The Imperial Japanese Navy. By F. T. Jane. (W. Thacker
and Co. 21s.)—Mr. Jane, after giving us a succinct and lucid account of the modern Japanese Navy and its construction as affected by the Revolution, recapitulates the main incidents of the Chino- Japanese War, and then describes the newer ships built in the interval which succeeded and heralded the Russo-Japanese War. It is all very clearly and intelligently done, and one does not want a better guide to that Navy, which it is said the Japanese regard as the best in the world. Certainly its organisation seems perfect, and its behaviour up to the present, as Mr. Jane observes, has given no opportunity for contradicting this notion. The real interest of Mr. Jane's book is in his description and criticism of the personal characteristics of the Japanese sailor and his value as a fighting man. Summing up his conclusions, we arrive at the following results. The Japanese officer is afraid of nothing, he has a superb confidence in himself and his Navy, and his recreation is acquiring knowledge of his profession. He be- lieves in just what suits his convenience or what is handiest,. —practically speaking, says Mr. Jane, the Fleet is his religion. .Personally he is a gentleman, polite, sensitive, curiously callous—like the Chinese, he can often see only the ridiculous .where we should see human suffering of . the sickening kind— and for art in the abstract he cares nothing. He is practical above everything. The faults, the defects rather, of his qualities are these. He is too prone to look to the future, would think for his Admiral—though this does not affect his obedience to the quarter-deck—and he is impatient at the steps which he must take before he himself commands. But if, as Mr. Jane says, a Lieutenant not only thinks, but would be able to command properly at a moment's notice, there is no more to be said. The long and short of it is that he views battle as practice, and death as an incident; he is not brave in our sense, rising superior to the civilised fear of death ; but he likes fighting, and the risks affect him about as much as the calculations in an actuary's table. " If people don't like being killed, why do they fight ?" he says. One officer's views given to Mr. Jane are significant,—he would have no war correspondents and no surrender. Personally he is a very good fellow, as we know; polite, self-controlled, though we often hurt his sensitiveness; never loses his dignity, and, moreover, he admires courage in others, and sinks any individual claim to heroism in the general credit, as in the torpedo attacks at Wei- hai-wei in 1895. But our readers had better study Mr. Jane's book ; it is the best account extant of the Japanese Navy and its possibilities as indicated by the Japanese officer.
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