THE RISE OF JAPAN
The misfortune of success has never been better exemplified in the
world's history than in the results which have followed from the White
Man's attempt to arouse Japan to an appreciation of the blessings of
European civilisation. Our fathers and grandfathers of the middle
nineteenth century battered at the barred and picturesque doors of the
land of the Mikado with a vague idea that there was plunder, trade or
some other tangible benefit to be got from dragging the quaint Yellow
Recluse out of his retirement. Without a foreboding, every civilised
Power that had a fighting ship and the time to spare, took some part in
urging Japan to awake and be modern. A great deal of gunpowder was
burned before the little Asiatic nation stirred. Then she seemed in a
flash to learn the whole lesson of our combative civilisation. Naval
strategy; the forging of trade-marks; military organisation;
appreciation of the value of cheap labour and of machinery in industry;
aseptic surgery; resolute and cunning diplomacy--all these were suddenly
added to the mental equipment of an Asiatic people, and all used in
reprisal against Europe. To-day Japan is the greatest warrior Power in
the Pacific, and is also a powerful factor in that war for markets which
is not the least important manifestation of race rivalry. As sailors,
soldiers, merchants and factory hands, the Japanese are unmistakably
awake.
With a discipline impossible of achievement by a European race, the
Japanese people pursued the methods of eclectic philosophy in their
nation-making. They copied the best from the army systems of Germany and
France: duplicated the British naval discipline: adopted what they
thought most efficient of the industrial machinery of Europe and
America, including a scientific tariff. Nothing that seemed likely to be
of advantage was neglected. Even the question of religion was seriously
considered, and these awakened people were at one time on the point of a
simultaneous national adoption of some form of Christianity. But they
were convinced on reflection that nothing of Europe's success in this
world was due to religion; and, unconcerned for the moment with anything
that was not of this world, decided to forbear from "scrapping"
Shintoism and sending it to the rubbish heap where reposed the
two-handled sword of the Sumarai.[10]
This miracle of the complete transformation of a race has been
accomplished in half a century. Within the memory of some living people
the Japanese were content with a secluded life on their hungry islands,
where they painted dainty pictures, wove quaint and beautiful fabrics,
cultivated children and flowers in a spirit of happy artistry, and
pursued war among themselves as a sport, with enthusiasm certainly, but
without any excessive cruelty, if consideration be given to Asiatic
ideas of death and the Asiatic degree of sensitiveness to torture. They
were without any ideas of foreign conquest. The world had no respect for
Japan then. Specimens of Japanese painting and pottery were admired by a
few connoisseurs in little corners of the world (such as Bond Street,
London), and that was all. Now, Japan having learned the art of modern
warfare, we know also that the Japanese are great artists, great
philosophers, great poets. Of a sudden a nation has jumped from being
naturally chosen as the most absurd and harmless vehicle for a Gilbert
satire to that of being "the honoured ally" of Great Britain, in respect
to whose susceptibilities that satire should be suppressed.
But our belated respect for the artistry of the Japanese gives little,
if any, explanation of the miracle of their sudden transformation. The
Chinese are greater artists, greater philosophers, superior
intellectually and physically. They heard at an even earlier date the
same harsh summons from Europe to wake up. But it was neglected, and,
whatever the outcome of the revolutionary movement now progressing, the
Chinese are not yet a Power to be taken into present consideration as
regards the Pacific Ocean or world-politics generally. The most patient
search gives no certain guidance as to the causes of Japan's sudden
advance to a position amongst the world's great nations. If we could
accurately determine those causes it would probably give a valuable clue
to the study of the psychology of races. But the effort is in vain. An
analogy is often drawn between the Japanese and the British. Except that
both were island races, there are few points of resemblance. The British
islands, inhabited originally by the Gauls, had their human stock
enriched from time to time by the Romans, the Danes, the Teutons, the
Normans. The British type, in part Celtic, in part Roman, in part
Danish, in part Anglo-Saxon, in part Norman, was naturally a
hard-fighting, stubborn, adventurous race fitted for the work of
exploration and colonisation.
