At Kyoto Jinsai opened a private school, and lectured there for forty years, training, all in all, some three thousand students in philosophy. He spoke occasionally of metaphysics, and described the universe as a living organism in which life always overrode death; but like Confucius he had a warm prejudice in favor of the terrestrial practical.
That which is useless in governing the state, or in walking in the way of human relations, is useless. . . . Learning must be active and living; learning must not be mere dead theory or speculation. . . . Those who know the way seek it in their daily life. . . . If apart from human relations we hope to find the way, it is like trying to catch the wind. . . . The ordinary way is excellent; there is no more excellent in the world.”115
After the death of Jinsai his school and work were carried on by his son, Ito Togai. Togai laughed at fame, and said: “How can you help calling a man, whose name is forgotten as soon as he dies, an animal or sand? But is it not a mistake for man to be eager to make books, or construct sentences, in order that his name may be admired, and may not be forgotten?”116 He wrote two hundred and forty-two volumes; but for the rest he lived a life of modesty and wisdom. The critics complained that these books were strong in what Molière called virtus dormitiva; nevertheless Togai’s pupils pointed out that he had written two hundred and forty-two books without saying an unkind word of any other philosopher. When he died they placed this enviable epitaph upon his tomb:
He did not talk about the faults of others. . . .
He cared for nothing but books.
His life was uneventful.117
The greatest of these later Confucians was Ogyu Sorai; as he himself put the matter, “From the time of Jimmu, the first emperor of Japan, how few scholars have been my equal!” Unlike Togai he enjoyed controversy, and spoke his mind violently about philosophers living or dead. When an inquiring young man asked him, “What do you like besides reading?” he answered, “There is nothing better than eating burnt beans and criticizing the great men of Japan.” “Sorai,” said Namikawa Tenjin, “is a very great man, but he thinks that he knows all that there is to be known. This is a bad habit.”118 Ogyu could be modest when he wished: all the Japanese, he said, explicitly including himself, were barbarians; only the Chinese were civilized; and “if there is anything that ought to be said, it has already been said by the ancient kings or Confucius.”119 The Samurai and the scholars raged at him, but the reformer shogun, Yoshimune, enjoyed his courage, and protected him against the intellectual mob. Sorai set up his rostrum at Yedo, and like Hsün-tze denouncing the sentimentality of Mo Ti, or Hobbes refuting Rousseau before Rousseau’s birth, flung his laughing logic at Jinsai, who had announced that man is naturally good. On the contrary, said Sorai, man is a natural villain, and grasps whatever he can reach; only artificial morals and laws, and merciless education, turn him into a tolerable citizen.
As soon as men are born, desires spring up. When we cannot realize our desires, which are unlimited, struggle arises; when struggle arises, confusion follows. As the ancient kings hated confusion, they founded propriety and righteousness, and with these governed the desires of the people. . . . Morality is nothing but the necessary means for controlling the subjects of the Empire. It did not originate with nature, nor with the impulses of man’s heart, but it was devised by the superior intelligence of certain sages, and authority was given to it by the state.120
As if to confirm the pessimism of Sorai, Japanese thought in the century that followed him fell even from the modest level to which its imitation of Confucius had raised it, and lost itself in a bitter ink-shedding war between the idolaters of China and the worshipers of Japan. In this battle of the ancients against the moderns the moderns won by their superior admiration of antiquity. The Kangakusha, or (pro-) Chinese scholars, called their own country barbarous, argued that all wisdom was Chinese, and contented themselves with translating and commenting upon Chinese literature and philosophy. The Wagakusha, or (pro-) Japanese scholars, denounced this attitude as obscurantist and unpatriotic, and called upon the nation to turn its back upon China and renew its strength at the sources of its own poetry and history. Mabuchi attacked the Chinese as an inherently vicious people, exalted the Japanese as naturally good, and attributed the lack of early or native Japanese literature and philosophy to the fact that the Japanese did not need instruction in virtue or intelligence.*
Inspired by a visit to Mabuchi, a young physician by the name of Moto-ori Norinaga devoted thirty-four years to writing a forty-four-volume commentary on the Kojiki, or “Records of Ancient Events”—the classical repository of Japanese, especially of Shinto, legends. This commentary, the Kojiki-den, was a virorous assault upon everything Chinese, in or out of Japan. It boldly upheld the literal truth of the primitive stories that recounted the divine origin of the Japanese islands, emperors and people; and under the very eyes of the Tokugawa regents it stimulated among the intellectuals of Japan that movement back to their own language, ways and traditions which was ultimately to revive Shinto as against Buddhism, and restore the supremacy of the emperors over the shoguns. “Japan,” wrote Moto-ori, “is the country which gave birth to the Goddess of the Sun, Amaterasu; and this fact proves its superiority over all other countries.”122 His pupil Hirata carried on the argument after Moto-ori’s death:
It is most lamentable that so much ignorance should prevail as to the evidences of the two fundamental doctrines that Japan is the country of the gods, and her inhabitants the descendants of the gods. Between the Japanese people and the Chinese, Hindus, Russians, Dutch, Siamese, Cambodians, and other nations of the world, there is a difference of kind rather than of degree. It was not out of vainglory that the inhabitants of this country called it the land of the gods. The gods who created all countries belonged, without exception, to the Divine Age, and were all born in Japan, so that Japan is their native country, and all the world acknowledges the appropriateness of the title. The Koreans were the first to become acquainted with this truth, and from them it was gradually diffused through the globe, and accepted by everyone. . . . Foreign countries were of course produced by the power of the creator gods, but they were not begotten by Izanagi and Izanami, nor did they give birth to the Goddess of the Sun, which is the cause of their inferiority.123
Such were the men and the opinions that established the Sonno Jo-i movement to “honor the Emperor and expel the foreign barbarians.” In the nineteenth century that movement inspired the Japanese people to overthrow the Shogunate and reestablish the supremacy of the Divine House. In the twentieth it plays a living rôle in nourishing that fiery patriotism which will not be content until the Son of Heaven rules all the fertile millions of the resurrected East.
CHAPTER XXX
The Mind and Art of Old Japan
I. LANGUAGE AND EDUCATION
The language—Writing—Education
MEANWHILE the Japanese had borrowed their systems of writing and education from the barbarian Chinese. Their language was peculiarly their own, presumably Mongolian and akin to the Korean, but not demonstrably derived from this or any other known tongue. It differed especially from the Chinese in being polysyllabic and agglutinative, and yet simple; it had few aspirates, no gutturals, no compound or final consonants (except n); and almost every vowel was melodiously long. The grammar, too, was a natural and easy system; it dispensed with number and gender in its nouns, with degrees of comparison in its adjectives, and with personal inflections in its verbs; it had few personal pronouns, and no relative pronouns at all. On the other hand there were inflections of negation and mood in adjectives and verbs; troublesome “postpositions”—modifying suffixes—were used instead of prepositions; and complex honorifics like “Your humble servant” and “Your Excellency” took the place of the first and second personal pronouns.
The language dispensed even with writing, apparently, until Koreans and Chinese brought the art to Japan in the early centuries of our era; and then the Japanese were content for hundreds of years to express their Italianly beautiful speech in the ideographs of the Middle Kingdom. Since a complete Chinese character had to be used for each syllable of a Japanese word, Japanese writing, in the Nara age, was very nearly the most laborious ever known. During the ninth century that law of economy which determines so much of philology brought to the relief of Japan two simplified forms of writing. In each of them a Chinese character, shortened into cursive form, was used to represent one of the forty-seven syllables that constitute the spoken speech of Japan; and this syllabary of forty-seven characters served instead of an alphabet.* Since a large part of Japanese literature is in Chinese, and most of the remainder is written not in the popular syllabary but in a combination of Chinese characters and native alphabets, few Western scholars have been able to master it in the original. Our knowledge of Japanese literature is consequently fragmentary and deceptive, and our judgments of it can be of little worth. The Jesuits, harassed with these linguistic barriers, reported that the language of the islands had been invented by the Devil to prevent the preaching of the Gospel to the Japanese.*2
Writing remained for a long time a luxury of the higher classes; until the latter part of the nineteenth century no pretense was made of spreading the art among the people. In the Kyoto age the rich families maintained schools for their children; and the emperors Tenchi and Mommu, at the beginning of the eighth century, established at Kyoto the first Japanese university. Gradually a system of provincial schools was developed under governmental control; their graduates were eligible to enter the university, and those graduates of the university who passed the required tests became eligible for public office. The civil wars of the early feudal period broke down this educational progress, and Japan neglected the arts of the mind until the Tokugawa Shogunate reorganized peace and encouraged learning and literature. Iyeyasu was scandalized to find that ninety per cent of the Samurai could not read or write.5 In 1630 Hayashi Razan established at Yedo a training-school in public administration and Confucian philosophy, which later developed into the University of Tokyo; and Kumazawa, in 1666, founded at Shizutani the first provincial college. By allowing teachers to wear the sword and boast the rank of the Samurai, the government induced students, doctors and priests to set up private schools in homes or temples for the provision of elementary education; in 1750 there were eight hundred such schools, with some forty thousand students. All these institutions were for the sons of the Samurai; merchants and peasants had to be content with popular lecturers, and only prosperous women received any formal education. Universal education, in Japan as in Europe, had to wait for the needs and compulsions of an industrial life.6
II. POETRY
The “Manyoshu”—The “Kokinshu”—Characteristics of Japanese poetry—Examples—The game of poetry—The “hokka”-gamblers
The earliest Japanese literature that has come down to us is poetry, and the earliest Japanese poetry is by native scholars accounted the best. One of the oldest and most famous of Japanese books is the Manyoshu, or “Book of Ten Thousand Leaves,” in which two editors collected into twenty volumes some 4,500 poems composed during the preceding four centuries. Here in particular appeared the work of Hitomaro and Akahito, the chief poetic glories of the Nara age. When his beloved died, and the smoke from the funeral pyre ascended into the hills, Hitomaro wrote an elegy briefer than In Memoriam:
Oh, is it my beloved, the cloud that wanders
In the ravine
Of the deep secluded Hatsuse Mountain?7
A further effort to preserve Japanese poetry from time’s mortality was made by the Emperor Daigo, who brought together eleven hundred poems of the preceding one hundred and fifty years into an anthology known as the Kokinshu—“Poems Ancient and Modern.” His chief aide was the poet-scholar Tsurayuki whose preface seems more interesting to us today than the fragments which the book has brought down to us from his laconic muse:
The poetry of Japan, as a seed, springs from the heart of man creating countless leaves of language. . . . In a world full of things man strives to find words to express the impression left on his heart by sight and sound. . . . And so the heart of man came to find expression in words for his joy in the beauty of blossoms, his wonder at the song of birds, and his tender welcome of the mists that bathe the landscapes, as well as his mournful sympathy with the evanescent morning dew. . . . To verse the poets were moved when they saw the ground white with snowy showers of fallen cherry blossoms on spring mornings, or heard on autumn evenings the rustle of falling leaves; or year after year gazed upon the mirror’s doleful reflections of the ravages of time, . . . or trembled as they watched the ephemeral dewdrop quivering on the beaded grass.8
Tsurayuki well expressed the recurrent theme of Japanese poetry—the moods and phases, the blossoming and decay, of nature in isles made scenic by volcanoes, and verdant with abundant rain. The poets of Japan delight in the less hackneyed aspects of field and woods and sea—trout splashing in mountain brooks, frogs leaping suddenly into noiseless pools, shores without tides, hills cut with motionless mists, or a drop of rain nestling like a gem in a folded blade of grass. Often they interweave a song of love with their worship of the growing world, or mourn elegiacally the brevity of flowers, love and life. Seldom, however, does this nation of warriors sing of war, and only now and then does its poetry lift the heart in hymns. After the Nara period the great majority of the poems were brief; out of eleven hundred in the Kokinshu all but five were in the pithy tanka formfive lines of five, seven, five, seven and seven syllables. In these poems there is no rhyme, for the almost invariable vowel ending of Japanese words would have left too narrow a variety for the poet’s choice; nor is there any accent, tone or quantity. There are strange tricks of speech: “pillow words,” or meaningless prefixes added for the sake of euphony; “prefaces,” or sentences prefixed to a poem to round out its form rather than to develop its ideas; and “pivot words” used punningly in startling diversities of sense to bind one sentence with the next. These, to the Japanese, are devices sanctified by time, like alliteration or rhyme to the English; and their popular appeal does not draw the poet into vulgarity. On the contrary these classic poems are essentially aristocratic in thought and form. Born in a courtly atmosphere, they are fashioned with an almost haughty restraint; they seek perfection of modeling rather than novelty of meaning; they suppress rather than express emotion; and they are too proud to be anything but brief. Nowhere else have writers been so expressively reticent; it is as if the poets of Japan had had a mind to atone by their modesty for the braggadocio of her historians. To write three pages about the west wind, say the Japanese, is to show a plebeian verbosity; the real artist must not so much think for the reader as lure him into active thought; he must seek and find one fresh perception that will arouse in him all the ideas and all the feelings which the Occidental poet insists on working out in self-centered and monopolistic detail. Each poem, to the Japanese, must be the quiet record of one moment’s inspiration.
So we shall be misled if we seek in these anthologies, or in that Golden Treasury of Japan, the Hyaku-nin-isshu—“Single Verses by a Hundred People”—any heroic or epic strain, any sustained or lyric flight; these poets, like the rash wits of the Mermaid Tavern, were willing to hang their lives on a line. So when Saigyo Hoshi, having lost his dearest friend, became a monk, and mystically found in the shrines at Ise the solace he was seeking, he wrote no Adonaîs, nor even a Lycidas, but these simple lines:
What it is
That dwelleth here
I know not;
Yet my heart is full of gratitude,
And the tears trickle down.9
And when the Lady Kaga no Chiyo lost her husband she wrote, merely:
All things that seem
Are but
One dreamer’s dream. . . .
I sleep. . . . I wake. . . .
How wide
The bed with none beside.10
Then, having lost also her child, she added two lines:
Today, how far may he have wandered,
The brave hunter of dragon-flies!11
In the imperial circles at Nara and Kyoto the composition of tankas became an aristocratic sport; female chastity, which in ancient India had required an elephant as its price, was often satisfied, at these courts, with thirty-one syllables of poetry cleverly turned.12 It was a usual thing for the emperor to entertain his guests by handing them words with which to fashion a poem;13 and the literature of the time refers casually to people conversing with one another in acrostic poetry, or reciting tankas as they walked in the streets.14 Periodically, at the height of the Heian age, the emperor arranged a poetry contest or tournament, in which as many as fifteen hundred candidates competed before learned judges in the making of tanka epigrams. In 951 a special Poetry Bureau was established for the management of these jousts, and the winning pieces in each contest were deposited in the archives of the institution.
In the sixteenth century Japanese poetry felt guilty of long-windedness, and decided to shorten the tanka—originally the completion, by one person, of a poem begun by another—into the hokku—a “single utterance” of three, lines, boasting of five, seven and five syllables, or seventeen in all. In the Genroku age (1688-1704) the composition of these hokku became first a fashion, then a craze; for the Japanese people resembles the American in an emotional-intellectual sensitivity that makes for the rapid rise and fall of mental styles. Men and women, merchants and warriors, artisans and peasants neglected the affairs of life to match hokku epigrams, constructed at a moment’s warning. The Japanese, with whom gambling is a favorite passion, wagered so much money in hokku-composing contests that some enterprising souls made a business of conducting them, fleecing thousands of devotees daily, until at last the government was forced to raid these poetical resorts and prohibit this new mercenary art.15 The most distinguished master of the hokku was Matsura Basho (1643-94), whose birth, it seemed to Yone Noguchi, “was the greatest happening in our Japanese annals.”16 Basho, a young Samurai, was so deeply! moved by the death of his lord and teacher that he abandoned the life of the court, renounced all physical pleasures, gave himself to wandering, meditation and teaching, and expressed his quiet philosophy in fragments of nature poetry highly revered by Japanese literati as perfect examples of concentrated suggestion:
The old pond,
Aye, and the sound of a frog leaping into the water.
Or
A stem of grass, whereon
A dragon-fly essayed to light.17
III. PROSE
1. Fiction
Lady Murasaki—The “Tale of Genji”—lts excellence—Later Japanese fiction—A humorist
If Japanese poems are too brief for the taste of the Western mind, we may console ourselves with the Japanese novel, whose masterpieces run into twenty, sometimes thirty, volumes.18 The most highly regarded of them is the Genji Monogatari (literally and undeniably “Gossip about Genji”), which in one edition fills 4,234 pages.19 This delightful romance was composed about the year 1001 A.D. by the Lady Murasaki no-Shikibu. A Fujiwara of ancient blood, she married another Fujiwara in 997, but was left a widow four years later. She dulled her sorrow by writing an historical novel in fifty-four books. After filling all the paper she could find, she laid sacrilegious hands upon the sacred sutras of a Buddhist temple, and used them for manuscript;20 even paper was once a luxury.
