A TROUBLER OF ISRAEL
The signification of this gift of life, that we should leave a better
world for our successors, is being understood.--MEREDITH
To some people in Japan the countryman Kanzō Uchimura is "the Japanese
Carlyle." To others he is a religious enthusiast and the Japanese
equivalent of a troubler of Israel. He appeared to me in the guise of
a student of rural sociology.
Uchimura is the man who as a school teacher "refused to bow before the
Emperor's portrait."[100] He endured, as was to be expected, social
ostracism and straitened means. But when his voice came to be heard in
journalism it was recognised as the voice of a man of principle by
people who heard it far from gladly. There is a seamy side to some
Japanese journalism[101] and Uchimura soon resigned his editorial
chair. He abandoned a second editorship because he was determined to
brave the displeasure of his countrymen by opposing the war with
Russia. To-day he deplores many things in the relations of Japan and
China.
[Illustration: _Fuhei_
MUZZLED EDITORS]
Uchimura has written more than two dozen books, mostly on religion.
_How I became a Christian_ has been translated into English, German,
Danish, Russian and Chinese, and is to that extent a landmark in the
literary history of Japan. His Christianity is an Early Christianity
which places him in antagonism, not only to his own countrymen who are
Shintoists, Buddhists or Confucians, or vaguely Nationalists, but to
such foreign missionaries as are sectarians and literalists. His
earliest training was in agricultural science, and the welfare of the
Japanese countryside is near his heart. If he be a Carlyle, as his
fibre and resolution, downright way of writing and speaking, hortatory
gift, humour, plainness of life and dislike of officials, no less than
his cast of countenance, his soft hat and long gaberdine-like coat
have suggested, he is a Carlyle who is content to stay both in body
and mind at Ecclefechan. He is not, however, like Carlyle, whom he
calls "master," a peasant, but a samurai.
"As you penetrate into the lives of the farmers and discover the
influences brought to bear on them," Uchimura said to me in his
decisive way, "there will be laid bare to you _the foundations of
Japan_. You know our proverb, of course, _No wa kuni no taihon nari_
('Agriculture is the basis of a nation')? Have you been to Nikko?"
This seemed a little inconsequent, but I told him I had not yet been
to Nikko. ("Until you have seen Nikko," runs the adage, "do not say
'splendid'.") "How many of the tourists who are delighted with Nikko,"
he went on, "have heard how the richest farms near that town were
devastated? A century ago a minister of the Shogun, who realised that
fertility depended on trees, saw to the whole range of Nikko hills
being afforested. It was a tract twenty miles by twenty miles in
extent. But the 'civilised' authorities of our own days sold all the
timber to a copper company for 8,000 yen. The company destroyed the
fertility of the district not only by cutting down the forest but by
poisoning the water with which the farmers irrigated their crops. A
member of Parliament gave himself with such devotion to the cause of
the ruined farmers that when he died the ashes of his cremated body
were divided and preserved in four shrines erected to his memory."
It was a sad thing, said Uchimura, that the farmers of Japan, because
of the decreased fertility of the land due to the denudation of the
hills of trees, and because of their increased expenses, should be
laying out "a quarter of their incomes on artificial manures." "The
enemies which Japan has most to fear to-day," Uchimura declared, "are
impaired fertility and floods."
It may be well, perhaps, to explain for a few readers how floods do
their ill work. The rain which falls on treeless mountains is not
absorbed there. The water washes down the mountain sides, bringing
with it first good soil and then subsoil, stones and rock. The hills
eventually become those peaked deserts the queer look of which must
have puzzled many students of Japanese pictures. The debris washed
away is carried into the rivers, along with trees from the lower
slopes, and the level of the river beds is raised. Because there is
less space in the river beds for water the rivers overflow their
banks, and disastrous floods take place. The farmers, the local
authorities and the State raise embankments higher and higher, but
embankment building is costly and cannot go on indefinitely. The real
remedy is to decrease the supply of water by planting forests in the
mountains[102]. In many places the rivers are flowing above the level
of the surrounding country. The imagination is caught by the fact that
there are four earthquakes a day in Japan[103] and that within a
twelvemonth fires destroy 400 acres or so of buildings; but every
year, on an average, floods, tidal waves and typhoons together drown
more than 600 people and cause a money loss of 25 million yen! Every
year 10½ million yen are spent by the State and the prefectures on
river control alone.
Uchimura put on his famous wideawake and we went out for a walk. "I
should like," he said, "to press the view that the vaunted expansion
of Japan has meant to the farmers an increase of prices and taxes and
of armaments out of all proportion to our population[104]."
