Japan and Chinese Culture

Atomic Gentleman

To the more informed reader: If the words ‘kanbun’ and ‘kanshi’ mean anything to you, then most of what I write in the first part of this article will not be at all novel to you. However, in the second section, which focuses on the Yangmingist character of the Meiji Restoration, I provide what I hope to be novel commentary on original sources not otherwise available in English.

A few weeks ago, I found myself engaged in a debate over whether a unified “Asian culture” or “civilization” encompassing the nations of East Asia can be said to exist. For one generally familiar with his system of thought, the opposing party’s views on the matter would hardly need elaboration even if you were not familiar with the particular statements in question. Divided into two camps, we have on one hand the Han Borg, a particularly repellent fellaheen “civilization” representing the culmination of the human failure generally typical of all Non-IE peoples; on the other, we have the conspicuously broad Axis of Resistance known as “all of the non-Chinese peoples of East Asia.”

To make this view of things coherent, many are forced to engage in what the Jesuit Matteo Ricci might have called “interpretation in our favour” of the historical facts. Thus the Koreans, who for centuries existed in a subservient relationship to the dynasties of China derided by later nationalists as “Serving the Great,” are said to have fought a desperate struggle for resistance against their hated Han adversary. (BAP uses the example of the protracted struggle between the most probably Japonic kingdom of Goguryeo and the Sui Dynasty of China.) Similarly treated is the history of the Manchu, an originally semi-agricultural people that had organized themselves as a Sinicized frontier-state decades before their later invasion of China, for their having imposed a system of preferential ethnic treatment and bans on intermarriage similar to that which the Romanized Visigoths and Franks imposed on their conquered subjects.

It is not my goal in this essay, however, to litigate the case of these more peripheral ethnicities, but to specifically address the relationship between Japan and China. In the conventional view among the online right, we are presented with two human types as distinct in race-feeling as the collectivist Han bugman on the one hand and the noble Japanese warrior aristocracy on the other. Surely two peoples as different in bearing and disposition could not be said to inhabit the same “culture?”

I am in agreement with the Pervert that the word “culture” is a floating signifier that allows for disingenuous argumentation depending on its manner of use. We can speak of culture in terms of pots and utensils, or we can speak of culture as the expression of deeper civilizational values, and it is not immediately clear how one can derive the latter from a simple investigation of the former. I hope that you will grant me, however, that we may speak of it heuristically as follows. I may rattle off a series of names: Clovis, Charlegmagne, Abelard, Aquinas, Petrarch, Erasmus, Machiavelli, Luther, Shakespeare, Descartes, Bacon, Bach, Voltaire, Kant, Goethe, Napoleon, Metternich, Chateaubriand, Beethoven, Stendhal, Flaubert, Darwin, Wagner, Nietzsche… and you understand that there is a common thread that unites these disparate figures to each other in a way that they are not, for example, tied to Tamerlane or the Qin emperor. It is my contention that there exists a shared civilizational superstrate between Japan and China, at least the China of old, that may allow one to similarly speak in one breath of names like Confucius, Mencius, Qu Yuan, Cao Cao, Bashō, Du Fu, Nogi Maresuke, Taira no Atsumori, Wang Yangming, Hiraga Gennai, Seki Takakazu, Oda Nobunaga… Bridging the gap between the more straightforward but mundane view of culture, and the more apropos but nebulous and unfalsifiable conception of it, I believe it to be useful to speak of culture in an etymologically-informed sense of “upbringing”: namely, as a certain tradition of learning which unites the moral and intellectual self-conception of peoples who might otherwise differ in many ways.

My intention in the first part of this article is to provide what I consider a necessary factual basis for any meaningful discussion of the Japan-China connection. An analysis of the superficial cultural output of each nation can obviously not refute the notion that, while one may have borrowed from the other, the Chinese and Japanese are of a different character. In any case, it is not my intention to do so. China is China, and Japan is Japan, and each may have relative merits and defects that the other does not. This should not have to be said, but that Japan, Vietnam, and Korea can be said to share a common civilizational heritage with China does not mean that they owe subservience to the modern People’s Republic, or that each nation has no right to take pride in its own individual achievements.

