A photograph of Maurice Pinguet.

Maurice Pinguet. (Source: Shōichi Saeki & Tōru Haga, Eds., Gaikokujin ni yoru Nihonron no meicho - Goncharov kara Pinguet made, Chuokoron-Shinsha Inc., 1987, p. 273)

Maurice Pinguet was born in Allier, France in 1929. In 1949, he entered the Grande École for training secondary school teachers (École normale supérieure, ENS) in Paris. At the same time, he studied Greek and Latin classical literature and French literature at the Sorbonne. In 1952, he received his college teaching credential in French literature and later taught at a local high school. From 1956 to 1958, he was a researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (Centre national de la recherche scientifique, CNRS). It was around this time that he began his friendships with people like Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes. In 1958, he came to Japan as a foreign lecturer at the University of Tokyo’s College of Liberal Arts, where he taught a wide range of courses, including French literature and French thought. From 1963, he served as the Director of the Franco-Japanese Institute in Tokyo. He returned to France in 1968 to teach French literature at the University of Paris III (Université Paris-III). For three years, from 1976, he taught a seminar on Japanese culture at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) at the invitation of Roland Barthes. In the first year, he explored “the main features of the discourse on Japan in Western writings,” and eventually hit upon the problematic area of “voluntary death.” Over the next two years, he explored this issue in collaboration with Professor Jacqueline Pigeot of the University of Paris VII (Université Paris-VII), who translated and provided a wide variety of textual material on “ voluntary death” in Japanese literature. In 1979, he again came to Japan to teach students at the University of Tokyo’s College of Liberal Arts. During this period, he wrote this book over 40 months spanning the years from 1981 to 1984. Maurice Pinguet passed away in 1991.

Perhaps the most sought after discourse on Japan is a theory that not only discusses Japan, but is also grounded in a deep, universal understanding of humanity. In other words, while dealing with the particularity of Japan, it would present, develop, and provide insight into universal human issues within that particularity (a task easier said than done).

But we now have an inspiring masterpiece that has tackled that difficult task head-on. This is Maurice Pinguet’s magnum opus, La mort volontaire au Japon (Jishi no Nihonshi), the Japanese translation of which runs to more than 450 pages. The term jishi (自死) may be unfamiliar to some, but it is the Japanese translation of “la mort volontaire (voluntary death),” (which is part of the original French title of this book), and means a death chosen by one’s own will, a death by suicide. In his choice of title, we can already sense the author’s firm determination to understand “suicide” by positively linking it to human free will. In fact, for the author, “suicide” is an extremely human activity, in which death, something that perhaps inherently transcends human will, is still connected to it, like a momentary spark in which the extreme freedom of the human being is illuminated. On the basis of the universality of this unique “philosophy of death,” the author discusses the “suicide problem” in Japanese society and analyzes the history of “voluntary death” in Japan.

Pinguet’s work, therefore, is, above all, an attempt to bring the particularity of “voluntary death” in Japan into a universal context. The difficulty of this work lies in the fact that it must contend with a double exclusionist attitude.

In fact, Japanese “suicide” in the eyes of foreigners in general still retains a violent and insane image of seppuku or kamikaze. Even recently, the impact of the “self-determined death” or jiketsu (自決) of the internationally known writer Mishima Yukio has revived this image of Japan in the eyes of the rest of the world. This image of “Japan as a land of suicide” has reduced Japan’s uniqueness to a realm of madness beyond rational comprehension. Corresponding to this exclusionism on the part of the West, there can also be found a narrow-minded exclusionism on the part of Japanese people, who believe that Japanese culture is incommunicable to foreigners. The one side banishes Japan as a singularity, while the other side confines itself within its own uniqueness. Refuting these double exclusionism and locating Japanese particularity within a realm of universal understanding and sympathy is the ambitious hope that runs through this magnum opus.

To this end, the author makes use of rigorous social statistics to argue that Japan is by no means the world’s leading “suicide nation” as commonly believed. Surprisingly, he opens his book on Japan with the death of Cato, an ancient Roman statesman who committed seppuku to obtain his own freedom after losing a battle against Caesar. Cato’s jishi (voluntary death) was not aliqua furoris rabie constrictus (some kind of madness-obsessed) suicide, as later Western societies would condemn it to be. Instead, here it is viewed as an act of completely rational free will, and nothing less than an act that testifies to human dignity.

