Advent 4, Year A : December 21, 2025
“Face” and Forgiveness
Donald Seekins
The recent crisis in relations between Japan and China sparked by the November 7th comment of PM Sanae Takaichi that if China invaded Taiwan, it would be an “existential security threat” to Japan, thus justifying a Japanese attack on China, reminds me of something that might seem completely unrelated: the anthropologist Ruth Benedict’s famous distinction between “shame cultures” and “guilt cultures” in her classic analysis of Japanese social values and behavior, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword.
Japan, she wrote, is a “shame society” in which people struggle to maintain “face” or “dignity,” relying on external sanctions rather than an absolute morality to enforce proper social behavior. The chief source of such sanctions is public opinion, especially that emanating from people in superior social positions (parents, teachers, army officers, top executives). Thus, the most typical action in a shame society is for people to avoid, deny or hide those things about themselves which are seen as “bad” in the eyes of peers or superiors. Parents tell children: “other people will speak ill of you” when they do something “wrong.” A child, of course, is unlikely to come up with the reply of the philosopher Socrates to such a statement: “do not fear the opinions of ignorant people.” A shame culture is heteronomous because the source of moral behavior is outside the agent.
In a “guilt society,” the feeling of guilt arises in people who transgress what they believe is an absolute morality. An audience is not needed. This morality usually comes in the form of a religion, although the 18th century German philosopher Immanuel Kant framed an ethical system based not on religion, but rationality. The guilt-ridden person is one who feels internally the weight of his or her sins (for example, Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment) while the shame-ridden person seeks to hide his or her offence by making a proper presentation to others. A guilt culture is autonomous because it is internalized, often described as the individual’s conscience. To a participant in shame culture, the idea of conscience makes little sense.
Applying Benedict’s distinction to entire nations or populations seems to me suspect, a kind of cultural determinism which is as pernicious as the racial determinism which used to dominate the human sciences. Even if they are not especially religious, I have met Japanese people who seem to be motivated by guilt rather than shame. And many Americans, such as loyal followers of Donald Trump, seem driven by a childish faith in an external power, the “MAGA God-Emperor.”
However, Japan, China and Korea dwell diplomatically in the world of shame culture. It forms the substance of their interrelationships. First, these countries have lots of skeletons in their historical closets: the millions of Asian victims of Japan’s invasions in the 1930s and 1940s, the millions more Chinese victims who suffered and died during Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, and the many, mostly upper class, Koreans who greatly benefited from Japanese colonial rule and were loyal to Japan during the war. For an insider or an outsider to expose these skeletons is to provoke indignation and (at least) verbal violence.
In the atmosphere of a shame culture, national egos are extremely sensitive. Even an innocent remark on one side can inspire indignation and saber-rattling on the other (not that I am saying that Takaichi’s Taiwan remark was innocent). This year, the eightieth anniversary of the end of World War II, the Chinese film industry released movies on Unit 731 and the Nanjing massacre, which caused the Japanese government to accuse it, and the Beijing government, of stirring up anti-Japanese extremism. It had a similar reaction to South Korea’s exposure of the “comfort woman” issue several years ago and even went to the length of pressuring Berlin, the capital of Germany, to remove a statue of the “comfort girl” in one of its parks. Such things “dirty” the precious image of “Beautiful Japan” even if they are historically true. In a shame culture, all participants are wound up tightly, poised to react violently in case of a perceived slight to themselves or the group to which they belong. This is a common feature of criminal gangs: the yakuza, the Triads, the Italian cosa nostra or the Russian Bratva. In Los Angeles, the desecration of a gang member’s special jacket can lead to a shooting war with a rival gang in the city’s meanest streets. The gang member’s jacket is more precious than his life. Like a national flag, it is treated with reverence.
Shame culture demands absolute conformity from group members. The November 7th Beijing-Tokyo spat sparked by Prime Minister Takaichi’s comments has gotten to the ironic, if not absurd, level of the two nations losing their dignity and decorum at exactly the same time that they seek to protect them from outside attack. This is perhaps most clearly seen in the comment of China’s consul in Osaka, who implied that Takaichi’s head should be chopped off.
Around the world – but especially in East Asia where it is strong – nationalism gives normally restrained “good” people the opportunity to revert to being spoiled, bullying children.
So, is there a way out of this vicious cycle?
In December 1970, German Chancellor Willy Brandt visited Warsaw and expressed his remorse vividly by spontaneously kneeling in front of a monument to the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. This later became known as the Kniefall von Warschau or the “Kneeling in Warsaw,” which impressed even the Poles, who lost one fifth of their population during the 1939-1945 German occupation. In Brandt’s words: “at the abyss of German history and under the weight of millions of murdered people, I did what humans do when speech fails them.”
Post-1945 Germany has had many problems of its own (like Japan, it is now afflicted by extremist parties pushing a xenophobic agenda), but Brandt showed in his actions and statements that he dwelt in a guilt culture, a world in which there are both universal standards of right and wrong and a way, through confession, to reestablish humane bonds between past victims and victimizers – or at least their descendants. What is powerful about such a confession is that although it is in part a ritual performed before an audience (bringing flowers to the monument, kneeling), it is also a sincere expression of the confessor’s heart.
The contrast with post-war East Asia is striking.
Forgiveness is central to Christianity. In the Lord’s Prayer, we say “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” God does not owe us forgiveness; we must forgive first. But usually there can be no forgiveness without confession. And the confession must be sincere – which means that the confessor must truly open himself up to those he or she confesses to. The confessor makes himself vulnerable. He humbles himself. To the proud, this is unthinkable.
Imagine if, having been so ill-treated by the Germans that forgiveness was not possible, Willy Brandt’s Polish audience had rejected his Kniefall. One could hardly blame them; six million Poles died under Nazi rule. The country was looted and devastated by both German and Soviet armies. But terrible and unjust harm would have been done to a good man, who had bravely opened his heart to others.
In her book The Human Condition, the philosopher Hannah Arendt says that “The discoverer of the role of forgiveness in human affairs was Jesus of Nazareth . . . [he says] it is not true that only God has the power to forgive, and second, that this power does not derive from God – as though God, not men, would forgive through the medium of human beings – but on the contrary must be mobilized by men toward each other before they can hope to be forgiven by God” (pp. 238, 239).
Humans have free will and true confession and forgiving can only be acts of free will by the individual. Arendt quotes the Gospel of Matthew that “if ye from your hearts forgive, God shall do likewise.”
But again, forgiveness generally requires confession, which is why we say prayers of confession on our knees in every Sunday service. In The Human Condition, Arendt says that a free act is basically a disclosure of the self. Willy Brandt, by acting the way he did in Warsaw, was opening himself up, confessing to those people whom his compatriots so greatly harmed. Through this confession, he revealed his rare qualities as a man (G., mensch).
In German, the word mensch means not only “man,” but a man of honor and dignity.
Probably Brandt paid politically for his Kniefall back in Germany. The conservative opposition must have accused him of debasing national pride, of trying to appease the Poles, who in 1970 were still communists.
Sadly, leaders in Japan and China aren’t following his example. Japan’s government is not yet willing to sincerely confess, and – given the history – China’s leaders are in no position to forgive. Because of this, continued and costly hostilities if not war between the two countries may be unavoidable.
