ETHIOPIA AND JAPAN IN COMPARATIVE CIVILIZATIONAL PERSPECTIVE*

Donald N. Levine
University of Chicago

At first blush, it is hard to imagine two societies more dissimilar than Japan and Ethiopia.
Consider their religious traditions. With most of its historic peoples adhering to Judaism, Christianity,
and Islam, Ethiopia presents an exemplar par excellence of Semitic religiosity, marked by moral
subordination to a commanding supernatural deity—as is its largest indigenous tradition, that of the
Oromo. In sharp contrast, Japanese religiosity, which draws from an even more diverse range of
traditions—Shinto, Buddhism, neo-Confucianism, and Taoism—has been oriented in ways that sacralize
the natural world.
Or consider their economies. With 7% of its labor force in agriculture, Japan ranks among the
wealthiest countries in the world; Ethiopia, with a labor force 80% in agriculture, remains one of the
poorest. Japan reports a literacy rate of 100%; Ethiopia’s populace is largely illiterate (10% literacy
in 1976, about 36% two decades later). Japan’s population enjoys exceptional health, registering life
expectancies of 77 (male)/83 (female) and an infant mortality rate of 4 per 1,000, and supporting one
physician per 566 persons; Ethiopians still suffer a number of chronic epidemics, register life
expectancies of 46 (male)/48 (female) and an infant mortality rate of 123 per 1,000, and get by with
no more than one physician for 60,000 people.
Or consider their political records. Japan shows continuous political stability over the past half
century. During the same period, Ethiopia witnessed numerous revolts and attempted coups; a rash of
civil wars, leading in the case of Eritrea to outright secession; two forcible changes of regime; and, at
present, a regime held illegitimate by some sectors of the population and by a vocal expatriate
community. Japan has maintained a civil society that permits a wide range of free political and cultural
expression, whereas Ethiopia holds more independent journalists in prison than any country outside of
China and Turkey.
Their records in the international arena show comparably dramatic contrasts. Japan’s invasions
of Manchuria and China in the 1930s helped trigger World War II and led to severe cruelties toward the
peoples of East Asia, including China, Korea, Burma, and the Philippines. By contrast, Ethiopia in the
1930s was a victim of unprovoked invasion by Fascist Italy, pursued through a war machine that rained
poisoned gas upon peasants armed with spears. In the postwar era, Japan tended to abstain from
international efforts to stem Communist expansion and maintain world peace, whereas Ethiopia,
earlier casualty of a dysfunctional system of collective security, played a gallant role in United Nations
military actions in Korea and the Congo and, through actions of both Emperor Haile Selassie and her

*
Paper presented at the XIIIth International Conference of Ethiopian Studies, Kyoto, December 12-17, 1997.
Published in Passages: Interdisciplinary Journal of Global Studies 3 (1), 1-32.
 -2-

current Prime Minister, performed statesmanlike services in mediating major conflicts in Nigeria,
Morocco, Somalia, and the Sudan.
Given such contrasts, a thesis about basic similarities between the two nations would appear
fanciful. To note, for example, that Showan Emperor Haile Selassie I (1931-74) was reckoned the
126th monarch of a continuous Solomonid dynasty while Showa Emperor Hirohito (1926-89) was
reckoned the 124th monarch of the continuous Jimmu dynasty must seem part coincidence, part pun.
Yet even those who link a thesis about parallels between Ethiopia and Japan to the fevered imagination
of a comparative sociologist might pause before this fact: earlier in the present century, writers in both
countries expressed acute awareness of their mutual affinities (Zewde 1990). Thus, an issue of The
Japanese Weekly Chronicle in 1933 celebrated “the spiritual affinity between Japan and Abyssinia,”1
while in Ethiopia, pre-war Foreign Minister Blattengeta Heruy Walde Sellasie (in Medhara Berhan
Hagara Japan [The Japanese Nation, Source of Light]) and post-war Minister of Education Kebbedde
Michael (in Japan Indemin Seletenech [How Japan Modernized]) described striking similarities
between the two countries. Scarcely noticed among those similarities was the fact that Ethiopia and
Japan were the only non-European countries to defeat modern European imperialists (Ethiopia
against Italy in 1896, Japan against Russia in 1905). Prior to that, moreover, they had distinguished
themselves by withstanding other imperial powers: Japan against Mongols in the 1280s, Ethiopia
against Ottoman Turks in the 1580s. Both countries welcomed intercourse with the Portuguese early
in the 16th century, whom they then extruded abruptly early in the following century.
Behind those stunning coincidences, I shall now argue, lay societal developments that exhibit
strikingly similar trajectories across two-and-a-half millennia, and civilizational forms that are in
important respects identical. Appreciation of those similarities may led to hypotheses about patterns
of civilizational dynamics more generally as well as provide some considerations to qualify claims of
absolute uniqueness. Against those similarities, moreover, factors that led to such discrepant
experiences of modernization come to be seen with increased clarity and security.

A. Historical profiles
The many connotations of the concept of civilization include the notion of a society extended
in time and space. Although the spatial extensions of Ethiopia and Japan are not nearly so vast as
those of the commonly-cited cases of Chinese, South Asian, Islamic, and Hellenic civilizations, their
extension in time is remarkable. Both societies bear marks of continuous development over more than
2,500 years. To represent those developments in summary fashion I have divided them into four
periods, which are represented schematically in Figure 1.

1
Such perceptions of affinity fed the pronounced sense of solidarity with Ethiopia expressed by the Japanese public
following Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935—evident, for example, in the decision of the Osaka Chamber of
Commerce to provide straw sandals to Ethiopians to protect their feet against poison gas, in the dispatch of 1,200
Japanese swords to Ethiopia to assist in the war effort, and in the applications of Japanese volunteers to join the
Ethiopian Army that flooded the Ethiopian consulate in Tokyo (Zewde 1990).
 -3-

FIGURE 1
DEVELOPMENTAL PROFILES OF ETHIOPIAN AND JAPANESE CIVILIZATIONS

PERIOD HISTORICAL EPISODES ETHIOPIA JAPAN

I Immigrants cross channels, Semites from SW Arabia invade Yayoi from Korea invade
7C BCE toupgrade agriculture, mix with indigenous Nilotes and Cushites, indigenous Ainu and Jomon,
8C CE indigenous peoples 1st millennium BCE 4C BCE
Prehistoric kingdoms Pre-Aksumite kingdoms at Yeha Mythic Jimmu dynasty at Nara,
GENESIS established, ca 7-5C BCE and Azbi, ca 7-5C BCE ca 7-5C BCE
Historic kingdoms flourish, 1- Agazyan kingdom at Aksum, Yamato dynasty, 4-7C CE
AND 7C CE 1-7C CE
Burial megaliths for chieftains Giant obelisks at Aksum Giant mounds (kofun) at Yamato,
CLASSICAL Conquest of nearby peninsula 3-6C
SW Arabia occupied, Korea occupied, 360-562;
SYNTHESIS 3-4C & 520-575 CE final rout, 668
Early nature religions, Nature spirits, sun, moon, Venus Nature spirits, sun-goddess;
supplemented through Christianity enters with conversion Buddhism enters from Korea,
imported world religion, of Ezana, 356; diffused by Kaleb 538;
4-7C and Syrian missionaries, 6C diffused via Prince Shotoku,
early 7C
Classical religious architecture Debra Damo monastery, 6C Rock- Horyuji monastery, 7C
hewn churches throughout Tigray Nara temples, Daibutsu, 8C

II Expansions of Beja, Agew, Somali, Fujiwara, Taira & Minamoto

8C to Classic kingdom attacked and Arabs isolate Aksumite clans clash sporadically, 9-12C
15C kingdom, 7-9C Kammu moves capital from Nara
Capital abandoned, 7-10 C Aksum coinage stops, capital to Heian (Kyoto), late 8C
TURMOIL, moves elsewhere, mid-7C; Civil disturbances issue in
Aksum sacked, mid-10C Yoritomo Shogunate, 10-12C
TRANS- New political center, further Center shifts southward
LOCATION, inland from point of entry of Zagwe Dynasty at Wag and Lasta, Center shifts from Kinai eastward
foreign influence,mid-12C 1150-1270 to Kanto Plain
AND Kamakura Shogunate,1185-1333
Great artistic achievements, Monolithic cathedrals at Lalibela Architecture, sculpture, literature
12-13C flourish
MEDIEVAL Expansion of state and growth Ethiopian state expands under Repulse of Mongol invasions
of national sentiment spurred Solomonid dynasty, est. 1270, spurs national consciousness,
SYNTHESIS by civil strife and clashes with clashes with border principalities 1280s
enemies National epic redacted, 14 C
Buddhism spreads, sects flourish
Efflorescence of religious and Christianity spreads, monastic (True Pure Land, Lotus, and Zen)
aesthetic culture, centers flourish, 13-16 C in provincial monasteries, 13-
13C-16C Qene poetry; Royal Chronicles; 16C
greatest painting, 14-15C No drama; ikebana; greatest
painting schools, 15 C
 -4-

