THE JAPANESE SPIRIT
BY
OKAKURA-YOSHISABURO
WITH AN INTRODUCTION
BY
GEORGE MEREDITH
NEW YORK
JAMES POTT & CO.
1905
TO MY BROTHER
_Bellario_ Sir, if I have made
A fault in ignorance, instruct my youth:
I shall be willing, if not able, to learn:
Age and experience will adorn my mind
With larger knowledge; and if I have done
A wilful fault, think me not past all hope
For once.
_Philaster_, Act. II. Sc. I.
PREFACE
The following pages owe their existence to Mr. Martin White, whose keen
interest in comparative sociology led to the opening of special courses
for its investigation in the University of London.
My thanks are due to Mr. P.J. Hartog, Academic Registrar of the
University, as well as to Dr. and Mrs. E.R. Edwards, who inspired me
with the courage to take the present task on my inexperienced shoulders.
But above all I render the expression of my deepest obligation to
Professor Walter Rippmann. Had it not been for his friendly interest and
help, I would not have been able thus to come before an English public.
For the peculiarities of thought and language, which, if nothing else,
might at least make the booklet worthy of a perusal, I naturally assume
the full responsibility myself.
With these prefatory words, I venture to submit this essay to the
lenient reception of my readers.
INTRODUCTION
We have had illuminating books upon Japan. Those of Lafcadio Hearn will
always be remembered for the poetry he brought in them to bear upon the
poetic aspects of the country and the people. Buddhism had a fascination
for him, as it had for Mr. Fielding in his remarkable book on the
practice of this religion in Burma.[1] There is also the work of Captain
Brinkley, to which we are largely indebted.
These Lectures by a son of the land, delivered at the University of
London, are compendious and explicit in a degree that enables us to form
a summary of much that has been otherwise partially obscure, so that we
get nearer to the secret of this singular race than we have had the
chance of doing before. He traces the course of Confucianism, Laoism,
Shintoism, in the instruction it has given to his countrymen for the
practice of virtue, as to which Lao-tze informs us with a piece of
'Chinese metaphysics' that can be had without having recourse to the
dictionary: '_Superior virtue is non-virtue. Therefore it has virtue.
Inferior virtue never loses sight of virtue. Therefore it has no virtue.
Superior virtue is non-assertive and without pretension. Inferior virtue
asserts and makes pretensions._' It is childishly subtle and easy to be
understood of a young people in whose minds Buddhism and Shintoism
formed a part.
The Japanese have had the advantage of possessing a native Nobility who
were true nobles, not invaders and subjugators. They were, in the
highest sense, men of honor to whom, before the time of this dreadful
war, Hara-kiri was an imperative resource, under the smallest suspicion
of disgrace. How rigidly they understood and practised Virtue, in the
sense above cited, is exemplified in the way they renounced their
privileges for the sake of the commonweal when the gates of Japan were
thrown open to the West.
Bushido, or the 'way of the Samurai,' has become almost an English word,
so greatly has it impressed us with the principle of renunciation on
behalf of the Country's welfare. This splendid conception of duty has
been displayed again and again at Port Arthur and on the fields of
Manchuria, not only by the Samurai, but by a glorious commonalty imbued
with the spirit of their chiefs.
All this is shown clearly by Professor Okakura in this valuable book.
It proves to general comprehension that such a people must be
unconquerable even if temporarily defeated; and that is not the present
prospect of things. Who could conquer a race of forty millions having
the contempt of death when their country's inviolability is at stake!
Death, moreover, is despised by them because they do not believe in it.
'The departed, although invisible, are thought to be leading their
ethereal life in the same world in much the same state as that to which
they had been accustomed while on earth.' And so, 'when the father of a
Japanese family begins a journey of any length, the raised part of his
room will be made sacred to his memory during his temporary absence; his
family will gather in front of it and think of him, expressing their
devotion and love in words and gifts in kind. In the hundreds of
thousands of families that have some one or other of their members
fighting for the nation in this dreadful war, there will not be even one
solitary house where the mother, wife, or sister is not practising this
simple rite of endearment for the beloved and absent member of the
family.' Spartans in the fight, Stoics in their grief.
Concerning the foolish talk of the Yellow Peril, a studious perusal of
this book will show it to be fatuous. It is at least unlikely in an
extreme degree that such a people, reckless of life though they be in
front of danger, but Epicurean in their wholesome love of pleasure and
pursuit of beauty, will be inflated to insanity by the success of their
arms. Those writers who have seen something malignant and inimical
behind their gracious politeness, have been mere visitors on the fringe
of the land, alarmed by their skill in manufacturing weapons and
explosives--for they are inventive as well as imitative, a people not to
be trifled with; but this was because their instinct as well as their
emissaries warned them of a pressing need for the means of war. Japan
and China have had experience of Western nations, and that is at the
conscience of suspicious minds.