But the Japanese had, so far as can be ascertained, little advantage
from cross-breeding. Probably they were originally a Tartar race. The
primitive inhabitants of the islands were ancestors of the Hairy Ainus,
who still survive in small numbers. Like the aboriginals of Australia,
the Ainus were a primitive rather than a degraded type, closely allied
to the ancestors of the European races. Probably the Tartar invaders who
colonised Japan came by way of Corea. But after their advent there was
no new element introduced to give the human race in Japan a fresh
stimulus; and that original Tartar stock, though vigorous and warlike,
has never proved elsewhere any great capacity for organisation.
In the sixth century of the Christian Era, Chinese civilisation and the
Buddhistic religion came to the Japanese, who at the time had about the
same standard of culture as the Red Indians of the American continent
when the _Mayflower_ sailed. For some four centuries the Japanese island
race was tributary to China, and during that time there was evolved a
national religion, Shintoism, which probably represented the old Tartar
faith modified by Chinese philosophy. In the eighth and subsequent
centuries, Japan in its national organisation very closely resembled
feudal Europe. As in Europe, there was a service tenure for the land; a
system by which organised groups, or KO's, became answerable
collectively for the deeds of each member of the group; and, as in
feudal Europe, Church and State made rival claims to supreme power.
Indiscriminate fighting between rival feudal lords, a constant strife
between the Shoguns, representing the priestly power, and the Mikados,
representing the civil power, make up the islands' history for century
after century. Through it all there is no gleam of light on the
evolution of the latent powers which were to come to maturity, as in an
hour, during the nineteenth century. Japan appeared to be an average
example of a semi-civilised country which would never evolve to a much
higher state because of the undisciplined quarrelsomeness of its people.
In the sixteenth century Europe first made the acquaintance of Japan.
Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Spanish, British traders and explorers
visited the country. St Francis Xavier established missions there and
baptized many in the Christian faith. After two centuries of general
toleration, with intervals of welcome and yet other intervals of
resolute massacre, in 1741 the last of the Europeans were ordered out of
the islands, the Japanese having decided that they wanted neither the
religion, the trade, nor the friendship of the White Man. The same
prohibitions were applied at the same time to Chinese traders. A
resolute policy of exclusiveness was adopted.
Japan seems to have learned absolutely nothing from her first contact
with European civilisation. She settled down to the old policy of
rigorous exclusiveness, and to a renewal of her tribal and religious
warfare, in the midst of which, like a strange flower in a rocky cleft,
flourished a dainty æstheticism. The nineteenth century thus dawned on
Japan, a bitterly poor country, made poorer by the devotion of much of
her energies to internal warfare and by the devotion of some of her
scanty supply of good land to the cultivation of flowers instead of
grain. The observer of the day could hardly have imagined more
unpromising material for the making of the modern Japanese nation,
organised with Spartan thoroughness for naval, military and industrial
warfare.
The United States in 1853 led the way in the successful attempt of White
civilisation to open up trade relations with Japan. The method was
rude; and it was followed by resolute offers of "friendship," backed by
armed threats, from Great Britain, France, Russia and Portugal. The
Japanese wanted none of them. The feeling of the people was distinctly
anti-foreign. They wished to be left to their flowers and their family
feuds. But the White Man insisted. In 1864 a combination of Powers
forced the Straits of Shimonoseki. The Japanese were compelled by these
and other outrages to a feeling of national unity. In the face of a
foreign danger domestic feuds were forgotten. By 1869 Japan had
organised her policy on a basis which has kept internal peace ever since
(with the exception of the revolt of the Satsuma in 1884), and she had
resolved on fighting out with Russia the issue of supremacy in the
Pacific. Within a quarter of a century the new nation had established
herself as a Power by the sensational defeat, on land and sea, of China.
