JAPAN’S INGRATITUDE.
Japan is ungrateful. She always has been, and, I fear, always will be.
She has achieved over an adversary, in most essentials abler than
herself, a brilliant run of, at least temporary, victories, largely
because she has adopted Western methods of warfare; and now she is
celebrating the victory of her European-borrowed arms by slapping Europe
in the face. How very like a woman! How very like Japan!
The Emperor of Japan has politely informed us—cautiously informed us
through the Japanese minister in Washington—that we must please mind
our own business, for “no offer of mediation on the part of a third
Power would be accepted by Japan until her object, which was to crush
the power of China, had been completely attained.”
And it is being more or less openly said (I believe the authority I
quote to be entirely reliable) on the streets of Yokohama: “When we’ve
finished China we must teach one of the big European Powers a lesson.
England, for instance, thinks a great deal too much of herself and not
half enough of us.” If Japan is really ambitious for a war with England,
let us hope that she will soon find an excuse for it. The sooner such
warfare is waged the better—for China—and it will not greatly
inconvenience us.
Japan has drunk of the awful, red wine of war, and the wine has gone to
her pretty little head. Let us hope that she will not have too much of a
headache in the inevitable morning, and that she may, for the near
future at least, have the good sense to drink our health and her own in
the beverages that best suit her: a cup of tea and a wee thimbleful of
saki.
There are two reasons why Japan has so far triumphed over China, reasons
which prove Japan our debtor; and yet Japan has, as far as we are
concerned, borne her honours so badly that it deserves at least our
passing attention.
Compare China and Japan on the map; compare their populations and it
certainly seems that by this time the Chinese Goliath should have
crushed and appropriated the Japanese David. But maps don’t tell us
everything, and figures lie, if we ask them to say more than they ought.
Figures are excellent things, if we permit them to mind their own
business. But they are not philosophers; they are not logicians. Then,
too, David always has so many advantages over Goliath. David can get
about so much quicker. He can move his body sooner than the giant can
move one limb. His hand can receive the message sent it by his brain in
a fraction of the time that the same transaction takes Goliath.
Perhaps we have all—those of us who are surprised at China’s at least
momentary defeat—been looking too much upon the surface, taking a too
topographical view of the situation. Bulk is not always a blessing. It
may become an embarrassment. It is, at any rate, often misleading. The
size of China, and its vast population have been misleading to many of
us who have had more interest in the present Chino-Japanese war than
knowledge of China and Japan.
I call the war the Chino-Japanese war, because it is a Chino-Japanese
war. Korea is the excuse for the war, not the cause of the war. Poor,
picturesque, badly-used place, let us pray that she may not be too the
victim, altogether the victim of the war.
China has been, so far at least, quite unable to mobilize her forces.
Japan—who is the art concentration of many nations—has concentrated
her comparatively small, but altogether fine forces, concentrated them
with a nicety and a shrewdness that might well be a lesson to the Europe
from which she has learned her art of war.
The Art of War! Japan seems indeed to be making War a fine art—but,
alas! she is making it, no less than it has always been, a butchery!
There is, however, an underlying fact, which seems to me to account
above everything else—yes, and to account philosophically—for the
humbling of China, and the swift advance of Japan. The Chinese are
creative as a race; the Japanese are imitative. A creative nature is
self-reliant; and an imitative nature is, of necessity, self-doubtful.
China has been inclined to rely upon herself; Japan has doubted herself
and relied upon Europe. China’s strength has been China’s weakness; the
weakness of Japan has proven Japan’s strength. It is true that China has
bought ships and guns from Europe; that she has borrowed officers to
drill her soldiers, and to manage her ships; but all this has been done
in a spirit of disallowance. She has always believed in herself. To her,
all the rest of the world is, as it was to ancient Rome, “barbarian.”
Japan lacking, as a nation, the creative faculty, possesses, more
eminently than any other nation, the imitative faculty. Her art is
borrowed from China and Korea; her methods of government, and her
methods of war from that Western world to which she has so lately, for
the first time, opened her gates. Japan is victorious to-day because of
her self-distrust, and because of her eager and compliant imitation of
Western methods. China is defeated to-day because of her half-hearted
adoption of European ways and means.
