Part 20

_Moral Characteristics._--The most prominent trait of Japanese disposition is gaiety of heart. Emphatically of a laughter-loving nature, the Japanese passes through the world with a smile on his lips. The petty ills of life do not disturb his equanimity. He takes them as part of the day's work, and though he sometimes grumbles, rarely, if ever, does he repine. Exceptional to this general rule, however, is a mood of pessimism which sometimes overtakes youths on the threshold of manhood. Finding the problem of life insolvable, they abandon the attempt to solve it and take refuge in the grave. It seems as though there were always a number of young men hovering on the brink of such suicidal despair. An example alone is needed finally to destroy the equilibrium. Some one throws himself over a cataract or leaps into the crater of a volcano, and immediately a score or two follow. Apparently the more picturesquely awful the manner of the demise, the greater its attractive force. The thing is not a product of insanity, as the term is usually interpreted; letters always left behind by the victims prove them to have been in full possession of their reasoning faculties up to the last moment. Some observers lay the blame at the door of Buddhism, a creed which promotes pessimism by begetting the anchorite, the ascetic and the shuddering believer in seven hells. But Buddhism did not formerly produce such incidents, and, for the rest, the faith of Shaka has little sway over the student mind in Japan. The phenomenon is modern: it is not an outcome of Japanese nature nor yet of Buddhist teaching, but is due to the stress of endeavouring to reach the standards of Western acquirement with grievously inadequate equipment, opportunities and resources. In order to support himself and pay his academic fees many a Japanese has to fall into the ranks of the physical labourer during a part of each day or night. Ill-nourished, over-worked and, it may be, disappointed, he finds the struggle intolerable and so passes out into the darkness. But he is not a normal type. The normal type is light-hearted and buoyant. One naturally expects to find, and one does find, that this moral sunshine is associated with good temper. The Japanese is exceptionally serene. Irascibility is regarded as permissible in sickly children only: grown people are supposed to be superior to displays of impatience. But there is a limit of imperturbability, and when that limit is reached, the subsequent passion is desperately vehement. It has been said that these traits go to make the Japanese soldier what he is. The hardships of a campaign cause him little suffering since he never frets over them, but the hour of combat finds him forgetful of everything save victory. In the case of the military class--and prior to the Restoration of 1867 the term "military class" was synonymous with "educated class"--this spirit of stoicism was built up by precept on a solid basis of heredity. The _samurai_ (soldier) learned that his first characteristic must be to suppress all outward displays of emotion. Pain, pleasure, passion and peril must all find him unperturbed. The supreme test, satisfied so frequently as to be commonplace, was a shocking form of suicide performed with a placid mien. This capacity, coupled with readiness to sacrifice life at any moment on the altar of country, fief or honour, made a remarkably heroic character. On the other hand, some observers hold that the education of this stoicism was effected at the cost of the feelings it sought to conceal. In support of that theory it is pointed out that the average Japanese, man or woman, will recount a death or some other calamity in his own family with a perfectly calm, if not a smiling, face. Probably there is a measure of truth in the criticism. Feelings cannot be habitually hidden without being more or less blunted. But here another Japanese trait presents itself--politeness. There is no more polite nation in the world than the Japanese. Whether in real courtesy of heart they excel Occidentals may be open to doubt, but in all the forms of comity they are unrivalled. Now one of the cardinal rules of politeness is to avoid burdening a stranger with the weight of one's own woes. Therefore a mother, passing from the chamber which has just witnessed her paroxysms of grief, will describe calmly to a stranger--especially a foreigner--the death of her only child. The same suppression of emotional display in public is observed in all the affairs of life. Youths and maidens maintain towards each other a demeanour of reserve and even indifference, from which it has been confidently affirmed that love does not exist in Japan. The truth is that in no other country do so many dual suicides occur--suicides of a man and woman who, unable to be united in this world, go to a union beyond the grave. It is true, nevertheless, that love as a prelude to marriage finds only a small place in Japanese ethics. Marriages in the great majority of cases are arranged with little reference to the feelings of the parties concerned. It might be supposed that conjugal fidelity must suffer from such a custom. It does suffer seriously in the case of the husband, but emphatically not in the case of the wife. Even though she be cognisant--as she often is--of her husband's extra-marital relations, she abates nothing of the duty which she has been taught to regard as the first canon of female ethics. From many points of view, indeed, there is no more beautiful type of character than that of the Japanese woman. She is entirely unselfish; exquisitely modest without being anything of a prude; abounding in intelligence which is never obscured by egoism; patient in the hour of suffering; strong in time of affliction; a faithful wife; a loving mother; a good daughter; and capable, as history shows, of heroism rivalling that of the stronger sex. As to the question of sexual virtue and morality in Japan, grounds for a conclusive verdict are hard to find. In the interests of hygiene prostitution is licensed, and that fact is by many critics construed as proof of tolerance. But licensing is associated with strict segregation, and it results that the great cities are conspicuously free from evidences of vice, and that the streets may be traversed by women at all hours of the day and night with perfect impunity and without fear of encountering offensive spectacles. The ratio of marriages is approximately 8.46 per thousand units of the population, and the ratio of divorces is 1.36 per thousand. There are thus about 16 divorces for every hundred marriages. Divorces take place chiefly among the lower orders, who frequently treat marriage merely as a test of a couple's suitability to be helpmates in the struggles of life. If experience develops incompatibility of temper or some other mutually repellent characteristic, separation follows as a matter of course. On the other hand, divorces among persons of the upper classes are comparatively rare, and divorces on account of a wife's unfaithfulness are almost unknown.

