as we say in America, are for selling bric-a-brac, toys, lacquer ware,
bronzes, or ornamental things of one kind or another; but perhaps this
is largely because they give an artistic or ornamental appearance to a
thousand utensils and household articles which in America would be raw
and plain in their obvious practicality. The room in which I write is
a fine illustration of this: finished in natural, unpainted woods,
entirely without "fussiness" or show, and yet with certain touches and
bits of wood carving that make it a work of art. Upon this point I
must again quote Lafcadio Hearn, whose {49} books, although often more
poetic and laudatory than accurate, are nevertheless too valuable to
be neglected by any student of Japan:
"It has been said that in a Greek city of the fourth century before
Christ every household utensil, even the most trifling object, was
in respect of design an object of art; and the same fact is true,
though in another and stranger way, of all things in a Japanese
home; even such articles of common use as a bronze candlestick, a
brass lamp, an iron kettle, a paper lantern, a bamboo curtain, a
wooden tray, will reveal to educated eyes a sense of beauty and
fitness entirely unknown to Western cheap production."
Like most old Japanese cities, Kyoto is proud of its temples, Buddhist
and Shinto. And perhaps I should explain just here the difference
between these two faiths that were long merged into one, but have been
dissociated since the restoration of the Emperor to his old-time
powers forty years ago. Shinto is the ancient Japanese system of
ancestor-worship, with its doctrine of the divine descent of the
Mikado from the Sun-goddess and its requirement that every faithful
adherent make daily offerings to the spirits of the family's
ancestors. With the future life or with moral precepts for this life
it does not concern itself. "Obey the Emperor and follow your own
instincts," is the gist of the Shinto religion, in so far as it may be
called a religion at all: the tendency is to consider it only a form
of patriotism and not a religion.
Buddhism, on the other hand, is an elaborate system of theology
comprising a great variety of creeds, and insisting upon much
ecclesiastical form and ceremony, however little it may have to do
with practical morals. "The fact is, we Japanese have never gotten our
morals from our religion," said one quasi-Buddhist newspaper man to me
in Tokyo. "What moral ideas we have came neither from Shintoism nor
Buddhism, but largely from Confucius and the Chinese classics."
Buddhism as it left India may have been a rather exalted religious
theory, but if so, then in Japan it has certainly {50} degenerated
into a shameless mockery of its former self. To read Sir Edwin
Arnold's glorification of theoretical Buddhism in his "Light of Asia,"
and then see practical Buddhism in Japan with all its superstitions
and idolatries, is very much like hearing bewitched Titania's praise
of her lover's beauty and then turning to see the long ears and hairy
features of the ass that he has become.
Nor is it without significance that Sir Edwin Arnold himself coming to
Buddhist Japan dropped into open and flagrant immoralities such as a
Christian community would never have tolerated, while the foremost
American-bred apologists for Buddhism here have been but little
better. One of the greatest and wealthiest temples in Kyoto is more
notorious right now for the vices of its sacred (?) officials than for
any virtues in its creed, and one of the high priests, like the
Emperor himself, has a dozen or more women in his household. Some
Buddhists are making an earnest effort to bring about at least an
outward reformation of their organization, but the difficulties are
such as to make the success of the undertaking very improbable. With
the usual Japanese quality of imitativeness they have started "Young
Men's Buddhist Associations," "Sunday schools," etc., and are also
beginning to follow the example set by the Christians of participating
in philanthropic and charitable work. In the Buddhist service I
attended last Sunday the gorgeously robed priest sat on a raised altar
in the centre of the room, with other priests ranged about him, and
the general service, as usual, was much as if they had copied the
Catholic ritual.
After the Buddhist ceremonies, I went to the Christian service at the
Congregational School, or Doshisha, where the sound of the
American-born minister's voice was punctuated by the street sounds of
whirring rickshaw wheels and the noisy getas of passing Buddhists,
while outside the window I could see the bamboo trees and the now
familiar red disk and white border of the Mikado's flag. Prayer was
offered for {51} "the President of the United States, the King of
Great Britain, the Emperor of Germany, and the Emperor of Japan."
