All these qualities you will see exemplified in any Japanese work of art—from a large picture down to a tiny wooden carving. Take up a girl's silk dress and examine it carefully, and note how the lining is dyed and embroidered with as great, if not greater care, in order to make it harmonise in colour and design with the visible surface and add some exquisite meaning. Do not forget to look at the back when you come across a lacquered box, for it is not only the surface that receives our careful attention. And above all, you must always keep in mind that our artists think it a duty to be suggestive rather than explicit, and to leave something of their meaning to be divined by those who contemplate their works.
The time is now come to conclude my essay at an exposition of the Japanese spirit. I think I have given you occasion to see something of both the strong and the weak sides of my countrymen; for it is just where our favourable qualities lie that you will also find the corresponding weaknesses. The usual charges brought against us, that we are precocious, unpractical, frivolous, fickle, etc., are not worthy of serious attention, because they are all of them easily explained as but the attendant phenomena of the transitory age from which we are just emerging. Even the more sound accusation of our want of originality must be reconsidered in face of so many facts to the contrary, facts which show us to be at least in small things very original, almost in the French sense of that word. That we have always been ready to borrow hints from other countries is in a great measure to be explained by the consideration that we had from the very beginning the disadvantage and the advantage of having as neighbours nations with a great start in the race-course of civilisation. The cause of our being small in great things, while great in small things, can be partly found in the financial conditions of the country and in the non-individual nature of the culture we have received. These delicate questions will have to be raised again some centuries hence, when a healthy admixture of the European civilisation has been tried—a civilisation the effect of which has been, on the whole, so beneficial to our development, that we feel it a most agreeable duty gratefully to acknowledge our immense obligation to the nations of the West.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The Soul of a People.
[2] Professor T. Inouye's little pamphlet, published first in French, entitled Sur le Développement des Idées Philosophiques au Japon avant l'Introduction de la Civilisation Européenne, will give you some idea of our philosophic systems. For a serious perusal, its German translation, annotated and amplified, by Dr. A. Gramatzky (Kurze Übersicht über die Entwicklung der philosophischen Ideen in Japan, Berlin, 1897), is to be preferred.
[3] Professor Milne, Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, vol. viii. p. 82.
[4] Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, vol. xxv.
[5] Memoirs of the Literary Department of the University of Tôkyô, vol. i.
[6] Die körperlichen Eigenschaften der Japaner, vols. xxviii. and xxxii. of Mittheilungen der Gesellschaft für die Natur- und Völkerkunde Ostasiens.