that there should not be. No inexperienced foreigner can converse for
one half hour with any Japanese--at least with any Japanese who has
not sojourned abroad---and avoid saying something that jars upon
Japanese good taste or sentiment; and few--perhaps, none--among
untravelled Japanese can maintain a brief conversation in any
European tongue without making some startling impression upon the
foreign listener. Sympathethic understanding, between minds so
differently constructed, is next to impossible. But the foreign
professor who looks for the impossible--who expects from Japanese
students the same quality of intelligent comprehension that he might
reasonably expect from Western students--is naturally disturbed. "Why
must there always, remain the width of a world between us?" is a
question often asked and rarely answered.
Some of the reasons should by this time be obvious to my reader; but
one among them and the most, curious--will not. Before stating it I
must observe that while the relation between foreign [434] instructor
and the Japanese student is artificial, that between the Japanese
teacher and the student is traditionally one of sacrifice and
obligation. The inertia encountered by the stranger, the indifference
which chills him at all times, are due in great part to the
misapprehension arising from totally opposite conceptions of duty.
Old sentiment lingers long after old forms have passed away; and how
much of feudal Japan survives in modern Japan, no stranger can
readily divine. Probably the bulk of existing sentiment is hereditary
sentiment: the ancient ideals have not yet been replaced by fresh
ones.... In feudal times the teacher taught without salary: he was
expected to devote all his time, thought, and strength to his
profession. High honour was attached to that profession; and the
matter of remuneration was not discussed,--the instructor trusting
wholly to the gratitude of parents and pupils. Public sentiment bound
them to him with a bond that could not be broken. Therefore a
general, upon the eve of an assault, would take care that his former
teacher should have an opportunity to escape from the place
beleaguered. The tie between teacher and pupil was in force second
only to the tie between parent and child. The teacher sacrificed
everything for his pupil: the pupil was ready at all times to die for
his teacher. Now, indeed, the hard and selfish aspects of Japanese
character are coming to the surface. But a [435] single fact will
sufficiently indicate how much of the old ethical sentiment persists
under the new and rougher surface: Nearly all the higher educational
work accomplished in Japan represents, though aided by Government,
the results of personal sacrifice.
From the summit of society to the base, this sacrificial spirit
rules. That a large part of the private income of their Imperial
Majesties has, for many years, been devoted to public education is
well known; but that every person of rank or wealth or high position
educates students at his private expense, is not generally known. In
the majority of cases this help is entirely gratuitous; in a minority
of cases, the expenses of the student are advanced only, to be repaid
by instalments at some future time. The reader is doubtless aware
that the daimyo in former times used to dispose of the bulk of their
incomes in supporting and helping their retainers; supplying
hundreds, in some cases thousands, and in some few cases, even tens
of thousands, of persons with the necessaries of life; and exacting
in return military service, loyalty, and obedience. Those former
daimyo or their successors--particularly those who are still large
landholders--now vie with each other in assisting education. All who
can afford it are educating sons or grandsons or descendants of
former retainers; the subjects of this patronage being annually
selected from among the students of [436] schools established in the
former daimiates. It is only the rich noble who can now support a
number of students gratuitously, year after year; the poorer men of
rank cannot care for many. But all, or very nearly all, maintain
some,--and this even in cases where the patron's income is so small
that the expense could not be borne unless the student were pledged
to repay it after graduation. In some instances, half of the cost is
borne by the patron; the student being required to repay the rest.
Now these aristocratic examples are extensively followed through
other grades of society. Merchants, bankers, and manufacturers--all
rich men of the commercial and industrial classes--are educating
students. Military officers, civil service officials, physicians,
lawyers, men of every profession, in short, are doing the same thing.
Persons whose incomes are too small to permit of much generosity are
able to help students by employing them as door-keepers, messengers,
tutors,--giving them board and lodging, and a little pocket-money at
times, in return, for light services. In Tokyo, and in most of the
large cities, almost every large house is guarded by students who are
being thus assisted. As for what the teachers do--that requires
special mention.
The majority of teachers in the public schools do not receive
salaries enabling them to help students with money; but all teachers
earning more than the [437] bare necessary give aid of some sort.
