Out of the East (16 page)

But more and more each year it exemplifies the law that the greater the complexity of an organism, the greater also its susceptibility to fatal hurt. Always, as its energies increase, is there evolved within it a deeper, a keener, a more exquisitely ramified sensibility to every shock or wound,—to every exterior force of change. Already the mere results of a drought or a famine in the remotest parts of the earth, the destruction of the smallest centre of supply, the exhaustion of a mine, the least temporary stoppage of any commercial vein or artery, the slightest pressure upon any industrial nerve, may produce disintegrations that carry shocks of pain into every portion of the enormous structure And the wondrous capacity of that structure to oppose exterior forces by corresponding changes within itself would appear to be now endangered by internal changes of a totally different character. Certainly our civilization is developing the individual more and more. But is it not now developing him much as artificial heat and colored light and chemical nutrition might develop a plant under glass? Is it not rapidly evolving millions into purely special fitness for conditions impossible to maintain,—of luxury without limit for the few, of merciless servitude to steel and steam for the many? To such doubts the reply has been given that social transformations will supply the means of providing against perils, and of recuperating all losses. That, for a time at least, social reforms will work miracles is much more than a hope. But the ultimate problem of our future seems to be one that no conceivable social change can happily solve,—not even supposing possible the establishment of an absolutely perfect communism,—because the fate of the higher races seems to depend upon their true value in the future economy of Nature. To the query, "Are we not the Superior Race?"—we may emphatically answer "Yes;" but this affirmative will not satisfactorily answer a still more important question, "Are we the fittest to survive?"

Wherein consists the fitness for survival? In the capacity of self-adaptation to any and every environment;—in the instantaneous ability to face the unforeseen;—in the inherent power to meet and to master all opposing natural influences. And surely not in the mere capacity to adapt ourselves to factitious environments of our own invention, or to abnormal influences of our own manufacture,—but only in the simple power to live. Now in this simple power of living, our so-called higher races are immensely inferior to the races of the far East. Though the physical energies and the intellectual resources of the Occidental exceed those of the Oriental, they can be maintained only at an expense totally incommensurate with the racial advantage. For the Oriental has proved his ability to study and to master the results of our science upon a diet of rice, and on as simple a diet can learn to manufacture and to utilize our most complicated inventions. But the Occidental cannot even live except at a cost sufficient for the maintenance of twenty Oriental lives. In our very superiority lies the secret of our fatal weakness. Our physical machinery requires a fuel too costly to pay for the running of it in a perfectly conceivable future period of race-competition and pressure of population.

Before, and very probably since, the apparition of Man, various races of huge and wonderful creatures, now extinct, lived on this planet. They were not all exterminated by the attacks of natural enemies : many seem to have perished simply by reason of the enormous costliness of their structures at a time when the earth was forced to become less prodigal of her gifts. Even so it may be that the Western Races will perish—because of the cost of their existence. Having accomplished their uttermost, they may vanish from the face of the world,—supplanted by peoples better fitted for survival.

Just as we have exterminated feebler races by merely
overliving
them,—by monopolizing and absorbing, almost without conscious effort, everything necessary to their happiness,—so may we ourselves be exterminated at last by races capable of
underliving
us, of monopolizing all our necessities; races more patient, more self-denying, more fertile, and much less expensive for Nature to support. These would doubtless inherit our wisdom, adopt our more useful inventions, continue the best of our industries,—perhaps even perpetuate what is most worthy to endure in our sciences and our arts. But they would scarcely regret our disappearance any more than we ourselves regret the extinction of the dinotherium or the ichthyosaurus.

Footnotes

1
Kano Jigoro. Mr. Kano contributed some years ago to the
Transactions of the Asiatic Society
a very interesting paper on the history of Jiujutsn.