Japan jumps at conclusions with the swift intelligence of a bright
woman. China proves, and proves again, the worth of any custom or method
that she adopts. Japan improves everything that she adopts. China is
more like a wise man, she understands everything that she adopts. China
is the slower, but China is the surer.
Japan has so far had the best of the fight, because she has imitated us,
and because she has been able to mobilize her forces.
Whether the present war will suddenly break through the thick crust of
Chinese self-sufficiency, of Chinese bigotry, of Chinese hatred of
change, remains to be seen. If it does, China may swiftly regain her
lost ground. In any event it is not probable that so thoughtful, so
wise, so reasonable a people as the Chinese will fail to sooner or later
learn thoroughly the lesson which this present war preaches to them.
Perhaps in a few months, perhaps in twenty or thirty years, but surely
sometime, China will learn how right Galileo was, how decidedly the
world does move, and how needful it is that we who live on the world,
should move with the world. Then we may all learn how great a people the
Chinese really are; how vastly superior in many ways to their more
fascinating, more artistic, but less stable neighbours—the Japanese.
I am not, I know, taking a popular view of the relative admirableness of
China and Japan; but I believe that I take the true view. It is a view
diametrically opposed to the consensus of European opinion, but it is
not a view altogether original with me. A number of eminent men, who
have spent some of the best years of their lives in China and Japan,
compare the two peoples quite as much to the advantage of China as I
have ventured to do. In 1882 Herr von Brandt, who was then the German
minister to Pekin, who had previously been in office in Tokio, an able
diplomat, and a man greatly valued by Sir Harry Parkes, wrote to Sir
Harry:—“The news you gave me about the treaty revision has interested
me much. For my part I would see no objection to the institution of a
kind of mixed court for all cases in which Japanese were concerned,
provided the judges were elected from a certain number of persons
nominated by the Treaty Powers. The proposal to submit foreigners to the
Japanese police jurisdiction seems inadmissible; conflicts of all kinds
and gravity would, in my opinion, be the immediate consequences of such
a concession. In general it seems to me that the Japanese have done
nothing which could entitle them to the concessions they demand, and
that the experience of the past hardly authorizes any far-going
experiment for the future; the fact that Japanese jurisdiction is at the
present moment as bad as can be can hardly be given as a reason to
extend it over those who are not subjected to it for the present. The
opening of the country to foreign trade can hardly be considered as a
fair equivalent, as the Japanese, if the measure is carried out, are
certain to reap much more benefit from it than the foreigners will ever
do. After all, I am glad that it is not my business to put the Japanese
world right again: with all their faults there is much more steadiness
and logic in the Chinese than in their high flightinesses the sons of
the land of the Rising Sun.”
Yes; the Japanese have a graceful knack of quietly getting the best of
most bargains, and certainly the opening of the Japanese treaty ports to
Europeans has, as regards everything but art, benefited Japan far more
than it has benefited Europe. Herr von Brandt’s prophecy has been more
than fulfilled, and that gives some little weight to his opinion that
there is more steadiness and logic in the Chinese than in the Japanese.
Sir Harry Parkes had as much cause as man well could have to hate the
Chinese; and yet, again and again, he has felt impelled to utter some
testimony in their favour. On the fourteenth of December, 1874, he wrote
to Sir D. Brooke Robertson:—“I think our views resemble very closely on
the China-Japan question, now of the past fortunately. The luck has
fallen to Japan, who certainly did not deserve it. I can’t help feeling
sorry to see the old country opposite give in, when she had right on her
side, to this youngster among nations.”
