sanction behind their demand is very different from that which, both in law and in custom, gives the Prussian father arbitrary rights over his wife and children. What is demanded is not for this reason less exacting in Japan, but the effects are different. The Japanese do not learn in their home life to value arbitrary authority, and the habit of submitting to it easily is not fostered. Submission to the will of the family is demanded in the name of a supreme value in which, however onerous its requirements, all of them have a stake. It is demanded in the name of a common loyalty.
Every Japanese learns the habit of hierarchy first in the bosom of his family and what he learns there he applies in wider fields of economic life and of government. He learns that a person gives all deference to those who outrank him in assigned“proper place,”no matter whether or not they are the really dominant persons in the group. Even a husband who is dominated by his wife, or an elder brother who is dominated by a younger brother, receives no less formal deference. Formal boundaries between prerogatives are not broken down just because some other person is operating behind the scenes. The facade is not changed to suit the facts of dominance. It remains inviolable. There is even a certain tactical advantage in operating without the trappings of formal status; one is in that case less vulnerable. The Japanese learn, too, in their family experience that the greatest weight that can be given to a decision comes from the family conviction that it maintains the family honor. The decision is not a decree enforced by an iron fist at the whim of a tyrant who happens to be head of the family. He is more nearly a trustee of a material and spiritual estate which is important to them all and which demands of them all that they subordinate their personal wills to its requirements. The Japanese repudiate the use of the mailed fist, but they do not for that reason subordinate themselves any the less to the demands of the family, nor do they for that reason give to those with assigned status any less extreme deference. Hierarchy in the family is maintained even though the family elders have little opportunity to be strongarmed autocrats.
Such a bald statement of hierarchy in the Japanese family does not, when Americans read it with their different standards of interpersonal behavior, do justice to the acceptance of strong and sanctioned emotional ties in Japanese families. There is very considerable solidarity in the household and how they achieve it is one of the subjects of this book. Meanwhile it is important in trying to understand their demand for hierarchy in the wider fields of government and economic life to recognize how thoroughly the habit is learned in the bosom of the family.
The hierarchal arrangements of Japanese life have been as drastic in relations between the classes as they have been in the family. In all her national history Japan has been a strong class and caste society, and a nation which has a centuries-long habit of caste arrangements has certain strengths and certain weaknesses which are of the utmost importance. In Japan caste has been the rule of life through all her recorded history and even back in the seventh century A. D. she was already adapting the ways of life she borrowed from casteless China to suit her own hierarchal culture. In that era of the seventh and eighth centuries, the Japanese Emperor and his court set themselves the task of enriching Japan with the customs of the high civilization that had greeted the amazed eyes of their envoys in the great kingdom of China. They went about it with incomparable energy. Before that time Japan had not even had a written language; in the seventh century she took the ideographs of China and used them co write her own totally different language. She had had a religion which named forty thousand gods who presided over mountains and villages and gave people good fortune-a folk religion which with all its subsequent changes has survived as modern Shinto. In the seventh century, Japan adopted Buddhism wholesale from China as a religion“excellent for protecting the State.”she had had no great permanent architecture, either public or private; the Emperors built a new capital city, Nara, on the model of a Chinese capital, and great ornate Buddhist temples and vast Buddhist monasteries were erected in Japan after the Chinese pattern. The Emperors introduced titles and ranks and laws their envoys reported to them from China. It is difficult to find anywhere in the history of the world any other such successfully planned importation of civilization by a sovereign nation.
Japan, however, from the very first, failed to reproduce China's casteless social organization. The official titles Japan adopted were in China given to administrators who had passed the State examinations, but in Japan they were given to hereditary nobles and feudal lords. They became part of the caste arrangements of Japan. Japan was laid out in a great number of semi-sovereign fiefs whose lords were constantly jealous of each other's powers, and the social arrangements that mattered were those that had to do with the prerogatives of lords and vassals and retainers. No matter how assiduously Japan imported civilization from China she could not adopt ways of life which put in the place of her hierarchy anything like China's administrative bureaucracy or her system of extended clans which united people from the most different walks of life into one great clan. Nor did Japan adopt the Chinese idea of a secular Emperor. The Japanese name for the Imperial House is“Those who dwell above the clouds”and only persons of this family can be Emperor. Japan has never had a change of dynasty, as China so often had. The Emperor was inviolable and his person was sacred. The Japanese Emperors and their courts who introduced Chinese culture in Japan no doubt could not even imagine what the Chinese arrangements were in these matters and did not guess what changes they were making.
In spite of all Japan's cultural importations from China, therefore, this new civilization only paved the way for centuries of conflict as to which of these hereditary lords and vassals was in control of the country. Before the eighth century had ended the noble Fujiwara family had seized dominance and had thrust the Emperor into the background. When, as time went on, the Fujiwaras’dominance was disputed by feudal lords and the whole country plunged into civil war, one of these, the famous Yoritomo Minamoto, vanquished all rivals and became actual ruler of the country under an old military title, the Shogun, which in full means literally“Barbarian-subduing Generalissimo.”This title, as was usual in Japan, Yoritomo made hereditary in the Minamoto family for as long as his descendants could hold the other feudal lords in check. The Emperor became an impotent figure. His chief importance was that the Shogun still depended upon him for his ritual investiture. He had no civil power. The actual power was held by a military camp, as it was called, which tried to hold its dominance by armed force over unrurly fiefs.Each feudal lord,the daimyo,had his armed retainers,the samurai whose swords were at his disposal,and they were always ready in periods of disorder to dispute the“proper place”of a rival fief or of the ruling Shogun.
In the sixteenth century civil war had become endemic. After decades of disorder the great Ieyasu won out over all rivals and in 1603 became the first Shogun of the House of Tokugawa. The Shogunate remained in Ieyasu's line for two centuries and a half and was ended only in 1868 when the“dual rule”of Emperor and Shogun was abolished at the beginning of the modern period. In many ways this long Tokugawa Era is one of the most remarkable in history. It maintained an armed peace in Japan up to the very last generation before it ended and it put into effect a centralized administration that admirably served the Tokugawas’purposes.
Ieyasu was faced with a most difficult problem and he did not choose an easy solution. The lords of some of the strongest fiefs had been against him in the civil war and had bowed to him only after a final disastrous defeat. These were the so-called Outside Lords. These lords he left in control of their fiefs and of their samurai, and indeed of all the feudal lords of Japan they continued to have the greatest autonomy in their domains. Nevertheless, he excluded them from the honor of being his vassals and from all important functions.These important positions were reserved for the Inside Lords, Ieyasu's supporters in the civil war. To maintain this difficult regime the Tokugawas relied upon a strategy of keeping the feudal lords, the daimyos, from accumulating power and of preventing any possible combination among them which might threaten the Shogun's control. Not only did the Tokugawas not abolish the feudal scheme; for the purpose of maintaining peace in Japan and dominance of the House of Tokugawa, they attempted to strengthen it and make it more rigid.
Japanese feudal society was elaborately stratified and each man's status was fixed by inheritance. The Tokuga was solidified this system and regulated the details of each caste's daily behavior. Every family head had to post on his doorway his class position and the required facts about his hereditary status. The clothes he could wear, the foods he could buy, and the kind of house he could legally live in were regulated according to this inherited rank. Below the Imperial Family and the court nobles, there were four Japanese castes ranked in hierarchal order: the warriors (samurai), the farmers, the artisans, and the merchants. Below these, again, were the outcasts. The most numerous and famous of these outcasts were the Eta, workers in tabooed trades. They were scavengers, buriers of the executed, skinners of dead animals and tanners of hides. They were Japan's untouchables, or, more exactly, their untouchables, for even the mileage of roads through their villages went uncounted as if the land and the inhabitants of the area did not exist at all. They were desperately poor, and, though guaranteed the exercise of their trades, they were outside the formal structure.
The merchants ranked just above the outcasts. However strange this seems to Americans, it was highly realistic in a feudal society. A merchant class is always disruptive of feudalism. As business men become respected and prosperous, feudalism decays. When the Tokugawas, by the most drastic laws any nation has ever enforced, decreed the isolation of Japan in the seventeenth century, they cut the ground from under the feet of the merchants. Japan had had an overseas trade all up and down the coast of China and Korea and a class of traders had been inevitably developing. The Tokugawas stopped all this by making it an offense worthy of capital punishment to build or operate any boat larger than a certain size. The small boats allowed could not cross to the continent or carry loads of trade goods. Domestic trade was severely restricted, too, by customs barriers which were set up on the borders of each fief with strict rules against letting goods in or out. Other laws were directed toward emphasizing the merchant's low social position. Sumptuary laws regulated the clothes they could wear, the umbrellas they could carry, the amount they could spend for a wedding or a funeral. They could not live in a samurai district. They had no legal protection against the swords of the samurai, the privileged warriors. The Tokugawa policy of keeping the merchants in inferior stations failed of course in a money economy, and Japan at that period was run on a money economy. But it was attempted.
