No more marked contrast appears in passing from our Western land to the
paper houses and cherry blossoms of Japan than appears in passing from
Korea to China. To achieve a correct appreciation of the Chinese the
traveller should first sojourn amongst the Koreans for several months,
and then, one fine day, cross over the Yalu into Manchuria. It would be
of exceptional advantage to the correctness of appreciation did he cross
over the Yalu on the heels of a hostile and alien army.
War is to-day the final arbiter in the affairs of men, and it is as yet
the final test of the worth-whileness of peoples. Tested thus, the
Korean fails. He lacks the nerve to remain when a strange army crosses
his land. The few goods and chattels he may have managed to accumulate
he puts on his back, along with his doors and windows, and away he heads
for his mountain fastnesses. Later he may return, sans goods, chattels,
doors, and windows, impelled by insatiable curiosity for a "look see."
But it is curiosity merely--a timid, deerlike curiosity. He is prepared
to bound away on his long legs at the first hint of danger or trouble.
Northern Korea was a desolate land when the Japanese passed through.
Villages and towns were deserted. The fields lay untouched. There was
no ploughing nor sowing, no green things growing. Little or nothing was
to be purchased. One carried one's own food with him and food for horses
and servants was the anxious problem that waited at the day's end. In
many a lonely village not an ounce nor a grain of anything could be
bought, and yet there might be standing around scores of white-garmented,
stalwart Koreans, smoking yard-long pipes and chattering,
chattering--ceaselessly chattering. Love, money, or force could not
procure from them a horseshoe or a horseshoe nail.
"Upso," was their invariable reply. "Upso," cursed word, which means
"Have not got."
They had tramped probably forty miles that day, down from their
hiding-places, just for a "look see," and forty miles back they would
cheerfully tramp, chattering all the way over what they had seen. Shake
a stick at them as they stand chattering about your camp-fire, and the
gloom of the landscape will be filled with tall, flitting ghosts,
bounding like deer, with great springy strides which one cannot but envy.
They have splendid vigour and fine bodies, but they are accustomed to
being beaten and robbed without protest or resistance by every chance
foreigner who enters their country.
From this nerveless, forsaken Korean land I rode down upon the sandy
islands of the Yalu. For weeks these islands had been the dread
between-the-lines of two fighting armies. The air above had been rent by
screaming projectiles. The echoes of the final battle had scarcely died
away. The trains of Japanese wounded and Japanese dead were trailing by.
On the conical hill, a quarter of a mile away, the Russian dead were
being buried in their trenches and in the shell holes made by the
Japanese. And here, in the thick of it all, a man was ploughing. Green
things were growing--young onions--and the man who was weeding them
paused from his labour long enough to sell me a handful. Near by was the
smoke-blackened ruin of the farmhouse, fired by the Russians when they
retreated from the riverbed. Two men were removing the debris, cleaning
the confusion, preparatory to rebuilding. They were clad in blue.
Pigtails hung down their backs. I was in China!
I rode to the shore, into the village of Kuelian-Ching. There were no
lounging men smoking long pipes and chattering. The previous day the
Russians had been there, a bloody battle had been fought, and to-day the
Japanese were there--but what was that to talk about? Everybody was
busy. Men were offering eggs and chickens and fruit for sale upon the
street, and bread, as I live, bread in small round loaves or buns. I
rode on into the country. Everywhere a toiling population was in
evidence. The houses and walls were strong and substantial. Stone and
brick replaced the mud walls of the Korean dwellings. Twilight fell and
deepened, and still the ploughs went up and down the fields, the sowers
following after. Trains of wheelbarrows, heavily loaded, squeaked by,
and Pekin carts, drawn by from four to six cows, horses, mules, ponies,
or jackasses--cows even with their newborn calves tottering along on puny
legs outside the traces. Everybody worked. Everything worked. I saw a
man mending the road. I was in China.
