I 
 
 t 
 
THE LIFE AND THOUGHT 
 OF JAPAN 
 
THE .•'•,._: ::;..■,;;; 
 
 LIFE AND THOUGHT 
 OF JAPAN 
 
 BY 
 
 OKAKURA-YOSHISABURO 
 
 Professor at the Higher Normal School^ Tokyo 
 AND AUTHOR OF "tHE JAPANESE SPIRIT" 
 
 WITH TWENTY-FIVE ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 LONDON AND TORONTO 
 J. M. DENT & SONS, LTD. 
 
0*f 
 
 [A// Rights Reserved^ 
 
 ~7?J2^a.cLyuy. SLi'SSL3 3^ 
 
PREFACE 
 
 The present work is a result of my humble attempts 
 to bring about a better understanding of my native 
 land by the Occidental mind. Its main object is to 
 show that Japan, in spite of such modern developments 
 as the feminist or the anarchist movements, still re- 
 mains in spirit very much the same as she ever was 
 in the days of yore. 
 
 My hearty thanks are due to Mr Joseph Warner, 
 whose deep sympathy with Japan enabled me to de- 
 liver to a Boston audience the lectures which are here 
 reprinted, with some modifications. I am also in- 
 debted to my friend, Mr Walter Rippmann, for under- 
 taking to see this book through the press. Nor must 
 I forget to mention here the Boston Athenaeum. Un- 
 grateful indeed should I be were I ever to forget 
 the sweet hours I spent amid books, in a home-like 
 snugness, where most of these chapters were actually 
 penned. 
 
 OKAKURA-YOSHISABURO. ' 
 
 Tokyo, 1913. 
 
 9247G4 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I. Cherry Blossoms 
 II. Old Japan at a New School . 
 
 III. The Undying Spirit of Old Japan 
 
 IV. Chinese Civilization and Japan 
 V. Buddhism in Japan 
 
 VI. Japan and the West . 
 VII. Japanese Home Life and Society 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I 
 
 21 
 
 39 
 57 
 79 
 95 
 "3 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 Cherry Blossoms . . . Frontispiece 
 
 FACING PAGE 
 
 The "Inner Shrine" at Ise, Sacred to the 
 
 Sun-Goddess . . . . .21 
 
 A Remnant of Feudal Times : The Main Gate of 
 
 A Daimyo's Residence in Tokyo . . 32 
 
 A " Foreign " Building in Tokyo belonging to a 
 
 Wealthy Nobleman . . .32' 
 
 The Ginza, Tokyo . . . . -39 
 
 An Ainu Patriarch ..... 40 
 
 A Japanese Wrestler . . .42 
 
 The Famous Actor Ganjiro as the Young Wankyu, 
 
 ONE OF his Favourite Parts . .42 
 
 His Imperial Majesty The Emperor Yoshihito 49 
 
 Her Imperial Majesty The Empress Sadako . 49 
 
 His Imperial Majesty The Late Emperor 
 
 mutsuhito . • • • 54 
 
 Her Imperial Majesty The Empress Dowager 
 
 Haruko . . . .54 
 
 Prince Shotoku . . -59 
 
 The Great Buddha of Kamakura 80 
 
 A Priest of the Zen Sect in his Chair of State 85 
 
Vlll 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 FACING PAGE 
 
 BODHIDHARMA {Jap. DaRUMA), THE FOUNDER OF THE 
 
 Dhyana Sect . 
 
 The Mongol Invaders Scattered 
 Warrior 
 
 BY A Japanese 
 
 Nobunaga 
 
 Hideyoshi (Taiko-Sama) 
 
 The Tea Ceremony (Chanoyu) 
 
 The Parlour, with Tokonoma (Alcove), Kakemono 
 (Picture), Flower Vase, etc, 
 
 Arranging Flowers . 
 
 The Household Shrine (Buddhist) 
 
 The Dolls' Festival . 
 
 The Marriage Ceremony 
 
 85 
 
 92 
 
 97 
 
 97 
 
 113 
 
 118 
 123 
 126 
 128 
 148 
 
THE 
 
 LIFE AND THOUGHT 
 
 OF TAPAN-Vf'\-,:;'; ..•:■:".' 
 
 CHERRY BLOSSOMS 
 
 My purpose is to make known, or try to make known, 
 to you what Japan and her people are, and this would 
 be no easy piece of work to accomplish with credit for 
 an experienced writer — a hundred times less so for 
 me who, with no mastery of the foreign language in 
 which I am to express myself, am to interpret one 
 series of social phenomena attendant on a nation in 
 the East, to another nation in the West with an 
 entirely different history of development. 
 
 One way in which this arduous task can be at- 
 tempted is certainly that of trying to tell you some of 
 my own private impressions about Japan and the 
 Japanese, as one born and bred in the country, and 
 deeply imbued with her ideals in her past as well as 
 her present life as a nation. And, in fact, that is just 
 what I am going to do in these pages; for, after all, 
 how else can anybody explain his own nationality 
 than by essaying to interpret his own being in its 
 
2 LIFE AND THOUGHT OF JAPAN 
 
 totality as a component element of that nationality? 
 If you will try to describe your country to a set of 
 people belonging to some other nation, you will im- 
 mediately see how the case stands. You could as well 
 make them understand what your favourite drink or 
 dish means to you. It would not do for that purpose 
 to teflittie iloscality and the year of production of the 
 food.in question, neither would it help much to detail 
 >t6 c»tlie,r§,h.6w the dish is prepared. We can feel what 
 it is, and mumble out our appreciation of it in words 
 that are not very likely to be construed in their proper 
 sense — that is all. Yes, feeling and giving some 
 suggestions as to the nature of our feelings are the 
 only means left to us in order to convey what we feel 
 to others with a different set of experiences from our 
 own. This is the reason why some teachers have at 
 times refrained from entering into any verbal explana- 
 tion in the course of their teachings and have had 
 recourse to some other means of expression. Buddha, 
 for example, who is undoubtedly one of the wisest, if 
 not indeed the wisest, of teachers of humanity, when 
 asked to preach the Law at the assembly on Mount 
 Gndhrakui^a, or Vulture's Peak, by the heavenly 
 King Mahabrahman, took and held in his hand the 
 golden-coloured flower presented to the Blessed One 
 by the king ; but he said no word. Silence and wonder 
 reigned. Nobody in the whole large assembly could 
 understand what the Teacher meant. After a while, 
 out of all his disciples, Mahakasyapa alone was seen 
 to betray a faint smile — a sweet smile of understand- 
 ing. Then the stillness was broken by the Bhagavat, 
 who spoke to his disciple thus: " Kasyapa, long have 
 
CHERRY BLOSSOMS 3 
 
 I treasured in my mind the wonderful thought of 
 Nirvawa, the eye of the True Law. I am satisfied to 
 see it transplanted in yours at last." This was what ) 
 the Buddhist priests call the doctrine of thought trans- 
 mitted by means of thought, ^tniLit eventually led to 
 the foundation of one of the most important sects of 
 Buddhism, that of the Dhyana, or *' Contemplation." 
 
 The symbolic nature of this doctrine, and its 
 studied avoidance of any lengthy oral explanation, 
 characterize it among us to this day. The so-called 
 " Direct communication from mind to mind, without 
 any help of the linguistic medium," is what the votaries 
 of that sect call the best of all the means of salvatioru^ 
 How and to what extent ^t has influenced Japanese 
 thought, thus leading to the establishment of the 
 love of laconic speech and the dislike of loudness 
 which are prominent features of our expression, in 
 art and elsewherej will form a very interesting and ^ 
 a most instructive subject of investigation for the 
 student of Japanese civilization. 
 
 Thus it will be seen that verbal expression, even if 
 there is no intentional mystification on the speaker's 
 part, but, on the contrary, a purpose even explicitly 
 to state his mind as clearly as possible, does not 
 always help the hearer much to the true meaning, 
 unless there has existed from the beginning a certain 
 sympathy between the two, resulting from a similar 
 development in their respective pasts. In that case 
 a smile or an uplifted finger, or any other slight in- 
 dication, would be as expressive to the other as lengthy 
 talking. 
 
 So on the present occasion, also, it were better if 
 
4 LIFE AND THOUGHT OF JAPAN 
 
 I could speak to you in some set of gestures, to express 
 what I feel Japan and her people are like, than by 
 thus using, or rather misusing, a language sacred to 
 you. At least, the former means would be more 
 amusing to you, but the pity is that I am no master 
 of any system of such an international symbolic 
 language to make it interesting for any considerable 
 length of time. Yet this ignorance on my part does 
 not hinder me from wondering with what, for example, 
 Buddha would have chosen to symbolize Japan and 
 her people, if he had been asked to do so. My thought 
 at once suggests that the symbol he would have 
 adopted is, a little bunch of cherry-tree blooms! 
 For the cherry-tree, the sakura as we call it, seems to 
 tell all the stories of Japanese thought and Japanese 
 personality — its strong sides are ours, and so, alas! 
 are its shortcomings. 
 
 The plum-tree, ume ; the peony, botan ; the 
 chrysanthemum, kiku ; the pyrus spectabilis, kaido ; 
 these and many others are very highly appreciated 
 by us ; but they are all of them flowers imported from 
 China, as their names indicate. Again, the narcissus, 
 pansy, begonia, anemone, tulip, and others are some 
 of the flowers for which we have recently begun to 
 acquire a taste since their introduction into our country 
 from the West. All these are beautiful in their own 
 way, and we like them; but none of these seems to 
 us Japanese fit to be chosen as the national flower — 
 the flower we should well be proud of as an emblem 
 of flowery Japan. 
 
 True, there is a Chinese character with which we 
 usually write the Japanese word for cherry. But 
 
CHERRY BLOSSOMS 5 
 
 that the tree for which the ideograph is intended does 
 not match our sakura, is well known from the writings 
 of the Chinese scholars and poets themselves who had 
 opportunities to see both in blossom. Your own 
 cherry-tree, again, which is regarded by you as a 
 fruit-tree, and is cultivated as such, compares rather 
 ill with our sakura as a fiower-tree. Our spring, with 
 its characteristic cherry-blossoms in their fullness of 
 gaiety and glow, covering hills and dales for miles and 
 miles, and spotting even the busiest of towns with 
 numberless balls of fleecy little clouds, has after all a 
 scenic beauty peculiar to the Land of the Rising Sun. 
 The national flower of China is the tree-peony. 
 That flower is as beautiful as a Chinese belle with her 
 repose and depth, but it lacks that simplicity, that 
 openness of expression which appeal more strongly 
 to our own taste. Your rose, so wonderfully rich in 
 fragrance and in the variety of lovely colours, well 
 deserves comparison with your types of womanly 
 beauty. The one, it must be confessed, is as fascinat- 
 ing to us as the other, only the very richness, the very 
 fullness of your rose, to say nothing about the pro- 
 verbial accompaniment, the thorn, make us prefer 
 the wild serenity, the good-natured frankness, with 
 which we are accustomed to associate our sakura. 
 Our sakura is very simple in colour and odour, and as 
 an individual flower is in no way to be compared with 
 the queen of your flowers, but it has just a sufficient 
 amount of serenity as well as naiveness to be the 
 proper object of admiration alike of our court nobles 
 and of common people. It harmonizes so well with 
 the land to which the sakura adds its charms, the land 
 
6 LIFE AND THOUGHT OF JAPAN 
 
 of the blue sky and the clear water, the land of gaiety 
 and openness! It adorns with equal propriety re- 
 tired recesses and populous quarters. Indeed, the 
 sakura is the typical flower of Japan ; with our classi- 
 cal writers and poets it was always the flower of Japan. 
 
 The sakura blooms late in the spring. The late 
 spring-time in Japan is mostly moist, and is generally 
 characterized by a series of overcast days of luke- 
 warm temperature, known as the flower-time cloudi- 
 ness. At night the modest moon shines through the 
 misty air on the equally misty world of blossoms, 
 and they reflect mildness and calm on each other. 
 In the day-time their gay and luxuriant glow reigns 
 supreme, giving the spring breeze its keynote of joy- 
 ful peace. The raggedness and fierceness of nature 
 in other seasons are now nowhere to be met with. It 
 is in the very bosom of such a climate that the sakura 
 begins its existence. The sakura may lack any dis- 
 tinctive mark to make it dignified and noble; but this 
 very lack of sterner features, and a general mildness 
 and peace which it always shows, are what makes the 
 sakura what it actually is. 
 
 The sakura is precious to us not because it gives us 
 so many individual flowers, but because it affords us 
 a kind of widespread canopy beneath which we may 
 dwell. Every year at the end of the spring we find 
 ourselves living in a common home made of the bloom- 
 ing sakura-trees in their fullness of glow. On all sides 
 we see nothing but the sakura, we look up and the sky 
 too is brightened and nearly covered with the sakura. 
 The mischievous breeze wafts the air with the dancing 
 petals, and assiduously covers the ground with a pink- 
 
CHERRY BLOSSOMS 7 
 
 white carpet of gay patterns; the Parisian battle 
 of confetti on a Mardi-gras being the only human 
 attempt that may claim any approach to the natural 
 " showers of fragrant flowers." 
 
 As the sakura is fostered in the balmy embrace of 
 the mother spring, so are we nursed in the delightful 
 arms of the sakura. No wonder that we should un- 
 consciously imbibe and come to partake of the sakura 
 nature and the sakura temperament in our being! 
 
 The sakura is gay, and so is our nature. The 
 sakura wants depth, and we also are deficient in that 
 quality. Both are equally characterized by the love 
 of purity and the lack of tenacity and abstruse thought. 
 
 The word sakura comes from the stem sak, whence 
 we derive the verb saku, "to bloom, to blow out.'* 
 Sakayeru is another derivative from the same stem, 
 meaning " to prosper, to be happy." Sachi is only a 
 disguised form of saki, and it means *' good luck." 
 And isn't the very word sake, the Japanese wine, 
 derived from the same root, a drink that makes people 
 " happy " and " blooming " when they take it? Well 
 have the Japanese reason to be merry, to pour sake, 
 the bottled " Happiness," and take it beneath the 
 beautiful canopy of sakura, the tree of Prosperity! 
 With every glance at the sakura, and with every cup 
 of sake, the mirthful spirit of the two is yearly instilled 
 with an increasing strength in the Japanese mentality. 
 We are a happy people ; we are a gay people ; we are 
 optimists. Not that the future concerns us less, but 
 that the present occupies us more. In all this the 
 sakura is our model. 
 
 Having thus far tried, though in the words of meta- 
 
8 LIFE AND THOUGHT OF JAPAN 
 
 phor, to characterize the Japanese, I think it time to 
 take a step further and tell you more in detail what 
 our main traits are. 
 
 The first Japanese trait, and indeed the most funda- 
 mental, that should be borne in mind by any student 
 of the people is their strong, and in some cases almost 
 morbid, love of cleanliness — sakura-like purity in the 
 physical and the moral sense of the word. 
 
 How this habit originated is a difficult question to 
 settle. Yet it seems to me quite probable that the 
 fact that disease and death result from filthy matter 
 in all its forms, gradually developed in the primitive 
 mind of our ancestors the sense of a connection between 
 these dismal phenomena and the punishment inflicted 
 by the deities whose displeasure they incurred by con- 
 tact with the source of defilement. Prompted per- 
 haps by this religious feeling, but certainly by the real 
 benefit and agreeable sensation resulting from a bath 
 in a clear stream or a thermal spring, both of which 
 are supplied in abundance by the hilly surface and the 
 volcanic nature of the land, the Japanese early learned 
 the value of cleanliness as one of the best means of 
 happy existence. Thus in due course of time the sense 
 of bodily cleanliness came to be inseparably associated 
 with that of moral rectitude. Sin was with our 
 ancestors something filthy sticking to their soul, just 
 as it were a smear on their faces. The Japanese 
 word for sin, tsumi, may have come from the verb 
 tsumu, to lay on — something laid on a man's con- 
 science and weighing on it heavily ! 
 
 As sin was a defilement, so was salvation from it 
 treated accordingly. They had recourse to purifica- 
 
CHERRY BLOSSOMS g 
 
 tion by means of water. When one of our creator- 
 deities, Izanagi by name, lost his spouse, our 
 mythology tells us that he went down to the land 
 of Darkness, Yomi-no-kuni, in search of his beloved 
 wife. But because he was as impatient as your 
 Orpheus, his over-curiosity brought him to a horrible 
 sight, the corpse of his once beautiful Izanami in 
 course of putrefaction. And she, turning a bitter 
 enemy at the insult she thus received at the hand of 
 her husband, gave chase and nearly caught the flying 
 Izanagi. And the first act of the husband on his 
 return from the land of Darkness was to bathe in 
 a stream — an act of lustration which was no less 
 necessary for him, a creator-deity, than for a common 
 mortal. This was needed that his divine quality 
 might be restored and maintained. 
 
 Such instances taken from our earliest records 
 may show you how in the simple mind of our ancestors 
 the ideas of bodily and moral cleanliness became com- 
 pletely blended, and to them the unclean conscience 
 gave the disagreeable sense of unwashedness, the 
 remedy for which was generally sought, through the 
 natural association of ideas, in an act of purgation, 
 which consisted, if not in an actual immersion in 
 water, at least in a form of lustration developed from 
 that act. 
 
 This mental attitude of establishing a close con- 
 nection between the morally wrong and the physically 
 impure, and the subsequent importance attached to 
 cleansing of some kind as a means of absolution, were 
 not indeed a monopoly of the Japanese. The ancient 
 Chinese had the same idea. Nor was it unknown 
 
10 LIFE AND THOUGHT OF JAPAN 
 
 to the earliest Greeks and the Romans. Lustration 
 was a world-wide practice ; it is still found in vogue 
 among primitive tribes of men. I need hardly remind 
 you of Juno's lustration by Iris after a visit to Hades, | 
 of Dante's immersion in Lethe when he had com- ' 
 pleted the circles of Paradise. Alcestis, after her 
 rescue by Herakles from Thanatos, had to be purified, 
 and was not allowed to speak for three days. Yet, the 
 fact to be well noted is that, while other nations in the 
 so-called civilized world have outlived the primitive 
 custom and the idea attached to it for many centuries, 
 we Japanese have never entirely lost sight of both, 
 but have worked them into an important element of 
 our national life. Here and nowhere else is to be 
 sought a rational interpretation of a number of customs 
 and mental habits which seem peculiar to the Japanese. 
 In my opinion, even such phenomena as a strong dis- 
 like of bloodshed, and the apparently antagonistic, 
 but equally strong preference of that form of suicide 
 known as hara-kiri (belly-cutting), can be attributed 
 to the prime motive of the love of cleanliness in body 
 and mind. 
 
 That we regarded putrefaction as the source of 
 all evil may be seen from the sense of horror with 
 which an object in course of corruption was looked 
 upon by the ancient Japanese. Any approach to it 
 was treated as a kind of sin, which made some form of 
 absolution necessary to bring one back to the original 
 state of innocence. To come in contact with, to have 
 sight of, nay, even any form of approach, however 
 distant, to things impure, made a man feel that he 
 stood in disfavour in the eyes of the Gods. This is 
 
CHERRY BLOSSOMS ii 
 
 the reason why our ancestors had a hatred of a dead 
 body, though they do not seem to have felt much fear 
 about death itself — not much fear, because they be- 
 lieved, as we all still believe to some extent, in the con- 
 tinuance of our human existence in this world in a 
 form which, though invisible, is essentially like our 
 daily life on earth. Hence the curious fact that the 
 ancient Japanese who had no scruple in killing each 
 other on the battle-field for any cause, turned with a 
 shudder from the sight of the result of their own 
 slaughter. 
 
 As they hated death as a stain, so they also felt a 
 strong dislike towards all those things which directly 
 or indirectly reminded them of it. A flow of blood, 
 for example, was unclean to them. Even childbirth 
 was considered, as in the Mosaic Law, a source of 
 uncleanliness, notwithstanding our immense love of 
 children and their mothers. Thus " it was the custom 
 in ancient Japan for women, when the time drew 
 near for their delivery, to retire to a shed specially 
 constructed to receive them, so that contamination 
 to the dwelling-house might be avoided. This was 
 still the practice in the island of Hachijo in 1878, and 
 even in Japan no longer than a century ago." * The 
 house of birth was set on fire and reduced to ashes 
 immediately after the convalescence of the mother. 
 
 " The death of a relation, attending a funeral, 
 pronouncing or executing a capital sentence, touch- 
 ing the dead body, even eating food prepared in 
 a house of mourning, all involved various degrees 
 of impurity." 
 
 * See Aston, Shinto^ The Way of the Gods^ p. 113. 
 
12 LIFE AND THOUGHT OF JAPAN 
 
 Before the Nara period of Japanese history, that is 
 until the eighth century after Christ, it was the custom 
 on the death of a sovereign to remove the capital to 
 a fresh site, no doubt for the sake of purity. In 
 8oi a " Great Purification " ceremony was perfoimed 
 because a dead dog had been discovered under one of 
 the palace buildings. In 882 a Prince was sent as 
 Envoy to the Ise shrine, because a dog gave birth to 
 a number of puppies within the precincts of the Im- 
 perial Palace. 
 
 If a person died within the precincts of a shrine, no 
 festival could be held there for thirty days, and a dis- 
 ability of five days was prescribed in the case of a dog 
 or other animal dying there. A domestic animal 
 giving birth to offspring defiled a house for three days. 
 A book of regulations of the time specially mentions 
 that there is "No disability on account of the hen 
 laying eggs! " It is very probable that the Japanese 
 word for wound, kega, means " stain or defilement," 
 in the sense that wounds are unclean in the eyes of the 
 Gods. For, according to the strict Shinto ideas of a 
 later period, a man must abstain from worship at a 
 shrine for thirty days if he has wounded somebody; 
 if he has vomited, he must not worship for two 
 days; if he has an abscess, until it is cured. 
 
 This will explain to you to some extent our 
 scrupulous avoidance of all those things which remind 
 us of a " defilement " when we are to undertake a 
 serious work. To this day, our artists, as well as our 
 artisans, when they are engaged on a piece of work 
 into which they mean to pour their whole heart and 
 soul, take care, first of all, to keep themselves as pure 
 
CHERRY BLOSSOMS 13 
 
 as they think proper, denying themselves all sorts of 
 personal indulgences, so that they can concentrate 
 their energy upon the single purpose they have in 
 view. You may perhaps have read of the cases, for 
 instance, of those famous old sword-smiths who, for 
 the production of their blades, shut themselves up for 
 weeks and for months in their workshops, partaking 
 only of food which they were quite sure was free from 
 any material or process of preparation that might have 
 even a distant connection with defilement. They 
 submitted to this because of its effect upon the desired 
 purity of their works of art. 
 
 It must certainly seem strange to you that we 
 should consider as unclean some such innocent in- 
 dulgence as family love and fireside mirth, which to 
 your Western mind are the holiest of holy pleasures. 
 But, to us Orientals, these forms of pleasure and delight 
 seem too keen and pertain too much to oneself to 
 satisfy our altruistic turn of thought — not that we 
 take any less pleasure in the indulgence, but that we 
 feel its overwhelming influence more strongly — in- 
 deed too strongly not to regard them as so many fetters 
 and hindrances to the perfect devotion of our minds 
 to some nobler cause. 
 
 The existence of the love of purity in such a degree 
 naturally presupposes the constant use of water, hot 
 or cold, as an effective means of both mental as well 
 as physical purgation. Although the establishment 
 of public baths, as you find them everywhere in Japan 
 to-day, dates back only a few centuries, the practice 
 of bathing in some form of clear water for religious 
 and sanitary purposes seems to have existed from 
 
14 LIFE AND THOUGHT OF JAPAN 
 
 time out of mind. At present there are over eleven 
 hundred public baths in the city of Tokyo, in which 
 it is calculated that five hundred thousand persons, 
 that is about one-third of its population, bathe daily, 
 the usual charge being about a penny. In addition 
 to this, every respectable house has its own bath-room. 
 Other cities and villages are similarly provided. This 
 may perhaps serve as an excuse on the part of the 
 Japanese of the old school for the lack of any device 
 so perfect as your system of daily renovated linen. 
 ** But as the bodies even of the men of the lowest 
 class," so writes Mr Chamberlain, ** are constantly 
 washed and scrubbed, it is hardly to be supposed that 
 their garments, though perhaps dusty outside, can be 
 very dirty within. The Japanese crowd is the sweetest 
 in the world." The same writer goes on to relate his 
 experience in a certain village which is famed for its 
 hot spring. Some of the inhabitants of the place 
 excused themselves to the gentlemen for their dirti- 
 ness during the busy summer months. " For," said 
 they, " we have only time to bathe twice a day." 
 *' How often, then, do you bathe in winter? " " Oh! 
 about four and five times daily. The children get into 
 the bath whenever they feel cold! " * 
 
 The love of cleanliness, and the consequent ab- 
 horrence of defilement, naturally led our ancestors to 
 the hatred of the sight of bloodshed in peaceful, every- 
 day life. And this hatred in its turn gave rise to the 
 establishment of a separate class of people, whose lot 
 it was to earn their means of livelihood by such de- 
 grading occupations as the slaughtering of cattle and 
 
 * See Chamberlain, Things Japanese^ p. 62. 
 
CHERRY BLOSSOMS i5 
 
 other domestic animals, together with skinning them 
 for commerical purposes, and digging criminals' 
 graves. Until forty years ago they formed a caste 
 by themselves, lived apart, generally on the outskirts 
 of towns and villages, and were governed by their own 
 headmen. 
 
 The origin of the Japanese pariah is altogether 
 obscure. The Eta, as they were called, are considered 
 by some to be the descendants of inferior foreign 
 tribes, who had come to Japan from their homes on 
 the Asiatic continent in the early days of our history, 
 while others see in them immigrants from some far-off 
 land in the Nearer East. But so far as linguistic and 
 ethnological evidences are concerned they betray no 
 particular traces of foreign origin. It is safer for us 
 to date back the first gradual organization of the 
 Eta as a separate class to a very early period — say the 
 seventh or eighth century — when the introduction of 
 Buddhism had caused all those who were connected 
 in any way with the taking of life to be looked upon 
 with horror and disdain — beyond even what was in- 
 tuitively felt as the result of the native cult. 
 
 This mention of the conspicuous distaste for blood- 
 shed and the consequent disdain of a class of people 
 chiefly concerned in the so-called " filthy " branch of 
 human occupation, brings us to another peculiarity 
 of the Japanese mind, which is fast fading before the 
 dawning rays of Mammon-worship. I mean the dis- 
 taste and contempt of money that still linger some- 
 where in the Japanese mind of the higher type. 
 What with sad experience of the amount of mischief 
 and real harm money sometimes does in human inter- 
 
i6 LIFE AND THOUGHT OF JAPAN 
 
 I 
 
 course, what with a still sadder recognition of the 
 dark cloud of avarice that often veils the brightness 
 of the otherwise kind Japanese soul, our forefathers 
 had early formed a kind of fear of it, and had done 
 their best to keep themselves free from the captivat- 
 ing influence of the bright enslaver. To them money 
 seemed to be as seductive and enervating an agency 
 as any other form of lust, and as they tried to flee 
 from these, calling them defilement and other horrible 
 names, so they did exactly the same thing with money. 
 Hence the association in our mind of a certain im- 
 purity with any dealing ^Yith money, and hence again 
 our disdain of a class of people whose occupation it 
 is to make money for money's sake — the trading class. 
 The samurai class offered their labour, either warlike 
 or peaceful, for the means of subsistence they got at 
 the hands of their feudal masters. The farmers and 
 the artisans offered their painful and painstaking 
 work to earn their daily bread. They were all 
 *' honest " workers in the eyes of our forefathers, 
 who were too bad political economists to be able to 
 realize that equal honesty is possible in a trading class 
 that lives by the arduous task of maintaining a balance 
 between demand and supply. How could buying an 
 article from one neighbour and selling it for a higher 
 price to another be called an honest process? The 
 traders were all cheaters to some extent, to our simple- 
 minded forefathers, and this notion lingers still to this 
 day in some corner of the mind of the Japanese belong- 
 ing to other classes of our society. We are not yet so 
 civilized as to think with some of the Western people 
 that " all is fair in war and business." To most of 
 
CHERRY BLOSSOMS 17 
 
 us money seems a stain, a defilement, and one of the 
 ideals of our labouring class is " not to make the day's 
 earnings live longer than the midnight.*' It is a pity 
 that the ordinary travellers in our country should 
 generally come in contact only with classes whom we 
 consider not fit representatives of our older views of 
 the world. 
 