The two classes which are appropriate to a stable feudalism, the warriors and the farmers, the Tokugawa regime froze into rigid forms. During the civil wars that were finally ended by Ieyasu, the great war-lord, Hideyoshi, had already completed, by his famous“sword hunt,”the separation of these two classes. He had disarmed the peasants and given to the samurai the solo right to wear swords. The warriors could no longer be farmers nor artisans nor merchants. Not even the lowest of them could any longer legally be a producer; he was a member of a parasitic class which drew its annual rice stipend from taxes levied upon the peasants. The daimyo handled this rice and distributed to each samurai retainer his allotted income. There was no question about where the samurai had to look for support; he was wholly dependent upon his lord. In earlier eras of Japanese history strong ties between the feudal chief and his warriors had been forged in almost ceaseless war between the fiefs;in the Tokugawa era of peace the ties became economic. For the warrior-retainer, unlike his European counterpart, was not a sub-seigneur owning his own land and serfs nor was he a soldier of fortune. He was a pensioner on a set stipend which had been fixed for his family line at the beginning of the Tokugawa Era. It was not large. Japanese scholars have estimated that the average stipend of all samurai was about what farmers were earning and that was certainly bare subsistence. *Nothing could be more to the family's disadvantage than division of this stipend among heirs and in consequence the samurai limited their families. Nothing could be more galling to them than prestige dependent on wealth and display, so they laid great stress in their code on the superior virtues of frugality.
A great gulf separated the samurai from the other three classes: the farmers, the artisans and the merchants. These last three were“common people.”The samurai were not. The swords the samurai wore as their prerogative and sign of caste were not mere decorations. They had the right to use them on the common people. They had traditionally done so before Tokugawa times and the laws of Ieyasu merely sanctioned old customs when they decreed:“Common people who behave unbecomingly to the samurai or who do not show respect to their superiors may be cut down on the spot.”It was no part of Ieyasu's design that mutual dependence should be built up between common people and the samurai retainers. His policy was based on strict hierarchal regulations. Both classes headed up to the daimyo and reckoned directly with him; they were on different stairways, as it were. Up and down each stairway there was law and regulation and control and reciprocity. Between the people on two stairways there was merely distance. The separateness of the two classes was necessarily bridged by circumstances over and over again but it was not a part of the system.
During the Tokugawa Era samurai retainers were not mere sword-swingers. They became increasingly the stewards of their overlords’estates and specialist in peaceful arts like the classical drama and the tea ceremony. All protocol lay in their sphere and the daimyo's intrigues were carried out by their skilled manipulations. Two hundred years of peace is a long time and mere individual sword swinging had its limits. Just as the merchants, in spite of the caste regulations, developed a way of life that gave high place to urbane and artistic and pleasurable pursuits, so the samurai, in spite of their ready swords, developed arts of peace.
The farmers, in spite of their legal defenselessness against the samurai, the heavy levies of rice made upon them and all the restrictions imposed upon them, had certain securities guaranteed them. They were guaranteed the possession of their farms and to have land gives a man prestige in Japan. Under the Tokugawa regime, land could not be permanently alienated and this law was a guarantee for the individual cultivator, not, as in European feudalism, for the feudal lord. The farmer had a permanent right to something which he valued supremely and he appears to have worked his land with the same diligence and unstinting care with which his descendants cultivate their rice fields today. Nevertheless, he was the Atlas who supported the whole parasitic upper class of about two million persons, including the government of the Shogun, the establishments of the daimyo and the stipends of the samurai retainers. He was taxed in kind, that is, he paid to the daimyo a percentage of his crops. Whereas in Siam, another wet-rice country, the traditional tax is 10 percent, in Tokugawa Japan it was 40 percent. But in reality it was higher than this. In some fiefs it was 80 percent and always there was corvee or work requisitions, which bore down on the strength and time of the famer. Like the samurai, the farmers also limited their families and the population of the whole of Japan stood at almost the same figure during all the Tokugawa centuries. For an Asiatic country during a long period of peace these static population figures tell a great deal about the regime. It was Spartan in its restrictions, both on the tax-supported retainers and on the producing class, but between each dependent and his superior, it was relatively dependable. A man knew his obligations, his prerogatives and his station and if these were infringed upon the poorest might protest.
The farmers, even in the direst poverty, carried their protests not only to the feudal lord but to the Shogunate authorities. There were at least a thousand of these revolts during the two and a half Tokugawa centuries. They were not occasioned by the traditional heavy rule of“40 percent to the prince and 60 percent to the cultivators”; they were all protests against additional levies. When conditions were no longer bearable, the farmers might march in great numbers against their overlords but the procedure of petition and judgment was orderly. The farmers drew up formal petitions for redress which they submitted to the daimyo's chamberlain. When this petition was intercepted or the daimyo took no notice of their complaints they sent their representatives to the capital to present their written complaints to the Shogunate. In famous cases they could insure its delivery only by inserting it into some high official's palanquin as he rode through the streets of the capital. But, no matter what risks the farmers took in delivering the petition, it was then investigated by the Shogunate authorities and about half of the judgments were in favor of the peasants.
Japan's requirements of law and order were not satisfied, however, with the Shogunate's judgment on the famers’claims. Their complaints might be just and it might be advisable for the State to honor them, but the peasant leaders had transgressed the strict law of hierarchy. Regardless of any decision in their favor, they had broken the essential law of their allegiance and this could not be overlooked. They were therefore condemned to death. The righteousness of their cause had nothing to do with the matter. Even the peasants accepted this inevitability. The condemned men were their heroes and the people came in numbers to the execution where the 1eaders were boiled in oil or beheaded or crucified, but at the execution the crowds did not riot. This was 1aw and order. They might afterward build the dead men shrines and honor them as martyrs, but they accepted the execution as part and parcel of the hierarchal laws by which they lived.
The Tokugawa Shoguns, in short, attempted to solidify the caste structure within each fief and to make each class dependent on the feudal lord. The daimyo stood at the apex of the hierarchy in each fief and he was allowed to exercise his prerogatives over his dependents. The Shogun's great administrative problem was to control the daimyo. In every way he prevented them from forming alliances or from carrying out schemes of aggression. Passport and customs officials were maintained at the frontiers of the fiefs to keep strict watch for“outgoing women and incoming guns”lest any daimyo try to send his women away and smuggle arms in. No daimyo could contract a marriage without the Shogun's permission lest it might lead to a dangerous political alliance. Trade between the fiefs was hindered even to the extent of allowing bridges to become impassable. The Shogun's spies too kept him well informed on the daimyo's expenditures and if the feudal coffers were filling up, the Shogun required him to undertake expensive public works to bring him in line again. Most famous regulation of all was that the daimyo live half of each year in the capital and, even when he returned to his fief for his residence there, he had to leave his wife behind him in Yedo (Tokyo) as a hostage in the hands of the Shoguns. In all these ways the administration made certain that it maintain the upper hand and enforce its dominant position in the hierarchy.
The Shogun was not, of course, the final keystone in this arch for he held sway as the appointee of the Emperor.The Emperor with his court of hereditary nobles(kuge)was isolated in Kyoto and was without actual power. The Emperor's financial resources were less than those of even lesser daimyos and the very ceremonies of the court were strictly circumscribed by Shogunate regulations. Not even the most powerful Tokugawa Shoguns,however, took any steps to do away with this dual rule of Emperor and actual ruler. It was no new thing in Japan. Since the twelfth century a Generalissimo (Shogun) had ruled the country in the name of a throne shorn of actual authority. In some centuries division of function had gone so far that the real power which the shadowy Emperor delegated to a hereditary secular chief was exercised in turn by a hereditary advisor of that chief. There has always been delegation upon delegation of original authority. Even in the last and desperate days of the Tokugawa regime, Commodore Perry did not suspect the existence of an Emperor in the background and our first envoy, Townsend Harris, who negotiated the first commercial treaty with Japan in 1858, had to discover for himself that there was an Emperor.
The truth is that Japan's conception of her Emperor is one that is found over and over among the islands of the Pacific. He is the Sacred Chief who may or may not take part in administration. In some Pacific islands he did and in some he delegated his authority. But always his person was sacred. Among New Zealand tribes the Sacred Chief was so sacrosanct that he might not feed himself and even the spoon with which he was fed must not be allowed to touch his sacred teeth. He had to be carried when he went abroad, for any land upon which he set his sacred foot became automatically so holy that it must pass into the Sacred Chief's possession. His head was particularly sacrosanct and no man could touch it. His words reached the tribal gods. In some Pacific islands, like Samoa and Tonga, the Sacred Chief did not descend into the arena of life. A Secular Chief performed all the duties of State. James Wilson, who visited the island of Tonga in the Eastern Pacific at the end of the eighteenth century, wrote that its government“resembles most the government of Japan where the sacred majesty is a sort of state prisoner to the captain-general.”The Tongan Sacred Chiefs were isolated from public affairs, but they performed ritual duties.They had to receive the first fruits of the gardens and conduct a ceremony before any man could eat of them. When the Sacred Chief died, his death was announced by the phrase,“The heavens are void.”He was buried with ceremony in a great royal tomb. But he took no part in administration.
The Emperor, even when he was politically impotent and“a sort of State prisoner to the Captain-general,”filled, according to Japanese definitions, a“proper station”in the hierarchy. The Emperor's active participation in mundane affairs was to them no measure of his status. His court at Kyoto was a value they preserved all through the long centuries of the rule of the Barbarian-subduing Generalissimos. His functions were superfluous only from a Western point of view. The Japanese, who at every point were accustomed to rigorous definition of hierarchal role, looked at the matter differently.
