The Religions of Japan Part 24

"That they should seek G.o.d, If haply they might feel after him, though he is not far from each one of us."--Paul.

"Other sheep have I which are not of this fold: them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice; and they shall become one flock, one shepherd"--Jesus.

CHAPTER XII - TWO CENTURIES OF SILENCE

The j.a.panese Shut In.

Sincerely regretting that we cannot pa.s.s more favorable judgments upon the Christianity of the seventeenth century in j.a.pan, let us look into the two centuries of silence, and see what was the story between the paling of the Christian record in 1637, and the glowing of the palimpsest in 1859, when the new era begins.

The policy of the j.a.panese rulers, after the supposed utter extirpation of Christianity, was the double one of exclusion and inclusion. A deliberate attempt, long persisted in and for centuries apparently successful, was made to insulate j.a.pan from the shock of change. The purpose was to draw a whole nation and people away from the currents and movements of humanity, and to stereotype national thought and custom.

This was carried out in two ways: first, by exclusion, and then by inclusion. All foreign influences were shut off, or reduced to a minimum. The whole western world, especially Christendom, was put under ban.

Even the apparent exception made in favor of the Dutch was with the motive of making isolation more complete, and of securing the perfect safety which that isolation was expected to bring. For, having built, not indeed with brick and mortar, but by means of edict and law, both open and secret, a great wall of exclusion more powerful than that of China's, it was necessary that there should be a port-hole, for both sally and exit, and a slit for vigilant scrutiny of any attempt to force seclusion or violate the frontier. Hence, the Hollanders were allowed to have a small place of residence in front of a large city and at the head of a land-locked harbor. There, the foreigners being isolated and under strict guard, the government could have, as it were, a nerve which touched the distant nations, and could also, as with a telescope, sweep the horizon for signs of danger.

So, in 1640, the Hollanders were ordered to evacuate Hirado, and occupy the little "outer island" called Deshima, in front of the city of Nagasaki, and connected therewith by a bridge. Any ships entering this hill-girdled harbor, it was believed, could be easily managed by the military resources possessed by the government. Vessels were allowed yearly to bring the news from abroad and exchange the products of j.a.pan for those of Europe. The English, who had in 1617 opened a trade and conducted a factory for some years,[1] were unable to compete with the Dutch, and about 1624, after having lost in the venture forty thousand pounds sterling, withdrew entirely from the j.a.panese trade. The Dutch were thus left without a rival from Christendom.

j.a.pan ceased her former trade and communications with the Philippine Islands, Annam, Siam, the Spice Islands and India,[2] and begun to restrict trade and communication with Korea and China. The Koreans, who were considered as va.s.sals, or semi-va.s.sals, came to j.a.pan to present their congratulations on the accession of each new Sh[=o]gun; and some small trade was done at Fusan under the superintendence of the daimi[=o]

of Tsushima. Even this relation with Korea was rather one of watchfulness. It sprang from the pride of a victor rather than from any desire to maintain relations with the rest of the world. As for China, the communication with her was astonishingly little, only a few junks crossing yearly between Nankin and Nagasaki; so that, with the exception of one slit in their tower of observation, the j.a.panese became well isolated from the human family.

This system of exclusion was accompanied by an equally vigorous policy of inclusiveness. It was deliberately determined to keep the people from going abroad, either in their bodies or minds. All seaworthy ships were destroyed. Under pain of imprisonment and death, all natives were forbidden to go to a foreign country, except in the rare cases of urgent government service. By settled precedents it was soon made to be understood that those who were blown out to sea or carried away in stress of weather, need not come back; if they did, they must return only on Chinese and Korean vessels, and even then would be grudgingly allowed to land. It was given out, both at home and to the world, that no shipwrecked sailors or waifs would be welcomed when brought on foreign vessels.

This inclusive policy directed against physical exportation, was still more stringently carried out when applied to imports affecting the minds of the j.a.panese. The "government deliberately attempted to establish a society impervious to foreign ideas from without, and fostered within by all sorts of artificial legislation. This isolation affected every department of private and public life. Methods of education were cast in a definite mould; even matters of dress and household architecture were strictly regulated by the State, and industries were restricted or forced into specified channels, thus r.e.t.a.r.ding economic developments."[3]

Starving of the Mind.

