IV

Now it is worth while to inquire if there be not some

compensatory value attaching to this impermanency and this

smallness in the national life.

Nothing is more characteristic of that life than its extreme

fluidity. The Japanese population represents a medium whose

particles are in perpetual circulation. The motion is in itself

peculiar. It is larger and more eccentric than the motion of

Occidental populations, though feebler between points. It is also

much more natural,--so natural that it could not exist in Western

civilization. The relative mobility of a European population and

the Japanese population might be expressed by a comparison

between certain high velocities of vibration and certain low

ones. But the high velocities would represent, in such a

comparison, the consequence of artificial force applied; the

slower vibrations would not. And this difference of kind would

mean more than surface indications could announce. In one sense,

Americans may be right in thinking themselves great travelers. In

another, they are certainly wrong; the man of the people in

America cannot compare, as a traveler, with the man of the people

in Japan. And of course, in considering relative mobility of

populations, one must consider chiefly the great masses, the

workers,--not merely the small class of wealth. In their own

country, the Japanese are the greatest travelers of any civilized

people. They are the greatest travelers because, even in a land

composed mainly of mountain chains, they recognize no obstacles

to travel. The Japanese who travels most is not the man who needs

railways or steamers to carry him.

Now, with us, the common worker is incomparably less free than

the common worker in Japan. He is less free because of the more

complicated mechanism of Occidental societies, whose forces tend

to agglomeration and solid integration. He is less free because

the social and industrial machinery on which he must depend

reshapes him to its own particular requirements, and always so as

to evolve some special and artificial capacity at the cost of

other inherent capacity. He is less free because he must live at

a standard making it impossible for him to win financial

independence by mere thrift. To achieve any such independence, he

must possess exceptional character and exceptional faculties

greater than those of thousands of exceptional competitors

equally eager to escape from the same thralldom. In brief, then,

he is less independent because the special character of his

civilization numbs his natural power to live without the help of

machinery or large capital. To live thus artificially means to

lose, sooner or later, the power of independent movement. Before

a Western man can move he has many things to consider. Before a

Japanese moves he has nothing to consider. He simply leaves the

place he dislikes, and goes to the place he wishes, without any

trouble. There is nothing to prevent him. Poverty is not an

obstacle, but a stimulus. Impedimenta he has none, or only such

as he can dispose of in a few minutes. Distances have no

significance for him. Nature has given him perfect feet that can

spring him over fifty miles a day without pain; a stomach whose

chemistry can extract ample nourishment from food on which no

European could live; and a constitution that scorns heat, cold,

and damp alike, because still unimpaired by unhealthy clothing,

by superfluous comforts, by the habit of seeking warmth from

grates and stoves, and by the habit of wearing leather shoes.

It seems to me that the character of our footgear signifies more

than is commonly supposed. The footgear represents in itself a

check upon individual freedom. It signifies this even in

costliness; but in form it signifies infinitely more. It has

distorted the Western foot out of the original shape, and

rendered it incapable of the work for which it was evolved. The

physical results are not limited to the foot. Whatever acts as a

check, directly or indirectly, upon the organs of locomotion must

extend its effects to the whole physical constitution. Does the

evil stop even there? Perhaps we submit to conventions the most

absurd of any existing in any civilization because we have too

long submitted to the tyranny of shoemakers. There may be defects

in our politics, in our social ethics, in our religious system,

more or less related to the habit of wearing leather shoes.

Submission to the cramping of the body must certainly aid in

developing submission to the cramping of the mind.

The Japanese man of the people--the skilled laborer able to

underbid without effort any Western artisan in the same line of

industry--remains happily independent of both shoemakers and

tailors. His feet are good to look at, his body is healthy, and

his heart is free. If he desire to travel a thousand miles, he

can get ready for his journey in five minutes. His whole outfit

need not cost seventy-five cents; and all his baggage can be put

into a handkerchief. On ten dollars he can travel for a year

without work, or he can travel simply on his ability to work, or

he can travel as a pilgrim. You may reply that any savage can do

the same thing. Yes, but any civilized man cannot; and the

Japanese has been a highly civilized man for at least a thousand

years. Hence his present capacity to threaten Western

manufacturers.

