means Japanese food; wafuku is Japanese dress. The native name of Japan, Yamato, is spelled in Japanese with two Chinese characters meaning Great Peace.
Yet quite often peace implies domination, and in many languages the word "pacify" means also "conquer." King Solomon could afford to be a king of peace because he reigned "over all the kings from the Euphrates to the land of the Philistines, and to the border of Egypt." Emperor Kammu could establish the Capital of Peace in Japan because he had first subjugated the aborigines of the north. The peaceful world that the Jewish prophets envisioned was to be ruled over by a scion of the House of David, later called the Messiah, who would destroy the enemies of Israel before establishing his kingdom of peace and bliss. Isaiah's verse about messianic peace is preceded by a verse concerning the ideal future king's authority:
Let us go up to the Mount of the Lord
To the House of the God of Jacob;
That He may instruct us in His ways,
And that we may walk in His paths.
For instruction shall come forth from Zion,
The word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
The Jews were often under the domination of others, but they were always inspired by the belief that in the future world of peace and justice they would serve as spiritual leaders. This vision of a world mission gave them the strength to suffer severe persecution and propelled them to the forefront of various "messianic" and idealistic movements in modern times like those of human rights, socialism, and communism.
The peace to which the Japanese aspired was also combined with a sense of mission. According to the Nihongi, Emperor Jimmi', the first sovereign of Japan, after conquering the plain of Yamato established a capital there that he called Hani-yasu, or Clay Peace. This capital, he declared, would be extended "so as to embrace all the six cardinal points, and the eight cords [or: corners] may be covered so as to form a roof." That declaration of "the eight cords under one roof" (hakko ichiu) became in modern times the slogan of Japanese imperialists, who claimed that Japan had a mission to establish peace in the world and to extend the emperor's authority over other countries. The Nihongi tells us about the third-century Empress Jingu, who with divine help pacified the island of Kyushu and conquered Korea. The king of the Korean kingdom of Silla is reported by the Nihongi to have told the empress: "I have heard that in the East there is a divine country called Nippon, and also that there is there a wise sovereign called the Tenno.... Henceforth forever, these lands shall be styled thy western frontier provinces, and will not cease to offer tribute." There is no historical evidence that such a conquest ever took place, but the legend about Empress Jingu and the declaration of the King of Silla were quoted later by those Japanese who intended to subjugate Korea.
3
Security Lost and
Security Assured
ALTHOUGH Jerusalem and Kyoto carried the ideal of peace within their names, in reality both cities have witnessed many wars. The greatest destruction of Kyoto occurred in the fifteenth century when two rival factions of the ruling warrior class fought each other in the streets of the capital for ten years over the question of who would succeed the shogun. During this bloody dispute, known as the Onin War, most of the city was burned to the ground. But the internal wars of Japan ended at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and since then Kyoto has indeed remained a city of peace. It even escaped the bombardments of World War II, which leveled most other Japanese cities, due to American consideration for its antiquities.
Jerusalem knew more destruction because its conquerors, being usually foreigners to the land, cared little for the city and were hostile to the cultural and religious traditions it had exemplified. On the other hand, in the wars that took place in Japan, except for the attempted Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century that never reached Kyoto, all parties to a conflict belonged to the same people, spoke the same language, believed in the same gods, cherished the same values, and respected the same masterworks of art. The defenders of a castle under siege would sometimes ask for a ceasefire during which its valued treasures could be handed to the enemy in order to save them from destruction. Moreover, all sides in the internal wars of Japan respected the same imperial line, and, unlike in other countries, no contending warrior ever attempted to destroy the imperial family or install his own clan in its place. For national or cultural continuity it mattered little who won or who lost in the many internal wars of Japan, whether they were the Taira or the Minamoto, the Northern Court or the Southern Court, Tokugawa Ieyasu or Takeda Shingen. The aim of all those contenders was to control the country, not to destroy it. Even a cruel warlord like Oda Nobunaga, who did destroy many temples and monasteries, showed great respect for the traditional arts.
An outstanding example of the self-restraint that the Japanese warriors exercised toward sacred institutions, buildings, and treasures is the survival of the Shosoin in Nara, a wooden storehouse built in the eighth century C.E. to accommodate the treasures of the Todaiji temple and the imperial palace. Despite the many wars that have raged in Japan during the twelve hundred years since the treasures were deposited there, the Shosoin has never been broken into or robbed. It still stands where it was erected, and its valuable treasures (recently removed to a modern museum) remain intact.
A glimpse of what might have happened in Japan had the feuding sides been foreign to each other is provided by the behavior of the Japanese during their invasion of Korea at the end of the sixteenth century. As occupiers of a foreign land for which they had little respect, the Japanese burned and pillaged the cities they conquered, destroying many art treasures. During their six years in Korea (1592-98), the Japanese caused more destruction than they had unleashed on their own country for many centuries.
The lot of Jerusalem over the centuries was often similar to that of Korea under the Japanese. While suppressing the Jewish Revolt in 70 C.E., the Romans slaughtered or enslaved most of the Jewish inhabitants of Jerusalem, razing the city in order to obliterate every trace of Jewish presence there. On its ruins the Romans built a new city in which Jews were not allowed to reside; the place that had been the religious capital of the Jews for a thousand years was forbidden to them. After the fall of Jerusalem, about a thousand Jewish zealots, including women and children, escaped to the fortress of Masada, built on the top of an isolated mountain in the Judean desert, where they held out for three more years against a formidable Roman siege. In 73 C.E., when resistance was no longer possible, they all committed suicide, preferring death to a life of slavery. The mass suicide at Masada, not approved by the religious leaders of that time, has many parallels in Japanese history, when warriors preferred to kill themselves rather than surrender. In 1333 in Kamakura, about three hundred members of the ruling Hojo family, including their retainers, committed mass suicide when their liege family was deposed from power. But because both winners and losers belonged to the same people, these dramatic suicides were less traumatic and less fateful for the Japanese than the suicides of the Masada defenders, which signaled the end of Jewish independence for almost nineteen hundred years.
Unsuccessful at revolt, and driven from their holy city, the Jews gradually became a minority in their own land. As synagogues began to replace the Temple, the Jews practiced their religion wherever they went. By the middle of the first millennium, most Jews already lived outside Palestine, and by the end of that millennium very few still lived there. At first they settled in neighboring Middle Eastern countries, from which they spread to other areas of the Mediterranean world, and later to other parts of Europe and Asia.
Unlike many other peoples who have been conquered, enslaved, or exiled over the ages, Jews survived as a community, a people with a common religion, a common language, and common aspirations. Lacking a territory and a government of their own, they always tried to obtain the status of a tolerated minority in other countries, in exchange for commercial and professional services. In medieval Christian Europe, the Jews were the only non-Christian community whose existence was tolerated. But this tolerance
