Where Half The World Is Waking Up Part 4

Such is a brief review of the salient features of present-day j.a.panese industry, and in no point do I find any material menace to the general well-being of American and European trade. It is my opinion that the j.a.panese will steadily develop industrial efficiency, but that in the future no more than in the present will j.a.pan menace European and American industry (unless she is permitted to take unfair advantages in Manchuria, Korea, etc.), for just in proportion as efficiency increases, just in the same proportion, broadly speaking, wages and standards of living will advance. The three--efficiency, wages, cost of living--seem destined to go hand in hand, and this has certainly been the experience thus far. And whatever loss we may suffer by reason of j.a.pan gradually supplanting us in certain cruder forms of production should be abundantly compensated for in the better market for our own higher-grade goods that we shall find among a people of increasing wealth and steadily advancing standards of living.

In any fair contest for the world's trade there seems little reason to fear any disastrous compet.i.tion from j.a.pan. Perhaps she has been allowed to make the contest unfair in Manchuria or elsewhere, but that, as Mr. Kipling would say, is another story.

Kobe, j.a.pan.

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VI

BUDDHISM, s.h.i.+NTOISM, AND CHRISTIANITY IN j.a.pAN

One of the most fascinating places in all j.a.pan is Kyoto, the old capital of the empire, and one of its most picturesque and historic cities. Without great factories such as Osaka boasts of, without the political importance of Tokyo, and without s.h.i.+pping advantages such as have made Kobe and Yokahoma famous, Kyoto is noted rather for conserving the life of old j.a.pan. Here are the family industries, the handicrafts, and a hundred little arts in which the Land of the Rising Sun excels.

Little themselves in stature, the people of j.a.pan are best in dealing with little things requiring daintiness, finish, and artistic taste.

Some one has said that their art is "great in little things and little in great things," and unlike many epigrams, it is as true as it is terse.

A traveler gets the impression that most of their shops, or "stores,"

as we say in America, are for selling bric-a-brac, toys, lacquer ware, bronzes, or ornamental things of one kind or another; but perhaps this is largely because they give an artistic or ornamental appearance to a thousand utensils and household articles which in America would be raw and plain in their obvious practicality. The room in which I write is a fine ill.u.s.tration of this: finished in natural, unpainted woods, entirely without "fussiness" or show, and yet with certain touches and bits of wood carving that make it a work of art. Upon this point I must again quote Lafcadio Hearn, whose {49} books, although often more poetic and laudatory than accurate, are nevertheless too valuable to be neglected by any student of j.a.pan:

"It has been said that in a Greek city of the fourth century before Christ every household utensil, even the most trifling object, was in respect of design an object of art; and the same fact is true, though in another and stranger way, of all things in a j.a.panese home; even such articles of common use as a bronze candlestick, a bra.s.s lamp, an iron kettle, a paper lantern, a bamboo curtain, a wooden tray, will reveal to educated eyes a sense of beauty and fitness entirely unknown to Western cheap production."

Like most old j.a.panese cities, Kyoto is proud of its temples, Buddhist and s.h.i.+nto. And perhaps I should explain just here the difference between these two faiths that were long merged into one, but have been dissociated since the restoration of the Emperor to his old-time powers forty years ago. s.h.i.+nto is the ancient j.a.panese system of ancestor-wors.h.i.+p, with its doctrine of the divine descent of the Mikado from the Sun-G.o.ddess and its requirement that every faithful adherent make daily offerings to the spirits of the family's ancestors. With the future life or with moral precepts for this life it does not concern itself. "Obey the Emperor and follow your own instincts," is the gist of the s.h.i.+nto religion, in so far as it may be called a religion at all: the tendency is to consider it only a form of patriotism and not a religion.

Buddhism, on the other hand, is an elaborate system of theology comprising a great variety of creeds, and insisting upon much ecclesiastical form and ceremony, however little it may have to do with practical morals. "The fact is, we j.a.panese have never gotten our morals from our religion," said one quasi-Buddhist newspaper man to me in Tokyo. "What moral ideas we have came neither from s.h.i.+ntoism nor Buddhism, but largely from Confucius and the Chinese cla.s.sics."

Buddhism as it left India may have been a rather exalted religious theory, but if so, then in j.a.pan it has certainly {50} degenerated into a shameless mockery of its former self. To read Sir Edwin Arnold's glorification of theoretical Buddhism in his "Light of Asia,"

and then see practical Buddhism in j.a.pan with all its superst.i.tions and idolatries, is very much like hearing bewitched t.i.tania's praise of her lover's beauty and then turning to see the long ears and hairy features of the a.s.s that he has become.

