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Chosen Peoples and

Promised Lands

JEWISH history starts with the patriarch Abraham; Japanese history begins with Emperor Jimmu. The stories of Abraham and Jimmu, despite their different components of myth and history, exhibit a decisively similar element: Both traditions trace the origins of their respective peoples to a divinely inspired migration, and both associate that migration with the concepts of a chosen people and a promised land.

The Middle Eastern patriarch Abraham (first called Abram) was, according to the biblical account, seventy-five years old when God commanded him to leave his home in Haran and proceed with his household to the land of Canaan. Abraham was a nineteenth-generation descendant of the father of all mankind, Adam, and was chosen by God to become the progenitor of "a great nation," blessed for all time. God promised Abraham the land of Canaan, described as "a land flowing with milk and honey": "Raise your eyes and look from where you are, to the north and south, to the east and west, for I give all the land that you see to you and your offspring forever. . . . Up, walk about the land, through its length and its breadth, for I give it to you." Abraham obeyed the divine order. He traveled the land of Canaan from north to south, establishing ties with local rulers, erecting altars to his One God, and renaming the places that he visited.

The East Asian chieftain Kamu Yamato Ihare Biko no Mikoto (much later, Emperor Jimmu) was, according to the ancient chronicles of Japan, the Kojiki and the Nihongi, forty-five years old when, with divine help, he led his army from the island of Kyushu to the plain of Yamato in central Japan. Jimmu was the great-great-grandson of the sun goddess, Amaterasu Omikami, and the grandson of Ninigi no Mikoto, the first deity to become an earthly monarch. During Jimmu's campaign, which took place on land and sea, he conquered many regions and changed the names of various places. After subjugating the Land of Yamato, he established his capital there and became the first emperor of Japan. The country that the gods helped Jimmu conquer was "the reed-plain-fifteen-hundred-autumns-fair-rice-ear land," a "fair land encircled on all sides by blue mountains." Jimmu inherited the blessing that had been given to his divine grandfather: "Do thou, my August Grandchild, proceed thither and govern it. .. . May prosperity attend thy dynasty, and may it, like Heaven and Earth, endure forever."

The southwestward migration of Abraham begins the history of the Jewish people. The northeastward expedition of Jimmu marks the historical beginning of the Japanese. The disparity in the ages of Abraham and Jimmu when they embarked upon their respective expeditions reflected the difference between the ages of the two peoples they led. Abraham, if he indeed existed, lived in the twentieth or nineteenth century before the common era (B.C.E.). The mythological date of Emperor Jimmu's conquest of Yamato is 660 B.C.E., but if he was a historical figure, he probably lived in the third or fourth century of the common era (C.E), more than two thousand years after Abraham.

Abraham's migration was to repeat itself, as both he and then later his descendants, the Jewish people, would leave the land of Canaan and return to it time after time, with each absence longer and more painful than the previous one. Emperor Jimmu's conquest of Yamato established him and his people on the islands of Japan, which they have never left nor been driven from since that time.

Like most other peoples in the world, the Jews and the Japanese have regarded themselves as unique nations. The Bible does not tell us why Abraham was chosen, from among all the people of his day, to receive the divine blessing and become the father of God's Chosen People. However, once he received the heavenly command, he proved himself worthy of the choice through his belief and obedience. But the status of a Chosen People was not accorded automatically to Abraham's descendants, Isaac, Jacob, and the twelve tribes of Israel (Jacob's later name). God made a "Covenant" with Abraham and his seed and continued divine favor was contingent upon faithfulness to the covenantal obligations: faith in God and the practice of justice and righteousness. Thus, in Judaism, the concept of a Chosen People had a dual implication: It referred to a particular ethnic group, the Children of Israel, who were bound by blood ties, and at the same time was conditional on their behavior toward God and one another. More often than not, according to the biblical view of history, this resulted in suffering a punishment rather than in enjoying the blessings. Yet, the covenantal relationship between God and the Jews was eternally valid, even when it was temporarily suspended by way of punishment.

Neither do the ancient chronicles of Japan tell us why Jimmu, of all the divine descendants of his time, was chosen to become the founder of the Japanese empire. Yet, he too proved himself worthy of the honor, conquering the land of Yamato and establishing a reign that was to last a long time. The blessing of Jimmu was also bestowed upon his descendants for all time, and his divinity was bequeathed to all future emperors of Japan. The divinity of the emperors did not depend on a covenantal relationship; it was biologically determined and only the descendants of Emperor Jimmu could possess it. For this reason, unlike in other countries, no other family ever tried to occupy the imperial throne of Japan. But divinity was not inherited automatically: The imperial sons who did not become emperors did not possess it, emperors acquired it only upon accession to the throne, and they lost it when they abdicated.

