Though some of the important articles of the same treaty were made useless by the intervention of the three Western powers, the war proved on the whole very beneficial to our country. The growth of the consciousness of the national strength emboldened the people to develop their activity in all directions. Several new industries began to flourish. The national wealth increased remarkably so as to enable the government to adopt a monometallic currency in gold. Education, high as well as low, was encouraged by the increase of various new schools and by the strengthening of their staffs. We laboured very hard for the ten following years, and then the Russo-Japanese war took place.
It was indeed fortunate that we could win after all in the war in which we put our national destiny at stake. Not only in this war with Russia, but in that with China a decade before, we had been by no means sure of victory, when we decided to enter into them. It is such a war generally that proves salutary to the victorious party, when, after having been fought with difficulty, it ends in a way better than had been anticipated. It was so in the war of 1894-1895, and was not otherwise in that waged ten years later. These military successes, needless to say, increased still more the splendour of the imperial prerogative already magnificently revived. At the same time they countenanced the growth of conservatism. The impetus, however, which these wars gave to the general activity of the nation necessitated the people betaking themselves to the study and imitation of Western civilisation. And this Europeanisation, direct or through America, tended to make the nation more and more progressive. Thus conservatism in recent Japan has been marching hand in hand with liberalism, nay, even with radicalism, each alternately outweighing the other. This is why present Japan has appeared to be lacking in stability, especially in the eyes of foreign observers.
The years immediately succeeding the Russo-Japanese war formed the culminating period of the glorious era of Meidji, and also a turning-point of the national history. Up to that time foreign nations had been lavishing their kindness in the education of the novice nation, who seemed to them to be yet in her teens on account of having just entered into the concert of the world as a passive hearer. They did not know what would become of Japan, brought up and instructed in this way. In military affairs the English were our first masters, then came the French and the German. In the navy, the Dutch followed by the English were our instructors. In the sphere of legislation, the first advisers were the French, to whom the Germans succeeded. The latter also taught us their science of medicine, which to study in Japan the German language has become the first requisite. Besides what has been enumerated above, knowledge of all branches of industries, arts, and sciences has been introduced into our country in the highly advanced stage of the brilliant century. Who would have dreamt, however, of the victory of the Japanese over the Russians in January of 1904? In the war, it is true, a great many foreigners sympathised with the cause of the Japanese, simply because all bystanders are unconsciously wont to take the side of the weaker. The fall of Port Arthur and the annihilation of the Russian navy on the Sea of Japan were beyond all expectation. They now began to think that they might be also taken unawares by us, as they thought the Russians were, forgetting that they had ignored to study the Japanese. They rather repented that they had underestimated the real Japanese unduly, and thereby they have fallen into the error of overestimation. We do not think that a sheer victory on a battlefield can in any case be taken as a measure of the progress of civilisation in the victor. Moreover, in what field could we have been able to beat any European nation except in battle, if we could beat her at all? Almost all of our cultural factors we have borrowed from foreign countries, and therefore they are of later introduction, so that they could not be easily brought by our imitation, however adroit it might be, to a stage nearly so high as they had reached in their original homes. But as to the art of fighting only, we have come to practise it since the old times, and during the successive Shogunates it had been the calling most honoured and followed by us at the expense of other acquirements. In short, it was the speciality of old Japan, so that our success in arms could not testify to the sudden jump in other branches of our civilisation. Those foreigners, however, who had been accustomed to judge us from afar, looked only at the scientific and mechanical side of modern war, of which we had availed ourselves, and surmised that if we could stand excellently the test in this department, we must certainly have surpassed what they had expected of us in all respects. This surmise, which they felt not very agreeably, they flatly imputed to our dissimulation and feigning, and branded them as our national vices, instead of attributing the miscalculation to their self-deception and ignorance as regards things Japanese. On the contrary, we have had never the least intention to deceive any foreigner in the estimation of the merit of what we have achieved. Would it not be ridiculously absurd to assume the existence of such a tendency in any living nation in the world?
We have been thus overestimated and at the same time begun to be somewhat disliked by those short-sighted observers in foreign countries after our successful war with Russia. The pet nation of the whole world of yesterday was turned suddenly into the most suspected and dangerous nation of to-day! There have been many missionaries who had personal experience of our country, owing to their residence here for years, professing that they have tried their utmost to plead our cause. Unfortunately, their defence of us has not availed much, for a great part of them are used to depict us as a nation still evolving. Evolving they say, for our recent national progress is too evident a fact to be refuted, and they wish to ascribe it to their fruitful endeavours. Evolving, they say repeatedly, for they are fain to show that there is still remaining in Japan a wide field reserved for them to work, lest their raison d'être in this country should otherwise be lost forever. In fact, we are now far enough advanced as a nation as not to require the tutelage of the missionaries of recent times.
I regret that we have among us a certain number of typical braggarts, who unfortunately abound in every country, and their shameless bluffing has often caused astonishment to unprejudiced observers in foreign countries. Nevertheless, we as a nation are neither far better nor far worse than any other in the world. To remain as a petrified state, with plenty of well-preserved relics of all ages, is what we cannot bear for our country. We know well that a nation which produces sight-seers must be incomparably happier and more praiseworthy than that which furnishes quaint objects for show to please those sight-seers. If there be any other nation that wishes to make its home a peepshow for others, let it do so. That is not our business. What we aspire to earnestly as our national ideal is to make our country able to stand shoulder to shoulder with the senior Western nations in contributing to the advance and welfare of world civilisation. We shall proceed toward this goal, however fluctuating foreign opinion about us may be for years or ages to come.
INDEX
A
Abe, family, [93]