堕落論 English

Within half a year, the face of the world had changed.

I who go forth as a humble shield of the great lord.

At the side of the sovereign I would die, and never look back.

The young men scattered like flowers, yet those same men who survived became black marketeers.

I shall not wish for a life of a hundred years; one day I shall go forth as a royal shield, pledged to my lord.

The women who sent off their men with brave and devoted hearts — within the space of half a year, the act of pressing their foreheads to the memorial tablets of their late husbands will have become merely a matter of routine, and the day when a new face takes hold in their hearts cannot be far off.

It is not that human beings have changed.

Human beings have always been this way; what changed was only the surface of the times.

In the old days, one of the reasons given for overriding the clemency appeal for the forty-seven loyal retainers and carrying out their execution was, they say, a kind of paternalistic concern that if they were allowed to live on, some among them might bring shame upon themselves and tarnish the reputation so honorably earned.

Such human sentiment does not exist in the law of the modern age.

And yet this tendency lingers quite strongly in the hearts of people, and it seems to be one of those general human sentiments — the wish to let a beautiful thing end while it is still beautiful.

A dozen or so years ago, there was a male student and a young woman who committed double suicide somewhere near Oiso, wishing to end their lives of love while still virgin and pure, and the public's sympathy was considerable; I myself, when a niece who had been very close to me died by her own hand at the age of twenty-one several years ago, felt something like relief that she had died while still beautiful.

She appeared outwardly demure, but there was a precariousness about her, a sense that she might plunge headlong into the abyss, and I had the feeling that watching her life out to its end would have been more than I could bear.

During this war, writers were forbidden to write about the love affairs of widows.

The military politicians' scheme was to prevent war widows from being tempted into debauchery, and they wished to have these women live out their remaining days as devoted apostles.

The military men's capacity for understanding vice was keen; it was not that they were unaware of women's fickleness of heart — indeed they knew it all too well — and it was precisely this knowledge that led them to devise such prohibitions.

It is generally said that Japanese warriors of old had no understanding of the hearts of women and children, but this is a superficial view; the code of Bushido — that crude and unyielding set of rules they devised — found its greatest significance in serving as a bulwark against human weakness.

It was said that the warrior must pursue his enemy's trail relentlessly even if it meant becoming a beggar, parting the roots of grass in his search for vengeance — but were there truly any loyal retainers or filial sons who tracked their quarry with a genuine passion for revenge?

What they knew was merely the code of revenge and the honor prescribed by that code; the Japanese are by nature among the least given to hatred, and the least capable of sustaining it — the easy-going spirit of "today's enemy is tomorrow's friend" is the honest, unaffected sentiment of the people.

To compromise with yesterday's enemy, or rather to open one's heart to him completely, is a daily commonplace; and precisely because he was an adversary, one opens one's heart to him all the more readily, instantly yearning to serve two masters, yearning to serve even yesterday's enemy.

It is said one must not live to bear the shame of captivity — but without such a rule it would be impossible to drive Japanese men into battle; we are obedient to codes, yet our genuine and unfeigned feelings run contrary to those codes.

Japanese military history is less a history of Bushido than a history of stratagem and cunning, and one can come to understand the inner workings of history not so much by waiting on historical proof as by gazing honestly at the true desires of one's own heart.

Just as today's military politicians banned writing about widows' love affairs, the warriors of old had to use Bushido to suppress their own weaknesses and those of their men.

Kobayashi Hideo has described the type of the politician as a breed that possesses no originality but only manages and controls — but that does not seem entirely accurate.

The great majority of politicians are always this way, yet a few men of genius bring originality to the methods of management and control, and this becomes the model for mediocre politicians, running through individual eras and individual regimes as a single historical form that manifests the will of a vast living entity.

In the domain of politics, history is not merely the sum of its individual parts but is born as a distinct and enormous creature into which the individual is absorbed, and in the form of history, politics too carries out a grand and original act of creation.

Who was responsible for this war — Tojo, the military?

That too, certainly — but also, without question, the inescapable will of history, that enormous living creature running through Japan.

Before history, the Japanese were no more than children obedient to fate.

Even if individual politicians have no originality, politics in the form of history possesses originality, possesses will, and moves forward with an irresistible stride, like waves upon the open sea.

Who devised Bushido?

That too was surely history's original creation, or its instinct.

History is always sniffing out human beings.

And because Bushido consists of prohibitions against human nature and instinct, it is inhuman and anti-natural — yet in that it is the product of insight into that very human nature and instinct, it is entirely human.

In the imperial system as well, I see a profoundly Japanese — and therefore perhaps original — political creation.

The imperial system was not created by the emperors themselves.