I came to the city of Antung, and lodged with a merchant. He was a grain
merchant. Corn he had, hundreds of bushels, stored in great bins of
stout matting; peas and beans in sacks, and in the back yard his
millstones went round and round, grinding out meal. Also, in his back
yard, were buildings containing vats sunk into the ground, and here the
tanners were at work making leather. I bought a measure of corn from
mine host for my horses, and he overcharged me thirty cents. I was in
China. Antung was jammed with Japanese troops. It was the thick of war.
But it did not matter. The work of Antung went on just the same. The
shops were wide open; the streets were lined with pedlars. One could buy
anything; get anything made. I dined at a Chinese restaurant, cleansed
myself at a public bath in a private tub with a small boy to assist in
the scrubbing. I bought condensed milk, bitter, canned vegetables,
bread, and cake. I repeat it, cake--good cake. I bought knives, forks,
and spoons, granite-ware dishes and mugs. There were horseshoes and
horseshoers. A worker in iron realized for me new designs of mine for my
tent poles. My shoes were sent out to be repaired. A barber shampooed
my hair. A servant returned with corn-beef in tins, a bottle of port,
another of cognac, and beer, blessed beer, to wash out from my throat the
dust of an army. It was the land of Canaan. I was in China.
The Korean is the perfect type of inefficiency--of utter worthlessness.
The Chinese is the perfect type of industry. For sheer work no worker in
the world can compare with him. Work is the breath of his nostrils. It
is his solution of existence. It is to him what wandering and fighting
in far lands and spiritual adventure have been to other peoples. Liberty
to him epitomizes itself in access to the means of toil. To till the
soil and labour interminably with rude implements and utensils is all he
asks of life and of the powers that be. Work is what he desires above
all things, and he will work at anything for anybody.
During the taking of the Taku forts he carried scaling ladders at the
heads of the storming columns and planted them against the walls. He did
this, not from a sense of patriotism, but for the invading foreign devils
because they paid him a daily wage of fifty cents. He is not frightened
by war. He accepts it as he does rain and sunshine, the changing of the
seasons, and other natural phenomena. He prepares for it, endures it,
and survives it, and when the tide of battle sweeps by, the thunder of
the guns still reverberating in the distant canyons, he is seen calmly
bending to his usual tasks. Nay, war itself bears fruits whereof he may
pick. Before the dead are cold or the burial squads have arrived he is
out on the field, stripping the mangled bodies, collecting the shrapnel,
and ferreting in the shell holes for slivers and fragments of iron.
The Chinese is no coward. He does not carry away his doors amid windows
to the mountains, but remains to guard them when alien soldiers occupy
his town. He does not hide away his chickens and his eggs, nor any other
commodity he possesses. He proceeds at once to offer them for sale. Nor
is he to be bullied into lowering his price. What if the purchaser be a
soldier and an alien made cocky by victory and confident by overwhelming
force? He has two large pears saved over from last year which he will
sell for five sen, or for the same price three small pears. What if one
soldier persist in taking away with him three large pears? What if there
be twenty other soldiers jostling about him? He turns over his sack of
fruit to another Chinese and races down the street after his pears and
the soldier responsible for their flight, and he does not return till he
has wrenched away one large pear from that soldier's grasp.
Nor is the Chinese the type of permanence which he has been so often
designated. He is not so ill-disposed toward new ideas and new methods
as his history would seem to indicate. True, his forms, customs, and
methods have been permanent these many centuries, but this has been due
to the fact that his government was in the hands of the learned classes,
and that these governing scholars found their salvation lay in
suppressing all progressive ideas. The ideas behind the Boxer troubles
and the outbreaks over the introduction of railroad and other foreign
devil machinations have emanated from the minds of the literati, and been
spread by their pamphlets and propagandists.
