BOOKS.

THE JAPANESE SPIRIT.*

IP it is at times profitable to see ourselves as others see us, it is perhaps not less desirable for others to see us as we see ourselves. The objective and subjective aspects of men are complementary, and both are necessary to a complete judgment. This is not less true of nations than of men, and therefore we welcome this really valuable analysis, from the pen of a distinguished Japanese scholar, of the national characteristics of Japan. Professor Okakura wishes us to see through his eyes, and to realise the inwardness of Japan by substituting her social conventions for our own. This, of course, is difficult, for East is East and West is West, and few can shuffle off and on the garments of language and religion that represent truth and its medium to an entire race. But he achieves a considerable measure of success, and this is due chiefly to the fact that he himself has striven to see Europe as she sees herself.

Though, however, we cannot see Japan exactly as she is seen by the author of The Japanese Spirit, and by his brother, Mr. K. Okakura, the author of Ideals of the East, yet we can in part grasp what the former calls " the fundamental truths necessary for the proper understanding of my fatherland." We can grasp, at any rate, funda- mental facts. Whence do the Japanese race spring P is the great fact to be considered. There were, we are told, two races who came before them in the islands,—first a pigmy troglodyte race, who were displaced before the dawn of authentic history by the hairy Aino race, sturdy and large, some of whom still survive in the Yezo Island. By the year 660 B.C. the present ruling race were established in Japan. This is the Yamato race of Mongolian stock, who came to the islands by way of Korea. The date of the incursion seems to us significant. At about the very date that these Mongolians overflowed from Asia to the Eastern isles, another Himalayan race had poured West and had carried the devasta- tion of the Iron Age as far as Britain. There appear to have been two Mongolian waves, which broke upon Japan in com- paratively rapid succession, and even in this a close parallel is found in the case of Britain. The first Japanese Emperor, Jimmu, was reigning in the year 660 B.C. He claimed to be the great-grandson of that grandson of the Sun Goddess who descended upon Mount Takachiho from heaven to govern the land, and who brought with him triple gifts that signified wisdom, courage, and mercy. From Jimmu the present Emperor is descended : " the hundred and twenty-first link in the eternal chain."

The Mongolians carried with them to Japan, as the Aryans brought to Europe, the fundamental conception of ancestor- worship. But there took place in Japan a development that failed in Europe. Hebrew, Greek, and Alexandrian culture, coupled with Christianity, turned the current of develop- ment in the West, and ancestor-worship never became a formularised religion. In the Far East it took so strong a root that the culture of Confucius and the influence of Buddhism were unable to check or fundamentally modify the cult of Shintoism. The reason is perhaps to be found in Professor Okakura's statement that "the Japanese as a whole are not a people with much aptitude for deep metaphysical ways of thinking." But we doubt if this is the case. It is rather the result than the cause. Had the Tamato race moved West instead of East, it would have yielded to the powerful Occidental environment of climate and philosophic culture. " The abstruse conceptions of Chinese or Indian origin," which the Japanese received without thinking out, were not, and are not, logical conceptions such as those of Greece, and were not calculated to modify deep-rooted

national conceptions. The Japanese are "a people of the Present and the Tangible, of the broad Daylight and the

plainly Visible," only in so far as their Occidental type of mind has made them unconsciously reject the unreasoned processes of Asiatic religious thought. So far as their national religion goes, they believe as deeply as the West believes that true realities are invisible. Had Christianity come their way, they would have yielded, as the history of the seventeenth century shows, to its reasonableness and its spiritual affinity to their own simple faith in the "living dead."

The influence of China upon Japan has been a continuous force for more than fifteen hundred years. The philosophy of Confucius (who died in 478 B.C.) did not reach Japan by way of Korea in any permanent form until nearly a thousand years after the days of the philosopher, though some earlier influence may be traced. Confucianism came to stay in the train and company of Buddhism :-

"The gospel of Shilkyamuni has, ever since its introduction into our country, been made accessible only through the Chinese translation, which demanded a considerable knowledge of the written language of the Middle Kingdom. The keen and far", reaching spiritual interest aroused by Buddhism gave a fresh. and vigorous impulse to the study of Chinese literature., already increasingly cultivated for some centuries. Now, the knowledge of Chinese in its written form has, until quite recently, always been imparted by a painful perusal of the Chinese classics and Chinese books deeply imbued with Confucianism."

Thus the introduction of Buddhism in its Chinese or Korean form in 552 A.D. was accompanied and followed by the close study of Confucian ethics, which in no way obscured the ' Buddhist Path of Salvation. In the seventh century after Christ the government and the education of the people con• formed to a Chinese model; but the personality of the people persisted, and after the lapse of three centuries we find the Japanese thinking for themselves, but writing their thoughts in the ideographic script that China had given them. " The air was replete with the Buddhist thought of after-life and the Confucian ideas of broad-day morality. The sonorous reading of the Book of Filial Piety was heard all over the country." When the Japanese Dark Ages swept away de- cadent Chinese culture in much the same way that the European Dark Ages at about the same date swept away the decadent culture of Rome, Japan had already acquired and assimilated all that Buddhism and Confucianism, as then understood, could offer to a Shintoic people. It is true that the scholasticism of Chu-Hsi (1130-1200) obtained as great a vogue in China and Japan as the not dissimilar Christian scholasticism did at the same period in Europe and England. But in the East, as in the West, Reformation and Renaissance were in the air; and self-control, the purification of the heart, and the real return to Nature were opposed to the subtle scholastic developments of the same root-ideas that appeared in the Buddhistic Laoisin of Chu-Hsi and in many local forms of Buddhism.