The emperors sometimes plotted on their own behalf, but for the most part they did nothing; their plots never once succeeded, ending in exile or flight to some remote mountain, and ultimately they were always acknowledged as necessary for political reasons.

Even when they had been forgotten socially, they were brought out again for political purposes — and the political reasons for their existence were, so to speak, a product of politicians' instinct; those men had penetrated the innate tendencies of the Japanese people and within those tendencies had discovered the imperial system.

It was not something peculiar to the imperial house.

If a substitute had been possible, the family of Confucius, or of the Buddha, or of Lenin would have served just as well.

It was simply that no substitute proved possible.

At the very least, Japan's political men — nobles and warriors alike — had an instinct for the necessity of an absolute sovereign as the means of securing their own perpetual ascendancy (it was not perpetual, but they would surely have dreamed of it).

The Fujiwara clan of the Heian period manipulated the enthronement of emperors entirely as they pleased, yet never doubted that they themselves were subordinate to the emperor, nor did they find this in the least inconvenient.

Through the emperor's existence, they managed the disputes within their own house — a younger brother outmaneuvering an elder, an elder trouncing a father.

They were instinctive pragmatists who cared only that their own lives be pleasurable, and yet, paradoxically, they were deeply fond of and satisfied by the curious formality of conducting grand court ceremonies and bowing in obeisance to the emperor.

To bow before the emperor was both a means of demonstrating their own dignity and a means of feeling that dignity within themselves.

To us it is genuinely absurd.

We were exasperated by the foolishness of being made to bow our heads every time the tram turned below Yasukuni Shrine — but for certain people, it is only by doing so that they are able to feel their own existence; and so, while we may laugh at the absurdity of Yasukuni Shrine, we commit the same sort of absurdity ourselves in other matters.

We simply fail to notice our own foolishness.

It is said that Miyamoto Musashi, hurrying to the dueling ground beneath the descending pines at Ichijoji, happened to pass before a Hachiman shrine and was about to bow in prayer before stopping himself — and his teaching "I rely not on gods or buddhas" sprang from and was directed at this very tendency in himself; it was a word heavy with remorse, and the truth is that we spontaneously bow before all manner of absurd things, only without being aware of it.

The moralistic teacher who begins class by reverently lifting his textbook with both hands is surely feeling in that act his own dignity and perhaps even his own existence.

And we do similar things in one form or another.

A people as given to stratagem and cunning as the Japanese need the emperor both for the sake of stratagem and for the sake of moral legitimacy, and even when individual politicians do not feel that need, it is by historical instinct rather than consciously felt necessity that they find themselves unquestioning of the reality in which they exist.

Hideyoshi invited an imperial visit to Jurakutei and wept openly at the magnificence of the occasion — while feeling his own dignity confirmed by it, he also saw in that moment the god of the universe.

This is the case of Hideyoshi, and not of other politicians — but even if stratagems are the tools of the devil, it is not altogether strange that the devil should bow before a god with the innocence of a child.

Any contradiction whatsoever is possible.

In sum, the imperial system is of the same order as Bushido — like the prohibition "a faithful wife does not appear before two husbands,"

where the prohibition itself is inhuman and anti-natural, yet is human in the truth of its insight — so too the imperial system is neither truth nor nature in itself, yet contains within the historical discovery and insight that led to it a serious meaning not easily dismissed, and cannot be resolved by surface truths and laws of nature alone.

Wishing to let beautiful things end while still beautiful is a small and petty sentiment — even in the case of my niece, perhaps what I should have wished for was that she not commit suicide but live on, fall into hell, and wander the dark wasteland.

Indeed, the path of literature I have set for myself is just such a wandering in the wasteland, yet for all that I cannot quite extinguish that small wish to let beautiful things end while still beautiful.

Unfinished beauty is not beauty.

Perhaps it is only when the debasement itself of wandering through the hell one was bound to fall into can be beautiful that we may properly call it beauty — but must we always keep our eyes on a girl of twenty in the same moment as her ugliness at sixty?

This I do not know.

I prefer a woman of twenty.

Once dead there is nothing left, so they say — but what of it, I wonder.

I cannot straightforwardly accept the view that, now that the war is lost, the ones most to be pitied are the heroic spirits who fell in battle.

Yet when I think of generals past sixty being dragged before a court of law, clinging all the while to life, I have not the faintest idea what the attraction of living is — and yet I cannot help imagining that I myself, had I been a general of sixty, would likewise have clung to life as I was hauled before the tribunal, and so I am left simply dumbfounded by that strange and terrible force called life.

I prefer a woman of twenty — but do these old generals also prefer women of twenty?

And is the pity one feels for the heroic dead also a pity in the sense of preferring a woman of twenty?

If the shape of it were that clear, I could take some comfort in it and might even find a wholehearted conviction that would send me chasing after women of twenty — but living is something far more incomprehensible than that.

I have a strong aversion to the sight of blood; once, when an automobile collision occurred right before my eyes, I had already spun around and was running away.

And yet I loved great destruction.

I trembled before bombs and incendiary devices, and yet was violently excited by the ferocious destruction — and despite all that, I do not think there was ever a time in my life when I felt a greater love for and closeness to human beings than then.

I declined the advice to evacuate and the kind offers of several people who volunteered their country homes, and remained in Tokyo.

I had intended to make the air-raid shelter in Oi Hiroyuki's burnt-out plot my last refuge, and when I parted from Oi Hiroyuki as he evacuated to Kyushu I had also lost every friend I had in Tokyo — but I had already imagined myself crouching in that shelter with my breath held, while American troops landed and heavy artillery shells exploded all around, and I had come to a state of mind where I accepted and awaited that fate.

I thought I might die, but I must surely have believed more deeply that I would live.

Yet if one asks whether, having survived the ruins, I harbored any great ambition — the truth is I had no calculation beyond mere survival.

A strange rebirth into an unforeseeable new world.

That curiosity was the freshest thing in my entire life, and I was possessed by a peculiar spell: that in payment for that strange and vivid newness, I was compelled to stake my continued presence in Tokyo.

And yet I was a coward — on April 4th of 1945, I experienced for the first time a bombardment lasting two hours on all sides; the air above was as bright as day from the illuminating flares; my elder brother, who happened to be visiting Tokyo at that moment, called out from the shelter asking whether those were incendiary bombs; I opened my mouth to answer that no, those were illuminating flares falling — and discovered that I could not produce a voice at all without first bracing the muscles of my abdomen.

Also, I was at the time commissioned by the Japan Film Corporation, and immediately after the Ginza was bombed I was waiting on the roof of the Japan Film building on Ginza to receive an incoming formation; the building was five stories tall with a tower on top, and three cameras were mounted on that tower.

When the air-raid warning sounded, all human figures vanished from the streets, the windows, the rooftops, from all of Ginza; even the anti-aircraft gun emplacements on rooftops hid behind their parapets so that not a figure could be seen — the only people exposed under the open sky were the group of about ten on the Japan Film rooftop.

First a rain of incendiary bombs fell on Ishikawajima, and then the next formation came directly overhead.

I became aware that the strength was draining from my legs.

I was struck with astonishment at the sight of a cameraman, cigarette in his lips, aiming his camera at the formation with an almost maddeningly composed air.

And yet I loved great destruction.

The sight of human beings obedient to fate is strangely beautiful.

All the great mansions of Kojimachi had vanished as if they had never existed, still smoldering with dying embers, and a refined-looking father and daughter sat on the green grass of the moat bank beside a single red leather trunk.

Were it not for the vast, smoldering ruins on one side, it would have been indistinguishable from a peaceful picnic.

On Dogenzaka, which had likewise been wiped away and lay in vast smoldering ruins, a corpse was sprawled midway up the slope — not, it appeared, from the bombing but apparently killed by an automobile — with a single sheet of corrugated iron laid over it.

A soldier with a bayonet stood beside it.

Those going one way and those returning, the endless stream of disaster victims, passed around the corpse as if it were merely the flow of a mindless current, and no one even noticed the fresh blood on the road; the occasional person who did notice gave it no more attention than they would a scrap of paper thrown away.

The Americans said that the Japanese were dazed and stupefied immediately after the war's end, but the procession of disaster victims immediately after a bombing was not the dazed stupor of evacuation — it was a mindlessness of astonishing fullness and weight, entirely different in kind; these were children obediently following fate.

The ones who were always smiling were girls of fifteen or sixteen, sixteen or seventeen.

Their smiles were fresh and clear.

Rummaging through the ash and rubble to retrieve bits of crockery into a charred bucket, or sitting in the sun on the roadside keeping watch over a small pile of belongings — were these girls of that age smiling because they were full of dreams of the future and took no heed of present hardship, or was it from some high and proud vanity?

It was my pleasure to search the burnt-out fields for the smiling faces of young women.

Beneath that great destruction, there was fate — but there was no debasement.

People were mindless, yet they were full.

Those who had fled through raging fire and survived stood crowding near houses still burning for the warmth of the flames, and they were in a completely different world, separated by only a foot from those who were desperately fighting the same fire.

Great destruction, with its astonishing love.

Great fate, with its astonishing love.

