NEUOFFENBARUNG[MEr.01_009,001] Now that we have travelled through the south of the Earth and you have seen its conditions, inwardly, mind you, more than outwardly, let us return to the northern hemisphere and, as already mentioned, pay a short visit to the island state of Japan.
[MEr.01_009,002] As you already know, we shall need no years or months to get there. Look at the familiar screen. The whole heathen island state is already spread before your eyes.
[MEr.01_009,003] Look at the coasts. See how grimly they stare down from their high cliff tops onto the storm-tossed sea. Look all round and you will find few points level with the sea's surface.
[MEr.01_009,004] Here in the south is a single point suitable for landing, towards which a few foreign nations are allowed to steer their ships under the country's constitution.
[MEr.01_009,005] The few other places where the inhabitants can land are less accessible or often wholly inaccessible. Moreover, the so-called strictest and most just government there does not allow foreigners to land anywhere except the appointed landing place, for the following reasons.
[MEr.01_009,006] The first is to prevent these places from being profaned by depraved people. The second is that strangers, unaware of the great dangers of these other small landing places, would inevitably suffer harm and perish.
[MEr.01_009,007] The third reason is that the ruler imagines himself in sole possession of all arts, trades and secrets. He is constantly and avariciously afraid that if foreigners came to know them, his prosperity would be at an end. He has therefore appointed just one landing place, where these products, extraordinary in his opinion, are traded out of a special and just compassion.
[MEr.01_009,008] For he and his whole nation firmly believe that he alone is at the centre of the world and that foreigners from everywhere must come to him to buy the extraordinary produce of his land. By acquiring it they can form some idea of the perfection reached by the world's central principality. Indeed, he believes that people elsewhere on Earth cannot even guess how a simple little rush basket is made.
[MEr.01_009,009] If word reaches him that foreign ships are built with extraordinary skill, those who bring the news are always beaten, for such a report is held to be an open insult to majesty. He may then send one or two commissioners to find out in secret whether the report is really true.
[MEr.01_009,010] If they return and confirm it, their confirmation is regarded as outright treason. For this monarch says, ‘If one of my subjects had not betrayed it to the strangers, how could these stupid foreigners have acquired the secret knowledge to build themselves wooden houses that can carry them over the waves of the sea? Only we, the chosen people at the centre of the Earth, understand such things.’
[MEr.01_009,011] Investigating commissioners are at once sent from the capital and seat of government to all three lands, to question the coastal peoples with the utmost severity and discover where the betrayal came from.
[MEr.01_009,012] If the commissioners find nothing, they too receive a thorough beating on their return and are dismissed from their posts for three years. In that time they must study furiously under the most rigorous professors in the world.
[MEr.01_009,013] Their studies are followed by an extraordinarily strict examination. Those who pass are reinstated. Those who fail are beaten again and must start their studies from the beginning.
[MEr.01_009,014] While such commissioners are undergoing these penal studies, substitutes are at once appointed most graciously.
[MEr.01_009,015] The appointments are made as follows. Nine so-called candidates are summoned by His Most Just and Strictest Majesty and examined orally by him.
[MEr.01_009,016] First they must list all the manufactures of the land and say how they are made. Then they must name and enumerate to the letter all the mountains, rivers, valleys and plains, all the animals, tame or wild, and all the trees, plants and herbs. They must also give the exact names of all the subjects, where each is and what each owns.
[MEr.01_009,017] Finally they must recite the emperor's entire name, the hardest task of all for the candidates. It is so long that in a medium-sized hand you would scarcely fit it on one line on a strip of paper a mile long. It contains everything: the supposedly endless line of descent, all the things and trades of the land and the names of all his subjects.
[MEr.01_009,018] When you consider that, you will see what a strain on the memory it takes to learn this name by heart, as you say. You will ask why a name needs to be so long.
[MEr.01_009,019] That is very easily explained. The monarch has recorded in it all his glory, his history and his possessions.
[MEr.01_009,020] Other people in the land also have very long names, but on pain of death none may be longer than the monarch's.
[MEr.01_009,021] Much study is therefore devoted to the monarch's name so that people can compare their own names with his for length.
[MEr.01_009,022] If someone whose descent is likewise very ancient finds that his name is even longer than the monarch's, he takes the register of his name before the monarch, wailing and with his garment torn, and begs for punishment and the utter destruction of his name.
[MEr.01_009,023] If the monarch measures it with dividers and finds it truly two fathoms longer, six fathoms of the name are cut off and burnt. The petitioner is then most graciously given the proper number of blows, and only afterwards is the shortened name handed back to him.
