Evolution of the Japanese
Social and Psychic
BY
SIDNEY L. GULICK, M.A.
Missionary of the American Board in Japan
NEW YORK CHICAGO TORONTO
Fleming H. Revell Company
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THE GROWTH OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD
By
SIDNEY L. GULICK, M.A.
Illustrated with Twenty-six Diagrams 12 mo, Cloth, $1.50
“Commends itself to thoughtful, earnest men of any nation as a most valuable missionary paper. Mr. Gulick traces the Christian religion through history and up to now. The survey is calm, patient, thoroughly honest, and quietly assured.”
--Evangelist.
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY
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PREFACE
The present work is an attempt to interpret the characteristics of modern Japan in the light of social science. It also seeks to throw some light on the vexed question as to the real character of so-called race-nature, and the processes by which that nature is transformed. If the principles of social science here set forth are correct, they apply as well to China and India as to Japan, and thus will bear directly on the entire problem of Occidental and Oriental social intercourse and mutual influence.
The core of this work consists of addresses to American and English audiences delivered by the writer during his recent furlough. Since returning to Japan, he has been able to give but fragments of time to the completion of the outlines then sketched, and though he would gladly reserve the manuscript for further elaboration, he yields to the urgency of friends who deem it wise that he delay no longer in laying his thought before the wider public.
To Japanese readers the writer wishes to say that although he has not hesitated to make statements painful to a lover of Japan, he has not done it to condemn or needlessly to criticise, but simply to make plain what seem to him to be the facts. If he has erred in his facts or if his interpretations reflect unjustly on the history or spirit of Japan, no one will be more glad than he for corrections. Let the Japanese be assured that his ruling motive, both in writing about Japan and in spending his life in this land, is profound love for the Japanese people. The term "native" has been freely used because it is the only natural correlative for "foreign." It may be well to say that neither the one nor the other has any derogatory implication, although anti-foreign natives, and anti-native foreigners, sometimes so use them.
The indebtedness of the writer is too great to be acknowledged in detail. But whenever he has been conscious of drawing directly from any author for ideas or suggestions, effort has been made to indicate the source.
Since the preparation of the larger part of this work several important contributions to the literature on Japan have appeared which would have been of help to the writer, could he have referred to them during the progress of his undertaking. Rev. J.C.C. Newton's "Japan: Country, Court, and People"; Rev. Otis Cary's "Japan and Its Regeneration"; and Prof. J. Nitobe's "Bushido: The Soul of Japan," call for special mention. All are excellent works, interesting, condensed, informative, and well-balanced. Had the last named come to hand much earlier it would have received frequent reference and quotation in the body of this volume, despite the fact that it sets forth an ideal rather than the actual state of Old Japan.
Special acknowledgment should be made of the help rendered by my brothers, Galen M. Fisher and Edward L. Gulick, and by my sister, Mrs. F.F. Jewett, in reading and revising the manuscript. Acknowledgment should also be made of the invaluable criticisms and suggestions in regard to the general theory of social evolution advocated in these pages made by my uncle, Rev. John T. Gulick, well known to the scientific world for his contributions to the theory as well as to the facts of biological evolution.
S.L.G.
MATSUYAMA, JAPAN.
CONTENTS
[I. PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS]
Occidental conceptions of the recent history of Japan—Japan seems to be contradicting our theory of national evolution—Similarities of ancient and modern Japan—Japanese evolution is "natural"—The study of Japanese social evolution is of unusual interest, because it has experienced such marked changes—Because it is now in a stage of rapid growth—And is taking place before our eyes—Also because here is taking place a unique union of Occidental and Oriental civilizations—Comparison between India and Japan, 23
Mythology and tradition—Authentic history—Old Japan—The transition from Old to New Japan—New Japan—Compelled by foreign nations to centralize—Ideals and material instruments supplied from abroad—Exuberant Patriotism—"Ai-koku-shin," 35
[III. THE PROBLEM OF PROGRESS]
Is Japan making progress?—Happiness as a criterion—The oppressive rule of militarism—The emptiness of the ordinary life—The condition of woman—"The Greater Learning for Woman"—Divorce—Progress defined—Deficiency of the hedonistic criterion of progress, 52
Progress a modern conception and ideal—How was the "cake of custom" broken?—"Government by discussion" an insufficient principle of progress—Two lines of progress, Ideal and Material—The significance of Perry's coming to Japan—Effect on Japan of Occidental ideas—The material element of progress—Mistaken praise of the simplicity of Old Japan, L. Hearn—The significance of the material element of civilization—Mastery of nature—The defect of Occidental civilization, 61
[V. JAPANESE SENSITIVENESS TO ENVIRONMENT]
Our main question—Illustrations—Japanese students abroad—Sensitiveness to ridicule—Advantages and disadvantages of this characteristic—National sensitiveness to foreign criticism—Nudity—Formosa—Mental and physical flexibility—Adjustability—Some apparent exceptions—Chinese ideographs—How account for these characteristics, 72
[VI. WAVES OF FEELING—ABDICATION]
The Japanese are emotional—An illustration from politics—The tendency to run to extremes—Danger of overemphasizing this tendency—Japanese silent dissent—Men of balance in public life—Abdication—Gubbins quoted—Is abdication an inherent trait? 82
[VII. HEROES AND HERO-WORSHIP]
Popular national heroes—The craving for modern heroes—Townsend Harris's insight into Oriental character—Hero-worship an obstacle to missionary work—Capt. Jaynes—An experience in Kumamoto—"The sage of Omi"—"The true hero"—Moral heroes in Japan—The advantage and disadvantage of hero-worship—Modern moral heroes—Hero-worship depends on personality and idealism—The new social order is producing new ideals and new heroes, 89
Japanese love for children—Children's festivals—Toys and toy-stores—Do Japanese love children more than Americans do?—Importance in Japan of maintaining the family line—The looseness of the Japanese family tie—Early cessation of demonstrative affection—Infanticide, 96
Affection between husband and wife—Occidental and Oriental estimate of woman contrasted—This a subject easily-misunderstood—Kissing a social habit unknown in Japan—Demonstrative affection a social, not a racial characteristic—Some specific illustrations, Dr. Neesima—A personal experience—Illegitimate children—Fraudulent registration—Adult adoption—Divorce—Monogamy, polygamy, and prostitution—Race character, social order, and affection—Position of women—The social order and affection—The social order and the valuation of man and woman—The new social order and the valuation of man—The spread of Christian ideals and the re-organization of the family, 102
[X. CHEERFULNESS—INDUSTRY—TRUTHFULNESS—SUSPICIOUSNESS]
Japanese cheerfulness—Festivals—Pessimism existent, but easily overlooked—The ubiquity of children gives an appearance of cheerfulness—Industry—Illustrations—Easy-going—Sociological interpretation—Mutual confidence and trustfulness—Relation to communalistic feudalism—Changes in the social order and in character—The American Board's experience in trusting Japanese honor—The Doshisha and its difficulties—Suspiciousness—Necessary under the old social order—The need of constant care in conversation, 115
[XI. JEALOUSY—REVENGE—HUMANE FEELINGS]
Jealousy particularly ascribed to women—How related to the social order—Is jealousy limited to women?—Revenge—Taught as a moral duty—Revenge and the new social order—Are the Japanese cruel?—First impressions—Treatment of the insane—Of lepers—The cruelty and hardness of heart of Old Japan—Buddhistic teaching and practice—Buddhist and Christian Orphan Asylums—Treatment of horses—Torture in Old Japan—Crucifixion and transfixion by spears—Hard-heartedness cultivated under feudalism—Cruelty and the humane feelings in the Occident—Abolition of cruel customs in ancient and in Old Japan—Cruelty a sociological, not a biological characteristic—The rise of humane feelings—Doctors and hospitals—Philanthropy, 127
Ambition, both individual and national—The "Kumamoto Band"—Self-confidence and conceit—Refined in nature—Illustrations in the use of English—Readiness of young men to assume grave responsibilities—A product of the social order—Assumptions of inferiority by the common people—Obsequiousness—Modern self-confidence and assumptions not without ground—Self-confidence and success—Self-confidence and physical size—Young men and the recent history of Japan—The self-confidence and conceit of Western nations—The open-mindedness of most Japanese, 137
[XIII. PATRIOTISM—APOTHEOSIS—COURAGE]
"Yamato-Damashii": "The Soul of Japan"—Patriotism and the recent war with China—Patriotism of Christian orphans—Mr. Ishii—Patriotism is for a person, not for country—National patriotism is modern—Passionate devotion to the Emperor—A gift of 20,000,000 yen to the Emperor—The constitution derives its authority from the Emperor—A quotation from Prof. Yamaguchi—Japanese Imperial succession is of Oriental type—Concubines and children of the reigning Emperor—Apotheosis, Oriental and Occidental—Apotheosis and national unity—The political conflict between Imperial and popular sovereignty—Japanese and Roman apotheosis—Prof. Nash quoted—Courage—Cultivated in ancient times—A peculiar feature of Japanese courage—"Harakiri"—E. Griffis quoted—A boy hero—Relation of courage to social order—Japanese courage not only physical—modern instance of moral courage, 144
[XIV. FICKLENESS—STOLIDITY—STOICISM]
Illustrations of fickleness—Prof. Chamberlain's explanation—Fickleness a modern trait—Continuity of purpose in spite of changes of method—The youth of those on whom responsibility rests—Fluctuation of interest in Christianity not a fair illustration—The period of fluctuation is passing away—Impassiveness—"Putty faces"—Distinguish between stupidity and stoicism—Stupid stolidity among the farmers—Easily removed—Social stolidity cultivated—Demanded by the old social order—The influence of Buddhism in suppressing expression of emotion—An illustration of suppressed curiosity—Lack of emotional manifestations when the Emperor appears in public—Stolidity a social, not a racial trait—A personal experience—The increased vivacity of Christian women—Relations of emotional to intellectual development and to the social order, 159
[XV. ÆSTHETIC CHARACTERISTICS]
The wide development of the æsthetic sense in Japan—Japanese æsthetic development is unbalanced—The sense of smell—Painting—Japanese art pays slight attention to the human form—Sociological interpretation—The nude in Japanese art—Relation to the social order—Art and immorality—Caricature—Fondness for the abnormal in nature—Abnormal stones—Tosa cocks—Æsthetics of speech—The æsthetic sense and the use of personal pronouns—Deficiency of the æsthetic development in regard to speech—Sociological explanations—Close relation of æsthetics and conduct—Sociological explanation for the wide development of the æsthetic sense—The classes lived in close proximity—The spirit of dependence and imitation—Universality of culture more apparent than real—Defects of æsthetic taste—Defective etiquette—How accounted for—Old and new conditions—"Western taste debasing Japanese art"—Illustration of aboriginal æsthetic defects—Colored photographs—Æsthetic defects of popular shrines—The æsthetics of music—Experience of the Hawaiian people—Literary æsthetic development—Aston quoted—Architectural æsthetic development—Æsthetic development is sociological rather than biological, 170
Psychological unity of the East and the West—Brain size and social evolution—The size of the Japanese brain—Memory—Learning Chinese characters—Social selection and mnemonic power—Japanese memory in daily life—Memory of uncivilized and semi-civilized peoples—Hindu memory—Max Müller quoted—Japanese acquisition of foreign languages—The argument from language for the social as against the biological distinction of races—The faculty of imitation; is not to be despised—Prof. Chamberlain's over-emphasis of Japanese imitation—Originality in adopting Confucianism and Buddhism—"Shinshu"—"Nichirenshu"—Adoption of Chinese philosophy—Dr. Knox's over-emphasis of servile adoption—Our ignorance of Japanese history of thought—A reason for Occidental misunderstanding—The incubus of governmental initiative—Relation of imitation to the social order, 189
[XVII. ORIGINALITY—INVENTIVENESS]
Originality in art—Authoritative suppression of originality—Townsend Harris quoted—Suppression of Christianity and of heterodox Confucianism—Modern suppression of historical research—Yet Japan is not wholly lacking in originality—Recent discoveries and inventions—Originality in borrowing from the West—Quotations from a native paper, 203
[XVIII. INDIRECTNESS—"NOMINALITY"]
"Roundaboutness"—Some advantages of this characteristic—Illustrations—Study of English for direct and accurate habits of thought—Rapid modern growth of directness—"Nominality"—All Japanese history an illustration—The Imperial rule only nominal—The daimyo as a figure-head—"Nominality" in ordinary life—In family relations—Illustrations in Christian work—A "nominal" express train—"Nominality" and the social order, 210
Do Japanese lack the higher mental faculties?—Evidence of inventions—Testimony of foreign teachers—Japanese students, at home and abroad—Readiness in public speech—Powers of generalization in primitive Japan—"Ri" and "Ki," "In" and "Yo"—Japanese use of Chinese generalized philosophical terms—Generalization and the social order—Defective explanation of puerile Oriental science—Relation to the mechanical memory method of education—High intellectuality dependent on social order, 218
Do Japanese lack philosophical ability?—Some opinions—Some distinctions—Japanese interest in metaphysical problems—Buddhist and Confucian metaphysics—Metaphysics and ethics—Japanese students of Occidental philosophy—A personal experience—"The little philosopher"—A Buddhist priest—Rarity of original philosophical ability and even interest—Philosophical ability and the social order in the West, 225
Some criticisms of Japanese mental traits—Wide range of imaginative activity—Some salient points—Unbalanced imaginative development—Prosaic matter-of-factness—Visionariness—Impractical idealism—Illustrations—An evangelist—A principal—Visionariness in Christian work—Visionariness in national ambition—Imagination and optimism—Mr. Lowell's opinion criticised—Fancy and imagination—Caricature—Imagination and imitation—Sociological interpretation of visionariness—And of prosaic matter-of-factness—Communalism and the higher mental powers—Suppression of the constructive imagination—Racial intellectual characteristics are social rather than inherent, 233
Loyalty and filial piety as moral ideals—Quotations from an ancient moralist, Muro Kyuso—On the heavenly origin of moral teaching—On self-control—Knowledge comes through obedience—On the impurity of ancient literature—On the ideal of the samurai in relation to trade—Old Japan combined statute and ethical law—"The testament of Iyeyasu"—Ohashi's condemnation of Western learning for its impiety—Japanese moral ideals were communal—Truthfulness undeveloped—Relations of samurai to tradesman—The business standards are changing with the social order—Ancient Occidental contempt for trade—Plato and Aristotle, 249
[XXIII. MORAL IDEALS (Continued)]
The social position of woman—Valuation of the individual—Confucian and Buddhistic teaching in regard to concubinage and polygamy—Sociological interpretation—Japan not exceptional—Actual morality of Old Japan—Modern growth of immorality—Note on the "Social Evil"—No ancient teaching in regard to masculine chastity—Mr. Hearn's mistaken contention—Filial obedience and prostitution—How could the social order produce two different moral ideals?—The new Civil Code on marriage—Divorce—Statistics—Modern advance of woman—Significance of the Imperial Silver Wedding—The Wedding of the Prince Imperial—Relation of Buddhism and Confucianism to moral ideals and practice—The new spirit of Buddhism—Christian influence on Shinto; Tenri Kyo—The ancient moralists confined their attention to the rulers—The Imperial Edict in regard to Moral Education, 258
The publicity of Japanese life—Public bathing—Personal experience at a hot-spring—Mr. Hearn on privacy—Individualism and variation from the moral standard—Standards advancing—Revenge—Modern liberty of travel—Increase of wealth—Increasing luxury and vice—Increase of concubinage—Native discussions—Statistics—Business honesty—A native paper quoted—Some experiences with Christians—Testimony of a Japanese consul—Difference of gifts to Buddhist and to Christian institutions—Christian condemnation of Doshisha mismanagement—Misappropriation of trust funds in the West—Business honesty and the social order—Fitness of Christianity to the new social order—A summary—Communal virtues—Individual Vices—The authority of the moral ideal—Moral characteristics are not inherent, but social, in nature, 273
[XXV. ARE THE JAPANESE RELIGIOUS?]
