"But don't you think," I pleaded as I opened the gate to let him pass, "that there is, after all, something poetic in the volcanic conception of a garden?"
"No, no," he cried. "Poetic? No. Good night. Good night. I do not understand this new Japan. There is no repose any more. It is all volcanoes, all exploding. It is the beauties of calm that we are losing. Calm! Yes, that is it, calm! calm! calm!"
His agitated voice, shouting, "Calm! calm! calm!" came back to me as like a typhoon he whirled off into the darkness, leaving me in the sweet quiet of the garden—to meditate.
PART III
CHAPTER XVI
The "Connecticut Yankee" in Old Japan—Commodore Perry—The Elder Statesmen—Marquis Okuma—Self-made Men—Viscount Shibusawa—The Power of the Daimyo—Samurai Privileges, Including That of Suicide—Education in Old Japan—Jigoro Kano and Jiudo—The Farewell Letter of a Patriot—Kodokwan and Butokukai—The Old Military Virtues—General Nogi—His Death With Countess Nogi
Despite the convulsions, overturnings, and transitions through which so many nations have lately been passing, Japan still holds the world's record for swift and stupendous change. The thing that happened to Japan staggers the imagination. History affords no parallel. The nearest parallel is to be found in the fiction of a great imaginative writer. An American or a European going to Japan at approximately the time of the Imperial Restoration of 1868, found himself, in effect, dropped back through the centuries after the manner of Mark Twain's "Connecticut Yankee"; and the Japanese who lived through the transition which then began, met an experience like that pictured in Mark Twain's fantasy as having befallen the people of King Arthur's Court when modern knowledge was suddenly visited upon them.