[In the following excerpt, Fessler explains Akinari's philosophy on the nature of deities.]

Ueda Akinari, renowned for his fiction writing, was also a serious scholar of kokugaku, or National Learning. Of particular concern for him was the nature of the kami—their ethics (if any) and how those ethics reflected the cognitive nature of the beings themselves. In an age when the nature of the kami was being discussed by a number of kokugaku scholars, including the great Motoori Norinaga, 1730-1801, Akinari was but one voice in a crowd, yet his ideas on this issue differ distinctly from those of his peers. He agreed with them that Confucian and Buddhist scholars were wrong to impose their philosophical ethical framework upon the realm of the kami, for, he declared, the kami did not conform to such a normative structure. Akinari related the kami to what may be called ‘animal spirits’—foxes, badgers, and the like, animals that are attributed in Japanese folklore with supernatural powers. He held that the kami and animal spirits were behaviorally the same; both were characterized by an inability to conceive of a moral right and wrong.

Akinari kept a notebook of random thoughts and jottings on varied topics, titled Tandai Shōshin Roku, ‘A Record of Courage and Cowardice’, 1808. A supplementary text of further jottings, plus re-edited sections of Tandai, followed in 1809. Written in a mixture of literary and colloquial language, the entries present Akinari's ideas about philosophy, history, and literature, as well as his frank opinions of his contemporaries. The views expressed in the work are strong and at times biting. By the time Tandai was published, its author was seventy-six years old, blind in one eye and visually impaired in the other. He knew that he was at the end of his life and believed that it was time to make public his thoughts, regardless of the consequences.¹

THE NATURE OF THE KAMI

One of the recurring topics in Tandai, and the primary subject of the present article, is the nature of the kami. Akinari combines his commentary on the kami with criticism of Buddhism and Confucianism, for, like other kokugaku scholars, he felt that Buddhism and Confucianism were misguided philosophies. In Tandai, he both discusses the nature of the kami as he understood them and criticizes his Buddhist and Confucian contemporaries.²

Akinari was concerned with two issues regarding the kami: first, their cognitive nature, and second, how that nature helped shape their ethics and behavior. Here I shall refer to animal spirits and the kami together (‘kami/animal spirits’), because Akinari equated the two. The central idea is introduced in Tandai, 13:

By nature, such [fox] spirits do not distinguish between good and bad, or right and wrong. They protect what is good for them and curse what is bad. … The kami are believed to be the same. … They bless their faithful with happiness and curse the unfaithful.³

Here the concept of ‘good and bad, right and wrong’ is expressed by the term zen'akujasei.⁴ The same word is used later in Section 30:

According to I Ching, ‘That aspect of it which cannot be fathomed in terms of the light and dark is called spirit.’⁵ This shows that the Chinese, too, understood that man cannot judge the nature of the kami. It is precisely because of this that we have no disputes about the good and evil natures [zen'akujasei] of the kami, as we do about mankind.

The kami love well the man who serves them well. If someone scorns them, they punish him. Foxes and badgers seem to be the same as the kami.⁶

We can surmise from this passage that the kami recognize when someone does well or poorly by them, but that they have no overriding moral sense of right and wrong. It may be helpful to think of this in the following way: kami/animal spirits are perceptual beings, whereas humans are conceptual. The kami perceive good or ill will at a specific point in time, but do not conceive of a greater system of moral right and wrong. The kami neither recognize a way by which humans can store virtue for a future time, nor do they punish humans repeatedly for past evil deeds that have already been punished once.