 Thus you see that many of the so-called mental 
 peculiarities of the Japanese owe their origin to the 
 lo^e of purity and its complementary hatred of de- 
 filement. To this fountain-head is to be attributed 
 the origin of our taste for simplicity. The love of 
 newness, with its necessary accompaniment, curiosity, 
 is another outcome of the love of freshness. Our 
 love of order and complicated etiquette, our strong 
 taste for well-defined social gradations, and for things 
 old and full of antiquarian flavour, may also for the 
 same reason have their roots in a love of neatness. 
 They are in my view associations which naturally 
 result from the predominant idea — love of cleanliness 
 and dislike of defilement. 
 
 The spirit of vindictiveness and the pathetic yearn- 
 ing for vengeance — these are also qualities with which 
 the Japanese mind is usually associated. But, pray, 
 how could it be otherwise, being trained, as we actually 
 are, to look upon slights inflicted, either on our family 
 honour or on the national pride, as so many defilements 
 and wounds, that would not be clean and heal up 
 again, unless by a thorough washing through vindica- 
 tion? You may consider the cases of vendetta so 
 often met with in the public and private life of Japan, 
 merely as a kind of morning tub which a people take 
 
)^\ 
 
 i8 LIFE AND THOUGHT OF JAPAN 
 
 with whom love of cleanliness has grown into a 
 passion. 
 
 Cleanliness and purity in our dealings — these are 
 our favourite ideas in human intercourse. Meanness 
 and dark transactions — these are objects of our ab- 
 horrence. These ideals very often cause us to hasten 
 to any act of vindication within our nearest reach; 
 they make us too impatient to wait deliberately for a 
 better chance of proving our innocence and freedom 
 from any underhand meaning. Does not Hayano 
 Kambei, in the famous play of the " Forty-seven 
 Ronins," commit hara-kiri at once rather than make 
 any attempt to extricate himself from the charge of 
 murder, though he knows so well that he is as innocent 
 as he is loyal? 
 
 As I have intimated, the very mode of suicide by 
 cutting open the belly, hara-kiri, as it is called by 
 the Westerners,* is a result of the strong wish on 
 the part of the suicide to show that his " inside," 
 the supposed seat of his thought, was not guilty of 
 impure meaning ! 
 
 In short, it is to this day one of our highest ideals 
 to live clean, undefiled lives, which seem to us as 
 serene and beautiful as a cherry-tree in full bloom. 
 The sakura with its gay blossoms, which seem to be 
 ever ready to be scattered in the wind with a good 
 name behind, rather than covetously to cling to the 
 earthly life, seem to us to set up every spring an 
 exquisite example for us to follow in our worldly 
 existence. To live like the sakura and then die, when 
 
 * The word is rarely used by us, the common term for it being 
 
CHERRY BLOSSOMS 19 
 
 die we should, like the sakura, has been ever the ideal 
 of a true son of the Land of Yamato. 
 
 Our love of Nature, and our love of the child, the 
 symbol of undefiled humanity — are these not also 
 expressions of the same mental craving for the pure 
 and the beautiful? 
 
 Let me add one thing, in conclusion. It is my 
 sincere wish that you should by this time be to some 
 extent convinced that a nation with such an ideal and 
 such mental tendencies can never turn out to be a 
 cause of disturbance and harm in the future develop- 
 ment of the world. Her past history more than 
 amply proves that she is no such sanguinary nation 
 as some Western writers are pleased to suggest. It 
 is my strong belief that she will remain the peaceful 
 and faithful admirer of the sakura ideal, and never be 
 consciously the cause of social disturbance in her 
 intercourse with any of her sister-nations, unless the 
 wantonness or greed of other nations force us in self- 
 defence to an attitude which we should find it very 
 hateful to assume. 
 
> •" o ■> 
 
II 
 
 OLD JAPAN AT A NEW SCHOOL 
 
 Although there is no lack of books in European 
 languages on Japan and her people, you may still feel 
 in many respects helplessly in the dark about us; the 
 more so as the interpretations given in those all too 
 numerous publications are very often radically at 
 variance with each other, and it is no easy task even 
 for a trained mind to give all sorts of conflicting state- 
 ments made therein their due weight. 
 
 Some writers on my country have nothing but 
 enthusiastic praise for it, calling Japan, as one of them 
 actually does, " the one country in the world which does 
 not disappoint — it is unquestionably the unique nation 
 of the globe, the land of dream and enchantment, the 
 land which could hardly differ more from our own, 
 were it actually located in another planet, its people 
 not of this world . ' ' Illusion ! While others with equal 
 ardour run to the other extreme and are ready to ac- 
 cept the view of an " old resident " when he sweep- 
 ingly dubs Japan as " the land of disappointments." 
 Illusion again ! — Japan is neither; nor have her people 
 " the nature rather of birds or butterflies than of 
 ordinary human beings, unable to take life au grand 
 serieux," as Sir Edwin Arnold said of us, any more 
 than are " the Far Orientals a particularly unimagina- 
 
 21 
 
22 LIFE AND THOUGHT OF JAPAN 
 
 tive set of people," as the author of the Soul of the Far 
 East so authoritatively asserts. 
 
 These illusory notions, it is true, are occasionally 
 not without their use. They may either give form 
 and beauty to much that never existed except in vague 
 outline, in undeveloped germs in the people in ques- 
 tion ; or else they may serve to pander to Occidental 
 pride and prejudice. If one of you should travel in 
 Japan and find the land and her people more full of 
 sweetness than they really are, only because of the 
 poetic interpretation of Lafcadio Hearn, and come 
 home with more favourable impressions than would 
 otherwise be the case, why, you are only the gainer 
 by the illusion. And why should we not leave Sir 
 Rutherford Alcock alone and let him enjoy every stroll 
 in his country and every dinner in his English home 
 the more, from the delightful, though mistaken, idea 
 that in Japan " the flowers have no scent, the birds 
 no song, and the fruit and vegetables no flavour." 
 
 Yet there are times when we find it absolutely 
 necessary to take decided steps and put an end to those 
 fallacious notions, which, when left to themselves, are 
 in danger of ripening into some grievous international 
 misunderstanding, into, as the poet says: 
 
 " Ignorance, whose shadow is chill fear. 
 And cruelty its bitter pastime." 
 
 Hark ! what are those cries we hear far to the west 
 — cries of '' Yellow Peril! " as against *' White Dis- 
 aster! " As if the racial difference necessarily meant 
 an insurmountable obstacle to mutual understanding 
 — as if " the differences which separate the Oriental 
 
OLD JAPAN At A NEW SCHOOL ±i 
 
 from the Occidental mind were not infinitesimal as 
 compared with the likenesses which unite them." 
 
 Yet the cause of this mistaken idea, which often 
 threatens to bring about serious consequences, is not 
 very far to seek. The West and the East have so far 
 had no good opportunities to know each other well. 
 Until quite recently Japan was in your eyes little more 
 than a name for a few small islands somewhere near 
 China. And it is only since our war with the Middle 
 Kingdom in 1894 that she began to attract the world's 
 attention. Still, to this day, Japan seems to many to 
 have *' entered on her new career almost wholly by 
 dint of her adoption of the Western civilization. They 
 assume that there was nothing of importance in the old 
 civilization; that it was little superior to organized 
 barbarism." No wonder that " a well-educated and 
 widely-read Englishman should be curious to know 
 'how it was that the Japanese had succeeded in 
 jumping out of their skin!'" No wonder that *'an 
 equally thoughtful American, speaking about the 
 recent strides in civilization made by Japan, should 
 urge that this progress could not be real and genuine. 
 * How can such a mushroom-growth, necessarily with- 
 out deep roots in the past, be real, and strong, and 
 permanent? How can it escape being chiefly super- 
 ficial? ' " 
 
 But the truth is that we have deep roots in the 
 past, deeper by far than some of the Western nations, 
 and that we have never jumped out of our skin any 
 more than you have. The wands of magicians were 
 unluckily lost for ever in the Middle Ages, in the 
 Orient as in the Occident, otherwise would I readily 
 
24 LIFE ANC thought OF JAPAN 
 
 affirm that we could still work wonders, even if it were 
 merely for a break in this only too prosaic twentieth- 
 century noontide. As the case really stands, how- 
 ever, ** the actual process by which Old Japan has 
 been transformed into New Japan is perfectly natural 
 and necessary. It has been a continuous growth; it 
 is not the mere accumulation of external additions. 
 It does not consist alone of the acquisition of the 
 machinery and the institutions of the Occident. It is 
 rather a development from within, based upon already 
 existing ideas and institutions. New Japan is the 
 consequence of her old endowment and her new en- 
 vironment. Her evolution has been in progress and 
 can be traced for at least a millennium and a half, 
 during which she has been preparing for her latest 
 step. All that was necessary for its accomplishment 
 was the new environment." The new environment 
 came, and the result is what you all know. " Never, 
 perhaps, has the progress of a nation been so mani- 
 festly evolution as distinguished from a revolution,'* 
 writes Mr Gulick.* "No foreign conquerors have 
 come in with their armies, crushing down the old 
 and building up a new civilization. No rite or in- 
 cantation has been performed to charm the mar- 
 vellous tree of civilization and cause it to take root 
 and grow to such lofty proportions in an unprepared 
 soil." 
 
 Thus it will be seen that we sons of the Land of the 
 Rising Sun are no magicians, nor even conjurers, but a 
 set of plain and simple, peace-loving workers, plodding 
 laboriously along the toilsome road of honest life. 
 
 * The Evolution of the Japanese y p. 27. 
 
OLD JAPAN AT A NEW SCHOOL 25 
 
 We have made no sudden change — and how could 
 we, without prejudice to our very existence? Para- 
 doxical as it may seem, the Japanese, in spite of his 
 eagerness for the new civilization through which his 
 country is undergoing rejuvenescence, is at heart a 
 stubborn conservative. Yes, we remain to this very 
 day essentially the same old set of harmless islanders, 
 with practically the same physical and mental traits 
 that characterized our forefathers at the dawn of our 
 authentic history. 
 
 Let me take this opportunity and tell you at once 
 that one of the most prominent traits that we have 
 displayed during the long journey of our national 
 development is the sense of quick obedience to our 
 superiors. Be it understood that I mean by obedience 
 that docility of character which makes one promptly 
 submit to " the higher," " the above," or Kami as we 
 call it, and dutifully comply with it. The Gods are 
 Kami, and so we obey them. The Emperor is de- 
 scended from the Gods on high, he is a living god, an 
 Aki-tsu-mi-Kami, and so we obey him. By us he is 
 always called our Kimi, which is another form of Kami. 
 The Government, in all its endless ramifications, is in 
 some way connected with the Emperor, and by virtue 
 of this connection stands above us ; it is called 0-Kami 
 (with the honorific before it), and so we are ready to 
 obey it too. Great men are Kami ; and so are great 
 natural features. 
 
 In this way family relationship, professions, posi- 
 tions, age, sex, and numerous other social relations are 
 established in infinite gradations and rapports in ac- 
 cordance with which we are expected, and generally 
 
26 LIFE AND THOUGHT OF JAPAN 
 
 are ready, to proffer due obedience to our " highers," 
 our superiors of one kind or another. 
 
 Now of all the Kami in the Japanese Pantheon, the 
 Deity par excellence in our eyes is the Sun-Goddess, the 
 " Heaven-Illuminating-Great-Deity," as she is called 
 in our sacred books. That the sun should be regarded 
 as a goddess, instead of a god, might seem to you 
 rather curious — curious because your Hyperion, your 
 Apollo, your Phoebus, are all male deities. Not so 
 with us, who, from our forefathers' time to this very 
 day, have depended for our subsistence principally on 
 the products of the soil, most of all on rice. As a good 
 crop of rice, as well as other cereals, depends chiefly 
 on the abundant supply of sunshine, it is but natural 
 that we should look up to the heavenly Giver of warmth 
 as our guardian deity, whose merciful qualities seem 
 too mother-like to pertain to a god. Thus it is, per- 
 haps, that the sun has become a benefactress, a mother, 
 a goddess with us. And what is more harmful to a 
 good crop than a violent storm, blowing in an instant 
 the fruit of the toilsome year into naught? So has the 
 Sun-Goddess a brother, whose name is " Impetuous- 
 Male," Susa-no-wo, who " wept green mountains bare 
 and the seas and rivers dry " when he lost his mother, 
 and who committed all sorts of outrages against his 
 sister, thus obliging the Sun-Goddess, although only 
 for a time, to shut herself up in the " Rock Cave of 
 Heaven," and leave the whole world to darkness. 
 Susa-no-wo is the storm personified. He was tried for 
 his misdeeds by a council of gods, who banished him 
 into the Net her- World. 
 
 The indignation of the Sun-Goddess was soon 
 
OLD JAPAN AT A NEW SCHOOL 27 
 
 pacified in her motherly bosom, and she shines again 
 in the mid-sky as benignant as ever, to the great joy 
 of the people below, farming their plots of rice-field 
 on the earth. To clothe such a deity with the male 
 qualities and masculine attributes would have seemed 
 to our ancestors too harsh an act, entirely out of 
 harmony with their image of the universal bene- 
 factress, in which character she has occupied the most 
 tender part of our hearts. She has always been a 
 divine protectress, a goddess, the Kami of all the 
 myriad other Kami ! 
 
 A Japanese may at times be found not ready to 
 bow his haughty neck before the sterner authority of 
 a male deity. But who would, or could, ever be so 
 rude as to deny the divine mother her due of heartfelt 
 homage? And now imagine the advantage the first 
 Emperor, Jimmu Tenno, must have derived from this 
 belief when he began his mighty work of bringing the 
 whole country under his sway, declaring himself the 
 holy descendant of the thrice-holy Sun-Goddess, her- 
 self the daughter of the creator-deity of the whole 
 world. Those who had served under his banners 
 doubly felt the conviction of the righteousness of their 
 cause, while others who had been foolish enough to 
 draw the sword against the imperial army surely heard 
 in the declaration of his superhuman descent the re- 
 proof of the mother-deity as clearly as their biting 
 conscience told them of their shameful ingratitude. 
 The grand task of the unification of Japan was thus 
 brought to a fruitful conclusion in a comparatively 
 short time, giving the Japanese throne enhanced 
 holiness in the eyes of her people — the throne where 
 
28 LIFE AND THOUGHT OF JAPAN 
 
 the holy descendant of the Sun-Goddess is to sit 
 " coeval with the heaven and earth," as the phrase 
 goes. 
 
 I have thus far been trying to lay before you what 
 I deem the raison d'etre for the almost innate pro- 
 clivity of our mind to be ever ready to obey the will 
 of what we consider our " highers," of Kami, of the 
 Emperor, of the Government and of all authorities. 
 Other theories may be propounded for the mental 
 tendency which is discernible in our earliest pro- 
 genitors; but the fact remains that this tendency was 
 in existence two thousand years ago as it exists to- 
 day, only now in a stronger degree, for the charac- 
 teristic gains in force as time advances. At present no 
 reasonable wish is expressed, for example, on the part 
 of the Government, which is popularly thought to re- 
 present the Emperor's will, but the people are found 
 assiduously trying to carry it out to its full extent; 
 and, what is remarkable, they take to their work of 
 carrying out the wish without a murmur, nay, with a 
 will, in most cases fully believing in the wisdom of the 
 " higher " that originated it. 
 
 "Theirs not to make reply, 
 Theirs not to reason why, 
 Theirs but to do and die." 
 
 We are ever prepared to go and lay ourselves down 
 to die whenever the 0-Kami, the Government, should 
 judge necessary for us to do so for the sake of the 
 country. It was due to this mental attitude on the 
 part of the people that the wish of the Government was 
 more than duly executed when it found itself at the 
 very commencement of Meiji, the last era, badly in 
 
OLD JAPAN AT A NEW SCHOOL 29 
 
 need, among other things, of the material adjuncts of 
 the Western civiHzation. So immediately after the 
 final overthrow of the Tokugawa Shogunate, and with 
 it the old regime of the Feudal system, a systematic 
 and wholesale Europeanization of things Japanese was 
 set on foot. For was it not one of the five articles 
 of the memorable oath which the late Emperor 
 solemnly took in 1868, the year following his accession 
 to the throne, that " Knowledge shall be sought for 
 throughout the world so that the welfare of the Empire 
 may be promoted"? And where should we have 
 turned for new knowledge if it had not been to the 
 West — ^the West, whgse marvellous achievements in 
 science and industrial art had already for centuries 
 been subjects of wonder and envy among the more 
 advanced classes of the Samurai, in whom lay the real 
 motive power that brought on the present state of 
 things? Seiyo ! Seiyo ! The West! The West! 
 was our watchword. First adoption, and then adap- 
 tation, of the social organization in vogue in the 
 Western countries was carried on on a grand scale. 
 The army and navy were entirely reorganized on the 
 European pattern; post and telegraph services were 
 initiated, railways began to be constructed and light- 
 houses to be built, banks were established. Old 
 court dresses were replaced by uniforms in the foreign 
 style. The wearing of swords was forbidden, which 
 cost not a little pain to the Samurai, who would never 
 have parted with them unless he had strongly felt the 
 call of his new mission of cutting his figure in the world 
 with a peaceful weapon. The laws themselves were 
 revised. A new system of taxation was introduced, 
 
30 LIFE AND THOUGHT OF JAPAN 
 
 the calendar was changed from the lunar to the 
 Gregorian. 
 
 Education was by no means neglected among all 
 those changes. Indeed, the first care of the new 
 Central Government was to reopen schools established 
 by the Shogunate which had been closed at the be- 
 ginning of the new regime. Foreign teachers were 
 engaged, and students were sent abroad. Thus the 
 whole of Japan was aroused to a new life and new 
 activities. 
 
 Yet this was not the first time that contact with a 
 new and, in many respects, assuredly much higher 
 form of civilization had given rise to a sudden awaken- 
 ing of the latent forces and led to a tremendous out- 
 burst of pent-up energy, which would otherwise have 
 lain as inactive as a dormant volcano. Nearly fifteen 
 centuries before this epoch, the continental Asiatic 
 civilization gradually made itself felt in the island 
 empire in the form of the tributes the Korean princes 
 had from time to time sent to the Japanese court, and 
 a serious study of the Chinese classics was commenced 
 in the imperial household of the Emperor Ojin. Con- 
 fucianism came to be regarded as the *' True Path " to 
 be followed by every Japanese in matters of civic 
 virtue. 
 
 As to the religious system, it made its first appear- 
 ance in our country in a.d. 552 in the form of Bud- 
 dhism, which was greatly instrumental in the propaga- 
 tion of the Chinese learning and arts; our Buddhism 
 did not come to us direct from its original home, India, 
 but through the hands of the Chinese and the Koreans, 
 on whom we had for many centuries been accustomed 
 
OLD JAPAN AT A NEW SCHOOL 31 
 
 to draw for any fresh supply of force and form of 
 social innovation. The Buddhist doctrine was taught 
 clothed in the Chinese language, just as the Buddhist 
 images and temples were built by Chinese artists or 
 Korean workmen. 
 
 In this way Chinese learning and Buddhism came 
 to be instilled in Japan. Several embassies were at 
 successive times sent to China, and these were always 
 accompanied by a number of students and priests, who 
 returned home after several years' study in the Middle 
 Kingdom. The Japanese of those days were very 
 eager to study the new and superior civilization with 
 which they were brought into contact, and were not 
 slow to introduce it for the betterment of their own 
 political, social and moral conditions. 
 
 The time had now become ripe for the introduction 
 of great reforms in administration and general organi- 
 zation. The result was the so-called Reformation of 
 the Taikwa era about a.d. 650, that may well be said 
 to be the prototype of the Meiji Restoration of 1868, 
 inasmuch as it was a thorough remodelling of the 
 social organization on a foreign, that is, Chinese 
 pattern. 
 
 The length of time that was needed for things to 
 settle down after the Taikwa agitation was about a 
 hundred years, when the native spirit began to make 
 itself manifest from under the uncongenial cover of the 
 foreign civilization beneath which it had for some 
 time to simmer. It would interest many to try and 
 guess how long we are this time to remain in the awful 
 transition period. Some may think that we have 
 already served our years of toilsome apprenticeship 
 
32 LIFE AND THOUGHT OF JAPAN 
 
 to the Western masters of civilization, and are now 
 fully qualified to manage our affairs without any 
 further aid from them, while others may think us just 
 at the very beginning of our career of emancipation 
 from the direct influence of the West. The attitude 
 of the Japanese Government remains nearly the same 
 as at the beginning of the new epoch. " Look to the 
 Westerners for more knowledge, they are still our 
 superiors in many respects, try to work up to their 
 high state of civilization," adding, however, in the 
 same breath, " only be sure to stand firm on your 
 native soil, lest you should lose your footing as a true 
 Japanese." These are the words we find explicitly 
 written on all the activities which the 0-Kami, the 
 Government, daily displays. It is the 0-Kamis will 
 and the Emperor's too, which the former merely re- 
 presents. And the result is that the whole nation is 
 seen as busily engaged in honey-gathering in the 
 Western field as any swarm of bees around a rose- 
 bush, humming " Seiyol Seiyo! Seiyo!" The 
 West! The West! The West! all the time. Streets 
 are improved, foreign style; public buildings are con- 
 structed foreign style ; private houses only too often 
 have their rooms furnished foreign style; people be- 
 longing to the upper middle class frequent the so- 
 called foreign restaurants ; they are expected to know 
 the foreign etiquette at table, just as their wives are 
 curious to know something about foreign fancy-work. 
 Officials put on foreign clothes when they go to their 
 offices. Did not the Empress Dowager herself throw 
 off her native court dress for a foreign garment, thus 
 symbolically to show that the foreign things are to 
 
A REMNANT OF FEUDAL TIMES : THE MAIN GATE OF A DAIMYO S 
 RESIDENCE IN TOKYO. 
 
 FOREIGN BUILDING IN TOKYO BELONGING TO A WEALTHY NOBLEMAN. 
 
OLD JAPAN AT A NEW SCHOOL 33 
 
 be adopted? Were not European edifices added to 
 the medieval castles of Yedo, to turn them into an 
 imperial palace? 
 
 The hair of men is dressed after the foreign fashion. 
 Women's, too, is very often done in the same way, 
 though foreign hats are not worn except when they go 
 out in foreign dress, which is as yet extremely rare. 
 In the larger towns men are generally seen with a 
 foreign hat and very often with a pair of foreign shoes, 
 even when they are in the native kimono, which they, 
 officials and all, prefer to the foreign attire when at 
 home. But enough! You must surely be tired of 
 the epithet foreign, which stands for the native word 
 Seiyo, meaning " Occidental." So am I too, especially 
 when I remember that what we call Seiyo is very often 
 *' foreign " only in the sense that it is " foreign " to 
 any known form of the really Occidental thing for 
 which it is meant. 
 
 *' There is the rabbit-warren style," says Mr 
 Chamberlain, speaking of our Seiyo buildings, " exem- 
 plified in the streets at the back of the Ginza, the 
 main street of Tokyo. There is the wooden shanty 
 or bathing-machine style, of which the capital offers 
 a wealth of examples. There is the cruet-stand style, 
 so strikingly exemplified in the new Tokyo Prefecture. 
 The Brobdingnagian pigeon-house style is represented 
 here and there, both in wood and stone. Its chief 
 feature is having no window — at least, none to speak 
 of. After all," concludes the same author, ** these 
 things are Japan's misfortune, not her fault. She 
 discovered Europe, architecturally speaking, at the 
 wrong moment. We cannot, with any grace, blame 
 c 
 
34 LIFE AND THOUGHT OF JAPAN 
 
 a nation whom we have ourselves misled. If Japan's 
 contemporary efforts in architecture are worse even 
 than ours, it is chiefly because her people have less 
 money to dispose of. Moreover, Nature herself con- 
 fines them to the flat and the little; three stories 
 are a dangerous experiment in the earthquake-shaken 
 land." 
 
 The same writer elsewhere informs you that " most 
 Japanese towns of any size now boast what is called a 
 seiydryori, which, being interpreted, means a foreign 
 restaurant. Unfortunately, third-rate Anglo-Saxon in- 
 fluence has had the upper hand here, with the result 
 that the central idea of the Japano-European cuisine 
 is expressed in slabs of tough beefsteak anointed with 
 mustard and spurious Worcestershire sauce. This 
 culminating point is reached after several courses — 
 one of watery soup, another of fish fried in rancid 
 butter, a third of chickens' drumsticks stewed also in 
 rancid butter; and the feast not infrequently termi- 
 nates with what a local cookery book, unhappily 
 disfigured by numerous misprints, terms a * sweat 
 omlette.' " 
 
 I am not citing these facts to amuse you. They 
 are altogether too sad a thing for us to turn into mer- 
 riment. However ridiculous these phenomena may 
 seem to you, they are simply results of our honest 
 attempts at improving ourselves by following what 
 we deem your good examples, forgetting, in the rash- 
 ness of our appreciation of things Occidental, the 
 possible danger of unconsciously overdoing good 
 things, and very often rather out-heroding Herod! 
 Have we not already introduced into Japan not a few 
 
OLD JAPAN AT A NEW SCHOOL 35 
 
 most undesirable adjuncts of the Western civilization? 
 We know we have and, moreover, we are actually 
 suffering from them. But that makes no difference 
 in our high appreciation of your achievements in all 
 directions of human activity, for, whether we say it 
 or deny it, we are all of us your great admirers, and feel 
 ourselves very much behind you. You all seem to us 
 learned — and how could you be otherwise when even 
 the youngest of you can speak with fluency the Seiyo 
 language, which costs us so many years of toil to 
 master ! You live in the Seiyo buildings, and wear the 
 Seiyo clothes, you must be fabulously rich — and how 
 could you be otherwise when the poorest of you can 
 afford to live on the Seiyo food, which is considered a 
 luxury by many of us because its taste is new and 
 queer ! 
 
 Such is, in short, our mental attitude towards the 
 West at present. The whole nation is at school, and 
 you are our teachers, whether you are ready or not 
 to accept the responsible title. Your thoughts and 
 actions are in many cases assiduously copied and set 
 up before us as the " good forms " to mould ourselves 
 in, though it happens not infrequently that, what with 
 the lack of skill on the part of copiers, what with the 
 innate defects on the part of the furnishers of the 
 originals, distorted images utterly unfit for the public 
 eye are too often found traced on their otherwise stain- 
 less sheets. This kind of result has been very dis- 
 couraging, and has given some of us cause to reflect 
 whether it would not be wiser to rest contented with 
 the old system of things, which, if deprived of the 
 charm of novelty, is at least free from the accusation 
 
36 LIFE AND THOUGHT OF JAPAN 
 
 of crudeness. Nor are they altogether to blame when 
 we know that the Occident is very often only inade- 
 quately represented by a limited number of the 
 Westerners found in Japan. 
 
 Fifteen centuries ago our " Highers " said: " The 
 Chinese are our superiors, let us learn their things and 
 their methods." And so we went to work at once, and 
 learned as much as we could. A few centuries later 
 the same authority again said: " Buddhism is good. 
 Believe in it and be saved." And so we went to work 
 at once and believed in it and got its blessing as far 
 as our mentality permitted. A few centuries later 
 still, many of the local 0-Kami, and afterwards the 
 central one too, said: " Kirishitan (or the Roman 
 Catholic Church) is useful; its representatives give us 
 pistols and gunpowder ; adopt it." And so we went to 
 work at once and were just going fully to adopt it, as in 
 the case of Buddhism, when the other thought came 
 like a thunderbolt: " Kirishitan is dangerous; it is 
 the disguise the Westerners generally assume when they 
 approach their victim." And then last of all came: 
 "The Western nations are in advance of us in many 
 respects, learn much from them." Thus it is that we 
 are now trying our best to second the wish, running as 
 fast as our legs can carry us. In the hurry of the act 
 many of our former acquisitions are seen fast dropping 
 from most of the runners, evoking cries of warning 
 from the kind-hearted bystanders, as well as the more 
 cautious of their fellow-runners. But to what pur- 
 pose? You could as well caution them not to let fall 
 hot drops of soaking sweat. It is no joke, this busi- 
 ness of running for life. Had it not been for the 
 
OLD JAPAN AT A NEW SCHOOL 37 
 
 training we have had in the art of quick assimilation 
 of an alien form of culture, feeling at the same time a 
 keen sense of the wisdom and necessity of the step 
 taken by 0-Kami, the task would have proved too 
 much for our shoulders. 
 
