A Fantasy of Far Japan; Or, Summer Dream Dialogues

by Kencho Suematsu

—'You make me traverse almost the same field over again,' I said.

—'Never mind! The points are different,' she said.

—'Well, I need not speak of his occasional mistranslations of Japanese words or some small technical errors, but I can say that, in my opinion, he sometimes goes a little too far in giving reasons to matters concerning feeling and sentiment. For instance, he raises the question, if a soul be something concrete and suppose it is gone somewhere—heaven or Paradise, as one may term it—how would it be possible to be present simultaneously at the place where it is enshrined, or where offerings are made, and he tries to solve the difficulty philosophically and logically. He seems to place too much stress on our notions of ancestral worship. We practise it, we like it, and we think it fine and noble, and yet we do so from a spirit of feeling and sentiment. Many things in connection therewith are done by us, not always with conclusive, logical reasoning. In this respect many Europeans often misjudge us, forgetting that they themselves do the same at home. They canonise meritorious persons, sometimes only legendary; they have their wayside shrines of Madonna; they celebrate All Souls' Day, when the whole town or village flocks to the cemetery; they set up statues of great men,—a statesman, a warrior, a writer, a philanthropist, a musical composer, a sculptor, a scientist, and what not. They construct a grand pantheon or cathedral and consecrate the remains of their distinguished dead therein. They even erect colossal figures of an ideal personification, such as "Liberty" standing on high at the Place de la République, and other figures representing great cities, as at the Place de la Concorde. They sometimes decorate such figures on certain days with flowers, as is the case with the statue of Beaconsfield, which is covered with primroses on Primrose League Day, nay, sometimes a figure is decorated with wreaths all the year round, like Strasbourg at the Place de la Concorde. Mind, with regard to this last, I am not speaking of any political aspect of the matter. All this to my mind is very fine in idea. All this, I think, is not done for mere play, nor are those objects set up for mere ornament. The notion contained therein is, I think, intended to perpetuate and sanctify the memory of the person, or of an idea in the minds of the people. If any stranger, for instance, approach any of these objects and insult it in any gross manner, he would be sure to be much hissed, or even punished. From this, it is certain that these matters belong to the sphere of feeling and sentiment and are not exactly within the limits of strict philosophical and logical reasoning. Our ancestral worship and things connected with it are of the same kind. And yet those Occidentals who have themselves very similar things look upon such institutions in Japan with amazement or curiosity, or even with contempt, or else like Lafcadio Hearn, try to reason out some points which are not altogether soluable by ordinary reasoning. A Confucian saying has this: "When you perform a commemoration in honour of your dead parents, do it as though their spirit is present before you." And I think it quite right; it is no honour to the dead if one make an offering and reasons in his mind at the same time that the dead is nothing more than dust, or that its spirit could not be in existence, or at all events, far away from us in an unknown region. When a foreigner sees the shrine erected in Tokio where men, generals and soldiers alike, who died for their country, are consecrated as a sort of deity, he is apt to think it a peculiar custom. But what difference is there between our observance of the illustrious dead and that of burying a distinguished statesman or soldier in the Pantheon or Westminster Abbey? The only difference in all such matters seems to me to amount to this: the feeling and sentiment of the preservation of the memory of the deserving men is more intent and more general in one case than in the other.'

—'I cannot agree with you altogether in your philosophy,' said a young lady.

—'That may be,' said I. 'You shut your eyes to things near; we have a saying, "A lighthouse does not see its own base." Oh! I beg your pardon. I must not make such remarks; you see, too great a freedom of speech is apt to produce an abuse; nay, that very freedom sometimes even wrecks a grand army on an expedition.'

—'I see. That is the reason why you muzzled all the newspaper correspondents who purposely went out to the Far East, and, by doing so, you have nearly wrecked your own country.'

—'Yes, nearly,' I answered, 'but we happily managed to escape their vindictiveness, and won our battles. No one in the world knew that Togo was quietly waiting with his fleets for the ever-memorable Armada behind the islands of Tsushima, almost on the same spot where the great Mongolian Armada was annihilated some six hundred years ago.'

—'And yet you yourself are rather voluble. You are always talking about something: you talk a good deal more than any ordinary person.'

—'Excuse me,' I retorted, 'I don't think I am voluble at all. By nature I prefer listening to others than talking to them, for in listening to others one can learn something, but nothing when talking to them. I prefer still more to be alone, than either to be listening or talking, for then the waste of time is still less. I only talk when it is absolutely necessary. You know, of course, that from Pythagoras down to Spencer and Huxley, extending, over some four or five thousand years, thousands of philosophers have written books, millions of books, spinning out their thoughts or rather conjectures, like spiders webs, but the essence of it all is summed up in only these few words, "I don't know."'

—'Ah! I see,' cried she, 'you talk nowadays so much, because you think it necessary for the good of your country. Do you know you are generally called the "Japanese Mentor," or the "Missionary of things Japanese.'"