Blake Morgan Young sums up Akinari's view as follows:

Akinari contended that foxes, badgers, and other animals, unlike people, have no moral sense of right and wrong, but merely reward what is good for them and punish what is bad. The deities of Japan were of the same nature, he believed, blessing those who serve them and cursing those who neglect them, unlike Buddhas and sages, who have human bodies and feelings. In animals and supernatural beings Akinari saw a quality that rose above considerations of good and evil—a simple, pure, amoral instinct, beyond normal logic, to protect one's self and one's personal interest.⁷

According to Young, Akinari believed that the kami acted only to ‘protect one's self and one's personal interest’, in other words, they behaved only selfishly. But in Tandai, 31, he illustrated how some kami behavior could be altruistic:

During the Jōgan period, Mt Fuji erupted; mountain peaks crumbled and buried the valleys, and the land tumbled into the sea. People were injured, and the damage was so severe that it affected the neighboring regions. The ruler of Kai later declared, ‘This has happened because the priests have neglected to perform rituals for the kami of Asama Shrine on top of Mt Fuji.’ And so an imperial decree was issued and the priests were duly warned. When we think about this, we wish that the kami would have punished only the priests who neglected the rituals. Why were the kami willing to inflict this disaster upon the world?

There were two stone kami and one pond kami on Mt Aso in Higo. One day, the kami set fire and dried up all the water in the pond; the water itself seemed to become fire and remained like that for days. Provincial officials summoned a diviner to interpret the situation. He said, ‘This is an omen that there will be fires of war.’ Soldiers were mustered to protect Kyushu.

The kami of Asama Shrine on Mt Fuji harmed the country for its own sake. The stone kami produced an omen for the sake of the country. How is it that the kami can behave so differently?⁸

According to Akinari, therefore, the kami could at times act altruistically, but did not necessarily do so. He also showed that kami behavior was puzzling to humans, and suggested that it could not be judged on the basis of human moral constructs. The passage recording the eruption of Mt Fuji offers a good example of this: although on the one hand it appears that the kami understood ‘good and evil’ because they punished people for failing to worship them, it is important to keep in mind that such people did not fail to pay obeisance out of malice. Their unfaithfulness was caused by a slackening of devotion, true, but it did not involve animosity toward the kami. If the kami, like an animal, could only perceive the actions of humans, and not conceive of the intentions behind them, then it follows that their behavior might well be as Akinari declared.

Moriyama Shigeo also addresses Akinari's view of the kami, interpreting his philosophy as follows. Logical standards are a human phenomenon that cannot be applied to other animals; sense of harm also differs between humans and animals. Humans lead a life based on societal relationships, but fox and badger spirits exist in a world that lacks such norms. Theirs is a primal existence.⁹ The societal relationships that Akinari attributed to humans were the five basic Confucian relationships and the Buddhist teacher/disciple relationship. For Akinari, Buddhism and Confucianism were part of the human world, as distinguished from the realm of the kami, precisely because there was a direct relationship between humans and the deities of those two teachings. He states in Tandai, 30:

Buddhists say, ‘The kami and the buddhas share the same body.’ My thoughts on this are as follows. Like the Confucian sages, the buddhas send out leafy branches and roots of good deeds throughout the world; they spread their teaching far and wide. But the master who said that he would clothe everyone in dark robes and lead them on the Buddhist path¹⁰ was too narrow-minded.¹¹ The kami are divine entities; humans cannot follow religious practices and someday become a kami.¹²

This differentiates Shinto from Confucianism and Buddhism, for followers of the latter two religions can aspire to become ‘deities’: a Buddhist can attain enlightenment and a Confucian can become a sage. But no matter how devout, a follower of Shinto cannot possibly become a kami. By their nature the kami are distinct from humans.

But here a question may be posed—what of humans who are in fact considered kami, such as Tenjin or Hachiman?¹³ Akinari made no mention of this problem, but he could have presented three arguments to explain their existence: (1) they were never really kami, but were viewed as such in folklore; (2) they were never really human, but kami in human form; and (3) they were possessed by a kami or perhaps a fox spirit, and this empowered them to exhibit supernatural behavior. The last explanation is perhaps the most probable.