At night I was even more interested, even though I could not
understand a word, in a native Japanese service I attended for half an
hour. Although there was a downpour of rain the chapel was comfortably
filled and the faces of the worshippers, I thought, were of more than
ordinary intelligence and promise, while their sincerity is
illustrated by the fact that numbers of the women Christians are
actually depriving themselves of suitable food in order to give money
for erecting a larger church building.
The next evening I took tea with a missionary who has in his home one
of the public notices (dated March, 1868,) and common throughout the
empire forty odd years ago, prohibiting Christianity, the ancient
penalty being nothing less than death itself. The explanation of this
notice is found in a bit of history. Three hundred and sixty years ago
the Catholics came here, started missions, and made many converts
among the lords or daimyios, who ordered their followers also to
become Catholics, with the result that by the time of the first
English settlement at Jamestown, in 1607, there were from 600,000 to
1,000,000 Christians, nominal and actual, away over here in Japan.
Seven years later, however, government persecution began, Christianity
was put under the ban, and so remained until eight years after our
Civil War ended. Many Christians suffered martyrdom for their faith in
this long period; and a few who escaped detection even secretly handed
their faith down from father to son through all the long generations
until tolerance came again.
Dr. A. D. Hail, of Osaka, tells me that even as late as 1885 an old
man from the "backwoods," as we should say, came to a village where
Dr. Hail's brother was a missionary, discovered for the first time
that a man might be a Christian without being punished, and then
confessed that each day he had worshipped secretly at a little
Catholic shrine hidden in {52} his wall, as his father and his father's
father had done before him.
As another illustration of the changed attitude toward Christianity, I
may mention that a Japanese Buddhist once came to Doctor Hail's
services armed with a dagger to kill the preacher, but had his
attention caught by the sermon while waiting his chance and is now a
missionary himself!
Perhaps in no other respect is Christianity working a greater change
than in the general estimate of woman, although this is an objection
the natives openly urge against Christianity. Just as in any conflict
of interest the family in Japan has been everything and the individual
nothing, so in every disagreement between husband and wife his
opinions count for everything, hers for nothing. The orthodox and
traditional Japanese view as to a woman's place has been very
accurately and none too strongly set forth by the celebrated Japanese
moralist, Kaibarra, writing on "The Whole Duty of Woman":
"The great lifelong duty of a woman is obedience. . . . Should her
husband be roused at any time to anger, she must obey him with fear
and trembling, and never set herself up against him in anger and
forwardness. A woman should look on her husband as if he were Heaven
itself and never weary of thinking how she may yield to her husband,
and thus escape celestial castigation."
Similarly, in the "Greater Learning for Women" it is declared:
"The five worst maladies that afflict the female mind are
indocility, discontent, slander, jealousy and silliness. These five
maladies infest seven or eight out of every ten women, and it is
from these that arises the inferiority of women to men."
{53}
[Illustration: THE GREAT BUDDHA (DIABUTSU) AT KAMAKURA.]
This gigantic figure of Buddha (a man's head would barely reach the
statue's feet) singularly expresses the spirit of serene
contemplation for which the Buddhist religion stands; is indeed,
hauntingly suggestive of that dreamy Nirvana which it teaches is the
goal of existence. There is perhaps no finer piece of statuary in
the East than this.
{54}
[Illustration: THE DEGENERATE KOREANS AT REST AND AT WORK.]
The favorite occupation is smoking, but in the lower picture three
men together are managing to operate one spade. One man rams it into
the ground, and the other two (by means of ropes attached) jerk out
the shovelful of earth!
{52 continued}
The wife of the missionary I visited in Osaka told me one or two
amusing incidents--amusing in one aspect and pathetic in another--that
are of interest in this connection. A Japanese member of her church
declared: No, no, Mrs. {55} "Hail, you can't ever make me believe that
my wife is as good as I am!" On another occasion she was teaching a
Sunday-school class concerning the woman of Samaria, and asked: "Why
did Jesus ask the woman to call her husband?" And the Japanese answer
was: "Because he was going to talk on intellectual things and she
needed some man to help her understand!"