 Thus, when properly construed, the sight of Modern 
 Japan trying what some of our Western critics would 
 call an apish imitation of the Occident would lose 
 much of its comical aspect and present to you a true 
 cause for sympathy. As to the meanness and fickle- 
 ness with which we are so often accused, who would 
 be so short-sighted as to charge you with these short- 
 comings because you adopt the latest innovations in 
 the mechanical appliances? Nor would anybody, 
 except some heartless wretch of a husband, call your 
 ladies mean and fickle because they at times step into 
 a milliner's for a new mode in headgear. Just as they 
 retain the same physiognomy and mental constitution 
 under all sorts of ever-changing fashion in hats, we 
 remain the same old Japanese, with very much the 
 same turn of thought, amid scenes that are constantly 
 changing. This reminds me of some protean actor, 
 who disguises himself in quick succession into all 
 manners of persons. Now he is a tip-top dandy as 
 happy as a lark, now an old scholar, contemptuously 
 gazing over his spectacles at the shallow world around 
 him, now a dignified soldier, then a cunning tradesman, 
 and so on; but with all these alterations in the out- 
 ward he remains the same person in the green-room. 
 The only changes which really creep on him are those 
 that slowly but inevitably result from time and from 
 the varied experience which time inevitably brings. 
 
38 LIFE AND THOUGHT OF JAPAN 
 
 Exactly the same is true ,of Japan, as indeed of any 
 other nation on earth. The real Japan sustains, and 
 can sustain, only such changes as proceed from racial 
 and institutional sources. Outward help which a man 
 as well as a nation derives from other individuals or 
 nations can at best only be instrumental in bringing 
 forth the real being that would otherwise lie hidden in 
 the depth of undeveloped personality. 
 
 " Culture is like wealth — it makes us more ourselves, 
 it enables us to express ourselves." And in order to 
 express ourselves well — equally well, if not far better 
 than we have done with the culture we owe to China, 
 we have been taking apprenticeship in your work- 
 shops ; and when we have done with it to some extent 
 in the long future to come, we hope we shall be found, 
 as we have already done in our past, turning out such 
 articles as will contribute to the sweetness and light of 
 the world at large. In the meanwhile, it is our sincere 
 wish that you would kindly continue to live the ideal 
 lives full of sweetness and sunshine, if not for your own 
 ends, at least for the sake of the edification of your 
 most humble stude -.ts over the sea, the Japanese. 
 
Ill 
 
 THE UNDYING SPIRIT OF OLD JAPAN 
 
 In this chapter it is my humble desire to show you 
 some phases of the spiritual life of the Japanese in the 
 past as well as in the present. 
 
 For this purpose, the introductory scene I venture 
 to portray will be one at our metropolis, Tokyo, just 
 at this moment, so that I may more effectively draw 
 your attention to the contrast between the superficial 
 and the real Japan. If not with such an object, 
 Tokyo is certainly the last place any one who wishes 
 to give an outsider the best impressions of the country 
 would invite a peep into ; so ugly is it from the gigantic 
 process of street-improvement which the city is un- 
 dergoing at present. Even Nihon-bashi, the historic 
 wooden bridge in its very centre, has just been entirely 
 rebuilt, this time in stone, and of course in the foreign 
 style. 
 
 But then, is not this inevitable lack of stability 
 representative of that pathetic state of transition 
 through which the whole country has been, and still is, 
 passing into something new, since the restoration of 
 1868? When the whole nation is seen in the topsy- 
 turvy condition of a general spring-cleaning, why 
 should I be so mindful of a leaking pipe here and a few 
 broken pitchers there, displayed to the public view? 
 Besides, I flatter myself I have said enough in the pre- 
 
 39 
 
40 LIFE AND THOUGHT OF JAPAN 
 
 ceding chapter to make you understand the raison 
 d'etre of all these shocking sights. They are a part of 
 the results of our trying to learn what we can from the 
 West; and I hope that my frank exposition will not 
 arouse your derision at so painful an attempt on the 
 part of the naive admirers of your civilization. So I 
 feel no scruple when I put our capital, Tokyo, before 
 you just as it stands now, contorted and ugly; and at 
 once take you, in imagination, to the entrance of the 
 Shimbashi railway terminus which stands at the south- 
 eastern corner of the city. Here you will find an 
 almost incessant rush of human currents consisting of 
 all sorts and conditions of men, either carried away or 
 poured out by boxfuls through the shabby, stone-built 
 station. It goes without saying that the boisterous 
 streams thus hurrying to their respective destinations 
 are of heterogeneous character, the Europeans and 
 Americans, the Chinese and Koreans, forming no small 
 part of the crowd. But what concerns us is not those 
 honoured guests from the West, nor our nearer 
 neighbours; it is the purely native element only that 
 is to occupy our attention for the present. 
 
 Now let us suppose that we follow the flowing tide 
 that disperses itself into the Ginza, which is deemed the 
 prettiest street in Tokyo, being, as it actually is, 
 bordered by low, two-storied brick buildings in the 
 foreign style, used for dwelling as well as trading 
 purposes. All sorts of sign-boards are hung out with 
 inscriptions, not only in the native writing, but also 
 in foreign tongues for your benefit, many of which, 
 however, will be of very little use to you, and in some 
 cases hardly more intelligible than the writings in 
 
AN AINU PATRIARCH. 
 
THE UNDYING SPIRIT OF OLD JAPAN 41 
 
 Chinese characters. You will come across, for ex- 
 ample, some such literary curiosities as " Extracts of 
 Fowl," to show an egg-seller's, or the blood-curdling 
 phrase, ** Head Cutter" over a barber's shop. But, 
 in those cases, you are kindly to remember that these 
 atrocities we commit against your language are no 
 conscious distortions of it for merriment, but an 
 earnest and serious attempt on our part to make 
 ourselves intelligible to you. 
 
 Just as you find, as you surely will at first, the 
 houses all alike in appearance, so you will notice 
 nothing but the same cut of faces and general features 
 reigning among the people in the streets, except those 
 differences that accompany the diversity of age and 
 sex. But on a closer observation you will come, at 
 least to some extent, to acknowledge the truth of the 
 statement so often made in books on Japan, that 
 there are two distinct racial face-types among the 
 present Japanese. The one is " the round or so-called 
 * pudding-faced ' type, common among the lower 
 classes — a type very often met with among our 
 wrestlers. The other is what is generally termed 
 the ' aristocratic ' type of face, with its more oval 
 outline, a thinner nose, more slanting eyes, and 
 smaller mouth — the type to which Japanese actors 
 endeavour to conform when representing noblemen 
 and heroes. Be it remembered that both these 
 types are Mongol. Both have the yellowish skin, the 
 straight hair, the scanty beard, the broadish skull, 
 the more or less oblique eyes, and the somewhat 
 high cheek-bones, which characterize all well-estab- 
 lished branches of the Mongol race." 
 
42 LIFE AND THOUGHT OF JAPAN 
 
 Scholars now seem pretty much in accord in the 
 opinion that the " pudding-faced " type of the Japanese 
 race represents the earher current of immigrants from 
 the Asiatic continent, who, having made Izumo their 
 headquarters, in the north-western part of the main 
 island, had driven the hairy aborigines, the Ainu, 
 far into the north, and who, in turn, eventually put 
 themselves under the sway of still later immigrants, 
 the " aristocratic " conquerors, descended from a 
 region designated in our history as the " Plain of High 
 Heaven,'' under the leadership of the first Emperor, 
 Jimmu Tenno, 
 
 These distinctions, however, though they may 
 be helpful in the solution of various questions con- 
 cerning our original home and racial affinities on the 
 Asiatic continent, are not likely to be of much use to 
 you in the studies of the social phenomena of the 
 present day in my country, when we take into con- 
 sideration the fact that much mixing together of 
 blood has taken place between the two representa- 
 tive types in the course of more than two thousand 
 years. 
 
 Of much greater practical use to you are, on the 
 other hand, the distinguishing marks I am now going 
 to enumerate. One of these is the mode of dressing 
 the hair. Some of you, I presume, have read or 
 heard of the meaning we attach to different forms of 
 chignons, worn by our fairer sex; how a maiden, a 
 married woman and a widow can be distinguished 
 from one another, by a glance at the way in which 
 they dress their hair. This distinction, curious as it 
 may seem to you, to some extent exists even now, 
 
THE UNDYING SPIRIT OF OLD JAPAN 43 
 
 where the purely Japanese modes of doing the hair 
 are preserved, although economical and other reasons 
 have to some extent made it give way to the so-called 
 foreign style, which means a variant of the European 
 way of hair-dressing. 
 
 The custom of shaving off the eyebrows in a married 
 woman is now fast dying out in the bigger cities, linger- 
 ing only among the wives of the more conservative 
 bourgeois. It has been with much less scruple, how- 
 ever, that men's top-knots have been discarded in 
 favour of the cropped hair, so much so that they have 
 dwindled into a nearly extinct fashion, preserved only 
 among aged peasants living contentedly apart from 
 modern innovations. Others, high and low, the old 
 as well as the young, patronize here again the foreign 
 style. This does not necessarily mean, as you may 
 naturally infer, the use of a headgear, foreign or other- 
 wise, since some of us, mostly lower-class people, do 
 not mind being seen bare-headed in the street. Nor 
 do our women wear a hat, even when they have their 
 hair done a I'europeenne, unless they wear a foreign 
 dress, which, as I have already mentioned, is very 
 rare, even with the upper classes. 
 
 In strong contrast with this sparing use of European 
 costume on the part of our ladies, it is so widely patron- 
 ized by their brothers that every tenth man you meet 
 on the boulevards of Tokyo will be found in it. In- 
 deed, it forms our official attire, and almost everybody 
 who claims any connection with the Government, 
 central or local, thinks it no unpleasant duty to put 
 himself to some inconvenience for a. foreign suit, which, 
 in the eyes of an admiring populace, tells in the 
 
44 LIFE AND THOUGHT OF JAPAN 
 
 wearer's favour. Not that we continue to wear the 
 same inside our houses. When at home we natu- 
 rally prefer the kimono, which seems to us far 
 more comfortable and artistic, and is certainly in 
 better keeping with the general tone of a Japanese 
 dwelling. 
 
 Closely associated with, and, indeed, almost in- 
 separable from the use of the foreign clothes, is the 
 fashion of growing a moustache, which is another 
 visible sign to show that its owner is in some way con- 
 nected with the official Hfe, however frail the link may 
 be. A man in a suit of foreign clothes without a 
 moustache may be an apprentice-clerk or at best a 
 small foreign-goods dealer. But when he can afford 
 to have such a valued article as a fine growth of 
 moustache, well, he can be anybody from a prime 
 minister to — a police constable! But why all this 
 deference to a not altogether unclumsy feature, one 
 which until quite recently had been rather dis- 
 couraged for centuries all through the different 
 classes of Japanese society? Only because most 
 of you Westerners are supposed to stick to the 
 custom. 
 
 All these things, you may say, show the undeni- 
 able fact that we are consciously or unconsciously re- 
 ceiving a strong influence from the West of the Present, 
 and are fast losing our hold on the East of the Past. 
 Yes, in things that concern externals. But with re- 
 gard to our inward life we remain to this very moment 
 remarkably intact. The same old Japanese head is 
 at work under a Derby hat as under a Chinese cap 
 twelve centuries ago; nor is the heart that now beats 
 
THE UNDYING SPIRIT OF OLD JAPAN 45 
 
 beneath the European clothes in any way different 
 from the heart that beat then in the Mandarin jacket 
 copied from China. The Japanese spirit, let me assure 
 you once again, has so far suffered hardly any material 
 change from the various alterations that have taken 
 plac^ in its environment. And the reason thereof 
 may, briefly stated, be no other than this: things 
 material and external may be borrowed and bought, 
 winds may bring them as winds blow them away; but 
 the case is quite otherwise with things mental and 
 spiritual. They will never take root where the soil 
 is not propitious for their growth. If our mind can 
 understand and appropriate what has originated and 
 grown in your mind, is that not an evidence that ours 
 has very much the same form and degree of develop- 
 ment as yours? No such nonsense as mere borrow- 
 ing or imitation can at least be asserted of the learn- 
 ing of science and arts. Have you ever seen a perfect 
 reproduction of Mona Lisa? If so, the copier must 
 be as great an artist as the author of the immortal 
 work himself; for only such can imitate the original 
 painter in his totality, as stand, if not higher, at least 
 on the same level in intellect and skill. How many, 
 oh, how many, of us are trying to imitate our 
 great teachers: Christ, Buddha, Confucius! Only 
 in vain! I wish it were possible for us Japanese to 
 imitate other nations in their greatness. Then we 
 would not have failed to profit by the privilege of 
 culling beauties and sublimities from all sorts of flowers 
 that adorn the several gardens of thought and feeling 
 of the variegated world, most of all from those which 
 are now seen in full blossom in the European and the 
 
46 LIFE AND THOUGHT OF JAPAN 
 
 American beds of genius culture. As it is, however, 
 there is no other means of an approach to a higher 
 and nobler state of mind but that of the tedious trudg- 
 ing along the wearisome road of natural evolution. 
 If we have succeeded in adopting and assimilating, 
 rather quickly, some of the results of the Western 
 civilization, which had cost you many centuries of 
 painful labour, it is because we had also been seriously, 
 though silently, engaged in fostering the germs within 
 the closed doors of political seclusion, for hundreds of 
 years of equally painful investigation. The germs, for 
 example, of such studies as philosophy, history, law, 
 literature, music, calligraphy, mathematics, had first 
 been regularly taught in our university established 
 as early as the eighth century at the then capital, 
 Nara. Many of these studies, with some more recent 
 additions, have received further encouragement, since 
 the sixteenth century, when we came into contact with 
 the Western form of civilization. So, when at last 
 the day came for us to awake from our apparent 
 slumber with a violent shake, fifty years ago, our 
 mental soil was found well ploughed for the favourable 
 reception of any intellectual seeds Zephyrus might 
 bring on his comprehensive wings. Yes, any intel- 
 lectual seeds, but the case was quite otherwise with 
 the emotional seeds. The products of your mind have 
 readily found their way, because the methods of its 
 activity have had their parallel in those of ours. Not 
 so with the methods of the activity of our heart, pro- 
 ducing, as the natural outcome of, and consequent on, 
 the vital difference, a wide gap, a deep-seated sense 
 of alienation between the two mentalities which are 
 
THE UNDYING SPIRIT OF OLD JAPAN 47 
 
 in other respects so wonderfully similar to each 
 other. 
 
 Your frame of mind made it necessary for you early 
 to quit the patriarchal system of society and take 
 up individualism in its stead, while we, on the con- 
 trary, still remain faithful to the older form of social 
 organization, and find in families a more congenial 
 basis of our nationality. With us it is not " in- 
 dividuals before family," as is the case with you, but 
 " family before individuals "; a man is not so and so 
 by himself, but is a member of such and such a family. 
 The centre of the family is of course the legitimate 
 master of the family, the father in most cases. And 
 so the relative importance one assumes in a family 
 is settled in strict accordance with the degree of near- 
 ness to the centre. When, for example, a father, 
 hitherto in full power, abdicates in his son's favour, 
 and becomes what we call " a dweller in retirement," 
 inkyo, then it is the son who is the master in the neigh- 
 bours' eyes, and if the father and his wife still continue, 
 after the shifting of power, to be invested with any 
 amount of authority, it is because they stand in the 
 parental relation and receive their due of reverence 
 from the master, whose most agreeable duty it is to 
 make the comfort of his aged parents the object of his 
 constant care. 
 
 Now, a family may often form a member of a 
 greater " house," and in that case the principal family 
 that represents the trunk in a genealogical tree is, 
 as a matter of course, looked upon as the most im- 
 portant element of the whole ramification. Some of 
 these houses again actually claim their descent from 
 
48 LIFE AND THOUGHT OF JAPAN 
 
 the imperial family, while others stand to it in a 
 relation of a much less pretentious character. 
 
 At all events the imperial family stands in exactly 
 the same relation towards the different gradations of 
 families and houses of its subjects as these families 
 and houses, in their turn, stand towards their in- 
 dividual members. The imperial house is the main 
 stock of the lesser families into which the Japanese 
 have branched off in the course of time; it is our 
 " Head House," the " Great House,' Oyake, as 
 our ancestors called the imperial family. It thus 
 forms the sole focus of Japanese society whither all 
 the lesser families, great and small, old and new, unani- 
 mously send their several tributes of rays, to bum in 
 the common cause of loyalty and patriotism. True, 
 there were rebellious chiefs who opposed the conquer- 
 ing army of the first Emperor. But they soon learned 
 to feel the irresistible force of the persuasive belief in 
 his supernatural origin, which made them think it 
 wise to surrender themselves to the descendant of the 
 Sun-Goddess. And as to those swarms of immigra- 
 tion from China and Korea, who crossed the sea at 
 various periods in the early days of Japanese history, 
 it did not take many generations before they came to 
 adopt the views of the people with whom it was their 
 interest in every way to get mixed, and thus they 
 lost their own identity. In this manner, notwith- 
 standing an extensive admixture of foreign elements 
 to our original stock, we find ourselves as closely unified 
 a nation as if we had been perfectly homogeneous 
 from the very beginning. One and the same blood is 
 felt to run through our veins, characterized by one and 
 

THE UNDYING SPIRIT OF OLD JAPAN 49 
 
 the same set of religious and moral ideas. This may 
 perhaps be due to the fact that the three elements — 
 the conquering, the conquered, and the immigrating — 
 belonged originally to the same Mongolian race, with 
 very little trace of any mingling of Ainu and Malayan 
 blood. 
 
 Anyhow, there exists a strong feeling prevalent 
 among us that we have all sprung from one and the 
 same stem, that we all belong to the same family, with 
 common ancestors, that we are closely related to one 
 another in blood, and that we, even the humblest of 
 us, owe our origin to the same divine agency as the 
 Emperors, who are, so to say, our " seniors " and 
 *' elders " in the most exalted sense of the words. It 
 is this sense of a blood-relationship that exists among 
 us all — personages of noble descent as well as common 
 individuals from among the populace — that makes us 
 feel a peculiarly warm feeling towards the " Head 
 House " — a feeling which is the outcome of a long- 
 nurtured sense of gratitude and reverence which the 
 protected entertain towards the protector, under 
 whose paternal care they have for centuries enjoyed 
 much happiness and safety. But why only the sense 
 of gratitude and reverence? Might not the people 
 also entertain some other feelings, rather detrimental 
 to the interests of the imperial household? It is not 
 possible, even in the Land of the Rising Sun, that all 
 its Emperors should have been wise and generous 
 without a single exception. Yes; Japan has not 
 been entirely free from bad or weak-minded sovereigns; 
 but then the Emperors early ceased to come into direct 
 contact with the bulk of their people, their rule having 
 P 
 
50 LIFE AND THOUGHT OF JAPAN 
 
 mostly been carried on through the poHtical agency 
 known under various names, among others the Shogun, 
 who was held responsible for any mismanagement 
 in the government. And so, in the people's mind, 
 Emperors have remained as blameless for it as is the 
 sun for the temporary darkness caused by a passing 
 black cloud, behind which it is always felt to shine as 
 brightly as ever. Nay, the barriers, the distance that 
 lay between the true sovereign and the people, had only 
 helped to augment our respectful love towards the 
 object of our heart's adoration, until at last, forty- 
 five years ago, the veil was thrown off for ever, and 
 the Emperor came to take the rule for himself again, 
 when the last of the Tokugawa Shoguns resigned his 
 vicarious rule, and with it all the administrative 
 powers entrusted to him. It is this unique relation 
 between the imperial house and the people — a relation 
 not simply between the present Emperor and his 
 present subjects, but one which has existed for two 
 thousand years and more — that lends to all the im- 
 perial words a sweetness and dearness which renders 
 their acceptance a matter of most agreeable duty to 
 us. It is this unique relation, I say again, that makes 
 us instinctively feel the holiness and wisdom of the 
 imperial words whenever we listen to an outflow of 
 them. Every syllable, nay, every sound, appeals to 
 our heart and finds ready response there. 
 
 Besides these peculiar conditions which render 
 the relation between the sovereigns and their subjects 
 extremely harmonious in Japan, there is another fact 
 which tends to make the tie still more natural and in- 
 violable. From time immemorial our imperial and 
 
THE UNDYING SPIRIT OF OLD JAPAN 51 
 
 other progenitors had been tightly bound together by 
 a cult which is now known under the name of Shinto. 
 Now, Shinto means, literally translated, the " Way 
 of the Gods." " It is, in fine," as Mr Aston says, 
 " essentially a religion of gratitude and love. The 
 great gods, such as the Sun-Goddess and the Deity 
 of Food, are beneficent beings." They are addressed 
 as parents, or dear divine ancestors, and their festivals 
 have a joyous character, so much so that at the festival 
 of Nifu Myojin, in Kii, when the procession bearing 
 offerings arrives before the shrine, the village chief 
 calls out in a loud voice, " According to our annual 
 custom, let us laugh," to which a hearty response is 
 given. 
 
 Along with this process of personification by which 
 natural agents, like the sun and food, are turned into 
 objects of worship, there is another force that makes 
 gods out of our fellow-creatures. That is the process 
 of the deification of men. " Who could ever set a 
 limit to the honour which is due to such great men 
 as Shakespeare, Confucius, Buddha, Mahomet (and 
 pardon me for adding Christ)? Nor are they dead. 
 They live in their works, and subsequently in the 
 hearts and minds of their countrymen." 
 
 By means of these two processes of personification 
 and deification, which are still very active among us, 
 we continue to this very day to endow natural powers 
 and great men with divine qualities. They are not 
 all of them our ancestors in the strict sense of the word; 
 so the Shinto is not exactly a form of ancestor-worship. 
 It is such only in this sense, that we regard our 
 " Superiors," our " Elders," the Unknown, the Beauti- 
 
52 LIFE AND THOUGHT OF JAPAN 
 
 ful, the Sublime, nay, every form of superiority in 
 animate and inanimate nature, as our Ante-cessors, or 
 those who have taken more steps, and consequently 
 are more advanced than we are. In short, ours 
 is, in contradistinction to the Chinese ancestor- 
 worship, a worship of the " Higher," or Kami as we 
 \ ' ; call it, and it resembles the Chinese cult very closely 
 V only in this, that the Japanese and the Chinese alike 
 feel the blessed presence of the objects of their worship 
 surrounding day and night our earthly existence, and 
 keeping vigilant eyes on the well-being of those who 
 are under their guardianship. We offer them prayers 
 and words of thanks. We dedicate to them offerings 
 in kind, for they are to us both anthropomorphic, 
 and anthropopsychic, and seem pleased with the 
 earthly care we take of them. These offerings and 
 addresses to a deity are generally carried on at a 
 temple where some symbols of the spiritual presence 
 are to be found. At the present day there are in Japan 
 nearly two hundred thousand such places of worship, 
 besides the so-called " God's shelf," or domestic 
 shrine, which almost every house has for the worship 
 of one or more Kami whom the family has special 
 reason for honouring. 
 
 Thus we feel the constant presence of our guardian 
 spirits, who seem to us to stand altogether too near us 
 to be deemed any way outside of our family circles. 
 Just as you sometimes tell your thoughts to your 
 elders and ask their advice when they are with you, 
 so we do the same even when they are not visibly 
 with us, but nevertheless are with us in a changed 
 form. Hence our addresses made over our altars to 
 
THE UNDYING SPIRIT OF OLD JAPAN 53 
 
 the spirits of our Kami, This practice of speaking to 
 the spirits is, as you know, not confined to the Japanese. 
 It is also prevalent, for example, among the Chinese, 
 and is mentioned in the earliest records of the Middle 
 Kingdom. When, for instance, Chau-Kung inter- 
 cedes for the life of his brother King Woo, who lived 
 about 1 120 B.C., he addresses the spirits of his father, 
 grandfather, and great-grandfather, and advances as 
 a reason why his own life should be taken rather 
 than that of the king, that he possesses the qualities 
 which fit him more especially to wait on the spirits. 
 And there is a poem in the Shih-King, a collection 
 of ancient Chinese songs compiled about 500 B.C., 
 in which an aged Marquis of Wei admonishes himself 
 to a virtuous and intelligent course. It runs thus in 
 Dr Legge's translation: — 
 
 " When mingling with superior men, 
 In friendly intercourse, oh ! then 
 How mild your face ! What harmony ! 
 All wrong and error, how you flee ! 
 When in your chamber, 'neath its light, 
 Your conscience keep as pure and bright, 
 Say not, ' No one can see me here ; 
 The place is secret.' Be in fear. 
 The spirits come, but when and where 
 No one beforehand can declare ; 
 The more should we not spirits slight, 
 But ever feel as in their sight." 
 
 That this practice is also in vogue in Japan, to this 
 day, can best be seen from the fact that it forms the 
 most conspicuous part of the Emperor's performance 
 on all occasions of any importance. Let me quote 
 the opening and the closing paragraphs of the " Im- 
 perial Oath " which the late Emperor swore in state 
 
54 LIFE AND THOUGHT OF JAPAN 
 
 at the Imperial Palace on the nth of February 1889 
 at the drawing up of our Imperial Constitution. 
 
 " We, the Successor to the prosperous Throne of 
 Our Predecessors, do humbly and solemnly swear to 
 the Imperial Founder of Our House and to Our Im- 
 perial Ancestors that, in pursuance of a great policy 
 co-extensive with the heavens and with the earth, 
 We shall maintain and secure from decline the Ancient 
 form of government." 
 
 Here follow the reasons for the new step taken in 
 our legislature, and then comes the concluding para- 
 graph, which is: — 
 
 " We now reverently make Our prayer to Them 
 and to Our Illustrious Father, and implore the help 
 of their Sacred Spirits, and make to Them solemn 
 oath never at this time nor in the future to fail to be 
 an example to Our subjects in the observance of the 
 Laws hereby established. 
 
 " May the Heavenly Spirits witness this Our 
 solemn Oath." 
 
 The relation here displayed between the living and 
 the departed may be considered as a characteristic 
 of the Mongolian race to which both the Japanese and 
 the Chinese belong. It is, so to say, the substratum 
 of our religious nature, a substructure on which other 
 mental buildings have been superadded. Taoism 
 and Confucianism are such additions in the case of 
 the Chinese, while with us, besides these two doctrines, 
 
THE UNDYING SPIRIT OF OLD JAPAN 55 
 
 Buddhism has succeeded in building up a magnificent 
 edifice on the same basis. Indeed, the fact that these 
 forms of belief have taken root with any firmness in 
 our mental soil, points clearly to the common element 
 which they all possess of that faith in the omnipresence 
 of spirits, or Shinto as we call it. Thus a very curious 
 thing has come about: while the Shinto, with its 
 simple organization, has found it rather difficult to 
 hold its own against an encroaching foreign cult such 
 as Buddhism, which is in every way its superior so 
 far as systematic construction is concerned, it is 
 Buddhism that has really been conquered, although 
 apparently the Indian faith looks like the vanquisher. 
 For it is chiefly as a doctrine concerning the Present, 
 and not as one based on the belief in a future life, that 
 Buddhism has secured its admittance into the average 
 Japanese mind. You will see from what I have said 
 how difficult it is for Christianity to be truly under- 
 stood by the so-called believers among the Japanese 
 people. The Christian theology and Christian moral 
 system can hardly hope to meet with any better result 
 than other moral and religious doctrines in the work 
 of conversion. Its theories and forms can be taught 
 so as to be accepted and practised by the Japanese, 
 but whether it can ever succeed in touching our heart 
 of hearts, and make us care no more for the spirits of 
 our forefathers hovering in the air, is a question which 
 seems not likely to be answered in the affirmative, so 
 long at least as the present state of things continues 
 to prevail. For in our belief in those spirits there are 
 found all the germs necessary for the production of 
 a true Japanese subject, at once loyal, patriotic, and 
 
56 Life and thought oi^ japan 
 
 filially dutiful — and what subject is for his country 
 more precious than such a one? — loyal, patriotic, 
 and filially dutiful at the same time, because, by being 
 worthy of any one of these noble epithets, he cannot 
 help, from the nature of things, being worthy of the 
 other two ! 
 
