Iwa ni Hana

Photo of Shiba Ryōtarō (1923 - 1996), writer and historian.

It seems no exaggeration to say that Shiba Ryōtarō [司馬遼太郎,] was the foremost intellectual in post-war Japan. I think you would enjoy his prose writings if you enjoy reading informed opinion (let me stress the informed part).

We have many nouns for describing those who can gaze and see the future – fortune-teller, soothsayer, prophet, visionary etc; but we have only one noun for describing those who can gaze and see the past – historian. I once read somewhere that a writer and historian like Robert Graves (of I, Claudius fame) would probably not find himself lost if he were were suddenly transported through time travel back to Augustus’ Rome; he would know just every street and corner there as though he had lived there all his life. To apply the same comment on Shiba Ryōtarō, I think he would just know his way around Tokugawa Iemitsu’s Edo if he ever found himself transported there.

There are other reasons why Robert Graves and Shiba Ryōtarō overlap in my mind. One of them was that both wrote erudite essays on a wide range of topics. Those written by Robert Graves seem to have sadly fallen out of print (I now have only the notes I took when I borrowed those books from my university’s library). Those written by Shiba Ryōtarō are still popularly in print and I was lucky to get a large number of them at a second-hand bookstore. I have already read about twenty volumes of his prose writings and interview transcripts so far this winter. I just started to tackle his series of travelogue which runs to some twenty volumes. (It was also from these books that I suddenly got inspired to do what I call the “Shiba Ryōtarō pilgrimages” – I want to visit the historic sites he highlighted – not all in one go but gradually from area to area. Please stay tuned for more.)

There is another reason why Robert Graves and Shiba Ryōtarō overlap in my mind: they were both deeply scarred by their wartime experiences as young conscripted soldiers (the former in WWI and the latter in WWII). I think of them as kindred spirits – they seem to be coloured by the same spirit of disenchantment or disillusionment about the world at large. It makes you wonder what kind of conversation would have sprung between them if the two had met.

My favorite so far is a series of essays entitled Kono Kuni no Katachi [この国の形]. Below is an essay from that series that I translated, because I have a feeling I will be referring to it in future posts -

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Wakashu-sei by Shiba Ryōtarō

I would like to discuss below a subculture that may be hidden as an undead spirit in Japanese culture even now.

It is wakashu-sei [若衆制] that I would like to talk about. It is usually also called wakashu-gumi [若衆組], wakamono-gumi [若者組], wakarenchū [若連中], and sometimes wakashu-yado [若衆宿], or just simply yado [やど].

It was common to see wakashu-sei in villages within the Asian-Pacific circle of islands encompassing Polynesia, Melanesia, Indonesia, but it did not exist in China (though it might have existed in Fujian and Guangdong which used to be the land of Yue [越]) and Korea.

As far as wakashu-sei is concerned, the islands of Japan belonged to the same cultural circle as Asian-Pacific islands. Among others, the proto-Malay minority in Taiwan and the Miao minority in China used to have this system, and the system should still exist even now.

~~~

This system had always existed on the Japanese islands since ancient times.

However, it only existed on the level of farming villages, mountain villages and fishing villages. For example, in the late Heian period when samurai families began to rise to power, it seemed that they had either severed themselves from this system, or the system itself had evolved into a different form.

Among samurai families of the Edo period, there was no such system with the exception of the Satsuma domain. (Such custom had disappeared in Kyoto, Edo, Osaka and other regional cities. It was not so much that there was “civilization” in these cities. It was that they were not small communities founded on ties of blood, but “strangers” from all over the country.)

In the Heian era, there was a flourishing custom within the aristocratic class in Kyoto whereby a young nobleman may sneak into the home of a young women living there in order to sleep with her. This custom was called yobai [呼ばい] which is an ateji* of yobai [夜這い], and it was a sophisticated modification of wakashu-sei. For example, the sexual mores in The Tale of Genji would be unthinkable in Confucian societies (or, to put it another way, the northern patriarchal societies founded on cattle-breeding) like China and Korea (especially Korea of the Joseon dynasty).

The word yobai appeared in Kojiki as yobahi [用婆比], and appeared in Manyōshū as yobahi [夜延]. Its history is very old.

Jumping to a more recent example, it is said that towards the end of the Satsuma Rebellion [西南戦争] when all hope seemed to be lost, Saigō Takamori was climbing up a mountain slope and said “this is just like yobe,”** and made his fellow losers in the war laugh. As I mentioned before, in the Satsuma domain the age-old custom of wakashu-sei was integrated into the samurai system by way of a subsystem called gōchū [郷中], but there was no trace of the yobai custom flourishing within the samurai class, or at least it was not publicly acknowledged. Yobai existed only in the farming villages, mountain villages and fishing villages of Satsuma.