In closing this section, I want to emphasize that I do not say any of this in order to denigrate Japanese culture. Like every ensouled human being under the age of thirty, I owe an immense personal debt to the culture of Japan. I would not trade what I owe to Japan for all the Wuxia novels and cultivation simulators in the world. But it is precisely because of this debt of gratitude that I feel compelled to correct what I see as the distorted and exaggerated views of the Japanese posited by those of my own side. From those who would posit that the virtue in Japanese culture essentially lies in it having effectively aped and nurtured a healthier variety of Western culture than the one existing today, to those who would selectively deny the associations of Japanese culture as it actually exists with the broader culture of Asia at large in order to maintain it as an acceptable non-Western object of admiration; for how much Japanese culture has objectively been a civilizing influence on this sphere there is surprisingly little attention given to studying it on its own terms. We will be better off when we learn to admire the culture of Japan as her greatest sons understood it, and not as the decimononic parody that exists in the imagination of our sphere.

Much of this article focuses on the linguistic influence of Chinese, as it was my study of the Japanese language that lead me inevitably to the study of the Chinese classical canon by which it is so influenced. While written Japanese has existed in a recognizably modern form for a little over hundred years, the influence of classical Chinese extends back to the foundation of Japan as a state. Just as older writers in the West often quote unadapted passages of Latin and even Greek in their work, Japanese authors even into the 20th century would do the same for literary Chinese. Reading older texts in Japanese, I still often come across obscure vocabulary that my Japanese dictionaries are helpless to explain, but are extensively glossed by classical Chinese dictionaries compiled in China and Taiwan. And it is fitting that, even after decades of vernacularization and the legacy of Allied attempts to debase the Japanese culture and spirit by denigration of the classical canon, educated Japanese still retain a modicum of familiarity with the Chinese poetry and literature that was familiar to their ancestors, which are still taught in school — in the class known as “Japanese.”

Chinese Prose

“I don’t think there is a case where you had a Japanese statesman who wrote better Chinese than Japanese,” conjectures the Pervert in his case against a united “Asian Culture.” To provide a counterexample to this notion would be trivial, since for a good part of Japanese history many statesmen and scholars would not have meaningfully written in Japanese at all. It is well known that the Japanese writing system makes use of Chinese characters. But what Japan borrowed from China was not simply its letters, but the literary language itself. The earliest attested written records in Japanese are in Chinese, as are its earliest laws and records of state. Thus it came to pass that the opening article of the Seventeen Article Constitution, which is still quoted in Japan today as exemplary of the Japanese spirit of “harmony,” was first penned in literary Chinese.

In the Nara and Heian periods, from roughly the 8th to 13th centuries AD, we do see the penning of purely Japanese works, like the Tale of Genji, as well as poetry compiled in collections like the Man’yōshū. But it must be remembered that, until the nationalist-philological Kokugaku movement of the 17-18th centuries brought greater attention to these native Japanese works, many had either become unreadable and obscure in the subsequent centuries due to their archaic nature, as in the case of much of the older poetry; or were simply considered outside the purview of “higher” literature and only later elevated to cultural prominence, as was variously the case of the Tale of Genji and much female-authored vernacular literature. One is tempted to draw an analogy between the Kokugaku movement and the Romanticism of Europe. (One thinks, for example, of the reappraisal of poetic forms like the chansons de geste, the rediscovery of Beowulf, and the interest many great Europeans showed in Macpherson’s Ossian.) But I would argue that the vernacular literary tradition of European nations had always been much more robust than the Japanese. As a result, the “redefinition of the cultural canon” common to both movements was necessarily more extreme in the Japanese case.

There are, admittedly, a few peculiarities of the Japanese treatment of classical Chinese that must be addressed lest we give a lopsided view of Japan’s linguistic situation. I have spoken thus far of the Japanese writing “in” classical Chinese. But Chinese, whether we are speaking of the Middle Chinese which was first transmitted to Japan in the first millennium, or later spoken varieties like Mandarin, never had much prominence in Japan as a spoken language. Chinese writing was sub-vocalized not in Chinese, which few spoke, but in Japanese of a particular literary register. To draw a canonical analogy, it would be as if Latin had great currency as a written language in the English-speaking world, but knowledge of the pronunciation of the language had completely died out, so that one read the opening lines of Caesar’s De Bello Gallico as “Gallia est omnis dīvīsa in partēs trēs,” but read it aloud as “All Gaul is divided into three parts.”