IV 
 
 CHINESE CIVILIZATION AND JAPAN 
 
 References to Confucianism and Buddhism have 
 so often been made in the preceding chapters that I 
 feel justified in taking them as a subject for fuller con- 
 sideration, and in calling your attention to some of 
 the more important features of these Oriental systems 
 of ethical and moral teaching, as landmarks that 
 may be of some help for your deeper study of them 
 in the future. Buddhism may be considered by some 
 rather out of place here, because it is essentially an 
 Indian religion. But since it is through China and in 
 Chinese vesture that the Doctrine of Buddha has 
 been taught in Japan, I think it can with propriety 
 be treated as part of the present subject. 
 
 Confucianism, to begin with, is a name given to 
 an aggregate of ethical ideas considered in their ap- 
 plication to the conduct and duties of human life. 
 The doctrine derives its appellation from a wise man 
 usually called in a respectful way K'ung-foo-tsze, or 
 Kung the Honourable, who lived from 551 to 478 
 before Christ. Although his teachings have been 
 developed into a very intricate system of philosophy, 
 not unlike your Neoplatonism, at the hands of his 
 votaries in the Sung dynasty (eleventh century), 
 the great teacher himself never evinced any indul- 
 
 57 
 
58 LIFE AND THOUGHT OF JAPAN 
 
 gence in purely metaphysical ideas, much less in dia- 
 lectic feats. He was content to call himself " a trans- 
 mitter and not a maker, beHeving in and loving the 
 old." 
 
 In short, Confucianism in its original and simple 
 form is a doctrine which aims principally at the 
 harmonious strengthening of the so-called three Prin- 
 ciples of human relationship, viz., that of the lord and 
 retainer, that of the father and child, and that of the 
 husband and wife. Of these forms of relationship, 
 the one which was made the subject of special solici- 
 tude by K'ung-foo-tsze is that existing between a 
 father and his child. So much so that there is a book 
 called the Hsiao King, or the Classic of Filial Piety, 
 for the proper teaching on this point. This " classic *' 
 reached Japan very early, and already in the eighth 
 century it found its way into every Japanese household 
 by means of an imperial edict. This fact, which 
 means an early ingrafting of the principle enunciated 
 therein in the simple minds of our forefathers, may 
 serve as an excuse for me to dwell here at some length 
 on the nature of the book in question. The Hsiao 
 King, which is supposed to record a dialogue between 
 Confucius and his disciple Tsang-Ts'an on that weighty 
 subject, begins with these words: — 
 
 " Confucius was once sitting at leisure with his 
 disciple Tsang-Ts'an waiting on him. The master 
 said, * Ts'an, the wise kings of the olden times had an 
 important principle of consummate virtue. There- 
 with they conducted their governments and thereby 
 were the people made so harmonious that all, without 
 
PRINCE SHOTOKU, 
 
CHINESE CIVILIZATION AND JAPAN 59 
 
 distinction of class and rank, lived a life of perfect 
 contentment. Dost thou know what that may be? * 
 " Thereupon the disciple left his chair in reverence 
 and replied: ' I am an ignorant man, my most revered 
 master. How could I know what it may be? ' The 
 master said: * Filial piety is the root of virtue, from 
 which all teachings should spring. Take thy seat 
 again and I will tell thee about it. We receive our 
 bodies, hair, skin and all from our parents. If we 
 keep them unhurt, know that there begins our filial 
 piety. If we get on well in the world, practise what 
 we think righteous, commit deeds that should make 
 our names honoured by posterity, and in that way 
 bring fame on our elders, know that there ends our 
 filial piety. So this virtue is seen to begin with wait- 
 ing upon one's own parents, to be at its height in 
 serving one's lord, and to come to an end with one's 
 gaining reputation in the world.' " 
 
 In the succeeding five chapters Confucius shows 
 how filial piety is to be understood by different kinds 
 of people in accordance with their respective stations 
 in life, describing and allotting a special form of it for 
 an emperor, a feudal lord, a feudal vassal, an ordinary 
 gentleman, and lastly a commoner. 
 
 The position filial piety occupies in the Confucian 
 doctrine is a very exalted one. It is regarded as the 
 foundation of all human doings. It forms the very 
 central duty from which all the other human duties 
 take their rise and meaning. Merciful rule, loyalty, 
 fraternal and matrimonial love, benevolence and other 
 desirable qualities, all derive their being from the 
 
6o LIFE AND THOUGHT OF JAPAN 
 
 same fountain-head. Indeed, it is the " root of all 
 good deeds/' the hinge on which all the mechanism 
 of social organization turns. But that the fiHal piety 
 so strongly recommended by Confucius is not to be 
 understood in the light of mere servile obedience on 
 the son's part to the parent's will, no matter how 
 unreasonable, may well be gathered from the fol- 
 lowing words of the great Master found in the same 
 book: — 
 
 " If there are retainers (seven for a king, five for a 
 feudal lord, and three for a vassal respectively), who 
 will be ready to protest against a misdeed on the part 
 of their several lords, the former will be sure to rescue 
 the latter from losing their possessions. If a gentle- 
 man has a candid friend he will not lose his good name. 
 If a father has a candid son he will not be guilty of 
 any improper action. Therefore, when a son sees his 
 father in the commission of an improper action, he 
 should protest against his father, just as a retainer 
 should protest against the misdeed of his lord. How 
 could mere submission to the father's will be called 
 filial piety? " 
 
 Filial piety forms the very pivot upon which all 
 the other forms of human relationship turn. Not only 
 are the relations between the lord and the retainer, 
 and that existing between the husband and the wife, 
 regulated in accordance with the general tone of 
 harmonious intercourse between the father and the 
 son; but also such relations as those existing between 
 the senior and the junior, and the elder-born and the 
 
CHINESE CIVILIZATION AND JAPAN 6i 
 
 younger-born, are also settled with reference to the 
 same principal idea of natural filial reverence. 
 
 Besides filial piety, which is the virtue par excellence 
 of the Eastern world, other mental qualities which are 
 looked upon as cardinal virtues in Confucianism are: 
 mercy, justice, politeness, wisdom, and faithfulness. 
 
 Now if you remember the peculiar kind of relation 
 which had subsisted between the imperial household 
 and the people before the introduction of the Chinese 
 learning, it will be, I trust, no difficult thing to see how 
 cordially the Confucian doctrine was received by our 
 forefathers, who found in the learned words of the 
 Chinese teacher nothing but welcome expressions of 
 the tender yearnings of their simple but determined 
 devotion towards their lords and elders. Besides, the 
 close similarity, nay, one could almost say, identity 
 of the forms of worship, i.e., the worship of one's 
 ancestors, of natural powers and of national heroes, 
 smoothed the way for the Chinese moral system to 
 glide into our national life without meeting any re- 
 sistance. Indeed, we had had no system of ethical 
 views of our own to match the well-defined doctrine 
 with so many wise men and holy books to perpetuate 
 it. Ours were, on the contrary, mere simple teachings 
 of the devout heart which had as yet found no means 
 of being committed to writing. We can well imagine 
 how dazzling the effect of the newly-introduced learn- 
 ing was to the curious eyes of our wonder-stricken 
 forefathers, while their attention was at the same time 
 called to the material adjuncts of the continental 
 civilization. They became at once almost painfully 
 conscious of their own inferiority, and soon set them- 
 
62 LIFE AND THOUGHT OF JAPAN 
 
 selves to the task of learning what they could learn 
 from their highly-advanced neighbours, not only in the 
 form of books and culture, but also in all sorts of civic 
 arts and crafts. Indeed, had not the Chinese civiliza- 
 tion carried in her left hand arts and industry as learn- 
 ing was held in her right hand, Japan would not have 
 been so soon and so entirely charmed and become its 
 most devoted follower. During the years preceding 
 A.D. 248 mention is repeatedly made in our annals of 
 the tributes the Korean kings had sent to our court ; 
 among the rest we find even such items as embroiderers 
 and horses. It took, however, a long time before these 
 continental arts and sciences came to be acquired and 
 turned to account by the Japanese people. For a 
 considerable space of time they chiefly remained in the 
 hands of those naturalized foreigners who brought 
 them from over the seas, and pursued them as their 
 hereditary professions. And it was only after the 
 lapse of three hundred years, when Buddhism was 
 made known in our country, that the Chinese learning 
 really began to find its way among the people in general. 
 Buddhism did not reach us directly from its own 
 cradle — India; it came through Korea in the form of 
 Chinese translations of Buddhistic writings, so that a 
 considerable knowledge of the Chinese language and 
 literature, which were chiefly Confucian, was absolutely 
 necessary for the proper understanding of the Indian 
 religion. In this manner, strange as it may seem, the 
 study of Buddhism gave a fresh impulse to the further- 
 ance of the Confucian doctrine in Japan. The two 
 were not so very antagonistic, as might at first sight 
 be expected. The extremely secular character of the 
 
CHINESE CIVILIZATION AND JAPAN 63 
 
 latter, of which the moral code differed but little from 
 their own, proved rather helpful to the votaries of the 
 former, inasmuch as they could devote themselves with 
 more thoroughness to the spiritual side of the teachings 
 of their mighty Saviour. Our early Buddhists, there- 
 fore, did not see why they should try to suppress 
 the existing Confucian moral system in favour of 
 their own, only because it had not grown on Indian 
 soil. 
 
 Thus encouraged by the new influential advocates 
 of the teaching of Buddha, themselves admirers of 
 Chinese learning, Confucianism began with renewed 
 vigour to exercise a great influence on the future of the 
 Japanese. This took place during the seventh century, 
 when the reorganization of the Japanese government, 
 after the model of that of the Celestial Empire, made 
 our educational system quite Chinese. In the year 
 A.D. 604 Prince Shotoku, who represented a happy 
 amalgamation of the two doctrines, Confucianism and 
 Buddhism, issued the so-called Constitution in Seven- 
 teen Articles, which was a series of warnings, cautions 
 and instruction of various kinds which the Prince, as 
 the highest official, the regent of the Empress Suiko, 
 issued on behalf of all the officials under him. The 
 Constitution was deeply imbued with both Confucian 
 and Buddhistic ideas. Nor was the native Shinto cult 
 at all neglected on account of the adoption of the 
 foreign doctrines. This latter fact is proved by an 
 edict issued in the fifteenth year of the Empress Suiko 
 (A.D. 607), and as a consequence the same Prince 
 Shotoku — who was the greatest supporter of Buddhism 
 of his time — at the head of all other officials, went 
 
64 LIFE AND THOUGHT OF JAPAN 
 
 through the whole series of Shinto ceremonies, by 
 means of which the native deities were worshipped. 
 
 The three forms of cult, Shintoism, Confucianism 
 and Buddhism, went hand in hand, in one and the 
 same mind — a fact which proves how strong was the 
 hold of Shintoism on the minds of our forefathers, and 
 how the foreign doctrines were tolerated as far as they 
 suffered themselves to be the handmaids of the master 
 idea of the native religion. 
 
 So, notwithstanding the remarkable fact that the 
 Emperors and Empresses were found to be ready 
 converts to the Indian religion, soon after its introduc- 
 tion into Japan, they never entirely cast off their 
 original capacity as the highest priests of the native 
 cult. Nor were they followers of the Confucian 
 doctrine a step further than the system of Chinese 
 ethics coincided with the simple views indigenous to 
 their own religion. The different foreign systems of 
 religion and moral ideas were to them no more than so 
 many schools of metaphysical and ethical doctrines 
 to be studied and utilized for the strengthening and 
 the consolidation of the unwritten teachings of the 
 ** Way of the Gods," the Shinto, which, so to say, was 
 innate in their very beings. 
 
 This explains the apparent lack of unity in the 
 conduct of such a Mikado as the Empress Koken, who 
 reigned in the eighth century. Remaining in reality 
 faithful to the native cult, she proudly called herself a 
 " Humble Servant of the Three Treasures (viz., Buddha, 
 the Faith, and the Priesthood)," on the one hand; she 
 took care, on the other, as we have seen, to provide, 
 by means of an imperial edict, literally every house- 
 
CHINESE CIVILIZATION AND JAPAN 65 
 
 hold in Japan with a copy of the Classic of Filial Piety, 
 as the code of morals to be followed by every member 
 ^f each family. 
 
 In this way the Shinto soil of Japanese mentality 
 had been tilled and watered by Confucianism and 
 Buddhism for centuries, until at last it became fertile 
 enough to produce, among others, a series of moral 
 ideas, the aggregate of which, when applied to the 
 warrior class, is now known as Bushido, the Way of 
 the Samurai. That Bushido is an institution of no 
 modern date can easily be seen from those simple but 
 heartfelt expressions of the Japanese spirit preserved 
 in our earliest collection of poems called Mannyoshu, 
 which was compiled about 760 after Christ. Neither 
 are the general tenor and effervescence of its spirit a 
 monopoly of the warrior class alone. For the funda- 
 mental ethical ideas upon which Bushido is based are 
 nothing but those elements of morality which are 
 equally necessary to the civic and the military life — 
 integrity, fidelity, loyalty, broad-mindedness, gene- 
 rosity, patience, courage. 
 
 These qualities, although they existed and had been 
 assiduously fostered from the earliest time of our 
 national life, had failed to stand out conspicuously in 
 our mental history, until the beginning of the twelfth 
 century, when the gradual rise to real power of the 
 hitherto secondary warlike class naturally gave the 
 traditional civic code of morals much of the military 
 flavour. A simple act of virtue among soldiers was 
 now made doubly binding by an incantation of the war- 
 god Hachiman, and an oral reference to the equally 
 binding witness of the swords. 
 
 £ 
 
66 LIFE AND THOUGHT OF JAPAN 
 
 This spirit of Bushido, with loyalty as its principal 
 characteristic, has gradually extended itself among 
 people belonging to other classes of the Japanese com- 
 munity, and in the course of several centuries has 
 finally succeeded in forming a variety of it, which 
 might well be called " bourgeois chivalry." 
 
 Before passing on to the consideration of Buddhism 
 there is another Chinese doctrine which should not 
 remain unnoticed by any student of Oriental thought. 
 I mean Laoism,* or the philosophy originated by 
 Lao-tsze [h. 604 B.C.), one of the greatest thinkers that 
 China has ever produced. Since Laoism, through the 
 wonderful Tao-teh-king, a small book by Lao-tsze him- 
 self, but especially through Chwang-tsze, a work in ten 
 books by his famous follower Chwang-chow, has 
 exercised considerable influence on our thought for 
 twelve centuries, a word about it may not be out of 
 place before we proceed to consider the doctrine of 
 5akyamuni. 
 
 In Lao-tsze we find the perfect opposite of Con- 
 fucius, both in the bent of his mind and in his 
 views and methods of saving the world. Lao-tsze 
 endeavoured to reform humanity by warning them to 
 cast off all human artifice and to return to nature. 
 This may be taken as the whole tenor of his doctrine : 
 Do not try to do anything with your petty will, be- 
 cause it is the way to hinder and spoil the spontaneous 
 growth of the true virtue that permeates the universe. 
 To follow Nature's dictates, while helping it to develop 
 itself, is the very course sanctioned and followed by 
 
 * The section on Laoism is taken from my book, The Japanese Spirit, 
 by kind permission of the publishers, Messrs Constable & Co. 
 
CHINESE CIVILIZATION AND JAPAN 67 
 
 all the sages worthy of the name. Make away with 
 your " Ego " and learn to value simplicity and humility ; 
 for in total " altruism " exists the completion of self, 
 and in humble contentment and yielding pliancy are 
 to be found real grandeur and true strength. Under 
 the title " Dimming Radiance " he says: 
 
 '* Heaven endures and earth is lasting. And why 
 can heaven and earth endure and be lasting? Because 
 they do not live for themselves. On that account can 
 they endure. 
 
 " Therefore the True Man puts his person behind 
 and his person comes to the front. He surrenders his 
 person and his person is preserved. Is it not because 
 he seeks not his own ? For that reason he accomplishes 
 his own." 
 
 Again we hear him in his " Discourse on Virtue " : 
 
 " Superior virtue is non- virtue. Therefore it has 
 virtue. Inferior virtue never loses sight of virtue. 
 Therefore it has no virtue. Superior virtue is non- 
 assertive and without pretension. Inferior virtue 
 asserts and makes pretensions." 
 
 He talks about the " Return to Simplicity ": 
 
 *' Quit the so-called saintliness; leave the so- 
 called wisdom alone, and the people's gain will be 
 increased a hundredfold. 
 
 *' Abandon the so-called mercy; put away the so- 
 called righteousness, and the people will return to filial 
 devotion and paternal love. 
 
68 LIFE AND THOUGHT OF JAPAN 
 
 " Abandon your scheming; put away your devices, 
 and thieves and robbers will no longer exist." 
 
 Such is the general purport of the doctrine ex- 
 pounded by Lao-tsze. It is well to remember that this 
 doctrine, which we may call for distinction's sake 
 Laoism, has intrinsically very little to do with that 
 form of belief now so prevalent among the Chinese 
 which is known under the name of Taoism. Although 
 this name itself is derived from Lao-tsze's own word 
 Tao, meaning Reason or True Path, and although the 
 followers of Taoism see in the great philosopher its first 
 revealer, it is in all probability nothing more than a new 
 aspect and new appellation assumed by that aboriginal 
 Chinese cult which was based on nature-worship 
 and ancestor-worship. Ever since their appearance 
 in history the Chinese have had their belief in Shang- 
 ti, in spirits and in natural agencies. At an early date 
 this cult found the means of fresh development in the 
 mystic interpretation and solution of life as expressed 
 by Lao-tsze and his followers. The philosophical ideas 
 of these thinkers were not properly understood, and 
 words and phrases mostly metaphorical were con- 
 strued in such a manner that they came to mean 
 something quite different from what the original 
 writers wished to suggest. Such an idea, for instance, 
 as the deathlessness of a True Man by virtue of his 
 incorporation with the grand Truth Tao that pervades 
 Heaven and Earth, breathing in the eternity of the 
 universe, was easily misinterpreted in a very matter- 
 of-fact manner, e.g., anybody who realized Tao could 
 then enjoy the much-wished-for freedom from actual 
 
CHINESE CIVILIZATION AND JAPAN 69 
 
 death. You see how easy it is for an ordinary mind 
 to pass from one to the other when it hears Chwang- 
 tsze say: 
 
 " Fire cannot burn him who is perfect in virtue, nor 
 water drown him; neither cold nor heat can affect him 
 injuriously; neither bird nor beast can hurt him." 
 
 Or again : 
 
 " Though heaven and earth were to be overturned 
 and fall, they would occasion him no loss. His judg- 
 ment is fixed on that in which there is no element of 
 falsehood, and while other things change he changes 
 not." 
 
 It requires no great flight of imagination, therefore, 
 to follow the traces of development of the present form 
 of Taoism with its occult aspects. The eternity attri- 
 buted to a True Man in its Laoist sense begot the idea 
 of a deathless man in flesh and blood endowed with all 
 kinds of supernatural powers. This in turn produced 
 the notion that these superhuman beings knew some 
 secret means of preserving their life and could work 
 other wonders. Herbalism, alchemy, geomancy and 
 other magic arts owe their origin to this fountain-head 
 of primitive superstition. 
 
 There is little room for reasonable doubt that in 
 this way Taoism, although the name itself was of later 
 development, has been in its main features the religion 
 of China par excellence from the very dawn of its 
 history. It has from the beginning found a congenial 
 soil in the heart of the Chinese people,who still continue 
 to embrace the cult with great enthusiasm, and in 
 
70 LIFE AND THOUGHT OF JAPAN 
 
 whose helpless credulity the Taoist priests of to-day, 
 borrowing much help from the occult sides of Bud- 
 dhism and Hinduism, still find an easy prey for their 
 necromantic arts. 
 
 Not so with Laoism. One may well wonder how such 
 an uncongenial doctrine ever came to spring from the 
 soil of materialistic China. Some suggest that Lao-tsze 
 was a Brahman and not a Chinese at all. Another 
 explanation of this anomaly is to be found in the 
 attempted division of the whole Chinese civilization 
 into two geographically distinct groups, the rigid 
 Northern and the more romantic Southern types; 
 Laoism belonging to the latter, while Confucianism 
 belongs to the former. 
 
 The Confucian doctrine, it is true, was assimilated 
 in our mind without causing any repugnance whatever; 
 it was taken in and followed by us in toto from the very 
 beginning of its introduction in Japan. It was so, 
 however, because both Confucianism and Shintoism 
 are based on the same fundamental ideas of nature- 
 worship and hero-worship. Both may be said to be 
 expressions of the same yearning of the Chinese 
 and the Japanese soul. 
 
 The case was rather different with Buddhism. 
 Though not without some parallels in its attitude 
 toward the spirits of the deceased while they are in 
 purgatory, the whole system differs from the Chinese 
 and the Japanese cults in its very essence. While the 
 former, as well as Christianity, believe in one or more 
 personal gods, Buddhism does nothing of the sort, 
 substituting Dharma, or the Law of the Universe, for 
 any anthropomorphic ruler of the whole Cosmos. 
 
CHINESE CIVILIZATION AND JAPAN 71 
 
 This assertion may seem very strange, since Bud- 
 dhism is often looked upon as the most degrading 
 form of idolatry, because it is quite inseparably con- 
 nected with all kinds of images in metal, wood, or other 
 tangible material, to which incense and flowers are 
 ministered by the bowing worshippers. These idols 
 are, however, nothing but the symbolic representations 
 of those physical powers and moral qualities which are 
 found both in animate and inanimate nature, for the 
 better teaching of the weaker minds. The whole 
 pantheon, from the gentle-faced Dainichi (Vairucand) 
 to the fearful-looking Fudo (Acalya) , are all visualized 
 properties the world or our flesh is heir to, singled out 
 and exaggerated for a better study of the qualities thus 
 materialized. Suppose you were to represent all the 
 different human characteristics so deftly portrayed in 
 Bunyan's immortal work in some visible form, and 
 give each an appropriate niche in a chapel, so that the 
 lookers-on might get a keener impression of the ab- 
 stract qualities dealt with, you could then form an 
 approximate idea of the original meaning of Buddhist 
 images. 
 
 As to Buddha, he is, in the original sense of the 
 doctrine, only a teacher whose mission it is to attain a 
 perfect understanding of the true Law of the Universe 
 for himself, and then to preach it for the sake of those 
 poor mortals who are still groping in the hopeless night 
 of ignorance. The Indian Prince, Gautama, is called 
 one, because he attained Buddhaship by virtue of his 
 enormous exertion and toil, in his present and former 
 lives, and the subsequent enlightenment. He forms 
 only one link in the endless chain of such teachers, 
 
72 LIFE AND THOUGHT OF JAPAN 
 
 who are as numerous as " the grains of sand on the 
 Ganges' breezy shore/' If he and his disciples are 
 deified and worshipped, it is their several virtues that 
 are set up as objects of adoration, and not the mortal 
 pieces of clay. But as this sort of view is too abstract 
 for the understanding of the masses, the original 
 atheistic teachings of Buddha have gradually dwindled 
 into a theistic doctrine — ^not merely monotheistic, but 
 the polytheistic doctrine of to-day. Hence the distinc- 
 tion of the " Higher " and the " Lower " Buddhism. 
 
 Besides these two forms there is also the other dis- 
 tinction of the original or " Lesser " Buddhism and its 
 later development, the ** Greater " Buddhism. Both 
 attribute human and other aberrations from the proper 
 path of things and their necessary consequence, 
 universal misery, to ignorance of the true Law — an 
 almost incurable ignorance caused by blindness which 
 is avarice. Thus at the very fountain-head of our 
 boundless sea of misery stands the arch-fiend, Self. 
 It is this detestable Self that, daily and hourly, urges 
 us to numberless foolish attempts at the attainment 
 of our own petty objects which, if not altogether 
 egoistic, are sure to be egotistic — ^for, even apparently 
 the most merciful of our doings are at best founded 
 almost exclusively on some narrow philanthropic 
 basis — love of mankind, as distinguished from the 
 wider and nobler love of the whole creation, love of 
 nature in all its different expressions. Hence the 
 Doctrine of the Abnegation of Self, and of eternal 
 freedom from the ever-rotating Wheel of Fate, whose 
 motive power is Lust. The Htnayana, or " Lesser " 
 Buddhism, offers us this Freedom and promises the 
 
CHINESE CIVILIZATION AND JAPAN 73 
 
 subsequent Rest at the cost of a total annihilation of 
 our physical and mental beings, in the present as well 
 as in the future. The propounders of the Mahayana, 
 or " Greater " Buddhism, however, think this pessi- 
 mistic view as crude as it is unwholesome, for it is, ac- 
 cording to their theory, not at all necessary to look with 
 a shudder upon our own daily existence and try to get 
 rid of it, as if it were not itself a part of the grand and 
 adamantine Wheel of Causation of Karma. Why not 
 reach the desired freedom from Lust and be saved just 
 as and where we are, by means of a firm belief in the 
 True Law, and a persistent attempt to reach the final 
 enlightenment, through the long series of existences in 
 this world and those that are to follow? The Nirvana 
 or the total annihilation of Self was thus made possible 
 to us in the flesh, although the final enlightenment is, 
 generally speaking, only reached after a long chain of 
 lives, after a severe training and all forms of ordeals . A 
 compromise between the ascetic and secular interpre- 
 tation of the world was thus achieved, and Buddhism 
 has begun to assume a more optimistic character. 
 
 Thus you see that in Buddhism it is the Nirvana, 
 the total Annihilation of Self in behalf of Universal // 
 Love, that is aimed at. And although there is a differ- 
 ence of interpretation as to the nature of the Nirv^wa 
 among the followers of the Hinayana and the Mahsl- 
 yana forms of Buddhism, they are one in this that they 
 all honour the three Treasures, i.e., first, Buddha, or 
 the most enlightened Teacher; secondly, the Dharma, 
 or the True Law he taught us ; and thirdly, the Samgha, 
 or the priests who know best how to serve the Teacher 
 and the True Law. 
 
74 LIFE AND THOUGHT OF JAPAN 
 
 Now, the form of Buddhism that was first brought 
 over to Japan from the Asiatic continent belonged, as 
 did all the subsequent forms, to the " Greater " inter- 
 pretation. Although nothing certain can be ascer- 
 tained as to the exact date of its introduction in 
 my country as a whole, the Japanese court is 
 recorded to have been formally initiated in the 
 thirteenth year of the Mikado Kimmei, in AfD. 552, 
 through the agency of the King of Hyakusai, one of 
 the three Korean states into which the Peninsula was 
 then divided. The Korean king sent as a part of his 
 tribute to the imperial household a golden image of 
 Buddha and some scrolls of the sutras in Chinese trans- 
 lation. The Mikado inclined to the acceptance of the 
 new religion; but the majority of his council, the con- 
 servative Shintoists, persuaded him to reject the image 
 from his court. 
 
 The golden Buddha was accordingly conferred 
 upon one of his court nobles, Soga-no-Iname, who 
 from political as well as religious motives turned his 
 country house into the first Buddhist temple that ever 
 existed on Japanese soil. The pestilence which broke 
 out soon after was attributed by the partisans of the 
 native cult to the foreign innovation. They were largely 
 actuated by envy and enmity against the ascendancy 
 of the Soga family at that time. The accusation 
 proved effective; the temple was razed to the ground, 
 but such dire calamities followed on this act of sacri- 
 lege that it was soon allowed to be rebuilt. 
 
 Buddhist monks and nuns were then invited from 
 Korea in succession and came in large numbers. Prince 
 Shotoku, who was the regent under the Empress Suiko 
 
CHINESE CIVILIZATION AND JAPAN 75 
 
 from A.D. 593 to 621, was greatly instrumental in the 
 propagation of the new religion, himself lecturing and 
 writing commentaries on some of the most sacred books 
 of Buddhism. From his time forward the Indian re- 
 ligion became established as the predominant form of 
 belief in the land, though Shinto was never entirely 
 suppressed ; nay, as we saw in the preceding chapters, 
 Shinto has in reality never ceased to supply us with the 
 real sap of our spiritual existence as a nation. 
 
