Chapter XVI

A few weeks’ stay among them is, of course, not sufficient time to judge any people. But there are some things which make themselves as apparent in days as in years. Perhaps what impressed itself most strongly upon us were the mistakes we commonly make about the Japanese, false impressions, which have come to be accepted among us almost as truisms. Because they have shown themselves clever—“cribber,” one of my Japanese acquaintances pronounced it, and there seemed something amusingly significant in this form of the word; because they have shown more than a Yankee cuteness in copying the point of view and the institutions, the articles and the trade-marks, of other civilizations—many of us have hastily concluded that they are a very intelligent people. Because we hear with wondering interest that they never enter their houses with their shoes on, that they are always bathing, we think of them as a very cleanly people. Therefore it was something akin to a shock to us to find that in the mass the Japanese seem stupid, and that they are by no means as clean as we fancied.

To give the less important precedence, even their famous mat floors, untouched by shod feet, are often so dirty that to walk across them means to carry off a black sole. Frequent bathing is all very well, but when dozens habitually do so in the same water, Western notions may suggest quite another descriptive adjective. No wonder a Japanese doctor startled the medical world a few years ago by the assertion that bathing is unhealthful! Having in mind the skin-diseases alone that are passed along in Japanese bath-rooms, he was easily within the bounds of reason. Not even to mention the unspeakable Oriental manner in which they fertilize their fields, the “cleanly little Japanese” are more indecent in public customs than even the Spanish, even more frank about certain natural functions. But perhaps it is all in the point of view. These same public bathers consider our hand-shaking a dirty habit, especially prone to spread disease; they are shocked at the custom of blowing the nose and carrying the soiled handkerchief along—though not at the intolerable noses of nearly all small Japanese youngsters, even of the higher classes.

Quite aside from the difficulties of the language, we had frequent distinct examples, and the testimony of almost every frank and observing foreign resident with whom we talked, of Japanese stupidity. The rank and file at least are slow-witted—or shall I say, in order to be wholly on the safe side and avoid any false impression of wishing to give offense, that they are a surprisingly slow-thinking people? They catch an idea with exasperating sluggishness, by no means as quickly as more than one “wild” tribe with which I have come in contact. There are constant evidences of this mental deliberation,—their dragging, never-ending theatrical performances, for example. Observers in a position to know assure me that the Japanese are extremely poor aviators, because their minds will not work with the swiftness required in such a calling; or they suddenly let go of the controls to “look in the book and see” what they should do next. In the average interview their single-track minds run round and round in the same small circle, and nothing short of a mental earthquake will shake them out of it. With patience you can get them just so far in their thinking, and then you run again and again up against a stone wall. No doubt there are cases in which they make a pretense of this in order to avoid committing themselves or giving information which they are not sure has been released by the powers-that-be higher up; but that after all is only another proof of limited intelligence, since a brilliant people would find some smoother means of covering the retreat.

But perhaps our experience was limited as to class as well as in time. I have been assured by men who come into contact with Japanese in high places that these are unusually sharp-minded men, who at the same time admitted that the masses are stupid even by the standards of our own. I have heard this from several reputable sources; I have had a few hints of it myself. But I have yet to meet a dozen Japanese men whom I can vizualize as worthy opponents across a conference-table of even our own homespun diplomats and statesmen. Is there perhaps something in the Japanese form of government which brings the more brilliant men to the top more often than in our own; or is there naturally a wider gulf between the masses and the bright few? In this connection one recalls that the really oblique eye, which most of us assumed to be universal in Japan, is almost rare; and this is said to be the mark of the patrician, of the aristocratic, intelligent handful which built up Japan on the broad base of the heavier featured, the racially quite different, plebeian, gullible millions.