1
What seems to be the only serious mistake Japan has made in this regard is the adoption of leather shoes for her infantry. The fine feet of young men accustomed to the freedom of sandals, and ignorant of the existence of what we call corns and bunions, are cruelly tortured by this unnatural footgear. On long marches they are allowed to wear sandals, however; and a change in footgear may yet be made. With sandals, even a Japanese boy can easily walk his thirty miles a day, almost unfatigued.

2
A highly educated Japanese actually observed to a friend of mine: "The truth is that we dislike Western dress. We have been temporarily adopting it only as certain animals take particular colors in particular seasons,—
for protective reasons.

1
Nominal, because the simple fact is that the real object of missions is impossible. This whole question has been very strongly summed up in a few lines by Herbert Spencer :—

"Everywhere, indeed, the special theological bias, accompanying a special set of doctrines, inevitably prejudges many sociological questions. One who holds a creed to be absolutely true, and who by implication holds the multitudinous other creeds to be absolutely false in so far as they differ from his own, cannot entertain the supposition that the value of a creed is relative. That each religious system is, in its general characters, a natural part of the society in which it is found, is an entirely alien conception, and indeed a repugnant one. His system of dogmatic theology he thinks good for all places and all times. He does not doubt that, when planted among a horde of savages, it will be duly understood by them, duly appreciated by them, and will work upon them results such as those he experiences from it. Thus prepossessed, he passes over the proofs that a people is no more capable of receiving a higher form of religion than it is capable of receiving a higher form of government; and that inevitably along with such religion, as with such government, there will go on a degradation which presently reduces it to one differing but nominally from its predecessor. In other words, his special theological bias blinds him to an important class of sociological truths."

2
The missionary work was begun by St. Francis Xavier, who landed at Kagoshima in Ky
Å«
sh
Å«
on the 15th of August, 1549. A curious fact is that the word
Bateren
, a corruption of the Portuguese or Spanish
padre,
and so adopted into the language two centuries ago, still lingers among the common people in some provinces as a synonym for "wicked magician." Another curious fact worth mentioning is that a particular kind of bamboo screen—from behind which a person can see all that goes on outside the house without being himself seen—is still called a
Kirishitan
(Christian).

Griffis explains the larger success of the Jesuit missions of the sixteenth century partly by the resemblance between the outer forms of Roman Catholicism and the outer forms of Buddhism. This shrewd judgment has been confirmed by the researches of Ernest Satow (see
Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan
, vol. ii. part 2), who has published facsimiles of some documents proving that the grant to the foreign missionaries by the Lord of Yamaguchi was made that they might "
preach the law of Buddha"
—the new religion being at first taken for a higher form of Buddhism. But those who have read the old Jesuit letters from Japan, or even the more familiar compilation of Charlevoix, must recognize that the success of the missions could not be thus entirely explained. It presents us with psychological phenomena of a very remarkable order,—phenomena perhaps never again to be repeated in the history of religion, and analogous to those strange forms of emotionalism classed by Hecker as contagious (see his
Epidemics of the Middle Ages).
The old Jesuits understood the deeper emotional character of the Japanese infinitely better than any modern missionary society: they studied with marvelous keenness all the springs of the race-life, and knew how to operate them. Where they failed, our modern Evangelical propagandists need not hope to succeed. Still, even in the most flourishing period of the Jesuit missions, only six hundred thousand converts were claimed.

3
A recent French critic declared that the comparatively small number of public charities and benevolent institutions in Japan proved the race deficient in humanity! Now the truth is that in Old Japan the principle of mutual benevolence rendered such institutions unnecessary. And another truth is that the vast number of such institutions in the West testifies much more strongly to the inhumanity than to the charity of our own civilization.

1
First Principles
, 2d Ed., § 178.

2
That is, of course, the Japanese. I do not believe that under any circumstances the Occidentals could overlive the Chinese,—no matter what might be the numerical disproportion. Even the Japanese acknowledge their incapacity to compete with the Chinese; and one of the best arguments against the unreserved opening of the country is the danger of Chinese immigration.

