Red Sun Rising

CXXXIV

Archaeologists and anthropologists date the beginnings of the Japanese people back at least 30,000 years when a group of intrepid Paleo-Asiatics from the Amur region set out on a trek to the east. 

East Asia today

As the glaciers of the last Ice Age retreated, the low-lying lands that comprise the basin of the Sea of Japan were inundated, cutting off the proto-Japanese peoples from their distant relations in Korea, Manchuria and Siberia. They formed a people now called the Yamato. 

It was not until around the time of Christ that the Yamato people entered history. Unsurprisingly, it was the eminently practical Chinese who documented them.

Chinese and Japanese ideographs compared

For a very long time, the Japanese remained culturally tied to China. The earliest Japanese literature is written in Chinese, and the Japanese --- an imitative and inventive, though unoriginal people --- adopted and adapted Chinese ideography and cultural norms to meet conditions in their island nation. The Japanese claim that they, not the Chinese, have the most ancient Imperial House in the world. The Chrysanthemum Throne dates back 2,700 years to the semi-legendary Emperor Jimmu, but most of the Imperial trappings and Japanese culture on the whole, had and have a distinct Sinatic flavor. The economical Japanese, however, tend to simplify the somewhat rococo forms of Chinese culture into elegant and spare expressionism.*

Chinese temple architecture at Xiezhou Guandi

Japanese temple architecture at Heian Jingu

 

Kwan Yin (C.) or Kanzeon (J.) astride a dragon

 

During its isolationist period, Japan’s Christians were frequently persecuted by the Shogunate. The image of Kannon holding a baby served a dual purpose; for Japanese Catholics she was “Maria Kannon” the Blessed Virgin. For Buddhists she was the All-Compassionate protectress

The traditional Japanese Tea Ceremony (Chanoyu) is a highly ritualized affair noted for its simple elegance

A traditional Japanese Garden combines economy of space with artistic expression while allowing nature to present itself without artifice. Such gardens create islands of tranquility for Japan’s energetic people on its crowded and always heavily populated islands

Around the year 700, Japan began emerging as a unified state. A culture and literature, heavily inspired by, but distinctly different from, Chinese Buddhism began to emerge. Around the year 1200, after a civil war between competing Houses, the Emperor (always considered semi-divine and hence above the fray of more usual mortals) appointed a Shogun, or Steward, who ran the Empire in his name. It was not always a peaceable system. The Shogun had to mollify or fight competing warlords or Daimyo, and small wars were a constant of Japanese life.  Eventually, a feudal system evolved, similar to that of Western Europe in the same era.

The Mongol Empire c.1260. By 1300, Kublai Khan had conquered all of China and Indochina and the European borders of the Empire had moved eastward into Poland and Austria. Japan remained inviolate

In 1281, the Mongols, who ruled an empire stretching from present-day Cambodia to present-day Austria, attempted to invade Japan. The Mongol navy was destroyed by a typhoon in the Sea of Japan, which the Japanese later named the Kami-Kaze, or “Wind of the Gods.” The destruction of the Mongol fleet and the sparing of Japan, when so many other lands had fallen under the Mongol yoke, convinced the Japanese that they, as a people, were especially remarkable. Eventually, this sense of uniqueness led to a disdain for all other cultures, even the Chinese from which their own had evolved.

 

Two views of the Wind of the Gods, modern and ancient

The prevalence of war in Japan gave rise to a warrior caste, the Samurai (“Servants”) who adopted the Zen School of Buddhism as a religious, moral and ethical code. Over time, Samurai practices evolved into a particular form, Bushido.  

 

A Samurai warrior in distinctive traditional battle dress. By the middle Tokugawa Period although the Samurai trained as warriors they rarely fought except in practice bouts, and many had taken upsecondary occupations like physician or poet

Around 1550, at the same time that the Portuguese established Macao in the face of increasing Chinese isolationism, they also began trading with Japan. This eventually led the Shogun to close off Japan to all foreigners in 1640. Japan remained hermetically sealed away from the world (except for a small, inactive trading post outside Nagasaki) until 1854.

A monument to the “Black Ships” in Shimoda, Japan

 

The arrival of U.S. Commodore Matthew Perry and his fleet of “Black Ships” electrified Japan. Perry promised to blast Edo (Tokyo) into ruins unless the Japanese accepted a trade legation. Under duress, the Shogun did so, but caving to Western pressure weakened the Tokugawa Shogunate which had ruled Japan since 1603. In 1867, the young Emperor Meiji dismissed the Shogun, and began to rule directly.  

Meiji and his advisers were unlike the Manchu emperors of China. They understood intrinsically that if Japan was to survive as an independent state it would have to modernize. Meiji established a constitution and a parliament (the Diet) as well as a Cabinet (the Privy Council). Meiji stripped the Samurai of their power and privilege, built a conscript army and navy with modern weapons imported from the West, encouraged the wearing of Western clothing, adopted Victorian manners and norms for his Court, built railways, and instituted the industrialization of the country against firm, sometimes violent, resistance. However, by the turn of the Twentieth Century, Japan was a modern nation with some forms of democratic government. 

