Two Macbeths: Ambition and Frustration in Japan and Britain

English translation of the prose

AI-assisted English translation of the prose; quoted poems remain in Japanese. The Japanese original remains authoritative.

Originally published: 10 May 2020.

Men’s romantic aspirations and setbacks: two Macbeths, Japanese and British

An essay in the study of contemporary life
福田京一

Historical dates and interpretations follow the author’s original. Quoted Japanese song lyrics and poetry remain untranslated; existing English quotations are retained. Translated dialogue below follows the author’s Japanese renderings, rather than claiming to reproduce Shakespeare’s original wording.

Introduction

Graduation ceremonies remind me of singing “Aogeba Totoshi” (1884) in my elementary-school hall in the spring of 1954.

That year Japan showed signs of emerging from the immediate postwar confusion, raising the National Police Reserve, created in response to the Korean War, into the National Safety Force and then the Self-Defense Forces. Economic reconstruction also gathered pace. Amid the Jinmu boom of 1954–57, people said it was “no longer the postwar period” (Economic White Paper, 1954, as dated in the source). At the same time, the ideal of advancement in the world—a man’s romantic aspiration—began reviving. The song is steeped in that ideal, in words rarely heard today:

互いに睦し日ごろの恩　別るる後にもやよ忘るな　身を立て　名をあげ　やよ励めよ　今こそ別れめ　いざさらば

Many people worked hard with this exhortation at their backs. What happened to them after graduation? Let us begin there.

1. Establishing oneself and making one’s name: a man’s romantic aspiration, but…

Although GHQ encouraged American-style democracy after the war and individualism was promoted alongside it, most Japanese remained bound by the same family-centered values and ambitions for advancement as before. At a fundamental level, traditional morality and customs lived on. Many young people, sent into society fired by lessons in getting ahead, found themselves suffering disappointment before harsh realities.

Since the Meiji era, young people with neither land, assets, nor influential relatives had left the nest determined to remember their debt to teachers and parents and embrace the lesson of success in life. Encouraged to become a scholar, a minister, or a distinguished military man like General Nogi or Admiral Togo, they resolved to try. Yet their great ambitions could not be realized, and the gulf between dreams and reality left them despairing. Most worked as errand runners for tiny businesses or as laborers on low wages and long hours, doing all they could each day, then sleeping in exhaustion. Their painful lives were far removed from men’s romantic aspirations.

Even among those who continued striving toward high ambitions, many met illness or recession, failed midway, and ended their lives disappointed. Some followed their teachers’ and parents’ advice, worked honestly, enjoyed good fortune, accumulated wealth, and returned home in glory. But they were exceptions. Most men could barely secure a modest, peaceful life, and their romantic dreams had faded.

In other words, since the Meiji Restoration, the ideal embodied by “Aogeba Totoshi” continued tormenting youth through Taisho, Showa, and the years after the Pacific War. A glance at history shows how, while still incorporated into the dual structure of Japanese society, they were compelled to make futile efforts toward 身を立て　名をあげ.

I remember an older colleague’s account of 1930. Even a university graduate could find no job in Kyoto, Osaka, or Tokyo; he eventually found a teaching position in a middle school in a remote Iwate village, far from Kyoto. He was comparatively fortunate. Some have argued that Japan alone was buoyed by a Manchurian boom amid the world depression. Yet the conflicted feelings of the protagonists in Yasujiro Ozu’s I Graduated, But… (1929) and The Only Son (1936) were shared by many young people. Frustration, rather than romantic hope, filled their lives. Around the same time, village girls were sent directly from elementary school to silk factories in Hikone. A few years later, they returned with pulmonary disease and soon died coughing blood. Remembering classmates who had died, my mother told me this was not unusual.

In 1959, my cousin, one year older than me, could find no job after graduating from a technical high school in Hikone. Finally, his homeroom teacher’s intervention secured work at a rubber factory in Kawagoe, Saitama. Five years later, while at university, I visited him. Seeing his room in a shabby apartment building made me so sad and distressed that I almost wept.

After the 1960 struggle over the Security Treaty ended, the finance minister who had supposedly said “Poor people should eat barley” became prime minister and advocated doubling incomes. His actual House of Councillors statement was: “I want to move toward an economic principle whereby those with lower incomes eat barley and those with higher incomes eat rice.” When Japan entered rapid economic growth—often dated 1954–70, though in my experience it felt more like around 1960—boys and girls freshly out of junior high were gathered from across the country and sent to the cities by train. This was called group employment. Given transportation then, an endless, desolate darkness lay between Tokyo and Kyushu or Tohoku. Hoping one day to return to their parents, they endured loneliness in unfamiliar cities. Their story was a Showa version of Joko Aishi (1925), the sorrowful history of female factory workers. Their painful farewells, tears, hometowns, and night trains appear clearly in popular songs, including Hachiro Izawa’s determinedly cheerful “Aa Ueno Eki” (words: Yoshiaki Sekiguchi; music: Eiichi Arai; 1964).