PERIOD HISTORICAL EPISODES ETHIOPIA JAPAN

III Protracted warfare, internal and Adali jihad, 1527-43 Wars of unification, 1568-1603
16C to mid-19C external Oromo incursions 1527-1600 Hideyoshi invades Korea and
Defeat of Ottoman Turks, 1580s China, 1590-1600
Portuguese Jesuits introduce Portuguese Jesuits arrive (Alvarez Jesuit mission arrives, 1549
INTER- European culture; mission), 1520 Daimyo of Kyushu converts to
NATIONAL alien religion engenders civil Emp. Susneyos converts, 1622 Catholicism, 1563
strife, expulsion of Jesuits, 16- Hideyoshi Edict curtails work of
TENSIONS 17C Aggressive Mendez mission Jesuits, 1587
arrives, 1622 Christian missionaries are
AND Jesuits are expelled, 1632 expelled, 1624-1639

NATIONAL 2 1/4 centuries of national 1632-1850s 1614-1850s

isolation, 1620s-1850s
ISOLATION Stable capital; Gonder flourishes, castles are Osaka and other sites are
construction of major castles built by successive emperors, established as castle towns, 16C
1632-1755
Rule by feudal lords, with Zemena mesafint, Tokugawa Shogunate,
emperor a background ca 1750-1850 1603-1868
figurehead

IV Incursions by European British at Magdala, 1868 Americans at Uraga, 1853;

mid-19C to powers British bombardments,
mid-20C 1863-4
Tewodros II, 1855-68; Yohannes
EUROPEAN Classic notion of sacral IV, 1871-89; Sahle Maryam Restoration of Meiji emperor,
monarchy restored restores Solomonid symbolism 1868
INCURSIONS as Menilek II, 1889
First defeat of European Dogali, 1887; Adwa, 1896 Russo-Japanese War, 1904-5
AND powers
Constitution promulgated,
IMPERIAL defining emperor as “sacred 1931 1889
and inviolable”
MODERN- Reign of last traditional Haile Selassie I, 1931-74 Hirohito, 1926-89
IZATION emperor (“126th monarch of Solomonid (“124th monarch of Jimmu
dynasty”) dynasty”)

Period I: Genesis and Classical Synthesis

The prehistories of both nations are conspicuously obscure. In both cases, they have left
exquisite pottery: recently-discovered ceramic pots of pre-Aksumites, long-celebrated pottery from
Jomon culture. Both prehistories involve the migration of technologically advanced people across
waterways--the Yayoi from Korea, Sabaeans from Southwest Arabia--over unknown centuries of the
first millennium BCE. Improved agriculture, including irrigation, supported a regime of sacred
chieftains, who established cities that were at once political capitals, sacred sites, and commercial
centers. They also produced enormous burial structures--obelisks at Aksum, kofun at Yamato. Their
religions were oriented to the worship of natural spirits and heavenly bodies.
The period from mid-4C to mid-6C CE formed a turning point in both civilizations. It saw the
consolidation of strong kingdoms and initial conversions to a world religion—Christianity and
Buddhism, respectively. Growing strength of the kingdoms was accompanied by episodes of return
 -5-

colonization. Aksumite expeditions to South Arabia date from early 3C, and King Kaleb colonized the
Yemen for two decades in the sixth century. Japan occupied, by some accounts, three Korean
provinces from mid-4C to mid-6C.
The classical period reached a climax with new impetus toward the diffusion of the world religions
in the 6th century. Ethiopia experienced major liturgical innovations and missionary activity carried
out by a number of Syrian monks, followed by the creation of enduring valuable religious architecture:
the Debra Damo monastery and rock-hewn churches throughout Tigray (Plant 1985). In Japan there
were numerous missions to and from Buddhist centers in China, leading to the construction of the
Horyuji monastery, numerous Buddhist temples, and the great Daibutsu sculpture at Nara.

Period II: Turmoil, Translocation, and Medieval Synthesis

From about the middle of the seventh century, both societies saw increased skirmishing among
rival groups which, for different reasons, had the effect of leading to the abandonment of the classic
capitals. Expansions of Arabs, Bejas, and Agews crippled Aksum as a commercial center and led to her
destruction in late 10C. Sectarian factionalism at Nara induced Kammu in late 8C to abandon Nara as
the imperial capital, and eventually to establish the new capital at Kyoto.
In both places, the societal centers moved inland, away from the shores closest to the points of
entry for the migrations and influences from abroad. In Ethiopia this movement pushed southward,
leading to the Zagwe Dynasty at Wag and Lasta in 12-13C, then further south to Shoa in 1270. In
Japan the movement was generally eastward; although Kyoto stood in the same region as Nara, by the
twelfth century the great eastern plain of Kanto had begun to compete with the classical core area of
the Kinai Plain, which was located closer to the Korea Strait.
These inland movements were accompanied by a number of indigenizing cultural changes. The
elaborate stylized forms of the classical period gave way to earlier traditions more attuned to nature.
In Ethiopia, rectangular stone constructions of churches in the north became cylindrical churches with
thatched roofs further south. After the Japanese court ended all official communications with the
faltering Tang Chinese empire in 894, its culture also became inward-looking. Ornate Chinese styles
gave way to the Heian style of palace architecture that used unpainted wood and thatched roofs, and a
"Yamato" style of painting came to feature local scenes and incidents. Vernacular languages developed
out of the classical forms. Ancestral Ethiopic (Ge’ez) produced Tigrinya and Amharic; ancestral
Japanese evolved into modern Japanese and Okinawan.
Developments in the interiors issued in climaxes of political control and cultural efflorescence.
In Ethiopia we find a formidable expansion of the Solomonid polity under Emperors Amde Tseyon and
Zara Yaqob. We also find the expansion of religious culture through the disciples of charismatic monks
like Tekla Haymanot and Ewostatewos, and a new and expanding cultural role played by monasteries
generally. Religious and political energies blended in the production of hagiographic chronicles of kings
and saints, and a national epic, the Kibre Negest. In the 14-15C came the flowering of esoteric poetry
 -6-

and what are generally regarded as the finest works of Ethiopian painting in the form of miniatures in
illustrated manuscripts.
Japan experienced a comparable medieval synthesis. This was based on the political
consolidations under the Kamakura Shogunate (1185-1333) and the repulsion of an attempted invasion
by Mongol forces in the 1280s, which did much to stir up national sentiment. That period was also a
high point for the growth of Buddhist sects in provincial monasteries, including Lotus, True Pure Land,
and Zen. The founder of Lotus, Nichiren (13C), aroused large followings with his transposition of
Buddhism into a fiercely nationalistic key. The later Ashikaga Period (mid-14C to mid-16C) was a
time of intense economic and cultural growth during which a number of aesthetic genres underwent
notable development, including the formalized tea ceremony, no dramas, ikebana (the art of flower-
arranging), and what are considered to be the greatest schools of Japanese painting.

Period III: International Tensions and National Isolation

For both civilizations, the sixteenth century marked a crucial turning point. The scale of warfare
was magnified as both empires found themselves embattled within and without. The Ethiopian
kingdom was attacked in 1527 by Adali subjects from the east, on a jihad that had local roots but was
inspired and equipped by the Ottoman Turks. After barely surviving that assault, the kingdom was
engaged in decades of struggles sparked by the momentous expansion of Oromo tribes from the south.
During a resurgent interval, the monarchy under Sarsa Dengel (r.1563-1597) checked the territorial
ambitions of the Turks along the Eritrean coast. In Japan, a century of protracted feudal
skirmishings—the period of “Warring States”—led to the massive centralizing military campaigns of
Nobunaga (d. 1582) and his successors. Under Hideyoshi (r. 1582-98), Japan attempted to conquer
China by mounting two mammoth (but unsuccessful) invasions of Korea in the 1590s.
More consequential for their longer-term histories, the sixteenth century marked the beginning
of a shift of Ethiopia’s and Japan’s external focus from their classical sources of stimulation in Semitic
and Chinese civilizations to the encounter with European civilization. Navigators from Portugal, who
reached both shores at about the same time in the early 1540s, were the prime initiators of this
encounter. The Portuguese brought such benefits—military and diplomatic assistance to Ethiopia,
trade links to Japan, firearms to both2 —that they were welcomed in both lands, and Portuguese and
then Spanish Jesuit missionaries converted significant sectors of their elites to Catholicism. By the end
of the century they had won sufficient converts among the high and mighty, and alienated other elite
elements, that intense civil strife ensued. This eventuated in a backlash against European Christians
and their abrupt expulsion. Efforts to suppress Christianity in Japan began with Hideyoshi’s edict of
1587 and culminated with the expulsion of the Spanish in 1624 and the Portuguese in 1639. After

2
The very year that firearms entered Japan, 1543, was the year that Portuguese firearms were used to kill Ahmad Gragn
and thus reverse Christian Ethiopia's faltering military fortunes.
 -7-

Emperor Susneyos decided his conversion to Catholicism was disastrous for the country, he abdicated in
1632, whereupon Fasilidas expelled the Jesuits.
These episodes with the Jesuits precipitated a revulsion against Europeans and national policies of
isolation and turning inward that persisted for more than two centuries. Although their isolation
deprived them of the stimulation and technical advances they would have enjoyed by remaining in
contact with the outward world, it gave them opportunities to develop their own political institutions
and resources. The dynasty of emperors from Fasilidas through Iyasu II created the first stationary
political capital in Ethiopia since Aksum; the dynasty of shoguns founded by Tokugawa Ieyasu
constructed a new imperial bureaucracy and consolidated a stable class structure. The new dynasts
flaunted their national political muscle from magnificent castle towns, at Gonder, and at Azuchi,
Momoyana, and Osaka.

