A Journal from Japan: A Daily Record of Life as Seen by a Scientist

by Marie Carmichael Stopes

Innumerable times have I made believe to answer the question, “How do you like the Japanese?” or the even more impossible one, “What do you think of the Japanese?” Questions generally put by new acquaintances directly after introduction, in crowded drawing-rooms, where we were liable to be torn apart at any moment, and the qualifying clauses which would have followed a preliminary statement to be separated eternally from their principals, which cut but a poor figure without them. I soon found that in common justice I must avoid answering that query. Yet now, at the conclusion of this journal, when there is no escape, the question presents itself once more. A complete answer even here is impossible. Those who have read the foregoing pages will have already the key to much of the answer. But often they were smaller and more subtle things than could be recorded in this journal that built up the real impressions of the country.

Judging from the books on the subject, and the questions which I have been asked since my return, it seems fairly safe to say that nearly everything which is commonly held in England to be “Japanese,” and typical of that country, is not so. The number of horrible “export articles” which have been shown to me as “real Japanese,” or are said to have been brought back from Japan by some relative who had visited it, show that there is not a very wide knowledge of the true domestic culture of that country here. There is a phrase which seems to hover over every conversation on Japan, which should be included in the Book of Bromidioms. It is, “Of course everything in Japan is so artistic!” It sometimes appears in the alternative form, “The Japanese are a nation of artists!” As a result, everything which is guaranteed as coming from Japan is accepted as artistic by most people, and one finds otherwise cultured ladies serving their tea in the most unutterable crockery, which was made in Japan according to the Japanese merchant’s idea of what European (barbaric) taste must be, in defiance of every law of beauty both in Japan and here.

The Japanese are no longer a nation of artists. They cannot afford to be. In the security of their long peace, and when they were shut out from competition with the rest of the world, they evolved for every detail of daily life, and not only for their churches and palaces, formulae by which every workman could construct intrinsically beautiful things. These formulae, where they are undisturbed to-day, still make of the common workman an artist, in so far that he creates a beautiful thing, even if it be only a farthing piece of pottery. But alas, Western influence has in many places disturbed or broken these old traditions, and the craftsman is then like a mariner at sea without a compass. Apart from their own traditions, there is in the great majority of Japanese practically no artistic instinct. As a wise Japanese man once said to me, after deploring the lack of artistic feeling in his countrymen, perhaps it will reappear in another generation. The present one has had to use all its energies and thought for national defence. Commerce, Diplomacy, Education, Scientific Research, all, as well as war, he included in national defence. In these years of stress, Art, being of little account in the Western civilisation which they were trying to assimilate, had to stand aside. Where the progress in a new direction has not disturbed her courts, she is still served as she was served before the revolution, often best in the simple things of life, which in England have not yet been reached by an all-pervading genius, such as penetrated everywhere in the Japan of long ago.

