The industrialization of the newly decolonized countries after World War II invited American social scientists to revisit the problem of modernity and prompted a powerful debate over the universality of liberal thought. Nineteenth-century social theorists had been preoccupied with the social changes that accompanied industrialization: the breakdown of feudal obligations and protections and the shift towards an economy organized around anonymous exchange for the purpose of individual gain. How would modernizing societies that had shed their traditional social structures impose new, secular forms of meaning and order? And how would the liberal vision of social relationships as contracts rooted in self-interest inform ideals of a greater social good?
After the close of the war, modernization theory in the United States promoted a link between economic development and social development, equating material abundance and advanced capitalism with liberal democracy and human fulfillment (Cumings Reference Cumings1999; Dower Reference Dower and Dower1975, 48–50; Escobar Reference Escobar1995, 28; Gilman Reference Gilman2003). As the only allied power to escape major devastation at home during the war, the United States was at the center of the effort to spread industrialization, urbanization, and material prosperity around the world. It was a particular mix of idealism, optimism, and arrogance that led American statesmen and social scientists to contemplate the transformation of the “third world”—and to propose what such a transformation might look like: the dissolution of “old institutions” and traditional bonds of kinship, and the instillation instead of liberal democratic institutions (Escobar Reference Escobar1995, 3).
Japan was a highly visible laboratory for this process. It was the first non-Western nation to achieve considerable industrialization during the nineteenth century, ultimately defeating a major Western power (Russia) in 1905. Under the American occupation of Japan from 1945 to 1952, the transformation of Japan was viewed as a social experiment that, if successful, would reveal the universality of the principles of values of democratization and the principles of economic liberalism. In the decades that followed, there was a powerful imperative to regard Japan as traveling down a shared path, and to see in Japan's past some equivalence to Western antecedents to modernization.
It was in this spirit that American sociologist Robert Bellah made his early contribution to Japan studies, Tokugawa Religion: The Cultural Roots of Modern Japan (Bellah [1957] Reference Bellah1985). Under the influence of Talcott Parsons at Harvard, Bellah sought to find common ground with Max Weber's view of the European and American transition to capitalism, showcased in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Weber [1905] Reference Weber and Parsons1958). For Weber, the central motif of modernization had been “economic rationalization”: productivity, efficiency, planning, and gradual accumulation. Within early modern Japan of the 1700s and 1800s, Bellah claimed to have located a “functional analogue” to Weber's “Protestant ethic,” a parallel motivation to industrial productivity, rooted in the values of neo-Confucianism and Buddhism, and in the interpretation of Shintō that helped usher in the Meiji Restoration after 1868 (Bellah [1957] Reference Bellah1985, 2, 14–15). The book applied Weber (and more specifically Parsons) quite literally to the context of early modern Japan. In some ways, the argument was rather forced—an example of modernization theory reaching to impose a Western telos as if it were universal.Footnote 1
But Bellah was also doing something different. In seeking the roots of Japan's modernity in Tokugawa society, he did not focus on the more recognizably progressive aspects of urbanization and the emergence of the money economy. Instead he saw in traditional institutions themselves the foundations for Japan's modern industrialism. According to Bellah, it was the feudal values of the samurai (loyalty, hierarchy, and self-sacrifice) that undergirded Japan's modernity, not the economic rationalism of the merchants. While the profit motive thrived in certain sectors in Tokugawa Japan, according to Bellah, money-making was closely aligned with social goals and political service.
In this essay, I am concerned with the theoretical possibilities that Japan's place in modernization theory afforded, and the limits of these possibilities. The attempt to incorporate Asia into a universal theory of modernity in the 1950s and 1960s created great potential for ethnocentrism; however, it also created the possibility for the expansion of modern possibilities. In the immediate postwar conjuncture (as well as in the decades to come), Japan offered American intellectuals a terrain in which to explore a model of modernity that transcended liberal views of the separation of state and social values, and questioned the inevitability of the state as a neutral, agnostic container for the play of individual interests. Since then, “Asian values” have made an appearance as a counter-alternative to liberal democracy, though often as an “empty box,” divorced from historical and social context (Paramore Reference Paramore2015). Here I trace the logic of an early project that looked towards the East and the subsequent transliteration of this social analysis into normative thought for Americans. I attempt to spell out both the value of the project and its hazards.
American theories of social modernization in the 1950s embraced Weber, Maine, and others, seeing in modernity a shift from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft relationships in which “diffuse” and “involuntary” obligations would give way to contractual and “functionally specific” obligations, less invested with emotion and duty, and giving freer play to individual interests. Traditional affiliations and attachments (to kin and village) would give way to mass, anonymous interest-based groups (such as political parties) (J. Hall Reference Hall and Jansen1965, 21–22, 27; Parsons and Shils Reference Parsons and Shils1951, 11–15). The Weberian narrative regarded the investment by the state in cultural values, moralism, or religious faith as “premodern” (Paramore Reference Paramore2015, 271–72).
However, modern Japanese statesmen regarded popular democracy and the focus on individual rights warily. Under Meiji constitutional imperialism, political rights were granted through national belonging, rather than as natural rights inhering in the individual. Through the rehabilitation of the emperor in the founding of the modern state, the government fashioned a notion of national community or “national body” (kokutai) that skillfully drew on deeply rooted folk ideologies of filial piety in the attempt to forge a kin-like identification with the nation, and to create shared morality and civic virtue (Duus and Scheiner Reference Duus, Scheiner and Duus1998; Gluck Reference Gluck1985, 120–21, 124–27; Siemes Reference Siemes1966, 5–7, 33–34).
What Japan appeared to offer was the possibility of a society in which Gemeinschaft ideals of social integrity and communal ties could form the foundations for a modern state. Despite Bellah's embrace of the Parsonian framework in Tokugawa Religion, Bellah departed in key ways from the notion of a single, inevitable endpoint to modernity. He did not look to Tokugawa society to find antecedents to American-style liberal democracy; nor did he see Japan's modern transformation in terms of imitation of the West. In fact, Bellah's Japan research seems closely tied to his attempt to work out what he perceived to be tensions and inadequacies within American liberal thought. For Bellah, Japan offered a kind of theoretical possibility: a modern, secular, capitalist society that infused liberal values with shared social purpose. He quested after a model of modernity in which economic exchange and political participation continued to be contained by a broader ethical purpose; he later described this as “capitalism with an ethical constraint” (Bergman Reference Bergman2006, 4).
In what follows, I trace links between Bellah's concerns in Tokugawa Religion and his subsequent writing on Japanese intellectual thought, in particular his engagement with interwar philosopher Watsuji Tetsurō, who himself was engaged in the endeavor to imagine a modern society bounded by emotional ties of kinship and nation. Watsuji's ideal of a natural, organic social unity, rooted in the power of cultural identity, offered both possibilities and problems for Bellah. Bellah's later notion of “civil religion,” resonant with Watsuji's agenda, held up the ideal of a deeply felt identification with culture and nation that itself could fill the role of “God,” providing a secular set of guiding moral ideals. These ideas were closely related to his later, substantial body of work calling attention to the role of religion and moral values in shaping American society and politics. His engagement with Japan's 1930s ethno-nationalist thought reveals the tensions and contradictions within this ambition to reconcile democracy with an over-arching moral framework.
Bellah never followed up his historical research by exploring postwar Japanese institutions. Instead, his highly theoretical analysis of early modern Japan informed his later call for renewed community in the United States in his co-authored book Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, published in 1985.Footnote 2Habits became a breakaway publication for the University of California Press at a time of growing social fragmentation.Footnote 3 Thus, Bellah's analysis of Japan was closely tied to his major sociological contributions and normative call for social change in America.
