KOKKA NO HINKAKU, La dignité d'une nation (Masahiko Fujiwara)

6 Novembre 2012 , Rédigé par Pierre-Olivier Combelles

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Bushido Compliance

Mar, 30. 2006

Recently, some books on Bushido have gone on to become the best sellers. One of them is “Bushido-A Bilingual & Illustrated version” (Mikawa Shobo), which has notes and commentary added to the classical masterpiece “Bushido” by Inazo Nitobe. And the other one is “Kokka no Hinkaku (Dignity of a Nation) (Shinchosha) by Masahiko Fujiwara. In 2003, the film “The Last Samurai” directed by Tom Cruise with Ken Watanabe in the lead role became quite popular. Bushido and Samurai seem to be the keywords when talking of modern Japan.

Fujiwara’s book that has already sold over 1 million copies is a criticism of excessive stress on rationalism and logicism. It positions “Emotions” and “Form” on the opposite end of the spectrum. Form is the criterion for behavior based on the spirit of Bushido. Fujiwara writes, “Excessive Americanization has made inroads not only in the economy but even in our society, culture and the national character”. He laments that the Japanese are no longer concerned about being called coward or vulgar.

It gives solace to those who are displeased with business restructuring, take-over, and vulgar prosperity and who feel that the present trend of “the survival of the fittest” as reflected in bundling of the people together into “the Winners and the Losers” is going too far. It also works as a tranquilizer for those who are vexed with the lack of manners among the youth and increase in the number of the so-called NEET (Not in Employment, Education or Training). On reading “The earlier Japanese were really marvelous people”, those who dislike antagonistic China and South Korea or powerful America must be feeling proud. There are definitely many factors in this book that make it the best seller.

On the other hand, there is also criticism that such spiritualism should be shunned as it leads to nationalism.

Inazo Nitobe’s Bushido was originally published in America in 1899 in English. It was entitled “Bushido – The Soul of Japan”. It evoked interest across the world and was translated into many languages such as German, French and Chinese. Its Japanese version was published in 1900. It used typical terms like Makoto (honesty), Chugi (Loyalty), Hinsei (Character), Seppuku (Hara-kiri) and the Yamato(Japanese) spirit.

Soon thereafter, Russo-Japanese war broke out in 1904, which ended in Japanese victory in 1905. The victory was attributed to the Bushido.

Tetsujiro Inoue, a philosopher, poet and a Professor of the Tokyo Imperial University of the time, and Sukemasa Arima, a thinker co-authored the book “Bushido Classics” in 3 volumes soon thereafter. Major Publisher and Hakubunkan also published several books on Bushido such as “Theory of Bushido”, “Bushido Percepts” in rapid succession. It was around 1907. After the Meiji Restoration, Bushido was indeed a popular concept as the “Dignity of Nation” during the process of building of the nation.

Bushido concept is said to have been adopted as the norm for the Imperial Army. Imperial Instructions for military were issued in 1882 and they were based on the Bushido. Norms that constituted the standards for the warrior class became the foundation for the military formed by the commoners. It had 5 pillars namely loyalty, etiquette, valor, faithfulness and frugality. It is impossible to assume that they alone led to victory in the Russo-Japanese war but the basis for the argument that Bushido was behind the victory lies here.

Excuse me for being personal but my grand father Tatsuo Ninagawa, a moralist too wrote “History of Japanese Bushido” at that time published by Hakubunkan. He wrote grandiosely “Since the Russo-Japanese war, research on Bushido is a matter of great importance for everyone from politicians to businessmen, military-men and scholars”. He wrote in the conclusion that righteousness, integrity, honesty and valor ought to be practiced in business and it amounts to the so-called ‘gentleman-ship’ of the British. Indeed, isn’t it similar to ‘compliance’ in the corporate world in today’s jargon?

