Twelve Kingdoms: Interview with the Translator, Short Stories, Part II

Kate: You commented once that political states inherently retreat to feudalism. Is legalism part of the equation? It certainly comes up in the United States with the self-righteous religious right as it does with the self-righteous progressive left. Is legalism always tied to group identity? Gekkei appears to fear that possibility—that regicide could push the kingdom too far in the other direction. 

Eugene: When political systems regress to the mean, they inevitably veer into feudalism. I would argue that all democracies have been slowly creeping in that direction over the past century.

The more idealistic the society, the faster it creates an aristocracy of mandarins convinced it is up to them to preserve that idealism, and that without them in charge, everything would go to the dogs. The comfort of having everyone's social class preassigned and fixed. Everybody knows where he belongs in the pecking order.

It's not long before they see themselves as the Edo period samurai. The samurai constituted a hereditary civil service and were actually forbidden by sumptuary laws from doing anything else. Overall, they did a pretty good job and might have lasted longer had the shogunate not pursued isolationism so fanatically and traded a bit more openly with Europe in goods and ideas.

Legalism was never part of the core philosophy of Tokugawa rule. It waxed and waned according to the shogun. Utopianism never took root. They were a pragmatic bunch. In the aftermath of WWII, it took about twenty-four hours after the broadcast of Hirohito's Surrender Rescript for practically the entire population to slough off the previous two decades of ideological sloganeering.

Unfortunately, even skin-deep ideological sloganeering can cause a whole lot of damage in the short run. But as long as it is not coupled with the perpetual motion machine of utopianism, it burns out eventually.

Kate: Ah, utopianism! One of the greatest dangers, I would argue, to religion and to politics is the belief by a group that “we can create utopia NOW.” This idealistic problem is addressed full force in “Dreaming of Paradise.”

Western culture has Plato and other attempts at creating, on paper, the perfect utopia. Does Japan have the same? Have attempts to move the utopia off paper resulted in equally problematic outcomes?

Eugene: Since 1945, groups on both the far right and left in Japanese politics have failed to gain a foothold among the general populace. The far right did find a home among the yakuza, but even the yakuza failed to thrive in the long run (especially after law enforcement in Japan got tired of them).

Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong were both brutal dictators. The difference was the former was interested primarily in power in opposition to communism, not in pursuit of a utopian world. Mao coupled power (which "grows out of the barrel of a gun") with the utopianism of communism enforced via legalistic means. The result was devastation on a far more massive scale.

Today, Taiwan (like Spain after Franco) is a thriving democracy while China is slipping backwards into an Orwellian system ruled by the tools of high-tech legalism. Speaking of which, Chris Chappell's little essay on the subject at the end of this video provides a nice summary of the subject.