CHAPTER 7
£Innovation through
Conservatism: Japan
Religions generally look backwards to the sacredness of past tradition. But
religions cannot avoid changing in changed social circumstances, and the
tension of religious elites declines by accommodation with lay society. New
religious initiatives often take such accommodation as a foil, putting themselves
forward as a revival, a conservative return to original purity. Yet what is
revived is constructed out of contemporary ingredients, and turns out to be
innovation in conservative guise, no less than religious movements which
announce a new revelation.
Philosophies embedded in religions undergo the same dynamics; so do
secular philosophies cutting free from a religious base. This is most forcefully
illustrated in the case of Japan. Innovation in the conservative mode, however,
is not merely Asian traditionalism. Intellectual life is driven by oppositions,
filling attention space under the law of small numbers; intellectual fame goes
to those who carve out maximally distinctive positions. Conservative innova-
tion is a mode of all intellectual life.
Japanese society in many respects is a continuation of China’s. More to
the point, Japan gives an approximation of what China would have become
if it had continued the trajectory of the T’ang and Sung dynasties. It was
during those periods that Japan acquired organized structures of state and
religion beyond the level of clans; literate culture, art, and architecture all
developed by importing Chinese models. Japan broke free from the direct
influx of Chinese culture at just the time when China was turning, institution-
ally and intellectually, in a different direction. It was medieval China, Buddhist-
dominated China, that Japan continued; the stifling bureaucratic centraliza-
tion of Ming and Ch’ing, after the independence of Buddhist high culture had
been crushed, occurred while Japan was becoming autonomous. In tracing
modern Japanese development, we have a laboratory for what a society built
on Buddhist organizational structures would produce, economically and intel-
lectually.
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