Bellah's contributions to American social thought were threaded through his analysis of Japan (or perhaps his analysis of Japan always reflected his broader concerns). But it was not until the decline of American hegemony after the Vietnam War and Japan's prodigious economic growth captured the attention of American observers that the possibility of “learning from Japan” crystallized in American social thought. Institutions such as the nuclear family and corporate welfare stepped in to supplement the state, shaping the landscape of middle-class culture and creating a high degree of social cohesion. During the decades of rapid economic growth in Japan, the spirit of Bellah's search for a modern alternative was carried on in the American study of specific institutions, such as the firm, that seemed to combine capitalism with the commitment to particular cultural values.
Japan's example of a modern and democratic nation, held together by powerful cultural ideologies and homogenizing institutions, represented a counter-example to the excesses of American liberalism and individualism during that time. And while many Japan scholars did not read Habits of the Heart, and certainly most sociologists of the United States did not read Tokugawa Religion, Bellah's works represented a productive but problematic thought experiment that began in the 1950s but crystallized in the context of Japan's economic success, in which critiques of American ideals were realized and popularized, and new social possibilities were imagined through the engagement with studies of Asia.
Modernity without Liberalism: Tokugawa Religion
In Tokugawa Religion, Bellah took Weber's notion of the Protestant ethic as his template in exploring the seeds of the social transformation to industrialism in Tokugawa-period Japan (1600–1868). Weber had argued that the “rationalization” of certain world religions had precipitated a psychological uneasiness among believers. In traditional religions, the divine had been diffuse and immediate, invoked through magic and prayer to mediate specific situational needs. In world religions that emerged beginning in the tenth and eleventh centuries, the divine came to be more abstract and more remote from the temporal world, and religious practice became increasingly codified. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber's case study of the emergence of the “capitalist spirit” in the United States and Western Europe, Weber had argued that the transformation to Protestantism removed a sense of proximity to God that had previously been provided by Catholicism (through the sacrament, the confession, and the mediation of the figure of Mary). The “rationalization” of religion incited Puritans to seek signs of their salvation in the fruits of “instrumental activity”: industriousness, efficiency, frugality, and gradual accumulation—what Weber ([1905] Reference Weber and Parsons1958, 153–54) referred to as “worldly asceticism.”
Bellah ([1957] Reference Bellah1985, 11) described the Tokugawa Period as an urbanizing era in which a money economy was established, free labor became more common, communications systems improved, and the merchant class grew prosperous. Parallel to Weber's narrative, Bellah suggested that while medieval Buddhism and Shintō had been concerned primarily with “magic” and rites for fertility, purity, flood prevention, and such, the influence of Confucianism in the Tokugawa Period, as well as the rise of Nichiren Buddhism and the Jōdo Shinshū sect in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, moved away from magic and toward a “moralistic” stage (64–69). Like Protestantism, the newer religious formations called on individuals to achieve salvation through participation in the world, and encouraged them to link religious devotion with industriousness, this-worldly action, and moral self-cultivation (74–75, 122–26). So far, the narrative is reminiscent of Weber's story about rationalization in New England as salvation achieved through everyday acts of industriousness.
However, Bellah argued that Confucianism was concerned with political order: the containment of economic activity within ideals of proper comportment, hierarchy, loyalty, and the fulfillment of duties. What made Tokugawa society distinctive, he suggested, was the highly moralistic and regulatory nature of the bakufu (shogunate) and local governments—the rootedness of public commercial activities in social obligations and political ties (111–12). In Bellah's words, in Japan, “political rationalization” took primacy over economic rationalization, meaning that the system of political power and social values closely governed the economy, even in the context of the growth of the money economy (3–7, 19–22).
Bellah described the bakufu as rather stodgy and conservative, concerned primarily with preserving political power even at the cost of constraining economic development (22–24, 27–30). Consumption was controlled through sumptuary laws, and money-lending was highly regulated. Competition was organized through the guild system, which promoted honesty and quality. Free labor was regulated, and labor was provided mostly through kin-based relationships, indentured service, or long-term apprenticeships that forged deep social commitments (40). Converting wealth into status was difficult. In short, capitalism and economic exchange were contained within highly moralized domains of human relationships and political values.
Furthermore, Tokugawa society was a system of deeply personal loyalties, Bellah wrote, in which favorable economic conditions were regarded as blessings (on) bestowed by the political authority (as flood control, famine relief, and land reclamation were carried out by local han governments and the shogunate) (21, 41–42). The repayment of such blessings and the compliance with political order (hōon) was then regarded as “religious action,” expressed through industriousness and devotion to a larger collective good—extending from family out to village head, domain lords, and the shogunate (39). Thus, for Bellah, early modern exchanges of money and labor were contained and defined by relations of political and moral authority (21). Weber's notion of a higher calling was manifested in Tokugawa Japan as fulfillment of social obligation, political embeddedness, and a “unity of economy and polity” (108).
It was central to Bellah's narrative that it was the samurai, not the merchants, who brought about modern change. It was the samurai ideal of bushidō (learning [gakumon], diligence, restraint, frugality, and loyalty and duty to one's lord) that Bellah analogized to Protestant “this-worldly” instrumental action (90–96). The merchants (the embodiment of the transformation to the money economy) behaved somewhat like the samurai, according to Bellah. Citing studies of the Omi merchants who were followers of the Jōdo Shinshū sect, Bellah argued that Buddhism and Pietism absorbed by the Tokugawa merchants brought commercial activity more closely in line with “religious action,” by emphasizing profit as a means of repaying obligations to benevolent superiors (123).Footnote 4
Bellah's study of Ishida Baigan, a farmer turned Kyoto merchant, was in many ways the theoretical climax of the book, though it has been disputed by historians. Baigan was a farmer turned Kyoto merchant, whose movement championed the role of the merchants at a time when their growing wealth was stigmatized. Bellah's analysis of Baigan's Shingaku Movement, a religious movement focusing on self-cultivation that flourished among the merchants, focused closely on one key point: that money-making could be accommodated within the social apparatus when it was a gesture of political loyalty and selflessness. In an extended quote from Baigan, Bellah highlighted Baigan's analogy of merchants to samurai bureaucrats as “loyal retainers” of the state:
The samurai is the retainer (shin) who has rank from old. The farmer is the retainer of the countryside. The merchant and artisan are retainers of the town. To assist the ruler, as retainers, is the Way of the retainer. The trade of the merchants assists the empire…. The profit of the merchant too is a stipend permitted by the empire. To call this, which is only the profit of your own trade, greedy and immoral is to hate the merchants and wish for their destruction. Why hate and despise only the merchants? … If one calls receiving a stipend from one's lord ‘greedy’ or ‘immoral,’ then from Confucius and Mencius on down there is not a man who is moral. (Baigan 1904, 149–50, quoted in Bellah [1957] Reference Bellah1985, 158)
The Shingaku movement was central to Bellah's theoretical agenda in the book. Shingaku “moral learning” was transmitted through merchant literatures to provide a “moral and spiritual justification to commercial activity” (Robertson Reference Robertson and Bernstein1991, 88–89; Sawada Reference Sawada1993, 18–20). For Bellah, Baigan became the case study for a modern society in which capitalism never broke free from social values or national goals and in fact reaffirmed them. It remained rooted in ethical values and the larger political goals represented by the state.
It should be no surprise that Tokugawa Religion drew the ire of later critics of modernization theory. In some ways, Bellah's argument was rather forced—an example of applying Weber's and Talcott Parsons's schema of modernization rather literally to the Asian context: neo-Confucianism contained capitalism through political alliances; and motivation to work came from a sense of duty to certain groups (Bellah [1957] Reference Bellah1985, 14–15), such as nested loyalties to family (“filial piety”), local domain or han, and fiefdom. The kokutai ideology of the “body politic” or “national essence” (literally “national body”) aligned politics with industrial growth, even in the absence of the complete rationalization of the economic sphere.