Prof. Pfleiderer's view—Percival Lowell's definition of religion—Japanese appearance of irreligion due to many facts—Skeptical attitude of Confucius towards the gods—Ready acceptance of Western agnosticism—Prof. Chamberlain's assertion that the Japanese take their religion lightly—Statements concerning religion by Messrs. Fukuzawa, Kato, and Ito—Statements of Japanese irreligion are not to be lightly accepted—Incompetence of many critics—We must study all the religious phenomena—Pilgrimages—Statistics—Mr. Lowell's criticism of "peripatetic picnic parties"—Is religion necessarily gloomy?—God and Buddha shelves universal in Japan—Temples and shrines—Statistics, 286
[XXVI. SOME RELIGIOUS PHENOMENA]
Stoical training conceals religious emotions—The earnestness of many suppliants—Buddhistic and Shinto practice of religious ecstasy—The revolt from Buddhism a religious movement—Muro Kyu-so quoted—"Heaven's Way"—"God's omnipresence"—Pre-Christian teachers of Christian truth—Interpretation of modern irreligious phenomena—Japanese apparent lack of reverence—Not an inherent racial characteristic—Sketch of Japanese religious history—Shinto—Buddhism—Confucianism—Christianity—Roman Catholicism—Protestantism—Religious characteristics are social, not essential or racial, 296
[XXVII. SOME RELIGIOUS CONCEPTIONS]
Japanese conceptions as to deity—The number and relation of the gods to the universe—Did the Japanese have the monotheistic conception?—Attractiveness of Christian monotheism—Confucian and Buddhist monism—Religious conception of man—Conception of sin—Defective terminology—Relation of sin to salvation—"Holy water"—Holy towels and the spread of disease—The slight connection between physical and moral pollution—W.E. Griffis quoted—Exaggerated cleanliness of the Japanese—Public bathing houses—Consciousness of sin in the sixteenth century—A recent experience—Doctrine of the future life—Salvation from fate—"Ingwa"—These are important doctrines—"Mei" (Heaven's decree)—Japan not unique—Sociological interpretations of religious characteristics, 310
[XXVIII. SOME RELIGIOUS PRACTICES]
Loyalty and filial piety as religious phenomena—Gratitude as a religions trait—Hearn quoted—Unpleasant experiences of ingratitude—Modern suppression of phallicism—Brothels and prostitutes at popular shrines—The failure of higher ethnic faiths to antagonize the lower—Suppression of phallicism due to Western opinion—The significance of this suppression to sociological theory—Religious liberty—Some history—Inconsistent attitude of the Educational Department—Virtual establishment of compulsory state religion—Review and summary—The Japanese ready learners of foreign religions—The significance of this to sociology—Japanese future religion is to be Christianity, 322
[XXIX. SOME PRINCIPLES OF NATIONAL EVOLUTION]
Progress is from smaller to larger communities—Arrest of development—The necessity of individualism—The relation of communal to individual development—A possible misunderstanding—The problem of distribution—Personality, 332
[XXX. ARE THE JAPANESE IMPERSONAL?]
Assertion of Oriental impersonality—Quotations from Percival Lowell—Defective and contradictory definitions—Arguments for impersonality resting on mistaken interpretations—Children's festivals—Occidental and Oriental method of counting ages—Argument for impersonality from Japanese art—From the characteristics of the Japanese family—The bearing of divorce on this argument—Do Japanese "fall in love"?—Suicide and murder for love—Occidental approval and Oriental condemnation of "falling in love"—Sociological significance of divorce and of "falling in love," 344
[XXXI. THE JAPANESE NOT IMPERSONAL]
The problem stated—Definitions—Remarks on definitions—Characteristics of a person—Impersonality defined—A preliminary summary statement—Definitions of Communalism and Individualism—The argument for "impersonality" from Japanese politeness—Some difficulties of this interpretation—The sociological interpretation of politeness—The significance of Japanese sensitiveness—Altruism as a proof of impersonality—Japanese selfishness and self-assertiveness—Distinction between communal and individualistic altruism—Deficiency of personal pronouns as a proof of impersonality—A possible counter-argument—Substitutes for personal pronouns—Many personal words in Japanese—Origin of pronouns, personal and others—The relation of the social order to the use of personal pronouns—Japanese conceive Nationality only through Personality—"Strong" and "weak" personality—Strong personalities in Japan—Feudalism and strong personalities, 356
[XXXII. IS BUDDHISM IMPERSONAL?]
Self-suppression as a proof of impersonality—Self-suppression cannot be ascribed to a primitive people—Esoteric Buddhism not popular—Buddhism emphasized introspection and self-consciousness—Mr. Lowell on the teaching of Buddha—Consciousness of union with the Absolute a developed, not a primitive, trait—Buddhist self-suppression proves a developed self—Buddhist self-salvation and Christian salvation by faith—Buddhism does not develop rounded personality—Buddhism attributes no worth to the self—Buddhist mercy rests on the doctrine of transmigration, not on the inherent worth of man—Analysis of the diverse elements in the asserted "Impersonality "—Why Buddhism attributed no value to the self—The Infinite Absolute Abstraction—Buddhism not impersonal but abstract—Buddhist doctrine of illusion—Popular Buddhism not philosophical—Relation of "ingwa," Fate, to the development of personality—Relation of belief in freedom to the fact of freedom—Sociological consequences of Buddhist doctrine, 377
[XXXIII. TRACES OF PERSONALITY IN SHINTOISM, BUDDHISM, AND CONFUCIANISM]
Human illogicalness providential—Some devices for avoiding the evils of logical conclusions—Buddhistic actual appeal to personal self-activity—Practical Confucianism an antidote to Buddhist poison—Confucian ethics produced strong persons—The personal conception of deity is widespread—Shinto gods all persons—Popular Buddhist gods are personal—Confucian "Heaven" implies personality—The idea of personality not wholly wanting in the Orient—The idea of divine personality not difficult to impart to a Japanese—A conversation with a Buddhist priest—Sketch of the development of Japanese personality—Is personality inherent?—Intrinsic and phenomenal personality—Note on the doctrine of the personality of God, 389
[XXXIV. THE BUDDHIST WORLD-VIEW]
Comparison of Buddhist, Greek, and Christian conceptions of God—Nirvana—The Buddhistic Ultimate Reality absolute vacuity—Greek affirmation of intelligence in the Ultimate Reality—Christian affirmation of Divine Personality—The Buddhist universe is partly rational and ethical—The Greek universe is partly rational and ethical—Corresponding views of sin, salvation, change, and history—Resulting pessimism and optimism—Consequences to the respective civilizations and their social orders, 398
[XXXV. COMMUNAL AND INDIVIDUAL ELEMENTS IN THE EVOLUTION OF JAPANESE RELIGIOUS LIFE]
Japanese religious life has been predominantly communal—Shinto provided the sanctions for the social order—Recent abdication of Shinto as a religion—Primitive Shinto world—view—Shinto and modern science—Shinto sanctions for the modern social order—Buddhism is individualistic—Lacks social ideals and sanctions—Hence it could not displace Shinto—Shinto and Buddhism are supplementary—Produced a period of prosperity—The defect of Buddhist individualism—Imperfect acceptance of Shinto—Effect of political history—Confucianism restored the waning communal sanctions—The difference between Shinto and Confucian social ideals and sanctions—The difference between Shinto and Confucian world-views—Rejection of the Confucian social order—An interpretation—The failure of Confucianism to become a religion—Western intercourse re-established Shinto sanctions—Japan's modern religious problem—Difficulty of combining individual and communal religious elements—Christianity has accomplished it—Individualism in and through communalism—A modern expansion of communal religion—Shared by Japan—Some Japanese recognize the need of religion for Japan—Sociological function of individualistic religion in the higher human evolution—Obstacle to evolution through the development of intellect—The Japanese mind is outgrowing its old religious conceptions—The dependence of religious phenomena on the ideas dominating society—Note on National and Universal religions—Buddhism not properly classified as Universal—The classification of religions, 404
[XXXVI. WHAT ARE THE ESSENTIAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE ORIENT]
The conclusion reached in this work—Contrary to the opinion of tourists, residents, and many sociologists—Professor Le Bon quoted—Social psychic characteristics not inherent—Evolution and involution—Advocates of inherent Oriental traits should catalogue those traits—An attempt by the London Daily Mail—Is the East inherently intuitive, and the West logical?—The difficulty of becoming mutually acquainted—The secret of genuine acquaintance—Is the East inherently meditative and the West active?—Oriental unity and characteristics are social, not inherent—Isolated evolution is divergent—Mutual influence of the East and the West—Summary statement, 422
Review of our course of thought—Purpose of this chapter—The problem studied in this work—Interrelation of social and psychic phenomena—Heredity defined and analyzed—Evolution defined—Exact definition of our question, and our reply—What would be an adequate disproof of our position—Reasons for limiting the discussion to advanced races—Divergent evolution dependent on segregation—Distinction between racial and social unity—Relation of the individual psychic character to the social order—"Race soul" a convenient fiction—Psychic function produces psychic organism—Causes and nature of plasticity and fixity of society—Relation of incarnate ideas to character and destiny—Valuelessness of "floating" ideas—Progress is at once communal and individual—Personality is its cause, aim, and criterion—Progress in personality is ethico-religious—Japanese social and psychic evolution not exceptional, 438
INTRODUCTION
The tragedy enacted in China during the closing year of the nineteenth century marks an epoch in the history of China and of the world. Two world-views, two types of civilization met in deadly conflict, and the inherent weakness of isolated, belated, superstitious and corrupt paganism was revealed. Moreover, during this, China's crisis, Japan for the first time stepped out upon the world's stage of political and military activity. She was recognized as a civilized nation, worthy to share with the great nations of the earth the responsibility of ruling the lawless and backward races.
The correctness of any interpretation as to the significance of this conflict between the opposing civilizations turns, ultimately, on the question as to what is the real nature of man and of society. If it be true, as maintained by Prof. Le Bon and his school, that the mental and moral character of a people is as fixed as its physiological characteristics, then the conflict in China is at bottom a conflict of races, not of civilizations.
The inadequacy of the physiological theory of national character may be seen almost at a glance by a look at Japan. Were an Oriental necessarily and unchangeably Oriental, it would have been impossible for Japan to have come into such close and sympathetic touch with the West.
The conflict of the East with the West, however, is not an inherent and unending conflict, because it is not racial, but civilizational. It is a conflict of world-views and systems of thought and life. It is a conflict of heathen and Christian civilizations. And the conflict will come to an end as soon as, and in proportion as, China awakes from her blindness and begins to build her national temple on the bedrock of universal truth and righteousness. The conflict is practically over in Japan because she has done this. In loyally accepting science, popular education, and the rights of every individual to equal protection by the government, Japan has accepted the fundamental conceptions of civilization held in the West, and has thus become an integral part of Christendom, a fact of world-wide significance. It proves that the most important differences now separating the great races of men are civilizational, not physiological. It also proves that European, American, and Oriental peoples may be possessed by the same great ideals of life and principles of action, enabling them to co-operate as nations in great movements to their mutual advantage.
While even we of the West may be long in learning the full significance of what has been and still is taking place in Japan and more conspicuously just now, because more tragically, in China, one thing is clear: steam and electricity have abolished forever the old isolation of the nations.
Separated branches of the human race that for thousands of years have been undergoing divergent evolution, producing radically different languages, customs, civilizations, systems of thought and world-views, and have resulted even in marked physiological and psychological differences, are now being brought into close contact and inevitable conflict. But at bottom it is a conflict of ideas, not of races. The age of isolation and divergent evolution is passing away, and that of international association and convergent social evolution has begun. Those races and nations that refuse to recognize the new social order, and oppose the cosmic process and its forces, will surely be pushed to the wall and cease to exist as independent nations, just as, in ancient times, the tribes that refused to unite with neighboring tribes were finally subjugated by those that did so unite.
Universal economic, political, intellectual, moral, and religious intercourse is the characteristic of the new æon on which we are entering. What are to be the final consequences of this wide intercourse? Can a people change its character? Can a nation fully possessed by one type of civilization reject it, and adopt one radically different? Do races have "souls" which are fixed and incapable of radical transformations? What has taken place in Japan, a profound, or only a superficial change in psychical character? Are the destinies of the Oriental races already unalterably determined?
The answers to these questions have already been suggested in the preceding paragraphs, in regard to what has already taken place in Japan. But we may add that that answer really turns on our conception as to the nature of the characteristics separating the East from the West. In proportion as national character is reckoned to be biological, will it be considered fixed and the national destiny predetermined. In proportion as it is reckoned to be sociological, will it be considered alterable and the national destiny subject to new social forces. Now that the intercourse of widely different races has begun on a scale never before witnessed, it is highly important for us to know its probable consequences. For this we need to gain a clear idea of the nature both of the individual man and of society, of the relation of the social order to individual and to race character, and of the law regulating and the forces producing social evolution. Only thus can we forecast the probable course and consequences of the free social intercourse of widely divergent races.
It is the belief of the writer that few countries afford so clear an illustration of the principles involved in social evolution as Japan. Her development has been so rapid and so recent that some principles have become manifest that otherwise might easily have escaped notice. The importance of understanding Japan, because of the light her recent transformations throw on the subject of social evolution and of national character and also because of the conspicuous rôle to which she is destined as the natural leader of the Oriental races in their adoption of Occidental modes of life and thought, justifies a careful study of Japanese character. He who really understands Japan, has gained the magic key for unlocking the social mysteries of China and the entire East. But the Japanese people, with their institutions and their various characteristics, merit careful study also for their own sakes. For the Japanese constitute an exceedingly interesting and even a unique branch of the human race. Japan is neither a purgatory, as some would have it, nor a paradise, as others maintain, but a land full of individuals in an interesting stage of social evolution.
Current opinions concerning Japan, however, are as curious as they are contradictory. Sir Edwin Arnold says that the Japanese "Have the nature rather of birds or butterflies than of ordinary human beings." Says Mr. A.M. Knapp: "Japan is the one country in the world which does not disappoint ... It is unquestionably the unique nation of the globe, the land of dream and enchantment, the land which could hardly differ more from our own, were it located in another planet, its people not of this world." An "old resident," however, calls it "the land of disappointments." Few phenomena are more curious than the readiness with which a tourist or professional journalist, after a few days or weeks of sight-seeing and interviewing, makes up his mind in regard to the character of the people, unless it be the way in which certain others, who have resided in this land for a number of years, continue to live in their own dreamland. These two classes of writers have been the chief contributors of material for the omnivorous readers of the West.
It appears to not a few who have lived many years in this Far Eastern land, that the public has been fed with the dreams of poets or the snap-judgments of tourists instead of with the facts of actual experience. A recent editorial article in the Japan Mail, than whose editor few men have had a wider acquaintance with the Japanese people or language, contains the following paragraph:
"In the case of such writers as Sir Edwin Arnold and Mr. Lafcadio Hearn it is quite apparent that the logical faculty is in abeyance. Imagination reigns supreme. As poetic nights or outbursts, the works of these authors on Japan are delightful reading. But no one who has studied the Japanese in a deeper manner, by more intimate daily intercourse with all classes of the people than either of these writers pretends to have had, can possibly regard a large part of their description as anything more than pleasing fancy. Both have given rein to the poetic fancy and thus have, from a purely literary point of view, scored a success granted to few.... But as exponents of Japanese life and thought they are unreliable.... They have given form and beauty to much that never existed except in vague outline or in undeveloped germs in the Japanese mind. In doing this they have unavoidably been guilty of misrepresentation.... The Japanese nation of Arnold and Hearn is not the nation we have known for a quarter of a century, but a purely ideal one manufactured out of the author's brains. It is high time that this was pointed out. For while such works please a certain section of the English public, they do a great deal of harm among a section of the Japanese public, as could be easily shown in detail, did space allow."—Japan Mail, May 7, 1898.