 One sect after another had been brought over from 
 the Continent until, at the end of the Nara period in 
 the eighth century after Christ, there were six different 
 denominations of Buddhism represented in Japan. 
 But as yet they were not able to influence us much, 
 since they were chiefly welcomed in the upper classes 
 of Japanese society as importers of the material ad- 
 juncts of the continental Asiatic civilization. We 
 owe many of the pregnant seeds of industry and fine 
 arts to the Chinese ministers of Buddhistic doctrine 
 who came over to preach it among us. Many Japanese 
 students were also gathering honey on the Chinese soil 
 to supply their countrymen with the newly-awakened 
 necessaries of body and mind. Thus Buddhism, in 
 conjunction with Confucianism, whose secular char- 
 acter made the co-operation of the two possible, early 
 began to exercise a strongly beneficial influence on the 
 as yet simple social organism of Japan at that time. 
 
 Owing to their influence, general education, the 
 care of the poor and the sick, the study of medicine, 
 the importation and cultivation of useful arts were 
 effectively established. Yet the Indian doctrine 
 made little way outside the upper circles. To the 
 
76 LIFE AND THOUGHT OF JAPAN 
 
 wondering masses it was only something gorgeous and 
 strange, with glittering edifices and imposing images, 
 a reverential approach to which seemed to them not 
 unlikely to incur the disfavour of the native gods, as 
 many avowed that it really did. For the better 
 assimilation and the final incorporation of Buddhism 
 with the Shinto ideas, we were to wait till the beginning 
 of the next century, in the new capital, Kyoto, in 
 Yamashiro. 
 
 In A.D. 804 two highly-gifted Japanese priests, 
 Saicho and Kukai, went over to China to complete 
 their studies in the Buddhist doctrine. The former 
 returned after a year's stay and established the Tendai 
 sect on Mount Hiei near Kyoto, while the latter stayed 
 a few more years, and on his return transplanted the 
 Shingon sect to Mount Koya, in Kii province. These 
 two sects found their most devoted patrons in the 
 Mikado and the Fujiwara family, in whose hands the 
 real power of government remained for the three 
 succeeding centuries. 
 
 During the long period of general calm the native 
 Japanese spirit had ample occasion to find its expres- 
 sion, chiefly through the medium of the works of art 
 and industry then brought to existence by a happy 
 amalgamation of native and continental ideas. The 
 rise and gradual extension of the native syllabic script, 
 formed out of the Chinese ideographs which were 
 hitherto exclusively in use, did a great deal to propa- 
 gate knowledge among the masses. Buddhism, too, 
 was made accessible and no longer repugnant to any 
 member of Japanese society by the diplomatic coup 
 on the part of the Buddhist priesthood who received 
 
CHINESE CIVILIZATION AND JAPAN 77 
 
 the native Shinto gods in their pantheon as avatars of 
 ancient Buddhas. This clever device, which, along 
 with the invention of the native script, is generally 
 attributed to the ingenuity of Kukai, was very effective 
 in the quicker assimilation of Buddhism. It now be- 
 came almost inseparably mixed with Shintoism, so 
 much so that temples of the native gods throughout 
 the country were, until quite recently, served by 
 Buddhist priests. Only at court and a few Shinto 
 temples of great national importance, such as those of 
 Ise and Izumo, was a knowledge of the native cult in 
 its original simplicity maintained. Buddhism, it may 
 be said, has stolen our hearts from Shinto by this in- 
 genious scheme. Yes, to all appearance; but, in 
 reality, it has lost its real hold on our mind by its 
 own double-dealing, for the people to this day worship 
 more of their native gods through the symbolic repre- 
 sentations of the Indian religion than vice versa. 
 
BUDDHISM IN JAPAN 
 
 Have you ever heard the Japanese story about the 
 painter and his fools? A painter was once asked to 
 draw the figure of a man whom he would consider very 
 foolish. Thereupon he at once took up his brush and 
 drew an angler sitting leisurely on the bank of a not 
 very promising-looking stream, and vacantly gazing 
 at the still-standing float with no near prospect of a 
 nibble. The idea pleased the fancy of his applicant, 
 who was, however, still eccentric enough to ask the 
 painter whom the latter should deem still more foolish 
 than the one already depicted. Some strokes of the 
 brush followed, and lo! there appeared on the paper 
 the spectator standing behind with his burning 
 curiosity about somebody else's affairs. 
 
 This story is very interesting to me, not on account 
 of its utilitarian view of things, which is so amusingly 
 petty, but on account of its graphic representation of 
 our attitude as members of human society. Are we 
 not all of us foolish anglers most of our days with our 
 little rods and lines, trying to allure with some nasty 
 piece of bait a big fish just where it happens not to live? 
 Are we not glad when we get at long intervals a nibble, 
 and eventually a bite from a tiny minnow of know- 
 ledge or wealth? Are we not absorbed spectators of 
 somebody else's '* catches," with our never satisfied 
 
 79 
 
8o LIFE AND THOUGHT OF JAPAN 
 
 curiosity and ever burning thirst for novelties? Yes, 
 we are conceited anglers in the boundless pools of truth, 
 of happiness and what not, and the most curious 
 spectators too, patiently waiting for a jerk at our 
 neighbour's line, and neglecting our own affairs 
 through interest in those of other persons. 
 
 Vanity and curiosity may well be said to be the 
 aurora borealis of the dreary pole of human existence. 
 They beautify the otherwise prosaic human life with 
 sweet dreams and artistic illusions. They are the 
 yeast that leavens the human loaf in all its different 
 shapes and gives it, besides, its different tastes. It is 
 they that brought the eye of Copernicus to the tele- 
 scope, as they still do that of a servant-girl to the key- 
 hole. It is they that made the ancient miners dive 
 deep into the heart of the earth in quest of gold, as 
 they still make you dive into the recesses of your daily 
 papers for elopements, murders and such little en- 
 chantments. Happy are those who are not altogether 
 shorn of these qualities, the salt and pepper to season 
 the daily dishes of our earthly life! 
 
 If vanity and curiosity are in any way to be looked 
 upon as sources of happiness in this world, Japan has 
 every reason to be highly congratulated, for in both 
 her share is no small one. From the earliest dawn of 
 her authentic history in the hoary past to this very 
 day in the twentieth century, they have always formed 
 two of the most prominent features of our national 
 character. They have ever beckoned us to any form 
 of things that had greatness and newness as yet un- 
 known to us, and made us try to live up to an elevated 
 standard. They made us welcome the different forms 
 
THE GREAT BUDDHA OF KAMAKURA. 
 
BUDDHISM IN JAPAN 8i 
 
 of continental Asiatic civilization in the early days of 
 our history, just as they have made us repeat the same 
 process with Western culture during the last fifty 
 years. 
 
 In the last chapter I gave you an opportunity to 
 see these motive powers at work in our mind whenever 
 we find a new form of culture, nay, even a new phase 
 of an old form of it, drawing your attention at the same 
 time to an almost contradictory fact, that the Japanese 
 mind had, along with its burning curiosity, evinced 
 a strong faithfulness to its old self. First adoption 
 of foreign things, and then adaptation of them to its 
 own use, has been its method from the beginning to 
 the end. 
 
 We stopped just where we had been considering 
 this point with regard to the Tendai and the Shingon 
 sects that were introduced and established in Japan, 
 the former by Saicho and the latter by Kukai, in the 
 latter half of the ninth century after Christ. Let me 
 take up the thread where we left it, and pursue it for 
 a little distance before we arrive ultimately at the 
 consideration of the relation between Japan and the 
 West. 
 
 One of the symptoms in which the usual working 
 of the Japanese mind made itself manifest was, that 
 both of these predominant branches of Buddhism, the 
 Tendai and the Shingon sects, soon came to be looked 
 upon as a kind of necromantic system with weird 
 formulas more fit to cure physical derangements than 
 to furnish a spiritual consolation, thus turning the 
 Indian cult of the Future into the Japanese one of the 
 Present Life. Incantations and prayers for temporal 
 F 
 
82 LIFE AND THOUGHT OF JAPAN 
 
 purposes were almost the only regular business the 
 priesthood was seriously engaged in. The priests 
 eventually shared the general corruption of the Fuji- 
 wara family, who monopolized the power of the state for 
 nearly four hundred years (a.d. 670-1050), their sons 
 holding all the great posts of Government, while their 
 daughters were married to nominal occupants of the 
 throne. 
 
 The dream of luxury and refinement of the effemi- 
 nate potentates, however, was soon pitilessly to be 
 broken by the clatter of hoofs of the military chiefs, 
 more at home on a neighing war-horse than on an 
 embroidered seat. With the fall of the Fujiwara 
 family came also the marked degradation of the monk- 
 hood. The monasteries swarmed with followers of 
 Buddha, who could with more ease wield broadswords 
 and quarter-staves than the holy words of the great 
 master 5akyamuni. 
 
 They were for many centuries mostly barracks of 
 lawless bands of soldiers in scarfs and with shaved 
 heads, who poured from time to time down on the 
 valley of Kyoto for political purposes, to have the way- 
 ward will of the military abbots recognized by the 
 temporal power. Little wonder that their Buddhism 
 had long ceased to do much good to themselves or any- 
 body else. 
 
 The necessity for a new and better means of salva- 
 tion was keenly felt; and in answer to the urgent 
 yearning there arose three different sects in quick 
 succession, the Jodo (or "Pure Land") sect, the 
 Zen (or " Contemplation ") sect, and the Hokke (or 
 " Law-Flower ") sect. 
 
BUDDHISM IN JAPAN 83 
 
 Of these, the first, or "Pure Land" sect, was 
 founded by a Japanese priest called Genku in a.d. 1174. 
 This sect is very interesting to us in that it bears a 
 striking resemblance to Protestantism, because it 
 teaches the doctrine of justification by faith in Amida 
 (Amitabha) Buddha alone. According to this doctrine 
 this Buddha, whose abode is in the " Pure Land in the 
 West/' has done for us all that is necessary for the at- 
 tainment of Enlightenment. And the only thing left 
 for us to do is simply to rely upon the power of good 
 already achieved in our behalf by the merciful Saviour. 
 
 A sincere cry of " I rely on Amida (Namu Amida- 
 butsu !) '' is in itself sufficient to redeem one from any 
 atrocious form of sin. No need of exercising one's 
 own petty effort, but an implicit belief in the power of 
 the vicarious Redeemer, and you are saved! What 
 a sweet doctrine for lazy people to embrace, after so 
 much of mysticism and abuse on the part of the 
 votaries of the aristocratic sects of Buddhism. 
 
 The Jodo sect achieved a great advance in its 
 organization at the hands of a distinguished disciple of 
 Genku, named Shinran, who developed it, in a.d. 1224, 
 into a new sect, known as the Monto (or Ikko) sect. 
 Shinran set an example himself to show his convic- 
 tion that a priest could marry and lead an essentially 
 secular life, without prejudice to his belief and preach- 
 ing, nay, much more in harmony with it than the life 
 of a would-be anchorite. In his sect the idea of being 
 born again in the Pure Land of Amida Buddha has been 
 systematically worked up, for the sake of the general 
 masses with very limited mental power, into something 
 very similar to the Christian idea of Heaven. Be this 
 
r- 
 
 84 LIFE AND THOUGHT OF JAPAN 
 
 as it may, the Monto sect is the most widespread of 
 all Buddhist sects now prevalent in Japan. 
 
 The next sect that was brought under our notice 
 almost along with the Jodo was that of the Zen or 
 " Contemplation." It was introduced to Japan as 
 an independent religious belief for the first time in 
 A.D. 1 191 by Eisai, the founder of the Rinsai school 
 of the sect. It took root immediately and found its 
 devoted patrons mostly among the warrior class of 
 the time, for many reasons. First of all, the Shogun- 
 ate, which just at this time had been called into exist- 
 ence by the victorious warrior-statesman, Yoritomo, 
 with its headquarters at Kamakura, was in need of 
 a new sect to embrace as its own, in order to free itself 
 from the domineering influences of the conventional 
 ones, which were once beneficial to, but were now 
 scourging the Court at Kyoto. It would have sided 
 with the Jodo sect if that had not been vulgarized by 
 its propaganda among the masses. As it was, the 
 " Pure Land '* sect was found not dignified enough 
 for the military rulers now in the ascendancy to deign 
 to patronize it — it stood in glaring contrast to the 
 " Contemplation " sect with its charming accompani- 
 ments, the spiritual and material products of the 
 Chinese civilization of the Sung dynasty. 
 
 The fascination was altogether too strong for our 
 inherent love of beauty and curiosity to resist. Yet 
 there was still another reason to make the Zen Shu, 
 which is our name for the " Contemplation " sect, 
 very captivating to a soldier's frame of mind. Not 
 only did there exist, in those stormy days of almost 
 constant civil wars, a strong necessity for every member 
 
■\. 
 
 
 BODHIDHARMA {Jdp. DAROMa) 
 
 THE FOUNDER OF THE 
 
 DHYANA SECT 
 
 A PRIEST OF THE ZEN SECT IN HIS 
 CHAIR OF STATE, 
 
BUDDHISM IN JAPAN 85 
 
 of the Samurai class to be prepared for every emer- 
 gency and to be trained to step with measured pace 
 into the dire jaws of gaping death — not only that, but 
 there was also in the very mode of teaching the True 
 Law something else that was pleasing to the soldier — 
 its freedom from convention and book-learning, and 
 its direct appeal to one's conscience, one's " True 
 Heart " (Magokoro), which it has ever been our chief 
 care and great pride, from the earliest times of our 
 national existence, to keep pure and clean. 
 
 The early Zen priests recognized the failure of the 
 conventional methods of instruction, carried on by 
 means of lengthy talk on the Holy and Righteous 
 to the nearly benumbed senses of a yawning audience, 
 and they adopted and used the one now followed by 
 their Chinese masters — that of instilling their Truth 
 through symbols and gestures, and by an extremely 
 paradoxical way of approaching a subject. If one 
 had asked them if parricide were the culmination of 
 filial piety, they would have readily said yes, and would 
 have been heard the next moment confirming the view 
 of another disciple that obedience to one's parent was 
 the most exalted act to which a son can ever aspire. 
 
 To them conviction of any kind by means of self- 
 absorption of mind, until, as they would say, " you 
 could hear the falling top of a burning stick of incense 
 crashing on the ashy bed of the burner as loud as a 
 thunder-clap," was precious as a substructure on which 
 to build their further teachings, to lead their converts 
 to the final enlightenment. " Turn your eyes," they 
 woiild insist, " not outward to books and opinions, 
 which are as useless to you as they are misleading; 
 
 i? 
 
86 LIFE AND THOUGHT OF JAPAN 
 
 but direct them inward to your own true heart, the 
 conscience, the Buddha in you. Be true to it, foster 
 it, and get salvation from it.'' 
 
 The way of taking lessons in the doctrine had 
 much that was very attractive to a Samurai neophyte. 
 The modus operandi, which remains nearly unaltered 
 to this day, is briefly this: the pupils of different 
 degrees of attainment are seen coming in and arrang- 
 ing themselves in a row along the grey walls of a some- 
 what dark, entirely cheerless, and altogether austere- 
 looking " Contemplation Hall," with which a Zen 
 temple of importance is nearly always provided. 
 They sit, with their legs crossed in the prescribed way, 
 in absolute silence, trying to think out, yet (as these 
 votaries would have it) without thought, the abstruse 
 problems previously set them by the patriarch of the 
 temple. The benumbing silence is only at long inter- 
 vals broken by an occasional application of the so- 
 called " warning cane " of the proctor on duty, who 
 keeps a vigilant eye on the petrified sitters, a flourish of 
 the stick often calling attention to a drowsy mind 
 wandering in some land of dreams. 
 
 The problems are generally so contrived as to make 
 any definite answer to them quite impossible. One is 
 asked " to hear the clapping of one hand "; another, 
 " to feel the yearning for one's mother before one's 
 own conception "; and a third, to prove that " salt is 
 the sweetest substance with which the tongue is ever 
 brought into contact." When a pupil thinks he has 
 worked himself up, by means of the complete absorp- 
 tion of mind, into a firm conviction about a given 
 problem, the way to it being made somewhat easy by 
 
BUDDHISM IN JAPAN S7 
 
 a course of lectures regularly delivered at the temple, 
 he first announces his intention of communicating his 
 solution to the head priest by ringing a small bell that 
 hangs in the hall. 
 
 He then leaves the hall to approach another at 
 the end of a long corridor, where the master sits wait- 
 ing during certain hours every day for any one of his 
 pupils to bring his conclusion to him and get further 
 guidance in the training. On this occasion what is 
 strictly required from the pupil is to concentrate his 
 whole mind on the truth he deems to have arrived at, 
 and proceed, with his hands put palm against palm, 
 to bring the conclusion, safe and undisturbed by any 
 other idea, into the very presence of the veteran 
 patriarch whose trained eyes are sure soon to detect 
 his exact state of mind and who will at once take re- 
 course to some appropriate measures in behalf of the 
 pupil. 
 
 A sudden shout, or even a box on the learner's un- 
 expecting ears, is sometimes used as a means of awaken- 
 ing a groping mind into the proper groove of under- 
 standing. But absolute secrecy is observed as to the 
 occurrences in the patriarch's hall, and nobody but 
 the parties concerned knows anything about what has 
 passed between the two. 
 
 After all this talk about the Zen sect, the im- 
 pression I have left on your mind may, I am afraid, 
 be at best a very bewildering one. And yet, as the 
 subject seems to me too important to be left in utter 
 darkness, I take the liberty to stop here for a moment 
 and add a few remarks of further explanation. ^ 
 
 fFrom time immemorial there existed in India a 
 
L. 
 
 88 LIFE AND THOUGHT OF JAPAN 
 
 belief that it was possible by intense self-absorption 
 to attain a mental state by which transcendental 
 power and wisdom were acquired. This belief was 
 originally Brahman and not Buddhist. Yet in course 
 of time it came to be incorporated in Buddhism and has 
 indeed come to form a feature of it. The working of 
 wonders by different Rakan (Arhan), which so often 
 furnishes favourite subjects to Japanese and Chinese 
 painters, is nothing but the symbolic representation 
 of the mental powers acquired by this practice. 
 Buddha himself is known to have taken recourse to 
 it in his strivings after Enlightenment. To this day 
 it forms one of the six ways of attaining Wisdom.* 
 
 The mental condition which accompanies the ac- 
 quisition of these powers is called in Sanskrit Dhyana, 
 or " Contemplation," of which there are four stages. 
 
 According to the original Indian texts, as given in 
 Dr Rhys Davids' excellent little book on Buddhism, 
 the first Dhyana stage is a state of joy and gladness 
 born in seclusion, full of reflection and investigation, 
 the practiser having separated himself from all sen- 
 suality and all sin. 
 
 The second Dhyana is a state of joy and gladness 
 born of deep tranquillity, without reflection and in- 
 vestigation, these being suppressed; it is the tranquil- 
 lization of thought, the predominance of intuition. 
 
 In the third Dhyana the practiser is patient by 
 gladness and the destruction of passion, joyful and 
 conscious. 
 
 The fourth Dhyana is purity of equanimity and 
 
 * See E. J. Eitel, Handbook of Chinese Buddhism, under Pdranutd 
 (p. 115). 
 
BUDDHISM IN JAPAN 89 
 
 recollection, without sorrow and without joy, by the 1 
 destruction of previous gladness and grief, by the re- 
 jection of joy, and the rejection of sorrow. 
 
 In the first Dhyana the practiser, holy, pure, and 
 alone, applies his mind to some deep subject of re- 
 ligious thought, reasoning upon it, investigating it. 
 Gradually his mind becomes clear, reasoning vanishes, 
 intuition has been reached: this is the second Dhyana. 
 Then the consciousness of the subject thought of 
 vanishes, and a state of enduring gladness is reached, 
 wherein the whole body is lifted up with ecstasy: 
 this is the third Dhyana. This felt ecstasy, however, 
 soon passes away, and there is only left equanimity 
 and memory, without either joy or sorrow. "So at 
 least," concludes Dr Davids, " I understand this 
 difficult and very ancient passage, which seems to me 
 to be describing a state which has been reached by 
 others besides Buddhists — a moment of unusual con- 
 viction and insight, followed by exalted ecstasy and 
 ending in abiding religious peace.'' 
 
 As to the transmission of the Dhyana doctrine, it is 
 generally stated in Buddhist writings that Mahakas- 
 yapa got the whole truth of it from Gautama himself, 
 and gave i tin turn to Ananda, 5awavana and so on, 
 till it reached, in the sixth century of the Christian 
 era, an Indian prince named Bodhidharma, who even- 
 tually became the twenty-eighth patriarch of the sect. 
 He left his native country for China, where after a few 
 unsuccessful attempts at calling the attention of the 
 feudal lords to the doctrine he advocated, he finally 
 settled down at a monastery in Lohyang. It is in 
 this monastery that he was seen sitting cross-legged, 
 
go LIFE AND THOUGHT OF JAPAN 
 
 never taking his eyes off the wall before which he 
 remained for nine years in constant meditation. 
 
 The Doctrine itself reached Japan long before 
 Eisai established it as an independent sect in the 
 twelfth century. A Chinese priest is known to have 
 come over in a.d. 729 and propagated it among the 
 Japanese monks. It failed, however, to attract much 
 attention at that time. Besides, in those early days 
 the doctrine was of much more sober character. It 
 was then merely one of the means of arriving at 
 Nirvawa in the purely religious sense of the word. 
 But when it came to be more systematically taught 
 by Eisai five centuries later, it assumed a new aspect. 
 It was turned into an effective means of fostering the 
 habit of complete absorption of the mind in a subject 
 brought before it, no matter whether it be a religious 
 concern or a secular one. 
 
 In those stormy days of perpetual fighting the 
 soldier-class felt much need of training themselves to 
 face death with a smile. And if they could stride 
 into the whirl of battle with calmer steps, because they 
 had been taught by the monks how to evoke a strong 
 conviction that life and death are ultimately the same 
 thing, and that consequently no real distinction justi- 
 fied them in hesitating between one state and the 
 other, well, that was just as much of the training as 
 they cared for. It was not the mere spiritual salva- 
 tion, in the purely Buddhistic sense of the term, that 
 they wanted to have. 
 
 Moreover, the paradoxical way of approaching a 
 subject practised by the Zen monks was very convinc- 
 ing to the simple mind of a warrior, and the very 
 
BUDDHISM IN JAPAN 91 
 
 severity of the discipline adopted in the training of 
 a neophyte in the Zen monastery had its own charms 
 for the hardy disciples. Had the so-called " Contem- 
 plation " consisted merely in tracing the delicate 
 thread of rational reasoning along the logical steps 
 of because and therefore, the Zen sect would never 
 have achieved such success in my country, as it 
 actually did in our Middle Ages, and is still doing 
 to some extent among the rising generation of 
 present Japan. 
 
 From what I have thus far told you of the nature 
 and practice of the " Contemplation sect," you are 
 sure to have noticed some elements in it that have 
 made its doctrine acceptable to our Samurai class. 
 The training of mind advocated by it was ennobling 
 and manly as contrasted with the usual effeminate 
 way of bowing before the gilt images and their aristo- 
 cratic ministers. The freedom from convention and the 
 return to the dictates of the heart was also felt to be 
 congenial to their old Japanese spirit. These spiritual 
 benefits, in conjunction with the renewed contact with 
 the Chinese civilization through the Zen priests, who 
 were chiefly instrumental in furnishing us with the 
 choice intellectual fruits of continental culture, eventu- 
 ally resulted a few centuries later in the magnificent 
 expression of the national taste, late in the Ashikaga 
 period (a.d. 1338-1573). The musical drama, called 
 No, the Tea-ceremony, or Chanoyu, as we call it, land- 
 scape gardening, the art of arranging flowers — all 
 these and many other institutions that gave, and still 
 continue to give, Japanese life much of its characteristic 
 sweetness, owe their origin to the resuscitating infiu- 
 
92 LIFE AND THOUGHT OF JAPAN 
 
 ence of the happy admixture of the Zen ideas with our 
 native love of simpHcity and purity. 
 
 Still later Nichiren, the founder of the Hokke sect, 
 disgusted with the corruption of the older aristocratic 
 sects, Tendai and Shingon, contemptuous of the shallow- 
 ness of the popular sects, Jodo and Monto, and angry 
 with the successes of the Zen sect, began his fiery 
 career by a bold public denunciation of all the exist- 
 ing Buddhist sects, while he called his own the best 
 doctrine that could ever be devised. His doctrine 
 resembles that of the Tendai sect in this, that he as 
 well as they derived the fundamental ideas from the 
 Sacred Book of the Lotus of the Good Law (Saddharma 
 Pum^arika Sdtra), while it bears a close similarity to 
 that of the Jodo sect in its declaration, that a simple 
 recital of a " Namu-Myoho-Renge-Kyo " (I rely on 
 the Sacred Book of the Lotus of the Good Law) is enough 
 to save a man, because the appeal would immedi- 
 ately cause all the power of salvation contained in 
 the Sacred Book beneficially to bear upon the reciter 
 of those words. 
 
 Although the attitude of defiance assumed by 
 Nichiren did not make him popular either with the 
 Imperial Court at Kyoto or with the Shoguns at 
 Kamakura, both being in the hands of one or another 
 of the prevalent sects against which he waged war 
 so fiercely, Nichiren succeeded in gathering a good 
 harvest of believers in his easily-earned means of salva- 
 tion among the masses in Kamakura and the neigh- 
 bouring provinces where he was chiefly active. 
 
 In one of the desperate struggles for a favourable 
 recognition of his faith by the Kamakura government 
 
BUDDHISM IN JAPAN 93 
 
 he chanced to send a written warning that if his 
 sect were not accepted by it as the national 
 religion, a great disaster would happen to the nation 
 in the form of a foreign invasion. Although the words 
 failed to produce any effect in favour of their author, 
 the disaster itself actually made its appearance in 
 A.D. 1267 as threatened in the form of the Mongol 
 invasion. On the scornful repulsion of the several 
 embassies whom the haughty court of the Kublai 
 Khan successively sent to Japan to negotiate her sub- 
 jugation to the Tartar throne, the Mongol master of 
 the Middle Kingdom was irritated to such a degree 
 that he made up his mind to annex Japan at the point 
 of the sword. Finally, in a.d. 1281, an army, more 
 than one hundred thousand in strength, was sent over. 
 The country was in imminent danger. But just when 
 the Chinese soldiers were preparing to land, a fearful 
 storm, known to this day as the " Divine Wind," arose, 
 and swept the whole army into the sea of Genkai, 
 very near the place where in 1904 Admiral Togo anni- 
 hilated the Russian fleet. Only three out of the 
 whole Chinese army are said to have escaped the 
 catastrophe to tell the dismal tale to their shuddering 
 countrymen. 
 
 One of the many good lessons the Mongol invasion 
 gave to the Japanese was the knowledge of the exist- 
 ence of firearms, the disastrous effect of which was 
 too keenly experienced by our soldiers on guard to be 
 easily forgotten. Through the subsequent centuries 
 curiosity to know the exact nature of the mysterious tC^'^' 
 weapon was maintained by the Shoguns as well as 
 the feudal lords, until in the middle of the sixteenth 
 
 / 
 
94 LIFE AND THOUGHT OF JAPAN 
 
 century a Portuguese ship chanced to anchor at a 
 small island at the southern end of Kyushu with 
 some arquebuses on board. These old-fashioned 
 hand-guns were presented to the local authority 
 as a grateful remembrance of the kindness the mates 
 received at its hands. The long-dreamt-of weapons 
 were soon forwarded to the Daimyo (feudal lord) of 
 Bungo, who was a near relation of the lord of the 
 island government. The result is not difficult to 
 imagine. 
 
 The manufacture of firearms was set on foot im- 
 mediately after, under the direction of a Portuguese 
 named Fernan Mendez Pinto, and in less than six 
 months as many as six hundred pieces of them were 
 called into existence, the weapons being known to this 
 day as tane-ga-shima, the name of the island where 
 firearms were first brought to our notice. 
 
