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CounterPunch
December
9, 2002
Religious Bigotry
Then and Now:
Some Thoughts on Pearl Harbor Day
by GARY LEUPP
On no fewer than seventeen occasions since Sept.
11, President Bush has spoken favorably of Islam, producing enough
quotable material to constitute a White House pamphlet, In
the President's Words: Respecting Islam, which you can probably
pick up free at any U.S. embassy in a Muslim country. It's
not for me to judge whether the president's words reflect his
scholarly understanding (yes, I'm joking), or merely the influence
of Colin Powell and other among his advisors who soberly reflect,
"One point two billion. Twenty percent of humanity. Over
half the world's oil. Better not to alienate those people."
In any case, Bush's pragmatic gestures to the Muslim community,
in the U.S. and elsewhere, clash with the positions of key administration
figures and Bush supporters, such as Attorney General John Ashcroft,
who has stupidly opined that "Islam is a religion in which
God requires you to send your son to die for him [whereas] Christianity
is a faith where God sent his son to die for you." Fundamentalist
Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson told the Washington Times
last month that Bush's officially tolerant view "ignores
history. Any student of history knows that [Islam]'s not a peaceful
religion."
Now William S. Lind, Director
of the Center for Cultural Conservatism at the Free Congress
Foundation, has attacked the president for his visit December
5 to the Islamic Center of Washington with a satirical piece
on the foundation's website published the following day. Indicating
the depth of the Islamophobes' disgust with Bush's stated stance
of tolerance, he depicts the president following up the Islamic
Center visit by hosting a "sunrise breakfast" for "leading
Japanese-Americans, the Japanese diplomatic community and a delegation
of Shinto priests from Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, which commemorates
Japan's war dead." (Thus he slickly connects all those of
Japanese ethnicity with Shinto religious belief.) Bush addresses
the gathering on the morning of December 7, that "day that
will live in infamy," declaring, "Christianity and
Shinto are very much alike. Both are religions of peace, just
as Islam is a religion of peace." (But Christianity and
Shinto are of course thoroughly dissimilar. Lind's point is
that Islam, too, is a world apart from the Judeo-Christian tradition
that he and the Center for Cultural Conservatism so passionately
uphold.) "In hosting this morning's breakfast," Bush
says, "I send a message to all the dead warriors gathered
at the Yasukuni shrine. America treasures your friendship. America
honors your faith." He joins the gathering in observing
the rising sun (symbol of imperial Japan and of the sun goddess,
Amaterasu), having arranged a "special flyover of Japanese
naval aircraft" for the occasion.
It is mildly clever satire, penned with
entirely vicious intent: to depict Islam in general as an enemy
of America on a par with Japanese fascism in the 1940s, and Bush's
understated, matter-of-fact acknowledgement that Islam isn't
really the problem as treacherously naïve. Exploiting the
often drawn (if misconstrued) parallel between the Pearl Harbor
attack in 1941 and 9-11, it effectively alloys two racisms and
two categories of religious bigotry. I've examined bigotry about
Islam elsewhere (see "Challenging Ignorance on Islam: a
Ten-Point Primer for Americans," Counter Punch, July 24,
2002). Since Lind uses Shinto (and the Japanese who produced
this belief system) as an analogue to the Islam he so hates and
fears, he apparently supposes that the former are the better
exposed and despised, at least among his readership. So I'm inclined
to challenge his confusion about Shinto.
First some general facts. Shinto (loosely,
"the way of the gods") has been practiced in Japan
for over 1600 years, maybe for much longer. Believers worship
the kami, which may be deities with personalities described
in texts (the oldest of these dating to the eighth century),
roughly analogous to the Greco-Roman or Nordic gods; or rocks,
streams, mountains, forests, without personal attributes, that
are revered simply because they evoke a sense of awe. The focal
Shinto institution is the shrine, a simple, austerely elegant
wooden structure that houses the spirit of a kami. You
know you're in the vicinity of a Shinto shrine when you see a
torii, a sort of gate shaped like an H with a bar over
the top. These can be of wood or stone or concrete, small or
huge. You enter a path through the torii and soon find
a well where you are supposed to wash your hands and mouth.