ANIMAL SPIRITS

In Tandai, 27 & 28, Akinari used an animal parable and an account of fox possession to illustrate the bestial lack of a sense of ‘good and evil’. In 27, a dog steals a fish from a basket, only to be chased with a long pole by the fishmonger. After the man retrieves the fish, the dog continues to try to steal it. The dog neither learns a lesson, feels guilt, nor applies its experience to realize that the fish does not belong to it. It merely perceives the existence of the fish and consequently desires to possess it. Akinari remarks:

After observing the dog's behavior, I got to thinking that if a man steals something, he won't do it again, so this happening proved that a dog's nature is not the same as a man's. Its nature is just as I saw it.¹⁴

Because Akinari has already told us that the kami have the same nature as animals, we can apply the above conclusion about a dog's nature to the kami as well. Section 28 tells the story of an innocent girl possessed by an angry fox; it believes that she purposely poured dirty water on it while it was asleep, but in fact she did this quite unintentionally. A monk comes to exorcise the girl, and in the monk's words to the fox, Akinari explains the difference between human and animal (and kami) morals:

‘The place where you were sleeping was not your den. It's not as if the girl knew you were there and poured water on you deliberately. It's wrong to blame her for making a mistake out of ignorance. Mistakes people make out of ignorance are not really mistakes.’¹⁵

The priest sees right and wrong in the situation, but vainly tries to explain this distinction to the fox, who cannot distinguish between malicious and unintentional error. It can perceive only the result of the girl's action and take retaliation. A human would both perceive the result and conceive of the reason (here, an unintended accident) behind it. In essence, Akinari understood kami/animal spirits as simple beings, unhindered by the contemplation and conceptualization that humans employ in their attempt to understand the world.

In Tandai, 13 & 26, Akinari argues that Confucian scholars, specifically Nakai Riken, 1732-1817, were wrong in their contention that supernatural entities do not exist. Akinari had at one point been a member of the Kaitokudō, the Merchant Academy of Osaka, the same academy with which Riken was associated, but in his later years he became alienated from its Confucian philosophies. Riken and his contemporaries at the Kaitokudō focused on a rational epistemology, one that did not allow for supernatural events. But what were inadmissible superstitions to the Kaitokudō scholars were valid beliefs to Akinari.¹⁶

Akinari quotes Riken as saying, ‘There are no such things as ghosts,’ and ‘I question whether people can really be possessed by spirits.’¹⁷ To this Akinari replied that fox possession was indeed a reality: ‘There have been plenty of cases of fox and badger possession.’¹⁸ In 29, he tells of presumed cases of fox possession not only of his friend and Confucian scholar Hosoai Hansai, 1717-1803, but also of himself. He concludes that scholars such as Riken deny fox possession because they spend too much time confined within the walls of their academy, isolated from the real world.

NORINAGA

Along with the kokugaku scholar Motoori Norinaga, Akinari criticized Buddhism and Confucianism because of their normative structure. Both men also rejected any normative analysis of Shinto, spurning the Chinese concept of an ordered universe with clear distinctions between good and evil. But Akinari did not agree with Norinaga on all kokugaku issues. He had a distinct distaste for philosophical constructs, so not only did he dismiss Buddhism and Confucianism, but he also rejected some of the popular views at the time about Shinto and kokugaku. For example, whereas Norinaga regarded the two earliest Japanese national histories, Kojiki, 712, and Nihon Shoki, 720, as accurate accounts, Akinari believed that the former was contrived to glorify the imperial line, and that only Nihon Shoki was a valid historical text.¹⁹

Akinari is also critical of the kokugaku notion that the Kojiki creation myth was the only true creation myth. In Tamakushige, Norinaga held:

The True Way is one and the same, in every country and throughout heaven and earth. This Way, however, has been correctly transmitted only in our Imperial Land. Its transmission in all foreign countries was lost long ago in early antiquity … [t]he ways of foreign countries are no more the original Right Way than end-branches of a tree are the same as its root.²⁰

But Akinari saw Japan and its kami as merely one country and its myths among many. He explained:

Each [of the other myths] has a separate account of the creation of the universe for each country … and even if one transfers them to other countries they would not be accepted, being self-regarding accounts.²¹