The Peace of Shimonoseki extended her territory to Formosa and the
Pescadores, and filled her treasury with the great war indemnity of
£57,000,000. She then won, too, a footing on the Asiatic mainland, but
was for the time being cheated of that by the interference of Europe, an
interference which was not repeated when, later, having defeated Russia
in war and having won an alliance with Great Britain, she finally
annexed Corea.
From the Peace of Shimonoseki in 1895 the progress of Japan has been
marvellous. In 1900 she appeared as one of the civilised Powers which
invaded China with a view to impress upon that Empire the duty a
semi-civilised Power owed to the world of maintaining internal order. In
1902 she entered into a defensive and offensive alliance with Great
Britain, by which she was guaranteed a ring clear from interference on
the part of a European combination in the struggle with Russia which she
contemplated. The treaty was a triumph of diplomatic wisdom. Appearing
to get little, Japan in real truth got all that her circumstances
required. A treaty binding Great Britain to come to her aid in any war
would have been hopeless to ask for, and not very useful when obtained,
for the Japanese attack on Russia might then have been the signal for a
general European war in which possibly a European combination would have
crippled Great Britain and then turned its united attention to the
destruction of Japan's nascent power. A treaty which kept the ring clear
for a single-handed struggle with Russia was better than that risk. In
return Japan gave nothing in effect except a pledge to make war on her
own immediate enemy, Russia, for the assistance of Great Britain if
necessity arose.
The conditions created by the Anglo-Japanese treaty of 1902 developed
naturally to the Battle of Mukden, the culminating point of a campaign
in which for the first time for many years the Yellow Race vanquished
the White Race in war. That Battle of Mukden not only established
Japan's position in the world. It made the warlike awakening of China
inevitable, and restored to the daylight again the long-hidden yet
always existing arrogance of Asia. Asia has ever nurtured an insolence
beside which any White Race pride is insignificant. That fact is made
patent during recurring epochs of history. The Persian Darius sent to
the Greeks for earth and water, symbols to acknowledge that "Persia
ruled the land and the oceans." The Huns later looked upon the White Men
whom they conquered as something lower than animals. The Turks, another
great Asiatic race to war against Europe, could compare the White Man
only to that unclean beast, the dog. The first European ambassadors who
went to China were forced to crawl with abject humility to the feet of
the Chinese dignitaries. In his secret heart--of which the European mind
knows so little--the Asiatic, whether he be Japanese, Chinese, or
Indian, holds a deep disdain for the White. The contempt we feel for
them is returned more than one hundredfold.
Mukden brought that disdain out of its slumber. The battle was therefore
an event of history more important than any since the fall of
Constantinople. For very many years the European hegemony had been
unquestioned. True, as late as 1795, Napoleon is credited with having
believed that the power of the Grand Turk might be revived and an
Ottoman suzerainty of Europe secured. But it was only a dream; more than
half a century before that the doom of the Turk, who had been the most
serious foe to Christian Europe, was sealed. From 1711 to 1905,
whatever questions of supremacy arose among the different European
Powers, there was never any doubt as to the superiority of the European
race over all coloured races. The White Man moved from one easy conquest
to another. In Asia, India, China, Persia and Japan were in turn
humbled. Africa was made the slave-farm of the White Race.
Now in the twentieth century at Mukden the White Race supremacy was
again challenged. It was a long-dormant though not a new issue which was
thus raised. From the times beyond which the memory of man does not
stretch, Asia had repeatedly threatened Europe. The struggle of the
Persian Empire to smother the Greek republics is the first of the
invasions which has been accurately recorded by historians; but probably
it had been preceded by many others. The waves of war that followed were
many. The last was the Ottoman invasion in the fourteenth century, which
brought the banners of Asia right up to the walls of Vienna, swept the
Levant of Christian ships, and threatened even the Adriatic; and which
has left the Turk still in the possession of Constantinople. But by the
beginning of the eighteenth century the fear of the Turks gaining the
mastery of Europe had practically disappeared, and after then the
Europeans treated the coloured races as subject to them, and their
territories as liable to partition whenever the method of division among
rival White nations could be agreed upon.