[MEr.01_009,024] Now let us return to our candidates. If three or four have passed the examination, they are at once handed what you call their decree of appointment. With it comes the immediate duty of going to the spot as commissioners to uncover the treason mentioned earlier.
[MEr.01_009,025] These men are generally a shade cleverer than the former ones. They usually spend one, two or three years on the investigation and think up a clever trick to outwit their monarch. When they return, they commonly bring several bribed witnesses. These testify that after this dreadful event lightning struck the spot three more times and that everyone present then praised the great god in the Sun for working so great a sign to glorify the great prince before his people.
[MEr.01_009,026] Now you may ask why the first three were less cunning than their successors.
[MEr.01_009,027] You will be surprised when I tell you that the first three were even more cunning. They are now at once released from their studies and acknowledged by the monarch's own mouth as perfectly upright, strict and well-versed statesmen. In this way they attain the highest rank, are even permitted to touch the monarch's robe four times a year and are spared all further beatings. It does not matter that they failed to establish the facts as their successors did. Here great loyalty alone decides the matter.
[MEr.01_009,028] The successors, now duly appointed officers of state, rise to the rank of their predecessors. You must not think this a trifling thing in that country.
[MEr.01_009,029] An officer who may touch the monarch's robe four times a year is so extraordinary that when he walks along the road or is carried in a sedan chair everyone must fall on their face before him on pain of death. A word spoken by him to anyone is so extraordinary that the person often does not leave the spot for three days after receiving such favour.
[MEr.01_009,030] If the word was unfavourable, if the officer addressed a rebuke or some other unpleasantness to the person, called them by the name of an animal or said something else dishonourable, the person immediately begins to howl and lament and begs the high official most graciously to grant them a punishment. This is granted without much ado.
[MEr.01_009,031] The petitioner at once begs the high statesman not to make the punishment too mild, but to have him beaten to his satisfaction according to the officer's strictness, justice and pleasure.
[MEr.01_009,032] When the officer has heard this plea with his most graciously inclined ear, he orders his plentiful servants to take hold of the petitioner by his hands and feet and lift him from the ground. When he hangs in the air between eight servants, the man charged with beating comes with a bamboo scourge and beats him until the high statesman signals that with that stroke his favour is at an end.
[MEr.01_009,033] The petitioner, beaten half to death, is laid on the ground again. His neighbours come up and praise to him the officer's great wisdom, justice and strictness.
[MEr.01_009,034] You might wish to see the people offer praise to the monarch for this too. But that is not possible in this country. The monarch stands too high to be praised by the common people.
[MEr.01_009,035] This and a few things of the same kind are really the best part of this constitution. Now that we know it, it is fitting to shed a little light on the bad part.
[MEr.01_009,036] In this respect things truly go as nowhere else in the world. First, no one in this land owns property. Everything belongs exclusively to the monarch.
[MEr.01_009,037] Each person, or rather each class, is told exactly what work they must do and how much of it.
[MEr.01_009,038] Their food and clothing are prescribed, as are their dwelling and district, which they may never leave except by special order of the state.
[MEr.01_009,039] It is further prescribed how many wives a man may have and how many children he may father with them.
[MEr.01_009,040] It is prescribed, down to the last drop of the law, how much of what he produces he must hand over.
[MEr.01_009,041] The coast dwellers are strictly forbidden to give anything to foreigners outside the appointed trading place. Under no circumstances are they ever to allow a foreigner to set foot on Japanese soil beyond that place.
[MEr.01_009,042] The goods that may be sold to foreigners and what foreigners may offer for them are prescribed exactly. It is further strictly laid down that no more than one foreigner may remain in the place as interpreter, and from the moment he is accepted as such he must never leave the coast.
[MEr.01_009,043] On top of this he must teach his language to three Japanese commissioners. For all that, he may never go even an hour's walk into the interior.
[MEr.01_009,044] See, that is roughly an outline of the Japanese constitution. I say roughly because the land has no fixed law of state as such. Its living law is the reigning prince and his chief officers, and they are almost entirely at liberty to make a new law on the spot for each case that arises.
[MEr.01_009,045] You truly cannot imagine how small a circumstance makes the law impose an altogether different penalty for an offence there. I shall give you one small example. A person is assigned a measured district beyond which he must not go.
[MEr.01_009,046] Someone has not remembered the boundary exactly and steps just half a foot over the line. If a neighbour notices, he reports it to the next neighbour, and that one to the next, until the report reaches the dwelling of the district watchman.