How history repeats itself! Twenty years ago the war cloud that hung
over China and Japan was fanned away by the temperate winds of European
advice, absorbed in the sunshine of common sense. To-day the storm of
war has burst over Further Asia, burst in splendid, awful fury; and the
Chinese and Japanese are slaying each other by the shoal. We have taught
them how to do it. And the Chinese Goliath lies smitten (smitten almost
to death, at least so his enemy seems to think), by the well directed
pebbles of Japan. Of the effect of the successive and reportedly
crushing blows administered by Japan to her colossal neighbour, it is,
of course, too early to speak with confidence. Success means so much to
China, that should the present run of ill luck continue, the downfall of
the reigning dynasty would not be surprising. A victorious Japanese army
in the streets of Pekin would almost inevitably so result. Let us hope
that China—China the picturesque, China the beautiful—will not be
bowed so low as that. Our own interests in the Orient would suffer
materially through such a radical disturbance of the balance of power.
For our own sake, and for the sake of right, it is to be hoped that
China will be spared the humiliation of opening the gates of her sacred
and capital city to an invading army from Japan. That would be the
saddest misfortune that has ever befallen China: sadder far than the
misfortune that befell her when we took from her the island of Hong
Kong, and flew our flag above the dragon on the imperial palace at
Pekin. But so long as Japan is essentially stronger in army and in navy
than China, China must submit, with what grace she can, to defeat. But
having learned from us how to fight, it really is too bad of Japan to
turn up at us her pretty, little, yellow nose, to shake her
flower-crowned head at us in derision, or to make it uncomfortable for
our countrymen and women within her gates.
This is as true of the Japanese to-day as when Sir Harry Parkes wrote it
twenty years ago:—“The Japanese have committed the error of believing
all that they have been told about themselves and increasing this by
their own imagination, and the result is that their own little island is
too small to hold them.”
At this moment Japan evidently believes that her present victories are
attributable more to her own skill and prowess than to her exact and
servile adoption of European methods and models, and so she is tossing
her head and treating us a little rudely.
Ah, well! we all have to learn some sharp lessons, whether we are
individuals or nations. China is learning such a lesson now. I wonder
whose turn it will be next—Japan’s?
This, at least, when next Japan fights let us hope that she may have
become Europeanized enough not to wage war before she declares it.
Ingratitude seems to me to have been the trait most pronounceably shown
by the Japanese during this present struggle. And the desire of some
Japanese women to join the army as combatants seems to me the most
amusing incident in a war that has had more than one funny side to it.
But there is one other thing to have been noticed about Japan of late: a
thing that seems to have rather escaped notice—Japan is trembling.
In the glowing moment of her supreme victories, in this long hour of her
almost unprecedented run of luck, does it seem more stupid, or more
impertinent to speak of Japan as being a-tremble? The laws of some
countries hold that truth is no libel. The laws of other countries hold
that truth is the greatest libel. I am uttering libel or I am not
uttering libel, according to the country by whose laws I may be judged.
Most emphatically, I am uttering the truth. No other word so truly
adjectives Japan as does the word trembling.
This is the age of earthquakes. Almost daily the papers record the
upheaval of some part or other of the world. And earthquakes are
becoming almost common where they used to be nearly or quite unheard of.
Japan, as far we know, always has been, and probably always will be, the
stronghold of earthquakes. That inscrutable some one whom some of us
call God; that inscrutable something which some of us call Fate; that
inscrutable some one or something of which the bravest of us, the most
phlegmatic of us, the most callous of us, one and all, stand in more
than wholesome dread; for uncountable centuries, has seen fit, and will
see fit, to hold over the flower-crowned head of Japan a Damoclean
sword. The thread by which that sword is held is very much frailer than
the thread that, in the classic days of old Greece, held that sword’s
prototype. It breaks, does the Japanese thread. It breaks very often. It
breaks with a persistent irregularity that is almost regular in its
frequency. And Japan is disembowelled with a Hari-Kari far more
terrible, far more merciless than the Hari-Kari which used to be the
glory of the well-born criminals, or the well-born unfortunates of old
Japan.
The first time I ever saw a Japanese earthquake (and I have had the
misfortune to see many), it occurred to me that the Japanese, who create
nothing, who imitate and ornament everything, had caught from the brutal
butchery of Nature (Nature who is worshipped in Japan, as she is
worshipped almost nowhere else), the idea of that terrible
self-annihilation which was for centuries the gruesome glory of Japan.
Japan is the pet lamb of Nature, the favourite home of art, the chosen
throne of beauty, and yet the Japanese always have had the greatest
enthusiasm for the horrible in Nature, and the horrible in art.
Nature is, perhaps, the most convenient term by which we, who believe in
God, we who believe in Fate, and we who believe in nothing, can agree to
commonly express our common wish to personify that of which none of us
know too much, but of which we all think, more or less, and of which
most of us wish to speak rather frequently.
I have called Japan the pet child of Nature, and so she is. Not all the
earthquakes that have ever out-canniballed the cannibals; not all the
earthquakes that ever swallowed houses and gulped down humans, could
counterbalance the enormous partiality which Nature shows for Japan.
Never bloomed such flowers, never grew such trees, never did such
moonlight, with such dappled gold and silver, glorify such landscapes.
Verily doth Nature love Japan as she loves no other spot on earth. Out
of the great womb of Nature Japan was born, and truly every star in
heaven danced and shone the brighter. But Nature, like many another
mother, seems to have overtaxed herself in giving to the world so
sublime a child. The umbilical cord has never been cut between Nature
and Japan. The Japanese have never ceased to suck the wonderful milk of
Nature, the milk that has nourished in them their great love for the
beautiful, their great appreciation of the beautiful, and their supreme
gift of reproducing the beautiful. But all this seems to have worn on
Nature. The mother who nurses her child beyond a physically reasonable
period invariably suffers. The child may thrive, but the mother grows
ill: most women who are ill are hysterical. Nature, if there is such a
thing as Nature, is a mother. Nature, if there is such a thing as
Nature, is a woman. Nature is a mother, because from Nature have we, all
parts of our world, and all other worlds, been born. Nature is a woman,
because no manly thing could be so cruel to its offspring as Nature is.
The child is so over-grown, so hungry, so perpetually demanding of,
draining Nature, that Nature, veriest woman that she is, must needs,
once in a way, lose patience with Japan.
But save for her momentary losses of temper, Nature is to Japan the
tenderest of mothers, fashioning for her, as all mothers love to fashion
for their favourite children, the daintiest of garments. And never yet
did pet child wear such fine frocks, such robes of soft but splendid
beauty, as Nature makes, year in year out, season in season out, for
Japan. She weaves them of flowers, she buckles them with brilliant
berries, and she sprays them with a drench of soft, warm, unsoiling, and
altogether incomparable perfume. She sings sweet songs of mother-love to
her pet child. Such lullabies she croons to it! She keeps for it the
most wonderful of orchestras. An orchestra that makes ceaseless, but
everchanging music. Humming birds wing notes of music into that
marvellous concerto, silver rills “that gush out i’ the midst of roses,”
waterfalls that in the moonlight and in the sunlight kiss the
moss-warmed rocks, and leap in passionate ecstasy into the arms of the
flower-dressed earth, drip liquid notes of beauty into that wondrous
symphony. The wings of butterflies add falsetto, but, oh! so sweet,
notes, and the wind, as it wantons between the wanton trees, and kisses
the fragrant flowers, steals from them their honey, and adds perfume
unto perfume, and music unto music, until Japan, Nature’s pet baby,
cuddles down into the warm eider-down of its cradle, an eider-down that
is incomparably soft with flower-petals, and that smells of blossoms
that are sweeter than music.
Nature does ten hundred gracious, gentle, mother-kindnesses to Japan,
and Japan accepts them all, and asks for more, and then Nature, well,
Nature’s nerves give out, and as many another mother, who has an almost
idolatrous love for her child, has done, Nature gives Japan a fearful
shaking. When Nature recovers herself a bit, and sees what she has done,
she is always very sorry, and about the tumbled, broken, paper houses,
through the ruined fields of paddy and of rice, over the heaps of torn
and burned wisteria, well, she does what mothers have done before her,
she stoops and kisses the place that she has made sting, she scatters
violets over her pet child’s bruises, she makes vines, blue with blossom
and purple with perfume, grow over the marks which she has made upon the
dimpled limbs and the pretty features of her favourite, but somewhat
trying child.