Mukden made a new situation. The European Powers were prompt to
recognise the fact. Doubt even came to Great Britain whether the part
she had played as foster-mother to this Asiatic infant of wonderful
growth had been a wise one. A peace was practically forced upon Japan, a
peace which secured for her at the moment nothing in the way of
indemnity, but little in the way of territorial rights, and not even the
positive elimination of her enemy from the Asiatic coast. True, she has
since won Corea on the basis of that peace and has made secure certain
suzerain rights in Manchuria, but this harvest had to be garnered by
resolute diplomacy and by maintaining a naval and military expenditure
after the war which called for an extreme degree of self-abnegation from
her people.
If the present position of affairs could be accepted as permanent, there
would be no "problem of the Pacific." That ocean would be Japan's
home-water. Holding her rugged islands with a veteran army and navy; so
established on the mainland of Asia as to be able to make a flank
movement on China; she is the one "Power in being" of the Pacific
littoral. But as already stated, the verdict of the war with Russia
cannot be taken as final. And soon the United States will come into the
Pacific with overwhelming force on the completion of the Panama
Canal--an event which is already foreshadowed in a modification of the
Anglo-Japanese treaty to relieve Great Britain of the possible
responsibility of going to war with America on behalf of Japan. The
permanence of the Japanese position as the chief Power of the Pacific
cannot therefore be presumed. The very suddenness with which her
greatness has been won is in itself a prompting to the suspicion that it
will not last. It has been a mushroom growth, and there are many
indications that the forcing process by which a Power has been so
quickly raised has exhausted the culture bed. In the character of her
population Japan is in some respects exceedingly rich. The events of the
past few years have shown them to possess great qualities of heroism,
patience and discipline. But they have yet to prove that they possess
powers of initiative, without which they must fail ultimately in
competition with peoples who make one conquest over Nature a
stepping-stone to another. And it is not wholly a matter of race
prejudice that makes many observers view with suspicion the "staying
power" of the character of a nation which thinks so differently from the
average European in matters of sex, in commercial honesty, and in the
obligations of good faith. Many of those who have travelled in the East,
or have done business with Japan, profess a doubt that an enduring
greatness can be built upon a national character which runs contrary in
most matters to our accepted ideas of ethics. They profess to see in the
present greatness of achievement marking Japanese national life a "flash
in the pan"--the astonishing precocity and quickness of progress of that
type of doomed infant which quickly flowers and quickly fades in the
European slums and which is known as "The Mongol" to medical science
because of a facial peculiarity which identifies it infallibly. "The
Mongol" of European child-life comes to an astonishingly early maturity
of brain: its smartness is marvellous. But it is destined always to an
early end from an ineradicable internal weakness which is, in some
strange way, the cause of its precocious cleverness.
Whether the Japanese cleverness and progressiveness will last or not,
the nation has to be credited with them now as a live asset. But apart
from the national character the nation possesses little of "natural
capital." There is practically no store of precious metals; a poor
supply of the useful minerals; small area of good land; and the local
fisheries have been exploited with such energy for many generations that
they cannot possibly be expanded in productivity now. The statesmen of
New Japan have certainly won some overseas Empire as an addition to the
resources available for a sound fabric of national greatness. But what
has been won is quite insufficient to weigh in the scale against the
"natural capital" of almost any of Japan's rivals in the Pacific.
For want of territory to colonise under her own flag, Japan has lost
many subjects to alien flags. Japanese settlements of some strength
exist on the Pacific coast of America, in the Hawaiian Islands, and in
parts of China. There is little doubt that Japanese policy has hoped
that in some cases at least her flag would follow her nationals. Talk,
not all of it quite irresponsible, has credited Japan with definite
designs on many Pacific settlements, especially the Hawaiian Group where
her nationals to-day outnumber any other single element of the
population. But there are now no islands or territories without a
protecting flag. Even when, as was said to be the case with Mexico and
another Latin-American country, a weak and friendly nation seems to
offer the chance of annexation of territory following a peaceable
penetration, there is the power of the United States to interpose a
veto. Japan thus cannot add to her natural resources without a war; and
she has not, it would seem, sufficient natural resources to back up a
war with the enemies she would have to meet now in the Pacific.
