“Spiritually there is very undeniable decadence. Open ports, huge fleets of steamers, thousands of miles of rails, telephone and telegraph wires, a navy ranking at least seventh in the world’s list, a consolidated postal system, flourishing banks, and all else of like nature, are nothing more than signs of material progress. Like our allies, we have grown worldly wise, and have come to view the almighty dollar with a feeling akin to veneration. People point, and with justice, to the tremendous social revolution of the Restoration days; but where we have got rid of daimyō and shōmyō, of hatamoto and samurai, have we not plutocrats and bureaucrats as potent and unconscionable as the most tyrannical of the one-time feudal barons? The outcast pariahs—the eta—no longer exist in law or name; but they exist in fact. The operatives of the Ōsaka mills, the wretched human shambles of the prostitute quarters, the sick and suffering poor—are these not social pariahs and even worse? We miss the sternly martial virtue of the days of yore; the unbending dignity of the true, the real Yamato-damashii (the spirit of Japanese chivalry).... Never were bribery and corruption more rife: the whole machinery of the State is suffering from this dry-rot; and even those who are called upon to set the country an example have their price. Nepotism is taking the place of clannish interdependence. One’s fortunes are easily made if one happens to be a ‘forty-second cousin’ of a favourite courtesan, a popular geisha, or a spoiled mistress.”
“Irresponsible rhetoric,” the reader may think, and indulged in the more freely because the writer chose to employ the English tongue, which is yet unknown to the majority of his countrymen. But these considerations do not apply to the official utterances of an ex-Premier (Count Okuma) and his Minister of Education. The former, who is not chary of autobiography, in a speech which created some sensation confessed that as a young man he had been too dazzled by the splendour of Western civilisation to appreciate the seamy side of material progress, but recent experience of popular movements and public affairs had convinced him that the supreme need of all classes, if their prosperity were to continue, was a return to the higher morality of the past. Mr. Hayashi, who may be thought to have interpreted his duty of directing national education too literally, put the matter in a nutshell. “Let us suppose,” said he to a popular audience, “that Japan in the course of a thousand years or so were to become a republic. If the same Mammon-worship should exist then as exists now, it is certain that the Vanderbilt or Jay Gould of the day would be elected President.” Few nations care to be lectured in this way, even by Ministers of Education. The result was a violent agitation, fomented in the patriotic Press, which demanded the resignation of one who could be so disloyal to his sovereign as to hint at a possible republic ten centuries ahead. The rash moralist found it expedient to resign. Assuming, however, as one is perhaps entitled to assume, that the speaker had chiefly in mind the venality of politicians, I doubt very much either the extent or the heinousness of the evil denounced. Reduced to detail, the charges amount to this: that electors and deputies have been known to sell their votes and to advocate measures from which they have made preparations to derive financial benefit. Such evils are inseparable from the infancy of representative government, and persist in veiled form in its maturity. The Unionist member of the Salisbury-Chamberlain party who has been called upon to vote successive bounties or remission of taxes to landed proprietors and clerical tithe-payers is guilty of somewhat similar acts, with this trifling difference: that instead of rewarding his supporters with money from his own purse, he draws upon the State treasury. It would not be surprising if Japanese politicians were more openly corrupt than our own, for most of them take American politics as the nearest and most friendly school of democracy—a school where self-seeking is avowedly the first duty of a public man, and where the prizes fall to the cleverest manipulator or servitor of plutocratic trusts. But, as a matter of fact, neither Tammany nor Panama is yet transplanted to the banks of Sumidagawa. The laws aimed at electoral bribery are stringent and frequently enforced. Accusations of corruption are invariably followed by official inquiry. It is evident, then, that if the offender be sometimes clever enough to evade discovery, at least public opinion is neither cynical nor depraved. A stronger negative argument is furnished by the fact that the Liberals and Progressives (as the two anti-ministerial parties were called until the fusion in 1898), who had been excluded until that year from office, though constituting on more than one occasion a majority in the Lower House of the Diet, did not accuse the Ministers who launched Japan on the sea of parliamentary government of either misgovernment or dishonest finance. Nepotism was the sum and substance of their complaint. The Chōshi men monopolised the chief posts in the railway department, the Satsuma men held control of army and navy: in a word, the ascendency of the pre-revolutionary clans survived the revolution. But, when their own turn came in the summer of 1898 to divide the spoils of office, to which they had been summoned by the astuteness of Marquess Ito, prompt to cover personal chagrin at his own defeat by advocacy of his opponents’ claims to Imperial recognition, the followers of Counts Okuma and Itagaki found it impossible to reconcile the claims of contending office-seekers. Indeed, so bitter did the dissensions become, that the alliance was dissolved, and the first Ministry based on a majority in the Lower House