THE GEOGRAPHY OF JAPAN

Japan is an island country. This basic geographic fact has shaped their history and the character of their peoples, and is central to the way they think of themselves. The Japanese islands stretch across the north-western corner of the Pacific Ocean, from the northernmost island, the island of Etorofu which is still occupied by the Russians 60 years after the end of the Second World War, to Yonaguni Island off the coast of Taiwan in the south. All in all there are well over one thousand islands making up the Japanese archipelago, but over 95% of the land area of Japan is made up of just four islands, the four main islands by which Japan is identified. These are called Hokkaido, Honshu, Kyushu and Shikoku.

The entire country is further south than most Europeans imagine: the northern tip of Japan is roughly on the latitude of Bordeaux, and the southern reaches of the Ryukyu islands stretch to within the tropics. Tokyo is on the same latitude as Los Angeles, or Cairo or Teheran. The rough range of Japan from north to south equates with the Eastern seaboard of the United States, and much of the climate that Japan lives through can be compared with the Atlantic coastline of America – cold winters, hot summers and regular batterings from strong winds in the late summer and early autumn. Japan has the further physical disadvantage, shared by the West Coast of the United States but not by the Eastern seaboard, of being a very volcanic country, full of geysers and hot springs, and prone to earthquakes.

VOLCANOES AND EARTHQUAKES

The volcanoes and earthquakes of Japan are not merely exotic features of a distant land. They are real and active and play an important part in defining how Japanese people live.

Active volcanoes

Late in 2003, there was concern that Mount Fuji, which had lain dormant since 1707, was showing signs of renewed activity. An eruption by the largest mountain in Japan (3,776 metres high) would have a devastating effect on Tokyo and the surrounding Kanto plain. There are several active volcanoes in Japan, especially down in Kyushu where Mount Aso, and Sakurajima which erupted violently in 1914, are all active. Showa-Shinzan (‘the New Mountain of the Showa Era’) in Hokkaido was formed between 1943 and 1945 as a result of volcanic activity near Mount Usu. By September 1945, it had reached a height of 408 metres, and it is still rumbling.

Volcanic activity has also created many hot springs all around Japan, where for centuries people have gone to bathe in the naturally heated pools and streams. They still attract millions of visitors each year.

Devastating earthquakes

The more sinister side of this instability of the earth’s crust shows itself in earthquakes. There are earthquakes every day in Japan, some which cannot be felt and some of which can be devastating. For people unused to them, a first experience of an earthquake can be daunting. The vast majority of earthquakes are so slight as to be unnoticeable, and even those which you can feel are usually so mild that the sensation is no more than that of being on a slow-moving train. However, major earthquakes can and do occur, and this fact has made a significant difference to the way the Japanese live.

Building to withstand earthquakes

Traditional Japanese houses tend to be made of wood. This is not just because it is easiest to build in wood, or that trees are one of the few plentiful natural resources in Japan. It is also because if an earthquake strikes, they will collapse with less chance of causing cataclysmic damage. They can also easily be rebuilt. In the twentieth century, the importation of modern technology was constrained by the need for it to be earthquake proof. Even today, practically all electric cables are suspended overhead rather than buried underground as they would be in most western countries, because of the danger of disruption by an earthquake.

The American architect Frank Lloyd Wright also had a huge influence on the way buildings are constructed in modern Japan. In 1921 his Imperial Hotel in Tokyo was completed, and in 1923 a huge earthquake struck. Most wooden buildings collapsed, and those that did not were consumed by the fire that followed the earthquake; but the Imperial Hotel survived. Lloyd Wright had built it of ferro-concrete and based it on a foundation of mud, which allowed the building to sway a little with the earthquake but took the violence out of the tremors. The lessons were quickly learned and since then virtually all new buildings over a certain size have been made of ferro-concrete, using the principles established by Frank Lloyd Wright.