The shrine structure itself is not usually
entered, but worshippers approach it (often singly, in private),
stand before it, sound a gong and clap to gain the deity's attention,
pray, perhaps drop a few coins in the offertory and leave. Every
shrine is different. Some feature a lot of phallic/fertility
cult material, and emptied kegs of donated rice wine abound.
Shinto is all about earthly happiness and pleasure. It places
no emphasis on metaphysics and elaborates no moral code. While
the Judeo-Christian tradition posits sin as the fundamental problem;
Buddhism, desire and the suffering arising from it; and Confucianism,
social disorder produced by inattention to natural hierarchies;
Shinto posits defilement. One wants to be cleansed of
filth, and distanced from blood and death that most represent
defilement.
Buddhism arrived in Japan in the sixth
century, from India via China and Korea. With its highly sophisticated
philosophical doctrines, Buddhism had little in common with Shinto,
but as elsewhere in Asia, it made its peace with the indigenous
faith. Westerners are often puzzled about how two very different
religions can coexist harmoniously, and how many people can say
they are both Shinto and Buddhist. This is no doubt because the
Judeo-Christian (I should say, Judeo-Christian-Islamic) tradition
demands exclusive adherence to one version of Truth, while Buddhism
has shown infinite capacity to incorporate non-Buddhist beliefs
into itself. Buddhist missionaries simply pronounced the native
Shinto deities bodhisattvas, or enlightened beings, adding them
to the Mahayana Buddhist pantheon or identifying them with existing
members. Tolerance and inclusiveness have been the hallmarks
of Japanese religion.
The above describes Shinto as it has
traditionally been practiced. After 1868, when reformers who
consciously sought to emulate the west overthrew the feudal regime
in Japan, Shinto was established as the state religion---in conscious
imitation of the (Christian) state churches in Europe, an imagined
source of western strength. For a short time the new rulers promoted
an anti-Buddhist movement; they abandoned that effort, but clearly
separated Shinto from the Buddhist administrative structure and
accorded it a higher status than the imported faith. Shinto priests
were placed on the government payroll, and the role of the emperor,
as the descendent of the Sun Goddess, was enormously magnified.
For centuries, the pious peasant worshipping the kami at
the local shrine had given little thought to the emperor, who
was far away ("above the clouds") and usually powerless
politically; his or her Shinto was not emperor-centered. But
the State Shinto perfected in the Meiji era (1868-1912)
encouraged, even demanded, that the citizens of the industrializing,
"modernizing" state accord the emperor worshipful respect.
Primary school history texts asserted his divine origins. School
children bowed every year to the emperor's portrait and copies
of the Imperial Rescript on Education in what the tiny (legally
tolerated) Christian minority regarded as a pagan religious ritual.
To criticize the kokutai (the "national body,"
or mystical union between the Japanese emperor, people, and landscape---in
essence a religious concept conflating Japaneseness with support
for the monarchy) was a serious criminal offense. The only equally
serious ideological transgression was to criticize "the
system of private property." (Note that in Japan, the ruling
elite coupled capitalism and the emperor system as the twin pillars
of the modern state, beyond reproach. Only the radical left agitated,
underground, against both.)
During the Second World War, Americans
were encouraged to see (as Lind would have us see now) the conflict
with Japan in religious terms. Better-educated people were aware
that several religious traditions influenced the thinking of
most Japanese, and saw no special reason to vilify Buddhism or
Confucianism, which after all, were practiced in wartime ally
China. But Shinto, unique to Japan, was plainly evil. It had
no moral code. Its scriptures' long, lewd passages about deities'
copulation and various bodily functions had so offended Victorian
translators that they had rendered those disturbing sections
into Latin.
Worse, Shinto asserted Japan's superiority
over all other nations. It maintained that the Japanese rulers,
and the Japanese in general, were descended from the Sun Goddess.
Emperor Hirohito (before his spectacular postwar rehabilitation
at the hands of the U.S. Occupation) was reviled in wartime America,
especially among Christian evangelicals, for claiming that he
was a kami or god. (In fact, the concept of divinity in
Japan was and is markedly different from the western concept.)
