3 Taking One's Proper Station
第三章 各得其所
ANY ATTEMPT to understand the Japanese must begin with their version of what it means to ‘take one's proper station.' Their reliance upon order and hierarchy and our faith in freedom and equality are poles apart and it is hard for us to give hierarchy its just due as a possible social mechanism. Japan's confidence in hierarchy is basic in her whole notion of man's relation to his fellow man and of man's relation to the State and it is only by describing some of their national institutions like the family, the State, religious and economic life that it is possible for us to understand their view of life.
当你要了解日本人时，首先要弄清日本人是怎样考虑“各得其所”的。日本人对于秩序和等级制度的信赖，同我们对自由平等的信仰，完全不是一回事。我们很难把等级制度正确地看做一个可以实现的社会机构。对等级制度的信赖，是日本人处理人与人之间关系和人与国家关系时所持观念的基础。只有通过具体记述他们的国民制度，如家族、国家、宗教生活和经济生活等，我们才能真正理解他们的人生观。
The Japanese have seen the whole problem of international relations in terms of their version of hierarchy just as they have seen their internal problems in the same light. For the last decade they have pictured themselves as attaining the apex of that pyramid, and now that this position belongs instead to the Western Nations, their view of hierarchy just as certainly underlies their acceptance of the present dispensation. Their international documents have constantly stated the weight they attach to it. The preamble to the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy which Japan signed in 1940 reads: ‘The Governments of Japan, Germany and Italy consider it as the condition precedent to any lasting peace that all nations of the world be given each its proper station……' and the Imperial Rescript given on the signing of the Pact said the same thing again:
日本人常常是从等级制度的角度来观察国内问题的，同时也从同样的角度来看国际问题。十多年来，他们一直认为日本正在接近国际等级制度金字塔的尖顶。今天金字塔的尖顶已被西方独占鳌头，然而日本人对等级制度仍然坚信不移。日本在外交文件里不厌其烦地表明他们是如何重视等级制度的。一九四○年，日本与德国、意大利缔结了三国同盟。条约的前言这样写道：“大日本帝国、德意志政府和意大利政府一致认为，万邦各得其所是持久和平之前提……”为条约颁布的诏书也同样写道：
To enhance our great righteousness in all the earth and to make of the world one household is the great injunction bequeathed by our Imperial Ancestors and we lay this to heart day and night. In the stupendous crisis now confronting the world it appears that war and confusion will be endlessly aggravated and mankind suffer incalculable disasters. We fervently hope that disturbances will cease and peace be restored as soon as possible…… We are therefore deeply gratified that this pact has been concluded between the Three Powers.
大义扬八纮，坤舆俱一宇，此乃皇祖皇宗之大训。朕日夜不敢稍有忘怀。当今世局不安，骚乱四起，万民所蒙祸患实难估测。朕唯愿早日勘定祸乱，恢复和平……今三国条约始立，朕深感欣慰。
The task of enabling each nation to find its proper place and all individuals to live in peace and security is of the greatest magnitude. It is unparalleled in history. This goal is still far distant……
万邦各得其所，兆民各得其安，乃旷古之大业，前途维艰……
On the very day of the attack on Pearl Harbor, too, the Japanese envoys handed to Secretary of State Cordell Hull a most explicit statement on this point:
在袭击珍珠港的当天，日本使节向美国国务卿赫尔递交了一份声明，非常明确地阐明了如下几点：
It is the immutable policy of the Japanese Government…… to enable each nation to find its proper place in the world…… The Japanese Government cannot tolerate the perpetuation of the present situation since it runs directly counter to Japan's fundamental policy to enable each nation to enjoy its proper station in the world.
……万邦各得其所是帝国坚定不移的国策……以上乃与帝国之万邦各得其所之根本国策完全背道而驰，帝国政府断然不能容忍。
This Japanese memorandum was in response to Secretary Hull's a few days previous which had invoked American principles just as basic and honored in the United States as hierarchy is in Japan. Secretary Hull enumerated four: inviolability of sovereignty and of territorial integrity; nonintervention in other nations' internal affairs; reliance on international co-operation and conciliation; and the principle of equality. These are all major points in the American faith in equal and inviolable rights and are the principles on which we believe daily life should be based no less than international relations. Equality is the highest, most moral American basis for hopes for a better world. It means to us freedom from tyranny, from interference, and from unwanted impositions. It means equality before the law and the right to better one's condition in life. It is the basis for the rights of man as they are organized in the world we know. We uphold the virtue of equality even when we violate it and we fight hierarchy with a righteous indignation.
上述日本备忘录答复了几天前赫尔备忘录提出的问题。如同日本人尊重等级制度一样，赫尔备忘录提出了美国人尊重的基本原则。赫尔备忘录提出了四项原则，一、互不侵犯主权和领土；二、互不干涉内政；三、加强国际合作和谅解；四、平等互利。这些都是以美国人所信仰的平等和权利不可侵犯为基础的。我们深信，这些原则不仅在国际交往方面，即便在日常生活中也是应该遵循的。平等是美国人憧憬的美好世界的最高道德标准。第三章各得其所平等意味着我们摆脱压制、干涉和己所不欲的重担获得的自由。平等意味着人类在法律面前的平等和改善自己处境的权利。在现实社会里，平等是以组织的方式实现的基本人权的基础。即使在我们亵渎它的时候，我们仍然支持平等的道义。我们怀着正义的愤怒向等级制度宣战。
It has been so ever since America was a nation at all. Jefferson wrote it into the Declaration of Independence, and the Bill of Rights incorporated in the Constitution is based on it. These formal phrases of the public documents of a new nation were important just because they reflected a way of life that was taking shape in the daily living of men and women on this continent, a way of life that was strange to Europeans. One of the great documents of international reporting is the volume a young Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville, wrote on this subject of equality after he had visited the United States in the early eighteen-thirties. He was an intelligent and sympathetic observer who was able to see much good in this alien world of America. For it was alien. The young de Tocqueville had been bred in the aristocratic society of France which within the memory of still active and influential men had first been jolted and shocked by the French Revolution and then by the new and drastic laws of Napoleon. He was generous in his appreciation of a strange new order of life in America but he saw it through the eyes of a French aristocrat and his book was a report to the Old World on things to come. The United States, he believed, was an advance post of developments which would take place, though with differences, in Europe also.
美国人的这种思想，自建国以来一贯如此。杰斐逊在独立宣言中提到了这种思想，美国宪法中的人权法案也体现了这种思想。一个新成立的国家，在正式文件中使用这种词汇显得十分重要。因为它们表达了大陆人在日常生活中逐步形成的生活方式。欧洲人对这种生活方式还一无所知。法国青年亚历克西·徒·托克维尔一八三○年初访问美国之后，写了一本有关平等问题的书。 《关于美国的民主制》，1835年。——译注这本书后来成为国外介绍美国情况的重要文献之一。托克维尔独具慧眼，从陌生的美国社会生活中看到了许多长处。托克维尔生活在法国贵族社会中。当时，法国革命和接踵而至的拿破仑新法律震撼和冲击着法国的贵族社会，法国的达官显贵对此还心有余悸。托克维尔以一个法国贵族的眼光打量美国社会。他以宽容的态度评价美国社会的崭新生活秩序，向旧世界报导即将来临的事物。他深信美国已成为社会发展的前哨基地，美国社会的发展必将冲击欧洲。
He reported therefore at length on this new world. Here people really considered themselves the equals of others. Their social intercourse was on a new and easy footing. They fell into conversation as man to man. Americans did not care about the little attentions of a hierarchal etiquette; they did not demand them as their due nor offer them to others. They liked to say they owed nothing to any man. There was no family here in the old aristocratic or Roman sense, and the social hierarchy which had dominated the Old World was gone. These Americans trusted equality as they trusted nothing else; even liberty, he said, they often in practice let fly out of the window while they looked the other way. But they lived equality.
因此，托克维尔详细地介绍这个新世界，深感那里的人类是真正平等的。人们的社交建立在崭新的毫不拘束的基础上。美国人讨厌那种无聊的等级制度的礼仪。对此，他们既不强求于人，也不强加于人。他们不喜欢别人的恩赐。那里没有古老的贵族制度的家庭，支配旧世界的等级制度正在土崩瓦解。平等是美国人惟一坚信的事物；即便是自由，他们也会时常放诸脑后，但他们一直生活在平等之中。
It is invigorating for Americans to see their forebears through the eyes of this stranger, writing about our way of life more than a century ago. There have been many changes in our country but the main outlines have not altered. We recognize, as we read, that America in 1830 was already America as we know it. There have been, and there still are, those in this country who, like Alexander Hamilton in Jefferson's day, are in favor of a more aristocratic ordering of society. But even the Hamiltons recognize that our way of life in this country is not aristocratic.
一个外国人对我们一个世纪前的生活方式作了细致的描述。通过他，我们看到了祖先的身影，受到极大的鼓励。尽管我们的国家以后发生了无数变革，但是基本轮廓一点也没有变。通过这本书，我们认识到今天的美国早在一八三○年就已初具雏形。像杰斐逊时代支持贵族主义社会秩序的汉密尔顿之流，在美国不乏其人。过去有，今天仍然有。但是汉密尔顿之辈也不得不承认今天美国社会的生活方式绝不是贵族主义式的。
When we stated to Japan therefore just before Pearl Harbor the high moral bases on which the United States based her policy in the Pacific we were voicing our most trusted principles. Every step in the direction in which we pointed would according to our convictions improve a still imperfect world. The Japanese, too, when they put their trust in ‘proper station' were turning to the rule of life which had been ingrained in them by their own social experience. Inequality has been for centuries the rule of their organized life at just those points where it is most predictable and most accepted. Behavior that recognizes hierarchy is as natural to them as breathing. It is not, however, a simple Occidental authoritarianism. Both those who exercise control and those who are under others' control act in conformity to a tradition which is unlike our own, and now that the Japanese have accepted the high hierarchal place of American authority in their country it is even more necessary for us to get the clearest possible idea of their conventions. Only so can we picture to ourselves the way in which they are likely to act in their present situation.
