within her boundaries the rights of the individual had been more
respected.... Now the absence of individual freedom in modern Japan
would certainly appear to be nothing less than a national danger. For
those very habits of unquestioning obedience, and loyalty, and
respect for authority, which made feudal society possible, are likely
to render a true democratic regime impossible, and would tend to
bring about a state of anarchy. Only races long accustomed to
personal liberty,--liberty to think about matters of ethics apart
from matters of government,--liberty to consider questions of right
and wrong, justice and injustice, independently of political
authority,--are able to face without risk the peril now menacing
Japan. For should social disintegration take in Japan the same course
which it followed in the old European societies,--unchecked by any
precautionary legislation,--and so bring about another social
revolution, the consequence could scarcely be less than utter ruin.
In the antique world of Europe, the total disintegration of the
patriarchal system occupied centuries: it was slow, and it was
normal--not having been brought about by external forces. In Japan,
on the contrary, this disintegration is taking place under enormous
outside pressure, operating with the rapidity of electricity and
steam. In Greek societies the changes were effected in about three
[451] hundred years; in Japan it is hardly more than thirty years
since the patriarchal system was legally dissolved and the industrial
system reshaped; yet already the danger of anarchy is in sight, and
the population--astonishingly augmented by more than ten
millions--already begins to experience all the forms of misery
developed by want under industrial conditions.
It was perhaps inevitable that the greatest freedom accorded under
the new order of things should have been given in the direction of
greatest danger. Though the Government cannot be said to have done
much for any form of competition within the sphere of its own direct
control, it has done even more than could have been reasonably
expected on behalf of national industrial competition. Loans have
been lavishly advanced. subsidies generously allowed; and, in spite
of various panics and failures, the results have been prodigious.
Within thirty years the value of articles manufactured for export has
risen from half a million to five hundred million yen. But this
immense development has been effected at serious cost in other
directions. The old methods of family production--and therefore most
of the beautiful industries and arts, for which Japan has been so
long famed--now seem doomed beyond hope; and instead of the ancient
kindly relations between master and workers, there have been brought
into existence--with no legislation to restrain [452] inhumanity--all
the horrors of factory-life at its worst. The new combinations of
capital have actually reestablished servitude, under harsher forms
than ever were imagined under the feudal era; the misery of the women
and children subjected to that servitude is a public scandal, and
proves strange possibilities of cruelty on the part of a people once
renowned for kindness,--kindness even to animals.
There is now a humane outcry for reform; and earnest efforts have
been made, and will be made, to secure legislation for the protection
of operatives. But, as might be expected, these efforts have been
hitherto strongly opposed by manufacturing companies and syndicates
with the declaration that any Government interference with factory
management will greatly hamper, if not cripple, enterprise, and
hinder competition with foreign industry. Less than twenty years ago
the very same arguments were used in England to oppose the efforts
then being made to improve the condition of the industrial classes;
and that opposition was challenged by Professor Huxley in a noble
address, which every Japanese legislator would do well to read
to-day. Speaking of the reforms in progress during 1888. the
professor said:
"If it is said that the carrying out of such arrangements as those
indicated must enhance the cost of production, and thus handicap the
producer in the race of competition. I venture, in the first place.
to doubt the fact; but, if it be [453] so, it results that industrial
society has to face a dilemma, either alternative of which threatens
destruction.
"On the one hand, a population, the labour of which is sufficiently
remunerated, may be physically and morally healthy, and socially
stable, but may fail in industrial competition by reason of the
dearness of its produce. On the other hand, a population, the labour
of which is insufficiently remunerated, must become physically and
morally unhealthy, and socially unstable; and though it may succeed
for a while in competition, by reason of the cheapness of its
produce, it must in the end fall, through hideous misery and
degradation, to utter ruin.
"Well, if these be the only alternatives, let us for ourselves and
our children choose the former, and, if need be, starve like men. But
I do not believe that a stable society, made up of healthy, vigorous,
instructed, and self-ruling people would ever incur serious risk of
that fate. They are not likely to be troubled with many competitors
of the same character just yet; and they may be safely trusted to
find ways of holding their own."*
[*The Struggle for Existence in Human Society. "Collected Essays,"
Vol. IX. pp, 113--219.]