But even more harmful to the reading public of England and America are the hastily formed yet, nevertheless, widely published opinions of tourists and newspaper correspondents. Could such writers realize the inevitable limitations under which they see and try to generalize, the world would be spared many crudities and exaggerations, not to say positive errors. The impression so common to-day that Japan's recent developments are anomalous, even contrary to the laws of national growth, is chiefly due to the superficial writings of hasty observers. Few of those who have dilated ecstatically on her recent growth have understood either the history or the genius of her people.
"To mention but one among many examples," says Prof. Chamberlain, "the ingenious Traveling Commissioner of the Pall Mall Gazette, Mr. Henry Norman, in his lively letters on Japan published nine or ten years ago, tells the story of Japanese education under the fetching title of 'A Nation at School'; but the impression left is that they have been their own schoolmasters. In another letter on 'Japan in Arms,' he discourses concerning 'The Japanese Military Re-organizers,' 'The Yokosuka dockyard,' and other matters, but omits to mention that the reorganizers were Frenchmen, and that the Yokosuka dockyard was also a French creation. Similarly, when treating of the development of the Japanese newspaper, he ignores the fact that it owed its origin to an Englishman, which surely, to a man whose object was reality, should have seemed an object worth recording. These letters, so full and apparently so frank, really so deceptive, are, as we have said, but one instance among many of the way in which popular writers on Japan travesty history by ignoring the part which foreigners have played. The reasons for this are not far to seek. A wonderful tale will please folks at a distance all the better if made more wonderful still. Japanese progress, traced to its causes and explained by references to the means employed, is not nearly such fascinating reading as when represented in the guise of a fairy creation, sprung from nothing, like Aladdin's palace."—"Things Japanese," p. 116.
But inter-racial misunderstanding is not, after all, so very strange. Few things are more difficult than to accommodate one's self in speech, in methods of life, and even in thought, to an alien people; so identifying one's deepest interest with theirs as really to understand them. The minds of most men are so possessed by notions acquired in childhood and youth as to be unable to see even the plainest facts at variance with those notions. He who comes to Japan possessed with the idea that it is a dreamland and that its old social order was free from defects, is blind to any important facts invalidating that conception; while he who is persuaded that Japan, being Oriental, is necessarily pagan at heart, however civilized in form, cannot easily be persuaded that there is anything praiseworthy in her old civilization, in her moral or religious life, or in any of her customs.
If France fails in important respects to understand England; and England, Germany; and Germany, its neighbors; if even England and America can so misunderstand one another as to be on the verge of war over the boundary dispute of an alien country, what hope is there that the Occident shall understand the Orient, or the Orient the Occident?
Though the difficulty seems insurmountable, I am persuaded that the most fruitful cause of racial misunderstandings and of defective descriptions both of the West by Orientals, and of the East by Occidentals, is a well-nigh universal misconception as to the nature of man, and of society, and consequently of the laws determining their development. In the East this error arises from and rests upon its polytheism, and the accompanying theories of special national creation and peculiar national sanctity. On these grounds alien races are pronounced necessarily inferior. China's scorn for foreigners is due to these ideas.
Although this pagan notion has been theoretically abandoned in the West, it still dominates the thought not only of the multitudes, but also of many who pride themselves on their high education and liberal sentiments. They bring to the support of their national or racial pride such modern sociological theories as lend themselves to this view. Evolution and the survival of the fittest, degeneration and the arrest of development, are appealed to as justifying the arrogance and domineering spirit of Western nations.
But the most subtle and scholarly doctrine appealed to in support of national pride is the biological conception of society. Popular writers assume that society is a biological organism and that the laws of its evolution are therefore biological. This assumption is not strange, for until recent times the most advanced professional sociologists have been dominated by the same misconception. Spencer, for example, makes sociology a branch of biology. More recent sociological writers, however, such as Professors Giddings and Fairbanks, have taken special pains to assert the essentially psychic character of society; they reject the biological conception, as inadequate to express the real nature of society. The biological conception, they insist, is nothing more than a comparison, useful for bringing out certain features of the social life and structure, but harmful if understood as their full statement. The laws of psychic activity and development differ as widely from those of biologic activity and development as these latter do from those that hold in the chemical world. If the laws which regulate psychic development and the progress of civilization were understood by popular writers on Japan, and if the recent progress of Japan had been stated in the terms of these laws, there would not have been so much mystification in the West in regard to this matter as there evidently has been. Japan would not have appeared to have "jumped out of her skin," or suddenly to have escaped from the heredity of her past millenniums of development. This wide misunderstanding of Japan, then, is not simply due to the fact that "Japanese progress, traced to its causes and explained by reference to the means employed, is not nearly such fascinating reading as when represented in the guise of a fairy creation," but it is also due to the still current popular view that the social organism is biological, and subject therefore to the laws of biological evolution. On this assumption, some hold that the progress of Japan, however it may appear, is really superficial, while others represent it as somehow having evaded the laws regulating the development of other races. A nation's character and characteristics are conceived to be the product of brain-structure; these can change only as brain structure changes. Brain is held to determine civilization, rather than civilization brain. Hampered by this defective view, popular writers inevitably describe Japan to the West in terms that necessarily misrepresent her, and that at the same time pander to Occidental pride and prejudice.
But this misunderstanding of Japan reveals an equally profound misunderstanding in regard to ourselves. Occidental peoples are supposed to be what they are in civilization and to have reached their high attainments in theoretical and applied science, in philosophy and in practical politics, because of their unique brain-structures, brains secured through millenniums of biological evolution. The following statement may seem to be rank heresy to the average sociologist, but my studies have led me to believe that the main differences between the great races of mankind to-day are not due to biological, but to social conditions; they are not physico-psychological differences, but only socio-psychological differences. The Anglo-Saxon is what he is because of his social heredity, and the Chinaman is what he is because of his social heredity. The profound difference between social and physiological heredity and evolution is unappreciated except by a few of the most recent sociological writers. The part that association, social segregation, and social heredity take in the maintenance, not only of once developed languages and civilizations, but even in their genesis, has been generally overlooked.
But a still more important factor in the determination of social and psychic evolution, generally unrecognized by sociologists, is the nature and function of personality. Although in recent years it has been occasionally mentioned by several eminent writers, personality as a principle has not been made the core of any system of sociology. In my judgment, however, this is the distinctive characteristic of human evolution and of human association, and it should accordingly be the fundamental principle of social science. Many writers on the East have emphasized what they call its "impersonal" characteristics. So important is this subject that I have considered it at length in the body of this work.
Sociological phenomena cannot be fully expressed by any combination of exclusively physical, biological, and psychic terms, for the significant element of man and of society consists of something more than these—namely, personality. It is this that differentiates human from animal evolution. The unit of human sociology is a self-conscious, self-determinative being. The causative factor in the social evolution of man is his personality. The goal of that evolution is developed personality. Personality is thus at once the cause and the end of social progress. The conditions which affect or determine progress are those which affect or determine personality.
The biological evolution of man from the animal has been, it is true, frankly assumed in this work. No attempt is made to justify this assumption. Let not the reader infer, however, that the writer similarly assumes the adequacy of the so-called naturalistic or evolutionary origin of ethics, of religion, or even of social progress. It may be doubted whether Darwin, Wallace, Le Conte, or any exponent of biological evolution has yet given a complete statement of the factors of the physiological evolution of man. It is certain, however, that ethical, religious, and social writers who have striven to account for the higher evolution of man, by appealing to factors exclusively parallel to those which have produced the physiological evolution of man, have conspicuously failed. However much we may find to praise in the social interpretations of such eminent writers as Comte, Spencer, Ward, Fiske, Giddings, Kidd, Southerland, or even Drummond, there still remains the necessity of a fuller consideration of the moral and religious evolution of man. The higher evolution of man cannot be adequately expressed or even understood in any terms lower than those of personality.
EVOLUTION OF THE JAPANESE
I
PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS
Said a well educated and widely read Englishman to the writer while in Oxford, "Can you explain to me how it is that the Japanese have succeeded in jumping out of their skins?" And an equally thoughtful American, speaking about the recent strides in civilization made by Japan, urged that this progress could not be real and genuine. "How can such a mushroom-growth, necessarily without deep roots in the past, be real and strong and permanent? How can it escape being chiefly superficial?" These two men are typical of much of the thought of the West in regard to Japan.
Seldom, perhaps never, has the civilized world so suddenly and completely reversed an estimate of a nation as it has that with reference to Japan. Before the recent war, to the majority even of fairly educated men, Japan was little more than a name for a few small islands somewhere near China, whose people were peculiar and interesting. To-day there is probably not a man, or woman, or child attending school in any part of the civilized world, who does not know the main facts about the recent war: how the small country and the men of small stature, sarcastically described by their foes as "Wojen," pygmy, attacked the army and navy of a country ten times their size.
Such a universal change of opinion regarding a nation, especially regarding one so remote from the centers of Western civilization as Japan, could not have taken place in any previous generation. The telegraph, the daily paper, the intelligent reporters and writers of books and magazine articles, the rapid steam travel and the many travelers—all these have made possible this sudden acquisition of knowledge and startling reversal of opinion.
There is reason, however, to think that much misapprehension and real ignorance still exists about Japan and her leap into power and world-wide prestige. Many seem to think that Japan has entered on her new career through the abandonment of her old civilization and the adoption of one from the West—that the victories on sea and land, in Korea, at Port Arthur, and a Wei-hai-wei, and more recently at Tientsin and Pekin, were solely due to her Westernized navy and army. Such persons freely admit that this process of Westernization had been going on for many years more rapidly than the world at large knew, and that consequently the reputation of Japan before the war was not such as corresponded with her actual attainments. But they assume that there was nothing of importance in the old civilization; that it was little superior to organized barbarism.
These people conceive of the change which has taken place in Japan during the past thirty years as a revolution, not as an evolution; as an abandonment of the old, and an adoption of the new, civilization. They conceive the old tree of civilization to have been cut down and cast into the fire, and a new tree to have been imported from the West and planted in Japanese soil. New Japan is, from this view-point, the new tree.
Not many months ago I heard of a wealthy family in Kyoto which did not take kindly to the so-called improvements imported from abroad, and which consequently persisted in using the instruments of the older civilization. Even such a convenience as the kerosene lamp, now universally adopted throughout the land of the Rising Sun, this family refused to admit into its home, preferring the old-style andon with its vegetable oil, dim light, and flickering flame. Recently, however, an electric-light company was organized in that city, and this brilliant illuminant was introduced not only into the streets and stores, but into many private houses. Shortly after its introduction, the family was converted to the superiority of the new method of illumination, and passed at one leap from the old-style lantern to the latest product of the nineteenth century. This incident is considered typical of the transformations characteristic of modern Japan. It is supposed that New Japan is in no proper sense the legitimate product through evolution of Old Japan.
In important ways, therefore, Japan seems to be contradicting our theories of national growth. We have thought that no "heathen" nation could possibly gain, much less wield, unaided by Westerners, the forces of civilized Christendom. We have likewise held that national growth is a slow process, a gradual evolution, extending over scores and centuries of years. In both respects our theories seem to be at fault. This "little nation of little people," which we have been so ready to condemn as "heathen" and "uncivilized," and thus to despise, or to ignore, has in a single generation leaped into the forefront of the world's attention.
Are our theories wrong? Is Japan an exception? Are our facts correct? We instinctively feel that something is at fault. We are not satisfied with the usual explanation of the recent history of Japan. We are perhaps ready to concede that "the rejection of the old and the adoption of Western civilization" is the best statement whereby to account for the new power of Japan and her new position among the nations, but when we stop to think, we ask whether we have thus explained that for which we are seeking an explanation? Do not the questions still remain—Why did the Japanese so suddenly abandon Oriental for Occidental civilization? And what mental and other traits enabled a people who, according to the supposition, were far from civilized, so suddenly to grasp and wield a civilization quite alien in character and superior to their own; a civilization ripened after millenniums of development of the Aryan race? And how far, as a matter of fact, has this assimilation gone? Not until these questions are really answered has the explanation been found, So that, after all, the prime cause which we must seek is not to be found in the external environment, but rather in the internal endowment.
An effort to understand the ancient history of Japan encounters the same problem as that raised by her modern history. What mental characteristics led the Japanese a thousand years ago so to absorb the Chinese civilization, philosophy, and language that their own suffered a permanent arrest? What religious traits led them so to take on a religion from China and India that their own native religion never passed beyond the most primitive development, either in doctrine, in ethics, in ritual, or in organization? On the other hand, what mental characteristics enabled them to preserve their national independence and so to modify everything brought from abroad, from the words of the new language to the philosophy of the new religions, that Japanese civilization, language, and religion are markedly distinct from the Chinese? Why is it that, though the Japanese so fell under the bondage of the Chinese language as permanently to enslave and dwarf their own beautiful tongue, expressing the dominant thought of every sentence with characters (ideographs) borrowed from China, yet at the same time so transformed what they borrowed that no Chinaman can read and understand a Japanese book or newspaper?
The same questions recur at this new period of Japan's national life. Why has she so easily turned from the customs of centuries? What are the mental traits that have made her respond so differently from her neighbor to the environment of the nineteenth-century civilization of the West Why is it that Japan has sent thousands of her students to these Western lands to see and study and bring back all that is good in them, while China has remained in stolid self-satisfaction, seeing nothing good in the West and its ways? To affirm that the difference is due to the environment alone is impossible, for the environment seems to be essentially the same. This difference of attitude and action must be traced, it would seem, to differences of mental and temperamental characteristics. Those who seek to understand the secret of Japan's newly won power and reputation by looking simply at her newly acquired forms of government, her reconstructed national social structure, her recently constructed roads and railroads, telegraphs, representative government, etc., and especially at her army and navy organized on European models and armed with European weapons, are not unlike those who would discover the secret of human life by the study of anatomy.
This external view and this method of interpretation are, therefore, fundamentally erroneous. Never, perhaps, has the progress of a nation been so manifestly an evolution as distinguished from a revolution. No foreign conquerors have come in with their armies, crushing down the old and building up a new civilization. No magician's wand has been waved over the land to make the people forget the traditions of a thousand years and fall in with those of the new régime. No rite or incantation has been performed to charm the marvelous tree of civilization and cause it to take root and grow to such lofty proportions in an unprepared soil.
In contrast to the defective views outlined above, one need not hesitate to believe that the actual process by which Old Japan has been transformed into New Japan is perfectly natural and necessary. It has been a continuous growth; it is not the mere accumulation of external additions; it does not consist alone of the acquisition of the machinery and the institutions of the Occident. It is rather a development from within, based upon already existing ideas and institutions. New Japan is the consequence of her old endowment and her new environment. Her evolution has been in progress and can be traced for at least a millennium and a half, during which she has been preparing for this latest step. All that was necessary for its accomplishment was the new environment. The correctness of this view and the reasons for it will appear as we proceed in our study of Japanese characteristics. But we need to note at this point the danger, into which many fall, of ascribing to Japan an attainment of western civilization which the facts will not warrant. She has secured much, but by no means all, that the West has to give.