This has not exempted Japan from earthquake damage, as the severe Hanshin earthquake of 1994, which struck Kobe and Osaka, showed only too clearly. However, Japanese anti earthquake technology is far in advance of most other parts of the world, and their public buildings are far more likely to withstand an earthquake than those in other parts of the world, even in those places like California where earthquakes are a real risk.

Mountainous islands

The country is so seismic because the origins of the Japanese islands are comparatively recent in geological terms. The generally accepted theory is that they were created by the collision of four tectonic plates – the Pacific plate, the Philippine plate, the Amurian plate and the Sea of Okhotsk plate. This has created a country that is mountainous, with the coastline falling quickly away to deep ocean beds, which make coastal navigation much more dangerous than around Great Britain and northern Europe, for example.

The spine of Japan is very mountainous and runs with short, fast flowing rivers, so much so that barely 20% of the whole country is habitable. The total area, some 378,000 square kilometres, is about half as much again as the area of the United Kingdom, but in terms of habitable area, it is barely half the size of habitable Britain.

HOKKAIDO

Hokkaido, the northern island, is the second largest in area of Japan’s islands at around 83,500 square kilometres, but is only the third largest in terms of population.

Climate

The climate of Hokkaido, and its main city Sapporo, is sub-Arctic, with deep snow throughout the winter months. The coldest temperature ever recorded in Japan, minus 41 degrees Celsius, was recorded in Asahikawa in Hokkaido. The annual Snow Festival in Sapporo in February attracts thousands of visitors from all over Japan and elsewhere, and features massive ice carvings, which remain frozen for weeks on end. The Winter Olympics were held there in 1972, but Sapporo remains probably best known within Japan for the local beer company and its main brand, which is also called Sapporo.

The summers in Hokkaido are milder than further south, with average June temperatures around 15 degrees Celsius, several degrees cooler than in Tokyo, and over ten degrees cooler than Kyushu. They are also drier, because Hokkaido is beyond the northern edge of the monsoon belt, which just stretches far enough north to include Tokyo and the Kanto plain on which it lies, but peters out in northern Honshu.

Population and cities

Despite the increasing popularity of winter sports holidays in Hokkaido, and the growth of its agricultural industry – the only part of Japan where agriculture is not based on rice – the island remains underpopulated. Apart from Sapporo itself, with a population of around one million, there is only Otaru, the port for Sapporo, facing the Japan Sea and acting as a stepping off point for the ferries to Russia and Korea, and Hakodate, the town which faces the north coast of Honshu across the Tsugaru Straits, which would classify itself as much more than a small town in Japanese terms.

Sapporo is a new city, having grown from virtually nothing at the end of the nineteenth century. It is laid out in a rectangular grid pattern, but this is not in accordance with the ancient Chinese model, as the ancient capital Kyoto is. It is a copy of the American grid system. The terrain of Hokkaido is less dominated by steep mountains and fast-flowing rivers (although it is certainly mountainous) than its more sourtherly neighbours. The impression it leaves on the visitor is one of space and openness, at least in comparison with the rest of Japan.

SHIKOKU

The two main southern islands, Shikoku and Kyushu, are very different. Shikoku, the smallest and least populated of the four main Japanese islands, was until quite recently seen as a pleasant agricultural part of the country, left behind by much of what went on in the rest of Japan. It is less than one quarter the size of Hokkaido and about two-fifths of Kyushu’s size, or in European terms, a little smaller than Wales. It used to be difficult to reach from Honshu, except by boat across the Inland Sea, but the building of the Seto Ohashi bridge via the stepping stones of small islands in the Inland Sea has made Shikoku more accessible. The England football team, for example, used Shikoku as a their training and hotel base during the 2002 World Cup, although the nearest they actually played was across the bridge in Osaka.

KYUSHU

Kyushu, the southernmost of the main islands, is half the size of Hokkaido, but only one-fifth the size of Honshu. It contains several major cities – Nagasaki, Kita-Kyushu, Fukuoka and Kagoshima, for example – and has for many years been a centre of heavy industry, especially shipbuilding. It is also virtually subtropical at the southern end, and Kagoshima with its sandy beaches, soft palm trees and the permanent veil of smoke over the cone of the Sakurajima volcano, is one of the most popular tourist destinations within Japan.

