Japan, aspects & destines

Preface

The first papers of this book were written in Japan fifteen months ago, with the writer's mind innocent of a notion that the book must appear in the hour — almost, as it seems, in the moment — of a supreme crisis, possibly the supreme crisis, of Japan's modern history, perhaps of all her history. The author began with a hope of executing something in the nature of a vignette of manners ; at the most, or at the best, of executing a picture of the strange evolutions of a great political, industrial, social, ethical Idea — the Japanese Revolution. Circumstances — but not circumstances alone, for there were the inherent seductions of the task — make him responsible for something of the nature of a political, even a polemical, treatise. It is true, indeed, that any personal contact, however fugitive, with the current of Far Eastern politics in these recent times must have turned the eyes of any one possessing a spark of imagination, forward to the looming of the great trouble which at this moment engages the world's thought and speculation, if not its moving anxiety. Therefore there was always the chance that this or any other book on Japan, undertaken in these recent times, might ' hit '

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the ' psychological moment ' in full career, and, incidentally, load its writer at least with a suspicion of the repugnant guilt of manufacturing a book for an epoch — that is to say, of deliberately and of set purpose lying in wait for the * moment ' and ministering, with dubious private purpose and doubtful public benefit, to its unnatural needs. This onus the author repudiates without length of words. Events are chiefly guilty, not he. So much as this should be open to the candid reader in the book itself. What may not be so clear is the writer's mind and admission about Japan. This is that Japan is — incomprehensible, not to be understood. This, indeed, is one of the very tritest things he, or any one else, could say about Japan. Nevertheless, and having written his book, he says it. It is his confession. He does not understand Japan. This is the background of his book — the incomprehensibility, the impenetrability, the mystery of Japan. The writer has made a book about that which he does not understand — not a new precedent in literature perhaps. It is the person who stays three weeks or three months in Japan who understands it. The present writer, unfortunately for his hope of understanding it, spent three years in it — in close, daily, arduous association with its people, with its problems, with its politics. Therefore he does not understand Japan. There is an Englishman of Tokyo who has spent three decades in Japan — his sojourn unbroken by a single flying visit to his own country or to the nearer Americas. He has seen all, he has been in the midst of all,

PREFACE vii

almost he has been an actor in all the wonderful events of the wonderful history of Japan since 1870, or thereabouts. He is a master of the Japanese tongue. He has compiled a great dictionary of the language. He is married to a Japanese lady ; he has, if I mistake not, a son in the Japanese Army. He has just lately completed a work — a Work — on Japan in eight splendid volumes — of infinite learning and scholarship. Yet this gentleman has on various occasions made public confession that he does not understand Japan — not quite in so many words, perhaps, but clearly to this effect. And he and his high reputation were to be less esteemed it he made any other opposite profession. Hence may the present writer be absolved of the crime of an unseemly temerity in making a book about that which he does not understand. I have great, almost illustrious, exemplars — men of my own race, of almost a lifetime's residence in Japan, who have made small libraries about Japan without having understood. Nescience is always bold, often presumptuous. Yet where is the limit of speculation in face of the Unknowable .? There is no measure of the immeasurable, no plummet for the unfathomable. By this token I claim indulgence for my speculations in face of the Japanese Unknowable — in plain terms for the views of Japan and the Japanese destiny set forth in my concluding chapters. I have, indeed, pleas, or a plea — besides illustrious example — in extenuation of the rest of the book. Wagner's saying — I quote it appropriately from one of my viii JAPAN

exemplars — is : '•Alles Verstdndniss kommt uns nur durch die Liebe.^ ' Love ' is certainly my plea, with * understanding ' a question in abeyance, for I have confessed nescience. But, for these concluding chapters aforesaid, I make bold enough to claim that, at least, they take Japan, and the Japanese destiny, seriously. Hitherto the Japanese Unknowable seems to have given excuse chiefly for mirth. Because people have not understood, they have laughed. Ignorance, indeed, commonly laughs, but knowledge of ignorance, consciousness of it, ought to regulate another mien. Is it not time for us of Western Europe to know our ignorance ; to recognise the Unknowable, and wear against it a more continent face, if as yet we find it difficult to adopt about it a more serious mind ? Is it not time in these pregnant opening weeks of 1904 ."* I might urge this, if nothing besides — that by taking Japan seriously, we at least ensure against Japan taking us by surprise. I might urge more, but it must suffice that I bring a Bishop into the witness-box. After he had written his concluding papers, the writer by chance turned up among his notes and cuttings a letter of the Anglican Bishop of South Tokyo. If by quoting it he seem to deprive his own speculations of their originality, he at any rate secures a respectable ally for the defence of their probability. The Bishop of South Tokyo in 1901 wrote to his ecclesiastical confreres in England as follows : ' That the leaders here are absolutely settled and consistent in their intention that Japan shall be a Western, not an Eastern Power, in its methods and associations, and.

