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Individual Patterns in Historical Change: Imagery of Japanese Youth*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Robert Jay Lifton
Robert Jay Lifton
Affiliation:
Yale University
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Extract

Man not only lives within history; he is changed by it, and he causes it to change. This interplay between individual lives and wider historical forces is many-sided, erratic, seemingly contradictory, charged as it is by capricious human emotions. Yet there are common patterns—shared images and styles of imagery—which men call forth in their efforts to deal with the threat and promise of a changing outer and inner world. These patterns can sometimes be seen most clearly in cultures outside of one's own, and I have found them to be extremely vivid in present-day Japan.

Type
Psychology and Explanation of Historical Change
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 6 , Issue 4 , June 1964 , pp. 369 - 383
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1964

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References

1 This is a preliminary statement on one aspect of a study of Japanese youth conducted in Tokyo and Kyoto from 1960–1962. The work was supported by the Foundations' Fund for Research in Psychiatry and by the Department of Psychiatry of the Yale University School of Medicine. I am grateful to Dr. L. Takeo Doi, with whom I consulted regularly during the work; and to Miss Kyoko Komatsu and Mr. Hiroshi Makino for their general research assistance, including interpreting and translation.

2 Lifton, Robert J., “Youth and History: Individual Change in Postwar Japan”, Daedalus, Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1962), 91:172–197.Google Scholar

3 These patterns of imagery are, of course, by no means absolute or exclusive. They can and do overlap, and appear in various combinations. They may thus be regarded as “ideal types”.

4 Benedict, Ruth (The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1946Google Scholar) tended to stress the element of obligation in giri-ninjō; while L. Takeo Doi (“Giri-Ninjō; An Interpretation”, unpublished manuscript) has stressed the underlying element of dependency which he feels was neglected by Benedict in her general approach to Japanese culture.

5 Sigmund Freud quoted Romain Rolland as looking upon religion as “a feeling which he would like to call a sensation of ‘eternity’, a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded as it were, ‘oceanic’…” (Civilization and its Discontents, Standard Edition, London: The Hogarth Press (1961), 64–5)Google Scholar. The feeling need not, of course, be limited to specifically religious experience, and its emphasis upon the loss of time boundaries is especially relevent to us here.

6 Kokutai is a mystical-ideological concept which is impossible to define precisely, but which also contains the sense of “national body” or “national substance” – and could be translated as “national identity”. See Lifton, “Youth and History”, 179–180, and 196, reference note 6.

7 Historians have made analogous observations in relation to the Meiji Restoration.Thus Graig, Albert M. concludes his book, Chōshū in the Meiji Restoration (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1961Google Scholar) with the observation: “It was because Japan possessed such [traditional] characteristics when first confronted by the West that it was able so early to achieve a part of the transformation which is the goal of other nations in Asia today. In Japan … it is in a large measure to the strength and not to the weaknesses of the traditional society that we must turn to comprehend its modern history.” Jansen, Marius B. comes to similar conclusions in his Sakamoto Ryōma and the Meiji Restoration, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also the review article on both of these books by Smith, Thomas C., The Journal of Asian Studies (1962), 21:215–219.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 Lifton, Robert J., Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1961Google Scholar. See especially chapter 22.

9 Pachinko is a uniquely Japanese creation, a postwar slot-machine game which is a good deal more than a slot-machine game. It involves shooting metal balls in circular trajectories, so that they land, or do not land, in small round holes. It is utterly simple and repetitious. Played in large, crowded pachinko parlors, against a background of loud music and the constant clang of the metal balls, it has a strange fascination – to the point of addiction – for its enormous numbers of devotees. It has been called everything from a contemporary expression of Buddhist mysticism to a sign of Japan's postwar moral deterioration, though more often the latter. It is, in the very least, an interesting invention of a culture in transition.

10 This dream could, of course, be interpreted in other ways. One could, in a more conventional fashion, look upon the “bad master” as representing parental authority; and such a symbol of parental authority can then also be equated with the authority of the cultural past. I shall pursue these symbolic relationships in later publications, but here wish to stress (however one-sidedly) the historical elements of the dream.

11 Brown, Norman O., Life Against Death, Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press (1959), 93Google Scholar. While I strongly concur with Brown's focus upon the past (he stresses the individual past) as a prime mover of history, I would emphasize the interplay of time symbols, rather than his principle that “repression and the repetitioncompulsion generate historical time”.

12 See Erikson's, Erik H.Young Man Luther (New York, W. W. Norton & Co., 1958) for a brilliant exposition of the interplay between individual psychology (in this case the psychological struggles of a great man) and historical change.Google Scholar

13 Lifton, Thought Reform …, op. cit.

14 If we turn to more primitive cultures, we can see even more vividly the intimate interplay of the three modes in bringing about historical change – the combination of extremist “cargo cults” (consisting of both transformationist and restorationist elements) with more or less rationalized (accommodationist) techniques for modernization. See Mead, Margaret and Schwartz, Theodore, “The Cult as a Condensed Social Process”, in Group Processes (Transactions of the Fifth Conference), edited by Schaffner, Bertram, New York: Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation, 1958Google Scholar; Mead, Margaret, New Lives for Old, New York, William Morrow Co., 1956Google Scholar; and Worsley, Peter, The Trumpet Shall Sound: a Study of “Cargo” Cults in Melanesia, London, MacGibbon and Kee, 1957.Google Scholar