Published on February 17, 2020.
Based on a work by Kō Bun’yū, this essay contrasts the Chinese mentality and behavior expressed in the five characters “deceit, theft, strife, selfishness, and filth” with the Japanese national character expressed as “sincerity, giving, harmony, public-mindedness, and purity.”
It argues that while Confucianism and Sinocentrism deny diversity and seek unification, Japanese civilization, through its eight million gods, syncretism of Shinto and Buddhism, mixed kanji-kana writing, and artisan culture, is a civilization that accepts pluralistic values.

2020-02-17
I have long argued that all of the Chinese mentality and behavior can be understood through the five characters “deceit, theft, strife or fighting, selfishness, and filth.”
This is the complete opposite of the Japanese national character.
The following is from a work by Kō Bun’yū, one of the world’s foremost scholars thoroughly versed in China.
It is a book that not only the Japanese people but people all over the world must read.
In this essay, not only the preceding passage but also large portions of the middle have been omitted, but needless to say, all of those parts too are essential reading.
I urge the Japanese people to go to their nearest bookstore and purchase the book.
Those in the international community who have taken at face value the anti-Japanese propaganda of China and South Korea should recognize the truth through this essay.
In this column, I have repeatedly stated that I am Kūkai living in the present age.
This essay is a chapter that seems to declare loudly: here lies the true object of my long-cherished aspiration.
◎The Chinese Temperament That Denies Diversity and Seeks Unification
I have long argued that all of the Chinese mentality and behavior can be understood through the five characters “deceit, theft, strife or fighting, selfishness, and filth.”
This is the complete opposite of the Japanese national character.
The Japanese can be expressed by the five characters “sincerity, giving, harmony, public-mindedness, and purity.”
Chinese history is long.
Rounded off, China claims a history of 5,000 years.
As historical records, there is an enormous body of books, the most famous of which is the Complete Library of the Four Treasuries.
The Complete Library of the Four Treasuries is said to have comprehensively collected the Chinese classics commissioned by Emperor Qianlong of the Qing dynasty, but it adopted only well-preserved good editions and, like an encyclopedia, had most of the classics recopied and re-recorded in clean form.
The complete work consists of 78,731 volumes in total, and even the Annotated Catalog, which combines the general catalog and explanatory notes, amounts to as many as 200 volumes.
Seen from the standpoint of number and quantity, it may become a symbol of Chinese civilization, but how should it be evaluated from the standpoint of quality?
Chinese learning consists, roughly speaking, of only four fields: “classics,” “history,” “masters,” meaning the various schools of thought, and “collections,” meaning poetry and literary works.
In today’s terms, it has only the humanities; it has neither social science nor natural science.
As for “philosophy,” it is even doubtful whether it exists.
Even when viewed from the field of thought, it is quite biased.
For example, even during the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, praised as the golden age of Chinese thought and culture, an era said to have been one of “a hundred schools contending” and “a hundred flowers blooming,” when academic and verbal activities flourished, the thought of the various schools almost all remained at the level of “theory of purposes and methods.”
In today’s terms, it was extremely secular “how-to” or “know-how” theory.
Unlike India or Greece of the same era, or of even earlier eras, there was no philosophy.
In China, a theory of “recognition” began to sprout only in the Song dynasty, 700 to 1,000 years after the transmission of Buddhism.
In that age, the learning of “principle and vital force” became popular, and what systematized it were the Zhu Xi school and the Yangming school of the Ming dynasty.
It was little more than a reinterpretation of the Confucian classics using philosophical terminology stolen from Buddhism, and social science did not reach the level of the Islamic world or the Christian world either.
Kūkai’s Treatise on the Ten Stages of Mind of the Secret Mandala, written about 1,200 years ago, divides the development of human spiritual history into ten stages.
Confucianism, the mainstream learning of China, is classified, or ranked, as the “second stage of mind,” slightly evolved from animals, while the anti-mainstream thought of Laozi and Zhuangzi is classified as the “third stage of mind.”
Kūkai saw through the fact that Chinese thought and culture were not something worthy of self-praise, but, when seen from the standpoint of human history, remained close to the animal level, and at the cultural level remained “barbaric.”
As stated earlier, Japan is a civilization and culture that accepts pluralistic values.
There are eight million gods, and besides that, Christmas and New Year’s visits to shrines are also accepted; in short, anything that may be accepted and is good is preserved.