The extreme explicitness of the Japanese hierarchal system in feudal times, from outcast to Emperor, has left its strong impress on modern Japan. After all, the feudal regime was legally ended only about seventy-five years ago, and strong national habits do not pass away within one man's lifetime. Japanese statesmen of the modern period, too, laid their careful plans, as we shall see in the next chapter, to preserve a great deal of the system in spite of radical alterations in their country's objectives. The Japanese, more than any other sovereign nation, have been conditioned to a world where the smallest details of conduct are mapped and status is assigned. During two centuries when law and order were maintained in such a world with an iron hand, the Japanese learned to identify this meticulously plotted hierarchy with safety and security. So long as they stayed within known boundaries, and so long as they fulfilled known obligations, they could trust their world. Banditry was controlled. Civil war between the daimyo was prevented. If subjects could prove that others had overstepped their rights, they could appeal as the farmers did when they were exploited. It was personally dangerous but it was approved. The best of the Tokugawa Shoguns even had a Complaint Box into which any citizen could drop his protest, and the Shogun alone had a key to his box. There were genuine guarantees in Japan that aggressions would be rectified if they were acts that were not allowed on the existing map of conduct. One trusted the map and was safe only when one followed it. One showed one's courage, one's integrity in conforming to it, not in modifying it or in revolting against it. Within its stated limits, it was a known and, in their eyes, a dependable world. Its rules were not abstract ethical principles of a decalogue but tiny specifications. of what was due in this situation and what was due in that situation; what was due if one were a samurai and what was due if one were a common man; what was proper to elder brother and what was proper to younger brother.
The Japanese did not become a mild and submissive people under this system, as some nations have under a strong-handed hierarchal regime. It is important to recognize that certain guarantees were given to each class. Even the outcasts were guaranteed a monopoly of their special trades and their self-governing bodies were recognized by the authorities. Restrictions upon each class were great but there were order and security too.
The caste restrictions also had a certain flexibility they do not have, for instance, in India. Japanese customs provided several explicit techniques for manipulating the system without doing violence to the accepted ways. A man could change his caste status in several ways. When money lenders and merchants became wealthy, as they inevitably did under Japan's money economy, the rich used various traditional devices to infiltrate the upper classes. They became“land owners”by the use of liens and rents. It is true that the peasants’land was inalienable but farm rents were excessively high in Japan and it was profitable to leave the peasants on their 1and Money lenders settled on the 1and and collected their rents, and such“ownership”of land gave prestige as well as profit in Japan. Their children married samurai. They became gentry.
Another traditional manipulation of the caste system was through the custom of adoption. It provided a way“buying”samurai status. As merchants became richer in spite of all Tokugawa restrictions, they arranged for their sons’adoption into samurai families. In Japan one seldom adopts a son; one adopts a husband for one's daughter. He is known as an“adopted husband.”He becomes the heir of his father-in law. He pays a high price, for his name is stricken from his own family register and entered on his wife's. He takes her name and goes to live with his mother-inlaw. But if the price is high, the advantages are also great. For the prosperous merchant's descendants become samurai and the impoverished samurai's family gets an alliance with wealth. No violence is done to the caste system which remains just what it always was. But the system has been manipulated to provide upper-class status for the wealthy.
Japan therefore did not require castes to marry only among themselves. There were approved arrangements which allowed intermarriage among them. The resulting infiltration of prosperous traders into the lower samurai class played a large part in furthering one of the greatest contrasts between Western Europe and Japan. When feudalism broke down in Europe it was due to the pressure of a growing and increasingly powerful middle class and this class dominated the modern industrial period. In Japan no such strong middle class arose. The merchants and money lenders“bought”upper-class status by sanctioned methods. Merchants and lower samurai became allies. It is a curious and surprising thing to point out that at the time when feudalism was in its death throes in both civilizations, Japan sanctioned class mobility to a greater degree than continental Europe did, but no evidence for such a statement could be more convincing than the lack of any sign of a class war between aristocracy and bourgeoisie.
It is easy to point out that the common cause made by these two classes was mutually advantageous in Japan, but it would have been mutually advantageous in France too. It was advantageous in Western Europe in those individual instances where it occurred. But class rigidity was strong in Europe and the conflict of classes led in France to the expropriation of the aristocracy. In Japan they drew closer together. The alliance that overthrew the effete shogunate was an alliance between the merchant financiers and the samurai retainers. The modern era in Japan preserved the aristocratic system. It could hardly have happened without Japan s sanctioned techniques for class mobility.
If the Japanese loved and trusted their meticulously explicit map of behavior, they had a certain justification. It guaranteed security so long as one followed the rules; it allowed protests against unauthorized aggressions and it could be manipulated to one’s own advantage. It required the fulfillment of reciprocal obligations. When the Tokugawa regime crumbled in the first half of the nineteenth century, no group in the nation was in favor of tearing up the map. There was no French Revolution. There was not even an 1848. Yet the times were desperate. From the common people to the Shogunate, every class had fallen into debt to the money lenders and merchants. The mere numbers of the non-productive classes and the scale of customary official expenditures had proved insupportable. The daimyo as the grip of poverty tightened upon them were unable to pay the fixed stipends to their samurai retainers and the whole network of feudal ties became a mockery. They tried to keep afloat by increasing the already heavy taxes upon the peasants. These were collected years in advance and the farmers were reduced to extreme want. The Shogunate too was bankrupt and could do little to keep the status quo. Japan was in dire domestic extremity by 1853 when Admiral Perry appeared with his men of war. His forced entry was followed in 1858 by a trade treaty with the United States which Japan was in no position to refuse.
The cry that went up from Japan, however, was Isshin-to dig back into the past, to restore. It was the opposite of revolutionary. It was not even progressive. Joined with the cry“Restore the Emperor”was the equally popular cry“Expel the Barbarians”The nation supported the program of going back to a golden age of isolation and the few leaders who saw how impossible such a course would be were assassinated for their pains. There seemed not the slightest likelihood that this non revolutionary country of Japan would alter its course to conform to any Occidental patterns, still less that in fifty years it would compete with Western nations on their own grounds. Nevertheless, that is what happened. Japan used her own strengths, which were not at all the Occidental strengths, to achieve a goal which no powerful high-placed group and no popular opinion in Japan demanded. No Westerner in the eighteen-sixties would have believed if he had seen the future in a crystal ball. There seemed to be no cloud the size of a man's hand on the horizon to indicate the tumult of activity which swept Japan during the next decades. Nevertheless, the impossible happened. Japan's backward and hierarchy-ridden population swung to a new course and held it.