PREFACE ix

so far as Western ideas are good, in its ideas also, seems to me about the most certain and stable fact in Japanese politics. But if this is so, then if Japan were to lead China, which does not look very likely at present, it would only be by regenerating China, and this would be done according to Western ideas except so far as these are deliberately altered for the better by the infusion of what is thought by Japan to be best in the Eastern. I do not think the probability of any such movement on a world -affecting scale likely in the near future, but if it did come, and Japan with China became a leading influence in the world's thought and government, it would only be so because Japan, by taking out of its treasures things Eastern and Western, things new and old, had become the best leader for the next stage of human progress.' I feel that by this Bishop I am justified. Upon his reverend authority, by this high episcopal example, I am not to be charged with eccentricity in taking Japan seriously, any more than I am to be charged with making a book for an occasion, because it happens that Japan is in the world's eye when this book appears.

The author wishes to acknowledge his indebtedness to many Japanese newspapers, and to all the foreign — that is European — ^journals published in Japan. From their columns he has drawn many of his quotations of Japanese opinion on a variety of matters. He desires especially to mention the Japan Times^ of Tokyo, a Japanese-owned, Japanese-edited

X JAPAN

journal, printed in English, and the Japan Maily of Yokohama. He had recourse, also, while in Tokyo, to the Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan ; and he has, on occasion, verified the results of his own experience and observation by reference to Professor Chamberlain's Things Japanese^Gnffis's Mikado's Empire, and other works. Acknowledgment is made in the book itself of quotations from some other sources.

W. PETRIE WATSON.

Contents

4. Tokyo's Automatic Telephones

5. Manners and the Revolution .

7. The Revolution Corrupted

II

It would appear that one must be a novice in order to be able to furnish an estimate of the Japanese character. Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain, an Englishman who lately taught the Japanese their own language in the Imperial University of Tokyo, and has written more about Japan — or more successfully — than any other stranger, refers you, with compliments, to other writers when it devolves on him in his best-known book to discuss the character of this people. An Englishman of a quarter of a century's residence in the country said to me : ' When you've been six weeks in Japan you know everything. In six months you begin to doubt. In six years you are sure of nothing.' Another friend of mine, of important capacities, who has spent the best part of a lifetime in the land, and has met its people on many planes, sums up the discussion in the fashion of this somewhat mysterious interrogatory : ' Has anybody lived twenty years in Japan and written a book about it .^ ' ' You never know where you are in dealing with the Japanese,' the foreigner who does business with the people in their own country will tell you. Yet if you pursue the subject you will find that this man, the foreign trader, has an assurance which is quite absolute upon certain points. You never met lo JAPAN

a more confident man than the foreign trader in Japan — be his residence in the country of one or of twenty years' standing — when the question tabled concerns the commercial character of the Japanese. Here you find a man whose mind is made up ; who for immutability stands upon a rock ; who will not be moved ; who has forgotten, if he ever knew, that our own infinitely wise Mr. Burke has declared it to be impossible to draw an indictment against a whole nation. Even so, this man, if you catch him unawares by putting the question before him in another form, tells you he never knows where he is in doing business with the Japanese. ' They are rogues,' says he, ' but they may be all right.'

Catch the missionary ofF his guard — the missionary on formal occasions accepts it as his duty to put away all uncharitableness — and he will say they are a mysterious people whose heart is encased in an iron casket which doesn't contain it.

If one can do it, it is perhaps best to do as Mr. Percival Lowell did, and write epigrams about the Japanese. One does this, howsoever one writes, if you believe Sir Ernest Satow, lately and for long our minister at Tokyo, and in that capacity acquiring a greater store of learning about the Japanese and their country than any other man from over the sea. A friend of his reports his having said that he has never read a book about Japan which he has found in any sense of the word correct. It is easily credible, and Sir Ernest Satow's book would probably be the least accurate of all. Wherefore he has written nothing ; only collaborated in a dictionary and a guide-book.

Perhaps this mystery is the chasm, the unbridgeable gulf which separates the East from the West ; the

A FANTASY OF MYSTERY ii

Orient, which wins by stealth from the Occident, which triumphs by force. Perhaps it is another phase of the conflict betwixt the old man which the country is putting off, and the new which it is putting on.

