The geography of the Oriental Empire in no sense recalls that of America; there are neither wide plains, nor mighty rivers, nor fertile and luxurious forests. Narrow horizons, gentle hills, minute islands, closed seas, and the strange flora of the harmonious insular landscape: lotuses, cryptomera, bamboos, chrysanthemums, dwarf trees. Beliefs, manners, and customs all differ radically from the American. "The Europeans," writes Lafcadio Hearn, "build with a view to duration, the Japanese with a view to instability." A keen sentiment of all that is fugitive in life, of the anguish caused by the incessant flux and mobility of things, causes men to love ephemeral apparitions. Buddhism speaks of the fluidity of life. Japanese art strives to fix passing impressions; the dew, the pale light of the moon, the fleeting tints of twilight, the provisional temples, the small houses of wood, the rice-paper shoji, on which the very shadows of those within are vague and momentary. There is nothing persevering in Japanese life; the inhabitant is a nomad and nature is variable. Impassive Buddhas, seated on their blue lotus flowers, contemplate the irresistible current of appearances. Mobility, and a religious sense of becoming: these would be elements of dissolution in a divided America.
Powerful and traditional, the Japanese civilisation would weigh too heavily upon the Latin democracies, mixed as they are. Bushido, the cult of honour and fidelity to one's ancestors, is the basis of an intense nationalism; the contempt for death, the pride of an insular people, the subjection of the individual to the family and the native land, and the asceticism of the samurai, constitute so formidable a superiority that in the conflict between half-breed America and stoic Japan the former would lose both its autonomy and its traditions.
[[1]] Louis Aubert, Americains et Japonais, Paris, 1908, pp. 151 et seq.
[[2]] M. Aubert cites these and other extracts.
[[3]] The Peruvian imports into Japan were £101,000 in 1909; the Japanese imports into Peru only £4,400. There is a commercial treaty between Chili and Japan.
[[4]] Perhaps the emigration of Orientals towards the two Americas will be arrested, for there is a Chinese Far West which is slowly becoming peopled. Japan aspires to assure herself of the domination of Manchuria, and is sending colonists to Korea, the annexed peninsula. The excess of the population of China and Japan tends naturally to occupy territories in which everything is favourable—climate, religion, and race.
BOOK VII
PROBLEMS