The Japanese concept of a chosen people, which in the twentieth century drove them to imperialistic megalomania, was based on belief in the divinity of the emperors and on the assumption that the Japanese people constituted one family with the emperor as its permanent sacred head. This sanction was not conditional on the moral behavior of either the rulers or the ruled. It also lacked the Chinese Confucian provision for the monarch to lose the mandate of heaven if he acted inappropriately. Nevertheless, it possessed a moral element of its own: As divine monarchs, the Japanese emperors were to provide a moral model for the people, which many of them ostensibly did. Moreover, as alleged members of one great family, the Japanese were expected to treat each other in a moral way, an ideal that they have often claimed to cherish.

Among the Jews as well as among the Japanese, the concept of a chosen people was linked to the concept of a promised land. In neither case was the promised land a paradise on earth. The semi-arid land of Canaan, later known as the Land of Israel, was neither the richest nor the most fertile in the Middle East. Yet it became a Holy Land, the place where God wanted his abode to be erected and offerings made to him. Japan was far more blessed with rain than the Land of Israel, but compared with China or the lands of Southeast Asia, it was poor in natural resources. Nevertheless, according to Shinto, the native religion of Japan, it was a divine land, the place where the gods dwelt and the country that they protected.

The claim of the Jews and the Japanese to be chosen peoples and to inhabit divine lands had little objective substance. These were, after all, two relatively small and unimportant peoples, living in not very impressive countries on the fringes of the great empires of their time. Their own images as blessed nations were hardly self-evident, and they had to make great efforts to realize them. This gap between a subjectively assumed superiority and an objectively perceived inferiority created among both the Japanese and the Jews a tension that proved to be highly productive. The unabated dynamism that has historically characterized both peoples can be regarded as a recurring attempt to bridge this gap. In this sense, both Abraham and Jimmu may still be on their way to the promised land.

Abraham was not born a Jew. According to the biblical account, his family migrated to Haran from Ur of the Chaldees, an important political and cultural center in Mesopotamia. It was only after he arrived in the land of Canaan that Abraham and his descendants began to regard themselves as a distinct people, later to be called Jews. The Jews were one of many Semitic peoples who inhabited the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East. Another such tribe were the Arabs, who trace their ancestry to Ishmael, the elder son of Abraham and his Egyptian concubine, Hagar. Therefore, Abraham was not only the first Jew but also the first Arab; today, both Israelis and Arabs invoke in their prayers the name of this same ancestor to help them in their wars against each other.

Emperor Jimmu came from the province of Hyuga in eastern Kyushu. The island of Kyushu was the place where the first Japanese kingdoms, mentioned in the Chinese chronicles of the first centuries C.E., were located. It was also the island nearest to Korea, a land where Chinese culture had thrived before it reached Japan. Indeed, the high material culture absorbed into Japanese life until the middle of the first millennium C.E. arrived through Korea. This included advanced methods of wet-rice agriculture, horse breeding, textile weaving, and iron casting, as well as new forms of art, architecture, and political organization. The more advanced Chinese-Korean civilization entered Japan with Korean immigrants fleeing from the incessant wars on the peninsula. These immigrants were mostly of aristocratic origin, well versed in Chinese culture. In Japan they joined the local aristocracy and transmitted to it the advanced civilization of the continent.

There is a theory, first advanced by the Japanese historian Egami Namio in 1947, that a horse-riding tribe from Korea conquered Japan in the fourth century C.E. This conquest created the sudden advance in Japanese material civilization of that time and introduced new political and religious practices from the continent. Egami argued that the imperial clan of Japan belonged to this tribe of invaders, which settled first on the island of Kyushu and then, at the beginning of the fifth century, moved on to Yamato to establish its kingdom there. If that is true, then Emperor Jimmu was a Korean, and the heaven from which his grandfather had descended was nowhere but the Korean peninsula. Although this theory may be unpalatable to some modern Japanese, it is historically plausible.

To say that Abraham was an Arab or that Emperor Jimmu was a Korean does not diminish their stature as the alleged fathers of the Jews and the Japanese. These two nations, despite their ethnic and cultural resemblances to other peoples in their geographic proximity, developed quite early in their histories a strong tendency to distance themselves from their neighbors. Both the Jews and the Japanese regarded themselves—and still do—as categorically different from any other peoples. The feeling of "us" and "them" is, of course, common to all ethnic groups, but few peoples have drawn that line so sharply and clearly and maintained it for so long as have the Jews and the Japanese.