It must be admitted that the Japanese, like the British, have rather lost their taste for holidaying at home, and prefer to travel just as cheaply to Hawaii or the West Coast of America, or to New Zealand or Europe, but those jaded Tokyoites who stay in Japan and visit Kagoshima can have just as exotic a holiday as those who travel to Honolulu, which is these days almost more Japanese than Japan.

HONSHU

Honshu is the main island where all the main cities are – Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, Kyoto, Kobe, Yokohama, Hiroshima and many others. It is as mountainous as the other islands, with only a few coastal plains where the population can maintain a fragile foothold on the land.

Population

The Kanto Plain, which supports Tokyo, Yokohama, Kawasaki, Chiba and other smaller cities spreading mainly north and west from Tokyo, is one of the most densely populated regions in the world. At least 30 million people crowd into an area barely 10,000 square kilometres in area, a population density over ten times that of the United Kingdom. This sense of crowding is nothing new. Even in the eighteenth century, Tokyo (then called Edo) had a population of almost one million, making it one of the largest cities in the world at that time.

Cities

The narrow coastal strip along the southern edge of Honshu, stretching for about six hundred kilometres from Tokyo and Yokohama, via Hamamatsu, Nagoya, Osaka, Kobe and Hiroshima down to Shimonoseki at the tip of Honshu and just across the narrow straits from Kyushu, is where the bulk of Honshu’s population live. There are cities which face the Japan Sea coast, such as Niigata, and other conurbations in the northern half of Honshu, such as Sendai and Aomori, but the economic, social and political power of Japan looks south from Tokyo rather than north.

A journey by the Shinkansen bullet train from Tokyo westwards will show you a landscape that is built up practically all the way. In the distance you will see mountains, including the awe-inspiring sight of Japan’s highest peak, Mount Fuji, but all along the tracks are houses, factories and roads. Almost 80% of Japanese people, according to the latest census, live in administrative cities (or shi) which have a population of over 30,000. I used to live in Ashiya, between Kobe and Osaka, and I thought of it as not much more than a village. But it was officially Ashiya-shi, a city of more than 30,000 people. The Japanese live in a very crowded world.

OKINAWA AND OTHER ISLANDS

There are other islands in the Japanese archipelago that should not be forgotten. Okinawa is the fifth largest island of Japan, and forms part of the Ryukyu Islands well south of Kyushu. The Ryukyus were only returned to Japan by the Americans in 1972, after a quarter of a century of post-war American rule. The Ryukyus were for many centuries a separate kingdom, even if they broadly acknowledged the hegemony of the Japanese, and the culture is subtly different from the rest of Japan. It is still among the poorest parts of Japan.

Sado Island, in the Japan Sea off the coast of Honshu, is the sixth largest of the Japanese islands, but is less than 1,000 square kilometres in size. It is renowned as a beautiful island in Japanese legend and song, but is now little more than a pretty outpost of Japanese culture in the cold and inhospitable Japan Sea.

The islands of Iki and Tsushima, in the straits between Japan and the Korean peninsula, have been the subject of disputes over the centuries, and Tanegashima, just south of Kyushu, owes its fame to the fact that this is where the first Europeans landed when they came to conquer or convert (whichever was the easier) in the sixteenth century. It says much for Western civilization that the word tanegashima has come to mean a blunderbuss or firearm in Japanese – the thing that the Japanese most associated with the new arrivals.

AN ISLAND COUNTRY

So Japan is an island country, one that for most of its recorded history was remote from the mainland of Asia. It may be only a couple of hundred kilometres away, but the seas are deep and rough and the Japanese have historically not been a naval race. Their geographical isolation created a nation that sees itself as homogeneous and different from its near neighbours. It sees its history as being separate from the history of its neighbours and it sees its culture as different – clearly influenced by Chinese culture and in turn presenting influences of its own to Chinese culture – but nevertheless individual and unique in world and regional terms. ‘We Japanese’ – the phrase that is often used to begin an explanation of how things are done in Japan – is to a great extent justifiable. Japan is physically different from its neighbours and the Japanese do things differently.

