An explanation has occurred to me. You know the Japanese does nearly everything but his fighting—backward. Of course he reads and writes backward. At the theatre you find the dressing-room in the lobby. Keys turn from left to right, boring-tools and screws, I understand, turn from right to left, and a Japanese carpenter draws his plane toward him instead of pushing it away. Sometimes even the Japanese thinks and talks backward. For instance, suppose he says:
"I think I will go wash my hands." That, in Japanese, is:
"Te-wo aratte kimasho." Now, what he really has said is literally:
"Hands having washed I think I will come back."
Perhaps then our trouble is that the Japanese tells the truth backward and we can't understand. He might even be fighting that way—say, for an alliance with Russia—and we still should not understand—at least, not yet.
IV
MAKING FOR MANCHURIA
It came at last—that order for the front. On the 18th day of July, the Empress of China swung out of Yokohama Harbor, with eighteen men on board, who had been waiting four months for that order, almost to the very day. During those four months there was hardly a day that some one of those men was not led to believe by the authorities in Tokio that in the next ten days the order would come, and never would the authorities say that during any ten days the order would not come; so that they had perforce to stay waiting in Tokio from the freezing rains of March until the sweltering days of midsummer. Many of those men had been in Japan for five months and more, and yet knew absolutely nothing of the land save of Tokio and Yokohama, which, tourists tell me, are not Japan at all.