Originality and enterprise have been suppressed in the Chinese for scores
of generations. Only has remained to him industry, and in this has he
found the supreme expression of his being. On the other hand, his
susceptibility to new ideas has been well demonstrated wherever he has
escaped beyond the restrictions imposed upon him by his government. So
far as the business man is concerned he has grasped far more clearly the
Western code of business, the Western ethics of business, than has the
Japanese. He has learned, as a matter of course, to keep his word or his
bond. As yet, the Japanese business man has failed to understand this.
When he has signed a time contract and when changing conditions cause him
to lose by it, the Japanese merchant cannot understand why he should live
up to his contract. It is beyond his comprehension and repulsive to his
common sense that he should live up to his contract and thereby lose
money. He firmly believes that the changing conditions themselves
absolve him. And in so far adaptable as he has shown himself to be in
other respects, he fails to grasp a radically new idea where the Chinese
succeeds.
Here we have the Chinese, four hundred millions of him, occupying a vast
land of immense natural resources--resources of a twentieth-century age,
of a machine age; resources of coal and iron, which are the backbone of
commercial civilization. He is an indefatigable worker. He is not dead
to new ideas, new methods, new systems. Under a capable management he
can be made to do anything. Truly would he of himself constitute the
much-heralded Yellow Peril were it not for his present management. This
management, his government, is set, crystallized. It is what binds him
down to building as his fathers built. The governing class, entrenched
by the precedent and power of centuries and by the stamp it has put upon
his mind, will never free him. It would be the suicide of the governing
class, and the governing class knows it.
Comes now the Japanese. On the streets of Antung, of Feng-Wang-Chang, or
of any other Manchurian city, the following is a familiar scene: One is
hurrying home through the dark of the unlighted streets when he comes
upon a paper lantern resting on the ground. On one side squats a Chinese
civilian on his hams, on the other side squats a Japanese soldier. One
dips his forefinger in the dust and writes strange, monstrous characters.
The other nods understanding, sweeps the dust slate level with his hand,
and with his forefinger inscribes similar characters. They are talking.
They cannot speak to each other, but they can write. Long ago one
borrowed the other's written language, and long before that, untold
generations ago, they diverged from a common root, the ancient Mongol
stock.
There have been changes, differentiations brought about by diverse
conditions and infusions of other blood; but down at the bottom of their
being, twisted into the fibres of them, is a heritage in common--a
sameness in kind which time has not obliterated. The infusion of other
blood, Malay, perhaps, has made the Japanese a race of mastery and power,
a fighting race through all its history, a race which has always despised
commerce and exalted fighting.
To-day, equipped with the finest machines and systems of destruction the
Caucasian mind has devised, handling machines and systems with remarkable
and deadly accuracy, this rejuvenescent Japanese race has embarked on a
course of conquest the goal of which no man knows. The head men of Japan
are dreaming ambitiously, and the people are dreaming blindly, a
Napoleonic dream. And to this dream the Japanese clings and will cling
with bull-dog tenacity. The soldier shouting "Nippon, Banzai!" on the
walls of Wiju, the widow at home in her paper house committing suicide so
that her only son, her sole support, may go to the front, are both
expressing the unanimity of the dream.
The late disturbance in the Far East marked the clashing of the dreams,
for the Slav, too, is dreaming greatly. Granting that the Japanese can
hurl back the Slav and that the two great branches of the Anglo-Saxon
race do not despoil him of his spoils, the Japanese dream takes on
substantiality. Japan's population is no larger because her people have
continually pressed against the means of subsistence. But given poor,
empty Korea for a breeding colony and Manchuria for a granary, and at
once the Japanese begins to increase by leaps and bounds.
Even so, he would not of himself constitute a Brown Peril. He has not
the time in which to grow and realize the dream. He is only forty-five
millions, and so fast does the economic exploitation of the planet hurry
on the planet's partition amongst the Western peoples that, before he
could attain the stature requisite to menace, he would see the Western
giants in possession of the very stuff of his dream.
The menace to the Western world lies, not in the little brown man, but in
the four hundred millions of yellow men should the little brown man
undertake their management. The Chinese is not dead to new ideas; he is
an efficient worker; makes a good soldier, and is wealthy in the
essential materials of a machine age. Under a capable management he will
go far. The Japanese is prepared and fit to undertake this management.
