ntial (Pyle 105-6; 161). Also consider the view articulated in Japan's formal declaration of war against the U.S. in 1941, formally rejecting Western individualism and Chinese Confucian concept of the state as an extension of family loyalty in favor of "that which goes farther and which is greater than these. There is the Imperial Household . . . In Nippon, the nation is valued first, then next the family, and last the individual" (Iichiro 292-3). Further to this point, Dower cites the concept of "proper place" thinking, which (notwithstanding late Meiji rejection of Confucianism) he says had been inherited from Confucian notions of a well-ordered society. In Meiji Japan, however, the concept was encoded as a "mixture of racial pride and idealism" (Dower 278) that was to dominate world conquest in a way consistent with Nazi notions of pure blood and Lebensraum. The concept, articulated as Bushido or "meeting death with perfect calmness" (Ministry 284), entailed stability, respect, serenity of spirit, courtesy, and other elements of a hierarchical culture as positive virtues, the content of Japan's national morality on one hand and warrior's ethos on the other (Ministry 284). There is a view, indeed, that these values enabled the Japanese to find national purpose and a path toward restoration even in the midst of defeat after Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Pyle 229-30).
Virtue during the Meiji period, when Tanizaki and Kyoka were writing, appears to have been associated with features of culture that had a long-term provenance in Japan. Curiously, however, these Meiji authors did not look to either the Meiji or the Tokugawa period for cultural origin, but rather all the way back to the Heian aristocratic period, which just preceded the period of Shogunate. Tanizaki translated the Tale of the Genji, the major Heian work of fiction, from archaic to modern Japanese, first in the 1930s and for a second time in 1954 (Hirota 29; Chambers 107). To t...