was to receive a definite proportion of his salary from the church for
which he worked and the rest from the station. On inquiry I learned
that he was receiving only that provided by the station, and on
questioning him further he said that probably the sum promised by the
church was being kept as his monthly contribution to the expenses of
the church! Instances of this kind are not infrequent. While in Kyushu
I more than once discovered that a body of Christians, whose
evangelists we were helping to support proportionately, were actually
raising not a cent of their proportion. On inquiry, I would be told
that the evangelists themselves contributed out of their salary the
sums needed, and that, therefore, the Christians did not need to raise
it.
The mission, at one time, adopted the plan of throwing upon the local
churches the responsibility of deciding as to the fitness of young men
for mission aid in securing a theological education. It was agreed by
representatives of the churches and the mission that each candidate
should secure the approval of the deacons of the church of which he
was a member, and that the church should pay a certain proportion of
the candidate's school expenses. It was thought that by this method
the leading Christians of the young man's acquaintance would become
his sponsors, and that they would be unwilling to take this
responsibility except for men in whom they had personal confidence,
and for whom they would be willing to make personal contributions. In
course of time the mission discovered that the plan was not working as
expected. The young men could secure the approval of the deacons of
their church without any difficulty; and as for the financial aid from
the church, that could be very easily arranged for by the student's
making a monthly contribution to the church of the sum which the
church should contribute toward his expenses. Although this method
seems to the average Occidental decidedly deceptive, it seemed to the
Japanese perfectly proper. The arrangement, it is needless to state,
was not long continued. I am persuaded that the correct explanation of
these cases is "yumei-mujitsu."
Not long since express trains were put on between Kobe and Tokyo. One
morning at Osaka I planned to take the early express to Kyoto, distant
about thirty miles. These are the second and third cities of Japan,
and the travel between them is heavy. On applying for a ticket I was
refused and told there was no train for Kyoto. But as multitudes were
buying tickets, and going out upon the platform, I asked an official
what the trouble was, and received the explanation that for this
express train no tickets could be sold for less than forty miles; but
if I would buy a ticket for the next station beyond Kyoto, it would be
all right; I could get off at Kyoto. I was assured that I would be
allowed to land and leave the station at Kyoto. This I did then, and
have repeatedly done since. The same absurd rule is applied, I am
told, between Yokohama and Tokyo.
But our interest in these illustrations is the light they shed on
Japanese character. They indicate the intellectual angle from which
the people have looked out on life. What is the origin of the
characteristic? Is it due to deep-lying race nature, to the quality of
the race brain? Even more clearly than in the case of
"roundaboutness," it seems to me that "nominality" is due to the
nature of the old social order. Feudalism has always exhibited more or
less of these same features. To Anglo-Saxons, reared in a land blessed
by direct government of the people, by the people, and for the people,
such methods were not only needless but obnoxious. Nominal
responsibility without real power has been seen to breed numberless
evils. We have learned to hate all nominalism, all fiction in
government, in business and, above all, in personal character. But
this is due to the Anglo-Saxon social order, the product in large
measure of centuries of Christian instruction.
Through contact with Westerners and the ideas they stand for,
directness and reality are being assimilated and developed by the
Japanese. This would be impossible were the characteristic in question
due to inherent race nature necessarily bequeathed from generation to
generation by intrinsic heredity.
XIX
INTELLECTUALITY
Some writers hold that the Japanese are inherently deficient in the
higher mental faculties. They consider mediocre mentality to be an
inborn characteristic of Japan and assert that it lies at the root of
the civilizational differences distinguishing the East from the West.
The puerility of Oriental science in all its departments, the
prevalence of superstition even among the cultivated, the lack of
historical insight and interpretation of history are adduced as
conclusive evidences of this view.
Foreign teachers in Japanese employ have told me that Japanese
students, as compared with those of the West, manifest deficient
powers of analysis and of generalization. Some even assert that the
Japanese have no generalizing ability whatever, their progress in
civilization being entirely due to their remarkable power of clever
imitation. Mr. W.G. Aston, in ascribing the characteristic features of
Japanese literature to the fundamental nature of the race, says they
are "hardly capable of high intellectual achievement."[AL]
While we may admit that the Japanese do not seem to have at present
the same power of scientific generalization as Occidentals, we
naturally ask ourselves whether the difference is due to natal
deficiency, or whether it may not be due to difference in early
training. We must not forget that the youth who come under the
observation of foreign teachers in Japanese schools are already
products of the Japanese system of education, home and school, and
necessarily are as defective as it is.
In a previous chapter a few instances of recent invention and
important scientific discovery were given.
These could not have been made without genuine powers of analysis and
generalization. We need not linger to elaborate this point.