[MEr.01_009,047] The watchman goes straight to the spot with a pair of dividers and measures the trespass precisely. If it is a little over half a foot, a hundred blows must at once be given as punishment.
[MEr.01_009,048] If the watchman finds that at least three quarters of a foot has been put over the line, this circumstance nearly doubles the punishment.
[MEr.01_009,049] If someone puts a whole foot over the boundary, he first receives a number of blows beyond counting and is then tied to a stake for three days to accustom him to the narrowest of boundaries.
[MEr.01_009,050] If this happens seven times, his foot is at once cut off as far as he put it beyond the boundary.
[MEr.01_009,051] Whoever ventures even a few steps beyond his district without judicial permission is either hanged by way of mercy or beaten to death. If mercy is denied, he is bound naked to a cross and left there until he dies. Even on the cross, however, by pleading desperately he may obtain the mercy of being killed by a thrust of a lance.
[MEr.01_009,052] From this small example you can already form some idea of what things are like in this country. The arrangements are such that no one except the high officers of state already mentioned is exempt from the death penalty.
[MEr.01_009,053] And so one wedge drives another here, as it were. You will never see a lower officer held to account or punished for cruelty, but you will see it if he is proved to have been negligent in even the slightest degree.
[MEr.01_009,054] Hence the dividers and the scales are the chief part of the constitution there, for everything is measured and weighed.
[MEr.01_009,055] Consider that in all these general rules, as I have roughly set them out, the death penalty in all sorts of torturous forms plays the chief part. It will not be difficult to imagine fairly well what happens in a country where despotism has reached the highest peak of tyranny.
[MEr.01_009,056] Truly, there can scarcely be a second country on the face of the Earth like it in its arbitrary and cruel ways.
[MEr.01_009,057] I have now told you enough of the bad part of this land. But there is something worse still. You will wonder whether anything worse is possible in a country than what we have already heard. I tell you nothing for the moment and ask you only to look at My screen.
[MEr.01_009,058] See, this building is a temple! To this temple too I say, ‘Ephphatha!’ Now look inside. In a round cell off to one side, several girls and young men are being fed so that they may grow handsome and quite fat. The men sitting among them in yellow and blue clothes are the sacrificial priests.
[MEr.01_009,059] When a bad year comes upon this land, it is at once preached that God is angry with it. To appease Him an offering must therefore be made.
[MEr.01_009,060] At the high priest's command, six males and six females from this cell are immediately washed and dressed very prettily in their fashion. A priest then mounts what is called a seat of wisdom and declares in angry words, as though the wrathful deity spoke through him, how the sacrifice is to be offered.
[MEr.01_009,061] If the girls have grown very beautiful and voluptuous from this feeding, the deity disdains their sacrifice and gives them back to his priests as their property for life.
[MEr.01_009,062] With the young men, unless one is of quite exceptional beauty, the wrathful deity proceeds less gently. They are generally marked for sacrifice, which consists either in being burnt alive, beheaded and then burnt, or taken to a rock projecting into the sea and thrown into it.
[MEr.01_009,063] Such human sacrifice happens rarely, to be sure. But if it happens at all, that alone shows the country is in the deepest darkness and has the most shameful and wretched ideas of a true God.
[MEr.01_009,064] Among the worst things is the killing of children above the permitted number. The man who has fathered more than that number is mutilated in his genitals.
[MEr.01_009,065] Another of the worst things is the unheard-of cruelty with which the country proceeds against the entry of Christianity.
[MEr.01_009,066] Not even a person reborn and endowed with every power of working miracles dares venture there, for as a foreigner, a bringer of calamity and an inciter of the people he is immediately punished by the cruellest kind of death.
[MEr.01_009,067] There have indeed been cases in which I kept Christian messengers alive there through all manner of deaths. But these inhuman people counted it all as nothing and tried every conceivable kind of death on them without restraint, until the number appointed in My order was complete and I had to call My messenger back, so as not to see what is holy exposed any longer to such nameless contempt.
[MEr.01_009,068] But mark this. The moment when this free seat of Satan will be destroyed is not far off. When you hear that the monarchy is given up to foreign peoples, remember that the end of things is not far away.
[MEr.01_009,069] In this farthest land of the East there are still many peoples who will have nothing to do with Me. I shall send few more messengers there, apart from the messengers of My approaching judgement. It will be as with a fruit tree in autumn, when the unripe fruit is taken down with the ripe.
[MEr.01_009,070] The ripe fruit is kept for the Lord's table, but the unripe is thrown into the press and crushed. The little juice is taken for souring, and the pressings are thrown to the pigs. It will be as with a householder whose wheat has ripened in the field.
