The absence of any huge signs of the really huge things that
Japan has done bears witness to the very peculiar way in which
her civilization has been working. It cannot forever so work; but
it has so worked thus far with amazing success. Japan is
producing without capital, in our large sense of the word. She
has become industrial without becoming essentially mechanical and
artificial. The vast rice crop is raised upon millions of tiny,
tiny farms; the silk crop, in millions of small poor homes, the
tea crop, on countless little patches of soil. If you visit Kyoto
to order something from one of the greatest porcelain makers in
the world, one whose products are known better in London and in
Paris than even in Japan, you will find the factory to be a
wooden cottage in which no American farmer would live. The
greatest maker of cloisonne vases, who may ask you two hundred
dollars for something five inches high, produces his miracles
behind a two-story frame dwelling containing perhaps six small
rooms. The best girdles of silk made in Japan, and famous
throughout the Empire, are woven in a house that cost scarcely
five hundred dollars to build. The work is, of course,
hand-woven. But the factories weaving by machinery--and weaving
so well as to ruin foreign industries of far vaster capacity--are
hardly more imposing, with very few exceptions. Long, light, low
one-story or two-story sheds they are, about as costly to erect
as a row of wooden stables with us. Yet sheds like these turn out
silks that sell all round the world. Sometimes only by inquiry,
or by the humming of the machinery, can you distinguish a factory
from an old yashiki, or an old-fashioned Japanese school
building,--unless indeed you can read the Chinese characters over the
garden gate. Some big brick factories and breweries exist; but they
are very few, and even when close to the foreign
settlements they seem incongruities in the landscape.
Our own architectural monstrosities and our Babels of machinery
have been brought into existence by vast integrations of
industrial capital. But such integrations do not exist in the Far
East; indeed, the capital to make them does not exist. And
supposing that in the course of a few generations there should
form in Japan corresponding combinations of money power, it is
not easy to suppose correspondences in architectural
construction. Even two-story edifices of brick have given bad
results in the leading commercial centre; and earthquakes seem to
condemn Japan to perpetual simplicity in building. The very land
revolts against the imposition of Western architecture, and
occasionally even opposes the new course of traffic by pushing
railroad lines out of level and out of shape.
Not industry alone still remains thus unintegrated; government itself exhibits a like condition. Nothing is fixed except the
Throne. Perpetual change is identical with state policy.
Ministers, governors, superintendents, inspectors, all high civil and
military officials, are shifted at irregular and surprisingly short
intervals, and hosts of smaller officials scatter each time with the
whirl. The province in which I passed the first twelvemonth of my
residence in Japan has had four different governors in five years.
During my stay at Kumamoto, and before the war had begun, the
military command of that important post was three times changed. The
government college had in three years three directors. In educational
circles, especially, the rapidity of such changes has been phenomenal.
There have been five different ministers of education in my own time,
and more than five different educational policies. The twenty-six thousand
public schools are so related in their management to the local
assemblies that, even were no other influences at work, constant change
would be inevitable because of the changes in the assemblies. Directors
and teachers keep circling from post to post; there are men little
more than thirty years old who have taught in almost every province of
the country. That any educational system could have produced any great results under these conditions seems nothing short of miraculous.
We are accustomed to think that some degree of stability is necessary to all real progress, all great development. But Japan has given proof irrefutable that enormous development is possible without any stability at all. The explanation is in the race character,--a race character in more ways than one the very opposite of our own. Uniformly mobile, and thus uniformly impressionable, the nation has moved unitedly in the direction of great ends, submitting the whole volume of its forty millions to be moulded by the ideas of its rulers, even as sand or as water is shaped by wind. And this submissiveness to reshaping belongs to the old conditions of its soul life,--old conditions of rare unselfishness and perfect faith. The relative absence from the national character of egotistical individualism has been the saving of an empire; has enabled a great people to preserve its independence against prodigious odds. Wherefore Japan may well be grateful to her two great religions, the creators and the preservers of her moral power to Shinto, which taught the individual to think of his Emperor and of his country before thinking either of his own family or of himself; and to Buddhism, which trained him to master regret, to endure pain, and to accept as eternal law the vanishing of things loved and the tyranny of things hated.
