UCSD academic Masao Miyoshi wrote in Accomplices of Silence regarding the lack of individualism inherent in Japanese culture:
“The old vertical organization has survived almost intact in today’s highly corporate and industrialized Japan. Such a society still fosters a high degree of ritualism in everyday activities, whether economic, social, or cultural, as can be seen in […] the high development of the honorific system in the Japanese language […] Japanese society does not, in short, promote the necessary condition for growth of the novelistic imagination: the egalitarian sensibility that sees a unique human personality in powerful statesman and day-laborer alike. Instead, people are regarded according to their assigned social slots.” (Miyoshi 79)
The longevity of Japan’s hierarchical and anti-individualist “organization”, from Sōseki’s time until today, helps give us insight into what he was arguing for and against in his writing and the "feeling of the Meiji intellectual". It shows why historians and literary critics such as Rubin and Oketani considered Sōseki a proponent of individualism and an opponent of “doing everything for the state,” yet still found General Nogi’s act of junshi moving enough to include in Kokoro.
In his lecture titled My Individualism in 1914, the same year Kokoro began serialization, Sōseki affirms what Rubin calls “the value of individual existence in all its variousness, complexity, and difficulty.” (Rubin & Sōseki 24) An intimate lecture, My Individualism demonstrates how for Sōseki, as a Meiji man, discovery of himself was inseparable from a discovery of his Japanese identity. Indeed, Sōseki described the cause his inner turmoil in his studies and practice of English literature in a way that mirrors the cause of his dissatisfaction with Japan’s drive to modernize and stand on equal footing with the Western powers: namely, the superficiality of the act. Eventually, Sōseki declares discovery what he believed to be his life’s work: “to write books, to tell people that they need not imitate Westerners, that running blindly after others as they were doing would only cause them great anxiety.” (Rubin & Soseki 34) In modern terms, Sōseki wanted to prove to others that it was OK to be yourself, and to assert your individualism. To help us apply his logic to understand his fascination with General Nogi’s act of junshi, Sōseki outlines three specific principles supporting his thoughts on individuality:
“First, that if you want to carry out the development of your individuality, you must respect the individuality of others. Second, that if you intend to utilize the power in your possession, you must be fully cognizant of the duty that accompanies it. Third, that if you wish to demonstrate your financial power, you must respect its concomitant responsibilities.” (Rubin & Sōseki 40)
Thus, we begin to see how Sōseki came to respect General Nogi as he did. He did not see Nogi as having committed seppuku out of a misguided respect for an antiquated tradition for following his lord into death; rather, Nogi committed suicide to atone for what he saw as the dereliction of his duties during the Satsuma Rebellion and the 1904-05 Russo-Japanese War. He interpreted Nogi’s death as an assertion of his individualism, not a surrender of it, and saw the fact that Nogi lived with his guilt all that time as proof of his keen awareness of his own duties.
“No one - and I do mean no one - is going to be unconcerned about the nation’s safety when his country is in danger. But when the country is strong and the risk of war small, when there is no threat of being attacked from without, then nationalism ought to diminish accordingly and individualism enter to fill the vacuum.” (Rubin & Sōseki 45)
We therefore begin to see one of Sōseki’s possible intentions in having Sensei die after Nogi commits suicide. Sensei is not necessarily modeled on himself, as some critics have argued, but rather a vehicle for Sōseki to demonstrate the many ways in which modernity in Japan had troubled his generation of Meiji intellectuals. Sōseki bemoans those who choose self-interest rather than upholding one’s duties as a friend and as a family member, like with Sensei’s betrayal of K and his wife and his uncle’s betrayal of him. Sōseki laments the contagiousness of this phenomenon, such as when the narrator abandons his dying father to return to Tokyo. Yet Kokoro fundamentally remains a celebration of individuality: a story about two educated idlers in Sensei and the narrator both attempting to make sense of their place in a modern Japan.