要想理解日本人，首先必须要理解他们对于“各得其所”的说法。日本人对于秩序和等级制的依赖，和我们美国人对于自由和平等的信念之间，如两极之遥。即使等级制社会结构可能存在，我们也还是难以接受“等级制也有正当性”这一说法。日本人对等级制的信心是基于他们的整体观念，包括一个人对自己和家人及同事的关系的观念、个人和国家的关系的观念。因此，只有通过描述他们的一些民族习惯，比如家庭、国家、宗教和经济生活，我们才有可能理解他们的生活方式。
日本人依靠对等级制的理解，来看待整个国际关系中的问题，就像他们采取同一角度看他们自己的国内问题一样。近十年来，他们把自己比喻为高踞金字塔顶端的国家，这一地位现在被西方国家所占据，他们的等级制观点也就成为他们接受现状的心理基础。他们的国际文献不断陈述他们对于这一观点的重视。日本在1940年和德国、意大利签署的《三国同盟条约》的前言中说：“日本、德国和意大利的政府将以下条件视为实现最终和平的先决条件：世界上所有国家各得其所……”在就签署此协定而发布的天皇诏书中表达了同样的意思：
弘扬大义于八纮，缔造神舆为一宇，实我皇祖皇宗之大训，亦朕夙夜所眷念。今世局动乱不知胡底，人类蒙祸不知何极。朕所轸念者，唯在早日勘定祸乱，光复和平……兹三国盟约成立，朕心甚悦。
唯万邦各得其所，兆民悉安其业，此乃旷古大业，前途尚遥……
就在发动珍珠港袭击的当天，日本特使向国务卿卡代尔·赫尔呈交了声明，也详细陈述了这一观点：
“让万邦各得其所，这是日本政府的一项不会变更的政策……日本政府无法忍受当今现状长期维持下去，因为它的运行直接违背了日本最基本的政策：使万邦各得其所。”
日本人的这份备忘录是对数天前赫尔的备忘录的回应，赫尔国务卿的备忘录援引了美国人所尊崇的基本原则，恰如等级制之于日本。赫尔国务卿列举了四项原则：主权不可侵犯和领土完整；互不干涉内政；依赖国际合作和调解；平等原则。这些就是美国人“权利平等和不可侵犯”信念的所有要点，我们深信国际关系应在此基础上建立，日常生活也是如此。平等，对美国人而言，是为获得一个更好的世界的最高的、最富有道德感的基础。它对我们来说意味着不要暴政、不要干涉、不要强迫的自由。它意味着法律面前人人平等，每个人都有争取好的生活条件的权利。当人类在世界上被组织起来时，它是人类权利的基础。甚至在我们破坏了那一组织，为了正义的愤慨而和等级制战斗时，我们依旧在维护平等的价值。
自美国成立之日起，这一信念就已经存在。杰斐逊将其写入了《独立宣言》，被纳入宪法的《人权法案》也是以其为基础的。一个新国家在公开文件中写入这样的正式语句是非常重要的，因为它们反映了这一大陆上的人们在日常生活中所形成的生活方式，而这一生活方式对欧洲人来说是陌生的。一个年轻的法国人托克维尔所写的巨著[1]是伟大的国际报告文献之一，他在18世纪30年代早期访问过美国之后，就“平等”这一主题写了这部著作。他是个聪慧而且富有同情心的观察家，能够在完全陌生的美国看到很多美好的东西。美国对于他来说完全陌生。年轻的托克维尔是在法国的贵族社会中培养出来的，在当时依然活跃且有影响力的人士的记忆中，贵族社会被法国大革命搞得颠簸不平、剧烈动荡，随后又被一部崭新而激进的《拿破仑法典》[2]折腾了一番。他对美国陌生而崭新的生活方式表示赏识，这一态度展现了他的宽厚品质，但是他看美国社会是通过一双法国贵族的眼睛，他的这本书是对旧世界[3]提前报道了一个即将到来的事物。他认为，美国是即将出现的社会发展的前哨站，欧洲也会如此，尽管以后会有些差异。
因此，他尽可能详细地描述了这一新世界。在这里，人们从心底认为彼此平等。他们的社会交往是以一种崭新而且轻松的方式来进行。人们以平等身份相互交谈。美国人很少考虑那些等级礼仪，他们不要求别人必须有这种礼仪，同时也不将这些礼仪强加给别人。他们喜欢说，他们不欠任何人什么。这里也没有贵族世家或者古罗马所强调的家族英雄，统治旧世界的社会等级制度在这里全然不见。他说，美国人只相信平等，而不相信别的。甚至在实际生活中，如果他们想寻找别的方式的话，他们经常会在无意中忽略“自由”，但是他们必须生活得平等。
对美国人来说，通过一个外国人的眼睛看到祖先们在一个多世纪之前为我们写就的生活方式，这是很让人感到振奋的。在我们国家已经发生了不少变化，但是主纲领没有变更过。当我们读托克维尔的书时，我们认识到，18世纪30年代的美国已经是我们现在所了解的这个美国。以前在这个国家有一些人，比如杰斐逊时期的亚历山大·汉密尔顿[4]更赞同一个社会采用贵族秩序，以后也将还有这么一些人。但即使是汉密尔顿也认识到，在这个国家，我们的生活方式并不是贵族社会的方式。
因此在珍珠港袭击之前，我们对着日本人陈述高级道德基础——美国在此基础上形成了其太平洋政策——之时，我们是在宣讲我们最信赖的原则。我们确信，在这一方向上，我们所指出的每一步都将改善这个还不怎么完美的世界。当日本人举出他们对“各得其所”的信仰时，他们也是在举出他们的生活准则，它是在日本人自身社会经历中形成的根深蒂固的准则。在很多个世纪中，不平等就是他们组织生活的准则，就像以上文件所指出的，只有在不平等时，所有事物才都是最可预知和可接受的。对他们来说，接受等级制这一行为就像呼吸一样自然。但是，它并不简单等同于西方式独裁主义。日本的统治者和被统治者协调一致地在维护着与我们迥异的传统。尽管日本人已经接受了美国权威在他们国家的顶尖地位，但我们还是很有必要对他们的传统有一个尽可能清晰的概念。只有这样我们才能搞清楚他们在当今环境下可能选择的行为方式。
尽管日本近期已经西方化了，但它仍然是个贵族社会。每一种寒暄方式、每一种交往方式都要表明双方之间的社会距离的种类和程度。每当一个人对另一个人说“吃”或“坐下”时，都必须按双方的亲昵程度，或者双方的辈分使用不同的词。在每个不同场合必须使用不同的“你”，动词也有不同的表达形式。换句话说，日本人拥有“敬语”，就像很多太平洋地区的人那样，同时他们还伴之以相匹配的鞠躬和跪拜。所有这些行为都是由精细的规矩和习俗所规定的；知道一个人该向谁行礼还不是最重要的，最重要的是知道一个人该怎么行礼。某人的行礼动作对一个接受行礼的人来说是正确而合适的；但是当另一个人和该人的关系产生了微小的差异时，那么这样一种行礼动作就会被视为一种无礼，并遭到接受行礼的人的怨恨。行礼幅度变化也大，从跪在地上、前额触及放在地板上的手，直到仅仅是头和肩膀的微倾，动作不一而足。一个人必须从小就学会如何在每一个特殊场合行合适的礼。
尽管阶级差异很重要，但不仅仅是不同阶级需要靠相匹配的行为来确认，两个人之间性别、年龄、家庭关系以及早先的交往所产生的差异，也都要靠不同礼仪来确认。甚至对完全相同的两个人，在不同的场合也要表达不同程度的尊敬：一个平民可能和另外一个人亲密相处，无须向对方鞠躬，但是当对方穿上了军装时，穿平民服饰的朋友就要向他鞠躬。遵守等级制是一种艺术，它需要在多到数不清的要素之间求取平衡；在一些特殊场合，这些因素有的可以相互抵消，有的则相互增强。
当然，在一些人之间使用礼仪比较少。在美国，家庭圈子之内不会计较礼仪。当我们回到家，回到我们家庭的怀抱时，我们就摆脱了那些礼节的拘泥。在日本，家庭中对礼节要求反而很精细；正是在家庭中，孩子要学习尊敬他人的礼仪，并且谨慎地遵守。当一个妈妈用肩带把婴儿缠在背上时，她会将他的头压向他的手。学步儿童第一堂课就是对父亲和长兄奉行敬礼。妻子向丈夫鞠躬，孩子向父亲鞠躬，弟弟向长兄鞠躬，女孩则是不管几岁，要向所有兄弟们鞠躬。这些并不是空泛的姿态，它意味着对方有权干涉鞠躬者的一些事情，尽管他宁愿自己处理；那个接受鞠躬的人知道自己也要承担和他现在位置相适应的责任。建立在性别、辈分和长子权基础上的等级制是日本家庭生活的一部分。
当然，孝道是日本人的一项高级伦理法则，中国人也是如此。在16世纪和17世纪时，中国人对孝道的解读，和中国式佛教、儒家伦理和中国世俗文化一起被日本吸收。当然，孝道的表达在日本也必然会有所修正，以适应完全不同结构的日本家庭。在中国，一个人对他庞大的宗族也负有忠诚义务。这一宗族可能包括成千上万的人，这些人都对此人有制约权限，而且他能从中获得支持。在那个庞大的国家，在不同地方规矩也有所不同，但是在大多数地方，乡村中的中国人总是同属一个宗族。中国有4.5亿人之多，却只有470个姓，而且所有同姓的人，多多少少都认彼此为同宗。在一个地区居住的人可能无一例外地都属同宗；而且，那些居住在遥远城市的家庭也是他们的同宗。在一些特殊地区，比如说广东，所有的宗族成员联合在一起，组建一个壮观的宗族祠堂，他们定期一起祭拜和他们人数几乎一样多的祖先牌位，而这些祖先也都是由同一个始祖繁衍而来。每一个宗族都拥有财物、土地和庙宇，并设有宗族基金，经常为那些有前途的同宗子弟支付教育经费。它追踪那些分散的宗族成员，并不辞辛苦编纂族谱，这些族谱每十年左右一更新，以记载那些享有登记入册特权的成员的名字。它守着祖宗传下来的家规，如果宗族对当局并不认同的话，这一家规就会规定不得将犯罪的宗族成员交给国家。在帝国时代，这些庞大的半自治社区只是偶尔在名义上受国家管理，那些由国家轮换指派来的随和官员在当地始终是个外人。
