III. THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION

Changes in dress—In manners—The Japanese character—Morals and marriage in transition—Religion—Science—Japanese medicine—Art and taste—Language and education—Naturalistic fiction—New forms of poetry

Have the people themselves been changed by their Industrial Revolution? Certain external innovations catch the eye: the lugubrious bifurcate costume of the European man has captured and enclosed most urban males; but the women continue to clothe themselves in loose and colorful robes, bound at the waist with brocaded bands that meet in a spacious bow at the back.* Shoes are replacing wooden clogs as roads improve; but a large proportion of both sexes still move about in bare and undeformed feet. In the greater cities one may find every variation and combination of native and European dress, as if to symbolize a transformation hurried and incomplete.

Manners are still a model of diplomatic courtesy, though men adhere to their ancient custom of preceding women in entering or leaving a room or in walking along the street. Language is deviously polite, and rarely profane; a formal humility clothes a fierce self-respect, and etiquette graces the most sincere hostility. The Japanese character, like that of man everywhere, is a mosaic of contradictions; for life offers us diverse situations at divers times, and demands of us alternately force and gentleness, levity and gravity, patience and courage, modesty and pride. Therefore we must not be prejudiced against the Japanese because they are sentimental and realistic, sensitive and stoical, expressive and reticent, excitable and restrained; aboundingly cheerful, humorous and pleasure-loving, and inclined to picturesque suicide; lovingly kind—often to animals, sometimes to women—and occasionally cruel to animals and men.* The typical Japanese has all the qualities of the warrior—pugnacity and courage, and an unrivaled readiness to die; and yet, very often, he has the soul of an artist—sensuous, impressionable, and almost instinctively possessed of taste. He is sober and unostentatious, frugal and industrious, curious and studious, loyal and patient, with an heroic capacity for details; he is cunning and supple, like most physically small persons; he has a nimble intelligence, not highly creative in the field of thought, but capable of quick comprehension, adaptation, and practical achievement. The spirit and vanity of a Frenchman, the courage and narrowness of a Briton, the hot temper and artistry of an Italian, the energy and commercialism of an American, the sensitiveness and shrewdness of a Jew—all these have come together to make the Japanese.

Contact and conflict with the West have altered in some ways the moral life of Japan. The traditional honesty of its people† largely continues; but the extension of the franchise and the keen competition of modern trade have brought to Japan a proportionate share of democratic venality, industrial ruthlessness and financial legerdemain. Bushido survives here and there among the higher soldiery, and offers a mild aristocratic check to commercial and political deviltry. Despite the law-abiding patience of the common people assassination is frequent—not as a corrective of reactionary despotism but usually as an encouragement to aggressive patriotism. The Black Dragon Society, led by the apparently untouchable Toyama, has dedicated itself for over forty years to promoting among Japanese officials a policy of conquest in Korea and Manchuria;‡ and in the pursuit of this purpose it has given assassination a popular rôle in the political machinery of Japan.²⁶

The Far East has paralleled the West in that moral disturbance which accompanies every profound change in the economic basis of life. The eternal war of the generations—the revolt of over-eager youth against over-cautious age—has been intensified by the growth of individualist industry, and the weakening of religious faith. The transit from country to city, and the replacement of the family by the individual as the legal and responsible unit of economic and political society, has undermined parental authority, and subjected the customs and morals of centuries to the hasty judgment of adolescence. In the larger centers the young rebel against marriages parentally arranged; and the new couples, instead of taking up their residence in the establishment of the bridegroom’s father, tend increasingly to set up separate and independent homes—or apartments. The rapid industrialization of women has necessitated a loosening of the bonds that held them to domestic subserviency. Divorce is as common as in America, and more convenient; it may be had by signing a registration book and paying a fee of ten cents.²⁷ Concubinage has been made illegal, but in practice it is still permitted to those who can afford to ignore the law.²⁸

In Japan as elsewhere the machine is the enemy of the priest. Spencer and Stuart Mill were imported along with English technology, and the reign of Confucius in Japanese philosophy came to a sudden end. “The generation now at school,” said Chamberlain in 1905, “is distinctly Voltairean.”²⁹ By the same token—through its modern alliance with the machine—science prospered, and won a characteristic devotion, in Japan, from some of the most brilliant investigators of our time.* Japanese medicine, though dependent in most stages upon China or Korea, has made swift progress under European—especially German—example and stimulus. The work of Takamine in the discovery of adrenalin and the study of vitamins; of Kitasato in tetanus and pneumonia, and in the development of an anti-toxin for diphtheria; and, most famous and brilliant of all, of Noguchi in syphilis and yellow fever—these achievements indicate the rapidity with which the Japanese have ceased to be pupils, and have become teachers, of the world.