Moreover, Tokugawa Religion reads oddly as a historical work. It imposed a single pattern or framework onto all aspects of Tokugawa society, interpreting it selectively in a way that ran against the historical method of induction. In a critique of the totalizing and teleological nature of the project, historian James Ketelaar (Reference Ketelaar1995, 3) dismisses Tokugawa Religion as “an over-zealous reductionism applied to a complex and shifting world that resisted and finally escaped the too static paradigms deployed.” Clearly, Tokugawa history was more complex than Bellah's particular focus would allow (see also Harootunian Reference Harootunian1963, 330; Morris Reference Morris1957, 276; Yinger Reference Yinger1957, 50).
Whatever we may think of Bellah's historiography and historical method, my hope here is to step back from these debates in order to call attention to Bellah's programmatic agenda, which was to stretch Eurocentric narratives of modernity in order to accommodate Japan and ultimately to criticize these narratives.
All along, Bellah has been telling us that Japan underwent a great transformation that paralleled the West's, in which rationalization entailed disenchantment, the detachment of capitalist activity from primary collectivities, and a modern state rooted in legalism and administration. Yet we now see that Bellah's notion of “political rationalization” departed from Weber's formulation of economic rationalization in important ways, carving space for a substantially different notion of social modernization. For Weber, the “capitalist spirit” had originally been motivated by religious belief and spiritual need, but, once it had taken root, the utilitarian drive for productivity no longer needed its spiritual moorings (Weber [1905] Reference Weber and Parsons1958, 182).Footnote 5 Under the rationalization of mass labor markets, personal loyalties became “functional” and the influence of local kinship was destroyed (Weber [1905] Reference Weber and Parsons1958, 199; see also Weber Reference Weber, Gerth and Mills1946, 198–99). Weber, who had long emphasized the primacy of the German state, worried that the modern “administrative state” had lost its political goals and unity, becoming subservient to the capitalist economic order (Gerth and Mills [1946] Reference Gerth and Mills1958, 47; Giddens Reference Giddens1971, 180, 190–91).
In contrast, Bellah did not describe “rationalization” as the emergence of a distant and neutral administrative state or the detachment of capitalist activity from social groups and political objectives. In fact, according to Bellah, Japan did not undergo the most fundamental transformation associated with modern society: the separation of the sphere of economic exchange from the spheres of traditional social order. Indeed his entire analysis of Japan's modernization can be read as a refutation of the necessity of bourgeois ideology for sustaining capitalist development, including the logic of the self-regulating market, the anonymity of commercial and labor relations, the validation of self-interest as a noble ideal, and the formation of an “administrative state” that does not impose a vision of national morality.
One should pause to note the key ways in which Bellah departed from Weber's assumptions. Weber had famously declared that Confucian ritualism, moral governance, and “family piety” were antithetical to the formation of capitalism in China because they offered no transcendent ideal beyond state and society itself (Weber Reference Weber1951, 234–36, 247–49). The notion of “political rationalization” allowed Bellah to see as antecedents to modernization those same factors that Weber and contemporary theorists of modernization had described as preventing the achievement of economic rationalism, legalism, and disinterested capitalism in China (Farquhar and Hevia Reference Farquhar and Hevia1993, 493–94). As such, Japan became an important site to think about modern possibilities beyond the US model.
Bellah's claim that the Meiji transformation was not motivated by bourgeois values and did not constitute a rupture from traditional ethics is significant for his broader theoretical claims concerning Japan's modernity. He tells us that: (1) the 1868 restoration of the emperor was not carried out by merchants but by lower-class samurai who were not opposed to national principles (Bellah [1957] Reference Bellah1985, 25); (2) it was not a revolution (an overthrow of previous social ideals); and (3) it was not “an attempt on the part of an economically restricted middle class to overthrow ‘feudalism’ and win economic freedom” (184). Indeed, he asserts, “There was no ‘bourgeois’ ideology that directly attacked the ‘feudal’ ideology in the Tokugawa Period and the 1868 Restoration can in no sense be seen as a ‘bourgeois revolution’” (25).
Bellah's insistence that the Meiji restoration could not be considered a “revolution” betrays his theoretical battle at the time with materialism and structural Marxism, which regarded economic structure as determinative of social beliefs (185). Bellah's story is written against the Marxian notion that contradictions brought about by material realities (class conflict) would bring about social change through upheaval.Footnote 6 Bellah's debt to Weber is his insistence on the importance of belief, motivation, character, and the “underlying value system” in the shift towards modernity (Bellah Reference Bellah1970, 56–57). But Bellah is also deeply influenced by Durkheim. He finds in neo-Confucianism a system in which devotion to family, lord, and emperor merged into a devotion for the divine. Bellah's synthesis of Weber and Durkheim dislodges Weber's claim that Confucianism (role fulfillment, ceremony, self-cultivation through education, and “family piety”) was incompatible with capitalism, instead arguing that the Confucian relationship between economic well-being and morality provided the foundations for Japan's economic development.
Tokugawa Religion broke productive ground in the context of a postwar environment in which nonliberal, traditional, or feudal/authoritarian systems were viewed as “distortions” or “delays” within a universal process of modernization—a world in which it was widely held that there was only one way to be modern. Yet the limits of this thought experiment became clear over time as Bellah developed his idea of modernity into a normative ideal.
In 1958, the eminent Japanese political theorist Maruyama Masao published a major review of Bellah's Tokugawa Religion that called attention to the tensions within Bellah's ideal of modernity contained by normative ethics. Maruyama, a figure who came to represent the “conscience” of a postwar generation, together with the “modernist” (kindaishugi) thinkers of the 1950s and 1960s, had already singled out loyalty to family, village community, and nation—the same institutions that Bellah highlighted as foundations for Japanese industrialism—as obstacles to Japanese social modernization. While showing considerable interest in and admiration for the book, he raised strong reservations. Maruyama described Bellah's use of the language of “rationalization” (gōrika) and his notion of a “functional equivalent” to Protestantism as optimistic (Maruyama [1958] Reference Maruyama1985b, 284–85, 289). He criticized Bellah for ignoring the setbacks (satetsu) that accompanied developmental progress (yakushin) in Japan, and for focusing on the unique causes of Japan's modernity (genin no tokushūsei) while presuming the universality of the results (kekka no fuhensei) (288). In closing, Maruyama raised the question of how the reader could reconcile Bellah's notion of modernization and rationalization with the culmination of Meiji ideology in ultra-nationalism and the crisis of the war. Maruyama argued that religion had never completed its separation from magic in Japan (jujutsu kara no kaihō), and this continuing linkage was essential to Japan's modernity (284–85). It was impossible to separate traditionalism from rationalization, and analysis of modernization must show the interrelationship between the two (ryōsha no kōzō renkan) (287). In his analysis of early modern Japan, Bellah had failed to account for the paternalism (kafuchōteki keiki) and personalism that accompanied bureaucratization in Japan (287), and his analysis potentially fostered a misreading of the concepts of rationalization and modernization as they applied to Japan (289).Footnote 7
The review points to the complex agenda of Tokugawa Religion. Bellah had stretched Weber's notion of rationalization (as Maruyama pointed out), arguing for a scenario in which feudal and anti-liberal social relations could provide a framework for capitalism and social development. As I shall show, in his studies of Meiji and wartime national ideologies, Bellah found in Japanese citizens’ identification with the national polity and in emperor worship itself an example of a political commitment to a “higher purpose.” The belief that the Japanese people descended from the divine created a direct link between this-worldly politics and other-worldly religious commitments. It is this possibility of a modern state governed by a shared body of near-religious social ideals that preoccupied Bellah throughout his career. The ideal of the kokutai or “national body” that crystallized in Meiji Japan (and became a centerpiece of wartime propaganda) was a provocative thought experiment for Bellah in formulating his ideal of a “wider framework of purpose or belief” that could guide American community-building (Bellah [1957] Reference Bellah1985, 6). At the same time, Maruyama's question of when such belief blurred into more dangerous forms of authority and totalizing nationalism troubled Bellah, who admired Maruyama and was acquainted with him. And he returned to it throughout his subsequent work (Bellah Reference Bellah1970, Reference Bellah2003, Reference Bellah2007).
