Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 10, 2025
The peculiarity of Japan and the entire Orient is that the social order that fostered it lasted so long, before forces arose to modify it. In the Orient the principle of communalism gained such headway as effectually to prevent the introduction of this new principle.
Communalism and individualism are the two terms used throughout this work to describe two contrasted types of social order.
As soon as the two principles became clearly contrasted in thought, therefore, because of his actual experience, man could conceive of individualism only as the antithesis to communalism; it was felt that the two were mutually destructive. It inevitably followed that communalism as a principle was accepted and individualism condemned.
Those who from youth were in the hereditary line of rule, sons of Shoguns, daimyos, and samurai, were forced by the very communalism of the social order to an exceptional personal development. They shot far ahead of the common man. Feudalism is favorable to the development of personality in the favored few, while it represses that of the masses.
The ideals regarding woman then were not unique; they were part of the social order, and were determined by the principle of "communalism" unregulated by the principle of "individualism." Ideals respecting man and woman were equally affected. So long as man is not valued as a human being, but solely according to his accidental position in society, woman must be regarded in the same way.
They fail not only to take in all the facts, but they fail to explain even the facts they take in. Such a contrast of the East and the West can be stated only in the terms of communalism and individualism. The families and tribes of which it is composed need to become consolidated in order to survive in the struggle for existence with surrounding families, tribes, and nations.
In this sense, then, the influence of Buddhism and the condition of the Orient may be called "impersonal," but it is the impersonality of a defective religious psychology, and of communalism in the social order. Whether it is right to call this feature of Japan "impersonality," I leave with the reader to judge.
This religion clearly attains and maintains the apparently impossible combination of individualism and communalism by the nature of its conception of the method of individual salvation. Its communalism is guaranteed by, because it rests on, its individualism.
The preceding statement, however, is not equivalent to saying that when communalism and individualism arose in human consciousness they were both accepted as equally important. The reverse seems always to have been the case. As soon as the two principles are distinguished in thought, the communal is at once ranked as the higher, and the individual principle is scorned if not actually rejected.
But for various reasons it did not so turn, but developed an intensely local, a tribal communalism, and pushed loyalty to the Emperor as a vital reality entirely into the background. This was one of the defects of feudal Confucianism which finally led to its own overthrow. Shinto, as we have seen, had long been pushed aside by Buddhism and was practically forgotten by the people.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking