“Know ye, our subjects:
“Our imperial ancestors have founded our Empire on a basis broad and everlasting and have deeply and firmly implanted virtue; our subjects, ever united in loyalty and filial piety, have from generation to generation illustrated the beauty thereof. This is the glory and the fundamental character of our Empire, and herein also lies the source of our education. Ye, our subjects, be filial to your parents, affectionate to your brothers and sisters; as husbands and wives be harmonious; as friends true; bear yourselves in modesty and moderation; extend your benevolence to all; pursue learning and cultivate arts, and thereby develop intellectual faculties and perfect moral powers; furthermore, advance public good and promote common interests; always respect the Constitution and observe the laws; should emergency arise, offer yourselves courageously to the state; and thus guard and maintain the prosperity of our imperial throne coeval with heaven and earth. So shall ye not only be our good and faithful subjects, but render illustrious the best traditions of your forefathers.
“The way here set forth is indeed the teaching bequeathed by our imperial ancestors, to be observed alike by their descendants and the subjects, infallible for all ages and true in all places. It is our wish to lay it to heart in all reverence, in common with you, our subjects, that we may all thus attain to the same virtue.
“The 30th day of the 10th month of the 23d year of Meiji” [1890].[222]
It would be almost impossible to exaggerate the influence of this imperial edict. “Our whole moral education,” affirms Baron Kikuchi, “consists in instilling into the minds of our children the proper appreciation of the spirit of this rescript.”[223] The children learn it by heart just as the Roman children committed to memory the Twelve Tables of the laws.
Japanese believe that the effect of this instruction upon the national character, reënforcing the ancestral virtues of loyalty and devotion to duty, was exhibited in the recent war with Russia.[224]
A noteworthy feature of the rescript is that it is simply a reaffirmation of the teachings of the ancient moralists and the ethical traditions of the fathers—an inculcation of those virtues of loyalty and filial piety which the Japanese people have held in esteem and practiced from generation to generation.
A second feature of the edict which arrests attention is the universalistic and secular character of the morality inculcated. The virtues enjoined are universal benevolence, loyalty to duty, and self-devotion to the common good—a morality of the universal human heart and conscience, a morality, as the edict declares, good for all ages and for all places.
Japanese morals and Western civilization
The foregoing anticipates and gives answer to the questions: What will be the effect upon Japanese morality of those changes now going on in the life and thought of Japan through contact with the civilization of the West? What will be the effect upon Japanese public morality when the common belief in the divine descent of the Emperor, which is the root from which springs the primal duty of loyalty, is undermined, as modern science is certain to undermine it? What will be the effect upon Japanese domestic morality when Occidental conceptions of the family and of woman’s place in it come to modify, as they seem likely to do, those ideas and sentiments which from time immemorial have formed the basis of the family ethics of the East? What will be the ethical consequences when Western science renders obsolete the Shinto learning and the Confucian classics, which have hitherto formed the basis of so large a part of Japanese morality? What will be the effect upon the ancient ideal of character of the adoption of Christian ideas and teachings in place of those which have so long nourished the ethical feelings and sentiments of the Japanese people?