"I wonder," he said, "that Western visitors to Tokyo who talk of our immorality are not struck by the fact that in an Eastern capital a foreign lady may walk home at night and be practically safe from being spoken to. The Japanese are undoubtedly a very kind people. They may be unmoral, but they are not immoral."
"Most of our people do not understand liberty in the mental sexual relations. Love is not free. In a very large proportion of cases, indeed, parents would oppose a match because a son or daughter had fallen in love. And if it is difficult to marry for love it is not easy to fall in love.[ [109]] Society in which young men and young women meet is restricted; there are few opportunities of conversation. Without liberty towards women there can be no perfect sense of responsibility towards them."
What had been taught to women as the supreme virtue was the virtue of sacrifice for father, husband, children. It was most important to let women know the significance of individualism. They were always offering themselves for others before they became themselves. But the idea of individuality was very little clearer to the Japanese man than to the Japanese woman. People were too prone to wish to give 100 yen before they had 100 yen. The Japanese were the most devotional people in the world, but they hardly knew yet the things to be devoted to.
Yanagi is a leading member of a small association of literary men, artists and students who graduated together from the Peers' School. They call themselves for no obvious reason the Shirakaba or Silver Birch Society. The intelligent and consistent efforts of these young men to introduce vital Western work in literature, philosophy, painting, sculpture, draughtsmanship and music, and the large measure of success they have attained is of some significance. Several members of the group belong to the old Kuge families, that is the ancient nobility which surrounded the Emperor at Kyoto before the Restoration. Cut off for centuries from military and administrative activities by the dominance of the Shogunate Government, the Kuge devoted themselves to the arts and the refinements of life. For the exclusiveness of the past some of their descendants substitute artistic integrity. The Shirakaba has had for several years a remarkable magazine. Its editor and its publisher, its size, its price and its date of publication are continually changed; it never makes any bid for popularity; it expresses its sentiments in a downright way and it has always been anti-official: yet it survives and pays its way. Beyond the magazine, the Society has had every year at least one exhibition of what its members conceive to be significant modern European work. The members have also supported a few Japanese artists of outstanding sincerity. Through the Shirakaba the influence of Cezanne, Van Gogh, Rodin, Blake, Delacroix, Matisse, Augustus John, Beardsley, Courbet,Daumier, Maillol, Chavannes and Millet, particularly Cezanne, Van Gogh, Rodin and Blake, has been marked. The Silver Birch group has never tired of extolling the great names of Rembrandt, Dürer, El Greco, Van Eyck, Goya, Leonardo, Michael Angelo, Tintoretto, Giotto and Mantegna [[110]].
While an ardent Young Japan has formed and dissolved many societies, movements and fashions, this Shirakaba group has held fast and has gained friends by its sincerity, its vision and its audacity[[111]]. Rodin encouraged the Shirakaba efforts to reproduce the best Western art by presenting it with three pieces of sculpture.
"The intellectual man does no fighting," Froude has written. Why do not Yanagi and his friends make a stand on public questions? "Because," he said, "at the present stage of our development it is almost impossible to take up a strong attitude, and because, important though political and social questions are, they are not, in our opinion, of the first importance. To artists, philosophers, students of religion, such problems are secondary. More important problems are: What is the meaning of this world? What is God? What is the essence of religion? How can we best nourish ourselves so as to realise our own personalities? Political and social problems are secondary for us at present; they are not related emotionally to our present conditions[[112]].
For the East the Root,
For the West the Fruit.
"If we faced such problems directly we should probably make them primary problems, as you do in Great Britain. Our present attitude does not prove, however, that we are cold to political and social problems. In fact, when we think of these terrible political and social questions they make us boil. But you will understand that in order to have something to give to others, we must have that something. We are seeking after that something."
Yanagi, continuing, spoke of the direct contribution which the new artistic movement in Japan, under the influence of modern Western art, was making to the solution of political and social questions[[113]]. The interest of the younger generation in Post Impressionism was "quite disharmonious with the ordinary attitude towards militarism." European art broke down barriers in the Japanese mind. When the younger generation, nourished on higher ideals, grew up, it would be the State, and there would be a more hopeful condition of affairs. People generally supposed that social questions were the most practical; but religious, artistic, philosophic questions were, in the truest sense of the word, the most practical.
Yanagi went on to tell of his devotion to Blake. He could not understand "why Englishmen are so cool to him." He asked me how it was that there was no word about Blake in Andrew Lang's work on English literature. "I cannot imagine," he said, "why such an intelligent man could not appreciate Blake." Yanagi regarded Blake as "the artist of immense will, of immense desire, and a man in whom can be seen that affirmative attitude towards life, exhibited later by Whitman." Yanagi spoke also of "Anglo-Saxon nobility, liberty, depth of character and healthiness," and of "a deep and noble character" in English literature which he did not find elsewhere. Whitman, Emerson, Poe and William James were "the crown of America."