In Confucianism and in China, however, everything is unified, and diversity is denied.
Its defining characteristic is the attempt to unify and assimilate everything.
Because Japan has a polytheistic primitive Shinto, all kinds of cultures, civilizations, and cultural artifacts flowed in from every direction without being excluded.
Even so, Confucianism and Sinocentrism did not take root.
Japanese people’s religious faith is not especially strong to begin with.
What is often cited is the number of Christians in Japan.
Among the numbers of believers in each religion, Christianity accounts for about 1.92 million people, or only 1.1 percent of the total, according to the Agency for Cultural Affairs’ Religious Yearbook, 2018 edition.
On the other hand, according to estimates, believers in Shinto and Buddhism together exceed about 170 million people in total, according to the same yearbook cited above.
The reason this exceeds the population is that many people are believers in Shinto and also believers in Buddhism at the same time.
Because Japan is a polytheistic country, there is no sense of incongruity even if Shichi-Go-San is held at a shrine, a wedding at a church, and a funeral in Buddhist style.
Also, although Japanese people are said to have weak religious faith, there is also an argument that, when one sees the number of people who gather at shrines and temples for the first shrine visit of the New Year and other occasions, their faith is in fact not weak.
Because of the influence of monotheistic Judaism and the rise of Western Christianity and Middle Eastern Islam, in modern religious studies the evolution from polytheism to monotheism became the mainstream view.
However, when one sees that Shinto, born from polytheistic animism, became the foundation of Japanese civilization and the root of the receptivity of Japanese culture and civilization, Western religious studies must inevitably be revised.
Among the eight million gods and the eighty gods that appear in the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki, there is no almighty god.
Nor are there immortals who, as in Taoism, ride on clouds and roam freely throughout the four seas.
Rather, the god of rain and the god of the sun are both diligent, bestowing blessings on the people, and even Amaterasu Ōmikami weaves cloth.
Because there is no omniscient and omnipotent god, and each god has one skill and one art, they work together.
This created Japanese society based on coexistence and co-prosperity, and mutual aid.
The spirit that, even when followers of a different religion entered the pantheon, did not exclude them but welcomed them, created the Japanese mechanism of syncretism.
This did not merely become the basis for the syncretism of Shinto and Buddhism.
It may also be considered that the mixed kanji-kana writing system, discussed later, was born from this principle of syncretism.
There is a criticism that Japanese science and technology are nothing but imitation, and that there is almost no original ingenuity, but that is a prejudice against “originality.”
For example, the five-storied pagoda of Hōryū-ji, Iwakuni’s Kintai Bridge, built without using a single nail, the construction of castles in various places, and the stone arrangements of Japanese gardens are all the result of unique technologies born from Japan’s cultural climate.
Japanese “technology” is by no means mere imitation.
Much of Japanese technology is syncretic in character, and Japan is skillful at linking one technology with another.
Japan, which is even called “the land of artisans,” is good at refining skills to perfection.
While in the struggle for survival there are many “battles of everyone against everyone,” in the form of “person versus person,” the Japanese way of polishing technique is, as is often seen among Buddhist monks, to go from “entering the Way” to “cultivating the Way,” to repeat practice, and finally to “attain the Way,” so that if one masters one path, one comes to understand all paths.
Japan is rich in the spirit of cultivating the Way in both literary and military arts, and rather than a “war of all against all,” each sect, each school, and each lineage competes in art, competes in skill, competes in beauty, and perfects the art.
As “the land of artisans,” the quality of Japanese products and services is praised throughout the world.
The belief of primitive Shinto born from animism is the belief in ikiryō, or musubi, the spirit of birth and creation.
From giving birth to generation and creation, it contains diverse meanings.
In particular, within the fixed quantitative space of the Japanese archipelago, surrounded by the sea on all sides, the uniquely Japanese thought of “place,” or topos, was born and nurtured.
Within this fixed quantitative space, how can methods of symbiosis, such as coexistence and co-prosperity, be considered and matured while preserving diversity?
On the basis of the spirit of syncretism, Japan has created that mechanism.
In a world where religious confrontation and conflict never cease, it seems best for Spaceship Earth to navigate toward an unknown world while syncretizing various cultures and civilizations.
And the country most suited to that is Japan; it may also be called the mission of Japanese civilization.