日本完全不是这样。直到19世纪中期，也还是只有贵族家庭和武士家庭才被允许拥有姓氏。但是，在中国宗族系统中姓氏是根基，如果没有姓氏或者相当于姓氏的东西，宗族结构就无法发展起来。在一些部落中，记录谱系就相当于姓氏。但是在日本只有上层阶级才记录族谱，甚至在这些族谱中，就像“美国革命妇女会”[5]那样只从当下还活着的人向前回溯一代，并不从某一先人向下记录所有繁衍的人。这是很大的不同。除此之外，日本是个封建国家，忠诚并不是针对宗族大集团而言的，而是针对封建领主，他是当地居民的主君。与之相对比的是，中国任期短暂的政府官员对于他的治下来说，通常是个陌生人，所以他的势力不可能发展壮大。在日本，重要的是这个人属于萨摩藩还是肥前藩，每一个人都被系在藩中。
组织宗族的另一个方法是通过对远祖的崇拜，就是在圣地祭拜远祖和氏族神。针对日本平民来说，即使他们没有姓氏和族谱也可以参与其中。但是在日本，并没有针对远祖的祭拜礼，日本平民在神社祭拜，所有村民都来参加，无须证明他们都有共同的祖先。他们都被称为神社中神的“孩子”，这是因为他们生活在这位神的领地。就像世界上生活在固定区域的其他村民那样，日本村民也互有亲属关系，但是他们并不是从同一个祖先繁衍而来的很紧密的宗族团体。
与神社不同，对祖先的崇拜是在佛坛上进行的，它们被放置在起居室中，只供奉了六七个新近死去的人。所有日本人每天都要在自家佛坛前敬礼，不管他属于哪一个阶层。佛坛中供奉的类似微型墓碑的灵牌，代表了父母、祖父母和其他近亲属，家人要向这些灵牌供奉食物。墓地中曾祖父母墓碑上的字也不会再重刻，甚至三代之前祖先的身份都会很快湮没不闻。日本家庭人口的削减比例和西方相似，法国家庭应该是跟它最相近的。
因此，日本的孝道是局限在每天直接接触的家庭成员之内的。它意味着“各得其所”，涉及一个人在团体中的辈分、性别和年龄，这一团体很少超过如下范围：父亲、叔（伯）父、祖父、叔（伯）祖父，以及他们的孩子。即使是豪门望族，虽然会有更多人口，但家庭还是被细分为不同的支系，次子以下的孩子们很快就建立了自己的分支家庭。在这种狭窄而且直接接触的小团体内，规定“合适本分”的规则十分周详。在长者选择正式退休（隐居）之前，年轻人要对他严格服从。甚至现在，一个拥有几个成年孩子的父亲，如果他自己的父亲还没有退休，那么在没有获得老爷子的许可时，这位父亲就无权处理事务。哪怕孩子已经三四十岁了，父母还要包办婚姻乃至促成其离婚。父亲作为家庭内的男性首领，用餐时他的饭食要第一个端上来，入浴也是第一个，整个家庭都对他鞠躬，而他的回应只是颔首一下。在日本有一个特殊的谜语，以我们的双关形式来翻译就是：“为什么一个儿子想给他父母提建议就像一个佛教徒想蓄发一样？”（佛教徒要接受剃度）答案就是：“因为无论他怎么样都办不到。”
“合适本分”不仅仅意味着辈分差别，而且意味着年龄差别。当日本人想描述极端的混乱时，他会说什么东西是“非兄非弟”，这就像我们说什么东西“既不是鱼也不是鸟”。因为对日本人来说，一个人应该守住他作为长兄的本分，完全就像一条鱼就应该待在水里一样。年长儿子是继承人。去过日本的人知道，长子们很早就学会了一套责任不凡的气派，长子拥有几乎和父权相等的特权。在早期，弟弟们无一例外地都要依靠长兄；现在，尤其在乡镇和山村，按照古老习俗，长子要待在家里，而他的弟弟们可以离开家获得更多教育，并能获得更多的收入，但是兄弟间的古老等级习惯依然牢固。
甚至在现代的政论中，有关长子的传统特权问题在大东亚政策的讨论中，也被表现得淋漓尽致。1942年春天，一个陆军上校作为发言人在论及大东亚共荣圈时说：“日本是它们的大哥，它们都是日本的小弟，这一事实必须在占领区贯彻到每一户居民家里。为这些占领区居民过多考虑，会在他们心里滋生一些滥用日本人的善意的不良倾向，这对日本的统治是有害的。”换句话说，长兄为小弟们决定的事都是为他们好，因此，不应该为他们“考虑太多”。
不管年龄大小，一个人在等级制中的地位取决于此人的性别。日本女人走在她丈夫的后边，并且保持一副低姿态。即使有些女人有时穿上美国式的衣服，和丈夫并肩走路，并且在经过一道门槛时能够走在丈夫前面，但是一旦穿上和服，女人就会走在丈夫的后面。日本家庭中的女孩看到她的兄弟们获得礼物、关注和教育经费时，必须尽可能保持平和心态。即使日本为女人建立了学校，以提供高等教育，但其课程也满是礼仪和举止之类。即使有学识训练也不像男孩的那样严格。女校的校长会鼓励出身于中上层家庭的学生学习一些欧洲语言，但是他为女生推荐的理由是，她们在打扫了书架之后，能够将丈夫的书正确地放回书架。
然而，跟其他亚洲国家相比，日本女人拥有很大的自由度，而且这不单单是一起西化现象。日本不像中国上层阶级那样要求女性缠足。日本女人自由出入商店，可以在街上走来走去，并且不需要用面纱将自己隐藏起来。这让印度女性感叹不已。日本妻子经营他们的家庭商店，也掌管家庭账簿。如果出现了资金不足，正是由这些女人来决定从家里选什么东西拿到当铺。一个女人掌管着佣人，在孩子的婚姻上她有很大发言权。当她成为婆婆时，通常她在家庭里面就是铁腕女王，似乎她前半生从未当过唯命是从、只会点头哈腰的儿媳妇。
代际特权、性别特权、年龄特权在日本非常明显。但是行使这些特权的人更像是受托人，而不是武断的独裁者。父亲和长子对于家庭有责任感，不管家庭成员是活的、死的，还是尚未出生的，他必须做出重要决定，并且保证它们能落实。但是他也并不是拥有无限制的权威，他必须为了家庭的荣誉而承担责任。他必须使儿子们和弟弟们记住家庭遗产，包括物质方面和精神方面，他激励大家要对得起这些家庭遗产。即使是一个农民，他也时常不忘对先人所承担的高尚责任；如果他属于上层阶级，他向家庭承担的责任则愈加沉重。家庭的需求远远比个人的需求重要。
不论门第如何，遇到重要事务，家长要召集一次家庭会议。例如，为了订婚这样的事项举行会议，家庭成员会大老远赶来参加。在达成决定的过程中，每个人提到的细节都会被考虑到。兄弟或妻子的态度可能会起决定性作用，一家之主如果无视多数人意见，那么他就是给自己找麻烦。当然，对达成的决定，那个被决定了命运的人可能是极度不喜欢的。然而，他的长辈们，那些屈从于家庭会议决定的长辈们，很强硬地要求那个晚辈接受决定，就像他们自己以往所做的那样。在普鲁士，法律和习俗赋予了家长对妻子和孩子的专断特权，但日本人在强硬要求背后的制约力量与普鲁士的并不同。在日本，这种强制性并没有削弱，但是其影响力是不同的。日本人并不在他们的家庭生活中学习尊重专断权威，也没有在家里培养起轻易就服从权威的习惯。对于家庭意志的服从是以高尚的价值观来号召的——在这一价值观中，无论某项要求是多么繁重，所有家庭成员都要接受。这一价值观是以“共同的忠诚”的名义来号召的。
每一个日本人都首先在家庭内部养成服从等级制的习惯，然后把他学到的运用到更广泛的经济生活和政治领域。他认识到，一个人应该顺从于地位高于他的人，这样才算是“守分”，不管那些人在团体中是否具有支配力量。甚至一个丈夫受制于妻子，或者一个长子受制于他的兄弟，但表面上他也会得到妻子和兄弟的尊敬。从外表上看，特权从未因另外一些人在幕后操纵而受到破坏。表面的关系不会为了适应到底谁有控制权而有所改变。这种拥有控制权却又不打破原有格局的方式，有时甚至是一种战术上的优势，因为这样能让那个掌握实权的人较少受到攻击。日本人通过家庭经历学到了这一点：对一项决定最有力的支持是家庭成员确信此决定能够维护家庭荣誉。这种决定并不是偶然成为家长的暴君的一时心血来潮，而且也不是靠铁拳来落实的。日本的家长更近似于一个物质财富和精神财富的受托人，这些财富对于他们每一个人都很重要，同时这些财富要求所有人都要将个人意志放在家庭需求之后。日本人抗拒武力威胁，但是他们决不是因为这个原因才将他们的意志服从于家庭的需求，也决不是因为这个原因而对那些被指定有特权的人极端顺从。尽管家庭中的长者没有机会成为手段强硬的独裁者，家庭中的等级制却仍能维持。
