JAPANESE CHARACTERISTICS.
NO national character is more difficult to understand than that of the Japanese; nor upon any is there a greater conflict of apparently trustworthy evidence. According to one set of observers they are a proud people, full of vindictive- ness, indifferent to cruelty, given to cheating in ordinary affairs, careless of truth, and beyond all measure salacious ; while according to another they are the gentlest of mankind, full of pity and forgiveness, strictly honourable in all their transactions, and, though with different ideas of purity from Europeans, rather exceptionally chaste. A correspondent who has resided among them for more than twenty years in a capacity which gives him unusual advantages for observing their inner life, remonstrates with us this week against a harsh judgment passed in our columns by a reviewer, and sends us a quantity of pieces justificatives which will, he believes, con- vince us that the Japanese are among the finest people in the world. We have read them all, but that is not exactly the conclusion to which they lead us. We should say, upon the evidence which our correspondent supplies, that the most striking quality of the Japanese is precocity, that the keenness of their perceptions is far in advance of the soundness of their judgments, that their minds, or rather the minds of their leading classes, are always on the rush, that they receive ideas and lay aside ideas much as acute youngsters do, and that it was quite possible that longer experience, sharper trials, and the discipline of life, which comes to nations as well as to men, would leave them ordinary people. The Japanese upper class strike us, in fact, as the undergraduates of the human family, clever, enjoying, and full of " go," but as yet immature. All the opinions our correspondent has collected agree upon three points, the first of which is Japanese " levity." They love change for the sake of change, take up ideas because they are startling to their seniors or to their Government or to them- selves, and suffer none of them to really dye their minds with any permanent colour. Keenly susceptible to all impressions, even to those of natural scenery, to which many Asiatic minds appear impervious, full of cheerfulness at once from the beauty of their country, the exhilaration of their climate, and a certain joyousness which must be in their blood, they are open to all teachings, which, however, go about one inch deep. After yielding for centuries to Chinese influences, they were suddenly fascinated by the West, and accepted all its teachings ex- cept those which radically change men. They devise a con- stitution which does not work, except so far as it is sustained by the old fact of the Mikado's authority ; they start a Press which discusses everything in the spirit of an undergraduate's wine-party ; they even adopt a new costume and live in con- stricting uniforms before the majority have given up the habit of living in a loin-cloth. They read with attention all the philosophies of Europe and accept none of them, and study all religions only to come to the conclusion that little bits of all are probably true and big bits probably false, and that a religion which enjoined nice rules of conduct, but has no supernatural authority, would probably suit them beet. They debated gravely whether they should not adopt Christianity as an official creed, and advanced, we remember, as one argument for that course that it would greatly im- prove the melody and the depth of the national music. They, in fact, play with constitutions, amuse themselves with daring foreign policies, disport themselves among creeds, and will probably yet encounter some social or external catas- trophe which may destroy their energies, or, which is qnite as likely, may turn them from schoolboys into men. Their rush on China was exactly like what a rush of bold Etonians on superannuated veterans would have been ; it bore down. all opposition, the snowballs scattering the infirm old men, but of permanent result there was little or none except a- payment from the Chinese.
The second characteristic admitted on all hands is ex- cessive vanity, taking the form of an exaggerated amour proprc. The Japanese would kill himself rather than bear an insult, which to him, as to a certain class of Frenehmen, seems to make life no longer worth living. The dignity of his ego must be recognised, or he changes instantly, without re- flection or pause, from a man at once genial and gentle, into one of the most passionate and vindictive of mankind. Till very recently the harakiri, or suicide by disembowelling, was part of the code of honour, and the vendetta was pursued with. Corsican patience and incapacity of forgetting. This culti- vation of amour propre is extended, as in France, from the individual to the country. Unlike any other Asiatic, except, in a less degree, the Persian, the Japanese is conscious of his geographical habitat, and inordinately proud of it. There is nothing on earth like Japan ; Japan is the queen of all countries ; the dignity of Japan, the renown of Japan, the " glory " of Japan as a Frenchman would say, must be acknowledged everywhere and under all circumstances. The Japanese fights not for his cause, but for Japan ; he conquers for Japan ; he devises marvellous projects—the eonquest of Australia, for instance—not to gain advantages, or even to benefit his people, but in order that Japan may have a great place among the nations of the world. He hates China not for injuries done, but first of all because the Chinaman thinks China great and Japan small, and says so habitually through every Pekinese etiquette. When this vanity stirs him the Japanese ceases to reason or to fear; he cares literally nothing about his life, and all his elaborate code of rules of life gives way, as at Port Arthur, to a rush of the wild Asiatic fury, which may yet one day—if he is, for example, too much overcrowed by Russia—hurl him upon the foreigner, as it has often done upon individual foreigners, in a burst of unthinking massacre.