We may suggest our line of thought by asking what is the fundamental element of civilization? Does it consist in the manifold appliances that render life luxurious; the railroad, the telegraph, the post office, the manufactures, the infinite variety of mechanical and other conveniences? Or is it not rather the social and intellectual and ethical state of a people? Manifestly the latter. The tools indeed of civilization may be imported into a half-civilized, or barbarous country; such importation, however, does not render the country civilized, although it may assist greatly in the attainment of that result. Civilization being mental, social, and ethical, can arise only through the growth of the mind and character of the vast multitudes of a nation. Now has Japan imported only the tools of civilization? In other words, is her new civilization only external, formal, nominal, unreal? That she has imported much is true. Yet that her attainments and progress rest on her social, intellectual, and ethical development will become increasingly clear as we take up our successive chapters. Under the new environment of the past fifty years, this growth, particularly in intellectual, in industrial, and in political lines, has been exceedingly rapid as compared with the growths of other peoples.
This conception of the rise of New Japan will doubtless approve itself to every educated man who will allow his thought to rest upon the subject. For all human progress, all organic evolution, proceeds by the progressive modification of the old organs under new conditions. The modern locomotive did not spring complete from the mind of James Watt; it is the result of thousands of years of human experience and consequent evolution, beginning first perhaps with a rolling log, becoming a rude cart, and being gradually transformed by successive inventions until it has become one of the marvels of the nineteenth century. It is impossible for those who have attained the view-point of modern science to conceive of discontinuous progress; of continually rising types of being, of thought, or of moral life, in which the higher does not find its ground and root and thus an important part of its explanation, in the lower. Such is the case not only with reference: to biological evolution; it is especially true of social evolution. He who would understand the Japan of to-day cannot rest with the bare statement that her adoption of the tools and materials of Western civilization has given her her present power and place among the nations. The student with historical insight knows that it is impossible for one nation, off-hand, without preparation, to "adopt the civilization" of another.
The study of the evolution of Japan is one of unusual interest; first, because of the fact that Japan has experienced such unique changes in her environment. Her history brings into clear light some principles of evolution which the visual development of a people does not make so clear.
In the second place, New Japan is in a state of rapid growth. She is in a critical period, resembling a youth, just coming to manhood, when all the powers of growth are most vigorous. The latent qualities of body and mind and heart then burst forth with peculiar force. In the course of four or five short years the green boy develops into a refined and noble man; the thoughtless girl ripens into the full maturity of womanhood and of motherhood. These are the years of special interest to those who would observe nature in her time of most critical activity.
Not otherwise is it in the life of nations. There are times when their growth is phenomenally rapid; when their latent qualities are developed; when their growth can be watched with special ease and delight, because so rapid. The Renaissance was such a period in Europe. Modern art, science, and philosophy took their start with the awakening of the mind of Europe at that eventful and epochal period of her life. Such, I take it, is the condition of Japan to-day. She is "being born again"; undergoing her "renaissance." Her intellect, hitherto largely dormant, is but now awaking. Her ambition is equaled only by her self-reliance. Her self-confidence and amazing expectations have not yet been sobered by hard experience. Neither does she, nor do her critics, know how much she can or cannot do. She is in the first flush of her new-found powers; powers of mind and spirit, as well as of physical force. Her dreams are gorgeous with all the colors of the rainbow. Her efforts are sure, to be noble in proportion as her ambitions are high. The growth of the past half-century is only the beginning of what we may expect to see.
Then again, this latest and greatest step in the evolution of Japan has taken place at a time unparalleled for opportunities of observation, under the incandescent light of the nineteenth century, with its thousands of educated men to observe and record the facts, many of whom are active agents in the evolution in progress. Hundreds of papers and magazines, native and European, read by tens of thousands of intelligent men and women, have kept the world aware of the daily and hourly events. Telegraphic dispatches and letters by the million have passed between the far East and the West. It would seem as if the modernizing of Japan had been providentially delayed until the last half of the nineteenth century with its steam and electricity, annihilators of space and time, in order that her evolution might be studied with a minuteness impossible in any previous age, or by any previous generation. It is almost as if one were conducting an experiment in human evolution in his own laboratory, imposing the conditions and noting the results.
For still another reason is the evolution of New Japan of special interest to all intelligent persons. To illustrate great things by small, and human by physical, no one who has visited Geneva has failed to see the beautiful mingling of the Arve and the Rhone. The latter flowing from the calm Geneva lake is of delicate blue, pure and limpid. The former, running direct from the glaciers of Mont Blanc and the roaring bed of Chamouni, bears along in its rushing waters powdered rocks and loosened soil. These rivers, though joined in one bed, for hundreds of rods are quite distinct; the one, turbid; the other, clear as crystal; yet they press each against the other, now a little of the Rhone's clear current forces its way into the Arve, soon to be carried off, absorbed and discolored by the mass of muddy water around it. Now a little of the turbid Arve forces its way into the clear blue Rhone, to lose there its identity in the surrounding waters. The interchange goes on, increasing with the distance until, miles below, the two-rivers mingle as one. No longer is it the Arve or the old Rhone, but the new Rhone.
In Japan there is going on to-day a process unique in the history of the human race. Two streams of civilization, that of the far East and that of the far West, are beginning to flow in a single channel. These streams are exceedingly diverse, in social structure, in government, in moral ideals and standards, in religion, in psychological and metaphysical conceptions. Can they live together? Or is one going to drive out and annihilate the other? If so, which will be victor? Or is there to be modification of both? In other words, is there to be a new civilization—a Japanese, an Occidento-Oriental civilization?
The answer is plain to him who has eyes with which to see. Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard his spots? No more can Japan lose all trace of inherited customs of daily life, of habits of thought and language, products of a thousand years of training in Chinese literature, Buddhist doctrine, and Confucian ethics. That "the boy is father to the man" is true of a nation no less than of an individual. What a youth has been at home in his habits of thought, in his purpose and spirit and in their manifestation in action, will largely determine his after-life. In like manner the mental and moral history of Japan has so stamped certain characteristics on her language, on her thought, and above all on her temperament and character, that, however she may strive to Westernize herself, it is impossible for her to obliterate her Oriental features. She will inevitably and always remain Japanese.
Japan has already produced an Occidento-Oriental civilization. Time will serve progressively to Occidentalize it. But there is no reason for thinking that it will ever become wholly Occidentalized. A Westerner visiting Japan will always be impressed with its Oriental features, while an Asiatic will be impressed with its Occidental features. This progressive Occidentalization of Japan will take place according to the laws of social evolution, of which we must speak somewhat more fully in a later chapter.
An important question bearing on this problem is the precise nature of the characteristics differentiating the Occident and the Orient. What exactly do we mean when we say that the Japanese are Oriental and will always bear the marks of the Orient in their civilization, however much they may absorb from the West? The importance and difficulty of this question have led the writer to defer its consideration till toward the close of this work.
If one would gain adequate conception of the process now going on, the illustration already used of the mingling of two rivers needs to be supplemented by another, corresponding to a separate class of facts. Instead of the mingling of rivers, let us watch the confluence of two glaciers. What pressures! What grindings! What upheavals! What rendings! Such is the mingling of two civilizations. It is not smooth and Noiseless, but attended with pressure and pain. It is a collision in more ways than one. The unfortunates on whom the pressures of both currents are directed are often quite destroyed.
Comparison is often made between Japan and India. In both countries enormous social changes are taking place; in both, Eastern and Western civilizations are in contact and in conflict. The differences, however, are even more striking than the likenesses. Most conspicuous is the fact that whereas, in India, the changes in civilization are due almost wholly to the force and rule of the conquering race, in Japan these changes are spontaneous, attributable entirely to the desire and initiative of the native rulers. This difference is fundamental and vital. The evolution of society in India is to a large degree compulsory; in a true sense it is an artificial evolution. In Japan, on the other hand, evolution is natural. There has not been the slightest physical compulsion laid on her from without. With two rare exceptions, Japan has never heard the boom of foreign cannon carrying destruction to her people. During these years of change, there have been none but Japanese rulers, and such has been the case throughout the entire period of Japanese history. Their native rulers have introduced changes such as foreign rulers would hardly have ventured upon. The adoption of the Chinese language, literature, and religions from ten to twelve centuries ago, was not occasioned by a military occupancy of Japanese soil by invaders from China. It was due absolutely to the free choice of their versatile people, as free and voluntary as was the adoption by Rome of Greek literature and standards of learning. The modern choice of Western material civilization no doubt had elements of fear as motive power. But impulsion through a knowledge of conditions differs radically from compulsion exercised by a foreign military occupancy. India illustrates the latter; Japan, the former.
Japan and her people manifest amazing contrasts. Never, on the one hand, has a nation been so free from foreign military occupancy throughout a history covering more than fifteen centuries, and at the same time, been so influenced by and even subject to foreign psychical environment. What was the fact in ancient times is the fact to-day. The dominance of China and India has been largely displaced by that of Europe. Western literature, language, and science, and even customs, are being welcomed by Japan, and are working their inevitable effects. But it is all perfectly natural, perfectly spontaneous. The present choice by Japan of modern science and education and methods and principles of government and nineteenth-century literature and law,—in a word, of Occidental civilization,—is not due to any artificial pressure or military occupancy. But the choice and the consequent evolution are wholly due to the free act of the people. In this, as in several other respects, Japan reminds us of ancient Greece. Dr. Menzies, in his "History of Religion," says: "Greece was not conquered from the East, but stirred to new life by the communication of new ideas." Free choice has made Japan reject Chinese astronomy, surgery, medicine, and jurisprudence. The early choice to admit foreigners to Japan to trade may have been made entirely through fear, but is now accepted and justified by reason and choice.
The true explanation, therefore, of the recent and rapid rise of Japan to power and reputation, is to be found, not in the externals of her civilization, not in the pressure of foreign governments, but rather in the inherited mental and temperamental characteristics, reacting on the new and stimulating environment, and working along the lines of true evolution. Japan has not "jumped out of her skin," but a new vitality has given that skin a new color.
II
HISTORICAL SKETCH
How many of the stories of the Kojiki (written in 712 A.D.) and Nihongi (720 A.D.) are to be accepted is still a matter of dispute among scholars. Certain it is, however, that Japanese early history is veiled in a mythology which seems to center about three prominent points: Kyushu, in the south; Yamato, in the east central, and Izumo in the west central region. This mythological history narrates the circumstances of the victory of the southern descendants of the gods over the two central regions. And it has been conjectured that these three centers represent three waves of migration that brought the ancestors of the present inhabitants of Japan to these shores. The supposition is that they came quite independently and began their conflicts only after long periods of residence and multiplication.
Though this early record is largely mythological, tradition shows us the progenitors of the modern Japanese people as conquerors from the west and south who drove the aborigines before them and gradually took possession of the entire land. That these conquerors were not all of the same stock is proved by the physical appearance of the Japanese to-day, and by their language. Through these the student traces an early mixture of races—the Malay, the Mongolian, and the Ural-Altaic. Whether the early crossing of these races bears vital relation to the plasticity of the Japanese is a question which tempts the scholar.
Primitive, inter-tribal conflicts of which we have no reliable records resulted in increasing intercourse. Victory was followed by federation. And through the development of a common language, of common customs and common ideas, the tribes were unified socially and psychically. Consciousness of this unity was emphasized by the age-long struggle against the Ainu, who were not completely conquered until the eighteenth century.
With the dawn of authentic history (500-600 A.D.) we find amalgamation of the conquering tribes, with, however, constantly recurring inter-clan and inter-family wars. Many of these continued for scores and even hundreds of years—proving that, in the modern sense, of the word, the Japanese were not yet a nation, though, through inter-marriage, through the adoption of important elements of civilization brought from China and India via Korea, through the nominal acceptance of the Emperor as the divinely appointed ruler of the land, they were, in race and in civilization, a fairly homogeneous people.
The national governmental system was materially affected by the need, throughout many centuries, of systematic methods of defense against the Ainu. The rise of the Shogunate dates back to 883 A.D., when the chief of the forces opposing the Ainu was appointed by the Emperor and bore the official title, "The Barbarian-expelling Generalissimo." This office developed in power until, some centuries later, it usurped in fact, if not in name, all the imperial prerogatives.
It is probable that the Chinese written language, literature, and ethical teachings of Confucius came to Japan from Korea after the Christian era. The oldest known Japanese writings (Japanese written with Chinese characters) date from the eighth century. In this period also Buddhism first came to Japan. For over a hundred years it made relatively little progress. But when at last in the ninth and tenth centuries native Japanese Buddhists popularized its doctrines and adopted into its theogony the deities of the aboriginal religion, now known as Shinto, Buddhism became the religion of the people, and filled the land with its great temples, praying priests, and gorgeous rituals.
Even in those early centuries the contact of Japan with her Oriental neighbors revealed certain traits of her character which have been conspicuous in recent times —great capacity for acquisition, and readiness to adopt freely from foreign nations. Her contact with China, at that time so far in advance of herself in every element of civilization, was in some respects disastrous to her original growth. Instead of working out the problems of thought and life for herself, she took what China and Korea had to give. The result was an arrest in the development of everything distinctively native. The native religion was so absorbed by Buddhism that for a thousand years it lost all self-consciousness. Indeed the modern clear demarcation between the native and the imported religions is a matter of only a few decades, due to the researches of native scholars during the latter part of the last and the early part of this century. Even now, multitudes of the common people know no difference between the various elements of the composite religion of which they are the heirs.
Moreover, early contact with China and her enormous literature checked the development of the native language and the growth of the native literature. The language suffered arrest because of the rapid introduction of Chinese terms for all the growing needs of thought and civilization. Modern Japanese is a compound of the original tongue and Japonicized Chinese. Native speculative thought likewise found little encouragement or stimulus to independent activity in the presence of the elaborate and in many respects profound philosophies brought from India and China.
From earliest times the government of Japan was essentially feudal. Powerful families and clans disputed and fought for leadership, and the political history of Japan revolves around the varying fortunes of these families. While the Imperial line is never lost to sight, it seldom rises to real power.
When, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Japan's conquering arm reached across the waters, to ravage the coast of China, to extend her influence as far south as Siam, and even to invade Korea with a large army in 1592, it looked as if she were well started on her career as a world-power. But that was not yet to be. The hegemony of her clans passed into the powerful and shrewd Tokugawa family, the policy of which was peace and national self-sufficiency.
The representatives of the Occidental nations (chiefly of Spain and Portugal) were banished. The Christian religion (Roman Catholic), which for over fifty years had enjoyed free access and had made great progress, was forbidden and stamped out, not without much bloodshed. Foreign travel and commerce were strictly interdicted. A particular school of Confucian ethics was adopted and taught as the state religion. Feudalism was systematically established and intentionally developed. Each and every man had his assigned and recognized place in the social fabric, and change was not easy. It is doubtful if any European country has ever given feudalism so long and thorough a trial. Never has feudalism attained so complete a development as it did in Japan under the Tokugawa régime of over 250 years.
During this period no influences came from other lands to disturb the natural development. With the exception of three ships a year from Holland, an occasional stray ship from other lands, and from fifteen to twenty Dutchmen isolated in a little island in the harbor of Nagasaki, Japan had no communication with foreign lands or alien peoples.
Of this period, extending to the middle of the present century, the ordinary visitor and even the resident have but a superficial knowledge. All the changes that have taken place in Japan, since the coming of Perry in 1854, are attributed by the easy-going tourist to the external pressure of foreign nations. But such travelers know nothing of the internal preparations that had been making for generations previous to the arrival of Perry. The tourist is quite ignorant of the line of Japanese scholars that had been undermining the authority of the military rulers, "the Tokugawa," in favor of the Imperial line which they had practically supplanted.