The Emperor Meiji (1852-1912)

Meiji began what became, ultimately, the disastrous policy of Japanese expansionism: In 1881, he welcomed King Kalakaua of Hawaii to Tokyo, the first official State Visit in Japanese history. He prosecuted Japan’s first war against a largely prostrate China in 1894, seizing both Korea and Taiwan (Formosa) from China. Both were later annexed. In 1904-1905, Japan fought the Russian Empire, destroying its Asiatic Fleet at the Battle of Tsushima. With Japan’s defeat of a European Power** Japan was ranked among the leading nations of the world. By the time the Emperor Meiji’s life came to an end, Japanese leaders were contemplating a “Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere” led by the Empire of the Sun.  

The Battle of Tsushima in 1905 scattered the Russian Asiatic Fleet from Vladivostok to Mindanao in the Philippines. U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt won the Nobel Peace Prize for brokering the peace between Russia and Japan. Had he but known it, his own successful plan to seize Spain’s far-flung Pacific colonies in 1898 put the U.S. and Japan on a collision course in the Pacific

In 1910, at orders from Meiji, two Army Captains, Kumazo Hino and Yoshitoshi Tokugawa were sent to Europe to learn to fly and to buy planes for the newly-planned revolutionary idea of a Japanese Air Force.   

The first Japanese aircraft were a Dragonfly monoplane, a Farman biplane, and a Bleriot.  Hino became the first man to fly in Japan when his revving Dragonfly accidentally became airborne during a test. He flew about 100 feet and landed intact.  

The Rising Sun had taken to the skies.

Hino, testing his Dragonfly airplane in Tokyo, 1910. Hino reputedly became “obsessed” with flying; rather than encouraging his interest, the Imperial Government transferred him from the Engineers to the Infantry. Promoted to Major, he vanished from history

 

*The evolution of Zen Buddhism in Japan is highly indicative of the pattern of adoption and adaptation that marks Japanese culture. Buddhist meditative practice (Dhyana) began in India and was carried to China by the semi-legendary Indian sage Bodhidharma, revered as the 26^th Patriarch of Buddhism, and the first Chinese Patriarch. The Chinese called his system of meditation Chan-na. When chan-na was carried to Japan, owing to the tonal shifts between Chinese and Japanese ideographs, the word was pronounced Zen-na and eventually Zen. Japanese Zen Buddhists considered the Chinese Chan Buddhist fathers to be their own predecessors and called them by Japanese names: Thus, the Indian Bodhidharma became Bihangyu in Chinese and Daruma in Japanese; the Chinese sage Hui-Neng became Eno in Japan, Mazu (C.) became Baso (J.) Shi-Tou (C.) became Sekito (J.) and Lin-Chi (C.) became Rinzai. The popular Chinese protectress Kwan-Yin became Kannon or Kanzeon in Japan. Likewise, the Chinese symbols of Yin-Yang and dragons were adopted by the Japanese, though their artistic interpretation is different. The Chinese habit of horticulture became the Japanese arts of bonsai and ikebana. Other examples are too numerous to list here.

Two dragons. Chinese (top) and Japanese (bottom)

**Even Russian historians debate the position of Russia as a “European” versus an “Asiatic” nation. Founded around 800 by Swedish Vikings (the Varangians), Russia first looked East toward Byzantium. Afterward, all of Russia was swallowed up in the 13^th and 14^th Centuries by the Mongol Golden Horde, and Mongol social forms and customs informed Russian life until Tsar Peter The Great (1672-1725) forcibly “opened a window on the West” by forcing his nobles (boyars) to adopt Western customs. However, the Russian tendency toward Orientalism is subtly reinforced by its vast geographical presence in northern Asia. Russia’s Tsars also maintained power by using Cossacks (originally Christianized tribesmen of Kazakhstan in central Asia) as shock troops.  

Mongols of the 13^th and 14^th Centuries and Boyar nobles of the 15^th and 16^th both controlled Russia, dominating the reigning Tsars. Note the similarity in dress between the earlier Mongols and the later Boyars, and the obvious connection of both to the Cossack tribes of the 18^th, 19^th and 20^th Centuries

Cossacks, originally a Turkic people of Central Asia, adopted the Boyar style of dress and the Mongol form of action. Cossacks were feared for their casual brutality. Cossack regiments functioned well into the Twentieth Century before Stalin, retaliating against them for their anti-Bolshevism, destroyed their traditional militaristic social structure in the 1930s

--- This post is dedicated to Hiroko Weatherman, to Cathie "Cat" Weatherman Sears, and to my Dharma teachers who have shown me only the best that Japan has to offer. One hundred and eight gasshos to each of you.