Yet another point on which Akinari disagreed with Norinaga concerned the morals of the kami. As discussed above, the statements in Tandai imply that the kami operate on a perceptual level, judging events as they occur, rewarding the immediate good and punishing the immediate bad. For Akinari, the behavior of the kami was comprehensible, albeit quixotic. But Norinaga did not share this view. For him, the Japanese kami were august entities whose behavior could not be understood by human beings. He wrote, ‘It was an act of insolence for humans to impose their impertinent logic on the kami.’²²

Like Akinari, Norinaga felt that the kami were operating according to a set of principles, but unlike Akinari, he believed those principles to be so sophisticated that they were beyond human comprehension. According to Norinaga:

Given that the kami are not of the same sort as the Confucian sages or buddhas associated with foreign countries, we cannot judge them by using common worldly logic. It is difficult to inquire into the goodness or evil of a kami's nature from the standpoint of human nature. All things in heaven and earth come from that kami nature. And because what the kami do is different from what humans may think, there are bound to be many small differences between kami behavior and the reason recorded in these Chinese Confucian and Buddhist texts.²³

This accounted for irrational kami behavior and did not differ significantly from Akinari's views on the subject. Both men noted that the kami could not be equated with buddhas or Confucian sages, and that the kami used a rationale different from that employed by humans. Some years later, however, Norinaga expressed resignation about his hope of truly understanding the actions of the kami:

The kami differ from buddhas and the like. There are good kami and bad kami, and they perform their deeds in accordance with their nature. Although we may think that good people are necessarily good and bad people are necessarily bad, in many cases bad people are good and good people are bad. All of their actions are deeds of the kami, so it must be that the kami do not act simply according to what is good and bad. There is nothing for humans to do but fear the kami's wrath, and take comfort in prayer.²⁴

Norinaga recognized that the kami did not behave like humans, but he avoided any discussion aimed at understanding their motives. For him, it was enough to say that the kami were different and therefore incomprehensible. He placed the kami's morality on a superior, unreachable level because any closer examination would threaten their status in his writings.²⁵ He dismissed the entire question of humans imposing a normative structure on the kami, asserting, ‘We must understand that the kami are simply superior to the common man.’²⁶ In other words, humans should accept that fact and not examine kami behavior any further. Norinaga's hesitation to judge the kami led him eventually to hesitate to judge human behavior as well:

Even extremely good people become angry at times, and it is not necessarily bad for persons to lose their temper. Moreover, on rare occasions bad people will do a good deed. It seems difficult to set any certain rules about human behavior.²⁷

Akinari, on the other hand, believed that human behavior clearly followed the dictates of zen'akujasei. Humans conceived of ‘good and bad, right and wrong’, and regulated their behavior accordingly. Akinari did not see people as inherently good or bad by nature, but as beings who, unlike the kami, were able to conceive of both good and bad, and who had free will to choose one or the other.

Notes

1. See the ‘Ueda Akinari’ chapter in Shūichi Katō, A History of Japanese Literature, Kodansha International, 1983, 2, for specific citations of Akinari's social criticism. The annotated text of Tandai Shōshin Roku, 1809, is found in Nakamura Yukihiko, ed., Ueda Akinari Shū [uas], nkbt [Nihon Koten Bungaku Taikei] 56, Iwanami, 1959, pp. 251-381.

2. Among the translations of Tandai, pp. 8-15, below, sections 13, 26 & 30 are direct commentaries on the mistaken conceptions of Buddhists and Confucianists regarding the kami, while 27, 28, 29 & 31 are short parables illustrating the nature of both kami and other spirits, in accordance with the ideas expressed in 13, 26 & 30.

3. uas, p. 258; pp. 8-9, below.

4. This is a standard term used in Neo-Confucian writings, such as Motoori Norinaga's Genji Monogatari Tama no Ogushi, 1793-1796. Akinari uses it here with emphasis on the last two characters, which imply moral rights and wrongs, as opposed to the qualitative good and bad aspects of material objects.