1
This was written in 1893.

2
The ceremony of saluting His Majesty's picture is only a repetition of the ceremony required on presentation at court. A bow; three steps forward; a deeper bow; three more steps forward, and a very low bow. On retiring from the Imperial presence, the visitor walks backward, bowing again three times as before.

3
This is an authentic text.

4
See
Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan.

5
Letter-carriers and ordinary policemen are exempted. But the salary of a policeman is only abont six yen a month; that of a letter-carrier much less.

F
ALLING
in love at first sight is less common in Japan than in the West; partly because of the peculiar constitution of Eastern society, and partly because much sorrow is prevented by early marriages which parents arrange. Love suicides, on the other hand, are not infrequent; but they have the particularity of being nearly always double. Moreover, they must be considered, in the majority of instances, the results of improper relationships. Still, there are honest and brave exceptions; and these occur usually in country districts. The love in such a tragedy may have evolved suddenly out of the most innocent and natural boy-and-girl friendship, and may have a history dating back to the childhood of the victims. But even then there remains a very curious difference between a Western double suicide for love and a Japanese J
ō
shi. The Oriental suicide is not the result of a blind, quick frenzy of pain. It is not only cool and methodical: it is sacramental. It involves a marriage of which the certificate is death. The twain pledge themselves to each other in the presence of the gods, write their farewell letters, and die. No pledge can be more profoundly sacred than this. And therefore, if it should happen that, by sudden outside interference and by medical skill, one of the pair is snatched from death, that one is bound by the most solemn obligation of love and honor to cast away life at the first possible opportunity. Of course, if both are saved, all may go well. But it were better to commit any crime of violence punishable with half a hundred years of state prison than to become known as a man who, after pledging his faith to die with a girl, had left her to travel to the Meido alone. The woman who should fail in her vow might be partially forgiven; but the man who survived a J
ō
shi through interference, and allowed himself to live on because his purpose was once frustrated, would be regarded all his mortal days as a perjurer, a murderer, a bestial coward, a disgrace to human nature. I knew of one such case—but I would now rather try to tell the story of an humble love affair which happened at a village in one of the eastern provinces.

The village stands on the bank of a broad but very shallow river, the stony bed of which is completely covered with water only during the rainy season. The river traverses an immense level of rice-fields, open to the horizon north and south, but on the west walled in by a range of blue peaks, and on the east by a chain of low wooded hills. The village itself is separated from these hills only by half a mile of rice-fields ; and its principal cemetery, the adjunct of a Buddhist temple dedicated to Kwannon-of-the-Eleven-Faces, is situated upon a neighboring summit. As a distributing centre, the village is not unimportant. Besides several hundred thatched dwellings of the ordinary rustic style, it contains one whole street of thriving two-story shops and inns with handsome tiled roofs. It possesses also a very picturesque ujigami, or Shint
ō
parish temple, dedicated to the Sim-Goddess, and a pretty shrine, in a grove of mulberry-trees, dedicated to the Deity of Silkworms.

There was born in this village, in the seventh year of Meiji, in the house of one Uchida, a dyer, a boy called Tar
ō
. His birthday happened to be an aku-nichi, or unlucky day,—the seventh of the eighth month, by the ancient Calendar of Moons. Therefore his parents, being old-fashioned folk, Feared and sorrowed. But sympathizing neighbors tried to persuade them that everything was as it should be, because the calendar had been changed by the Emperor's order, and according to the new calendar the day was a kitsu-nichi, or lucky day. These representations somewhat lessened the anxiety of the parents; but when they took the child to the ujigami, they made the gods a gift of a very large paper lantern, and besought earnestly that all harm should be kept away from their boy. The kannushi, or priest, repeated the archaic formulas required, and waved the sacred gohei above the little shaven head, and prepared a small amulet to be suspended about the infant's neck; after which the parents visited the temple of Kwannon on the hill, and there also made offerings, and prayed to all the Buddhas to protect their first-born.