We have been too much accustomed to associate this kind of

independent mobility with the life of our own beggars and tramps,

to have any just conception of its intrinsic meaning. We have

thought of it also in connection with unpleasant

things,--uncleanliness and bad smells. But, as Professor

Chamberlain has well said, "a Japanese crowd is the sweetest in

the world" Your Japanese tramp takes his hot bath daily, if he

has a fraction of a cent to pay for it, or his cold bath, if he

has not. In his little bundle there are combs, toothpicks,

razors, toothbrushes. He never allows himself to become

unpleasant. Reaching his destination, he can transform himself

into a visitor of very nice manners, and faultless though simple

attire(1).

Ability to live without furniture, without impedimenta, with the

least possible amount of neat clothing, shows more than the

advantage held by this Japanese race in the struggle of life; it

shows also the real character of some 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. Think for a moment how important an

article of Occidental attire is the single costly item of white

shirts! Yet even the linen shirt, the so-called "badge of a

gentleman," is in itself a useless garment. It gives neither

warmth nor comfort. It represents in our fashions the survival of

something once a luxurious class distinction, but to-day

meaningless and useless as the buttons sewn on the outside of

coat-sleeves.

(1) Critics have tried to make fun of Sir Edwin Arnold's

remark that a Japanese crowd smells like a geranium-flower. Yet

the simile is exact! The perfume called jako, when sparingly

used, might easily be taken for the odor of a musk-geranium. In

almost any Japanese assembly including women a slight perfume of

jako is discernible; for the robes worn have been laid in drawers

containing a few grains of jako. Except for this delicate scent,

a Japanese crowd is absolutely odorless.

V

The absence of any huge signs of the really huge things that

Japan has done bears witness to the very peculiar way in which

her civilization has been working. It cannot forever so work; but

it has so worked thus far with amazing success. Japan is

producing without capital, in our large sense of the word. She

has become industrial without becoming essentially mechanical and

artificial. The vast rice crop is raised upon millions of tiny,

tiny farms; the silk crop, in millions of small poor homes, the

tea crop, on countless little patches of soil. If you visit Kyoto

to order something from one of the greatest porcelain makers in

the world, one whose products are known better in London and in

Paris than even in Japan, you will find the factory to be a

wooden cottage in which no American farmer would live. The

greatest maker of cloisonne vases, who may ask you two hundred

dollars for something five inches high, produces his miracles

behind a two-story frame dwelling containing perhaps six small

rooms. The best girdles of silk made in Japan, and famous

throughout the Empire, are woven in a house that cost scarcely

five hundred dollars to build. The work is, of course,

hand-woven. But the factories weaving by machinery--and weaving

so well as to ruin foreign industries of far vaster capacity--are

hardly more imposing, with very few exceptions. Long, light, low

one-story or two-story sheds they are, about as costly to erect

as a row of wooden stables with us. Yet sheds like these turn out

silks that sell all round the world. Sometimes only by inquiry,

or by the humming of the machinery, can you distinguish a factory

from an old yashiki, or an old-fashioned Japanese school

building,--unless indeed you can read the Chinese characters over

the garden gate. Some big brick factories and breweries exist;

but they are very few, and even when close to the foreign

settlements they seem incongruities in the landscape.

Our own architectural monstrosities and our Babels of machinery

have been brought into existence by vast integrations of

industrial capital. But such integrations do not exist in the Far

East; indeed, the capital to make them does not exist. And

supposing that in the course of a few generations there should

form in Japan corresponding combinations of money power, it is

not easy to suppose correspondences in architectural

construction. Even two-story edifices of brick have given bad

results in the leading commercial centre; and earthquakes seem to

condemn Japan to perpetual simplicity in building. The very land

revolts against the imposition of Western architecture, and

occasionally even opposes the new course of traffic by pushing

railroad lines out of level and out of shape.

Not industry alone still remains thus unintegrated; government

itself exhibits a like condition. Nothing is fixed except the

Throne. Perpetual change is identical with state policy.