The casual student of Japan has been equally ignorant of the real mental and moral caliber of the Japanese. Dressed in clothing that appeared to us fantastic, and armed with cumbersome armor and old-fashioned guns, it was easy to jump to the conclusion that the people were essentially uncivilized. We did not know the intellectual discipline demanded of one, whether native or foreign, who would master the native language or the native systems of thought. We forgot that we appeared as grotesque and as barbarous to them as they to us, and that mental ability and moral worth are qualities that do not show on the surface of a nation's civilization. While they thought us to be "unclean," "dogs," "red-haired devils," we perhaps thought them to be clever savages, or at best half-civilized heathen, without moral perceptions or intellectual ability.
Of Old Japan little more needs to be said. Without external commerce, there was little need for internal trade; ships were small; roads were footpaths; education was limited to the samurai, or military class, retainers of the daimyo, "feudal lords"; inter-clan travel was limited and discouraged; Confucian ethics was the moral standard. From the beginning of the seventeenth century Christianity was forbidden by edict, and was popularly known as the "evil way"; Japan was thought to be especially sacred, and the coming of foreigners was supposed to pollute the land and to be the cause of physical evils. Education, as in China, was limited to the Chinese classics. Mathematics, general history, and science, in the modern sense, were of course wholly unknown. Guns and powder were brought from the West in the sixteenth century by Spaniards and Portuguese, but were never improved. Ship-building was the same in the middle of the nineteenth century as in the middle of the sixteenth, perhaps even less advanced. Architecture had received its great impulse from the introduction of Buddhism in the ninth and tenth centuries and had made no material improvement thereafter.
But while there was little progress in the external and mechanical elements of civilization, there was progress in other respects. During the "great peace," first arose great scholars. Culture became more general throughout the nation. Education was esteemed. The corrupt lives of the priests were condemned and an effort was made to reform life through the revival of a certain school of Confucian teachers known as "Shin-Gaku"—"Heart-Knowledge." Art also made progress, both pictorial and manual. It would almost seem as if modern artificers and painters had lost the skill of their forefathers of one or two hundred years ago.
Many reasons explain the continuance of the old political and social order: the lack of a foreign foe to compel abandonment of the tribal organisation; the mountainous nature of the country with its slow, primitive means of intercommunication; the absence of all idea of a completely centralized nation. Furthermore, the principle of complete subordination to superiors and ancestors had become so strong that individual innovations were practically impossible. Japan thus lacked the indispensable key to further progress, the principle of individualism. The final step in the development of her nationality has been taken, therefore, only in our own time.
Old Japan seemed absolutely committed to a thorough-going antagonism to everything foreign. New Japan seems committed to the opposite policy. What are the steps by which she has effected this apparent national reversal of attitude?
We should first note that the absolutism of the Tokugawa Shogunate served to arouse ever-growing opposition because of its stern repression of individual opinion. It not only forbade the Christian religion, but also all independent thought in religious philosophy and in politics. The particular form of Confucian moral philosophy which it held was forced on all public teachers of Confucianism. Dissent was not only heretical, but treasonable. Although, by its military absolutism, the Tokugawa rule secured the great blessing of peace, lasting over two hundred years, and although the curse of Japan for well-nigh a thousand preceding years had been fierce inter-tribal and inter-family wars and feuds, yet it secured that peace at the expense of individual liberty of thought and act. It thus gradually aroused against itself the opposition of many able minds. The enforced peace rendered it possible for these men to devote themselves to problems of thought and of history. Indeed, they had no other outlet for their energies. As they studied the history of the past and compared their results with the facts of the present, it gradually dawned on the minds of the scholars of the eighteenth century, that the Tokugawa family were exercising functions of government which had never been delegated to them; and that the Emperor was a poverty-stricken puppet in the hands of a family that had seized the military power and had gradually absorbed all the active functions of government, together with its revenues.
It is possible for us to see now that these early Japanese scholars idealized their ancient history, and assigned to the Emperor a place in ancient times which in all probability he has seldom held. But, however that may be, they thought their view correct, and held that the Emperor was being deprived of his rightful rule by the Tokugawa family.
These ideas, first formulated in secret by scholars, gradually filtered down, still in secrecy, and were accepted by a large number of the samurai, the military literati of the land. Their opposition to the actual rulers of the land, aroused by the individual-crushing absolutism of the Tokugawa rule, naturally allied itself to the religious sentiment of loyalty to the Emperor. Few Westerners can appreciate the full significance of this fact. Throughout the centuries loyalty to the Emperor has been considered a cardinal virtue. With one exception, according to the popular histories, no one ever acknowledged himself opposed to the Emperor. Every rebellion against the powers in actual possession made it the first aim to gain possession of the Emperor, and proclaim itself as fighting for him. When, therefore, the scholars announced that the existing government was in reality a usurpation and that the Emperor was robbed of his rightful powers, the latent antagonism to the Tokugawa rule began to find both intellectual and moral justification. It could and did appeal to the religious patriotism of the people. It is perhaps not too much to say that the overthrow of the Tokugawa family and the restoration of the Imperial rule to the Imperial family would have taken place even though there had been no interference of foreign nations, no extraneous influences. But equally certain is it that these antagonisms to the ruling family were crystallized, and the great internal changes hastened by the coming in of the aggressive foreign nations. How this external influence operated must and can be told in a few words.
When Admiral Perry negotiated his treaty with the Japanese, he supposed he was dealing with responsible representatives of the government. As was later learned, however, the Tokugawa rulers had not secured the formal assent of the Emperor to the treaty. The Tokugawa rulers and their counselors, quite as much as the clan-rulers, wished to keep the foreigners out of the country, but they realized their inability. The rulers of the clans, however, felt that the Tokugawa rulers had betrayed the land; they were, accordingly, in active opposition both to the foreigners and to the national rulers. When the foreigners requested the Japanese government, "the Tokugawa Shogunate," to carry out the treaties, it was unable to comply with the request because of the antagonism of the clan-rulers. When the clan-rulers demanded that the government annul the treaties and drive out the hated and much-feared foreigners, it found itself utterly unable to do so, because of the formidable naval power of the foreigners.
As a consequence of this state of affairs, a few serious collisions took place between the foreigners and the two-sworded samurai, retainers of the clan-rulers. The Tokugawa rulers apparently did their best to protect the foreigners, and, when there was no possible method of evasion, to execute the treaties they had made. But they could not control the clans already rebellious. A few murders of foreigners, followed by severe reprisals, and two bombardments of native towns by foreign gunboats, began to reveal to the military class at large that no individual or local action against the foreigners was at all to be thought of. The first step necessary was the unification of the Empire under the Imperial rule. This, however, could be done only by the overthrow of the Tokugawa Shogunate; which was effected in 1867-68 after a short struggle, marked by great clemency.
We thus realize that the overthrow of the Shogunate as also the final abolishment of feudalism with its clans, lords, and hereditary rulers, and the establishment of those principles of political and personal centralization which lie at the foundation of real national unity, not only were hastened by, but in a marked degree dependent on, the stimulus and contribution of foreigners. They compelled a more complete Japanese unity than had existed before, for they demanded direct relations with the national head. And when treaty negotiations revealed the lack of such a head, they undertook to show its necessity by themselves punishing those local rulers who did not recognize the Tokugawa headship.
With the establishment of the Emperor on the throne, began the modern era in Japanese history, known in Japan as "Meiji"—"Enlightened Rule."
But not even yet was the purpose of the nation attained, namely, the expulsion of the polluters of the sacred soil of Japan. As soon as the new government was established and had turned its attention to foreign affairs, it found itself in as great a dilemma as had its predecessors, the Tokugawa rulers. For the foreign governments insisted that the treaties negotiated with the old government should be accepted in full by the new. It was soon as evident to the new rulers as it had been to the old that direct and forcible resistance to the foreigners was futile. Not by might were they to be overcome. Westerners had, however, supplied the ideals whereby national, political unity was to be secured. Mill's famous work on "Representative Government" was early translated, and read by all the thinking men of the day. These ideas were also keenly studied in their actual workings in the West. The consequence was that feudalism was utterly rejected and the new ideas, more or less modified, were speedily adopted, even down to the production of a constitution and the establishment of local representative assemblies and a national diet. In other words, the theories and practices of the West in regard to the political organization of the state supplied Japan with those new intellectual variations which were essential to the higher development of her own national unity.
A further point of importance is the fact that at the very time that the West applied this pressure and supplied Japan with these political ideals she also put within her reach the material instruments which would enable her to carry them into practice. I refer to steam locomotion by land and sea, the postal and telegraphic systems of communication, the steam printing press, the system of popular education, and the modern organization of the army and the navy. These instruments Japan made haste to acquire. But for these, the rapid transformation of Old Japan into New Japan would have been an exceedingly long and difficult process. The adoption of these tools of civilization by the central authority at once gave it an immense superiority over any local force. For it could communicate speedily with every part of the Empire, and enforce its decisions with a celerity and a decisiveness before unknown. It became once more the actual head of the nation.
We have thus reached the explanation of one of the most astonishing changes in national attitude that history has to record, and the new attitude seems such a contradiction of the old as to be inexplicable, and almost incredible. But a better knowledge of the facts and a deeper understanding of their significance will serve to remove this first impression.
What, then, did the new government do? It simply said, "For us to drive out these foreigners is impossible; but neither is it desirable. We need to know the secrets of their power. We must study their language, their science, their machinery, their steamboats, their battle-ships. We must learn all their secrets, and then we shall be able to turn them out without difficulty. Let us therefore restrict them carefully to the treaty ports, but let us make all the use of them we can."
This has virtually been the national policy of Japan ever since. And this policy gained the acceptance of the people as a whole with marvelous readiness, for a reason which few foreigners can appreciate. Had this policy been formulated and urged by the Tokugawa rulers, there is no probability that it would have been accepted. But because it was, ostensibly at least, the declared will of the Emperor, loyalty to him, which in Japan is both religion and patriotism, led to a hearty and complete acceptance which could hardly have been realized in any other land. During the first year of his "enlightened" rule (1868), the Emperor gave his sanction to an Edict, the last two clauses of which read as follows:
"The old, uncivilized way shall be replaced by the eternal principles of the universe.
"The best knowledge shall be sought throughout the world, so as to promote the Imperial welfare."
It is the wide acceptance of this policy, which, however, is in accord with the real genius of the people, that has transformed Japan. It has sent hundreds of its young men to foreign lands to learn and bring back to Japan the secrets of Western power and wealth; it has established roads and railways, postal and telegraphic facilities, a public common-school system, colleges and a university in which Western science, history, and languages have been taught by foreign and foreign-trained instructors; daily, weekly, and monthly papers and magazines; factories, docks, drydocks; local and foreign commerce; representative government—in a word, all the characteristic features of New Japan. The whole of New Japan is only the practical carrying out of the policy adopted at the beginning of the new era, when it was found impossible to cast out the foreigners by force. Brute force being found to be out of the question, resort was thus made to intellectual force, and with real success.
The practice since then has not been so much to retain the foreigner as to learn of him and then to eliminate him. Every branch of learning and industry has proved this to be the consistent Japanese policy. No foreigner may hope to obtain a permanent position in Japanese employ, either in private firms or in the government. A foreigner is useful not for what he can do, but for what he can teach. When any Japanese can do his work tolerably well, the foreigner is sure to be dropped.
The purpose of this volume does not require of us a minute statistical statement of the present attainments of New Japan. Such information may be procured from Henry Norman's "Real Japan," Ransome's "Japan in Transition," and Newton's "Japan: Country, Court, and People." It is enough for us to realize that Japan has wholly abandoned or profoundly modified all the external features of her old, her distinctively Oriental civilization and has replaced them by Occidental features. In government, she is no longer arbitrary, autocratic, and hereditary, but constitutional and representative. Town, provincial, and national legislative assemblies are established, and in fairly good working order, all over the land. The old feudal customs have been replaced by well codified laws, which are on the whole faithfully administered according to Occidental methods. Examination by torture has been abolished. The perfect Occidentalization of the army, and the creation of an efficient navy, are facts fully demonstrated to the world. The limited education of the few—- and in exclusively Chinese classics—has given place to popular education. Common schools number over 30,000, taught by about 100,000 teachers (4278 being women), having over 4,500,000 pupils (over 1,500,000 being girls). The school accommodation is insufficient; it is said that 30,000 additional teachers are needed at once. Middle and high schools throughout the land are rejecting nearly one-half of the student applicants for lack of accommodation.
Feudal isolation, repression, and seclusion have given way to free travel, free speech, and a free press. Newspapers, magazines, and books pour forth from the universal printing press in great profusion. Twenty dailies issue in the course of a year over a million copies each, while two of them circulate 24,000,000 and 21,000,000 copies, respectively.
Personal, political, and religious liberty has been practically secure now for over two decades, guaranteed by the constitution, and enforced by the courts.
Chinese medical practice has largely been replaced by that from the West, although many of the ignorant classes still prefer the old methods. The government enforces Western hygienic principles in all public matters, with the result that the national health has improved and the population is growing at an alarming rate. While in 1872 the people numbered 33,000,000, in 1898 they numbered 45,000,000. The general scale of living for the common people has also advanced conspicuously. Meat shops are now common throughout the land—a thing unknown in pre-Meiji times—and rice, which used to be the luxury of the wealthy few, has become the staple necessity of the many.
Postal and telegraph facilities are quite complete. Macadamized roads and well-built railroads have replaced the old footpaths, except in the most mountainous districts. Factories of many kinds are appearing in every town and city. Business corporations, banks, etc., which numbered only thirty-four so late as 1864 are now numbered by the thousand, and trade flourishes as in no previous period of Japanese history. Instead of being a country of farmers and soldiers, Japan is to-day a land of farmers and merchants. Wealth is growing apace. International commerce, too, has sprung up and expanded phenomenally. Japanese merchant steamers may now be seen in every part of the world.
All these changes have taken place within about three decades, and so radical have they been,—so productive of new life in Japan,—that some have urged the re-writing of Japanese history, making the first year of Meiji (1868) the year one of Japan, instead of reckoning from the year in which Jimmu Tenno is said to have ascended the throne, 2560 years ago (B.C. 660).
The way in which Japanese regard the transformations produced by the "restoration" of the present Emperor, upon the overthrow of the "Bakufu," or "Curtain Government," may be judged from the following graphic paragraph from The Far East:
"The Restoration of Meiji was indeed the greatest of revolutions that this island empire ever underwent. Its magic wand left nothing untouched and unchanged. It was the Restoration that overthrew the Tokugawa Shogunate, which reigned supreme for over two centuries and a half. It was the Restoration that brought us face to face with the Occidentals. It was the Restoration that pulled the demigods of the Feudal lords down to the level of the commoners. It was the Restoration that deprived the samurai of their fiefs and reduced them to penury. It was the Restoration that taught the people to build their houses of bricks and stones and to construct ships and bridges of iron instead of wood. It was the Restoration that informed us that eclipses and comets are not to be feared, and that earthquakes are not caused by a huge cat-fish in the bottom of the earth. It was the Restoration that taught the people to use the "drum-backing" thunder as their messenger, and to make use of the railroad instead of the palanquin. It was the Restoration that set the earth in motion, and proved that there is no rabbit in the moon. It was the Restoration that bestowed on Socrates and Aristotle the chairs left vacant by Confucius and Mencius. It was the Restoration that let Shakspere and Goethe take the place of Bakin and Chikamatsu. It was the Restoration that deprived the people of the swords and topnots. In short, after the Restoration a great change took place in administration, in art, in science, in literature, in language spoken and written, in taste, in custom, in the mode of living, nay in everything" (p. 541).