Nor is it without significance that Sir Edwin Arnold himself coming to Buddhist j.a.pan dropped into open and flagrant immoralities such as a Christian community would never have tolerated, while the foremost American-bred apologists for Buddhism here have been but little better. One of the greatest and wealthiest temples in Kyoto is more notorious right now for the vices of its sacred (?) officials than for any virtues in its creed, and one of the high priests, like the Emperor himself, has a dozen or more women in his household. Some Buddhists are making an earnest effort to bring about at least an outward reformation of their organization, but the difficulties are such as to make the success of the undertaking very improbable. With the usual j.a.panese quality of imitativeness they have started "Young Men's Buddhist a.s.sociations," "Sunday schools," etc., and are also beginning to follow the example set by the Christians of partic.i.p.ating in philanthropic and charitable work. In the Buddhist service I attended last Sunday the gorgeously robed priest sat on a raised altar in the centre of the room, with other priests ranged about him, and the general service, as usual, was much as if they had copied the Catholic ritual.

After the Buddhist ceremonies, I went to the Christian service at the Congregational School, or Dos.h.i.+sha, where the sound of the American-born minister's voice was punctuated by the street sounds of whirring rickshaw wheels and the noisy getas of pa.s.sing Buddhists, while outside the window I could see the bamboo trees and the now familiar red disk and white border of the Mikado's flag. Prayer was offered for {51} "the President of the United States, the King of Great Britain, the Emperor of Germany, and the Emperor of j.a.pan."

At night I was even more interested, even though I could not understand a word, in a native j.a.panese service I attended for half an hour. Although there was a downpour of rain the chapel was comfortably filled and the faces of the wors.h.i.+ppers, I thought, were of more than ordinary intelligence and promise, while their sincerity is ill.u.s.trated by the fact that numbers of the women Christians are actually depriving themselves of suitable food in order to give money for erecting a larger church building.

The next evening I took tea with a missionary who has in his home one of the public notices (dated March, 1868,) and common throughout the empire forty odd years ago, prohibiting Christianity, the ancient penalty being nothing less than death itself. The explanation of this notice is found in a bit of history. Three hundred and sixty years ago the Catholics came here, started missions, and made many converts among the lords or daimyios, who ordered their followers also to become Catholics, with the result that by the time of the first English settlement at Jamestown, in 1607, there were from 600,000 to 1,000,000 Christians, nominal and actual, away over here in j.a.pan.

Seven years later, however, government persecution began, Christianity was put under the ban, and so remained until eight years after our Civil War ended. Many Christians suffered martyrdom for their faith in this long period; and a few who escaped detection even secretly handed their faith down from father to son through all the long generations until tolerance came again.

Dr. A. D. Hail, of Osaka, tells me that even as late as 1885 an old man from the "backwoods," as we should say, came to a village where Dr. Hail's brother was a missionary, discovered for the first time that a man might be a Christian without being punished, and then confessed that each day he had wors.h.i.+pped secretly at a little Catholic shrine hidden in {52} his wall, as his father and his father's father had done before him.

As another ill.u.s.tration of the changed att.i.tude toward Christianity, I may mention that a j.a.panese Buddhist once came to Doctor Hail's services armed with a dagger to kill the preacher, but had his attention caught by the sermon while waiting his chance and is now a missionary himself!

Perhaps in no other respect is Christianity working a greater change than in the general estimate of woman, although this is an objection the natives openly urge against Christianity. Just as in any conflict of interest the family in j.a.pan has been everything and the individual nothing, so in every disagreement between husband and wife his opinions count for everything, hers for nothing. The orthodox and traditional j.a.panese view as to a woman's place has been very accurately and none too strongly set forth by the celebrated j.a.panese moralist, Kaibarra, writing on "The Whole Duty of Woman":

"The great lifelong duty of a woman is obedience. . . . Should her husband be roused at any time to anger, she must obey him with fear and trembling, and never set herself up against him in anger and forwardness. A woman should look on her husband as if he were Heaven itself and never weary of thinking how she may yield to her husband, and thus escape celestial castigation."

Similarly, in the "Greater Learning for Women" it is declared:

"The five worst maladies that afflict the female mind are indocility, discontent, slander, jealousy and silliness. These five maladies infest seven or eight out of every ten women, and it is from these that arises the inferiority of women to men."

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[Ill.u.s.tration: THE GREAT BUDDHA (DIABUTSU) AT KAMAKURA.]

This gigantic figure of Buddha (a man's head would barely reach the statue's feet) singularly expresses the spirit of serene contemplation for which the Buddhist religion stands; is indeed, hauntingly suggestive of that dreamy Nirvana which it teaches is the goal of existence. There is perhaps no finer piece of statuary in the East than this.

{54}

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE DEGENERATE KOREANS AT REST AND AT WORK.]

The favorite occupation is smoking, but in the lower picture three men together are managing to operate one spade. One man rams it into the ground, and the other two (by means of ropes attached) jerk out the shovelful of earth!

{52 continued}

The wife of the missionary I visited in Osaka told me one or two amusing incidents--amusing in one aspect and pathetic in another--that are of interest in this connection. A j.a.panese member of her church declared: No, no, Mrs. {55} "Hail, you can't ever make me believe that my wife is as good as I am!" On another occasion she was teaching a Sunday-school cla.s.s concerning the woman of Samaria, and asked: "Why did Jesus ask the woman to call her husband?" And the j.a.panese answer was: "Because he was going to talk on intellectual things and she needed some man to help her understand!"