THE CLIMATE OF JAPAN?

The Japanese climate has always played an essential role in shaping the Japanese way of life and character. It is not just the prevalence of earthquakes, volcanoes and other such evidence of seismic activity that has given them a sense of fatalism which pervades much of what they do: there is also the predictability of the climate which gives them intense pleasure when the predictions come true, and causes difficulties when the unexpected happens.

Monsoon

Japan is on the northern edge of the monsoon belt, as we have seen, and this means not only that the rains are predictable enough and the climate is warm and humid enough for rice to be grown, but also that every autumn, the country may well be lashed by violent typhoons. The English word ‘typhoon’ derives from the Japanese taifu meaning ‘a great wind’.

The monsoon climate means that Japan can forecast its weather with a considerable degree of accuracy, at least for the most populous part of the country that is within the monsoon belt. They know they will have dry winters, with only a small chance of snow in the cities to the south of the central mountains. They know they will have brief, rather wet springs, when the temperature increases quite quickly in the space of a few short weeks, and they know there will be a rainy season from early May to late June which is vital for a successful rice harvest. They also know they can rely on hot and very humid summers from the end of the rains until the typhoon season comes around in mid-September to blow the summer heat away, and make way for a very pleasant autumn season.

Cherry blossom time

A feature of the Japanese spring is the brief cherry blossom season. Throughout Japan there are millions of cherry trees (sakura) which bloom all too briefly between March and May. The cherry blossom is a symbol of the beauty and fragility of life and many songs and poems have been written in praise of what the Japanese see as something both to look forward to and to regret. Many cherry trees are planted in graveyards, which have thus become a very popular place to hold hanami (blossom-viewing) parties, at which people sit underneath the falling blossoms and drink and sing mournful songs of the evanescence of life. The media do their best to help, by treating the blossom as a weather front, or some would say as an advancing army. They publish daily bulletins of where the blossoms have got to in their progress from the south, and give estimates of the best days for viewing the blossoms before they fade and die.

It has to be said that the blossoms in full view by the side of a river or in the gardens of a shrine, or indeed in any of the countless cemeteries of Japan, are a beautiful sight, never to be forgotten by anybody who has been lucky enough to spend time just enjoying their splendour. In recent years, the march of the blossoms has been significantly earlier than usual (up to ten days early in 2003, for example) and the Japanese are worried that global warming will mean that their favoured weekends for viewing the cherry blossom will have to be put forward in future.

The rainy season

At the end of spring, the temperature and humidity rises throughout the country, and by early June, the rainy season, baiu in Japanese, comes to Kyushu and works its way northwards and eastwards over the next six weeks or so. There can be very heavy and damaging rainfalls during the rainy season, causing landslides and flooding in less well protected areas, but there is usually very little inconvenience felt in the cities, apart from the need to carry an umbrella everywhere. As the rains fade away, the long hot summer settles in, known more for its intense humidity than for the heat of the sun. The temperature can indeed rise to the high 30s Celsius, but it is the humidity that the visitor will feel. Despite the air-conditioning systems which go at full blast in homes, offices, trains, cars and taxis, in summer you still feel the heat and the stickiness, and many businessmen bring a second or even a third shirt to the office in the morning, to change into as the day wears on. People tend to avoid visiting Japan during July and August, even though these months are not so obviously devoted to holidaymaking as they are in Europe and North America.

The Bon Festival

In Japan, the main holiday festival in the summer is the Bon Festival (also known as o-bon) in mid-July, when the spirits of the dead are supposed to return to their native villages. It has a firm basis in Buddhist teaching, and is a fascinating mixture of the solemn and the high-spirited, as so many Japanese events are. The purpose of the festival is to honour the memory of the dead and to ‘stimulate ancestor-worship and filial piety’, in the words of one authority.