2. Japan from the early 1960s onward

Those fortunate enough to reach and graduate from university, especially male employees, were hailed as corporate warriors, perhaps modeled on wartime industrial warriors. Employee training drilled company loyalty into them, and they worked desperately until late at night. Two classmates who graduated in the Tokyo Olympics year, 1964, and became warriors in supposedly first-class companies died embittered on the salaryman’s battlefield when barely forty. Olympic marathon bronze medalist Kokichi Tsuburaya also died by suicide in January 1968, the year of the Mexico Olympics. His farewell note said: “Father, Mother, Kokichi is completely exhausted and can no longer run. Please forgive me.”

Meanwhile, some people seemed excluded from this competitive society from the outset. As a student delivering goods for the family business, I repeatedly saw day laborers lying beside the roads in Kamagasaki, drinking bakudan, cheap shochu, from the morning. When they could not find work, they sold blood. Some did so nearly ten times a month to buy that day’s food and drink, a problem even raised in the Diet.

Even this brief excavation of memory suggests that, although it is not untrue that young people once entered the world with great ambitions, this applied chiefly to those with exceptionally favorable circumstances, talent, powerful patrons, or connections. To put it plainly, most young Japanese worked hard with 身を立て　名をあげ　やよ励めよ in their hearts, then came to resent it, forgot it altogether, and had to work desperately simply to eat.

By the decade beginning in 1965, relentless work had given Japan’s middle class a little financial breathing room. Unlike today, many wives still stayed home. Once obtaining food ceased to be a struggle, a somewhat different scene emerged. The man still worked steadily and finally became a section chief. Then his wife began: “How long are you going to remain a section chief? The husband across the street is younger and already a department head. I’m embarrassed. You must try harder.” If he answered, “I’m happy as I am,” she continued, “Don’t you want a better life? Try to understand how I feel, seeing his wife every day.” If, despite his sour expression, he retained enough composure to let her complaints pass, things somehow worked out. Most husbands must have weathered it that way.

How bitterly people suffer under these circumstances. How does a man handle his romantic aspirations and desires?

Considering this, we find a curious convergence with the ambition for advancement and its collapse depicted in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, born as England moved from medieval to early modern times, and Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood.

3. Macbeth’s ambition and despair

Interestingly, scenes closely resembling those married couples’ conversations during Japan’s rapid-growth era appear in Macbeth (first performance estimated at 1606) and the film based on it, Throne of Blood (Akira Kurosawa, 1957). Let us consider Japan’s corporate warriors through these two scenes.

On the heath, a witch prophesies to Macbeth: “Hail, you who will become king.” He secretly hopes: “If fate will make me king, perhaps it will do so without my acting.” When his military achievements bring him the title Thane of Cawdor, as foretold, he increasingly expects that his wish to become King of Scotland may also be fulfilled. He sends a messenger to tell his wife about the prophecy and King Duncan’s forthcoming visit to his castle. She rejoices that this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity has come to kill the king and make her husband king.

When he returns, she declares, “Leave tonight’s important business to me.” Macbeth hesitates: “Doing such things always brings judgment in this world.” He tells her: “Let us take this plan no further. I have lately received rewards and golden praise from everyone. Why cast off this brilliant new clothing so quickly?” She answers: “Was the hope you wore then drunk? Has it been sleeping ever since? And now that it has awakened, do you turn pale remembering the desire that swelled so greatly? From now on, I shall think your love amounts to no more than this” (Act 1, Scene 7; all Japanese renderings in the original essay are the author’s own). Macbeth resists this vehement rebuke as best he can.

“I will do anything fitting for a man. Anyone attempting more than that is no man,” he replies. She presses him: “Then what beast made you tell me your plan before? Only when you have the courage to act will you become a man.” Thus Macbeth must surrender to his wife’s forceful will.

What kind of love does Lady Macbeth demand? Knights in medieval European romances, such as Tristan and Lancelot, follow the rules of courtly love and adore their beloved as they would the Virgin Mary. To win her love they fear no difficulty, face trials bravely, and willingly sacrifice themselves. Through these actions, the suitor elevates love—originally human, sexual desire, or eros—to Christian love. These ideal, Platonic medieval conventions still survived in Elizabethan times.