The Edo-era scholar and sinologist Ogyū Sorai had this to write (in Classical Chinese) of the predicament:

中華人多言。讀書讀書。予便謂讀書不如看書。此緣中華此方語音不同。此方耳口二者。皆不得力。

“Chinese speak frequently of reading books aloud. I would say that what we Japanese do is better thought of as ‘looking at books’ than ‘reading aloud books.’ The sounds of Chinese and Japanese are so completely different. Therefore the aural and oral aspects of reading do not develop for Japanese.” (translation from Emanuel Pastreich)

The form of “directly-translated Classical Chinese” used to interpret Chinese texts was in and of itself a literary form in Japan, one that enjoyed prominence until the vernacularization movement of the late 19th century. Japanese syntax differs from that of Chinese in many ways, the most immediate being that Japanese sentence order is generally Subject-Object-Verb, while Chinese has the same SVO order as English. Thus, to render any Chinese writing into intelligible Japanese, a series of syntactic rearrangements are necessary to clarify the relationship between parts of speech. Formal writing in Japanese eventually settled on a “mixed” form resembling Classical Chinese in its written form and a specialized archaic dialect of Classical Japanese in its spoken form. In terms of the earlier analogy to Latin, this would be as if our hypothetical English literati, wearied by the endless infixing and hyperbaton endemic to Classical Latin prose, simply wrote: “Omnia Gallia est divisa in tres partes,” in keeping with the expected English word order.

The written idiom of the Emperor of Japan closely resembled this style of mixed prose. The opening line of the “surrender” broadcast given by the Emperor on August 15, 1945 reads:

朕󠄂深ク世界ノ大勢ト帝國ノ現狀トニ鑑ミ非常ノ措置ヲ以テ時局ヲ收拾セムト欲シ茲ニ忠良ナル爾臣民ニ吿ク

Which is translated on the Chinese Wikipedia article on the speech like so:

朕深鑑世界之大勢與帝國之現狀，欲以非常之措置收拾時局，茲告爾忠良臣民

Anyone who is able to make out the shape of Chinese characters and differentiate them from the katakana present in the Japanese text will notice a very miraculous thing: this Chinese translation is simply a syntactic rearrangement of the exact same characters as exist in the Japanese original, with the only trivial exceptions being the semantically light particles 之 and 與. In fact, the only non-trivial difference between the characters that appear in the Chinese translation and the Japanese is in the one used to spell America, which in Chinese is 美 and Japanese is 米. This close correspondence between usage in characters is generally not the case between the modern written languages, whose writing conventions by now differ significantly and reflect peculiarities of their respective spoken varieties. This form of writing cannot be called Classical Chinese per se. But I venture to say that anyone literate in Classical Chinese could make sense of it, with more or less difficulty, by a simple mental rearrangement of the characters into normal Chinese syntax.

Then, there are the variety of written Japanese forms that cannot necessarily be called Chinese in form, but are sufficiently influenced by the language that they would not be readily comprehensible to one unfamiliar with classical Chinese writing conventions. These include Japan’s earliest chronicles, the Nihon Shoki and the Kojiki, which are often categorized as “classical Chinese” texts in Japanese sources, but which contain so many nativisms and grammatically awkward forms that they are best thought of simply as Japanese texts written in a particularly obtuse spelling system. Then there are writing styles like sōrōbun, once the standard epistolary style of Japanese, which makes far greater use of Chinese characters and Chinese-like forms than the modern language, but is so eccentric in its employment of these that it cannot readily be considered even as a form of pseudo-Chinese. Taken together, until the Meiji and Taishō eras the majority of formal writing would have fallen into one of these three categories: Classical Chinese subvocalized as Japanese; Classical Chinese rearranged into Japanese syntax subvocalized as Japanese; Classical Japanese written like “bad” Classical Chinese, or otherwise influenced by Chinese to a greater extent than the modern spoken language.

Chinese Poetry

城山　　＜西　道仙＞

孤軍奮鬪破圍還，

一百里程壘壁間。

吾劍既摧吾馬斃，

秋風埋骨故鄕山。

“Shiroyama,” or “The Mountain Castle”

By Nishi Dōsen

I break through the siege, outnumbered and alone,

Past countless walls and ramparts I return,

My sword is shattered, my horse lies dead.

Let the fall wind bury my bones

— Here in the mountains of home.