It may be foreseen that when the end has come, the Kaiser, always
honourably eager for the influence of his people, will draw a glove over
the historic 'Mailed Fist' and offer it to them frankly. It will surely
be accepted, and that of France, we may hope; Russia as well. England is
her ally--to remain so, we trust; America is her friend. She has, in
fact, won the admiration of Friend and Foe alike.
GEORGE MEREDITH.
[1] _The Soul of a People._
THE JAPANESE SPIRIT.
Since the end of the thirteenth century, when Marco Polo, on his return
to Venice, wrote about 'Cipango,' an island, as he stated, '1500 miles
off the coast of China, fabulously rich, and inhabited by people of
agreeable manners,' many a Western pen has been wielded to tell all
kinds of tales concerning the Land of the Rising Sun. Her long
seclusion; her anxious care to guard inviolate the simple faith which
had been gravely threatened by the Roman Church; her hearty welcome of
the honoured guests from the West, after centuries of independent
growth; the sudden, almost pathetic, changes she has gone through in the
past forty years in order to equip herself for a place on the world's
stage where powers play their game of balance; the lessons she lately
taught the still slumbering China through the mouths of thundering
cannon: all this has called into existence the expression of opinions
and comments of very varying merit and tone; and especially since the
out-break of the present war, when the daily news from the scenes of
action, where my brethren are fighting for the cause of wronged justice
and menaced liberty, is showing the world page after page of patriotism
and loyalty, written unmistakably in the crimson letters of heroes'
blood,--all this has given occasion to Europe and America to think the
matter over afresh. Here you have at least a nation different in her
development from any existing people in the Occident. Governed from time
immemorial by the immediate descendants of the Sun-Goddess, whose
merciful rule early taught us to offer them our voluntary tribute of
devotion and love, we have based our social system on filial piety, that
necessary outcome of ancestor-worship which presupposes altruism on the
one hand, and on the other loyalty and love of the fatherland. Different
doctrines of religion and morality have found their way from their
continental homes to the silvery shores of the Land of the Gods, only to
render their several services towards consolidating and widening the
so-called 'Divine Path,' that national cult whose unwritten tenets have
lurked for thousands of years hidden in the most sacred corner of our
hearts, whose pulse is ever beating its rhythm of patriotism and
loyalty. Buddhist metaphysics, Confucian and Taoist philosophy, have
been fused together in the furnace of Shintoism for fifteen centuries
and a half, and that apart from the outer world, in the island home of
Japan, where the blue sky looks down on gay blossoms and gracefully
sloping mountains. The final amalgamation of these forces produces,
among other results, the works of art and the feats of bravery now
before you, each bearing the ineffaceable hall-marks of Japan's past
history. Surely here you are face to face with a people worthy of
serious investigation, not only from the disinterested point of view of
a folk-psychologist. It is a study which will open to any impartial
observer a new horizon, more so than would be the case if he attempted
the sociological interpretation of a nation the history of whose
development was almost identical with that of his own. Here he meets
totally different sets of things with totally different ways of looking
at them; and this gives him ample occasion to realise the fact that
human thought and action may evolve in several forms and through several
channels before they reach their respective culmination where they all,
regardless of their original differences, melt into the common sea of
truth.
But this simple fact that 'God fulfills Himself in many ways,' as your
Tennyson has it, so necessary to ensure freedom from national bigotry
and conventional ignorance, so necessary too for a proper understanding
of oneself as the cumulative product of a nation's history, has not
always been kept in mind, even by those otherwise well-meaning authors,
whose works have some charm as descriptive writing, but give only a
superficial and often misleading account of the inner life of the
nation. True, a great deal of excellent work has been achieved by a
number of scholars of lasting merit, from Kaempfe's memorable work first
published in its English translation as early as 1727, down to the
admirable _Interpretation_ written last year by the late Mr. Lafcadio
Hearn, in whose death Japan lost one of her most precious friends,
possessing as he did the scholar's insight and the poet's pen, two
heavenly gifts seldom found united in a single man. It is mainly through
the remarkable labour of two learned bodies, the Asiatic Society of
Japan, and the _Deutsche Gesellschaft für Natur- und Völkerkunde
Ostasiens_, both with their headquarters in Tôkyô--in whose
indefatigable researches the 'Japan Society' in this city has ably
joined since 1892--that most valuable data have been constantly brought
to light, furnishing for future students sure bases for wider
generalizations. But owing to the numerous hindrances--some of which
look almost insurmountable to the Western investigator--a fair synthetic
interpretation of Japan as a nation, explaining all the important forces
that underlie the psychic and physical phenomena, still remains to be
written. The most formidable of the difficulties which meet a European
or American student at the very threshold of his researches is the
totally different construction of Japanese society, a difficulty which
makes it impossible to understand properly any set of the phenomena
belonging to it apart from the others which surround them. One could as
well cut a single mesh from a net without prejudice to the neighbouring
ones! The proper understanding of things Japanese therefore presupposes
freedom from your conventional philosophy of life, and the power of
viewing things through other people's eyes.