Period IV: European Incursions and Imperial Modernization

The centuries of national isolation were interrupted by dramatic episodes that signaled a need t o
contend with expansionist foreign powers. In Ethiopia the pressures of Mahdist expansionism from
Egypt and Sudan and of British, French, and Italian colonialism incited the nation-building efforts of
19C emperors Tewodros II, Yohannes IV, and Menilek II. The cannon at Uraga Bay unleashed a burst
of nationalist activity in Japan that included restoration of the Meiji monarchy. In both cases, ancient
myths of sacred emperors were revitalized as a way to inspire efforts needed to build a modern nation,
and both nations enshrined the symbolism of their ancient sacral monarchy in their modernizing
constitutions.3
So mobilized, both peoples mounted major efforts to defend themselves against encroachments
from European powers. These resulted in the defeat of Italian forces by Ras Alula at Dogali in 1887
and by Emperor Menilek’s armies at Adwa in 1896, and in the defeat of Russian forces, after two years
of intense combat by Emperor Meiji’s troops, in 1905. Their military prowess made Ethiopia and
Japan the first two non-European powers to negotiate treaties with European nations at the turn of the
century. The internal history of both societies since the late 19C includes numerous efforts t o
promote modernization from above that were legitimated by the imperial throne.
Compressing this brief summary, one can weave key developments of each period into a single
narrative. Both Ethiopia and Japan began their civilizational growth by grafting an idealized external
culture onto a proud indigenous base. Over centuries the resulting culture diffused inland over far-flung
areas through the institutions of a sacralized monarchy and religious traditions that buttressed those
institutions. In the sixteenth century they again found external challenges, and briefly shifted

3
The Meiji Constitution of 1889 designated the person of the emperor as "sacred and inviolable," language that, along
with many other passages, was incorporated into Ethiopia's first Constitution in 1931. In Ethiopia as in Japan, the
emperor thus came to be conceived, at one and the same time, as "1) a constitutional monarch, head of an authoritarian
state established by a constitution granted by the emperor, not demanded by the people; 2) supreme authority over the
armed forces, independent from control of the cabinet; and 3) a monarch of divine right" (Eisenstadt 1996, 35).
 -8-

attention from their classical roots to a newly expanding Europe. After some initial conversions t o
European Christian faith, their elites evinced nativistic reactions. Ensuing centuries of isolation gave
them space to build up internal political might along traditional feudal lines. When at last they could
ignore the threats of foreign expansion no longer, they looked toward European models in determined
efforts to modernize, while restoring an archaic notion of imperial grandeur.

B. Civilizational form
In addition to comparing their patterns of historical development, one can also think about
civilizations by considering certain formal properties they exhibit across their innumerable changes.
To do this is to think of a civilization, as Robert Redfield once put it, “as having a form that remains
the same while the content, institutions, usages, beliefs change” (Redfield 1962, 373). In comparing
the civilizations of Ethiopia and Japan, I find a common form that exhibits a complex of geopolitical
and cultural features. These I propose to gloss as receptive insularity; idealization of alien culture;
sacralization of an imperial homeland; parochialization; religious pluralism; political
decentralization; a hegemonic warrior ethos; and hierarchical particularism.

1. Receptive insularity
Begin with geography. Japan comprises a set of large islands and countless small ones; Ethiopia is
a virtual island: a large land mass bordered nearly one third by water, and otherwise ringed by forbidding
deserts, lowlands, and mountainous escarpments. Both territories exerted an attraction on outsiders;
both contain temperate climates, fertile areas, and sticky borders, in that people tend to stay once they
have made it in.
This is true for movements of culture as for movements of peoples. Observers of both
civilizations emphasize the extent to which each was eager to import alien cultural elements and then
to appropriate them in their home idiom through processes of “Ethiopianization” and “Japanization.”
In Storia della letteratura etiopica (1956), Enrico Cerulli described this trait by noting that throughout
their history, Ethiopian authors were influenced by foreign writings--by Greek, Syrian, Arabic, and
European sources--to an exceptional degree, but in a way that never took the form of passive, literal
borrowing:
Rather, one can say that it is precisely a typical Ethiopian tendency to collect the
data of foreign cultural and literary experience and transform them, sooner or later,
to such an extent that even translations in Ethiopic are not always translations, in
our sense of the term; but they frequently contain additions, supplementary material,
at times misrepresentations of the original, at other times simply the insertion of
 -9-

new materials in such a quantity that the literal sense of the original is completely
lost. (Cerulli 1956, 12-13).
A pattern of indigenizing incorporation has also been described for painting, music, agriculture, and
religion, where “Ethiopian responses reveal a recurrent pattern that indicates neither nativistic
rejection nor slavish adherence to imported forms, but a disposition to react to the stimulations of
exogenous models by developing and then rigidly preserving distinctly Ethiopian versions” (Levine
1974, 65).
A comparable pattern of importation and indigenization has been ascribed to Japanese culture by
many observers. It was manifest over centuries by the deliberate importation from China of forms of
writing, architecture, technology, religious belief, and ethical doctrines, which in turn underwent a
special coloration in being fashioned to suit the themes of Japanese experience. This reshaping into a
Japanese idiom affects virtually everything that has been imported, from Chinese Buddhism t o
American baseball. Referring to the extensive incorporation of external influences—"ideas, artifacts,
technologies, styles of dress"—into Japanese culture, Shmuel Eisenstadt contends that the process of
Japanization "entailed, not just the addition of local color, but the transformation of their basic
conceptions in line with the basic premises of Japanese civilization" (Eisenstadt 1996, 303-4). This
was manifest, for example, in the transformation of the Chinese notion of the emperor as standing
under the Mandate of Heaven to the Japanese notion of tenno, a heavenly ruler not accountable t o
any transcendent authority. Similarly, in his noted novel Silence (1969), Shusaku Endo describes the
early Japanese appropriation of Christianity as confounding the Latin term Deus with the Japanese
Dainichi—Great Sun; somewhat mordantly, Endo employs the metaphor of a mud swamp for the
Japanese pattern of receptive insularity.

2. Idealized alien culture

The receptivity of these two geopolitical islands to foreign cultures displayed a special intensity
and poignancy in relation to two major civilizational centers—Solomonic Israel and T’ang China. The
path laid by prestigious Sabaean culture-bearers was followed by waves of later immigrants who
converted inhabitants of the Aksumite realm to Judaeo-Christianity, later to Islam. In this process,
Jerusalem became idealized as the ancestral center whence originated the two major sources of royal
legitimacy, descendance from the line of King Solomon and possession of the Ark of the Covenant
from the temple at Jerusalem. This momentous cultural transfiguration was embodied in the Kibre
Negest, a text incorporating many oral and written traditions from Ethiopia and the Near East which
was redacted by Tigrean scribes in the 14th century4 . The idealization of Semitic culture anchored at
Jerusalem appears as the generative assumption of the Kibre Negest. It appears in total acceptance of
the belief in the divine dispensation accorded to the Solomonic lineage and the Christian mission, and
 -10-

extends to denigration of dark skin color and of the lineage descended from Ham (Levine 1974, 103
ff).
During the same centuries that would lead to the compilation of an Ethiopian epic extolling
Semitic symbols, Japan’s elite was drawn toward what they perceived as the superior Chinese
civilization. As Ethiopia had imported a Semitic script from Arabia Felix, Japan imported ideographic
writing from China. From the sixth century on, Japanese kings sent emissaries to China in a
determined effort to enhance their power and prestige. The Yamato court adopted the Chinese
calendar, reorganized court ranks and etiquette in accordance with Chinese models, created a system of
highways, began to compile official chronicles, and erected Buddhist temples. Prince Shotoku (573-
621), in particular, sent many students to learn Buddhism and Confucianism, and promulgated a
Seventeen Article Constitution based largely on Han Confucianism. Shotoku’s respect for Chinese
culture was so immense that he suppressed any reference to traditional Japanese religious practices or
to the Japanese principle of hereditary succession in his Constitution.