When Tar
ō
was six years old, his parents decided to send him to the new elementary school which had been built at a short distance from the village. Tar
ō
's grandfather bought him some writing - brushes, paper, a book, and a slate, and early one morning led him by the hand to the school. Tar
ō
Felt very happy, because the slate and the other things delighted him like so many new toys, and because everybody had told him that the school was a pleasant place, where he would have plenty of time to play. Moreover, his mother had promised to give him many cakes when he should come home.

As soon as they reached the school,—a big two-story building with glass windows,—a servant showed them into a large bare apartment, where a serious-looking man was seated at a desk. Tar
ō
's grandfather bowed low to the serious-looking man, and addressed him as Sensei, and humbly requested him to teach the little Fellow kindly. The Sensei rose up, and bowed in return, and spoke courteously to the old man. He also put his hand on Tar
ō
's head, and said nice things. But Tar
ō
became all at once afraid. When his grandfather had bid him good-by, he grew still more afraid, and would have liked to run away home; but the master took him into a large, high, white room, full of girls and boys sitting on benches, and showed him a bench, and told him to sit down. All the boys and girls turned their heads to look at Tar
ō
, and whispered to each other, and laughed. Tar
ō
thought they were laughing at him, and began to Feel very miserable. A big bell rang; and the master, who had taken his place on a high platform at the other end of the room, ordered silence in a tremendous way that terrified Tar
ō
. All became quiet, and the master began to speak. Taro thought he spoke most dreadfully. He did not say that school was a pleasant place: he told the pupils very plainly that it was not a place for play, but for hard work. He told them that study was painful, but that they must study in spite of the pain and the difficulty. He told them about the rules which they must obey, and about the punishments for disobedience or carelessness. When they all became frightened and still, he changed his voice altogether, and began to talk to them like a kind father,—promising to love them just like his own little ones. Then he told them how the school had been built by the august command of His Imperial Majesty, that the boys and girls of the country might become wise men and good women, and how dearly they should love their noble Emperor, and be happy even to give their lives for his sake. Also he told them how they should love their parents, and how hard their parents had to work for the means of sending them to school, and how wicked and ungrateful it would be to idle during study-hours. Then he began to call them each by name, asking questions about what he had said.

Tar
ō
had heard only a part of the master's discourse. His small mind was almost entirely occupied by the fact that all the boys and girls had looked at him and laughed when he had first entered the room. And the mystery of it all was so painful to him that he could think of little else, and was therefore quite unprepared when the master called his name.

"Uchida Tar
ō
, what do you like best in the world?"

Tar
ō
started, stood up, and answered frankly,—

"Cake."

All the boys and girls again looked at him and laughed; and the master asked reproachfully, "Uchida Tar
ō
, do you like cake more than you like your parents? Uchida Tar
ō
, do you like cake better than your duty to His Majesty our Emperor? "

Then Tar
ō
knew that he had made some great mistake ; and his face became very hot, and all the children laughed, and he began to cry. This only made them laugh still more ; and they kept on laughing until the master again enforced silence, and put a similar question to the next pupil. Tar
ō
kept his sleeve to his eyes, and sobbed.

The bell rang. The master told the children they would receive their first writing-lesson during the next class-hour from another teacher, but that they could first go out and play for a while. He then left the room; and the boys and girls all ran out into the school-yard to play, taking no notice whatever of Tar
ō
. The child Felt more astonished at being thus ignored than he had Felt before on finding himself an object of general attention. Nobody except the master had yet spoken one word to him; and now even the master seemed to have forgotten his existence. He sat down again on his little bench, and cried and cried ; trying all the while not to make a noise, for Fear the children would come back to laugh at him.

Suddenly a hand was laid upon his shoulder ; a sweet voice was speaking to him; and turning his head, he found himself looking into the most caressing pair of eyes he had ever seen,—the eyes of a little girl about a year older than he.

