Part 1

THE JAPANESE SPIRIT

BY

OKAKURA-YOSHISABURO

WITH AN INTRODUCTION

BY

GEORGE MEREDITH

NEW YORK

JAMES POTT & CO.

1905

TO MY BROTHER

_Bellario_ Sir, if I have made A fault in ignorance, instruct my youth: I shall be willing, if not able, to learn: Age and experience will adorn my mind With larger knowledge; and if I have done A wilful fault, think me not past all hope For once.

_Philaster_, Act. II. Sc. I.

PREFACE

The following pages owe their existence to Mr. Martin White, whose keen interest in comparative sociology led to the opening of special courses for its investigation in the University of London.

My thanks are due to Mr. P.J. Hartog, Academic Registrar of the University, as well as to Dr. and Mrs. E.R. Edwards, who inspired me with the courage to take the present task on my inexperienced shoulders. But above all I render the expression of my deepest obligation to Professor Walter Rippmann. Had it not been for his friendly interest and help, I would not have been able thus to come before an English public. For the peculiarities of thought and language, which, if nothing else, might at least make the booklet worthy of a perusal, I naturally assume the full responsibility myself.

With these prefatory words, I venture to submit this essay to the lenient reception of my readers.

INTRODUCTION

We have had illuminating books upon Japan. Those of Lafcadio Hearn will always be remembered for the poetry he brought in them to bear upon the poetic aspects of the country and the people. Buddhism had a fascination for him, as it had for Mr. Fielding in his remarkable book on the practice of this religion in Burma.[1] There is also the work of Captain Brinkley, to which we are largely indebted.

These Lectures by a son of the land, delivered at the University of London, are compendious and explicit in a degree that enables us to form a summary of much that has been otherwise partially obscure, so that we get nearer to the secret of this singular race than we have had the chance of doing before. He traces the course of Confucianism, Laoism, Shintoism, in the instruction it has given to his countrymen for the practice of virtue, as to which Lao-tze informs us with a piece of 'Chinese metaphysics' that can be had without having recourse to the dictionary: '_Superior virtue is non-virtue. Therefore it has virtue. Inferior virtue never loses sight of virtue. Therefore it has no virtue. Superior virtue is non-assertive and without pretension. Inferior virtue asserts and makes pretensions._' It is childishly subtle and easy to be understood of a young people in whose minds Buddhism and Shintoism formed a part.

The Japanese have had the advantage of possessing a native Nobility who were true nobles, not invaders and subjugators. They were, in the highest sense, men of honor to whom, before the time of this dreadful war, Hara-kiri was an imperative resource, under the smallest suspicion of disgrace. How rigidly they understood and practised Virtue, in the sense above cited, is exemplified in the way they renounced their privileges for the sake of the commonweal when the gates of Japan were thrown open to the West.

Bushido, or the 'way of the Samurai,' has become almost an English word, so greatly has it impressed us with the principle of renunciation on behalf of the Country's welfare. This splendid conception of duty has been displayed again and again at Port Arthur and on the fields of Manchuria, not only by the Samurai, but by a glorious commonalty imbued with the spirit of their chiefs.

All this is shown clearly by Professor Okakura in this valuable book.

It proves to general comprehension that such a people must be unconquerable even if temporarily defeated; and that is not the present prospect of things. Who could conquer a race of forty millions having the contempt of death when their country's inviolability is at stake! Death, moreover, is despised by them because they do not believe in it. 'The departed, although invisible, are thought to be leading their ethereal life in the same world in much the same state as that to which they had been accustomed while on earth.' And so, 'when the father of a Japanese family begins a journey of any length, the raised part of his room will be made sacred to his memory during his temporary absence; his family will gather in front of it and think of him, expressing their devotion and love in words and gifts in kind. In the hundreds of thousands of families that have some one or other of their members fighting for the nation in this dreadful war, there will not be even one solitary house where the mother, wife, or sister is not practising this simple rite of endearment for the beloved and absent member of the family.' Spartans in the fight, Stoics in their grief.

Concerning the foolish talk of the Yellow Peril, a studious perusal of this book will show it to be fatuous. It is at least unlikely in an extreme degree that such a people, reckless of life though they be in front of danger, but Epicurean in their wholesome love of pleasure and pursuit of beauty, will be inflated to insanity by the success of their arms. Those writers who have seen something malignant and inimical behind their gracious politeness, have been mere visitors on the fringe of the land, alarmed by their skill in manufacturing weapons and explosives--for they are inventive as well as imitative, a people not to be trifled with; but this was because their instinct as well as their emissaries warned them of a pressing need for the means of war. Japan and China have had experience of Western nations, and that is at the conscience of suspicious minds.