我们在珍珠港事件之前，向日本阐明了我们最信赖的原则，美国的太平洋政策的基本道德准则。我们确信，只要朝我们指明的方向努力，就能逐步改善迄今还不完美的世界。当然日本人也是以自己的社会实践获得的生活原理来表明他们的“各得其所”的信念。几个世纪来，不平等是最容易被预见和为人接受的概念。从这种意义上来说，不平等已成为日本人有组织的生活规则。对日本人来说，承认等级制度，就像呼吸一样，极为自然。日本的等级制度不等于西方的强权主义。在日本，行使支配权的人和接受支配的人，都按一种与我们的传统格格不入的方式行事。今天，日本人已按等级制度的观念承认美国在日本的权威。我们更有必要深入了解他们习惯的观念，这样我们才能在自己的头脑里清晰地勾画出日本人的行动方式。
Japan for all its recent Westernization is still an aristocratic society. Every greeting, every contact must indicate the kind and degree of social distance between men. Every time a man says to another ‘Eat' or ‘Sit down' he uses different words if he is addressing someone familiarly or is speaking to an inferior or to a superior. There is a different ‘you' that must be used in each case and the verbs have different stems. The Japanese have, in other words, what is called a ‘respect language,' as many other peoples do in the Pacific, and they accompany it with proper bows and kneelings. All such behavior is governed by meticulous rules and conventions; it is not merely necessary to know to whom one bows but it is necessary to know how much one bows. A bow that is right and proper to one host would be resented as an insult by another who stood in a slightly different relationship to title bower. And bows range all the way from kneeling with forehead lowered to the hands placed flat upon the floor, to the mere inclination of head and shoulders. One must learn, and learn early, how to suit the obeisance to each particular case.
近年来，尽管日本明显地朝西方化方向发展，但日本仍然是一个贵族主义的社会。日本人在社交寒暄时，必须首先弄清自己与对方的社会间隔的性质和程度。日本人对人说“Eat”或“Sit down”时，要按双方关系的亲疏、是上级还是下级，选择不同的词汇。同样一个“you”，日本人在不同的场合，会使用不同的说法。日语里同一意思的动词有好几个不同形式的词干。也就是说，日本人同许多太平洋民族一样，使用“敬语”。此外还有与此相辅的鞠躬和行礼。日本人的礼仪受极繁琐的规则和习惯的支配。单知道对谁行礼是远远不够的，还必须了解行礼的程度。对某一主人来说是恰到好处的礼节，如果换成一个与施礼者关系稍有不同的主人，同样的礼节就会碰壁，惹人心里不痛快。礼仪的种类繁杂，既有两手向前平伸低头的最虔敬的行礼，也有略低一下头的致意。人们必须学会什么样的礼节适于用什么样的场合。日本人必须从孩提时代起学习礼仪。
It is not merely class differences which must be constantly recognized by appropriate behavior, though these are important. Sex and age, family ties and previous dealings between two persons all enter into the necessary calculations. Even between the same two persons different degrees of respect will be called for on different occasions: a civilian may be on familiar terms with another and not bow to him at all, but when he wears a military uniform his friend in civilian clothes bows to him. Observance of hierarchy is an art which requires the balancing of innumerable factors, some of which in any particular case may cancel each other out and some of which may be additive.
日本人在交际时，必须通过适当的举动来表明各自的身份。这并不仅是出于等级制度的需要（当然这是很主要的因素）。性别、年龄和双方的家庭关系、交往程度等都是必须考虑的因素。同样的两个人，在不同的场合有不同的礼仪要求。例如，双方都是平民的话，就无须鞠躬行礼。但当一方身着军服时，情况就不一样了。平民必须向穿军服的行礼。维护等级制度，必须使无数的因素保持平衡。这些因素，在不同的场合，有的互相掣肘抵消，有的互相携持相辅相成。
There are of course persons between whom there is relatively little ceremony. In the United States these people are one's own family circle. We shed even the slight formalities of our etiquette when we come home to the bosom of our family. In Japan it is precisely in the family where respect rules are learned and meticulously observed. While the mother still carries the baby strapped to her back she will push his head down with her hand, and his first lessons as a toddler are to observe respect behavior to his father or older brother. The wife bows to her husband, the child bows to his father, younger brothers bow to elder brothers, the sister bows to all her brothers of whatever age.
当然，世界上还有不拘礼的人们。美国人在自己家里就不拘泥礼仪。我们回到家里就扔掉任何刻板的礼节，但日本人却不是这样。他们在家里传接礼仪，小心翼翼地进行实践。当孩子还在襁褓里时，母亲就会按着自己孩子的头让他学会鞠躬。在孩子蹒跚学步时，就要教会他懂得尊敬父亲和兄长。在家庭里，妻子要给丈夫行礼，孩子要向父亲行礼，弟弟要向兄长行礼。而女孩不论年龄大小，必须给所有的兄弟行礼。
It is no empty gesture. It means that the one who bows acknowledges the right of the other to have his way in things he might well prefer to manage himself, and the one who receives the bow acknowledges in his turn certain responsibilities incumbent upon his station. Hierarchy based on sex and generation and primogeniture are part and parcel of family life.
日本人的礼节决不是空洞的仪式，而意味着施礼者承认对方的权利，受礼者承认与自己的地位相应的责任。立足于性别、辈分的不同和长子继承权的等级制度，构成了日本家庭生活的基础。
Filial piety is, of course, a high ethical law which Japan shares with China, and Chinese formulations of it were early adopted in Japan along with Chinese Buddhism, Confucian ethics and secular Chinese culture in the sixth and seventh centuries A.D. The character of filial piety, however, was inevitably modified to suit the different structure of the family in Japan. In China, even today, one owes loyalty to one's vast extended clan. It may number tens of thousands of people over whom it has jurisdiction and from whom it receives support. Conditions differ in different parts of that vast country but in large parts of China all people in any village are members of the same clan. Among all of China's 450,000,000 inhabitants there are only 470 surnames and all people with the same surname count themselves in some degree clan-brothers. Over a whole area all people may be exclusively of one clan and, in addition, families living in far-away cities are their clan fellows. In populous areas like Kwangtung all the clan members unite in keeping up great clan-halls and on stated days they venerate as many as a thousand ancestral tablets of dead clan members stemming from a common forebear. Each clan owns property, lands and temples and has clan funds which are used to pay for the education of any promising clan son. It keeps track of dispersed members and publishes elaborate genealogies which are brought up to date every decade or so to show the names of those who have a right to share in its privileges. It has ancestral laws which might even forbid them to surrender family criminals to the State if the clan was not in agreement with the authorities. In Imperial times these great communities of semi-autonomous clans were governed in the name of the larger State as casually as possible by easygoing mandarinates headed by rotating State appointees who were foreigners in the area.
不言而喻，“孝道”是日本和中国特有的崇高道德观念。早在公元六世纪和七世纪，中国的孝道就同中国的佛教、儒教和世俗的中国文化一起传到日本。日本人对中国孝道的内容，进行了几分改革，使之能适合日本的家庭结构。在中国，人们今天仍然必须对自己所属的庞大宗族效忠。这个宗族人数有时多达数万人。宗族对全体成员行使统治权，并得到所有人的支持。中国幅员辽阔，情况也往往因地而异。但大部分地区，一个村庄的居民都是同姓宗族。中国人口多达四亿五千万，而姓氏只有四百七十个。同姓的人认为彼此在某种程度上是同族的同胞。有时某一地区的居民无一例外都是同族，有时还会包括远居城市的家庭。在广东那样人口密度极大的地区，宗族全体人员修起堂皇的祠堂。在某一约定的日子，大家聚集一室，祭祀同一祖宗繁衍下来的已故的宗族成员。奉祭的牌位有上千。每个宗族拥有自己的财产、土地和祠堂，有出息的宗族弟子还可望获得奖学金。他们非常关心那些分散居住的宗族成员的消息，大约每隔十年编写一次族谱，罗列一大串有权获得宗族荫庇的名字。宗族有祖传的族规。有的族规规定，未经宗族同意，不得将族中犯罪的人交给当局。在封建帝制时期，这种半自治性质的宗族社会在名义上受国家管理，但这种管理十分松散；不断更迭的政府所派出的管理者，在这个地区依然是局外人。
All this was different in Japan. Until the middle of the nineteenth century only noble families and warrior (samurai) families were allowed to use surnames. Surnames were fundamental in the Chinese clan system and without these, or some equivalent, clan organization cannot develop. One of these equivalents in some tribes is keeping a genealogy. But in Japan only the upper classes kept genealogies and even in these they kept the record, as Daughters of the American Revolution do in the United States, backward in time from the present living person, not downward in time to include every contemporary who stemmed from an original ancestor. It is a very different matter. Besides, Japan was a feudal country. Loyalty was due, not to a great group of relatives, but to a feudal lord. He was resident overlord, and the contrast with the temporary bureaucratic mandarins of China, who were always strangers in their districts, could not have been greater. What was important in Japan was that one was of the fief of Satsuma or the fief of Hizen. A man's ties were to his fief.
在这方面，日本就迥然不同。十九世纪中叶之前，日本只有贵族和武士拥有姓氏。姓氏是中国宗族制度的根本，如果没有姓氏或类似的制度，氏族组织就不会兴旺发达。划分家系也能起到姓氏的作用。但日本只有上层阶级才能划分家系，而且日本的家系像“美国革命女儿会”一八九○年在华盛顿创立，会员仅限于参加过独立战争的人的后裔。——译注那样，是从现在活着的一辈倒推上去的；不是从远到近、无一遗漏地将同一祖宗传下来的子孙都包括进去。这两种方式有天壤之别。封建制度的日本，需要人们效忠的对象，并不是亲属血缘集团，而是封建领主。日本的封建领主是生活在这块土地上的主宰者；中国的官吏都是外来的、临时的官僚。两者判若云泥。在日本，最要紧的是属于哪个藩，是萨摩藩还是肥前藩。一个人与自己的属藩被牢固地捆绑在一起。
Another way of institutionalizing clans is through the worship of remote ancestors or of clan gods at shrines or holy places. This would have been possible for the Japanese ‘common people' even without surnames and genealogies. But in Japan there is no cult of veneration of remote ancestors and at the shrines where ‘common people' worship all villagers join together without having to prove their common ancestry. They are called the ‘children' of their shrine-god, but they are ‘children' because they live in his territory. Such village worshipers are of course related to each other as villagers in any part of the world are after generations of fixed residence but they are not a tight clan group descended from a common ancestor.