以上我对日本的家庭等级制粗略描述了一下，当美国人怀抱完全不同的人际交往准则来阅读时，这些描述还不足以使他们对日本家庭中公认的、带有强制性的情感纽带有一个正确判断。这一纽带是日本家庭内部非常团结的一个主因，而且日本人怎么做到这一点的，正是我这本书要陈述的主题之一。同时，要想理解日本人为什么在更广泛的政治领域和经济生活领域要求等级制，首先要认识到他们是如何在家庭内部彻底地培养这种习惯的。
日本人的生活中，不同社会阶层之间的等级制与家庭中的一样强烈。在日本的民族史中，她一直是个强硬的等级社会和种姓社会。她将种姓制度贯彻了很多个世纪，使得它已经成为一种习惯，这样一个民族拥有足够的长处和弱势，而这些长处和弱势都对日本社会有至关重要的作用。在日本有记载的历史中，种姓就是生活的准则：在7世纪，日本已经修改了它从没有种姓制的中国所借来的生活方式，来适应她自己的等级文化。在7世纪和8世纪，日本天皇和他的宫廷就给自己定下了一个目标：用高度文明的风俗来丰富日本——这种文明在地域广大的中国广泛存在，曾让日本特使非常惊叹。而在此之前日本甚至没有书写语言，在7世纪时，它采用了中国的表意文字用来书写自己的语言，虽然两种语言完全不同。她拥有一种宗教，这种宗教涵盖了四万多种神衹，这些神衹占据了所有的山脉和山谷，并赐福给人——这是一种民间宗教，在经过了无数次变革后，以现代神道的方式延续下来。在7世纪，日本将佛教以一种“能够护国安邦的卓越宗教”从中国全盘接受过来。在此之前，日本不管是公共建筑还是私人建筑，都没有很高大的永久性建筑。天皇仿照中国都城建了一座新都城——奈良。大型而华丽的佛寺和大型的佛教僧侣修道院也依照中国模式建了起来。天皇引入官阶品位制度和法律制度，这些制度是他们的特使从中国推荐过来的。很难在世界其他国家的历史上发现还有哪个主权国家这么成功而有计划地汲取他国文明。
然而，从一开始，日本就没有照搬中国没有种姓的社会结构。从中国吸收过来的官衔，在中国本来是授予那些通过科举考试的行政官员的，但是在日本，它们被授予了世袭贵族和封建领主，使官衔制度成为日本种姓制度的组成部分。日本当时遍布着许多半自治的藩国，它们的领主不断地觊觎别人的势力；而且，社会结构中真正起作用的正是那些拥有特权的领主、家臣和侍从。不管日本如何勤勉地进口中国文明，她还是不能采纳中国的生活方式，不会将日本的等级制放在任何类似于中国的官僚制度或扩展型家族体系之内——在中国，这种家族体系团结了很多不同生活方式的人，并组建成一个庞大的宗族。日本也无法采纳中国的世俗皇帝的观念。日本人称皇室中的人为“云上人”，只有这一家庭的人才能成为天皇。中国经常改朝换代，日本则没有王朝更迭。天皇是不可侵犯的，他本人是神圣的。毫无疑问，将中国文化引入日本的天皇以及宫廷大臣们，根本无法想象中国制度在这些事务上的安排，也猜想不到他们进行了怎样的变革。
尽管日本从中国输入了文明，但这一新的文明只是导致了随后数世纪的纷争，因为世袭领主和家臣控制了这几个世纪。在8世纪结束之前，贵族藤原氏攫取了统治权，将天皇放在了后台。随着时间推移，藤原氏的统治权遭到了很多封建领主的质疑，随即全国陷入一片内乱。领主之一，著名的源赖朝[6]征服了所有的竞争对手，成为国家实际的统治者，他用的名头是一个古老的军事称谓——将军，按字面意义理解即“征夷大将军”。这一称谓在日本很常见。源赖朝使这一称谓只能在源氏家族世袭，只有他的子孙能够将其他封建领主控制在手中。天皇变成一个无能的符号。天皇最主要的作用是，将军仍然要依靠他进行礼仪上的授衔。他已经没有民政方面的权力，实际权力已经被“幕府”[7]掌握，正如它的名字所显示的，它要通过武装力量来制服那些不守规矩的藩国，以维持统治权。每一个封建领主（即“大名”），都保留有武装侍从（即“武士”），他们完全听命于大名，指哪里打哪里。在动乱年代，他们随时准备向竞争的藩国或者将军就“名分”问题发起挑战。
在16世纪，内战盛行。经过数十年的混乱，伟大的德川家康[8]战胜了所有对手，在1603年成为德川幕府的第一任将军。德川幕府维持了两个半世纪，直到1868年，天皇和幕府的“双重统治”终于被废除，德川政权才告结束，日本近代时期开始发端。从各方面来看，漫长的德川幕府时期在日本历史上是一个很卓越的时代。它用武力维持了一段和平时期，直到它结束之前的最后几年；它将中央集权制付诸实施，充分贯彻德川幕府的目标。
德川家康曾经面临一个很棘手的问题，他没有轻易做出决定。一些强大藩国的大名们曾经在内战中反对他，直至一次决定性的毁灭打击之后才臣服于他，他们就是所谓的“外样”（旁系大名）。他让这些领主保留了领地和武士，这些人也确实在自己的领域内享有高度自主权。然而，德川家康还是将他们排除在外，不让他们成为自己的家臣，而这在当时是一种荣誉；同时不给他们任何重要的任用机会。这些重要的任职安排只留给“谱代”（嫡系大名），即那些在内战中支持德川家康的领主。为了维持这种复杂政权，德川幕府要依靠一系列战略，来防止封建领主（即“大名”）累积权力，并且防止出现任何威胁到幕府控制权的藩国联盟。德川幕府不仅没有废除封建架构；而且，为了维持日本境内的和平以及德川幕府的统治权，幕府将军们还有意强化它，并使之更加严格。
日本的封建社会被精细地分为不同层次，每个人都被固定在他所世袭的社会层级中。德川幕府强化了这一体系，并且为每一个种姓规定了详细的日常行为。每一户的家长都必须在他的门前张贴表明其阶级地位和世袭身份的标志。他穿的衣服、买的食物、合法居住的房子的造型，都要符合世袭身份的相关规定。在皇室和宫廷贵族之下，按照等级顺序，日本存在四个种姓：士（武士）、农、工、商。在他们之下，是贱民阶级。在这些贱民中人数最多而且最著名的是“秽多”，即从事各种污秽职业的人。他们是清道夫、埋葬死囚的人、剥下死兽皮进行鞣制的皮匠。他们是日本人中的不可接触者；或者更精确的说法是，他们根本不是人。穿过他们居住的山村是不被计入道路里程的，就像这一段区域的陆地和居民根本就不存在。他们极端贫困，尽管他们从事职业活动也获得了许可，可是他们仍旧被排斥在正式社会结构之外。
商人阶级仅仅高于贱民阶级。尽管这让美国人感到惊诧，但它的确是封建时代的社会现实。商人阶级对封建制度来说总是具有破坏性。一旦商人越来越受人尊敬并且富裕起来时，封建制度也就崩溃了。德川幕府以任何民族都没有过的强硬法律来进行统治，他们甚至在17世纪时依旧坚持闭关锁国，这就将商人活动的余地全部取消了。沿着中国和朝鲜的海岸线，日本曾经有过海外贸易商人，商人阶层不可避免地要发展起来。德川幕府停止了这一切，明文规定：如果有谁胆敢制造或行驶超过一定尺寸的船只，就算违法，就会招致杀头。小船虽然获得行驶许可，但不能驶向亚洲大陆，也不能装载贸易货物。国内贸易也受到严格限制，因为在每一个藩的边界都设了很多关卡，而且每个藩都有针对货物进出的严格限令。另外有一些法律是为强调商人的社会地位低下而设立的。《奢侈取缔令》规定了商人能够穿的衣着，能够携带的伞，以及婚礼或者葬礼的花费数目。他们不能生活在武士居住的地区，在遇到武士用刀伤害时，没有法律保护他们，因为武士是有特权的战士。在靠金钱运转的时代，德川幕府将商人固定在底层社会的政策理所当然地失败了，因为日本在那一时期正是靠金钱来运转的。但是它一直在尝试这样做。
为了巩固封建制度，有两个阶级是很受欢迎的，那就是武士和农民。德川政权将它们分别固封起来。在德川家康终结内战之前，伟大的名将丰臣秀吉[9]已经通过著名的《缴刀令》将这两个阶级成功分离。他解除了农民的武装，给予武士独一无二的佩刀特权。武士从此再也不能兼做农民、工匠、商人。即使是最底层的武士也不能合法从事生产，他只能成为寄生阶级的一员，以禄米作为津贴，而这些稻米来自民间征集的赋税。大名掌握着这些稻米，按照规定的额度分配给每一个武士家臣。因此，武士不存在生计问题；他完全仰仗于他的主君。在日本历史的早期，这种封建大名和武士之间的紧密纽带曾经在藩国间主导了无数场战争。在德川幕府统治的和平时期，这种纽带变成了经济性的。日本的武士不像欧洲的骑士，他并不是次等诸侯，也没有自己的土地和农奴，不是拥有财富的战士。自德川时代之始，他就是领取固定津贴的人，其津贴数额按照一定规格来决定。这份津贴并不多，有日本学者曾估算所有武士的平均津贴和农民的每年所得差不多，也就是说武士过着相当拮据的生活。[10]给继承人分配津贴时总让武士心神不爽，结果导致武士的家庭规模缩小。对他们来说，如果社会威望取决于财富，这是最让他们感到难堪和激愤的事情。因此在武士信条中特别强调节俭的至上价值。