From what did this sense of separateness derive? In the case of the Jews, the source was originally religious: Jews believed that God had chosen them above all other peoples, established a covenant with them, and entrusted to them his holy commands. Judaism was not a religion to be propagated, but a religion to be kept and strictly observed. Other nations that were not chosen for this special covenantal relationship were called "gentiles" or "the other nations of the world." The Bible puts the following description of Israel in the mouth of the gentile prophet Balaam: "There is a people that dwells apart, not reckoned among the nations. . ." In time, this distinctiveness of the Jews embraced all aspects of life: They observed holidays no one else did, performed rituals no one else understood, communicated through a peculiar sacred language called Hebrew, wrote with a special alphabet, followed their own calendar, observed their own strict dietary rules, refused to intermarry with outsiders, and kept together wherever they went.

Self-definition for the Japanese was derived initially from geographical isolation: As an island nation physically detached from both China and Korea, the Japanese from early times developed a strong sense of independence. If the conquest by a fourth-century Korean tribe indeed occurred, it was the last conquest Japan knew until 1945. This obsession with independence was exemplified by the imperial institution; the emperors of Japan, considered to be gods, never recognized the suzerainty of the emperors of China, whom they considered mere mortals. As the fourteenth-century Japanese scholar Kitabatake Chikafusa wrote, "Since Japan is a separate continent, distinct from both India and China and lying in a great ocean, it is the country where the divine illustrious imperial line has been transmitted."

The Japanese adopted much of the culture of China but at the same time stubbornly refused to discard their indigenous culture. Thus the native religion subsequently called Shinto was preserved despite the fact that Buddhism and Confucianism were adopted; the native Japanese language was preserved despite the fact that much Chinese vocabulary was absorbed; Chinese script was adopted while Japanese supplementary phonetic syllabaries were developed; and Chinese institutions were introduced but modified according to Japanese practices. As it turned out, Chinese influence strengthened Japanese self-esteem rather than weakened it. By adopting the advanced culture and thought of China, the Japanese could claim that they were as good as the Chinese, and, because of their added Japaneseness, they could claim superiority.

Like the Jews, the Japanese kept their culture and religion within their ethnic boundaries and did not propagate them among other nations. They spoke a language nobody else understood, used a script partially their own, counted the years and months by their own system, adhered to a national religion nobody else shared, and cherished a mythology strictly their own.

Although the gods they worshiped were totally different, Abraham and Jimmu are both described as deeply religious men. One of the midrashim (traditional rabbinic interpretations of biblical text) states that when Abraham was a young man, he smashed the idols of his father Terah and announced his belief in one God. Abraham is thus considered to be the founder of monotheism as well as the father of the Jewish people. Therefore a convert having no biological Jewish parents is received into Judaism as a "son" or "daughter" of Abraham. The spirit of nonconformism that began with Abraham has characterized the Jews for most of their history. Yet, neither Abraham nor any other person has ever been deified by the Jews. Emperor Jimmu was a pious monarch, but he did not smash any idols. He adhered to the religion of his forefathers, which was the polytheistic and animistic creed we now call Shinto. Moreover, he himself became one of the myriad ("eight million") gods of that religion.

The religion that was subsequently called Judaism started as a spiritual revolution. It was a bold denial of previous convictions and a brave assertion of a higher-order belief system. The reduction of the number of deities from many to one was not a matter of arithmetic; it was an affirmation of the basic unity of the universe and of the moral purposefulness that underlies it, and so monotheism presented a qualitative rather than a mere quantitative shift. Shinto did not revolt against anything and did not try to assert any new truths. It is a religion of joyful acceptance of the world and of humanity as they are. Like other animistic religions, Shinto reveres the spirits of departed ancestors, celebrates the agricultural cycle, and worships the fertility of earth and of humans. Its aim is to please and appease the numerous gods and spirits who control the world around us. Shinto is therefore similar in many ways to the pagan religions that dominated the Middle East and Europe before the arrival of Judaism and its daughter religions, Christianity and Islam.

Due to this basic difference, Judaism and Shinto have treated other religions and creeds in opposite ways. The strict monotheism of Judaism excludes the belief in any other divinity. The Ten Commandments given to Moses make this very explicit: "I am the Lord your God.... You shall have no other gods beside me. . . . You shall not bow down to them or serve them. For I the Lord your God am an impassioned God. . . ." After losing their political independence, the Jews were often persecuted for their refusal to bow to other gods, and many died as martyrs for that refusal. Worshiping other gods is one of the three cardinal sins (the other two being murder and incest) that a Jew must refrain from committing even at the cost of his or her life.

This religious exclusivity was transmitted from Judaism to Christianity and Islam. Yet, whereas in Judaism exclusivity was usually manifested as the refusal of a persecuted minority to worship other deities and there was no inclination to proselytize others, in these two world religions it became an intolerance directed at the infidels under their domination and at those outside who had to be converted. As the religions of Christianity and Islam were spread over huge parts of the world by means of conquest and coercion in addition to missionary activities, religious conflicts and religious intolerance have come to characterize Western and Middle East civilizations for a long time.