A natural outcome of the Restoration is the exuberant patriotism that is so characteristic a feature of New Japan. The very term "ai-koku-shin" is a new creation, almost as new as the thing. This word is an incidental proof of the general correctness of the contention of this chapter that true nationality is a recent product in Japan. The term, literally translated, is "love-country heart"; but the point for us to notice particularly is the term for country, "koku"; this word has never before meant the country as a whole, but only the territory of a clan. If I wish to ask a Japanese what part of Japan is his native home, I must use this word. And if a Japanese wishes to ask me which of the foreign lands I am a native of, he must use the same word. The truth is that Old Japan did not have any common word corresponding to the English term, "My country." In ancient times, this could only mean, "My clan-territory." But with the passing away of the clans the old word has taken on a new significance. The new word, "ai-koku-shin," refers not to love of clan, but to love of the whole nation. The conception of national unity has at last seized upon the national mind and heart, and is giving the people an enthusiasm for the nation, regardless of the parts, which they never before knew. Japanese patriotism has only in this generation come to self-consciousness. This leads it to many a strange freak. It is vociferous and imperious, and often very impractical and Chauvinistic. It frequently takes the form of uncompromising disdain for the foreigner, and the most absolute loyalty to the Emperor of Japan; it demands the utmost respect of expression in regard to him and the form of government he has graciously granted the nation. The slightest hint or indirect suggestion of defect or ignorance, or even of limitation, is most vehemently resented.
A few illustrations of the above statements from recent experience will not be out of place. In August, 1891, the Minister of Education, Mr. Y. Osaki, criticising the tendency in Japan to pay undue respect to moneyed men, said, in the course of a long speech, "You Japanese worship money even more reverently than the Americans do. If you had a republic as they have, I believe you would nominate an Iwazaki or a Mitsui to be president, whereas they don't think of nominating a Vanderbilt or a Gould." It was not long before a storm was raging around his head because of this reference to a republican form of government as a possibility in Japan. The storm became so fierce that he was finally compelled to resign his post and retire, temporarily, from political life.
In October, 1898, the High Council of Education was required to consider various questions regarding the conduct of the educational department after the New Treaties should come into force. The most important question was whether foreigners should be allowed to have a part in the education of Japanese youth. The general argument, and that which prevailed, was that this should not be allowed lest the patriotism of the children be weakened. So far as appears but one voice was raised for a more liberal policy. Mr. Y. Kamada maintained that "patriotism in Japan was the outcome of foreign intercourse. Patriotism, that is to say, love of country—not merely of fief—and readiness to sacrifice everything for its sake, was a product of the Meiji era."
In 1891 a teacher in the Kumamoto Boys' School gave expression to the thought in a public address that, as all mankind are brothers, the school should stand for the principle of universal brotherhood and universal good-will to men. This expression of universalism was so obnoxious to the patriotic spirit of so large a number of the people of Kumamoto Ken, or Province, that the governor required the school to dismiss that teacher. There is to-day a strong party in Japan which makes "Japanism" their cry; they denounce all expressions of universal good-will as proofs of deficiency of patriotism. There are not wanting those who see through the shallowness of such views and who vigorously oppose and condemn such narrow patriotism. Yet the fact that it exists to-day with such force must be noted and its natural explanation, too, must not be forgotten. It is an indication of self-conscious nationality.
That this love of country, even this conception of country, is a modern thing will appear from two further facts. Until modern times there was no such thing as a national flag. The flaming Sun on a field of white came into existence as a national flag only in 1859. The use of the Sun as the symbol for the Emperor has been in vogue since 700 A.D., the custom having been adopted from China. "When in 1859 a national flag corresponding to those of Europe became necessary, the Sun Banner naturally stepped into the vacant place."[[A]]
The second fact is the recent origin of the festival known as "Kigensetsu." It occurs on February 11 and celebrates the alleged accession of Jimmu Tenno, the first Emperor of Japan, to the throne 2560 years ago (660 B.C.). The festival itself, however, was instituted by Imperial decree ten years ago (1890).
The transformation which has come over Japan in a single generation requires interpretation. Is the change real or superficial? Is the new social order "a borrowed trumpery garment, which will soon be rent by violent revolutions," according to the eminent student of racial psychology, Professor Le Bon, or is it of "a solid nature" according to the firm belief of Mr. Stanford Ransome, one of the latest writers on Japan?
This is the problem that will engage our attention more or less directly throughout this work. We shall give our chief thought to the nature and development of Japanese racial characteristics, believing that this alone gives the light needed for the solution of the problem.[[B]]
III
THE PROBLEM OF PROGRESS
What constitutes progress? And what is the true criterion for its measurement? In adopting Western methods of life and thought, is Japan advancing or receding? The simplicity of the life of the common people, their freedom from fashions that fetter the Occidental, their independence of furniture in their homes, their few wants and fewer necessities—these, when contrasted with the endless needs and demands of an Occidental, are accepted by some as evidences of a higher stage of civilization than prevails in the West.
The hedonistic criterion of progress is the one most commonly adopted in considering the question as to whether Japan is the gainer or the loser by her rapid abandonment of old ways and ideas and by her equally rapid adoption of Western ones in their place. Yet this appeal to happiness seems to me a misleading because vague, if not altogether false, standard of progress. Those who use it insist that the people of Japan are losing their former happiness under the stress of new conditions. Now there can be no doubt that during the "Kyu-han jidai," the times before the coming in of Western waves of life, the farmers were a simple, unsophisticated people; living from month to month with little thought or anxiety. They may be said to have been happy. The samurai who lived wholly on the bounty of the daimyo led of course a tranquil life, at least so far as anxiety or toil for daily rice and fish was concerned. As the fathers had lived and fought and died, so did the sons. To a large extent the community had all things in common; for although the lord lived in relative luxury, yet in such small communities there never was the great difference between classes that we find in modern Europe and America. As a rule the people were fed, if there was food. The socialistic principle was practically universal. Especially was emphasis laid on kinship. As a result, save among the outcast classes, the extremes of poverty did not exist.
Were we to rest our inquiries at this point, we might say that in truth the Japanese had attained the summit of progress; that nothing further could be asked. But pushing our way further, we find that the peace and quiet of the ordinary classes of society were accompanied by many undesirable features.
Prominent among them was the domineering spirit of the military class. They alone laid claim to personal rights, and popular stories are full of the free and furious ways in which they used their swords. The slightest offense by one of the swordless men would be paid for by a summary act of the two-sworded swashbucklers, while beggars and farmers were cut down without compunction, sometimes simply to test a sword. In describing those times one man said to me, "They used to cut off the heads of the common people as farmers cut off the head of the daikon" (a variety of giant radish). I have frequently asked my Japanese friends and acquaintances, whether, in view of the increasing difficulties of life under the new conditions, the country would not like to return to ancient times and customs. But none have been ready to give me an affirmative reply. On detailed questioning I have always found that the surly, domineering methods, the absolutism of the rulers, and the defenselessness of the people against unjust arbitrary superiors would not be submitted to by a people that has once tasted the joy arising from individual rights and freedom and the manhood that comes from just laws for all.
A striking feature of those Japanese who are unchanged by foreign ways is their obsequious manner toward superiors and officials. The lordly and oftentimes ruthless manner of the rulers has naturally cowed the subject. Whenever the higher nobility traveled, the common people were commanded to fall on the ground in obeisance and homage. Failure to do so was punishable with instant death at the hands of the retainers who accompanied the lord. During my first stay in Kumamoto I was surprised that farmers, coming in from the country on horseback, meeting me as I walked, invariably got down from their horses, unfastened the handkerchiefs from their heads, and even took off their spectacles if there were nothing else removable. These were signs of respect given to all in authority. Where my real status began to be generally known, these signs of politeness gave place to rude staring. It is difficult for the foreigner to appreciate the extremes of the high-handed and the obsequious spirit which were developed by the ancient form of government. Yet it is comparatively easy to distinguish between the evidently genuine humility of the non-military classes and the studied deference of the dominant samurai.
Another feature of the old order of things was the emptiness of the lives of the people. Education was rare. Limited to the samurai, who composed but a fraction of the population, it was by no means universal even among them. And such education as they had was confined to the Chinese classics. Although there were schools in connection with some of the temples, the people as a whole did not learn to read or write. These were accomplishments for the nobility and men of leisure. The thoughts of the people were circumscribed by the narrow world in which they lived, and this allowed but an occasional glimpse of other clans through war or a chance traveler. For, in those times, freedom of travel was not generally allowed. Each man, as a rule, lived and labored and died where he was born. The military classes had more freedom. But when we contrast the breadth of thought and outlook enjoyed by the nation to-day, through newspapers and magazines, with the outlook and knowledge of even the most progressive and learned of those of ancient times, how contracted do their lives appear!
A third feature of former times is the condition of women during those ages. Eulogizers of Old Japan not only seem to forget that working classes existed then, but also that women, constituting half the population, were essential to the existence of the nation. Though allowing more freedom than was given to women in other Oriental nations, Japan did not grant such liberty as is essential to the full development of her powers. "Woman is a man's plaything" expresses a view still held in Japan. "Woman's sole duty is the bearing and rearing of children for her husband" is the dominant idea that has determined her place in the family and in the state for hundreds of years. That she has any independent interest or value as a human being has not entered into national conception. "The way in which they are treated by the men has hitherto been such as might cause a pang to any generous European heart.... A woman's lot is summed up in what is termed 'the three obediences,' obedience, while yet unmarried, to a father; obedience, when married, to a husband; obedience, when widowed, to a son. At the present moment the greatest duchess or marchioness in the land is still her husband's drudge. She fetches and carries for him, bows down humbly in the hall when my lord sallies forth on his good pleasure."[[C]] "The Greater Learning for Women," by Ekken Kaibara (1630-1714), an eminent Japanese moralist, is the name of a treatise on woman's duties which sums up the ideas common in Japan upon this subject. For two hundred years or more it has been used as a text-book in the training of girls. It enjoins such abject submission of the wife to her husband, to her parents-in-law, and to her other kindred by marriage, as no self-respecting woman of Western lands could for a moment endure. Let me prove this through a few quotations.
"A woman should look on her husband as if he were Heaven itself and never weary of thinking how she may yield to her husband, and thus escape celestial castigation." "Woman must form no friendships and no intimacy, except when ordered to do so by her parents or by the middleman. Even at the peril of her life, must she harden her heart like a rock or metal, and observe the rules of propriety." "A woman has no particular lord. She must look to her husband as her lord and must serve him with all reverence and worship, not despising or thinking lightly of him. The great life-long duty of a woman is obedience.... When the husband issues his instructions, the wife must never disobey them.... Should her husband be roused to anger at any time, she must obey him, with fear and trembling." Not one word in all these many and specific instructions hints at love and affection. That which to Western ears is the sweetest word in the English language, the foundation of happiness in the home, the only true bond between husband and wife, parents and children—LOVE—does not once appear in this the ideal instruction for Japanese women.
Even to this day divorce is the common occurrence in Japan. According to Confucius there are seven grounds of divorce: disobedience, barrenness, lewd conduct, jealousy, leprosy or any other foul or incurable disease, too much talking, and thievishness. "In plain English, a man may send away his wife whenever he gets tired of her."
Were the man's duties to the wife and to her parents as minutely described and insisted on as are those of the wife to the husband and to his parents, this "Greater Learning for Women" would not seem so deficient; but such is not the case. The woman's rights are few, yet she bears her lot with marvelous patience. Indeed, she has acquired a most attractive and patient and modest behavior despite, or is it because of, centuries of well-nigh tyrannical treatment from the male sex. In some important respects the women of Japan are not to be excelled by those of any other land. But that this lot has been a happy one I cannot conceive it possible for a European, who knows the meaning of love or home, to contend. The single item of one divorce for every three marriages tells a tale of sorrow and heartache that is sad to contemplate. Nor does this include those separations where tentative marriage takes place with a view to learning whether the parties can endure living together. I have known several such cases. Neither does this take account of the great number of concubines that may be found in the homes of the higher classes. A concubine often makes formal divorce quite superfluous.
I by no means contend that the women of Old Japan were all and always miserable. There was doubtless much happiness and even family joy; affection between husband and wife could assuredly have been found in numberless cases. But the hardness of life as a whole, the low position held by woman in her relations to man, her lack of legal rights,[[D]] and her menial position, justify the assertion that there was much room for improvement.
These three conspicuous features of the older life in Japan help us to reach a clear conception as to what constitutes progress. We may say that true progress consists in that continuous, though slow, transformation of the structure of society which, while securing its more thorough organization, brings to each individual the opportunity of a larger, richer, and fuller life, a life which increasingly calls forth his latent powers and capacities. In other words, progress is a growing organization of society, accompanied by a growing liberty of the individual resulting in richness and fullness of life. It is not primarily a question of unreflecting happiness, but a question of the wide development of manhood and womanhood. Both men and women have as yet unmeasured latent capacities, which demand a certain liberty, accompanied by responsibilities and cares, in order for their development. Intellectual education and a wide horizon are likewise essential to the production of such manhood and womanhood. In the long run this is seen to bring a deeper and a more lasting happiness than was possible to the undeveloped man or woman.
The question of progress is confused and put on a wrong footing when the consciousness of happiness or unhappiness, is made the primary test. The happiness of the child is quite apart from that of the adult. Regardless of distressing circumstances, the child is able to laugh and play, and this because he is a child; a child in his ignorance of actual life, and in his inability to perceive the true conditions in which he lives. Not otherwise, I take it, was the happiness of the vast majority in Old Japan. Theirs was the happiness of ignorance and simple, undeveloped lives. Accustomed to tyranny, they did not think of rebellion against it. Familiar with brutality and suffering, they felt nothing of its shame and inhumanity. The sight of decapitated bodies, the torture of criminals, the despotism of husbands, the cringing obedience of the ruled, the haughtiness of the rulers, the life of hard toil and narrow outlook, were all so usual that no thought of escape from such an order of society ever suggested itself to those who endured it.
From time to time wise and just rulers did indeed strive to introduce principles of righteousness into their methods of government; but these men formed the exception, not the rule. They were individuals and not the system under which the people lived. It was always a matter of chance whether or not such men were at the head of affairs, for the people did not dream of the possibility of having any voice in their selection. The structure of society was and always had been absolute militarism. Even under the most benevolent rulers the use of cruel torture, not only on convicted criminals, but on all suspected of crime, was customary. Those in authority might personally set a good example, but they did not modify the system. They owned not only the soil but practically the laborers also, for these could not leave their homes in search of others that were better. They were serfs, if not slaves, and the system did not tend to raise the standard of life or education, of manhood or womanhood among the people. The happiness of the people in such times was due in part to their essential inhumanity of heart and lack of sympathy with suffering and sorrow. Each individual bore his own sorrow and pain alone. The community, as such, did not distress itself over individuals who suffered. Sympathy, in its full meaning, was unknown in Old Japan. The barbarous custom of casting out the leper from the home, to wander a lonely exile, living on the charity of strangers, is not unknown even to this day. We are told that in past times the "people were governed by such strong aversion to the sight of sickness that travelers were often left to die by the roadside from thirst, hunger, or disease; and householders even went the length of thrusting out of doors and abandoning to utter destitution servants who suffered from chronic maladies." So universal was this heartlessness that the government at one time issued proclamations against the practices it allowed. "Whenever an epidemic occurred the number of deaths was enormous." Seven men of the outcast, "the Eta," class were authoritatively declared equal in value to one common man. Beggars were technically called "hi-nin," "not men."