Besides this obstacle, there are many others; for example, that of the
language. Like most other nations in the East, we have been accustomed,
up to this very day, to use a written language, divided within itself
into several styles, which is considerably different from the
vernacular. To make this state of things still more complicated, Chinese
characters are profusely resorted to in the native writings, and are
used not only as so many ideographs for words of Chinese origin, but
also to represent native words. To make confusion worse confounded, they
are not infrequently used as pure phonetic symbols without any further
meaning attaching to them. So one and the same sign may be read in half
a dozen different ways, according to the hints, more or less sure, given
by the context. All this makes the study of Japanese immensely
difficult. It is difficult even for a Japanese with the best
opportunities; a hundred times more so, then, for a Western scholar who,
if he cares to study the subject at first hand at all, begins this
study, comparatively speaking, late in life, when his memory has
well-nigh lost the capacity of bearing such an enormous burden!
Still, there have been many Western scholars who, nothing daunted by the
above-mentioned hindrances, have done much valuable work. English names
like those of Sir E. Satow, G.W. Aston, B.H. Chamberlain, Lafcadio Hearn
are to be gratefully remembered by all future students in this field of
inquiry, as well as such German scholars as Dr. Baelz and Dr. Florenz.
Leaving the enumeration of general works on Japan, whose name is legion,
for some other time, let me mention one or two of those works of
reference which a would-be English scholar of Japanese matters might
find very useful. First of all Mr. B.H. Chamberlain's _Things
Japanese_--a book which gave birth to Mr. J.D. Hall's equally
indispensable _Things Chinese_--containing in cyclopædic form a mine of
information about Japan. Dr. Wenckstern's painstaking _Japanese
Bibliography_, with M. de Losny's earlier attempt as a supplement, gives
you the list of all writings on Japan in European tongues that have
appeared up to 1895. For those who want good books on the Japanese
language, Mr. Aston's _Grammar of the Japanese Written Language_, Mr.
Chamberlain's _Handbook of Colloquial Japanese_, as well as the same
author's _Monzi-no-Shirubi, a Practical Introduction to the Study of the
Japanese Writing_, are the best. As for books on the subject from the
pen of the Japanese themselves, Dr. Nitobe's _Bushido, Explanations of
the Japanese Thought_, and my brother K. Okakura's _Ideals of the East_,
besides a volume by several well-known Japanese, entitled _Japan by the
Japanese_, are to be specially mentioned.[1]
[1] Professor T. Inouye's little pamphlet, published first in French,
entitled _Sur le Développement des Idées Philosophiques au Japon avant
l'Introduction de la Civilisation Européenne_, will give you some idea
of our philosophic systems. For a serious perusal, its German
translation, annotated and amplified, by Dr. A. Gramatzky (_Kurze
Übersicht über die Entwicklung der philosophischen Ideen in Japan_,
Berlin, 1897), is to be preferred.
What I myself propose to do in this essay is to give to the best of my
ability, and so far as is possible with the scanty knowledge and the
limited space at my disposal, a simple statement in plain language of
what I think to be the fundamental truths necessary for the proper
understanding of my fatherland. I am not vain enough to attempt any
original solution of the old difficulty; knowing as I do my own
deficiencies, I should be well satisfied if I could manage to give you
some kind of general introduction to the Japanese views of life.
So much for the preliminary remarks. Let us now take a step further and
see what factors are to be considered as the bases of modern Japan.
'To which race do the Japanese belong?' is the first question asked by
any one who wants to approach our subject from the historical point of
view. Unfortunately not much is known as yet about our place in racial
science. If we do not take into account the inhabitants of the newly
annexed island of Formosa, we have, roughly speaking, two very different
races in our whole archipelago--the hairy Aino and the ruling Yamato
race, the former being the supposed aborigines, physically sturdy and
well developed, with their characteristic abundant growth of hair, who
are at present to be found only in the Yezo island in the northern
extremity of Japan, and whose number, notwithstanding all the care of
our government, is fast dwindling, the sum total being not much more
than 15,000. The Aino have a tradition that the land had been occupied
before them by another race of dwarfish stature called Koropokguru, who
are identified by some scholars with those primitive pit-dwellers known
in our history as Tuchigumo,[2] whose traces, although scanty, are still
to be met with in various parts of Yezo. Anyhow, we see at the first
dawn of history the aborigines gradually receding before the conquering
Yamato race, who are found steadily pushing on towards the northeast,
and who finally established themselves as a ruling body under the divine
banner of the first emperor Jimmu, from whose accession we reckon our
era, the present year being the 2565th, according to our recognised way
of counting dates.
[2] Professor Milne, _Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan_,
vol. viii. p. 82.