In actual fact it involves people going back to the villages or towns that their family originally came from, to greet the souls of their dead ancestors. Greeting the souls of one’s dead ancestors is obviously a joyful occasion, so mixed in with the filial piety and ancestor worship are big meals, parties and dancing. The Bon Odori (Bon dance) is still performed in many villages as a community dance in which hundreds of people will take part, dancing throughout the night to a rhythmic clapping of hands and beating of drums.

The autumn typhoon season

The summer eventually gives way to autumn, and brings in the typhoon season. Most of the typhoons which blow across the northern and western Pacific do not reach Japan: the severest typhoons each year tend to hit Taiwan, the Philippines and the Chinese mainland. However, they can be extremely destructive even as far north as the Japanese coast. The Ise Bay typhoon in late September 1959, for example, killed about 5,000 people in the Nagoya area.

When to visit

The best times for visiting Japan are the spring, during the cherry blossom season, and in the post-typhoon early winter, from mid-October until the end of the year. Japan’s humidity means that it has never been a popular destination for beach and sun holidays, although there are plenty of beaches around the country that attract local holidaymakers.

For business, there is no time of year which should obviously be avoided, with the one exception of ‘Golden Week’, a period from 29 April to 5 May when there are three national holidays and, usually, a weekend as well. Everybody goes away on holiday during those ten days or so, and no business visitor should set up a trip to Japan then. There will be nobody to do business with if you do.

THE MYTHOLOGY OF JAPAN

The relationship between the Japanese people and their homeland can best be summed up in the myth of the creation of Japan. According to the earliest Japanese legends, which were originally handed down by oral tradition and were not written down until about the eighth century AD, the islands of Japan were created by the gods Izanami and Izanagi. The pair became husband and wife and in due course Izanagi, no doubt very painfully, gave birth to the islands of Japan. At this point, they decided to create somebody to rule the land, and gave birth to the Sun Goddess, Amaterasu. Among the other children they produced was the evil Storm God, Susa-no-o.

Susa-no-o was banished from the heaven that his parents had created for his various acts of wickedness, but he nevertheless managed to be involved in the creation of the Japanese Imperial line. The myth tells us that the child who went on to found the Imperial line was actually created in the mouth of Susa-no-o, but only after he had chewed up his sister Amaterasu’s holy ornaments. She therefore claimed that the child was hers as much as her brother’s. According to the original nineteenth century translation of the myth, ‘the august name of the Deity that was born from the jewels that were twisted on her right august arm, and having crunchingly crunched them, he blew them away, was His-Wondrous-Augustness-of-Kumanu’.

The imperial family

His-Wondrous-Augustness-of-Kumanu in due course reproduced and it was his line that became the imperial family of Japan. The first Emperor, Jimmu, who is supposed to have become Emperor in 660 BC, is traditionally taken to be His-Wondrous-Augustness-of-Kumanu’s grandson. The present emperor, Akihito, is 125th in an unbroken line from Jimmu. It was not until the present emperor’s father, Hirohito, renounced his divinity in 1945, that the emperors of Japan were considered to be mere mortals.

A close connection with the land

The legend, while obviously no more than a simple myth, shows the connection between the Japanese people and their country. According to this legend, both the emperor and the country he reigns over are descended from the same line. The first emperor, Jimmu, was practically a first cousin to the land he ruled. The relationship between the people and their country could not be closer. A Japanese cannot imagine himself to be Japanese unless he is part of his homeland, and equally, a foreigner cannot become truly Japanese because he is not part of the family which includes the land as well as its people. It is hard to find another example of the close – one might almost call it intense – relationship between the Japanese people and their country. Perhaps the way the Jewish people identify with Israel, their Holy Land, is the only parallel.

JAPANESE RELIGION

The Japanese are not what we in the West would think of as a religious race. Their lives are broadly unaffected by religious beliefs, and their moral codes are based on philosophical rather than spiritual ideas. Nevertheless, religion plays a role in Japanese society, and like everything else about the archipelago, is peculiarly Japanese.