Those who descant on the happiness of Old Japan commit the great error of overlooking all these sad features of life, and of fixing their attention exclusively on the one feature of the childlike, not to say childish, lightness of heart of the common people. Such writers are thus led to pronounce the past better than the present time. They also overlook the profound happiness and widespread prosperity of the present era. Trade, commerce, manufactures, travel, the freest of intercommunication, newspapers, and international relations, have brought into life a richness and a fullness that were then unknown. But in addition, the people now enjoy a security of personal interests, a possession of personal rights and property, and a personal liberty, that make life far more worthy and profoundly enjoyable, even while they bring responsibilities and duties and not a few anxieties. This explains the fact that no Japanese has expressed to me the slightest desire to abandon the present and return to the life and conditions of Old Japan.
Let me repeat, therefore, with all possible emphasis, that the problem of progress is not primarily one of increasing light-heartedness, pure and simple, nor yet a problem of racial unification or of political centralization; it is rather a problem of so developing the structure of society that the individual may have the fullest opportunity for development.
The measure of progress is not the degree of racial unification, of political centralization, or of unreflective happiness, but rather the degree and the extent of individual personality. Racial unification, political centralization, and increasing happiness are in the attainment of progress, but they are not to be viewed as sufficient ends. Personality, can alone be that end. The wide development of personality, therefore, is at once the goal and the criterion of progress.
IV
THE METHOD OF PROGRESS
Progress as an ideal is quite modern in its origin. For although the ancients were progressing, they did it unconsciously, blindly, stumbling on it by chance, forced to it, as we have seen, by the struggle for existence. True of the ancient civilizations of Europe and Western Asia and Africa, this is emphatically true of the Orient. Here, so far from seeking to progress, the avowed aim has been not to progress; the set purpose has been to do as the fathers did; to follow their example even in customs and rites whose meaning has been lost in the obscurity of the past. This blind adherence was the boast of those who called themselves religious. They strove to fulfill their duties to their ancestors.
Under such conditions how was progress possible? And how has it come to pass that, ruled by this ideal until less than fifty years ago, Japan is now facing quite the other way? The passion of the nation to-day is to make the greatest possible progress in every direction. Here is an anomaly, a paradox; progress made in spite of its rejection; and, recently, a total volte-face. How shall we explain this paradox?
In our chapter on the Principles of National Evolution,[[E]] we see that the first step in progress was made through the development of enlarging communities by means of extending boundaries and hardening customs. We see that, on reaching this stage, the great problem was so to break the "cake of custom" as to give liberty to individuals whereby to secure the needful variations. We do not consider how this was to be accomplished. We merely show that, if further progress was to be made, it could only be through the development of the individualistic principle to which we give the more exact name communo-individualism. This problem as to how the "cake of custom" is successfully broken must now engage our attention.
Mr. Bagehot contends that this process consisted, as a matter of history, in the establishment of government by discussion. Matters of principle came to be talked over; the desirability of this or that measure was submitted to the people for their approval or disapproval. This method served to stimulate definite and practical thought on a wide scale; it substituted the thinking of the many for the thinking of the few; it stimulated independent thinking and consequently independent action. This is, however, but another way of saying that it stimulated variation. A government whose action was determined after wide discussion would be peculiarly fitted to take advantage of all useful variations of ideas and practice. Experience shows, he continues, that the difficulty of developing a "cake of custom" is far more easily surmounted than that of developing government by discussion; i.e., that it is far less difficult to develop communalism than communo-individualism. The family of arrested civilizations, of which China and India and Japan, until recent times, are examples, were caught in the net of what had once been the source of their progress. The tyranny of their laws and customs was such that all individual variations were nipped in the bud. They failed to progress because they failed to develop variations. And they failed in this because they did not have government by discussion.
No one will dispute the importance of Mr. Bagehot's, contribution to this subject. But it may be doubted whether he has pointed out the full reason for the difficulty of breaking the "cake of custom" or manifested the real root of progress. To attain progress in the full sense, not merely of an oligarchy or a caste, but of the whole people, there must not only be government by discussion, but the responsibilities of the government must be snared more or less fully by all the governed.
History, however, shows that this cannot take place until a conception of intrinsic manhood and womanhood has arisen, a conception which emphasizes their infinite and inherent worth. This conception is not produced by government by discussion, while government by discussion is the necessary consequence of the wide acceptance of this conception. It is therefore the real root of progress.
As I look over the history of the Orient, I find no tendency to discover the inherent worth of man or to introduce the principle of government by discussion. Left to themselves, I see no probability that any of these nations would ever have been able to break the thrall of their customs, and to reach that stage of development in which common individuals could be trusted with a large measure of individual liberty. Though I can conceive that Japan might have secured a thorough-going political centralization under the old régime, I cannot see that that centralization would have been accompanied by growing liberty for the individual or by such constitutional rights for the common man as he enjoys to-day. Whatever progress she might have made in the direction of nationality it would still have been a despotism. The common man would have remained a helpless and hopeless slave. Art might have prospered; the people might have remained simple-minded and relatively contented. But they could not have attained that freedom and richness of life, that personality, which we saw in our last chapter to be the criterion and goal of true progress.
If the reader judges the above contention correct and agrees with the writer that the conception of the inherent value of a human being could not arise spontaneously in Japan, he will conclude that the progress of Japan depended on securing this important conception from without. Exactly this has taken place. By her thorough-going abandonment of the feudal social order and adoption of the constitutional and representative government of Christendom, whether she recognizes it or not, she has accepted the principles of the inherent worth of manhood and womanhood, as well as government by discussion. Japan has thus, by imitation rather than by origination, entered on the path of endless progress.
So important, however, is the step recently taken that further analysis of this method of progress is desirable for its full comprehension. We have already noted quite briefly[[F]] how Japan was supplied by the West with the ideal of national unity and the material instruments essential to its attainment. In connection with the high development of the nation as a whole, these two elements of progress, the ideal and the material, need further consideration.
We note in the first place that both begin with imitation, but if progress is to be real and lasting, both must grow to independence.
The first and by far the most important is the psychical, the introduction of new ideas. So long as the old, familiar ideas hold sway over the mind of a nation, there is little or no stimulus to comparison and discussion. Stagnation is well-nigh complete. But let new ideas be so introduced as to compel attention and comprehension, and the mind spontaneously awakes to wonderful activity. The old stagnation is no longer possible. Discussion is started; and in the end something must take place, even if the new ideas are not accepted wholly or even in part. But they will not gain attention if presented simply in the abstract, unconnected with real life. They must bring evidence that, if accepted and lived, they will be of practical use, that they will give added power to the nation.
Exactly this took place in 1854 when Admiral Perry demanded entrance to Japan. The people suddenly awoke from their sleep of two and a half centuries to find that new nations had arisen since they closed their eyes, nations among which new sets of ideas had been at work, giving them a power wholly unknown to the Orient and even mysterious to it. Those ideas were concerned, not alone with the making of guns, the building of ships, the invention of machinery, the taming and using of the forces of nature, but also with methods of government and law, with strange notions, too, about religion and duty, about the family and the individual, which the foreigners said were of inestimable value and importance. It needed but a few years of intercourse with Western peoples to convince the most conservative that unless the Japanese themselves could gain the secret of their power, either by adopting their weapons or their civilization, they themselves must fade away before the stronger nations. The need of self-preservation was the first great stimulus that drove new thoughts into unwilling brains.
There can be no doubt that the Japanese were right in this analysis of the situation. Had they insisted on maintaining their old methods of national life and social order and ancient customs, there can be no doubt as to the result. Africa and India in recent decades and China and Korea in the most recent years tell the story all too clearly. Those who know the course of treaty conferences and armed collisions, as at Shimonoseki and Kagoshima between Japan and the foreign nations, have no doubt that Japan, divided into clans and persisting in her love of feudalism, would long since have become the territory of some European Power. She was saved by the possession of a remarkable combination of national characteristics,—the powers of observation, of appreciation, and of imitation. In a word, her sensitiveness to her environment and her readiness to respond to it proved to be her salvation.
But the point on which I wish to lay special emphasis is that the prime element of the form in which the deliverance came was through the acquisition of numerous new ideas. These were presented by persons who thoroughly believed in them and who admittedly had a power not possessed by the Japanese themselves. Though unable to originate these ideas, the Japanese yet proved themselves capable of understanding and appreciating them—in a measure at least. They were at first attracted to that which related chiefly to the externals of civilization, to that which would contribute immediately to the complete political centralization of the nation. With great rapidity they adopted Western ideas about warfare and weapons. They sent their young men abroad to study the civilization of the foreign nations. At great expense they also employed many foreigners to teach them in their own land the things they wished to learn. Thus have the Japanese mastered so rapidly the details of those ideas which, less than fifty years ago, were not only strange but odious to them.
Under their influence, the conditions which history shows to be the most conducive to the continuous growth of civilization have been definitely accepted and adopted by the people, namely, popular rights, the liberty of individuals to differ from the past so far as this does not interfere with national unity, and the direct responsibility and relation of each individual to the nation without any mediating group. These rights and liberties are secured to the individual by a constitution and by laws enacted by representative legislatures. Government by discussion has been fairly inaugurated.
During these years of change the effort has been to leave the old social order as undisturbed as possible. For example, it was hoped that the reorganization of the military and naval forces of the Empire would be sufficient without disturbing the feudal order and without abolishing the feudal states. But this was soon found ineffectual. For a time it was likewise thought that the adoption of Western methods of government might be made without disturbing the old religious ideas and without removing the edicts against Christianity. But experience soon showed that the old civilization was a unit. No part could be vitally modified without affecting the whole structure. Having knocked over one block in the long row that made up their feudal social order, it was found that each successive block was touched and fell, until nothing was left standing as before. It was found also that the old ideas of education, of travel, of jurisprudence, of torture and punishment, of social ranks, of the relation of the individual to the state, of the state to the family, and of religion to the family, were more or less defective and unsuited to the new civilization. Before this new movement all obstructive ideas, however, sanctioned by antiquity, have had to give way. The Japanese of to-day look, as it were, upon a new earth and a new heaven. Those of forty years ago would be amazed, not only at the enormous changes in the externals, life and government, but also at the transformation which has overtaken every element of the older civilization. Putting it rather strongly, it is now not the son who obeys the father, but the father the son. The rulers no longer command the people, but the people command the rulers. The people do not now toil to support the state; but the state toils to protect the people.
Whether the incoming of these new ideas and practices be thought to constitute progress or not will depend on one's view of the aim of life. If this be as maintained in the previous chapter, then surely the transformation of Japan must be counted progress. That, however, to which I call attention is the fact that the essential requisite of progress is the attainment of new ideas, whatever be their source. Japan has not only taken up a great host of these, but in doing so she has adopted a social structure to stimulate the continuous production of new ideas, through the development of individuality. She is thus in the true line of continuously progressive evolution. Imitating the stronger nations, she has introduced into her system the life-giving blood of free discussion, popular education, and universal individual rights and liberty. In a word, she has begun to be an individualistic nation. She has introduced a social order fitted to a wide development of personality.
The importance of the second line of progress, the physical, would seem to be too obvious to call for any detailed consideration. But so much has been said by both graceful and able writers on Japan as to the advantages she enjoys from her simple non-mechanical civilization, and the mistake she is making in adopting the mechanical civilization of the West, that it may not be amiss to dwell for a few moments upon it. I wish to show that the second element of progress consists in the increasing use of mechanisms.
The enthusiastic admirer of Japan hardly finds words wherewith sufficiently to praise the simplicity of her pre-Meiji civilization. No furniture brings confusion to the room; no machinery distresses the ear with its groanings or the eye with its unsightliness. No factories blacken the sky with smoke. No trains screeching through the towns and cities disturb sleepers and frighten babies. The simple bed on the floor, the straw sandal on the foot, wooden chopsticks in place of knives and forks, the small variety of foods and of cooking utensils, the simple, homespun cotton clothing, the fascinating homes, so small and neat and clean—in truth all that pertains to Old Japan finds favor in the eyes of the enthusiastic admirer from the Occident. One such writer, in an elaborate paper intended to set forth the superiority of the original Japanese to the Occidental civilization, uses the following language: "Ability to live without furniture, without impedimenta, with the least possible amount of neat clothing, shows more than the advantage held by the Japanese race in the struggle of life; it shows also the real character of some of the weaknesses in our own civilization. It forces reflection upon the useless multiplicity of our daily wants. We must have meat and bread and butter; glass windows and fire; hats, white shirts, and woolen underwear; boots and shoes; trunks, bags, and boxes; bedsteads, mattresses, sheets, and blankets; all of which a Japanese can do without, and is really better off without."[[G]] Surely one finds much of truth in this, and there is no denying the charm of the simpler civilization, but the closing phrase of the quotation is the assumption without discussion of the disputed point. Are the Japanese really better off without these implements of Western civilization? Evidently they themselves do not think so. For, in glancing through the list as given by the writer quoted, one realizes the extent of Japanese adoption of these Western devices. Hardly an article but is used in Japan, and certainly with the supposition of the purchaser that it adds either to his health or his comfort. In witness are the hundreds of thousands of straw hats, the glass windows everywhere, and the meat-shops in each town and city of the Empire. The charm of a foreign fashion is not sufficient explanation for the rapidly spreading use of foreign inventions.
That there are no useless or even evil features in our Western civilization is not for a moment contended. The stiff starched shirt may certainly be asked to give an account of itself and justify its continued existence, if it can. But I think the proposition is capable of defense that the vast majority of the implements of our Occidental civilization have their definite place and value, either in contributing directly to the comfort and happiness of their possessor, or in increasing his health and strength and general mental and physical power. What is it that makes the Occidental longer-lived than the Japanese? Why is he healthier? Why is he more intelligent? Why is he a more developed personality? Why are his children more energetic? Or, reversing the questions, why has the population of Japan been increasing with leaps and bounds since the introduction of Western civilization and medical science? Why is the rising generation so free from pockmarks? Why is the number of the blind steadily diminishing? Why are mechanisms multiplying so rapidly—the jinrikisha, the railroads, the roads, the waterworks and sewers, the chairs, the tables, the hats and umbrellas, lamps, clocks, glass windows and shoes? A hundred similar questions might be asked, to which no definite answers are needful.
Further discussion of details seems unnecessary. Yet the full significance of this point can hardly be appreciated without a perception of the great principle that underlies it. The only way in which man has become and continues to be increasingly superior to animals is in his use of mechanisms. The animal does by brute force what man accomplishes by various devices. The inventiveness of different races differs vastly. But everywhere, the most advanced are the most powerful. Take the individual man of the more developed race and separate him from his tools and machines, and it is doubtless true that he cannot in some selected points compete with an individual of a less developed race. But let ten thousand men of the higher development compete with ten thousand of the lower, each using the mechanisms under his control, and can there be any doubt as to which is the superior?
In other words, the method of human progress consists, in no small degree, in the progressive mastery of nature, first through understanding her and then through the use of her immense forces by means of suitable mechanisms. All the machines and furniture, and tools and clothing, and houses and canned foods, and shoes and boots, and railroads and telegraph lines, and typewriters and watches, and the ten thousand other so-called "impedimenta" of the Occidental civilization are but devices whereby Western man has sought to increase his health, his wealth, his knowledge, his comfort, his independence, his capacity of travel—in a word, his well-being. Through these mechanisms he masters nature. He extracts a rich living from nature; he annihilates time and space; he defies the storms; he tunnels the mountains; he extracts precious ores and metals from the rock-ribbed hills; with a magic touch he loosens the grip of the elements and makes them surrender their gold, their silver, and, more precious still, their iron; with these he builds his spacious cities and parks, his railroads and ocean steamers; he travels the whole world around, fearing neither beast nor alien man; all are subject to his command and will. He investigates and knows the constitution of stellar worlds no less than that of the world in which he lives. By his instruments he explores the infinite depths of heaven and the no less infinite depths of the microscopic world. All these reviled "impedimenta" thus bring to the race that has them a wealth of life both physical and psychical, practical and ideal, that is otherwise unattainable. By them he gains and gives external expression to the reality of his inner nature, his freedom, his personality. True, instead of bringing health and long life, knowledge and deep enjoyment, they may become the means of bitterest curses. But the lesson to learn from this fact is how to use these powers aright, not how to forbid their use altogether. They are not to be branded as hindrances to progress.
