ite of the fact that the Shintoist and Buddhist priests were deeply involved in sectarian and factional

conflicts. The common man reconciled and fused those religions on whose differences the priests
insisted. Fujii Otoo comments as follows: "What a close union Confucianism and Buddhism came to have
in the Kanazoshi * (Tales in Easy Japanese)! Among the scholars conflicts and controversies multiplied in
advocating their respective doctrines, but among common men they were made to fuse and
compromise. The Japanese are by nature inclined to rapprochement without threshing out an issue. No
one has yet taken up a noteworthy controversy between Confucianism and Buddhism, but, instead,
there are already many who advocate the unity of the three religions."138 Such a theoretical standpoint
was represented in its most consistent form in the school of "Learning of the Mind" (Sekimon Shingaku)
which exerted the greatest influence upon the comman man. Scholars like Toan Tejima, Baigan Ishida
(1685–1744), Doni* Nakazawa (1735–1803), Kyuo* Shibata (1783–1839) belonged to this school, from
whose standpoint they were cynical about the conflicts of various sects. Such a conciliatory attitude
seems ultimately to form part of Japan's cultural heritage. When the Christian civilization penetrated
into Japanese society after the Meiji Restoration, those who welcomed it were not necessarily going to
become Christians. For most people in Japan there was nothing about Christianity that was incompatible
with their traditional religion. That was the reason, it appears, why the Christian culture became
considerably widespread despite the extremely small minority converted to the Christian religion.
Perhaps social scientists will finally furnish us with statistical verification of my suggestion that the
Japanese are a tolerant people. My own impression comes, as I have shown, from the study of historical
documents and personal observation. Thanks to the spirit of tolerance, a massacre of heathens never
took place in Japan. In this respect, the situation differs vastly in Japan from that of the West. As far as
religion is concerned the idea of "harmony" is a foremost quality in this country's cultural history. Some
apparently exceptional cases have occurred: one being an overall and thoroughgoing persecution of
Christians, the second being the persecution of local Jodo-Shin* Previous Released By -TSJ5J- Next
Previous Released By -TSJ5J- Next Page 393 believers, and the third being a severe suppression of
Nichiren and the Non-Receiving-and-Non-Giving sect139 (one of the Nichiren sects, which has refused to
receive alms from or give alms to those other than the believers of the Hokke Sutra *). These, however,
were far from being religious persecutions in the Western sense of the word. These sects were
suppressed and persecuted simply because the ruling class feared the subversion that might be worked
by these sects upon a certain human nexus, i.e., the feudal social order maintained by the ruling class. A
mere difference of religious faith was generally a matter of no consequence for the Japanese unless it
was considered to be damaging to the established order of the social nexus, whereas in the West a
religious difference in itself would give rise to a conflict between opposing parties. A new problem may
be introduced here. If any of the different thoughts and religions can claim its own raison d'être, then
how can one determine their relative value, and what is the criterion of evaluation? As has already been
pointed out, the inclination to regard as absolute a limited specific human nexus naturally brings about a
tendency to disregard any allegedly universal law of humanity that every man ought to observe at any
place at any time. Instead, the standard of the evaluation of good