Dr. Sidney Gulick, with whom I had tea in Kyoto, tells of tying his wife's shoes on the street, on one occasion, only to find the j.a.panese amazed that a man should so humble himself. His wife's taking his arm in walking was also regarded as the height of impropriety!

No religion of the Far East has ever recognized the dignity of woman, probably because no religion has ever recognized the worth of the individual. Just as I have said, that in the old days, and almost as largely to-day, in the relations of the home, it was the family that counted and not the individual, so in his relations to the larger world beyond the individual formerly counted for nothing when weighed against the wishes of the superior cla.s.ses. In the earliest days, when the lord died, a number of his subjects were buried with him to wait upon his spirit in the Beyond. Later, with the same object in view, wives and servants committed suicide on the death of the master. Even now it is regarded as honorable for a girl to sell herself into shame to save the family from want.

The same antipodal difference between East and West--here "the family is the social unit" and with us the individual himself--explains the system of adoption: a younger son not being essential to the maintenance of the family cult may be adopted into another family, while the eldest son may not. On the same principle the father rules, not because of what he represents as an Individual, but because he represents the Family. Whenever he chooses, he abdicates, and must then join his other children in obeying the eldest son.

In the relations of citizens.h.i.+p the same disregard of {56} individual rights was the ancient rule, not merely in the fact that for centuries the smallest details of everyday life were regulated by law, but more seriously in that the Samurai, or privileged cla.s.s, might "cut down in cold blood a beggar, a merchant, or a farmer on the slightest provocation, or simply for the purpose of testing his sword," while in case of the ruin of their cause it was the honorable and natural thing for soldiers to commit "hari-kiri"--that is to say, commit suicide by disemboweling themselves. A j.a.panese writer recently declared that "the value of the individual life is an ill.u.s.tration of the Christian spirit" that is profoundly influencing j.a.pan, and he mentioned as an example that formerly suicide, in such circ.u.mstances as I have mentioned, "was regarded as an honorable act; now it is regarded as a sin."

Without professing the religion of fatalism which so influences the peoples of the Nearer East, the j.a.panese soldiers behave like fatalists because the fundamental basis of the social order for centuries has been the necessity of the Individual to sacrifice pleasure, comfort, or life itself when required either by the Family or by the Social Order. And this partially explains why it is said in sober earnest that the highest ambition of most j.a.panese schoolboys to-day is to die for their Emperor.

This is my last letter from j.a.pan, and my next letter will be from Korea--if the cholera doesn't get me. It has been raging in Osaka and in Kobe, both of which cities I have thought it necessary to visit in order to get first-hand information about industrial conditions.

Ordinarily, the cholera victim lives only a few hours. The first day's record here in Kobe, I believe, showed six cases and five deaths.

Gradually, however, cholera is being stamped out, just as we have eradicated yellow fever in Cuba and the South, and just as we shall eventually come to recognize the prevalence of typhoid in any town as a disgrace--an evidence of primitive and uncivilized {57} sanitary conditions. A friend of mine who came to Osaka in 1879 tells me that there were 10,000 cholera victims in that one city that year--the yellow flag on almost every street, and all through the night the sound of men hurrying past with new victims for the hospitals or with new corpses for the burning. In the thirteen years 1878-91 more than 313,000 j.a.panese died of the scourge.

I regret to say good-by to j.a.pan. It is a tremendously interesting country. For just as America represents the ultimate type of Occidental civilization, so does j.a.pan represent the ultimate type of Oriental civilization.

More than this, it is here that the full tides of Oriental and Occidental life are now meeting for the first time in human history.

For centuries uncounted the yellow man advanced across the plains and peaks of Asia, finding at last in these outlying islands his farthermost outpost, and so tarried here in the Farthest East, "the Land of the Rising Sun." He hardly thought of the existence of a West, but if his Buddha-like composure had been ruffled by such a thought, he might have droned monotonously:

"Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet."

But while the yellow man had thus moved steadily eastward, the white man, starting from the land of the Euphrates, had pitched his camp, with each succeeding generation, nearer and nearer the setting sun.

Greece--Rome--Spain--France--England--then four hundred years ago, more restless than the Mongolian, the white man dared the seas that hemmed him in and found a new continent to people. Westward still the course of empire then continued until in our time the white man planted his civilization on the Pacific Coast.

There was no more West.

Then it was, as if in obedience to a cosmic, racial instinct deeper than reason, the white man sent his messengers across the new-found ocean and awakened the Sleepy World {58} of the Yellow Man by the booming of Perry's guns off Yokahoma.

The Kingdom of Heaven, we are told, cometh not with observation, and the deeper meaning of the greatest events in human history may often escape the attention of contemporaries. My father and yours, perhaps, heard little and thought less of Perry's exploit, and yet it marked not merely a new historical epoch, but a new act in the long drama of human evolution itself. Curious, too, it is to observe how the strange world-destiny that shapes our ends gave to it a stage-setting in keeping with its dramatic significance. Not to England, nor to any other great naval and commercial Power of the time, but to the young United States--the nation that had found the ultimate West--came the unlikely but strangely fitting task of opening the Farthest East to Western trade and thought.