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Few, if any, developments in the postwar era possess as great a significance as the rise of Japan. Normally, Japan’s rise is discussed in economic or political terms. Its religious significance, especially for a nation such as the United States whose cultural inheritance is so deeply rooted in biblical religion, is seldom discussed, much less understood. Japan is the world’s most successful nation with non-Christian roots. Even the Soviet Union has Christian roots. Marxist atheism is grounded in the very biblical tradition that Marxism negates. Moreover, the apparent conflict between the Western proponents of a biblically grounded attitude and a secular ethic takes on the appearance of a family quarrel when seen against the horizon of Japanese religion and culture. Far from being the antithesis of biblical religion, the secular spirit that pervades so much of Western life is its unintended consequence. Wherever the biblical faith in a unique, exclusive, extramundane God penetrated, it was utterly destructive of indigenous gods and traditions. Sooner or later this polemical, desacralizing faith was bound to give birth to a consciousness that would not rest until all the gods without exception were dethroned. Under the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that a civilization as determined to preserve its own integrity as Japan should marshal all its forces to resist both the believing and the secular manifestations of biblical religion.

The Japanese have created a thoroughly modern, highly technological, capitalist civilization whose religious foundations rest upon animistic and polytheistic traditions that adherents of the biblical religions normally assume to be discredited, primitive, and idolatrous — a remnant of a far earlier stage of religious “evolution.” From the Japanese perspective, such views are, of course, utterly without substance.

We can perhaps best understand the long-range significance of the religious aspects of the challenge of Japanese capitalism if we consider the role of religion in fostering the rise of capitalism in both Japan and the nations of the West. In the case of the West, no one attempting to understand the role of religion in the development of capitalism can ignore the work of the German sociologist Max Weber. As is well known, Weber set forth the thesis that the modern Western bourgeois-capitalist world is an unintended consequence of the rise of ascetic Protestantism in the aftermath of the Reformation.

Weber did not hold that religion by itself was the cause of modern capitalism. He regarded religion as a necessary but not sufficient factor in the origin of modern economic rationalism. Weber stressed that material conditions alone could not have produced the peculiar form of economic rationalism in which the impulse to accumulate was combined with disciplined restraints upon consumption. Nor could capitalism by itself have produced the kind of economic ethic needed for its development. Weber held that the economic ethic which fostered the development of capitalism was an unintended consequence of the work of the great reformers, especially John Calvin, and their followers.

Predestination and Power

According to Weber, Calvin’s doctrine of double predestination was of crucial importance for the development of modern capitalism. By insisting that the issue of personal salvation had been settled at the very first moment of creation, Calvinism had the effect of radically devaluing the religious significance of all earthly institutions, including the Church. The believer was thrust back upon himself with no assurance of where he stood before an awesome, inscrutable, and utterly sovereign God. The believer’s situation was further aggravated by the fact that there was no longer any credible mediating agency authorized to prescribe the conditions under which an individual, aided by God’s grace, might merit salvation. Concerning the impact of predestination, Weber observes that the doctrine produced “a feeling of unprecedented inner loneliness of the single individual.”

Under the circumstances, it was inevitable that the believer seek for some hint of where he or she stood in the divine order. According to Weber, at this point economic activity took on a new meaning for the believing Protestant. Service in one’s worldly calling, even if it involved deriving profit from money itself, soon came to be regarded as offering the believer a sign of where he or she stood before the Creator. A believer who had prospered in his calling could reasonably assume that the God who had predestined all things from the beginning had been the ultimate cause of his or her well-being. The sober, methodical accumulation of wealth took on a religious meaning it had never before possessed. Thus, methodical work within the profane world became the path to overcoming anxiety concerning one’s ultimate destiny that prayer, ritual, and mystical contemplation had been in other traditions.

