Chapter 19

Some years ago I had a cow that I wished to sell. Being an American, my natural impulse was to ask a dairyman directly if he did not wish to buy; but that would not be the most Japanese method. I accordingly resorted to the help of a "go-between." This individual, who has a regular name in Japanese, "nakadachi," is indispensable for many purposes. When land was being bought for missionary residences in Kumamoto, there were at times three or even four agents acting between the purchaser and the seller and each received his "orei," "honorable politeness," or, in plain English, commission. In the purchase of two or three acres of land, dealings were carried on with some fifteen or more separate landowners. Three different go-betweens dealt directly with the purchaser, and each of these had his go-between, and in some cases these latter had theirs, before the landowner was reached. A domestic desiring to leave my employ conferred with a go-between, who conferred with his go-between, who conferred with me! In every important consultation a go-between seems essential in Japan. That vexatious delays and misunderstandings are frequent may be assumed.

The system, however, has its advantages. In case of disagreeable matters the go-between can say the disagreeable things in the third person, reducing the unpleasant utterances to a minimum.

I recall the case of two evangelists in the employ of the Kumamoto station. Each secured the other to act as go-between in presenting his own difficulties to me. To an American the natural course would have been for each man to state his own grievances and desires, and secure an immediate settlement.

The characteristic of "roundaboutness" is not, however, confined to Japanese methods of action, but also characterizes their methods of speech. In later chapters on the alleged Japanese impersonality we shall consider the remarkable deficiency of personal pronouns in the language, and the wide use of "honorifics." This substitution of the personal pronouns by honorifics makes possible an indefiniteness of speech that is exceedingly difficult for an Anglo-Saxon to appreciate. Fancy the amount of implication in the statement, "Ikenai koto-we shimashita" which, strictly translated, means "Can't go thing have done." Who has done? you? or he? or I? This can only be inferred, for it is not stated. If a speaker wishes to make his personal allusion blind, he can always do so with the greatest ease and without the slightest degree of grammatical incorrectness. "Caught cold," "better ask," "honorably sorry," "feel hungry," and all the common sentences of daily life are entirely free from that personal definiteness which an Occidental language necessitates. We shall see later that the absence of the personal element from the wording of the sentence does not imply, or prove, its absence from the thought of either the speaker or hearer. The Japanese language abounds in roundabout methods of expression. This is specially true in phrases of courtesy. Instead of saying, "I am glad to see you," the Japanese say, "Well, honorably have come"; instead of, "I am sorry to have troubled you," they say, "Honorable hindrance have done"; instead of "Thank you," the correct expression is, "It is difficult."

In a conversation once with a leading educator, I was maintaining that a wide study of English was not needful for the Japanese youth; that the majority of the boys would never learn enough English to make it of practical use to them in after-life, and that it would be wiser for them to spend the same amount of time on more immediately practical subjects. The reply was that the boys needed to have the drill in English in order to gain clear methods of thought: that the sharp distinctness of the English sentence, with its personal pronouns and tense and number, affords a mental drill which the Japanese can get in no other way; and that even if the boys should never make the slightest after-use of English in reading or conversation, the advantage gained was well worth the time expended. I have since noticed that those men who have spent some time in the study of a foreign language speak very much more clearly in Japanese than those who have not had this training. In the former case, the enunciation is apt to be more distinct, and the sentences rounded into more definite periods. The conversation of the average Japanese tends to ramble on in a never-ending sentence. But a marked change has come over vast numbers of the people during the last three decades. The roundaboutness of to-day is as nothing to that which existed under the old order of society. For the new order rests on radically different ideas; directness of speech and not its opposite is being cultivated, and in absolute contrast to the methods of the feudal era, directness of governmental procedure is well-nigh universal to-day. In trade, too, there has come a straightforwardness that is promising, though not yet triumphant. It is safe to assume that in all respectable stores the normal price is charged; for the custom of fixed prices has been widely adopted. If individuals are known to have the "beating down" habit, special prices are added for their sakes.

A personal experience illustrates the point. My wife and I had priced several lamps, had made note of the most satisfactory, and had gone home without buying. The next day a domestic was sent to secure the one which pleased us best. He was charged more than we had been, and in surprise mentioned the sum which we had authorized him to pay. The shopkeeper explained by saying that he always told us the true price in the beginning, because we never tried to beat him down. In truth, modern industrial conditions have pretty well banished the old-time custom of haggling. A premium is set on straightforwardness in business unknown to the old social order.