In the science of keeping life within stunted limits and artificial boundaries, the j.a.panese genius excels. It has been well said that "the j.a.panese mind is great in little things and little in great things." To cut the tap-root of a pine-shoot, and, by regulating the allowance of earth and water, to raise a pine-tree which when fifty years old shall be no higher than a silver dollar, has been the proud ambition of many an artist in botany. In like manner, the Tokugawa Sh[=o]guns (1604-1868) determined to so limit the supply of mental food, that the mind of j.a.pan should be of those correctly dwarfed proportions of puniness, so admired by lovers of artificiality and unconscious caricature. Philosophy was selected as a chief tool among the engines of oppression, and as the main influence in stunting the intellect. All thought must be orthodox according to the standards of Confucianism, as expounded by Chu Hi.

Anything like originality in poetry, learning or philosophy must be hooted down. Art must follow Chinese, Buddhist and j.a.panese traditions.

Any violation of this order would mean ostracism. All learning must be in the Chinese and j.a.panese languages--the former mis-p.r.o.nounced and in sound bearing as much resemblance to Pekingise speech as "Pennsylvania Dutch" does to the language of Berlin. Everything like thinking and study must be with a view of sustaining and maintaining the established order of things. The tree of education, instead of being a lofty or wide-spreading cryptomeria, must be the measured nursling of the teacup.

If that trio of emblems, so admired by the natives, the bamboo, pine and plum, could produce glossy leaves, ever-green needles and fragrant blooms within a s.p.a.ce of four cubic inches, so the law, the literature and the art of j.a.pan must display their normal limit of fresh fragrance, of youthful vigor and of venerable age, enduring for aye, within the vessel of j.a.panese inclusion so carefully limited by the Yedo authorities.

Such a policy, reminds one of the Amherst agricultural experiment in which bands of iron were strapped around a much-afflicted squash, in order to test vital potency. It recalls the pretty little story of Picciola, in which a tender plant must grow between the interstices of the bricks in a prison yard. Besides the potent bonds of the only orthodox Confucian philosophy which was allowed and the legally recognized religions, there was gradually formed a marvellous system of legislation, that turned the whole nation into a secret society in which spies and hypocrites flourished like fungus on a dead log. Besides the unwritten code of private law,[4] that is, the local and general customs founded on immemorial usage, there was that peculiar legal system framed by Iyeyas[)u], bequeathed as a legacy and for over two hundred years practically the supreme law of the land.

What this law was, it was exceedingly difficult, if not utterly impossible, for the aliens dwelling in the country at Nagasaki ever to find out. Keenly intellectual, as many of the physicians, superintendents and elect members of the Dutch trading company were, they seem never to have been able to get hold of what has been called "The Testament of Iyeyas[)u]."[5] This consisted of one hundred laws or regulations, based on a home-spun sort of Confucianism, intended to be orthodoxy "unbroken for ages eternal."

To a man of western mode of thinking, the most astonishing thing is that this law was esoteric.[6] The people knew of it only by its irresistible force, and by the constant pressure or the rare easing of its iron hand.

Those who executed the law were drilled in its routine from childhood, and this routine became second nature. Only a few copies of the original instrument were known, and these were kept with a secrecy which to the people became a sacred mystery guarded by a long avenue of awe.

The Dutchmen at Deshima.

The Dutchmen who lived at Deshima for two centuries and a half, and the foreigners who first landed at the treaty ports in 1859, on inquiring about the methods of the j.a.panese Government, the laws and their administration, found that everything was veiled behind a vague embodiment of something which was called "the Law." What that law was, by whom enacted, and under what sanctions enforced, no one could tell; though all seemed to stand in awe of it as something of superhuman efficiency. Its mysteriousness was only equalled by the abject submission which it received.

Foreign diplomatists, on trying to deal with the seat and source of authority, instead of seeing the real head of power, played, as it were, a game of chess against a mysterious hand stretched out from behind a curtain. Morally, the whole tendency of such a dual system of exclusion and of inclusion was to make a nation of liars, foster confirmed habits of deceit, and create a code of politeness vitiated by insincerity.

With such repression of the natural powers of humanity, it was but in accordance with the nature of things that licentiousness should run riot, that on the fringes of society there should be the outcast and the pariah, and that the social waste of humanity by prost.i.tution, by murder, by criminal execution under a code that prescribed the death penalty for hundreds of offences, should be enormous. It is natural also that in such a state of society population[7] should be kept down within necessary limits, not only by famine, by the restraints of feudalism, by legalized murder in the form of vendetta, by a system of prost.i.tution that made and still makes j.a.pan infamous, by child murder, by lack of encouragement given to feeble or malformed children to live, and by various devices known to those who were ingenious in keeping up so artificial a state of society.

