A GERMAN PROFESSOR ON JAPAN*

Pus most interesting portion of this first instalment of Dr. Rein's excellent work on Japan is undoubtedly his very readable and attractive summary of the history, civilisation, and ethno- graphy of the Japanese people. Oriental histories are usually mere catalogues of stupid tyrannies—interminable dramas, of which the actors change, but the parts and situations repeat themselves with tedious sameness. In them we catch glimpses indeed, of a people, but we rarely meet with any traces of a public. Such has not been the case in Japan. The Mikado has for many centuries been content to reign without governing. The ICub6 (ShOgun) wielded a more real power, but shared it in greater or less measure with the higher nobles, themselves influenced by their principal retainers, who, in their turn, were the exponents of the wishes and aspira- tions of the body of Samurai. The members of the Buddhist clergy formed a puissant hierarchy, and, with the Samurai, con- stituted a sufficiently numerous section of the nation to repre- sent its interests and genius with some approach to fairness and adequacy. Thus it is that the history of Japan may be read with a pleasure which only the lack of an associative connection with ourselves causes to be inferior to that which is afforded by a Japan: Trarels and Researches. undertaken at the Cost of the Prussian Government. By J. J. Rein, Professor of Geography in Marburg. Translated from the German. With Blastrations and Maps. Loudon Hodder and Stoughton. 1884.

the study of the great histories of the West. In Dr. Rein's vivid and picturesque narrative, the main outlines of the story are, we may be sure, accurately given. But of the details of the episodic struggles which are the flesh and blood of history, nothing like a critical or complete presentment will be possible until the archives and archmology of the country shall have

been sufficiently explored. Dr. Rein, we venture to think, should have remembered this, and have used his materials with

a somewhat greater reserve and diffidence than he has dis- played. He seems to regard Jimmu as an historical personage, and the indigenous records of the millennium preceding the appearance of the earliest known of Japanese writings—the

Kojiki, or Ancient Annals—as for the most part worthy of being treated as veracious history. But it is exceed-

ingly doubtful whether any trustworthy records are extant older than the twelfth century. The primitive annals probably reflect, in a more or less distorted manner, true history ; but to bring out the real image is a most difficult task, which only professed scholars are competent to undertake, and have not yet undertaken. Nevertheless, despite some instances of defective

research, hasty inference, and imprudent generalisation, the summary of Japanese history contained in the present volume is by far the best that has yet been given to the public, and many of the traditions set forth as historical fact bear, no doubt, a strong general resemblance to the actual occurrences.

To the explanations usually given of the anti-Christian policy of Iyeyasn and Iyemitsu Dr. Rein adds no suggestions of his own. Recent researches have shown that the massacre of Shimabara, in

1637, was probably caused by a political panic. The persecution of Iyemitsu and the isolative decrees of 1621 cannot be wholly accounted for on the current theory of foreign jealousies and native partisanships. The history of the Tokugawa rule is very imperfectly known, even to the Japanese themselves, the pub- lication of books of a political nature having been forbidden by Iyeyasu. But the researches of European scholars are throwing more and more light upon the history of the Christian episode; and the tendency is to attribute the policy of the earlier Shoguns to a leading desire to preserve intact the supremacy established by the great founder of the Tokugawa dynasty—a dynasty that for nearly three centuries assured to the country a tranquillity unparalleled in the history of the world.