 Although there is danger in believing fully Pinto's 
 accounts of his trips to Japan, which he described in 
 incredibly wild terms, fabulous enough to cause his 
 listeners to connect his forename with the adjective 
 ** mendacious," still, there is a great probability in 
 his statement that he took with him a Japanese 
 Samurai of the Satsuma clan, named Angero, and 
 his native servant, to Malacca, one of the principal 
 centres of Portuguese commercial activity in the 
 East. 
 
VI 
 
 JAPAN AND THE WEST 
 
 An American lady once told me how amused she was, 
 when staying in Florence, to hear an Italian gentleman 
 tell her, by way of compliment, all sorts of drolleries 
 and eccentricities supposed to be fashionable in the 
 United States. Thus, he expressed his great admira- 
 tion of the American national dance. " Your dance 
 is so pretty," he said, *' so lively and so full of mirth, 
 and so . . ." " But what do you mean by our 
 national dance? " said the American lady; " we have 
 none/' " Oh, yes, you have; of course I mean the 
 cake-walk! " 
 
 It very often happens that we are held responsible 
 for things we have never had a hand in making, 
 only because of the ambiguous use of general terms 
 like the East or the West. Are not the Japanese 
 sometimes suspected of some atrocity or malice of 
 which we are quite innocent, because we belong to the 
 Orientals and therefore have to answer for all the 
 misdeeds that have been committed in the East, far and 
 near? For the same reason you are to the generality 
 of us a part of what is known as the West and have 
 to answer for its actions. You receive credit and are 
 esteemed by us for every good thing that has been 
 achieved anywhere between St Petersburg and San 
 Francisco. But you must at the same time be 
 
 95 
 
96 LIFE AND THOUGHT OF JAPAN 
 
 prepared to take upon you the responsibility for 
 every misdeed that has ever been perpetrated by 
 any one member of the whole community of the 
 Occidentals. 
 
 Had those early Westerners who visited us in the 
 sixteenth century behaved more wisely and been less 
 intolerant in their dealings with the Japanese, they 
 would have done their work better and spared us the 
 fearful disadvantage of shutting ourselves up against 
 the outer world, and also the sentiment of mistrust 
 and the mauvaise honte that naturally still linger in 
 the popular attitude, even towards the best-meaning 
 members of the Western nations. 
 
 True, they had some excuses for the high-handed 
 way they adopted in Japan in those days. First, 
 their religious zeal was so strong that it nearly verged 
 on fanaticism. Secondly, they found our existing 
 Buddhist sects too corrupt, and a state of unrest 
 too predominant all over Japan, to let them sus- 
 pect the existence of sound religious doctrines that 
 might serve as sure foundations for building their 
 own moral edifice. 
 
 Yet the fact remains that it was principally owing 
 to their fatal lack of sympathy and their inability to 
 utilize the older beliefs that they failed to do us much 
 good, notwithstanding their praiseworthy endeavours 
 to do so, for, as with the innermost room of private 
 buildings, so with the sanctum sanctorum of a nation's 
 heart, there is no reaching it unless by the pass- way 
 already leading to it. Any attempt to break into it 
 would be sure to bring down the house itself. 
 
 This is one reason why I ventured in the two 
 
> e s »• , 
 
JAPAN AND THE WEST 97 
 
 preceding chapters to try your patience with a lengthy 
 discussion of Confucianism and Buddhism, because if 
 you are disposed, as I am sure some of you are, to go 
 to Japan some day and teach her to be a better nation, 
 especially from the religious and moral point of view, 
 your good wishes will be a great deal better understood, 
 appreciated and carried into practice by my country- 
 men, when you make use of what little elements, what 
 tiny clues we already have in our religious and moral 
 beliefs in common with your own to develop them 
 into anything you think proper. 
 
 I have shown that we have in our old beliefs neces- 
 sary ideas as a basis for your preaching of Roman 
 Catholicism. Elementary Protestant ideas could 
 also be readily found for your use in our old creed. 
 Even your Christian Science might easily make itself 
 heard and believed, because ideas essentially similar 
 to those preached by it now were prevalent among 
 us already in the eighth century after Christ. In 
 those early days there existed in Japan a strong belief 
 in the doctrine contained in the Buddhist scriptures, 
 namely, that all human sufferings were ascribable to 
 discord between the four elementary forces in nature 
 (earth, water, fire and air), and in consequence the 
 methods of dealing with diseases became essentially 
 psychic. For a time people became superstitious 
 enough to go so far as to try to cure physical diseases 
 simply by religious rites and supplications. This 
 form of belief still exists among the general masses, 
 and has a great deal of influence among them under 
 its Shinto garb. 
 
 Taking such considerations as an excuse for dwell- 
 
 G 
 
98 LIFE AND THOUGHT OF JAPAN 
 
 ing at some length on the nature and methods of the 
 Christian propagandists who came to us in the six- 
 teenth century from Spain and Portugal, I proceed 
 to deal with the subject before us: Japan and the 
 West. 
 
 It was Marco Polo, the Venetian traveller, who 
 first led European curiosity to turn its attention to- 
 wards the Land of the Rising Sun. His mention of 
 Japan, or "Zipangu,** as he called it, was the first 
 ever made in a European language, his Oriental 
 Travels having been reduced to writing in Latin about 
 A.D. 1298, while the author was detained as a prisoner 
 of war at Genoa. He had resided for seventeen years 
 (A.D. 1275-1292) at the court of the Mongol King, 
 the great Kublai Khan. During his long stay in China 
 it was his good or bad luck to witness the immense 
 Chinese fleet setting out for the conquest of our island 
 empire, only to be swept away to the bottom of the 
 sea of Genkai. Japan remained as free and undefiled 
 as ever. No sacrilegious sandals of foreign invaders 
 were ever to tread on the holy soil of the Land of the 
 Gods. The lesson was indelibly impressed on the 
 minds of the Chinese rulers strongly enough to make 
 them refrain ever after from repeating the foolish 
 attempt at a conquest of Japan. But the greedy 
 fancies they entertained of the fabulous wealth that 
 our country was then imagined to contain soon came 
 to be shared by the European kings through the exag- 
 gerated words of the Italian author. Let me quote 
 one of his descriptions of the country called " Zipangu,'* 
 which in Chinese means the " Land where the Sun takes 
 its Rise." 
 
JAPAN AND THE WEST 99 
 
 " Its inhabitants," writes Marco Polo, " are civi- 
 lized in their manners. They are independent of every 
 foreign power, and governed by their own Kings. 
 They have gold in the greatest abundance, its sources 
 being inexhaustible; but as the King does not allow 
 of its being exported, few merchants visit the country, 
 nor is it frequented by much shipping from other parts. 
 To this circumstance we are to attribute the extra- 
 ordinary richness of the sovereign palace, according 
 to what we are told by those who have access to the 
 place. The entire roof is covered with a plating of 
 gold, in the same manner as we cover our houses, 
 or, more properly, churches, with lead. The ceilings 
 of the halls are of the same precious metal; many of 
 the apartments have small tables of pure gold, con- 
 siderably thick; and the windows, also, have golden 
 ornaments. So vast, indeed, are the riches of the 
 palace that it is impossible to convey an idea of them. 
 
 " In this island there are pearls, also, in great 
 quantities, of a pink colour, round in shape, and of 
 great size, equal in value to white pearls, or even ex- 
 ceeding them. It is customary with one part of the 
 inhabitants to bury their dead, and with another part 
 to burn them. The former have a practice of putting 
 one of these pearls into the mouth of the corpse. 
 There are also found there a number of precious 
 stones." 
 
 It is quite natural that information of this kind 
 should arouse a strong curiosity in Occidental readers, 
 and for many centuries to come the rumour about the 
 fabulous wealth of the " Sun-Originating-Land " had 
 
100 LIFE AND THOUGHT OF JAPAN 
 
 continued to turn many a Western head towards that 
 country. Even Columbus is said to have been greatly 
 stimulated to undertake his epoch-making voyages 
 of discovery by the careful study of Marco Polo's 
 work, of which he was never tired. He confidently 
 expected by his westward voyage ultimately to reach 
 Cathay (China) and the Zipangu of the Venetian 
 author — the countries for which he sedulously 
 inquired throughout the Archipelago of the West 
 Indies, and also along both the southern and western 
 shores of the Caribbean Sea. This latter fact shows 
 us that Japan was in an indirect way instrumental in 
 the grand task of discovering the New World achieved 
 by the great Genoese sailor. 
 
 One of the Western nations, to which Marco Polo's 
 writings gave an additional, if not the principal, 
 stimulus for their political and commercial activities 
 in the East, was doubtless Portugal. 
 
 The connection between Portugal and Japan after- 
 wards became so important and fruitful of great re- 
 sults that it may be worth while to consider for a 
 moment what the former country stood for in the 
 politico-religious movements of the fifteenth century. 
 
 Although her hesitation to promise aid to Columbus 
 transferred the honour of his patronship to the Spanish 
 throne, yet the little kingdom stood at that time in 
 the very forefront of European progress and enter- 
 prise. In the all-important matter of maritime dis- 
 covery the Portuguese led the way with indomitable 
 courage and perseverance for the greater part of two 
 centuries. 
 
 Now, at the time when her subjects in the East first 
 
JAPAN AND THE WEST lOi 
 
 came in contact with Japan through tlire' two 'Japanese^' ' 
 who accompanied Mendez Pinto to:Ma,rg,cca,^f^6i"t\igAr;', i 
 was governed by one of the most fcigbted' Things tha't' 
 ever sat upon her throne. The rehgious zeal of John 
 III. (1521-1557) had introduced the Inquisition into 
 his kingdom in 1526, and the same zeal prompted him 
 to push on the conversion of his Oriental subjects and 
 their neighbours in the most vigorous fashion. To 
 effect that purpose a strong, dauntless and efficient 
 missionary organization was very necessary. 
 
 It was at this juncture that Ignatius Loyola pre- 
 sented to the Pope the draft of his regulations for his 
 proposed " Company (or Society) of Jesus." When 
 the projected Company came under his knowledge the 
 King of Portugal instructed his Ambassador at the 
 Vatican to press it on the Pope, and at the same time 
 to ask Loyola himself for some priests of his Society 
 for work in Portugal and her Indian possessions. The 
 latter request was attended to at once; in March 1540 
 Rodriguez, a Portuguese, and a Spaniard who was 
 eventually canonized as St Francis Xavier, were sent 
 to the king. Six months later a Bull confirming the 
 new Order was published. On reaching the court of 
 Lisbon, Xavier was soon requested by the king to 
 assume the direction of the Indian mission that was 
 a great source of solicitude to the Portuguese poten- 
 tate. Accordingly he set sail from the Tagus on 7th 
 April 1541. While Mendez Pinto may have been on 
 his way from Tanegashima to the Court of Bungo to 
 astonish the feudal lord and his subjects with the 
 potentialities of the matchlock, the famous Jesuit 
 was on his long and tedious voyage to Goa, a city on 
 
102 LIFE AND THOUGHT OF JAPAN 
 
 •the MaiabkV- Coast of India, which he reached on the 
 .'fijth.-Ot'M^y 15^2'. -Xavier remained in India till 1545, 
 'alnd' in S^jJteftiber of that year he arrived at Malacca. 
 
 It was during his stay there that he took what his 
 sincerest admirers cannot but deplore as a regrettable 
 step. He addressed a letter to the King of Portugal 
 urging him to set up the Inquisition in Goa, the actual 
 erection of the fearful tribunal taking place first in 
 1560. 
 
 Some time after Xavier's second visit in July 1547, 
 Angero, the Japanese, was taken to his presence. 
 
 Eight days after the interview he was dispatched 
 to the College of St Paul in Goa, where he arrived in 
 1548. Angero was attended by his Japanese servant. 
 On Whitsunday, 1548, the two Japanese were bap- 
 tized in the Cathedral by the Bishop of Goa, the master 
 as Paul of Holy Faith, and the servant as John. 
 Xavier thus had the means ready to hand for prose- 
 cuting the mission to Japan on which he had been 
 meditating very earnestly. It was under the guidance 
 of these Japanese converts that he, with a few of 
 his fellow-workers, landed at Kagoshima, the capital 
 of the province of Satsuma, on 15th August 1549, 
 the first real connecting link between Japan and the 
 West! 
 
 Thus far I have allowed myself to dwell at length 
 on the circumstances in which Japan first came in 
 contact with the West, because a knowledge of them 
 will be helpful to you in realizing the full extent of the 
 almost fanatic enthusiasm on the part of the Christian 
 missionaries, and the marvellous tolerance on the part ^ 
 of the Japanese central and local governments — a 
 
JAPAN AND THE WEST 103 
 
 political step soon followed by those drastic measures 
 which, though apparently fitful, were nevertheless 
 taken deliberately by our statesmen, the best Japan 
 has ever produced: Nobunaga, the unifier of Japan 
 in the early years of the sixteenth century ; Hideyoshi, 
 the Taiko-sama of your writers; and lyeyasu, the 
 founder of the Tokugawa Shogunate, who saw in the 
 reckless opinions and manners of the Christian propa- 
 gandists germs of imminent danger to our national' 
 unity. 
 
 From the very beginning the desire for new things 
 from the West was the principal reason for welcoming 
 the Christian missionaries. So, for example, although 
 Francis Xavier and his companions were on their 
 arrival cordially received by the Daimyo of Satsuma, 
 and soon obtained permission to preach the Holy 
 Gospel in the city of Kagoshima, yet when the Portu- 
 guese merchant ships went to Hirado, an island off the 
 west coast of Kyushu, belonging to another Daimyo, 
 the Prince of Satsuma turned against the missionaries 
 and forbade them from fiu-ther preaching and pro- 
 selytizing. 
 
 How Xavier travelled from one Daimyo to another 
 to propagate his religion in their dominions; how the 
 feudal princes, in their turn, welcomed him first of all 
 for some political reasons ; how his successors, Kosme 
 de Terres and others, continued the work of conver- 
 sion, committing in their zeal all sorts of extravagance 
 directed against the existing forms of belief; how 
 Nobunaga connived at and actually favoured their 
 acts of violence for some time, using them as pawns to 
 keep in check the unruly soldier-monks in the Bud- 
 
104 LIFE AND THOUGHT OF JAPAN 
 
 dhist monasteries; how Taiko-sama took care to dis- 
 tribute the territories of his Buddhist and Christian 
 generals in such a manner that their mutual enmity 
 might make them keep malicious vigilance on each 
 other's moves; how since a.d. 1592 the strong rivalry 
 between the Jesuits and their new competitors, the 
 Franciscans and Dominicans from the Spanish centre 
 of Oriental activity, the Philippines, began to smooth 
 the way for the expulsion of both from Japan ; how the 
 suspected evil intentions of the Western powers were 
 confirmed by a miscalculated means of intimidation 
 taken by a Spanish pilot, who pointed out on the map 
 the vast extent of the dominion of Philip II., and said, 
 " Our king begins by sending into the countries he 
 wishes to conquer religieux, who induce the people to 
 embrace our religion, and when they have made 
 considerable progress, troops are sent to combine 
 with the new Christians, and then our kings have 
 not much trouble in accomplishing the rest"; how 
 lyeyasu was tolerant towards Christians at first, and 
 tried to establish foreign trade with Manila and other 
 European possessions in the south; the ill-advised 
 remarks of a Spaniard in Japan concerning a great 
 number of ships which had then arrived at Manila 
 from New Spain, that the whole fleet had nothing but 
 men and munitions of war for the conquest of the 
 Moluccas; how in the spring of 1600 a Dutch vessel 
 named de Liefde arrived at Japan in a state of direst 
 extremity, with Will Adams among the survivors; 
 how the "pilot-major," who happened to be an 
 Englishman from Kent, was taken into lyeyasu's 
 confidence and built ships for him; how her newly- 
 
JAPAN AND THE WEST 105 
 
 won independence from the Spanish yoke and her 
 promise to abstain from any reUgious propaganda 
 in Japan, made Holland the only eligible window for 
 the new rays of Western civilization to pour in for two 
 hundred and fifty years to come; how dire economic 
 mismanagement and a strong religious persecution in 
 Amakusa and Arima, in Kyushu, led in 1637 to a 
 fearful uprising of the population, which was mostly -'- 
 Christian ; how this Shimabara Revolt was brought to 
 an end only after a fearful fight of three months ; how 
 the rebel generalissimo — a Samurai youth of seventeen 
 years of age, Masuda Shiro by name — was not only 
 Christian but was believed by his army to be the re- 
 incarnation of Christ Himself ; how the Japanese Jean 
 d'Arc preached and celebrated Mass twice a week 
 within the besieged castle, the parapet showing a 
 multitude of small flags with the Christian symbol in 
 red, and also wooden crosses of different descriptions: 
 all this, and many other items bearing on our inter- 
 course with the West, will be of more or less interest 
 to you. And, indeed, had I more space at my dis- 
 posal, I would have taken the liberty of touching them 
 at a less giddy speed.* As it is, however, I have no 
 choice than to conclude this hasty sketch of our inter- 
 course with the West with another summary: that 
 a wholesale process of persecution of Kirishitan 
 (Christians) followed the Shimbara Revolt, and the hope 
 of a foreign trade was nipped in the bud. The only 
 connection Japan had with the rest of the world for 
 two hundred years to come was a small market-place 
 
 * For details see James Murdoch's excellent work, A History of Japan j 
 during the Century of Early Exiropean Intercotirse(^s.V)- 154 2- 1 651). ^. 
 
io6 LIFE AND THOUGHT OF JAPAN 
 
 at Nagasaki, where only the Chinese and the Dutch 
 were allowed to trade. 
 
 During these years of seclusion the poor Dutch 
 traders had to put up with such inconvenience and 
 contempt as nothing but their lucrative commerce 
 would have made them endure. Engelbert Kaempfer 
 (1651-1716), the first European who has left us the 
 valuable result of his scientific observations about 
 Japan during his short stay there in the last decade of 
 the seventeenth century, writes in his History of Japan 
 as follows: 
 
 " The Dutch . . . left no stone unturned ... to 
 build a foundation for their own establishment. No 
 trouble, no expenses were spared to please the Shogun, 
 upon whom alone all the good or bad result of their 
 trading depended. Whatever could be thought of was 
 done to oblige the Councillors of State, particularly 
 the Prince of Hirado, and other great men, who had it 
 in their power to promote or to hinder their credit and 
 interest at court. The most exquisite curiosities of 
 nature and art were purchased and brought over for 
 the annual presents. The oddest and scarcest animals, 
 in particular, were bought up in the remotest kingdoms 
 of Europe, Persia and the Indies, to have wherewithal 
 to satisfy their demands, ridiculous and fanciful as they 
 generally were, and of animals so strange in their 
 nature, colours and shape, as perhaps never existed in 
 nature, though they pretended to give us the drawings 
 of them in order to enable us to find them out. In 
 short, the interests of the Dutch, and the great profits 
 which were likely to accrue to their East India Com- 
 
JAPAN AND THE WEST 107 
 
 pany from so advantageous a branch of trade, if they 
 could maintain themselves in credit and favour with 
 this nation, put them under an absolute necessity 
 blindly and passively to obey what demands were laid 
 upon them, however hard and unreasonable they 
 might be." 
 
 This is already disgusting enough, but something 
 more dreadful was at times to be enacted. '* The 
 deputation of the Dutch traders, convoyed to Yedo to 
 offer their congratulations on the accession of each 
 Shogun, were set to amuse His Highness by singing 
 songs, dancing and pretending to be drunk! " 
 
 These acts of humiliation were not only degrading 
 to the performers, but they were harmful to the 
 spectators also. They had by slow degrees placed us 
 on the gilded but perilous throne of haughty conceit, 
 from which it needed an immense amount of moral 
 courage to come down and greet with cordiality the 
 stars and stripes that appeared in 1859 0^ ^^^ horizon 
 of the Uraga coast. Whether we liked or no, the 
 determined caller would not stop knocking till the 
 whole household was astir and realized its position with 
 a shudder. It was lucky for us that the awakening 
 came from the United States. Who knows what the 
 result would have been had it taken place through 
 some less well-intentioned power? Everybody in 
 Japan, that knows anything of the history of those 
 troubled days, knows what we owe to them, and is 
 grateful for it. 
 
 Some might perhaps wonder why we did not shut 
 ourselves up entirely, instead of keeping up a luke- 
 
io8 LIFE AND THOUGHT OF JAPAN 
 
 warm sort of intercourse with the West. The reason 
 is very simple and soon told. We wanted to know 
 much about the outer world to keep ourselves abreast 
 of the progress that was being made outside our sea- 
 girt home. We have seen how the same progressive 
 spirit first came to be evoked, and was kept up ever 
 after, by our early contact with the products of the 
 civilization of the Asiatic continent. The attention 
 of our imperial rulers was attracted, in particular, by 
 the heavenly art of curing disease — the " art of 
 mercy," as medical science is called in the East. 
 Chinese medicine and pharmacy were introduced into 
 our country pari passu with gradually increasing 
 intercourse with the continent. Already in the reign 
 of the Emperor Mommu in the early part of the seventh 
 century, a medical school was founded in Japan. 
 There were in it special departments for internal 
 medicine, surgery, pediatrics, acupuncture, ophthal- 
 mology, dental surgery, otology, etc. 
 
 So, when we were brought face to face with a new 
 form of civilization in the sixteenth century, when the 
 so-called " Southern Barbarians (Namban)," as we 
 used to call the Portuguese and Spaniards, visited 
 us with their attractive novelties in warlike and 
 peaceful arts, our attention was directed, besides the 
 use of firearms, the art of building castles, the manu- 
 facture of gunpowder, cotton, tobacco, etc., to the 
 important art of healing, of which the early Christian 
 fathers could show us a new field of wonders unknown 
 to Chinese medicine. This fact did not escape the 
 sharp eyes of Francis Xavier, who found it conducive 
 to his proselytizing work to aid the poor and treat 
 
JAPAN AND THE WEST 109 
 
 their diseases gratuitously. In 1556 Otomo Sorin, the 
 feudal lord of Bungo and a Jesuit convert, established 
 at his capital Funai a hospital for the indigent, and 
 placed it under a Jesuit physician called Lewis de 
 Almeida. 
 
 In 1568 Oda Nobunaga, a general who was the real 
 ruler of Japan at that time, gave a plot of ground of 
 about ten acres in Kyoto to build a Christian church 
 called Namban-ji on the precincts, with a munificent 
 endowment for its maintenance. Two Jesuit priests, 
 who served the Church, being well versed in the prac- 
 tice of medicine, built wards on the premises, where 
 poor patients were invited and treated free of charge. 
 Nobunaga also gave them an area of about twelve 
 hundred acres in the province of Omi, where three 
 thousand kinds of medical plants were transplanted, 
 the artemisia vulgaris, still used in cauterization, being 
 supposed to be one of them. 
 
 Although Taiko-sama, who succeeded Nobunaga 
 in 1585, had for political reasons to banish all the 
 foreign priests at the Namban-ji from the shores of 
 Japan, their medical art was learned and propagated 
 by their native disciples at Osaka and Sakai, where 
 it took firm root, thus leading to the establishment 
 of the so-called Namban, or Portuguese, school of 
 medicine. 
 
 After Taiko-sama came lyeyasu. He knew the 
 benefit of foreign intercourse too well to take, at the 
 outset of his rule, any drastic measures against the 
 religieux who would not listen to his cautions and 
 warnings about sacrilegious interference with the 
 native forms of belief. But at last he was obliged to 
 
no LIFE AND THOUGHT OF JAPAN 
 
 keep a tighter hand on the affair, and finally restricted 
 the intercourse to a tiny licensed port at the western 
 end of Kyushu. Yet the little window was ever kept 
 open throughout the reigns of his successors to take in 
 some fresh air from the West, especially the salubrious 
 air of medicine. Consequently the Dutch East India 
 Company, now the sole representative of European 
 culture, took care to have, among other officials, a 
 physician resident at the trade port of Dejima, in 
 Nagasaki, for a certain term of years. The names of 
 Schambergen (1649-50), Hoffmann (1688) and Kaemp- 
 fer (1691-92) are to be mentioned among doctors of 
 this description. 
 
 Although Christianity was put under the ban of the 
 Government and strict orders were at first given to the 
 Dutch Company not to import foreign books of any 
 kind, the prohibition became less and less strict with 
 the recognition of the necessity of learning Dutch 
 methods of healing disease. The native Samurai at 
 Nagasaki, whose acquaintance with spoken Dutch 
 made them official interpreters, got permission to see 
 the Dutch doctors and learn their art. This gave rise 
 to the so-called " Oranda," or Dutch school of 
 medicine in Japan. 
 
 The task of translation from Dutch was now set 
 on foot under crushing disadvantages. But after 
 heroic endeavours the first Japanese rendering of a 
 European book on medicine was achieved in the latter 
 part of the eighteenth century, by a physician named 
 Maeno Ryotaku. The reading public quickly acknow- 
 ledged the superiority of Western medicine. Those 
 who had the foresight to realize the hopeless future of 
 
JAPAN AND THE WEST iii 
 
 the Chinese school of the science now flocked to Yedo, 
 where Maeno and his collaborator, Sugita Gempaku, 
 lived, and began to study the Dutch language as well 
 as medicine. In the course of a few years there were 
 translations of Dutch books, not only on medicine but 
 also on other subjects, astronomy, industrial arts, etc. 
 This gave rise to what is called the rangaku, or " Dutch 
 Learning," with the study of medicine as its centre. 
 
 The Dutch Learning was not merely instrumental 
 in bringing about the assimilation of Western know- 
 ledge. It taught some of the more thoughtful of its 
 students to raise cries of warning about the so-called 
 colonization policy of the European nations, and 
 preach the dire necessity of national defence against 
 their invasion, although their voice was generally 
 drowned in the predominant tide of ignorance. 
 
 But the time had now come for us to wake from the 
 sweet dream of power and greatness that had lasted 
 nearly two centuries. In 1804 a Russian envoy came 
 to Nagasaki and asked permission to trade. Three 
 years later two vessels belonging to the same nation- 
 ality pillaged the Island of Yezo. The following year 
 an English ship entered Nagasaki harbour in spite 
 of prohibition. The Tokugawa Government felt the 
 great need of preparing itself to take measures against 
 these intruders. In 181 1 a translation bureau was 
 called into existence by the Government, to furnish it 
 with necessary materials for a step in that direction. 
 
 Thus by the time we were to open our ports to 
 foreign trade, we were in possession of a fair number 
 of West-knowing patriots, through whose desperate 
 efforts the country finally emerged into its new life. 
 
112 LIFE AND THOUGHT OF JAPAN 
 
 As to the conviilsive efforts and struggles for a place 
 among the predominant nations of the world at and 
 ever after the opening of oiir doors to the foreign inter- 
 course, it must suffice to call your attention to two 
 facts which might perhaps be still new, at least to 
 some of you. One is that there is a comparatively 
 recent Japanese publication on the subject, called 
 Kaikoku-Gojunen-Shi, compiled by Count Okuma. 
 An English translation of it in two volumes has re- 
 cently appeared under the title of Fifty Years of 
 New Japan (Button & Co., New York). The other 
 is that the Susquehanna, the Mississippi, the Ply- 
 mouth and the Saratoga, which formed the United 
 States squadron Commodore Perry led into the Bay 
 of Yedo on 8th July 1853, were not, as they are gener- 
 ally supposed to be, the first American ships that 
 visited Japan during her seclusion. Nearly a hundred 
 years before that date two Salem ships entered under 
 the Dutch flag to the then only trade-port, the Harbour 
 of Nagasaki. The whole story, as given in the logs 
 kept by the ships, is capitally retold with many inter- 
 esting details in The Ships and Sailors of Old Salem, 
 by Mr R. D. Paine. 
 
• > J • 
 
 ,° a*'.. 5 
 
^r^ 
 
 II^ 
 
 \^ •■^<%. 
 
 "J 
 
VII 
 
 JAPANESE HOME LIFE AND SOCIETY 
 
 When two men stand face to face it is the right side 
 of one that corresponds to the left side of the other, 
 and vice versa. So it is also when two nations con- 
 front each other. What is " right " on one party lies 
 just where it is " not right " on the other party. 
 
 Children again, when they begin to talk, are very 
 much puzzled by what seems to them to be the arbi- 
 trary use of the personal pronouns. What is "I," 
 when A is speaking, becomes " you " when B speaks 
 to A, while C, who becomes either " I *' or " you," 
 when he speaks with his friend, is neither when A 
 speaks to B about C; C is now either a " he " or a 
 "she"! 
 