Suggestions, audacious rather than strictly scientific, have been put
forward as to the original home both of the Aino and the Japanese. The
Rev. I. Dooman, for instance, proposed in his paper read before the
meeting of the Asiatic Society of Japan in 1897 to derive both from the
people who had been living, according to him, on both sides of the great
Himalayan range. 'The Aino,' he says, 'the first inhabitants of these
(Japanese) islands, belong to the South Himalayan Centre; while the
Japanese, the second comers, belong to the North Himalayan, commonly
called Altaic races.'[3] But in face of the scanty knowledge at our
command about the respective sets of people in question, such wholesale
conjecture had better be postponed until some later time, when further
research shall have supplied surer data for our speculations. As regards
the Aino, we must for the present say, on the authority of Mr.
Chamberlain, that, remembering how the Aino race is isolated from all
other living races by its hairiness and by the extraordinary flattening
of the tibia and humerus, it is not strange to find the language
isolated too.[4]
[3] _Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan_, vol. xxv.
With respect to the Japanese proper, the only thing known about their
racial affinity is the theory proposed by the German scholar Dr. Baelz,
as the result of his elaborate measurements both of living specimens and
skeletons.[5] He considers the Yamato race to belong to the Mongolian
stock of the Asiatic continent, from where they proceeded to Japan by
way of the Corean peninsula. There are two distinct types noticeable
among them at present, one characterised by a delicate, refined
appearance, with oval face, rather oblique eyes, slightly Roman nose,
and a frame not vigorous yet well proportioned; the other marked out by
broader face, projecting cheek bones, flat nose, and horizontal eyes,
while the body is more robust and muscular, though not so well
proportioned and regular. The former is to be met with among the better
classes and in the southern parts of Japan, while the specimens of the
latter are found rather among the labouring population, and are more
abundant in the northern provinces. This difference of types,
aristocratic and plebeian, which is still more conspicuous among the
fair sex, is with good reason attributed to the two-fold wave of
Mongolian emigration which reached our island in prehistoric times. The
first emigrants, consisting of coarser tribes of the Mongolian race,
landed most probably on the northern coast of the main island somewhere
in the present Idzumo province, and settled down there, while the second
wave broke on the shores of Kyûshû. These emigrants seem to have
belonged to the more refined branch of the great Mongolian stock. This
hypothesis is borne out by our mythology, which divides itself into two
cycles, one centring at Idzumo and the other at Kyûshû, and which tell
us how the great-grandfather of the first great emperor Jimmu descended
from heaven on to the peak of the mountain Takachiho in Hyûga in Kyûshû.
Accompanied by his brother, he started from this spot on his march of
conquering migration to Yamato, fighting and subduing on his way tribes
who on the continent were once his kith and kin.
[4] _Memoirs of the Literary Department of the University of Tôkyô_,
vol. i.
[5] _Die körperlichen Eigenschaften der Japaner_, vols. xxviii. and
xxxii. of _Mittheilungen der Gesellschaft für die Natur- und Völkerkunde
Ostasiens_.
It might perhaps interest you to know something of our prevailing idea
of personal beauty, especially as, in such a homogeneous nation as the
Japanese, ruled from time immemorial by one and the same line of
dynasty, it may help us to make some vague conjectures as to the
physical appearances of at least one of those continental tribes out of
which our nation has been formed. The standard of beauty naturally
fluctuates a little according to sex and locality. In a lady, for
example, mildness and grace are, generally speaking, preferred to that
strength or manliness of expression which would be thought more becoming
in her brother. Tôkyô again does not put so much stress on the
fleshiness of limbs and face as does Kyôto. But, as a whole, there is
only one ideal throughout the Empire. So let me try to enumerate all the
qualities usually considered necessary to make a beautiful woman. She is
to possess a body not much exceeding five feet in height, with
comparatively fair skin and proportionately well-developed limbs; a head
covered with long, thick, and jet-black hair; an oval face with a
straight nose, high and narrow; rather large eyes, with large deep-brown
pupils and thick eyelashes; a small mouth, hiding behind its red, but
not thin, lips, even rows of small white teeth; ears not altogether
small; and long and thick eyebrows forming two horizontal but slightly
curved lines, with a space left between them and the eyes. Of the four
ways in which hair can grow round the upper edge of the forehead, viz.,
horned, square, round, and Fuji-shaped, one of the last two is
preferred, a very high as well as a very low forehead being considered
not attractive.
Such are, roughly speaking, the elements of Japanese female beauty. Eyes
and eyebrows with the outer ends turning considerably upwards, with
which your artists depict us, are due to those Japanese colour prints
which strongly accentuate our dislike of the reverse, for straight eyes
and eyebrows make a very bad impression on us, suggesting weakness,
lasciviousness, and so on. It must also be understood that in Japan no
such variety of types of beauty is to be met with as is noticed here in
Europe. Blue eyes and blond hair, the charms of which we first learn to
feel after a protracted stay among you, are regarded in a Japanese as
something extraordinary in no favourable sense of the term! A girl with
even a slight tendency to grey eyes or frizzly hair is looked upon as an
unwelcome deviation from the national type.