The radical devaluation of the normal religious media of redemption by ascetic Protestantism was part of a process identified by Weber as the “disenchantment of the world.” According to Weber, the roots of this disenchantment — which was indispensable to the development of the distinctive rationalism of the modern world — were to be found in the monotheistic exclusivism of biblical Judaism. By affirming a unique, supramundane, creator God, biblical Judaism denied any inherent sacrality to the natural world or to the political order. Of particular interest with regard to Japan is the fact that biblical religion was especially vehement in its rejection of the institution of divine kingship. The Bible’s radical desacralization of both the natural and the political order was an enormously significant step toward the rational mastery of the world.

Nevertheless, before the rationalizing activities of the modern era — the creation of an impersonal market economy, scientific investigation, and bureaucratic organization — could become culturally predominant, these activities had to be given a religiously legitimated, positive valence. Weber argued that this only became possible after ascetic Protestantism had redefined worldly activity, including the taking of interest, as a way of serving God. Only the combination of rationalization and Protestantism’s interpretation of worldly activity as a sacred calling could have provided the “take-off” energies that made capitalism possible in the West.

The development toward a purely secular, rationalized society can thus be seen as an unintended sociological consequence of biblical Judaism’s “disenchantment of the world.” The full force of biblical “disenchantment” was felt only after Protestantism elevated the authority of the Bible over that of the Church.

Divine Authority and Filial Piety

From a social-psychological perspective, Protestantism’s rejection of the authority of the church can be seen as a revolt of the sons against the fathers. A similar revolt was indispensable for the successful displacement of traditional society by modern civilization. According to sociologist Robert Bellah, biblical religion provided the legitimation that made these revolts ethically and psychologically acceptable.

Bellah’s argument takes as its starting point a comparison of the father-son symbolism in Christianity and Confucianism. Although the father-son symbolism plays a decisive role in Christianity, the natural family has little or no religious significance in biblical religion. By contrast, the father-son symbolism is inapplicable to the Ultimate in Confucianism, whereas the natural family has overwhelming religious significance.

Contrary to both popular and Freudian belief, the biblical God was not originally a father-god but the ultimate Suzerain of a political association. The Bible depicts God’s relationship with Israel not as a natural family but as a political treaty — a covenant. In such a pact, the superior party stipulates the conditions under which he will protect the inferior party as well as the penalties incurred for lack of fidelity to the terms of the treaty.

Isaiah ben-Dasan, a perceptive Japanese writer who took an Israeli pseudonym, has also argued that the divine-human relation in biblical religion could not be understood through the analogy of the relation between a natural parent and child. He argued that the relation was that “between adopted child and adoptive parent.” By thus depicting the divine-human relationship, biblical religion introduced an element of insecurity and anxiety into Western religious life. Unlike the unconditional relationship between a natural parent and child, that between an adoptive parent and child is likely to be conditional upon the fulfillment of contractual obligations.

As ben-Dasan reminds us, adoption is a parent-child relationship established by contract. This is in fact how the Bible depicts God’s relationship with Israel. The conditional character of the relationship is repeatedly stated. By contrast, ben-Dasan points out that the Japanese find the biblical idea of God as an adoptive parent distasteful. They regard their relationship with their deities as one of blood, like that of mother and child, as in the tradition of the descent of the emperor from the sun goddess, Amaterasu-omikami.

In biblical traditions, religion and the family are represented by a common set of symbols, yet they are institutionally differentiated. While filial piety is a supreme virtue in Confucianism, both Christianity and Judaism tend to devalue filial piety when it conflicts with the imperatives of religion. Before the Reformation, only the celibate clergy and monastic orders were in theory expected to hearken to this injunction in its full severity. The Reformation radicalized and universalized the injunction by its doctrine of the priesthood of all believers. Without realizing it, the Reformers had unleashed the full revolutionary force of biblical religion’s subordination of the natural sphere — the nuclear family and the extended family we know as the nation — to a supramundane principal.

