Uchiyama Gudō, "A View on Lieutenant General Itō's Adultery"
Uchiyama Gudō (内山愚童) (1908). 「伊藤中將姦通觀」 [A View on Lieutenant General Itō's Adultery], 『世界婦人』 21 (1 January 1908): 7. (Original Japanese here.)
Translation
A View on Lieutenant General Itō's Adultery
- Uchiyama Gudō
Madam Fukuda (福田女子)[1], it has already become that busy season when only fifteen days remain in the year. I have just now read the twentieth issue of Sekai Fujin (世界婦人, World Women). At your actions—carrying out Heaven's mission by bringing light into the dark world of women—people like us are deeply ashamed of ourselves.[2]
I hear that you intend to bring out the January issue before the year's end. I am certain that the present matter of concern, the Lieutenant General's adultery incident,[3] will be treated on your pages to bold, decisive new interpretations from various eminent contributors, for your readers to see.[4]
How would it be—would you not print my own view of this adultery in whatever blank space remains on your pages? I do not insist upon it in the least; but if there is anything in it worth taking, please let it be printed.
To state my faith plainly: only when filial piety is removed from the dictionary of ethics, loyalty cast aside, and, moreover, the word chastity thrown out, will the world at last behold the Kingdom of Heaven.[5] For this reason my view of the present adultery incident differs somewhat in character from that of the capitalist newspapers of the world,[6] which single out the Lieutenant General alone for abuse.
With this much said by way of preface, let me attempt, in the very simplest terms, a brief comment on each person concerned, and put the question to the assembled ranks of the world's readers.
Pitiable Yōichi (陽一)[7]—how wretched is one who lacks faith! Unable to cut through the deluding net of the system of private property,[8] it is the superstition that she is “my wife” that has brought about this incident. Even supposing the trial ends in Yōichi's victory, what benefit does this bring to Yōichi himself? Surely he cannot thereby recover the love that O-Hara (お原) sold to the Lieutenant General. How sad, Yōichi—you ought now to cast aside the superstition that a wife is one's private possession, and hold instead to the faith that husband and wife should remain so only for as long as their love endures; that when either partner's affection moves elsewhere, this should be regarded as a natural parting,[9] in which no selfish human will ought to intervene.[10] Only by entering into this faith will woman, for the first time, escape this world of suffering[11] and become a person of the Kingdom of Heaven. Know that if it is not so, eternal damnation cannot be escaped.[12]
O-Hara (お原),[13] captive of present-day society, O-Hara who stands at the very center of this adultery affair—when the Lieutenant General first proposed sexual relations to you, why did you not divorce Yōichi beforehand, and only afterward consent? It is said that you asked the Lieutenant General for a week's grace; had this thought occurred to you within that week, the present incident would never have arisen. And yet, having said this, you too are a child of your age; there is no one today in this world who is not a slave to vanity and to livelihood.[14] Since you had no prospect of becoming the Lieutenant General's wife, you could not summon the resolve to divorce Yōichi and openly share your love with him. Considering this, is not the system of private property in present-day society itself a thing to be cursed? Devote all your strength for the rest of your life toward overturning this system of private property, which has cast you down into your present fate—this alone will strike down the enemy that thrust you into today's pit.
Foolish Lieutenant General Gigorō (中將義五郎)[15]—I am not one who condemns this act of yours as a sin. And yet you too have been unable to cut through that net, and so cannot escape being called foolish. An incident such as this is nothing rare among your fellow officers; strip away the flimsy black curtain from today's society—filled as it is with those who fall into degradation because money is freely available to them and those driven to degradation by hunger—and one finds it everywhere. And yet the newspapermen of the world attack you as though they had encountered an enemy that comes but once in a thousand years; their sheer foolishness is enough to make one burst out laughing. At the same time, is it not also foolish of you to remain bound by so trivial a social system that you are even driven into administrative suspension?
I wonder whether this affair might not be Heaven's command to you to destroy this foolish society. Stop tormenting yourself and reflect deeply.[16] Is not the present society—contending as it does over honor as insubstantial as smoke and profit as fleeting as foam—fated sooner or later to perish? What is honor? What is property? And the very protagonist who contends over them—what is he himself? Stop this useless torment. Cease your torment, and after supper take up your cane and stroll through the cemetery at Yanaka (谷中);[17] there you shall come upon a clear gospel.
Thus having attained this new light, you shall arrive at an honor twice that of the rank you have won today by the sword. Do not torment yourself—go forward and fulfill your heaven-given mission.
