Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic

by Sidney Lewis Gulick

FICKLENESS—STOLIDITY—STOICISM

A frequent criticism of the Japanese is that they are fickle; that they run from one fad to another, from one idea to another, quickly tiring of each in turn. They are said to lack persistence in their amusements no less than in the most serious matters of life.

None will deny the element of truth in this charge. In fact, the Japanese themselves recognize that of late their progress has been by "waves," and not a few lament it. A careful study of school attendance will show that it has been subject to alternate waves of popularity and disfavor. Private schools glorying in their hundreds of pupils have in a short time lost all but a few score. In 1873 there was a passion for rabbits, certain varieties of which were then for the first time introduced into Japan. For a few months these brought fabulous prices, and became a subject of the wildest speculation. In 1874-75 cock-fighting was all the rage. Foreign waltzing and gigantic funerals were the fashion one year, while wrestling was the fad at another time, even the then prime minister, Count Kuroda, taking the lead. But the point of our special interest is as to whether fickleness is an essential element of Japanese character, and so dominant that wherever the people may be and whatever their surroundings, they will always be fickle; or whether this trait is due to the conditions of their recent history. Let us see.

Prof. Basil H. Chamberlain says, "Japan stood still so long that she has to move quickly and often now to make up for lost time." This states the case pretty well. Had we known Japan only through her Tokugawa period, the idea of fickleness would not have occurred to us; on the contrary, the dominant impression would have been that of the permanence and fixity of her life and customs. This quality or appearance of fickleness is, then, a modern trait, due to the extraordinary circumstances in which Japan finds herself. The occurrence of wave after wave of fresh fashions and fads is neither strange nor indicative of an essentially fickle disposition. Glancing below the surface for a moment, we shall see that there is an earnestness of purpose which is the reverse of fickle.

What nation, for example, ever voluntarily set itself to learn the ways and thoughts and languages of foreign nations as persistently as Japan? That there has been fluctuation of intensity is not so surprising as that, through a period of thirty years, she has kept steadily at it. Tens of thousands of her young men are now, able to read the English language with some facility; thousands are also able to read German and French. Foreign languages are compulsory in all the advanced schools. A regulation going into force in September, 1900, requires the study of two foreign languages. This has been done at a cost of many hundred thousands of dollars. There has been a fairly permanent desire and effort to learn all that the West has to teach. The element of fickleness is to be found chiefly in connection with the methods rather than in connection with the ends to be secured. From the moment when Japan discovered that the West had sources of power unknown to herself, and indispensable if she expected to hold her own with the nations of the world, the aim and end of all her efforts has been to master the secrets of that power. She has seen that education is one important means. That she should stumble in the adoption of educational methods is not strange. The necessary experience is being secured. But for a lesson of this sort, more than one generation of experience is required of a nation. For some time to come Japan is sure to give signs of unsteadiness, of lack of perfect balance.

A pitiful sight in Japan is that of boys not more than five or six years of age pushing or pulling with all their might at heavily loaded hand-carts drawn by their parents. Yet this is typical of one aspect of Japanese civilization. The work is largely done by young people under thirty, and vast multitudes of the workers are under twenty years of age. This is true not only of menial labor, but also in regard to labor involving more or less responsibility. In the post offices, for instance, the great majority of the clerks are mere boys. In the stores one rarely sees a man past middle age conducting the business or acting as clerk. Why are the young so prominent? Partly because of the custom of "abdication." As "family abdication" is frequent, it has a perceptible effect on the general character of the nation, and accounts in part for rash business ventures and other signs of impetuosity and unbalanced judgment. Furthermore, under the new civilization, the older men have become unfitted to do the required work. The younger and more flexible members of the rising generation can quickly adjust themselves to the new conditions, as in the schools, where the older men, who had received only the regular training in Chinese classics, were utterly incompetent as teachers of science. Naturally, therefore, except for instruction in these classics, the common-school teachers, during the earlier decades, were almost wholly young boys. The extreme youthfulness of school-teachers has constantly surprised me. In the various branches of government this same phenomenon is equally common. Young men have been pushed forward into positions with a rapidity and in numbers unknown in the West, and perhaps unknown in any previous age in Japan.