The return to Nature found its culmination in the Zen sect, which taught the doctrine of perfect self-control in all the changes and chances of life. The sect attracted the ruling classes, and its effect upon them reacted on the entire nation. "So long," we are told, "as the Zen sect is not duly con- sidered, the whole set of phenomena peculiar to Japan—from the all-pervading laconism to the harakiri—will remain a sealed book." But Shintoism underlies the national character, if Buddhism has clothed it. " Speaking generally, we are still Shintoists to this day—Buddhists, Christians, and so long as we are born Japanese." It is a simple spiritual religion :— " 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. Like the little child so touchingly described by Wordsworth, we cannot see why we should not count the so-called dead still among the existing. The difference between the two is that of tangibility or visibility, but nothing more."

It is the cult of " daylight and the living dead," while Buddhism, despite its past great influence, is that of " night and gloomy death." To the Shintoist " this so-called death is nothing else than a new life in this present world of ours led in a supernatural way." To the absent head of a family

as thousands have died. in Manchuria, there is no change. Offerings and salutations continue, for his essential self is in his own home. This glorification of the conception of home life underlies all that is greatest in Japan. Be the modern Japanese never so agnostic, he believes that even though dead he will hear, as living he ever hears, the call of home. Professor Okakura in a flash of true poetry illustrates the intensity of the conception :—" You could sooner convince an ordinary European of the non-existence of a personal God. When it gets dusk every bird knows whither to wing its way home.

Even so with us all when the night of Death spreads its dark folds over our mortal mind ! "

It is strange, holding such deeply spiritual views, that the vast majority of the Japanese should be agnostic to the extent of denying the existence of any God or gods whatsoever. The author explains this scepticism, not apparently without a certain pride, by the fact that Japan has had since 1870 an entirely undenominational system of education. This may be so ; but we think that the chief cause is that worship of " the Present and the Tangible, of the broad Daylight and the plainly Visible," which stands in such strange contrast to the communion with " the living dead," and to the inward virtues of Bushido. Much as Japan has gained in material power from her intercourse with the West, her loss will, in the long run, prove greater than her gain if the worship of the tangible is to take the place of the virtues and the spirituality that have in so rapid a space of time given Japan her place

among the nations. Contact with the West has made Japan agnostic, and possibly the sight of Christianity ap- parently struggling for its existence in countries professedly Christian has contributed to this result. But we cannot

believe that she will remain agnostic, or indeed permanently outside the Christian pale. Of Occidental material gifts she

has made more in a short time than any nation ever did before, and she is not likely to do less with the spiritual gifts of Europe. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries showed how susceptible the race is to the influence of Christianity, and we think the author of this book can scarcely justify, though he passes over with an obscure phrase, the extirpa-

tion of Christianity by massacre on an appalling scale three centuries ago. Since its reintroduction it has spread to an extent that Japanese observers do not attempt to ignore. In a remarkable passage Professor Okakura deals with this question. He says :—

" Some have indeed gone so far as to say that wo owe the whole success we have up to now achieved in this remarkable war to the holy inspiration we drew from the teaching of Jesus Christ. I indorse this opinion to its full extent, but only if we are to understand by His teaching that whole body of truth and love which are of the essence of Christianity, and which we used in former days to call by other names, such as Bushido, Confucianism, etc. But if you insist on having it understood in a narrow sectarian sense, with a personal God and rigid formalities as its main features, then I should say.that I cannot agree with you, for this Christianity occupies rather an awkward place in our Japanese mind, finding itself somewhere between the national worship of the living dead, and modern agnosticism, or scientific monism."

Such a view of Christianity is not an unnatural one for a Japanese thinker to take; but his deduction is not ours. The logical deduction from the present position of Christianity in Japan is that it will save Japan from the otherwise inevitable consequences of the agnosticism and materialism which she adopted from Europe at the very stage when intellectual Europe was wearying of such views, and will add to her worship of the living dead that worship of a living God which has always played so noble a part in the history of great nations. In the past the religion of Japan has had much in common with her literature. It has devoted itself to the minute and personal, and has disregarded the universal. The epic quality has been absent alike from her religion and her literature. The domestic shrine and the tiny perfect ode have represented both. But Japan is now in living touch with a religion full of epic as well as personal qualities, she is passing through a period crowded with epic incident, and is engaged in a war in which personal qualities are continually related to vast movements. We think, therefore, that the spirit of Japan will unite with the spirit of Christianity as that spirit is understood in the West, though doubtless the embodiment will be new and dictated by local environment..