VI

What of the future of Japan? No one can venture any positive

prediction on the assumption that existing tendencies will

continue far into that future. Not to dwell upon the grim

probabilities of war, or the possibility of such internal

disorder as might compel indefinite suspension of the

constitution, and lead to a military dictatorship,--a resurrected

Shogunate in modern uniform,--great changes there will assuredly

be, both for better and for worse. Supposing these changes

normal, however, one may venture some qualified predictions,

based upon the reasonable supposition that the race will

continue, through rapidly alternating periods of action and

reaction, to assimilate its new-found knowledge with the best

relative consequences.

Physically, I think, the Japanese will become before the close of

the next century much superior to what they now are. For such

belief there are three good reasons. The first is that the

systematic military and gymnastic training of the able-bodied

youth of the Empire ought in a few generations to produce results

as marked as those of the military system in Germany,--increase

in stature, in average girth of chest, in muscular development

Another reason is that the Japanese of the cities are taking to a

richer diet,--a flesh diet; and that a more nutritive food must

have physiological results favoring growth. Immense numbers of

little restaurants are everywhere springing up, in which "Western

Cooking" is furnished almost as cheaply as Japanese food.

Thirdly, the delay of marriage necessitated by education and by

military service must result in the production of finer and finer

generations of children. As immature marriages become the

exception rather than the rule, children of feeble constitution

will correspondingly diminish in number. At present the

extraordinary differences of stature noticeable in any Japanese

crowd seem to prove that the race is capable of great physical

development under a severer social discipline.

Moral improvement is hardly to be expected--rather the reverse.

The old moral ideals of Japan were at least quite as noble as our

own; and men could really live up to them in the quiet benevolent

times of patriarchal government. Untruthfulness, dishonesty, and

brutal crime were rarer than now, as official statistics show,

the percentage of crime having been for some years steadily on

the increase--which proves of course, among other things, that

the struggle for existence has been intensified. The old standard

of chastity, as represented in public opinion, was that of a less

developed society than our own; yet I do not believe it can be

truthfully asserted that the moral conditions were worse than

with us. In one respect they were certainly better; for the

virtue of Japanese wives was generally in all ages above

suspicion(1). If the morals of men were much more open to

reproach, it is not necessary to cite Lecky for evidence as to

whether a much better state of things prevails in the Occident.

Early marriages were encouraged to guard young men from

temptations to irregular life; and it is only fair to suppose

that in a majority of cases this result was obtained.

Concubinage, the privilege of the rich, had its evil side; but it

had also the effect of relieving the wife from the physical

strain of rearing many children in rapid succession. The social

conditions were so different from those which Western religion

assumes to be the best possible, that an impartial judgment of

them cannot be ecclesiastical. One fact is indisputable,--that

they were unfavorable to professional vice; and in many of the

larger fortified towns,--the seats of princes,--no houses of

prostitution were suffered to exist. When all things are fairly

considered, it will be found that Old Japan might claim, in spite

of her patriarchal system, to have been less open to reproach

even in the matter of sexual morality than many a Western

country. The people were better than their laws asked them to be.

And now that the relations of the sexes are to be regulated by

new codes,--at a time when new codes are really needed, the

changes which it is desirable to bring about cannot result in

immediate good. Sudden reforms are not made by legislation. Laws

cannot directly create sentiment; and real social progress can be

made only through change of ethical feeling developed by long

discipline and training. Meanwhile increasing pressure of

population and increasing competition must tend, while quickening

intelligence, to harden character and develop selfishness.

Intellectually there will doubtless be great progress, but not a

progress so rapid as those who think that Japan has really

transformed herself in thirty years would have us believe.

However widely diffused among the people, scientific education

cannot immediately raise the average of practical intelligence to

the Western level. The common capacity must remain lower for

generations. There will be plenty of remarkable exceptions,

indeed; and a new aristocracy of intellect is coming into

existence. But the real future of the nation depends rather upon

the general capacity of the many than upon the exceptional

capacity of the few. Perhaps it depends especially upon the

development of the mathematical faculty, which is being

everywhere assiduously cultivated. At present this is the weak

point; hosts of students being yearly debarred from the more

important classes of higher study through inability to pass in

mathematics. At the Imperial naval and military colleges,

however, such results have been obtained as suffice to show that

this weakness will eventually be remedied. The most difficult

branches of scientific study, will become less formidable to the

children of those who have been able to distinguish themselves in

such branches.