Concerning the virtues of truth and probity, extremely conflicting opinions have been expressed. The Japanese _samurai_ always prided himself on having "no second word." He never drew his sword without using it; he never gave his word without keeping it. Yet it may be doubted whether the value attached in Japan to the abstract quality, truth, is as high as the value attached to it in England, or whether the consciousness of having told a falsehood weighs as heavily on the heart. Much depends upon the motive. Whatever may be said of the upper class, it is probably true that the average Japanese will not sacrifice expediency on the altar of truth. He will be veracious only so long as the consequences are not seriously injurious. Perhaps no more can be affirmed of any nation. The "white lie" of the Anglo-Saxon and the _hoben no uso_ of the Japanese are twins. In the matter of probity, however, it is possible to speak with more assurance. There is undoubtedly in the lower ranks of Japanese tradesmen a comparatively large fringe of persons whose standard of commercial morality is defective. They are descendants of feudal days when the mercantile element, being counted as the dregs of the population, lost its self-respect. Against this blemish--which is in process of gradual correction--the fact has to be set that the better class of merchants, the whole of the artisans and the labouring classes in general, obey canons of probity fully on a level with the best to be found elsewhere. For the rest, frugality, industry and patience characterize all the bread-winners; courage and burning patriotism are attributes of the whole nation.

There are five qualities possessed by the Japanese in a marked degree. The first is frugality. From time immemorial the great mass of the people have lived in absolute ignorance of luxury in any form and in the perpetual presence of a necessity to economize. Amid these circumstances there has emerged capacity to make a little go a long way and to be content with the most meagre fare. The second quality is endurance. It is born of causes cognate with those which have begotten frugality. The average Japanese may be said to live without artificial heat; his paper doors admit the light but do not exclude the cold. His brazier barely suffices to warm his hands and his face. Equally is he a stranger to methods of artificial cooling. He takes the frost that winter inflicts and the fever that summer brings as unavoidable visitors. The third quality is obedience; the offspring of eight centuries passed under the shadow of military autocracy. Whatever he is authoritatively bidden to do, that the Japanese will do. The fourth quality is altruism. In the upper classes the welfare of the family has been set above the interests of each member. The fifth quality is a genius for detail. Probably this is the outcome of an extraordinarily elaborate system of social etiquette. Each generation has added something to the canons of its predecessor, and for every ten points preserved not more than one has been discarded. An instinctive respect for minutiae has thus been inculcated, and has gradually extended to all the affairs of life. That this accuracy may sometimes degenerate into triviality, and that such absorption in trifles may occasionally hide the broad horizon, is conceivable. But the only hitherto apparent evidence of such defects is an excessive clinging to the letter of the law; a marked reluctance to exercise discretion; and that, perhaps, is attributable rather to the habit of obedience. Certainly the Japanese have proved themselves capable of great things, and their achievements seem to have been helped rather than retarded by their attention to detail.