The hero of the tale is the son of an emperor by his favorite concubine Kiritsubo, who is so beautiful that all the other concubines are jealous of her, and actually tease her to death. Murasaki, perhaps exaggerating the male’s capacity for devotion, represents the Emperor as inconsolable.
As the years went by, the Emperor did not forget his lost lady; and though many women were brought to the palace in the hope that he might take pleasure in them, he turned from them all, believing that there was not anyone in the world like her whom he had lost. . . . Continually he pined that fate should not have allowed them to fulfil the vow which morning and evening was ever talked of between them, the vow that their lives should be as the twin birds that share a wing, the twin trees that share a bough.21
Genji grows up to be a dashing prince, with more looks than morals; he passes from one mistress to another with the versatility of Tom Jones, and outmodes that conventional hero by his indifference to gender. He is a woman’s idea of a man—all sentiment and seduction, always brooding and languishing over one woman or the next. Occasionally, “in great unhappiness he returned to his wife’s house.”22 The Lady Murasaki retails his adventures gaily, and excuses him and herself with irresistible grace:
The young Prince would be thought to be positively neglecting his duty if he did not indulge in a few escapades; and every one would regard his conduct as perfectly natural and proper even when it was such as they would not have dreamed of permitting to ordinary people. . . . I should indeed be very loath to recount in all their detail matters which he took so much trouble to conceal, did I not know that if you found that I had omitted anything you would at once ask why, just because he was supposed to be an emperor’s son, I must needs put a favorable showing on his conduct by leaving out all his indiscretions; and you would soon be saying that this was no history but a mere made-up tale designed to influence the judgment of posterity. As it is, I shall be called a scandal-monger; but that I cannot help.23
In the course of his amours Genji falls ill, repents him of his adventures, and visits a monastery for pious converse with a priest. But there he sees a lovely princess (modestly named Murasaki), and thoughts of her distract him as the priest rebukes him for his sins.
The priest began to tell stories about the uncertainty of this life and the retributions of the life to come. Genji was appalled to think how heavy his own sins had already been. It was bad enough to think that he would have them on his conscience for the rest of his present life. But then there was also the life to come. What terrible punishments he had to look forward to! And all the while the priest was speaking Genji thought of his own wickedness. What a good idea it would be to turn hermit, and live in some such place! . . . But immediately his thoughts strayed to the lovely face which he had seen that afternoon; and longing to know more of her he asked, “Who lives with you here?”24
By the coöperation of the author Genji’s first wife dies in childbirth, and he is left free to give first place in his home to his new princess, Murasaki.*
It may be that the excellence of the translation gives this book an extraneous advantage over other Japanese masterpieces that have been rendered into English; perhaps Mr. Waley, like Fitzgerald, has improved upon his original. If, for the occasion, we can forget our own moral code, and fall in with one that permits men and women, as Wordsworth said of those in Wilhelm Meister, to “mate like flies in the air,” we shall derive from this Tale of Genji the most attractive glimpse yet opened to us of the beauties-hidden in Japanese literature. Murasaki writes with a naturalness and ease that soon turn her pages into the charming gossip of a cultured friend. The men and women, above all the children, who move through her leisurely pages are ingratiatingly real; and the world which she describes, though it is confined for the most part to imperial palaces and palatial homes, has all the color of a life actually lived or seen.* It is an aristocratic life, not much concerned with the cost of bread and love; but within that limitation it is described without sensational resort to exceptional characters or events. As Lady Murasaki makes Uma no-Kami say of certain realistic painters:
Ordinary hills and rivers, just as they are, houses such as you may see everywhere, with all their real beauty of harmony and form—quietly to draw such scenes as this, or to show what lies behind some intimate hedge that is folded away far from the world, and thick trees upon some unheroic hill, and all this with befitting care for composition, proportion and the life—such works demand the highest master’s utmost skill, and must needs draw the common craftsman into a thousand blunders.26
No later Japanese novel has reached the excellence of Genji, or has had so profound an influence upon the literary development of the language.27 During the eighteenth century fiction had another zenith, and various novelists succeeded in surpassing the Lady Murasaki in the length of their tales, or the freedom of their pornography.28 Santo Kioden published in 1791 an Edifying Story Book, but it proved so little to its purpose that the authorities, under the law prohibiting indecency, sentenced him to be handcuffed for fifty days in his own home. Santo was a vendor of tobacco-pouches and quack medicines; he married a harlot, and made his first reputation by a volume on the brothels of Tokyo. He gradually reformed the morals of his pen, but could not unteach his public the habit of buying great quantities of his books. Encouraged, he violated all precedents in the history of Japanese fiction by demanding payment from the men who published his works; his predecessors, it seemed, had been content with an invitation to dinner. Most of the fiction writers were poor Bohemians, whom the people classed with actors among the lowest ranks of society.29 Less sensational and more ably written than Kioden’s were the novels of Kyokutei Bakin (1767-1848), who, like Scott and Dumas, transformed history into vivid romance. His readers grew so fond of him that he unwound one of his stories into a hundred volumes. Hokusai illustrated some of Bakin’s novels until, being geniuses, they quarreled and parted.
The jolliest of these later novelists was Jippensha Ikku (d. 1831), the Le Sage and Dickens of Japan. Ikku began his adult life with three marriages, of which two were quickly ended by fathers-in-law who could not understand his literary habits. He accepted poverty with good humor, and, having no furniture, hung his bare walls with paintings of the furniture he might have had. On holidays he sacrified to the gods with pictures of excellent offerings. Being presented with a bathtub in the common interest, he carried it home inverted on his head, and overthrew with ready wit the pedestrians who fell in his way. When his publisher came to see him he invited him to take a bath; and while his invitation was being accepted he decked himself in the publisher’s clothes, and paid his New Year’s Day calls in proper ceremonial costume. His masterpiece, the Hizakurige, was published in twelve parts between 1802 and 1822, and told a rollicking tale in the vein of The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club—Aston calls it “the most humorous and entertaining book in the Japanese language.”30 On his deathbed Ikku enjoined his pupils to place upon his corpse, before the cremation then usual in Japan, certain packets which he solemnly entrusted to them. At his funeral, prayers having been said, the pyre was lighted, whereupon it turned out that the packets were full of firecrackers, which exploded merrily. Ikku had kept his youthful promise that his life would be full of surprises, even after his death.
2. History
The historians—Arai Hakuseki
We shall not find Japanese historiography so interesting as its fiction, though we may have some difficulty in distinguishing them. The oldest surviving work in Japanese literature is the Kojiki, or “Record of Ancient Things,” written in Chinese characters by Yasumaro in 712; here legend so often takes the place of fact that the highest Shinto loyalty would be needed to accept it as history.31 After the Great Reform of 645 the government thought it advisable to transform the past again; and about 720 a new history appeared, the Nihongi, or “Record of Nippon,” written in the Chinese language, and adorned with passages bravely stolen from Chinese works and sometimes placed, without any fetichism of chronology, in the mouths of ancient Japanese. Nevertheless the book was a more serious attempt to record the facts than the Kojiki had been, and it provided the foundation for most later histories of early Japan. From that time to this there have been many histories of the country, each more patriotic than the last. In 1334 Kitabatake wrote a “History of the True Succession of the Divine Monarchs”—the Jintoshotoki—on this modest and now familiar note:
Great Yamato (Japan) is a divine country. It is only our land whose foundations were first laid by the Divine Ancestor. It alone has been transmitted by the Sun Goddess to a long line of her descendants. There is nothing of this kind in foreign countries. Therefore it is called the Divine Land.32
First printed in 1649, this work began that movement for the restoration of the ancient faith and state which culminated in the passionate polemics of Moto-ori. The very grandson of Iyeyasu, Mitsu-kuni, by his Dai Nihonshi (“The Great History of Japan,” 1851)—a 240-volume picture of the imperial and feudal past—played a posthumous part in preparing his countrymen to overthrow the Tokugawa Shogunate.
Perhaps the most scholarly and impartial of Japanese historians was Arai Hakuseki, whose learning dominated the intellectual life of Yedo in the second half of the seventeenth century. Arai smiled at the theology of the orthodox Christian missionaries as “very childish,”33 but he was bold enough to ridicule also some of the legends which his own people mistook for history.34 His greatest work, the Hankampu, a thirty-volume history of the Daimyo, is one of the marvels of literature; for though it must have required much research, it appears to have been composed within a few months.35 Arai derived something of his learning and judgment from his study of the Chinese philosophers. When he lectured on the Confucian classics the Shogun Iyenobu, we are told, listened with rapt and reverent attention, in summer refraining from brushing the mosquitoes from his head, in winter turning his head away from the speaker before wiping his running nose.36 In his autobiography Arai paints a devout picture of his father, and shows the Japanese citizen at his simplest and best:
Ever since I came to understand the heart of things, my memory is that the daily routine of his life was exactly the same. He never failed to get up an hour before daybreak. He then had a cold bath, and did his hair himself. In cold weather the woman who was my mother would propose to order hot water for him, but this he would not allow, as he wished to avoid giving the servants trouble. When he was over seventy, and my mother also was advanced in years, sometimes, when the cold weather was unendurable, a lighted brazier was brought in, and they lay down to sleep with their feet against it. Beside the fire was placed a kettle with hot water, which my father drank when he got up. Both of them honored the way of Buddha. My father, when he had arranged his hair and adjusted his clothing, never neglected to make obeisance to Buddha. . . . After he was dressed he waited quietly for the dawn, and then went out to his official duty. . . . He was never known to betray anger, nor do I remember that, even when he laughed, he gave way to boisterous mirth. Much less did he ever descend to violent language when he had occasion to reprimand anyone. In his conversation he used as few words as possible. His demeanor was grave. I have never seen him startled, flurried, or impatient. . . . The room he usually occupied he kept cleanly swept, had an old picture hung on the wall, and a few flowers which were in season were set out in a vase. He would spend the day looking at them. He painted a little in black and white, not being fond of colors. When in good health he never troubled the servant, but did everything for himself.37
3. The Essay
The Lady Sei Shonagon—Kamo no-Chomei
Arai was an essayist as well as an historian, and made brilliant contributions to what is perhaps the most delightful department of Japanese literature. Here, as in fiction, a woman stands at the top; for Lady Sei Shonagon’s “Pillow Sketches” (Makura Zoshi) is usually accorded the highest as well as the earliest place in this field. Brought up in the same court and generation as Lady Murasaki, she chose to describe the refined and scandalous life about her in casual sketches whose excellence in the original can only be guessed at by us from the charm that survives in translation. Born a Fujiwara, she rose to be a lady in waiting to the Empress. On the latter’s death Lady Sei retired, some say to a convent, others say to poverty. Her book shows no touch of either. She takes the easy morals of her time according to the easy judgment of her time, and does not think too highly of spoil-sport ecclesiastics.
A preacher ought to be a good-looking man. It is then easier to keep your eyes fixed on his face, without which it is impossible to benefit by his discourse. Otherwise the eyes wander and you forget to listen. Ugly preachers have therefore a grave responsibility. . . . If preachers were of a more suitable age I should have pleasure in giving a more favorable judgment. As matters actually stand, their sins are too fearful to think of.38
She adds little lists of her likes and dislikes:
Cheerful things:
Coming home from an excursion with the carriages full to overflowing;
To have lots of footmen who make the oxen and the carriages speed along;
A river-boat going down stream;
Teeth nicely blackened. . . .
Dreary things:
A nursery where a child has died;
A brazier with the fire gone out;
A coachman who is hated by his ox;
The birth of a succession of female children in the house of a scholar.
Detestable things:
People who, when you are telling a story, break in with “Oh, I know,” and give quite a different version from your own. . . .
While on friendly terms with a man, to hear him sound the praises of a woman whom he has known. . . .
A visitor who tells a long story when you are in a hurry. . . .
The snoring of a man whom you are trying to conceal, and who has gone to sleep in a place where he has no business. . . .
Fleas.39
The Lady’s only rival for the highest place in the Japanese essay is Kamo no-Chomei. Being refused the succession to his father as the superior guardian of the Shinto shrine of Kamo at Kyoto, Chomei became a Buddhist monk, and at fifty retired to a contemplative life in a mountain hermitage. There he wrote his farewell to the busy world under the title of Hojoki (1212)—i.e., “The Record of Ten Feet Square.” After describing the difficulties and annoyances of city life, and the great famine of 1181,* he tells how he built himself a hut ten feet square and seven feet high, and settled down contentedly to undisturbed philosophy and a quiet comradeship with natural things. An American, reading him, hears the voice of Thoreau in thirteenth-century Japan. Apparently every generation has had its Walden Pond.
IV. THE DRAMA
The “No” plays—Their character—The popular stage—The Japanese Shakespeare—Summary judgment
Last of all, and hardest to understand, is the Japanese drama. Brought up in our English tradition of the theatre, from Henry IV to Mary of Scotland, how shall we ever attune ourselves to tolerate what must seem to us the fustian and pantomime of the No plays of Japan? We must forget Shakespeare and go back to Everyman, and even farther to the religious origins of Greek and modern European drama; then we shall be oriented to watch the development of the ancient Shinto pantomime, the ecclesiastical kagura dance, into that illumination of pantomime by dialogue which constitutes the No (or lyrical) form of Japanese play. About the fourteenth century Buddhist priests added choral songs to their processional pantomimes; then they added individual characters, contrived a plot to give them action as well as speech, and the drama was born.40
These plays, like the Greek, were performed in trilogies; and occasionally Kyogen, or farces (“mad words”), were acted in the intervals, to relieve and facilitate the tension of emotion and thought. The first part of the trilogy was devoted to propitiating the gods, and was hardly more than a religious pantomime; the second was performed in full armor, and was designed to frighten all evil spirits away; the third was of a milder mood, and sought to portray some charming aspect of nature, or some delightful phase of Japanese life.41 The lines were written for the most part in blank verse of twelve syllables. The actors were men of standing, even among the aristocracy; a playbill survives which indicates that Nobunaga, Hideyoshi and Iyeyasu all participated as actors in a No play about 1580.42 Each actor wore a mask, carved out of wood with an artistry that makes such masks a prize for the art collector of today. Scenery was meagre; the passionate imagination of the audience could be relied upon to create the background of the action. The stories were of the simplest, and did not matter much: one of the most popular told of the impoverished Samurai who, to warm a wandering monk, cut down his most cherished plants to make a fire; whereupon the monk turned out to be the Regent, and gave the knight a goodly reward. But as we in the West may go again and again to hear an opera whose story is old and perhaps ridiculous, so the Japanese, even today, weep over this oft-told tale43 because the excellence of the acting renews on each occasion the power and significance of the play. To the hasty and businesslike visitor such performances as he may find of these dramatized lyrics are rather amusing than impressive; nevertheless a Japanese poet says of them: “Oh, what a tragedy and beauty in the No stage! I always think that it would certainly be a great thing if the No drama could be properly introduced into the West. The result would be no small protest against the Western stage. It would mean a revelation.”44 Japan itself, however, has not composed such plays since the seventeenth century, though it acts them devotedly today.
The history of the drama, in most countries, is a gradual change from the predominance of the chorus to the supremacy of some individual rôle—at which point, in most such sequences, development ends. As the histrionic art advanced in tradition and excellence in Japan it created popular personalities who subordinated the play to themselves. Finally pantomime and religion sank to a subordinate rôle, and the drama became a war of individuals, full of violence and romance. So was born the kabuki shibai, or popular theatre, of Japan. The first such theatre was established about the year 1600 by a nun who, tired of convent walls, set up a stage at Osaka, and practised dancing for a livelihood.45 As in England and France, the presence of women on the stage seemed revolting and was forbidden; and since the upper classes (except in safe disguise) shunned these performances, the actors became almost a pariah caste, with no social incentive to keep their profession from immorality and corruption. Men perforce took the parts of women, and carried their imitation to such a point as to deceive not only their audiences but themselves; many of these actors of female rôles remained women off the stage.46 Perhaps because lighting was poor, the actors painted their faces with vivid colors, and wore robes of gorgeous designs to indicate and dignify their rôles. Back of the stage and about it, usually, were choral and individual reciters, who sometimes carried on the vocal parts while the actors confined themselves to pantomime. The audience sat on the matted floor, or in tiers of boxes at either side.47
The most famous name in the popular drama of Japan is Chikamatsu Monzayemon (1653-1724). His countrymen compare him with Shakespeare; English critics, resenting the comparison, accuse Chikamatsu of violence, extravagance, bombast, and improbable plots, while granting him “a certain barbaric vigor and luxuriance”;48 apparently the similarity is complete. Such foreign plays seem mere melodrama to us, because either the meaning or the nuances of the language are concealed from us; but this would probably be the effect of a Shakespearean play upon one unable to appreciate its language or follow its thought. Chikamatsu seems to have made undue use of lovers’ suicides to cap his climaxes, in the style of Romeo and Juliet; but perhaps with this excuse, that suicide was almost as popular in Japanese life as on the stage.
