The Gist of Japan: The Islands, Their People, and Missions

by R. B. Peery

B. "I will now be very impolite and leave you."

A. "If that is so, excuse me. Sayonara."

V

JAPANESE CIVILIZATION

The question is often asked, Are the Japanese a civilized people? The answer will entirely depend upon our definition of civilization. If civilization consists in a highly organized commercial and industrial life, in the construction and use of huge, towering piles of manufactories and commercial houses, such as are seen in New York and Chicago, in amassing enormous capital, controlling the trade of the country by monopolies, and doing the work of the world by machinery that moves with the precision of clockwork, then Japan is not yet civilized. But if civilization consists in a courteous, refined manner, in a calm enjoyment of literature and the arts, in an ability to live easily and comfortably with a due regard to all the amenities of life, then the Japanese are a civilized people.

A very brilliant writer on Japanese subjects[[1]] has said that the Japanese have been a civilized people for at least a thousand years. Chinese civilization was brought to Japan early in the Christian era, and flourished for more than fifteen hundred years. While it differs much from European civilization, it is a highly organized and developed system, venerable with age. When people of the West speak of civilized countries they are apt to think of Europe and America, to the exclusion of all the rest of the world. This is unfair. Chinese civilization is much older than our own. Long before the dark ages of Europe the Chinese were living under a regular system of laws and were engaged in all peaceful pursuits. Systematic methods of agriculture, the art of printing, gunpowder, and the mariners' compass were all known and used. While our own forefathers in northern Europe roamed the forests as wild men and dressed in skins, the Chinese were living quietly in cities and towns, dressed in silks. This venerable Chinese civilization was readily adopted in Japan, and prevailed down to the time of the Restoration, in 1868. Since that time the adoption and assimilation of Western civilization have been progressing with a rapidity and success which have no precedent in the history of the world. The old immobile, crystallized Chinese civilization has been thrown off, and the vigorous, elastic forms of the West have been successfully adopted. Japanese civilization of to-day is European, only with a national coloring.

[[1]] Lafcadio Hearn.

On the advice of an American missionary,[[2]] who was then president of the Imperial University, and who arranged the program for the expedition, in 1872 a committee of seventy intelligent Japanese gentlemen, many of them from the noble families, was sent to the West to visit the capitals of the several countries, examine into their forms of government and civilization, and, of all that they found, to choose and bring back with them what was best adapted to Japan. This committee, after visiting Washington, London, Berlin, and other places, and carefully examining into their different institutions, returned and reported to the government. From this time began the rapid adoption of Western civilization, which is still in progress.