I. LANGUAGE AND EDUCATION
The language—Writing—Education
MEANWHILE the Japanese had borrowed their systems of writing and education from the barbarian Chinese. Their language was peculiarly their own, presumably Mongolian and akin to the Korean, but not demonstrably derived from this or any other known tongue. It differed especially from the Chinese in being polysyllabic and agglutinative, and yet simple; it had few aspirates, no gutturals, no compound or final consonants (except n); and almost every vowel was melodiously long. The grammar, too, was a natural and easy system; it dispensed with number and gender in its nouns, with degrees of comparison in its adjectives, and with personal inflections in its verbs; it had few personal pronouns, and no relative pronouns at all. On the other hand there were inflections of negation and mood in adjectives and verbs; troublesome “postpositions”—modifying suffixes—were used instead of prepositions; and complex honorifics like “Your humble servant” and “Your Excellency” took the place of the first and second personal pronouns.
The language dispensed even with writing, apparently, until Koreans and Chinese brought the art to Japan in the early centuries of our era; and then the Japanese were content for hundreds of years to express their Italianly beautiful speech in the ideographs of the Middle Kingdom. Since a complete Chinese character had to be used for each syllable of a Japanese word, Japanese writing, in the Nara age, was very nearly the most laborious ever known. During the ninth century that law of economy which determines so much of philology brought to the relief of Japan two simplified forms of writing. In each of them a Chinese character, shortened into cursive form, was used to represent one of the forty-seven syllables that constitute the spoken speech of Japan; and this syllabary of forty-seven characters served instead of an alphabet.* Since a large part of Japanese literature is in Chinese, and most of the remainder is written not in the popular syllabary but in a combination of Chinese characters and native alphabets, few Western scholars have been able to master it in the original. Our knowledge of Japanese literature is consequently fragmentary and deceptive, and our judgments of it can be of little worth. The Jesuits, harassed with these linguistic barriers, reported that the language of the islands had been invented by the Devil to prevent the preaching of the Gospel to the Japanese.*2
Writing remained for a long time a luxury of the higher classes; until the latter part of the nineteenth century no pretense was made of spreading the art among the people. In the Kyoto age the rich families maintained schools for their children; and the emperors Tenchi and Mommu, at the beginning of the eighth century, established at Kyoto the first Japanese university. Gradually a system of provincial schools was developed under governmental control; their graduates were eligible to enter the university, and those graduates of the university who passed the required tests became eligible for public office. The civil wars of the early feudal period broke down this educational progress, and Japan neglected the arts of the mind until the Tokugawa Shogunate reorganized peace and encouraged learning and literature. Iyeyasu was scandalized to find that ninety per cent of the Samurai could not read or write.5 In 1630 Hayashi Razan established at Yedo a training-school in public administration and Confucian philosophy, which later developed into the University of Tokyo; and Kumazawa, in 1666, founded at Shizutani the first provincial college. By allowing teachers to wear the sword and boast the rank of the Samurai, the government induced students, doctors and priests to set up private schools in homes or temples for the provision of elementary education; in 1750 there were eight hundred such schools, with some forty thousand students. All these institutions were for the sons of the Samurai; merchants and peasants had to be content with popular lecturers, and only prosperous women received any formal education. Universal education, in Japan as in Europe, had to wait for the needs and compulsions of an industrial life.6