A foreign historian, in these matters, can only report, but cannot judge. Japanese acting, to a transient observer, seems less complex and mature, but more vigorous and exalting than the European; Japanese plays seem more plebeianly melodramatic, but less emasculated with superficial intellectualism, than the plays of France, England and America today. So, reversely, Japanese poetry seems slight and bloodless, and too aristocratically refined, to us whose appetite has taken in lyrics of almost epic length (like Maud), and epics of such dulness that doubtless Homer himself would nod if he were compelled to read the accumulated Iliad. The Japanese novel seems sensational and sentimental; and yet two of the supreme masterpieces of English fiction—Tom Jones and Pickwick Papers—have apparently their equal counterparts in the Genji Monogatari and the Hizakurige, and perhaps Lady Murasaki excels in subtlety, grace and understanding even the great Fielding himself. All things are dull that are remote and obscure; and things Japanese will remain obscure to us until we can completely forget our Western heritage and completely absorb Japan’s.
V. THE ART OF LITTLE THINGS
Creative imitation—Music and the dance—“Inro” and “netsuke”—Hidari Jingaro—Lacquer
The outward forms of Japanese art, like almost every external feature of Japanese life, came from China; the inner force and spirit, like everything essential in Japan, came from the people themselves. It is true that the wave of ideas and immigration that brought Buddhism to Japan in the seventh century brought also, from China and Korea, art forms and impulses bound up with that faith, and no more original with China and Korea than with Japan; it is true, even, that cultural elements entered not only from China and India, but from Assyria and Greece—the features of the Kamakura Buddha, for example, are more Greco-Bactrian than Japanese. But such foreign stimuli were used creatively in Japan; its people learned quickly to distinguish beauty from ugliness; its rich men sometimes prized objects of art more than land or gold,* and its artists labored with self-effacing devotion. These men, though arduously trained through a long apprenticeship, seldom received more than an artisan’s wage; if for a moment wealth came to them they gave it away with Bohemian recklessness, and soon relapsed into a natural and comfortable poverty.50 But only the artist-artisans of ancient Egypt and Greece, or of medieval China, could rival their industry, taste and skill.
The very life of the people was instinct with art—in the neatness of their homes, the beauty of their clothing, the refinements of their ornaments, and their spontaneous addiction to song and dance. For music, like life, had come to Japan from the gods themselves; had not Izanagi and Izanami sung in choruses at the creation of the earth? A thousand years later the Emperor Inkyo, we read, played on a wagon (a kind of zither), and his Empress danced, at an imperial banquet given in 419 to signalize the opening of a new palace. When Inkyo died a Korean king sent eighty musicians to attend the funeral; and these players taught the Japanese new instruments and new modes—some from Korea, some from China, some from India. When the Daibutsu was installed in the temple of Todaiji at Nara (752), music from T’ang Chinese masters was played in the ceremony; and the Shoso-in, or Imperial Treasure-house, at Nara still shows the varied instruments used in those ancient days. Singing and recitative, court music and monastic dance music, formed the classical modes, while popular airs were strummed on the biwa—a lute—or the samisen—a three-stringed banjo.51 The Japanese had no great composers, and wrote no books about music; their simple compositions, played in five notes of the harmonic minor scale, had no harmony, and no distinction of major and minor keys; but almost every Japanese could play some one of the twenty instruments which had come over from the continent; and any one of these, when properly played, said the Japanese, would make the very dust on the ceiling dance.52 The dance itself enjoyed “a vogue unparalleled in any other country”53—not so much as an appendage to love as in the service of religious or communal ceremony; sometimes a whole village turned out in costume to celebrate a joyful occasion with a universal dance. Professional dancers entertained great audiences with their skill; and men as well as women, even in the highest circles, gave much time to the art. When Prince Genji, says the Lady Murasaki, danced the “Waves of the Blue Sea” with his friend To no-Chujo, everyone was moved. “Never had the onlookers seen feet tread so delicately, nor heads so exquisitely poised So moving and beautiful was this dance that at the end of it the Emperor’s eyes were wet, and all the princes and great gentlemen wept aloud.”54
Meanwhile all who could afford it adorned their persons not only with fine brocades and painted silks, but with delicate objects characteristic, almost definitive, of the old Japan. Shrinking ladies flirted from behind fans of alluring loveliness, while men flaunted netsuke, inro and expensively carved swords. The inro was a little box attached to the belt by a cord; it was usually composed of several infolding cases carefully carved in ivory or wood, and contained tobacco, coins, writing materials, or other casual necessities. To keep the cord from slipping under the belt, it was bound at the other end to a tiny toggle or netsuke (from ne, end, and tsuke, to fasten), upon whose cramped surface some artist had fashioned, with lavish care, the forms of deities or demons, philosophers or fairies, birds or reptiles, fishes or insects, flowers or leaves, or scenes from the life of the people. Here that impish humor in which Japanese art so far excels all others found free and yet modest play. Only the most careful examination can reveal the full subtlety and significance of these representations; but even a glance at this microcosm of fat women and priests, of agile monkeys and delightful bugs, cut upon less than a cubic inch of ivory or wood, brings home to the student the unique and passionately artistic quality of the Japanese people.*
Hidari (i.e., “left-handed”) Jingaro was the most famous of Japanese sculptors in wood. Legend told how he had lost an arm and gotten a name: when an offended conqueror demanded of Jingaro’s Daimyo the life of his daughter, Jingaro carved a severed head so realistically that the conqueror ordered the artist’s right hand to be cut off as punishment for killing the daughter of his lord.55 It was Jingaro whose chisel formed the elephants and the sleeping cat at the shrine of Iyeyasu at Nikko, and the “Gate of the Imperial Envoy” at the Nishi-Hongwan Temple in Kyoto. On the inner panels of this gate the artist told the story of the Chinese sage who washed his ear because it had been contaminated by a proposal that he should accept the throne of his country, and the austere cowherd who quarreled with the sage for thus defiling the river.56 But Jingaro was merely the most characterful of the now nameless artists who adorned a thousand structures with lovingly carved or lacquered wood. The lacquer tree found in the islands a peculiarly congenial habitat, and was nourished with skilful care. The artisans sometimes covered with successive coats of lacquer, cotton and lacquer a form chiseled in wood; but more often they went to the pains of modeling a statue in clay, making from this a hollow mould, and then pouring into the mould several layers of lacquer, each thicker than before.57 The Japanese carver lifted wood to a full equality with marble as a material for art, and filled shrines, mausolea and palaces with the fairest wood-decoration known in Asia.
VI. ARCHITECTURE
Temples—Palaces—The shrine of Iyeyasu—Homes
In the year 594 the Empress Suiko, being convinced of the truth or utility of Buddhism, ordered the building of Buddhist temples throughout her realm. Prince Shotoku, who was entrusted with carrying out this edict, brought in from Korea priests, architects, wood-carvers, bronze founders, clay modelers, masons, gilders, tile-makers, weavers, and other skilled artisans.58 This vast cultural importation was almost the beginning of art in Japan, for Shinto had frowned upon ornate edifices and had countenanced no figures to misrepresent the gods. From that moment Buddhist shrines and statuary filled the land. The temples were essentially like those of China, but more richly ornamented and more delicately carved. Here, too, majestic torii, or gateways, marked the ascent or approach to the sacred retreat; bright colors adorned the wooden walls, great beams held up a tiled roof gleaming under the sun, and minor structures—a drum-tower, e.g., or a pagoda—mediated between the central sanctuary and the surrounding trees. The greatest achievements of the foreign artists was the group of temples at Horiuji, raised under the guidance of Prince Shotoku near Nara about the year 616. It stands to the credit of the most living of building materials that one of these wooden edifices has survived unnumbered earthquakes and outlasted a hundred thousand temples of stone; and it stands to the glory of the builders that nothing erected in later Japan has surpassed the simple majesty of this oldest shrine. Perhaps as beautiful, and only slightly younger, are the temples of Nara itself, above all the perfectly proportioned Golden Hall of the Todaiji Temple there; Nara, says Ralph Adams Cram, contains “the most precious architecture in all Asia.”59
The next zenith of building in Japan came under the Ashikaga Shogunate. Yoshimitsu, resolved to make Kyoto the fairest capital on earth, built for the gods a pagoda 360 feet high; for his mother the Takakura Palace, of which a single door cost 20,000 pieces of gold ($150,000); for himself a Flower Palace, that consumed $5,000,000; and the Golden Pavilion of Kinkakuji for the glory of all.60 Hideyoshi too tried to rival Kublai Khan, and built at Momoyama a “Palace of Pleasure” which his whim tore down again a few years after its completion; we may judge its magnificence from the “day long portal” removed from it to adorn the temple of Nishi-Hongwan; all day long, said its admirers, one might gaze at that carved portal without exhausting its excellence. Kano Yeitoku played Ictinus and Pheidias to Hideyoshi, but adorned his buildings with Venetian splendor rather than with Attic restraint; never had Japan, or Asia, seen such abounding decoration before. Under Hideyoshi, too, the gloomy Castle of Osaka took form, to dominate the Pittsburgh of Japan, and become the death-place of his son.
Iyeyasu inclined rather to philosophy and letters than to art; but after his death his grandson, Iyemitsu, content himself with a wooden shanty for his palace, lavished the resources of Japanese wealth and art to build around the ashes of Iyeyasu at Nikko the fairest memorial ever raised to any individual in the Far East. Here, ninety miles from Tokyo, on a quiet hill reached by a shaded avenue of stately cryptomerias, the architects of the Shogun laid down first a series of spacious and gradual approaches, then an ornate but lovely Yo-mei-mon Gate, then, by a brook crossed with a sacred and untouchable bridge, a series of mausolea and temples in lacquered wood, femininely beautiful and frail. The decoration is extravagant, the construction is weak, the omnipresent red paint flares like a hectic rouge amid the modest green of the trees; and yet a country incarnadined with blossoms every spring may need brighter colors to express its spirit than those that might serve and please a less impassioned race.
We cannot quite call this architecture great, for the demon of earthquake has willed that Japan should build on a timid scale, and not pile stones into the sky to crash destructively when the planet wrinkles its skin. Hence the homes are of wood and seldom rise beyond a story or two; only the repeated experience of fire and the reiterated commands of the government prevailed upon the citizens of the cities, when they could afford it, to cover their wooden cottages and palaces with roofs of the. The aristocracy, unable to raise their mansions into the clouds, spread them spaciously over the earth, despite an imperial edict limiting the size of a dwelling to 240 yards square. A palace was rarely one building; usually it was a main structure connected by covered walks with subordinate edifices for various groups in the family. There was no distinction of dining-room, living-room or bedroom; the same chamber could serve any purpose, for at a moment’s notice a table might be laid down upon the matted floor, or the rolled up bedding might be taken from its hiding-place and spread out for the night. Sliding panels or removable partitions separated or united the rooms, and even the latticed or windowed walls were easily folded up to give full play to the sun, or the cooling evening air. Pretty blinds of split bamboo offered shade and privacy. Windows were a luxury; in the poorer homes the summer light found many openings, which in winter were blocked up with oiled paper to keep out the cold. Japanese architecture gives the appearance of having been born in the tropics, and of having been transported too recklesssly into islands that stretch up their necks to shivering Kamchatka. In the more southern towns these fragile and simple homes have a style and beauty of their own, and offer appropriate dwellings for the once gay children of the sun.
VII. METALS AND STATUES
Swords—Mirrors—The Trinity of Horiuji—Colossi—Religion and sculpture
The sword of the Samurai was stronger than his dwelling, for the metalworkers of Japan spent themselves on making blades superior to those of Damascus or Toledo,61 sharp enough to sever a man from shoulder to thigh at a blow, and ornamented with guards and handles so highly decorated, or so heavily inlaid with gems, that they were not always perfectly adapted to homicide. Other workers in metal made bronze mirrors so brilliant that legends arose to commemorate their perfection. So a peasant, having bought a mirror for the first time, thought that he recognized in it the face of his dead father; he hid it as a great treasure, but so often consulted it that his suspicious wife ferreted it out, and was horrified to find in it the picture of a woman about her own age, who was apparently her husband’s mistress.62 Still other artisans cast tremendous bells, like the forty-nine-ton monster at Nara (732 A.D.), and brought from them a sweeter tone than our clanging metal clappers elicit in the West, by striking a boss on the outer surface of the bell with a swinging beam of wood.
The sculptors used wood or metal rather than stone, since their soil was poor in granite and marble; and yet, despite all difficulties of material, they came to surpass their Chinese and Korean teachers in this most definitive of all the arts—for every other art secretly emulates sculpture’s patient removal of the inappropriate. Almost the earliest, and perhaps the greatest, masterpiece of sculpture in Japan is the bronze Trinity at Horiuji—a Buddha seated on a lotus bud between two Bodhisattwas, before a screen and halo of bronze only less beautiful than the stone lacery of Aurangzeb’s screen in the Taj Mahal. We do not know whose hands reared these temples and built this statuary; we may admit Korean teachers, Chinese examples, Indian motives, even Greek influences coming down from far Ionia across a thousand years; but we are sure that this Trinity is among the most signal accomplishments in the history of art.*
Possibly because their stature was short, and their bodies could hardly contain all the ambitions and capacities of their souls, the Japanese took pleasure in building colossi, and had better success in this questionable art than even the Egyptians. In the year 747, an epidemic of smallpox having broken out in Japan, the Emperor Shomu commissioned Kimimaro to cast a gigantic Buddha in propitiation of the gods. For this purpose Kimimaro used 437 tons of bronze, 288 pounds of gold, 165 pounds of mercury, seven tons of vegetable wax, and several tons of charcoal. Two years and seven attempts were required for the work. The head was cast in a single mould, but the body was formed of several metal plates soldered together and thickly covered with gold. More impressive to the foreign eye than this saturnine countenance at Nara is the Daibutsu of Kamakura, cast of bronze in 1252 by Ono Goroyemon; here, perhaps because the colossus sits on an elevation in the open air, within a pleasant entourage of trees, the size seems to accord with the purpose, and the artist has expressed with remarkable simplicity the spirit of Buddhist contemplation and peace. Once a temple housed the figure, as still is the case at Nara; but in 1495 a great tidal wave destroyed both the temple and the town, leaving the bronze philosopher serene amid widespread destruction, suffering and death. Hideyoshi too built a colossus at Kyoto; for five years fifty thousand men labored at this Buddha, and the great Taiko himself, clad in the garb of a common laborer, sometimes helped them conspicuously at their task. But hardly had it been erected when, in 1596, an earthquake threw it down, and scattered the wreckage of its sheltering sanctuary about its head. Hideyoshi, says Japanese story, shot an arrow at the fallen idol, saying, scornfully, “I placed you here at great expense, and you cannot even defend your own temple.”65
From such colossi to dangling netsuke Japanese sculpture ran the range of every figure and every size. Sometimes its masters, like Takamura today, gave years of labor to figures hardly a foot tall, and took delight in representing gnarled octogenarians, jolly gourmands and philosophic friars. It was good that humor sustained them, for most of the gains that came from their toil went to their subtle employers rather than to themselves, and in their larger works they were much harassed by conventions of subject and treatment laid upon them by the priests. The priests wanted gods, not courtesans, from the sculptors; they wished to inspire the people to piety, or to fashion their virtues with fear, rather than to arouse in them the sense and ecstasy of beauty. Bound hand and soul to religion, sculpture decayed when faith lost its warmth and power; and, as in Egypt, the stiffness of conventions, when piety had fled, became the rigor of death.