在神社和祭坛供奉祖宗和氏族之神，也是使氏族制度化的一种办法。这样，没有姓氏和家系的日本“庶民”也应该可效仿。但是，日本人不祭祀几代前的祖宗。全村集合在“庶民”祭祀的神社前，无须证明大家都是同宗。他们都是祭神的神社的“孩子”，因为他们都居住在神社的领域里。同世界上其他民族一样，供奉同一氏神的村民，世代居住在同一块土地上，互相有了亲缘关系，但他们不是一个祖先繁衍下来的有血缘关系的氏族集团。
The reverence due to ancestors is paid at a quite different shrine in the family living room where only six or seven recent dead are honored. Among all classes in Japan obeisance is done daily before this shrine and food set out for parents and grandparents and close relatives remembered in the flesh, who are represented in the shrine by little miniature gravestones. Even in the cemetery the markers on the graves of great-grandparents are no longer relettered and the identity even of the third ancestral generation sinks rapidly into oblivion. Family ties in Japan are whittled down almost to Occidental proportions and the French family is perhaps the nearest equivalent.
日本人不是在神社，而是在家中客厅的神龛供奉祖先。日本不管哪个阶级，每天都向供奉在神龛里的牌位进行祭拜和供献食品。日本人供奉的只是最近亡故的父母、祖父母或近亲，不超过六七个人。坟地上曾祖父母的墓很少得到修缮，墓碑上的字迹变得依稀难辨。三代前的祖先的墓，早已被遗忘干净，无人祭扫。日本的家族联系逐渐减弱，变得与西方相差无几。法国的家族制度与此极为相似。
‘Filial piety' in Japan, therefore, is a matter within a limited face-to-face family. It means taking one's proper station according to generation, sex, and age within a group which includes hardly more than one's father and father's father, their brothers and their descendants. Even in important houses, where larger groups may be included, the family splits up into separate lines and younger sons establish branch families. Within this narrow face-to-face group the rules that regulate ‘proper station' are meticulous. There is strict subservience to elders until they elect to go into formal retirement (inkyo). Even today a father of grown sons, if his own father has not retired, puts through no transaction without having it approved by the old grandfather. Parents make and break their children's marriages even when the children are thirty and forty years old. The father as male head of the household is served first at meals, goes first to the family bath, and receives with a nod the deep bows of his family. There is a popular riddle in Japan which might be translated into our conundrum form: ‘Why is a son who wants to offer advice to his parents like a Buddhist priest who wants to have hair on the top of his head?' (Buddhist priests had a tonsure.) The answer is, ‘However much he wants to do it, he can't.'
因此，日本的“孝道”的含义是，在包括自己的父辈、祖父辈以及伯父、叔父、伯祖、叔祖等直系亲属在内的集团里，按辈分、性别和年龄各得其所。“孝道”只限于直接照面的家庭成员间。含有庞大集团的大家族会分出若干旁系，次子以下男孩分家独立。在这种窄小的、直接见面的集团内，对“各得其所”有极为繁琐的规定。家庭中的老人，在正式退隐之前，他的吩咐不能打折扣。今天一个父亲，他的好几个儿子都已长大成人，但如果他自己的父亲还没隐退，那么他不管干什么事，都要经自己父亲的同意。孩子即便到了三十或四十岁，父亲对孩子的婚姻大事仍有决定权。作为一家之长，父亲在吃饭时第一个动筷，洗澡排在第一个，轻轻地点头接受家庭成员的行礼。在日本有这样一则笑话——“为什么说儿子给老子提意见与和尚想蓄发是一回事？”（佛教的和尚要剃发）回答是：“想干但办不到。”
Proper station means not only differences of generation but differences of age. When the Japanese want to express utter confusion, they say that something is ‘neither elder brother nor younger brother.' It is like our saying that something is neither fish nor fowl, for to the Japanese a man should keep his character as elder brother as drastically as a fish should stay in water. The eldest son is the heir. Travelers speak of ‘that air of responsibility which the eldest son so early acquires in Japan.' The eldest son shares to a high degree in the prerogatives of the father. In the old days his younger brother would have been inevitably dependent upon him in time; nowadays, especially in towns and villages, it is he who will stay at home in the old rut while his younger brothers will perhaps press forward and get more education and a better income. But old habits of hierarchy are strong.
各得其所不单是辈分之差，年龄之差也起很大作用。日本人在形容杂乱无章时，往往好用“非兄非弟”这样的成语，这与我们在形容事物不伦不类时所用的“neither fish nor fowl”(非鱼非禽)意思差不多。其实日本人认为，如同鱼应该待在水里一样，男人就应该保持长子的样子。日本的长子是继承家业的人。到过日本的人都感到“日本的长子有点装腔作势”。长子的特权与父亲的特权不相上下。以前弟弟大都成为哥哥的绊脚石。今天，尤其是农村，只有长子循规蹈矩地待在家庭里，老二和老三都到社会上去闯荡，有些人受的教育和收入都远远胜于长子。但是习惯的等级制度仍然根深蒂固，势力强大。
Even in political commentary today the traditional prerogatives of elder brothers are vividly stated in discussions of Greater East Asia policy. In the spring of 1942 a Lieutenant Colonel, speaking for the War Office, said on the subject of the Co-prosperity Sphere: ‘Japan is their elder brother and they are Japan's younger brothers. This fact must be brought home to the inhabitants of the occupied territories. Too much consideration shown for the inhabitants might engender in their minds the tendency to presume on Japan's kindness with pernicious effects on Japanese rule.' The elder brother, in other words, decides what is good for his younger brother and should not show ‘too much consideration' in enforcing it.
今天的政治评论，在议论大东亚政策时，明确地提到了传统长子的特权。一九四二年春，一名中校作为陆军省的发言人，就“大东亚共荣圈”发表过这样的讲话：“日本是他们的兄长，他们是日本的弟弟。必须让占领区的老百姓充分理解这一点。对老百姓过于关怀，会使他们利用我们的关怀，影响日本的统治。”换句话说，当哥哥为弟弟作出决定，并让他去做的时候，不能显得过分仁慈。
Whatever one's age, one's position in the hierarchy depends on whether one is male or female. The Japanese woman walks behind her husband and has a lower status. Even women who on occasions when they wear American clothes walk alongside and precede him through a door, again fall to the rear when they have donned their kimonos. The Japanese daughter of the family must get along as best she can while the presents, the attentions, and the money for education go to her brothers. Even when higher schools were established for young women the prescribed courses were heavily loaded with instruction in etiquette and bodily movement. Serious intellectual training was not on a par with boys', and one principal of such a school, advocating for his upper middle class students some instruction in European languages, based his recommendation on the desirability of their being able to put their husband's books back in the bookcase right side up after they had dusted them.
不管年龄大小，一个人在等级制度中的位置，将会因性别而异。日本的妇女必须亦步亦趋地跟在丈夫后面，社会地位也比丈夫低。有时妇女穿上西服，同丈夫并肩而行，进出大门时受到优先。但一换上和服，一切又恢复老样子。在日本的家庭里，礼物、关心和教育费用，只有男孩才有份，女孩只能在一旁侍立观看。那些专门为年轻妇女开设的学校，主要教授礼仪，真正的知识教育远不及男子。曾有一个这种学校的校长建议，应对学校里中产阶级出身的学生教授一定程度的欧洲语言知识。然而这位校长是希望他的女学生在结婚之后，在收拾整理丈夫的洋书时，不要将书放倒了。
Nevertheless, the Japanese women have great freedom as compared to most other Asiatic countries and this is not just a phase of Westernization. There never was female foot-binding as in the Chinese upper classes, and Indian women today exclaim over Japanese women going in and out of shops, up and down the streets and never secreting themselves. Japanese wives do the family shopping and carry the family purse. If money fails, it is they who must select something from the household and carry it to the pawnshop. A woman runs her servants, has great say in her children's marriages, and when she is a mother-in-law commonly runs her household realm with as firm a hand as if she had never been, for half her life, a nodding violet.
虽说如此，比起大部分亚洲国家来，日本妇女有较大的自由。这并不只是日本走欧洲化道路带来的结果。日本妇女从未像中国上流社会的女子那样缠足。日本妇女不用隐身深闺，可以自由地在街头巷尾抛头露面，购买物品。今天的印度妇女目睹这些，不禁会发出惊叹之声。日本由妻子总管全家的财务，负责采买。当家庭经济拮据时，妻子可将家中合适的物品送进当铺去换钱。当儿子结婚时，主妇的发言权更大了，不时地指挥女佣忙东忙西。一旦儿子娶了媳妇，自己熬成婆婆之后，态度就为之一变；同整个前半辈子默默无闻凡事逆来顺受的可怜相相比，判若两人。
The prerogatives of generation, sex, and age in Japan are great. But those who exercise these privileges act as trustees rather than as arbitrary autocrats. The father or the elder brother is responsible for the household, whether its members are living, dead, or yet unborn. He must make weighty decisions and see that they are carried out. He does not, however, have unconditional authority. He is expected to act responsibly for the honor of the house. He recalls to his son and younger brother the legacy of the family, both in material and in spiritual things, and he challenges them to be worthy. Even if he is a peasant he invokes noblesse oblige to the family forebears, and if he belongs to more exalted classes the weight of responsibility to the house becomes heavier and heavier. The claims of the family come before the claims of the individual.
在日本，辈分、性别和年龄的特权是如此之大，但是行使特权的人并不是专横跋扈的独裁者，而是以一种被委以重任的心情行事。父亲或兄长对整个家族负责，包括活着的、已故的或即将出生的人。他必须对重大问题作出决定，并要保证将决定付诸实现。但是他的权力是有限的。人们期望他的行动能维护一家的声誉。他要在物质和精神两个方面给儿子和弟弟留下一笔遗产。人们要求他成为与这种责任相应的人。即使是普通的农家，人们仍要求他行为高尚。他所属的阶级越是上层，他对家庭所负的责任就越重。家庭的要求往往优先于个人的要求。
In any affair of importance the head of a family of any standing calls a family council at which the matter is debated. For a conference on a betrothal, for instance, members of the family may come from distant parts of Japan. The process of coming to a decision involves all the imponderables of personality. A younger brother or a wife may sway the verdict. The master of the house saddles himself with great difficulties if he acts without regard for group opinion. Decisions, of course, may be desperately unwelcome to the individual whose fate is being settled. His elders, however, who have themselves submitted in their lifetimes to decisions of family councils, are impregnable in demanding of their juniors what they have bowed to in their day. The sanction behind their demand is very different from that which, both in law and in custom, gives the Prussian father arbitrary rights over his wife and children. What is demanded is not for this reason less exacting in Japan, but the effects are different. The Japanese do not learn in their home life to value arbitrary authority, and the habit of submitting to it easily is not fostered. Submission to the will of the family is demanded in the name of a supreme value in which, however onerous its requirements, all of them have a stake. It is demanded in the name of a common loyalty.