But a kiss never yet altogether made up for a blow. Our children forgive
us our cruelties, but they never forget them; and Japan is always in a
state of apprehension. Japan is always afraid that in another moment its
mother Nature may lose her temper, and Nature does not often keep Japan
long waiting.
For centuries the great artifice of the Japanese Government (or should I
say the great art?) has been to divert the minds of the perpetually
frightened Japanese people. The criminal going to the gallows often
conserves his personal dignity, and augments his personal courage with a
glass of brandy. The Japanese Government holds to the lips of its
once-so-often-to-be-by-earthquake-shaken-and-perhaps-destroyed people a
cup of redder wine—Blood. The blood of adversaries, or the blood of
themselves, seems to be the liquor that, from the earliest history of
Japan, has had the greatest power to intoxicate the Japanese people, and
to make them forget the sword that hangs above them, and which in any
moment may fall and cut into the bowels of their country.
Korea has, of course, been for a very long time an excuse for war
between China and Japan. They seem to have an uncontrollable appetite
for wrangling with each other, and poor Korea hangs, like a ready bone,
between the open, snarling mouths of Ah-man and Yamamato.
But, for all that, I verily believe that the immediate causes of the
present war in Asia were the plague in China, and the earthquakes in
Japan. The minds of the Chinese, and the minds of the Japanese, had to
be diverted, else might they both have gone mad. This is true, at least
of Japan, who struck the first blow, and in many ways forced the war.
Korea has been offered up in sacrifice by China and Japan, with a
devotion to their own safeties, and a belief in their own gods, which
would have done credit to Abraham. They poured the vitriol of their
hatred over Korea, and lit her myriad gardens with the torch of war, as
complacently as Moses slew the task-master in the brick-field of
Pharaoh.
Earthquakes are perhaps as little understood as any of Nature’s
mysterious phenomena. A new science has sprung up almost mushroom-like
amongst us of recent years; a science that is attempting the elucidation
to human understanding of the laws that govern earthquakes. This new
science has not as yet made much positive headway, and seismologists
themselves know comparative little of the phenomena they study.
To-day we are in a Japanese village. In every door-yard great clumps of
gorgeous chrysanthemums echo the glory of the sunset, wonderful tangles
of wisteria throw their plum-coloured shadows upon the clean white paper
windows, and the clean white paper doors of the hundred or more clean
little houses. Upon the spotless-floored, flower-wreathed verandahs the
waning sunshine sketches in crimson, in purple, and in gold the outlines
of the wisteria petals, and the wisteria leaves. Roses, crimson and
white and yellow, spot the grass. Painted bowls of blue and white
porcelain, heaped with silky rice, stand on the verandahs, and on one
verandah, perhaps, stands an old bowl of yellow Satsuma, which holds the
evening meal of rice. Lacquered trays of fish stand beside the bowls of
rice. The families, soft-featured, pleasing of face, graceful of
gesture, gentle of manner, squat artistically upon the spotless floors.
The sun sets, the moon comes up, the rice and the fish have been eaten.
The birds and the butterflies sing. All is peace and contentment. The
beautiful bowls have been tenderly washed, and the villagers have gone
to sleep, resting their elaborately dressed heads upon their queer
little wooden pillows.
To-morrow we are in the same village, but where is the village? It is
torn and crushed. A thrill has passed through the earth at sunrise The
chrysanthemums shake their heavy heads in terror, the wisteria vines are
alive with dismay, every purple head quivering with afright. Every
golden bell upon every crimson, lacquered, carved temple cries out in
alarm so musical, so sweet, that it is incomprehensible that even so
angry, so momentarily relentless a mother as Nature is not moved to
pity, and to stay her hand. But no. The wisterias are roughly wrenched
from off the walls up which they were wont to climb, decking foot after
foot with their lavish beauty. The chrysanthemums are torn into rags so
small and pitiful, that if here and there we find an unmutilated petal
it seems to us quite huge.