In general, traditional societies can be understood as more or less autonomous, religiously legitimated, extended kinship groups in which far greater emphasis is accorded to collective than to individual interests. As we shall see, in spite of its modernization, Japan remains such a society. An enormous psychic effort is required to reject traditional society for the individualistic, depersonalized professionalism of the modern capitalist West. Weber believed that only a religiously legitimated redefinition of the sacred could have fostered the transformation. The Reformation’s assertion that all things human are to be subordinated to the sovereign Creator God gave Protestants the moral and emotional leverage to turn away from old ways and begin anew — not once but continually.

By contrast, filial piety is at the heart of the Confucian ethic. Unlike biblical religion, the Confucian system has no point of leverage by means of which disobedience to parents could be justified. Without willingness to breach the ethic of filial piety, as was done in Western religion, there does not seem to have been any way in which the revolutionary new beginnings necessary for modernization could have been initiated within a Confucian civilization.

Nevertheless, not only has East Asia modernized and adopted capitalism, but it has done so with far greater success than Africa, the Middle East, or Latin America. Hence, the question arises whether Weber’s Protestant-ethic hypothesis has been disproven. In reality, Weber did not hold that the non-Western nations were incapable of modernization or capitalist development. He did, however, believe that the process could only have been initiated in the Protestant West.

A Tradition is Challenged

Perhaps the most fundamental insight offered by Weber is that, in addition to appropriate material conditions, traditional societies can only be transformed into modern societies by a radical redefinition of the sacred. The case of Japan would appear to confirm this insight. Even before the appearance of Commodore Matthew Perry and his “Black Ships” in 1853, word of China’s humiliation in 1842 at the hands of Great Britain had reached Japan. Shortly after China’s defeat, a questionnaire was addressed by an official of the shogunate to one of the Hollanders living in Nagasaki. The European was asked why the Tartars had lost. The Hollander replied: “Bravery alone is not sufficient, the art of war demands something more. No outlandish power can compete with a European one, as can be seen by the great realm of China which has been conquered by only four thousand men.”

When China’s humiliation was followed by the forcible opening of Japan by Commodore Perry in 1853 and the unequal commercial treaties forced upon Japan between 1858 and 1866, Japan had the choice of either radically restructuring her society or suffering defeat and humiliation by the predatory Western powers. Japan was threatened economically as well as militarily. With tariffs on goods imported to Japan set by foreigners and with Japan’s handicraft industries incapable of competing with Western factories, Japan soon found herself flooded with manufactured foreign goods that ruined much of her domestic handicraft industry at a time when her currency was rapidly depreciating and high inflation was dangerously distorting her domestic economy.

As we know, the foreign threat was met speedily and successfully by perhaps the most radical restructuring of any society the world has ever known. One of the most remarkable aspects of Japan’s modernization is that it was carried out with relatively little bloodshed. The samurai elite responsible for the Meiji Restoration of 1868 were genuine revolutionaries who had largely emerged from a group of dissidents from the lower strata of their class. Crucial to the success of their revolution was the transformation wrought in the imperial office, whose sacred charismatic character is deeply rooted in Japan’s earliest history. Just as religion had played a crucial role in the modernization of the West, so too a very different kind of religion — one that rested upon the archaic institution of divine kingship — played an equally important role in Japan’s modernization.

Reestablishment of the Emperor’s Authority

The final step in bringing the shogunate to an end was taken with the Meiji Restoration and the proclamation of the sacred character of the imperial office. The first article of the constitution of 1889 reads: “The Empire of Japan shall be reigned over and governed by a line of Emperors unbroken for ages eternal.” The third article reads: “The Emperor is sacred and inviolable.”

Perhaps the most important interpreter of the Meiji era was Prince Ito, who was largely responsible for drafting the written constitution. His Commentaries on the Constitution appeared in 1889. In the Meiji period the emperor lost the ability to speak independently of his counselors — he spoke, if at all, through the oligarchs who governed in his name. No longer could dissidents claim to speak on his behalf in opposing the policies of government. Power was exercised in his name while the ceremonial aspects of the imperial institution were exalted.

