Another means for improving the educational system of Japan is to be found in teachers’ associations, educational societies, and summer institutes. The first two are local; the last are national. The educational societies are for the purpose of increasing the general interest in education in the different localities; the teachers’ associations are, as in America, for the improvement of methods of instruction; and the summer institutes are for the same purpose on a broader scale.
What was written about private schools may be repeated concerning libraries. No Japanese Carnegie has yet appeared; only a few men, like Mr. Ōhashi, and the late Baron Kodama, formerly Governor of Formosa, have endowed libraries as memorials. The largest public library is the Imperial Library[148] in Tōkyō, with over 400,000 volumes, of which more than 50,000 volumes are in European languages.
It is in the domain of science that the Japanese have achieved, perhaps, their greatest intellectual successes. Their work in original investigation is always painstaking, and in many cases it has attained an international reputation. The names of Dr. Kitasato, associated with the famous Dr. Koch in his researches, and Dr. Aoyama, the hero of the pest in China, are well known; and now comes Dr. Ishigami, who claims to have discovered the germ of smallpox.
The chief defects in the Japanese educational system are on three lines: dependence on Chinese ideographs, vague instruction in ethics, and encouragement of cramming. The removal of these hindrances to progress is engaging the attention of thoughtful educators, but is a slow and gradual process.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
“The Wee Ones of Japan” (Mrs. Bramhall), pp. 97-108; “When I was a Boy in Japan” (Shioya); “A Japanese Boy” (Shigemi); “Japanese Girls and Women” and “A Japanese Interior” (Miss Bacon), all give interesting accounts of school life in both Old and New Japan. The Department of Education issues annually in English, for free distribution on application, a “Report,” which contains the latest statistics and other information. “The Educational Conquest of the Far East” (Lewis) is an excellent discussion of educational conditions and problems of the day in China and Japan. See also Scherer’s “Young Japan,” pp. 284-311. The (English) catalogue of the Imperial University, Tōkyō, is instructive. “Every Day Japan” (Lloyd) contains interesting material on this subject. “Japanese Education” (Kikuchi) is authoritative.
CHAPTER XVI
ÆSTHETIC JAPAN
Outline of Topics: Japan’s debt to art.—Wide diffusion of æsthetic ideals.—Chinese origin of Japanese art.—Painting the key-note.—Considered a form of poetry.—Characteristics.—Color prints.—Sculpture.—Keramics.—Metal work.—Cloisonné. Lacquer.—Embroidery.—Music.—Poetry.—Dancing.—Drama. Tea ceremonies.—Flower arrangement.—Landscape gardening.—Unity of the arts.—Bibliography.
IT has been said with a great deal of truth that no other country in the world owes so much to its art as Japan. As Huish puts it, “Japan would never have attracted the extraordinary notice which she so rapidly did had it not been for her art.... Her art manufactures have penetrated the length and breadth of the world.” Yet it is a curious fact, to which Chamberlain calls attention, that the Japanese have “no genuinely native word” for either art or nature. The expression “fine art” is commonly represented by the word bi-jutsu, a Chinese compound meaning literally “beauty-craft.” So intimately are æsthetic ideals bound up with the whole course of Japanese life and modes of thought, that art is not, as in the Western world, a mere sporadic efflorescence, but the inevitable expression of the spirit of the Eastern civilization, and needing therefore no distinctive term to denote it as a thing set apart and existing by itself.
While this is true, it is also true that Japan furnishes no exception to Mr. Whistler’s dictum that “there never was an art-loving nation.” The explanation of this seeming paradox is one which needs to be borne in mind. The æsthetic ideals crystallized in the works of the countless generations of artists who for more than a thousand years have held to them firmly as their guiding principles, have become so much the intellectual heritage of the people as a whole that it is most natural that the foreign observer, noting the æsthetic impress upon everything about him, should look upon the Japanese as a nation of artists. To an extent not known elsewhere the Japanese mechanic is indeed an art-isan. And there is a measure of truth in Percival Lowell’s assertion that there are “no mechanical arts in Japan simply because all such have been raised to the position of fine arts.”[149] From the Japanese point of view, however, differences in degree of artistic perception are as pronounced among the Japanese as among other peoples. In Japan, as in all other lands, artistic inspiration is given to but few among the many; artists having creative genius tower high above their fellows; and the little touches that excite the wonder and admiration of the outside world are seen to be in large degree the outcome of conventional notions rather than the expression of individual feeling.