~~~

Besides conducting the festivals of the village, wakashu also thought that the young women of their village were under their control. There was a kind of feeling of sanctity about this, and they did not forgive young men from other villages who sneaked in to sleep with those young women.

During the night, they would sneak into the homes of the young women in the village whom they liked in order to sleep with them. Sometimes there were cases where more than one young man was sleeping with the same young woman. If she got pregnant, she had the right to name the father of the child.

Once a young man had been named, even if he was just playing around with her, he was not allowed to run away and had to marry the young woman. The born child sometimes might look like some other young man in the village, but that was not a problem.

There was a feeling that such a child was born to the collective community as a whole. Such a feeling was probably an acquiesced element in a collective polity founded on blood ties.

~~~

This system went through an upheaval of change after the Meiji period.

During the Meiji period, wakashu-sei came to be seen as a barbarian custom. This custom was destroyed between the 38th year of Meiji (1905) when seinendan [青年団] began to be launched under the leadership of Ministry of Culture and Ministry of Internal Affairs, and up to the 14th year of Taisho (1925) with the founding of Dai Nippon Rengō Seinen Dan [大日本連合青年団].

There was one constructive contribution that Dai Nippon Rengō Seinen Dan made. In the 11th year of Showa, they published a high-quality book of research entitled Research on the Wakamono System [若者制度の研究] on the very old custom they turned their back on. (Copies of this book should be available at old libraries.)

~~~

Joining a wakashu-gumi (which was called yado-iri, gumi-iri or wakamono-iri) usually happened when a young man reached the age of fifteen or thereabouts, and he usually left it when he married.

When he joined, it was necessary to have someone from the “adult system” [オトナ制] of the village to introduce him. There was a ritual to his inception. At the top seat sat the leader of wakashu, and to his right and left sat his assistants, and following them sat other wakashu in a row of descending order in accordance to their age. The new joiner would make oaths before them.

Once he joined, he would sleep at the same inn with his fellow wakashu at night.

In this way, villages before the Meiji era were governed jointly by an “adult system” alongside a youth organization that was wakashu-sei.

It was the responsibility of wakashu to conduct festivals and rituals (such as going wild and carrying the shrine), to perform fire-fighting functions, to act as life guards at sea, and to carry paramilitary functions like having water skirmishes with other villages.

The head of wakashu was on equivalent standing with the head of the elders of the “adult system” in the village as far as the administration of wakashu-sei was concerned. Moreover, this may be slightly off-topic, but from ancient times, there had always been a kind to sanctity attached to unmarried young men as though they were some kind of heaven-sent children from the local deities [氏神の申し子]. Adults never made light of the lead of wakashu just because he was younger then they.