"What is it?" she asked him tenderly.

Tar
ō
sobbed and snuffled helplessly for a moment, before he could answer: "I am very unhappy here. I want to go home."

"Why?" questioned the girl, slipping an arm about his neck.

"They all hate me ; they will not speak to me or play with me."

"Oh no!" said the girl. "Nobody dislikes you at all. It is only because you are a stranger. When I first went to school, last year, it was just the same with me. You must not fret."

"But all the others are playing; and I must sit in here,"protested Tar
ō
.

"Oh no, you must not. You must come and play with me. I will be your playfellow. Come!"

Tar
ō
at once began to cry out loud. Selfpity and gratitude and the delight of newfound sympathy filled his little heart so full that he really could not help it. It was so nice to be petted for crying.

But the girl only laughed, and led him out of the room quickly, because the little mother soul in her divined the whole situation. "Of course you may cry, if you wish," she said; "but you must play, too!" And oh, what a delightful play they played together!

But when school was over, and Tar
ō
's grandfather came to take him home, Tar
ō
began to cry again, because it was necessary that he should bid his little playmate good-by.

The grandfather laughed, and exclaimed, "Why, it is little Yoshi,—Miyahara O-Yoshi! Yoshi can come along with us, and stop at the house a while. It is on her way home."

At Tar
ō
's house the playmates ate the promised cake together; and O-Yoshi mischievously asked, mimicking the master's severity, "Uchida Tar
ō
, do you like cake better than
me?"

O-Yoshi's father owned some neighboring rice-lands, and also kept a shop in the village. Her mother, a samurai, adopted into the Miyahara family at the time of the breaking up of the military caste, had borne several children, of whom O-Yoshi, the last, was the only survivor. While still a baby, O-Yoshi lost her mother. Miyahara was past middle age; but he took another wife, the daughter of one of his own farmers,—a young girl named Ito O-Tama. Though swarthy as new copper, O-Tama was a remarkably handsome peasant girl, tall, strong, and active; but the choice caused surprise, because O-Tama could neither read nor write. The surprise changed to amusement when it was discovered that almost from the time of entering the house she had assumed and maintained absolute control. But the neighbors stopped laughing at Miyahara's docility when they learned more about O-Tama. She knew her husband's interests better than he, took charge of everything, and managed his affairs with such tact that in less than two years she had doubled his income. Evidently, Miyahara had got a wife who was going to make him rich. As a step-mother she bore herself rather kindly, even after the birth of her first boy. O-Yoshi was well cared for, and regularly sent to school.

While the children were still going to school, a long-expected and wonderful event took place. Strange tall men with red hair and beards—foreigners from the West—came down into the valley with a great multitude of Japanese laborers, and constructed a railroad. It was carried along the base of the low hill range, beyond the rice-fields and mulberry groves in the rear of the village ; and almost at the angle where it crossed the old road leading to the temple of Kwannon, a small station-house was built; and the name of the village was painted in Chinese characters upon a white signboard erected on a platform. Later, a line of telegraph-poles was planted, parallel with the railroad. And still later, trains came, and shrieked, and stopped, and passed,—nearly shaking the Buddhas in the old cemetery off their lotus-flowers of stone.

The children wondered at the strange, level, ash-strewn way, with its double lines of iron shining away north and south into mystery; and they were awe-struck by the trains that came roaring and screaming and smoking, like storm-breathing dragons, making the ground quake as they passed by. But this awe was succeeded by curious interest,—an interest intensified by the explanations of one of their school-teachers, who showed them, by drawings on the blackboard, how a locomotive engine was made ; and who taught them, also, the still more marvelous operation of the telegraph, and told them how the new western capital and the sacred city of Kyoto were to be united by rail and wire, so that the journey between them might be accomplished in less than two days, and messages sent from the one to the other in a Few seconds.