The willingness of the Japanese soldiers-particularly the kamikaze
(the "wind of the gods" suicide pilots)---to sacrifice
themselves for the emperor disgusted and terrified Americans,
and this willingness was understood in religious terms. How could
one not regard Shinto as the Devil's work?
During the U.S. Occupation, beginning
in September 1945, U.S. officials sought to demilitarize and
democratize Japan. This meant discarding the schoolbooks that
reproduced Shinto myth as history and glorified the samurai the
heroes of the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese Wars, imposing
the American-authored constitution that remains in effect, converting
the now-cooperative Emperor Hirohito from head of state to "symbol
of state" and persuading him (in his ningen sengen or
"statement of my humanity" on New Year's day 1946)
to publicly renounce claims to divinity. For some it meant challenging
the prevalent religious beliefs with aggressive Christian missionary
activity. Supreme Commander Gen. Douglas MacArthur himself, a
devout Christian, requested of the U.S. missionary societies
"Bibles, Bibles and more Bibles." "Japan is a
spiritual vacuum," he told U.S. Protestant evangelicals
visiting Japan in late 1945. "If you do not fill it with
Christianity, it will be filled with Communism. Send me 1,000
missionaries." Some U.S. officials advocated banning the
Shinto faith in toto. (Was it not a "fascist"
religion?) In October, John Carter Vincent, a top State Department
official in the Division of Far Eastern Affairs, announced in
a radio broadcast that Shinto would be eliminated entirely due
to its putative fascist connections.
But cooler heads prevailed; scholars
pointed out the need to distinguish between the (harmless) "folk
Shinto" and the (malign) State Shinto presumed to underlie,
among other evils, the kamikaze suicide bombers. State
Shinto was indeed dismantled, and freedom of religion decreed;
but the shrines were left alone, and people continued to flock
to them, offering simple prayers for health, happiness, and success
on college admissions exams. As it turned out, Shinto per
se was no threat at all. (Yasukuni, where the souls of Japan's
war dead, including some war criminals, are enshrined, is an
unusual case. It indeed retains the atmosphere of State Shinto
and holds a special place in the hearts of Japan's rightist politicians,
who are, by the way, almost always pro-U.S., and the neofascist
groups and yakuza gangsters.)
Which brings me back to Mr. Lind, not
a cool head, who cannot distinguish between mainstream Islam
and al-Qaeda fanaticism, much less folk Shinto and State Shinto.
Nor, apparently, between Japanese, Japanese-Americans, and Shinto
believers. For the record, most Japanese, even if officially
listed as both Buddhists and Shinto believers, are not religious
in the western sense; i.e., they do not believe in gods or an
afterlife, but follow tradition in this most tradition-bound
of societies, getting married in Shinto rites and cremated following
Buddhist funerals. As for Japanese-Americans, more of them are
Christians than Buddhists, and few indeed, except in Hawai'i,
are interested in Shinto. In Hawai'i, however, an event in some
way honoring the Shinto faith, involving the governor, Japanese
diplomats, Japanese-Americans, and Shinto priests (a gathering
on a smaller scale that that posited in Lind's satire) is not
entirely inconceivable---despite the fact that the Japanese military
attacked Hawai'i 61 years ago. It is not uncommon at all in Hawai'i
for a new building to be blessed by a Hawai'ian kahuna, a Christian
cleric, a Buddhist priest, and a Shinto priest-exorcist waving
a sakaki-branch wand. As an irreligious person, I may
roll my eyes in wonderment that in the twenty-first century people
still seek refuge in all varieties of such myth and ritual, but
until humankind outgrows irrational beliefs, I think it best
to extend tolerance to all the religions with which parents,
generation after generation, burden their children. Tolerance
seems to work in the Hawai'ian case. Maybe bigots like Lind could
learn from it.
Gary Leupp
is an an associate professor, Department of History, Tufts University
and coordinator, Asian Studies Program.
He can be reached at: gleupp@tufts.edu
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