 To us grown-up people this jumping about of the 
 personal pronouns has ceased to seem strange, for we 
 are perfectly convinced of the fact that all three, A, 
 B and C, can, without any logical inconsistency, be, 
 according to circumstances, either an I, or a you, or 
 else a he or she. 
 
 Yet we are not so ready to see the rationality of an 
 equally salient point, where our understanding is apt 
 to get muddled by a tinge of either genteel or patriotic 
 ignorance. To you shark's fin ^ la chinoise seems as 
 horrible as swallow' s-nest soup, your well-bred con- 
 tempt of the so-called strange, and therefore queer, 
 H 113 
 
114 LIFE AND THOUGHT OF JAPAN 
 
 race making you forget to reason that the Chinese 
 dishes might be as deUcious as your own. 
 
 " How dreadful of the Japanese to eat raw fish," 
 a lady is heard to say, while her fingers are busy 
 squeezing a slice of lemon on the shells of fresh oysters 
 before her. "Quite so," responds her partner; "be- 
 sides, think of their use of chopsticks. Isn't it 
 barbarous? " So saying he grasps his fork in triumph, 
 as if the idea derived from a tearing paw were in any 
 way more civiHzed than that suggested by a pecking 
 beak. 
 
 What corresponds to your " Christian name " is 
 with us put after the family names. Our books begin 
 with the page where yours end. The lines run per- 
 pendicularly instead of horizontally, and they file 
 themselves from right to left. " Tools are of sur- 
 prising shapes," writes Lafcadio Hearn, " and are 
 handled after surprising methods; the blacksmith 
 squats at his anvil, wielding a hammer such as no 
 Western smith could use without long practice; the 
 carpenter pulls, instead of pushing, his extraordinary 
 plane and saw." " Mr Percival Lowell has truthfully 
 observed," continues the same author, " that the 
 Japanese speak backwards, read backwards and write 
 backwards — and that * this is only the ab c oi their 
 contrariety.' " 
 
 And yet, with all our curiousness and strangeness 
 and weirdness, our thousand and one topsy-turvy 
 ways, as you are pleased to call them, we never go on 
 our heads in the street, nor are we known to crawl on 
 the ceiling when at home. In spite of the direction 
 Qur eye takes in passing from word to word, our books 
 
JAPANESE HOME LIFE AND SOCIETY 115 
 
 are written, read, and do their work in the same way 
 as everywhere else. Whether our saws and planes 
 are pushed or pulled, timber is split, sawed and planed. 
 Houses and cabinets are called into existence all the 
 same, and so are hoes, shovels and horse-shoes. True, 
 our verbs stand always at the end of a sentence, and 
 never at the beginning as yours sometimes do. But 
 have you ever thought that this syntactic order could 
 possibly have its advantages too? It is, in my 
 opinion, just what a young lady should use in dealings 
 with her admirers. Apart from its being polite and 
 sonorous in the extreme, the language allows her, 
 because of the verbal position, to keep her definite 
 answer to the last moment ! 
 
 Besides these considerations pertaining to the 
 Japanese side, did the idea ever occur to you that your 
 own ways might appear to us no less curious and 
 strange than ours do to you? Do you know how 
 amusing it sometimes is to us to see you at your daily 
 performances? Your mode of expressing friendship 
 by a grasp of hands; your manner of imparting 
 affection by an application of lips; your fondness of 
 hopping about on tip-toe in a dancing-hall, with your 
 arm round the waist of a person of different sex ; your 
 readiness to wear indoors the same pair of shoes in 
 which you have shuffled about the street — all this and 
 many other oddities cannot fail to attract our atten- 
 tion before our senses get benumbed by an immersion 
 in the Lethe of habit. 
 
 You seem to us strongly convinced of your supe- 
 riority, very often in a stronger degree than we are 
 ready to acknowledge. You believe in one God, and 
 
ii6 LIFE AND THOUGHT OF JAPAN 
 
 all are hopeless heathens who do not do the same, as 
 if your God could not fulfil His will in any other form. 
 You belong to the Caucasian race, and all are hope- 
 lessly inferior who do not belong to it — so much so 
 that an American authority on Japan kindly proposed 
 to vindicate in his new book the possibility of our being 
 a great nation by pointing to the probable existence of 
 a drop of your blood in our veins through our early 
 intermarriage with the hairy Ainu, the Caucasian 
 aborigines of our islands! 
 
 Your consciousness of your own importance is 
 simply admirable, I could almost say divine, since you 
 do not allow Nature herself to have her way. Instead 
 of admiring her just as she is, you wage war against 
 her. Inch by inch, mile by mile, her dominion is 
 snatched from her rule. First of all, enormous build- 
 ings rear their haughty heads high up against heaven, 
 to free you from cold and heat, and out of their forti- 
 fied windows your sciences send missiles to put her 
 handmaids in chains. Natural powers have thus been 
 brought under your control, and work for you in your 
 thousand factories to make you rich, well-known, but 
 not always happier: slaves of the lamp do not always 
 do that for their task-master. 
 y " Oh, how beautiful," you would say to a rose by 
 
 the wayside, and immediately break it from the bush 
 and stick it in your buttonhole to make it add beauty 
 to your more pretty breast. Why not look more 
 attentively at the flower and allow it for a minute to 
 take you out of your own too omnipresent conscious 
 ego, and learn the sweetness of being absorbed in the 
 beauty of the universe? 
 
JAPANESE HOME LIFE AND SOCIETY 117 
 
 With us the case is quite dii^erent. Partly owing 
 to the entirely different ethical atmosphere that we 
 have breathed for centuries past, partly owing to 
 beauty of landscape and clemency of weather, we have 
 early been taught to befriend Nature, and to find in 
 abnegation of the actual self the fulfilment of the ideal 
 self. We admire Nature in all her forms; we throw 
 ourselves into the fostering lap of Nature and laugh 
 and play and lose ourselves in the joy. Flowers are 
 our friends, and so is the snow. We are ready to yield 
 our little human schemes and follow the dictates of 
 Nature, for in a bowing neck we feel the latent strength 
 of a snow-ridden bamboo, as powerful as the mighty 
 arm of a hard-necked oak. 
 
 In the connubial relation, too, instead of adopting 
 the tug-of-war system, both parties pulling their har- 
 dest at the opposite ends of the matrimonial tie, we 
 follow the more congenial law of gravitation. Each 
 party is with us ready to be attracted by the greater 
 principle that resides in the other — the husband yield- 
 ing to the power of womanly pliancy in the wife, the 
 wife yielding to the power of manly strength in the 
 husband. 
 
 We are, of course, well aware of the undeniable fact 
 that the greatest happiness of a married couple in 
 Japan, or any other country, consists and can consist 
 only in the reciprocal admiration of the finest quality 
 that is given each respectively in surpassing measure. 
 Neither are we ignorant of the fact that from the 
 standpoint of biology the distinction of sex is not an 
 item of such great importance as we are generally 
 accustomed to consider; it is simply one small factor 
 
ii8 LIFE AND THOUGHT OF JAPAN 
 
 attendant on animated nature, and does not count 
 very much in the distribution of the so-called manly 
 and womanly qualities among individual members of 
 human society. It is a well-known fact that we often 
 find a strong mind, worthy of the best specimens of 
 bearded humanity, in the angel-like figure of a lady, 
 while a contemptible weakness of will and judgment is 
 not seldom met with in a man of robust constitution. 
 
 Yet from the general state of physical and mental 
 development. Nature has always expressed herself in 
 /such a way that in the East at least men are expected 
 / to stand for the cause of positive force — straight- 
 ( forwardness; while women are considered at their 
 \ best when they side with negative force — pliancy. 
 " Husband to propose, wives to follow," w^as one of 
 the ancient sayings in China, whose statesmen 
 heard in the so-called crowing hens a sure sign of 
 national disaster. Japan had from the very be- 
 ginning a similar mental attitude in the valuation of 
 sex attributes — so much so that, in our mythology, the 
 deformity of Hiruko, the first-born child of the creator- 
 deities, is ascribed to the fact that the goddess expressed 
 her admiration of her husband's beauty without wait- 
 ing till the god had finished expressing his admiration 
 of that of his wife. It was natural that Japan should, 
 in the main, follow the Chinese views in these as in 
 almost everything else concerning moral doctrine. 
 Besides the Confucian teachings with regard to the 
 respective positions of men and women, we have also 
 been greatly influenced by Buddhist ideas about them. 
 Both of these systems were, generally speaking, un- 
 fair in their treatment of women, for the Chinese sages 
 
JAPANESE HOME LIFE AND SOCIETY ii^ 
 
 considered, as one of their proverbs says, that ** women 
 and children are the most difficult subjects to deal 
 with," while the religious Indians saw in their wives 
 meshes of the net of human passions which hindered 
 them from reaching enlightenment. Notwithstanding 
 this strong influence to which we were exposed, how- 
 ever, it is quite remarkable that the Japanese should 
 never once in their long career have allowed themselves 
 to ill-treat their women. Fathers and mothers, hus- 
 bands and wives, brothers and sisters have always 
 stood on the same level of dignity, with only this dis- 
 tinction, that the male members were so trained as to 
 develop themselves along the more positive side of life, 
 while female members were taught to fulfil themselves 
 along the negative side of it. The gay brilliancy of 
 broad daylight represents the one ; the calm repose of 
 moonlit night is the symbol for the other. If a 
 mighty rock, fearlessly erecting its head in the sea, 
 stands for the masculine, it is the noiselessly swelling 
 water, lisping on its breast, that is the counterpart of 
 the feminine. Is unused energy in any way stronger 
 than vis viva, because it lies dormant? Latent or 
 active, hidden or visible, the force resides in each. In 
 both the Universe is whole, the two elements com- 
 plementing each other. The moment each should 
 try to fight the other, then both are sure to meet 
 destruction ! 
 
 Such is, in short, the Japanese philosophy of 
 domestic happiness. Our boys and girls are taught 
 in accordance with this ideal. This and the cult of 
 Kami-wovship form the warp and weft of which the 
 whole fabric of Japanese society is woven. Without 
 
120 LIFE AND THODGHT OF JAPAN 
 
 the help of this golden texture no Japanese abode were 
 harmonious. It would simply be " four walls and 
 a ceiling," as Tackleton, the toy merchant, says, and 
 nothing else. But through this marvellous network 
 of mutual cordiality the worldly rays of right and 
 duty are sifted into celestial beams, which turn each of 
 our simple wood-made houses into a dear, dear home, 
 as sweet as any poet can ever sing ! 
 
 With these preliminary remarks, which I deem 
 absolutely necessary for a visitor to a Japanese home, 
 let me introduce you to one of the purely Japanese 
 private dwellings where our middle-class families 
 dwell. We leave our jinrikisha at the wooden gate, for 
 such is the first entrance to a little garden in front of 
 the premises, which are carefully screened from the 
 outer view by a surrounding hedge or fence in neat, 
 broad panels. A few yards from the gate and you are 
 at the front door. No knocker, no pull at the bell, 
 but a literal call, brings to you a smiling maid who, 
 kneeling politely, inquires your " honourable " name. 
 In a minute you are " humbly " asked to make your 
 " honourable " entrance. You are " honourably " 
 helped to take off your *' honourable " coat, and 
 " humbly " shown to the " honourable " parlour, for 
 with us no words are addressed to a guest by servants 
 or masters without the necessary accompaniment of 
 some verbal expression of respect. In thus finding 
 yourselves for the first time in a Japanese house, where 
 everything is in small proportions, you will surely 
 realize, to your agreeable surprise, how enormously 
 gigantic your *' honourable " statures are, not to say 
 anything of the " honourable " hats of your ladies! 
 
Japanese home life and society 121 
 
 But before you step into the hall you must not for- 
 get to take off your shoes. We leave our clogs and 
 sandals in a paved enclosure inside the front door and 
 never allow any foot-gear in the house except the tabi, 
 national foot-gloves in white or dark-blue cotton. 
 And the reason thereof is not far to seek. In our early 
 days for several centuries people used to squat on the 
 floor with a little piece of pretty thick straw mattress 
 under them, which served them as bedstead as well 
 at night. In course of time these pieces (each 3x6 
 feet), came to cover the whole surface of the floor, 
 thus turning the room itself into a big bed, preserving 
 a faint shadow of the original idea in the name and 
 form of the present tokonoma ("mattress-room"), 
 which is the alcove with its floor generally a few inches 
 higher than that of the rest of the same apartment. 
 Such being the history of the development of our floor, 
 foot-gear in any way reminding us of the dirt of the 
 street naturally came to be scrupulously excluded 
 from our rooms. Hence the necessity of taking off 
 your shoes. I think you never go to bed with your 
 foot-gear on. 
 
 A Japanese parlour of ordinary size is usually a 
 square of six yards by four, with a few walls and many 
 sliding paper doors. These latter noiselessly open 
 into adjacent rooms, or else generally across a veranda 
 into a little garden. A little gay screen in a darker 
 corner and many windows with shoji, slender frames 
 of thin, semi-transparent paper, give us enough light 
 to dispel any dismal feeling from the room. The 
 habit of sitting on the floor saves us the necessity of a 
 high ceiling, eight feet or less being the usual height. 
 
122 LIFE AND THOUGHT OF JAPAN 
 
 In the middle of the room you may have a small square 
 mahogany table, twelve inches high, across which you 
 talk with the host or hostess. In winter one or more 
 little hibachi, or braziers, with a miniature Fujiyama 
 of red charcoal in the centre, are put at your side. The 
 inevitable tea makes its appearance before you — pure 
 green tea which is quite unlike your black tea, with an 
 admixture of cream and sugar, and in a porcelain dish 
 a little heap of sweets with a poetic name and as poetic 
 a shape. 
 
 You sit on a little square wadded cushion of silk 
 facing the alcove, where in the middle a kakemono, 
 that is, a panel with a picture or a poem in Chinese 
 script, is seen, hanging with perhaps a vase of flowers 
 in proper arrangement, or else a little curio in wood or 
 bronze. On one or both sides of the iokonoma you 
 see more recesses with wooden shelves in zigzag with 
 a few scrolls of pictures or some Oriental books in folio 
 on each. On the walls outside these niches one or 
 two oblong scrolls in frames are as likely as not to be 
 seen resting on the lintels. The general tone of the 
 room is that of neatness and serenity. Every sign 
 of loudness is abhorred and avoided. The walls are 
 of a warm but subdued colour. They are innocent of 
 wall-paper and stand bare in their simplicity. We 
 dislike varnishing, except an occasional application of 
 lacquer to the sill of the tokonoma ; wood is left in its 
 native grain. 
 
 This description of a Japanese parlour might 
 perhaps give you an impression of extreme bareness. 
 That could only come from the association of your 
 own rooms, with their massive walls of brick and 
 
ARRANGING FLOWtRS. 
 
JAPANESE HOME LIFE AND SOCIETY 123 
 
 mortar. Your windows are proportionally small as 
 compared with their width, and they do not always 
 relieve you from your dreary seclusion. Your high 
 ceilings only help you to realize the narrowness of your 
 sphere of influence. Imprisonment is naturally the 
 sensation you feel in yom: apartment — the most fear- 
 ful thing that can be imagined for a people like you 
 with a strong love of personal liberty. And it is but 
 natural that you should try to free yourselves from 
 its stifling effect. This explains at least partly your 
 method of room decoration, with its bewildering rich- 
 ness in knick-knacks of value, and of no value, glitter- 
 ing, glaring, gleaming, and twinkling from all sorts 
 and conditions of elevations — from tables, desks, 
 shelves and mantelpieces; while on the gorgeously 
 carpeted floor a tanned polar bear roars defiance at a 
 couching Bengal tiger in front of the fireplace. Nor are 
 your walls allowed to remain passive. Every imagi- 
 nable form of rectangular holes is cut into them 
 by paintings, water-colours, photographs, etchings, 
 mirrors and stone tablets, to lead you out from your 
 mental imprisonment, generally with this sad result 
 that the original principle of artistic relief is quite mis- 
 understood in many of your homes, where the process 
 of imaginary perforation is often carried to such an 
 extent that I often think nothing short of a target 
 after a day's successful shooting exercise with the most 
 modern revolving firearms would stand a comparison 
 with it in result ! 
 
 In Japanese houses the greater openness to the 
 outer atmosphere makes it unnecessary, and even 
 obnoxious, that we should take recourse to the same 
 
124 LIFE AND THOUGHT OF JAPAN 
 
 methods ; a hand on the sHding shoji is enough to con- 
 nect us with the ever-present smile of Nature. This 
 faciHty, together with the double keynote struck by 
 the doctrines of obedience to the Higher and mutual 
 completion, makes us attempt to shade ourselves into 
 the outer world of physical existence. " No two flowers 
 of equal strength in a single vase " is one of the favourite 
 precepts of a master of flower-arrangement ; while the 
 tea ceremony took its rise in teaching our mighty sol- 
 diers how to bow their haughty, stiff necks before 
 the pliant yet irresistible curves of beauty, and hear 
 in the silver note of a seething tea-kettle heavenly 
 music of harmonious life. Even the gardener, work- 
 ing in his livery, revolts at the idea of man's conquest 
 of Nature. Systematically avoiding your geometrical 
 arrangement, because it seems to us to partake too 
 much of human artifice, he relies implicitly on the 
 principle of naturalness, taking care to be in accord 
 with the physical aspects that surround his piece of 
 art. In his handiwork you find the instincts of the 
 Zen idea of paradox and the Chinese philosophy of 
 positive and negative principles at work, for they are 
 deeply interwoven in the very texture of his simple 
 being. 
 
 One feature that stands conspicuous in a piece of 
 Japanese work is doubtless its emblematic character, 
 which is but a natural outcome of the extensive use 
 of symbolism in Buddhist teaching. Not only did 
 the Zen priests habitually take recourse to gestures 
 and epigrammatic utterances, but was not the very 
 Buddhist pantheon the result of mental powers and 
 qualities made visible by means of painted or sculptured 
 
JAPANESE HOME LIFE AND SOCIETY 125 
 
 imagery? Fostered in the bosom of these ideas our 
 artists early realized the opportunities of symbolic 
 representation. As with the cross, dove, key, etc., in 
 your Christian art, so we have our own emblems, giving 
 us an undercurrent of association which, intermingled 
 with the main stream of ideas, defines our real position 
 towards an object of worship in view. This force is 
 active in our mind not only in the religious field but 
 in all the domains of secular thought. A pine-tree 
 means chastity and faithfulness. A plum-tree repre- 
 sents refinement and nobility. A stork, a tortoise, 
 a carp, a duck each tells its own story to our mind. 
 True, you have your own language of flowers. But it 
 is more meant to swell the pages of a supercilious book 
 on etiquette, and I wonder if a bunch of violets is to 
 many very much more than lovely little flowers. 
 
 With us the symbol goes a little further, and a 
 worker in art in Japan can with justice count on our 
 subconscience to an advanced degree, beyond what 
 is possible in the case of your artists. This latter 
 fact has given rise to another feature of Japanese 
 workmanship, namely, its allusive, sketchy character. 
 Not only a full word, but one-third of it, is thought 
 to be more than enough to the wise. Anything done 
 in full seems to us to carry something of redundancy 
 in it. Hence our love of terseness, hence our love of 
 laconism. 
 
 Such then is the general atmosphere and environ- 
 ment of our home, in which the children of a typically 
 Japanese family are brought up. Let us now see how 
 they grow up to manhood and womanhood amidst 
 these several ideals. 
 
126 LIFE AND THOUGHT OF JAPAN 
 
 Except in over-modernized houses the welcome 
 news of an addition to the family is first announced 
 at the household altar called Kamidana. The Kami- 
 dana means " God's Shelf," and is the Shinto altar, 
 a plain wooden shelf. In the centre of this sacred 
 place is placed what we call Onusa, or " Great Offer- 
 ing/* which is part of the offerings made to the Sun- 
 Goddess, at her temple at Ise. The Onusa is distri- 
 buted from the temple to every house in Japan at the 
 end of each year, and is worshipped by every loyal 
 Japanese as the representation of the all-important 
 Imperial Ancestor. On this altar the offerings of rice, 
 sak6, and branches of the sakaki-tree (cleyera japonica) 
 are usually placed; and every morning the members of 
 the household make reverential obeisance before it 
 by clapping hands and bowing, while in the evening 
 lights are also offered on the shelf. On this altar 
 are often placed, in addition, representative tablets of 
 some other Shinto deities. 
 
 In addition to the Kamidana, most houses have a 
 Butsudan, or " Buddhist altar," for, as we have seen. 
 Buddhism has for twelve centuries been inextricably 
 mingled with our religious beliefs. Until quite re- 
 cently, when the separation of Shinto temples from 
 the Buddhist ones was carried out, the gods of the two 
 systems often hved under one and the same roof, not 
 to mention the further intermixture following the 
 most systematic persecution of the Kirishitan under 
 the Tokugawa government, which made the peaceful 
 existence of Japanese subjects in their native country 
 possible only on this condition, that they were regis- 
 tered at a Buddhist church as recognized believers. 
 

 
 
 ,— t 
 
 \ 1 
 
 il i^.;^ . j| 
 
 •P Ulv 
 
 1 
 
 ^'1 
 
 If,' 
 
 THE HOUSEHOLD SHRINE (buDDHIST). 
 
JAPANESE HOME LIFE AND SOCIETY 127 
 
 Now Butsudan in an ordinary house is a minia- 
 ture Buddhist shrine, with cenotaphs bearing on the 
 front posthumous Buddhist appellations, and on the 
 back the actual names used by the deceased during 
 their lifetime. Offerings of flowers, branches of the 
 Shikimi-tree {illicium religiosum), tea, rice, and other 
 vegetable food are as a rule placed before the ceno- 
 taphs, while incense is daily burnt and in the evening 
 small lamps are lighted. The announcement of the 
 newcomer will naturally follow birth at the Buddhist 
 altar also. 
 
 In about a month's time the new-born child is taken 
 to the public shrine where resides the local tutelary 
 god, or the patron god of a man's birthplace or domi- 
 cile. Such a place of worship is called Uji-gami, 
 which, literally translated, means the " God of the 
 clan." " The change in the use of the word," writes 
 Professor Hozumi, " possibly rose from the fact that 
 in early days clansmen usually lived together in the 
 same locality, and erected a temple for the worship 
 of their ancestral eponyms, with the result that the 
 clan god and local patron god meant one and the same 
 deity. But subsequently, the means of communica- 
 tion gradually developing, the members of the various 
 clans began to disperse and live in different parts of 
 the country." Moreover, the administrative depart- 
 ments of the empire, from being tribal, gradually 
 became local and territorial — another fact which tends 
 to show that the worship of Uji-gami, or the local 
 patron gods, is a relic of the original worship of clan- 
 ancestors. 
 
 The day of the Miyamaeri, or public introduction 
 
128 LIFE AND THOUGHT OF JAPAN 
 
 of the new-born child to the auspicious patronage of 
 the local god, is also the occasion when it is for its 
 recognition ceremoniously ushered into the houses of 
 the relatives and friends of the family in the neigh- 
 bourhood. The day being previously known, the round 
 results in heaps of toys for the little blinking visitor, 
 whom they present with a papier-mach^ dog and a 
 so-called deng-deng drum, and a few other playthings. 
 A little paper sack containing a few sticks of ante- 
 confection is the visitor's customary present in 
 return. 
 
 As soon as the child begins to talk it is initiated, 
 as in every other country, into the mystic land of 
 nursery rhymes. Often its little sister, with her 
 chattering charge tied on her back, is seen nursing in 
 the street, telling it in songs how ship after ship for 
 miles on end sails into Japanese harbours, each with 
 its cargo of valuable treasure, and the seven gods of 
 good luck as its patron deities; why hares jump at 
 the sight of the full moon, and so on. Still later, 
 fairy tales are told to the wondering little minds by 
 mothers at their needlework ; how a merciful poor old 
 man by his care brought to life a dying sparrow, and 
 how it made the rest of his days happy by a present 
 of a box full of precious things; how the wrongs of 
 a crab, suffered at the hands of a wicked monkey, were 
 finally avenged by his friends, Mr Bee, Mr Egg, and 
 Mr Pounding Mortar; how the kindness to a homeless 
 and sick dog led an old man and his wife, after many 
 turns of fortune, from dire necessity to a well-to-do 
 condition in which they ended their days happily; 
 and so on. 
 
THE dolls' festival. 
 
JAPANESE HOME LIFE AND SOCIETY 129 
 
 Of these tales the most beloved by our young folk, 
 however, is certainly the Adventures of Master Peach- 
 ling. Here again we have an aged couple living their 
 honest life alone in a lonely country, the old man daily 
 going to the hillside to cut wood. The old woman, 
 whose lot was to spend her days in washing clothes at 
 a mountain rivulet, one day saw an enormous peach 
 floating down the stream. She caught and carried 
 it home to share it with her husband at their evening 
 meal. But, lo, when the peach was being cut, it split 
 in two of its own accord, and out jumped from it a 
 plump little angel of a baby to be the delight and com- 
 fort of the old couple. He was named Momotaro or 
 Master Peachling, and after a short time grew up to 
 be a stout young warrior, who insisted so earnestly on 
 making an invasion of the Island of Ogres to carry off 
 their treasure that the foster-parents finally gave 
 their consent, and he set out on the perilous under- 
 taking. On his way to the Island of the Ogres he was 
 severally accosted by a pheasant, a dog, and an ape, 
 who, in turn, asked and were permitted to serve under 
 his banner on the condition that they were given a 
 millet dumpling each in return — " the very best millet 
 dumplings in all Japan! " At last Master Peachling 
 and his retainers reached their destination, and after 
 a fearful fight brought the ogres to subjection, so that 
 they could never more do any harm to the Land of 
 the Emperors. The victorious adventurer went home 
 laden with riches, and maintained his foster-parents 
 in peace and plenty for the remainder of their lives. 
 
 This story, which reminds you of your Jack and the 
 Beanstalk, will show you, as the others hinted above 
 I 
 
130 LIFE AND THOUGHT OF JAPAN 
 
 do, that the moral turns principally on two important 
 points in Japanese ethical teaching, namely, good 
 men get their sure meed in the long run, and the im- 
 portance of doing our duty towards our elders, the 
 Mikado, and the country, for the good they have done 
 for us. 
 
 By this time our children grow big enough for some 
 parents to think of sending them to a kindergarten, 
 the door of which is, in Japan, ever open to our children 
 at the completion of their third year. 
 
 Although it is now a fashion with the parents of 
 our middle and upper classes to send their children to 
 a kindergarten, it does not form a part of the national 
 educational system. The value of the kindergarten 
 is still a question with us, some educationists contend- 
 ing that it is prejudicial to the development of children, 
 while others contend that there can be no harm if it is 
 properly conducted; we are all agreed in this that 
 there should be no systematic teaching, not even of 
 the letters of the alphabet, in the kindergartens, that 
 children should there simply be made to play with 
 gifts and take part in games, to sing songs, etc. We 
 are careful that the rooms in a kindergarten shall not 
 be called rooms but nursery-halls, that those in charge 
 of children shall not be called teachers but nurse- 
 mothers. With all this care too often kindergartens 
 are made into a sort of elementary school, the fault 
 partly lying with the parents, many of whom demand 
 some such teaching. 
 
 Before proceeding to talk about the Elementary 
 School, which forms the lowest grade of our educa- 
 tional system, let me remind you that in Japan educa- 
 
JAPANESE HOME LIFE AND SOCIETY 131 
 
 tion is considered one of the most important functions 
 of the State, and is therefore entirely under State 
 control; the administration of affairs connected with 
 it is under the Minister of Education, who directly 
 or indirectly is in charge of the whole educational 
 system of the Empire. 
 
 At the very base of the entire system Hes the 
 Elementary School. The course pursued there is 
 divided into Ordinary and Higher. The former ex- 
 tends over six years, and is compulsory for all children 
 who have completed their sixth year. After that 
 comes the Higher course, which extends over two (or 
 three) years. 
 
 In the elementary schools boys and girls are usu- 
 ally taught together, often in the same classes, there 
 being only a slight difference in the subjects taught 
 and in the manner of teaching them. But beyond 
 this the education of a boy and a girl becomes 
 distinct as regards both schools and subjects. 
 
