War without Mercy by John Dower

Author:John Dower [Dower, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-81614-6
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-01-24T16:00:00+00:00

“The Inherent Character of the People,” a key chapter in Cardinal Principles of the National Polity, began with a quotation from the seventeenth-century scholar Yamaga Sokō: “The Land of Japan stands high above the other nations of the world, and her people excel the peoples of the world.” From the early-nineteenth-century nationalist scholar Fujita Tōko came a poem whose opening lines told how “The sublime ‘spirit’ of the universe / Gathers pure over this Land of the Gods.”37

While Cardinal Principles of the National Polity went so far as to state outright that “our country is a divine country governed by an Emperor who is a deity incarnate,” it did not claim that all of the Japanese people were originally of divine descent. Rather, it was suggested that in ancient times Japan had been peopled by divinely descended clans “of one blood and one mind” under the emperor, to whom subordinate groups of unrelated blood were affiliated. In time, however, all merged into one under the emperor.38 In more popular renderings, the argument that the Yamato race as a whole was divinely descended was presented less hesitantly. For example, a text entitled History of Japan which was translated into English by one of the government’s own tourism agencies in 1939 spoke of the “consanguineous unity” of the nation, and the emergence over the centuries of “a race of admirable tendencies” which was so thoroughly assimilated “that the imperial blood may be said to run in the veins of all Japanese, who have thus become kinsmen with one another, descended from a common ancestor.” And who was that progenitor?

That common ancestor, or ancestress, is Amaterasu Omikami [the Sun Goddess]. The relations between the Imperial House and the people today may therefore be likened to those between the trunk and branches of a gigantic tree, for if we were to trace the genealogy of each Japanese subject, we would find that he belongs to a family which centuries ago was either a direct or an indirect offshoot of the Imperial Family.… In other words, the Imperial Family and the people having a common ancestor in Amaterasu Omikami, our sovereign and his subjects are completely united like one man to form the Japanese nation and state.39

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