MATSUE, April, 1891.
DEAR PROFESSOR CHAMBERLAIN,--I am delighted to hear the fire-drill is at
last in your hands.
About Shintō ... Of course, as far as its philosophy is concerned
(which I am very fond of, in spite of my devotion to Herbert Spencer),
and romance of religious sentiment, and legends, and art,--my Izumo
experiences have not at all changed my love of Buddhism. If it were
possible for me to adopt a faith, I should adopt it. But Shintō seems
to me like an occult force,--vast, extraordinary,--which has not been
seriously taken into account as a force. I think it is the hopeless,
irrefragable obstacle to the Christianization of Japan (for which
reason I am wicked enough to love it). It is not all a belief, nor all
a religion; it is a thing formless as a magnetism and indefinable as an
ancestral impulse. It is part of the Soul of the Race. It means all the
loyalty of the nation to its sovereigns, the devotion of retainers to
princes, the respect to sacred things, the conservation of principles,
the whole of what an Englishman would call sense of duty; but that
this sense seems to be hereditary and inborn. I think a baby is Shintō
from the time its eyes can see. Here, too, the symbolism of Shintō is
among the very first things the child sees (I suppose it is the same in
Tōkyō). The toys are to a great extent Shintō toys; and the excursions
of a young mother with a baby on her back are always to Shintō temples.
How much of Confucianism may have entered into and blended with what
is a striking characteristic of Japanese boys in their attitude toward
teachers and superiors, I do not know; but I think that what is now most
pleasing in these boys is the outer reflection of the spirit of Shintō
within them,--the hereditary spirit of it.
The Shinshū sect is the only one, as far as I can learn, whose
members in Izumo are not also Shintōists; but the sect is very weak
here. Even the Nichirenites are Shintōists. The two religions are
so perfectly blended here that the lines of demarcation are sometimes
impossible to find.
Well, I think we Occidentals have yet to learn the worship of
ancestors; and evolution is going to teach it to us. When we become
conscious that we owe whatever is wise or good or strong or beautiful
in each one of us, not to one particular inner individuality, but to
the struggles and sufferings and experiences of the whole unknown chain
of human lives behind us, reaching back into mystery unthinkable,--the
worship of ancestors seems an extremely righteous thing. What is
it, philosophically, but a tribute of gratitude to the past,--dead
relatively only,--alive really within us, and about us.
With best regards, in momentary haste,