5. Richard Wilhelm, tr., The I Ching or Book of Changes, Princeton U.P. 1967 edition, p. 301. The word here in Chinese is shen, which can be translated as ‘spirit’ or ‘spiritual’. Although the same character is used to write the Japanese word kami, it here clearly refers to a broader concept than Japanese deities. Akinari uses this line specifically to support his argument about kami. This may seem to be quoting I Ching slightly out of context, but given that he felt that deities in any country had the same nature as those in Japan, the use of I Ching here does not invalidate his argument.

6. uas, p. 272; pp. 12-13, below.

7. Blake Morgan Young, Ueda Akinari, University of British Columbia Press, 1982, p. 61.

8. uas, pp. 273-74; p. 14, below.

9. Moriyama Shigeo, Gen'yō no Bungaku: Ueda Akinari, San'ichi, 1982, p. 316.

10. This refers to poem n1134 in Senzai Wakashū, 1183, compiled by Fujiwara Shunzei:

              ōke naku
    ukiyo no tami ni
              ōu kama
    waga tatsu some ni
    sumizome no sode

              How unfitting
    for the people of this world
              to don
    darkly dyed robes
    here for the first time.

    The poem refers to leading all living beings, dressed in dyed robes, along the Buddhist path. The term ukiyo no tami refers to lay people who for the first time are participating in this religious practice.

11. Here Akinari uses the Buddhist term shōjō, the ‘lesser vehicle’, or Hinayana Buddhism, to indicate that the view expressed is overly simple.

12. uas, p. 272; p. 12, below.

13. Tenjin is the name given to Sugawara Michizane, 845-903, a scholar and court figure in the early Heian period. After his death in exile, a series of natural disasters were attributed to his angry spirit. A major shrine in the capital was dedicated to him, and he is posthumously referred to as the kami Tenjin. Since the Heian period, the kami Hachiman has been identified as the deified spirit of Emperor Ōjin, r. 270-310.

14. uas, p. 269; p. 5, below.

15. uas, p. 270; p. 11, below.

16. For the Kaitokudō, see Tetsuo Najita, Visions of Virtue in Tokugawa Japan: The Kaitokudō, Merchant Academy of Osaka, University of Chicago Press, 1987.

17. uas, pp. 258 & 268; p. 8, below.

18. uas, p. 258; p. 8, below.

19. In Tandai, 30, Akinari mentions the importance of Nihon Shoki, emphasizing that it did not embellish facts in order to legitimize the imperial reign. He also expressed his distrust of Kojiki in Yasumigoto, 1792. uas, n. 30, pp. 399-400.

20. Ryusaku Tsunoda et al., ed., Sources of Japanese Tradition, Columbia U.P., 1958, pp. 520-21.

21. As quoted in Katō, p. 193.

22. Hino Tatsuo, Norinaga to Akinari, Chikuma, 1984, p. 175.

23. Hino Tatsuo, ed., Motoori Norinaga Shū, Shinchōsha, 1983, pp. 462-63.

24. Quoted in Hino, Norinaga to Akinari, p. 175. It is interesting to note that Norinaga implied that human actions were at least sometimes controlled by kami. It is not clear whether he meant that humans were occasionally possessed by kami or whether kami could actually be humans simultaneously.

25. For example, if the kami were not superior to humans, how would it be possible to justify the importance accorded them in the creation of Japan? Kokugaku was founded on the concept that Japan was central in the world; any belittling of the kami threatened to weaken the nationalist arguments of the kokugaku scholars.

26. From Norinaga's Suzunoya Tōmon Roku, ‘A Compilation of Norinaga's Answers’, published posthumously by his students in 1835. In Zōho Motoori Norinaga Zenshū, Yoshikawa, 1928, 6, p. 115.

27. Suzunoya Tōmon Roku, in Zōho Motoori Norinaga Zenshū, p. 115. For a detailed discussion of Norinaga's views on Shinto, see Maruyama Masao, Studies in the Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan, Princeton U.P., 1974.