每当发生重大事件时，不管哪个阶级的家庭，家长都要召集亲属讨论发生的事件。有的家庭成员会从老远的地方赶来参加关于婚娶的商谈。在没有得出结论之前，任何言微位卑之辈的意见，都有可能被采纳。有时弟弟和妻子的意见起决定性的作用。如果家长无视众人的意见一意孤行的话，会使自己处于进退维谷的困境。当然会议作出的决定，对当事人来说，有时绝难心服口服。这时曾对亲族会议决定有过亲身经验的年长者会不厌其烦地要求当事人委曲从命。这种要求的背后潜伏着一股强制力。这种力量与普鲁士法律和习俗保护下的丈夫对妻儿恣意妄为的权力，毫无相同之处。在日本，要求的强制性不会因此减弱，但效果却不同。在家庭生活中，日本人不要求学会尊重专制的权力，决不培养唯命是从的习性。他们被要求服从家庭的意志。这种要求不管多么难办，只要与全体家族的利益休戚相关，就有最大的价值。也就是以共同忠诚的名义提出要求的。
Every Japanese learns the habit of hierarchy first in the bosom of his family and what he learns there he applies in wider fields of economic life and of government. He learns that a person gives all deference to those who outrank him in assigned ‘proper place,' no matter whether or not they are the really dominant persons in the group. Even a husband who is dominated by his wife, or an elder brother who is dominated by a younger brother, receives no less formal deference. Formal boundaries between prerogatives are not broken down just because some other person is operating behind the scenes. The fa ade is not changed to suit the facts of dominance. It remains inviolable. There is even a certain tactical advantage in operating without the trappings of formal status; one is in that case less vulnerable. The Japanese learn, too, in their family experience that the greatest weight that can be given to a decision comes from the family conviction that it maintains the family honor. The decision is not a decree enforced by an iron fist at the whim of a tyrant who happens to be head of the family. He is more nearly a trustee of a material and spiritual estate which is important to them all and which demands of them all that they subordinate their personal wills to its requirements. The Japanese repudiate the use of the mailed fist, but they do not for that reason subordinate themselves any the less to the demands of the family, nor do they for that reason give to those with assigned status any less extreme deference. Hierarchy in the family is maintained even though the family elders have little opportunity to be strong-armed autocrats.
日本人不管是谁，都是先在家里学会等级制度的习惯，然后再运用到经济生活和政治等更广阔的领域里。他们要学会对在“各得其所”中位置比自己高的人，表示真心实意的敬意，而不管他们实际上是否在集团中掌权。即使是受妻子管辖的丈夫或被弟弟控制的哥哥，在表面上他们仍旧受到尊敬。不管谁在幕后操纵，特权与特权之间形式上的界限，决不会因此而打破；表面上决不会迎合实际的支配关系而有所变动，谁也不得触犯。不受实际的身份约束掌握实权的人物，这样无疑从策略上来说对他们是有利的，至少可以少受攻击。通过家庭生活的实践，日本人懂得，保全家门名誉的决定会得到家庭成员的拥护，在一项决定中这种确信将会占最大的分量。这种决定不是暴君式的家长随心所欲作出的强迫命令。日本的家长更接近物质和精神财产管理人的角色。对家庭成员来说，这种财产至关紧要，家族成员的个人意志必须服从要求。日本人反对使用暴力，但他们在服从家族要求和对人表示敬意方面依然如故。即使家族中的年长者毫无机会成为深谋远虑的独裁者，家庭中的等级制度仍井然有序。
Such a bald statement of hierarchy in the Japanese family does not, when Americans read it with their different standards of interpersonal behavior, do justice to the acceptance of strong and sanctioned emotional ties in Japanese families. There is very considerable solidarity in the household and how they achieve it is one of the subjects of this book. Meanwhile it is important in trying to understand their demand for hierarchy in the wider fields of government and economic life to recognize how thoroughly the habit is learned in the bosom of the family.
以上我们就日本家庭中的等级制度作了如实的描绘。美国人在对人行动方面有一套自己的基准，单靠以上的记述很难使他们理解日本家庭中存在的那种众所周知的强有力的感情纽带。日本的家庭有非常显著的连带性，这种连带性是如何形成的？这将是本书所要解决的问题之一。当我们需要了解日本人在政治和经济生活等更广阔的领域提出的等级制度的要求时，认识一下日本人是如何在家庭中熟悉等级制度的习惯，将是很有益处的。
The hierarchal arrangements of Japanese life have been as drastic in relations between the classes as they have been in the family. In all her national history Japan has been a strong class and caste society, and a nation which has a centuries-long habit of caste arrangements has certain strengths and certain weaknesses which are of the utmost importance. In Japan caste has been the rule of life through all her recorded history and even back in the seventh century A.D. she was already adapting the ways of life she borrowed from casteless China to suit her own hierarchal culture. In that era of the seventh and eighth centuries, the Japanese Emperor and his court set themselves the task of enriching Japan with the customs of the high civilization that had greeted the amazed eyes of their envoys in the great kingdom of China. They went about it with incomparable energy. Before that time Japan had not even had a written language; in the seventh century she took the ideographs of China and used them to write her own totally different language. She had had a religion which named forty thousand gods who presided over mountains and villages and gave people good fortune—a folk religion which with all its subsequent changes has survived as modern Shinto. In the seventh century, Japan adopted Buddhism wholesale from China as a religion ‘excellent for protecting the State.'* She had had no great permanent architecture, either public or private; the Emperors built a new capital city, Nara, on the model of a Chinese capital, and great ornate Buddhist temples and vast Buddhist monasteries were erected in Japan after the Chinese pattern. The Emperors introduced titles and ranks and laws their envoys reported to them from China. It is difficult to find anywhere in the history of the world any other such successfully planned importation of civilization by a sovereign nation.
在阶级关系中，日本人生活中的等级组织，也同在家庭中一样，极为彻底。有史以来日本就是一个世袭社会，阶级分明。日本国民几个世纪来一直生活在世袭制中，他们所具有的若干长处和短处颇有重大意义。世袭制是日本有史以来贯彻始终的生活原理。七世纪，日本从没有世袭制的中国借用的生活方式，已逐步适应日本的等级制文化。伟大中国的高度文明曾使日本派往中国的使节赞叹不已。在七世纪至八世纪之间，日本的天皇和宫廷着手用中国的文明来繁荣日本。他们对这项事业倾注了无与伦比的精力。在此之前，日本连文字都没有。七世纪日本采用中国的象形文字，并用它来书写毫无共同之处的另一种语言。迄今为止，日本的宗教只有山上和村镇供奉的无数神灵，祈求他们给人类带来好运。这种民间宗教以后几经变迁，最后演变成今天的神道。日本在七世纪从中国引进佛教。佛教作为“护国之教”得到大力普及。 引自乔治·赛姆：奈良时代编年史中《日本：短暂的文化历史》，第131页。以前日本朝野都没有坚固的永久性建筑。当时天皇仿效中国的首都格式，兴建了奈良城。国内许多地方也都竞相按中国样式修建起雄伟的寺院和庙宇。天皇采用了使节从中国带回的职官制度和律令。在世界历史上很难找到一个主权国家会像日本那样如此顺利地有计划地引进文明。
Japan, however, from the very first, failed to reproduce China's casteless social organization. The official titles Japan adopted were in China given to administrators who had passed the State examinations, but in Japan they were given to hereditary nobles and feudal lords. They became part of the caste arrangements of Japan. Japan was laid out in a great number of semi-sovereign fiefs whose lords were constantly jealous of each other's powers, and the social arrangements that mattered were those that had to do with the prerogatives of lords and vassals and retainers. No matter how assiduously Japan imported civilization from China she could not adopt ways of life which put in the place of her hierarchy anything like China's administrative bureaucracy or her system of extended clans which united people from the most different walks of life into one great clan. Nor did Japan adopt the Chinese idea of a secular Emperor. The Japanese name for the Imperial House is ‘Those who dwell above the clouds' and only persons of this family can be Emperor. Japan has never had a change of dynasty, as China so often had. The Emperor was inviolable and his person was sacred. The Japanese Emperors and their courts who introduced Chinese culture in Japan no doubt could not even imagine what the Chinese arrangements were in these matters and did not guess what changes they were making.
但是日本一开始就遇到了困难，无法照搬中国那种没有世袭制的社会组织。中国通过科举授予的官职，在日本被授予世袭贵族和封建领主，并成为日本世袭制的内容之一。日本在行政上划分许多半独立的藩，由那些嗜权如命的领主当藩主。主要的社会规定都与领主和家臣的特权息息相关。中国的官僚行政制度及将各种身份和职业的人统一在一个宗族之下的宗族制度，对日本来说，无论怎样孜孜不倦地学习，也无法用它来代替等级制度。日本也没有采用中国的世俗的皇帝思想。日语把皇室称为“居住在云上的人”。意思是只有他们这一族才能继承皇位。中国的政权频繁交替，而日本从未发生过这种情况。天皇不可亵渎，天皇的身体神圣不可侵犯。日本的天皇和宫廷引进了中国文化，但对中国的组织机构熟视无睹，也不去想自己是怎样加以改革的。
In spite of all Japan's cultural importations from China, therefore, this new civilization only paved the way for centuries of conflict as to which of these hereditary lords and vassals was in control of the county. Before the eighth century had ended the noble Fujiwara family had seized dominance and had thrust the Emperor into the background. When, as time went on, the Fujiwaras' dominance was disputed by feudal lords and the whole country plunged into civil war, one of these, the famous Yoritomo Minamoto, vanquished all rivals and became actual ruler of the country under an old military title, the Shogun, which in full means literally ‘Barbarian-subduing Generalissimo.' This title, as was usual in Japan, Yoritomo made hereditary in the Minamoto family for as long as his descendants could hold the other feudal lords in check. The Emperor became an impotent figure. His chief importance was that the Shogun still depended upon him for his ritual investiture. He had no civil power. The actual power was held by a military camp, as it was called, which tried to hold its dominance by armed force over unruly fiefs. Each feudal lord, the daimyo, had his armed retainers, the samurai, whose swords were at his disposal, and they were always ready in periods of disorder to dispute the ‘proper place' of a rival fief or of the ruling Shogun.
