Part 4 (2/2)
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[Ill.u.s.tration: THE GREAT BUDDHA (DIABUTSU) AT KAMAKURA.]
This gigantic figure of Buddha (a man's head would barely reach the statue's feet) singularly expresses the spirit of serene contemplation for which the Buddhist religion stands; is indeed, hauntingly suggestive of that dreamy Nirvana which it teaches is the goal of existence. There is perhaps no finer piece of statuary in the East than this.
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[Ill.u.s.tration: THE DEGENERATE KOREANS AT REST AND AT WORK.]
The favorite occupation is smoking, but in the lower picture three men together are managing to operate one spade. One man rams it into the ground, and the other two (by means of ropes attached) jerk out the shovelful of earth!
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The wife of the missionary I visited in Osaka told me one or two amusing incidents--amusing in one aspect and pathetic in another--that are of interest in this connection. A j.a.panese member of her church declared: No, no, Mrs. {55} ”Hail, you can't ever make me believe that my wife is as good as I am!” On another occasion she was teaching a Sunday-school cla.s.s concerning the woman of Samaria, and asked: ”Why did Jesus ask the woman to call her husband?” And the j.a.panese answer was: ”Because he was going to talk on intellectual things and she needed some man to help her understand!”
Dr. Sidney Gulick, with whom I had tea in Kyoto, tells of tying his wife's shoes on the street, on one occasion, only to find the j.a.panese amazed that a man should so humble himself. His wife's taking his arm in walking was also regarded as the height of impropriety!
No religion of the Far East has ever recognized the dignity of woman, probably because no religion has ever recognized the worth of the individual. Just as I have said, that in the old days, and almost as largely to-day, in the relations of the home, it was the family that counted and not the individual, so in his relations to the larger world beyond the individual formerly counted for nothing when weighed against the wishes of the superior cla.s.ses. In the earliest days, when the lord died, a number of his subjects were buried with him to wait upon his spirit in the Beyond. Later, with the same object in view, wives and servants committed suicide on the death of the master. Even now it is regarded as honorable for a girl to sell herself into shame to save the family from want.
The same antipodal difference between East and West--here ”the family is the social unit” and with us the individual himself--explains the system of adoption: a younger son not being essential to the maintenance of the family cult may be adopted into another family, while the eldest son may not. On the same principle the father rules, not because of what he represents as an Individual, but because he represents the Family. Whenever he chooses, he abdicates, and must then join his other children in obeying the eldest son.
In the relations of citizens.h.i.+p the same disregard of {56} individual rights was the ancient rule, not merely in the fact that for centuries the smallest details of everyday life were regulated by law, but more seriously in that the Samurai, or privileged cla.s.s, might ”cut down in cold blood a beggar, a merchant, or a farmer on the slightest provocation, or simply for the purpose of testing his sword,” while in case of the ruin of their cause it was the honorable and natural thing for soldiers to commit ”hari-kiri”--that is to say, commit suicide by disemboweling themselves. A j.a.panese writer recently declared that ”the value of the individual life is an ill.u.s.tration of the Christian spirit” that is profoundly influencing j.a.pan, and he mentioned as an example that formerly suicide, in such circ.u.mstances as I have mentioned, ”was regarded as an honorable act; now it is regarded as a sin.”
Without professing the religion of fatalism which so influences the peoples of the Nearer East, the j.a.panese soldiers behave like fatalists because the fundamental basis of the social order for centuries has been the necessity of the Individual to sacrifice pleasure, comfort, or life itself when required either by the Family or by the Social Order. And this partially explains why it is said in sober earnest that the highest ambition of most j.a.panese schoolboys to-day is to die for their Emperor.
This is my last letter from j.a.pan, and my next letter will be from Korea--if the cholera doesn't get me. It has been raging in Osaka and in Kobe, both of which cities I have thought it necessary to visit in order to get first-hand information about industrial conditions.
Ordinarily, the cholera victim lives only a few hours. The first day's record here in Kobe, I believe, showed six cases and five deaths.
Gradually, however, cholera is being stamped out, just as we have eradicated yellow fever in Cuba and the South, and just as we shall eventually come to recognize the prevalence of typhoid in any town as a disgrace--an evidence of primitive and uncivilized {57} sanitary conditions. A friend of mine who came to Osaka in 1879 tells me that there were 10,000 cholera victims in that one city that year--the yellow flag on almost every street, and all through the night the sound of men hurrying past with new victims for the hospitals or with new corpses for the burning. In the thirteen years 1878-91 more than 313,000 j.a.panese died of the scourge.
I regret to say good-by to j.a.pan. It is a tremendously interesting country. For just as America represents the ultimate type of Occidental civilization, so does j.a.pan represent the ultimate type of Oriental civilization.
More than this, it is here that the full tides of Oriental and Occidental life are now meeting for the first time in human history.
For centuries uncounted the yellow man advanced across the plains and peaks of Asia, finding at last in these outlying islands his farthermost outpost, and so tarried here in the Farthest East, ”the Land of the Rising Sun.” He hardly thought of the existence of a West, but if his Buddha-like composure had been ruffled by such a thought, he might have droned monotonously:
”Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.”
But while the yellow man had thus moved steadily eastward, the white man, starting from the land of the Euphrates, had pitched his camp, with each succeeding generation, nearer and nearer the setting sun.
Greece--Rome--Spain--France--England--then four hundred years ago, more restless than the Mongolian, the white man dared the seas that hemmed him in and found a new continent to people. Westward still the course of empire then continued until in our time the white man planted his civilization on the Pacific Coast.
There was no more West.
Then it was, as if in obedience to a cosmic, racial instinct deeper than reason, the white man sent his messengers across the new-found ocean and awakened the Sleepy World {58} of the Yellow Man by the booming of Perry's guns off Yokahoma.
The Kingdom of Heaven, we are told, cometh not with observation, and the deeper meaning of the greatest events in human history may often escape the attention of contemporaries. My father and yours, perhaps, heard little and thought less of Perry's exploit, and yet it marked not merely a new historical epoch, but a new act in the long drama of human evolution itself. Curious, too, it is to observe how the strange world-destiny that shapes our ends gave to it a stage-setting in keeping with its dramatic significance. Not to England, nor to any other great naval and commercial Power of the time, but to the young United States--the nation that had found the ultimate West--came the unlikely but strangely fitting task of opening the Farthest East to Western trade and thought.
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