SHINTO

The mythology of the birth of Japan is part of what is now known as Shinto, which translates as ‘The Way of the Gods’. As one Japanese authority has put it, ‘Viewed from a purely scientific viewpoint, ‘primitive Shinto’ is nothing but an underdeveloped, childish set of religious beliefs. Emotionally, however, ‘primitive Shinto’ is regarded as a pure vitally important religion by the Japanese.’ It is interesting that the Japanese themselves can see that to an outsider the ideas of Shinto might be considered childish, yet at the same time they would consider them pure and vitally important. As somebody once described it to me, ‘I believe it, but I know it isn’t true.’ In the West, we may pride ourselves on a more sophisticated concept of religion, but even the most erudite Biblical or Talmudic scholar would understand that simplicity is a virtue rather than a disadvantage in philosophical terms.

Gods of the natural world

Shinto is based around the concept of kami, which translates as ‘god’. In Shinto, the gods are everywhere, in a tree, a mountain or a waterfall. They are not humanised beings with a physical shape for people to worship; they are the essence of the tree or the mountain or the waterfall. They are not really there to help human beings except inasmuch as they reflect humanity’s relationship with the natural world. Mount Fuji is not a god, and nor do the gods dwell on Mount Fuji in the way that the ancient Greeks believed their gods lived on Mount Olympus. The essence of Mount Fuji, its significance to the Japanese, is the kami.

Kami helpers

There are other kami who might be seen as the equivalent of the Christian patron saints, who help different types of people. Fishermen, woodcutters and swordmakers, for example, would all revere kami who do not so much protect them as provide them with the skills they need to achieve greatness in their chosen field. Then there are the kami who protect one family or village. All kami expect that the people they oversee will make the effort to help themselves. It is not enough for a man to pray to a kami to make him a great hunter or farmer – he must also put a great deal of effort into improving himself and thus achieving his aims. The kami is there to bring reward for these efforts rather than to replace them. Not for nothing are effort and persistence prime virtues in Japan.

Shinto shrines

Shinto shrines are everywhere in Japan. During the early part of the twentieth century, as nationalism and militarism took a hold over Japanese society, there was an attempt to formalise state Shinto around the figure of the Emperor, and the idea that Shinto could in some way be compared to state religions like, for example, the Church of England or the Russian and Greek Orthodox churches, was promulgated. But Shinto has never been based around a series of frequent and regular visits to holy places, as Christianity, Judaism or Islam require, and it would be wrong to suggest that Shinto was ever organised to that extent.

All the same, Shinto shrines are regularly visited at certain times of the year – on New Year’s Day, for example – or on special occasions such as for weddings or coming-of-age ceremonies. Visit any one of the major shrines at any time and you will see very many people offering a little money and saying a brief prayer.

Shinto has a part to play in Japanese life, but the outsider tends not to notice because it is not a determined proselytising religion seeking converts. In fact, it is very much the opposite: Shinto is the religion for Japan, and is not relevant to outsiders. That is one reason why the Japanese do not feel it is anybody else’s business but their own if the prime minister or any other government official chooses to visit the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, which is sacred to the memory of those who died in war. The list of people enshrined there includes several who were executed for war crimes after 1945, and outsiders might therefore consider official visits by Japanese politicians to Yasukuni as insensitive at best.

BUDDHISM

The other main religion of Japan is Buddhism, and the two coexist very easily. Buddhism came over to Japan in the latter part of the sixth century AD, from China and Korea. The monks who brought the new religion also brought with them sutras written in Chinese, the first writing that Japan had ever seen. For this reason as much as any other, the impact of Buddhism was immediate and very great.

Buddhism is inherently very different from Shinto, as it looks for the evils of the world within men’s desires and to purity of the mind for the elimination of evil, while Shinto looks to the outside world, and indeed does not concern itself with correcting evil or promoting good but merely with the acceptance of the existence of good and evil.