There are few sights more pitiful than the sight of a Japanese village
that has been broken by earthquake. Bits of wood, shreds of paper,
wrecks of trees, broken flowers, torn vines are tangled together in
picturesque, but deplorable _débris_. The people are homeless, at the
best, more than probably, they, too, are torn and maimed, most possibly
they are killed. The rice is spilled, and the bowls of blue, and white,
and of yellow Satsuma are broken. Silver pipes, torn kimonos, bits of
pottery, that if whole again were worth a king’s ransom, strew the
scene, and for the moment hide the gashes in the ground. And yet, like
everything else in Japan, even this scene of desolation has its juvenile
aspect; it looks not unlike a toy that a spoiled child has broken in
anger.
The trouble, the misery, the agony, physical and mental, that
earthquakes entail year in and year out on the people of Japan is beyond
exaggeration, and quite beyond the pale of light writing. All thinking
travellers must feel that it is no wonder that a people periodically
subjected to such momentous torture, periodically need a big stimulant.
And so, perhaps, it is less shame (than at the first glance it seems) to
the powers that in Japan be, that soon after the recent disembowelment
of Nagasaki, and the upheaval of many other Japanese states and
villages, they, the powerful ones of Japan, have seen fit to go to war
with China.
The plague that so recently devastated China, though more repulsive in
detail, is far less hopeless to contemplate than the Japanese
earthquakes. If China should ever come to the adopting of fairly proper
sanitary laws, if China’s poverty should ever go down once and for all
beneath the iron heel of China’s really vast common sense, and China’s
infinite capacity of contrivance, then would China, always vigorous, be
baptized into new health, and then would China’s plagues be matters of
the past.
I am fain to hope all good things for China. But I fear that earthquakes
will never be matters of the past in Japan. Well, both these
peoples—one very great, the other very charming—have been sorely
afflicted within the last year, and both have fell a-fighting.
We can only hope that right may prove mighty, and that in the near end
peace may crown the Asiatic all.
We always think of Japanese women as the embodiment of everything that
is feminine and gentle. And with the exception of the yoshiwara and the
hardest worked women of the coolie class, we picture the women of Japan
as shrinking from publicity, from unnecessary exertion, and from
anything bordering on self-assertion. Yet in the days gone by Japan has
had a class of women who have been quite opposite to all this, and yet
who have been neither yoshiwara nor coolies. I mean the Japanese
Amazons, who have more than once played active parts in Japanese
warfares. This class has quite died out, but during the present
Chino-Japanese war a number of Japanese women of high birth have
petitioned the Mikado to permit them to join the army—join it as active
soldiers—at least, so a recent despatch says. This is funny; but not in
the least incredible. The Japanese are the funniest people alive. They
are perpetually doing the most unexpected, I might almost say the most
indefensible things, but they do them with such an air of artistic
propriety, that it is a very keen-eyed European indeed who realizes that
anything not altogether _au fait_, mentally or morally, has happened.
The Japanese are so incapable of a _gaucherie_ that we do not appreciate
their very extensive capacity for folly.
A Japanese woman in the thick of the fight! Her kimono well tucked up
from her little dimpled feet. Her obi bulging with cartridges! A
knapsack rubbing corns on the sweet, stooped, brown shoulders! Armed
cap-à-pie! A plumed helmet crushing down the elaborate shape of her
perfumed coiffure! A sword hitting roughly against the warm limb, to
which bright-eyed, brown children have been wont to gently cling! A
great coarse gun chafing the soft arm and softer breast where laughing,
yellow babies have slept and dreamed glad, soft dreams, and as they
learned to love their mother’s milk, learned the three great lessons of
Japanese life: learned to be happy, learned to be courteous, learned to
be beautiful and artistic! It makes me laugh.
