The foundations of Japan

by J. W. Robertson Scott

A TROUBLER OF ISRAEL

The signification of this gift of life, that we should leave a better world for our successors, is being understood.—Meredith

To some people in Japan the countryman Kanzō Uchimura is "the Japanese Carlyle." To others he is a religious enthusiast and the Japanese equivalent of a troubler of Israel. He appeared to me in the guise of a student of rural sociology.

Uchimura is the man who as a school teacher "refused to bow before the Emperor's portrait."[ ^[100]] He endured, as was to be expected, social ostracism and straitened means. But when his voice came to be heard in journalism it was recognised as the voice of a man of principle by people who heard it far from gladly. There is a seamy side to some Japanese journalism[ ^[101]] and Uchimura soon resigned his editorial chair. He abandoned a second editorship because he was determined to brave the displeasure of his countrymen by opposing the war with Russia. To-day he deplores many things in the relations of Japan and China.

Fuhei
MUZZLED EDITORS

Uchimura has written more than two dozen books, mostly on religion. How I became a Christian has been translated into English, German, Danish, Russian and Chinese, and is to that extent a landmark in the literary history of Japan. His Christianity is an Early Christianity which places him in antagonism, not only to his own countrymen who are Shintoists, Buddhists or Confucians, or vaguely Nationalists, but to such foreign missionaries as are sectarians and literalists. His earliest training was in agricultural science, and the welfare of the Japanese countryside is near his heart. If he be a Carlyle, as his fibre and resolution, downright way of writing and speaking, hortatory gift, humour, plainness of life and dislike of officials, no less than his cast of countenance, his soft hat and long gaberdine-like coat have suggested, he is a Carlyle who is content to stay both in body and mind at Ecclefechan. He is not, however, like Carlyle, whom he calls "master," a peasant, but a samurai.

"As you penetrate into the lives of the farmers and discover the influences brought to bear on them," Uchimura said to me in his decisive way, "there will be laid bare to you the foundations of Japan. You know our proverb, of course, No wa kuni no taihon nari ('Agriculture is the basis of a nation')? Have you been to Nikko?" This seemed a little inconsequent, but I told him I had not yet been to Nikko. ("Until you have seen Nikko," runs the adage, "do not say 'splendid'.") "How many of the tourists who are delighted with Nikko," he went on, "have heard how the richest farms near that town were devastated? A century ago a minister of the Shogun, who realised that fertility depended on trees, saw to the whole range of Nikko hills being afforested. It was a tract twenty miles by twenty miles in extent. But the 'civilised' authorities of our own days sold all the timber to a copper company for 8,000 yen. The company destroyed the fertility of the district not only by cutting down the forest but by poisoning the water with which the farmers irrigated their crops. A member of Parliament gave himself with such devotion to the cause of the ruined farmers that when he died the ashes of his cremated body were divided and preserved in four shrines erected to his memory."

It was a sad thing, said Uchimura, that the farmers of Japan, because of the decreased fertility of the land due to the denudation of the hills of trees, and because of their increased expenses, should be laying out "a quarter of their incomes on artificial manures." "The enemies which Japan has most to fear to-day," Uchimura declared, "are impaired fertility and floods."

It may be well, perhaps, to explain for a few readers how floods do their ill work. The rain which falls on treeless mountains is not absorbed there. The water washes down the mountain sides, bringing with it first good soil and then subsoil, stones and rock. The hills eventually become those peaked deserts the queer look of which must have puzzled many students of Japanese pictures. The debris washed away is carried into the rivers, along with trees from the lower slopes, and the level of the river beds is raised. Because there is less space in the river beds for water the rivers overflow their banks, and disastrous floods take place. The farmers, the local authorities and the State raise embankments higher and higher, but embankment building is costly and cannot go on indefinitely. The real remedy is to decrease the supply of water by planting forests in the mountains[^[102] ]. In many places the rivers are flowing above the level of the surrounding country. The imagination is caught by the fact that there are four earthquakes a day in Japan [^[103]] and that within a twelvemonth fires destroy 400 acres or so of buildings; but every year, on an average, floods, tidal waves and typhoons together drown more than 600 people and cause a money loss of 25 million yen! Every year 10½ million yen are spent by the State and the prefectures on river control alone.

Uchimura put on his famous wideawake and we went out for a walk. "I should like," he said, "to press the view that the vaunted expansion of Japan has meant to the farmers an increase of prices and taxes and of armaments out of all proportion to our population[^[104]]."

Uchimura stood stock still in the little wood we had entered. "There is one thing more," he added gravely. "Before you can get deeply into your subject you must touch religion. There you see the depths of the people. A large part of the deterioration of the countryside is due to the deterioration of Buddhism. You must ask about it. You will see in the villages much of what your old writers used to call 'priestcraft.' You will hear of the thraldom of many of the people. You will see with your own eyes that real Christianity may be a moral bath for a rural district."

"The essentials, not the forms of Christianity," he declared, would save the countryside by "brotherly union." "Brotherly union" would make a better life and a better agriculture. The rural class, he explained, was more sharply divided than foreigners understood into owners of land who lived on their rents and farmers who farmed[^[105]]. The division between the two classes was "as great as an Indian caste division." "To the landowner who lives in his village like a feudal lord the simple Gospel, with its insistence on the sacredness of work, comes as an intellectual revolution." Women as well as men of means received from Christianity "a new conception of humanity." They ceased to "look upon their own glory and to take delight in the flattery of poor people." They changed their way of speaking to the peasants. They developed an interest, of which they knew nothing before, in the spiritual and material betterment of the men, women and children of their village.