If we now consider our mythology, with a view to tracing the continental
home of the Yamato race, we find, to our disappointment, that our
present knowledge is too scanty to allow us to arrive at a conclusion.
Indeed, so long as the general science of mythology itself remains in
that unsettled condition in which its youth obliges it to linger, and
especially so long as the Indian and Chinese bodies of myths--by which
our mythology is so unmistakably influenced--do not receive more serious
systematic treatment, the recorded stories of the Japanese deities
cannot be expected to supply us with much indication as to our
continental home. One thing is certain about them, that they were not
free from influences exerted by the different myths prevalent among the
Chinese and the Indians at the time when they were written down in our
earliest history, the _Ko-ji-ki_ or _Records of Ancient Matter_,
completed in A.D. 712. There is an excellent English translation of the
book, with an admirable introduction and notes, by Mr. B.H. Chamberlain.
According to this book, the original ethereal chaos with which the world
began gradually congealed, and was finally divided into heaven and
earth. The male and female principles now at work gave birth to several
deities, until a pair of deities named Izanagi and Izanami, or the
'Male-who-invites' and the 'Female-who-invites,' were produced. They
married, and produced first of all the islands of Japan big and small,
and then different deities, until the birth of the Fire-God cost the
divine mother her life. She subsequently retired to the Land of Darkness
or Hades, where her sorrowful consort descended, Orpheus-like, in quest
of his spouse. He failed to bring her back to the outer world, for, like
the Greek musician, he broke his promise not to look at her in her more
profound retirement. The result was disastrous. Izanagi barely escaped
from his now furious wife, and on coming back to daylight he washed
himself in a stream, in order to purify himself from the hideous sights
and the pollution of the nether-world. This custom of lustration is, by
the way, kept up to this day in the symbolic sprinkling of salt over
persons returning from a funeral--salt representing pure water, as our
name for it, 'the flower of the waves,' well indicates. Our love of
cleanliness and of bathing might be also recognised in this early
custom. Impurity, whether mental or corporal, has always been regarded
as a great evil, and even as a sin.
Now one of the most important results of the purification of the god
Izanagi was the birth of three important deities through the washing of
his eyes and nose. The Moon-God and the Sun-Goddess emerged from his
washing his right and left eyes, while Susanowo, their youngest brother,
owed his existence to the washing of his nose; three illustrious
children to whom the divine father trusted the dominion of night, day,
and the seas.
The last-mentioned deity, whose name would mean in English 'Prince
Impetuous,' lost his father's favour by his obstinate longing to see
Izanami, the divine mother, in Hades, and was expelled from the father's
presence. He eventually went up to heaven to pay a visit to his sister,
the Sun-Goddess, whom he gravely offended by his monstrous outrages on
her person, and who was consequently so angry that she shut herself up
in a rocky chamber, thus causing darkness in the world outside. In
accordance with the deliberate plans worked out by an assembly of a
myriad gods, she was at last allured from her cavern by the sounds of
wild merriment caused by the burlesque dancing of a female deity, and
day reigned once more.
The now repenting offender was driven down from heaven, and he wandered
about the earth. It was during this wandering that in Idzumo he, like
Perseus, rescued a beautiful young maid from an eight-headed serpent. He
won her hand and lived very happily with her ever after.
In the meantime the state of things in the 'High Plain of Heaven'
ripened to the point that the Sun-Goddess began to think of sending her
august child to govern the
'Luxuriant-Reed-Plain-Land-of-Fresh-Rice-Ears,' that is to say, Japan.
Messages were previously sent to pacify the land for the reception of
the divine ruler. This took much time, during which a grandson was born
to the Sun-Goddess, and in the end it was this grandson who was
designated to come down to earth instead of his father. On his departure
a formal command to descend and rule the land now placed under his care
was accompanied by the present of a mirror, a sword, and a string of
crescent-shaped jewels. These treasures, still preserved in our imperial
household as regalia, are generally interpreted to mean the three
virtues of wisdom, courage, and mercy--necessary qualities for a perfect
ruler. It was on the high peak of Mount Takachiho that the divine ruler
descended to earth. He settled down in the country until his
great-grandson, known in history as Emperor Jimmu, founded the empire
and began that unique line of rulers who have governed the 'Land of the
Gods' for more than two thousand years, the present emperor being the
hundred and twenty-first link in the eternal chain.
Such is, in brief, the story about my country before it was brought
under the rule of one central governing body. Subjected to scientific
scrutiny the whole tale presents many gaps in logical sequence. It
betrays, besides, traces of an intermingling of the early beliefs of
other nations. Still, it must be said that the divine origin of our
emperors has invested their throne with the double halo of temporal and
of spiritual power from the earliest days of their ascendancy; and the
people, themselves the descendants of those patriarchs who served under
the banners of Emperor Jimmu, or else of those who early learned to bow
themselves down before the divine conqueror, have looked up to this
throne with an ever-growing reverence and pride.
