CHAPTER XXXVII
IN THE END
And after a foreigner has spent months or years in the midst of these charming people, what has he discovered them to be? What does the future hold for them? To what end did Commodore Perry precipitate upon them the struggle and ferment of the nineteenth century? The present generation ceasing to be what their forefathers were, what do they expect of their descendants? Is our world thoroughly to occidentalize them, or will they slowly orientalize us? Which civilization is to hold, and which is the better? These are the unsolvable problems that continually confront the thoughtful observer.
The Japanese are the enigma of this century; the most inscrutable, the most paradoxical of races. They and their outward surroundings are so picturesque, theatrical, and artistic that at moments they appear a nation of poseurs—all their world a stage, and all their men and women merely players; a trifling, superficial, fantastic people, bent on nothing but pleasing effects. Again, the Occidental is as a babe before the deep mysteries, the innate wisdom, the philosophies, the art, the thought, the subtle refinements of this finest branch of the yellow race. To generalize, to epitomize is impossible; for they are so opposite and contradictory, so unlike all other Asiatic peoples, that analogy fails. They are at once the most sensitive, artistic, and mercurial of human beings, and the most impassible, conventional, and stolid; at once the most logical, profound, and conscientious, and the most irrational, superficial, and indifferent; at once the most stately, solemn, and taciturn, and the most playful, whimsical, and loquacious. While history declares them aggressive, cruel, and revengeful, experience proves them yielding, merciful, and gentle. The same centuries in which was devised the elaborate refinement of cha no yu saw tortures, persecutions, and battle-field butcheries unparalleled. The same men who spent half their lives in lofty meditation, in indicting poems, and fostering art, devoted the other half to gross pleasures, to hacking their enemies in pieces, and watching a hara kiri with delight. Dreaming, procrastinating, and referring all things to that mythical mionichi (to-morrow), they can yet amaze one with a wizard-like rapidity of action and accomplishment. The same spirit which built the Shinagawa forts during the three months of Commodore Perry’s absence at times animates the most dilatory tradesmen and coolies.
There is no end to the surprises of Japanese character, and the longer the foreigner lives among them the less does he understand the people, and the less do his facts contribute to any explanation. Their very origin is mysterious, their Ainos the rock on which ethnologists founder. Their physical types present so many widely differing peculiarities that one cannot believe in any common source, or in the preservation of the race from outside influences for so many centuries. Some coolie possesses the finely-cut features, perfectly-modelled surfaces, and proudly-set head of a Roman emperor. Some peer exhibits the features, the stolidity, and the slow, guttural articulation of a Sioux Indian, and it is common to see coolies identical in figure and countenance with the native races of the north-west coast of America. One group of children might come from an Alaskan village, and in another group frolic the counterparts of Richter’s fisher boys of Italy. At times the soft, musical speech flows like Italian; at other times it is rough and harsh, and rumbles with consonants.
Their very simplicity, their childlike naivete, deceives one into a conviction of their openness, while a mysterious, invisible, unconquerable barrier rises forever between us and them. The divergence of life and thought began in Western Asia too many ages since for the races that followed the setting sun to find, at this late day, the clew to the race that sought the source of the sun’s rising. China, which once gave the Japanese their precepts and models and teachers, shows now more differences than resemblances. Far as the pupils have departed from the traditions of the instructor, there yet remains a celestial conservatism, a worship of dry formality, and a respect for the conventional which the new order overcomes but slowly. The missionaries in China, who have to contend against the apathy or open hostility and the horrible surroundings of the native population, greatly admire the Japanese, and envy their colleagues who live in so beautiful a country, among so clean, courteous, and friendly a people, so eager to learn and so quick to acquire. It is true that foreign merchants and officials in China laud the superior qualities of the Celestial, and infer a superficiality and want of seriousness in the Japanese; but the alien who has dwelt in Japan experiences a new homesickness when he exchanges a Japanese port for one across the Yellow Sea, with “Nanking” instead of “Nippon” servitors about him. The Japanese make an unconscious appeal to a sentiment deeper than mere admiration, but the secret of the fascination they exercise defies analysis.
Politically and socially, the Japanese copy the examples of the western world; and the Restoration, with its consequences, furnishes the most astonishing political problem of the century. The sudden abandonment of the old order, the upspringing of a whole nation armed cap-a-pie in modern panoply of peace, has been too amazing to be at once accepted, at least among Europeans, as a real and permanent condition of things. If Europe cannot take the United States seriously after a whole century of steadfastness, much less can it comprehend an alien nation like Japan in a brief score of years.
A constitution and a parliament have been voluntarily given to a people who had hardly chafed under autocratic forms, or even demanded a representation. Its military and naval establishments, its police organization, and its civil service are modelled upon the best of many foreign models. Its educational system is complete, an admirable union of the best of American, English, and German methods. Its postal establishment, its light-houses, telegraphs, railways, hospitals equal those of the West. And all this was accomplished, not by slow growth and gradual development, the fruit of long need, but almost overnight, voluntarily, and at a wave of the imperial magician's wand.