3. Sacralized homeland
Although Ethiopia and Japan idealized the foreign sources of Great Traditions which they sought
to incorporate, they counterposed to that idealization a strong feeling of national pride and a keen
sense of being hallowed as a chosen nation. They accomplished this by creating a divine emperor and
by identifying the inhabitant of that office with the sacred mission of his nation, which gave them
sufficient self-confidence later to disavow their earlier sources of foreign inspiration.
In Ethiopia, this involved a reversal of values through which Ethiopia came to be defined as a
Chosen Nation that had taken the place of the Chosen People of Israel. The Kibre Negest did this,
first, by representing Menilek as the first-born of Solomon’s sons, then by having Menilek and his
retainers steal the Ark of the Covenant from Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem and spirit it back to the
region of Aksum. The transfer of God’s favor to Ethiopia was sealed by their reception of the
Christian faith, and finally by condemning the “Roman” Christians for having forsaken the orthodox
faith by following the heretical teachings of Nestorius. This signified Ethiopia’s emergence as the sole
authentic bearer of Christianity, home of the only people in the world thereafter favored by the God of
Solomon.
In Japan, a comparable tension was already hinted at in the reign of Prince Shotoku, in letters he
sent to the Sui court that seemed to assert a status equal to that of the Chinese sovereign.5 As in
Ethiopia, the crucial factor in elevating Japan above its idealized source of legitimacy was to claim a
special divine status for the country’s emperor by tracing his lineage to a uniquely sacralized apex.
This stemmed from indigenous beliefs associated with what came to be called Shintoism, especially the

4
This text was translated and published in by E. A. Wallis Budge, as The Queen of Sheba and her only Son Menyelek
(1922). For further discussion of its provenance and contents, see Levine 1974, ch. 7.
 -11-

notion that the Japanese emperor was descended from Amaterasu, the Sun Goddess. The charisma thus
associated with the Japanese emperor became constitutive of the privileged status of the Japanese
people. As one of the leaders of the 18C Shinto revival, Motoori Norinaga, reaffirmed: “The Sun
Goddess is a universal deity as well as a national one, but she has shown special favor to the Japanese
and guides them to a special destiny” (Tsunoda et al. II, 15). (There is solar symbolism in the
Ethiopian lore, too, for the Kibre Negest marks the shift of divine favor from the Jews to the
Ethiopians by a dream of Solomon in which the sun flies away from Israel to shine brightly ever after
over the land of Ethiopia.)
Throughout the past millennium, the emperors, however powerless, never ceased to be the
ultimate legitimators of the sacralized political order. Rases and shoguns, however ambitious, could
never be invested with the powers and symbols of a legitimate monarch. Although Hideyoshi and
Tewodros came from peasant stock, they both sought to legitimate themselves by associating
themselves with imperial symbolism. The latent symbolic significance of the emperor made it possible
for the imperial symbol to be drastically reconfigured in the Meiji period as the central symbol of the
new political regime (Eisenstadt 1996, 249), as happened to a large extent during the reigns of Menilek
II and Haile Selassie I.
In both countries, the feeling of being part of a chosen nation has been reinforced at the local
level by the dispersal of symbolism that embodies their chosenness. Most Abyssinian homes belonged
to a parish which contains a tabot, a replica of the Ark of the Covenant allegedly brought to the land
from Jerusalem. Similarly, many Japanese homes in the Edo period came to possess a piece of the
shrine of the Sun Goddess at Ise, thus honoring the divine ancestry of the emperor. The sense of being
especially chosen referred to land and language as well as to the image of an age-old divine monarchy.
Both Ethiopians and Japanese tend to revere their scenic landscapes as exceptionally precious and their
national languages as bearing some transcendent imprint.

4. Parochialization
Central to the civilizations of Ethiopia and Japan alike, then, is a collective self-image that rests
on a perch facing in two directions, outward toward an idealized foreign culture and inward to a
sacralized imperial homeland. One may gain further insight into this combination of outward
idealization and self-idealization by considering the formulations of S. N. Eisenstadt in his magisterial
Japanese Civilization (1996). Eisenstadt views Japan in a perspective framed by the conception of
Axial civilizations—those civilizations within which emerged new types of ontological visions
involving conceptions of a basic tension between transcendental and mundane orders (ancient Israel
and later second-Temple Judaism and Christianity; ancient Greece; Zoroastrian Iran; early Imperial
China; Hinduism and Buddhism; and, later, Islam). This leads him to construe Japan as “the only non-

5
For example, one Shotoku letter bore the superscription, “The Son of Heaven of the Land of the Rising Sun to the
 -12-

Axial civilization that maintained . . . a history of its own, without being in some way marginalized by
the Axial civilizations . . . with which it was in continuous contact” (14). Moreover, unlike other non-
Axial civilizations, Japan evolved an elaborate “wisdom literature” and sophisticated philosophical and
aesthetic discourse. The uniqueness of Japanese civilization, he suggests, reflects its pervasive “de-
Axialization.” Although Japanese elites imported the Axial traditions of Buddhism and Confucianism,
they transformed them in ways that weakened their critical impact on the mundane order. This
transformation “was a double-pronged one, manifest, on the cultural and ideological level, in the
weakening of transcendental and universalistic orientations and their channeling into an immanentist,
particularistic, primordial direction and, on the organizational level, in the relatively low institutional
autonomy of the major Confucian schools and scholars and of the Buddhist’s sects’ leaders and seers,
who remained embedded in the prevailing social settings and networks—be they familial, regional, or
political” (259-60).
The key moment in Eisenstadt's interpretation would seem to be the shift of sacralization from
transcendent principles to the glorification of Japan itself. More generally, this can be construed as a
process of parochialization. This process has other manifestations. Historically, Japan has been
content to hold on to its indigenized versions of universalistic ideologies such as Buddhism,
Confucianism, and various Western ideologies without attempting to reexport them. Prior to its
expansionist counteroffensive against the West earlier in this century, Japan showed no missionary
impulse. And although Japan has continually been oriented to other, broader civilizations, it has never
considered itself to be part of a broader civilizational universe (Eisenstadt 1996, 304, 308).
Although one must be careful to avoid distortions when fitting the facts of Ethiopia's civilization
into this mold, to the extent that resemblances can be identified, they are illuminating. It is perhaps
most accurate to say that Ethiopian civilization tilted heavily in the direction of Japan's
parochialization, even if it did not lean quite so far as Japan did. It is true that Ethiopian Orthodox
Church was formally under the jurisdiction of the Alexandrian Patriarchate for sixteen centuries (ca
360 CE to 1960); that Ethiopian Christians and Jews alike oriented themselves to what they
understood as their ancestral homeland in the Holy Land; and that Ethiopian delegates were welcomed
at the Council of Florence in 1441. That said, it is also true that a primary orientation of most
Ethiopian elites has been to the suzerainty of their divine emperor, and that no Ethiopian emperor
could have been overthrown before 1974, as occurred repeatedly in China or Europe, by an appeal t o
universalistic principles. The rebellions against Emperors Susneyos and Lijj Iyasu were cases in point,
since the charges against them were that they were threatening the national polity by affiliating too
brazenly with religionists from outside lands.
Again, apart from the brief excursion into Yemen at the behest of the Byzantine King Justin, the
enlargement of their territory by conquest of adjacent areas, and the exceptional proselytizing of

Son of Heaven of the Land of the Setting Sun.” This quite displeased the Sui emperor (Tsunoda et al. 1958; I, 37).
 -13-

Emperor Yohannes IV, Ethiopian kings were not disposed to engage in missionary activity on behalf of
their parochialized faith. One cannot imagine Ethiopian kings, no matter how powerful, organizing
something on the order of a European Crusade or an Islamic jihad. The latter-day diffusion of
Ethiopian themes in Jamaica through the Rastafarian movement was a source of embarrassment for
Ethiopians. Finally, although Aksumite Ethiopia did indeed figure as an active part of a broader
civilizational universe, following the Arab expansions of the 7C which cut her off from much of the
outside world Ethiopia became peripheral to the Judaic and Christian ecumenes—as, later, her converts
to Islam became peripheral to the Islamic ecumene.
In the encounter with modernity, finally, neither civilization sought to legitimate its reluctant
embrace in universalistic terms. The Meiji insistence on progress and on learning from the West, like
that of Emperors Menilek and Haile Selassie, appealed to needs to defend their country against foreign
imperialisms and to cope with the more successful nations of Europe, not to a discourse that affirmed
the general, universalistic values of modern culture.

