Written on 2019-05-24.
Through the continuity of history since the Kojiki, the link between the Imperial House and myth, the ancient forms preserved at Izumo Taisha and Tsukuyomi Shrine, and recent advances in Jomon studies, this dialogue explores Japan’s unmatched sense of cohesion and civilizational depth.
It also highlights how the Occupation tried to sever Japan from its mythic past, yet failed to erase the nation’s historical consciousness.

2019-05-24

The following is from a book that every Japanese citizen must read, and indeed a book that people throughout the world should also read.

The Weight of History Creates a Sense of Unity at the Popular Level

Takayama
In 1993, when I was in the United States as the Los Angeles correspondent, an APEC meeting hosted by Clinton happened to be held.
Hosokawa Morihiro came from Japan, and it was a time when Mahathir was calling for the creation of an economic framework called the East Asian Economic Caucus, or EAEC, by Japan and ASEAN, so they were trying to crush that idea at APEC.
As the leaders of each country stood lined up in Seattle, I was astonished to see Clinton bending at the waist and guiding Hosokawa Morihiro.
It was just like an usher at a theater saying, “Your seat is this way,” going ahead of Hosokawa while bent forward.
He later became strange, but between an Arkansas country bumpkin and a daimyo family that had continued for 400 years, a difference in dignity naturally appears.
Even Clinton, who knew nothing at all about Japan, still sensed in him something like the bearing that comes from history.
Only Hosokawa himself did not notice it.

Watanabe
Yes, he himself did not notice it.
That is interesting.

Takayama
Did he not find it strange?
Why is Clinton bending over and leading me forward, he should have wondered.
As I watched it on television, I thought he should not let Clinton lower his head like that, but should let him guide him while standing proud.
That scene may not have been broadcast in Japan.
On the American program, they ran it at length.

Watanabe
I see.
The reason long history is felt as a living continuity, and court noble families and daimyo houses have survived down to the present, is that the victors did not carry out revenge to the bitter end.
That is why in Japan, even though the form of the state changed several times, the fundamental principle of having the Emperor at its center was never severed.
For example, even after the Meiji Restoration, the Tokugawa family served for two generations as speakers of the House of Peers, and the daimyo of the feudal era were treated as kazoku nobility, which can hardly be called a revolution in the strict sense.
The daughter of the Aizu Matsudaira family, once called enemies of the court, even married into the imperial family, as in the case of Princess Chichibu Yasuhito’s consort, and reconciliation was advanced.

Takayama
Looking further back, even the settlement after Sekigahara allowed the daimyo who had joined the Western Army to remain as tozama lords, and Japan as a whole held harmony to be the highest good.
This too is something rarely found in Western history.

Watanabe
That is exactly why Japanese people can feel, somewhere deep down, that after all they are fellow Japanese.
History runs continuously from the age of myth, and for example there is no modern nation that possesses a history continuing from 712, when the Kojiki was compiled.
A genealogy remains of the direct descendants of the goddess and god who created the country in myth, and that genealogy is connected to the Imperial House.
There is no country where the genealogy is connected from myth down to the present generation, neither in Greek mythology nor in Germanic mythology.
If that is so, then surely the sense of unity is different from that of other countries.
I do not know whether foreigners, when told this, would be astonished or would believe it, but in 2014, Princess Noriko of the Takamado family married Senge Kunimaro, the gonnomiya of Izumo Shrine, the position next below the chief priest, did she not.
How far back does that go?
The descendants of Ninigi-no-Mikoto, the imperial grandchild, are the Takamado family, while the younger brother of Ninigi-no-Mikoto became the ancestor of the Senge family.
In other words, the connection goes back to the age of the gods.
From such ancient times, the genealogies of both families have remained connected without break, and even the shrine itself still exists.
Both the shrine and the genealogy remain as actual things.
If we were to apply this story to a foreign country, it would be like saying that the descendants of Agamemnon of the Achaeans, who attacked in the Trojan War, were still living and guarding the temple, while the descendants of Troy, who were attacked, also still remained, and that the daughter of that line married a descendant of Agamemnon, with the genealogies still preserved.
It would be an unthinkable story.
And yet, not only is it conceivable, it has actually happened.
Izumo Taisha appears in the Kojiki in the tradition of Okuninushi’s ceding of the land.
It is the story in which, in exchange for ceding the land, he demanded that the grand Izumo Taisha be built.
Exactly as is written, “If you will build for me a grand shrine whose pillars are planted deep to the bedrock below and whose chigi rise high enough to reach Takamagahara, then I shall yield the land and withdraw into seclusion,” that very thing remains at Izumo Taisha.
The form of a building from the age of myth remains preserved.
To give a simpler example, we say east, west, south, and north.
Among these, west, south, and north each have only two readings.
Nishi has sei and nishi, south has nan and minami, and north has hoku and kita, the Chinese-derived and native readings.
But east alone has three.
To, higashi, and azuma.
Why is that?
Because of the eastern campaign myth of Yamato Takeru.
When crossing the sea toward the Boso Peninsula, his consort Ototachibana-hime threw herself into the water to calm the raging waves, and his lament, “Azuma haya,” became the origin of calling the eastern country “azuma.”
Because of this myth, the reading azuma has continued down to the present day.
It is a unique country, and one might even call it a kind of miracle.

Takayama
It was MacArthur too who tried from the outset to deny those myths and sever the continuity of history.
Even so, the reason one can still feel the continuity of history from the age of myth into the historical age is that old things have been preserved, and one can actually sense that they continue to live within Japanese society.
For example, recently, research into the Jomon period has advanced, and it has become clear that Japan was not at all the remote edge of the world, as it had long been said to be.
The Jomon period, which created highly splendid ornaments and trade goods, and built an egalitarian and humane society, formed the foundation of later Japanese culture.
Pottery too was made ahead of the rest of the world.
Yet Japanese people do not know these things, and there are newspapers and media that do not try to inform them.
From as far back as the Jomon age, the Japanese planted chestnuts and millet, lived in harmony with abundant nature, and carried on refined communal lives ahead of the rest of the world, and that has been handed down continuously even into the forms of society and organization we have today.
Otherwise, a mature democratic nation of this degree could never have been formed.

Watanabe
Yes, that is true.

Takayama
The other day, I went to Iki.
Tsukuyomi Shrine, which appears in the Nihon Shoki, the original shrine of Kyoto’s Tsukuyomi Shrine, the shrine of Tsukuyomi-no-Mikoto, who is the brother of Amaterasu Omikami and the elder brother of Susanoo-no-Mikoto, was properly still there.
Even though it had been ravaged during the Mongol invasions, it had suffered no real damage, and the shrine was still being carefully preserved.
Interestingly, Iki has no temples, only shrines.
When one visits places all over Japan, myths remain in visible form as shrines themselves, and the history from before the introduction of Buddhism has been firmly preserved.
One can truly feel that ancient things have been handed down.

Watanabe
The occupation forces interfered in Japan’s religion by issuing the Shinto Directive in order to show that “the Emperor is not a god.”
For example, the school called Jingu Kogakkan was temporarily abolished, and even at Kokugakuin University it became impossible to teach the Kojiki.
However, at Sophia University, where I studied, there was a lecture on the Kojiki as part of the liberal arts curriculum.
I attended that lecture and read the Kojiki itself, and came to know that myth forms the foundation of the Japanese view of history.
Even 70 years after the war, that fact has not changed, and indeed more and more Japanese people are beginning to notice it.
That is a major change.