Dr. Sidney Gulick, with whom I had tea in Kyoto, tells of tying his
wife's shoes on the street, on one occasion, only to find the Japanese
amazed that a man should so humble himself. His wife's taking his arm
in walking was also regarded as the height of impropriety!
No religion of the Far East has ever recognized the dignity of woman,
probably because no religion has ever recognized the worth of the
individual. Just as I have said, that in the old days, and almost as
largely to-day, in the relations of the home, it was the family that
counted and not the individual, so in his relations to the larger
world beyond the individual formerly counted for nothing when weighed
against the wishes of the superior classes. In the earliest days, when
the lord died, a number of his subjects were buried with him to wait
upon his spirit in the Beyond. Later, with the same object in view,
wives and servants committed suicide on the death of the master. Even
now it is regarded as honorable for a girl to sell herself into shame
to save the family from want.
The same antipodal difference between East and West--here "the family
is the social unit" and with us the individual himself--explains the
system of adoption: a younger son not being essential to the
maintenance of the family cult may be adopted into another family,
while the eldest son may not. On the same principle the father rules,
not because of what he represents as an Individual, but because he
represents the Family. Whenever he chooses, he abdicates, and must
then join his other children in obeying the eldest son.
In the relations of citizenship the same disregard of {56} individual
rights was the ancient rule, not merely in the fact that for centuries
the smallest details of everyday life were regulated by law, but more
seriously in that the Samurai, or privileged class, might "cut down in
cold blood a beggar, a merchant, or a farmer on the slightest
provocation, or simply for the purpose of testing his sword," while in
case of the ruin of their cause it was the honorable and natural thing
for soldiers to commit "hari-kiri"--that is to say, commit suicide by
disemboweling themselves. A Japanese writer recently declared that
"the value of the individual life is an illustration of the Christian
spirit" that is profoundly influencing Japan, and he mentioned as an
example that formerly suicide, in such circumstances as I have
mentioned, "was regarded as an honorable act; now it is regarded as a
sin."
Without professing the religion of fatalism which so influences the
peoples of the Nearer East, the Japanese soldiers behave like
fatalists because the fundamental basis of the social order for
centuries has been the necessity of the Individual to sacrifice
pleasure, comfort, or life itself when required either by the Family
or by the Social Order. And this partially explains why it is said in
sober earnest that the highest ambition of most Japanese schoolboys
to-day is to die for their Emperor.
---
This is my last letter from Japan, and my next letter will be from
Korea--if the cholera doesn't get me. It has been raging in Osaka and
in Kobe, both of which cities I have thought it necessary to visit in
order to get first-hand information about industrial conditions.
Ordinarily, the cholera victim lives only a few hours. The first day's
record here in Kobe, I believe, showed six cases and five deaths.
Gradually, however, cholera is being stamped out, just as we have
eradicated yellow fever in Cuba and the South, and just as we shall
eventually come to recognize the prevalence of typhoid in any town as
a disgrace--an evidence of primitive and uncivilized {57} sanitary
conditions. A friend of mine who came to Osaka in 1879 tells me that
there were 10,000 cholera victims in that one city that year--the
yellow flag on almost every street, and all through the night the
sound of men hurrying past with new victims for the hospitals or with
new corpses for the burning. In the thirteen years 1878-91 more than
313,000 Japanese died of the scourge.
I regret to say good-by to Japan. It is a tremendously interesting
country. For just as America represents the ultimate type of
Occidental civilization, so does Japan represent the ultimate type of
Oriental civilization.
More than this, it is here that the full tides of Oriental and
Occidental life are now meeting for the first time in human history.
For centuries uncounted the yellow man advanced across the plains and
peaks of Asia, finding at last in these outlying islands his
farthermost outpost, and so tarried here in the Farthest East, "the
Land of the Rising Sun." He hardly thought of the existence of a West,
but if his Buddha-like composure had been ruffled by such a thought,
he might have droned monotonously:
"Oh, East is East, and West is West,
and never the twain shall meet."