To-day there is visible a tendency to hardening,--a danger of changes leading to the integratio
V
Japan has done bears witness to the very peculiar way in which
her civilization has been working. It cannot forever so work; but
it has so worked thus far with amazing success. Japan is
producing without capital, in our large sense of the word. She
has become industrial without becoming essentially mechanical and
artificial. The vast rice crop is raised upon millions of tiny,
tiny farms; the silk crop, in millions of small poor homes, the
tea crop, on countless little patches of soil. If you visit Kyoto
to order something from one of the greatest porcelain makers in
the world, one whose products are known better in London and in
Paris than even in Japan, you will find the factory to be a
wooden cottage in which no American farmer would live. The
greatest maker of cloisonne vases, who may ask you two hundred
dollars for something five inches high, produces his miracles
behind a two-story frame dwelling containing perhaps six small
rooms. The best girdles of silk made in Japan, and famous
throughout the Empire, are woven in a house that cost scarcely
five hundred dollars to build. The work is, of course,
hand-woven. But the factories weaving by machinery--and weaving
so well as to ruin foreign industries of far vaster capacity--are
hardly more imposing, with very few exceptions. Long, light, low
one-story or two-story sheds they are, about as costly to erect
as a row of wooden stables with us. Yet sheds like these turn out
silks that sell all round the world. Sometimes only by inquiry,
or by the humming of the machinery, can you distinguish a factory
from an old yashiki, or an old-fashioned Japanese school
building,--unless indeed you can read the Chinese characters over the
garden gate. Some big brick factories and breweries exist; but they
are very few, and even when close to the foreign
settlements they seem incongruities in the landscape.
Our own architectural monstrosities and our Babels of machinery
have been brought into existence by vast integrations of
industrial capital. But such integrations do not exist in the Far
East; indeed, the capital to make them does not exist. And
supposing that in the course of a few generations there should
form in Japan corresponding combinations of money power, it is
not easy to suppose correspondences in architectural
construction. Even two-story edifices of brick have given bad
results in the leading commercial centre; and earthquakes seem to
condemn Japan to perpetual simplicity in building. The very land
revolts against the imposition of Western architecture, and
occasionally even opposes the new course of traffic by pushing
railroad lines out of level and out of shape.
Not industry alone still remains thus unintegrated; government itself exhibits a like condition. Nothing is fixed except the
Throne. Perpetual change is identical with state policy.
Ministers, governors, superintendents, inspectors, all high civil and
military officials, are shifted at irregular and surprisingly short
intervals, and hosts of smaller officials scatter each time with the
whirl. The province in which I passed the first twelvemonth of my
residence in Japan has had four different governors in five years.
During my stay at Kumamoto, and before the war had begun, the
military command of that important post was three times changed. The
government college had in three years three directors. In educational
circles, especially, the rapidity of such changes has been phenomenal.
There have been five different ministers of education in my own time,
and more than five different educational policies. The twenty-six thousand
public schools are so related in their management to the local
assemblies that, even were no other influences at work, constant change
would be inevitable because of the changes in the assemblies. Directors
and teachers keep circling from post to post; there are men little
more than thirty years old who have taught in almost every province of
the country. That any educational system could have produced any great results under these conditions seems nothing short of miraculous.
We are accustomed to think that some degree of stability is necessary to all real progress, all great development. But Japan has given proof irrefutable that enormous development is possible without any stability at all. The explanation is in the race character,--a race character in more ways than one the very opposite of our own. Uniformly mobile, and thus uniformly impressionable, the nation has moved unitedly in the direction of great ends, submitting the whole volume of its forty millions to be moulded by the ideas of its rulers, even as sand or as water is shaped by wind. And this submissiveness to reshaping belongs to the old conditions of its soul life,--old conditions of rare unselfishness and perfect faith. The relative absence from the national character of egotistical individualism has been the saving of an empire; has enabled a great people to preserve its independence against prodigious odds. Wherefore Japan may well be grateful to her two great religions, the creators and the preservers of her moral power to Shinto, which taught the individual to think of his Emperor and of his country before thinking either of his own family or of himself; and to Buddhism, which trained him to master regret, to endure pain, and to accept as eternal law the vanishing of things loved and the tyranny of things hated.
To-day there is visible a tendency to hardening,--a danger of changes leading to the integratio
V