In primitive Japan, as in every other primitive human society,
ancestor-worship was the first form of belief. Each family had its own
departed spirits of forefathers to whom was dedicated a daily homage of
simple words and offerings in kind. The guardian ghosts demanded of
their living descendants that they should be good and brave in their own
way. As these families of the same race and language gathered themselves
around the strongest of them all, imbued with a firm belief in its
divine origin, they contributed in their turn their own myths to the
imperial ones, thus eventually forming and consolidating a national
cult; and it was but natural that the people's heart should come in
course of time to re-echo in harmony with the keynote struck by the one
through whom the gods breathe eternal life. The whole nation is bound by
that sacred tie of common belief and common thought. Here lies the great
gap that separates, for example, the Chinese cult of fatalism from our
Path of Gods as a moral force. The Chinese have believed from the
earliest times in one supreme god whom they called the Divine Presider
(_Shang-ti_) or the August Heaven (_Hwang-t'ien_ or simply _T'ien_),
who, according to their notion, carefully selects a fit person from
among swarming mankind to be the temporary ruler of his
fellow-countrymen, but only for so long as it pleases the god to let him
occupy the throne. At the expiration of a certain period, the heavenly
mission (_T'ien-ming_) is transferred through bloodshed and national
disaster to another mortal, who exercises the earthly rule until he or
his descendants incur the disfavour of the 'Heaven above.' To this day
the Chinese word for revolution means the 'renovation of missions'
(_kweh-ming_). This fatalistic idea, which is but a natural outcome of
the almost too democratic nature of the people of the Celestial Empire
and of the frequent changes of dynasties it has had to go through, is
almost unknown in our island home in its gravest aspects; more than
that, ever since its introduction into Japan, this idea, along with the
Indian doctrine of pitiless fate, has gradually taught us to offer a
more resigned and determined service to our respective superiors who
culminate in the divine person of the Emperor himself. This is well
illustrated by the fact that no attempt at the formal occupation of the
throne has ever been made, even on the part of those powerful Shoguns
who were the real rulers of our country; they knew full well how
dangerous and fatal for themselves it would be to tamper with that hinge
on which the nation's religious life turns. Only once in our long
history is there an example of an unsuccessful attempt (and it is the
highest treason a Japanese subject can think of), when a Buddhist monk
named Dôkyô, encouraged by the undue devotion of the ruling empress,
tried to ascend the throne by means of the recognition of the higher
temporal rank of the Buddhist priesthood over the imperial ministry of
the native cult. This imminent danger was averted by the bold and
resolute patriotism of a Shinto priest, Wake-no-Kiyomaro, who, in
Luther-like defiance of all peril and personal risks, declared
fearlessly, in the very presence of the haughty and menacing head of the
Buddhist Church, the divine will, 'Japan is to know no emperor except in
the person of the divine descendants of the Sun-Goddess!'
Turning now to the question of language, we must confess that the
linguistic affinities of Japanese are as little cleared up as the other
problems we have been considering. The only thing we know about the
Japanese language amounts to this: it belongs, morphologically speaking,
to the so-called agglutinative languages, _e.g._, those which express
their grammatical functions by the addition of etymologically
independent elements--prefixes and suffixes--to the unchangeable roots
or base forms. Genealogically, to follow the classification expounded by
Friedrich Müller in his _Grundriss der Sprachwissenschaft_, who based
his system on Haeckel's division of the human race by the nature and
particularly the section of the hair, Japanese is one of the languages
or groups of languages spoken by the Mongolian race.
But this characterisation of our tongue does not help us much. One could
as well point to the East at large to show where Japan lies!
Notwithstanding the general uncertainty as regards the exact position of
our language, this much is sure, that Japanese has, in spite of the
immense number of loan-words of Chinese origin, no fundamental
connection with the monosyllabic language of China, whose different
syntactical nature and want of common roots baffles the attempts on the
part of some speculative Europeans to connect it with our own tongue. At
the same time, it is well known among competent scholars that Japanese,
with its most distant dialect Luchuan, bears great kinship to the
Corean, Manchurian, and Mongolian languages. It shares with them,
besides the dislike of commencing a word with a trilled sound or with a
sonant, almost the same rules for the arrangement of the component
elements of a sentence. According to the Japanese syntax, the following
rules can, for instance, be applied to Corean without alteration:--
1. All the qualifying words and phrases are put before those they
qualify. Attributive adjectives and adverbs, and their equivalents, are
placed before nouns and verbs they modify.
2. The grammatical subject stands at the beginning of the sentence.
3. Predicative elements are at the end of a sentence.
4. Direct and indirect objects follow the subject.
5. Subordinate sentences precede the principal ones.
One thing worthy of notice is the fact that, notwithstanding the most
convincing structural similarity that exists between these affiliated
languages, they contain, comparatively speaking, few words in common,
even among the numerals and personal pronouns, which have played such an
important part in Indo-European philology. We must still wait a long
time before a better knowledge of linguistic affinity reveals such
decisive links of connection as will enable us to trace our Japanese
home on the continent.