But it is not all mystery. Japan's national character is not wholly a point of interrogation. There is, for instance, no doubt about the permanence of her people's character for politeness. It is possible they may be losing it. His manners are the last thing the born gentleman loses, and though Japan has thrown overboard much of her heritage of the canons and habitudes of the Feudal Age, she remains polite. This — her politeness — is a sweet savour everywhere in the land ; it illumines the gloomiest hovel ; it thrives on the humblest fare. A jinrikisha- puller seldom passes another, carrying a ' fare,' without a word of apology or explanation. How strange London would think it to hear the cabby who whipped past the cob ahead of him shout to the other driver a polite expression of his regrets and his regards ! Far away among Japan's inland mountains you will meet a group of urchins who will drop you a unanimous and spontaneous curtsey, and often a grave one. The person who is spoken to in friendly conversation is as ' honourable ' in Japan to-day as ever. So are his wife and his second cousin. The person who speaks is as much of a hog as ever ; his wife has to be apologised for now as in the palmy days of Ceremony, and his second cousin is at the best a lout of a fellow.

But away from this and some other firm ground in this question of Japan's national character, what is there and where are we ? Can we do more than ask questions ? Are these people truth-tellers .? Do they know reverence ? Do they admire great things ? Do they pursue idealisms? Do they know the true ambition and the true humility ? Do they know where each becomes a transgression of the law ? Do they know to keep their eyes on the stars and their feet on the earth ? Are they sons and daughters of History, or of yesterday ? Do they know in what things man is an angel and in what things a devil ? Have they learned sacrifice ?

Strange enigma ! Hardly on one of these matters could even a Japanese speak with assurance for the whole of his people.

You may proclaim on unchallenged authority that the Japanese know and pursue the practice of good manners, the offices of kindliness ; that they know and pursue beautiful things with perhaps more of sincerity and simplicity than the Greeks ; that they are lovers of their country and behold their king with awe ; that as dutiful sons and daughters they adorn the story of humanity.

These things to their honour. On the other side I shall quote some Japanese authorities. Says one of their writers : ' In the matter of mutual distrust we Japanese know that it exists to such an extent that we are hard put to it when having to defend ourselves against the charges brought by foreigners.' This chiefly in matters of commerce and business — whence the foreign trader's grudge against this people, with whom * he never knows where he is,' as I have quoted.

Says a notable Japanese Christian (a clergyman) : ' The Japanese readily gives up, and says there is no help for it ; or, when fighting against some enemy, he again very quickly makes peace. To fight to the bitter end, even in the cause of righteousness, is not his strong characteristic. To take care of himself, and be faithful until his time of death comes, nay more, to cherish the noble hope of eternal life — this spirit I believe he can attain unto only through the influence of Christianity.'

One of their philosophers of the day writes : ' Japanese morality consists of an appeal to the feelings. Filial piety, loyalty, what are they but sentiments? Our education is all centred on the education of the emotions. Until we pay more attention to the development of the intellect and the will we shall not be qualified to rank with the foremost nations.'

I have again Pere 's opinion sweetly distilled

to me in the garden he loved, a garden of suburban Tokyo. Let me give it to show how, after twenty years of the intimacy of service of this race, they are only a mitigated mystery. I cannot, unfortunately,

report Pere 's benignant eye, nor the sibilant

' The Japanese,' said he, as we walked in his garden, ' the Japanese seem to me exactly like children. You do not expect a moral act from a child, and it is exactly so with this people. You may get one who is honest and will remain so for a considerable time, but it is impossible to say that he will not break away to-morrow,, or to-day, in the manner of a child.

' As to religion, I think, as you say, that they do not have the religious " faculty." The after-life does not enter into their view at all. Their Shintoism takes no account of an after-life except in the form of transmigration. They have, indeed, their Shinto hero-gods, which are like our Catholic saints — men who died long ago, but who, as the priests tell them, are in the spiritworld protecting them. There is no real idea of the continuance of their own lives, nor of God. There is no feeling of the supernatural as we think of it, and therefore no feeling of a thing called religion.

' As to the character of the Japanese they are, as I say, children. For instance, they have no capacity for forethought. The Japanese are, I think, the most perfect Christians in the world, for they certainly do as the Bible says, they " take no thought for the morrow." Indeed, I think they must be more perfect than Christ Himself, for in the morning they take no thought for the afternoon. They are remarkable for their lack of fixity of purpose, especially in their occupations. I often tell them about this in my sermons. I say to them that if they are potato merchants to-day they should stick to that business and not run off to-morrow to be railway porters or street cleaners. I tell my congregations that they must be reasonable beings before they can be good Christians.