Nonetheless, drawing on his engagement with Japan, Bellah had carved a path for the consideration of alternative forms of modernity in a highly ethnocentric political environment. As I shall suggest in the next section, the notion of the emperor as an emblem of Japanese cultural values who was both “god” and “ancestor” carried great potential for Bellah's formulation of the ideal of civil religion: a notion of a higher authority that could sanction a set of this-worldly ethical principles to the people.
A Unity of Politics and Religion
In the mid-1960s, not long after Tokugawa Religion was published, Bellah turned his attention to the United States. He was concerned about diminished moral ideals in American society in an era in which the country was socially fragmented, mired in the Vietnam War, and coming to terms with lingering racial divides. Bellah's essays of this time express a “yearning” for the healing of the split between religion and politics. In The Broken Covenant ([1975] Reference Bellah1992), Bellah pointed to the historical importance of religious revivalism in establishing the American sense of political community, arguing that early American notions of citizenship and constitutionalism had always been undergirded by “feeling.” He wrote of contemporary America as having a depleted national consciousness and lacking a “transcendent ethical vision” (34, 142). In the context of the social fragmentation of the 1960s, Bellah craved “cultural authenticity” (vii) and the “legitimation of the state” through transcending values and ideals—a deep sense of patriotism that could be visceral and compelling (171). In the introduction to the second edition of The Broken Covenant, Bellah refers to his early interest in tribal societies like the Navajo and Pueblo, and also, later, in Japan, where he felt “a degree of cultural authenticity” that he found missing in the United States.
In fact, Bellah's first foray into American studies began with a 1961 Fulbright lecture during a year in Japan. He proposed to explain to his Japanese audience, “who had been so sternly lectured to by the Occupation on the critical importance of the separation of church and state,” that despite their liberal ideals, Americans, historically, too have invoked religion as a frame for enacting politics (Bellah Reference Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler and Tipton2001, 259).
The ideas were published in a controversial essay in Daedalus, “Civil Religion in America” (1967), in which Bellah used the term “civil religion” to convey a higher set of social principles referenced through the language of God. “Civil religion” was not associated with any particular religion or sect, but rather with “God in the civil world.” It was a God who offered a guiding moral framework, a “higher criterion” for right and wrong—a God concerned with “order, law, and right” (Bellah Reference Bellah1967, 7).
Central to this argument is a critique of classical liberal values, specifically the notion of democracy as centered on liberal contractualism and the freedom to pursue self-interest. Instead, Bellah points to the historical invocation of a “higher authority” in American politics, on which political decisions have been based. He spells out this critique:
In American political theory, sovereignty rests of course, with the people, but implicitly, and often explicitly, the ultimate sovereignty has been attributed to God…. What difference does it make that sovereignty belongs to God? Though the will of the people as expressed in majority vote is carefully institutionalized as the operative source of political authority, it is deprived of an ultimate significance. The will of the people is not itself the criterion of right and wrong. There is a higher criterion in terms of which this will can be judged; it is possible that the people may be wrong. (Bellah Reference Bellah1967, 4)
In Bellah's follow-up book, The Broken Covenant ([1975] Reference Bellah1992), written to clarify his ideas on civil religion, he worried that Americans had drifted too far towards the “radical theoretical individualism” of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Adam Smith (26). He described a deep conflict within the American liberal tradition, between “constitutional liberalism” (the negotiation of individual interests under the tent of a neutral, caretaker state) and “biblical republicanism,” a strand of liberalism in the tradition of Machiavelli, Montesquieu, and Tocqueville, in which the state itself constituted “an expression of the total way of life of the people, its economics, its customs, its religion” (171). While Bellah argued that both strands were integral to the American democratic tradition, he worried about the growing dominance of the “constitutional-liberal” tradition. He wrote:
The basic unclarity rests on whether we are a republic in recognizable relation to the republics of classical and modern times and dependent on that inner spirit of republican character and mores that makes for republican citizenship or whether we are a liberal constitutional regime governed through artificial contrivance and the balancing of conflicting interests. (Bellah [1975] Reference Bellah1992, 170–71)
What distinguished the liberalism of Hobbes from the classical and other republican traditions, according to Bellah, was “the absence of any notion of God or the Good” (26). Bellah described this liberal tradition as “the most wildly utopian idea in the history of political thought, namely, that a good society can result from the actions of citizens motivated by self-interest alone when those actions are organized through the proper mechanisms” (172).
In the search for a higher order, Japan represented an interesting comparison to the United States. American civil religion referred to an overarching, shared value system that guides the political process. In the United States, Bellah understood this sense of identity and shared purpose to come from a biblically derived narrative in which America saw itself as “the new world,” “the new Israel,” and a place on earth where “God's law will be enacted.”Footnote 8 In comparison, Bellah claimed that within Japan, the higher authority was defined by cultural identity itself. Nonetheless, there was a resonance between Bellah's notion of “cultural identity” in Japan (a secular entity with authoritative power) and American “civil religion,” an invocation of the divine meant to provide secular, this-worldly ethical guidance.
In his essays on Japanese intellectual history, also written in the mid-1960s (published collectively in Imagining Japan, 2003), Bellah argued that across historical moments, Japanese national identity demonstrated a pattern of loyalty to the “social nexus”—rather than to specified political principles or transcendent religious orthodoxies (Bellah Reference Bellah2003, 116). The pattern of loyalty to the social nexus was consolidated in Meiji-era modernization reforms, in which, in a “revolution from above,” the emperor was restored as both a political leader and a religious symbol, and furthermore as an emblem of the national culture. The constitution was installed as a “gift” from the emperor, whose sovereignty was sacred; the role of the parliament was diminished; the imperial government was installed to “represent” the will of the people; and the Japanese people were constructed as “subjects,” not “citizens.” Political authority was entwined with cultural identity and religious authority (115–17).Footnote 9
Bellah expressed a great deal of fascination with the notion that the Japanese polity itself carried divine qualities. For Bellah, the Meiji and prewar kokutai ideology, describing the “national body” of Japan, represented a higher order in which authority, shared purpose, and “ultimate value” (in Bellah's words) came not from God, nor from an external or universalizable set of principles or dogma, but rather from a body of shared social principles possessing authoritative, quasi-divine status (Bellah Reference Bellah2003, 114–16, 118). The Meiji emperor became both a divine figure and a political one, linking the people to the world of the kami, beginning with the bonds of filial piety that extended outwards towards the gods. The emperor is God but also “father”; the people are worshippers but also “children.” Closeness to the divine is expressed through political loyalty, or on (expressing gratitude and debt through loyalty). In his analysis of kokutai ideology as it developed in Meiji Japan, Bellah expressed interest in the parallel drawn between filial piety and loyalty to the emperor and the state:
[T]he high regard for the emperor when linked to this identification of loyalty and filial piety has some very interesting implications for the concept of the state. God, emperor, lord and father tend to be made into equivalents…. The emperor is “divine,” he is “lord” and he is “father” of the national family. The people are worshippers, retainers, and children. (Bellah Reference Bellah2003, 104–5)
In Bellah's interpretation of kokutai ideology, we see his indebtedness to Durkheim's notion of religion as an expression of social ideals. Bellah sees the divine figure of the emperor as an extension of this-worldly social ties that exemplified this Durkheimian notion in a very literal way (see Durkheim Reference Durkheim and Thompson1985, 121–22, 125–27). The emperor as divine authority represented a totem-like figure: a representation and extension of the social ties that unite the polity through kinship, descent, indebtedness, and loyalty. Emperor worship is filial piety writ large; in Bellah's words, “Loyalty is the ‘great filial piety’ and devotion to one's parents is the ‘small filial piety.’ … [Kokutai] is a concept of the state in which religious, political and familistic ideas are indissolubly merged” (Bellah Reference Bellah2003, 103–4).