But while the yellow man had thus moved steadily eastward, the white
man, starting from the land of the Euphrates, had pitched his camp,
with each succeeding generation, nearer and nearer the setting sun.
Greece--Rome--Spain--France--England--then four hundred years ago,
more restless than the Mongolian, the white man dared the seas that
hemmed him in and found a new continent to people. Westward still the
course of empire then continued until in our time the white man
planted his civilization on the Pacific Coast.
There was no more West.
Then it was, as if in obedience to a cosmic, racial instinct deeper
than reason, the white man sent his messengers across the new-found
ocean and awakened the Sleepy World {58} of the Yellow Man by the
booming of Perry's guns off Yokahoma.
The Kingdom of Heaven, we are told, cometh not with observation, and
the deeper meaning of the greatest events in human history may often
escape the attention of contemporaries. My father and yours, perhaps,
heard little and thought less of Perry's exploit, and yet it marked
not merely a new historical epoch, but a new act in the long drama of
human evolution itself. Curious, too, it is to observe how the strange
world-destiny that shapes our ends gave to it a stage-setting in
keeping with its dramatic significance. Not to England, nor to any
other great naval and commercial Power of the time, but to the young
United States--the nation that had found the ultimate West--came the
unlikely but strangely fitting task of opening the Farthest East to
Western trade and thought.
When at last the world has grown old and nations and empires not yet
formed shall themselves have gone the mortal way common alike to human
creatures and human creations, I think the far historian will record
few events either more dramatic or more pregnant with undreamed-of
meaning than Perry's entrance into Japanese waters just five years
after the discovery of gold in California had ended the world-old
drama of our westward march.
So to-day, as I have said, the full tides of Orient and Occident have
rushed together in Japan, and it is not merely a land of curious
customs and strange phenomena, but a land in which the contrasts exist
side by side, and most interesting of all, a land of strangely
mingling social and industrial currents. East and West have met, and
we wait to see what forces in each shall prevail when the shock of
their fierce encounter shall have passed. For it is not merely Japan,
but all Asia, whose future may be affected by the outcome of the new,
tense struggle here between the ideals of West and East.
As on the streets of Tokyo and Yokahoma the Japanese {59} in European
dress jostles his brother in native garb, as streams of men in coats
and trousers and shoes mingle with men wearing kimonas, hikamas, and
getas, so in the minds of the people the teachings of modern science
and Confucian classic meet; the faith of the Christian grapples with
the faith of the Buddhist; the masterful aspirations of Western
civilization surge against the old placidity of the East.
What shall be the outcome? Upon nothing else, it seems to me, depends
so much as upon the religious foundation upon which Japan seeks to
build the structure of her newer and richer life. Many of her people,
if I may change the figure, are seeking to put the new wine of
Christian civilization into the old bottles of Shinto and Buddhist
ritualism. That this must fail is, I think, self-evident. Many others,
like the iconoclasts of the French Revolution, would sweep away all
religion, but they will find that they are fighting against an
ineradicable instinct of human nature, the innate craving of the
divine in man.
In my own brief stay in Japan I have seen enough to convince me of the
truth of both the foregoing observations. I confess that I came to the
country with a distinct doubt as to the wisdom of stressing mission
work here--came thinking the field less promising then elsewhere. But
I go away with no such feeling. What I have seen and heard has
dispelled my doubts. Speaking simply as a journalist and a student of
social and industrial conditions, I believe that to-day Japan needs
nothing more than Christian missionaries--men who are willing to
forget dogma and tradition and creedal differences in emphasizing the
fundamental teachings of Christ Himself, and who have education,
sympathy, and vision to fit them for the stupendous task of helping
mold a new and composite type of human civilization, a type which may
ultimately make conquest of the whole Oriental half of our human race.
Kobe, Japan.
{60}
VII
KOREA: "THE LAND OF THE MORNING CALM"
I have become a contemporary of David and the patriarchs of Israel. In
the civilization into which I have come science and invention are in
swaddling clothes, the Pyramids are yet young, the great nations of
Western Europe still in the womb of Time.