VIII. POTTERY
The Chinese stimulus—The potters of Hizen—Pottery and tea—How Goto Saijiro brought the art of porcelain from Hizen to Kaga—The nineteenth century
In a sense it is not quite just to Japan to speak of her importing civilization from Korea and China, except in the sense in which northwestern Europe took its civilization from Greece and Rome. We might also view all the peoples of the Far East as one ethnic and cultural unity, in which each part, like the provinces of one country, produced in its time and place an art and culture akin to and dependent upon the art and culture of the rest. So Japanese pottery is a part and phase of Far Eastern ceramics, fundamentally like the Chinese, and yet stamped with the characteristic delicacy and fineness of all Japanese work. Until the coming of the Korean artisans in the seventh century, Japanese pottery was merely an industry, moulding crude materials for common use; there was, apparently, no glazed pottery in the Far East before the eighth century, much less any porcelain.66 The industry became an art largely as a result of the entrance of tea in the thirteenth century. Chinese tea-cups of Sung design came in with tea, and aroused the admiration of the Japanese. In the year 1223 Kato Shirozemon, a Japanese potter, made his way perilously to China, studied ceramics there for six years, returned to set up his own factory at Seto, and so far surpassed all preceding pottery in the islands that Seto-mono, or Seto-ware, became a generic name for all Japanese pottery, just as chinaware, in the seventeenth century, became the English term for porcelain. The Shogun Yoritomo made Shirozemon’s future by setting the fashion of rewarding minor services with presents of Shirozemon’s tea-jars, filled with the new marvel of powdered tea. Today the surviving specimens of this Toshiro-yaki* are accounted almost beyond price; they are swathed in costly brocade, and kept in boxes of the finest lacquer, while their owners are spoken of with bated breath as the aristocracy of connoisseurs.67
Three hundred years later another Japanese, Shonzui, was lured to China to study its famous potteries. On his return he established a factory at Arita, in the province of Hizen. He was harassed, however, by the difficulty of finding in the soil of his country minerals as well adapted as those of China to make a fine pâte; and it was said of his products that one of their main ingredients was the bones of his artisans. Nevertheless Shonzui’s wares of Mohammedan blue were so excellent that the Chinese potters of the eighteenth century did their best to imitate them for export under his counterfeited name; and the extant examples of his work are now as highly valued as the rarest paintings of Japan’s greatest masters of the brush.68 About 1605 a Korean, Risampei, discovered at Izumi-yama, in the Arita district, immense deposits of porcelain stone; and from that moment Hizen became the center of the ceramic industry in Japan. In Arita, too, labored the famous Kakiemon, who, after learning the art of enameling from a Chinese ship-master, made his name almost synonymous with delicately decorated enameled porcelain. Dutch merchants shipped large quantities of Hizen products to Europe from the port of Arita at Imari; 44,943 pieces went to Holland alone in the year 1664. This brilliant Imari-yaki became the rage in Europe, and inspired Aebregt de Keiser to inaugurate the golden age of Dutch ceramics in his factories at Delft.
Meanwhile the rise of the tea ceremony had stimulated a further development in Japan. In 1578 Nobunaga, at the suggestion of the tea-master Rikyu, gave a large order for cups and other tea utensils to a family of Korean potters at Kyoto. A few years later Hideyoshi rewarded the family with a gold seal, and made its wares, the Raku-yaki, almost de rigueur for the ritual of drinking tea. Hideyoshi’s generals returned from their unsuccessful invasion of Korea with numerous captives, among whom, by a discrimination unusual in warriors, were many artists. In 1596 Shimazu Yoshihiro brought to Satsuma a hundred skilled Koreans, including seventeen potters; and these men, with their successors, established throughout the world the high reputation of Satsuma for that richly colored glazed ware to which an Italian town has given our name of faience. But the greatest Japanese master in this branch of the art was the Kyoto potter Ninsei. Not only did he originate enameled faience, but he gave to his products a grace and proud restraint that have made them precious to collectors ever since, so that his mark has been more often counterfeited than that of any other artist in Japan.69 Because of his work, decorated faience mounted to the intensity of a craze in the capital, and in some quarters of Kyoto every second house was turned into a miniature pottery.70 Only less famous than Ninsei was Kenzan, older brother of the painter Korin.
The romance that so often lurks behind ceramics appears in the story of how Goto Saijiro brought the art of porcelain from Hizen to Kaga. An excellent bed of potter’s stone having been discovered near the village of Kutani, the feudal lord of the province resolved to establish a porcelain industry there; and Goto was sent to Hizen to study its methods of firing and design. But the secrets of the potters were so carefully concealed from outsiders that Goto for a while was baffled. Finally he disguised himself as a servant, and accepted a menial place in the household of a potter. After three years his master admitted him to a pottery, and there Goto worked for four years more. Then he deserted the wife whom he had married at Hizen and the children whom she had borne to him, and fled to Kaga, where he gave his lord a full report of the methods he had learned. From that time on (1664) the potters of Kutani became masters, and Kutani-yaki rivaled the best wares of Japan.71
The Hizen potteries retained their leadership throughout the eighteenth century, largely as a result of the benevolent care which the feudal lord of Hirado lavished upon the workmen in his factories; for a century (1750-1843) the blue Michawaki wares of Hirado stood at the head of Japanese porcelains. In the nineteenth century Zengoro Hozen brought the leadership to Kyoto by clever imitations that often surpassed his models, so that sometimes it became impossible to decide which was the original and which was the copy. In the final quarter of the century Japan developed cloisonné enameling from the crude condition in which it had remained since its entry from China, and took the lead of the world in this field of ceramics.72 Other branches deteriorated during the same period, for the rising demand of Europe for Japanese pottery led to a style of exaggerated decoration alien to the native taste, and the habits engendered in meeting these foreign orders affected the skill and weakened the traditions of the art. Here, as everywhere, the coming of industry has been for a while a blight; mass production has taken the place of quality, and mass consumption has replaced discriminating taste. Perhaps, after invention has run its fertile course, and social organization and experience have spread the gift of leisure and taught its creative use, the curse may be turned into a blessing; industry may lavish comforts upon the majority of men, while the worker, after paying his lowered tribute of hours to the machine, may once again become an artisan, and turn the mechanical product, by loving individual treatment, into a work of personality and art.
IX. PAINTING
Difficulties of the subject—Methods and materials—Forms and ideals—Korean origins and Buddhist inspiration—The Tosa School—The return to China—Sesshiu—The Kano School—Koyetsu and Korin—The Realistic School
Japanese painting, even more than the other topics that have demanded a place in these pages, is a subject that only specialists should touch; and if it is included here, along with other esoteric realms wherein angels have feared to tread, it is in the hope that through this veil of errors some glimpse may come, to the reader, of the fulness and quality of Japanese civilization. The masterpieces of Japanese painting cover a period of twelve hundred years, are divided amongst a complex multiplicity of schools, have been lost or injured in the flow of time, and are nearly all hidden away in private collections in Japan.* Those few chef-d’ œuvres that are open to alien study are so different in form, method, style and material from Western pictures that no competent judgment can be passed upon them by the Occidental mind.
First of all, like their models in China, the paintings of Japan were once made with the same brush that was used in writing, and, as in Greece, the word for writing and for painting was originally one; painting was a graphic art. This initial fact has determined half the characteristics of Far Eastern painting, from the materials used to the subordination of color to line. The materials are simple: ink or water-colors, a brush, and absorbent paper or silk. The labor is difficult: the artist works not erect but on his knees, bending over the silk or paper on the floor; and he must learn to control his stroke so as to make seventy-one different degrees or styles of touch.73 In the earlier centuries, when Buddhism ruled the art of Japan, frescoes were painted, much in the manner of Ajanta or Turkestan; but nearly all the extant works of high repute take the form either of makimono (scrolls), kakemono (hangings), or screens. These pictures were made not to be arranged indigestibly in picture galleries—for there are no such galleries in Japan—but to be viewed in private by the owner and his friends, or to form a part of some decorative scheme in a temple, a palace or a home. They were very seldom portraits of specific personalities; usually they were glimpses of nature, or scenes of martial action, or strokes of humorous or satirical observation of the ways of animals, women and men.
They were poems of feeling rather than representations of things, and were closer to philosophy than to photography. The Japanese artist let realism alone, and rarely tried to imitate the external form of reality. He scornfully left out shadows as irrelevant to essences, preferring to paint in plein air, with no modeling play of light and shade; and he smiled at Western insistence on the perspective reduction of distant things. “In Japanese painting,” said Hokusai, with philosophic tolerance, “form and color are represented without any attempt at relief, but in European methods relief and illusion are sought for.”74 The Japanese artist wished to convey a feeling rather than an object, to suggest rather than to represent; it was unnecessary, in his judgment, to show more than a few significant elements in a scene; as in a Japanese poem, only so much should be shown as would arouse the appreciative mind to contribute to the esthetic result by its own imagination. The painter too was a poet, and valued the rhythm of line and the music of forms infinitely more than the haphazard shape and structure of things. And like the poet he felt that if he were true to his own feeling it would be realism enough.
It was probably Korea that brought painting to the restless empire that now has conquered her. Korean artists, presumably, painted the flowing and colorful frescoes of the Horiuji Temple, for there is nothing in the known history of Japan before the seventh century that could explain the sudden native achievement of such faultless excellence. The next stimulus came directly from China, through the studies there of the Japanese priests Kobo Daishi and Dengyo Daishi; on his return to Japan in 806 Kobo Daishi gave himself to painting as well as to sculpture, literature and piety, and some of the oldest masterpieces are from his many-sided brush. Buddhism stimulated art in Japan, as it had done in China; the Zen practice of meditation lent itself to brooding creativeness in color and form almost as readily as in philosophy and poetry; and visions of Amida Buddha became as frequent in Japanese art as Annunciations and Crucifixions on the walls and canvases of the Renaissance. The priest Yeishin Sozu (d. 1017) was the Fra Angelico and El Greco of this age, whose risings and descendings of Amida made him the greatest religious painter in the history of Japan. By this time, however, Kose no-Kanaoka (fl. ca. 950) had begun the secularization of Japanese painting; birds, flowers and animals began to rival gods and saints on the scrolls.
But Kose’s brush still thought in Chinese terms, and moved along Chinese lines. It was not till the suspension of intercourse with China in the ninth century had given Japan the first of five centuries of isolation that she began to paint her own scenery and subjects in her own way. About 1150, under the patronage of imperial and aristocratic circles at Kyoto, a national school of painting arose which protested against imported motives and styles, and set itself to decorate the luxurious homes of the capital with the flowers and landscapes of Japan. The school had almost as many names as it had masters: Yamato-riu, or Japanese Style; Waga-riu, again meaning Japanese Style; Kasuga, after its reputed founder; and finally the Tosa School, after its principal representative in the thirteenth century, Tosa Gon-no-kumi; thereafter to the end of its history the name Tosa was borne by all the artists of the line. They deserved their nationalist name, for there is nothing in Chinese art that corresponds to the ardor and dash, the variety and humor, of the narrative scrolls of love and war which came from the brushes of this group. Takayoshi, about 1010, painted in colors gorgeous illustrations of the seductive tale of Genji; Toba Sojo amused himself by drawing lively satires of the priestly and other scoundrels of his time, under the guise of monkeys and frogs; Fujiwara Takanobu, towards the end of the twelfth century, finding his high lineage worthless in terms of rice and sake, turned to the brush for a living, and drew great portraits of Yoritomo and others, quite unlike anything yet done in China; his son Fujiwara Nobuzane patiently painted the portraits of thirty-six poets; and in the thirteenth century Kasuga’s son, Keion, or someone else, drew those animated scrolls which are among the world’s most brilliant achievements in the field of draughtsmanship.
Slowly these native sources of inspiration seemed to dry up into conventional forms and styles, and Japanese art turned once more for nourishment to the new schools of painting that had arisen in the China of the Sung Renaissance. The impulse to imitation was for a time uncontrolled; Japanese artists who had never seen the Middle Kingdom spent their lives in painting Chinese characters and scenes. Cho Densu painted sixteen Rakan (Lohans, Arhats, Buddhist saints), now among the treasures of the Freer Gallery in Washington; Shubun took the precaution of being born and reared in China, so that, on coming to live in Japan, he could paint Chinese landscapes from memory as well as from imagination.
It was during this second Chinese mood of Japanese painting that the greatest figure in all the pictorial art of Japan appeared. Sesshiu was a Zen priest at Sokokuji, one of the several art schools established by Yoshimitsu, the Ashikaga Shogun. Even as a youth he astonished his townsmen with his draughtsmanship; and legend, not knowing how to express its awe, told how, when he was tied to a post for misbehavior, he had drawn with his toes such realistic mice that they came to life and bit through the cords that bound him.75 Hungry to know the masters of Ming China at first hand, he secured credentials from his religious superiors as well as from the Shogun, and sailed across the sea. He was disappointed to find that Chinese painting was in decay, but he consoled himself with the varied life and culture of the great kingdom, and went back to his own land filled and inspired with a thousand ideas. The artists and nobles of China, says a pretty tale, accompanied him to the vessel which was to take him back to Japan, and showered white paper upon him with requests that he should paint a few strokes, if no more, upon them and send them back; hence, according to this story, his pen name Sesshiu, meaning “Ship of Snow.”76 Arrived in Japan, he seems to have been welcomed as a prince, and to have been offered many emoluments by the Shogun Yoshimasa; but (if we may believe what we read) he refused these favors, and retired to his country parish in Choshu. Now he threw off, as if each were a moment’s trifle, one masterpiece after another, until nearly every phase of Chinese scenery and life had taken lasting form under his brush. Seldom had China, never had Japan, seen paintings so various in scope, so vigorous in conception and execution, so decisive in line. In his old age the artists of Japan made a path to his door and honored him, even before his death, as a supreme artist. Today a picture of Sesshiu is to a Japanese collector what a Leonardo is to a European; and legend, which transforms intangible opinions into pretty tales, tells how one possessor of a Sesshiu, finding himself caught in a conflagration beyond possibility of escape, slashed open his body with his sword, and plunged into his abdomen the priceless scroll—which was later found unharmed within his half-consumed corpse.77
The ascendancy of Chinese influence continued among the many artists patronized by the feudal lords of the Ashikaga and Tokugawa Shogunates. Each baronial court had its official painter, who was commissioned to train hundreds of young artists who might be turned, at a moment’s notice, to the decoration of a palace. The temples now were almost ignored, for art was being secularized in proportion as wealth increased. Towards the end of the fifteenth century Kano Masanobu established at Kyoto, under Ashikaga patronage, a school of secular painters known from his first name, and devoted to upholding the severely classical and Chinese traditions in Japanese art. His son, Kano Motonobu, reached in this direction a mastery second only to that of Sesshiu himself. A story told of him illustrates admirably the concentration of mind and purpose that constitutes the greater part of genius. Having been commissioned to paint a series of cranes, Motonobu was discovered, evening after evening, walking and behaving like a crane. It turned out that he imitated, each night, the crane that he planned to paint the following day. A man must go to bed with his purpose in order to wake up to fame. Motonobu’s grandson, Kano Yeitoku, though a scion of the Kano line, developed under the protection of Hideyoshi an ornate style all the world away from the restrained classicism of his progenitors. Tanyu transferred the seat of the school from Kyoto to Yedo, took service under the Tokugawas, and helped to decorate the mausoleum of Iyeyasu at Nikko. Gradually, despite these adaptations to the spirit of the times, the Kano dynasty exhausted its impetus, and Japan turned to other masters for fresh beginnings.
About 1660 a new group of painters arrived on the scene, named, from its leaders, the Koyetsu-Korin School. In the natural oscillation of philosophies and styles, the Chinese manners and subjects of Sesshiu and Kano seemed now conservative and worn out; and the new artists turned to domestic scenes and motives for their subject-matter and inspiration. Koyetsu was a man of such diverse talents as bring to mind Carlyle’s jealous claim that he had never known any great man who could not have been any sort of a great man; for he was distinguished as a calligrapher, a painter, and a designer in metal, lacquer and wood. Like William Morris he inaugurated a revival of fine printing, and supervised a village in which his craftsmen pursued their varied arts under his direction.78 His only rival for the first place among the painters of the Tokugawa age was Korin, that astonishing master of trees and flowers, who, his contemporaries tell us, could with one stroke of his brush place a leaf of iris upon the silk and make it live.79 No other painter has been so purely and completely Japanese, or so typically Japanese in the taste and delicacy of his work.*
The last of the historic schools of Japanese painting in the strictest sense was founded at Kyoto in the eighteenth century by Maruyami Okyo. A man of the people, Okyo, stimulated by some knowledge of European painting, resolved to abandon the now thinned-out idealism and impressionism of the older style, and to attempt a realistic description of simple scenes from everyday life. He became especially fond of drawing animals, and kept many species of them about him as objects of his brush. Having painted a wild boar, he showed his work to hunters, and was disappointed to find that they thought his pictured boar was dead. He tried again and again, until at last they admitted that the boar might not be dead but merely asleep.81 Since the aristocracy at Kyoto was penniless, Okyo had to sell his pictures to the middle classes; and this economic compulsion had much to do with turning him to popular subjects, even to the painting of some Kyoto belles. The older artists were horrified, but Okyo persisted in his unconventional ways. Mori Sosen accepted Okyo’s naturalistic lead, turned and lived with the animals in order to portray them faithfully, and became Japan’s greatest painter of monkeys and deer. By the time Okyo died (1795) the realists had won all along the line, and a completely popular school had captured the attention not only of Japan but of the world.