And yet I do not discredit the veracity of the telegram. The Japanese
women are very, very drowsy. But when they wake up—and
semi-occasionally they do wake up—they wake up with a start.
Great occasions seem to infuse them with electricity. I quite believe
that to-day there are in Japan thousands of delicate, daintily
accustomed, women who would gladly join the active ranks of war.
Japanese patriotism is as supreme, as gracious, as graceful as Japanese
art; and unlike Japanese art it is often visionary.
That the Japanese women want to fight the Chinese soldiers—is very
amusing, and rather interesting. It proves that they have pluck. It
proves that they have bad taste. That it does prove them guilty of bad
taste makes it remarkable. The Chino-Japanese wrangle over Korea is, I
believe, the first event in all our world’s long history that has
convicted the women of Japan of bad taste.
Whether any Japanese women would prove effective soldiers, I doubt. I
doubt if even the women of the coolie class: the women who sort tea in
Kobe, the women who, in Nagasaki, running up and down the sides of P.
and O. and other steamers, carry upon their muscular brown backs,
murderous loads of coal, would advantageously augment the Japanese army.
I doubt if the women of the Ainos (the Ainos are the fiercest, wildest
people of Japan) would acquit themselves usefully in the field of
battle. That the women of Japan would acquit themselves bravely, nobly,
in the terrible moment of battle, admits of no doubt. But to be brave is
one thing; to be noble is another; to be useful is still another.
Greatly to his credit (he seems to be—take him all in all—a very
worthy, manly sort of fellow), the Emperor of Japan has not, I believe,
allowed the women of Japan to swell the pretty ranks of his victorious
army.
Yes; the Japanese army is a pretty army. I am speaking disrespectfully
of the army of a nation that has beaten the great nation of China! China
is not beaten yet. Japan has trod hard, very hard on one of China’s
toes, and the toe is crushed and bleeding. But China—great big, broad,
yellow China is not beaten; and won’t be for a few days more.
The Manchu dynasty may be unthroned. But China will go on for hundreds
of years very much as she has gone on for hundreds of years. The
Japanese army has proved itself a very industrious, capable,
workman-like army indeed; but for all that, it is a pretty army.
The Japanese soldiers are plucky little heroes, every one of them, but
they look for all the world like toy warriors—toy warriors in nice new
uniforms.
If Japan were engaged in war, not with China, but with one of the
first-class European Powers, Japan would fight as bravely as she is
fighting now, every bit as bravely, but would her success be so swift
and meteor-like? I wonder.
If Japan should ever fall a-fighting of a Western power, then I advise
the Mikado to enlist as many of his lady subjects as he can, and when
the bugle sounds the battle hour, place them in the front ranks. Then
might Japan hope to conquer, not one, but every nation in Europe, and
have at her feet every army in Christendom. No European soldier could
draw sword, or aim gun against the Japanese army, if its front ranks
were filled with almond-eyed, smiling-mouthed, crêpe-clad, Amazons. Then
would the British soldier cease to sing “God Save the Queen” and “Rule
Britannia.” Then would he stand at attention before the ranks of Japan;
and this the battle hymn he’d sing:—
“I fear no foe in shining armour
Though his lance be swift and keen,
But I fear and love the glamour
’Neath thy drooping lashes seen.”
The Chinese soldier is not so sentimental. He is extremely sensible.
“All’s game that comes to my gun,” is his motto in time of war, and he
would argue (not without some show of justice) that if a woman were
foolish enough, unsexed enough, to go into the field of battle as a
combatant, a maker of carnage, the sooner she were exterminated the
better.
Yes; the Emperor of Japan has done well to exclude the dainty women folk
of Japan from active participation in the present fray. Let the women of
Japan wait. When there is a Japanese-European war, then their turn will
have come, and they will have the proud happiness of being Japan’s
invincible defenders, Japan’s strongest soldiers, and the conquerors of
all Europe.