This new birth, this sudden change from feudalism and the Middle Ages to a constitutional Government and the nineteenth century of Europe and America, is a unique spectacle. This spectacle—this unparalleled effort of a people to lay aside what they were born to reverence and follow, because alien customs seemed to promise a greater good to a greater number—this spectacle, which should have challenged the admiration, the sympathy, and the generous aid of western nations—has been met almost by their opposition. A weaker people groping towards the light, learning by the saddest experiences, has been hampered, bound, and forced from its chosen way by the Christian nations, who have taken every shameful advantage of superior strength and astuteness. Unjust treaties were forced upon the Japanese at a time when they could not protest, and when they could neither understand nor foresee the workings of them. Backed by a display of naval strength, these treaties were pressed upon the little nation, and by the bully’s one argument a revision of these unjust agreements has been denied them for these thirty years; although the Japan of to-day, its conditions and institutions are, in no one particular, what they were at the time of the first negotiations. Pathetic have been the struggles of citizens and statesmen, while the most high-spirited of races has been forced to submit to political outrages or face the consequences of war—the imposition of yet harder terms by their oppressors. Limited in its revenues by these very treaties, Japan can the less consider war with unscrupulous western powers. The Government, in its efforts to secure foreign training for its people, has been fleeced, imposed upon, and hoodwinked, through its ignorance of foreign ways. Reluctantly admitting the perfidy of one people, the Japanese have turned to another. In consequence, they are berated for their fickleness and love of change, and taunted with the fact that American, English, and German influences, successively, have been uppermost at court, and their languages and customs successively fashionable. The Germans, to our shame be it said, have dealt with them more honorably than any other people, and the present triumph of German interests has been well deserved.
The ambition, the courage, and persistency of this small nation, in the face of such hindrances, is wonderful; and their struggles with strange tongues, strange customs, and strange dress, all at once, were heroic. Indifferent critics ascribe this peaceful revolution to a love of novelty and an idle craze for foreign fashions. They claim that it is but a phase, a fleeting fancy, a bit of masquerading, to be abandoned when the people weary of it, or attain their ends. But fickleness is not the characteristic of thousands of persons of one race, pursuing the same objects for thirty years; nor could a nation of such taste and intelligence adopt and adhere to strange customs for the mere sake of novelty. Prophecies of retrogression discredit themselves, now that a whole generation has grown up to whom the new is the established order. Japanese youths, educated and trained abroad, have returned home to fill the places of foreign instructors and managers. Each year fewer and fewer foreigners are needed in Government departments and institutions. “Japan for the Japanese” is a familiar cry. The desire for enlightenment and the impulse towards progress were the result of forces already acting from within, long before Commodore Perry’s black ships came to anchor in Mississippi Bay, and still potent as then.
In this day the way to distinction and power is open to the humblest. There is a baton in every knapsack, an imperial councillor’s star in every school-room. The merchant has been ennobled, the samurai have sat at the Emperor’s table, the eta walks free, the equal of other citizens, and the humblest peasant has inviolable civil rights. Women have come out of their guarded seclusion, and enjoy a social existence and importance and a legal equality, and their educational opportunities are ever enlarging. Marriage laws, divorce laws, and property laws secure to them rights greater than some European women hold. The family life and authority remain unchanged, and the privacy of the home is jealously guarded, no foreigner penetrating to that sacred centre. The family ceremonies and festivals are observed as punctiliously as ever. The nobility and the official class lead the social life of Europeans, but the conservatism of the middle or merchant class still clings to the old order, which another century may find almost unchanged.
The art of Japan has already revolutionized the western world, leaving its impress everywhere. The quick appropriation of Japanese ideas and expressions marks an era in the Occident as distinct as that of the Renaissance. For all her giving with full hands, we can return nothing to this most art-loving of nations. Western examples and teachings, and the ignorant demands of western trade, have wrought artistic havoc in the Island Empire. Wherever foreign orders have been received, the simplest work has so deteriorated, has been so vulgarized and cheapened, that recognized efforts are now making to arrest this degradation of the national art. Cultivated Japanese, appalled at this result of western teachings, encourage artists and artisans in the study of national masterpieces and the practice of the old methods, and the labors of these public-spirited citizens are ably seconded by the Government. The foreign professor of drawing, with his hard pencils and his plaster casts, is a functionary of the past. To-day the youth of Japan holds to his own writing-brush, and begins, as aforetime, with the one stroke, two stroke, and three stroke sketches that lie at the root of the old masters’ matchless art. Strangely enough, all perception of the beauty and relation of color seems to leave the Japanese when they use foreign materials. The people who have all their lives wrought and used and worn the most harmonious combinations of color in their garments and household goods, will execute monstrosities in Berlin wools in place of the rich old fukusa, and combine the crudest and most hostile hues with unconcern. The very use of foreign furnishings or utensils seems to abate the national rage for cleanliness, and in any tea-house that aspires to be conducted in foreign fashion, one discovers a dust, disorder, shabbiness, and want of care that is wholly un-Japanese.
Nor in other ways has contact with foreigners wrought good to these people. Conservative families have been mortified and humiliated by what seems to them the roughness and vulgarity of the manners of their sons and daughters who had been educated abroad. Many gentlemen even, in Tokio, long refused their daughters a foreign education for this reason. The mission-schools for girls found it necessary to engage masters of cha no yu and of native deportment and etiquette, to instruct the pupils ill their charge. Among the lower classes the decay of courtesy, under foreign influences, was rapid. The bold, impertinent, ill-mannered coolies and nesans of the treaty ports are as unlike as possible to the same people in interior or remoter towns.
If the people are to lose their art, the fine finish of their manners, the simplicity of living, all the exquisite charm of their homes. Commodore Perry should be rated as their worst enemy. If they refine and make better what they now receive from the Occident, as they did with what China gave them long ago, is it not possible that Japan will surpass the world in the next century? Already the art workshop of the globe, has it no greater mission, as travel brings all countries nearer together, than to become the play-ground and holiday country of all nations, occupying the same relation to both hemispheres that Switzerland does to Europe?
Surely some better lot than that awaits this charming people, who so quickly win the admiration, sympathy, and affection of the stranger that is within their gates.