X. PRINTS
The “Ukiyoye” School—Its founders—Its masters—Hokusai—Hiroshige
It is another jest of history that Japanese art should be most widely known and influential in the West through that one of all its forms which is least honored in Japan. About the middle of the eighteenth century the art of engraving, which had come to Japan in the luggage of Buddhism half a millennium before, was turned to the illustration of books and the life of the people. The old subjects and methods had lost the tang of novelty and interest; men were surfeited with Buddhist saints, Chinese philosophers, meditative animals and immaculate flowers; the new classes that were slowly rising to prominence looked to art for some reflection of their own affairs, and began to produce artists willing to meet these demands. Since painting required leisure and expense, and produced but one picture at a time, the new artists adapted engraving to their purposes, cut their pictures into wood, and made as many cheap prints from the blocks as their democratic purchasers required. These prints were at first colored by hand. Then, about 1740, three blocks were made: one uncolored, another partly colored rose-red, the third colored here and there in green; and the paper was impressed upon each block in turn. Finally, in 1764, Harunobu made the first polychrome prints, and paved the way for those vivid sketches, by Hokusai and Hiroshige, which proved so suggestive and stimulating to culture-weary Europeans thirsting for novelty. So was born the Ukiyoye School of “Pictures of the Passing World.”
Its painters were not the first who had taken the untitled man as the object of their art. Iwasa Matabei, early in the seventeenth century, had shocked the Samurai by depicting, on a six-panel screen, men, women and children in the unrestrained attitudes of common life; in 1900 this screen (the Hikone Biobu) was chosen by the Japanese Government for exhibition in Paris, and was insured on its voyage for 30,000 yen ($15,000).82 About 1660 Hishikawa Moronobu, a designer of Kyoto dress patterns, made the earliest block prints, first for the illustration of books, then as broadsheets scattered among the people, almost like picture postcards among ourselves today. About 1687 Toru Kujomoto, designer of posters for the Osaka theatres, moved to Yedo, and taught the Ukiyoye School (which belonged entirely to the capital) how profitable it might be to make prints of the famous actors of the day. From the stage the new artists passed to the brothels of the Yoshiwara, and gave to many a fragile beauty a taste of immortality. Bare breasts and gleaming limbs entered with disarming coyness into the once religious and philosophical sanctuaries of Japanese painting.
The masters of the developed art appeared towards the middle of the eighteenth century. Harunobu made prints of twelve or even fifteen colors from as many blocks, and, remorseful over his early pictures for the stage, painted with typical Japanese delicacy the graceful world of happy youth. Kiyonaga reached the first zenith of artistry in this school, and wove color and line into the swaying and yet erect figures of aristocratic women. Sharaku seems to have given only two years of his life to designing prints; but in this short time he lifted himself to the top of his tribe by his portraits of the Forty-seven Ronin, and his savagely ironic pictures of the stage’s shooting “stars.” Utamaro, rich in versatility and genius, master of line and design, etched the whole range of life from insects to courtesans; he spent half his career in the Yoshiwara, exhausted himself in pleasure and work, and earned a year in jail (1804) by picturing Hideyoshi with five concubines.83 Wearied of normal people in normal attitudes, Utamaro portrayed his refined and complaisant ladies in almost spiritual slenderness, with tilted heads, elongated and slanting eyes, lengthened faces, and mysterious figures wrapped in flowing and multitudinous robes. A degenerating taste exalted this style into a bizarre mannerism, and was bringing the Ukiyoye School close to corruption and decay, when its two most famous masters arose to give it another half-century of life.
“The Old Man Mad with Painting,” as Hokusai called himself, lived almost four-score years and ten, but mourned the tardiness of perfection and the brevity of life.
From my sixth year onwards a peculiar mania for drawing all sorts of things took possession of me. At my fiftieth year I had published quite a number of works of every possible description, but none were to my satisfaction. Real work began with me only in my seventieth year. Now at seventy-five the real appreciation of nature awakens within me. I therefore hope that at eighty I may have arrived at a certain power of intuition which will develop further to my ninetieth year, so that at the age of a hundred I can probably assert that my intuition is thoroughly artistic. And should it be granted to me to live a hundred and ten years, I hope that a vital and true comprehension of nature may radiate from every one of my lines and dots. . . . I invite those who are going to live as long as I to convince themselves whether I shall keep my word. Written at the age of seventy-five years by me, formerly Hokusai, now called the Old Man Mad with Painting.84
Like most of the Ukiyoye artists he was born of the artisan class, the son of a mirror-maker. Apprenticed to the artist Shunso, he was expelled for originality, and went back to his family to live in poverty and hardship throughout his long life. Unable to live by painting, he peddled food and almanacs. When his house burned down he merely composed a hokka:
It has burned down;
How serene the flowers in their falling!85
When, at the age of eighty-nine, he was discovered by death, he surrendered reluctantly, saying: “If the gods had given me only ten years more I could have become a really great painter.”86
He left behind him five hundred volumes of thirty thousand drawings. Intoxicated with the unconscious artistry of natural forms, he pictured in loving and varied repetition mountains, rocks, rivers, bridges, waterfalls and the sea. Having issued a book of “Thirty-six Views of Fuji,” he went back, like the fascinated priest of Buddhist legend,* to sit at the foot of the sacred mount again, and draw “One Hundred Views of Fuji.” In a series named “The Imagery of the Poets” he returned to the loftier subjects of Japanese art, and showed, among others, the great Li Po beside the chasm and cascade of Lu. In 1812 he issued the first of fifteen volumes called Mangwa—a series of realistic drawings of the homeliest details of common life, piquant with humor and scandalous with burlesque. These he flung off without care or effort, a dozen a day, until he had illustrated every nook and cranny of plebeian Japan. Never had the nation seen such fertility, such swift and penetrating conception, such reckless vitality of execution. As American critics looked down upon Whitman, so Japanese critics and art circles looked down upon Hokusai, seeing only the turbulence of his brush and the occasional vulgarity of his mind. But when he died his neighbors—who had not known that Whistler, in a modest moment, would rank him as the greatest painter since Velasquez87—marveled to see so long a funeral issue from so simple a home.
Less famous in the West but more respected in the East was the last great figure of the Ukiyoye School—Hiroshige (1796-1858). The hundred thousand distinct prints that claim his parentage picture the landscapes of his country more faithfully than Hokusai’s, and with an art that has earned Hiroshige rank as probably the greatest landscape painter of Japan. Hokusai, standing before nature, drew not the scene but some airy fantasy suggested by it to his imagination; Hiroshige loved the world itself in all its forms, and drew these so loyally that the traveler may still recognize the objects and contours that inspired him. About 1830 he set out along the Tokaido or post road from Tokyo to Kyoto, and, like a true poet, thought less of his goal than of the diverting and significant scenes which he met on his way. When at last his trip was finished, he gathered his impressions together in his most famous work—“The Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido” (1834). He liked to picture rain and the night in all their mystic forms, and the only man who surpassed him in this—Whistler—modeled his nocturnes upon Hiroshige’s.88 He too loved Fuji, and made “Thirty-six Views” of the mountain; but also he loved his native Tokyo, and made “One Hundred Views of Yedo” shortly before he died. He lived less years than Hokusai, but yielded up the torch with more content:
I leave my brush at Azuma
And go on the journey to the Holy West,
To visit the famous scenery there.*89
XI. JAPANESE ART AND CIVILIZATION
A retrospect—Contrasts—An estimate—The doom of the old Japan
The Japanese print was almost the last phase of that subtle and delicate civilization which crumbled under the impact of Occidental industry, just as the cynical pessimism of the Western mind today may be the final aspect of a civilization doomed to die under the heel of Oriental industry. Because that medieval Japan which survived till 1853 was harmless to us, we can appreciate its beauty patronizingly; and it will be hard to find in a Japan of competing factories and threatening guns the charm that lures us in the selected loveliness of the past. We know, in our prosaic moments, that there was much cruelty in that old Japan, that peasants were poor and workers were oppressed, that women were slaves there, and might in hard times be sold into promiscuity, that life was cheap, and that in the end there was no law for the common man but the sword of the Samurai. But in Europe too men were cruel and women were a subject class, peasants were poor and workers were oppressed, life was hard and thought was dangerous, and in the end there was no law but the will of the lord or the king.
And as we can feel some affection for that old Europe because, in the midst of poverty, exploitation and bigotry, men built cathedrals in which every stone was carved in beauty, or martyred themselves to earn for their successors the right to think, or fought for justice until they created those civil liberties which are the most precious and precarious portion of our inheritance, so behind the bluster of the Samurai we honor the bravery that still gives to Japan a power above its numbers and its wealth; behind the lazy monks we sense the poetry of Buddhism, and acknowledge its endless incentives to poetry and art; behind the sharp blow of cruelty, and the seeming rudeness of the strong to the weak, we recognize the courtliest manners, the most pleasant ceremonies, and an unrivaled devotion to nature’s beauty in all her forms. Behind the enslavement of women we see their beauty, their tenderness, and their incomparable grace; and amid the despotism of the family we hear the happiness of children playing in the garden of the East.
We are not much moved today by the restrained brevity and untranslatable suggestiveness of Japanese poetry; and yet it was this poetry, as well as the Chinese, that suggested the “free verse” and “imagism” of our time. There is scant originality in Japan’s philosophers, and in her historians a dearth of the high impartiality that we expect of those whose books are not an annex to their country’s armed or diplomatic force. But these were minor things in the life of Japan; she gave herself wisely to the creation of beauty rather than to the pursuit of truth. The soil she lived on was too treacherous to encourage sublime architecture, and yet the houses she built “are, from the esthetic point of view, the most perfect ever designed.”90 No country in modern times has rivaled her in the grace and loveliness of little things—the clothing of the women, the artistry of fans and parasols, of cups and toys, of inro and netsuke, the splendor of lacquer and the exquisite carving of wood. No other modern people has quite equaled the Japanese in restraint and delicacy of decoration, or in widespread refinement and sureness of taste. It is true that Japanese porcelain is less highly valued, even by the Japanese, than that of Sung and Ming; but if only the Chinese product surpasses it, the work of the Japanese potter still ranks above that of the modern European. And though Japanese painting lacks the strength and depth of Chinese, and Japanese prints are mere poster art at their worst, and at their best the transient redemption of hurried trivialities with a national perfection of grace and line, nevertheless it was Japanese rather than Chinese painting, and Japanese prints rather than Japanese water-colors, that revolutionized pictorial art in the nineteenth century, and gave the stimulus to a hundred experiments in fresh creative forms. These prints, sweeping into Europe in the wake of reopened trade after 1860, profoundly affected Monet, Manet, Degas and Whistler; they put an end to the “brown sauce” that had been served with almost every European painting from Leonardo to Millet; they filled the canvases of Europe with sunshine, and encouraged the painter to be a poet rather than a photographer. “The story of the beautiful,” said Whistler, with the swagger that made all but his contemporaries love him, “is already complete—hewn in the marbles of the Parthenon, and broidered, with the birds, upon the fan of Hokusai—at the foot of Fuji-yama.”91
We hope that this is not quite true; but it was unconsciously true for the old Japan. She died four years after Hokusai. In the comfort and peace of her isolation she had forgotten that a nation must keep abreast of the world if it does not wish to be enslaved. While Japan carved her inro and flourished her fans, Europe was establishing a science that was almost entirely unknown to the East; and that science, built up year by year in laboratories apparently far removed from the stream of the world’s affairs, at last gave Europe the mechanized industries that enabled her to make the goods of life more cheaply—however less beautifully—than Asia’s skilful artisans could turn them out by hand. Sooner or later those cheaper goods would win the markets of Asia, ruining the economic and changing the political life of countries pleasantly becalmed in the handicraft stage. Worse than that, science made explosives, battleships and guns that could kill a little more completely than the sword of the most heroic Samurai; of what use was the bravery of a knight against the dastardly anonymity of a shell?
There is no more amazing or portentous phenomenon in modern history than the way in which sleeping Japan, roughly awakened by the cannon of the West, leaped to the lesson, bettered the instruction, accepted science, industry and war, defeated all her competitors either in battle or in trade, and became, within two generations, the most aggressive nation in the contemporary world.
CHAPTER XXXI
The New Japan
I. THE POLITICAL REVOLUTION
The decay of the Shogunate—America knocks at the door—The Restoration—The Westernization of Japan—Political reconstruction—The new constitution—Law—The army—The war with Russia—Its political results
THE death of a civilization seldom comes from without; internal decay must weaken the fibre of a society before external influences or attacks can change its essential structure, or bring it to an end. A ruling family rarely contains within itself that persistent vitality and subtle adaptability which enduring domination requires; the founder exhausts half the strength of the stock, and leaves to mediocrity the burdens that only genius could bear. The Tokugawas after Iyeyasu governed moderately well, but, barring Yoshimune, they numbered no positive personalities in their line. Within eight generations after Iyeyasu’s death the feudal barons were disturbing the Shogunate with sporadic revolts; taxes were delayed or withheld, and the Yedo treasury, despite desperate economies, became inadequate to finance national security or defense.1 Two centuries and more of peace had softened the Samurai, and had disaccustomed the people to the hardships and sacrifices of war; epicurean habits had displaced the stoic simplicity of Hideyoshi’s days, and the country, suddenly called upon to protect its sovereignty, found itself physically and morally unarmed. The Japanese intellect fretted under the exclusion of foreign intercourse, and heard with restless curiosity of the rising wealth and varied civilization of Europe and America; it studied Mabuchi and Moto-ori, and secretly branded the shoguns as usurpers who had violated the continuity of the Imperial dynasty; it could not reconcile the divine descent of the Emperor with the impotent poverty to which the Tokugawas had condemned him. From their hiding-places in the Yoshiwara and elsewhere, subterranean pamphleteers began to flood the cities with passionate appeals for the overthrow of the Shogunate, and the restoration of the Imperial power.
Upon this harassed and resourceless Government the news burst in 1853 that an American fleet, ignoring Japanese prohibitions, had entered Uraga Bay, and that its commander insisted upon seeing the supreme authority in Japan. Commodore Perry had four ships of war and 560 men; but instead of making a display of even this modest force, he sent a courteous note to the Shogun Iyeyoshi, assuring him that the American Government asked nothing more than the opening of a few Japanese ports to American trade, and some arrangements for the protection of such American seamen as might be shipwrecked on Japanese shores. The T’ai-p’ing Rebellion called Perry back to his base in Chinese waters; but in 1854 he returned to Japan armed with a larger squadron and a persuasive variety of gifts—perfumes, clocks, stoves, whiskey . . .—for the Emperor, the Empresses, and the princes of the blood. The new Shogun, Iyesada, neglected to transmit these presents to the royal family, but consented to sign the Treaty of Kanagawa, which conceded in effect all the American demands. Perry praised the courtesy of the islanders, and announced, with imperfect foresight, that “if the Japanese came to the United States they would find the navigable waters of the country free to them, and that they would not be debarred even from the gold-fields of California.”2 By this and later treaties the major ports of Japan were open to commerce from abroad, tariffs were specified and limited, and Japan agreed that Europeans and Americans accused of crime in the islands should be tried by their own consular courts. Stipulations were made and accepted that all persecution of Christianity should cease in the Empire; and at the same time the United States offered to sell to Japan such arms and battleships as she might need, and to lend officers and craftsmen for the instruction of this absurdly pacific nation in the arts of war.3
The Japanese people suffered keenly from the humiliation of these treaties, though later they acknowledged them as the impartial instruments of evolution and destiny. Some of them wished to fight the foreigners at any cost, to expel them all, and restore a self-contained agricultural and feudal regime. Others saw the necessity of imitating rather than expelling the West; the only course by which Japan could avoid the repeated defeats and the economic subjection which Europe was then imposing upon China was by learning as rapidly as possible the methods of Western industry, and the technique of modern war. With astonishing finesse the Westernizing leaders used the baronial lords as aides in overthrowing the Shogunate and restoring the Emperor, and then used the Imperial authority to overthrow feudalism and introduce Occidental industry. So in 1867 the feudal lords persuaded the last of the shoguns, Keiki, to abdicate. “Almost all the acts of the administration,” said Keiki, “are far from perfect, and I confess it with shame that the present unsatisfactory condition of affairs is due to my shortcomings and incompetence. Now that foreign intercourse becomes daily more extensive, unless the government is directed from one central authority, the foundations of the state will fall to pieces.”4 The Emperor Meiji replied tersely that “Tokugawa Keiki’s proposal to restore the administrative authority to the Imperial Court is accepted”; and on January 1, 1868 the new “Era of Meiji” was officially begun. The old religion of Shinto was revised, and an intensive propaganda convinced the people that the restored emperor was divine in lineage and wisdom, and that his decrees were to be accepted as the edicts of the gods.
Armed with this new power, the Westernizers achieved almost a miracle in the rapid transformation of their country. Ito and Inouye braved their way through every prohibition and obstacle to Europe, studied its industries and institutions, marveled at the railroad, the steamship, the telegraph and the battleship, and came back inflamed with a patriotic resolve to Europeanize Japan. Englishmen were brought in to superintend the construction of railways, the erection of telegraphs, and the building of a navy; Frenchmen were commissioned to recast the laws and train the army; Germans were assigned to the organization of medicine and public health; Americans were engaged to establish a system of universal education; and to make matters complete, Italians were imported to instruct the Japanese in sculpture and painting.5 There were temporary, even bloody, reactions, and at times the spirit of Japan rebelled against this hectic and artificial metamorphosis; but in the end the machine had its way, and the Industrial Revolution added Japan to its realm.