If the future of Japan could depend upon her army and her navy, upon
the high courage of her people and their readiness to die by the
hundred thousand for ideals of honour and of duty, there would be
small cause for alarm in the present state of affairs. Unfortunately
her future must depend upon other qualities than courage, other
abilities than those of [454] sacrifice; and her struggle hereafter
must be one in which her social traditions will place her at an
immense disadvantage. The capacity for industrial competition cannot
be made to depend upon the misery of women and children; it must
depend upon the intelligent freedom of the individual; and the
society which suppresses this freedom, or suffers it to be
suppressed, must remain too rigid for competition with societies in
which the liberties of the individual are strictly maintained. While
Japan continues to think and to act by groups, even by groups of
industrial companies, so long she must always continue incapable of
her best. Her ancient social experience is not sufficient to avail
her for the future international struggle,--rather it must sometimes
impede her as so much dead weight. Dead, in the ghostliest sense of
the word,--the viewless pressure upon her life of numberless vanished
generations. She will have not only to strive against colossal odds
in her rivalry with more plastic and more forceful societies; she
will have to strive much more against the power of her phantom past.
Yet it were a grievous error to imagine that she has nothing further
to gain from her ancestral faith. All her modern successes have been
aided by it; and all her modern failures have been marked by needless
breaking with its ethical custom. She could compel her people, by a
simple fiat, to adopt the [455] civilization of the West, with all
its pain and struggle, only because that people had been trained for
ages in submission and loyalty and sacrifice; and the time has not
yet come in which she can afford to cast away the whole of her moral
past. More freedom indeed she requires,--but freedom restrained by
wisdom; freedom to think and act and strive for self as well as for
others,--not freedom to oppress the weak, or to exploit the simple.
And the new cruelties of her industrial life can find no
justification in the traditions of her ancient faith, which exacted
absolute obedience from the dependant, but equally required the duty
of kindness from the master. In so far as she has permitted her
people to depart from the way of kindness, she herself has surely
departed from the Way of the Gods....
And the domestic future appears dark. Born of that darkness, an evil
dream comes oftentimes to those who love Japan: the fear that all her
efforts are being directed, with desperate heroism, only to prepare
the land for the sojourn of peoples older by centuries in commercial
experience; that her thousands of miles of railroads and telegraphs,
her mines and forges, her arsenals and factories, her docks and
fleets, are being put in order for the use of foreign capital; that
her admirable army and her heroic navy may be doomed to make their
last sacrifices in hopeless contest against some combination of
greedy states. provoked or encouraged to aggression [456] by
circumstances beyond the power of Government to control.... But the
statesmanship that has already guided Japan through many storms
should prove able to cope with this gathering peril.
[457]
REFLECTIONS
In the preceding pages I have endeavoured to suggest a general idea
of the social history of Japan, and a general idea of the nature of
those forces which shaped and tempered the character of her people.
Certainly this attempt leaves much to be desired: the time is yet far
away at which a satisfactory work upon the subject can be prepared.
But the fact that Japan can be understood only through the study of
her religious and social evolution has been, I trust, sufficiently
indicated. She affords us the amazing spectacle of an Eastern society
maintaining all the outward forms of Western civilization; using,
with unquestionable efficiency, the applied science of the Occident;
accomplishing, by prodigious effort, the work of centuries within the
time of three decades,--yet sociologically remaining at a stage
corresponding to that which, in ancient Europe, preceded the
Christian era by hundreds of years.
But no suggestion of origins and causes should diminish the pleasure
of contemplating this curious world, psychologically still so far
away from us in the course of human evolution. The wonder and [458]
the beauty of what remains of the Old Japan cannot be lessened by any
knowledge of the conditions that produced them. The old kindliness
and grace of manners need not cease to charm us because we know that
such manners were cultivated, for a thousand years, under the edge of
the sword. The common politeness which appeared, but a few years ago,
to be almost universal, and the rarity of quarrels, should not prove
less agreeable because we have learned that, for generations and
generations, all quarrels among the people were punished with
extraordinary rigour; and that the custom of the vendetta, which
rendered necessary such repression, also made everybody cautious of
word and deed. The popular smile should not seem less winning because
we have been told of a period, in the past of the subject-classes,
when not to smile in the teeth of pain might cost life itself. And
the Japanese woman, as cultivated by the old home-training, is not
less sweet a being because she represents the moral ideal of a
vanishing world, and because we can faintly surmise the cost,--the
incalculable cost in pain,--of producing her.
No: what remains of this elder civilization is full of charm,--charm
unspeakable,--and to witness its gradual destruction must be a grief
for whomsoever has felt that charm. However intolerable may seem, to
the mind of the artist or poet, those countless restrictions which
once ruled all this fairy-world [459] and shaped the soul of it, he
cannot but admire and love their best results: the simplicity of old
custom,--the amiability of manners,--the daintiness of habits,--the
delicate tact displayed in pleasure-giving,--the strange power of
presenting outwardly, under any circumstances, only the best and
brightest aspects of character. What emotional poetry, for even the
least believing, in the ancient home-religion,--in the lamplet
nightly kindled before the names of the dead, the tiny offerings of
food and drink, the welcome-fires lighted to guide the visiting
ghosts, the little ships prepared to bear--them back to their rest!