Let us now consider what were the effects of the continental
civilisation on the mental development of the Japanese within their
insular home.
Before entering into details about the various continental doctrines
implanted in our country from China and India, it may be well to tell
you something of the mental attitude of the Japanese in facing a new
form of culture, in many senses far superior to their own. Nothing
definite can perhaps be said about it; but when we grope along the main
cord of historical phenomena we think we find that the Japanese as a
whole are not a people with much aptitude for deep metaphysical ways of
thinking. They are not of the calibre from which you expect a Kant or a
Schopenhauer. Warlike by nature more than anything else, they have been
known from the very beginning to have had the soldier-like simplicity
and the easy contentment of men of action--qualities which the practical
nature of Confucian ethics had ample chance to develop. The abstruse
conceptions of Chinese or Indian origin have been received into the
Japanese mind just as they were preached, and usually we have not
troubled ourselves to think them out again; but in accordance with our
peculiarly quick habit of perceiving the inner meaning of things, we
have generalised them straight away and turned them immediately into so
many working principles. There are any number of instances of slight
hints given by some people on the continent and worked out to suit our
own purposes into maxims of immediate and practical value. Ideals in
their original home are ideals no longer in our island home. They are
interpreted into so many realities with a direct bearing on our daily
life. We have been and are, even to this day, always in need of some new
hints and suggestions to work up into so many dynamic forces for
practical use. Upon Europe and America the full power of our mental
searchlight is now playing, in quest of those new ideas for future
development for which we have been accustomed to draw mainly on China
and India. Even such a commonplace thing as the drinking of a cup of tea
becomes in our hands something more: it becomes a training in stoic
serenity, in the capacity of smiling at life's troubles and
disturbances. Some day you might learn from us a new philosophy based on
the use of motor cars and telephones as applied to life and conduct!
This, as you will see, explains why we have failed to produce any
original thinkers; this is why we have to recognise our indebtedness
for almost all the important ideas which have brought about social
innovation either to China or to India, or else to the modern Western
nations; and this notwithstanding so many national idiosyncrasies and
characteristics which are to be found in the productions of our art and
in our life and ways, and which are even as handfuls of grain gathered
in foreign fields and brewed into a national drink of utterly Japanese
flavour. We are, I think, a people of the Present and the Tangible, of
the broad Daylight and the plainly Visible. The undeniable proclivity of
our mind in favour of determination and action, as contrasted with
deliberation and calm, makes it an uncongenial ground for the sublimity
and grandeur of that 'loathed melancholy, of Cerberus and blackest
midnight born,' to take deep root in it. Pure reasoning as such has had
for us little value beyond the help it affords us in harbouring our
drifting thought in some nearest port, where we can follow any peaceful
occupation rather than be fighting what we should call a useless fight
with troubled billows and unfathomable depths. Such, according to my
personal view, are the facts about our mentality considered generally.
And now it is necessary to speak of the main waves of cult and culture
that successively washed our shores.
The first mention in our history of the introduction of the Chinese
learning into the imperial household places it in the reign of the
fifteenth emperor Ô-jin, in the year 284 after Christ according to the
earliest native records, but according to more trustworthy recent
computation[6] considerably later than that date. We are told that a
certain prince was put under the tutorship of a learned Corean scholar
of Chinese, who, at the request of the emperor, came over to Japan with
the _Confucian Analects_ (_Iun-yü_) and some other Chinese classics as a
tribute from the King of Kudara. But long before the learning of the
Celestial Empire found its way through Corea into our imperial court, it
had in all probability been making its silent influence felt here and
there among the Japanese people. Great swarms of immigrants had sought a
final place of rest in our sea-girt country from many parts of China,
where raging tyranny and menacing despotism made life intolerable even
for Chinese meekness; these, and the bands of daring invaders which
Japan sent out from time to time to the Corean and Chinese coasts, had
given us many opportunities of coming into contact with the learning
prevalent among our continental neighbours. In this manner Chinese
literature, with its groundwork of Confucian ethics, surrounded by the
strange lore derived from Taoism, and perhaps also from Hindu sources,
had been gradually but surely attracting the ever-increasing attention
of our warlike forefathers, who were to become in course of time its
devoted admirers.
[6] Cp. Bramsen's _Japanese Chronological Tables_.
Now, Confucianism pure and simple, as taught by the sage Kung-foo-tsze
(551-478 B.C.), from whom the doctrine derived its name, was,
notwithstanding the contention of the famous English sinologue Dr.