Of necessity that Revolution (the only real revolution in modern history) lifted to wealth and economic power a new class of men—manufacturers, merchants and financiers—who in the old Japan had been ranked at the very bottom of the social scale. This rising bourgeoisie quietly used its means and influence first to destroy feudalism, and then to reduce to an imposing pretense the restored authority of the throne. In 1871 the Government persuaded the barons to surrender their ancient privileges, and consoled them with government bonds in exchange for their lands.* Bound by ties of interest to the new society, the old aristocracy gave its services loyally to the Government, and enabled it to effect with bloodless ease the transition from a medieval to a modern state. Ito Hirobumi, recently returned from a second visit to Europe, created, in imitation of Germany, a new nobility of five orders—princes, marquises, counts, viscounts and barons; but these men were the rewarded servants, not the feudal enemies, of the industrial regime.
Modestly and tirelessly Ito labored to give his country a form of government that would avoid what seemed to him the excesses of democracy, and yet enlist and encourage the talent of every class for a rapid economic development. Under his leadership Japan promulgated, in 1889, its first constitution. At the top of the legal structure was the emperor, technically supreme, owning all land in fee simple, commander of an army and a navy responsible to him alone, and giving to the Empire the strength of unity, continuity, and regal prestige. Graciously he consented to delegate his law-making power, so long as it pleased him, to a Diet of two chambers—a House of Peers and a House of Representatives; but the ministers of state were to be appointed by him, and to be accountable to him rather than to the Diet. Underneath was a small electorate of some 460,000 voters, severely limited by a property qualification; successive liberalizations of the franchise raised the number of voters to 13,000,000 by 1928. Corruption in office has kept pace with the extension of democracy.6
Along with these political developments went a new system of law (1881), based largely upon the Napoleonic Code, and representing a courageous advance on the medieval legislation of the feudal age. Civil rights were liberally granted—freedom of speech, press, assembly and worship, inviolability of correspondence and domicile, and security from arrest or punishment except by due process of law.† Torture and ordeal were abolished, the Eta were freed from their caste disabilities, and all classes were made theoretically equal before the law. Prisons were improved, prisoners were paid for their work, and on their liberation they were equipped with some modest capital to set them up in agriculture or trade. Despite the lenience of the code, crime remained rare;7 and if an orderly acceptance of law is a mark of civilization, Japan (allowing for a few assassinations) must stand in the first rank of modern states.
Perhaps the most significant feature of the new Constitution was the exemption of the army and the navy from any superior except the Emperor. Never forgetting the humiliation of 1853, Japan resolved to build an armed force that would make her master of her own destiny, and ultimately lord of the East. Not only did she establish conscription; she made every school in the land a military training camp and a nursery of nationalist ardor. With an amazing aptitude for organization and discipline, she soon brought her armed power to a point where she could speak to the “foreign barbarians” on equal terms, and might undertake that gradual absorption of China which Europe had contemplated but never achieved. In 1894, resenting the despatch of Chinese troops to put down an insurrection in Korea, and China’s persistent reference to Korea as a tributary state under Chinese suzerainty, Japan declared war upon her ancient tutor, surprised the world with the speed of her victory, and exacted from China the acknowledgment of Korea’s independence, the cession of Formosa and Port Arthur (at the tip of the Liaotung Peninsula), and an indemnity of 200,000,000 taels. Germany and France supported Russia in “advising” Japan to withdraw from Port Arthur on condition of receiving an additional indemnity of 30,000,000 taels (from China). Japan yielded, but kept the rebuff in bitter memory while she waited for revenge.
From that hour Japan prepared herself grimly for that conflict with Russia which imperialistic expansion in both empires made apparently inevitable. Availing herself of England’s fear that Russia might advance into India, Japan concluded with the mistress of the seas an alliance (1902-22) by which each party contracted to come to the aid of its ally in case either should go to war with a third power, and another power should intervene. Seldom had England’s diplomats signed away so much of England’s liberty. When, in 1904, the war with Russia began, English and American bankers lent Japan huge sums to finance her victories against the Tsar.8 Nogi captured Port Arthur, and moved his army north in time to turn the scales in the slaughter of Mukden—the bloodiest battle in history before our own incomparable Great War. Germany and France seem to have contemplated coming to the aid of Russia by diplomacy or arms; but President Roosevelt made it known that in such case he would “promptly side with Japan.”9 Meanwhile a Russian squadron of twenty-nine ships had gallantly sailed around the Cape of Good Hope, in the longest war-voyage ever made by a modern fleet, to face the Japanese in their own waters. Admiral Togo, making the first known naval use of radio, kept himself informed of the Russian flotilla’s course, and pounced upon it in the Straits of Tsushima on May 27, 1905. To all his commanders Togo flashed a characteristic message: “The rise or fall of the Empire depends on this battle.”10 The Japanese lost 116 killed and 538 wounded; the Russians lost 4000 dead and 7000 prisoners, and all but three of their ships were captured or sunk.
The “Battle of the Sea of Japan” was a turning point in modern history. Not only did it end the expansion of Russia into Chinese territory; it ended also the rule of Europe in the East, and began that resurrection of Asia which promises to be the central political process of our century. All Asia took heart at the sight of the little island empire defeating the most populous power in Europe; China plotted her revolution, and India began to dream of freedom. As for Japan, it thought not of extending liberty but of capturing power. It secured from Russsia an acknowledgment of Japan’s paramount position in Korea, and then, in 1910, formally annexed that ancient and once highly civilized kingdom. When the Emperor Meiji died, in 1912, after a long and benevolent career as ruler, artist and poet, he could take to the progenitor gods of Japan the message that the nation which they had created, and which at the outset of his reign had been a plaything in the hands of the impious West, was now supreme in the Orient, and was well on its way to becoming the pivot of history.
II. THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
Industrialization—Factories—Wages—Strikes—Poverty—The Japanese point of view
Meanwhile, in the course of half a century, Japan had changed every aspect of its life. The peasant, though poor, was free; he could own a modest parcel of land by paying an annual tax or rental to the state; and no lord could hinder him if he chose to leave the fields and seek his fortune in the cities. For there were great cities now along the coast: Tokyo (i.e., the “Eastern Capital”), with its royal and aristocratic palaces, its spacious parks and crowded baths, and a population second only to that of London and New York; Osaka, once a fishing village and a castle, now a dark abyss of hovels, factories and skyscrapers, the center of the industries of Japan; and Yokohama and Kobe, from whose gigantic wharves, equipped with every modern mechanism, those industries despatched to a thousand ports the second largest merchant marine in the world.*
The leap from feudalism to capitalism was eased by an unprecedented use of every aid. Foreign experts were brought in, and Japanese assistants obeyed their instructions eagerly; within fifteen years the clever learners had made such progress that the foreign specialists were paid off and courteously sent home. Following the lead of Germany the Government took over posts, railroads, telegraphs and telephones; but at the same time it made generous loans to private industries, and protected them with high tariffs from the competition of factories abroad. The indemnity paid by the Chinese after the war of 1894 financed and stimulated the industrialization of Japan precisely as the French indemnity of 1871 had accelerated the industrialization of Germany. Japan, like the Germany of a generation before, was able to begin with modern equipment and feudal discipline, while their long-established competitors struggled with obsolescent machinery and rebellious workingmen. Power was cheap in Japan, and wages were low; laborers were loyally submissive to their chiefs; factory laws came late, and were leniently enforced.12 In 1933 the new Osaka spindles needed one girl for twenty-five machines; the old Lancashire spindles required one man for six.13
The number of factories doubled from 1908 to 1918, and again from 1918 to 1924; by 1931 they had increased by fifty per cent more,14 while industry in the West plumbed the depths of depression. In 1933 Japan took first place as an exporter of textile products, sending out two of the five-and-a-half billion yards of cotton goods consumed in that year by the world.15 By abandoning the gold standard in 1931, and allowing the yen to fall to forty per cent of its former value in international exchange, Japan increased her foreign sales fifty per cent from 1932 to 1933.16 Domestic as well as foreign commerce flourished, and great merchant families, like the Mitsui and the Mitsubishi, amassed such fortunes that the military joined the wage-earning classes in meditating governmental absorption or control of industry and trade.†
While the growth of commerce generated a new and prosperous middle class, the manual workers bore the brunt of the low production costs through which Japan undersold her competitors in the markets of the world. The average wage of the men in 1931 was $1.17 a day; of the women, 48 cents a day; 51 per cent of the industrial workers were women, and twelve per cent were under sixteen years of age.19* Strikes were frequent and communism was growing when the war spirit of 1931 turned the nation to patriotic cooperation and conformity; “dangerous thoughts” were made illegal, and labor unions, never strong in Japan, were subjected to severe restrictions.20 Great slums developed in Osaka, Kobe and Tokyo; in those of Tokyo a family of five occupied an average room space of from eight to ten feet square—a trifle more than the area covered by a double bed; in those of Kobe twenty thousand paupers, criminals, defectives and prostitutes lived in such filth that each year epidemics decimated them, and infant mortality rose to four times its average for the remainder of Japan.21 Communists like Katayama and Christian Socialists like Kagawa fought violently or peaceably against these conditions, until at last the Government undertook the greatest slum-clearing project in history.
A generation ago Lafcadio Hearn expressed a bitter judgment upon the modern regime in Japan:
Under the new order of things forms of social misery never before known in the history of the race are being developed. Some idea of this misery may be obtained from the fact that the number of poor people in Tokyo unable to pay their residence tax is upward of 50,000; yet the amount of the tax is only about twenty sen, or ten cents in American money. Prior to the accumulation of wealth in the hands of the minority there was never any such want in any part of Japan—except, of course, as a temporary consequence of war.22
The “accumulation of wealth in the hands of the minority” is, no doubt, a universal and apparently unfailing concomitant of civilization. Japanese employers believe that the wages which they pay are not too low in relation to the comparative inefficiency of Japanese labor, and the low cost of living in Japan.23 Low wages, thinks Japan, are necessary for low costs; low costs are necessary for the capture of foreign markets; foreign markets are necessary for an industry dependent upon imported fuels and minerals; industry is necessary for the support of a growing population in islands only twelve per cent of whose soil permits cultivation; and industry is necessary to that wealth and armament without which Japan could not defend herself against the rapacious West.
III. THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION
Changes in dress—In manners—The Japanese character—Morals and marriage in transition—Religion—Science—Japanese medicine—Art and taste—Language and education—Naturalistic fiction—New forms of poetry
Have the people themselves been changed by their Industrial Revolution? Certain external innovations catch the eye: the lugubrious bifurcate costume of the European man has captured and enclosed most urban males; but the women continue to clothe themselves in loose and colorful robes, bound at the waist with brocaded bands that meet in a spacious bow at the back.* Shoes are replacing wooden clogs as roads improve; but a large proportion of both sexes still move about in bare and undeformed feet. In the greater cities one may find every variation and combination of native and European dress, as if to symbolize a transformation hurried and incomplete.
Manners are still a model of diplomatic courtesy, though men adhere to their ancient custom of preceding women in entering or leaving a room or in walking along the street. Language is deviously polite, and rarely profane; a formal humility clothes a fierce self-respect, and etiquette graces the most sincere hostility. The Japanese character, like that of man everywhere, is a mosaic of contradictions; for life offers us diverse situations at divers times, and demands of us alternately force and gentleness, levity and gravity, patience and courage, modesty and pride. Therefore we must not be prejudiced against the Japanese because they are sentimental and realistic, sensitive and stoical, expressive and reticent, excitable and restrained; aboundingly cheerful, humorous and pleasure-loving, and inclined to picturesque suicide; lovingly kind—often to animals, sometimes to women—and occasionally cruel to animals and men.* The typical Japanese has all the qualities of the warrior—pugnacity and courage, and an unrivaled readiness to die; and yet, very often, he has the soul of an artist—sensuous, impressionable, and almost instinctively possessed of taste. He is sober and unostentatious, frugal and industrious, curious and studious, loyal and patient, with an heroic capacity for details; he is cunning and supple, like most physically small persons; he has a nimble intelligence, not highly creative in the field of thought, but capable of quick comprehension, adaptation, and practical achievement. The spirit and vanity of a Frenchman, the courage and narrowness of a Briton, the hot temper and artistry of an Italian, the energy and commercialism of an American, the sensitiveness and shrewdness of a Jew—all these have come together to make the Japanese.
Contact and conflict with the West have altered in some ways the moral life of Japan. The traditional honesty of its people† largely continues; but the extension of the franchise and the keen competition of modern trade have brought to Japan a proportionate share of democratic venality, industrial ruthlessness and financial legerdemain. Bushido survives here and there among the higher soldiery, and offers a mild aristocratic check to commercial and political deviltry. Despite the law-abiding patience of the common people assassination is frequent—not as a corrective of reactionary despotism but usually as an encouragement to aggressive patriotism. The Black Dragon Society, led by the apparently untouchable Toyama, has dedicated itself for over forty years to promoting among Japanese officials a policy of conquest in Korea and Manchuria;‡ and in the pursuit of this purpose it has given assassination a popular rôle in the political machinery of Japan.26
The Far East has paralleled the West in that moral disturbance which accompanies every profound change in the economic basis of life. The eternal war of the generations—the revolt of over-eager youth against over-cautious age—has been intensified by the growth of individualist industry, and the weakening of religious faith. The transit from country to city, and the replacement of the family by the individual as the legal and responsible unit of economic and political society, has undermined parental authority, and subjected the customs and morals of centuries to the hasty judgment of adolescence. In the larger centers the young rebel against marriages parentally arranged; and the new couples, instead of taking up their residence in the establishment of the bridegroom’s father, tend increasingly to set up separate and independent homes—or apartments. The rapid industrialization of women has necessitated a loosening of the bonds that held them to domestic subserviency. Divorce is as common as in America, and more convenient; it may be had by signing a registration book and paying a fee of ten cents.27 Concubinage has been made illegal, but in practice it is still permitted to those who can afford to ignore the law.28
In Japan as elsewhere the machine is the enemy of the priest. Spencer and Stuart Mill were imported along with English technology, and the reign of Confucius in Japanese philosophy came to a sudden end. “The generation now at school,” said Chamberlain in 1905, “is distinctly Voltairean.”29 By the same token—through its modern alliance with the machine—science prospered, and won a characteristic devotion, in Japan, from some of the most brilliant investigators of our time.* Japanese medicine, though dependent in most stages upon China or Korea, has made swift progress under European—especially German—example and stimulus. The work of Takamine in the discovery of adrenalin and the study of vitamins; of Kitasato in tetanus and pneumonia, and in the development of an anti-toxin for diphtheria; and, most famous and brilliant of all, of Noguchi in syphilis and yellow fever—these achievements indicate the rapidity with which the Japanese have ceased to be pupils, and have become teachers, of the world.
Hideyo Noguchi was born in 1876 in one of the lesser islands, and in a family so poor that his father deserted on learning that another child was due. The neglected boy fell into a brazier; his left hand was burned to a stump, and his right hand was injured almost to the point of uselessness. Shunned at school because of his scars and deformities, he was planning to kill himself when a surgeon came to the village, treated the right hand successfully, and so won Noguchi’s gratitude that the lad there and then dedicated himself to medicine. “I will be a Napoleon to save instead of to kill,” he announced; “I can already get along on four hours of sleep at night.”30 Penniless, he worked in a pharmacy until he had persuaded its owner to advance him funds for the study of medicine. After graduating he came to the United States, and offered his services to the Medical Corps of the Army at Washington in return for his expenses. The Rockefeller Foundation for Medical Research gave him a laboratory, and Noguchi, literally single-handed, entered upon a fruitful career of experiment and research. He produced the first pure culture of the syphilitic germ, discovered the syphilitic nature of general paralysis and locomotor ataxia, and finally (1918) isolated the yellow fever parasite. Made famous and momentarily affluent, he went back to Japan, honored his old mother, and knelt in gratitude to the kindly pharmacist who had paid for his medical education. Then he went to Africa to study the yellow fever that was raging along the Gold Coast, was himself infected with it, and died (1928) at the pitifully early age of fifty-two.