[MEr.01_009,071] Truly, no one will wait for the weeds to ripen. They will be taken from the field along with the wheat and then separated from it by the servants.
[MEr.01_009,072] They will tie the weeds in bundles, let them dry in the open field and then set them alight and burn them to the ground, so that all their seed is destroyed. My wheat they will bring into the barns of eternal life.
[MEr.01_009,073] See, you must therefore not take offence if you still find so much unripe fruit on the Earth and so many weeds among the wheat.
[MEr.01_009,074] Do not think that I shall delay My day on that account. Truly I tell you, I shall only hasten it for the sake of the elect. For if those days in the time of the last appointed tribulations were not shortened, truly even the living would lose their life.
[MEr.01_009,075] Be at ease, therefore. Use this account less as a literal view of the world overflowing with filth than as a means of looking within yourselves. I give it to you so that you may recognise the world in yourselves, despise it and flee it out of love for Me.
[MEr.01_009,076] Only at the end of the last hour shall I draw the veil from your eyes. Then you will see fully where I am really leading you with these twelve hours. Amen.
A further word about Japan, as a supplement to the Ninth Hour.
[MEr.01_009,077] Japan consists of the islands of 1. Sachalin, 2. Jesso, 3. Niphon or Nypon, 4. Xikoko or Likok, 5. Kinsin or Ximo, and is the most populous country on Earth.
[MEr.01_009,078] Its area is scarcely as great as that of Great Britain. The Japanese of today consist only of Mongols, Malays and a few Indigenous inhabitants. They are in no way related to the Chinese and surpass them in everything, in education as well as in cruelty.
[MEr.01_009,079] A great part of the reason they far surpass the Chinese in the most varied sciences is that their language has only forty-eight simple letters, whereas the Chinese have about fifty thousand. Their language is very soft and pliant, their religion a refined heathenism and their laws tyrannical in the highest degree.
[MEr.01_009,080] There are ten so-called castes among the inhabitants. Each has some fixed, unalterable laws and others that may be changed at will.
[MEr.01_009,081] Each person is strictly assigned a district and may not leave it before being released. The release consists of a kind of leave from work.
[MEr.01_009,082] The principal towns are Jeddo or Edo, on the river Tonkai, with 280,000 houses and more than a million inhabitants in 1841, making it almost the most populous city on Earth in that year; Rio or Miako, with 140,000 houses and nearly a million inhabitants; Nagasake, a port with 10,000 houses and nearly 100,000 inhabitants; and Mastmai or Matsumai, with 6,000 houses and 60,000 inhabitants.
[MEr.01_009,083] The northernmost tip of the island of Saghalin is called Cape Elizabeth by the English. In its western half is Cape Patience. This most northerly and poorest island is separated from Jesso by the La Peyrouse Strait.
[MEr.01_009,084] At the south-eastern tip of Jesso lies Mastmai or Matsumai. The island is separated from Niphon or Nipon by the Sangar Strait. This middle and largest island is also the seat of government.
[MEr.01_009,085] On it is a great harbour named Namba, without municipal rights, then the capital Jeddo or Edo (now Tokyo), with a great harbour protected by the dreadful Cape Ring, and then the mountain town of Rio or Miako, the largest manufacturing town of the Japanese. This is also the most mountainous island, just as Saghalin, the most northerly, is the most volcanic.
[MEr.01_009,086] Sikok is virtually a single mountain rising from the sea, and therefore sparsely populated. By contrast, Kinsing, with the port of Nagasaki, is overpopulated. It has the strictest laws and is accessible only to the Dutch, and even then only on the little island off Nagasaki called Guelport, a name handed down from the expelled, disreputable Portuguese and Spaniards.
[MEr.01_009,087] Beyond the north-western half of Nipon is another sizeable island, Sado, a refuge for the Indigenous inhabitants, who enjoy certain privileges there. Some Portuguese have also taken refuge there. They may never leave and must worship everything Japanese and the full moon.
[MEr.01_009,088] The entire population of Japan is some forty million, four sevenths of them female. Apart from mechanics, mathematics, navigation, geography and astronomy, they are ahead of the peoples of the Earth in every industry, and possess great wealth and many secrets.
[MEr.01_009,089] The people of Sado still possess second sight here and there, and have knowledge from the earliest times of Meduhed.
[MEr.01_009,090] They number three million, excluding the Portuguese, of whom there are only a few thousand. Let all this serve as a fuller view of the country, and it may be added to the Ninth Hour. Amen!