The Japanese Feeling of Security: Leadership and Security

Abstract

Let us consider security as it is experienced in different societies. The Japanese peasant makes his living from the produce of the earth and as long as he lives on the ancestral earth—particularly as long as he uses the ancestral privy—he has an awareness of a kind of individual immortality. Of course, there are things which threaten that security—damage from cold, typhoons, epidemics and so on. But these are natural catastrophes unrelated to man’s own capacities. It was popularly believed that when the virtue of the man in authority was great the five cereals (rice, wheat, Chinese millet, fortail mille and bean) were fertile and when that authority was lacking there were changes in the heavens and in human society and starvation occurred.