The development of science, in Japan as in the West, has been accompanied by a decay of the traditional arts. The overthrow of the old aristocracy destroyed a nursery of taste, and left each generation to develop its own norms of excellence anew. The influx of foreign money seeking native wares led to rapid quantitative production, and debased the standards of Japanese design. When the buyers turned to the quest for ancient works, the artisans became forgers, and the manufacture of antiques became in Japan, as in China, one of the most flourishing of modern arts. Cloisonné is probably the only branch of ceramics that has progressed in Japan since the coming of the West. The chaotic passage from handicraft to machinery, and the sudden irruption of foreign tastes and ways clothed in the gaudy prestige of victory and wealth, have unsettled the esthetic sense of Japan, and weakened the sureness of her taste. Perhaps, now that Japan has chosen the sword, she is destined to repeat the history of Rome—imitative in art, but masterly in administration and war.*
A flattery of Occidental modes has marked for a generation the intellectual life of the new empire. European words crowded into the language, newspapers were organized in Western style, and a system of public schools was established after American exemplars. Japan heroically resolved to make itself the most literate nation on earth, and it succeeded; in 1925 99.4 per cent of all Japanese children attended school,31 and in 1927, 93 per cent of the people could read.32 Students took religiously to the new secular learning; hundreds of them lost their health in their eagerness for knowledge,33 and the Government was obliged to take active measures for the encouragement of athletics, gymnastics and games of every kind from ju-jitsu to baseball. Education was removed from religious auspices, and became more thoroughly secularized in Japan than in most European nations. Five imperial universities were supported, and forty-one other universities, only less imperial, gathered in thousands of zealous students. By 1931 the Imperial University of Tokyo had 8,064 students, and the University of Kyoto had 5,552.34
Japanese literature, in the last quarter of the century, lost itself in a series of imitative fashions. English liberalism, Russian realism, Nietzschean individualism and American pragmatism swept the intelligentsia in turn, until the spirit of nationalism reasserted itself, and Japanese writers began to explore their native material in their native ways. A young woman, Ichi-yo, before dying in 1896 at the age of twenty-four, inaugurated a naturalistic movement in fiction by presenting vividly the misery and subjection of women in Japan.35 In 1906 the poet Toson brought this movement to its height with a long novel—Hakai or “The Breaking of the Pledge”—which told in poetic prose the story of a teacher who, having promised his father never to reveal the fact that he was of Eta or slave origin, worked his way by ability and education to a high position, fell in love with a girl of refinement and social standing, and then, in a burst of honesty, confessed his origin, surrendered his sweetheart and his place, and left Japan forever. This novel contributed powerfully to the agitation that finally ended the historic disabilities of the Eta class.
The tanka and the hokka were the last forms of Japanese culture to yield to the influence of the West. For forty years after the Restoration they continued to be the required modes of Japanese verse, and the poetic spirit lost itself in miracles of ingenuity and artifice. Then, in 1897, Toson, a young teacher of Sendai, sold to a publisher, for fifteen dollars, a volume of poems whose individual length constituted a revolution almost as startling as any that had shaken the fabric of the state. The public, tired of elegant epigrams, responded gratefully, and made the publisher rich. Other poets followed the path that Toson had explored, and the tanka and hokka surrendered at last their thousand-year-old domination.36
Despite the new forms the old Imperial Poetry Contest still continues. Every year the Emperor announces a theme, and sets an example by inditing an ode to it; the Empress follows him; and then twenty-five thousand Japanese, of every sort and condition, send in their compositions to the Poetry Bureau at the Imperial Palace, to be judged by the highest bards of the land. The ten poems accounted best are read to the Emperor and the Empress, and are printed in the New Year’s issue of the Japanese press.37 It is an admirable custom, fit to turn the soul for a moment from commercialism and war, and proving that Japanese literature is still a vital part in the life of the most vital nation in the contemporary world.
IV. THE NEW EMPIRE
The precarious bases of the new civilization—Causes of Japanese imperialism—The Twenty-one Demands—The Washington Conference—The Immigration Act of 1924 —The invasion of Manchuria—The new kingdom—Japan and Russia—Japan and Europe—Must America fight Japan?
Despite its rapid growth in wealth and power the new Japan rested upon precarious foundations. Its population had mounted from; 3,000,000 in the days of Shotoku Taishi to some 17,000,000 under Hideyoshi, some 30,000,000 under Yoshimune, and over 55,000,000 at the end of Meiji’s reign (1912).* It had doubled in a century, and the mountain-ribbed islands, so sparsely arable, contained with difficulty their multiplying millions. An insular population half as great as that of the United States had to support itself on an area one-twentieth as large.38 It could maintain itself only by manufactures; and yet Japan was tragically poor in the fuels and minerals indispensable to industry. Hydro-electric power lurked in the streams that flowed from the mountains to the sea, but the full development of this resource would add only one-third to the power already used,39 and could not be relied upon for the expanding needs of the future. Coal was found here and there, in almost inaccessible veins, in the islands of Kyushu and Hokkaido, and oil could be secured from Sakhalin; but iron, the very bone and sinew of industry, was almost completely absent from Japanese soil.40 Finally, the low standard of living to which the nature of the strong and the costliness of materials and power had condemned the masses of Japan made consumption lag more and more behind production; every year, from factories ever better equipped, there poured forth a mounting surplus of goods unpurchasable at home and crying out for markets abroad.
Out of such conditions imperialism is born—that is, the effort of an economic system to exercise control, through its agent the government, over foreign regions upon which it is believed to depend for fuels, markets, materials or dividends. Where could Japan find those opportunities and those materials? She could not look to Indo-China, or India, or Australia, or the Philippines; for these had been preempted by Western powers, and their tariff walls favored their white masters against Japan. Clearly China had been placed at Nippon’s door as a providentially designed market for Japanese goods; and Manchuria—rich in coal and iron, rich in the wheat that the islands could not profitably grow, rich in human resources for industry, taxation and war—Manchuria belonged by manifest destiny to Japan. By what right? By the same right whereby England had taken India and Australia, France Indo-China, Germany Shantung, Russia Port Arthur, and America the Philippines—the right of the need of the strong. In the long run no excuses would be necessary; all that was needed was power and an opportunity. In the eyes of a Darwinian world success would sanction every means.
Opportunity came generously—first with the Great War, then with the breakdown of European and American economic life. The War did not merely accelerate production in Japan (as in America) by giving to industry an ideal foreign market—a continent at war; at the same time it absorbed and weakened Europe, and left Japan with almost a free hand in the East. Therefore she invaded Shantung in 1914; and a year later she presented to China those “Twenty-one Demands” which, if they had been enforced, would have made all China a gigantic colony of little Japan,
Group I of the Demands asked Chinese recognition of Japanese suzerainty in Shantung; Group II asked certain industrial privileges, and an acknowledgment of Japan’s special rights, in Manchuria and Eastern Mongolia; Group III proposed that the greatest of mining companies on the mainland should become a joint concern of China and Japan; Group IV (aimed at America’s request for a coaling station near Foochow) stipulated that “no island, port or harbor along the coast shall be ceded to any third Power.” Group V modestly suggested that the Chinese should hereafter employ Japanese advisers in their political, economic and military affairs; that the police authority in the major cities of China should be jointly administered by Chinese and Japanese; that China should purchase at least fifty per cent of all her munitions from Japan; that Japan should be allowed to build three important railways in China; and that Japan should have the right freely to establish railways, mines and harbors in the Province of Fukien.41
The United States protested that some of these Demands violated the territorial integrity of China, and the principle of the Open Door. Japan withdrew Group V, modified the remaining Demands, and presented them to China with an ultimatum on May 7, 1915. China accepted them on the following day. A Chinese boycott of Japanese goods ensued; but Japan proceeded on the historically correct assumption that boycotts are sooner or later frustrated by the tendency of trade to follow the line of lowest costs. In 1917 the suave Viscount Ishii explained the Japanese position to the American people, and persuaded Secretary of State Lansing to sign an agreement recognizing “that Japan has special interests in China, particularly in the part to which her possessions are contiguous.” In 1922, at the Washington Conference, Secretary of State Hughes prevailed upon the Japanese to acknowledge the principle of the “Open Door” in China, and to be content with a navy sixty per cent as large as England’s or America’s.* At the close of the Conference Japan agreed to return to China that part of Shantung (Tsingtao) which she had taken from Germany during the War. The Anglo-Japanese Alliance died a silent death, and America dreamed cozily of eternal peace.
Out of this youthful confidence in the future came one of the gravest failures of American diplomacy. Finding the people of the Pacific Coast troubled by the influx of Japanese into California, President Theodore Roosevelt in 1907, with the good sense that hid behind his popular bluster, quietly negotiated with the Japanese Government a “Gentlemen’s Agreement” by which Japan promised to forbid the emigration of her laborers to the United States. But the high birth rate of those already admitted continued to disturb the western states, and several of them enacted laws preventing aliens from acquiring land. When, in 1924, the American Congress decided to restrict immigration, it refused to apply to the races of Asia that principle of quotas on which the reduced immigration of European peoples was to be allowed;* instead it forbade the entrance of Asiatics altogether. Approximately the same result would have been secured by applying the quota to all races, without discrimination or name; and Secretary Hughes protested “that the legislation would seem to be quite unnecessary even for the purpose for which it is devised.”42 But hot-heads interpreted as a threat the warning uttered by the Japanese Ambassador of the “grave consequences” that might come from the act; and in a fever of resentment the Immigration Bill was passed.
All Japan flared up at what appeared to be a deliberate insult. Meetings were held, speeches were made, and a patriot committed hara-kiri at the door of Viscount Inouye’s home in order to express the national sense of shame. The Japanese leaders, knowing that the country had been weakened by the earthquake of 1923, held their peace and bided their time. In the natural course of events America and Europe would some day be weakened in turn; and then Japan would seize her second opportunity, and take her delayed revenge.
When the greatest of all wars was followed by almost the greatest of all depressions, Japan saw a long-awaited chance to establish her mastery in the Far East. Announcing that her businessmen had been maltreated by the Chinese authorities in Manchuria, and secretly fearful that her railway and other investments there were threatened with ruin by the competition of the Chinese, Japan, in September, 1931, allowed her army, of its own initiative, to advance into Manchuria. China, disordered with revolution, provincial separatism and purchasable politicians, could make no unified resistance except to resort again to the boycott of Japanese goods; and when Japan, in alleged protest against boycott propaganda, invaded Shanghai (1932), only a fraction of China rose to repel the invasion. The objections of the United States were cautiously approved of “in principle” by European powers too absorbed in their individual commercial interests to take decisive and united action against this dramatic termination of the white man’s brief authority in the distant East. The League of Nations appointed a commission under the Earl of Lytton, which made an apparently thorough and impartial investigation and report; but Japan withdrew from the League on the same ground on which America, in 1935, refused to join in the World Court—that she did not care to be judged by a court of her enemies. The boycott reduced Japanese imports into China by fortyseven per cent between August, 1932, and May, 1933; but meanwhile Japanese trade was ousting Chinese commerce in the Philippines, the Malay States and South Seas, and, so soon as 1934, Japanese diplomats, with the aid of Chinese statesmen, persuaded China to write a tariff law favoring Japanese products as against those of the Western powers.43
In March, 1932, Japanese authority installed Henry P’u Yi, inheritor of the Manchu throne in China, as Chief Executive of the new state of Manchukuo; and two years later it made him Emperor under the name of Kang Teh. The officials were either Japanese or complaisant Chinese; but behind every Chinese official was a Japanese adviser.44 While the “Open Door” was technically maintained, ways were found to place Manchukuoan trade and resources in Japanese hands.45 Immigration from Japan failed to develop, but Japanese capital poured in abundantly. Railways were built for commercial and military purposes, highways were rapidly improved, and negotiations were begun for the purchase of the Chinese Eastern Railway from the Soviet. The Japanese army, victorious and competent, not only organized the new state, but dictated the policy of the Government at Tokyo. It conquered the province of Jehol for Pu-yi, advanced almost to Peiping, retreated magnanimously, and bided its time.
Meanwhile Japanese representatives at Nanking strain every yen to win from the Chinese Government an acceptance of Japanese leadership in every economic and political aspect of Chinese life. When China has been won, by conquest or by loans, Japan will be ready to deal with her ancient enemy—once the Empire of all the Russias, now the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Up along Mongolia’s caravan route through Kalgan and Urga, or across the Manchukuoan border into Chita, or at any one of a hundred vulnerable points where the Trans-Siberian Railway, still for the most part single-tracked in the Far East, coils itself about the new state, the Japanese army may strike and cut the spinal cord that binds China, Vladivostok and Trans-Baikalia with the Russian capital. Feverishly, heroically, Russia prepares for the irrepressible conflict. At Kuznetzk and Magnetogorsk she develops great coal mines and steel factories, capable of being transformed into giant munition plants; while at Vladivostok a host of submarines arranges to entertain a Japanese fleet, and hundreds of bombing planes have their eyes on Japan’s centers of production and transport, and her cities of flimsy wood.
Behind this ominous foreground stand the tamed and frustrated Western powers: America chafing at the loss of Chinese markets, France wondering how long she can hold Indo-China, England disturbed about Australia and India, and harassed by Japanese competition not only in China but throughout her empire in the East. Nevertheless France prefers to help finance Japan rather than to antagonize her; and canny Britain waits in unprecedented patience, hoping that each of her great competitors in Asiatic trade will destroy the other and leave the world to England again. Every day the conflict of interest becomes more acute, and approaches nearer to open strife. Japan insists that foreign companies selling oil to Japan shall maintain on her soil a reserve of oil sufficient to supply the islands for half a year in case of emergency. Manchukuo is closing her doors to non-Japanese oil. Japan, over the protests of Americans, and over the veto of the Uruguayan President, has won permission from the legislature of Uruguay to build on the River Plate a free port for the dutiless entry or manufacture of Japanese goods. From that strategic center the commercial and financial penetration of Latin America will proceed at a rate unequaled since Germany’s rapid conquest of South American trade helped to bring on the Great War, and America’s participation in it. As the memory of that war begins to fade, preparations for another become the order of the day.
Must America fight Japan? Our economic system gives to the investing class so generous a share of the wealth created by science, management and labor that too little is left to the mass of producers to enable them to buy back as much as they produce; a surplus of goods is created which cries out for the conquest of foreign markets as the only alternative to interrupting production—or spreading the power of consumption—at home. But this is even truer of the Japanese economic system than of our own; it too must conquer foreign markets, not only to maintain its centralized wealth, but to secure the fuels and raw materials indispensable to her industries. By the sardonic irony of history that same Japan which America awoke from peaceful agriculture in 1853, and prodded into industry and trade, now turns all her power and subtlety to winning by underselling, and to controlling by conquest or diplomacy, precisely those Asiatic markets upon which America has fixed her hopes as potentially the richest outlet for her surplus goods. Usually in history, when two nations have contested for the same markets, the nation that has lost in the economic competition, if it is stronger in resources and armament, has made war upon its enemy.*
Envoi
OUR ORIENTAL HERITAGE
We have passed in unwilling haste through four thousand years of history, and over the richest civilizations of the largest continent. It is impossible that we have understood these civilizations, or done them justice; for how can one mind, in one lifetime, comprehend or appraise the heritage of a race? The institutions, customs, arts and morals of a people represent the natural selection of its countless trial-and-error experiments, the accumulated and unformulable wisdom of all its generations; and neither the intelligence of a philosopher nor the intellect of a sophomore can suffice to compass them understandingly, much less to judge them with justice. Europe and America are the spoiled child and grandchild of Asia, and have never quite realized the wealth of their pre-classical inheritance. But if, now, we sum up those arts and ways which the West has derived from the East, or which, to our current and limited knowledge, appear first in the Orient, we shall find ourselves drawing up unconsciously an outline of civilization.
The first element of civilization is labor—tillage, industry, transport and trade. In Egypt and Asia we meet with the oldest known cultivation of the soil,* the oldest irrigation systems, and the first† production of those encouraging beverages without which, apparently, modern civilization could hardly exist—beer and wine and tea. Handicrafts and engineering were as highly developed in Egypt before Moses as in Europe before Voltaire; building with bricks has a history at least as old as Sargon I; the potter’s wheel and the wagon wheel appear first in Elam, linen and glass in Egypt, silk and gunpowder in China. The horse rides out of Central Asia into Mesopotamia, Egypt and Europe; Phoenician vessels circumnavigate Africa before the age of Pericles; the compass comes from China and produces a commercial revolution in Europe. Sumeria shows us the first business contracts, the first credit system, the first use of gold and silver as standards of value; and China first accomplishes the miracle of having paper accepted in place of silver or gold.
The second element of civilization is government—the organization and protection of life and society through the clan and the family, law and the state. The village community appears in India, and the city-state in Sumeria and Assyria. Egypt takes a census, levies an income tax, and maintains internal peace through many centuries with a model minimum of force. Ur-Engur and Hammurabi formulate great codes of law, and Darius organizes, with imperial army and post, one of the best administered empires in the annals of government.