I would like to note that it is not at all surprising that Bellah would have found in Japan a fruitful terrain for exploring the possibility of a modern state that imposed a near-religious sense of moral values onto secular regimes of governance and capitalism. The notions of kokutai as deployed by Meiji bureaucrats and scholars skillfully drew on the moral and emotional valences of family and filial piety (trust, love, and respect for one's parents) to specifically combat the effects of individualism and to promote a natural affinity between individual and national polity. This articulation of the polity as united around a basis of civic virtue and human relatedness treaded into moral and psychological terrain (Barshay Reference Barshay1992, 371–73; Duus and Scheiner Reference Duus, Scheiner and Duus1998; Gluck Reference Gluck1985, 120–21, 124–27; Hardacre Reference Hardacre1989; Koschmann Reference Koschmann1981–82, 610–12; Wakabayashi Reference Wakabayashi1986, 13–15).Footnote 10
Framers of the constitution hoped to imbue Japan's new modern state with the deeply felt meaning that they believed Christianity had provided to modern European nation-states. Itō Hirobumi, a key framer of the Meiji constitution, said in a speech opening the deliberations of the Privy Council on the constitutional draft: “In Europe, religion is the foundation of the state. The feeling and thought of the people is deeply penetrated by and rooted in religion. In our country however the religions represent no important force. What in our country can alone be the foundation is the Imperial House” (quoted in Siemes Reference Siemes1966, 37).
In Tokugawa Religion, Bellah paid particular attention to the work of Mito scholars, who returned to Confucian notions of social relations and moral practice as foundations for political order. They sought to promote a fundamentalist belief in the legitimacy of the imperial line and deftly joined Shintō mythical history of Japan as the Land of the Gods with Confucian ideals concerning the moral force of ritual. In his influential essays, Shinron (New theses, 1825), Mito scholar Aizawa Seichisai advanced the notion of saisei itchi, the “unity of religion [literally, ritual] and government”: the importance of spiritual governance of the people through the cultivation of loyalty through ritual, comportment, education, and individual morality. Koschmann has described saisei itchi as a “religio-political paradigm,” which sought to provide an “experiential basis” for the identification with the national essence (Koschmann Reference Koschmann1987, 62, 66–68, 70–74; see also Maxey Reference Maxey2014).Footnote 11 Aizawa sought to instill the same kind of psychological commitment to government that he believed had allowed Western, Christian nations to conquer other peoples through teachings, ritual, and small benevolent acts—in Aizawa's words, to “vanquish enemies without resorting to battle” (Wakabayashi Reference Wakabayashi1986, 9–10, 68–69; Aizawa 1825, 137, in Wakabayashi Reference Wakabayashi1986, 72).Footnote 12Saisei itchi and its renaissance in the early Meiji kokutai ideal of “organic community” must have offered a powerful paradigm for Bellah in his quest for a politics infused with higher meaning or “civil religion.” Recent discussions of Shintō's secular role in late nineteenth-century governance also shed light on the usefulness of kokutai thought for Bellah's agenda (Josephson Reference Josephson2012, 139–45, 211).Footnote 13
I have already shown that in employing the Weberian framework of rationalization to understand early modern Japan, Bellah was in fact already creating space for a substantially different understanding of what a modern society might look like. It is remarkable that Bellah, in the late 1950s and 1960s, designated the kokutai ideology as fruitful terrain for exploring an alternative modernity, even though he recognized the ethical dilemmas within this conception of the state and acknowledged the kokutai ideology as laying the foundations for fascist ideologies that bloomed in the prewar decades. These tensions in his thought were heightened in his later studies of Japanese identity, and in his project to formulate a communitarian critique of individualism in the context of the United States.
Bellah's Engagement with Watsuji Tetsurō: The Attempt to Contain Democracy with Culturalism
As discussed above, Bellah's work since the 1970s argued that constitutional democracy in America has historically been supplemented by emotional forms of moral commitment that liberal ideals of “freedom” could not capture. In his elaboration of the idea of civil religion, Bellah's studies of interwar Japanese intellectual thought are highly relevant. In his analyses of modern Japanese intellectual thought, Bellah (Reference Bellah2003, 114) highlighted “the strong feeling of personal identification that the Japanese feel with their culture” and “an absolute quality to that notion of culture that is associated with divine authority.”
Since the late nineteenth century, Japanese intellectuals and bureaucrats had engaged in their own reflective process on the social alienation and fragmentation associated with industrialism and capitalist modernity. “Culturalist” thinkers strove to position Japan as offering a unique solution to the problem of modernity by calling attention to the role of culture and community as a means to transcend the technologization of everyday life and the breakdown of shared values through urbanization and the marketplace. (Harootunian Reference Harootunian2000, 250–51, 256–58, 283–84, 286–91; Najita and Harootunian Reference Najita, Harootunian and Wakayabashi1998, 239–40).
In particular, I wish to call attention to Bellah's engagement with Tokyo University philosopher Watsuji Tetsurō (1889–1960), an architect of the kokutai ideology.Footnote 14 Watsuji's essays in the 1920s and 1930s represented an ambitious critique of Western liberalism and utilitarianism, and an attempt to integrate cultural specificity into Eurocentric notions of progress through both hermeneutical methods and the study of lived social spaces (Larrimore Reference Larrimore2004, 241, 245–46). By the 1920s, he had embarked on an exploration of the historical roots of Japanese ethics in Buddhism and ancient culture, in hopes of finding a “higher ideal” of modernity than Anglo-American individualism (Najita and Harootunian Reference Najita, Harootunian and Wakayabashi1998, 242–43).
Watsuji's ideas were deployed by the militarist government in the 1930s and 1940s, and his work was shunned by many liberal and modernist intellectuals after the war. He was a major contributor to Kokutai no hongi (Cardinal principles of the national entity of Japan), the government's widely circulated 1937 propagandist tract claiming a shared national identity rooted in familial devotion and the imperial line. Yet Bellah's essay on Watsuji, published in the Journal of Asian Studies in 1965, one of first major English-language commentaries to be published, stands out as one of the more appreciative appraisals of his work (Bellah Reference Bellah1965b; LaFleur Reference LaFleur, Seisaku and Carter1996).Footnote 15
Watsuji's resonance for Bellah can be better understood through recent scholarship that emphasizes Watsuji's cosmopolitanism and interest in democracy. Watsuji was a product of a second-generation Meiji milieu, influenced by Europe and the ideals of democracy, learning, cultural refinement (kyōyō), aestheticism, and self-cultivation (jinkaku kōjō) (Karube Reference Karube1995, 8, 11, 38–40; LaFleur Reference LaFleur and Rimer1990). Taishō period (1912–26) intellectuals were critical of the neo-Confucianism dogma offered by the first generation of Meiji neo-Confucian scholars—the writers and interpreters of the Imperial Rescript, who described loyalty and self-sacrifice to nation (chū) as an extension of loyalty to family (kō). Watsuji hoped to instead offer what Harootunian has described as a “deeper foundational layer” for Meiji articulations of the polity, rooted not in dogma or structures of loyalty, but in lived culture and custom, and in everyday thought and behavior that created a sense of belonging that was not enforced through dogma but rather welled forth from the ground up (Harootunian Reference Harootunian2000, 283; see also Najita and Harootunian Reference Najita, Harootunian and Wakayabashi1998, 238–52).Footnote 16
In the Journal of Asian Studies essay, Bellah pays close attention to Watsuji's attempt to wrestle with the problem of the Christian God as a transcendent expression of truth (particularly in Nihon no shindō [The way of the subject in Japan] and Rinrigaku [Ethics]). He highlights Watsuji's argument that what “relates men to their deepest and most basic absolute” is, in any society, the social collectivity (represented by the state) and not the transcendent icon of religion or God (Bellah Reference Bellah2003, 122).Footnote 17 In other words, national and cultural values themselves could form the equivalent of the Christian symbol of a transcendent God. Drawing on Rinrigaku, Bellah summarizes Watsuji:
The claim of the world religions that they relate men directly to the absolute is only a pretense. They actually develop human relational structures like the sangha and the church as substitutes for the state…. [T]here is no such thing as a universal religion or a religion that relates the individual to the absolute without any social context…. All religions are necessarily the religions of particular peoples and cannot be truly universal. (Bellah Reference Bellah2003, 122–23)
Watsuji interprets “the state” (kokka) in Rinrigaku as a dense moral-cultural sphere. In his telling, traditional societies worshipped their kings as gods. But the king-god was, in Watsuji's words, “thrust out from the people” (shūdan jishin kara oshidasarete kuru). It is because God represents the “totality of the people's culture” (minzoku no zentaisei) that he is recognized as holy. Watsuji describes a world in which political and religious power are deeply intertwined, and political legitimacy is gained through faith in shared symbols and beliefs (Watsuji [1937] Reference Watsuji1962, 607–8, also 609–11; see also Watsuji Reference Watsuji1962, 188–89).
