I
Without losing a single ship or a single battle, Japan has broken
down the power of China, made a new Korea, enlarged her own
territory, and changed the whole political face of the East.
Astonishing as this has seemed politically, it is much more
astonishing psychologically; for it represents the result of a
vast play of capacities with which the race had never been
credited abroad,--capacities of a very high order. The
psychologist knows that the so-called "adoption of Western
civilization" within a time of thirty years cannot mean the
addition to the Japanese brain of any organs or powers previously
absent from it. He knows that it cannot mean any sudden change in
the mental or moral character of the race. Such changes are not
made in a generation. Transmitted civilization works much more
slowly, requiring even hundreds of years to produce certain
permanent psychological results.
It is in this light that Japan appears the most extraordinary
country in the world; and the most wonderful thing in the whole
episode of her "Occidentalization" is that the race brain could
bear so heavy a shock. Nevertheless, though the fact be unique in
human history, what does it really mean? Nothing more than
rearrangement of a part of the pre-existing machinery of thought.
Even that, for thousands of brave young minds, was death. The
adoption of Western civilization was not nearly such an easy
matter as un-thinking persons imagined. And it is quite evident
that the mental readjustments, effected at a cost which remains
to be told, have given good results only along directions in
which the race had always shown capacities of special kinds.
Thus, the appliances of Western industrial invention have worked
admirably in Japanese hands,--have produced excellent results in
those crafts at which the nation had been skillful, in other and
quainter ways, for ages. There has been no transformation,
--nothing more than the turning of old abilities into new and
larger channels. The scientific professions tell the same story.
For certain forms of science, such as medicine, surgery (there
are no better surgeons in the world than the
Japanese), chemistry, microscopy, the Japanese genius is
naturally adapted; and in all these it has done work already
heard of round the world. In war and statecraft it has shown
wonderful power; but throughout their history the Japanese have
been characterized by great military and political capacity.
Nothing remarkable has been done, however, in directions foreign
to the national genius. In the study, for example, of Western
music, Western art, Western literature, time would seem to have
been simply wasted(1). These things make appeal extraordinary to
emotional life with us; they make no such appeal to Japanese
emotional life. Every serious thinker knows that emotional
transformation of the individual through education is impossible.
To imagine that the emotional character of an Oriental race could
be transformed in the short space of thirty years, by the contact
of Occidental ideas, is absurd. Emotional life, which is older
than intellectual life, and deeper, can no more be altered
suddenly by a change of milieu than the surface of a mirror can
be changed by passing reflections. All that Japan has been able
to do so miraculously well has been done without any
self-transformation; and those who imagine her emotionally closer
to us to-day than she may have been thirty years ago ignore facts
of science which admit of no argument.
Sympathy is limited by comprehension. We may sympathize to the
same degree that we understand. One may imagine that he
sympathizes with a Japanese or a Chinese; but the sympathy can
never be real to more than a small extent outside of the simplest
phases of common emotional life,--those phases in which child and
man are at one. The more complex feelings of the Oriental have
been composed by combinations of experiences, ancestral and
individual, which have had no really precise correspondence in
Western life, and which we can therefore not fully know. For
converse reasons, the Japanese cannot, even though they would,
give Europeans their best sympathy.
But while it remains impossible for the man of the West to
discern the true color of Japanese life, either intellectual or
emotional (since the one is woven into the other), it is equally
impossible for him to escape the conviction that, compared with
his own, it is very small. It is dainty; it holds delicate
potentialities of rarest interest and value; but it is otherwise
so small that Western life, by contrast with it, seems almost
supernatural. For we must judge visible and measurable
manifestations. So judging, what a contrast between the emotional
and intellectual worlds of West and East! Far less striking that
between the frail wooden streets of the Japanese capital and the
tremendous solidity of a thoroughfare in Paris or London. When
one compares the utterances which West and East have given to
their dreams, their aspirations, their sensations,--a Gothic
cathedral with a Shinto temple, an opera by Verdi or a trilogy by
Wagner with a performance of geisha, a European epic with a
Japanese poem,--how incalculable the difference in emotional
volume, in imaginative power, in artistic synthesis! True, our
music is an essentially modern art; but in looking back through
all our past the difference in creative force is scarcely less
marked,--not surely in the period of Roman magnificence, of
marble amphitheatres and of aqueducts spanning provinces, nor in
the Greek period of the divine in sculpture and of the supreme in
literature.
And this leads to the subject of another wonderful fact in the
sudden development of Japanese power. Where are the outward
material signs of that immense new force she has been showing
both in productivity and in war? Nowhere! That which we miss in
her emotional and intellectual life is missing also from her
industrial and commercial life,--largeness! The land remains what
it was before; its face has scarcely been modified by all the
changes of Meiji. The miniature railways and telegraph poles, the
bridges and tunnels, might almost escape notice in the ancient
green of the landscapes. In all the cities, with the exception of
the open ports and their little foreign settlements, there exists
hardly a street vista suggesting the teaching of Western ideas.
You might journey two hundred miles through the interior of the
country, looking in vain for large manifestations of the new
civilization. In no place do you find commerce exhibiting its
ambition in gigantic warehouses, or industry expanding its
machinery under acres of roofing. A Japanese city is still, as it
was ten centuries ago, little more than a wilderness of wooden
sheds,--picturesque, indeed, as paper lanterns are, but scarcely
less frail. And there is no great stir and noise anywhere,--no
heavy traffic, no booming and rumbling, no furious haste. In
Tokyo itself you may enjoy, if you wish, the peace of a country
village. This want of visible or audible signs of the new-found
force which is now menacing the markets of the West and changing
the maps of the far East gives one a queer, I might even say a
weird feeling. It is almost the sensation received when, after
climbing through miles of silence to reach some Shinto shrine,
you find voidness only and solitude,--an elfish, empty little
wooden structure, mouldering in shadows a thousand years old. The
strength of Japan, like the strength of her ancient faith, needs
little material display: both exist where the deepest real power
of any great people exists,--in the Race Ghost.
(1) In one limited sense, Western art has influenced Japanese.
literature and drama; but the character of the influence proves
the racial difference to which I refer. European plays have been
reshaped for the Japanese stage, and European novels rewritten
for Japanese readers. But a literal version is rarely attempted;
for the original incidents, thoughts, and emotions would be
unintelligible to the average reader or playgoer. Plots are
adopted; sentiments and incidents are totally transformed. "The
New Magdalen" becomes a Japanese girl who married an Eta. Victor
Hugo's _Les Miserables_ becomes a tale of the Japanese civil war;
and Enjolras a Japanese student. There have been a few rare
exceptions, including the marked success of a literal translation
of the _Sorrows of Werther_.