NEW-AND-OLD JAPAN
By Dr. G. C. ALLEN
FROM 1922 to 1925 I lived in a provincial town in Japan, and not until last year was I able to revisit the country. Before I returned there in July I anticipated striking changes ; for a decade is a long period in the history of modern Japan, and in 1925 the reconstruction-work in the region devastated by the Great Earthquake was still incomplete. Yet, after a stay of several months, I have come home impressed not so much by the changes (which are many) as by the absence of any sharp break or contrast with the country I had known. Rickshas have been forced off the streets by taxis ; in the big towns there are now huge departmental stores and blocks of flats ; in Tokyo the hundreds of " modern girls " in Western dress seem to be creatures of a different race from the Japanese woman of tradition ; there are dance-halls, cabarets and jazz, which were unknown when I first visited the country ; and Western-style restaurants are attached even to Kabuki theatres. But it is just where the surface changes are most obvious that the continuity of tradition can be most clearly perceived. A taxi-driver with his efficient American car lingered a few moments after receiving his modest fare to apologise grace- fully for the inadequacy and poor quality of his vehicle. In the dance-halls the couples are as serious and intent as if they were taking part in one of their old ritualistic dances. Even the jazz has a flavour of Japan—so, alas, has the Western- style food. A friend educated in England, who is now a pro- fessional speculator on the Stock Exchange, and is very modem and Western in his own opinion, returns at frequent intervals to his native village to offer prayers and gifts before his ancestral shrine. A manager of an up-to-date clock factory, when complimented upon his new factory-shrine, said, only half in jest, " Yes, business has picked up quite a lot since we had that." The proprietor of a famous culture- pearl concern runs in Tokyo a Ruskin Tea-Room, furnished appropriately and adorned with Ruskin's letters and manu- scripts, and with pictures of Coniston. Here come University students and the liberal intelligentsia, for Ruskin's social ideas still have a considerable influence in these circles. Last autumn the proprietor closed his pearl-fisheries for three days so that his employees might offer prayers for the spirits of the oysters killed in the course of this trade. The old curious mixture of strict etiquette and informality is even today characteristic of social life. Before a train or a 'bus starts the conductor asks the travellers to pardon him for having kept them waiting, and at the end of the journey he bows and thanks them in very polite terms for having ridden in his vehicle and asks them to see that they do not leave any of their belongings behind in the compartment. Yet the passengers who enter the trains in their neat foreign- style suits remove all their outer garments, if the weather is hot, and sit comfortably in their underwear, sometimes with a block of ice tied with a towel to the top of their heads. Many parts of the rapidly growing industrial cities are hideous with box-like concrete buildings, with galvanised iron, and with rickety poles supporting a jumble of electricity- and telegraph-wires. But the details are often surprisingly beautiful. One may see a cheap restaurant, built in under a low railway arch, with an exquisite facade, and in the two or three square yards of ground in front of it there may be a miniature landscape garden with waterfall, rocks, and dwarf trees.