Not only has he proved himself an apt imitator of Western material
progress, a sturdy worker, and a capable organizer, but he is far more
fit to manage the Chinese than are we. The baffling enigma of the
Chinese character is no baffling enigma to him. He understands as we
could never school ourselves nor hope to understand. Their mental
processes are largely the same. He thinks with the same thought-symbols
as does the Chinese, and he thinks in the same peculiar grooves. He goes
on where we are balked by the obstacles of incomprehension. He takes the
turning which we cannot perceive, twists around the obstacle, and,
presto! is out of sight in the ramifications of the Chinese mind where we
cannot follow.
The Chinese has been called the type of permanence, and well he has
merited it, dozing as he has through the ages. And as truly was the
Japanese the type of permanence up to a generation ago, when he suddenly
awoke and startled the world with a rejuvenescence the like of which the
world had never seen before. The ideas of the West were the leaven which
quickened the Japanese; and the ideas of the West, transmitted by the
Japanese mind into ideas Japanese, may well make the leaven powerful
enough to quicken the Chinese.
We have had Africa for the Afrikander, and at no distant day we shall
hear "Asia for the Asiatic!" Four hundred million indefatigable workers
(deft, intelligent, and unafraid to die), aroused and rejuvenescent,
managed and guided by forty-five million additional human beings who are
splendid fighting animals, scientific and modern, constitute that menace
to the Western world which has been well named the "Yellow Peril." The
possibility of race adventure has not passed away. We are in the midst
of our own. The Slav is just girding himself up to begin. Why may not
the yellow and the brown start out on an adventure as tremendous as our
own and more strikingly unique?
The ultimate success of such an adventure the Western mind refuses to
consider. It is not the nature of life to believe itself weak. There is
such a thing as race egotism as well as creature egotism, and a very good
thing it is. In the first place, the Western world will not permit the
rise of the yellow peril. It is firmly convinced that it will not permit
the yellow and the brown to wax strong and menace its peace and comfort.
It advances this idea with persistency, and delivers itself of long
arguments showing how and why this menace will not be permitted to arise.
To-day, far more voices are engaged in denying the yellow peril than in
prophesying it. The Western world is warned, if not armed, against the
possibility of it.
In the second place, there is a weakness inherent in the brown man which
will bring his adventure to naught. From the West he has borrowed all
our material achievement and passed our ethical achievement by. Our
engines of production and destruction he has made his. What was once
solely ours he now duplicates, rivalling our merchants in the commerce of
the East, thrashing the Russian on sea and land. A marvellous imitator
truly, but imitating us only in things material. Things spiritual cannot
be imitated; they must be felt and lived, woven into the very fabric of
life, and here the Japanese fails.
It required no revolution of his nature to learn to calculate the range
and fire a field gun or to march the goose-step. It was a mere matter of
training. Our material achievement is the product of our intellect. It
is knowledge, and knowledge, like coin, is interchangeable. It is not
wrapped up in the heredity of the new-born child, but is something to be
acquired afterward. Not so with our soul stuff, which is the product of
an evolution which goes back to the raw beginnings of the race. Our soul
stuff is not a coin to be pocketed by the first chance comer. The
Japanese cannot pocket it any more than he can thrill to short Saxon
words or we can thrill to Chinese hieroglyphics. The leopard cannot
change its spots, nor can the Japanese, nor can we. We are thumbed by
the ages into what we are, and by no conscious inward effort can we in a
day rethumb ourselves. Nor can the Japanese in a day, or a generation,
rethumb himself in our image.
Back of our own great race adventure, back of our robberies by sea and
land, our lusts and violences and all the evil things we have done, there
is a certain integrity, a sternness of conscience, a melancholy
responsibility of life, a sympathy and comradeship and warm human feel,
which is ours, indubitably ours, and which we cannot teach to the
Oriental as we would teach logarithms or the trajectory of projectiles.