Tadashi Karube (Reference Karube1995, 89) shows that it was Watsuji's discovery of the Japanese classics (the Kojiki and the Nihon shoki) that offered him a way to reconcile this cultural nationalism with enlightenment values of self-cultivation. He calls attention to Nihon kodai bunka (Ancient Japan), Watsuji's 1930s study of ancient Japanese culture and the unification of the Yamato kingdom, a text that also informed Bellah's 1965 essay. In the text, Watsuji explores the consolidation of the national polity and constructs a narrative for the emergence of the emperor as the embodiment and symbol of that shared national essence. Watsuji acknowledges that the Japanese were likely composed of multiple peoples and tribes (minzoku). What united the people of the Yamato and Yayoi periods, in his reading of the Kojiki and Nihon shoki, was the powerful charisma of the early rulers (for example, the princess king Himiko of the Yayoi period)—their supernatural (chōjinteki, shinpi teki na joō) abilities to mesmerize the people through magic (kidō) (Watsuji Reference Watsuji1939, 32–33).Footnote 18
Karube hones in on a theme of “hikari” or “light” that surfaces in Watsuji's work as Watsuji returns to the question of Japanese nationhood in the early 1930s. The notion of “light” in Watsuji's analysis refers to how ordinary people were seduced by the light of “culture,” to which they would have been exposed during ceremonial moments. For Watsuji, it is those moments in which people participate in ceremonial activities, the erection of a temple, the emperor's ascension to the throne, or the building of a great Buddha that create a sense of exaltation and intoxication in which individual consciousness as a national subject is awakened (kokumin no hitori to shite ishiki suru) (Karube Reference Karube1995, 72–73). The near-religious luster of national culture intensifies the compelling political power of the state.
In Nihon kodai bunka, Watsuji emphasizes that the unification of Japan resulted not from the totalitarian power of any one leader, but rather from the seductive powers of the leader as an expression of shared culture and the people's own sense of “spiritual excitement” (shinteki kofun) (Watsuji Reference Watsuji1939, 45–46, 73). Watsuji writes:
Even a leader who is close to God waits for the welling forth of the heart of the people. In our histories, we have underestimated the extent to which the gods (kami) are responding to this popular expression. The people's will is reflected in the leader; the leader does not impose it. This is the way that the will of the people, and the will of the gods, comes to be symbolized in the leader. (Soshite, kono kami no kokoro, sunawachi kokutai no kokoro ga, kunshu ni oite, shōchō sareru no de aru.) (45–46)
It is this alignment of voluntary participation and self-realization with political devotion and social unity that links with Bellah's call for a moral coherence compatible with liberalism. In The Broken Covenant, Bellah writes about the Second Great Awakening after 1800, when religion became closely tied to the national mandate of Manifest Destiny:
The increasingly elaborated techniques of the revivalists for reaching into the deepest level of unconscious motivation … were to be used not only as an aid to open him to the infusion of divine grace, but to make him a citizen…. Evangelical religion contributed to the growth of a national consciousness that cannot be understood wholly in terms of classic liberal theory. America was not simply a neutral legal state within which the individual could rationally pursue his self-interest…. [A]mong the majority population self-interest was intertwined with idealism in deep and complex ways. (Bellah [1975] Reference Bellah1992, 48–49)
One hears a close resonance in the two authors’ thought in Bellah's discussion of the role of the Great Awakenings and evangelicalism in shaping American democracy. Liberalism in the days of the Puritans, argued Bellah, had always been supplemented by a more emotional, moral attachment to the polity than the liberal ideal of individual choice and freedom could capture (Bellah [1975] Reference Bellah1992, 29–31). The Puritan covenant with God was never understood as merely contractual, but was inspired by the emotional experience of conversion and rebirth and its capacity to produce an “inner assent” to the ethical obligations of the polity (10–11, 19–21). In Watsuji's work, Bellah finds, in his words, a theory of the state as a “natural and self-actualizing form of social authority” that derives its authority from representing the shared national consciousness of the people (Bellah Reference Bellah2003, 123, 133, 136). For Watsuji, Bellah claimed, nationalism had to be “neither reactionary nor feudal” (128).
In a sense, Bellah's and Watsuji's endeavors were parallel. Watsuji endeavored to formulate a notion of totalizing and cohesive national community that could accommodate individual subjectivity and voluntary identification with the state. Bellah sought to imagine a liberal, secular politics that could be animated by a sense of oneness, social trust, national ideals, and overarching moral commitments. Watsuji's ideals of archaism and communal immersion must have been compelling counterweights to the lonely moral quest of the Protestant as Bellah imagined it. But when did such immersion in the polity cross into the terrain of a reified, dangerous nationalism—an assertion of “organic community” meant to naturalize belonging and render conflicting interests invisible (Barshay Reference Barshay1992; Ivy Reference Ivy and Tansman2009; Tansman Reference Tansman and Tansman2009)?
Watsuji's emphasis on “culture” rather than discourses of “blood” or racial superiority is important here. Doak (Reference Doak2007, 205–6) has argued that Watsuji's articulation of ethnicity (minzoku) “stemmed from the 1920s liberal tradition of seeing ethnicity as a cultural, rather than a racial community.” Doak's insight helps us understand why Watsuji's ideas might have been useable and compelling to Bellah.
But Bellah's interest in Japanese cultural nationalism reveals the complex tensions within his project of supplementing Tocquevillian ideals of grassroots community with overarching moral ideals. For Watsuji, loyalty to the collectivity among the Japanese was voluntary and natural—evidenced by the nature of their homes and communities and rooted in neither democratic rights nor coercive authority. He characterized the Japanese polity in terms of naturalized bonds, a “boundary-less” connection (hedatenaki aidagara) mediated by “trust” (shinrai) and “emotional intimacy” (shizen eki na jōai), as in the Japanese home with its sliding doors, where the partition between the two is maintained solely by “trust” (otagai no shinrai ni oite shikirareru nomi de atte) (Watsuji [1935] Reference Watsuji1962, 145–46, 147, 165). Watsuji located Japanese commitments to the social collectivity within everyday life, naturalizing and depoliticizing them.
In Rinrigaku, Watsuji's more philosophical reflection on human relationships and the polity, he depicted public spaces, or “publicness (kōkyōsei) significantly differently from early and mid-twentieth-century European notions of the “public sphere,” described as a space inhabited by mutually autonomous individuals, unsupervised by the state. Rather, Watsuji's ideal took the form of an expanded private sphere of shared assumptions—in Watsuji's words, a “thick” space (nōkō ni sonzai shite iru) that is defined by shared moral and cultural assumptions. In Watsuji's long discussion in Rinrigaku, what marks the boundary between “public” (kōteki) and “private” (shiteki) spaces is that moment in which secrets among an inside group are “revealed” to a broader sphere of members (monogoto no arawa ni naru), thus broadening the narrowly held beliefs to a larger group of people (Watsuji [1937] Reference Watsuji1962, 153, 155–57).Footnote 19 For Watsuji, the “public” was a densely particularistic, culturally demarcated space, and he was doubtful that a sense of social belonging could extend beyond the borders of the nation (157–59).