Compared to these, the face of defeat is no more than mere debasement.

But when set against the astonishing ordinariness of debasement, its plain and inevitable normality, even the love in that tremendous and great destruction and the beauty of human beings obedient to fate feel like empty illusions, fleeting as foam.

The ideology of the Tokugawa Shogunate sought to make the forty-seven retainers eternal men of righteousness by putting them to death — and though it may have managed to prevent the debasement of those forty-seven men, there is no way it could have prevented human beings themselves from perpetually falling from righteousness to mediocrity and then to hell.

Even if one establishes the code that "a faithful wife does not appear before two husbands" and "a loyal retainer does not serve two masters," one cannot prevent human beings from falling — and even granting that one might succeed in preserving the purity of a virgin by putting her to death, when one hears the commonplace footsteps of debasement, those footsteps as ordinary and inevitable as waves breaking on a shore, one cannot help but discover that the pettiness of human contrivance and the pettiness of a virgin's purity preserved through human contrivance are no more than empty illusions fleeting as foam.

The brave men of the Special Attack Units were merely illusions — does not human history begin from the moment one becomes a black marketeer?

That widows should live as apostles is likewise an illusion — does not human history begin from the moment a new face comes to fill one's heart?

And perhaps the emperor too is merely an illusion — perhaps the true history of the emperor can only begin from the moment he becomes a plain human being.

Human beings themselves are just as astonishingly vast as that great living creature called history.

To live is truly the one and only mystery.

That generals in their sixties and seventies, without committing ritual suicide, were hauled before a tribunal side by side — this was a magnificent human spectacle revealed by the war's end; Japan was defeated and Bushido perished, but it was through the true womb of debasement that human beings were at last born.

Outside the proper course of living and falling — can there truly be a convenient shortcut that genuinely saves human beings?

I am not fond of seppuku.

Long ago, Matsunaga Danjo — a crafty, gloomy schemer — was cornered by Nobunaga and had no choice but to die in battle with the castle as his pillow; but just before dying, in accordance with his daily habit, he applied moxa for longevity, then pressed a gun to his face, shattered it, and died.

He was past seventy at the time, yet was the sort of dissolute man who thought nothing of dallying openly with women in front of others.

I sympathize with how that man died, but I am not fond of seppuku.

I trembled, and yet I gazed, entranced, at the beauty of it all.

I had no need to think.

Because there was only beauty there, and no human beings.

In fact, there were no even thieves.

It is said that present-day Tokyo is dark, but during the war it was in true darkness, and yet even in the depths of night there was no fear of being waylaid and robbed — one walked through the dark at midnight and slept without bolting the doors.

Wartime Japan was a utopia out of a dream, brimming with only an empty and hollow beauty.

But it was not the true beauty of human beings.

And if we were to forget to think, there could be no spectacle more carefree and grand than this.

Even with the constant terror of bombs, as long as one did not think, one was always at ease — one only needed to gaze, entranced.

I was a fool.

I had been playing with the war with the most carefree innocence.

After the war's end, we were permitted every freedom — but when a person is permitted every freedom, they will surely discover their own inexplicable limitations and the unfreedom that entails.

Human beings can never be eternally free.

Because human beings live, and must also die, and because human beings think.

Political reform can be accomplished in a single day, but the transformation of human beings does not work that way.

Human nature, first discovered and set upon its path far away in ancient Greece — how much transformation has it undergone today?

Human beings.

No matter how tremendous the destruction and fate that war brings to bear, there is nothing it can ultimately do to human beings themselves.

The war has ended.

The brave men of the Special Attack Units have already become black marketeers, and the widows are already swelling with new faces in their hearts, are they not?

Human beings have not changed.

They have simply returned to being human.

Human beings debase themselves.

The righteous and the saintly debase themselves too.

This cannot be prevented, and people cannot be saved through prevention.

Human beings live, and human beings fall.

Outside of this fact there is no convenient shortcut to saving people.

It is not that we fall because we lost the war.

We fall because we are human, and only because we are alive.

But human beings will never be able to go on falling without end.

Because the human heart cannot be like steel in the face of hardship.

Human beings are pitiable and frail, and therefore foolish — but they are too weak to go on falling to the end.

Human beings will inevitably find themselves unable but to slay their virgins, unable but to devise Bushido, unable but to bring out and enthrone the emperor.

But in order not to slay another's virgin but one's own, to devise one's own Bushido and one's own emperor, a person must fall properly along the path of falling and fall all the way through.

And just as each person must fall, so too must Japan fall.

By falling all the way down the path of debasement, one must discover oneself, and save oneself.

Salvation by politics is a worthless thing, no more than surface skin.