Another of the myths common in this country about Japan is that her people are all brilliantly, almost diabolically, clever. This, I think, is very far from being even a semblance of the truth. With very few exceptions, individual men and women among the Japanese are capable of very much less mental activity in a day than a corresponding English man or woman. An educated Englishman has his hobby, often more or less intellectual, to come to when the day’s work is done. He reads, as a matter of course, a number of books and reviews on all sorts of subjects, and he spends a good many hours per week in social life of various kinds. Because he goes to the theatre one evening or takes his wife to a concert, it does not mean that he requires to come two hours late to work the following day, or that he thinks it an excuse for absenting himself all morning from business. A dinner with a dozen friends in the evening may often precede several hours’ writing late at night, in the life of an English Professor. But the average Japanese intellectual man could not do this at all, or could not do it often. An individual Japanese may make as good a show in his profession as the Englishman, but he is generally economising every possible expenditure of brain force outside this profession, and will enjoy less social life in a month than the average working (not social) Englishman indulges in in a week. It seemed to me to be characteristic of the average Japanese to be only able to hold the reins of one set of thoughts at once. I shall never forget the astonishment with which I listened to a Professor who explained that the reason that he came two hours after the time he should have given his University lecture was that his child had been naughty that morning and required correction, and that it took thought and time to accomplish it. It is difficult to give concrete examples, but on many occasions I have watched one thought ousting another in a Japanese mind which in an Englishman’s would have developed together. This gives an impression of what often appears very like stupidity in a Japanese, outside the range of the one thing that he has in hand, and sometimes even within it. But this does not affect the general position of the nation as a whole when it sets itself to any task, let us say the conquering of the Russians in a war. In Government Departments each man has his special duty, and can concentrate entirely on that. The man above him has to correlate that with the rest, and so on to the top of the service, where the places are generally filled (certainly in the University, a Government Department) by brilliant men, who have what I feel inclined to call the English capacity for controlling a number of things at once. Most of the men at the top have been in the West, and even without that additional training they form exceptions to the rule which the others seem to exemplify. The nation as a whole then, composed of individuals who are rather stupid, led by brilliant men, and worked with a splendid system of organisation, assisted by the old feudal spirit not yet dead, presents to the world as good or better a front than one in which the individuals are each more independently developed.

Even in merely manual labour, the Japanese in Japan do not seem to do so much as workmen do at home. A Japanese coal mine has in its pay nearly one-half as many workers again as an English mine with the same output. The climate has much to do with this, and the national customs. The climate, although beautiful and sunny nearly all the year round, has a subtle lethargic effect, so that even the Englishman in Japan does less than he could do in England. Generations of this insidious influence have undoubtedly affected the Japanese; the children playing so quietly with none of the obstreperousness of vigorous youth are an index of its power.

A question that few of my drawing-room acquaintances spare me is one on the religious condition of the Japanese. This is generally so worded that it is clear that the interrogator is already certain that they are devoid of religious feeling, but that he trusts the West is doing something for the stimulation of their souls. Again I must disagree with the popular impression in this country. There is no land in which I have been where there seemed to be a more universal religious feeling, none in which the religion formed more an integral part of daily life. The religious temperament is strongly developed in the majority of Japanese. But the religious temperament is not to be confounded with any particular religion. It is indeed often most strongly developed in those who appear to have no religion, perhaps because the very strength of their religious instincts debars them from being satisfied with the formulated religion of their time. In little-educated people too that instinct often finds expression in superstitions, or in the popular forms of religions which have a pantheon of gods or saints. Thus is it in Japan. Their feeling for religion is gratified constantly throughout every day, not kept apart for the Sabbath, as it is here. It is true that the religious ideas of the mass of the people are neither very clear nor very high, but they are a very real part of their daily life. In the country in England one may go many miles without seeing a church, and we do not have wayside shrines, but in Japan there is some shrine or temple at every turn, in nearly every house, even in most hotels. And these shrines are not deserted, they are tended daily by the passers-by as well as by the dwellers in the immediate neighbourhood. In the main streets of Tokio, the streets where the West has penetrated, even there I have seen little shrines, perhaps like dolls’ houses, only a couple of feet high, reverently tended by passing labourers, or coolies who set down a long pole with its swinging burdens to present some little offering to the spirit of the shrine. It may be that all they have to offer are the worn sandals which they take off their feet, or a wisp of straw.