It may be foreseen that when the end has come, the Kaiser, always honourably eager for the influence of his people, will draw a glove over the historic 'Mailed Fist' and offer it to them frankly. It will surely be accepted, and that of France, we may hope; Russia as well. England is her ally--to remain so, we trust; America is her friend. She has, in fact, won the admiration of Friend and Foe alike.

GEORGE MEREDITH.

[1] _The Soul of a People._

THE JAPANESE SPIRIT.

Since the end of the thirteenth century, when Marco Polo, on his return to Venice, wrote about 'Cipango,' an island, as he stated, '1500 miles off the coast of China, fabulously rich, and inhabited by people of agreeable manners,' many a Western pen has been wielded to tell all kinds of tales concerning the Land of the Rising Sun. Her long seclusion; her anxious care to guard inviolate the simple faith which had been gravely threatened by the Roman Church; her hearty welcome of the honoured guests from the West, after centuries of independent growth; the sudden, almost pathetic, changes she has gone through in the past forty years in order to equip herself for a place on the world's stage where powers play their game of balance; the lessons she lately taught the still slumbering China through the mouths of thundering cannon: all this has called into existence the expression of opinions and comments of very varying merit and tone; and especially since the out-break of the present war, when the daily news from the scenes of action, where my brethren are fighting for the cause of wronged justice and menaced liberty, is showing the world page after page of patriotism and loyalty, written unmistakably in the crimson letters of heroes' blood,--all this has given occasion to Europe and America to think the matter over afresh. Here you have at least a nation different in her development from any existing people in the Occident. Governed from time immemorial by the immediate descendants of the Sun-Goddess, whose merciful rule early taught us to offer them our voluntary tribute of devotion and love, we have based our social system on filial piety, that necessary outcome of ancestor-worship which presupposes altruism on the one hand, and on the other loyalty and love of the fatherland. Different doctrines of religion and morality have found their way from their continental homes to the silvery shores of the Land of the Gods, only to render their several services towards consolidating and widening the so-called 'Divine Path,' that national cult whose unwritten tenets have lurked for thousands of years hidden in the most sacred corner of our hearts, whose pulse is ever beating its rhythm of patriotism and loyalty. Buddhist metaphysics, Confucian and Taoist philosophy, have been fused together in the furnace of Shintoism for fifteen centuries and a half, and that apart from the outer world, in the island home of Japan, where the blue sky looks down on gay blossoms and gracefully sloping mountains. The final amalgamation of these forces produces, among other results, the works of art and the feats of bravery now before you, each bearing the ineffaceable hall-marks of Japan's past history. Surely here you are face to face with a people worthy of serious investigation, not only from the disinterested point of view of a folk-psychologist. It is a study which will open to any impartial observer a new horizon, more so than would be the case if he attempted the sociological interpretation of a nation the history of whose development was almost identical with that of his own. Here he meets totally different sets of things with totally different ways of looking at them; and this gives him ample occasion to realise the fact that human thought and action may evolve in several forms and through several channels before they reach their respective culmination where they all, regardless of their original differences, melt into the common sea of truth.

But this simple fact that 'God fulfills Himself in many ways,' as your Tennyson has it, so necessary to ensure freedom from national bigotry and conventional ignorance, so necessary too for a proper understanding of oneself as the cumulative product of a nation's history, has not always been kept in mind, even by those otherwise well-meaning authors, whose works have some charm as descriptive writing, but give only a superficial and often misleading account of the inner life of the nation. True, a great deal of excellent work has been achieved by a number of scholars of lasting merit, from Kaempfe's memorable work first published in its English translation as early as 1727, down to the admirable _Interpretation_ written last year by the late Mr. Lafcadio Hearn, in whose death Japan lost one of her most precious friends, possessing as he did the scholar's insight and the poet's pen, two heavenly gifts seldom found united in a single man. It is mainly through the remarkable labour of two learned bodies, the Asiatic Society of Japan, and the _Deutsche Gesellschaft für Natur- und Völkerkunde Ostasiens_, both with their headquarters in Tôkyô--in whose indefatigable researches the 'Japan Society' in this city has ably joined since 1892--that most valuable data have been constantly brought to light, furnishing for future students sure bases for wider generalizations. But owing to the numerous hindrances--some of which look almost insurmountable to the Western investigator--a fair synthetic interpretation of Japan as a nation, explaining all the important forces that underlie the psychic and physical phenomena, still remains to be written. The most formidable of the difficulties which meet a European or American student at the very threshold of his researches is the totally different construction of Japanese society, a difficulty which makes it impossible to understand properly any set of the phenomena belonging to it apart from the others which surround them. One could as well cut a single mesh from a net without prejudice to the neighbouring ones! The proper understanding of things Japanese therefore presupposes freedom from your conventional philosophy of life, and the power of viewing things through other people's eyes.