Buddhism now appears to take a higher profile in Japanese society than Shinto, partly because it is an internationally organised religion. It is also partly because there are Japanese sects within Buddhism, like the Soka Gakkai, which formed its own political party in 1964. This party, Komeito, or ‘Clean Government Party’, has played a significant role in Japanese politics since its foundation. Sects like Soka Gakkai and others claim millions of adherents, making it look as though virtually all Japanese have strong religious affiliations. However, most Japanese will say that they believe in a variety of religions, and they make use of the appropriate ritual at the appropriate time.

There are ancient and modern Buddhist temples throughout Japan, including some of the most famous monuments in the country. The Great Buddha of Kamakura, for example, was built in the thirteenth century, while the Kinkaku-ji and the Ginkaku-ji, the Golden Pavilion and the Silver Pavilion in Kyoto, were built in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and still attract thousands of visitors throughout the year.

Zen Buddhism

There are probably ten or more major Buddhist sects active in Japan, but Japan’s great contribution to world Buddhism is Zen. Zen Buddhism originally came from China in the twelfth century, and its appeal to the Japanese warrior caste was immediate. Its influence on the way of the samurai (Bushido) was intense. Japanese monks and ascetics developed their own style of Zen, which has become peculiarly Japanese in its philosophy and appeal.

Followers of Zen seek enlightenment by meditation and the teaching of emptiness, a process that is achieved by, among other things, contemplating a series of unanswerable riddles. Each follower is expected to work out his way of salvation by means of physical and mental austerity and self-discipline, so that he can achieve the will power and inner strength demanded of the samurai.

CONFUCIANISM

The main moral underpinning of the Japanese way of life is not, however, Buddhism but another imported philosophy, Confucianism. Kong Fuzi (559 – 479 BC), whose name has been westernised as Confucius, was a comparatively minor Chinese government official who developed a code of behaviour based on both hierarchy and merit. Confucianism made its way to Japan probably as early as the fifth century AD, and has been at the heart of the structure of Japanese society ever since.

Confucianism promotes both the preservation of a rightful order, typified by his emphasis on filial piety (the obedience a son owes his father), and advancement by merit, as shown by his encouragement of scholarship and education. Confucianism as propagated during the years of the Tokugawa shoguns (say 1610 to 1860) was one that served not only to petrify the status quo into four unbreakable class divisions – with the samurai at the top, of course – but also kept women in a servile position.

A Japanese woman was throughout her life meant to be subservient to men, firstly to her father, secondly to her husband and finally to her son. ‘Consider your husband as your master, respect him and serve him deferentially’ was a typical injunction in the widely-read Onna Daigaku (The Great Learning for Women), which was published in the eighteenth century. The lot of women has changed a great deal since then, but Japan is still a man’s country.

CHRISTIANITY

Christianity first came to Japan in the sixteenth century, but has never been accepted as anything other than a foreign religion.

Fewer than one percent of Japanese would claim to be practising Christians, although its image is greater than that in the main cities because you will see a few churches and, more noticeably, many young couples like to include a Christian element in their marriage ceremonies. The white bridal gown and veil are fashionable items for Japanese brides. Then there is Christmas, with the story of the infant Jesus, which is well known in Japan. There are all denominations of Christians in Japan, along with Mormons, Quakers and Jehovah’s Witnesses, but it is still very rare and surprising to meet a Japanese who fully espouses the Christian faith.

JAPANESE MORAL CODES

As a general rule, and at the risk of over-simplifying a complicated subject, one could say that Japanese moral values are relative while western moral values are absolute. Most great western religions teach a set of rules which are eternal truths. The Ten Commandments teach us that ‘thou shalt not kill’, which means it is wrong to kill under any circumstances at any time. Of course, the West does not live up to the standards set by the Ten Commandments or the other moral teachings of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, but we are taught in absolutes of right and wrong.

Oriental philosophies, on the other hand, and Japanese moral codes in particular, teach how to behave in different circumstances. Certainly there is a law against murder in Japan, and as a general rule it is best to follow the philosophy of not killing one’s neighbours. But everything is relative – there are circumstances in which it is better to kill than not to kill. Moral absolutes are intransigent and wrong to Japanese ways of thinking.