The line “Whoever lov’d that lov’d not at first sight?” from Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander (1598) is taken up by Phebe in As You Like It (3.5.82). Romeo, a sheltered young man who had been involved with Rosalind [the name used in the source], likewise transforms into a knight of romance at his first sight of Juliet. Their love is fated and religious:

愛も憎しみもわれらの力では御し難し/なんとなれば意志は運命に支配されているから

Thus Marlowe. Fated, sacred love—how romantic!

Lady Macbeth, however, measures her husband’s love by whether he can become the man—or “beast”—who satisfies her desire. She no longer asks for chivalry or selfless religious love. Or perhaps this is more accurate: as with an infant innocently demanding its mother’s milk, she seeks to make Macbeth a faithful servant of her desires. If so, the witch who gives him the enigmatic prophecy can be read as Lady Macbeth’s double. In any case, once “love” as destiny is invoked at a moment of life choice, the medieval warrior Macbeth has no choice left.

4. In Throne of Blood, made during rapid economic growth

Next, consider the couple’s exchanges in Throne of Blood, made near the beginning of Japan’s rapid-growth period. “I am happy as I am” is spoken by its protagonist, Washizu Taketoki, to his wife Asaji. He continues: “As master of this residence, I will serve our lord faithfully. I prefer peace suited to my station.” Although concealing ambition deep within, he insists, “There is nothing in my heart.” His wife says, “That is a lie,” and attacks his lack of spirit. She suggests that if his comrade Miki Yoshiaki tells their lord Tsuzuki Kuniharu the prophecy heard in the forest, the lord will suspect rebellion and attack. He replies that he trusts the lord who has rewarded his military service fairly, and the friend close to him since childhood. She explains: “This is a world where parents kill children and children kill parents for advancement and renown. These are latter days when one kills others to avoid being killed.” Just then, their lord unexpectedly arrives with a small retinue and requests lodging for the night. Asaji urges her husband to kill him: this is the perfect chance to become lord of Spider’s Web Castle, as foretold. Taketoki, this Showa Macbeth, could have shouted, “Can you not be satisfied with the life I finally gained through honest effort?” Instead, when she insists, “Only a man with great ambition is truly a man,” he gives in and follows her instructions. Why?

Replace Taketoki with a corporate warrior in rapid-growth Japan and it becomes clear. Many Showa warriors serve their companies faithfully, obtain modest rewards and happiness, and feel satisfied. But if a wife like Asaji waits at home, dissatisfied with things as they are, what choices remain? Seen this way, Throne of Blood is clearly a story of a time when the myth of advancement began to shake. If one is capable and has worked hard, should one not receive more? One believes one has worked sufficiently for the family; if one’s wife remains dissatisfied, perhaps society itself is unreasonable. Then surely there is nothing wrong with using dishonest means to obtain what one wants. If it goes undiscovered, so much the better; this too is survival. The film can therefore be read as a melodramatic narrative expressing, through marital dialogue, the conflict dormant in the hearts of salarymen laboring themselves to the bone for their families: good, understood as loyalty, diligence, thrift, self-control, and fidelity, versus evil, understood as satisfying desire.

Japan originally had no concept of love as an absolute assimilated to God’s love. Thus Asaji does not confront her husband like Lady Macbeth with “From now on I shall think your love amounts to no more than this.” As Sei Ito writes, “For Japanese people, love between spouses either has the substance of forgiving each other, or is attachment itself” (“The Falsity of ‘Love’ in Modern Japan,” 1958). Asaji, Japan’s Lady Macbeth, neither abandons affection for her inadequate husband nor forgives him; she clings throughout to her own ego. Describing the logic of troubled times—parents and children killing one another for advancement, killing to avoid being killed—she draws him to herself to satisfy her own desires. Her trump card in persuasion is the Meiji-era maxim that only a man with great ambition is truly a man.

By the late twentieth century, modern Japan’s myth of rising in the world, formed by combining Confucian thought with the Protestant work ethic imported since Meiji, had lost its appeal. Distortions of modernization appeared everywhere, and an era arrived when fair play could not secure success, resembling the warring age of inferiors overthrowing superiors. In a world where effort and diligence went unrewarded, unreasonable realities hardened into a division between a tiny winning group and a great many losers. “Boys, be ambitious!” now sounded distant and empty to young people. “Why am I among the losers? Isn’t something wrong?” asked the Showa descendants of the Macbeths. Beneath rapid growth’s frivolous mood, one glimpsed the chaos of transition and the apocalyptic world foretold eerily on the heath: “Fair is foul, and foul is fair” (Act 1, Scene 1).

5. Through a postmodern interpretation

Shakespeare’s tragedies and comedies, born in the transitional Elizabethan age (1558–1603), in which medieval and modern elements mingled, are permeated by the sensibility of the witches chanting “Fair is foul, and foul is fair.” Curiously, it corresponds to our own sensibility today.

