Dealing with the backlog,
and other worthy goals

Samuel P. Huntington, ‘The Clash of Civilizations’. Foreign Affairs. Summer 1993, volume 22, number 3.

Ooka Makoto, ‘Sitting in a Circle: Thoughts on the Japanese Group Mentality’. Soshitsu Sen XV Distinguished Lecture on Japanese Culture, Donald Keene Center, 6 March 2000.

Itô Mikiharu, ‘Evolution of the Concept of Kami’. Originally published as ‘Kami kannen no tenkai’ in Shimode Sekiyo and Tamamuro Fumio, eds., Kamigami no tanjô to tenkai [The birth and evolution of the gods], Kôza Shintô [The Shinto series], v. 1. (Tokyo: Ôfûsha, 1991). Translated and republished 1998 & 2000, Japanese Institute for Culture and Classics, Kokugakuin University.

Ichimura Naoya, ‘Restoration-of-status-quo relief to redress infringement of authors’ moral rights’. From Copyright Update Japan 2000, Copyright Research and Information Center.

At the top of the pile, for no particular reason, is Samuel Huntington’s 1993 Foreign Affairs essay ‘The Clash of Civilizations’. This essay and the book that grew out of it picked up a new lease on life in recent months, which is of course a pity; but enduring fame was probably inevitable for Huntington’s line of thinking. It is vague enough to look true in almost any situation, and its central argument – that in the future the ‘great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural’ – is so patently obvious that editorialists should be trotting it out for generations to come. Indeed, this pan-generational appeal is one of Huntington’s main points, rehearsing as he does an age-old hypothesis about the inevitability of conflict between Islam and Christianity. Two points strike me as more directly relevant for us in Japan. One is a peculiarity of rhetoric and perhaps of philosophy: in ‘The Clash of Civilizations’ it seems to be taken as given that human cultures cannot tolerate internal tensions for very long, and that where there is conflict, someone has to win and someone has to lose. The other point has to do with Huntington’s odd way of looking at Japan: at one moment, we get to be a civilization all to ourselves; at another moment, we draw closer to Asia; and at yet another we are admitted as an honorary member of Western civilization. This manoeuvring should make it clear that unresolved tensions and suspended conflicts – to say nothing of eagerly sought or grudging accommodations – are the norm rather than the exception between cultures or ‘civilizations’. That there will be tension and a great deal of difficulty is less a prediction than it is a fact of life.

Next one down the pile is an essay by Ooka Makoto, ‘Sitting in a Circle: Thoughts on the Japanese Group Mentality’, which was given at the Donald Keene Center in New York on 6 March 2000. Ooka is one of our foremost contemporary poets; he concludes this essay recommending that we pay closer attention to the solitary excellence and individuality demonstrated in the work and personalities of great Japanese poets. He develops a powerful and stimulating argument about the lives of poets like Sugawara Michizane and Matsuo Bashô, relating their experience as lone practitioners at odds with their society to his own life in postwar Japan. Although his conclusions are affecting and probably true, he begins with a vague sort of argument that reminds me uncomfortably of Huntington. Ooka describes an experience he had on a transatlantic flight, when a group of Japanese travellers sat in a circle playing cards. He extrapolates from this to build an elegant point about Japanese group behaviour – the commonplace idea that our culture values group harmony above individual identity; and that this pose of ‘sitting in a circle’ is emblematic of the threat this ‘groupism’ poses to outsiders and mavericks. A large part of this line of thinking is certainly true; but it tends to neglect the fact that most other cultures have their own way of sitting in circles. To value a life of solitude has been seen as a threat to general order all over the world, throughout history; and the outsiders among us have often turned out to be our greatest artists. Why this might be so, and the lessons the group can learn from the people who refuse to join it, are essential lines of inquiry for any thinking person. It strikes me as a pity that so many of us who think about Japan feel compelled to find exceptional qualities of group behaviour in this culture: exceptionalism is inevitably a distraction whenever we aim at clear-eyed reasoning.

As we move further down the pile, we start to angle off in a different direction, with an essay by Itô Mikiharu on the ‘Evolution of the Concept of Kami’, published by the Institute for Japanese Culture and Classics at Kokugakuin University. Studies of Shinto and the varieties of Japanese religion have often been happy hunting grounds for those with an exceptionalist bent, and I was pleased to discover that Itô’s text is admirably free of these tendencies. I hope to devote more space to discussion of the ‘kami’ elsewhere on this site. For the purpose of the present tour through my reading tray, we can say that this word refers to a manifestation of divinity, or – much more loosely – as a god or goddess, much as the Ancient Greeks or Native Americans understood them. Itô looks at the prehistory of the concept of kami in Japanese religion, and finds parallels in the religious culture of Southeast Asia. In the end, he joins a growing body of researchers who suggest that a significant part of ancient Japanese culture had its origins in people who migrated from Southeast Asia. He also sketches an interesting metaphorical understanding of kami through the concepts of a ‘coexistence’ of minor deities and ‘integration’ of major deities. It is a story of how ancient people understood their relationship with the world and with each other, and how this developed and changed over time. As most things do, it all became mixed up with politics and statecraft; at the same time a local stratum remained where the old ways persisted and slowly came to blend with and interpenetrate larger structures. Relations between local people and extra-local forces are always complicated, and do not inevitably lead to one side vanquishing the other. This is a valuable – if over-obvious – corrective to both Huntington’s canny vagueness and Ooka’s well-intentioned exceptionalism.

We all live in villages when we find ourselves at home – even if our village is contained in a larger city, or fails to be a neatly contiguous physical space. People come together to form larger and more complex social groups to avoid trouble; and how a society reacts when trouble arises can tell us a lot about that society’s distinctiveness. All this is by way of justifying the presence of the next and final item in this week’s pile: Ichimura Naoya’s ‘Restoration-of-status-quo relief to redress infringement of authors’ moral rights’ – a thesis on copyright law published by the Japanese government’s Copyright Research and Information Center. Ichimura examines the case law relating to the moral rights of authors and their rights of redress in cases where these are deemed to have been infringed. It is a rather lumpy topic, made more difficult by the fact that ‘moral rights’ are neither easy to pin down in fact nor to restore in the breach. His paper concludes with a useful summary table that sets out the particulars of a number of recent judgements: poets aggrieved at changes made to their haiku; cases of unauthorized republication of novels; cases where a publisher served up an author’s work in slightly different language in a new edition, and did not bother to pay for it. The courts look through all these cases with reference to international copyright law and standards, and with regard to local case law and precedents. Decisions reflect individual and collective rights and responsibilities; they recognize that people will always tend to be both imitative and inventive in their public and private thoughts. In short, this, like all case law, reveals a human culture in its most intimate details. It shows us what we are all like in general, and how we all differ in our particulars. Let it be a lesson for the Huntington in all of us that the worthy goal is balance.

2002/06/08, with minor modifications in August 2003

Date posted: 2003-09-15