The Limitations of the Genre of the Heroic Individual Biography

Howes's Japan's Modern Prophet is the most detailed study of Uchimura Kanzō (1861–1930) in a Western language. Uchimura, a Christian convert, is best known in the West for three things: 1) his refusal as a young high school teacher to bow deeply before a copy of the Imperial Rescript on Education; 2) his book How I Became a Christian (1893); and 3) his concept of mukyōkai, or non-affiliation with any church denomination. Readers will learn much about this enigmatic figure in modern Japanese history from this hefty study of just under four hundred pages of text. Still, in spite of the many insights into Uchimura's life that Howes provides, I ultimately found this study unsatisfying. I will try to elucidate the reasons for this below.

This is an old-fashioned biography in many respects. It follows Uchimura's life chronologically from childhood to death, using his diaries, letters, published work, and the writings and reminiscences of students and friends as the main documents. In classical historiographical fashion, Howes assumes a natural unity between the man/author, his writings, his ideas, and his lived experience. In this form of intellectual history, an individual—precisely an individual—is heroic exactly insofar as he resists the prevailing Zeitgeist. The biographer conjures the figure of the heroic individual out of writings cut and pasted into “evidence” of the unity and integrity of his ideas and actions as a guise for his own ideology or theology. In other words, the texts authored by Uchimura are a pretext for the verbal effect of the biographer's act of conjuring up the past for present purposes.

In his biography, Howes's depiction of Uchimura's world rarely moves outside of the circles he moved in, so the reader has little sense of the swirl of events in Japan and the many other intellectual and non-intellectual critics of the government. The broader world—the context for Howes's own text—is sketched out, like a flimsy cardboard backdrop for a play, only to the extent necessary to provide a horizon for the protagonist to strut around on the stage delivering monologues. In Howes's hands, Uchimura's correspondence is revelatory, providing immediate insight into his “ongoing attempts to live his faith.” Given his own defining focus on Uchimura's struggles to live a Christian life, Howes feels little compunction to bring in external (extraneous?) matters and figures. Thus, he writes, “This work uses these autobiographical revelations plus the reactions of numerous followers who preserved letters from him and noted their reactions to him. During his long and distinguished career as a writer, Uchimura commented on much that was going on around him in Japanese society. I mention these contacts but leave their analysis to others” (2).

Howes's tight focus on Uchimura also means that the reader hears little about other leading Japanese figures in the worlds of politics, education, journalism, and religion. As a result, most readers will have little basis for evaluating Howes's claims concerning either Uchimura's uniqueness or, at other times, his representative nature. Howes can blithely claim that “there are few if any Japanese with whom [Uchimura] can be compared” (11) only because he does not look beyond Uchimura's immediate world. This claim for uniqueness is, of course, unwarranted hyperbole. Yet, it is important to note how it functions rhetorically as a warrant for Howes's myopic focus. Whether this rhetorical move will be successful or not remains to be seen. I suspect that readers who possess some knowledge of modern Japanese history and society will feel, as I did, a sense of claustrophobia while reading this study.

Howes begins by probing the psychological development of his subject from childhood to young adulthood, following Erik Erikson's model of psychobiography. Some readers might enjoy this literary genre; in Howes's hands, I found it to be unremarkable and unconvincing, while the claims flowing from his psychologizing are often overblown. Not surprisingly, the biography of the heroic individual requires a narrative structure and plot involving repeated episodes of struggle and the overcoming of obstacles in the journey to individuation. One example of Howes's mode of argumentation must suffice to illustrate how he works. Early on he writes:

In and of themselves, none of these three “forces” is remarkable. After all, who among us does not desire affection? Who, in growing up, does not have to learn to dominate her or his surroundings or need to internalize a sense of responsibility? Howes's emphasis on Uchimura's timidity as a child, though, is required here precisely so that his later public speaking can be seen as evidence of his heroic journey to the status of an autonomous individual. Similarly, by stressing the force of the young Kanzō's desire and need for affection, Howes can then present the mature Uchimura as a heroic figure of integrity, standing alone in speaking truth to power.

Let me return to Howes's characterization of Uchimura as an incomparable individual in modern Japan. First, let us look at Howes's list of “great men”—and they are all men—to which he would add Uchimura. “Every now and then an individual appears,” he writes, “who judges his or her community ruthlessly in terms of a transcendent ethic. … Any list of such persons would include the Old Testament prophets, Dante, Luther, Kierkegaard, Carlyle, and Gandhi” (11). Note that, save for Gandhi, all of these figures are identified with Western Christianity (even the prophets of the Hebrew Bible are Christianized through Howes's referring to them as “Old Testament prophets”). The implicit terms and norms of “greatness” used by Howes are, to begin with, Western, Christian, and tied to the value of individualism (Gandhi appears on this list, no doubt, because of his pacifism, a core value for Howes).