It is curious to notice how largely straw enters into the place of religious offerings. Straw ropes hang before the temple gates, or single straws depending from a line make a decorative fringe; old straw sandals, or new and monstrous sandals specially made for the purpose, are offered in piles to a small shrine. This offering of straw is symbolic in a land where so many things are made of it. The matting and nearly all the comforts of the house are made of straw, the sandals and rain coats, the labourer’s hats,—in the very poor places even the walls as well as the thatch of his house are all made of straw. Those who are too poor to give the ears of the rice except on special occasions, can yet afford a wisp of rice-straw for many a shrine, and rice is naturally symbolic of all their material welfare. It is not only in the peasant that this close daily touch of religion may be found. Driven back to the secret places of the house, and not spoken of to foreigners, is yet the shrine, kept with its daily ministration, in homes where one would least expect to find it. I asked an “atheist” scientific professor once what he would do if the woman whom he loved should die. He told me that he would engrave her name on the tablet in his shrine, before which was a prayer made every day. The religious instinct is a far greater thing than any formulated religion, and though missionaries may continue to tell the world that the Japanese are naturally irreligious, that will not prevent the Japanese from being deeply religious—until they have assimilated the Western attitude to religion, as they are doing toward other things. Perhaps one reason that the missionary finds the Japanese irreligious is that they take religion so happily, and make of it so much a part of their daily life, laughing in the temples, playing round the temple grounds, lighting the light of their little shrines in their homes when their household lamps are lit. One of the commonest sights in Japan is a band of peasant pilgrims on their way to some shrine, and it is the ambition of innumerable poor folk, who could never afford ordinary travel and holidays, to visit every temple of importance in the country. How many English common folk since the days of the Canterbury Pilgrims would travel on foot for a hundred miles to lay a wisp of straw on a shrine? Because the Japanese are not (and I think never will be in our sense of the word) Christians there is no excuse for our concluding that they are not religious.

Only of one thing more will I now speak. Sometimes carelessly, sometimes sadly, it has often been said that there can be no true understanding, no deep friendship between the East and the West. Even Lafcadio Hearn is quoted as an instance of the disappointment that must await the foreigner who tries to get to the heart of a Japanese. And Lafcadio Hearn, as is now being recognised, has shown us more truly and more beautifully than any other writer the inner life of Japan. He tells us, it is true, that in the end he found that it was only with the children that we could reach a real and close understanding and love, that as they grew up to men and women they receded farther and farther from one, till a great wall was built between them, and the lovable and loving child had become a friend who had lost the key of sympathy. This is perhaps true in most cases, but we must not forget that with his genius for suggestive and true description, and for poetical rendering of the things around him, Hearn seems to have had also a perfect genius for destroying individual friendships. Evidence of this is found cropping up in many places in Japan, where he shattered his friendships with English and Japanese alike; and it is already made clear in his Letters. One of the tests of friendship is time, and only at the end of a lifetime can one say just which men and women had been one’s real friends, but circumstance is almost as good a test as time, and that may give its stamp to a relationship very swiftly. Some Japanese—perhaps, nay certainly, they are exceptional natures—have a genius for friendship. There is in them a sweetness and delicacy, a sensitive comprehension of moods, a depth of feeling and a beauty of feeling which only the exceptional Westerner could match. The almost inhuman coldness which is so often attributed to the Japanese is not at all truly characteristic of them. Their reserve appears to us to be reserve only because we do not know how to read the signs of their expression, and because many careless Europeans before us may have trampled on holy ground. The apparently immobile face is immobile only because we ourselves are not alive to its subtle changes. When you know a Japanese face it is as eloquent as that of a sensitive English girl. And the moods and feelings it mirrors are not alien to ours. Some of the thoughts and some of the conclusions from the same premises may be different from ours, but they are not the essentials in friendship. The coldness and the insincerity of the Japanese are qualities which we have largely invented for them to save us the trouble of learning their truths, and of cultivating the power to read their subtle expressions. Nor are they always difficult to read if we have the privilege of friendship. In the “changeless eyes” of the Japanese I have seen fire and mist, radiance and storm. I have seen men’s tears welling up from the sweetness beneath to veil the eyes that looked on sorrowful things, or things so beautiful as to be a pain—as is Mount Fuji in an opal morning. In the hearts of some Japanese I have found friendship, tested by circumstance, true, and generous, and sweet. Those from the West who cannot find it also need not lay all the blame on the Japanese.