And this immemorial doctrine of filial piety,--exacting all that is
noble, not less than all that is terrible, in duty, in gratitude, in
self-denial,--what strange appeal does it make to our lingering
religious instincts; and how close to the divine appear to us the
finer natures forged by it! What queer weird attraction in those
parish-temple festivals, with their happy mingling of merriment and
devotion in the presence of the gods! What a universe of romance in
that Buddhist art which has left its impress upon almost every
product of industry, from the toy of a child to the heirloom of a
prince;--which has peopled the solitudes with statues, and chiselled
the wayside rocks with texts of sutras! Who can forget the soft
enchantment of this Buddhist atmosphere?--the deep music of the great
bells?--the [460] green peace of gardens haunted by fearless things,
doves that flutter down at call, fishes rising to be fed? ... Despite
our incapacity to enter into the soul-life of this ancient East,
--despite the certainty that one might as well hope to remount the
River of Time and share the vanished existence of some old Greek
city, as to share the thoughts and the emotions of Old Japan,--we
find ourselves bewitched forever by the vision, like those wanderers
of folk-tale who rashly visited Elf-land.
We know that there is illusion,--not as to the reality of the
visible, but as to its meanings,--very much illusion. Yet why should
this illusion attract us, like some glimpse of Paradise?--why should
we feel obliged to confess the ethical glamour of a civilization as
far away from us in thought as the Egypt of Ramses? Are we really
charmed by the results of a social discipline that refused to
recognize the individual?--enamoured of a cult that exacted the
suppression of personality?
No: the charm is made by the fact that this vision of the past
represents to us much more than past or present,--that it foreshadows
the possibilities of some higher future, in a world of Perfect
sympathy. After many a thousand years there may be developed a
humanity able to achieve, with never a shadow of illusion, those
ethical conditions prefigured by the ideals of Old Japan: instinctive
unselfishness, [461] a common desire to find the joy of life in
making happiness for others, a universal sense of moral beauty. And
whenever men shall have so far gained upon the present as to need no
other code than the teaching of their own hearts, then indeed the
ancient ideal of Shinto will find its supreme realization.
Moreover, it should be remembered that the social state, whose
results thus attract us, really produced much more than a beautiful
mirage. Simple characters of great charm, though necessarily of great
fixity, were developed by it in multitude. Old Japan came nearer to
the achievement of the highest moral ideal than our far more evolved
societies can hope to do for many a hundred years. And but for those
ten centuries of war which followed upon the rise of the military
power, the ethical end to which all social discipline tended might
have been much more closely approached. Yet if the better side of
this human nature had been further developed at the cost of darker
and sterner qualities, the consequence might have proved unfortunate
for the nation. No people so ruled by altruism as to lose its
capacities for aggression and cunning could hold their own, in the
present state of the world, against races hardened by the discipline
of competition as well as by the discipline of war. The future Japan
must rely upon the least [462] amiable qualities of her character for
success in the universal struggle; and she will need to develop them
strongly.
*
* *
How strongly she has been able to develop them in one direction, the
present war with Russia bears startling witness. But it is certainly
to the long discipline of the past that she owes the moral strength
behind this unexpected display of aggressive power. No superficial
observation could discern the silent energies masked by the
resignation of the people to change,--the unconscious heroism
informing this mass of forty million souls, the compressed force
ready to expand at Imperial bidding either for construction or
destruction. From the leaders of a nation with such a military and
political history, one might expect the manifestation of all those
abilities of supreme importance in diplomacy and war. But such
capacities could prove of little worth were it not for the character
of the masses,--the quality of the material that moves to command
with the power of winds and tides. The veritable strength of Japan
still lies in the moral nature of her common people,--her farmers and
fishers, artizans and labourers,--the patient quiet folk one sees
toiling in the rice-fields, or occupied with the humblest of crafts
and callings in city by-ways. All the unconscious heroism of the race
is in these, and all its splendid courage,--a [463] courage that does
not mean indifference to life, but the desire to sacrifice life at
the bidding of the Imperial Master who raises the rank of the dead.
From the thousands of young men now being summoned to the war, one
hears no expression of hope to return to their homes with glory;--the
common wish uttered is only to win remembrance at the Shokonsha--that
"Spirit-Invoking Temple," where the souls of all who die for Emperor
and fatherland are believed to gather. At no time was the ancient
faith stronger than in this hour of struggle; and Russian power will
have very much more to fear from that faith than from repeating
rifles or Whitehead torpedoes.* Shinto, as a religion of patriotism,
is a force that should suffice, if permitted fair-play, to affect not
only the destinies of the whole Far East, but the future of
civilization. No more irrational assertion was ever made about the
Japanese than the statement of their indifference to religion.