Bellah's 1965 Journal of Asian Studies essay addressed the problems of particularism and described wartime fascism in Japan as a “profoundly pathological” expression of it. He argued that kokutai ideology failed to transcend the goals of the nation, and hence failed to invoke a higher moral authority (Bellah Reference Bellah2003, 134–35, 137–38). But it is difficult to locate a moment in which Bellah offered a precise answer to Maruyama's 1958 question of when immersion in community crossed the line into cruder forms of nationalism, homogenization, or irresistible social suasion.Footnote 20
Bellah revisited Maruyama's critique of Tokugawa Religion numerous times (Bellah Reference Bellah1970, Reference Bellah2003, Reference Bellah2007). His concern for guiding moral values was resonant with Maruyama's concern with the capacity for “transcendence”—a critical regard of the everyday world to see beyond “what is” in order to establish “what ought to be” (Bellah Reference Bellah and Jansen1965a, 375). Yet there were important differences. In an essay on Maruyama Masao's “Protestant imagination,” Andrew Barshay (Reference Barshay2006, 5) argues that both Maruyama and Bellah were drawn to the ideal of the “protestant” who answers to a higher moral order. But Maruyama's reformation was fundamentally a secular one, argues Barshay—the formation of a conscience that studiously avoided the practice of worship or devotion. Fearful of individual belief and the possibility of self-deception, betrayal, and “being dragged along” by totalizing systems of thought, Maruyama was, in Barshay's words, “a Protestant without becoming a Christian,” who, perhaps painfully, held himself at a distance from powerful social beliefs (Barshay Reference Barshay2006, 4–5, 7).
In contrast, Bellah's notion of a higher order, while defined in secular terms, retained strong ties to “belief.” Particularism (the ideals of family, community, ritual, social solidarity, and shared beliefs) remained central to Bellah's conception of “transcendence.”Footnote 21
In the introduction to the 1985 paperback edition of Tokugawa Religion, widely taken to be an apologia for the excesses of modernization theory, Bellah addressed Maruyama's critique and acknowledged the bullishness of Parsons's representation of modernity as prosperity, progress, and democracy (Bellah [1957] Reference Bellah1985, xiv). But the essay feels more like a reassertion of Bellah's call for a guiding moral frame, rather than a concession to Maruyama's concern for individual autonomy. Reflecting on Japan's high-growth era, Bellah worried about the decline of the family shrine and the break-up of old neighborhoods (xii, xx). Maruyama had worried about the tyranny of the zaibatsu and Japanese bureaucracy.
Thus, despite modernization theory's Eurocentric assumptions, Bellah located a conception of an alternative modernity in Japanese culturalism and kokutai ideology. He articulated this conception more fully as a critique of late twentieth-century capitalism in Habits of the Heart. While Japan is no longer an object of analysis in Habits of the Heart, we now see how Bellah's reading of kokutai ideology was entwined with his critique of liberal-individualism and his call for renewed community in America.
Community and Democracy in Habits of the Heart
In 1985, Bellah, together with four co-authors, published Habits of the Heart, a call for the return to community and shared morality among the American middle class. Through interviews and verbatim quotations, Bellah and his colleagues chronicled their observations of “individualism” in American middle-class lives, and how that individualism, in their words, “may have grown cancerous” (Bellah et al. Reference Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler and Tipton.1985, vii).
Drawing on interviews and verbatim quotations, Bellah et al. argued that in the context of industrialism, feelings of relationality and communalism had increasingly retreated into the private sphere, while the goal of individual achievement and profit motive came to dominate the occupational sphere of industry. Returning to Alexis de Tocqueville's ideal of American identity as shaped by community participation, the authors argue that a “split” had occurred in which the public world no longer linked the individual to a broader community of shared interest (66, 68).
In an argument evocative of Bellah's other works, Bellah and his co-authors argue for the need for a “wider framework … of common values beyond merely self-fulfillment” that contemporary Americans can draw on in making moral decisions (16). They find among their interviewees a preoccupation with individual interests or goals that cannot be articulated or defended with respect to broader, commonly shared interests or values. They sum up this mentality: “What is good is what one finds rewarding. If one's preferences change, so does the nature of the good. Even the deepest ethical virtues are justified as matters of personal preference” (6). “Fairness,” not “sacrifice,” is the governing principle of even intimate social relationships, Bellah et al. write. “If other people don't meet your needs, you have to be willing to walk out, since in the end that may well be the only way to protect your interests” (16). For Bellah et al., the therapeutic process offered a window into the mentality of contemporary Americans. Exploration of the self is no longer conceptualized in terms of broader moral imperatives (47).
For example, they quote the therapist Margaret Oldham:
I do think it's important for you to take responsibility for yourself, I mean, nobody else is going to really do it. I mean people do take care of each other, people help each other, you know, when somebody's sick, and that's wonderful. In the end, you're alone and you really have to answer to yourself … and if you don't get the job you want, or, you know, meet the person you want, it's at least in part your responsibility. I mean your knight in shining armor is not going to meet you on the street and leave messages all over the world trying to find you. It's not going to happen. (15)
For Bellah et al., Oldham's vision of individual fulfillment as self-knowledge and self-assertion is hollow; it reflects an impoverished notion of shared purpose and offers no theory for how one's fulfillment is connected to that of others. Oldham's insistence that “one must be clear about one's needs” implies that “there is no wider framework within which to justify common values” (16).Footnote 22
Bellah was engaging with communitarian thought at that time, in particular Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue, a critique of post-enlightenment moral philosophy arguing that moral philosophy after Kant had lost its sense of “rational justification” and “objective moral standards” for human behavior (MacIntyre [1981] Reference MacIntyre1984, 19, 50).Footnote 23 More broadly, communitarian thinkers were responding to the work of philosopher John Rawls in the 1950s, who had attempted to move beyond utilitarian ideals of the good society (the greatest good for the greatest number) by arguing that in an ideal world, individuals would come together to agree upon principles of justice and fairness, and that such agreement was only possible when these principles were not rooted in specific social beliefs and values, experiences, or subject positions, but were “common to all rational persons” (Rawls Reference Rawls1957, 653–54, 658; see also Sandel Reference Sandel1984, 2, 4–5). Communitarians objected to Rawls's notion of “the thin theory of the good”—the minimal statements Rawls felt one could make about social ideals in the effort to divorce “fairness” from morality.
The Habits of the Heart critique bears striking resemblances to a prior critique of American culture, written by Watsuji Tetsurō himself, which Bellah had analyzed in his 1965 essay. Watsuji's angry essay, “American national character” (Amerika no kokuminsei, 1943), published in the middle of the Pacific War, linked American character to two key strands of European social thought: Francis Bacon's notion of the “logic of invention” (hatsumei no ronri) and Thomas Hobbes's notion of “natural law” (shizenhō) (Watsuji [1943] Reference Watsuji1962: 457–58, 460–61). For Watsuji, Bacon's thought symbolized the utilitarian emphasis on “civilization” as about material progress and “machine civilization” (kikai bunmei) (458)—a means of making life more convenient—rather than a process of moral refinement or aesthetic cultivation. Hobbes's notion of war of all against all, in which individuals must resort to social contracts (keiyaku) in order to protect themselves (460–61), was problematic in that it naturalized a state of conflict whereby individuals fought to promote their own interests.Footnote 24
Watsuji's final few pages of the essay offer a biting critique of American character as consumed by a mindless thirst for activity and stimulation. He writes that American culture thrives on innovation, intense sensory stimulation (kyōretsu na shigeki), the pleasure of tension (kinchō no yorokobi), and the pleasure of action (kōdō no yorokobi)—evidenced most obviously by American sports matches. Such a mentality suited the pioneers, he wrote, but contemporary Americans lack moral meaning in their lives (jinrin teki igi o sōshitsu shite iru) (480). The essay concludes, “Americans have come to Asia seeking to conquer the world with ‘quantity’ (ryō), but what awaits them after that is a ‘nervous breakdown’” (480).Footnote 25
It is easy to see why Bellah found the critique of American materialism and utilitarianism compelling. Watsuji's rejection of liberal democracy lay in his mistrust of the liberal, secular state that derived its authority through protecting individual rights and interests rather than through representing the shared beliefs of the people. Watsuji's work pointed to the artificiality of legal rights and social contracts in contrast with deeply rooted sociocultural ideals. At the same time, Watsuji's politics clearly highlight the tensions within Bellah's own vision for a democracy contained by a higher order. For Watsuji's work betrays a deep mistrust of the people and of the possibility of cultural pluralism. His critique of popular democracy rested on a fear of tyranny of the majority, and he viewed the free play of individual interests and competition as anarchic and potentially barbaric (Harootunian Reference Harootunian2000, 257–58; Karube Reference Karube1995, 58; Oguma Reference Oguma and Askew2002, 280). While Bellah admired the civic participation depicted by Tocqueville in the early nineteenth century, the notion of democracy (minponshugi) that inspired Watsuji and other interwar intellectuals emphasized self-cultivation through national belonging, not the political rights of the individual as expressed independently of the state. Watsuji plainly rejected the idea that the solidarity of the nation could be compatible with the foundational ideals of liberalism, while Bellah continued to hold out for an ideal of a transcendent national community that could accommodate American popular democracy, a reconciliation that in the end felt strained.