武士和其他三个阶级（农民、工匠和商人）之间存在一道鸿沟。后三个阶级被统称为“庶民”，但武士不是。武士佩带的刀不仅仅是一种装饰，更是他们的特权和种姓标志。他们有权对平民用刀。在德川时代之前，他们已经习惯于这么做，德川家康仅仅是将习俗法律化，他谕令：“如果平民对武士表现得不得体，或者没有对武士之崇高地位表示出尊敬，武士得当场杀之。”在德川家康的制度中，没有考虑到平民和武士之间应该建立起相互依赖的关系。他的政策基于严格的等级法令。庶民阶级和武士阶级都直接受制于大名，直接与他联系。这两个阶级处于不同的阶层之上，每个阶层又各有一套从上而下的法律、规定、制约力量和相互义务。在两个阶层的人们之间，距离遥不可及。虽然在各种现实场合中，这两个阶层很有必要互通往来，但是这并不在制度考虑范围之内。
在德川幕府时期，武士侍从不仅仅是刀剑风尚的引领人，他们还逐渐成为藩主家产的管家和各种风雅艺术的专家，比如古典戏剧和茶道。他们处理各种文书，大名的谋略也通过他们来巧妙地施行。两百年的和平时期是一段很长的时间，舞刀弄剑的机会毕竟有限。尽管还带着刀，武士们也培育出了各种雅尚，这就像当时的商人，尽管有种姓间的限制，但商人们还是培养了这样一种生活方式：崇尚文雅、艺术和让人愉悦的追求。
尽管从法律上来说，农民在面对武士时是没有任何防守力量的，而且他们还要缴纳沉重的税米，所有的禁令都加诸他们身上，但农民还是被赋予了一定的安全感。他们被获准占有自己的农田，而在日本，拥有田地才有威望。在德川时代，田地不能永久转让，这项法律给单个的耕作者提供了一份保障，而并不是像欧洲的封建制度，这份保障只提供给封建领主。日本的农民拥有这样一项令他无比珍视的永恒权利，他就像今天他们的后裔那样在稻田里不辞辛苦地劳作。但农民仍旧是供养了200万寄生阶级的阿特拉斯[11]，他所供养的包括政府、大名和武士。他以实物缴纳赋税；也就是说，他将自己的农作物按一定百分比缴纳给大名。在暹罗等其他水田国家，传统的税额是10%；但是德川幕府时期的日本，这一数额是40%；事实上缴纳的数额要更高。在一些藩中，这一数额甚至达到80%。此外还有徭役和无偿劳作，这些差役和劳作耗尽了农民的所有精力和时间。就像武士一样，农民不得不控制家庭规模。整个德川幕府时期，日本的总人数一直保持着一个稳定的数字。就一个亚洲国家来说，在长期的和平时代，停滞的人口数字足以说明很多有关这一政权的事实。无论就靠赋税供养的武士来说，还是就劳动阶级来说，这个政权对两者都实施了斯巴达式的严格限制。但是在每一个寄生者和他的宗主之间，这种限制也是一种保障。一个人熟知他的义务、特权和地位，如果遭到冒犯，穷苦人也可以提出抗议。
由于极度贫困，农民也不断反抗，不仅仅对抗封建领主，也对抗幕府当局。在两个半世纪的德川幕府时期，他们至少发动了1000次暴动。这些暴动并不是由传统的沉重律令“四公六民”所引发，而都是由额外的征收导致的反抗。一旦生活条件难以再容忍，农民可能会大规模游行，反抗他们的藩主，但是请愿程序和判决过程是有序的。农民们提交正式的请愿书来要求公正对待，这些请愿书被交给大名的管家。当他们的请愿书被拦截扣押，或者大名根本不在乎他们的抱怨时，他们就派出自己的代表到首都江户，向幕府将军表达他们的抱怨。在一些著名的起义中，他们只有在高官经过江户街道时，将请愿书塞到该高官的轿子里，才能确保案子被受理。但是，不管农民们在递交请愿书的时候是如何冒险，它的确会得到幕府当局的调查，并且大约一半的判决是对农民有利的。
然而，日本人对于法律和秩序的追求，并不仅仅满足于幕府对于农民的要求给予判决。农民的抱怨可能是正当的，而且国家尊重他们或许是适宜的，但是农民领袖们已经僭越了等级制下的严格法律。尽管一些判决对农民有利，但他们破坏了重要的效忠法律，而这是无法被忽略的。因此他们被判处死刑。事件起因的正当性在此不起任何作用。甚至农民们也义不容辞地接受了它。那些被判刑的人是他们的英雄，他们成群结队赶往行刑地，他们的领袖在那里被泼上油烧死，或者被砍头，或者被钉死；但是在行刑中，没有人发动骚乱。这就是法律和秩序。他们可能会在事后为死去的人建立神社，给予他们烈士的荣耀，但是他们把行刑看成社会等级制法律的一部分。
简而言之，德川幕府认为包括每一个藩在内的种姓制度应该稳定，并且使每一个阶级都依赖封建领主。在每个藩之内，大名站在等级制的顶端，他可以对依靠他的人实施特权。幕府将军最大的行政难题是如何控制大名。他会通过各种方式来防止大名之间的联盟，并防止他们进行侵略的谋划。在每一个藩的边界，哨卡和关口的官员们要严密监视“出女入炮”[12]，以防任何大名私下运送他们的女人出去，或者走私武器进来。没有将军的许可，任何大名不得联姻，以免成为危险的政治联姻。各藩之间的贸易也受到制约，甚至曾经被许可走的桥都不让人通行。幕府派出来的密探让将军对大名们的财政收支了如指掌，如果一个大名的家里富得流油，将军会要求他承担一些颇耗资费的公益项目，好让他与其他大名的财政状况基本平衡。在这些规定中，最著名的一条是：在每一年中的一半时间里，大名要居住在京都江户；甚至当他返回领地时，必须将妻子留在江户（东京），作为将军的人质。通过一切手段，幕府确保了它能够稳居上层，并且在等级制中强化了它的统治地位。
当然，幕府将军并不是这架构中的拱心石[13]，因为它当权是出于天皇的任命。天皇和他的世袭贵族们（公卿）组成的宫廷在京都是被孤立的，而且没有什么实权。天皇的经济来源甚至比那些最寒窘的大名都要少，最主要的宫廷仪式也是由幕府严格限制的。但是，即使是最有权力的德川幕府，也没有废除天皇和实际统治者这一双重统治形式。双重统治在日本并不是什么新鲜事。自12世纪以来，大元帅（将军）就以已经被剥夺实际权威的天皇的名义统治着国家。在某些时期，权力的分散甚至达到了这样的程度：居于后台的天皇委任一个世袭的世俗领袖，这人所拥有的实际权力又由其世袭政治顾问来行使。初始权力经常这样被委托和再委托。直到德川政权最后的殊死关头，美国海军准将佩里[14]并不知道幕后还有天皇的存在。而且美国的第一任特使塔恩森得·哈瑞斯（他在1858年和日本就第一份商业条约[15]进行了谈判），也是几经努力才发现还有一位天皇存在。
日本对于天皇的概念和太平洋岛屿中普遍存在的那种概念一样。他是个神圣的领袖，可以参与到行政事务中，也可以不参与。在一些太平洋岛屿中，神圣领袖可以自己掌权，可以参与到行政事务中；在另一些岛屿中，神圣领袖将权力委托给别人，但他本人是神圣的。在新西兰的部落中，神圣领袖不可侵犯，以至于他不可以自己吃饭，甚至他在被喂食时汤匙也不能碰到他神圣的牙齿。他外出时必须由人抬着，因为他神圣的脚趾所触及之地都自动变得神圣，必须都划归神圣领袖所有。他的头尤其神圣不可侵犯，没有人敢碰到它，据说他可以直接和部落神对话。在一些太平洋岛屿，例如萨摩亚和汤加，他们神圣的领袖不能光降到世俗舞台上，一个世俗的领袖承担了所有国家责任。18世纪末期，詹姆士·威尔森曾访问过位于西太平洋的汤加岛，他写道：汤加政府“像极了日本政府，神圣的陛下就像总政务官控制下的一个国家囚徒”。汤加的神圣领袖被隔绝于世俗事务之外，但是他们要承担起礼仪上的责任：他们必须接受果园的第一枚果子，并且举行一种仪式，然后其他人才能够吃果子；当神圣领袖死去，讣告中会出现“天堂已经空虚”这样的词句；他被按照礼仪埋葬在一个庞大的皇家墓地；但是他不参与行政事务。
日本天皇尽管在政治上无所作为，只不过是“总政务官控制下的一个国家囚徒”，但按照日本人的定义，对于等级制来说他的存在仍是大有必要的。在日本人看来，天皇对于世俗事务的积极参与对他的地位无益。位于京都的皇宫被日本人视如珍宝，在征夷大将军的治下保存了长长的数个世纪。从西方观点来看，天皇的功能完全是多余的。但是在那些对等级制习以为常的日本人眼中，情况却大不相同。