5. Religious pluralism
One consequence of softening the demands of an axial doctrine has been a relatively permissive
attitude toward different faiths. Although all historic religions can be said to involve combinations of
cultural traits, there seems to be a distinctive type of syncretic pattern in Ethiopia and Japan that
marks their religious experience off from comparable experiences elsewhere, especially in Europe and
much of the Islamic world. I shall gloss it as pluralism, to emphasize a certain degree of acceptance
and interconnection of distinct religious traditions rather than their syncretic combination in a single
faith.
In both countries, this pluralistic acceptance extends to ancient local traditions as well as to world
religions, although the former is more pronounced in Japan and the latter in Ethiopia. In Japan,
devotion to spirits known as kami reflects an ancestral worship of things of nature that became
codified as Shinto. Local kami have been worshipped for protection and have formed a basis for
communal identities. They have entered into the national political culture by the myth of Jimmu, a
divine warrior. This myth makes subsequent Japanese emperors descendants of the kami whose shrine
is at Ise, Sun Goddess Amaterasu. Side by side with these beliefs has been the observance of many forms
of Buddhism. The two traditions have not been synthesized, but have functioned in a complementary
way, for example, with Shinto rituals being observed for birth and wedding ceremonies and Buddhist
rituals at death.
Perhaps the most striking feature of Ethiopian religious pluralism has been the extent to which
the different Semitic religions, so often at war with one another in most other countries, have been
practiced in ways that have not been absolutely exclusive. Ethiopian Christianity not only
incorporates a number of ancient Judaic features but also enjoyed many centuries of intercourse with
Hebraized religionists, like the Felashas and the Qemant. The former, it now seems clear, incorporated
 -14-

Christian liturgy and monastic practices in the course of constituting their distinctive tradition
(Shelemay 1986). Indeed, over time there have been numerous conversions in both directions between
Christians and Jews (Pankhurst 1992). Relations with Islam began on a cordial foot, with Mohammed
reportedly telling his followers of the friendliness of the Abyssinian kingdom; despite severe political
hostilities in 16C and more recent times, Muslim traditions have also enjoyed phases of toleration and
mutuality. Symbolic of their close relations is the existence of ceremonies and pilgrimages where
members of all three religions participate, such as the annual pilgrimage to honor Saint Gabriel at
Kulubi.
In addition, Ethiopian national culture continues to draw on pre-Christian local traditions, as in
the sacralization of natural phenomena like mountains and trees, and the association of chiefly power
with the symbolism of lions and honeybees. The constitution of Christian Ethiopian communal
identities in terms of the local tabot has some resemblance to the Japanese association of local
identities with their kami. And there is more than a little resemblance between their respective
customs of carrying about portable shrines: parading with the colorfully-attended tabot on Ethiopian
Orthodox holidays and celebrating the brilliantly-decorated makoshi during matsuri festivals. Indeed, a
number of ceremonies and pilgrimages find practitioners of traditional Oromo religion, Christianity,
and Islam participating jointly or taking turns. Thus, the Faraqasa pilgrimage draws heavily on Islamic
traditions, yet includes elements of Christian and local Oromo symbolism (Pankhurst 1994).

6. Decentralization of control
Beyond the fact of their insularity, Ethiopia and Japan further exhibit geographical similarities in
the character of their terrain. Both countries possess forbiddingly mountainous topographies, often
described as the Alps of Africa and Asia. Their mountains formed borders among numerous localities,
affording them distinctive identities as provinces or feudal domains. The political histories of both
countries have accordingly been stories of continuous oscillation between efforts to centralize and
centrifugal forces that isolated local domains. At the extreme, this issued in periods of feudal
organization where the hold of an imperial center was extremely attenuated. Even at its strongest,
however, the Ethiopian monarchy always characterized itself as negusa negest—King of
Kings—indicating that in principle the rulers of provincial regions had some sort of claim to special
authority. This devolution of authority reproduced itself at successive lower levels. Folk wisdom on
the process found expression in the words of an Amharic proverb, “Ka-Gonder negus/ yagar
ambaras”—”the petty district chief [is obeyed] more that the Gonder King” (Levine 1965, 156).
When Emperor Menilek embarked on far-reaching imperial expansion that more than tripled the size
of the territory under the authority of the Ethiopian state, he was perfectly content to recognize the
jurisdiction of local chiefs and kings so long as they submitted to his overarching authority.
The pattern of decentralizing control figures as one of the most frequently noted themes in
analyses of Japanese society. It was manifest in the unique baku-han system of the Tokugawa political
 -15-

system, whereby authority was wielded by regional administrators, the daimyo, despite a unified
national authority under the shogun. Ruth Benedict (1946) describes this pattern more generally as a
parcelization of obligations into separate spheres of activity. Thomas Rohlen (1989) represents it as a
devolution of political authority, involving delegated trust, to various peripheral domains. Eisenstadt
(1996) represents it in various ways, including flexibility of movement among different social
contexts, extensions of trust, and a striking capacity to incorporate protest and oppositional demands.
For both countries, a disposition to tolerate political decentralization evinces an elective affinity for
the pattern of religious pluralization.
The necessity of decentralization has favored the longevity of a type of social system that has
often been described as feudal in character. Analysts have estimated the duration of feudalism in both
societies at more than a thousand years (Reischauer 1950, Levine 1965). In thinking of Japan, the
definition of feudalism that John Hall formulated with an eye to Japan holds equally well for Ethiopia:
Feudalism is . . . a condition of society in which there is at all levels a fusion of the
civil, military, and judicial elements of government into a single authority. This
fusion of public and private functions being achieved in the person of the locally
powerful military figure, it is also natural that military practices and values become
predominant in the total society (Hall 1970, 77).

7. Warrior ethos
The ascendance of powerful warrior-lords and their retainers made martial values dominant in
both civilizations during the past millennium, and military prowess was long the royal road to prestige
and legitimacy. This was not just a matter of according high prestige to military men; it involved the
diffusion of martial attitudes, virtues, and ambitions throughout the population.
This came about through very different routes. In Ethiopia, it meant the diffusion of combative
dispositions and abilities throughout the population. This feature so impressed the first European
practitioner of Ethiopian Studies, Job Ludolphus, that he described Ethiopians as "a Warlike People and
continually exercis'd in War . . . except in Winter, at what time by reason of the Inundation of the
Rivers, they are forc'd to be quiet" (Ludolphus 1684, 217). It meant that every able-bodied male who
was not a clergyman was assumed ready to engage in battle at a moment's notice—armed, skilled,
supplied, and transported, all through his own devices. It meant that boys were encouraged to be
combative and that as men they were disposed to be fearless in combat.6 It even meant that, for most
of the past millennium, the royal capital took the form of an army camp—"a vast array of tents,
arranged in combat-ready formation with the Emperor's tents in the center, flanked and guarded at the
front and rear by officers of standard ranks with their entourages" (Levine 1968, 7).

6
It was due to their "unreasoning offensive spirit," an Italian officer wrote in 1937, that Ethiopian troops were easy to
defeat by a disciplined modern army (Perham 1948, 167).
 -16-

In Japan, the hegemony of martial values derived not from universal combat-readiness but from
the way in which a military class, the samurai, came to set the tone of the national culture over the
past millennium. This class emerged in the late Heian Period as a group of military specialists
positioned to serve the court nobility. In time they acquired power in their own right by establishing
domination over agricultural land and building their own hierarchical political organizations,
culminating in a semicentral regime, the shogunate, in the late 12C. The samurai political organization
rested on the formation of strong emotional bonds between military masters and vassals upheld by a
strict code of honor (Ikegami 1995). In the Tokugawa Period this code was elaborated into a formal
code of martial ethics known as Bushido (the Way of the Warrior). The code enjoined such virtues as
loyalty, politeness, diligence, frugality, and a constant sense of readiness to die. At this time, the bushi
class became more segregated than ever, since membership in it was hereditary and only those within it
were entitled to bear arms. On the other hand, the ethos of this class became hegemonic in the
society. In contrast to China of the time, the Japanese insisted on retaining a martial spirit as part of
the mark of a gentlemen (Hall 1970, 82). During the Tokugawa period, it has been said, the samurai
ethic came close to being the national ethic, for even the merchant class had become "Bushido-ized"
(Bellah 1957, 98).
One of the marks of the warrior ethos in both cultures was a disposition to value ascetic
hardiness. This is manifest, for example, in the Ethiopian ideal of gwebeznet, a symbol for masculine
aggressiveness and hardiness. This virtue has traditionally been instilled by encouraging boys to return
insult or injury with sticks and stones, rewarding temper tantrums, and associating proper masculinity
with the ability to walk barefoot, go long without food, or eat hot peppers (Levine 1966). In
consequence, Ethiopian soldiers have been noted for great endurance—they climb mountains with ease,
march rapidly for distances under heavy pack with light rations, and sleep on a rock. In Japan, similar
virtues were the pride of the samurai class, who prided themselves on undergoing great hardships
without complaint—for example by undergoing a week of arduous training outside each year in the dead
of winter (kangeiko).
Another mark of the warrior ethos has been a pronounced concern about honor and a sensitivity
to insult that numerous observers have found in the psychological profile of both peoples. This
sensitivity probably also reflects the tension between the idealization of outsiders and self-idealization
noted above.
One can also associate the prominent place of martial values in both cultures with certain
aesthetic dispositions. There may be an elective affinity between the lifestyle of the warrior and an
interest in expressive genres that are terse in form and wryly fatalistic in content. Beyond that, both
cultures involve a mixture of emotional inhibition, strict control, and a reliance on ambiguous modes of
expression that would appear to conjoin a martial ethos with what may be describe as a pervasive
pattern of hierarchical particularism.
 -17-