That there were many who tried to break through this wall, from both the inside and the outside, and to force the frontiers of exclusion and inclusion, is not to be wondered at. Externally, there were bold spirits from Christendom who burned to know the secrets of the mysterious land.

Some even yearned to wear the ruby crown. The wonderful story of past Christian triumphs deeply stirred the heart of more than one fiery spirit, and so we find various attempts made by the clerical brethren of southern Europe to enter the country. Bound by their promises, the Dutch captains could not introduce these emissaries of a banned religion within the borders; yet there are several notable instances of Roman Catholic "religious"[8] getting themselves left by shipmasters on the sh.o.r.es of j.a.pan. The lion's den of reality was Yedo. Like the lion's den of fable, the footprints all led one way, and where these led the bones of the victims soon lay.

Besides these men with religious motives, the ships of the West came with offers of trade and threats of invasion. These were English, French, Russian and American, and the story of the frequent episodes has been told by Hildreth, Aston,[9] Nitobe, and others. There is also a considerable body of native literature which gives the inside view of these efforts to force the seclusion of the hermit nation, and coax or compel the j.a.panese to be more sociable and more human. All were in vain until the peaceful armada, under the flag of thirty-one stars, led by Matthew Calbraith Perry,[10] broke the long seclusion of this Thorn-rose of the Pacific, and the unarmed diplomacy of Townsend Harris,[11]

brought j.a.pan into the brotherhood of commercial and Christian nations.

Within the isolating walls and the barred gates the story of the seekers after G.o.d is a thrilling one. The intellect of choice spirits, beating like caged eagles the bars of their prisons, yearned for more light and life. "Though an eagle be starving," says the j.a.panese proverb, "it will not eat grain;" and so, while the ma.s.s of the people and even the erudite, were content with ground food--even the chopped straw and husks of materialistic Confucianism and decayed Buddhism--there were n.o.ble souls who soared upward to exercise their G.o.d-given powers, and to seek nourishment fitted for that human spirit which goeth upward and not downward, and which, ever in restless discontent, seeks the Infinite.

Protests of Inquiring Spirits.

There is no stronger proof of the true humanity and the innate G.o.d-likeness of the j.a.panese, of their worthiness to hold and their inherent power to win a high place among the nations of the earth, than this longing of a few elect ones for the best that earth could give and Heaven bestow. We find men in travail of spirit, groping after G.o.d if haply they might find Him, following the ways of the Spirit along lines different, and in pathways remote, from those laid down by Confucius and his materialistic commentators, or by Buddha and his parodists or caricaturists. The story of the philosophers, who mutinied against the iron clamps and governmentally nourished system of the Seido College expounders, is yet to be fully told.[12] It behooves some j.a.panese scholar to tell it.

How earnest truth-seeking j.a.panese protested and rebelled against the economic fallacies, against the political despotism, against the abominable usurpations, against the false strategies and against the inherent immoralities of the Tokugawa system, has of late years been set forth with tantalizing suggestiveness, but only in fragments, by the native historians. Heartrending is the narrative of these men who studied, who taught, who examined, who sifted the mountains of chaff in the native literature and writings, who made long journeys on foot all over the country, who furtively travelled in Korea and China, who boarded Dutch and Russian vessels, who secretly read forbidden books, who tried to improve their country and their people. These men saw that their country was falling behind not only the nations of the West, but, as it seemed to them, even the nations of the East. They felt that radical changes were necessary in order to reform the awful poverty, disease, licentiousness, national weakness, decay of bodily powers, and the creeping paralysis of the Samurai intellect and spirit. How they were ostracized, persecuted, put under ban, hounded by the spies, thrown into prison; how they died of starvation or of disease; how they were beheaded, crucified, or compelled to commit _hara-kiri_; how their books were purged by the censors, or put under ban or destroyed,[13] and their maps, writings and plates burned, has not yet been told. It is a story that, when fully narrated, will make a volume of extraordinary interest.

It is a story which both Christian and human interests challenge some native author to tell. During all this time, but especially during the first half of the nineteenth century, there was one steady goal to which the aspiring student ever kept his faith, and to which his feet tended.