封建时代的日本，从贱民到天皇这一极端明晰的等级体系，给近代日本留下了深刻的烙印。毕竟，从法律意义上来说封建政权仅仅结束于75年前[16]，根深蒂固的国民习惯在一个人的有生之年还不能清除。我们在下一章将会看到，尽管国家目标已经发生了根本性的变化，但近代日本的政治家们仍然慎重地出台各种政策，以保留这一等级体制的大部分内容。相对于其他主权国家而言，日本人更加致力于营造这样一个世界：所有微小行为细节都已经被规定得清清楚楚，所有人的身份也已经分配得妥妥帖帖。在两个世纪中，在这个世界里，法律和秩序是依靠铁腕来维持的，日本人在此期间已经学会了将精心设计的等级制等同于安全与和平。只要他们置身于已知的世界中，而且只要他们完成了已知的义务，他们就可以信赖他们的世界。盗贼被控制住了，发生在大名间的内战被阻止了。如果臣民能够证明其他人践踏了他们的权利，他们可以像以前农民所做的那样，在遇到剥削时发起请愿。就个人来说，这是危险的，但是它获得了公众的认可。德川幕府中最开明的一位将军甚至设置了一个诉愿箱，任何公民都可以将自己的抗议内容投入其中，只有将军本人拥有这个箱子的钥匙。日本人天生就确信，如果某些人的行为并不被现存的行为规范所许可，那么这种僭越行为会得到纠正。日本人信任这些规范，而且相信只有遵照执行才能安全。一个人是在遵照执行中显示他的勇气和气节，而不是在修正和反抗中显示勇气和气节。在日本人看来，由各种规范所限制的世界才是已知的、可信赖的世界。它的规则并不像《摩西十诫》那样属于抽象的伦理原则，而是很细微的规范，用来规定在某种场合什么是合适的，在另外的场合什么是合适的；如果是武士该怎么做，如果是平民又该怎么做；长兄应该怎么做，弟弟应该怎么做。
在这样的体系之下，日本人并不像其他生活在铁腕等级制政权之下的人，他们没有成为一个外表恭顺却具有颠覆潜力的民族。认识到每一个阶级都会得到确定的保障，这一点很重要。甚至贱民也有保障：他们可以垄断他们的特殊行业，他们自治的社会结构也获得了当局的认可。虽然对每一个阶级的限制沉重而繁杂，但它们同时也是秩序和安全的保证。
种姓之间的限制也有一定的灵活性，而这是印度等国所没有的。在不触犯大家普遍接受的方式的情况下，日本人的习惯提供了一些直接有效的手段来巧妙应对等级体系。一个人可以通过几种渠道来改变自己的种姓地位。当高利贷者和商人越来越有钱，就像他们在日本金钱经济中必然要做的那样，富人就会通过各种手段来渗透到上等阶级。他们运用抵押权和地租成为“地主”。尽管农民的土地不可剥夺，但是地租在日本实在太高了，让农民仍然留在土地上仍是有利可图的。高利贷者则在那块土地上安家，并收取地租。在日本，这样成为土地的所有者不仅收获利润，还可以获得威望。他们的孩子和武士家庭结亲，他们也成为绅士。
另一种改变种姓的传统方法是通过寄养。它提供了一种“购买”武士身份的途径。尽管德川幕府时期有各种禁令，商人们还是越来越富，他们会把自己的子嗣寄养在武士家庭。在日本，很少有人收养儿子，而是为女儿收养一个丈夫。这个孩子被称为“婿养子”，他以后会成为他岳父的继承人。但他也是付了很高代价的，因为他的名字要从他自己的家庭登记簿中剔除，而进入妻子的家庭。他要姓妻子的姓，并和岳父母生活在一起。代价虽然大，但利益也很明显，因为富裕商人的后代变成了武士，而贫困的武士家庭也得到了经济上的帮助。在这些操作中并没有对种姓体系进行暴力破坏，一切就像它原来的样子。但是这样一来，就为富人提供了上升到上层阶级的渠道。
因此，日本并不要求只能在各种姓内部通婚。他们支持各种允许互相通婚的措施。富裕商人渗透到下层武士阶级所导致的结果，是西欧和日本之间形成强烈对比的成因之一。当封建制度在欧洲崩溃，一个不断成长并逐渐强势的中产阶级所造成的压力会顺势出现，并且这一阶级主导了近代工业时代。在日本并没有这样一个强势的中产阶级出现。商人和高利贷者通过公众认可的手段“购买”了上层阶级的身份。商人和下层武士结成了联盟。当日本和欧洲的封建制度都日薄西山之际，日本的阶级流动程度更甚于欧洲大陆，这一点看上去的确很让人奇怪和惊讶；但是没有任何迹象表明，日本的贵族和资产阶级之间发生了阶级战争，没有任何陈述能比这一点更有说服力了。
日本这两个阶级共同从事的事业对双方都有利，这很容易理解。在法国，两个阶级也曾经互相有利益输送，在西欧曾经有几个类似的例子。但西欧的阶级界限还是很严格；在法国，阶级之间的冲突还引发了剥夺贵族财产。在日本，他们的目标却趋向一致，推翻老朽的幕府统治的联盟是商人、金融家和武士侍从的联盟。近代日本还保留着贵族制度。如果阶级流动得不到容许，这几乎是不可能发生的。
只要拥护并信任那些精细而明确的规范，那么他们的行为就正当而合理。只要遵循这些规范，它就能使人获得安全感。它许可在遭到侵犯时进行反击；为了某人的利益，它又可以被操纵利用。它要求相互履行义务。当德川政权在19世纪上半期崩溃时，整个国内并没有集团赞同破坏原有等级制。这里没有法国大革命，甚至1848年式的革命也没有。但那是个充满绝望的年代：从平民到将军，每一个阶级都欠了高利贷者和商人的债。那些人数众多的不事生产的阶级以及正常的财政支出，都已经维持不下去了。曾经能掌控贫困阶级的大名们加强了控制，但他们再也无力支付津贴给武士侍从，整个封建纽带的网络系统变成了一个笑话。他们试图通过提高农民身上已经很高的赋税来保持稳定。这些措施只不过是把农民变成赤贫的时间提早了几年而已。幕府将军本人也已经破产，因此也没什么办法来维持其身份。1853年，日本国内面临着可怕的极端状态，而这时海军准将佩里带着他的士兵出现了。他武装入境，随即在1858年达成了一份日美通商条约，这次日本毫无拒绝之力。
此时从日本也发出了呼声，然而只是“一新”[17]——“恢弘往昔”、“王政复古”。这完全是革命的对立面。它甚至连激进都称不上。和“尊王”并举的是同样出名的口号“攘夷”。国民支持回到黄金时代闭关锁国的路子上。少数领袖看到这样一份事业几乎不可能实现，于是努力奋斗，却遭到暗杀。像日本这样的非革命国家，没有任何迹象表明它将会改弦更张，将事业方向转到改革，并向西方学习，更不用说会在50年中居然可以凭借自身条件和西方国家竞争。但是，日本就是做到了。日本运用了她自己的长处，而根本不是西方的长处，就达到了一个目标，甚至高层和民间舆论都没有提出过这一要求。在19世纪60年代，如果一个西方人在水晶球里看到了未来，他几乎不能相信这一切。当时似乎毫无迹象预示20年后会有一股风暴横扫日本。然而，它就是发生了。日本那些落后的、被等级制蹂躏的民众急速转向另一项事业，并且坚持了下去。
注释：
[1] 指《论美国的民主》一书。托克维尔（1805～1859），是法国著名的自由主义宪政思想家，出身于诺曼底贵族，但在政治上倾向于自由主义。《论美国的民主》是托克维尔亲自在美国进行考察后写出的一部世界名著。除了对美国的政治制度进行社会学分析之外，托克维尔还以美国为背景阐述了其政治哲学思想。
[2] 1804年颁布。这部法典的立法原则是自由和平等原则、所有权原则和契约原则。这部法典是拿破仑最引以为傲的对人类的功绩。它对后来很多资本主义国家的立法产生了很大影响。
[3]“旧世界”是美国人对欧洲大陆的称呼。
[4] 亚历山大·汉密尔顿（1757～1804），美国开国元勋之一，也是美国宪法的起草人之一。他是财经专家，美国第一任财政部长。死于与亚伦·伯尔的决斗。
[5] 因为该会会员只限于参加独立战争者的后裔，故有此说。
[6] 源赖朝（1147～1199），平安时代末期武将源义朝之子，13岁时曾因参与政变而被流放到荒凉的伊豆半岛，长达20年之久。1180年重新崛起，1192年任征夷大将军，建立日本历史上第一个武士政权镰仓幕府。
[7]“幕”意指军队的帐幕、帐篷；“府”指王室等收放财宝和文件的地方。江户时代中期以后，幕府变成了掌握统治实权的机构。有人认为“镰仓幕府”和“室町幕府”事实上是当代用词，当时人们并未称呼过镰仓和室町的统治机构为“幕府”。
[8] 德川家康（1543～1616），江户幕府的第一代征夷大将军。原姓松平氏，1566年奉敕改姓德川。个性以隐忍著称，被称为“战国第一忍者”。
[9] 丰臣秀吉（1536～1598），初名木下藤吉郎。曾做织田信长的家臣。继室町幕府之后，首次完成近代日本的统一。为1590～1598年日本的实际统治者。1598年死于征伐朝鲜之战。
[10] 引自赫尔伯特·诺尔曼《日本近代国家的诞生》。——原注
[11] 阿特拉斯源自希腊神话，这里意为庞大的群体。
[12] 这里的女人指的是滞留江户、被将军作为人质的大名的妻子。
[13] 拱心石是建筑术语，指核心和关键。
[14] 马希·佩里（1794～1858），美国海军将领。1853年，佩里率领舰队进入江户湾（今东京湾）岸的浦贺，要求与德川幕府谈判，史称“黑船事件”。1854年，日本与美国签订了《日美亲善条约》。
[15] 即《日美友好通商条约》,1858年签订。
[16] 从1868年德川幕府倒台开始算起。
[17] 1868年1月，倒幕派发动了“王政复古”政变，确定了“百事一新”的施政方针。