In other respects, some temporary retrogression is to be looked

for. Just so certainly as Japan has attempted that which is above

the normal limit of her powers, so certainly must she fall back

to that limit, or, rather, below it. Such retrogression will be

natural as well as necessary: it will mean nothing more than a

recuperative preparation for stronger and loftier efforts. Signs

of it are even now visible in the working of certain

state-departments,--notably in that of education. The idea of

forcing upon Oriental students a course of study above the

average capacity of Western students; the idea of making English

the language, or at least one of the languages of the country;

and the idea of changing ancestral modes of feeling and thinking

for the better by such training, were wild extravagances. Japan

must develop her own soul: she cannot borrow another. A dear

friend whose life has been devoted to philology once said to me

while commenting upon the deterioration of manners among the

students of Japan: "_Why, the English language itself has been a

demoralizing influence!_" There was much depth in that

observation. Setting the whole Japanese nation to study English

(the language of a people who are being forever preached to about

their "rights," and never about their "duties") was almost an

imprudence. The policy was too wholesale as well as too sudden.

It involved great waste of money and time, and it helped to sap

ethical sentiment. In the future Japan will learn English, just

as England learns German. But if this study has been wasted in

some directions, it has not been wasted in others. The influence

of English has effected modifications in the native tongue,

making it richer, more flexible, and more capable of expressing

the new forms of thought created by the discoveries of modern

science. This influence must long continue. There will be a

considerable absorption of English--perhaps also of French and

German words--into Japanese: indeed this absorption is already

marked in the changing speech of the educated classes, not less

than in the colloquial of the ports which is mixed with curious

modifications of foreign commercial words. Furthermore, the

grammatical structure of Japanese is being influenced; and though

I cannot agree with a clergyman who lately declared that the use

of the passive voice by Tokyo street-urchins announcing the fall

of Port Arthur--("_Ryojunko ga senryo sera-reta!_") represented

the working of "divine providence," I do think it afforded some

proof that the Japanese language, assimilative like the genius of

the race, is showing capacity to meet all demands made upon it by

the new conditions.

Perhaps Japan will remember her foreign teachers more kindly in

the twentieth century. But she will never feel toward the

Occident, as she felt toward China before the Meiji era, the

reverential respect due by ancient custom to a beloved

instructor; for the wisdom of China was voluntarily sought, while

that of the West was thrust upon her by violence. She will have

some Christian sects of her own; but she will not remember our

American and English missionaries as she remembers even now those

great Chinese priests who once educated her youth. And she will

not preserve relics of our sojourn, carefully wrapped in septuple

coverings of silk, and packed away in dainty whitewood boxes,

because we had no new lesson of beauty to teach her,--nothing by

which to appeal to her emotions.

(1) The statement has been made that there is no word for

chastity in the Japanese language. This is true in the same sense

only that we might say there is no word for chastity in the

English language,--became such words as honor, virtue, purity,

chastity have been adopted into English from other languages.

Open any good Japanese-English dictionary and you will find many

words for chastity. Just as it would be ridiculous to deny that

the word "chastity" is modern English, because it came to us

through the French from the Latin, so it is ridiculous to deny

that Chinese moral terms, adopted into the Japanese tongue more

than a thousand years ago are Japanese to-day. The statement,

like a majority of missionary statements on these subjects, is

otherwise misleading; for the reader is left to infer the absence

of an adjective as well as a noun,--and the purely Japanese

adjectives signifying chaste are numerous. The word most commonly

used applies to both sexes,--and has the old Japanese sense of

firm, strict, resisting, honorable. The deficiency of abstract

terms in a language by no means implies the deficiency of

concrete moral ideas,--a fact which has been vainly pointed out

to missionaries more than once.