* Sometimes I think the future of the country must be great, but oftenest I am depressed by many signs around me, and so relapse into doubt. The longer I am here and the more I see, I think the less enthusiastic I am about them.

* There is an abyss between Europeans and Japanese. I believe that that abyss can be bridged by Christianity and by Christ alone.'

Pere tried to amuse me, 1 think. He succeeded, but he forgot the governing men of Japan.

This finally, though it is merely the statement of a prize-winner in a Tokyo newspaper symposium on an allegation that early development and earl)'^ decay are characteristics of the Japanese : ' Japanese have four defects : ( i ) They are quick-witted, but weak ; (2) they are satisfied with small attainments ; (3) they soon weary of things they undertake ; (4) they grow old too soon.'

On the important matters to which these quotations are apposite there is probably a passable unanimity even among the Japanese themselves. The ruck of the people is somewhat shifty ; somewhat easily dashed in enterprise ; somewhat superficially emotional ; somewhat easily ' satisfied with small attainments.'

Beyond these things, which are not for admiration, and beyond those others I have quoted which are honourable, there is a great unknown, where even they themselves feel that they walk in chaos, a chaos — not an anarchy — which is probably forming into Beauty, but which the devil's advocates among Japan's critics would have you believe is to take the horrid shape of Japan's Tarpeian rock with the sea of destruction below.

This unknown holds the embryo of the soul of the Japan of the future. This chaos holds in suspension the constituents of Japan's national character. There has already been a deposit from the New, as there is a solid residuum from the Old, but the body of this people's national genius, this people's soul, is in the air, in the womb, in chaos, in mystery.

The educated Japanese who knows what you mean when you ask for a glimpse of the soul of his country and his people tells you that it is Bushido— the code of the military gentlemen, the knights, of the Old Japan ; our own early-day chivalry with the ladies left out, or with the master, the lord of the soil, the baron and his authority, displacing the ladies and the church. But Bushido does not carry us very far on the way to comprehension and understanding of the Japanese character to-day. How could it, when you know that the Japanese military class numbered two millions, and that the Japanese nation to-day is forty-four or forty-five millions strong .'' How could it when you know that an avalanche of new ideas has been poured in upon the land from Europe — Europe, which is six hundred years away from a code with a recognisable family resemblance to Bushido — Europe, which in those six hundred years has taken unto herself innumerable new gods ?

Japan at present cannot be classified by national attributes. There is a meagre list of postulates for the majority of the people — that they are artists, patriots, practisers of the graces of life ; that they are crafty in treaty, but withal 'satisfied with small attainments'; emotional. Nobody knows anything more for certain ; whether they have imagination, magnanimity, the mind for great attempts and great sacrifices ; self-reliance, the instinct for the practical based on the ideal, the capacity for hardness without cruelty ; the power to win without loss, to lose with gain ; endurance, social fortitude, private self-respect ; and the score more of the constituents of character. This is all a jumble, a confusion in which all the virtues and all their opposites, all light and all darkness, are visible and invisible. So it is that Europeans of forty years' residence in Japan know less of its people than the stripling who ' came out ' last year. They mean that their eyes have a wider and keener perception of the chaos ; of the unknowable ; that they know better than the novice that it is impossible to know.

The gods of Europe, and the manes and penates of the Japan which was not Europe, in their conflict make this mystery.

You find on examination that the country is saved from the penalties of this chaos by its governing men. Under them are forty-four and a half millions of people whose minds are not made up between the old gods and the new ; who, in their perplexity, worship under both hierarchies, or under none ; who mollify their dryads with peace-ofFerings bought with the wages of service given to alien deities. The commercial class, for one instance, does not yet know whether to succeed with Oriental cunning or with the European strong hand and straight dealing. But the governing men know what they must do. They know that with the nation's affairs it must be the European strong hand, as far as the country is able, and European straight dealing whether the country is able or whether it isn't — this, or nothing. Therefore the strong hand and the straight dealing it is ; as witness a great navy and a formidable army, and the Alliance with England which was born in straight dealing and must prosper in it. This keeps the country right with the world — its governing men know what has to be done. They ride upon the chaos. The world sees them ; not the Japanese people. As much as is seen of this people is still chiefly a mystery.