Shinto, even more than the pagan religions of the ancient Near East, has been tolerant toward other religions and deities. The huge pantheon of Shinto gods, always ready to admit the spirits of deceased persons as well as living emperors, could easily absorb other new gods. Buddhism could enter Japan in the sixth century C.E. and remain until today the nation's main religion without displacing the native Shinto adhered to by most Japanese. Shinto gods could be worshiped as Buddhist deities and vice versa, and the temples and shrines of both religions could share the same precincts. In other words, one could embrace the new religion without giving up the old, an option that did not exist in the West.

Another difference between Judaism and Shinto is their attitudes toward human behavior. Judaism sets strict moral rules: "You shall not murder. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not steal." In addition to the Ten Commandments, which include the proscriptions above, there are hundreds of injunctions regarding how one should behave toward God and toward one's fellow human beings, what one should eat, and what one should wear. The world of the Bible and subsequent Judaism is divided between right and wrong, things that it is right to do and those that should not be done. This rigid moral code was later adopted by Christianity and Islam.

Shinto does not have such a strict moral code. It distinguishes between the exemplary behavior of the pious emperors and the vicious behavior of their opponents, but it presents no specific injunctions. The Shinto gods themselves sometimes go awry. Thus, the storm god Susanoo, brother of the sun goddess, used to burn forests, destroy harvests, and defecate in his sister's palace in order to annoy her. But there is no Satan, or ultimate evil, in Shinto. Wayward gods, demons and angry spirits are dangerous, but they can be pacified. Unlike Shinto, Buddhism possesses a moral code, but it holds to a less strict morality than the monotheistic religions and its injunctions differ from one sect to another. When Buddhism was adopted in Japan, its moral demands were moderated by Shinto's accommodation to human desires and frailties. Morality in Japan has been a social rather than a religious matter, molded by the common-sense injunctions of Confucianism rather than by the commandments of a transcendent God. Right and wrong are not absolute concepts. Killing or stealing are wrong when they disrupt social harmony, but they can be considered appropriate under other circumstances. The strict rules that govern Japanese behavior are based on the need to preserve social order rather than on divine commands.

Judaism places God at the center of the universe and regards nature as his creation. Nature worships God, but the beauty of nature has rarely occupied an important place in Judaism. According to the Mishnah (the earliest layer of the Talmud, containing traditional oral interpretations of scriptural ordinances), if a Jew while on a journey interrupts his study to exclaim: "Oh, what a beautiful tree" or "Oh, what a beautiful field," he places his soul in jeopardy.

Shinto is a religion that worships the gods manifested in the exquisite beauty or the frightening awe of nature. Places of exceptional scenery are sanctified as holy sites. This reverence of beauty is a central element in Japanese culture, rivalling that of the ancient Greeks. But whereas for the Greeks the ultimate beauty was to be found in the human form, for the Japanese it is found in landscape. Unlike Judaism, which is ethically oriented, Shinto is aesthetically oriented. Japanese Buddhism adapted this orientation and perfected it through its own aesthetic sensitivities, as exemplified by the impact of Shingon and Zen on Japanese art.

Sensitivity to nature brought the Japanese, like other early peoples, to conduct their lives according to the natural divisions of time, that is, days, months, and years. The Jews, however, were the first to sanctify the week, a unit of time not related to natural rhythms, but based on the biblical story of creation and institutionalized by the observance of the Sabbath: "Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath of the Lord your God. . . . For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth and sea, and all that is in them, and he rested on the seventh day." The Jewish concept of mandatory periodic rest, like the Jewish idea of a seven-day unit of time, did not exist in Japan until introduced by Christian missionaries in the sixteenth century and was not institutionalized until the second half of the nineteenth century. Japanese rested when there was no work to do; Jews rested by divine decree.

Jews could not simultaneously adhere to different theologies, as did the Japanese, who subscribed to Confucianism and Buddhism in addition to their native Shinto. But within Judaism different schools and trends have always flourished. Indeed, the three books of the Bible that are attributed to King Solomon bear a surprising resemblance to the three religious traditions of Japan. The Song of Solomon, with its joyful spirit, love of nature, and strong eroticism, echoes the Shinto world view; the Book of Proverbs, with its practical maxims, moral injunctions, and praise of wisdom, resembles Confucian precepts; and the Book of Ecclesiastes, with its existential pessimism, negation of the world, and distrust of the intellect, sounds similar to Buddhist beliefs. If King Solomon wrote these three books, as the Bible would have us believe, he was not only "wiser than all men," but to some degree also the bearer of a Japanese-style pluralistic approach to life within Judaism that is not usually acknowledged.