The rise and decline of the Christian Church in Japan has been instanced as a sign of the fickleness of the people. It is a mistaken instance, for there are many other causes quite sufficient to account for the phenomenon in question. Let me illustrate by the experience of an elderly Christian. He had been brought to Christ through the teachings of a young man of great brilliancy, whose zeal was not tempered with full knowledge—which, however, was not strange, in view of his limited opportunities for learning. His instruction was therefore narrow, not to say bigoted. Still the elderly gentleman found the teachings of the young man sufficiently strong and clear thoroughly to upset all his old ideas of religion, his polytheism, his belief in charms, his worship of ancestors, and all kindred ideas. He accepted the New Testament in simple unquestioning faith. But, after six or eight years, the young instructor began to lose his own primitive and simple faith. He at once proceeded to attack that which before he had been defending and expounding. Soon his whole theological position was changed. Higher criticism and religious philosophy were now the center of his preaching and writing. The result was that this old gentleman was again in danger of being upset in his religious thinking. He felt that his new faith had been received in bulk, so to speak, and if a part of it were false, as his young teacher now asserted, how could he know that any of it was true? Yet his heart's experience told him that he had secured something in this faith that was real; he was loath to lose it; consequently, for some years now, he has systematically stayed away from church services, and refrained from reading magazines in which these new and destructive views have been discussed; he has preferred to read the Bible quietly at home, and to have direct communion with God, even though, in many matters of Biblical or theoretical science, he might hold his mistaken opinions. A surface view of this man's conduct might lead one to think of him as fickle; but a deeper consideration will lead to the opposite conclusion.

The fluctuating condition of the Christian churches is not cause for astonishment, nor is it to be wholly, if at all, attributed to the fickleness of the national character, but rather, in a large degree, to the peculiar conditions of Japanese life. The early Christians had much to learn. They knew, experimentally, but little of Christian truth. The whole course of Christian thought, the historical development of theology, with the various heresies, the recent discussions resting on the so-called "higher criticism" of the Bible, together with the still more recent investigations into the history and philosophy of religion in general, were of course wholly unknown to them. This was inevitable, and they were blameless. All could not be learned at once.

Nor is there any blame attached to the missionaries. It was as impossible for them to impart to young and inexperienced Christians a full knowledge of these matters as it was for the latter to receive such information. The primary interest of the missionaries was in the practical and everyday duties of the Christian life, in the great problem of getting men and women to put away the superstitions and narrowness and sins springing from polytheism or practical atheism, and getting them started in ways of godliness. The training schools for evangelists were designed to raise up practical workers rather than speculative theologians. Missionaries considered it their duty (and they were beyond question right) to teach religion rather than the science and philosophy of religion. When, therefore, the evangelists discovered that they had not been taught these advanced branches of knowledge, it is not strange that some should rush after them, and, in their zeal for that which they supposed to be important, hasten to criticise their former teachers. As a result, they undermined both their own faith and that of many who had become Christians through their teaching.

The dullness of the church life, so conspicuous at present in many of the churches, is only partly due to the fact that the Christians are tired of the services. It is true that these services no longer afford them that mental and spiritual stimulus which they found at the first, and that, lacking this, they find little inducement to attend. But this is only a partial explanation. Looking over the experience of the past twenty-five years, we now see that the intense zeal of the first few years was a natural result of a certain narrowness of view. It is an interesting fact that, during one of the early revivals in the Doshisha, the young men were so intense and excited that the missionaries were compelled to restrain them. These young Christians felt and said that the missionaries were not filled with the Holy Spirit; they accordingly considered it their duty to exhort their foreign leaders, even to chide them for their lack of faith. The extraordinary expectations entertained by the young Japanese workers of those days and shared by the missionaries, that Japan was to become a Christian nation before the end of the century, was due in large measure to an ignorance alike of Christianity, of human nature, and of heathenism, but, under the peculiar conditions of life, this was well-nigh inevitable. And that great and sudden changes in feeling and thought have come over the infant churches, in consequence of the rapid acquisition of new light and new experience, is equally inevitable. These changes are not primarily attributable to fickleness of nature, but to the extraordinary additions to their knowledge.