Christmas, Beethoven’s Ninth and Chushingura
I like the Christmas season, and I don’t think I’m the only one.
Many musical events are held. Last week, I played and sang “Silent Night, Holy Night” with the M.U.E.S.S. members, in English of course. Also in the street, famous traditional (and sometimes inevitable) Christmas songs are sung and listened to by many people.
Japanese people like to sing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. I like to play it (parts of it, that is, not the whole). Although I know the lyrics in neither English nor German, I try to sing it in both languages.
The reason why the Japanese like “Beethoven’s Ninth” is that the progression of mood agrees with the Japanese mind. This is what I read in a newspaper (perhaps Mainichi shinbun, no link to the article because it is a very old one).
The Ninth is a long symphony (I do not know how long it is) in four movements. Each movement has its own atmosphere, and the sense of joyfulness and happiness increases gradually. From the first to the third movement, the atmosphere is not joyful or happy but it builds up as the symphony progresses, and the fourth and final movement reaches the highest point of joyfulness and happiness. This development fits the Japanese taste very well.
The same structure can be seen in Chushingura. In this traditional and historical Japanese revenge story, Asanotakumino Kami is bullied by Kira until he loses his calm and injures him. For this, Asano is sentenced to death and executed. In the following year, Oishi Kuranosuke and fourty-seven warriors who supported Asano decide to take revenge on Kira for Asano’s death. Eventually, they succeed in doing it and the story finishes happily and successfully. The struggle and pain come first. The success comes last.
That the struggle and pain come first and the joy and happiness come last is what Japanese people like. In this way, we conclude the year to be good and peaceful. Even though there is so much war and crimes, we come to think that every year is very good. Doing so, we welcome the coming year and hope it will be as good as the previous one. In Beethoven’s Ninth and in Chushingura, the same structure of progression are seen. This is the reason why we like the “Ninth,” especially at the end of a year.
What we often hear in the street is the fourth movement of the “Ninth.” I like it very much. Can anyone sing it in English or German?
Comments
Hi Ruedi,
Yes, eventually, the warriors were sentenced to death by the goverment. So many warriors were sacrificed in this incident, which would seem a tragetic story.
But Tsunayoshi, the 4th tycoon in the period, and the common people were delighted and even applauded them. Because in those days, the common people were complaining about the goverment, which ordained the rule that prohibits any kinds of acts of killing any animals.
Furthermore, amongst the Samurai, Kuranosuke and the 47 warriors were respected as heros thanks to their revenge of their lord.
>Isn’t a story in which dozens of lives are sacrificed to the medieval notion of loyalty a story of tragic waste?
Yes that’s right. Kuranosuke made up his mind to revenge his lord. At the same time, he had already decided to die for his lord because his attempt clearly was a capital offense. Even though he knew this, he decided to carry it out. That is because he decided to honor Bushido, the Japanese chivalry.
Although Kuranosuke and the 47 warriors were sentenced to death after the big incident, they must have been satisfied and delighted by the success of their well-organized revenge.
Is this explanation good enough?
Well, it’s good enough as far as it goes — thanks!
What bothers me about Chushingura isn’t the story itself (revenge plots are the stuff of drama) nor the “joy” that Edo-period contemporaries may have felt after the historical events had played out.
What bothers me about Chushingura is today’s naive, unreflecting celebration of samurai heroism, the notion that the ronin are a “model for emulation”.
There’s one element in all of this which is easy enough to relate to: nostalgia. We live in an age whose most ardently held beliefs are of a commercial nature, so anyone who was ready to die for quaint, old-fashioned ideals such as loyalty and honour has a certain appeal.
But once you look closer, that appeal may begin to fade.
There’s little doubt that by today’s standards the shogunate was a highly repressive military dictatorship; not a place where civil liberties flourished. But if you’re going to read the Chushingura story as a rebellion against the Tokugawa regime, then the rebels come off as misguided and foolhardy rather than heroic. Suicide attacks don’t bring down governments.
Bushido? B.H. Chamberlain, a professor at Tokyo University, wrote a snarky piece in 1912 titled The Invention of a New Religion in which he debunks bushido as a sham:
Bushido was unknown until a decade or two ago! The very word appears in no dictionary, native or foreign, before the year 1900. Chivalrous individuals of course existed in Japan, as in all countries at every period; but Bushido, as an institution or a code of rules, has never existed. The accounts given of it have been fabricated out of whole cloth, chiefly for foreign consumption. An analysis of medieval Japanese history shows that the great feudal houses, so far from displaying an excessive idealism in the matter of fealty to one emperor, one lord, or one party, had evolved the eminently practical plan of letting their different members take different sides, so that the family as a whole might come out as winner in any event, and thus avoid the confiscation of its lands.
So, if fealty (ie absolute loyalty to a feudal lord) is not a prominent feature of Japanese feudalism, then why should anyone wish to celebrate the ronin’s loyal revenge as an example of supreme honor? The answer to that question might well be that it reflects an element of pre-WWII Japanese nationalism, which was eager to make loyalty to the Emperor into an absolute moral imperative.
Even if that connection should turn out to be false, I find the samurai ideal unsavoury. As I understand it, the samurai code of honour consists in unquestioning obedience. Obedience is a virtue in many Eastern philosphical systems, particularly in Confucianism, but it’s hardly the only virtue or the highest (in Buddhism, compassion is considered to be the highest virtue). Obedience may also be a virtue of the soldier, but it’s hardly a virtue of the citizen: you can build armies on the principle of obedience, but you cannot build democracies on it. Democracies are built on civil liberties and their exercise.
But coming back to the ronin. Here’s this group of almost fifty men who are willing to throw away their lives in vain posturing: they engage in a suicide attack knowing that it will achieve nothing beyond flamboyantly reaffirming a code of honour. If an abstract code of honour is more important than the lives of a couple of dozen warriors, then those warriors presumably don’t have any real responsibilities and commitments in their lives. This kind of detachment strikes me as swagger rather than heroism.
Hey, Ruedi. I agree you about bushido. Obedience was a virtue for samurai in old days and even now when we hear or see the pure obedience in books or movies, we admire it. What I mean by ‘the pure obedience’ is that you obey someone with your life sacrificed. The lord you follow is everything. I think obedience is still a virtue for Japanese. Not many follow this virtue, though.
And one more thing. In Japan, being sportsmanlike or not to stick to something has been seen as a good attitude. So, when samurai were driven into a corner, they killed themselves. They didn’t stick to lives. So, samurai in chushingura were following this virtue of obedience by giving their lives.
In old days, it seems to me that there were many tacit and clear rules for everyone to follow. If you are samurai and when you should have this situation, doing this is ideal. If you fail to do this, you will humiliate your family and yourself ;(
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Apparently, Beethoven’s Ninth was first performed in Japan by a group of German prisoners of war on June 1, 1918, in Naruto, where every June there is a performance of the symphony to commemorate the event.
The words of the fourth movement are adapted from Friedrich von Schiller’s Ode to Joy. This Wikipedia article has the German original and an English translation of the poem. You may have to look up a few words, but it should be fairly easy to understand.
Why do you think the Chushingura story ends in “joy and happiness”? The warriors decide to avenge their lord by killing his adversary, then they turn themselves in to a tribunal which they know will sentence them to death.
Is there joy and happiness in their acceptance of death as the price they have to pay for their revenge? Is there heroism? Isn’t a story in which dozens of lives are sacrificed to the medieval notion of loyalty a story of tragic waste?