日本从中国大量吸收各种文明。这些新的文明只不过为世袭领主的家臣开辟了一条旷日持久的争权夺利的战争之路。在十二世纪末之前，贵族藤原氏挟天子以令诸侯，掌握着统治权。不久封建领主拒绝藤原氏的统治，内乱四起。封建领主之一的源赖朝逐一战胜了其他对手，自称“将军”，成为真正的统治者。“将军”这个官职自古就有，全称为“征夷大将军”，意为“征服未开化野蛮之辈的军事首领”。这个官职，按通例由源氏世袭。天皇形同虚设。由于将军在礼仪上还要由天皇任命，所以保留其天皇的位置。天皇没有任何政治权力。实权由幕府幕府本为大将的军营之意，后指将军的政府。——译注掌握。幕府对那些不服管的藩行使武力来确保统治。封建领主，也就是“大名”拥有武装的家臣，即“武士”。武士们按主君的命令挥刀拼搏，在动荡的岁月里常常枕戈待旦，随时准备征讨那些拦路的藩主和意图篡位的将军。
In the sixteenth century civil war had become endemic. After decades of disorder the great Ieyasu won out over all rivals and in 1603 became the first Shogun of the House of Tokugawa. The Shogunate remained in Ieyasu's line for two centuries and a half and was ended only in 1868 when the ‘dual rule' of Emperor and Shogun was abolished at the beginning of the modern period. In many ways this long Tokugawa Era is one of the most remarkable in history. It maintained an armed peace in Japan up to the very last generation before it ended and it put into effect a centralized administration that admirably served the Tokugawas' purposes.
在十六世纪，内乱就像瘟疫一样四处蔓延。伟大的武将德川家康经过几十年的征讨，击败了所有对手，于一六○三年成为德川家的第一代将军。在一八六八年废除天皇和将军的“双重统治”之前，德川家世袭将军长达两个半世纪。漫长的德川时代，是日本历史上最值得注目的时代之一。整个德川时代始终维持着武装和平，实施对德川家有利的中央集权制。
Ieyasu was faced with a most difficult problem and he did not choose an easy solution. The lords of some of the strongest fiefs had been against him in the civil war and had bowed to him only after a final disastrous defeat. These were the so-called Outside Lords. These lords he left in control of their fiefs and of their samurai, and indeed of all the feudal lords of Japan they continued to have the greatest autonomy in their domains. Nevertheless, he excluded them from the honor of being his vassals and from all important functions. These important positions were reserved for the Inside Lords, Ieyasu's supporters in the civil war. To maintain this difficult regime the Tokugawas relied upon a strategy of keeping the feudal lords, the daimyos, from accumulating power and of preventing any possible combination among them which might threaten the Shogun's control. Not only did the Tokugawas not abolish the feudal scheme; for the purpose of maintaining peace in Japan and dominance of the House of Tokugawa, they attempted to strengthen it and make it more rigid.
德川家康曾面临极端困难的问题，但他并没有选择简单的解决方法。在动乱的年月里，有些藩主一直同他作对，直到最后在决战中一败涂地之后才归顺他。这就是所谓的“外样大名”。德川家康仍让他们统管原来的领地和武士。在日本所有的封建领主中，这些大名在他们的领地上继续拥有最大的自治权。但是德川家康剥夺了他们成为德川家家臣的荣誉，将他们排斥在一切重要职务之外。所有重要的地位都分封给“谱代大名”，他们在动乱年月中一直支持德川家康。为了维持这种困难的政治体制，德川家康采取了一系列措施，禁止封建领主，即“大名”积蓄力量，不准大名之间有威胁将军统治的联合举动。德川氏非但没有废除封建体制，反而出自维护日本和平和加强德川家统治的需要，进一步加强和巩固了封建制度。
Japanese feudal society was elaborately stratified and each man's status was fixed by inheritance. The Tokugawas solidified this system and regulated the details of each caste's daily behavior. Every family head had to post on his doorway his class position and the required facts about his hereditary status. The clothes he could wear, the foods he could buy, and the kind of house he could legally live in were regulated according to this inherited rank. Below the Imperial Family and the court nobles, there were four Japanese castes ranked in hierarchal order: the warriors (samurai), the farmers, the artisans, and the merchants. Below these, again, were the outcasts. The most numerous and famous of these outcasts were the Eta, workers in tabooed trades. They were scavengers, buriers of the executed, skinners of dead animals and tanners of hides. They were Japan's untouchables, or, more exactly, their uncountables, for even the mileage of roads through their villages went uncounted as if the land and the inhabitants of the area did not exist at all. They were desperately poor, and, though guaranteed the exercise of their trades, they were outside the formal Structure.
日本的封建社会层次繁多，各人的身份因世袭而定。德川进一步巩固了这种制度，详细地规定了各种世袭的日常行动。各户的家长必须在家门口挂牌写明自己的阶级地位和世袭身份，一个人穿什么衣服、买什么食品、住什么房子，都按世袭的身份有不同的规定。排在皇室和宫廷贵族之下的四个世袭等级顺序是武士、农民、工人、商人。除此之外，还有一个被排斥在社会之外的贱民阶级。贱民阶级中人数最多的是被称做“秽多”的人，从事那些一般人忌讳的行业。他们中有拾垃圾的、埋死囚的、剥死兽皮的、制皮革的。他们是日本的不可接触的贱民，正确地说是“非人”。公路通过他们部落的那部分，从路标中根本就找不出来，好像这块土地和居民都不复存在。他们穷困潦倒，虽说有经营执照，但被排斥在正式社会组织之外。
The merchants ranked just above the outcasts. However strange this seems to Americans, it was highly realistic in a feudal society. A merchant class is always disruptive of feudalism. As business men become respected and prosperous, feudalism decays. When the Tokugawas, by the most drastic laws any nation has ever enforced, decreed the isolation of Japan in the seventeenth century, they cut the ground from under the feet of the merchants. Japan had had an overseas trade all up and down the coast of China and Korea and a class of traders had been inevitably developing. The Tokugawas stopped all this by making it an offense worthy of capital punishment to build or operate any boat larger than a certain size. The small boats allowed could not cross to the continent or carry loads of trade goods. Domestic trade was severely restricted, too, by customs barriers which were set up on the borders of each fief with strict rules against letting goods in or out. Other laws were directed toward emphasizing the merchants' low social position. Sumptuary laws regulated the clothes they could wear, the umbrellas they could carry, the amount they could spend for a wedding or a funeral. They could not live in a samurai district. They had no legal protection against the swords of the samurai, the privileged warriors. The Tokugawa policy of keeping the merchants in inferior stations failed of course in a money economy, and Japan at that period was run on a money economy. But it was attempted.
商人的地位略高于贱民。美国人一定会感到不可理解。但在封建社会中，这是符合实际情况的事实。商人阶级往往是封建制度的破坏者。实业家受人尊敬，他的事业繁荣，封建制度就会衰落。德川在十七世纪颁布了强硬的法律，宣布日本实行锁国令。其目的是剥夺商人的立锥之地。以前，日本与中国和朝鲜沿海一带常有贸易往来，商人阶级大有兴旺之势。德川限制建造船舶和出海船舶的规模，违者将处以极刑，这阻止了商人势力的发展。允许建造的小船无法远航去大陆，更不能装运商品。国内贸易也受到严格限制，各藩边境设有关卡，严格监视着商品的流通。不仅如此，当时还有各种法律规定商人低贱的社会地位。奢侈取缔令规定了商人可穿的衣服、可用的伞以及婚丧允许开支的金额。他们不得与武士同居一地，对特权阶级武士对他们的凌辱，法律不予保护。德川贬低商人地位的政策影响了货币经济的发展，当时日本刚刚开始实行货币经济。
The two classes which are appropriate to a stable feudalism, the warriors and the farmers, the Tokugawa regime froze into rigid forms. During the civil wars that were finally ended by Ieyasu, the great war-lord, Hideyoshi, had already completed, by his famous ‘sword hunt' the separation of these two classes. He had disarmed the peasants and given to the samurai the sole right to wear swords. The warriors could no longer be farmers nor artisans nor merchants. Not even the lowest of them could any longer legally be a producer; he was a member of a parasitic class which drew its annual rice stipend from taxes levied upon the peasants. The daimyo handled this rice and distributed to each samurai retainer his allotted income. There was no question about where the samurai had to look for support; he was wholly dependent upon his lord. In earlier eras of Japanese history strong ties between the feudal chief and his warriors had been forged in almost ceaseless war between the fiefs; in the Tokugawa era of peace the ties became economic. For the warrior-retainer, unlike his European counterpart, was not a sub-seigneur owning his own land and serfs nor was he a soldier of fortune. He was a pensioner on a set stipend which had been fixed for his family line at the beginning of the Tokugawa Era. It was not large. Japanese scholars have estimated that the average stipend of all samurai was about what farmers were earning and that was certainly bare subsistence.* Nothing could be more to the family's disadvantage than division of this stipend among heirs and in consequence the samurai limited their families. Nothing could be more galling to them than prestige dependent on wealth and display, so they laid great stress in their code on the superior virtues of frugality.