Conclusion
Bellah's Tokugawa Religion was an early gesture towards the expansion of notions of what modern societies might look like. But Bellah had located this counter-alternative in the anti-liberal, mythological, and nationalistic discourse of the kokutai. The power of Bellah's experiment was limited by the “top-down” nature of the embrace of particularistic values in Japan and the notion of community as a totalizing whole that encompasses and shapes individuals but does not easily accommodate pluralism, conflict, or tension.
One way to understand the broader context for Bellah's concerns, and his interest in Japan, is to consider the predicament that faced liberal intellectuals during the Cold War. While socialism had once offered a powerful social ideal and counter-alternative to mass capitalism for liberal and radical intellectuals in the United States and Western Europe in the 1930s, emerging awareness of Soviet totalitarianism after the war pressed intellectuals to search for forms of community that could be compatible with the postwar mandate of democracy and economic growth. The quest was highlighted in the conclusion of sociologist Daniel Bell's influential 1954 book, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties, where Bell described the collapse of revolutionary ideology and the effacement of class consciousness under the banner of global development. Bell wondered, after the collapse of communism as a counter-ideal, where would capitalist society find utopic, prescriptive visions and momentum for internal critique (D. Bell [1960] Reference Bell1988, 405)?
It was the call for a collectivism that could be compatible with capitalism and secular democracy to which I believe Bellah's research on Japan was answering. Modernization theory privileged liberal freedoms and the free market as desirable outcomes. However, liberal intellectuals of the 1950s and 1960s worried about the “mass society” and the damage they associated with mass production and automation, consumerism, and mass culture and leisure. In the late 1970s, Bellah himself, together with Daniel Bell and conservative social critic Christopher Lasch, consulted with President Jimmy Carter in preparing a moral appeal to the American people to conserve energy. The address, delivered on July 15, 1970, famously took Americans to task for consumer excess and spiritual hollowness, claiming, “[P]iling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose” (Jacobs Reference Jacobs2016, 227–28).
It was Japan's postwar democratization, the submergence of radically leftist politics in Japan (including labor and anti-American student activism), and rapid economic expansion that ultimately created a context in which Japanese society could be held up effectively as a locus of comparison for the excesses of American liberalism and individualism. Postwar institutions such as corporate welfare, the nuclear family, standardized education, and neighborhood groups supplemented the role of the state and provided a powerful sense of social cohesion during the decades of rapid economic growth. Such changes were captured in a number of postwar ethnographies of Japan, including Ezra and Suzanne Vogel's Reference Vogel1963 study of the salarymen and their families, Japan's New Middle Class, which described the ways in which the large-scale firm replaced previous forms of authority, such as government welfare and rural kinship hierarchies, by providing welfare and social care, including housing, long-term employment, recreation, and training (Vogel Reference Vogel1963, 255–56). Anthropologist Thomas P. Rohlen (Reference Rohlen1974) studied the “spiritual education” provided in corporate training programs at a large Japanese bank—programs that self-consciously sought to replace the social values that managers feared occupation-era reforms had eclipsed. In a sense, these studies pursued Bellah's Weberian agenda of identifying forms of religious meaning in secular, capitalist institutions. And they located this spiritualism and community in on-the-ground, secular institutions, at one remove from the state, and fully compatible with capitalist growth.
In the context of Japan's democratization and rapid economic growth, American humility after the Vietnam War, and American economic stagnation of the 1970s, the compelling power of these counter-examples was considerable (Rohlen Reference Rohlen1974, 34–40, 212–20, 235–40). Vogel's Reference Vogel1979 bestseller, Japan as Number One, echoed Bellah's ideas, calling for Americans to learn from Japanese institutions that contained and regulated capitalism through technocracy and shaped individual behavior through local forms of social control. While Bellah moved on to the United States and never really engaged with the landscape of postwar Japanese society and culture, Vogel's argument that the United States could learn from Japan in solving postindustrial social issues suggested a powerful reversal of the conventional modernization narrative in which American society was the implied endpoint—though it was a reversal greeted with skepticism and disbelief by many (Vogel Reference Vogel1979, viii).Footnote 26
The problems of holding up Japan as a mirror were many, but the criticisms leveled at Bellah's critique of the United States provide insight into one important one. Bellah's fellow communitarian, moral philosopher Michael Walzer (Reference Walzer, Allen and Regan1998, 175), has argued that Bellah created a vision of community writ large, where “the whole country is conceived of as one community of citizens.” This is in contrast, Walzer writes, to the plural, freely made, individual commitments to diverse communities that people in the United States actually inhabit: immigrant communities; ethnic communities; religious groups; labor unions; and communities of work, family, and neighborhoods. Walzer argues that it is these loyalties—not to the culture of the whole—that form the basis for the “solidarity” to society that communitarians admire (Walzer Reference Walzer, Allen and Regan1998, 177, 179; see also Walzer Reference Walzer1990, 15; Reference Walzer and Mouffe1992, 91–92, 98).Footnote 27 This concern continues to be relevant in appraising Japan's postwar democracy, in which cultural ideals instilled through schools, firms, and families continue to shape society as a whole in ways that limit pluralism and attempt to contain social, political, and class fissures.
The excesses of under-regulated capitalism are still in evidence with the rise of neoliberalism and the ongoing global problems of environmental degradation, precarity, and inequality. Newly developing countries seek alternatives to the prescription of free-market capitalism, and do not necessarily see American society as the ideal model. American intellectuals have more recently looked to neo-Confucianism or Islamic orthodoxy to seek alternatives to liberal-individualism (D. A. Bell Reference Bell2006; Mahmood Reference Mahmood2005). While Japan's democracy still constitutes a compelling case in some respects, it has always been a partial and problematic counter-example, owing to the close relationship between community and national community in Japan. For a number of reasons, the “Japan moment” has passed, but it is not clear what will replace it as a tool to think with.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful for the opportunity to present earlier versions of this work to colleagues at the Tokyo University Institute for Social Research; the International Christian University Institute of Asian Cultural Studies Asia Forum; and a Princeton University Center for the Study of Religion workshop, where Jason Josephson, Mark Larrimore, and Jeffrey Stout offered discussant's comments and Stephen Teiser facilitated. Harry Harootunian's comments at a 2014 Association for Asian Studies panel were formative, as were earlier conversations. I have also benefited greatly from conversations with Andrew Barshay, John Campbell, Ben Elman, Fabian Drixler, Sheldon Garon, Carol Greenhouse, Tanya Luhrmann, Stephen Macedo, Richard Madsen, Jonathan Morduch, William Steele, Julia Thomas, and Michael Walzer, and from comments from the anonymous reviewers for JAS.