In spite of the loss of an active political role, the imperial institution gained overwhelming new importance. As a direct descendant of the sun goddess Amaterasu-omi-kami, the emperor symbolized national continuity, identity, and sovereignty at a time when foreigners threatened these values more profoundly than at any other time in Japan’s history. The Meiji oligarchs were thus able to utilize the imperial institution to “give unprecedented policies the color of great antiquity” and “to make it appear that what was in fact an administration by relatively lowly placed new men proceeded instead from the most highly pedigreed and unquestionably legitimate of all possible sources.”

When we compare the extreme social and political disorders that accompanied the transformation of traditional into modern capitalist societies in the Christian West with the relatively bloodless transformation that took place in non-Christian Japan, the Japanese achievement appears truly impressive. Unlike their modernizing counterparts in the English Revolution of the seventeenth century and the French Revolution of the late eighteenth century — who purchased the transformation of their respective societies with regicide and civil war — the modernizing elite of Japan succeeded in rationalizing the economy and society of their nation with a minimum of domestic violence or alienation of elite classes and institutions.

By utilizing a seemingly conservative doctrine — that of the emperor’s divinity — to legitimate a radical social and political revolution, the elite was able to create a strong central government, abolish all estate distinctions, eliminate warrior privileges, open military service to commoners, establish a system of universal public education, and facilitate the entry of members of the samurai class into the world of business and commerce. All this was done without the transformation of traditional elites and institutions into embittered enemies of the new social order as was so often the case in Europe.

Modernization and Tradition

That thoughtful Japanese leaders of the Meiji era were concerned lest too great a reliance on Western ways lead to the destruction of the value of filial piety is evident in the “Imperial Rescript: the Great Principles of Education, 1879,” written by Motoda Eifu, the Confucian lecturer to the emperor. The rescript states that the push toward Western ways had “a serious defect: it reduced benevolence, justice, loyalty, and filial piety to a secondary position.”

The Imperial Rescript on Education of 1890 gives expression to the determination of Japan’s leaders to preserve the historic continuity of Japanese civilization and its values at a time of the most revolutionary socioeconomic transformations in all of Japanese history. Whereas the West initiated modernization with a rejection of the highest religious and political authorities — not excluding regicide — and tended to equate modernization with secularization, Japan undertook modernization under the authority of its supreme religio-political authority and in defense of the values of its traditional civilization.

The religious traditions fostering modernization in Japan and the West can thus be seen as polar opposites. Where one is Jewish, Christian, or Muslim, it is impossible to worship the God of Abraham without rejecting the gods of one’s earliest ancestors. In order to worship the God of the Bible, somewhere in history a drastic uprooting process had to have taken place. The old pagan gods had to be forsworn and the ways of one’s oldest ancestors abandoned.

The contrast with earthbound, non-nomadic Japan — a nation that has never forsworn her most ancient gods nor thought of these spirits as separate from nature — could not be greater. Japan’s modernization was predicated upon unconditional reaffirmation of the sacred connection between the modern state and its most archaic roots. Unlike every nation of Judaeo-Christian inheritance, the Japanese alone remain in contact with their oldest sources of religious and cultural values.

Two Paths to Modernization

When in 1945 the victorious Americans used their political leverage to secure the emperor’s denial of his divinity, they were responding to the institution of divine kingship in a way that accorded with their age-old biblical tradition. MacArthur favored the return of Christian missionaries in large numbers to Japan and saw the occupation as an unparalleled opportunity for the conversion of the Japanese to Christianity. In spite of apparently favorable circumstances, the postwar missionaries who came to Japan quickly discovered that few, if any, free countries offer less promise to Christian missions than Japan. After more than a century of strenuous efforts, with one of the world’s largest concentrations of foreign missionaries — almost 5,200 in number — Japan remains more resistant to Christianity than any other developed country. Less than 1 percent of the population is Christian and the numbers are declining.