8. Hierarchical particularism
A number of the features noted above and many others reflect a complex of value orientations
that Robert Bellah (1957) began to analyze under the rubric of "particularistic performance" values.
Particularism refer to a primary emphasis in social relations on evaluative criteria grounded on
personal relations rather than universalistic standards. Kin relations comprise the locus classicus of
particularism. In Japan, the family is overshadowed by larger groupings, especially the han or fiefdom,
but han as well as other institutions outside the family are permeated by kinship symbolism. The same
can be said of extrafamilial institutions in Ethiopia. Performance values stress the achievement of
goals rather than the possession of certain qualities. In Japan, Bellah argues, there appears to be no
quality or status which, once possessed, is self-validating; rather, persons in all spheres are judged by the
contribution they make to achieving the goals of the system in question. The same holds for
traditional Ethiopia, where peasants were judged by their abilities in farming, litigation, and following
local customs, and rulers were judged by their martial prowess and ability as governors.
I wish to extend this analysis by adding, to the pattern variables of particularism-universalism and
quality-performance, a pattern variable which I employed in analyzing the traditional Abyssinian social
system: hierarchalism-egalitarianism (Levine 1974). This variable concerns the extent to which a
society values differences in status and relationships that involve ruling over others. Here both
Ethiopia and Japan stand at the end of the continuum where all social relations are cast into superior-
inferior levels, and vocabulary and gestures that register different levels of deference are highly
differentiated and prominent. Although both societies honor universalism, qualities, and egalitarianism
to a limited extent in certain contexts, it is clear that they place overwhelming emphasis on
particularism, performance, and hierarchalism. This is to say that the archetypal social form in both
societies is the patron-client relation, in which patrons are owed total allegiance and deference, while
clients are supported so long as they performs in ways that enhance the patron's well-being. This
pattern is not the only one that can be combined with an emphasis on martial values, but it is
constitutive for martial societies that are organized as feudal systems. Allegiance to the emperor
becomes a template for all other relations, but one's highest level of allegiance is due to one's local lord.
The pattern of hierarchical particularism links a number of the civilizational features already
identified—in particular, features of parochialization, religious pluralism, and political decentralization,
ambiguity in expressive culture, as well as systems of cultural features not yet mentioned. The primacy
of particularism sets an automatic limit on the extent to which beliefs and actions can be subordinated
to universalistic doctrines and standards. It provides the spiritual energy behind processes of de-
Axialization that Eisenstadt has analyzed so incisively. It limits the level of universalistic regulation of
moral and philosophical doctrines, thereby facilitating the kind of accommodation of differing religious
traditions so conspicuous in both countries. The combination of particularism with performance and
hierarchical values supports the devolution of authority onto local authorities, such that generalized
 -18-

criteria of service to their society at large, as evolved in China or Western Europe, can never replace
patron-client connections. They translate the notion of truth into the personalistic notion of being
true to one's liege, such that the deference owed to superiors in both cultures makes it important t o
suppress negative feelings and to present a deceptive, congenial response on the surface.
Indeed, both countries evince an aesthetic based on suppression of affect, rigid control, and
cultivation of ambiguity. This pattern appears in Abyssinian art and architecture, which reveal highly
controlled repetition of geometric motifs. It is also evident in the trope of semm'nna warq, wax and
gold, which has been favored as a way to represent the contrast between a concrete public image and a
concealed private meaning. “Wax and gold” symbolizes the configuration behind the Abyssinian’s
predilection both for ambiguous verse couplets and for indirection in interpersonal communications
(Levine 1965). All genres of Japanese art evince a tightly controlled mastery of form. In Japan the
notions of tatemae and honne (public and private), and its older parallel dichotomy, omote and ura
(front and back), signify important distinctions between what one reveals to others and what one keeps
to oneself, a mode so constitutive of normal intercourse that outsiders tend to experience it as
exasperating deception (Doi 1986). In poetry the use of a concrete image to evoke deep meanings and
unspoken feelings is fundamental to the samurai aesthetic, and was articulated in the aesthetic principle
of yugen, the mystery behind appearances.
The pattern of hierarchical particularism, finally, generates a mode of cultural transmission in
which devotion to a particular teacher becomes a paramount consideration. This appeared in Abyssinia
in the special attachments to the masters of diverse schools of liturgical song and religious poetry and,
to a greater extent in Japan, in fealty to senseis who impart distinctive ways of fighting, meditating,
serving tea, or arranging flowers.

9. Weak public domain

One of the most illuminating dimensions of Eisenstadt's analysis of Japanese civilization
concerns his treatment of features of the political system that have been continually reproduced over
the centuries, albeit in changing concrete forms. Persisting into the contemporary era, these include
traits that disposed a constitutional-democratic system to function in a highly restrictive and repressive
manner, including bureaucratic censorship; a weak system of judicial review; weak protection of human
rights; and behind these, a set of decision-making processes that are diffuse and secretive, rendering it
difficult to pinpoint a locus of responsibility for decisions-developments that have led some to describe
the modern political system of Japan as a "pseudo-democracy" (Eisenstadt 1996, 75; Herzog, 1993).
Throughout the Meiji regime, which mediated the transition to a modern political order, public
space and discourse continued to be monopolized by the government and the bureaucracy as
representatives of the national community, the kokutai, legitimized by the emperor. This meant that
the state was conflated with civil society, which prevented the formation of a public arena that could
be autonomous from the state yet enjoy access to it.
 -19-

Although Ethiopia did not develop a widely-shared conception of a national community

comparable to that of the kokutai, as I mention below, Eisenstadt's account of Japanese political
customs could have just as well have been written about Ethiopia. In both systems, during the crucial
modernizing decades under Meiji and Haile Selassie, a continual tendency to conflate the public domain
with that of the state disabled any tendencies toward open, principled political discourse. It was due to
this conflation of state and civil society with the national community, Eisenstadt and others have
argued, that produced so weak a civil society and led to what has been described as a pseudo-democracy.
Although Ethiopia did not achieve a constitutional democracy under Haile Selassie, it did secure a
revised constitution in 1955 that provided for a system of parliamentary elections. Even so, under
Haile Selassie it proved nearly impossible for participants in a civil society to form professional
associations, let alone political parties. It was this difficulty, arguably, that created the vacuum into
which the Derg marched during the declining months of the late emperor's regime. Under the Derg, of
course, this pattern of central control of all manner of associations was enormously amplified. The
pattern persists, albeit in less brazen and conspicuous form, under the current regime, whose leaders
publicly advocate a strong opposition-but only after they have armed themselves handsomely,
disarmed the opposition, and used their superior might to harass and discredit potential opponents. It
is not surprising that one hears references to Ethiopia's current system as a pseudo-democracy (wushet-
democracie) even more frequently than in Japan. What is rarely appreciated is how deeply the system
that leads to this repressiveness has been rooted in civilizational conditions which, like those in Japan,
have a long prehistory-and which, as with Japan, figured in earlier successes in which both countries
withstood European imperialisms.

C. Historic differences between the two civilizations

Faced with the profound and extensive similarities between Ethiopia and Japan outlined above,
one naturally wonders how they could have negotiated the challenges of modernization so very
differently. Yet precisely their extensive base of historic similarities throws into relief the factors that
caused Japan to modernize so swiftly and Ethiopia so haltingly. An efficient way to identify those
factors might be to ask: what accounts for the fact that in Japan, unlike Ethiopia, an extensive
commercial class and a disciplined work force were securely in place when the two countries faced a
need to modernize in the course of the 19th century? I shall mention nine such factors.

1. Geographic conditions favorable to trade

Although both countries were mountainous, Ethiopia’s mountains were more severe. Japanese
travelers could take advantage of the vast plains of Honshu, on which good roads were built during the
Heian period. By the 17C a system of five major highways, the Gokaido, radiated out from Edo t o
connect with the highways of central and western Japan established earlier, thereby creating a national
system of good roads. Ethiopia’s trails could not even accommodate wheels, and travel by foot or
 -20-

mule was impeded for months during the annual rainy season. Not until the Italian Occupation of the
1930s did Ethiopia secure a minimal system of national highways.
With respect to transportation abroad, Ethiopia’s single sea coast made it vulnerable. The 7C
Arab expansion closed off the Red Sea littoral and drove a wedge between Ethiopia and Mediterranean
Europe that had been essential for Aksumite trade. Although moving its center toward the interior
meant a radical diminution of foreign trade for Ethiopia, in Japan moving away from the Korea Strait
simply meant moving toward other ports (Hakata, Mura, Sakai, Kamakura). Both of these geographic
advantages, which brought with them transportation systems for the roads and waterways and skilled
merchant seamen, enabled a continuous development of domestic and foreign trade in Japan.