There is more at work here, however, that should give us great pause. Leaving aside the biblical prophets, all of the “great men” are highly educated intellectuals and writers. Uchimura's greatness, too, we are told, came in no small part through his lifelong publishing activities, although he never embraced modern scholarly approaches to the study of the Bible. The unspoken implication here is that uneducated persons (peasants, factory workers, et cetera) could not meet the criteria for greatness. Moreover, given the educational situation in late nineteenth-century Japan, when few girls were permitted to pursue higher education, women are seemingly excluded from achieving greatness.

Even more troubling, perhaps, is Howes's implication that only a “transcendent ethic” (read “transcendent deity”) can provide a valid basis for a serious social and political critique. Yet, years ago Joseph M. Kitagawa noted that, throughout history, the Japanese created and re-created religious worlds of meaning through different versions of an “immanental theocracy,” through “a synthesis of polity, religion, society, and culture.”Footnote ¹ The native kami cults were (and are) this-worldly in orientation, while the deities—anything but transcendent beings—also inhabit this world in mountains, rivers, trees, waterfalls, and other natural phenomena, as well as in material objects (bronze mirrors, swords, and so on). By implication, Howes continues the charge against Shinto, proffered by early Christian missionaries and other Western observers, that Shinto had no system of ethics. Indeed, it is implied that by its very nature it could not have any; Shinto must be defined by its lack of a transcendent deity and a transcendent ethic. In sum, then, religious participants in the kami cults are, by definition, excluded from “greatness” insofar as they cannot assume an authentic prophetic role. Taking the prophets of the Hebrew Bible as the normative measure of prophethood is problematic in and of itself, but Howes's seeming denial of the very possibility of a powerful sociopolitical critique coming from anything but a transcendent (male) ethic is an unexamined and historically untenable assumption.

Even if we confine ourselves to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Japan, there were other persons—specifically non-Christian Japanese—who offered powerful critiques of Japanese society and the government based on religious ethical values. Take Deguchi Nao (1836–1912), an older contemporary of Uchimura's, to mention just one such individual. The foundress of the so-called “new religion” Ōmoto-kyō, this uneducated and illiterate woman became a vocal and vociferous critic of the Meiji government, as well as of many aspects of industrialization and modernization. Howes's criteria for greatness would seemingly exclude Deguchi Nao, yet Helen Hardacre has called her “one of the great geniuses of Japanese religious history.”Footnote ² In a common pattern in the history of religions in Japan and its patriarchal social structure, Deguchi Nao's religious career began when, at age fifty-six, she was possessed by a kami who revealed himself to be the “Great Source” of the universe. In the following years and decades, she also offered a powerful critique of the patriarchal social structure in Japan, something the socially conservative Uchimura never did. Then, too, Deguchi Nao was imprisoned by the government for her expressed views; Uchimura always managed to stay out of prison by judiciously tempering his criticism of the state. Uchimura saved his strongest words, his so-called “ruthless” criticism, for the ecclesiastical structure of Christian churches and foreign missionaries. Yet, one must ask, how much courage did it take to criticize organized Christian churches and missionaries in Japan in the Meiji and Taishō eras? For three centuries, Christianity had been demonized by the government in Japan. (On this, see Nam-lin Hur, Death and Social Order in Tokugawa Japan: Buddhism, Anti-Christianity, and the Danka System [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007]).

This is not to imply that Uchimura was not a significant figure in modern Japan; he was. But, like all historical figures, his popular image is a constructed one and contested, with a complex history of its own. This history is not explored by Howes at all. Rather, his biography in large measure seeks to buttress and legitimate the popular image of Uchimaru as a heroic individual of conscience who stood up to the state. Howes's heroic portrayal of Uchimura as “Japan's modern prophet” is made possible only because he largely ignores other individuals who spoke out, as well as how broader cultural developments in Japan led Uchimura to represent himself and, posthumously, others to represent him to the world as a heroic individual of conscience. For instance, readers of Howes's biography will search in vain for any mention, let alone serious consideration, of the Meiji government's legal actions to define “religion” (shūkyō, a neologism) and, then, to control “religions” in the face of pressure from Western powers. Religions at this time were defined as “foreign” religious groups and communities, while State Shinto—a blatant “invented tradition”—was declared not to be a religion at all. Rather, the government educational and propaganda operations presented the newly established state cult, commonly known as State Shinto (kokka shintō), as the timeless expression of the nature of the Japanese people and their proper relationship to the imperial family. It is essential to engage the extensive and ever-growing scholarly literature on this topic in Japanese and Western languages if one is to appreciate Uchimura's own understanding of religion and the reception of his ideas in Japan. Would that Howes had undertaken this task. There is no doubt still an audience for “great man” biographies. Professional historians, though, with a critical eye to the unspoken and unwarranted assumptions underlying this genre, will not be satisfied.