The third and most curious characteristic of the Japanese is his belief in words. He shares this with the Chinese, who will go on uttering apophthegms about mercy while he is torturing a prisoner, and about virtue while he is taking a bribe ; and with a certain kind of Frenchman, who will surround the medal of his Emperor with the inscription, "La Republique Franeaise," and celebrate a defeat, as Barrere did, as proof of the greatness of his arms. It is in the domain of religion that this is perhaps most apparent. The Japanese calls himself, and thinks himself, religions, while he denies the supernatural ; and in half-a- dozen documents before us declares that " virtue" in Japan is nobler than virtue elsewhere, because it is not supported by any idea of future reward and punishment, because, that is, that except as a system of social and police utility, it has no meaning at all. He bases his conduct on rules which he thinks expedient, and says, " What a religious being am I to have thought of anything so obviously calcu- lated to enable me to live in happiness and peace." He has an enormous respect for the words of ancient philosophers and European writers, will quote them, as our own country- folk still quote proverbs, as if they ended discussion, and will, if he is young, hurl them at his seniors in the most exasperating way ; but he does not all the while absorb this wisdom, and will pass from believing in, say, St. Augustine to believing in, say, Mr. Grant Allen at a. bound, and with no sense that he is exhibiting volatility of intellect. He is, in fact, intellectually an Asiatic under- graduate, with the quickness, and the mental curiosity, and• the mental rashness and instability of that stage in the pro- gress of life.
So far we have said little to justify the English admiration. ;r liking for the Japanese ; but there is a little more to be remarked. He has the good qualities of his faults. The nimble- ness of his intellect is real, or at least it is real among the non-labouring classes, and it may develop by-and-by into a high quality of speed. One could easily conceive of a great and original Japanese mathematician. Only the Persian in Asia has anything like it, and the Persian is fettered in the use of his brain by his Mahommedanism, or by the fierce Sufeeism, that blank denial of all axioms, by which, if he begins to be sceptical, his Mahommedianism is usually re- placed. The Japanese's vanity for his country constantly develops in action into a very real kind of patriotism, which the long experience of mankind has ascertained to be one of the most effective of the virtues ; and the Japanese has another quality still, which differentiates him strongly from all other Asiatics. He has imbibed, and will act on, the idea of duty. If he conceives that it is his function to do a certain piece of work he will do it, be the consequences what they may. When he was a servant to an old feudal noble he would obey that noble's order in utter carelessness of his own life, and now that he obeys only the State he will do its work as an Englishman would, without thinking about himself. Our correspondent, with his great experience, declares that though Japanese in business may be over "smart," the better classes are absolutely indifferent to money, meet ruin with unimpaired cheerfulness, and at heart look down on profit- making as " low," a state of feeling which enables the State easily to find officials who cannot be bribed. Most Japanese officers and trained men will in the same way face melinite shells, that is, the risk of sudden death or ghastly wounds, not so much from courage—they have not, as we understand them, quite the French elan—but because it is their duty to run those risks. It is this quality, together with the lingering reverence for their immensely ancient Monarchy, that imparts to the Japanese a national strength which they would not derive, any more than the Persians, from their over-volatile brains alone. It is a lofty quality, and may enable them to go far ; but their risk is a liability to over- reach themselves, and to overestimate their strength, not in itself, but in proportion to that of Europeans, who have in them a fount of energy which as yet the history of the world shows to be special to the white races. We have excluded from this, of course inadequate, sketch of the nation's characteristics, their success in a certain field of art, partly because we are con- scious of want of sympathy with that art, and partly because we have never understood the English idea that art and Asia are antagonistic ideas. No Asiatic race has done much in sculp- ture, though the extinct Cambodian, judging from some specimens of his art in Paris, might have done had he con- tinued to exist; but several Asiatic nations have displayed at periods great art capacity, especially for architecture and the arrangement of colour. An Egyptian designed the Hall t.f Columns at Luxor, an Arab built the Alhambra, and, as we believe, another Arab the Taj Mehal, though the latter is disputed; Moorish iron and silver work was once unrivalled in delicacy of design ; carpet-makers and embroiderers have still much to learn from Persian designers ; and no one in Europe attempts to rival the now dying enamels of Jeypore with their crusted jewels. Fondness for their art is rather the special characteristic of Japan than success in developing their artistic faculty, and the extent to which this is a mental peculiarity and not a result of isolation and continuity of demand is still undecided. At all events, it is not because of her art that Japan will be able to assert a great place among the nations of Asia, though no doubt that art helps to per- suade Europe to recognise her claim.
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