III.--LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE

_Language._--Since the year 1820, when Klaproth concluded that the Japanese language had sprung from the Ural-Altaic stock, philologists have busied themselves in tracing its affinities. If the theories hitherto held with regard to the origin of the Japanese people be correct, close relationship should exist between the Japanese and the Korean tongues, and possibly between the Japanese and the Chinese. Aston devoted much study to the former question, but although he proved that in construction the two have a striking similarity, he could not find any corresponding likeness in their vocabularies. As far back as the beginning of the Christian era the Japanese and the Koreans could not hold intercourse without the aid of interpreters. If then the languages of Korea and Japan had a common stock, they must have branched off from it at a date exceedingly remote. As for the languages of Japan and China, they have remained essentially different throughout some twenty centuries in spite of the fact that Japan adopted Chinese calligraphy and assimilated Chinese literature. Mr K. Hirai has done much to establish his theory that Japanese and Aryan had a common parent. But nothing has yet been substantiated. Meanwhile an inquirer is confronted by the strange fact that of three neighbouring countries between which frequent communication existed, one (China) never deviated from an ideographic script; another (Korea) invented an alphabet, and the third (Japan) devised a syllabary. Antiquaries have sought to show that Japan possessed some form of script before her first contact with either Korea or China. But such traces of prehistoric letters as are supposed to have been found seem to be corruptions of the Korean alphabet rather than independent symbols. It is commonly believed that the two Japanese syllabaries--which, though distinct in form, have identical sounds--were invented by Kukai (790) and Kibi Daijin (760) respectively. But the evidence of old documents seems to show that these syllabaries had a gradual evolution and that neither was the outcome of a single scholar's inventive genius.

The sequence of events appears to have been this:--Japan's earliest contact with an over-sea people was with the Koreans, and she made some tentative efforts to adapt their alphabet to the expression of her own language. Traces of these efforts survived, and inspired the idea that the art of writing was practised by the Japanese before the opening of intercourse with their continental neighbours. Korea, however, had neither a literary nor an ethical message to deliver, and thus her script failed to attract much attention. Very different was the case when China presented her noble code of Confucian philosophy and the literature embodying it. The Japanese then recognized a lofty civilization and placed themselves as pupils at its feet, learning its script and deciphering its books. Their veneration extended to ideographs. At first they adapted them frankly to their own tongue. For example, the ideographs signifying _rice_ or _metal_ or _water_ in Chinese were used to convey the same ideas in Japanese. Each ideograph thus came to have two sounds, one Japanese, the other Chinese--e.g. the ideograph for _rice_ had for Japanese sound _kome_ and for Chinese sound _bei_. Nor was this the whole story. There were two epochs in Japan's study of the Chinese language: first, the epoch when she received Confucianism through Korea; and, secondly, the epoch when she began to study Buddhism direct from China. Whether the sounds that came by Korea were corrupt, or whether the interval separating these epochs had sufficed to produce a sensible difference of pronunciation in China itself, it would seem that the students of Buddhism who flocked from Japan to the Middle Kingdom during the Sui era (A.D. 589-619) insisted on the accuracy of the pronunciation acquired there, although it diverged perceptibly from the pronunciation already recognized in Japan. Thus, in fine, each word came to have three sounds--two Chinese, known as the _kan_ and the _go_, and one Japanese, known as the _kun_. For example:--

"KAN" "GO" JAPANESE SOUND. SOUND. SOUND. MEANING.

_Sei_ _Jo_ _Koe_ Voice _Nen_ _Zen_ _Toshi_ Year _Jinkan_ _Ningen_ _Hito no aida_ Human being.

As to which of the first two methods of pronunciation had chronological precedence, the weight of opinion is that the kan came later than the _go_. Evidently this triplication of sounds had many disadvantages, but, on the other hand, the whole Chinese language may be said to have been grafted on the Japanese. Chinese has the widest capacity of any tongue ever invented. It consists of thousands of monosyllabic roots, each having a definite meaning. These monosyllables may be used singly or combined, two, three or four at a time, so that the resulting combinations convey almost any conceivable shades of meaning. Take, for example, the word "electricity." The very idea conveyed was wholly novel in Japan. But scholars were immediately able to construct the following:--

Lightning. _Den._ Exhalation. _Ki._ Electricity. _Denki._ Telegram. _Dempo._ _Ho_ = tidings. Electric light. _Dento._ _To_ = lamp. Negative electricity. _Indenki._ _In_ = the negative principle. Positive electricity. _Yodenki._ _Yo_ = the positive principle. Thermo-electricity. _Netsudenki._ _Netsu_ = heat. Dynamic-electricity. _Ryudo-denki._ _Ryudo_ = fluid. Telephone. _Denwa._ _Wa_= conversation.