Besides this obstacle, there are many others; for example, that of the language. Like most other nations in the East, we have been accustomed, up to this very day, to use a written language, divided within itself into several styles, which is considerably different from the vernacular. To make this state of things still more complicated, Chinese characters are profusely resorted to in the native writings, and are used not only as so many ideographs for words of Chinese origin, but also to represent native words. To make confusion worse confounded, they are not infrequently used as pure phonetic symbols without any further meaning attaching to them. So one and the same sign may be read in half a dozen different ways, according to the hints, more or less sure, given by the context. All this makes the study of Japanese immensely difficult. It is difficult even for a Japanese with the best opportunities; a hundred times more so, then, for a Western scholar who, if he cares to study the subject at first hand at all, begins this study, comparatively speaking, late in life, when his memory has well-nigh lost the capacity of bearing such an enormous burden!

Still, there have been many Western scholars who, nothing daunted by the above-mentioned hindrances, have done much valuable work. English names like those of Sir E. Satow, G.W. Aston, B.H. Chamberlain, Lafcadio Hearn are to be gratefully remembered by all future students in this field of inquiry, as well as such German scholars as Dr. Baelz and Dr. Florenz. Leaving the enumeration of general works on Japan, whose name is legion, for some other time, let me mention one or two of those works of reference which a would-be English scholar of Japanese matters might find very useful. First of all Mr. B.H. Chamberlain's _Things Japanese_--a book which gave birth to Mr. J.D. Hall's equally indispensable _Things Chinese_--containing in cyclopædic form a mine of information about Japan. Dr. Wenckstern's painstaking _Japanese Bibliography_, with M. de Losny's earlier attempt as a supplement, gives you the list of all writings on Japan in European tongues that have appeared up to 1895. For those who want good books on the Japanese language, Mr. Aston's _Grammar of the Japanese Written Language_, Mr. Chamberlain's _Handbook of Colloquial Japanese_, as well as the same author's _Monzi-no-Shirubi, a Practical Introduction to the Study of the Japanese Writing_, are the best. As for books on the subject from the pen of the Japanese themselves, Dr. Nitobe's _Bushido, Explanations of the Japanese Thought_, and my brother K. Okakura's _Ideals of the East_, besides a volume by several well-known Japanese, entitled _Japan by the Japanese_, are to be specially mentioned.[1]

[1] Professor T. Inouye's little pamphlet, published first in French, entitled _Sur le Développement des Idées Philosophiques au Japon avant l'Introduction de la Civilisation Européenne_, will give you some idea of our philosophic systems. For a serious perusal, its German translation, annotated and amplified, by Dr. A. Gramatzky (_Kurze Übersicht über die Entwicklung der philosophischen Ideen in Japan_, Berlin, 1897), is to be preferred.

What I myself propose to do in this essay is to give to the best of my ability, and so far as is possible with the scanty knowledge and the limited space at my disposal, a simple statement in plain language of what I think to be the fundamental truths necessary for the proper understanding of my fatherland. I am not vain enough to attempt any original solution of the old difficulty; knowing as I do my own deficiencies, I should be well satisfied if I could manage to give you some kind of general introduction to the Japanese views of life.

So much for the preliminary remarks. Let us now take a step further and see what factors are to be considered as the bases of modern Japan.

'To which race do the Japanese belong?' is the first question asked by any one who wants to approach our subject from the historical point of view. Unfortunately not much is known as yet about our place in racial science. If we do not take into account the inhabitants of the newly annexed island of Formosa, we have, roughly speaking, two very different races in our whole archipelago--the hairy Aino and the ruling Yamato race, the former being the supposed aborigines, physically sturdy and well developed, with their characteristic abundant growth of hair, who are at present to be found only in the Yezo island in the northern extremity of Japan, and whose number, notwithstanding all the care of our government, is fast dwindling, the sum total being not much more than 15,000. The Aino have a tradition that the land had been occupied before them by another race of dwarfish stature called Koropokguru, who are identified by some scholars with those primitive pit-dwellers known in our history as Tuchigumo,[2] whose traces, although scanty, are still to be met with in various parts of Yezo. Anyhow, we see at the first dawn of history the aborigines gradually receding before the conquering Yamato race, who are found steadily pushing on towards the northeast, and who finally established themselves as a ruling body under the divine banner of the first emperor Jimmu, from whose accession we reckon our era, the present year being the 2565th, according to our recognised way of counting dates.

[2] Professor Milne, _Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan_, vol. viii. p. 82.