Ministers, governors, superintendents, inspectors, all high civil

and military officials, are shifted at irregular and surprisingly

short intervals, and hosts of smaller officials scatter each time

with the whirl. The province in which I passed the first

twelvemonth of my residence in Japan has had four different

governors in five years. During my stay at Kumamoto, and before

the war had begun, the military command of that important post

was three times changed. The government college had in three

years three directors. In educational circles, especially, the

rapidity of such changes has been phenomenal. There have been five

different ministers of education in my own time, and more than

five different educational policies. The twenty-six thousand

public schools are so related in their management to the local

assemblies that, even were no other influences at work, constant

change would be inevitable because of the changes in the

assemblies. Directors and teachers keep circling from post to

post; there are men little more than thirty years old who have

taught in almost every province of the country. That any

educational system could have produced any great results under

these conditions seems nothing short of miraculous.

We are accustomed to think that some degree of stability is

necessary to all real progress, all great development. But Japan

has given proof irrefutable that enormous development is possible

without any stability at all. The explanation is in the race

character,--a race character in more ways than one the very

opposite of our own. Uniformly mobile, and thus uniformly

impressionable, the nation has moved unitedly in the direction of

great ends, submitting the whole volume of its forty millions to

be moulded by the ideas of its rulers, even as sand or as water

is shaped by wind. And this submissiveness to reshaping belongs

to the old conditions of its soul life,--old conditions of rare

unselfishness and perfect faith. The relative absence from the

national character of egotistical individualism has been the

saving of an empire; has enabled a great people to preserve its

independence against prodigious odds. Wherefore Japan may well be

grateful to her two great religions, the creators and the

preservers of her moral power to Shinto, which taught the

individual to think of his Emperor and of his country before

thinking either of his own family or of himself; and to Buddhism,

which trained him to master regret, to endure pain, and to accept

as eternal law the vanishing of things loved and the tyranny of

things hated.

To-day there is visible a tendency to hardening,--a danger of

changes leading to the integration of just such an officialism as

that which has proved the curse and the weakness of China. The

moral results of the new education have not been worthy of the

material results. The charge of want of "individuality," in the

accepted sense of pure selfishness, will scarcely be made against

the Japanese of the next century. Even the compositions of

students already reflect the new conception of intellectual

strength only as a weapon of offense, and the new sentiment of

aggressive egotism. "Impermanency," writes one, with a fading

memory of Buddhism in his mind, "is the nature of our life. We

see often persons who were rich yesterday, and are poor to-day.

This is the result of human competition, according to the law of

evolution. We are exposed to that competition. We must fight each

other, even if we are not inclined to do so. With what sword

shall we fight? With the sword of knowledge, forged by

education."

Well, there are two forms of the cultivation of Self. One leads

to the exceptional development of the qualities which are noble,

and the other signifies something about which the less said the

better. But it is not the former which the New Japan is now

beginning to study. I confess to being one of those who believe

that the human heart, even in the history of a race, may be worth

infinitely more than the human intellect, and that it will sooner

or later prove itself infinitely better able to answer all the

cruel enigmas of the Sphinx of Life. I still believe that the old

Japanese were nearer to the solution of those enigmas than are

we, just because they recognized moral beauty as greater than

intellectual beauty. And, by way of conclusion, I may venture to

quote from an article on education by Ferdinand Brunetiere:--

"All our educational measures will prove vain, if there be no

effort to force into the mind, and to deeply impress upon it, the

sense of those fine words of Lamennais: '_Human society is based

upon mutual giving, or upon the sacrifice of man for man, or of

each man for all other men; and sacrifice is the very essence of

all true society._' It is this that we have been unlearning for

nearly a century; and if we have to put ourselves to school

afresh, it will be in order that we may learn it again. Without

such knowledge there can be no society and no education,--not, at

least, if the object of education be to form man for society.

Individualism is to-day the enemy of education, as it is also the

enemy of social order. It has not been so always; but it has so

become. It will not be so forever; but it is so now. And without

striving to destroy it-which would mean to fall from one extreme

into another--we must recognize that, no matter what we wish to

do for the family, for society, for education, and for the

country, it is against individualism that the work will have to

be done."