The third element of civilization is morality—customs and manners, conscience and charity; a law built into the spirit, and generating at last that sense of right and wrong, that order and discipline of desire, without which a society disintegrates into individuals, and falls forfeit to some coherent state. Courtesy came out of the ancient courts of Egypt, Mesopotamia and Persia; even today the Far East might teach manners and dignity to the brusque and impatient West. Monogamy appeared in Egypt, and began a long struggle to prove itself and survive in competition with the inequitable but eugenic polygamy of Asia. Out of Egypt came the first cry for social justice; out of Judea the first plea for human brotherhood, the first formulation of the moral consciousness of mankind.
The fourth element of civilization is religion—the use of man’s supernatural beliefs for the consolation of suffering, the elevation of character, and the strengthening of social instincts and order. From Sumeria, Babylonia and Judea the most cherished myths and traditions of Europe were derived; in the soil of the Orient grew the stories of the Creation and the Flood, the Fall and Redemption of man; and out of many mother goddesses came at last “the fairest flower of all poesy,” as Heine called Mary, the Mother of God. Out of Palestine came monotheism, and the fairest songs of love and praise in literature, and the loneliest, lowliest, and most impressive figure in history.
The fifth element in civilization is science—clear seeing, exact recording, impartial testing, and the slow accumulation of a knowledge objective enough to generate prediction and control. Egypt develops arithmetic and geometry, and establishes the calendar; Egyptian priests and physicians practise medicine, explore diseases enematically, perform a hundred varieties of surgical operation, and anticipate something of the Hippocratic oath. Babylonia studies the stars, charts the zodiac, and gives us our division of the month into four weeks, of the clock into twelve hours, of the hour into sixty minutes, of the minute into sixty seconds. India transmits through the Arabs her simple numerals and magical decimals, and teaches Europe the subtleties of hypnotism and the technique of vaccination.
The sixth element of civilization is philosophy—the attempt of man to capture something of that total perspective which in his modest intervals he knows that only Infinity can possess; the brave and hopeless inquiry into the first causes of things, and their final significance; the consideration of truth and beauty, of virtue and justice, of ideal men and states. All this appears in the Orient a little sooner than in Europe: the Egyptians and the Babylonians ponder human nature and destiny, and the Jews write immortal comments on life and death, while Europe tarries in barbarism; the Hindus play with logic and epistemology at least as early as Parmenides and Zeno of Elea; the Upanishads delve into metaphysics, and Buddha propounds a very modern psychology some centuries before Socrates is born. And if India drowns philosophy in religion, and fails to emancipate reason from hope, China resolutely secularizes her thought, and produces, again before Socrates, a thinker whose sober wisdom needs hardly any change to be a guide to our contemporary life, and an inspiration to those who would honorably govern states.
The seventh element of civilization is letters—the transmission of language, the education of youth, the development of writing, the creation of poetry and drama, the stimulus of romance, and the written remembrance of things past. The oldest schools known to us are those of Egypt and Mesopotamia; even the oldest schools of government are Egyptian. Out of Asia, apparently, came writing; out of Egypt the alphabet, paper and ink; out of China, print. The Babylonians seem to have compiled the oldest grammars and dictionaries, and to have collected the first libraries; and it may well be that the universities of India preceded Plato’s Academy. The Assyrians polished chronicles into history, the Egyptians puffed up history into the epic, and the Far East gave to the modern world those delicate forms of poetry that rest all their excellence on subtle insights phrased in a moment’s imagery. Nabonidus and Ashurbanipal, whose relics are exhumed by archeologists, were archeologists; and some of the fables that amuse our children go back to ancient India.
The eighth element of civilization is art—the embellishment of life with pleasing color, rhythm and form. In its simplest aspect—the adornment of the body—we find elegant clothing, exquisite jewelry and scandalous cosmetics in the early ages of Egyptian, Sumerian and Indian civilization. Fine furniture, graceful pottery, and excellent carving in ivory and wood fill the Egyptian tombs. Surely the Greeks must have learned something of their skill in sculpture and architecture, in painting and bas-relief, not only from Asia and Crete, but from the masterpieces that in their day still gleamed in the mirror of the Nile. From Egypt and Mesopotamia Greece took the models for her Doric and Ionic columns; from those same lands came to us not merely the column but the arch, the vault, the clerestory and the dome; and the ziggurats of the ancient Near East have had some share in moulding the architecture of America today. Chinese painting and Japanese prints changed the tone and current of nineteenth century European art; and Chinese porcelain raised a new perfection for Europe to emulate. The sombre splendor of the Gregorian chant goes back age by age to the plaintive songs of exiled Jews gathering timidly in scattered synagogues.
These are some of the elements of civilization, and a part of the legacy of the East to the West.
Nevertheless much was left for the classic world to add to this rich inheritance. Crete would build a civilization almost as ancient as Egypt’s, and would serve as a bridge to bind the cultures of Asia, Africa and Greece. Greece would transform art by seeking not size but perfection; it would marry a feminine delicacy of form and finish to the masculine architecture and statuary of Egypt, and would provide the scene for the greatest age in the history of art. It would apply to all the realms of literature the creative exuberance of the free mind; it would contribute meandering epics, profound tragedies, hilarious comedies and fascinating histories to the store of European letters. It would organize universities, and establish for a brilliant interlude the secular independence of thought; it would develop beyond any precedent the mathematics and astronomy, the physics and medicine, bequeathed it by Egypt and the East; it would originate the sciences of life, and the naturalistic view of man; it would bring philosophy to consciousness and order, and would consider with unaided rationality all the problems of our life; it would emancipate the educated classes from ecclesiasticism and superstition, and would attempt a morality independent of supernatural aid. It would conceive man as a citizen rather than as a subject; it would give him political liberty, civil rights, and an unparalleled measure of mental and moral freedom; it would create democracy and invent the individual.
Rome would take over this abounding culture, spread it throughout the Mediterranean world, protect it for half a millennium from barbarian assault, and then transmit it, through Roman literature and the Latin languages, to northern Europe; it would lift woman to a power and splendor, and a mental emancipation, which perhaps she had never known before; it would give Europe a new calendar, and teach it the principles of political organization and social security; it would establish the rights of the individual in an orderly system of laws that would help to hold the continent together through centuries of poverty, chaos and superstition.
Meanwhile the Near East and Egypt would blossom again under the stimulus of Greek and Roman trade and thought. Carthage would revive all the wealth and luxury of Sidon and Tyre; the Talmud would accumulate in the hands of dispersed but loyal Jews; science and philosophy would flourish at Alexandria, and out of the mixture of European and Oriental cultures would come a religion destined in part to destroy, in part to preserve and augment, the civilization of Greece and Rome. Everything was ready to produce the culminating epochs of classical antiquity: Athens under Pericles, Rome under Augustus, and Jerusalem in the age of Herod. The stage was set for the three-fold drama of Plato, Caesar, and Christ.
Glossary*
of foreign terms not immediately defined in the text
Ab initio (L)—from the outset.
Ahankara (H)—consciousness of self.
Amor dei intellectualis (L)—intellectual love of God.
Anna (H)—an (Asiatic) Indian coin worth one-sixteenth of a rupee, or about two cents.
Aperçu (F)—a flash of insight.
Arbiter elegantiarum (L)—arbiter of elegance.
Arcana (L)—secret mysteries.
Arhat (H)—one who has earned Nirvana.
Asana (H)—the third stage of Yoga.
Ashram (a) (H)—a hermitage.
Ashvamedha (H)—the horse sacrifice.
A tergo (L)—from behind.
Bas-relief (F)—low relief; the partial carving of figures upon a background.
Bizarrerie (F)—something strange or queer.
Bodhi (H)—knowledge, illumination.
Bonze (F from J)—a Buddhist monk of the Far East.
Bourgeoisie (F)—literally, the townspeople; the middle classes.
Brahmachari (H)—a young student vowed to chastity.
Breccia (I)—a rock of angular fragments joined with cement.
Buddhi (H)—intellect.
Bushido (J)—the code of honor of the Samurai.
Ca. (circa) (L)—about.
Cela vous abêtira (F)—that will dull your mind.
Chandala (H)—a group of Outcastes.
Charka (H)—a spinning wheel.
Chef-d’œuvre (F)—masterpiece.
Chinoiseries (F)—pieces of Chinese art.
Civitas (L)—city-state.
Condottiere (I)—bandit.
Corvée (F)—forced labor for the state.
Coup d’état (F)—a violent but merely political revolution.
Coup d’œil (F)—a glance of the eye.
Credat qui vult (F)—let who will believe it.
Cuisine (F)—kitchen; cooking.
Daibutsu (J)—Great Buddha; usually applied to the colossi of Buddha.
Daimyo (J)—lord.
De fontibus non disputandum (L)—there is no use disputing about origins.
Dénouement (F)—issue; conclusion.
De rigueur (F)—rigorously required by convention.
Devadasi (H)—literally, a servant of the gods; usually, a temple courtesan in India.
Dharana (H)—the sixth stage of Yoga.
Dharma (H)—duty.
Dhyana (H)—the seventh stage of Yoga.
Djinn (A)—spirits.
Dolce far niente (I)—(it is) sweet to do nothing.
Dramatis personae (L)—persons of the drama.
Dreckapothek (G)—treatment by excrementitious drugs.
En masse (F)—in a mass.
Esprit (F)—spirit.
Ex tempore (L)—on the spur of the moment.
Faïence (F)—richly colored glazed earthenware, named from the Italian town of Faënza, formerly famed for such pottery.
Faux pas (F)—a false step.
Fellaheen (A)—peasants.
Fête des Fous (F)—Feast of Fools.
Fiacre (F)—an open cab.
Flagrante delicto (L)—literally, while the crime is blazing; in the very act.
Flambé (F)—blazed.
Geisha (J)—an educated courtesan.
Genre (F)—class, kind.
Ghat (H)—a mountain-pass; a landing-place; steps leading down to water.
Glaucopis Athene (Gr)—owl-eyed Athene.
Gopuram (H)—gateway.
Gotra (H)—group.
Gunas (H)—active qualities.
Guru (H)—teacher.
Hara-kiri (J)—self-disembowelment.
Here boöpis (Gr)—cow-eyed Here (Juno).
Hetairai (Gr)—the educated courtesans of Greece.
Ibid. (L)—in the same place.
Id. (L)—the same person or author.
Inro (J)—boxes worn at the girdle.
Jenseits von Gut und Böse (G)—beyond good and evil.
Jinricksha (J)—a man-drawn open cab.
Ju jitsu (J)—literally, the soft art; a Japanese method of self-defense without weapons, by a variety of skilful physical artifices.
Junshi (J)—following in death; the suicide of a subordinate to serve his dead lord in the other world.
Jus primæ noctis (L)—the right of (possessing the bride on) the first night.
Kadamba (H)—an Indian flower.
Kakemono (J)—a pictorial or calligraphic hanging.
Karma (H)—deed; the law that every deed receives its reward or punishment in this life or in a reincarnation.
Khaddar (H)—Indian homespun.
Kusha (H)—an Indian grass.
Kutaja (H)—an Indian flower.
Labia minora (L)—the smaller folds of the vulva.
Laissez-faire (F)—literally, let it be; the theory or practice of leaving the economic life of a society free from governmental control.
Lapis lazuli (L)—a stone of rich azure blue.
La politique n’a pas d’entrailles (F)—politics has no bowels (of mercy).
La seule morale (F)—the only morality.
Le chanson de Roland (F)—the Song of Roland.
L’École de l’Extrème Orient—School of the Far East.
Legato (I)—smoothly; without breaks.
Les savants ne sont pas curieux (F)—scholars have no curiosity (Anatole France),
Lex talionis (L)—the law of retaliation.
Lingua franca (L)—a common tongue.
Lohan (C)—one who has earned Nirvana.
Mahatma (H)—great soul.
Manas (H)—mind.
Mandapam (H)—porch.
Mardi Gras (F)—literally, fat Tuesday, the last day of carnival before Mercredi Maigre, Lean (fasting) Wednesday and the beginning of Lent.
Mastaba (A)—an oblong sloping tomb.
Mater dolorosa (L)—the sorrowful Mother.
Mina (L from Gr. from He)—a coin of the ancient Near East, worth (in Babylonia) sixty shekels.
Mise-en scène (F)—the scenic situation.
Moksha (H)—deliverance.
Motif (F)—a characteristic feature or theme.
Mullah (A)—a Moslem scholar.
Muni (H)—saint.
Naga (H)—snake.
Nandi (H)—the benediction introducing a Hindu drama.
Nautch (H)—a Hindu temple dancer.
Netsuke (J)—carved knobs for holding a tassel.
Nishka (H)—a coin often used as an ornament.
Nom de plume (F)—a pen-name.
Nyama (H)—the second stage of Yoga.
Odium literarium (L)—a mutual dislike occasionally noticeable among authors.
Objets d’art (L)—art objects.
Pace (L)—with peace; with all respect to.
Pankha (H)—a fan.
Parvenu (F)—one recently arrived at wealth or place.
Passim (L)—here and there.
Pâte (F)—the potter’s vessel in its paste form.
Patesi (S)—the priest-magistrate of an early Mesopotamian state.
Penchant (F)—inclination.
Petite marmite (F)—a small pot.
Pièce de résistance (F)—the main item.
Pishachas (H)—ghosts; goblins.
Plein air (F)—full air; a theory and school of painting which emphasized the representation of scenes in the open air, as against studio painting.
Prakriti (H)—producer.
Pranayama (H)—the fourth stage of Yoga.
Pratyabara (H)—the fifth stage of Yoga.
Protégé (F)—a person protected and aided by another.
Pro tempore (L)—for the time.
Purdah (A)—a screen or curtain; the seclusion of women.
Purusha (H)—person, spirit.
Qui vive (F)—who lives; who goes there?; alert.
Raconteurs (F)—story-tellers.
Raga (H)—a musical motif or melody.
Raja (H)—king; Maharaja—great king.
Raksha (H)—a nocturnal demon.
Ramadan (A)—the ninth month of the Moslem year, during which no food must be taken between sunrise and sunset.
Rapport (F)—intimate relation.
Religieux (F)—members of religious orders.
Rig (H)—a hymn.
Rishi (H)—a wise man.
Ronin (J)—an unattached Samurai.
Rupee (H)—an Indian coin worth about 32 cents.
Sake (J)—rice wine.
Salonnière (F)—a frequenter of a salon; usually referring to the French salons or drawing-room receptions of the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries.
Samadhi (H)—the eighth stage of Yoga.
Samaj (H)—assembly; society.
Samhita (H)—collection.
Samohini (H)—a drug.
Sang-de-bœuf (F)—(color of) bull’s blood.
Sannyasi (H)—a hermit saint.
Sari (H)—a silk robe.
Sati (H)—suttee; devoted wife; the burial of a widow with her husband.
Savant (F)—scholar.
Sei (J)—caste.
Sen (J)—a Japanese coin, worth one-hundredth of a yen.
Se non è vero è ben trovato (I)—if it is not true it is well invented.
Seppuku (J)—ritual self-disembowelment.
Sesquipedalia verba (L)—words a foot and a half long.
Shaduf (A)—a bucket swung on a pole to lift water.
Shakhti (H)—the female energy of a god.
Shaman (H)—a magician, or miracle-working priest.
Shastra (H)—a text-book.
Shastra (H)—treatise.
Shekel (He)—a coin of the Near East, of varying value.
Shinto (J)—the Way of the Gods; the worship of the national deities and the emperor in Japan.
Shloka (H)—couplet.
Shogun (J)—general; military governor.
Siesta (Sp)—a short sleep or rest.
Silindhra (H)—an Indian flower.
Sine qua non (L)—an indispensable condition.
Soufflé (F)—blown.
Swadeshi (H)—economic nationalism; the exclusive use of native products.
Swaraj (H)—self-rule.
Tantra (H)—rule or ritual.
Tattwa (H)—reality.
Tempera (I)—distemper; painting in which the pigments are mixed or “tempered” with an emulsion of egg, usually with the addition of “size” (diluted glue) to secure adhesion.
Terracotta (I)—baked clay, coated with glaze.
Torii (J)—gateways.
Tour de force (F)—an act of sudden ability.
Urœus (L)—a serpent image symbolizing wisdom and life; usually worn by the Egyptian kings.
Virtus dormitiva (L)—soporific power.
Yaki (J)—wares.
Yen (J)—a Japanese coin, normally worth about fifty cents.
Ziggurat (Assyrian-Babylonian)—a tower of superimposed and diminishing stories, usually surrounded by external stairs.
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INDIAN YEAR BOOK, 1929. Bombay, 1929.
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JEWISH ENCYCLOPEDIA. 12V. New York, 1901.
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KEYSERLING, COUNT HERMANN: Creative Understanding. New York, 1929.
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PLATO: Dialogues. Tr. Jowett. 4V. New York, n.d.
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REPORT OF THE INDIAN CENTRAL COMMITTEE. Calcutta, 1929.
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