Roundaboutness is, however, closely connected with "yumei-mujitsu," the other characteristic mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. This, for the sake of simplicity, I venture to call "nominality." Japanese history is a prolonged illustration of this characteristic. For over a thousand years "yumei-mujitsu" has been a leading feature in governmental life. Although the Emperor has ostensibly been seated on the throne, clothed with absolute power, still he has often reigned only in name.[AK] Even so early as 130 A.D., the two families of Oomi and Omuraji began to exercise despotic authority in the central government, and the feudal system, as thus early established, continued with but few breaks to the middle of the present century. There were also the great families which could alone furnish wives to the Imperial line. These early took possession of the person of the Emperor, and the fathers of the wives often exercised Imperial power. The country was frequently and long disturbed by intense civil wars between these rival families. In turn the Fujiwaras, the Minamotos, and the Tairas held the leading place in the control of the Emperor; they determined the succession and secured frequent abdication in favor of their infant sons, but within these families, in turn, there appeared the influence of the "yumei-mujitsu" characteristic. Lesser men, the retainers of these families, manipulated the family leaders, who were often merely figureheads of the contending families and clans. Emperors were made and unmade at the will of these men behind the scenes, most of whom are quite unknown to fame. The creation of infant Emperors, allowed to bear the Imperial name in their infancy and youth, but compelled to abdicate on reaching manhood, was a common device for maintaining nominal Imperialism with actual impotence.

When military clans began to monopolize Imperial power, the people distinctly recognized the nature of their methods and gave it the name of "Bakufu" or "curtain government," a roundabout expression for military government. There has been a succession of these "curtain governments," the last and most successful being that of the Tokugawa, whose fall in 1867-68 brought the entire system to an end and placed the true Emperor on the throne.

But this "yumei-mujitsu" characteristic of Japanese life has been by no means limited to the national government. Every daimyate was more or less blighted by it; the daimyo, or "Great Name," was in too many cases but a puppet in the hands of his "kerai," or family retainers. These men, who were entirely out of sight, were, in very many cases, the real holders of the power which was supposed to be exercised by the daimyo. The lord was often a "great name" and nothing more. That this state of affairs was always attended with evil results is by no means the contention of these pages. Not infrequently the people were saved by it from the incompetence and ignorance and selfishness of hereditary rulers. Indeed, this system of "yumei-mujitsu" government was one of the devices whereby the inherent evils of hereditary rulers were more or less obviated. It may be questioned, however, whether the device did not in the long run cost more than it gained. Did it not serve to maintain, if not actually to produce, a system of dissimulation and deception which could but injure the national character? It certainly could not stimulate the straightforward frankness and outspoken directness and honesty so essential to the well-being of the human race.

Although "yumei-mujitsu" government is now practically extinct in Japan, yet in the social structure it still survives.

The Japanese family is a maze of "nominality." Full-grown young men and women are adopted as sons and daughters, in order to maintain the family line and name.

A son is not a legal son unless he is so registered, while an illegitimate child is recognized as a true son if so registered. A man may be the legal son of his grandmother, or of his sister, if so registered. Although a family may have no children, it does not die out unless there has been a failure to adopt a son or daughter, and an extinct family may be revived by the legal appointment of someone to take the family name and worship at the family shrine. The family pedigree, therefore, does not describe the actual ancestry, but only the nominal, the fictitious. There is no deception in this. It is a well-recognized custom of Old Japan. Its origin, moreover, is not difficult to explain. Nor is this kind of family peculiar to Japan. It is none the less a capital illustration of the "yumei-mujitsu" characteristic permeating the feudal civilization, and still exerting a powerful influence. Even Christians are not free from "nominalism," as we have frequently found in our missionary work.

A case in mind is of an evangelist employed by our mission station. He was to receive a definite proportion of his salary from the church for which he worked and the rest from the station. On inquiry I learned that he was receiving only that provided by the station, and on questioning him further he said that probably the sum promised by the church was being kept as his monthly contribution to the expenses of the church! Instances of this kind are not infrequent. While in Kyushu I more than once discovered that a body of Christians, whose evangelists we were helping to support proportionately, were actually raising not a cent of their proportion. On inquiry, I would be told that the evangelists themselves contributed out of their salary the sums needed, and that, therefore, the Christians did not need to raise it.