Among the instructors and professors of the higher educational
establishments, the helping of students seems to be thought of as a
matter of course,--so much a matter of course that we might suspect a
new "tyranny of custom," especially in view of the smallness of
official salaries. But no tyranny of custom would explain the
pleasure of sacrifice and the strange persistence of feudal idealism
which are revealed by some extraordinary facts. For example: A
certain University professor is known to have supported and educated
a large number of students by dividing among them, during many years,
nearly the whole of his salary. He lodged, clothed, boarded, and
educated them, bought their books, and paid their fees,--reserving
for himself only the cost of his living, and reducing even that cost
by living upon hot sweet potatoes. (Fancy a foreign professor in
Japan putting himself upon a diet of bread and water for the purpose
of educating gratuitously a number of poor young men!) I know of two
other cases nearly as remarkable; the helper, in one instance, being
an old man of more than seventy, who still devotes all his means,
time, and knowledge to his ancient ideal of duty. How much obscure
sacrifice of this kind has been performed by those least able to
afford it never will be known: indeed, the publication of the facts
would only give pain. I am guilty of some indiscretion in mentioning
[418] even the cases brought to my attention--though human nature is
honoured by the mention.... Now it should be evident that while
Japanese students are accustomed to witness self-denial of this sort
on the part of native professors, they cannot be much impressed by
any manifestation of interest or sympathy on the part of the foreign
professor, who, though receiving a higher salary than his Japanese
colleagues, has no reason and small inclination to imitate their
example.
Surely this heroic fact of education sustained by personal
sacrifices, in the face of unimaginable difficulties, is enough to
redeem much humbug and wrong. In spite of the corruption which has
been of late years rife in educational circles,--in spite of official
scandals, intrigues, and shams,--all needed reforms can be hoped for
while the spirit of generous self-denial continues to rule the world
of teachers and students. I can venture also the opinion that most of
the official scandals and failures have resulted from the
interference of politics with modern education, or from attempting to
imitate foreign conventional methods totally at variance with
national moral experience. Where Japan has remained true to her old
moral ideals she has done nobly and well: where she has needlessly
departed from them, sorrow and trouble have been the natural
consequences.
There are yet other facts in modern education [439] suggesting even
more forcibly how much of the old life remains hidden under the new
conditions, and how rigidly race-character has become fixed in the
higher types of mind. I refer chiefly to the results of Japanese
education abroad,--a higher special training in German, English,
French, or American Universities. In some directions these results,
to foreign observation at least, appear to be almost negative.
Considering the immense psychological differentiation,--the total
oppositeness of mental structure and habit,--it is astonishing that
Japanese students have been able to do what they actually have done
at foreign Universities. To graduate at any European or American
University of mark, with a mind shaped by Japanese culture, filled
with Chinese learning, crammed with ideographs,--is a prodigious
feat: scarcely less of a feat than it would be for an American
student to graduate at a Chinese University. Certainly the men sent
abroad to study are carefully selected for ability; and one
indispensable requisite for the mission is a power of memory
incomparably superior to the average Occidental memory, and different
altogether as to quality,--a memory for details;--nevertheless, the
feat is amazing. But with the return to Japan of these young
scholars, there is commonly an end of effort in the direction of the
speciality studied,--unless it happens to have been a purely
practical subject. Does this signify incapacity for independent work
[440] upon Occidental lines? incapacity for creative thought? lack of
constructive imagination? disinclination or indifference? The history
of that terrible mental and moral discipline to which the race was so
long subjected would certainly suggest such limitations in the modern
Japanese mind. Perhaps these questions cannot yet be
answered,--except, I imagine, as regards the indifference, which is
self-evident and undisguised. But, independently of any question of
capacity or inclination, there is this fact to be considered,--that
proper encouragement has not yet been given to home-scholarship. The
plain truth is that young men are sent to foreign seats of learning
for other ends than to learn how to devote the rest of their lives to
the study of psychology, philology, literature, or modern philosophy.
They are sent abroad to fit them for higher posts in
Government-service; and their foreign study is but one obligatory
episode in their official career. Each has to qualify himself for
special duty by learning how Western people study and think and feel
in certain directions, and by ascertaining the range of educational
progress in those directions; but he is not ordered to think or to
feel like Western people--which would, in any event, be impossible
for him. He has not, and probably could not have, any deep personal
interest in Western learning outside of the domain of applied
science. His business is to learn how to understand such matters from
the [441] Japanese, not from the Occidental, point of view. But he
performs his part well, does exactly what he has been told to do, and
rarely anything more. His value to his Government is doubled or
quadrupled by his allotted experience; but at home--except during a
few years of expected duty as professor or lecturer--he will probably
use that experience only as a psychological costume of ceremony,--a
mental uniform to be donned when official occasion may require.
It is otherwise in the case of men sent abroad for scientific studies
requiring, not only intelligence and memory, but natural quickness of
hand and eye,--surgery, medicine, military specialities. I doubt
whether the average efficiency of Japanese surgeons can be surpassed.