The defect of Occidental civilization to-day is hot its multiplicity of machinery, but the defective view that still blinds the eyes of the multitude as to the true nature and the legitimate goal of progress. Individual, selfish happiness is still the ideal of too many men and women to permit of the ideal which carries the Golden Rule into the markets and factories, into the politics of parties and nations, which is essential to the attainment of the highest progress. But no one who casts his eyes over the centuries of struggle and effort through which man has been slowly working his way upward from the rank of a beast to that of a man, can doubt that progress has been made. The worth of character has been increasingly seen and its possession desired. The true end of effort and development was never more clear than it is at the close of the nineteenth century. Never before were the conditions of progress so bright, not only for the favored few in one or two lands, but for the multitudes the world over. Isolation and separation have passed from this world forever. Free social intercourse between the nations permits wide dissemination of ideas and their application to practical life in the form of social organization and mechanical invention. This makes it possible for nations more or less backward in social and civilizational development to gain in a relatively short time the advantages won by advanced nations through ages of toil and under favoring circumstances. Nation thus stimulates nation, each furnishing the other with important variations in ideas, customs, institutions, and mechanisms resulting from long-continued divergent evolution. The advantages slowly gained by advanced peoples speedily accrues through social heredity to any backward race really desiring to enter the social heritage.
Thus does the paradox of Japan's recent progress become thoroughly intelligible.
V
JAPANESE SENSITIVENESS TO ENVIRONMENT
With this chapter we begin a more detailed study of Japanese social and psychic evolution. We shall take up the various characteristics of the race and seek to account for them, showing their origin in the peculiar nature of the social order which so long prevailed in Japan. This is a study of Japanese psychogenesis. The question to which we shall continually return is whether or not the characteristic under consideration is inherent and congenital and therefore inevitable. Not only our interpretation of Japanese evolution, past, present, and future, but also our understanding of the essential nature of social evolution in general, depends upon the answer to this question.
We naturally begin with that characteristic of Japanese nature which would seem to be more truly congenital than any other to be mentioned later. I refer to their sensitiveness to environment. More quickly than most races do the Japanese seem to perceive and adapt themselves to changed conditions.
The history of the past thirty years is a prolonged illustration of this characteristic. The desire to imitate foreign nations was not a real reason for the overthrow of feudalism, but there was, rather, a more or less conscious feeling, rapidly pervading the whole people, that the feudal system would be unable to maintain the national integrity. As intimated, the matter was not so much reasoned out as felt. But such a vast illustration is more difficult to appreciate than some individual instances, of which I have noted several.
During a conversation with Drs. Forsythe and Dale, of Cambridge, England, I asked particularly as to their experience with the Japanese students who had been there to study. They both remarked on the fact that all Japanese students were easily influenced by those with whom they customarily associated; so much so that, within a short time, they acquired not only the cut of coats and trousers, but also the manner and accent, of those with whom they lived. It was amusing, they said, to see what transformations were wrought in those who went to the Continent for their long vacations. From France they returned with marked French manners and tones and clothes, while from Germany they brought the distinctive marks of German stiffness in manner and general bearing. It was noted as still more curious that the same student would illustrate both variations, provided he spent one summer in Germany and another in France.
Japanese sensitiveness is manifested in many unexpected ways. An observant missionary lady once remarked that she had often wondered how such unruly, self-willed children as grow up under Japanese training, or its lack, finally become such respectable members of society. She concluded that instead of being punished out of their misbehaviors they were laughed out of them. The children are constantly told that if they do so and so they will be laughed at—a terrible thing.
The fear of ridicule has thus an important sociological function in maintaining ethical standards. Its power may be judged by the fact that in ancient times when a samurai gave his note to return a borrowed sum, the only guarantee affixed was the permission to be laughed at in public in case of failure. The Japanese young man who is making a typewritten copy of these pages for me says that, when still young, he heard an address to children which he still remembers. The speaker asked what the most fearful thing in the world was. Many replies were given by the children—"snakes," "wild beasts," "fathers," "gods," "ghosts," "demons," "Satan," "hell," etc. These were admitted to be fearful, but the speaker told the children that one other thing was to be more feared than all else, namely, "to be laughed at." This speech, with its vivid illustrations, made a lasting impression on the mind of the boy, and on reading what I had written he realized how powerful a motive fear of ridicule had been in his own life; also how large a part it plays in the moral education of the young in Japan.
Naturally enough this fear of being laughed at leads to careful and minute observation of the clothing, manners, and speech of one's associates, and prompt conformity to them, through imitation. The sensitiveness of Japanese students to each new environment is thus easily understood. And this sensitiveness to environment has its advantages as well as its disadvantages. I have already referred to the help it gives to the establishment of individual conformity to ethical standards. The phenomenal success of many reforms in Japan may easily be traced to the national sensitiveness to foreign criticism. Many instances of this will be given in the course of this work, but two may well be mentioned at this point. According to the older customs there was great, if not perfect, freedom as to the use of clothing by the people. The apparent indifference shown by them in the matter of nudity led foreigners to call the nation uncivilized. This criticism has always been a galling one, and not without reason. In many respects their civilization has been fully the equal of that of any other nation; yet in this respect it is true that they resembled and still do resemble semi-civilized peoples. In response to this foreign criticism, however, a law was passed, early in the Meiji era, prohibiting nudity in cities. The requirement that public bathing houses be divided into two separate compartments, one for men and one for women, was likewise due to foreign opinion. That this is the case may be fairly inferred from the fact that the enforcement of these laws has largely taken places where foreigners abound, whereas, in the interior towns and villages they receive much less attention. It must be acknowledged, however, that now at last, twenty-five years after their passage, they are almost everywhere beginning to be enforced by the authorities.
My other illustration of sensitiveness to foreign opinion is the present state of Japanese thought about the management of Formosa. The government has been severely criticised by many leading papers for its blunders there. But the curious feature is the constant reference to the contempt into which such mismanagement will bring Japan in the sight of the world—as if the opinion of other nations were the most important issue involved, and not the righteousness and probity of the government itself. It is interesting to notice how frequently the opinion of other nations with regard to Japan is a leading thought in the mind of the people.
In this connection the following extract finds its natural place:
In a very large number of schools throughout the country special instructions have been given to the pupils as to their behavior towards foreigners. From various sources we have culled the following orders bearing on special points, which we state as briefly as possible.
(1) Never call after foreigners passing along the streets or roads.
(2) When foreigners make inquiries, answer them politely. If unable to make them understand, inform the police of the fact.
(3) Never accept a present from a foreigner when there is no reason for his giving it, and never charge him anything above what is proper.
(4) Do not crowd around a shop when a foreigner is making purchases, thereby causing him much annoyance. The continuance of this practice disgraces us as a nation.
(5) Since all human beings are brothers and sisters, there is no reason for fearing foreigners. Treat them as equals and act uprightly in all your dealings with them. Be neither servile nor arrogant.
(6) Beware of combining against the foreigner and disliking him because he is a foreigner; men are to be judged by their conduct and not by their nationality.
(7) As intercourse with foreigners becomes closer and extends over a series of years, there is danger that many Japanese may become enamored of their ways and customs and forsake the good old customs of their forefathers. Against this danger you must be on your guard.
(8) Taking off your hat is the proper way to salute a foreigner. The bending of the body low is not be commended.
(9) When you see a foreigner be sure and cover up naked parts of the body.
(10) Hold in high regard the worship of ancestors and treat your relations with warm cordiality, but do not regard a person as your enemy because he or she is a Christian.
(11) In going through the world you will often find a knowledge of a foreign tongue absolutely essential.
(12) Beware of selling your souls to foreigners and becoming their slaves. Sell them no houses or lands.
(13) Aim at not being beaten in your competition with foreigners. Remember that loyalty and filial piety are our most precious national treasures and do nothing to violate them.
Many of the above rules are excellent in tone. Number 7, however, which hails from Osaka, is somewhat narrow and prejudiced. The injunction not to sell houses to foreigners is, as the Jiji Shimpo points out, absurd and mischievous.[[H]]
The sensitiveness of the people also works to the advantage of the nation in the social unity which it helps to secure. Indeed I cannot escape the conviction that the striking unity of the Japanese is largely due to this characteristic. It tends to make their mental and emotional activities synchronous. It retards reform for a season, to be sure, but later it accelerates it. It makes it difficult for individuals to break away from their surroundings and start out on new lines. It leads to a general progress while it tends to hinder individual progress. It tends to draw back into the general current of national life those individuals who, under exceptional conditions, may have succeeded in breaking away from it for a season. This, I think, is one of the factors of no little power at work among the Christian churches in Japan. It is one, too, that the Japanese themselves little perceive; so far as I have observed, foreigners likewise fail to realize its force.
Closely connected with this sensitiveness to environment are other qualities which make it effective. They are: great flexibility, adjustability, agility (both mental and physical), and the powers of keen attention to details and of exact imitation.
As opposed to all this is the Chinese lack of flexibility. Contrast a Chinaman and a Japanese after each has been in America a year. The one to all appearances is an American; his hat, his clothing, his manner, seem so like those of an American that were it not for his small size, Mongolian type of face, and defective English, he could easily be mistaken for one. How different is it with the Chinaman! He retains his curious cue with a tenacity that is as intense as it is characteristic. His hat is the conventional one adopted by all Chinese immigrants. His clothing likewise, though far from Chinese, is nevertheless entirely un-American. He makes no effort to conform to his surroundings. He seems to glory in his separateness.
The Japanese desire to conform to the customs and appearances of those about him is due to what I have called sensitiveness; his success is due to the flexibility of his mental constitution.
But this characteristic is seen in multitudes of little ways. The new fashion of wearing the hair according to the Western styles; of wearing Western hats, and Western clothing, now universal in the army, among policemen, and common among officials and educated men; the use of chairs and tables, lamps, windows, and other Western things is due in no small measure to that flexibility of mind which readily adopts new ideas and new ways; is ready to try new things and new words, and after trial, if it finds them convenient or useful or even amusing, to retain them permanently, and this flexibility is, in part, the reason why the Japanese are accounted a fickle people. They accept new ways so easily that those who do not have this faculty have no explanation for it but that of fickleness. A frequent surprise to a missionary in Japan is that of meeting a fine-looking, accomplished gentleman whom he knew a few years before as a crude, ungainly youth. I am convinced that it is the possession of this set of characteristics that has enabled Japan so quickly to assimilate many elements of an alien civilization.
Yet this flexibility of mind and sensitiveness to changed conditions find some apparently striking exceptions. Notable among these are the many customs and appliances of foreign nations which, though adopted by the people, have not been completely modified to suit their own needs. In illustration is the Chinese ideograph, for the learning of which even in the modern common-school reader, there is no arrangement of the characters in the order of their complexity. The possibility of simplifying the colossal task of memorizing these uncorrelated ideographs does not seem to have occurred to the Japanese; though it is now being attempted by the foreigner. Perhaps a partial explanation of this apparent exception to the usual flexibility of the people in meeting conditions may be found in their relative lack of originality. Still I am inclined to refer it to a greater sensitiveness of the Japanese to the personal and human, than to the impersonal and physical environment.
The customary explanation of the group of characteristics considered in this chapter is that they are innate, due to brain and nerve structure, and acquired by each generation through biological heredity. If closely examined, however, this is seen to be no explanation at all. Accepting the characteristics as empirical inexplicable facts, the real problem is evaded, pushed into prehistoric times, that convenient dumping ground of biological, anthropological, and sociological difficulties.
Japanese flexibility, imitativeness, and sensitiveness to environment are to be accounted for by a careful consideration of the national environment and social order. Modern psychology has called attention to the astonishing part played by imitation, conscious and unconscious, in the evolution of the human race, and in the unification of the social group. Prof. Le Tarde goes so far as to make this the fundamental principle of human evolution. He has shown that it is ever at work in the life of every human being, modifying all his thoughts, acts, and feelings. In the evolution of civilization the rare man thinks, the millions imitate.
A slight consideration of the way in which Occidental lands have developed their civilization will convince anyone that imitation has taken the leading part. Japan, therefore, is not unique in this respect. Her periods of wholesale imitation have indeed called special notice to the trait. But the rapidity of the movement has been due to the peculiarities of her environment. For long periods she has been in complete isolation, and when brought into contact with foreign nations, she has found them so far in advance of herself in many important respects that rapid imitation was the only course left her by the inexorable laws of nature. Had she not imitated China in ancient times and the Occident in modern times, her independence, if not her existence, could hardly have been maintained.
Imitation of admittedly superior civilizations has therefore been an integral, conscious element of Japan's social order, and to a degree perhaps not equaled by the social order of any other race.
The difference between Japanese imitation and that of other nations lies in the fact that whereas the latter, as a rule, despise foreign races, and do not admit the superiority of alien civilizations as a whole, imitating only a detail here and there, often without acknowledgment and sometimes even without knowledge, the Japanese, on the other hand, have repeatedly been placed in such circumstances as to see the superiority of foreign civilizations as a whole, and to desire their general adoption. This has produced a spirit of imitation among all the individuals of the race. It has become a part of their social inheritance. This explanation largely accounts for the striking difference between Japanese and Chinese in the Occident. The Japanese go to the West in order to acquire all the West can give. The Chinaman goes steeled against its influences. The spirit of the Japanese renders him quickly susceptible to every change in his surroundings. He is ever noting details and adapting himself to his circumstances. The spirit of the Chinaman, on the contrary, renders him quite oblivious to his environment. His mind is closed. Under special circumstances, when a Chinaman has been liberated from the prepossession of his social inheritance, he has shown himself as capable of Occidentalization in clothing, speech, manner, and thought as a Japanese. Such cases, however, are rare.
But a still more effective factor in the development of the characteristics under consideration is the nature of Japanese feudalism. Its emphasis on the complete subordination of the inferior to the superior was one of its conspicuous features. This was a factor always and everywhere at work in Japan. No individual was beyond its potent influence. Attention to details, absolute obedience, constant, conscious imitation, secretiveness, suspiciousness, were all highly developed by this social system. Each of these traits is a special form of sensitiveness to environment. From the most ancient times the initiative of superiors was essential to the wide adoption by the people of any new idea or custom. Christianity found ready acceptance in the sixteenth century and Buddhism in the eighth, because they had been espoused by exalted persons. The superiority of the civilization of China in early times, and of the West in modern times, was first acknowledged and adopted by a few nobles and the Emperor. Having gained this prestige they promptly became acceptable to the rank and file of people who vied with each other in their adoption. A peculiarity of the Japanese is the readiness with which the ideas and aims of the rulers are accepted by the people. This is due to the nature of Japanese feudalism. It has made the body of the nation conspicuously subject to the ruling brain and has conferred on Japan her unique sensitiveness to environment.
Susceptibility to slight changes in the feelings of lords and masters and corresponding flexibility were important social traits, necessary products of the old social order. Those deficient in these regards would inevitably lose in the struggle for social precedence, if not in the actual struggle for existence. These characteristics would, accordingly, be highly developed.