Modernity passed through the Enlightenment’s promise of progress and happiness and capitalism’s development and maturation, from the Industrial Revolution to the information revolution. As it approached decline in the late twentieth century, an age of sensibility called the postmodern arrived. Generally, “postmodern” vaguely names a period when we cannot foresee what will follow modernity. We have still not passed through this moratorium. Thus the Elizabethan age, also the height of the English Renaissance, shares features with postmodernity as a transition from medieval to modern times: anti-rationalism, suspicion of authority, camp, parody, teasing established order, collage, joining order and disorder, Baroque ornament, and a seasoning of Gothic grotesquerie.

A good example is “Musekinin Ichidai Otoko,” featured in Nippon Musekinin Jidai (director: Kengo Furusawa, 1962), sung by Hitoshi Ueki, with words by Yukio Aoshima and music by Hiroaki Hagiwara:

人生で大事な事は/タイミングにC調に無責任/コツコツやる奴はごくろうさん/ハイ！ごくろうさん

The song was popular while an afterimage of the advancement myth remained, during rapid economic growth. The success story promising happiness through backbreaking work is completely parodied. Similarly, in “Hai Sore made yo” (1962), the man who worked hard to marry fails to obtain the peace he imagined, and comically laments that it was not supposed to turn out this way:

私だけがあなたの妻/丈夫で永持ち致します/テナコト言われてソノ気になって/女房にしたのが大まちがい/云々

Of course, just as men suffered under the myth of advancement, women forced into the mold of “good wife, wise mother” certainly had much to say for themselves.

Meanwhile, on the public stage, Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka appeared in 1972, praised as a modern Taiko and a model of success. A boy from a poor farming family in Niigata, he remembered his Meiji-born mother’s teaching and went to Tokyo at fifteen. After strenuous effort brought him to the summit of politics, he sought to enrich the entire population by implementing his plan to remodel the Japanese archipelago. He contributed to rising incomes while addressing the land-price increases and inflation accompanying large infrastructure projects, and the oil shock. He too was arrested in a corruption case in 1976. Nevertheless, from the end of Showa into Heisei, the economy grew until its GDP was described as the world’s second largest. The bubble economy (1986–92) then collapsed almost instantly. Around its bursting, graduation ceremonies began replacing “Aogeba Totoshi” with songs such as “Tabidachi no Hi ni” (words: Noboru Kojima; music: Hiromi Sakamoto; 1991) and “Okuru Kotoba” (words: Tetsuya Takeda; music: Kazuomi Chiba; 1979).

Conclusion: can romantic aspirations return?

From growth to collapse, like Macbeth’s life tossed about by fate’s spinning wheel, Japan’s modernization since Meiji rushed toward its end. Along the way, more people found emptiness in working hard for Japan, renown, family, and livelihood, and grew tired of living. A Man Vanishes (Shohei Imamura, 1967), based on an actual case, and Tora-san’s Rise and Fall (Yoji Yamada, 1975) feature men who suddenly disappear from their wives’ lives without warning. The now-obsolete term johatsu, “evaporation,” became fashionable. From the 1970s into the 1980s, more than 100,000 people went missing each year, including about as many women as men. These women too, amid rapid social change, could find no meaning in the home they had been told was their place. “Evaporation” continued into Heisei, though numbers declined somewhat.

As Heisei gave way to Reiwa, bleak scenes became everyday occurrences: workplace bullying, parents abusing children and spouses, malicious bullying among children—people of every age tormenting the weak, often bringing death. As the myths of advancement and “good wife, wise mother,” surviving from Meiji through Showa, disappeared, the old meaning and purpose of work were lost. Their accompanying ethical core broke apart, naturally bringing a decline in the spirit that governs living as a human being. Surrounded as well by external threats—earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, and the novel coronavirus spreading worldwide—children must now navigate this sea of confusion. Or rather, they must drift through it.

When young Tanjiro, protagonist of Koyoharu Gotouge’s manga Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba (2016–), returns home from work, he finds disaster: demons have killed his family, and his surviving younger sister, her blood sucked, has become a demon and lies between life and death. To restore her humanity and avenge his family, he sets out to fight demons. They do not necessarily appear in demonic form and may attack suddenly. In an incomprehensible, grotesque, almost comically entangled world where friend and enemy are unclear, he must preserve courage and kindness, learn techniques to defeat demons, train himself, and grow. One day he too may be devoured and become a demon. Only the son of a poor charcoal-burning farming household, he nonetheless continues his journey fighting evil creatures as they appear, like a medieval knight. May we not call this another modern romance—a tale of chivalry?

10 May 2020