Notes
- ↑ Fukuda Hideko (福田英子, 1865–1927), the addressee, was a prominent Meiji-era women's rights activist and former Freedom and People's Rights Movement agitator who moved into the socialist orbit of the Heiminsha (平民社) group. She founded and edited Sekai Fujin beginning in January 1907; the magazine carried contributions from Heiminsha-affiliated writers such as Abe Isoo, Kinoshita Naoe, and Kōtoku Shūsui before being suppressed by the authorities in 1909. Gudō's honorific address here, "-joshi" (女子), was a period convention for addressing a woman of standing in correspondence, roughly equivalent to "Madam" or "Ms."; it is not part of her given name.
- ↑ 赫顔の至り, literally "the utmost of a flushed face": an idiom for being so moved or humbled by another's conduct that one's own face reddens with a mixture of admiration and shame at falling short of it.
- ↑ The scandal Gudō refers to is treated in later scholarship under the title "伊藤中将姦通事件" ("the Lieutenant General Itō adultery incident"). The officer is identified in the title by surname and rank, Itō Chūjō ("Lieutenant General Itō"), and later in the body of the essay by rank and given name alone, "Chūjō Gigorō" ("Lieutenant General Gigorō")—the same person addressed two different ways, not two different people.
- ↑ 快刀亂麻, literally "a sharp blade cutting through tangled hemp": an idiom for resolving a complicated, snarled problem swiftly and decisively.
- ↑ 天國, "Kingdom of Heaven": a Christian, not a Buddhist, term. Gudō, a Sōtō Zen priest, repeatedly reaches for Christian vocabulary in this essay ("faith" 信仰, "gospel" 福音) rather than standard Buddhist terms such as jōdo (浄土, Pure Land). This may be a rhetorical choice aimed at Fukuda's readership—Fukuda herself had studied at Uchimura Kanzō's Bible study group before turning to socialism—though it is also consistent with Gudō's broader habit of freely mixing religious idioms in his anarchist writings.
- ↑ 資本家新聞, "capitalist newspapers." Gudō's framing pits his own anarchist reading of the scandal against the mainstream ("capitalist") papers' moralizing coverage of it.
- ↑ As with O-Hara below, only a given name is used for the husband, without a surname—likely a convention of the original scandal reporting this essay is responding to, rather than an editorial choice by Gudō.
- ↑ 私有制度 ("the system of private property") is a recurring target in Gudō's writing and a central term of his anarcho-communist critique; he uses it here to reframe a personal scandal as a symptom of a systemic institution (private ownership, extended by analogy to the ownership of a spouse) rather than an individual moral failing. The original compounds this with 迷網, "net of delusion" (迷, mayoi, being a standard Buddhist term for ignorance or delusion). Gudō thus casts the institution of private property itself as a form of delusion, an entangling net from which one must free oneself rather than merely an unjust social arrangement.
- ↑ 自然の離別, "a natural parting": Gudō here articulates a position closely resembling the "free love" arguments current among contemporary anarchist and socialist circles, which challenged lifelong monogamous marriage as an extension of the property system and held that a relationship should endure only as long as mutual affection does.
- ↑ 人意の私心, "the selfish will (私心) of human intention": the character 私 ("private," "selfish") here echoes 私有制度 ("the system of private property") used earlier in the essay, linking private possession with selfish human intervention.
- ↑ 苦なる此世界, "this world of suffering": 苦 (ku) is also the standard Sino-Japanese Buddhist term for dukkha, the suffering identified in the First Noble Truth. Gudō frames escape from the private-property marriage system in language carrying Buddhist resonance immediately before switching to the Christian-derived "Kingdom of Heaven" as the destination of that escape.
- ↑ 永劫の墮獄, literally an eternal falling into hell. Gudō again combines language of hell with the Christian-inflected "Kingdom of Heaven" and "faith" that structure the passage.
- ↑ Only a given name, prefixed with the honorific "O-" conventionally used before women's names in this period, is given for the wife—again likely reflecting how she was identified in the original press coverage rather than an editorial choice by Gudō.
- ↑ 虛榮と生活の奴隷, "a slave to vanity and to livelihood": dorei ("slave") is stock vocabulary of the contemporary socialist and labor press, most often deployed for wage labor under capitalism ("wage slavery"); Gudō extends the same figure to describe everyone's bondage to social appearance and to the need to survive economically, folding O-Hara's situation into a general social condition rather than treating it simply as an individual failing.
- ↑ The text here reads 中將義五郎—"Lieutenant General Gigorō"—with no surname. This is the same officer named in the title as Itō Chūjō (伊藤中將); Gudō simply addresses him here by rank and given name rather than by surname.
- ↑ 煩悶 denotes anguish, distress, or agonized inner struggle. 沈思黙考 means to think or reflect deeply and silently. Although both expressions can carry resonances appropriate to Gudō's religious vocabulary, neither is in itself a specifically Buddhist technical term.
- ↑ Yanaka Cemetery (谷中霊園), established in 1874 in northeastern Tokyo, was and remains one of the city's largest public cemeteries, historically associated with quiet walks and reflection on mortality.
