Rare days in Japan

by George Trumbull Ladd

After the aged speaker had taken his seat again, a much younger man, the Vice-Mayor of the city, arose; and beginning by expressing his hearty agreement with the sentiments of the last speaker, he proceeded to emphasise the truth with passionate fervour, and wound up his address by saying: “There are enough of us, one hundred and fifty leading citizens of Osaka, seated around this table here to-night, to change the whole moral condition of the city, and to redeem it from its deservedly bad reputation, if only we truly and fixedly will to have it so.”

Several months later I had another similar experience, which I mention here, because it illustrates so well the extraordinary interest in moral issues which characterised the disposition of the nation at the close of the Russo-Japanese war, and which made itself felt in so powerful a way upon all the audiences which I addressed during the year of my stay. Toward the close of the course of lectures and addresses at Sendai, I was invited to visit the barracks where twenty-five or thirty thousand of the recruits for the Japanese army are regularly undergoing their preparation for service. After I had been shown about the entire establishment by an escort of under-officers, the General in command, a distinguished veteran of the Russo-Japanese war, called me into his private office. There, he first of all assured me that he had followed the accounts of the lectures and addresses as they had been published in the various papers, and then thanked me for what had been done in general for the good of his country; but, more particularly, for the assistance rendered to him personally in his work of training the young men for the Japanese army. Upon surprise being expressed as to how such a thing could be, the General began to explain his statement as follows: His great difficulty was not in teaching the manual of arms or the proper way to manœuvre upon the field of battle. His great difficulty was in giving these recruits the necessary “spiritual” training (I use his word, and explain it to mean,—The moral spirit which animates the upright and knightly soldier, the spirit which, in the Japanese language, is called “Bushidō”). At this I again expressed surprise and a wish for further light upon his kindly remark. He then went on to say that since the Government had reduced the term of required service from three years to two, the time was more than ever all too short to inculcate and enforce the right moral spirit on youths, many of whom came from homes in which this spirit by no means prevailed. But a profound moral impression had been made upon the teachers in the public schools all over the land; the teachers would take these moral teachings and impress them upon the pupils under their charge; and “these are the boys that will later come to me.” When my thoughts turned homeward—as, of course, they were bound promptly to do,—they awakened a strange mixture of feelings of amusement and of concern; of the former, when the effort was made to imagine any remotely similar conversation occurring with a General or a recruiting officer there; and of concern, at the obvious decline of the spirit of patriotism in the United States, as evinced by the almost purely mercenary way in which all branches of the public service have come to be regarded by the body of the people. That it is difficult to keep the ranks of our small standing army filled by offers of big pay, much leisure, and opportunities for foreign travel, is significant, not so much because of a growing and, perhaps, reasonable distaste for a military career, as of a prevalent conviction that the nation is bound to serve individual and class interests rather than the individual and the class to serve the interests of the nation.

The most thoughtful leaders of Japan are at present exceedingly fearful that those more serious and self-reliant traits, which I have chiefly selected to characterise, may succumb to the incoming flood of commercial avarice, and of the love of comfort and luxury. And they have grave reasons to be afraid. But I leave on record my testimony to the truth that immediately after the close of the great war with Russia, the nation of Japan was not only willing to hear, but even coveted to hear, how it might prepare itself by intelligent adherence to sound moral principles—in education, in business, in the army and navy,—for an era of genuine and lasting prosperity, at peace with the rest of the world.

CHAPTER VI
GARDENS AND GARDEN PARTIES

To understand thoroughly and appreciate justly the theory and history of the art of landscape and other gardening in Japan would require the study of a life-time. It is doubtful if any foreigner could accomplish this task even at the expense of so great devotion;—so subtle and in some respects bizarre and whimsical is the philosophy of nature implied in the tenets of some of the various schools. The native experts, too, take the same delight in minute distinctions, and in the arguments urged in support of them, in the field of æsthetics, which characterises the speculations of Japanese Buddhism in the field of religion. And, indeed, in Japan, as everywhere else in the world, the philosophy of nature and the philosophy of art are both closely related to ideas and sentiments of at least a genuine quasi-religious character. I shall therefore make no attempt to discourse on so abstruse and difficult matters.

It may safely be said, however, that the art of landscape-gardening, as it has developed in Japan, has the general features which are common to all forms of Japanese art. According to Baron Kuki, official custodian of the Emperor’s art treasures, these are, chiefly, the following three: “The first is mildness and pure simplicity. Colouring is for the most part sober and plain, and very seldom gorgeous. Japanese art prefers moderation and genial ease to excessive grandeur; sobriety and chastity to profundity, intensity, and vulgarity. Even such horror-inspiring subjects as the pictures of hell are not thrilling in effect. The statue of Buddha at Nara is grand, but it is only the highwater mark of Continental influence, and does not represent the pure Japanese disposition.

“The second characteristic of Japanese art is its exquisite lightness or delicacy. This is due to the joyful frame of the people’s mind, and to the wonderful dexterity of their hands. There is no artistic product which is not marked by charming workmanship.

“The third feature is its idealism in representation. Japanese art is not realistic, it does not aim at photographic accuracy; but by the free and bold exercise of imagination, it tries to abstract the essential aspect of objects, and to give expression to the artist’s sentiments by its portrayal. It is for this reason that form is comparatively little regarded, while idea is considered all-important; that it is weak in realistic delineation and strong in decorative design. These three characteristics underlie all Japanese art, and distinguish it from the art of other Oriental nations.”

So far as I am able to recognise these characteristics as present in the gardens which I have seen, they have resulted in certain marked excellencies and in certain scarcely less marked defects. These gardens are to a degree realistic, in that they try to present a picture of all the principal features of nature,—oftentimes, and indeed generally, within a small and seemingly inadequate amount of space. Miniature mountains, rivers, lakes, water-falls, forest, and stretches of sea-coast, may be comprised within the grounds of a gentleman’s ordinary estate, or even within the few square-feet of the humbler citizen’s back-yard. And it is uniformly the back-yard in Japan, where the grounds for “plaisance” are situated. Even a platter or other dish may be made the receptacle for a garden which shall essay to hold up to view a picture of those complex artistic achievements that are accomplished by nature on a so much larger scale.