On the other hand, wakashu sometimes played tricks on the families of adults they did not like. At worse, they would let their victim’s house burn to the ground when there was a fire accident; or when there was a forest fire, they would send the fire to a mountain owned by an adult they did not like. Even so, they were usually not publicly reprimanded or criticized by adults for these deeds.

~~~

The wakashu system called gōchū within the Satsuma samurai class was located in each city, and yado [やど] was called sha [社] in the Satsuma dialect. Also, in the Satsuma dialect, young men who were compared to a “two-year-old horse” [二歳駒]*** were called nise [ニセ], and young men of the samurai class who had joined sha were called heko [兵児]. Sha was a place where these young men were trained up on their prowess, courage and moral fibre.

Rai Sanyou [頼 山陽] (1780 – 1832) from Geishū was traveling throughout Kyūshū in his late thirties in the 1st year of Bunsei (1818), and while staying at Kagoshima for around twenty days, he was surprised by the strange custom of gōchū in Satsuma, and wrote a poem of praise entitled Zenheko no Uta [前兵児謡].****

It may be taken to mean that the military prowess of Satsuma was supported by this heko system.

The leader of gōchū was a young man with leadership ability around 18 or 19 years of age chosen by his peers. When the leader of gōchū visited the father of one of his sha‘s subordinates on the subordinate’s account, no matter how highly ranked that father might, he had to wear hakama to welcome him at the front door of his house.

I would like to touch upon Saigō whom I gave an example of this earlier. I would like to add that Saigō was born in Shimokajiyachō [下加治屋町] which was a little removed from the feudal castle (and where some seventy households of low-ranking samurai families lived). He was chosen to be the head of gōchū when he was 18 or 19.

At that time, the heko of his sha included Ōkubo Toshimichi [大久保利通], Saigō Jūdō [西郷従道] (the younger brother of Saigō Takamori), as well as Ōyama Iwao [大山巌] and Murata Shinhachi [村田新八]. During the conflicts of the Bakumatsu period that followed, they all fought on the side of Saigō Takamori.

At that time, because the feudal lord of the Satsuma domain was still young, the “adult system” was in effect controlled by Shimatsu Hisamitsu [島津久光], the biological father of the feudal lord. Hisamitsu was conservative by temperament, and was alarmed by the increasingly wakashu-like character embodied in Saigō.

In the meantime, Saigō’s fame grew to the point where he came to be regarded The Leader among all the different gōchū within the domain of Satsuma. At the end, he kind of deceived Hisamitsu in using domain’s military force for the purpose of revolution, finally overthrowing the shogunate and forming the new Meiji government, while astonishing Hisamitsu in all this.

~~~

Afterwards, Saigō grew unhappy with the new government and returned to his homeland, and the Satsuma men who pretty much formed the Imperial Guards [近衛軍], being devoted to Saigō, followed him homeward to Kagoshima. It is not impossible to say that this was the natural behaviour expected of wakushu towards their leader. In this instance, the “adult system” was the new government headed by Ōkubo Toshimichi.

After these “uniformed wakashu” returned to their homeland, they founded a private military academy in Kagoshima, and founded one branch academy within each town. Theses academies were more like a resurrection of gōchū system than schools, and might well be called the militarization of gōchū system.

Saigō was opposed to the idea of “founding military academies” in order to oppose the new government by force, but in the end he went along with the explosion of those private academies. It was based on a custom beyond comprehension that he had no choice but to become their shrine.

In essence, Saigō had never stopped being The Leader of all the different gōchū in Satsuma from Bakumatsu period onwards.

~~~

This is just what I thought of all of a sudden. In the early Showa era, could the fact that general headquarters carrying the “shrine” that was military mandate [統師権] began to turn wakashu and went berserk against the “adult system” that was parliamentary cabinet be related the above-mentioned subculture?

In addition, the general headquarters of Kandō also turned wakashu against the main general headquarters, causing the Manchu Incident and the Nomonhan Incident. They took separate action without regard to the “adult system” back in Tokyo. If we consider the the above-mentioned subculture, it may become easier to understand.

After the war, if you consider the bureaucracy and the corporation as the “adult system” as well as labour system, it is not impossible to make the observation that the subculture may still be alive.

~~~

Notes:

* Ateji [当て字]: A Chinese character used as a phonetic symbol rather than for its meaning. An arbitrarily used substitute character.

** Yobe ga gotaru [夜這が如たる]: I do not know the Satsuma dialect. “This is just like yobai” is just my best guess of what that means.

*** Nisaikoma (?), nisaigoma (?) [二歳駒]: “Two-year old horse” is only my best guess. Even after searching on Google, I am not sure if this may have some idiomatic meaning I am not aware of.

**** It is beyond my ability to translate poetry, so I did not include it here.