The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

390 chapter 36The Japanese are in some ways an easier case than the Chinese and theSouth Asians, in other ways harder. Westerners have no trouble recognizingthe heroic stoicism of the samurai as parallel to the character of a Christianknight. Check off the virtues: courage, temperance, faith as integrity, prudencein the skills of the swordsman, though brought to what seems to aWesterner an insane degree of perfection, with a sword so repeatedly temperedthat it can cut in half a Western sword at a stroke. The parallel allowsfor profit in such odd cultural exchanges as the importation of Japanesechildren’s cartoons, and Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai with Japanese andEnglish subtitles.But Ruth Benedict argued in 1946 that the Japanese, unlike the Westernersor the Chinese, do not have a notion of an invariant character, called bythe Greeks and their Christian and Muslim admirers a “soul,” psyche, anima.Most official Buddhisms worldwide, for example, do not recognize apudgala, a soul resistant to change from one reincarnation to the next.Japanese Buddhism is on this matter orthodox. The tragic Mizoguchi film,The Life of Oharu (1952), from a seventeenth-century novel, tells the story ofa woman’s social descent. But it tells it in long shots. Japanese morality lieson the surface of society, not inside the person. It is a matter of mos in theRoman sense, not ethos in the Greek.Benedict argued that Japan was a “shame” culture, as against the modernWestern “guilt” culture. To avoid shame one must follow the “circle of chu,”the infinite duty to the emperor or to the nation, or the “circle of giri,” thefinite yet precise duty to others or to one’s honor. Either set of duties isexternal. They are both about social honor, not about the state of one’ssoul. Compare the similar duties of personal sacrifice at Rome, the earlyBrutus I have mentioned executing his two sons for treason, or Romanmothers telling their boys to go and die for the patria. A table of Japanesevirtues, Benedict claims, is not a description of a courageous, just, hopeful,loving person. That would be Greek, not Roman. The Japanese/Romanvirtues derive from the social circles of obligation. 11 They sound, indeed,Kantian, which is perhaps another objection to Kant’s strange system, sincehe is recommending it for modern Europeans, not Japanese or ancientRomans. “Each circle,” Benedict explains, “has its special detailed code anda man judges his fellows, not by ascribing to them integrated personalities[good or evil], but by saying of [bad men] that . . . ‘they do not know [thecode of the circle of] giri.’ ” 12