That we have groped for the way of right conduct and agonized over the
soul betokens our spiritual endowment. Though we have strayed often and
far from righteousness, the voices of the seers have always been raised,
and we have harked back to the bidding of conscience. The colossal fact
of our history is that we have made the religion of Jesus Christ our
religion. No matter how dark in error and deed, ours has been a history
of spiritual struggle and endeavour. We are pre-eminently a religious
race, which is another way of saying that we are a right-seeking race.
"What do you think of the Japanese?" was asked an American woman after
she had lived some time in Japan. "It seems to me that they have no
soul," was her answer.
This must not be taken to mean that the Japanese is without soul. But it
serves to illustrate the enormous difference between their souls and this
woman's soul. There was no feel, no speech, no recognition. This
Western soul did not dream that the Eastern soul existed, it was so
different, so totally different.
Religion, as a battle for the right in our sense of right, as a yearning
and a strife for spiritual good and purity, is unknown to the Japanese.
Measured by what religion means to us, the Japanese is a race without
religion. Yet it has a religion, and who shall say that it is not as
great a religion as ours, nor as efficacious? As one Japanese has
written:
"Our reflection brought into prominence not so much the moral as the
national consciousness of the individual. . . . To us the country is more
than land and soil from which to mine gold or reap grain--it is the
sacred abode of the gods, the spirit of our forefathers; to us the
Emperor is more than the Arch Constable of a Reichsstaat, or even the
Patron of a Kulturstaat; he is the bodily representative of heaven on
earth, blending in his person its power and its mercy."
The religion of Japan is practically a worship of the State itself.
Patriotism is the expression of this worship. The Japanese mind does not
split hairs as to whether the Emperor is Heaven incarnate or the State
incarnate. So far as the Japanese are concerned, the Emperor lives, is
himself deity. The Emperor is the object to live for and to die for.
The Japanese is not an individualist. He has developed national
consciousness instead of moral consciousness. He is not interested in
his own moral welfare except in so far as it is the welfare of the State.
The honour of the individual, _per se_, does not exist. Only exists the
honour of the State, which is his honour. He does not look upon himself
as a free agent, working out his own personal salvation. Spiritual
agonizing is unknown to him. He has a "sense of calm trust in fate, a
quiet submission to the inevitable, a stoic composure in sight of danger
or calamity, a disdain of life and friendliness with death." He relates
himself to the State as, amongst bees, the worker is related to the hive;
himself nothing, the State everything; his reasons for existence the
exaltation and glorification of the State.
The most admired quality to-day of the Japanese is his patriotism. The
Western world is in rhapsodies over it, unwittingly measuring the
Japanese patriotism by its own conceptions of patriotism. "For God, my
country, and the Czar!" cries the Russian patriot; but in the Japanese
mind there is no differentiation between the three. The Emperor is the
Emperor, and God and country as well. The patriotism of the Japanese is
blind and unswerving loyalty to what is practically an absolutism. The
Emperor can do no wrong, nor can the five ambitious great men who have
his ear and control the destiny of Japan.
No great race adventure can go far nor endure long which has no deeper
foundation than material success, no higher prompting than conquest for
conquest's sake and mere race glorification. To go far and to endure, it
must have behind it an ethical impulse, a sincerely conceived
righteousness. But it must be taken into consideration that the above
postulate is itself a product of Western race-egotism, urged by our
belief in our own righteousness and fostered by a faith in ourselves
which may be as erroneous as are most fond race fancies. So be it. The
world is whirling faster to-day than ever before. It has gained impetus.
Affairs rush to conclusion. The Far East is the point of contact of the
adventuring Western people as well as of the Asiatic. We shall not have
to wait for our children's time nor our children's children. We shall
ourselves see and largely determine the adventure of the Yellow and the
Brown.
FENG-WANG-CHENG, MANCHURIA.
_June_ 1904,