Legge, nothing more and nothing less than an aggregate of ethical ideas
considered in their application to the conduct and duties of our
everyday life. 'The great teacher never allowed himself to be considered
an expounder of any new system of either religious or metaphysical
ideas. He was content to call himself 'a transmitter and not a maker,
believing in and loving the ancients.' True to the spirit of these
words, and most probably having no other course open to him on account
of his extremely utilitarian turn of mind, he devoted his whole life to
the elucidation of the True Path of human life, as exemplified by those
half-mythical rulers of old China, Yaô, Shun, etc., from whom he derived
his ideals and his images of perfect man in flesh and blood. These early
kings were of course no creation of Confucius himself; the only thing he
did was to place the forms, which popular tradition had handed down
surrounded by legendary halos, in high relief before the people, as
perfect models to regulate the earthly conduct of the individuals as
members of a society. His attitude towards the ancient classics which he
compiled and perpetuated was that of one transmitting faithfully. He
studied them, and exhorted and helped his disciples to do the same, but
he did not alter them, nor even digest them into their present form.'[7]
In order to find concrete examples to show his ethical views more
positively, he wrote a history of his native state Loò from 722 to 484
B.C., in which, while faithfully recording events, he took every
opportunity to jot down his moral judgment upon them in the terse words
and phrases he knew so well how to wield. As abstract reasoning had
little charm for his practical mind, he systematically avoided indulging
in discussions of a metaphysical nature. 'How can we know anything of an
After-life, when we are so ignorant even of the Living,' was his answer
when asked by one of his disciples about Death. Ancestor-worship he
sanctioned, as might naturally be expected from his enthusiastic
advocacy of things ancient, and also from the importance he attached to
filial piety, which strikes the keynote of his ethical ideas. But here
too his indifference to the spiritual side of the question is very
remarkable. Perhaps he found the holy altar of his day so much
encumbered by the presence of innumerable fetishes and demons, that he
felt little inclination to approach and sweep them away. 'To give
oneself,' he said on one occasion, 'to the duties due to men, and while
respecting spiritual things to keep aloof from them, may be called
wisdom.'
[7] Legge's _The Religion of China_, p. 137.
The main features which he advocated are found well reflected in the
first twelve out of sixteen articles of the so-called sacred Edict,
published by the famous K'ang Hsi (1654-1722), the second emperor of the
present Manchu dynasty, in 1670 A.D., which embody the essential points
of Confucianism, as adapted to the requirements of modern everyday
Chinese life.
1. Esteem most highly filial piety and brotherly submission, in order to
give due prominence to the social relations.
2. Behave with generosity to the branches of your kindred, in order to
illustrate harmony and benignity.
3. Cultivate peace and concord in your neighbourhood, in order to
prevent quarrels and litigation.
4. Recognise the importance of husbandry and the culture of the
mulberry-tree, in order to ensure sufficiency of food and clothing.
5. Show that you prize moderation and economy, in order to prevent the
lavish waste of your means.
6. Make much of the colleges and seminaries, in order to make correct
the practice of the scholars.
7. Discountenance and banish strange doctrines, in order to exalt
correct doctrines.
8. Describe and explain the laws, in order to warn the ignorant and
obstinate.
9. Exhibit clearly propriety and gentle courtesy, in order to improve
manners and customs.
10. Labour diligently at your proper callings, in order to give
well-defined aims to the people.
11. Instruct sons and younger brothers, in order to prevent them doing
what is wrong.
12. Put a stop to false accusations, in order to protect the honest and
the good.
Here too you see what an important place filial piety occupies, which
Confucius himself prized so highly. The Hsiao King, or the 'Sacred Book
of Filial Piety,' which is supposed to record conversations held between
Confucius and his disciple Tsang Ts'an on that weighty subject, has the
following passage: 'He who (properly) serves his parents in a high
situation will be free from haughtiness; in a low situation he will be
free from insubordination; whilst among his equals he will not be
quarrelsome. In a high position haughtiness leads to ruin; among the
lowly insubordination means punishment; among equals quarrelsomeness
tends to the wielding of weapons.' These words, naïve as they are,
express the exalted position filial affection occupies in the eyes of
Confucianism. 'Dutiful subjects are to be found in the persons of filial
sons,' and again, 'Filial piety is the source whence all other good
actions take their rise,' are other sayings expressing its importance.
Along with this virtue, other forms of moral force, such as mercy,
uprightness, courage, politeness, fidelity, and loyalty, have been duly
considered and commended by the great teacher himself and his disciples.
Among these, Mencius (373-289 B.C.) is most enterprising and attractive,
digesting and systematising with a great deal of philosophic talent the
rather fragmentary ideas of his great master. It is he who, among other
things, informs us, on the assumed authority of a passage in the
Shu-King, how the sage Shun made it a subject of his anxious solicitude
to teach the five constituent relationships of society, viz., affection
between father and son; relations of righteousness between ruler and
subject; the assigning of their proper spheres to husband and wife;
distinction of precedence between old and young; and fidelity between
friend and friend--an idea which has played such an important part in
the history of the development of the Oriental mind.