Every branch of learning can thus be equipped with a vocabulary. Potent, however, as such a vehicle is for expressing thought, its ideographic script constitutes a great obstacle to general acquisition, and the Japanese soon applied themselves to minimizing the difficulty by substituting a phonetic system. Analysis showed that all the required sounds could be conveyed with 47 syllables, and having selected the ideographs that corresponded to those sounds, they reduced them, first, to forms called _hiragana_, and, secondly, to still more simplified forms called _katakana_.

Such, in brief, is the story of the Japanese language. When we come to dissect it, we find several striking characteristics. First, the construction is unlike that of any European tongue: all qualifiers precede the words they qualify, except prepositions which become postpositions. Thus instead of saying "the house of Mr Smith is in that street," a Japanese says "Smith Mr of house that street in is." Then there is no relative pronoun, and the resulting complication seems great to an English-speaking person, as the following illustration will show:--

JAPANESE. ENGLISH.

_Zenaku wo saiban suru tame no_ The unique standard which is used Virtue vice-judging sake of for judging virtue or vice is _mochiitaru yuitsu no hyojun wa_ benevolent conduct solely. used unique standard _jiai no koi tada_ benevolence of conduct only _kore nomi._ this alone.

It will be observed that in the above sentence there are two untranslated words, _wo_ and _wa_. These belong to a group of four auxiliary particles called _te_ _ni_ _wo_ _ha_ (or _wa_), which serve to mark the cases of nouns, _te_ (or _de_) being the sign of the instrumental ablative; _ni_ that of the dative; _wo_ that of the objective, and _wa_ that of the nominative. These exist in the Korean language also, but not in any other tongue. There are also polite and ordinary forms of expression, often so different as to constitute distinct languages; and there are a number of honorifics which frequently discharge the duty of pronouns. Another marked peculiarity is that active agency is never attributed to neuter nouns. A Japanese does not say "the poison killed him" but "he died on account of the poison;" nor does he say "the war has caused commodities to appreciate," but "commodities have appreciated in consequence of the war." That the language loses much force owing to this limitation cannot be denied: metaphor and allegory are almost completely banished.

The difficulties that confront an Occidental who attempts to learn Japanese are enormous. There are three languages to be acquired: first, the ordinary colloquial; second, the polite colloquial; and, third, the written. The ordinary colloquial differs materially from its polite form, and both are as unlike the written form as modern Italian is unlike ancient Latin. "Add to this," writes Professor B. H. Chamberlain, "the necessity of committing to memory two syllabaries, one of which has many variant forms, and at least two or three thousand Chinese ideographs, in forms standard and cursive--ideographs, too, most of which are susceptible of three or four different readings according to circumstance,--add, further, that all these kinds of written symbols are apt to be encountered pell mell on the same page, and the task of mastering Japanese becomes almost Herculean." In view of all this there is a strong movement in favour of romanizing the Japanese script: that is to say, abolishing the ideograph and adopting in its place the Roman alphabet. But while every one appreciates the magnitude of the relief that would thus be afforded, there has as yet been little substantial progress. A language which has been adapted from its infancy to ideographic transmission cannot easily be fitted to phonetic uses.

_Dictionaries._--F. Brinkley, _An Unabridged Japanese-English Dictionary_ (Tokyo, 1896); Y. Shimada, _English-Japanese Dictionary_, (Tokyo, 1897); _Webster's Dictionary, trans. into Japanese_, (Tokyo, 1899); J. H. Gubbins, _Dictionary of Chinese-Japanese Words_ (3 vols., London, 1889); J. C. Hepburn, _Japanese-English and English-Japanese Dictionary_ (London, 1903); E. M. Satow and I. Masakata, _English-Japanese Dictionary_ (London, 1904).