There was one place of pilgrimage, toward which the sons of the morning moved, and which, despite the spy and the informer and the vigilance of governors, fed their spirits, and whence they carried the sacred fire, or bore the seed whose harvest we now see. That goal of the pilgrim band was Nagasaki, and the place where the light burned and the sacred flames were kindled was Deshima. The men who helped to make true patriots, daring thinkers, inquirers after truth, bringers in of a better time, yes, and even Christians and preachers of the good news of G.o.d, were these Dutchmen of Deshima.

A Handful of Salt in a Stagnant Ma.s.s.

The Nagasaki Hollanders were not immaculate saints, neither were they sooty devils. They did not profess to be Christian missionaries. On the other hand, they were men not devoid of conscience nor of sympathy with aspiring and struggling men in a hermit nation, eager for light and truth. The Dutchman during the time of hermit j.a.pan, as we see him in the literature of men who were hostile in faith and covetous rivals in trade, is a repulsive figure. He seems to be a brutal wretch, seeking only gain, and willing to sell conscience, humanity and his religion, for pelf. In reality, he was an ordinary European, probably no better, certainly no worse, than his age or the average man of his country or of his continent. Further, among this average dozen of exiles in the interest of commerce, science or culture, there were frequently honorable men far above the average European, and shining examples of Christianity and humanity. Even in his submission to the laws of the country, the Dutchman did no more, no less, but exactly as the daimi[=o]s,[14] who like himself were subject to the humiliations imposed by the rulers in Yedo.

It was the Dutch, who, for two hundred years supplied the culture of Europe to j.a.pan, introduced Western science, furnished almost the only intellectual stimulant, and were the sole teachers of medicine and science.[15] They trained up hundreds of j.a.panese to be physicians who practised rational medicine and surgery. They filled with needed courage the hearts of men, who, secretly practising dissection of the bodies of criminals, demonstrated the falsity of Chinese ideas of anatomy. It was Dutch science which exploded and drove out of j.a.pan that Chinese system of medicine, by means of which so many millions have, during the long ages, been slowly tortured to death.

The Deshima Dutchman was a kindly adviser, helper, guide and friend, the one means of communication with the world, a handful of salt in the stagnant ma.s.s. Long before the United States, or Commodore Perry, the Hollanders advised the Yodo government in favor of international intercourse. The Dutch language, nearest in structure and vocabulary to the English, even richer in the descriptive energy of its terms, and saturated withal with Christian truth, was studied by eager young men.

These speakers of an impersonal language which in psychological development was scarcely above the grade of childhood, were exercised in a tongue that stands second to none in Europe for purity, vigor, personality and philosophical power. The j.a.panese students of Dutch held a golden key which opened the treasures of modern thought and of the world's literature. The minds of thinking j.a.panese were thus made plastic for the reception of the ideas of Christianity. Best of all, though forbidden by their contracts to import Bibles into j.a.pan, the Dutchmen, by means of works of reference, pointed more than one inquiring spirit to the information by which the historic Christ became known. The books which they imported, the information which they gave, the stimulus which they imparted, were as seeds planted within masonry-covered earth, that were to upheave and overthrow the fabric of exclusion and inclusion reared by the Tokugawa Sh[=o]guns.

Time and s.p.a.ce fail us to tell how eager spirits not only groped after G.o.d, but sought the living Christ--though often this meant to them imprisonment, suicide enforced by the law, or decapitation. Yet over all j.a.pan, long before the broad pennant of Perry was mirrored on the waters of Yedo Bay, there were here and there ma.s.ses of leavened opinion, spots of kindled light, and fields upon which the tender green sprouts of new ideas could be detected. To-day, as inquiry among the oldest of the Christian leaders and scores of volumes of modern biography shows, the most earnest and faithful among the preachers, teachers and soldiers in the Christian army, were led into their new world of ideas through Dutch culture. The fact is revealed in repeated instances, that, through father, grandfather, uncle, or other relative--some pilgrim to the Dutch at Nagasaki--came their first knowledge, their initial promptings, the environment or atmosphere, which made them all sensitive and ready to receive the Christian truth when it came in its full form from the living missionary and the vital word of G.o.d. Some one has well said that the languages of modern Europe are nothing more than Christianity expressed with differing p.r.o.nunciation and vocabulary. To him who will receive it, the mastery of any one of the languages of Christendom, is, in a large sense, a revelation of G.o.d in Christ Jesus.

Seekers after G.o.d.