Manners may have deteriorated a little, but in spite of efforts of the half-sophisticated to suppress good manners be as something unbecoming in the citizens of a first-rate Power, natural courtesy keeps breaking through. Even the develop- ment of the tourist industry has not had the disastrous effect on manners that might be expected. Except at the ports, there is no touting. Poor men will offer to do services for the traveller as host for guest, and will turn aside from a proffered tip. Japanese are vain and proud ; but their vanities, sometimes irritating enough, are often disarming because of their simplicity and ingenuousness. A University student who had attached himself to me in the hope of learning some English while I was walking in the country, led me up a hill, from the crest of which we could see a few shabby wooden buildings and a sordid-looking little gravel playground. " There is my Alma Mater," he said proudly. It was his primary school. The extreme nationalists are noisy. Day after day the radio grinds out political propaganda and laudations of various manifestations of the " Japanese spirit," and tourist magazines and English editions of the Japanese newspapers inform the foreigner of the peculiar splendour of Japan's culture. But the ordinary decent Japanese is revolted at this assertiveness. He thinks that these excellences exist, but his tradition is hostile to the parade of them and to this crude insistence upon national superiority. As a Japanese friend said : " There is too much said about the Japanese spirit nowadays. Although one feels that it exists, one cannot define it, and it ought not to be spoken about." Business men are resentful of the British policy of dis- criminating against Japanese exports to the Empire, and they are warned by the nationalists against revealing information about Japan's economic position to foreigners ; but when in contact with a foreigner (even with an Englishman) they are unable to maintain themselves at the high level of patriotic fervour and insularity that is expected of them, and they fall back easily into friendliness and hospitality. The poor and simple who have never heard of quota restrictions, or British intrigue in China, or even of Japan's imperial destiny, can still treat a Westerner as a fellow- being and as one who, being far from his home and friends, is worthy of special consideration. The good humour of the Japanese crowd still remains. I went to a popular Tokyo shrine at festival-time, and soon I was jambed tight in a huge slowly-moving mass of people. We shuffled on without excitement until some idiotic policemen lost their heads and began to push us about. After I had involuntarily stepped on the bare feet of my unknown neighbour and had given him a blow in the eye with my elbow, he grinned cheerfully up at me and said that it was fine to be a large and tall foreigner when one was in such a crowd. Occasionally one meets business men who are somewhat puffed up with commercial success, and their complacency recalls England of the '6o's. The Japanese manufacturer contrasts his own energy and protracted labours with the easy-going habits of his foreign competitors, and he feels that Japan's economic future is assured. He declares that it is not the low wages but the superior skill of his workers which lies at the foundations of Japan's industrial progress, and this skill, he says, is partly innate and partly the result of a long tradition of craftsmanship. He does not know that not long ago the superiority of the English manufacturing industry was attributed to precisely these causes and that the English visitor to Japan sometimes feels that he has stepped back into his own Victorian era when he hears these familiar catchwords. Big business considers Europe to be decadent. England has had a great past but is now hastening to decay. " Is war between our countries inevit- able ? " asked a representative of big business ; " or is England shrewd enough to put aside considerations of prestige and to recognise (as a Power whose zenith is passed) that she must accommodate her imperial policy to Japan's ambitions ? "
In other circles there is a different attitude. A working man, casually encountered, asked me if my countrymen were not all rich people. When I denied this, he took it for a polite disclaimer and went on to describe the poverty of his own land. I murmured the names of Mitsui and Iwasaki. This roused him. " Yes," he burst out, " except for these two, except for them, we are all poor." Another, met on a country excursion, told me that many of his countrymen spent their leisure drinking and quarrelling. In Christian countries, which he admired, he understood that men were well-behaved. As for himself, he liked to come in leisure moments to the place where we were then sitting, and to remain looking at the wooded mountain that rose before us.
Satisfaction is still found in the contemplation of nature and in simple artistic pleasures. Noh plays and tea-ceremony are being revived as a form of nationalistic propaganda ; but the practice of verse-making and other arts is extra- ordinarily widespread and owes nothing to political reasons. It is not uncommon for groups of business men to meet once a week to study and practise the art of scroll-painting. Although power, economic and political, seems to be concentrated in a few groups in Japan, there is no lack of initiative among the people. Men of ideals working in obscurity for ends which have nothing to do with national power or glory are to be found in no insignificant numbers, and it is from them that the nation derives its real strength and greatness, and from them that in crisis or disaster leaders would spring.
It is not easy for a foreigner to form confident judgements about the Japanese, even when he has managed to overcome their distressing shyness and to make many friends among them. Japan's politics are doubtless deplorable ; her police often tyrannical ; and the insidious influence of America is permeating her social and artistic life. But the abiding impression is not of an aggressive and harsh civilisa- tion, but of something tender and precious, a note of melancholy, a whisper of past beauty hushed but not yet silenced.