Hideyo Noguchi was born in 1876 in one of the lesser islands, and in a family so poor that his father deserted on learning that another child was due. The neglected boy fell into a brazier; his left hand was burned to a stump, and his right hand was injured almost to the point of uselessness.Shunned at school because of his scars and deformities, he was planning to kill himself when a surgeon came to the village, treated the right hand successfully, and so won Noguchi’s gratitude that the lad there and then dedicated himself to medicine. “I will be a Napoleon to save instead of to kill,” he announced; “I can already get along on four hours of sleep at night.”³⁰ Penniless, he worked in a pharmacy until he had persuaded its owner to advance him funds for the study of medicine. After graduating he came to the United States, and offered his services to the Medical Corps of the Army at Washington in return for his expenses. The Rockefeller Foundation for Medical Research gave him a laboratory, and Noguchi, literally single-handed, entered upon a fruitful career of experiment and research. He produced the first pure culture of the syphilitic germ, discovered the syphilitic nature of general paralysis and locomotor ataxia, and finally (1918) isolated the yellow fever parasite. Made famous and momentarily affluent, he went back to Japan, honored his old mother, and knelt in gratitude to the kindly pharmacist who had paid for his medical education. Then he went to Africa to study the yellow fever that was raging along the Gold Coast, was himself infected with it, and died (1928) at the pitifully early age of fifty-two.

The development of science, in Japan as in the West, has been accompanied by a decay of the traditional arts. The overthrow of the old aristocracy destroyed a nursery of taste, and left each generation to develop its own norms of excellence anew. The influx of foreign money seeking native wares led to rapid quantitative production, and debased the standards of Japanese design. When the buyers turned to the quest for ancient works, the artisans became forgers, and the manufacture of antiques became in Japan, as in China, one of the most flourishing of modern arts.Cloisonné is probably the only branch of ceramics that has progressed in Japan since the coming of the West. The chaotic passage from handicraft to machinery, and the sudden irruption of foreign tastes and ways clothed in the gaudy prestige of victory and wealth, have unsettled the esthetic sense of Japan, and weakened the sureness of her taste. Perhaps, now that Japan has chosen the sword, she is destined to repeat the history of Rome—imitative in art, but masterly in administration and war.*

A flattery of Occidental modes has marked for a generation the intellectual life of the new empire. European words crowded into the language, newspapers were organized in Western style, and a system of public schools was established after American exemplars. Japan heroically resolved to make itself the most literate nation on earth, and it succeeded; in 1925 99.4 per cent of all Japanese children attended school,³¹ and in 1927, 93 per cent of the people could read.³² Students took religiously to the new secular learning; hundreds of them lost their health in their eagerness for knowledge,³³ and the Government was obliged to take active measures for the encouragement of athletics, gymnastics and games of every kind from ju-jitsu to baseball. Education was removed from religious auspices, and became more thoroughly secularized in Japan than in most European nations. Five imperial universities were supported, and forty-one other universities, only less imperial, gathered in thousands of zealous students. By 1931 the Imperial University of Tokyo had 8,064 students, and the University of Kyoto had 5,552.³⁴

Japanese literature, in the last quarter of the century, lost itself in a series of imitative fashions. English liberalism, Russian realism, Nietzschean individualism and American pragmatism swept the intelligentsia in turn, until the spirit of nationalism reasserted itself, and Japanese writers began to explore their native material in their native ways. A young woman, Ichi-yo, before dying in 1896 at the age of twenty-four, inaugurated a naturalistic movement in fiction by presenting vividly the misery and subjection of women in Japan.³⁵ In 1906 the poet Toson brought this movement to its height with a long novel—Hakai or “The Breaking of the Pledge”—which told in poetic prose the story of a teacher who, having promised his father never to reveal the fact that he was ofEta or slave origin, worked his way by ability and education to a high position, fell in love with a girl of refinement and social standing, and then, in a burst of honesty, confessed his origin, surrendered his sweetheart and his place, and left Japan forever. This novel contributed powerfully to the agitation that finally ended the historic disabilities of the Eta class.

The tanka and the hokka were the last forms of Japanese culture to yield to the influence of the West. For forty years after the Restoration they continued to be the required modes of Japanese verse, and the poetic spirit lost itself in miracles of ingenuity and artifice. Then, in 1897, Toson, a young teacher of Sendai, sold to a publisher, for fifteen dollars, a volume of poems whose individual length constituted a revolution almost as startling as any that had shaken the fabric of the state. The public, tired of elegant epigrams, responded gratefully, and made the publisher rich. Otherpoets followed the path that Toson had explored, and the tanka and hokka surrendered at last their thousand-year-old domination.³⁶

Despite the new forms the old Imperial Poetry Contest still continues. Every year the Emperor announces a theme, and sets an example by inditing an ode to it; the Empress follows him; and then twenty-five thousand Japanese, of every sort and condition, send in their compositions to the Poetry Bureau at the Imperial Palace, to be judged by the highest bards of the land. The ten poems accounted best are read to the Emperor and the Empress, and are printed in the New Year’s issue of the Japanese press.³⁷ It is an admirable custom, fit to turn the soul for a moment from commercialism and war, and proving that Japanese literature is still a vital part in the life of the most vital nation in the contemporary world.