No sooner had the Bakufu (Sh8gun Government) been over- thrown by the Court party, in 1868, than the latter immediately adopted the very policy it had indicted the Yedo authorities for pursuing. The " stinking dogs and goats" of a few years pre- viously became the models of new Japan. It was enough to be an Ijin-san (foreign gentleman), which term replaced the old To :yin (China fellow), to be saluted as Sensei (venerable sir), and offered an appointment. An elderly German barber from New York, Dr. Rein tells us, was made surgeon-general of the Formosan expedition, in 1874, at a salary of $500 a month. Foreigners, on the other hand, were infected with a sort of Japanese furore. A respectable American lawyer (not a Consul, as Dr. Rein calls him), engaged as legal adviser to the Govern- ment, took to strutting about in native dress, armed with two swords, as if he were a Tokugawa yakunin (official). Huge boards were set up with extraordinary devices upon them, that turned out upon inspection to be patterns for European evening dress, which was adopted as the Court costume. The procession of courtiers thus attired on New Year's Day in- demnified the foreign residents of Tokio for the lack of the familiar pantomimes of the season. Some foreign merchants made, more lost, fortunes in supplying the Japanese with scents, pomades, and knicknacks. Among other extraordinary fancies that took hold of the people may be mentioned the rage for rabbits—a rabbit-like hare, but no true rabbit, exists in Japan—the price of which ran up to over $1,000: The Government at last was obliged to interfere, and issued a sort of sumptuary edict by which the mania was finally, but not without diffi- culty, suppressed. These follies the Japanese have got fairly rid of, and their rulers, despite the curious suspicion with which they still regard the foreigner, whose methods they nevertheless adopt, are making earnest attempts to work out a truer civilisation. They have paid particular attention to education, and there is hardly a village in Japan unprovided with a public school. But an enormous obstacle stands in the way. Our spelling-reform enthusiasts aver that one-fourth of a child's school-time is occupied in vain attempts to master the intricacies of English spelling. In Japan, the youth must work, and work hard, up to the age of fifteen or sixteen, before he can

read or write, with any ease, the Chinese characters in which all the best literature of his country, and nearly all the journal- istic literature, are written. What an opportunity for reading- and-writing reformers is here ! Nor would reform be a difficult matter. Japanese can be perfectly transliterated into roman, and there is besides a native syllabary, which is more or less used, but generally in connection with, and in ex- planation of, the Chinese character. No doubt there are some advantages connected with the retention of the Chinese character ; but these, compared with the disadvantages, are, to- quote a common Japanese saying, but as one hair to those of nine bulls. Until some such reform be accomplished, it is possible for more than a very small minority of the people to acquire other than the merest rudiments of knowledge, and Japan must remain heavily overvreighted with her ignorance in her competition with other civilised nations. Her very language-

is becoming degraded into a sort of broken-down Chinese, and the gages. (elegant talk) of a Tokio official would sound in the

ears of a mediteval writer much as the " ls.ngage diabolique '

of the Limousin student did in those of the ever-famous Pants.- gruel. In addition, the use of the Chinese character continues,

in a literary sense, the isolation of the country. The language- (apart from its Chinese corruption) is simple enough; the whole difficulty lies in the mere decipherment, to attain ease in which requires several years' close study.

In his chapter on ethnography, Dr. Rein has not made use of Baelz's admirable investigations on the subject. The Japanese skull differs greatly from the European—especially in the im- mense size of the upper maxillary bone, in the very low palatine index, in the frequent openness of the metepic suture, in the extreme prognathism, and in a common occurrence in the molar bone of the curious sutural line in the zyzonia occasionally met with in European crania. The most recent researches seem to show that the earliest inhabitants of Japan were a littoral race, living on fish, of a stock akin to that which originated the populations of Polynesia and Melanesia. The aborigines were probably conquered by and absorbed in suc- cessive immigrations of Mongoloid peoples, who had dwelt for a longer or shorter time in the Corean Peninsula ; but there are no evidences of any connection between these invaders and the Akkadians, who appear to be in a fair way of replacing the Ten Tribes as the fashionable resource for solving ethnographical puzzles. Archaic Japanese lends considerable support to this theory. Its vocabulary is divisible into two categories,—one of words consisting mainly of vowels and liquids, and often beginning with" k ;" the other of words containing sibilant and dental consonants. The latter is the Mongoloid element, the former the Polynesian one. Polynesian languages are the only known languages which can be perfectly represented by the- Japanese syllabary.

No existing work on Japan can pretend to vie with the pre- sent one in the fulness and accuracy with which the physio- graphy, natural history, and topography of the country,—sub- jects which Dr. Rein has made specially his own,—are treated, and for a long time to come it must rank as the standard autho- rity in such matters. The illustrations are mostly excellent;. in particular we can commend, as a strikingly picturesque ex- ample of Japanese military architecture, the view of the Castle of Kumamoto, built in the seventeenth century by that famous adversary of Christianity, Kato Kiyomasa, and celebrated in more recent times for its gallant defence by the Imperialists against the Satsuma insurgents of 1877. We feel bound to add that the translation hardly does justice to the author.