But this characterisation of our tongue does not help us much. One could as well point to the East at large to show where Japan lies! Notwithstanding the general uncertainty as regards the exact position of our language, this much is sure, that Japanese has, in spite of the immense number of loan-words of Chinese origin, no fundamental connection with the monosyllabic language of China, whose different syntactical nature and want of common roots baffles the attempts on the part of some speculative Europeans to connect it with our own tongue. At the same time, it is well known among competent scholars that Japanese, with its most distant dialect Luchuan, bears great kinship to the Corean, Manchurian, and Mongolian languages. It shares with them, besides the dislike of commencing a word with a trilled sound or with a sonant, almost the same rules for the arrangement of the component elements of a sentence. According to the Japanese syntax, the following rules can, for instance, be applied to Corean without alteration:—
1. All the qualifying words and phrases are put before those they qualify. Attributive adjectives and adverbs, and their equivalents, are placed before nouns and verbs they modify.
2. The grammatical subject stands at the beginning of the sentence.
3. Predicative elements are at the end of a sentence.
4. Direct and indirect objects follow the subject.
5. Subordinate sentences precede the principal ones.
One thing worthy of notice is the fact that, notwithstanding the most convincing structural similarity that exists between these affiliated languages, they contain, comparatively speaking, few words in common, even among the numerals and personal pronouns, which have played such an important part in Indo-European philology. We must still wait a long time before a better knowledge of linguistic affinity reveals such decisive links of connection as will enable us to trace our Japanese home on the continent.
Let us now consider what were the effects of the continental civilisation on the mental development of the Japanese within their insular home.
Before entering into details about the various continental doctrines implanted in our country from China and India, it may be well to tell you something of the mental attitude of the Japanese in facing a new form of culture, in many senses far superior to their own. Nothing definite can perhaps be said about it; but when we grope along the main cord of historical phenomena we think we find that the Japanese as a whole are not a people with much aptitude for deep metaphysical ways of thinking. They are not of the calibre from which you expect a Kant or a Schopenhauer. Warlike by nature more than anything else, they have been known from the very beginning to have had the soldier-like simplicity and the easy contentment of men of action—qualities which the practical nature of Confucian ethics had ample chance to develop. The abstruse conceptions of Chinese or Indian origin have been received into the Japanese mind just as they were preached, and usually we have not troubled ourselves to think them out again; but in accordance with our peculiarly quick habit of perceiving the inner meaning of things, we have generalised them straight away and turned them immediately into so many working principles. There are any number of instances of slight hints given by some people on the continent and worked out to suit our own purposes into maxims of immediate and practical value. Ideals in their original home are ideals no longer in our island home. They are interpreted into so many realities with a direct bearing on our daily life. We have been and are, even to this day, always in need of some new hints and suggestions to work up into so many dynamic forces for practical use. Upon Europe and America the full power of our mental searchlight is now playing, in quest of those new ideas for future development for which we have been accustomed to draw mainly on China and India. Even such a commonplace thing as the drinking of a cup of tea becomes in our hands something more: it becomes a training in stoic serenity, in the capacity of smiling at life's troubles and disturbances. Some day you might learn from us a new philosophy based on the use of motor cars and telephones as applied to life and conduct!
This, as you will see, explains why we have failed to produce any original thinkers; this is why we have to recognise our indebtedness for almost all the important ideas which have brought about social innovation either to China or to India, or else to the modern Western nations; and this notwithstanding so many national idiosyncrasies and characteristics which are to be found in the productions of our art and in our life and ways, and which are even as handfuls of grain gathered in foreign fields and brewed into a national drink of utterly Japanese flavour. We are, I think, a people of the Present and the Tangible, of the broad Daylight and the plainly Visible. The undeniable proclivity of our mind in favour of determination and action, as contrasted with deliberation and calm, makes it an uncongenial ground for the sublimity and grandeur of that 'loathed melancholy, of Cerberus and blackest midnight born,' to take deep root in it. Pure reasoning as such has had for us little value beyond the help it affords us in harbouring our drifting thought in some nearest port, where we can follow any peaceful occupation rather than be fighting what we should call a useless fight with troubled billows and unfathomable depths. Such, according to my personal view, are the facts about our mentality considered generally. And now it is necessary to speak of the main waves of cult and culture that successively washed our shores.