Publisher: Masao Ninagawa

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From the Magazine | Notebook

The Japan That Says No

A new bestseller expresses Japan's popular dissatisfaction with globalization

By JIM FREDERICK

Monday, Jun. 19, 2006

The book everyone was talking about last week at the first World Economic Forum (WEF) ever held in Tokyo was not Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat, or some other tome on globalization. It was a slim Japanese volume called The Dignity of a State. Written by mathematician Masahiko Fujiwara, the book is ostensibly a nostalgic call to return to ancient Japanese virtues. But it's also a shrill rant that blames free markets for a wide assortment of Japan's—and the world's—woes. "Globalism," Fujiwara writes, "is merely a strategy of the U.S. that seeks world domination after the Cold War." The author also calls the market economy "a system that clearly divides the society into a minority of winners and a majority of losers." WEF members, most of them proponents of free markets and open economies, might want to dismiss Fujiwara as part of the radical fringe of strident antiglobalization protesters. But the book has touched a nerve in Japan, where many feel economic reforms are destroying the country's egalitarianism, creating a nation of haves and have-nots. The Dignity of a State has sold 2 million copies since last November, making it Japan's second best-selling title of 2006. (It trails only the latest Harry Potter installment). A grassroots backlash against reform in the world's second largest economy is worrying to some WEF delegates. "This book's popularity is not a positive development," says Charles D. Lake II, vice chairman of Aflac Insurance in Japan. But it is an important one. Despite Japan's much-heralded success in modernizing its economy, the fact remains that a large segment of Japanese society loathes the way things are heading. While there is no English-language version of the book, you can bet that many attendees of this conference have already ordered their companies to prepare an internal translation.

With reporting by Yuki Oda

From the Jun. 26, 2006 issue of TIME Asia magazine

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(Août 2006) TOKYO (AFP) - "Aujourd'hui les Japonais idolâtrent l'argent. Avant, le fric ne les intéressait pas. Nous sommes en train de perdre notre éthique et notre morale".

La "déclinologie" n'est pas une spécialité uniquement française ou européenne: elle a trouvé un héraut au Japon en la personne d'un mathématicien, Masahiko Fujiwara, qui vient de publier un best-seller déplorant la perte de l'identité nippone et appelant à la restauration des valeurs du "bushido" (le code d'honneur des samouraïs).

Depuis sa sortie en novembre 2005, son essai "Kokka no Hinkaku" ("La Dignité d'une Nation") rencontre un succès à la fois phénoménal --l'éditeur en a tiré plus de deux millions de copies et le livre a été numéro un des ventes pendant 11 semaines-- et surprenant, dans un pays peu enclin au débat intellectuel.

Fujiwara, 63 ans, professeur de la vénérable Université de filles d'Ochanomizu à Tokyo, qui a enseigné à Cambridge et au Colorado, y pourfend la modernité sabre au clair.

"Ce que j'essaie de dire, c'est que le plus important est l'identité. Les gens ont l'esprit lobotomisé par l'américanisme. Le monde prend un mauvais chemin. La mondialisation est un désastre. La licence, la liberté, l'égalité, la démocratie, toutes ces valeurs que chérissent les Occidentaux sont toutes aussi désastreuses", affirme-t-il à l'AFP.

"Le Japon est en train de perdre son orgueil et sa dignité. Il est une colonie américaine. Nous sommes le 51e Etat. Les Etats-Unis nous ont forcé à abandonner confiance et fierté après 1945. Nous étions si choqués d'avoir été vaincus que nous sommes devenus des béni-oui-oui".

Pour le professeur Fujiwara, depuis l'arrivée des Occidentaux en 1853, le Japon a perdu sa vertu essentielle, le "hinkaku", mot complexe que l'on traduit par "grâce", "raffinement", "dignité"... A ses yeux des "valeurs innées" japonaises, synonymes d'équilibre et de mesure, qui offriraient une alternative au règne de la "logique" occidentale, en particulier américaine.

Paradoxalement, ce mathématicien esthète n'a pas de mots assez durs pour dénoncer le "rationalisme" de l'Occident, source du "chaos du monde".

Il aime à citer le Jésuite Saint François-Xavier qui, après avoir débarqué dans l'Archipel en 1549, saluait avec admiration ces Japonais --"le meilleur des peuples incroyants"-- qui ne méprisaient pas le dénuement, respectaient au contraire les samouraïs pauvres, et dont les critères de moralité étaient très élevés.

Ce qu'il faut rétablir, dit Fujiwara en fustigeant "le fondamentalisme du marché", c'est la compassion envers les faibles dans une société matérialiste où se creuse le fossé entre riches et pauvres.