 The object of elementary school education is, as 
 defined by the Imperial Ordinance, " to give children 
 the rudiments of moral and civic education, together 
 with such general knowledge and skill as are necessary 
 for life, while due attention is paid to their bodily 
 development," the subjects taught being the essentials 
 of morals, Japanese, arithmetic, Japanese history and 
 geography, science, drawing, singing and gymnastics, 
 and simple manual work. Besides these there is 
 sewing for girls. 
 
 Of all subjects the most important is of course the 
 teaching of morals, whose aim is with us " to cultivate 
 the moral nature of children and to guide them in 
 
132 LIFE AND THOUGHT OF JAPAN 
 
 the practice of virtues." In order to attain this aim, 
 easy precepts appropriate for practice concerning 
 such virtues as filial piety and obedience to elders, 
 affection and friendship, frugality and industry, 
 modesty, fidehty, moral courage, etc., are given. 
 Neither are some of the duties towards the State and 
 society forgotten ; care is taken to instil them properly 
 in the young minds, with a view to elevating their 
 moral character, strengthening their will, increasing 
 their spirit of enterprise, and making them value 
 pubHc virtues, and fostering the spirit of loyalty and 
 patriotism. In short, our moral teaching in the ele- 
 mentary schools is at present, as is the case with higher 
 institutions, entirely based on the spirit of the Imperial 
 Rescript on Education, which was promulgated on the 
 30th of October 1890. 
 
 As the moral principles therein expressed strike 
 the keynote of Japanese ethical life now as they did 
 in former days, I take the liberty to introduce the 
 Imperial Words to you. The Rescript runs thus: — 
 
 " Know ye, Our subjects: 
 
 " Our Imperial Ancestors have founded Our Empire 
 on a basis broad and everlasting, and have deeply 
 and firmly implanted virtue; Our subjects ever united 
 in loyalty and filial piety have from generation to 
 generation illustrated the beauty thereof. This is 
 the glory of the fundamental character of Our Empire, 
 and herein also lies the source of Our education. Ye, 
 Our^^subjects, be fihally pious to your parents, affec- 
 tionate to your brothers and sisters; as husbands and 
 wives be harmonious; as friends, true; bear yourselves 
 
JAPANESE HOME LIFE AND SOCIETY 133 
 
 in modesty and moderation; extend your benevolence 
 to all; pursue learning and cultivate arts, and there- 
 by develop intellectual faculties and perfect moral 
 powers. Furthermore, advance public good and 
 promote common interests; always respect the Con- 
 stitution and observe the laws; should emergency 
 arise, offer yourselves courageously to the State; and 
 thus guard and maintain the prosperity of Our Im- 
 perial Throne coeval with heaven and earth. So 
 shall ye not only be Our good and faithful subjects, 
 but render illustrious the best traditions of your fore- 
 fathers. 
 
 *' The Way here set forth is indeed the teaching 
 bequeathed by our Imperial Ancestors, to be observed 
 alike by Their Descendants and the subjects, infallible 
 for all ages and true in all places. It is Our wish to 
 lay it to heart in all reverence, in common with you. 
 Our subjects, that we may all attain to the same 
 virtue." 
 
 While the teachers are thus busy engaged at school 
 in the work of initiating the young minds in the 
 noble aspirations of serving the cause of their elders, 
 their Mikado and their country, the elder members 
 of their respective families are not idle in impressing 
 them with similar ideas. They generally try, by means 
 of fireside tales, to prepare their steps to go unerring 
 through the zigzag passes of social duties. 
 
 Our little ones themselves, when they reach their 
 tenth year, or still earlier, usually begin to show signs 
 that they find fables not so very attractive as they 
 used to do. They urge their mothers and sisters to 
 
134 LIFE AND THOUGHT OF JAPAN 
 
 tell them some " true " stories about " brave " men 
 and women. They are found sitting around their 
 father of an evening, and listening, with gleaming 
 eyes in their beaming little faces, wild with wonder and 
 curiosity, to the time-honoured tales of our good old 
 times. First comes, perchance, the story of Itakura 
 Shigemune, how he was appointed by inheritance to 
 the office of a local government, and was presented 
 with a famous sword by his own father, who told his 
 young heir how extremely important his new calling 
 was, which could well be likened to a sharp blade in 
 this, that when wielded properly it worked marvels 
 for a righteous cause, while it would prove a source 
 of fearful disaster in the hand of an unworthy user of 
 it. The next will be the story about the feudal lord 
 of Kokura, how he suffered one of his retainers, of 
 whose wisdom and judgment he was fully convinced, 
 to cure his heir, a boy of eight, of his dislike of thunder- 
 storms, by making the poor shivering little child sit 
 out in the veranda. When the boy with piteous 
 cries asked to be excused from the terrifying ordeal 
 the old man would say: " Such lack of courage will 
 never make a good Samurai." On another occasion 
 the same old man made his young master fearfully 
 angry by letting his caged pet fly away. " Such 
 cruelty is not fit for a Samurai," was the cold answer 
 of the old retainer to the boy's enraged demands of 
 a vindication. The father not only agreed with the 
 old man's action, but was thankful for it. 
 
 The third story will perhaps be that of a scholar, 
 called Matsuzaki Kankai; how, when a boy of seven, 
 he went for a ramble with his father on a hill, and how 
 
JAPANESE HOME LIFE AND SOCIETY 135 
 
 he was scared by the sudden appearance of a large 
 snake on his way. Thereupon Hakkei, the father, 
 ordered him immediately to kick off his sandals and 
 courageously tread barefooted on the crawling reptile, 
 which he did, and was cured for the rest of his life from 
 the dread. 
 
 In these evening tales, lessons for future wives and 
 mothers are by no means neglected. Besides many, 
 many stories, old and new, about well-known cases 
 of chastity and almost superhuman self-abnegation, 
 told and retold of our women, such narratives as the 
 following are very often introduced into our fireside 
 talks. A great favourite is that of the wife of our 
 famous patriot, Kusunoki Masashige, who after serv- 
 ing for a long time the cause of an unfortunate Mikado, 
 the Emperor Godaigo, killed himself in 1336 at Shijo- 
 nawate, near the present Kobe, to save himself from 
 the disgrace of being captured by the overpowering 
 Ashikaga forces. The last wish which he expressed 
 to his son Masatsura, a lad of thirteen or less at that 
 time, was that the latter should grow up a brave 
 soldier, and devote his life and that of all his retainers 
 to the imperial and patriotic cause. The boy on his 
 return to his house was, however, too sad at the ill 
 luck that had befallen his father, and lost his mind so 
 far as to try to commit hara-kiri, an act from which 
 his vigilant, wise mother saved him. She succeeded 
 in convincing her son that it was far nobler to preserve 
 his life for the time being and, growing up a famous 
 Samurai, to devote his manhood in full vigour to the 
 cause of the throne. Under her careful instruction 
 and care Masatsura became a warrior quite as loyal 
 
136 LIFE AND THOUGHT OF JAPAN 
 
 as his father, and had the satisfaction of dying a young 
 patriot true to his father's wish. 
 
 Though not so well known as the preceding story, 
 that of Chisato, the mother of Heguri Hironao, who 
 lived in the ninth century a.d., appeals profoundly 
 to our mothers in the bud. She is said to have shown 
 her disapprobation, by moodily shutting herself up 
 in her room, whenever her young son was known to 
 be on intimate terms with lads of no character, while 
 she looked very happy when she saw him in the com- 
 pany of his good friends. The young man was after- 
 wards appointed an envoy to the Chinese court. On 
 this occasion she disposed of all things she had held 
 precious to get enough to make her son a handsome 
 present of money, so that he should in no way discredit 
 his country and his family through lack of the neces- 
 sary funds in the expensive intercourse in the Celestial 
 Empire. 
 
 A story of similar type, but of a distressing char- 
 acter, is that of the mother of Hara Mototoki. Kara 
 was one of the famous Forty-seven Ronins who 
 avenged their wronged Daimyo, the Lord of Ako, by 
 a night attack on the dwelling of Ko-no-Moronao, 
 who was the cause of their lord's ruin. It was during 
 the year of their secret preparation for the final blow 
 that one day Hara received a message from the leader 
 of the league, Oishi Kuranosuke, to meet him at Kyoto, 
 where the leader then resided. Living, as he did, a 
 bachelor life alone with his mother, he was very sorry 
 to leave her to her own solitary care, because he knew 
 too well that the trip might mean an eternal farewell 
 to the aged matron, who, however, with an instinctive 
 
JAPANESE HOME LIFE AND SOCIETY 137 
 
 guess at the situation, convinced her son of the useless- 
 ness of his keeping the real state of affairs from her 
 knowledge ; and encouraged him to do his best in the 
 noble attempt, without any further concern about 
 herself. " For loyalty is weightier," she said, " than 
 filial duty, which is best fulfilled in the fulfilment of 
 the other." Finding solace in her words, the dutiful 
 son took his leave, but came back in a week's time, 
 wishing to see his mother once more, before he left for 
 Yedo, where the vengeance was to take place not 
 long after. 
 
 The mother did not seem pleased at this sign of 
 attachment. She shared, however, her evening meal 
 with her son and early retired to her own room with a 
 cheerful good-night on her smiling lips. On the next 
 morning the mother was found dead in bed with a 
 letter addressed to her son, the purport of which was 
 " an unmitigated expression of her deep regret con- 
 cerning the amount of care her son should have spent 
 on her, thus making utmost devotion to his greater 
 duty somewhat more difficult. To cure the trouble 
 at the root she had made up her mind to offer her own 
 life for the sake of her son." These words made 
 Mototoki feel the double importance of his loyal 
 mission. He fought bravely in the night of actual 
 vengeance; and, for his firmer grasp of his loyal 
 sword, he was thankful to his heroic mother. 
 
 To return to the work in the Elementary School, 
 the subject in the curriculum that stands next in im- 
 portance to the teaching of morals is with us that of 
 the mother tongue. In this lesson part of the work 
 to be accomplished is to develop the moral and intel- 
 
138 LIFE AND THOUGHT OF JAPAN 
 
 lectual capacities of the pupils, by means of a proper 
 treatment of the subject-matter taken from such topics 
 as Morals, History, Geography, Science, etc. But 
 the principal, or more direct, aim of it consists in 
 making children properly learn words and sentences 
 in common use, all Japanese letters, and such Chinese 
 characters as occur most frequently in our reading, 
 so that our boys and girls are enabled to express 
 their thoughts correctly and distinctly. 
 
 All this sounds very easy when spoken of in this 
 manner, but the case is quite different when the teach- 
 ing is to be actually carried out. The main difficulty 
 of course arises from the fatal admixture of Chinese 
 script in our national writing. How horrible it is can- 
 not be even faintly realized by a Westerner, unless 
 he knows that the Japanese, besides their own com- 
 paratively simple system of letters called Kana, have 
 to learn a great number of Chinese characters. The 
 Chinese take recourse to the so-called ideographs to 
 communicate their ideas by writing, using almost 
 always a different sign to express each different idea. 
 For instance, they have one for the sun, another for 
 the moon, a third for a man, a fourth for woman, and 
 so on. These signs are used by us principally in two 
 different ways, namely, to represent the originally 
 Chinese words now adopted in our language, and also 
 to represent native Japanese words. Hence one and 
 the same character can be read at least in two entirely 
 distinct manners. The sign for the sun may be either 
 pseudo-Chinese nichi (alias jitsu) or else hi ; that for 
 the moon may be either pseudo-Chinese gatsu (alias 
 getsu) or else Japanese tsuki, and so on. The number 
 
JAPANESE HOME LIFE AND SOCIETY 139 
 
 of these characters is very great, nearly fifty thousand 
 at a rough estimate. Of these at least three thousand 
 are expected to be in the possession of a well-educated 
 Japanese man or woman. 
 
 But as even this is considered far too large a 
 number to be introduced into Elementary School edu- 
 cation, a careful selection of twelve hundred signs has 
 been made, which are systematically taught as the most 
 useful. Yet as these signs are not only pronounced in 
 at least two different ways, but most of them assume 
 different appearances in their regular and cursive 
 forms, the number is practically three or four times as 
 great to the young learners. Your young boys and 
 girls ought to grumble less over their Latin grammar 
 in future, thinking of the harder fate of their Japanese 
 fellow-scholars. 
 
 There is no doubt as to the fact that the Chinese 
 writing is at best fearfully complicated — enough to 
 make an old Jesuit declare it to be evidently " the 
 invention of a conciliabule of demons, to harass the 
 faithful " — it is, however, not altogether without 
 certain general principles in its formation and use, 
 which alleviates the difficulty to a considerable extent. 
 I am not going to trouble you with any detailed account 
 of it ; suffice it to say that only a very limited number 
 of the Chinese characters are the simple outcome of 
 original picture-writing, as is the case with such signs 
 as for child, bird, etc. Most of them are, on the 
 contrary, obtained by means of a combination of such 
 radical elements. The combination of " sun " and 
 " moon " means " brightness." Put two signs of 
 " hand " side by side and it means " to worship." 
 
140 LIFE AND THOUGHT OF JAPAN 
 
 There is a sign which consists of a " house " with 
 a "woman" inside. What do you think it means? 
 The character must have, in my opinion, been invented 
 either by a happy husband or else by an anti-suffragist 
 in China five thousand years before Christ, for it 
 means " peace " ! 
 
 The use of Chinese characters in Japan has un- 
 doubtedly many drawbacks, which some of us are 
 trying to do away with by an exclusive system of 
 writing, like the native Kana syllabary or the Roman 
 alphabet. But the movement has so far failed to pro- 
 duce any important result. In the meanwhile, we 
 have to be satisfied with the old way, which is not 
 without its good sides. " Japanese calligraphy is 
 artistic," writes Mr Chamberlain; " above all it is bold, 
 because it comes from the shoulder instead of merely 
 from the wrist. A little experience will convince any 
 one that, in comparison with it, the freest, boldest 
 English hand is little better than the cramped scribble 
 of some rheumatic crone. One consequence of this 
 exceeding difficulty and beauty is that calligraphy 
 ranks high in Japan among the arts." 
 
 Another is the development of a highly fastidious 
 sense of balance and proportion in our minds as to 
 propriety and neatness of execution in form. You 
 could hardly realize how disagreeable and almost dis- 
 tressing it is to us to see, for instance, a picture hung 
 on the wall in any degree more slanting than it ought 
 to. The strong mental tendency in the Japanese of 
 committing facts to memory without much reasoning 
 might possibly be one of the results induced by our 
 process of silent accumulation of Chinese ideographs. 
 
JAPANESE HOME LIFE AND SOCIETY 141 
 
 But enough of the Japanese mode of writing! 
 Now let us return to the Elementary School again, and, 
 starting from it, run through the other schools stand- 
 ing above it, so that we may still have some time left 
 to make a few remarks concerning the organization of 
 Japanese social life. 
 
 After six years of compulsory education in an 
 Elementary School a boy may enter a Middle School 
 with a course of five years. The subjects taught 
 are Morals, Japanese, Classical Chinese, English (or 
 German or French), History, Physics and Chemistry, 
 Law and Economics, Drawing, Singing and Gym- 
 nastics. 
 
 After passing through the Middle School a boy 
 intending to pursue the university course enters what 
 we call " Higher Schools," where there are several 
 preparatory courses, extending over three years. 
 
 On his finishing the preparatory course the boy is 
 eligible for one of the colleges of the Imperial Uni- 
 versities, which have an undergraduate course. 
 
 Or instead of going to the Imperial University, a 
 boy, after he has finished the Middle School, may enter 
 at once a Special College. 
 
 Or again he may enter the Higher Normal School, 
 in case he wishes to be a teacher in middle-grade 
 schools. 
 
 There are, besides, a few schools and colleges, out- 
 side the jurisdiction of the Department of Education, 
 such as the Military and Naval Schools, Nautical 
 School, etc. 
 
 So much for boys. A girl's education runs on 
 somewhat similar lines. After the Elementary School 
 
142 LIFE AND THOUGHT OF JAPAN 
 
 course she may enter a Girls' High School, with four 
 (or five) years devoted to the study of practically the 
 same subjects as are taught in the Middle School for 
 boys. The difference consists in the less thorough 
 manner in the class-room treatment of the subjects 
 taught, and in the substitution of " Household 
 matters '* and " Sewing " for Law and Economy. 
 
 No provision has so far been made, except by 
 private enterprise, to give girls a higher education than 
 the supplementary course of the Girls' High School, 
 the only other means of receiving it being either at the 
 Female Higher Normal School, for intending teachers 
 of Girls' High Schools, and the Musical Academy for 
 those who want a special training in music. 
 
 I should have mentioned technical or industrial 
 schools for boys and girls of different grades. There 
 are, besides, Normal Schools for men and women wish- 
 ing to become teachers in the Elementary Schools. 
 
 Having given you some idea about our school 
 system, let me now tell you how our society is organ- 
 ized, by means of a reference to our form of marriage. 
 Our girls leave their High Schools generally at 
 about eighteen years of age, and that is with us high 
 time for their parents to begin thinking seriously of 
 suitable young men. But there are some considera- 
 tions which must precede any account of an actual 
 match, for the ideas that are associated in our mind 
 with the word " marriage " are entirely different from 
 those which are naturally connected with it in the 
 Western mind. 
 
 In Japan, until quite recently (as late as 1898), a 
 '* house " was legally a corporation and a legal unit of 
 
JAPANESE HOME LIFE AND SOCIETY 143 
 
 the State. Now the term " house/' in the sense in 
 which it is employed in the Japanese law, does not 
 mean a household, much less a dwelling-place, but a 
 group of persons, usually but not necessarily bearing 
 the same surname, and subject to the authority of its 
 head. A " house " may consist of the head alone, or 
 of the head and one or more house-members; the 
 latter consisting of the relatives of the head or of his 
 predecessors, or sometimes also of the relatives of 
 house-members who have no tie of kinship with the 
 family. A house-member may, with the consent of 
 the house-head, establish a new " house " and become 
 its head. 
 
 It will be seen from the above statement that 
 house-membership and kinship are two things. Nor 
 is it always the elders who are the house-heads. " It 
 may sometimes happen," says Baron Kikuchi, in his 
 Japanese Education, " that the house-head is a minor, 
 and his (or her) father or mother a house-member. 
 In such case the house-head is under the parental 
 authority of the latter, while at the same time the latter 
 is legally subject to the authority of the former as the 
 house-head. In face of this double-faced relationship 
 Japanese law attaches more weight to the ' house ' 
 than to the kinship, and a man's rights and duties, 
 capacities and incapacities, are usually determined by 
 his position as a member of the house, and not by his 
 position as a kindred of the family." 
 
 All this shows how important the " house " is in the 
 Japanese society of our day; yet it was of far greater 
 importance in former times, when the feudal system 
 was in vogue. In those days every head of a " house " 
 
144 LIFE AND THOUGHT OF JAPAN 
 
 was expected to discharge, among other duties, the 
 all-important one of military service. But that 
 particular duty, and some others, a woman was 
 naturally unfit to fulfil, and she consequently could 
 not become a house-head. Her only chance of legal 
 existence was therefore as a house-member under the 
 house-headship either of her parents, or of her husband, 
 or else of her son. Hence the so-called rule of the 
 " Three Obediences " of a woman. She was through- 
 out her lifetime subject to the authority of one house- 
 head or another. Yet this does not necessarily mean 
 that her status was very low. She owed obedience, it 
 is true, to the house-head in the legal sense; but then 
 she was a wife, or a mother, and as such she was 
 entitled to, and actually received, her due of love and 
 respect. 
 
 With us marriage was, and practically still is, an 
 affair of the house, and not of the individuals. The 
 union came to be recognized by law because it had 
 its fundamental idea in ancestor- worship. " The 
 State recognized the wedlock," writes Professor 
 Hozumi, " and made rules for its protection, because 
 it was regarded in former days as a means of perpetuat- 
 ing the worship of ancestors. In the eyes of our old law 
 it was essential that a family should perpetuate itself 
 for ever, and marriage represented the union of man 
 and woman for the purpose of obtaining a successor 
 to maintain the continuity of ancestor-worship. It 
 was a means to an end, and that end was the con- 
 tinuity of the sacra. It was considered therefore one 
 of the greatest misfortunes that could befall a man to 
 die without leaving a son to perpetuate the worship of 
 
JAPANESE HOME LIFE AND SOCIETY 145 
 
 his ancestors and himself." Mencius, the great 
 disciple of Confucius, considers " the greatest unfilial 
 act to be dying without posterity/' and all other 
 Chinese sages are of the same opinion. Thus, to leave 
 the world without male issue came to be regarded by 
 us as the greatest sin, according to the Chinese philo- 
 sophy which has been taught in Japan for more than 
 a thousand years. The reason of this doctrine is 
 obvious. The posthumous happiness of the ancestors 
 of a family depended on the proper performance of the 
 family sacra. It was therefore the duty of every head 
 of a house to marry, for the purpose of avoiding the 
 calamity of the family sacra being extinct Hence 
 the ideas about the Seven Grounds of Divorce, 
 which were: first, sterility; second, adultery; third, 
 disobedience to the father-in-law or the mother- 
 in-law; fourth, loquapity; fifth, larceny; sixth, 
 jealousy; seventh, serious disease. Marriage was, as 
 we have seen, contracted for a special object, and that 
 object failing, a man was justified in dissolving the 
 union. A man was, indeed, under a moral obligation 
 to his ancestors to do so. 
 
 It is well to state, however, that the majority of 
 these grounds of divorce do not find a place in the 
 code now in force, bigamy, adultery, desertion, cruelty 
 or gross insult, condemnation to punishments for cer- 
 tain offences, sexual immorality, disappearance from 
 residence, etc., being the principal grounds now. 
 
 Thus it will be seen that the law of divorce has 
 undergone a great change, and in its present form it 
 has very little to do with the original idea of ancestor- 
 worship and the perpetuation of family sacra. Yet, 
 
 K 
 
146 LIFE AND THOUGHT OF JAPAN 
 
 even at present, the fact remains practically un- 
 changed, that marriage is no simple affaire de cceur of 
 the parties immediately concerned; it is an important 
 affair between two social units, the houses of the 
 parties — an affair, the legal and social consequence of 
 which brings about one of the following two results: 
 either the wife enters, or marries into the " house " of 
 her husband and becomes one of the house-members, 
 or, in case a female house-head contracts marriage, 
 the husband enters, or marries into the " house " of his 
 wife, thus becoming a house-member under the legal 
 authority of his wife, the house-head. 
 
 In such circumstances as have been detailed above 
 our marriage must necessarily be essentially different 
 from yours. Hence also the diversity in the way of 
 contracting it. With us the union does not enter into 
 its first phase as often seen on your stage by a youth 
 kneeling in a rose-garden on one knee, with a hand 
 pressed on his throbbing heart, while the other brings 
 the finger-tips of his faintly smiling goddess to his 
 burning lips, to the most timely music of the warbling 
 nightingale. With our young men, taking a wife 
 assumes a far more sober character, not because they 
 are less vulnerable to Cupid's arrow, but because they 
 are more conscious of their responsibility to their 
 respective " houses " for the step, which necessarily 
 means the addition of an important member to them. 
 The cold current of family honour is always present in 
 a strong degree to mitigate the hot stream of reckless 
 love. Hence the coolness of our courtship. Although 
 much freedom has been introduced into our sex rela- 
 tions in recent years, the typical mode in which a 
 
JAPANESE HOME LIFE AND SOCIETY 147 
 
 marriage in the old style takes place among our 
 people belonging to the upper middle class at present, 
 remains very much like the description of one given 
 by Miss Bacon in her ever-charming Japanese Girls 
 and Women : — 
 
 *' The courtship is somewhat after the following 
 manner. A young man, who finds himself in a position 
 to marry, speaks to some married friend, and asks him 
 to be on the lookout for a beautiful and accomplished 
 maiden who would be willing to become his wife. 
 The friend, acting rather as advance agent, makes a 
 canvass of all the young maidens of his acquaintance, 
 inquiring among his friends, and finally decides that 
 so-and-so (Miss Flower, let us say) will be a very good 
 match for his friend. Having arrived at this decision 
 he goes to Miss Flower's parents and lays the case of 
 his friend before them. Should they approve of the 
 suitor a party is arranged at the house of some common 
 friend, where the young people may have a chance to 
 meet each other and decide each upon the other's 
 merits. Should the young folks find no fault with the 
 match, presents are exchanged, a formal betrothal is 
 entered into , and the marriage is hastened forward. All 
 arrangements between the contracting parties are 
 made by go-betweens, or seconds, who hold themselves 
 responsible for the success of the marriage, and must 
 be concerned in the divorce proceedings, should divorce 
 become desirable Or necessary. 
 
 " The marriage ceremony, which seems to be neither 
 religious nor legal in its nature, takes place at the 
 house of the groom, to which the bride is carried, 
 
mS life and thought of japan 
 
 accompanied by her go-betweens, and, if she be of the 
 higher classes, by her own confidential maid, who will 
 serve her as her personal attendant in the new life in 
 her husband's house. The trousseau and household 
 goods, which the bride is expected to bring with her, 
 are sent before. The household goods required by 
 custom as a part of the outfit of every bride are as 
 follows: a bureau; a low desk or table for writing ; a 
 work-box ; two of the lacquer trays or tables on which 
 meals are served, together with everything required 
 for furnishing them, even to the chopsticks; and two 
 or more complete sets of handsome bed furnishings. 
 The trousseau will contain, if the bride be of a well-to- 
 do family, dresses for all seasons, and handsome sashes 
 without number; for the unchanging fashions of Japan, 
 together with the durable quality of the dress material, 
 make it possible for a woman, at the time of her mar- 
 riage, to enter her husband's house with a supply of 
 clothing that may last her through her lifetime. The 
 parents of the bride, in giving up their daughter, as 
 they do when she marries, show the estimation in 
 which they have held her by the beauty and com- 
 pleteness of the trousseau with which they provide her. 
 This is her very own ; and in the event of a divorce she 
 brings back with her to her father's house the clothing 
 and household goods that she carried away as a bride. 
 " With the bride and her trousseau are sent a great 
 number of presents from the family of the bride to the 
 members of the groom's household. Each member of 
 the family, from the aged grandfather to the youngest 
 grandchild, receives some remembrance of the occa- 
 sion ; and even the servants and retainers, down to the 
 
JAPANESE HOME LIFE AND SOCIETY 149 
 
 jinrikisha men, and the hetto in the stables, are not 
 forgotten by the bride's relatives. Besides this present- 
 giving the friends and relatives of the bride and groom, 
 as in this country, send gifts to the young couple, often 
 some article for use in the household, or crepe or silk 
 for dresses. 
 
 " In old times the wedding took place in the after- 
 noon, but it is now usually celebrated in the evening. 
 The ceremony consists merely in a formal drinking of 
 the native wine [sake) from a two-spouted cup, which 
 is presented to the mouths of the bride and groom 
 alternately. This drinking from one cup is a symbol 
 of the equal sharing of the joys and sorrows of married 
 life. At the ceremony no one is present but the bride 
 and bridegroom, their go-betweens and a young girl, 
 whose duty it is to present the cup to the lips of the 
 contracting parties. When this is over the wedding 
 guests, who have been assembled in the next room 
 during the ceremony, join the wedding party, a grand 
 feast is spread and much merriment ensues. 
 
 " On the third day after the wedding the newly- 
 married couple are expected to make a visit to the 
 bride's family, and for this great preparations are 
 made. A large party is usually given by the bride's 
 parents, either in the afternoon or evening, in honour 
 of this occasion, to which the friends of the bride's 
 family are invited. The young couple bring with 
 them presents from the groom's family to the bride's, 
 in return for the presents sent on the wedding day." 
 
 Thus is a new "house" formed to furnish an- 
 other corner-stone to Japanese society, where the 
 
150 LIFE AND THOUGHT OF JAPAN 
 
 same process of multiplication has been going on for 
 centuries, still goes on at present, and will continue to 
 go on for many, many centuries to come, thus to make 
 every one of our social units constantly keep in view 
 its family ties, and their consequent duties, towards 
 the " Head-House,*' the Oyake, the '* Whole Japanese 
 Nation/' with the Mikado as its House-Head! 
 
 THE END 
 
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