to Argentina (who lost his job over his outspokenness) charges his countrymen with numerous weaknesses, including immaturity and feudalistic thinking.14 Such severe self-criticism may or may not be justified, but the fact that it exists and that many take it seriously shows the question of identity to be a matter of international consequence. Japan now expects herself, and is in turn expected, to be a world leader and helper, particularly to her sister nations in Southeast Asia. This guidance and aid must be cultural, economic, and political, not military, her present leaders insist.15 Both Japanese and foreign spokesmen sound warnings about the danger of recurrent militarism, and intense political discussion presently focuses on such issues as the role of Japan's Self-Defense Force and the security treaty with the United States.16
This insistence on Japan's non-militant role suggests something of the trauma suffered by the Japanese psyche from the militarism of the 1930s and the subsequent defeat in World War II. A good example is the strife on the university campuses throughout Japan during 1968 and 1969. Almost obsessed by the fear of returning to anything resembling a police state, school administrators refused to call police to the campuses until the situation reached chaotic proportions. Dissenting students capitalized on this reluctance. The university problem is a complex issue, revealing the search for identity in a number of ways. In part, of course, it is the rebelliousness displayed in some degree by every generation, a repudiation of the past, an expression of the desire to be mature, independent, resourceful. On a more philosophical level, it is part of a near-universal protest against the secularization of man, a voicing, consciously or unconsciously, sometimes shrill and incoherent, of the fear that the atomic age will divest life of its mystery and man of his manhood. But for the Japanese in particular it deeply involves the "face" of Japan, the entire social structure of the nation and the problems of an educational system long overdue for reevaluation and change17 It is also a special search for guidelines by a generation which shares with young people of other nations the desire to develop an acceptable self-image apart from, though with some guidance from, the past, but which unlike most others finds the past era repudiated even by its elders. The militarism of the 1930s is unthinkable; to look further to the past is to be archaic. "Should women's college girls be like mothers of the Meiji era?" one frustrated student recently wrote on the wall of a strife-tom Tokyo private college.18 This graffito has a message. The girl is asking who she is.
There is no more dramatic, nor ironic, example of a contemporary search for identity than the current problem in Israel concerning who is a Jew. The issue has complex social, political, and religious significance.19 Japan has no comparable example, but there is, in the striking growth of the so-called new religions, another indication of the contemporary search for values, a seeking for past assurances in modern dress. Two examples are the Buddhist-based Soka Gakkai and Rissho Koseikai groups, which claim followers in the millions. The former sponsors Japan's third largest political party, Komeito, while the latter offers group therapy sessions as part of its modern appeal. Both are, among other things, attempts to link past and present, to draw upon tradition and yet remain relevant and up-to-date. Though they emphasize group identity strongly, in both a modern stress on the individual operates as a subtheme. They are efforts to meet the needs of a people whose past is rich, whose present is prosperous, and whose future is promising, but who, after all, need something more substantial than room coolers and color television to insure a healthy self-image.
Examples of popular culture like comic strips and cartoons, though sometimes overlooked, also indicate the contemporary search to determine what it is to be Japanese. The ever-popular Sazae-san, which has been likened to America's Blondie, suggests, when one examines the assumptions behind the humorous incidents, something of the image Japanese currently have of the mid-twentieth century housewife and domestic scene.20 Sampei Sato's cartoons provide equally illuminating insights into the frustrations of the salary man, whether it is in trying to please the boss, cope with the hazards of speeding traffic, or survive the stresses of the rush hour on the trains.21 In one example, the befuddled protagonist tries to kiss a girl dressed and starved in the Twiggy fashion. He closes his eyes and, to the girl's cries of "idiot," kisses a slender tree instead. Such light moments afford welcome and wholesome relief to the more serious self-probing, but even here the effort to discern and define what it means to be a modern Japanese is apparent.
To be a modern Japanese, however, is not to be altogether "modern." Most Japanese, probably like most Americans or Europeans, would be hard pressed to say just to what extent they have been molded by their past, or to what extent past values still control their decisions. Ruth Benedict's Chrysanthemum and the Sword is helpful in understanding the Japanese mentality.22 The traditional Japanese concepts of obligation, self-sacrifice, and shame are different than those of an American, she points out, and they still affect, sometimes profoundly, the behavior of many people. The recent university strife again provides a dramatic example. Westerners were shocked to read of the suicides of a few noted Japanese professors who in taking their lives claimed responsibility for failure to resolve problems on their campuses. To most Americans, the university problem, even on a given campus, would seem so complex as to preclude any one man's taking such responsibility on himself. Quite obviously, these Japanese professors looked at it otherwise. Similarly, other psychological patterns from past tradition continue to operate among the people, particularly those of the prewar generation.
But the changes have been great. The most important ideological change in postwar Japan was negative, say the authors of America's standard textbook on East Asia. It was "the destruction of the sociopolitical identity that had functioned as the basis of orthodoxy until 1945."23 In its place is something new. "The new education, the consumer society, new economic patterns, the rise in the status of women, the slow advance of the conjugal family ideal, unionization, the pursuit of happiness, the new religious freedom, all can be seen as quantitative change along lines begun in prewar Japan. Yet the changes are not simply linear. Rather, the total effect is a new social configuration, a new way of life."24
One of the indicators of the complexity of the new way is the very term "identity." For better or worse, one can no longer define oneself simply in elemental terms like "male" or "female," "adult" or "child." One is expected to draw and quarter and then further subdivide oneself into innumerable bits of allegiance which, metaphysically glued together, make up one's "identity." A Japanese now may be not only husband, father, uncle, or grandfather, but Liberal Democrat, Socialist, or member of Komeito. More than eldest son, head of household, or go-between for a friend's daughter's marriage, he may be inner-directed, other-directed, old-fashioned, or new-fashioned. In short, he may identify himself in terms of various combinations of factors—geographical, political, economic, social, religious, psychological, family, home, or other. And one might, if he is Japanese, be specially tempted to associate himself with the institution where he is employed, as the custom of identifying on the telephone implies. "Hello, this is Mitsubishi's Mr. Tanaka speaking," one says, or, "Hello, this is Tokyo University's Mr. Suzuki." It's all part of one's "identity."
The word "identity," admittedly, is ambiguous and slippery, but it may well be a keyword of the times. Perhaps by its ambiguity it may suggest, as such ambiguous keywords often do, something distinctive about the age. Perhaps the passion for identifying, classifying, clarifying, and showing relationships is in part a measure of twentieth-century man's failures in the area of simply being. At any rate, the problem of identity is prominent in the minds of Japan's contemporary artists, and the postwar Japanese novel stresses the quest and sometimes hints at the goals.
In attempting to trace out such a theme, the Western critic should acknowledge the difficulties of the subject and the limitations of his approach. There is, first of all, the perennial problem of translations. Already a miniature battle of the books concerning the difficulties of translation into Japanese is available to readers of English in the form of journal articles.25 Shoichi Saeki, commenting on the translations into English of Junichiro Tanizaki's The Makioka Sisters, Yasunari Kawabata's Snow Country, Osamu Dazai's The Setting Sun, Shohei Ooka's Fires on the Plain, and Yukio Mishima's The Sound of Waves and The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, says, "My experience, from the very first moment that I began
