Somebody Else's Century: East and West in a Post-Western World by Smith Patrick

Author:Smith, Patrick [Smith, Patrick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pantheon
Published: 2010-08-31T04:00:00+00:00

NEITHER WAS JAPAN to be Japan as it had been. Many things would have to change if it were going to leave Asia. Things would be left behind and things added, for this was a time of many invented traditions. A constitutional monarchy would require a proper monarch, so the emperor would move from ancient obscurity in Kyoto to reside in the shogun’s palace in Tokyo: the Meiji Restoration, thus. New rites, if this is not an oxymoron, were established. There was a new calendar, which would turn the year back to 1 at the start of each imperial reign. Japan still lives in two kinds of time, two chronologies: the sequential time it took up from the West and the circular time it invented to plant the emperor firmly in the consciousness of his subjects.

One of the truly attractive things about native Japanese tradition—the tradition that predates even the great borrowing from China—was its apparent ease in matters to do with sex and gender. This is very likely to extend back to the foundational myths, which centered on a sun goddess. There is much evidence of matriarchal power in early, pre-Sinified Japan. Men and women were at home with each other. Love and intimacy were accessible in the most touchingly innocent way. The early poetry attests to this over and over. But this, too, had to go if the new Japan was to be a nation the way Westerners made nations. It would not do, this feminine thread of ease and delight. The Meiji Restoration was led by samurai, who drew their traditions from the warrior class in Tang dynasty China. Samurai tradition became the root of modern Japanese tradition, then. The older tradition was erased. This is why, strange but fair to say, modern Japan has made itself so singularly wanting in intimacy. On the way to making a nation, the Japanese forgot the way they had once known so well how to love.

The most fundamental forgetting Japan has done in the modern era has to do with its understanding of nature. This is a complex topic, because Asia’s traditional conception of nature is so at variance with the West’s and because humanity’s relationship with the physical world is so basic to the way we think. A Japanese scholar put the point with admirable simplicity in view of its complications. Modern Japan, he said, was “baptized by science.”

In the Western mind, nature is considered an object. It is outside of us, and so it is alien to us and we to it. Man is nature’s master—a thought found in the Old Testament—and so he must act upon it. We call our means of asserting ourselves upon the material world “science.” As Nietzsche put it many times, science is the humanization of nature. And there is nothing, we believe, that science cannot do and nowhere it should not go.

Asia’s traditional idea of humanity and nature was very different: nature was all, humanity a part of it. There was no alienation, no subject-object relationship.

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