Uchimura stood stock still in the little wood we had entered. "There
is one thing more," he added gravely. "Before you can get deeply into
your subject you must touch religion. There you see the depths of the
people. A large part of the deterioration of the countryside is due to
the deterioration of Buddhism. You must ask about it. You will see in
the villages much of what your old writers used to call 'priestcraft.'
You will hear of the thraldom of many of the people. You will see with
your own eyes that real Christianity may be a moral bath for a rural
district."
"The essentials, not the forms of Christianity," he declared, would
save the countryside by "brotherly union." "Brotherly union" would
make a better life and a better agriculture. The rural class, he
explained, was more sharply divided than foreigners understood into
owners of land who lived on their rents and farmers who farmed[105].
The division between the two classes was "as great as an Indian caste
division." "To the landowner who lives in his village like a feudal
lord the simple Gospel, with its insistence on the sacredness of work,
comes as an intellectual revolution." Women as well as men of means
received from Christianity "a new conception of humanity." They ceased
to "look upon their own glory and to take delight in the flattery of
poor people." They changed their way of speaking to the peasants. They
developed an interest, of which they knew nothing before, in the
spiritual and material betterment of the men, women and children of
their village.
I went a two-days journey into the country with Uchimura. We stayed at
the house of a landowner who was one of his adherents. I found myself
in a large room where two swallows were flitting, intent on building
on a beam which yearly bore a nest. In this room stood a shrine
containing the ancestral tablets. The daily offerings were no longer
made, but Uchimura's counsel, unlike that of some zealots, was to
preserve not only this shrine but the large family shrine in the
courtyard. Near by was an engraving of Luther.
[Illustration: "THE JAPANESE CARLYLE."]
[Illustration: MR. AND MRS. YANAGI.]
Uchimura spoke in the house to some thirty or more "people of the
district who had accepted Christianity." His appeal was to "live
Christianity as given to the world by its founder." The address, which
was delivered from an arm-chair, was based on the fifth chapter of
Matthew, which in the preacher's copy appeared to contain
cross-references to two disciples called Tolstoy and Carlyle. When I
was asked to speak I found that the women in the gathering had places
in front. "The remarkable effect of Christianity among those who
have come to think with us," Uchimura told me afterwards, "is seen
most in their treatment of women. Our host, had he not been a
Christian, would have been credited by public opinion with the
possession of a concubine, and would not have been blamed for it."
When, after the speaking, we knelt in a circle and talked less
formally of how best to benefit rural people, we were joined by the
women folk. Later, when a dozen of the neighbours were invited to
dinner, it was not served at separate tables for each kneeling guest,
but at one long table, an innovation "to indicate the brotherly
relation."
[Illustration: CHILDREN CATCHING INSECTS ON RICE-SEED BEDS]
[Illustration: MASTERS OF A COUNTRY SCHOOL AND SOME OF THE CHILDREN.]
"So you see," said Uchimura, as we walked to the station in the
morning, "in an antiquated book, which, I suppose, stands dusty on the
shelves of some of your reformers, there is power to achieve the very
things they aim at." He went on to explain that he looked "in the
lives of hearers, not in what they say," for results from his
teaching. He believed in liberty and freedom, in sowing the seed of
change and reform and allowing people to develop as they would. "Let
men and women believe as they have light."
He spoke in his kindly way of how "the bond of a common faith enables
Japanese to get closer to the foreigner and the foreigner closer to
the Japanese." There were many things we foreigners did not
understand. We did not understand, for example, that "A man's a man
for a' that" was an unfamiliar conception to a Japanese. I was to
remember, when I interrogated Japanese about the problems of rural
life, that they had had to coin a word for "problems." Above all, I
must be careful not to "exaggerate the quality of Eastern morality."
Uchimura asserted sweepingly that "morality in the Anglo-Saxon sense
is not found in Japan." We of the West underrated the value of the
part played by the Puritans in our development. Our moral life had
been evolved by the soul-stirring power of the Hebrew prophets and of
Christ. To deny this was "kicking your own mother." Just as it was not
possible for the Briton or American to get his present morality from
Greece and Rome exclusively, it was not possible for the Japanese to
obtain it from the sources at his disposal.
The faults of the Eastern were that he thought too much of outward
conduct. Good political and neighbourly-relations, kindliness, honesty
and thrift were his idea of morality. "To love goodness and to hate
evil with one's whole soul is a Christian conception for which you may
search in vain through heathendom." The horror which the Western man
of high character felt when he thought of the future of the little
girls in attendance on geisha was not a horror generated by Plato.