武士和农民符合安定的封建制度需要，德川幕府进一步巩固和保存了这一形式。早在德川家康平定内乱之时，有名的武将丰臣秀吉就发起过“刀狩”运动，使得农民和武士这两个阶级彻底分离。丰臣秀吉没收了农民手中的武器，只准武士带刀。武士不能再兼农民、工匠或商人。连身份最低贱的武士，法律也禁止他们从事生产活动。他们成为寄生阶级的一员，依靠从农民交纳的租米中提取的俸禄为生。大名掌握着租米，他们按论功行赏的办法给自己的家臣——武士——分配租米。武士不必再为衣食住行伤脑筋，他们完全寄生于领主。在日本历史的早期，藩国之间连年不断的战争，成为封建领主和手下的武士之间的牢固纽带。而在安定的德川时代，这种纽带已变成经济关系。日本的武士，完全不同于中世纪欧洲的骑士。他们既不是拥有自己的领地和农奴的小领主，也不是那种不择主人的流浪骑士。在德川时代早期，他们按门第的高低领取一定数额的俸禄。俸禄不算优厚。有的日本学者经过推算，认为武士阶级的平均俸禄同农民的收入相差无几，仅能赖以糊口。引自诺曼：《日本近代国家的形成》，第69页，注12。对武士家庭来说，继承有限俸禄的人越多越不合算，因此他们严格控制人口的增长。此外，他们认为再也没有比摆阔显赫和虚张声势更令人恼怒的了，因此他们崇尚勤俭之德。
A great gulf separated the samurai from the other three classes: the farmers, the artisans and the merchants. These last three were ‘common people.' The samurai were not. The swords the samurai wore as their prerogative and sign of caste were not mere decorations. They had the right to use them on the common people. They had traditionally done so before Tokugawa times and the laws of Ieyasu merely sanctioned old customs when they decreed: ‘Common people who behave unbecomingly to the samurai or who do not show respect to their superiors may be cut down on the spot.' It was no part of Ieyasu's design that mutual dependence should be built up between common people and the samurai retainers. His policy was based on strict hierarchal regulations. Both classes headed up to the daimyo and reckoned directly with him; they were on different stairways, as it were. Up and down each stairway there was law and regulation and control and reciprocity. Between the people on two stairways there was merely distance. The separateness of the two classes was necessarily bridged by circumstances over and over again but it was not a part of the system.
武士与农、工、商三个阶级之间横贯着一条不可逾越的鸿沟，后三个阶级是“庶民”。武士作为特权标志佩带的刀，不单单是装饰品。武士有权对庶民行使武力。远在德川时代之前，日本就有这种沿袭。德川家康的法令规定：“庶民如对武士有无礼举动者，或对上不尊者，可立斩勿论。” 引自《家康遗训百条》及享保三年的《御定书百条》。——译注这种法令不过是使过去的惯例具有法律效果。德川家康从来没有考虑过让庶民和武士阶级之间建立起相互依靠的关系。德川的政策立足于严格的等级规定。庶民阶级和武士阶级一同受大名统辖，他们分别与大名发生联系。两个阶级分别处于不同的阶梯上。在各自的阶梯上，自上至下有统一的法令和规则、支配和义务。但是不同阶梯上的人员之间有一条鸿沟。有时迫于需要，两个阶梯之间也会临时架起通道，但毕竟是例外。
During the Tokugawa Era samurai retainers were not mere sword-swingers. They became increasingly the stewards of their overlords' estates and specialists in peaceful arts like the classical drama and the tea ceremony. All protocol lay in their sphere and the daimyo's intrigues were carried out by their skilled manipulations. Two hundred years of peace is a long time and mere individual sword-swinging had its limits. Just as the merchants, in spite of the caste regulations, developed a way of life that gave high place to urbane and artistic and pleasurable pursuits, so the samurai, in spite of their ready swords, developed arts of peace.
德川时代的武士不单是舞刀弄枪的武夫。他们渐渐变成掌握各种技艺的专家，有的为主君管理财产，有的会能乐和茶道。他们掌管所有的文件。大名的主张都通过他们巧妙的手法得以实现。安定的二百年是漫长的，在这段时期里，他们的武艺很少有用武之地。商人在严格的世袭制限制下，生活方式逐步向都市生活、艺术和娱乐等高级地位发展。武士在随时作好战斗准备的同时，也钻研起和平的技艺。
The farmers, in spite of their legal defenselessness against the samurai, the heavy levies of rice made upon them and all the restrictions imposed upon them, had certain securities guaranteed them. They were guaranteed the possession of their farms and to have land gives a man prestige in Japan. Under the Tokugawa regime, land could not be permanently alienated and this law was a guarantee for the individual cultivator, not, as in European feudalism, for the feudal lord. The farmer had a permanent right to something which he valued supremely and he appears to have worked his land with the same diligence and unstinting care with which his descendants cultivate their rice fields today. Nevertheless, he was the Atlas who supported the whole parasitic upper class of about two million persons, including the government of the Shogun, the establishments of the daimyo and the stipends of the samurai retainers. He was taxed in kind, that is, he paid to the daimyo a percentage of his crops. Whereas in Siam, another wet-rice country, the traditional tax is 10 per cent, in Tokugawa Japan it was 40 per cent. But in reality it was higher than this. In some fiefs it was 80 per cent and always there was corvée or work requisitions, which bore down on the strength and time of the farmer. Like the samurai, the farmers also limited their families and the population of the whole of Japan stood at almost the same figure during all the Tokugawa centuries. For an Asiatic country during a long period of peace these static population figures tell a great deal about the regime. It was Spartan in its restrictions, both on the tax-supported retainers and on the producing class, but between each dependent and his superior, it was relatively dependable. A man knew his obligations, his prerogatives and his station and if these were infringed upon the poorest might protest.
农民要交纳繁重的租米，并受到种种限制。不过他们也得到若干保证，拥有土地的所有权。日本拥有土地的人倍增。在德川统治下，禁止土地永久让渡。这一法律保证了个体耕作者的利益，并不像欧洲封建制度那样保护封建领主的利益。农民拥有无比珍贵的土地权，他们辛勤地在自己的土地上耕作着，仿佛看到自己的子孙也在耕作着这块土地。他们像希腊神话中用双肩支撑地球的阿特拉斯一样，支撑着多达两百万人的上层寄生阶级，包括将军的政府、藩府、吃俸禄的武士。他们以实物完税，也就是说按一定的比例将收获的粮食交给大名。同样种植水稻的暹罗，传统的租米是收成的百分之十。而日本在德川时代租米是收成的百分之四十；实际上有时比例更高，有的藩可高达百分之八十。不仅如此，农民还要承担沉重的劳役。农民也同武士一样，被严格控制人口的增长。德川统治的二百五十年内，日本全国的人口几乎没有增长。作为一个长期安定、经济增长的亚洲国家，人口统计数字稳定不变，清楚地表明了统治的性质。无论是寄生的武士，还是生产者，统治者都对他们采取斯巴达式的限制。但是单独的隶属者和上司的关系，还是比较融洽的。人们都清楚自己的义务、特权和地位。当受到侵犯时，再穷的人也可以提出抗议。
The farmers, even in the direst poverty, carried their protests not only to the feudal lord but to the Shogunate authorities. There were at least a thousand of these revolts during the two and a half Tokugawa centuries. They were not occasioned by the traditional heavy rule of ‘40 per cent to the prince and 60 per cent to the cultivators'; they were all protests against additional levies. When conditions were no longer bearable, the farmers might march in great numbers against their overlords but the procedure of petition and judgment was orderly. The farmers drew up formal petitions for redress which they submitted to the daimyo's chamberlain. When this petition was intercepted or the daimyo took no notice of their complaints they sent their representatives to the capital to present their written complaints to the Shogunate. In famous cases they could insure its delivery only by inserting it into some high official's palanquin as he rode through the streets of the capital. But, no matter what risks the farmers took in delivering the petition, it was then investigated by the Shogunate authorities and about half of the judgments were in favor of the peasants.*
生活在水深火热之中的农民，不仅可对封建领主，而且还能对幕府当局提出抗议。在德川统治的二百五十年间，农民起义少说也有一千多起。农民起义并不是传统的“四公六民”（收成的四成归领主，六成归耕作者）重税引起的，而是农民无法忍受更残酷的横征暴敛。这时农民聚集到领主城下，按合法的手续提出诉讼。农民写好正式的匡正秕政请愿书，递交给大名的亲信。如果大名撕毁了请愿书，不愿倾听农民的申诉，农民就直接派代表前往江户，向幕府递交诉状。有时幕府的重臣路过市内时，会有人拦轿投送诉状。农民的这种做法要冒极大风险。幕府当局最后对诉状作出判决，多半判定对农民有利。引自休·伯顿：《日本德川时代的农民起义》，《日本亚洲学会丛刊》第二辑第16种，1938年。——译注
Japan's requirements of law and order were not satisfied, however, with the Shogunate's judgment on the farmers' claims. Their complaints might be just and it might be advisable for the State to honor them, but the peasant leaders had transgressed the strict law of hierarchy. Regardless of any decision in their favor, they had broken the essential law of their allegiance and this could not be overlooked. They were therefore condemned to death. The righteousness of their cause had nothing to do with the matter. Even the peasants accepted this inevitability. The condemned men were their heroes and the people came in numbers to the execution where the leaders were boiled in oil or beheaded or crucified, but at the execution the crowds did not riot. This was law and order. They might afterward build the dead men shrines and honor them as martyrs, but they accepted the execution as part and parcel of the hierarchal laws by which they lived.
幕府仅对农民的主张作出判决，并不能满足日本的法和秩序的要求。农民的申诉也许是正当的，国家接受他们的申诉或许也是上策，但是农民起义的领袖破坏了严格的等级制度的法。即使判决对他们是有利的，他们破坏了服从主君的最重要的法，这是不能宽恕的。因此他们被判死刑，而动机的正确与否，与此毫不相干。农民们只能哀叹命运，束手待毙。被判死刑者成为他们心中的英雄。民众蜂拥来到刑场，观看起义的领袖被投入油锅或砍头。在刑场上，群众决不会发起暴动。这是法，是秩序。他们会为死者建立祠庙进行奉祭。他们承认判处刑罚是等级制法律的需要。
The Tokugawa Shoguns, in short, attempted to solidify the caste structure within each fief and to make each class dependent on the feudal lord. The daimyo stood at the apex of the hierarchy in each fief and he was allowed to exercise his prerogatives over his dependents. The Shogun's great administrative problem was to control the daimyo. In every way he prevented them from forming alliances or from carrying out schemes of aggression. Passport and customs officials were maintained at the frontiers of the fiefs to keep strict watch for ‘outgoing women and incoming guns' lest any daimyo try to send his women away and smuggle arms in. No daimyo could contract a marriage without the Shogun's permission lest it might lead to a dangerous political alliance. Trade between the fiefs was hindered even to the extent of allowing bridges to become impassable. The Shogun's spies too kept him well informed on the daimyo's expenditures and if the feudal coffers were filling up, the Shogun required him to undertake expensive public works to bring him in line again. Most famous regulation of all was that the daimyo live half of each year in the capital and, even when he returned to his fief for his residence there, he had to leave his wife behind him in Yedo (Tokyo) as a hostage in the hands of the Shoguns. In all these ways the administration made certain that it maintain the upper hand and enforce its dominant position in the hierarchy.