For the author, Pinguet, and also for us, the readers, Cato’s “voluntary death” is a powerful light that illuminates Japanese culture and history from the outside. That is to say, only in the light of the “voluntary death” of an ancient Roman statesman, one can see in the Japanese tradition of “suicide,” which until now has been regarded as a madness or a mysterious activity that defies universal understanding, an endeavor to “combine this ultimate act of death with reason and deliberate, if painful, decision-making,” wherein “the reason for life and the reason for death are dispassionately measured.” With this view of “voluntary death” as the ultimate form of free will, the author then provides an in-depth view of the Japanese “voluntary death” tradition from the ancient times of the Nihon shoki and Kojiki to the “self-determined death” of Mishima Yukio. There is the Buddhist dialectical ethic of life and death, as well as the Bushidō ethic of seppuku represented by Hagakure (In the Shadow of Leaves, a practical and spiritual guide for samurai). There is also a discussion of the suicides of Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, Dazai Osamu and others who have colored the history of modern Japanese literature, as well as a study of the “martyrdom or jun-shi (殉死)” of General Nogi Maresuke, and the deaths of young officers in the February 26 Incident (in this coup attempt, two committed suicide and most of them were executed).

In each case, the author’s gaze is focused on the moment when an individual, faced with a given fate, chooses the inevitability of death by force of his rational will. The emphasis is not on what historical or social context defines a death, nor on reducing a death to a variety of particular causes.

Rather, the issue is how we may read into it the supreme power of the human will, which, in the moment of one’s decision to give oneself over to death, turns one’s fate into an inevitability based on one’s own freedom.

After quoting the notes of Sasaki Hachirō, a young pilot of the Special Units (the so-called Kamikaze Squadron), Pinguet writes, “Destiny must not only be endured, it must be loved and conquered, for that is the price of serenity—amor fati.”

Therefore, make no mistake, what the author is trying to say through this “idea of voluntary death” is by no means a mischievous glorification of death. Nor is he giving an aesthetic value to suicide. On the contrary, the author sees “voluntary death” as an extreme paradox, a proof of the supremacy of human freedom and human will that transcends even death, and thus amounts to a full and fundamental affirmation of human life. The “amor fati” is nothing less than an unlimited affirmation of this life for each and every individual.

Thus, in the author’s eyes, Japan appears as a privileged place for continuing to preserve and confront the ultimate brilliance of human freedom, which is lost on Western societies that have fallen into what the author calls “pharisaic hypocrisy” by demeaning and banning suicides and depriving people of “the freedom to die.” In this way Japan may become a ray of hope for the Western world, which has become buried in the deep shadow of nihilism.

To break free from a metaphysics that is hostile to remaining within the limits of human conditions, to sweep away that unhappy consciousness that denigrates the human search for the “better” in the name of the supreme Good, to wither the lingering roots of nihilism that dismisses not death itself but all things destined to die as void. It is Japan, and Japan alone, who comes from the deepest depths of its history to encourage and strengthen us on this steep but hopeful path.

Has there ever been such a sincere and vehement call for Japan and its culture from the side of the West, which has often boasted of itself as a formidable and powerful modern civilization? Here, Japan is charged with the role of presenting another kind of humanism that transcends the limits of modern Western humanism—a role that is relevant to the entire history of humankind.

Can our country, Japan, really respond well to such an austere demand? Can Japan open up the particularity of its own existence to universality at large, without falling into the self-righteous exclusivism that rests on the superficial particularity of Japanese culture?

“It must be possible,” Maurice Pinguet would probably assert. For in his magnum opus, La mort volontaire au Japon, he demonstrated that death—a particularity that cannot be replaced by any other for an individual—can be linked to the universal free will of man without compromising that particularity in the slightest, and that is where the best traditional morality of the Japanese exists.

Therefore, for those Japanese who aspire to actively open Japanese culture and rise to the challenge, there is no other book that comes from the deepest recesses of the soul to encourage and strengthen them as much as La mort volontaire au Japon.