Another set of facts throwing light on our problem is the success of
so many Japanese students, at home and in foreign lands, in mastering
modern thought. Great numbers have come back from Europe and America
with diplomas and titles; not a few have taken high rank in their
classes. The Japanese student abroad is usually a hard worker, like
his brother at home. I doubt if any students in the new or the old
world study more hours in a year than do these of Japan. It has often
amazed me to learn how much they are required to do. This is one fair
sign of intellectuality. The ease too with which young Japan, educated
in Occidental schools and introduced to Occidental systems of thought,
acquires abstruse speculations, searching analyses, and generalized
abstractions proves conclusively Japanese possession of the higher
mental faculties, in spite of the long survival in their civilization
of primitive puerility and superstitions and the lack of science,
properly so called.
Japanese youths, furthermore, have a fluency in public speech
decidedly above anything I have met with in the United States. Young
men of eighteen or twenty years of age deliver long discourses on
religion or history or politics, with an apparent ease that their
uncouth appearance would not lead one to expect. In the little school
of less than 150 boys in Kumamoto there were more individuals who
could talk intelligibly and forcefully on important themes of national
policy, the relation of religion and politics, the relation of Japan
to the Occident and the Orient, than could be found in either of the
two colleges in the United States with which I was connected. I do not
say that they could bring forth original ideas on these topics. But
they could at least remember what they had heard and read and could
reproduce the ideas with amazing fluency.
A recent public meeting in Tokyo in which Christian students of the
University spoke to fellow-students on the great problems of religion,
revealed a power of no mean order in handling the peculiar
difficulties encountered by educated young men. A competent listener,
recently graduated from an American university and widely acquainted
with American students, declared that those Japanese speakers revealed
greater powers of mind and speech than would be found under similar
circumstances in the United States.
The fluency with which timid girls pray in public has often surprised
me. Once started, they never seem to hesitate for ideas or words. The
same girls would hardly be able to utter an intelligible sentence in
reply to questions put to them by the pastor or the missionary, so
faint would be their voices and so hesitating their manner.
The question as to whether the Japanese have powers of generalization
receives some light from a study of the language of the people. An
examination of primitive Japanese proves that the race, prior to
receiving even the slightest influence from China, had developed
highly generalized terms. It is worth while to call attention here to
a simple fact which most writers seem to ignore, namely, that all
language denotes and indeed rests on generalization. Consider the word
"uma," "horse"; this is a name for a whole class of objects, and is
therefore the product of a mind that can generalize and express its
generalization in a concept which no act of the imagination can
picture; the imagination can represent only individuals; the mind that
has concepts of classes of things, as, for instance, of horses,
houses, men, women, trees, has already a genuine power of
generalization. Let me also call attention to such words as "wake,"
"reason"; "mono," "thing"; "koto," "fact"; "aru," "is"; "oro,"
"lives"; "aru koto," "is fact," or "existence"; "ugoku koto,"
"movement"; "omoi," "thought"; this list might be indefinitely
extended. Let the reader consider whether these words are not highly
generalized; yet these are all pure Japanese words, and reveal the
development of the Japanese mind before it was in the least influenced
by Chinese thought. Evidently it will not do to assert the entire lack
of the power of generalization to the Japanese mind.
Still further evidence proving Japanese possession of the higher
mental faculties may be found in the wide prevalence and use of the
most highly generalized philosophical terms. Consider for instance,
"Ri" and "Ki," "In" and "Yo." No complete translation can be found for
them in English; "Ri" and "Ki" may be best translated as the rational
and the formative principles in the universe, while "In" and "Yo"
signify the active and the passive, the male and the female, the light
and the darkness; in a word, the poles of a positive and negative. It
is true that these terms are of Chinese origin as well as the thoughts
themselves, but they are to-day in universal use in Japan. Similar
abstract terms of Buddhistic origin are the possession of the common
people.
Of course the possession of these Chinese terms is not offered as
evidence of independent generalizing ability. But wide use proves
conclusively the possession of the higher mental faculties, for,
without such faculties, the above terms would be incomprehensible to
the people and would find no place in common speech. We must be
careful not to give too much weight to the foreign origin of these
terms. Chinese is to Japanese what Latin and Greek are to modern
European languages. The fact that a term is of Chinese origin proves
nothing as to the nature of the modern Japanese mind. The developing
Japanese civilization demanded new terms for her new instruments and
increasing concepts. These for over fifteen centuries have been
borrowed from, or constructed out of, Chinese in the same way that all
our modern scientific terms are constructed out of Latin and Greek. It
is doubtful if any of the Chinese terms, even those borrowed bodily,
have in Japan the same significance as in China. If this is true, then
the originating feature of Japanese power of generalization becomes
manifest.