disbanded before the Diet met. Power has since reverted to the same men, whose sagacity has made Japan triumph alike over armed foes and treaty-allies. Seeing that no more than eight per cent. of the population have votes, participation in home politics is confined to a comparatively small circle; and not to all of them, since most of the merchants with whom I conversed on the subject were content to leave their interests in the hands of the authorities, and expressed great resentment at the action of the sōshi or professional agitators employed by politicians to cajole or threaten a constituency. It is inevitable at present that place and power should be the goal of all parties, and that politics should present the aspect of a scramble for office. There is no dividing-line between political parties, as elsewhere. No one desires to return to the feudal régime, or to tamper with the Constitution, or to limit the royal prerogative. In the face of national danger it is easy for all parties to unite, since nothing divides them but such questions as the incidence of taxation and the distribution of posts. In the course of time, should the last vestige of acquiescent docility on the part of the toilers be swept away, the industrial sphinx will pose its question to the Japanese as to all other modern communities; the rich will be ranged against the poor, the socialist against the conservative. But, as things are now, even the loss of diplomatic prestige occasioned by the triumph of Russia in Manchuria, of which the blame cannot justly be assigned to isolated Japan, is counterbalanced by the careful development of military and commercial resources which would seem the crowning duty of the Emperor’s advisers. The increasing prosperity of the country is the best answer to malevolent critics, and, if the charge of spiritual decadence in politics is to be sustained, weightier evidence must be produced than the writer has been able to discover.
Well, I have taken a bird’s-eye view of the Japanese as they appear to the resident alien, because his protesting voice is generally drowned in the joyful ejaculations of passing travellers. I have put aside for the moment my own prepossessions, which were only strengthened by intercourse with natives of every class, in order that the dark side of the shield might not be veiled. Dishonest traders aided by tortuous enactments, and mistrustful teachers suspicious of Western propaganda, insubordinate inferiors and incompetent officials—all these constitute grave stumbling-blocks to happiness; But it would not be fair to ignore the facts which promise a brighter future. There are many firms whose integrity is unquestioned, many journalists who try to stem the current of national misunderstanding by sagacious counsel. Experience and fuller knowledge are sure to prove wholesome correctives. The anti-foreign bias, though real and formidable, is based on the fear of half-understood eventualities. Closer intercourse and wider education will cause wisdom to spread down from the rulers to the ruled, who are not yet on familiar terms with our conceptions of trade and government.
It is to be hoped, when the nation feels thoroughly at home in its new house, equipped from garret to cellar with the latest improvements and occupied by a tenant-proprietor whom no conceivable machination of jealous neighbours can dislodge, that even the foreign lodger will be permitted to exercise his calling without the slightest hindrance or disability.
So much for the world behind the scenes, of which a glimpse has been vouchsafed to the reader. It will be seen that those who sustain rôles in the daintiest of comediettas are also cast for a problem-play; that they are no more exempt from envy, hatred, and vanity than other sensitive artists; that their professional dislike to alien amateurs, who add insult to injury by expecting the deference due to higher national status while competing for the pence and plaudits of the same public, is very human and not without excuse; that, in spite of these infirmities, they may be industrious bread-winners and excellent performers. After all, the proper place for sightseers is the front of the house. Let us go there, and forget the intrigues of the green-room, in which we have happily no concern. We have come many miles to witness the play; let us give it undivided attention.
[NOTE TO “BEHIND THE SCENES.” CASSANDRA JUSTIFIED?]
Though time and space had so muffled the protesting shrieks of Cassandra that I could no longer hear her whirling prophecies or follow her sorry fortunes from day to day in the chivalrous Press of the treaty-ports, I never lost interest or sympathy in her loudly predicted future. I would picture her borne with streaming eyes and hair from her extra-territorial temple; I would ask myself whether she had yet been borne off into bondage unspeakable by some Japanese Agamemnon. News travels slowly, and I was forced to content myself with the most meagre reports, when one day came a letter with the Yokohama postmark, in which the writer took exception to some statements made by me in a lecture to the Playgoers’ Club on the subject of Japanese theatres, and improved the occasion by despatching much irrelevant information on the subject of Japanese iniquity. I owe a heavy debt of gratitude to Mr. F. Schroeder, the editor and proprietor of The Eastern World, for those letters and pamphlets. They assure me of the welcome fact that Cassandra is alive and free, and protesting more loudly than ever. I gladly give publicity to the incidents and speculations recorded in them, for, while they seem to justify honest apprehension on the part of Cassandra’s friends, they also contain indications that Agamemnon is by no means so subject to Thersites as the foes of Far Eastern democracy would have us believe.