每一代德川家的将军都企图巩固各藩的世袭制，使每个阶级都依附于封建领主。大名凌驾于藩的等级制度之上，有权对属下行使特权。将军的主要职责是在行政上控制大名。将军想方设法阻止大名缔结同盟和向外扩张。将军在各藩边境设立关卡，检查旅行证明，征收关税。为了防止大名将妻妾做抵押购买武器，严密监查“女人和枪支的进出”。没有将军的许可，大名不准私自订婚，以防大名靠裙带关系结成政治同盟。各藩之间的贸易受到限制，只能通过指定的桥梁才能交易。将军派出密探监视大名的财政。藩的金库日益盈满时，将军会让大名承担大量的土木工程，使他们的金库恢复到原来水平。将军规定每个大名每年必须在江户居住半年，他们回去时，必须将妻子留在江户做人质。幕府就是这样用各种手段来维护权力，确保在等级制中的统治地位。
The Shogun was not, of course, the final keystone in this arch for he held sway as the appointee of the Emperor. The Emperor with his court of hereditary nobles (kuge) was isolated in Kyoto and was without actual power. The Emperor's financial resources were less than those of even lesser daimyos and the very ceremonies of the court were strictly circumscribed by Shogunate regulations. Not even the most powerful Tokugawa Shoguns, however, took any steps to do away with this dual rule of Emperor and actual ruler. It was no new thing in Japan. Since the twelfth century a Generalissimo (Shogun) had ruled the country in the name of a throne shorn of actual authority. In some centuries division of function had gone so far that the real power which the shadowy Emperor delegated to a hereditary secular chief was exercised in turn by a hereditary advisor of that chief. There has always been delegation upon delegation of original authority. Even in the last and desperate days of the Tokugawa regime, Commodore Perry did not suspect the existence of an Emperor in the background and our first envoy, Townsend Harris, who negotiated the first commercial treaty with Japan in 1858, had to discover for himself that there was an Emperor.
当然，将军并不是等级制这座拱桥的最后一块拱心石。他受命于天皇而掌权。天皇同世袭贵族被剥夺了实权，隐居在京都。天皇的财产还比不上一个小小的大名。宫廷中的一切仪式，都要受幕府法律的制约。但是大权独揽的德川将军也未敢废除天皇同实权者并列的双重统治。双重统治在日本由来已久。有的朝代，有名无实的天皇将实权委托给世俗的首领，而首领又受世袭的执权（政治顾问）控制。所以实权常常会这样几经周折，变成双重、三重统治。就在德川幕府气息奄奄之时，柏利海军准将也没有察觉到日本还有天皇的存在。一八五八年，哈利斯作为我国的第一代公使，同日本商谈通商条约。他靠自己发现了天皇的存在。
The truth is that Japan's conception of her Emperor is one that is found over and over among the islands of the Pacific. He is the Sacred Chief who may or may not take part in administration. In some Pacific islands he did and in some he delegated his authority. But always his person was sacred. Among New Zealand tribes the Sacred Chief was so sacrosanct that he might not feed himself and even the spoon with which he was fed must not be allowed to touch his sacred teeth. He had to be carried when he went abroad, for any land upon which he set his sacred foot became automatically so holy that it must pass into the Sacred Chief's possession. His head was particularly sacrosanct and no man could touch it. His words reached the tribal gods. In some Pacific islands, like Samoa and Tonga, the Sacred Chief did not descend into the arena of life. A Secular Chief performed all the duties of State. James Wilson, who visited the island of Tonga in the Eastern Pacific at the end of the eighteenth century, wrote that its government ‘resembles most the government of Japan where the sacred majesty is a sort of state prisoner to the captain-general.'* The Tongan Sacred Chiefs were isolated from public affairs, but they performed ritual duties. They had to receive the first fruits of the gardens and conduct a ceremony before any man could eat of them. When the Sacred Chief died, his death was announced by the phrase, ‘The heavens are void.' He was buried with ceremony in a great royal tomb. But he took no part in administration.
日本人对天皇的观念，与太平洋诸岛经常看到的观念同出一辙。他是神圣酋长，或许参与政治，或许不参与政治。有的太平洋岛屿，酋长行使自己的权力，有的岛屿的酋长把权力委托给别人。但他们的身体神圣不可触及。在新几内亚的部落里，神圣酋长的身体是不能碰的。吃饭时他自己不动手，有人将饭菜送到他嘴里，这时候勺子不能碰到他的牙齿。酋长外出时必须有人抬着，否则他落脚的土地都变成圣地，归酋长所有。他的头部是最神圣的部位，绝对不准摸。他的话可传到部落的神灵耳中。有一些太平洋岛屿，像西萨摩亚和汤加，神圣酋长完全与世俗生活隔离。由世俗酋长负责行政事务。十八世纪末曾访问过东太平洋、汤加岛的威尔逊，曾这样写道：“汤加的政治体制酷似日本，在日本，神圣的皇帝犹如大将军手中的政治犯。” 引自詹姆斯·威尔逊：《1796年，1797年，1798年，达夫号前往南太平洋的传教之旅》，伦敦，1799年，第384页。汤加岛的神圣酋长远离公务，只负责宗教事务。他去果园采摘第一批果实，主持祭祀，否则谁也不能品尝果实。神圣酋长的死亡，被称为“天空虚虚”。在一场庄严的仪式之后，被葬入庞大的墓中。但他同政治全无关系。
The Emperor, even when he was politically impotent and ‘a sort of State prisoner to the Captain-general,' filled, according to Japanese definitions, a ‘proper station' in the hierarchy. The Emperor's active participation in mundane affairs was to them no measure of his status. His court at Kyoto was a value they preserved all through the long centuries of the rule of the Barbarian-subduing Generalissimos. His functions were superfluous only from a Western point of view. The Japanese, who at every point were accustomed to rigorous definition of hierarchal r le, looked at the matter differently.
天皇即使在政治上毫无权力，即使他处在“大将军手中的政治犯”境地，按日本人的观念，他在等级制度中仍有蛮不错的位置。天皇积极参与俗务，对日本人来说，同时能成为衡量天皇身份的尺子。在长达几世纪的大将军统治时期，天皇在京都的宫殿保存完好。只有从西方的角度来看，天皇的职能才是无用的。在各方面习惯等级制的日本人，从另一个角度看待事物。
The extreme explicitness of the Japanese hierarchal system in feudal times, from outcast to Emperor, has left its strong impress on modern Japan. After all, the feudal regime was legally ended only about seventy-five years ago, and strong national habits do not pass away within one man's lifetime. Japanese statesmen of the modern period, too, laid their careful plans, as we shall see in the next chapter, to preserve a great deal of the system in spite of radical alterations in their country's objectives. The Japanese, more than any other sovereign nation, have been conditioned to a world where the smallest details of conduct are mapped and status is assigned. During two centuries when law and order were maintained in such a world with an iron hand, the Japanese learned to identify this meticulously plotted hierarchy with safety and security. Solong as they stayed within known boundaries, and so long as they fulfilled known obligations, they could trust their world. Banditry was controlled. Civil war between the daimyo was prevented. If subjects could prove that others had overstepped their rights, they could appeal as the farmers did when they were exploited. It was personally dangerous but it was approved. The best of the Tokugawa Shoguns even had a Complaint Box into which any citizen could drop his protest, and the Shogun alone had a key to his box. There were genuine guarantees in Japan that aggressions would be rectified if they were acts that were not allowed on the existing map of conduct. One trusted the map and was safe only when one followed it. One showed one's courage, one's integrity in conforming to it, not in modifying it or in revolting against it. Within its stated limits, it was a known and, in their eyes, a dependable world. Its rules were not abstract ethical principles of a decalogue but tiny specifications of what was due in this situation and what was due in that situation; what was due if one were a samurai and what was due if one were a common man; what was proper to elder brother and what was proper to younger brother.
日本封建时代的等级制，对下自贱民，上至天皇都有明确的规定，在近代日本也留下了深刻的痕迹。封建制度仅在七十五年前才宣告结束，根深蒂固的国民习性绝不会在一代人的短暂时间里消失殆尽。我们将在下面一章里谈到，近代的日本政治家们制订了周密的计划，以便将这种制度的许多部分保存下来，尽管国家的性质有了根本性的变化。同其他主权国家相比，日本人必须在严格规定各人社会地位的世界中生活，各人的行动严格按事先画好的地图行事。二百年来，法和秩序一直依靠武力来维持。生活在这种世界中的日本人，懂得了经过周密安排的等级制度与安全和保证是一回事。只要他们不逾越这个既知的领域，只要履行既知的义务。这个世界就可以依赖。这个世界没有匪贼，大名之间没有内乱，当别人侵犯自己的权利时，人们可以像农民被残酷剥削时一样，提出抗议。当然这种做法对个人有一定的危险，但是一种合法的手段，德川将军中的有识者曾设立过“诉愿箱”，亲自掌管开箱的钥匙。老百姓都可以投书诉说不平。侵略行为如果在日本人的行动“地图”上不允许的话，则必须纠正。人们相信“地图”，只有按“地图”规定行动时，才会感到安全。人们只有在服从规定时才显得勇敢和高尚，而不是在修改和反抗它时。“地图”上标示的范围，是既知世界，在日本人看来，是可以依赖的世界。这种规定不像摩西的十诫那样，它不是空间的道德原理，而是有具体的内容，如在这种场合如何做，在那种场合如何做，武士该怎样做，庶民该怎样做，哥哥怎么做相称，弟弟怎么做相称。
The Japanese did not become a mild and submissive people under this system, as some nations have under a stronghanded hierarchal regime. It is important to recognize that certain guarantees were given to each class. Even the outcasts were guaranteed a monopoly of their special trades and their self-governing bodies were recognized by the authorities. Restrictions upon each class were great but there were order and security too.