Indeed from this standpoint, the fact that the Japanese have made such
extensive use of the Chinese language shows the degree to which the
Japanese mind has outgrown its primitive development, demanding new
terms for the expression of its expanding life. But mental growth
implies energy of acquisition. The adoption of Chinese terms is not a
passive but an active process.
Acquisition of generalized terms can only take place with the
development of a generalizing mind. Foreign terms may help, but they
do not cause that development.
In a study of the question whether or not the Japanese possess
independent powers of analysis and generalization, we must ever
remember the unique character of the social environment to which they
have been subjected. Always more or less of an isolated nation, they
have been twice or thrice suddenly confronted with a civilization much
superior to that which they in their isolation had developed. Under
such circumstances, adoption and modification of ideas and language as
well as of methods and machinery were the most rational and natural
courses.
The explanation usually given for the puerilities of Oriental science,
history, and religion has been short and simple, namely, the inherent
nature of the Oriental races, as if this were the final fact, needing
and admitting no further explanation. That the Orient has not
developed history or science is doubtless true, but the correct
explanation of this fact is, in my opinion, that the educational
method of the entire Orient has rested on mechanical memorization;
during the formative period of the mind the exclusive effort of
education has been to develop a memory which acts by arbitrary or
fanciful connections and relations. A Japanese boy of Old Japan, for
instance, began his education at from seven to eight years of age and
spent three or four years in memorizing the thousands of Chinese
hieroglyphic characters contained in the Shisho and Gokyo, nine of the
Chinese classics. This completed, his teacher would begin to explain
to him the meaning of the characters and sentences. The entire
educational effort was to develop the powers of observing and
memorizing accidental, superficial, or even purely artificial
relations. This double faculty of observing trifling and irrelevant
details, and of remembering them, became phenomenally and abnormally
developed.
Recent works on the psychology of education, however, have made plain
how an excessive development of a child's lower mental faculties may
arrest its later growth in all the higher departments of its
intellectual nature; the development of a mechanical memory is well
known as a serious obstacle to the higher activities of reason. Now
Japanese education for centuries, like Chinese, has developed such
memory. It trained the lower and ignored the higher. Much of the
Japanese education of to-day, although it includes mathematics,
science, and history, is based on the mechanical memory method. The
Orient is thus a mammoth illustration of the effects of
over-development of the mechanical memory, and the consequent arrest
of the development of the remaining powers of the mind.
Encumbered by this educational ideal and system, how could the ancient
Chinese and Japanese men of education make a critical study of
history, or develop any science worthy of the name? The childish
physics and astronomy, the brutal therapeutics and the magical and
superstitious religions of the Orient, are a necessary consequence of
its educational system, not of its inherent lack of the higher mental
powers.
If Japanese children brought up from infancy in American homes, and
sent to American schools from kindergarten days onward, should still
manifest marked deficiencies in powers of analysis and generalization,
as compared with American children, we should then be compelled to
conclude that this difference is due to diverse natal psychic
endowment. Generalizations as to the inherent intellectual
deficiencies of the Oriental are based on observations of individuals
already developed in the Oriental civilization, whose psychic defects
they accordingly necessarily inherit through the laws of social
heredity. Such observations have no relevancy to our main problem. We
freely admit that Oriental civilization manifests striking
deficiencies of development of the higher mental faculties, although
it is not nearly so great as many assert; but we contend that these
deficiencies are due to something else than the inherent psychic
nature of the Oriental individual. Innumerable causes have combined to
produce the Oriental social order and to determine its slow
development. These cannot be stated in a sentence, nor in a paragraph.
In the final analysis, however, the causes which produce the
characteristic features of Japanese social order are the real sources
of the differentiating intellectual traits now characterizing the
Japanese. Introduce a new social heredity,--a new system of
education,--one which relegates a mechanical memory to the
background,--one which exalts powers of rational observation of the
profound causal relations of the phenomena of nature, and which sets a
premium on such observation, analysis, and generalization, and the
results will show the inherent psychic nature of the Oriental to be
not different from that of the Occidental.
XX
PHILOSOPHICAL ABILITY
We are now prepared to consider whether or not the Japanese have
philosophical ability. The average educated Japanese believe such to
be the case. The rapidity and ease with which the upper classes have
abandoned their superstitious faiths is commonly attributed by
themselves to the philosophical nature of their minds. Similarly the
rapid spread of so-called rationalism and Unitarian thought and Higher
Criticism among once earnest Christians, during the past decade, they
themselves ascribe to their interest in philosophical questions, and
to their ability in handling philosophical problems.
Foreigners, on the other hand, usually deny them the possession of
philosophical ability.