The study of war, I need hardly say, is one for which the national
mind and character have inherited aptitude. But men sent abroad
merely to win a foreign University-degree, and destined, after a term
of educational duty, to higher official life, appear to set small
value upon their foreign acquirements. However, even if they could
win distinction in Europe by further effort at home, that effort
would have to be made at a serious pecuniary sacrifice, and its
results could not as yet be fairly appreciated by their own
countrymen.
Some of us have wondered at times what the old Egyptians or the old
Greeks would have done if [442] suddenly brought into dangerous
contact with a civilization like our own,--a civilization of applied
mathematics, with sciences and branch-sciences of which the mere
names would fill a dictionary. I think that the history of modern
Japan suggests very clearly what any wise people, with a civilization
based upon ancestor-worship, would have done. They would have
speedily reconstructed their patriarchal society to meet the sudden
peril; they would have adopted, with astonishing success, all the
scientific machinery that they could use; they would have created a
formidable army and a highly efficient navy; they would have sent
their young aristocrats abroad to study alien convention, and to
qualify for diplomatic duty; they would have established a new system
of education, and obliged all their children to study many new
things;--but toward the higher emotional and intellectual life of
that alien civilization, they would naturally exhibit indifference:
its best literature, its philosophy, its broader forms of tolerant
religion could make no profound appeal to their moral and social
experience.
[443]
INDUSTRIAL DANGER
Everywhere the course of human civilization has been shaped by the
same evolutional law; and as the earlier history of the ancient
European communities can help us to understand the social conditions
of Old Japan, so a later period of the same history can help us to
divine something of the probable future of the New Japan. It has been
shown by the author of La Cite Antique that the history of all the
ancient Greek and Latin communities included four revolutionary
periods.* The first revolution had everywhere for its issue the
withdrawal of political power from the priest-king; who was
nevertheless allowed to retain the religious authority. The second
revolutionary period witnessed the breaking up of the gens or (Greek
genos). the enfranchisement of the client from the authority of the
patron, and several important changes in [444] the legal constitution
of the family. The third revolutionary period saw the weakening of
the religious and military aristocracy, the entrance of the common
people into the rights of citizenship, and the rise of a democracy of
wealth,--presently to be opposed by a democracy of poverty. The
fourth revolutionary period witnessed the first bitter struggles
between rich and poor, the final triumph of anarchy, and the
consequent establishment of a new and horrible form of
despotism,--the despotism of the popular Tyrant.
[*Not excepting Sparta. The Spartan society was evolutionally much
in advance of the Ionian societies; the Dorian patriarchal clan
having been dissolved at some very early period. Sparta kept its
Kings; but affairs of civil justice were regulated by the Senate, and
affairs of criminal justice by the ephors, who also had the power to
declare war and to make treaties of peace. After the first great
revolution of Spartan history the King was deprived of power in civil
matters, in criminal matters, and in military matters: he retained
his sacerdotal office. See for details. La Cite Antique, pp,
285-287.]
To these four revolutionary periods, the social history of Old Japan
presents but two correspondences. The first Japanese revolutionary
period was represented by the Fujiwara usurpation of the imperial
civil and military authority,--after which event the aristocracy,
religious and military, really governed Japan down to our own time.
All the events of the rise of the military power and the
concentration of authority under the Tokugawa Shogunate properly
belong to the first revolutionary period. At the time of the opening
of Japan, society had not evolutionally advanced beyond a stage
corresponding to that of the antique Western societies in the seventh
or eighth century before Christ. The second revolutionary period
really began only with the reconstruction of society in 1871. But
within the space of a single generation thereafter, Japan entered
upon her third revolutionary [445] period. Already the influence of
the elder aristocracy is threatened by the sudden rise of a new
oligarchy of wealth,--a new industrial power probably destined to
become omnipotent in politics. The disintegration (now proceeding) of
the clan, the changes in the legal constitution of the family, the
entrance of the people into the enjoyment of political rights, must
all tend to hasten the coming transfer of power. There is every
indication that, in the present order of things, the third
revolutionary period will run its course rapidly; and then a fourth
revolutionary period, fraught with serious danger, would be in
immediate prospect.