日本人虽然生活在这种制度下，但他们完全不像其他几个同样在专制的等级制统治下的国民那样温良恭顺。承认每个阶级都有某种程度的保证是很重要的。即便是贱民阶级，他们也有垄断特殊行业的权利，当局承认他们的自治团体。各个阶级都有极大的限制，但换来的是秩序和保证。
The caste restrictions also had a certain flexibility they do not have, for instance, in India. Japanese customs provided several explicit techniques for manipulating the system without doing violence to the accepted ways. A man could change his caste status in several ways. When money lenders and merchants became wealthy, as they inevitably did under Japan's money economy, the rich used various traditional devices to infiltrate the upper classes. They became ‘land owners' by the use of liens and rents. It is true that the peasants' land was inalienable but farm rents were excessively high in Japan and it was profitable to leave the peasants on their land. Money lenders settled on the land and collected their rents, and such ‘ownership' of land gave prestige as well as profit in Japan. Their children married samurai. They became gentry.
日本的世袭制有某种程度的灵活性，不像印度那样无法通融。对于普遍承认的惯例，日本的习惯做法是巧妙地控制它，而不是正面顶撞。人们可通过几种办法改换世袭的身份，这是像日本那样实行货币制度的国家必然的趋势。高利贷者和商人们成为富豪之后，玩弄那种传统的权术，跻身上层阶级。他们利用抵押权和地租当上“地主”。日本禁止农民让渡土地，但是日本的地租极高，将农民紧紧束缚在土地上对地主是有利的。高利贷者盘踞在土地上收敛地租。在日本拥有这种土地，除了获得利润外，还可带来权势。他们的子女可同武士联姻，本人可当上老爷。
Another traditional manipulation of the caste system was through the custom of adoption. It provided a way of ‘buying' samurai status. As merchants became richer in spite of all Tokugawa restrictions, they arranged for their sons' adoption into samurai families. In Japan one seldom adopts a son; one adopts a husband for one's daughter. He is known as an ‘adopted husband.' He becomes the heir of his father-in-law. He pays a high price, for his name is stricken from his own family register and entered on his wife's. He takes her name and goes to live with his mother-in-law. But if the price is high, the advantages are also great. For the prosperous merchant's descendants become samurai and the impoverished samurai's family gets an alliance with wealth. No violence is done to the caste system which remains just what it always was. But the system has been manipulated to provide upper-class status for the wealthy.
另外一个巧妙操纵世袭制的传统做法就是收养子。这个方法开辟了一条“购买”武士身份之路。商人们在德川氏的种种掣肘下，仍然不断聚敛财富。发家致富的商人把自己的儿子送给武士家当养子。日本人很少视养子为亲儿子，但养子往往能成为女婿，一般称为“入赘女婿”。入赘女婿可以成为养父的继承人，但他们也付出了相当的代价。他们的名字被从自己家庭的户籍上注销，而转到妻子家的户籍上；他必须用妻子的姓，住到妻子家，同养母一道生活。不过牺牲大，获益也大。富商的子孙摇身变成武士，落魄的武士同富豪结成亲家。世袭制一点也没有受到损害，依然故我。但是富豪可以巧妙地操纵世袭制，获得上层阶级的身份。
Japan therefore did not require castes to marry only among themselves. There were approved arrangements which allowed intermarriage among them. The resulting infiltration of prosperous traders into the lower samurai class played a large part in furthering one of the greatest contrasts between Western Europe and Japan. When feudalism broke down in Europe it was due to the pressure of a growing and increasingly powerful middle class and this class dominated the modern industrial period. In Japan no such strong middle class arose. The merchants and money lenders ‘bought' upper-class status by sanctioned methods. Merchants and lower samurai became allies. It is a curious and surprising thing to point out that at the time when feudalism was in its death throes in both civilizations, Japan sanctioned class mobility to a greater degree than continental Europe did, but no evidence for such a statement could be more convincing than the lack of any sign of a class war between aristocracy and bourgeoisie.
因此，在日本绝非只能在同一世袭种姓内通婚。通过公认的手续，不同的世袭种姓可以通婚。结果，富裕的商人逐渐浸入下层武士阶级，使得欧洲和日本存在的明显差异，越发加大。在欧洲，日益繁荣的中产阶级最终摧毁了封建制度，并且领导了近代的产业时代。日本并没有产生这种强大的中产阶级。商人和高利贷者通过合法的手段买到上流阶级的身份；商人和下层武士结成了同盟。当欧洲和日本的封建制度处于临终的痛苦期时，日本比欧洲大陆各国更宽容阶级之间的转移。这种做法极为巧妙，令人感到惊奇。在日本全然看不到贵族和市民阶级之间有过阶级斗争的痕迹，这有力地证实了上述做法。
It is easy to point out that the common cause made by these two classes was mutually advantageous in Japan, but it would have been mutually advantageous in France too. It was advantageous in Western Europe in those individual instances where it occurred. But class rigidity was strong in Europe and the conflict of classes led in France to the expropriation of the aristocracy. In Japan they drew closer together. The alliance that overthrew the effete Shogunate was an alliance between the merchant-financiers and the samurai retainers. The modern era in Japan preserved the aristocratic system. It could hardly have happened without Japan's sanctioned techniques for class mobility.
日本两个阶级团结合作，因为这样做对双方都是有利的——下这样的结论是很简单的。如果真是这样的话，法国也应有这种利益关系。西方实行合作的一两个特殊例子也可以说明合作对双方有利。但是总的来说，欧洲的阶级明显固定不变，法国的阶级斗争导致贵族丧失财产。日本的阶级关系更融洽一些。由商人、高利贷阶级和武士阶级结成的同盟，推翻了摇摇欲坠的幕府。日本到了近代仍保存着贵族制度。如果日本没有公认的阶级转移手段，是决不会产生这种情况的。
If the Japanese loved and trusted their meticulously explicit map of behavior, they had a certain justification. It guaranteed security so long as one followed the rules; it allowed protests against unauthorized aggressions and it could be manipulated to one's own advantage. It required the fulfillment of reciprocal obligations. When the Tokugawa regime crumbled in the first half of the nineteenth century, no group in the nation was in favor of tearing up the map. There was no French Revolution. There was not even an 1848. Yet the times were desperate. From the common people to the Shogunate, every class had fallen into debt to the money lenders and merchants. The mere numbers of the non-productive classes and the scale of customary official expenditures had proved insupportable. The daimyo as the grip of poverty tightened upon them were unable to pay the fixed stipends to their samurai retainers and the whole network of feudal ties became a mockery. They tried to keep afloat by increasing the already heavy taxes upon the peasants. These were collected years in advance and the farmers were reduced to extreme want. The Shogunate too was bankrupt and could do little to keep the status quo. Japan was in dire domestic extremity by 1853 when Admiral Perry appeared with his men of war. His forced entry was followed in 1858 by a trade treaty with the United States which Japan was in no position to refuse.
日本人喜好并依赖周密的行动“地图”，他们有着颇能令人信服的理由，只要人们循规蹈矩，这张“地图”就会给予保证；它允许对不当侵略提出抗议，并可巧妙地运作为自己谋福利。“地图”要求相互履行义务。十九世纪，在德川幕府即将崩溃时，日本没有一个集团提出要撕毁这张“地图”。日本没有爆发“法国大革命”，也没发生“二月革命”（一八四八年），不过日本的经济形势越来越糟。从庶民到幕府都被迫向高利贷者和商人告贷而负债累累，无力支撑众多的非生产阶级和巨额的经常性财政支出。入不敷出的大名无钱给家臣支付规定的俸禄，封建纽带的联系名存实亡。他们急于早日结束借贷度日的局面，只有不断加重税收，使得农民雪上加霜。租税已征收到好几年之后，农民一贫如洗，生计窘迫。幕府也是债台高筑，难以维持。一八五三年，海军上将柏利率领他的军队闯入日本，之后迫使日本在一八五八年与美国签订了通商条约。此时，日本国内已极端困顿，毫无招架之力。
The cry that went up from Japan, however, was Isshin—to dig back into the past, to restore. It was the opposite of revolutionary. It was not even progressive. Joined with the cry ‘Restore the Emperor' was the equally popular cry ‘Expel the Barbarians.' The nation supported the program of going back to a golden age of isolation and the few leaders who saw how impossible such a course would be were assassinated for their pains. There seemed not the slightest likelihood that this non-revolutionary country of Japan would alter its course to conform to any Occidental patterns, still less that in fifty years it would compete with Western nations on their own grounds. Nevertheless, that is what happened. Japan used her own strengths, which were not at all the Occidental strengths, to achieve, a goal which no powerful?high-placed group and no popular opinion in Japan demanded. No Westerner in the eighteen-sixties would have believed if he had seen the future in a crystal ball. There seemed to be no cloud the size of a man's hand on the horizon to indicate the tumult of activity which swept Japan during the next decades. Nevertheless, the impossible happened. Japan's backward and hierarchy-ridden population swung to a new course and held it.
日本各地到处响起了“一新”的呼声，要恢复过去的秩序，同革命背道而驰，根本不是进步。“尊王”和“攘夷”这两个口号遥相呼应，一样鼓舞人心。国民支持恢复黄金时代的治国政纲。少数感到这种方针难以成功的领导人遭到暗杀。人们怎么也想象不到厌恶革命的日本会改变方针效仿西方各国，而且在仅仅五十年后，在西方各国拿手的领域里，日本会成为他们的竞争对手。这种情况毕竟发生了。日本靠着自己固有的长处——与西方各国概念不同的长处，达到了目标，这是一个一群日本地位显赫的人物和一般民众舆论都没有要求过的目标。十九世纪六十年代的西方人，如果他们在水晶球中预见过未来的话，无论如何是不会相信这种事实的。谁也不会想到地平线上的一块巴掌大的黑云，在几十年后会变成席卷日本的风暴。但是这种不可能的事发生了。在等级制度愚弄下落后的日本民众奋起直追，找到了一条崭新的道路，坚定不移地向前走着。