Suggestions, audacious rather than strictly scientific, have been put forward as to the original home both of the Aino and the Japanese. The Rev. I. Dooman, for instance, proposed in his paper read before the meeting of the Asiatic Society of Japan in 1897 to derive both from the people who had been living, according to him, on both sides of the great Himalayan range. 'The Aino,' he says, 'the first inhabitants of these (Japanese) islands, belong to the South Himalayan Centre; while the Japanese, the second comers, belong to the North Himalayan, commonly called Altaic races.'[3] But in face of the scanty knowledge at our command about the respective sets of people in question, such wholesale conjecture had better be postponed until some later time, when further research shall have supplied surer data for our speculations. As regards the Aino, we must for the present say, on the authority of Mr. Chamberlain, that, remembering how the Aino race is isolated from all other living races by its hairiness and by the extraordinary flattening of the tibia and humerus, it is not strange to find the language isolated too.[4]

[3] _Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan_, vol. xxv.

With respect to the Japanese proper, the only thing known about their racial affinity is the theory proposed by the German scholar Dr. Baelz, as the result of his elaborate measurements both of living specimens and skeletons.[5] He considers the Yamato race to belong to the Mongolian stock of the Asiatic continent, from where they proceeded to Japan by way of the Corean peninsula. There are two distinct types noticeable among them at present, one characterised by a delicate, refined appearance, with oval face, rather oblique eyes, slightly Roman nose, and a frame not vigorous yet well proportioned; the other marked out by broader face, projecting cheek bones, flat nose, and horizontal eyes, while the body is more robust and muscular, though not so well proportioned and regular. The former is to be met with among the better classes and in the southern parts of Japan, while the specimens of the latter are found rather among the labouring population, and are more abundant in the northern provinces. This difference of types, aristocratic and plebeian, which is still more conspicuous among the fair sex, is with good reason attributed to the two-fold wave of Mongolian emigration which reached our island in prehistoric times. The first emigrants, consisting of coarser tribes of the Mongolian race, landed most probably on the northern coast of the main island somewhere in the present Idzumo province, and settled down there, while the second wave broke on the shores of Kyûshû. These emigrants seem to have belonged to the more refined branch of the great Mongolian stock. This hypothesis is borne out by our mythology, which divides itself into two cycles, one centring at Idzumo and the other at Kyûshû, and which tell us how the great-grandfather of the first great emperor Jimmu descended from heaven on to the peak of the mountain Takachiho in Hyûga in Kyûshû. Accompanied by his brother, he started from this spot on his march of conquering migration to Yamato, fighting and subduing on his way tribes who on the continent were once his kith and kin.

[4] _Memoirs of the Literary Department of the University of Tôkyô_, vol. i.

[5] _Die körperlichen Eigenschaften der Japaner_, vols. xxviii. and xxxii. of _Mittheilungen der Gesellschaft für die Natur- und Völkerkunde Ostasiens_.

It might perhaps interest you to know something of our prevailing idea of personal beauty, especially as, in such a homogeneous nation as the Japanese, ruled from time immemorial by one and the same line of dynasty, it may help us to make some vague conjectures as to the physical appearances of at least one of those continental tribes out of which our nation has been formed. The standard of beauty naturally fluctuates a little according to sex and locality. In a lady, for example, mildness and grace are, generally speaking, preferred to that strength or manliness of expression which would be thought more becoming in her brother. Tôkyô again does not put so much stress on the fleshiness of limbs and face as does Kyôto. But, as a whole, there is only one ideal throughout the Empire. So let me try to enumerate all the qualities usually considered necessary to make a beautiful woman. She is to possess a body not much exceeding five feet in height, with comparatively fair skin and proportionately well-developed limbs; a head covered with long, thick, and jet-black hair; an oval face with a straight nose, high and narrow; rather large eyes, with large deep-brown pupils and thick eyelashes; a small mouth, hiding behind its red, but not thin, lips, even rows of small white teeth; ears not altogether small; and long and thick eyebrows forming two horizontal but slightly curved lines, with a space left between them and the eyes. Of the four ways in which hair can grow round the upper edge of the forehead, viz., horned, square, round, and Fuji-shaped, one of the last two is preferred, a very high as well as a very low forehead being considered not attractive.

Such are, roughly speaking, the elements of Japanese female beauty. Eyes and eyebrows with the outer ends turning considerably upwards, with which your artists depict us, are due to those Japanese colour prints which strongly accentuate our dislike of the reverse, for straight eyes and eyebrows make a very bad impression on us, suggesting weakness, lasciviousness, and so on. It must also be understood that in Japan no such variety of types of beauty is to be met with as is noticed here in Europe. Blue eyes and blond hair, the charms of which we first learn to feel after a protracted stay among you, are regarded in a Japanese as something extraordinary in no favourable sense of the term! A girl with even a slight tendency to grey eyes or frizzly hair is looked upon as an unwelcome deviation from the national type.