The mission, at one time, adopted the plan of throwing upon the local churches the responsibility of deciding as to the fitness of young men for mission aid in securing a theological education. It was agreed by representatives of the churches and the mission that each candidate should secure the approval of the deacons of the church of which he was a member, and that the church should pay a certain proportion of the candidate's school expenses. It was thought that by this method the leading Christians of the young man's acquaintance would become his sponsors, and that they would be unwilling to take this responsibility except for men in whom they had personal confidence, and for whom they would be willing to make personal contributions. In course of time the mission discovered that the plan was not working as expected. The young men could secure the approval of the deacons of their church without any difficulty; and as for the financial aid from the church, that could be very easily arranged for by the student's making a monthly contribution to the church of the sum which the church should contribute toward his expenses. Although this method seems to the average Occidental decidedly deceptive, it seemed to the Japanese perfectly proper. The arrangement, it is needless to state, was not long continued. I am persuaded that the correct explanation of these cases is "yumei-mujitsu."

Not long since express trains were put on between Kobe and Tokyo. One morning at Osaka I planned to take the early express to Kyoto, distant about thirty miles. These are the second and third cities of Japan, and the travel between them is heavy. On applying for a ticket I was refused and told there was no train for Kyoto. But as multitudes were buying tickets, and going out upon the platform, I asked an official what the trouble was, and received the explanation that for this express train no tickets could be sold for less than forty miles; but if I would buy a ticket for the next station beyond Kyoto, it would be all right; I could get off at Kyoto. I was assured that I would be allowed to land and leave the station at Kyoto. This I did then, and have repeatedly done since. The same absurd rule is applied, I am told, between Yokohama and Tokyo.

But our interest in these illustrations is the light they shed on Japanese character. They indicate the intellectual angle from which the people have looked out on life. What is the origin of the characteristic? Is it due to deep-lying race nature, to the quality of the race brain? Even more clearly than in the case of "roundaboutness," it seems to me that "nominality" is due to the nature of the old social order. Feudalism has always exhibited more or less of these same features. To Anglo-Saxons, reared in a land blessed by direct government of the people, by the people, and for the people, such methods were not only needless but obnoxious. Nominal responsibility without real power has been seen to breed numberless evils. We have learned to hate all nominalism, all fiction in government, in business and, above all, in personal character. But this is due to the Anglo-Saxon social order, the product in large measure of centuries of Christian instruction.

Through contact with Westerners and the ideas they stand for, directness and reality are being assimilated and developed by the Japanese. This would be impossible were the characteristic in question due to inherent race nature necessarily bequeathed from generation to generation by intrinsic heredity.

XIX

INTELLECTUALITY

Some writers hold that the Japanese are inherently deficient in the higher mental faculties. They consider mediocre mentality to be an inborn characteristic of Japan and assert that it lies at the root of the civilizational differences distinguishing the East from the West. The puerility of Oriental science in all its departments, the prevalence of superstition even among the cultivated, the lack of historical insight and interpretation of history are adduced as conclusive evidences of this view.

Foreign teachers in Japanese employ have told me that Japanese students, as compared with those of the West, manifest deficient powers of analysis and of generalization. Some even assert that the Japanese have no generalizing ability whatever, their progress in civilization being entirely due to their remarkable power of clever imitation. Mr. W.G. Aston, in ascribing the characteristic features of Japanese literature to the fundamental nature of the race, says they are "hardly capable of high intellectual achievement."[AL]

While we may admit that the Japanese do not seem to have at present the same power of scientific generalization as Occidentals, we naturally ask ourselves whether the difference is due to natal deficiency, or whether it may not be due to difference in early training. We must not forget that the youth who come under the observation of foreign teachers in Japanese schools are already products of the Japanese system of education, home and school, and necessarily are as defective as it is.

In a previous chapter a few instances of recent invention and important scientific discovery were given.

These could not have been made without genuine powers of analysis and generalization. We need not linger to elaborate this point.

Another set of facts throwing light on our problem is the success of so many Japanese students, at home and in foreign lands, in mastering modern thought. Great numbers have come back from Europe and America with diplomas and titles; not a few have taken high rank in their classes. The Japanese student abroad is usually a hard worker, like his brother at home. I doubt if any students in the new or the old world study more hours in a year than do these of Japan. It has often amazed me to learn how much they are required to do. This is one fair sign of intellectuality. The ease too with which young Japan, educated in Occidental schools and introduced to Occidental systems of thought, acquires abstruse speculations, searching analyses, and generalized abstractions proves conclusively Japanese possession of the higher mental faculties, in spite of the long survival in their civilization of primitive puerility and superstitions and the lack of science, properly so called.