A number of Japanese women have petitioned the Emperor to enrol them as
army nurses, and send them to the seat of war. So wise a man as
Mutsuhito will not, I feel sure, refuse so admirable a suggestion. Cooks
are taught sometimes: statesmen made, poets manufactured as often as
not. Nurses are born.
The knack of nursing is a gift; a gift from God. Japanese women have
this gift to a delightful degree. Physically, they are ideal nurses.
Their voices are sweet, low, and clear. Their motion is gentle and
graceful. Their touch is cool but comfortable, soft, comforting. They
have not a single quality among them that could rasp the sorest nerves.
A Japanese girl (now the wife of a lieutenant in the Japanese navy) used
to make illness a perfect treat to me when we were girls at school
together. It was a big family ours, almost a thousand, if I remember,
but Shige nursed us all, from the Lady Principal to the college cat. We
always thought her inspired with a gentle, loving talent for helping and
soothing the sick. Certainly she was the best nurse I ever knew: but
when I came to live in Japan, I learned that every Japanese woman is an
almost ideal nurse.
The Chinese hospitals are hells of horror. The Japanese hospitals are
heavens of flower-perfumed rest and consolation.
The soldiers of Japan have acquitted themselves well in the field and in
the sea of battle. And they seem to have had all the best of the Korean
war.
The woman of Japan will excel always and everywhere in the holier half
of war: the binding of wounds, the staunching of blood flow, the decent
shrouding of the dead.
And so the strife goes on. The fate of Korea, and perchance the fate of
the Far East, hangs in war’s awful balance. Yet even now Korea is half
asleep amid her lotus-flowers, and far more inclined to dream away a
hermit life, hidden behind the Ever-white Mountains, lulled by the
crooning of the Yellow and the Japan Seas, than to come out into the
tumult, the struggle, and the glare of international day.
THE END.
GLOSSARY.
_Ainos_—A fierce, almost barbarian people, living in the north of
Japan.
_Arrack_—A strong liquor distilled from rice.
_Chulalongkorn_—The present king of Siam.
_Flower-boats_—The boats upon which the Chinese flower-girls
live.
_Geisha_—(Literally) An accomplished person.
_Jinrickshaw_—A two-wheeled vehicle, pulled by a coolie, or by
coolies.
_Joss-house_—The temple of a Chinese god.
_Junks_—A species of Chinese boats.
_Khan_—A partially underground furnace.
_Kimono_—The principal or outer robe worn both by Japanese men
and women.
_Ki-saing_—A Geisha girl.
_Kow-tow_—A profound Chinese obeisance.
_Lien-hoas_—Chinese water-lilies.
_Mogree flowers_—A peculiarly sweet Indian blossom, worn by the
Nautch girls when they dance.
_Mutsuhito_—The present Emperor of Japan.
_Obi_—A narrow Japanese belt, worn above a broad sash.
_Paddy_—Young rice.
_Pailow_—A Chinese memorial arch, usually erected to the honour
of a woman who, upon her husband’s death, has killed herself.
_Purdah-women_—Oriental women living in strict family seclusion.
_Queue_—The long braid of hair worn by Chinese men.
_Saki_—A strong Japanese liquor.
_Sampan_—A small, rude, native boat.
_Samshu_—A Chinese liquor.
_Satsuma_—A famous Japanese family. A peculiarly beautiful and
valuable pottery, especially noted for its glaze, its exquisite
decorations, and for its interesting history.
_Sen_—A small Chinese coin; a cent; a hundredth part of a Yen, or
dollar.
_Son wang-don_—The home of the king of the fairies.
_Tai-wan_—Formosa.
_Taro_—A Korean sweet potato.
_Torii_—A Japanese arch, marking the approach to a temple or
sacred place.
_Yamun_—The official residence of a Chinese mandarin.
_Yu-lan_—A beautiful flower of the Far East.
* * * * *
Transcriber’s Notes:
Archaic spellings and hyphenation have been retained. Punctuation and
obvious typesetting errors have been corrected without note.
* * * * *
[End of _Quaint Korea_, by Louise Jordan Miln]