Dr. Peery, in his volume entitled "The Gist of Japan," says: "By
nature, I think, they are more inclined to be practical than
speculative. Abstract theological ideas have little charm for them.
There is a large element in Japan that simulates a taste for
philosophical study. Philosophy and metaphysics are regarded by them
as the profoundest of all branches of learning, and in order to be
thought learned they profess great interest in these studies. Not only
are the highly metaphysical philosophies of the East studied, but the
various systems of the West are looked into likewise. Many of the
people are capable of appreciating these philosophies, too; but they
do it for a purpose." Other writers make the same general charge of
philosophical incompetence. One or two quotations from Dr. Knox's
writings were given on this subject, under the head of Imitation.[AM]
What, then, are the facts? Do the Japanese excel in philosophy, or
are they conspicuously deficient? In either case, is the
characteristic due to essential race nature or to some other cause?
We must first distinguish between interest in philosophical problems
and ability in constructing original philosophical systems. In this
distinction is to be found the reconciliation of many conflicting
views. Many who argue for Japanese philosophical ability are impressed
with the interest they show in metaphysical problems, while those who
deny them this ability are impressed with the dependence of Japanese
on Chinese philosophy.
The discussions of the previous chapter as to the nature of Japanese
education and its tendency to develop the lower at the expense of the
higher mental faculties, have prepared us not to expect any
particularly brilliant history of Japanese philosophy. Such is indeed
the case. Primitive Japanese cosmology does not differ in any
important respect from the primitive cosmology of other races. The
number of those in Old Japan who took a living interest in distinctly
metaphysical problems is indisputably small. While we admit them to
have manifested some independence and even originality, as Professor
Inouye urges,[AN] yet it can hardly be maintained that they struck out
any conspicuously original philosophical systems. There is no
distinctively Japanese philosophy.
These facts, however, should not blind us to the distinction between
latent ability in philosophical thought and the manifestation of that
ability. The old social order, with its defective education, its habit
of servile intellectual dependence on ancestors, and its social and
legal condemnation of independent originality, particularly in the
realm of thought, was a mighty incubus on speculative philosophy.
Furthermore, crude science and distorted history could not provide the
requisite material from which to construct a philosophical
interpretation of the universe that would appeal to the modern
Occidental.
In spite, however, of social and educational hindrances, the Japanese
have given ample evidence of interest in metaphysical problems and of
more or less ability in their solution. Religious constructions of the
future life, conceptions as to the relations of gods and men and the
universe, are in fact results of the metaphysical operations of the
mind. Primitive Japan was not without these. As she developed in
civilization and came in contact with Chinese and Hindu metaphysical
thought, she acquired their characteristic systems. Buddhist first,
and later Confucian, metaphysics dominated the thought of her educated
men. In view of the highly metaphysical character of Buddhist
doctrines and the interest they have produced at least among the
better trained priests, the assertion that the Japanese have no
ability in metaphysics cannot be maintained.
At one period in the history of Buddhism in Japan, prolonged public
discussions were all the fashion. Priests traveled from temple to
temple to engage in public debate. The ablest debater was the abbot,
and he had to be ready to face any opponent who might appear. If a
stranger won, the abbot yielded his place and his living to the
victor. Many an interesting story is told of those times, and of the
crowds that would gather to hear the debates. But our point is that
this incident in the national life shows the appreciation of the
people for philosophical questions. And although that particular
fashion has long since passed away, the national interest in
discussions and arguments still exists. No monks of the West ever
enjoyed hair-splitting arguments more than do many of the Japanese.
They are as adept at mental refinements and logical juggling as any
people of the West, though possibly the Hindus excel them.
If it be said that Confucianism was not only non-metaphysical, but
uniquely practical, and for this reason found wide acceptance in
Japan, the reply must be first that, professing to be
non-metaphysical, it nevertheless had a real metaphysical system of
thought in the background to which it ever appealed for authority, a
system, be it noted, more in accord with modern science and philosophy
than Buddhist metaphysics; and secondly, although Confucianism became
the bulwark of the state and the accepted faith of the samurai, it
was limited to them. The vast majority of the nation clung to their
primitive Buddhistic cosmology. That Confucianism rested on a clearly
implied and more or less clearly expressed metaphysical foundation may
be seen in the quotations from the writings of Muro Kyuso which are
given in chapter xxiv. We should note that the revolt of the educated
classes of Japan from Buddhism three hundred years ago, and their
general adoption of Confucian doctrine, was partly in the interests of
religion and partly in the interests of metaphysics. In both respects
the progressive part of the nation had become dissatisfied with
Buddhism. The revolt proves not lack of religious or metaphysical
interest and insight, but rather the reverse.