Japanese youths, furthermore, have a fluency in public speech decidedly above anything I have met with in the United States. Young men of eighteen or twenty years of age deliver long discourses on religion or history or politics, with an apparent ease that their uncouth appearance would not lead one to expect. In the little school of less than 150 boys in Kumamoto there were more individuals who could talk intelligibly and forcefully on important themes of national policy, the relation of religion and politics, the relation of Japan to the Occident and the Orient, than could be found in either of the two colleges in the United States with which I was connected. I do not say that they could bring forth original ideas on these topics. But they could at least remember what they had heard and read and could reproduce the ideas with amazing fluency.

A recent public meeting in Tokyo in which Christian students of the University spoke to fellow-students on the great problems of religion, revealed a power of no mean order in handling the peculiar difficulties encountered by educated young men. A competent listener, recently graduated from an American university and widely acquainted with American students, declared that those Japanese speakers revealed greater powers of mind and speech than would be found under similar circumstances in the United States.

The fluency with which timid girls pray in public has often surprised me. Once started, they never seem to hesitate for ideas or words. The same girls would hardly be able to utter an intelligible sentence in reply to questions put to them by the pastor or the missionary, so faint would be their voices and so hesitating their manner.

The question as to whether the Japanese have powers of generalization receives some light from a study of the language of the people. An examination of primitive Japanese proves that the race, prior to receiving even the slightest influence from China, had developed highly generalized terms. It is worth while to call attention here to a simple fact which most writers seem to ignore, namely, that all language denotes and indeed rests on generalization. Consider the word "uma," "horse"; this is a name for a whole class of objects, and is therefore the product of a mind that can generalize and express its generalization in a concept which no act of the imagination can picture; the imagination can represent only individuals; the mind that has concepts of classes of things, as, for instance, of horses, houses, men, women, trees, has already a genuine power of generalization. Let me also call attention to such words as "wake," "reason"; "mono," "thing"; "koto," "fact"; "aru," "is"; "oro," "lives"; "aru koto," "is fact," or "existence"; "ugoku koto," "movement"; "omoi," "thought"; this list might be indefinitely extended. Let the reader consider whether these words are not highly generalized; yet these are all pure Japanese words, and reveal the development of the Japanese mind before it was in the least influenced by Chinese thought. Evidently it will not do to assert the entire lack of the power of generalization to the Japanese mind.

Still further evidence proving Japanese possession of the higher mental faculties may be found in the wide prevalence and use of the most highly generalized philosophical terms. Consider for instance, "Ri" and "Ki," "In" and "Yo." No complete translation can be found for them in English; "Ri" and "Ki" may be best translated as the rational and the formative principles in the universe, while "In" and "Yo" signify the active and the passive, the male and the female, the light and the darkness; in a word, the poles of a positive and negative. It is true that these terms are of Chinese origin as well as the thoughts themselves, but they are to-day in universal use in Japan. Similar abstract terms of Buddhistic origin are the possession of the common people.

Of course the possession of these Chinese terms is not offered as evidence of independent generalizing ability. But wide use proves conclusively the possession of the higher mental faculties, for, without such faculties, the above terms would be incomprehensible to the people and would find no place in common speech. We must be careful not to give too much weight to the foreign origin of these terms. Chinese is to Japanese what Latin and Greek are to modern European languages. The fact that a term is of Chinese origin proves nothing as to the nature of the modern Japanese mind. The developing Japanese civilization demanded new terms for her new instruments and increasing concepts. These for over fifteen centuries have been borrowed from, or constructed out of, Chinese in the same way that all our modern scientific terms are constructed out of Latin and Greek. It is doubtful if any of the Chinese terms, even those borrowed bodily, have in Japan the same significance as in China. If this is true, then the originating feature of Japanese power of generalization becomes manifest.

Indeed from this standpoint, the fact that the Japanese have made such extensive use of the Chinese language shows the degree to which the Japanese mind has outgrown its primitive development, demanding new terms for the expression of its expanding life. But mental growth implies energy of acquisition. The adoption of Chinese terms is not a passive but an active process.

Acquisition of generalized terms can only take place with the development of a generalizing mind. Foreign terms may help, but they do not cause that development.

In a study of the question whether or not the Japanese possess independent powers of analysis and generalization, we must ever remember the unique character of the social environment to which they have been subjected. Always more or less of an isolated nation, they have been twice or thrice suddenly confronted with a civilization much superior to that which they in their isolation had developed. Under such circumstances, adoption and modification of ideas and language as well as of methods and machinery were the most rational and natural courses.