Pathetic, even to the compulsion of tears, is the story of these seekers after G.o.d. We, who to-day are surrounded by every motive and inducement to Christian living and by every means and appliance for the practice of the Christian life, may well consider for a moment the struggle of earnest souls to find out G.o.d. Think of this one who finds a Latin Bible cast up on the sh.o.r.e from some broken ship, and bearing it secretly in his bosom to the Hollander, gains light as to the meaning of its message. Think of the n.o.bleman, Watanabe Oboru,[16] who, by means of the j.a.panese interpreter of Dutch, Takano Choyei, is thrilled with the story of Jesus of Nazareth who helped and healed and spake as no other man spake, teaching with an authority above that of the masters Confucius or Buddha. Think of the daimi[=o] of Mito,[17] who, proud in lineage, learned and scholarly, and surrounded by a host of educated men, is yet unsatisfied with what the wise of his own country could give him, and gathers around him the relics unearthed from the old persecutions. From a picture of the Virgin, a fragment of a litany, or it may be a part of a breviary, he tries to make out what Christianity is.

Think of Yokoi Heishiro,[18] learned in Confucius and his commentators, who seeks better light, sends to China for a Chinese translation of the New Testament, and in his lectures on the Confucian ethics, to the delight and yet to the surprise of his hearers who hear grander truth than they are able to find in text or commentary, really preaches Christ, and prophesies that the time will come when the walls of isolation being levelled, the brightest intellects of j.a.pan will welcome this same Jesus and His doctrine. Think of him again, when unable to purify the Augean stables of Yedo's moral corruption, because the time was at hand for other cleansing agencies, he retires to his home, content awhile with his books and flowers. Again, see him summoned to the capital, to sit at Ki[=o]to--like aged Franklin among the young statesmen of the Const.i.tution in Philadelphia--with the Mikado's youthful advisers in the new government of 1868. Think of him pleading for the elevation of the pariah Eta, accursed and outcast through Buddhism, to humanity and citizenship. Then hear him urge eloquently the right of personal belief, and argue for toleration under the law, of opinions, which the j.a.panese then stigmatized as "evil" and devilish, but which we, and many of them now, call sound and Christian. Finally, behold him at night in the public streets, a.s.saulted by a.s.sa.s.sins, and given quick death by their bullet and blades. See his gray head lying severed from his body and in its own gore, the wretched murderers thinking they have stayed the advancing tide of Christianity; but at home there dwells a little son destined in G.o.d's providence to become an earnest Christian and one of the brilliant leaders of the native Christianity of j.a.pan in our day.

The Buddhist Inquisitors.

During the nation's period of Thorn-rose-like seclusion, the three religions recognized by the law were Buddhism, Shint[=o] and Confucianism. Christianity was the outlawed sect. All over the country, on the high-roads, at the bridges, and in the villages, towns and cities, the fundamental laws of the country were written on wooden tablets called kosats[)u]. These, framed and roofed for protection from the weather, but easily before the eyes of every man, woman and child, and written in a style and language understood of all, denounced the Christian religion as an accursed "sect," and offered gold to the spy and informer;[19] while once a year every Samurai was required to swear on the true faith of a gentleman that he had nothing to do with Christianity. From the seventeenth century, the country having been divided into parishes, the inquisition was under the charge of the Buddhist priests who penetrated into the house and family and guarded the graveyards, so that neither earth nor fire should embrace the carca.s.s of a Christian, nor his dust or ashes defile the ancestral graveyards. Twice--in 1686 and in 1711--were the rewards increased and the Buddhist bloodhounds of j.a.pan's Inquisition set on fresh trails. On one occasion, at Osaka, in 1839,[20] a rebellion broke out which was believed, though without evidence, to have been instigated in some way by men with Christian ideas, and was certainly led by Oshio, the bitter opponent of Buddhism, of Tokugawa, and of the prevalent Confucianism.

Possibly, the uprising was aided by refugees from Korea. Those implicated were, after speedy trial, crucified or beheaded. In the southern part of the country the ceremony of Eb.u.mi or trampling on the cross,[21] was long performed. Thousands of people were made to pa.s.s through a wicket, beneath which and on the ground lay a copper plate engraved with the image of the Christ and the cross. In this way it was hoped to utterly eradicate the very memory of Christianity, which, to the common people, had become the synonym for sorcery.

But besides the seeking after G.o.d by earnest souls and the protest of philosophers, there was, amid the prevailing immorality and the agnosticism and scepticism bred by decayed Buddhism and the materialistic philosophy based on Confucius, some earnest struggles for the purification of morals and the spiritual improvement of the people.