2. Continuous use of monetary currency

Monetary currency was widely used in both countries during the classical period. Some five
hundred different mintings in gold, silver, and bronze were made in Ethiopia between 3C and 10C.7 For
reasons that have never been fully explained—but surely including the cutting off of Red Sea trade due
to Islamic expansion, and protracted internal warfare—the use of monetized coins came to an end with
the fall of Aksum and the move to the interior. Early in the 19C Maria Theresa Thalers came into
use, but Ethiopians continued to resist the use of coinage until well into the 20C. Not until the 1920s
did the peasantry and traditional elites come to accept coins at their face value. For nearly a
millennium up to the eve of Ethiopia’s drive to modernize, then, trade beyond barter relied largely on
imperfect media like salt bars, cloth, iron bars, and, later, rifle cartridges—a condition that posed an
enormous impediment to the development of capitalist enterprise there (Schaefer 1990).
Japanese trade, however, had the advantage of monetized currency throughout its history. By
the Tokugawa period monetary currency was used on a national scale. Although the Japanese
government was not yet minting coins again in 17C, imported Chinese currency was widely circulated,
and unminted gold and silver were used by weight. Cash currency facilitated the expansion of
moneylending, credit arrangements, and the one-price system, all of which were highly developed in
the Edo period. It promoted the extension of trust throughout the country, a condition that is
essential for the capital-intensive development Japan enjoyed and that was so muted in Ethiopia.

3. Urbanization
Except for the Gonderine period, Ethiopia’s emperors ruled from mobile capitals for most of her
history after the fall of Aksum. Except for Islamic Harar, no cities emerged to serve religious or
commercial needs. Trading went on at local markets that were usually held on a weekly basis, although
some larger markets were held on a daily basis. Japanese rulers, however, generally resided in urban
centers. From an early period, political capitals like Nara, Kyoto, and Kamakura as well as port towns
like Hamata and Osaka provided opportunities for lively commercial activity. On the eve of the
 -21-

Tokugawa Shogunate there occurred an enormous boost in urban development. The three decades after
1580, when the largest daimyos settled down to consolidate their resources and regimes, has been
described as a period of urban construction without parallel in world history (Hall 1970, 157). By
1800, there existed a great department store in Edo (modern Tokyo) which employed over a thousand
persons, and cities provided an ample supply of formally free labor available for employment in
enterprises of many kinds.

4. Ethnic homogeneity
A prime factor affecting the birth of a secure national market in the two countries was the level
of ethnic heterogeneity. Although Japan had to contend with provincial parochialisms that impeded
trade at times, she had only one sizeable ethnic minority, the Ainu. Consequently, Japan never
experienced destructive warfare among groups organized on ethnic and religious lines, and was able t o
orient nearly the entire population to the symbolism of a Japanese nation with relatively little
difficulty. By contrast, Ethiopia’s more severe mountainous terrain favored the separation of
habitational enclaves that promoted processes of ethnic and linguistic differentiation. Consequently,
the Greater Ethiopia culture area included dozens of diverse ethnic groups, most of whose members
probably possessed little or no attachment to the symbolism of the Ethiopian polity. Although trading
patterns among them were often of very long standing, the formation of a national market was
impeded by traditions of mutual distrust, not to mention the periodic warfare that was so destructive of
economic resources.

5. Centuries of domestic peace

Building on the favorable infrastructure of roads, merchant marine, currency, cities, and a
nationwide ethnolinguistic community, economic development in Japan expanded enormously during
the Ashikaga Period, thanks to a close, mutually supportive association between feudal lords and the
merchant class. The destructive domestic warfare that occurred during the century of “Warring States”
known as Sengoku (1467-1568) came to an end through the actions of the three great reunifiers: Oda
Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu. The Tokugawa Shogunate, or Edo period
(1600-1868) provided more than two centuries of Tahei, the “great peace,” giving Japan an
extraordinary opportunity to develop its economic resources.
Ethiopia had a nearly identical set of geopolitical developments—a period of the princes (the
Zemene Mesafint, 1755-1855), followed by three great reunifiers: Tewodros II, Yohannes IV, and
Menilek II. In Ethiopia, however, these developments took place three centuries later, and were not
finished when Ethiopia faced the challenge of economic modernization. The centuries Japan could use
to reach a point of takeoff for full-speed economic growth were spent on protracted internal conflicts
in Ethiopia.

7
Indeed, coins minted at Aksum were found as far afield as Egypt, Persia, and India (Schaefer 1990, 24).
 -22-

6. Differentiation of political structures

Japan enjoyed two further structural advantages that favored the stabilization of a national
market. One was the separation of the figure of the emperor from the role of the supreme political
ruler, a development that was anticipated not long after the Heian period and fully consolidated during
the Tokugawa Shogunate. The symbolism of the sacred throne provided some unifying cement in the
country even when political differences and competing military ambitions were in play. In Ethiopia,
except for the relatively short period of the Zemene Mesafint, emperors were also supreme political
rulers, such that disaffection with their policies always posed a threat to the unity of the state.
Japan’s other structural advantage was the development of a somewhat rationalized bureaucratic
administration during the Shogunate. The Tokugawa peace turned the caste of military lords into a
stratum of civil administrators. The level of centralization achieved by the Shogunate favored the
promulgation of numerous legal regulations for them to administer. Ethiopia had to wait until the
reign of Haile Selassie for a national bureaucratic administration to emerge.

7. Legitimation of trade and a commercial class

The emphasis on virtues such as courage, self-discipline, and loyalty under feudal regimes
typically entails the depreciation of commercial activity for being animated by selfishness, greed, and
laxity. This was true in both countries during the medieval period. In Ethiopia, trade was left largely
to outsiders such as Arabs and Armenians or to members of lower-status ethnic groups. In Japan,
however, development of an indigenous merchant class, the chonin, was favored by the lack of ethnic
differentiation and by the emergence of ideas and attitudes that valorized commerce. Thus, the
popular Buddhist sect Jodo Shinshu developed a number of formulations that made the work of
merchants righteous by defining their business as “Bodhisattva deeds,” and the widely influential
teachings of Ishida Baigan decried those who spread hateful sayings about merchants and insisted that
the work of merchants was comparable to that of the samurai (Bellah 1957, 120, 158).

8. Valorization of craft ethic

Substantial economic modernization, we have known since Max Weber, has involved some sort
of cultural support for disciplined manual labor. This entails clothing mundane work with ethical
significance such that it can be viewed as an admirable calling. Absent that, manual work will be viewed
as drudgery if not demeaning. In traditional Ethiopia, the notion of calling was attached to four roles
only: rulers, warriors, clergy, and peasants. If the activity of merchants was morally disfavored, that of
artisans was often despised. It was relegated to pariah groups that were treated as outcastes. The work
of tanners, potters, smiths, and weavers—however essential their products—was typically looked down
on and frequently despised; this was especially often the case for leather workers (Levine 1974).
Although the Japanese too have denigrated certain kinds of labor, most notably in tenacious
attitudes toward the outcast burakumin who work as butchers and tanners, they nevertheless underwent
 -23-

a major change over the past several centuries whereby the work of artisans came to be endowed with
the same religious valorization as has the labor of those who followed the Protestant ethic in Western
Europe. Bellah (1957) describes a number of religious movements that sanctified hard work, frugality,
and mundane production—ethical values that may have been directly initially to peasants but that
accompanied them as they streamed into the cities to become artisans throughout the Tokugawa
centuries. In a widely recognized formulation of Ishida Baigan, not just the samurai are retainers, but
the farmers are “retainers” of the countryside while artisans and merchants are “retainers “ of the city
streets. Besides Shingaku, the popular ethical movement that Baigan founded, other traditions drawing
on Buddhist and Confucian ideas, such as Jodo Shinshu and Hotoku, stressed diligence in production and
economy in expenditure. Instead of opposing the status honor of war lords to morally suspect
activities of merchants and artisans, they drew on the palette of samurai values to depict mundane
daily labor in a radiant light.