Consider the bewildering rapidity of recent changes,--from the
reconstruction of society in 1871 to the opening of the first
national parliament in 1891. Down to the middle of the nineteenth
century the nation had remained in the condition common to European
patriarchal communities twenty-six hundred years ago: society had
indeed entered upon a second period of integration, but had traversed
only one great revolution. And then the country was suddenly hurried
through two more social revolutions of the most extraordinary
kind,--signalized by the abolition of the daimiates, the suppression
of the military class, the substitution of a plebeian for an
aristocratic army, popular enfranchisement, the rapid formalism of a
new commonalty. industrial [446] expansion, the rise of a new
aristocracy of wealth, and popular representation in government! Old
Japan had never developed a wealthy and powerful middle class: she
had not even approached that stage of industrial development which,
in the ancient European societies, naturally brought about the first
political struggles between rich and poor. Her social organization
made industrial oppression impossible: the commercial classes were
kept at the bottom of society,--under the feet even of those who, in
more highly evolved communities, are most at the mercy of
money-power. But now those commercial classes, set free and highly
privileged, are silently and swiftly ousting the aristocratic
ruling-class from power,--are becoming supremely important. And under
the new order of things, forms of social misery, never before known
in the history of the race, are being developed. Some idea of this
misery may be obtained from the fact that the number of poor people
in Tokyo unable to pay their annual resident-tax is upwards of
50,000; yet the amount of the tax is only about 20 sen, or 5 pence
English money. Prior to the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a
minority there was never any such want in any part of Japan,--except,
of course, as a temporary consequence of war.
The early history of European civilization supplies analogies. In the
Greek and Latin communities, up to the time of the dissolution of the
gens, there [447] was no poverty in the modern meaning of that word.
Slavery. with some few exceptions, existed only in the mild domestic
form; there were yet no commercial oligarchies, and no industrial
oppressions; and the various cities and states were ruled, after
political power had been taken from the early kings, by military
aristocracies which also exercised religious functions. There was yet
little trade in the modern signification of the term; and money, as
current coinage, came into circulation only in the seventh century
before Christ. Misery did not exist. Under any patriarchal system,
based upon ancestor-worship, there is no misery, as a consequence of
poverty, except such as may be temporarily created by devastation or
famine. If want thus comes, it comes to all alike. In such a state of
society everybody is in the service of somebody, and receives in
exchange for service all the necessaries of life: there is no need
for any one to trouble himself about the question of living. Also, in
such a patriarchal community, which is self-sufficing, there is
little need of money: barter takes the place of trade.... In all
these respects, the condition of Old Japan offered a close parallel
to the conditions of patriarchal society in ancient Europe. While the
uji or clan existed, there was no misery except as a result of war,
famine, or pestilence. Throughout society--excepting the small
commercial class--the need of money was rare; and such coinage as
existed [448] was little suited to general circulation. Taxes were
paid in rice and other produce. As the lord nourished his retainers,
so the samurai cared for his dependants, the farmer for his
labourers, the artizan for his apprentices and journeymen, the
merchant for his clerks. Everybody was fed; and there was no need, in
ordinary times at least, for any one to go hungry. It was only with
the breaking-up of the clan-system in Japan that the possibilities of
starvation for the worker first came into existence. And as, in
antique Europe, the enfranchised client-class and plebeian-class
developed, under like conditions, into a democracy clamouring for
suffrage and all political rights, so in Japan have the common people
developed the political instinct, in self-protection.
It will be remembered how, in Greek and Roman society, the
aristocracy founded upon religious tradition and military power had
to give way to an oligarchy of wealth, and how there subsequently
came into existence a democratic form of government,--democratic, not
in the modern, but in the old Greek meaning. At a yet later day the
results of popular suffrage were the breaking-up of this democratic
government, and the initiation of an atrocious struggle between rich
and poor. After that strife had begun there was no more security for
life or property until the Roman conquest enforced order.... Now it
seems not unlikely that there will he witnessed in Japan, at no very
[449] distant day, a strong tendency to repeat the history of the old
Greek anarchies. With the constant increase of poverty and pressure
of population, and the concomitant accumulation of wealth in the
hands of a new industrial class, the peril is obvious. Thus far the
nation has patiently borne all changes. relying upon the experience
of its past, and trusting implicitly to its rulers. But should
wretchedness be so permitted to augment that the question of how to
keep from starving becomes imperative for the millions, the long
patience and the long trust may fail. And then, to repeat a figure
effectively used by Professor Huxley, the Primitive Man, finding that
the Moral Man has landed him in the valley of the shadow of death,
may rise up to take the management of affairs into his own hands, and
fight savagely for the right of existence. As popular instinct is not
too dull to divine the first cause of this misery in the introduction
of Western industrial methods, it is unpleasant to reflect what such
an upheaval might signify. But nothing of moment has yet been done to
ameliorate the condition of the wretched class of operatives, now
estimated to exceed half a million.
M. de Coulanges has pointed out* that the absence of individual
liberty was the real cause of the disorders and the final ruin of the
Greek societies.
[*La Cite Antique. pp, 400-401.]