"Heathen life looks nice on the outside to foreigners," but
Confucianism, Buddhism and Shintoism had all been weak in their
attitude towards immorality. It was Christianity alone which
controlled sexual life. Without deep-seated love of and joy in
goodness and deep-seated horror of evil it was impossible to reform
society.
Uchimura said that it had taken him thirty years to reach the
conviction that the best way of raising his countrymen was by
preaching the religion of "a despised foreign peasant." Many things he
had been told by exponents of Christianity now seemed "very strange,"
but there remained in the first four books of the New Testament, in
the essence of Christianity, principles "which would give new life to
all men." Moved by this belief, Uchimura and his friends gave their
lives to the work of the Gospel, to a work attended by humiliations;
"but this is our glory."
Japanese civilisation, he reiterated, was "only good in the sense that
Greek and Roman civilisations were good." Modern Japan represented
"the best of Europe minus Christianity; the moral backbone of
Christianity is lacking." "Probe a dozen Buddhist priests in turn," he
said, "and you find something lacking; you don't find the Buddhist or
Confucian really to be your brother[106]."
"The greatness of England," he went on, "is not due to the inherent
greatness of the English people, but to the greatness of the truths
which they have received." In considering the sources of national
greatness, it was idle to believe that some peoples were original and
some not original in their ideas and methods. Where were the people to
be found who were without extraneous influence? Where would England be
without Greek philosophy, Roman law, and Christianity?
Our talk broke off as several peasant women passed us on the narrow
way by the rice fields. The mattocks they carried were the same weight
as their husbands' mattocks and the women were going to do the same
work as the men. But the women were nearly all handicapped by having a
child tied on their backs. Uchimura, returning to his objection to
foreign political adventure, said that Japan, properly cultivated,
could support twice its present population. There were many marshy
districts which could be brought into cultivation by drainage. Then
what might not forestry do? But the progress could not be made because
of lack of money. The money was needed for "national defence."
"For myself," said Uchimura, "I find it still possible to believe in
some power which will take care of inoffensive, quiet, humble,
industrious people. If all the high virtues of mankind are not
safeguarded somehow, then let us take leave of all the ennobling
aspirations, all the poetry, and all the deepest hopes we have, and
cease to struggle upward. The question is whether we have faith." We
still waited, he declared, for the nation which would be Christian
enough to take its stand on the Gospel and sacrifice itself
materially, if need be, to its faith that right was greater than
might.
And so "impractical, outspoken to rashness, but thoroughly sincere and
experienced," as one of his appreciative countrymen characterised him
to me, we take leave of the "Japanese Carlyle." With whom could I have
gone more provocatively towards the foundation of things at the
beginning of my investigation in farther Japan?
FOOTNOTES:
[100] The statement is, he told me, a calumny. He explained that he
lost his post for refusing to bow, not to the portrait, but to the
signature of the Emperor, the signature appended to that famous
Imperial rescript on education which is appointed to be read in
schools. Uchimura is very willing, he said, to show the respect which
loyal Japanese are at all times ready to manifest to the Emperor, and
he would certainly bow before the portrait of His Majesty; but in the
proposal that reverence should be paid to the Imperial autograph he
thought he saw the demands of a "Kaiserism"--his word, he speaks
vigorous English--which was foreign to the Japanese conception of
their sovereign, which would be inimical to the Emperor's influence
and would be bad for the nation.
[101] But journalism is one of the most powerful influences for good,
and some of the best brains of the country is represented in it.
Papers like the _Jiji, Asahi, Nichi Nichi_, and the Osaka papers run
in conjunction with them have altogether a circulation approaching two
millions.
[102] For statistics of forests, see Appendix XXXII.
[103] A severe shook occurs on an average about every six years. The
eminent seismologist, Professor Omori, told me that he does not expect
an earthquake of a dangerous sort for a generation.
[104] The _Oriental Economist_, a Japanese publication, in the autumn
of 1921 suggested the abandonment of all the extensions to the Empire
on the score that they had not been a benefit to Japan, and that she
was in no way dependent on them. See also Appendix XXXIII.
[105] See Appendix XXXIV.
[106] What of the old story which I have heard from Uchimura and
others of the Confucian missionary to certain head hunters of Formosa?
After many years of labour among them they promised to give up head
hunting if they might take just one more head. At last the good man
yielded, and told them that a Chinaman in a red robe was coming
towards the village the next day and his head might be taken. On the
morrow the men lay in wait for the stranger, sprang on him and cut off
his head, only to find that it was the head of their beloved
missionary. Struck with remorse and realising the evil of head taking,
the tribe gave up head hunting for ever.