Part 9

All my life Japan had been one of the two countries on earth I most wanted to see. No more enthusiastic pro-Japanese ever put foot on the shore of that little island than I was when I swung into Yokohama Harbor nearly seven months before. I had lost much--but I was carrying away in heart and mind the nameless charm of the land and of the people--for the charm of neither has much succumbed to the horrors imported from us; Fujiyama, whose gray head lies close under the Hand of Benediction; among the foot-hills below the Maid of Miyanoshita--may Fuji keep her ever safe from harm; O-kin-san the kind, who helps the poor and welcomes the stranger--her little home at the head of the House of the Hundred Steps I could see from the deck of the ship; the great Daibutsu at Kamakura, whose majestic calm stills all the world while you look upon his face and--the babies, in streets and doorways--the babies that rule the land as kings. I did have, too, for a memory, Shin--my rickshaw man--but Shin failed me at the last minute on the dock. Yes, even at that last minute on the dock, Shin tried to fool me. But I forgive him.

Of this war in detail I knew no more than I should have known had I stayed at home--and it had taken me seven months to learn that it was meant that I should not know more. There can be no quarrel with what was done--only with the way it was done--which was not pretty. Somehow, as Japan sank closer to the horizon, I found myself wondering whether the Goddess of Truth couldn't travel the breadth of that land incog.--even if she played the leading part in a melodrama with a star in her forehead and her own name emblazoned in Japanese ideographs around her breast. I think so. I wondered, too, if in shedding the wrinkled skin of Orientalism, Japan might not have found it even better than winning a battle--to shed with it polite duplicity and bring in the blunt telling of the truth; for if the arch on which a civilization rests be character, the key-stone of that arch, I suppose, must be honesty--simple honesty.

Right gladly we struck the backward Trail of the Saxon.

Transcriber Notes:

Passages in italics were indicated by _underscores_.

Small caps were replaced with ALL CAPS.

Throughout the dialogues, there were words used to mimic accents of the speakers. Those words were retained as-is.

Errors in punctuations and inconsistent hyphenation were not corrected unless otherwise noted.

On page ix, "Liaoyang" was replaced with "Liao-Yang".