9. Collectivism versus individualism

Bellah likened Japanese religious ideas that turned mundane labor into a sacred obligation to the
Protestant idea of this-worldly calling depicted by Weber. In addition, however, he emphasized a
different kind of value, one that was not prominent in the Protestant tradition. This is the value of
selfless devotion to the collectivity and its goals. Bellah finds this value embodied in the Japanese
disposition to promote loyalty to various corporate groups: to the family, to the fiefdom, and to the
nation. The transference of the imagery and sentiments of family loyalty to the nation informed the
notion of kokutai, “national body,” a concept of the state in which religious, political, and familistic
ideas were indissolubly merged (Bellah 1957, 98-106).
In Greater Ethiopia I designated this value orientation as “collectivism,” in pointed contrast with
the pattern found in Abyssinian, or Amhara-Tigrean, society, which I glossed as “individualism.”8 If
traditional Abyssinia and Japan share the values of particularism, performance, and hierarchicalism,
they diverge markedly on this pattern variable. Attitudes toward litigation and toward outlaws illustrate
that difference conspicuously. Ethiopians tend to maximize the opportunity for self-assertion through
litigious disputes; the Japanese go out of their way to avoid confrontation and open conflict.
Ethiopians admired the shifta, the lone individual who rebels from his lord and takes to the bush; such a
career might lead ultimately to the throne, as it did for Tewodros II. By contrast the ronin, unattached
samurai who wandered about without a political home, were scarcely culture heroes in Japan. Under
Tokugawa law, the smallest unit of society was the family (ie)—the individual as such did not
exist—and it was matter of honor to keep one’s family name unblemished. In Abyssinia, there were no
family names. Rules of ambilineal descent gave individuals rights through both parental lines, man and
women alike were expected to promote their own interests, prudently but aggressively.
 -24-

The Meiji Restoration, and the miracle of Japan’s economic modernization more generally, owed
much to the confluence of a solidaristic ethic, one that enjoins selfless work on behalf of collectivities,
with an ethic of disciplined labor in this world, and to government actions that fostered economic
growth by moral exhortation as well as through technical information and entrepreneurial incentives.
Economic modernization in Japan, Bellah persuasively argues, stemmed not so much from the
industrious strivings of individual entrepreneurs as from the corporate strivings of families, companies,
and patriots. In Western Europe and the United States, an ambitious individualism could drive the
engine of economic development because it was so thoroughly harnessed to an ethic of universalistic
achievement criteria. In Ethiopia, however, hierarchical individualism was tied to particularistic values
and to a martial ethic that extolled hardiness and courage more than self-discipline and frugality.
Ethiopian religionists and moralists never made the leap from their notion of the Warrior’s Way to an
ethic that praised diligence in all forms of homely everyday labor. Abyssinian individualism was tied t o
strivings to please a superior patron, and the highest worldly honors accrued to those who literally
fought their way to the top.
Even today, the modal Ethiopian disposition is probably to promote oneself politically by
finding a suitable patron, in a way that looks down on activities like commerce and craft or industrial
labor, and with little sense of corporate loyalty of any sort. The current Prime Minister has, like a
number of his predecessors, literally shot his way into power, and has publicly boasted of the
significance of his guerrilla days in the bush as the schooling of choice for his political career and
vocation9 . At the same time that well-to-do Japanese citizens appear to be chafing under the
conformist pressures of a national culture that subordinates individual expression to the demands of
hierarchy, performance, and group solidarity, Ethiopians are experiencing frustration over their
inability to subordinate individualistic ambitions to the welfare of larger communities, and by a slow
pace of economic growth that seems due to a paucity of motivation for rigorous entrepreneurial
commitment and regular industrial work. How hauntingly similar, those two civilizations, and
yet—how striking the contrast between those two different worlds.

8
I contrasted this pattern with that of the other most extensive population in historic Ethiopia, the Oromo, who tend
to exhibit a pattern of egalitarian collectivism.
9
In an interview in a Tigrinya-language Eritrean quarterly, the Prime Minister expressed his conviction that “To me
quality of life means to be part of an armed struggle . . . I don’t think that there is a better life than the life of a
combatant. If I were not a combatant I don’t think I would have been a happy person.” (Hwyet 11, May 1997)
 -25-

REFERENCES
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Houghton Mifflin.
Cerulli, Enrico. 1956. Storia della letteratura etiopica. Milan.
Doi, Takeo. 1986. The Anatomy of Self, trans. Mark A. Harbison. Tokyo: Kodansha International.
Eisenstadt, S.N. 1996. Japanese Civilization: A Comparative View. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Endo, Shusaku. 1969. Silence, trans. William Johnston. New York: Taplinger.
Ikegami, Eiko. 1995. The Taming of the Samurai. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Hall, John W. 1970. Japan From Prehistory to Modern Times. New York: Dell.
Herzog, Peter J. 1993. Japan's Pseudo-Democracy. New York: New York University Press.
Levine, Donald N. 1965. Wax and Gold: Tradition and Innovation in Ethiopian Culture. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
_______. 1966. “The Concept of Masculinity in Ethiopian Culture,” The International Journal of
Social Psychiatry XII, 1, 17-23
_______. 1968. “The Military in Ethiopian Politics: Capabilities and Constraints,” in Henry Bienen,
ed., The Military Intervenes: Case Studies in Political Development: 5-34. New York: Russell Sage.
_______. 1974. Greater Ethiopia: The Evolution of a Multiethnic Society. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Ludolphus, Job. 1684. A New History of Ethiopia, trans. J.P. Gent, 2nd ed. London.
Munro-Hay, Stuart. 1991. Aksum: An African Civilization of Late Antiquity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.
Pankhurst, Alula. 1994. “Reflections on Pilgrimages in Ethiopia.” in Harold Marcus, ed., Papers of the
12th International Conference of Ethiopian Studies II, 933-953 Lawrenceville: The Red Sea Press.
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25.
Perham, Margery. 1948. The Government of Ethiopia. New York: Oxford University Press.
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Tsunoda, Ryusaku, et al. 1958. Sources of Japanese Tradition (2 vols.) New York: Columbia University
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Addis Ababa: Addis Ababa University Press.
 ETHIOPIA AND JAPAN IN COMPARATIVE CIVILIZATIONAL PERSPECTIVE
Donald N. Levine
University of Chicago

Abstract

Although Ethiopia and Japan appear disparate, depth-historical analysis reveals striking
similarities across four epochs. An epoch of genesis and classical synthesis, ca 600 BCE to mid-7C CE,
displays migrations across narrow waterways, prehistoric centers, burial megaliths, worship of
nature/heavenly bodies, leading to strong kingdoms (4C CE), conversions to world religions, episodes of
return colonization, then (6-7C) spread of those religions and related architecture. Epoch II, mid-7C
through 15C, opens with civil warfare, abandonment of classic capitals; by 12C, new centers arise
inland (Zagwe, Kamakura), leading to geopolitical expansion, burgeoning national sentiment, and (in
14-15C) efflorescence of religious/aesthetic culture.
Epoch III displays external warfare, then Portuguese Jesuits in mid-16C. Expulsion of Catholics
(early 17C) precipitates isolation for two centuries—time for political realignments, magnificent castle
towns, new decentralizations. Finally, 19C European incursions disrupt isolation and force
modernization. Pressures from Egypt, Sudan, Europe incite nation-building in Ethiopia; Anglo-
American ships unleash modernization in Japan. Ancient myths of sacred emperors revive to advance
modern nation-building, including victories against Italy and Russia ca 1900. Constitutions of 1889
(Meiji) and 1931 (Haile Selassie) pronounce emperor “sacred and inviolable.”
Comparable formal features of the two civilizations include (1)receptive insularity, (2)idealized
alien culture, (3)sacralizing homeland, (4)cultural parochialization, (5)religious pluralism; (6)political
decentralization, (7)warrior ethos, and (8)value patterns of hierarchical particularism.
Differences highlighted against this ground of commonalities may explain the two countries’
radically divergent modernizing experiences. Salient factors include (1)geographic conditions favoring
trade, (2)use of monetary currency, (3)urbanization, (4)ethnic homogeneity, (5)centuries of domestic
peace, (6)differentiation of political structures, (7)legitimation of trade and a commercial class,
(8)valorization of craft ethic, and (9)collectivism/individualism pattern variable.
 ETHIO PIA AN D JAPAN IN
C O MPARATIVE C IVILIZATIO N AL PERS PEC TIVE

Donald N. Levine

Department of Sociology
The University of Chicago
1126 East 59th Street
Chicago, Illinois 60637
USA
Telephone: 1-(773)-702-7917
Fax: 1-(773)-702-4849
Electronic Mail: [email protected]
 Major Strategies of Comparative Analysis

A. Induction of Types (parts 1 and 2)

B. Empirical generalization (part 3)

C. Method of Difference: where a cause is specified by identifying the one respect in which
a case where y occurs differs from an otherwise exactly similar case where y does not
occur (part 4; Weber on religion and Capitalism)

D. Method of Agreement: pick out as cause the one common feature in a number of
otherwise different cases where the y occurs

E. Theme and Variations (Benedict on patterns of culture; Weber on forms and directions of
rationalization/routes to salvation)

F. Baseline and variations (Benedict on China, Japan re monarchy)