I went a two-days journey into the country with Uchimura. We stayed at the house of a landowner who was one of his adherents. I found myself in a large room where two swallows were flitting, intent on building on a beam which yearly bore a nest. In this room stood a shrine containing the ancestral tablets. The daily offerings were no longer made, but Uchimura's counsel, unlike that of some zealots, was to preserve not only this shrine but the large family shrine in the courtyard. Near by was an engraving of Luther.

"THE JAPANESE CARLYLE."

MR. AND MRS. YANAGI.

Uchimura spoke in the house to some thirty or more "people of the district who had accepted Christianity." His appeal was to "live Christianity as given to the world by its founder." The address, which was delivered from an arm-chair, was based on the fifth chapter of Matthew, which in the preacher's copy appeared to contain cross-references to two disciples called Tolstoy and Carlyle. When I was asked to speak I found that the women in the gathering had places in front. "The remarkable effect of Christianity among those who have come to think with us," Uchimura told me afterwards, "is seen most in their treatment of women. Our host, had he not been a Christian, would have been credited by public opinion with the possession of a concubine, and would not have been blamed for it." When, after the speaking, we knelt in a circle and talked less formally of how best to benefit rural people, we were joined by the women folk. Later, when a dozen of the neighbours were invited to dinner, it was not served at separate tables for each kneeling guest, but at one long table, an innovation "to indicate the brotherly relation."

CHILDREN CATCHING INSECTS ON RICE-SEED BEDS

MASTERS OF A COUNTRY SCHOOL AND SOME OF THE CHILDREN.

"So you see," said Uchimura, as we walked to the station in the morning, "in an antiquated book, which, I suppose, stands dusty on the shelves of some of your reformers, there is power to achieve the very things they aim at." He went on to explain that he looked "in the lives of hearers, not in what they say," for results from his teaching. He believed in liberty and freedom, in sowing the seed of change and reform and allowing people to develop as they would. "Let men and women believe as they have light."

He spoke in his kindly way of how "the bond of a common faith enables Japanese to get closer to the foreigner and the foreigner closer to the Japanese." There were many things we foreigners did not understand. We did not understand, for example, that "A man's a man for a' that" was an unfamiliar conception to a Japanese. I was to remember, when I interrogated Japanese about the problems of rural life, that they had had to coin a word for "problems." Above all, I must be careful not to "exaggerate the quality of Eastern morality." Uchimura asserted sweepingly that "morality in the Anglo-Saxon sense is not found in Japan." We of the West underrated the value of the part played by the Puritans in our development. Our moral life had been evolved by the soul-stirring power of the Hebrew prophets and of Christ. To deny this was "kicking your own mother." Just as it was not possible for the Briton or American to get his present morality from Greece and Rome exclusively, it was not possible for the Japanese to obtain it from the sources at his disposal.

The faults of the Eastern were that he thought too much of outward conduct. Good political and neighbourly-relations, kindliness, honesty and thrift were his idea of morality. "To love goodness and to hate evil with one's whole soul is a Christian conception for which you may search in vain through heathendom." The horror which the Western man of high character felt when he thought of the future of the little girls in attendance on geisha was not a horror generated by Plato. "Heathen life looks nice on the outside to foreigners," but Confucianism, Buddhism and Shintoism had all been weak in their attitude towards immorality. It was Christianity alone which controlled sexual life. Without deep-seated love of and joy in goodness and deep-seated horror of evil it was impossible to reform society.

Uchimura said that it had taken him thirty years to reach the conviction that the best way of raising his countrymen was by preaching the religion of "a despised foreign peasant." Many things he had been told by exponents of Christianity now seemed "very strange," but there remained in the first four books of the New Testament, in the essence of Christianity, principles "which would give new life to all men." Moved by this belief, Uchimura and his friends gave their lives to the work of the Gospel, to a work attended by humiliations; "but this is our glory."

Japanese civilisation, he reiterated, was "only good in the sense that Greek and Roman civilisations were good." Modern Japan represented "the best of Europe minus Christianity; the moral backbone of Christianity is lacking." "Probe a dozen Buddhist priests in turn," he said, "and you find something lacking; you don't find the Buddhist or Confucian really to be your brother [^[106]]."

"The greatness of England," he went on, "is not due to the inherent greatness of the English people, but to the greatness of the truths which they have received." In considering the sources of national greatness, it was idle to believe that some peoples were original and some not original in their ideas and methods. Where were the people to be found who were without extraneous influence? Where would England be without Greek philosophy, Roman law, and Christianity?

Our talk broke off as several peasant women passed us on the narrow way by the rice fields. The mattocks they carried were the same weight as their husbands' mattocks and the women were going to do the same work as the men. But the women were nearly all handicapped by having a child tied on their backs. Uchimura, returning to his objection to foreign political adventure, said that Japan, properly cultivated, could support twice its present population. There were many marshy districts which could be brought into cultivation by drainage. Then what might not forestry do? But the progress could not be made because of lack of money. The money was needed for "national defence."

"For myself," said Uchimura, "I find it still possible to believe in some power which will take care of inoffensive, quiet, humble, industrious people. If all the high virtues of mankind are not safeguarded somehow, then let us take leave of all the ennobling aspirations, all the poetry, and all the deepest hopes we have, and cease to struggle upward. The question is whether we have faith." We still waited, he declared, for the nation which would be Christian enough to take its stand on the Gospel and sacrifice itself materially, if need be, to its faith that right was greater than might.

And so "impractical, outspoken to rashness, but thoroughly sincere and experienced," as one of his appreciative countrymen characterised him to me, we take leave of the "Japanese Carlyle." With whom could I have gone more provocatively towards the foundation of things at the beginning of my investigation in farther Japan?