This at least is how I have felt now that, having left Japan, I am
travelling through Korea, "the Land of the Morning Calm"--or "Chosen,"
as the Japanese will call it hereafter--whose authentic recorded
history runs back into the twelfth century before the Christian era,
and whose general features must have changed but little in all this
time. A typical Korean view of the present year might well be
photographed to illustrate a Sunday-school lesson from the Old
Testament.
The men in the fields I have seen plow with bullocks harnessed in the
primitive fashion of the earliest civilization. Their plow stocks are
of wood rough-hewn from their native forest trees, the plowman here
never standing between the "plow-handles," as we say, because there is
only one handle and that little better than a stick of firewood. With
sickles equally primitive I have seen men cutting the ripe rice in the
fields; with flails, beating out their grain. Their houses, hardly
high enough to stand up in, are little more than four square rock
walls with roofs of straw, over which pumpkin vines clamber or on
which immense quantities of red pepper are drying in the autumn sun.
Nor would the dress of the people--everybody {61} in white (or what
was once white) garments--have seemed strange in ancient Judea.
There is also the same mixture of plains and peaks as Bible pictures
of the Holy Land have made familiar, and at night, as October's
hunters' moon glorifies all the landscape, a faint light gleaming here
and there from an opening in the rock huts, and with Arcturus and the
Pleiades of Job in the sky, it has seemed almost sacrilege to mar the
ancient environment by such an anachronism as a modern railway
locomotive. Rather, in looking out over the picturesque mountains and
valleys and sniffing the cool, dry air, you feel "the call of the
wild" in your blood. Across long centuries the life of your far-gone
nomadic ancestors calls to you. Almost irresistibly you are moved to
take a human friend and a friendly horse or pony and pitch your camp
out under the great stars--larger and brighter indeed do they seem to
burn here in the Orient--and feel the dew on your face as you awaken
in the "morning calm" of the ancient Hermit Kingdom, whose feeble life
was snuffed out, like the flame of a burnt-down candle, but a few
short months ago.
As I came into Seoul three nights ago I found it hardly less
fascinating than the country through which I had travelled during the
day. Through ancient streets, unlit by any electric glare, strangely
robed, almost spirit-like white figures were gliding here and there in
the moonlight, singly or in groups, and but a few minutes' ride in our
rickshaws brought us to the old South Gate. Great monument of a dead
era is it, relic of the days when Seoul trusted to its ten miles of
massive stone walls (already a century old when Columbus set sail from
Palos) to keep out the war-like Mongol and Tartar.
In Japan I found a different world from that which I had known, but a
world in which East and West were strangely mingled: much of the
familiar with the unfamiliar. Here in Korea, on the contrary, I have
found the real East, the Asia of romance, of tradition and of fable,
almost untouched by {62} Western influences--dirty, squalid,
unprogressive, and yet with a fascination all its own. Great bare
mountains look down on the capital city, the old city-wall climbing
their steep sides, and the historic Han flows through an adjacent
valley. The thatched or tiled roofs of the houses are but little
higher than one's head, and I shall never forget what a towering
skyscraper effect is produced by a photographer's little two-story
studio building on the main street of the city. Practically every
other building is but little higher and not greatly larger as a rule,
than the pens in which our American farmers fatten hogs in the fall.
Most American merchants would expect to make more in a day than the
average white-robed, easy-going Seoul merchant has in stock, but he
smokes his long-stemmed pipe in peaceful contemplation of the world
and doesn't worry. There are no sidewalks in Seoul, of course,
although it has been for five centuries (until now) the capital of a
kingdom, and a quarter of a million people call the city their home;
no carriages or buggies, no sewerage, and but few horses. There are
miserable little overloaded ponies that the average farmer would feel
that he could pitch single-handed into his barn-loft, but the
burden-carriers are mostly bulls that are really magnificent in
appearance, both oxen and ponies carrying loads on their backs that an
American would expect to crush them.