If she were to put aside dreams of conquest and Empire, has Japan a
sound future in the Pacific as a thriving minor manufacturing and
trading power? I must say that it seems to me doubtful. The nation has
drunk of the wine of life and could hardly settle down to a humdrum
existence. No peaceable policy could allow of a great prosperity, for
the reasons of natural poverty already stated. It would be a life of
drudgery without the present dream of glory. To study the Japanese
emigrant away from his own country is to understand that he has not the
patience for such a life. In British Columbia, in California, in Hawaii,
the same conclusion is come to by European fellow-residents, that the
Japanese worker is arrogant, unruly, unreliable. In Japan itself there
are signs that the industrial population will not tolerate for ever a
life of very poor living and very hard working if there is not a
definite and immediate benefit of national glory promised.
The position of Japan in the Pacific seems to me, then, that she cannot
reasonably expect to win in a struggle for its mastery: and yet that she
will inevitably be forced to enter into that struggle. A recent report
in a Tokio paper stated: "At a secret session of the Budget Commission
on February 3, Baron Saito, Minister of Marine, declared that the
irreducible minimum of naval expansion was eight battleships of the
super-Dreadnought class, and eight armoured cruisers of the same class,
which must be completed by 1920, construction being begun in 1913. The
cost is estimated at £35,000,000." And the paper (_Asahi Shimbun_) went
on to hint at the United States as the Power which had to be confronted.
That is only one of very many indications of Japanese national feeling.
She has gone too far on the path to greatness to be able to retire
safely into obscurity. She must "see it through." Feats of strength far
nearer to the miraculous than those which marked her astonishing victory
over Russia would be necessary to give Japan the slightest chance of
success in the next struggle for the hegemony of the Pacific.
FOOTNOTES:
[10] Since writing the above, the Japanese Government has revived in a
modified form the proposal for a State adoption, in part at least, of
the Christian religion. A communication to the Japanese Press on 20th
January 1912 from the Minister for Home Affairs stated:--"In order to
bring about an affiliation of the three religions, it is necessary to
connect religion with the State more closely, so as to give it
(religion) added dignity, and thus impress upon the public the necessity
of attaching greater importance to religious matters. The culture of
national ethics can be perfected by education combined with religion. At
present moral doctrines are inculcated by education alone, but it is
impossible to inculcate firmly fair and upright ideas in the minds of
the nation unless the people are brought into touch with the fundamental
conception known as God, Buddha, or Heaven, as taught in the religions.
It is necessary, therefore, that education and religion should go hand
in hand to build up the basis of the national ethics, and it is,
therefore, desirable that a scheme should be devised to bring education
and religion into closer relations to enable them to promote the
national welfare. All religions agree in their fundamental principles,
but the present-day conceptions of morals differ according to the time
and place and according to the different points of view. It is ever
evolving. It may, therefore, be necessary for Shintoism and Buddhism to
carry their steps towards Western countries. Christianity ought also to
step out of the narrow circle within which it is confined, and endeavour
to adapt itself to the national sentiments and customs, and to conform
to the national polity in order to ensure greater achievements. Japan
has adopted a progressive policy in politics and economics in order to
share in the blessings of Western civilisation. It is desirable to bring
Western thought and faith into harmonious relationship with Japanese
thought and faith in the spiritual world."
This proposal to change in one act the religion of a nation "to ensure
greater achievements" will perhaps do something to support the
contention, which will be put forward later, that a nation which takes
such a curious view of life is not capable of a real and lasting
greatness, however wonderful may be its feats of imitation.