Religion is still, as it has [464] ever been, the very life of the
people,--the motive and the directing power of their every action: a
religion of doing and suffering, a religion without cant and
hypocrisy. And the qualities especially developed by it are just
those qualities which have startled Russia, and may yet cause her
many a painful surprise. She has discovered alarming force where she
imagined childish weakness; she has encountered heroism where she
expected to find timidity and helplessness.**
[*The following reply, made by Admiral Togo Commander-in-Chief of the
Japanese fleet, to an Imperial message of commendation received after
the second attempt to block the entrance to Port Arthur, is
characteristically Shinto:--
"The warm message which Your imperial Majesty condescended to grant
us with regard to the second attempt to seal Port Arthur, has not
only overwhelmed us with gratitude, but may also influence the
patriotic manes of the departed heroes to hover long over the
battle-field and give unseen protection to the Imperial forces."...
[Translated in the JAPAN TIMES of March 31st, 1904.]
--Such thoughts and hopes about the brave dead might have been
uttered by a Greek warrior before the battle of Salamis. The faith
and courage which helped the Greeks to repel the Persian invasion
were of precisely the same quality as that religious heroism which
now helps the Japanese to challenge the power of Russia.]
[**The case of the Japanese officers and men on the transport Kinshu
Maru, sank by the Russian warships on the 26th of last April, should
have given the enemy matter for reflection. Although allowed an
hour's time for consideration, the soldiers refused to surrender, and
opened fire with their rifles on the battleships. Then, before the
Kinshu Maru was blown in two by a torpedo, a number of the Japanese
officers and men performed harakiri.... This strong display of the
fierce old feudal spirit suggests how dearly a Russian success would
be bought.]
*
* *
For countless reasons this terrible war (of which no man can yet see
the end) is unspeakably to be regretted; and of these reasons not the
least are industrial. War must temporarily check all tendencies
towards the development of that healthy individualism without which
no modern nation can become prosperous and wealthy. Enterprise is
numbed, markets paralyzed, manufactures stopped. Yet, in the
extraordinary case of this extraordinary people, it is possible that
the social effects of the contest will prove to some degree
beneficial. Prior to hostilities, there had been a visible tendency
to [465] the premature dissolution of institutions founded upon
centuries of experience,--a serious likelihood of moral
disintegration. That great changes must hereafter be made,--that the
future well-being of the country requires them,--would seem to admit
of no argument. But it is necessary that such changes be effected by
degrees,--not with such inopportune haste as to imperil the moral
constitution of the nation. A war for independence,--a war that
obliges the race to stake its all upon the issue,--must bring about a
tightening of the old social bonds, a strong quickening of the
ancient sentiments of loyalty and duty, a reinforcement of
conservatism. This will signify retrogression in some directions; but
it will also mean invigoration in others. Before the Russian menace,
the Soul of Yamato revives again. Out of the contest Japan will come,
if successful, morally stronger than before; and a new sense of
self-confidence, a new spirit of independence, might then reveal
itself in the national attitude toward foreign policy and foreign
pressure.
--There would be, of course, the danger of overconfidence. A people
able to defeat Russian power on land and sea might be tempted to
believe themselves equally able to cope with foreign capital upon
their own territory; and every means would certainly be tried of
persuading or bullying the government [466] into some fatal
compromise on the question of the right of foreigners to hold land.
Efforts in this direction have been carried on persistently and
systematically for years; and these efforts seem to have received
some support from a class of Japanese politicians, apparently
incapable of understanding what enormous tyranny a single privileged
syndicate of foreign capital would be capable of exercising in such a
country. It appears to me that any person comprehending, even in the
vaguest way, the nature of money-power and the average conditions of
life throughout Japan, must recognize the certainty that foreign
capital, with right of land-tenure, would find means to control
legislation, to control government, and to bring about a state of
affairs that would result in the practical domination of the empire
by alien interests. I cannot resist the conviction that when Japan
yields to foreign industry the right to purchase land, she is lost
beyond hope. The self-confidence that might tempt to such yielding,
in view of immediate advantages, would be fatal. Japan has
incomparably more to fear from English or American capital than from
Russian battleships and bayonets. Behind her military capacity is the
disciplined experience of a thousand years; behind her industrial and
commercial power, the experience of half-a-century. But she has been
fully warned; and if she chooses hereafter to invite her own ruin, it
will not have [467] been for lack of counsel,--since she had the
wisest man in the world to advise her.* [*Herbert Spencer.]