Ill

One must needs make haste to describe Tokyo, Japan's capital — the centre of the Japanese Revolution in Being. For before the ink of one's writing is dry the description may be a reminiscence of the past, an anachronism, a memory. Your ' yesterday ' of to-day may be tomorrow's ' last century ' as to the streets of Tokyo ; as to its architecture, its shops, its very topography, and its moats of slimy green water and their gloomy walls, Cyclopean built. For one thing, Tokyo suffers from fires. In the old days the fires made a new city of it every seven years. Nowadays two hundred houses are a night's mouthful to their terrible maws. But the Municipality tries to get even with the dragon and make the future of Tokyo great by pigeon-holing the ground plan of a new Tokyo against to-morrow's fire. Tokyo's ' congested areas ' are glorified there into schemes of ample avenues, which will starve the fire dragon, make the city great, and bewilder the stranger who knew Tokyo last year. Tokyo, it seems, is always in the hands of the scene-shifters. It is a dissolving view ; almost a mirage, so fleeting — the hoary permanence of our English towns being considered — are the images of wood and stucco which abide for a day within its ample circuit. The founda-

i8 tion of the city was three hundred years ago, but were it not for its moats and its tombs, one could not assure oneself that one beholds Antiquity anywhere in Tokyo.

Perhaps the best and the most is said when we say that Tokyo is typical of Japan. In this city you see the transmutation of a nation in progress. It is the centre of the whirlpool where all the flotsam and jetsam of the Old Japan — that which has no strength or plea or relevancy other than its age — is brought together and drawn down to oblivion by the centripetal force of the New. And the maelstrom as yet has not done a tithe of its work ; its power, its momentum, is young. Hence perhaps it is that Tokyo is more interesting in these days — certainly more curious and ridiculous — than it ever was in its past, than ever it may be in its future. The city is a lightning-change artist. It is a harlequin and a clown ; a sober City man and a hall porter ; a guy with an undertaker's pants and the scarlet doublet of a Cavalier ; it wears the features of a statesman and the hat of an Irish pedlar. And this, of course, is necessary. To transform a country in a generation is to make it ridiculous. In Tokyo you surprise the lightning-change artist when he has doiFed his smock for a frock-coat, but before he has been able to discard his corduroys and his brogues. Not to be laughed at, Tokyo should be closed for alterations and repairs for twenty years. She cannot retreat to her boudoir, so the lady changes in public, and blushes withal. But the world is considerate, and we need only laugh in our sleeves.

The true impressionist picture of Japan's capital would convey that any picture — any permanent picture — is impossible, that a permanent picture will be impossible for the next twenty years, perhaps for the next fifty or one hundred years. If this picture, which cannot be a picture, can assume the character of a humorous sketch — Hercules or Helen wearing a silk hat, and attired in a Japanese dressing-gown made in London — as an allegorical representation of present-day Tokyo it is complete.

There is a spot in a tree-lined avenue of Tokyo, from which you may see, upon the right, a French- American chateau (the official residence of a Minister); in front, a foreign Legation, with a Doric colonnade, embosomed among the trees of a Japanese garden ; on the left, the Japanese Houses of Parliament, an indescribable huddle of plaster and timber, apparently all gables ; and behind, if you turn about, a Japanese newspaper office, built to simulate an honest, stonefronted fabric, but bewrayed by blotches like the map of Africa on the face which it shows to the Swiss-American chateau. All this is within a radius of a few hundred yards from your standing-place, and all the time you are within the enceinte of a castle moat of the time of our James I.

A London architect, transported per magic carpet to the Ginza, Tokyo's Cheapside, should find it every whit as good as the play. The excellent folks there would entice the stranger to traffic with them in their pretty Japanese wares, but they do not know about the street itself. They forget its excellent entertainment. Less than 50 per cent of it is now Japanese ; none of it perhaps is now pure Japanese, for most of the once Japanese shops, of fired plaster and tiled roofs, have glass fronts, and counters, and doors with iron locks, all which are European. That which is not Japanese is everything else : which means that it is nothing you can classify or name. None of it is tall ; Tokyo's earthquakes will always kill the Yankee skyscraper here. There is one two-storied building in the Ginza. Its height attracts your attention from afar ; it stands up so. Tokyo, as a whole, is superficial area without height. In this Cheapside, the Ginza, there is a white-painted, square-built block, with a petty pediment flanked by towers carrying cupolas shaped after the Stamboul ellipse. This meretricious mongrel, which wears a German clock in its front and sells Japanese-European gew-gaws within, shoulders a small piece of Whitechapel, of old and rain- washed brick. Cheek by jowl with the little bit of Whitechapel is a Parisian kiosk, and next door to that you have a row of huts, or hutches, or lean-to's — what you will — of wood, of plaster, of clay, of glass, or of all — even of stone — with less than twenty feet of frontage each, and permission to be there, in the principal business street of the capital of Japan, because the Government of the land was converted to Europeanism a generation ago. But the width of the street foretells its future, and speaks of the dreams its rulers dream who were brought up to alleys, if not in them.