Apart from the fact that Christianity is rejected as “un-Japanese” by a population with a very strong sense of group identity and a strong distrust of anything foreign that cannot be readily assimilated, the Japanese find the biblical conceptions of an omnipotent, extramundane Creator who establishes a covenant with a non-Japanese group utterly lacking in credibility.

It is precisely that which a “disenchanting” religion rejects — namely, animism and polytheism — that Shinto affirms. Moreover, it should be noted that, in spite of its animism and polytheism, Shinto plays a significant role in contemporary Japanese business, science, and technology. Among the leading corporations that have Shinto shrines at their headquarters are the Sanwa Group, Toyota, the Mitsubishi group, Hitachi, Toshiba, and Matsushita. Groundbreaking ceremonies for new factories usually involve a Shinto ritual, as was the case at the groundbreaking ceremonies for Mazda’s new automobile factory in Michigan and the jointly owned Chrysler-Mitsubishi American factory.

Biblical religion and indigenous Japanese religious tradition have thus provided alternative paths to the modern capitalist world. Biblical religion alone, with its denigration of filial piety and its tradition of relativizing human institutions in the light of the ideal of service to a sovereign Creator God, possessed the psychic mechanism to begin the monumental breach with the past implied in modernization. One can say without exaggeration that the modern Western world is largely an unintended consequence of the cultural triumph of a biblical understanding of the nature of things.

Nevertheless, if Japan did not have a value system capable of initiating a fundamental breach with the past, it did have the religious and cultural resources necessary to defend its civilization against the West — and it has done that with astonishing success. Japanese modernization was essentially a defensive strategy: first, to secure Japan against Western military aggression; second, to defend Japan against Western economic aggression; and ultimately, to defend Japanese civilization against the destruction of its historic values that would most assuredly have ensued if Japan as a nation had been converted to any form of biblical religion.

The majority of Japanese have interpreted their postwar economic and technological achievements as confirming the superiority of their civilization over that of their trading partners and competitors. If ever the Japanese were amenable to conversion to a biblical religion, that time has passed. In a dialogue between Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone and Professor Takeshi Umehara, the prime minister offered the following comment on Japanese religion:

The Japanese tend toward polytheism rather than monotheism. We believe in many gods and consider ourselves part of nature’s unending cycle. There is broad and general acceptance of the idea that a man’s fate is inseparable from that of every animal, tree, and blade of grass. Japan’s ancestor worship is thus quite different from Christianity’s contract between man and his monotheistic god. In the process of honoring our forefathers, we create the harmony which is such an integral part of our life-style.

Unlike most allegedly primitive indigenous religions, Japanese religion has demonstrated its power to inspire a capitalist civilization capable of competing successfully with the West in almost every significant sphere of human activity. Seldom, if ever, has the monotheistic exclusivism of biblical religion been challenged as successfully as it has by modern Japan.

It should be obvious that this writer has a very profound respect for the achievements of Japanese civilization, especially in the Meiji and post-World War II periods. Nevertheless, he feels constrained to conclude by raising an issue that may prove to be of considerable importance in the years ahead. Those who fault biblical religion for its exclusivism tend to overlook one of its principal strengths, namely, its ability to unite men and women hitherto strangers to each other in a new community of worship and moral obligation. By contrast, while Japan has been most successful in defending the integrity, continuity, and organic character of its civilization, its indigenous traditions offer little basis for a wider base of community than that which rests on kinship and common descent.

In view of the overwhelming international importance of Japan, one must ask whether she can any longer ignore the problem of finding a more universal basis for community than offered by her indigenous traditions. Whatever shortcomings can be discerned in biblical religion, it has repeatedly demonstrated its capacity to enlarge humanity’s sense of community. The question of whether Japan has the indigenous spiritual resources to enlarge her sense of community may be the most important confronting her in the coming Pacific era.