The above poem was written in commemoration of the final stand of Saigō Takamori, the leader of the 1877 Satsuma Rebellion who, true to the above account, fought a valiant but doomed last stand against Imperial forces in the province of his birth. Decades after the poem’s composition, and despite the fact that the Japanese of that conflict were generally on the offensive and not in nearly as desperate of a situation as the poem describes, it became popular in a singable gin’ei, or “recital” version among the soldiers of the second Sino-Japanese war.

This choice of Classical Chinese for the language of poetic composition was by no means unique. Indeed, although it can by no means be said that Japanese-language poetry had no prestige as an art form, kanshi, or Chinese poetry, was the preferred form for many artists and of at least equal importance through Japanese history. Educated Japanese were proficient in the composition of both.

A peculiarity of the kanshi style is that the Japanese would compose poems in pure classical Chinese, according to the rhyme schemes and tone patterns of Middle Chinese (in general, the pronunciation of the medieval Tang and Song dynasties,) but read them aloud in translation in an archaic form of Japanese, which does not have tones and for which no attempt was ever made to incorporate rhyming. To which the question naturally arises: why bother with such a bizarre and roundabout system of composition at all? Why agonize over rhyme schemes and tone patterns in one language when the final product is a direct translation into a language that lacks both? A parsimonious explanation is that the Japanese did so purely out of obeisance to convention and due to the prestige of literary Chinese. I think, though, that a case can be made for Chinese poetry on its own merits. (Ezra Pound thought the same.) It must be remembered in this connection that Japanese poetry itself suffered many of the same limitations in rigidity of form and archaism as kanshi did. A standard haiku allows for exactly 17 morae, while the longer tanka are limited to 31. Compare this to Chinese poetry: even the short jueju poems that became widespread in Japan allow for the use of 7 characters divided across 4 lines — and a single Chinese character communicates significantly more information than does a Japanese syllable.

Inoue Tetsujirō, in the preface to the Shintaishishō, an 1882 compilation of vernacular poetry and the first major vernacular compilation of its kind, laments (in classical Chinese) of Japanese poetry:

我邦之人。可學和歌。不可學詩。詩雖今人之詩。而比諸和歌。則爲難解矣。何不學和歌乎。後入大學。學泰西之詩。其短者雖似我短歌。而其長者至 卷。非我長歌之所能企及也。且夫泰西之詩。隨世而變。故今之詩。用今之語。用至到精緻。使人翫讀不倦。於是乎久曰。古之和歌。不足取也。

“…The people of our land should study the waka, and not the poems of the Chinese. Even the Chinese poems composed by the men of today are harder to comprehend than the waka. Why do we not study the waka!

Afterwards I entered university, and studied the poems of the West. The shorter verse is comparable to our own Tanka. But the longer may reach many tens of volumes. These surpass even the longest Chōka. And the poems of the West change with the world, so that the poems of today use the words of today. And as they are of the utmost precision and refinement, men read them with pleasure and yet never tire. Thereupon I finally came to the thought: of how little worth are the waka of old!”

My own assessment of both traditional forms of poetry is not as harsh. I believe that if a learner of Japanese takes some time to familiarize himself with the basic syntax of classical Chinese, then many kanshi are surprisingly accessible. Additionally, the poetry of the Tang dynasty was consistently held up as an imitative model by later Chinese, to the point where the rhymes of later poems often correspond not to the rhymes of any contemporary spoken variety of Chinese, but to those of the rhyme dictionaries compiled in the Tang era. As a result, the standard “canon” of Classical Chinese poems is relatively consistent between Japan and China, and poets in both countries were familiar with a similar ensemble of names like Li Bai and Du Fu. Therefore, much of what one learns about Chinese poetry in a purely Chinese context is readily transferrable to the study of Japanese kanshi, and vice versa.

In any case, there is a sensibility, I think, inherent in the kanshi that is not as fully developed in Japanese poetry proper. At the very least, there is something that the Young Officers of the Japanese interwar era saw in the Songs of Chu that they did not find in their native poetic idiom. Even for the incidental influence they had on the Japanese understanding of composition and aesthetics they would be worthy of independent study. For a tangentially-relevant but engaging primer on the workings of classical Chinese poetry, the volume Cathay: A Critical Edition, a critical commentary on Ezra Pound’s translations of Chinese poetry off of (indirectly) Japanese sources, is of independent interest.