Comme signes du déclin, il avance la délinquance juvénile en hausse, la multiplication des "freeters" (diplômés qui font des petits boulots à temps perdu, souvent volontairement) et des "NEET" (Not in Education, Employment or Training -- Sans Education, Emploi ni Formation). "Ils ne veulent plus bosser du tout. Avant les Japonais étaient des accros du boulot".

Les principaux responsables, selon lui, sont l'occupant américain et les syndicats d'enseignants de gauche qui ont "détruit l'Education" et imposé une vision "masochiste" de l'Histoire japonaise.

Pour autant, Masahiko Fujiwara se défend d'être nationaliste, et critique l'expansionnisme "égoïste" du Japon impérial entre 1905 et 1945.

Il est aussi opposé aux visites du Premier ministre Junichiro Koizumi au sanctuaire shintoïste du Yasukuni, haut lieu spirituel du nationalisme japonais.

"Je suis patriote, pas nationaliste. Les nationalistes sont pervertis parce qu'ils ne s'occupent que du seul intérêt de leur pays. Le patriotisme, c'est l'amour de sa culture, de sa littérature, de son histoire", argue-t-il.

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Interview du Professeur M. Fujiwara par David Pilling du Financial Times (9 mars 2007): link

En dépit de l'inévitable et congénitale arrogance du journaliste, celle du coq juché sur son tas de fumier, entrevue d'un grand intérêt pour les nombreuses citations du Pr. Fujiwara. Totalement inconnu en France, le livre de Masahiko Fujiwara, Kokka no Hinkaku (La dignité d'une nation) a suscité une exceptionnelle campagne de désinformation dans les médias étasuniens.

Extraits:

(…) Masahiko Fujiwara (…) whose themes are (…): the limits of western logic, why Japan should return to samurai values, and the unique sensitivity of Japanese to nature.

(…) he says it has taken half a century of obsession with wealth, followed by a long period of stagnation, to make the Japanese realise what they have lost.

“Japan used to despise money, just like English gentlemen,” he says. “But after the war, under American influence, we concentrated on prosperity.”

(…) Before I can count them, Fujiwara is talking about bushido, the chivalrous samurai code whose essence, he says, is being lost. “When bushido started in the 12th century it was swordsmanship. Since there were no wars in the 260 years of the Edo era, that swordsmanship became a kind of value system: sensitivity to the poor and to the weak, benevolence, sincerity, diligence, patience, courage, justice.”

(…) Fujiwara yearns for bushido, the way of the samurai abandoned in 1868 by Meiji revolutionaries who thought Japan must modernise if it were not to be colonised. They dissolved the samurai class, removing swords and hacking off topknots. The trauma of abandoning, almost overnight, one social system and substituting it with another – embracing a foreign culture to resist foreign domination – is keenly felt in a nation even today torn in its attitudes towards the outside world.

(…) Japan’s slide into militarism can be traced to its abandonment of an honour code. “We became very arrogant. We wanted to become president of Asia, so we invaded one country after another. We lost our senses.

“I always say Japan should be extraordinary; it should not be an ordinary country. We became a normal country, just like other big nations. That’s all right for them. But we have to be isolated, especially mentally.”

(…) “we pay great attention to aesthetics. In writing we have shodo [calligraphy] and for flowers we have ikebana [flower arrangement].”

In England, he had been shocked to see esteemed Cambridge professors slurping their tea from mugs. “We have tea ceremony. Everything we make into art.”

The Japanese do indeed have a genius for making things beautiful, though they have done less well with nature, which they ransacked in the second half of the 20th century. His section on Japan’s unique sensitivity to nature provoked particularly heavy scribbling in the margins of my copy of his book.

He recounts, for example, how a visiting American professor, on hearing the sound of crickets, asks Fujiwara: “What’s that noise?” Fujiwara is appalled. Doesn’t the professor realise he is listening to music, something obvious to any Japanese? How, he wonders, can we have lost a war to these imbeciles?

“When we listen to that music we hear the sorrow of autumn because winter is coming,” he tells me. “The summer is gone. Every Japanese feels that. And, at the same time, we feel the sorrow of our life, our very temporary short life.”