Of course it is partly their long-winded Japanese formalities that give the impression of mental inertness. Unless they have lived long abroad they cannot understand our abrupt way of asking or giving directions or of making arrangements. They prefer the circuitous route of ultra-politeness—or ultra-deviousness; they accuse us of being “fire-engines” because we expect a ten-word instruction to be interpreted in less than that many minutes. It is really, I suppose, the long set forms in which they must address one another, their endless honorifics, that take much of the time and the energy which might otherwise express itself in mental alertness. Greetings and farewells of the most casual, meet-on-the-street kind are interminable, accompanied by innumerable low bows at strictly fixed intervals. A formal conversation reminds one of a Broadway musical comedy of some years back in which a foreigner talked incessantly for ten minutes, at the end of which the “interpreter” informed the audience that “He said, ‘Yes.’” We got the impression, too, that it is difficult to hold the average Japanese to the point, whether because of a naturally wandering attention or the custom of making mental side excursions into recesses to which the Westerner is never admitted.

As to that far-famed Japanese courtesy, it was, of course, in constant evidence. Groups of a dozen or a score of men often stood on railway platforms bowing to a departing friend in exact unison, like a field of wheat over which strong gusts of wind are passing, until the train carried him out of sight. Leave a native inn and you will have the whole personnel bobbing up and down at the threshold and wishing you until you are out of hearing a continued life of ease and prosperity—provided you have remembered every one in your parting distributions. Yet, like some of the European nations famed for their politeness, theirs is largely a courtesy of forms rather than a genuine consideration for the rights and convenience of others. There is often much more real courtesy among peoples who take fewer pains to show it outwardly.

I have mentioned the complete disrespect for the sleeper, whether in train, inn, or home. The street manners of Japan are not on the whole good; when it comes to public conveyances they are almost barbaric. The same man who has bowed himself nearly to the ground a score of times in parting from the kowtowing group of friends on the platform will not have the slightest compunction in stretching out across four seats and letting three fellow-travelers stand for a hundred miles. As far as our observations carry, the giving up of a place to a woman is unheard of; even if she has a baby on her back she has been so well trained to take second place that astonishment would overwhelm her if the rule were broken. It is a rare foreign visitor, I am sure, who has not had the humiliating and probably anger-producing experience of entering some important establishment, or one announcing itself grandiloquently in English, not only to find no one with the slightest knowledge of that tongue, but to have the entire staff leave its typewriters and desks and come to laugh at him, as at some ungainly creature escaped from the zoo. This form of rudeness is so common in Japan as to suggest that it is not recognized there as such, any more than is their frank, incessant staring; but it is one of the things that is most likely to leave resentment in the soul of the traveler long after he has departed. I wonder what habits of our own offend, entirely “unbeknownst” to us, the visitor to our own land. As to the silly giggling that often besets the Japanese when they hear, or particularly when they attempt to speak, our tongue, we should not forget that under their skins they are as timid and self-conscious as any civilized race on earth.

On the other hand it would not be difficult to make up quite a long list of the good qualities of the Japanese. Their unbounded patience might head it—though that has also the germs of vice in it. Rarely indeed is a Japanese visibly angry; to show wrath or impatience is the height of ill-breeding, as with several other Oriental peoples; which perhaps is why the Westerner who complains about anything, who even asks to have the slightest custom altered, is more or less secretly ranked as “queer” or of low social standing. Many a passing traveler forgets this, to his and his country’s disadvantage. They are a remarkably uncomplaining people; there is said to be no profanity in the language—which is enough in itself to make the national pace slow. Their quietness is as pleasing as is their almost complete lack of jewelry. They certainly have none of the indolence of so many Oriental races—unless the multitudes of monks and bonzes squatting in motionless contentment in temples and monasteries is evidence of it. They certainly are not expansive, be that a fault or a virtue; life on the whole is very solemn to the Japanese, and only once in a blue moon does the visitor meet one with a suggestion of the saving sense of humor. A joke goes a very long way without exploding, and except among those who have traveled abroad it is quite likely never to reach its goal. Not only is life itself no joking matter with them; I can recall no people, either in frock-coats or loin-cloths, that takes itself, its customs, and its institutions more seriously.

Even the children have little fun in them. Young or old they are a disciplined people, in great contrast to their near neighbors, the Chinese, to the Latin-American, who keeps constantly recurring to my mind in this connection, and to a large extent to us Americans. That this may be due as much to temperament as to centuries of training was often suggested. The striking difference of deportment between our, I believe, quite normal American small son and Japanese children of similar age was constant evidence on this point. While he showed endless curiosity at everything about him, and incessant inventiveness in satisfying it, or in amusing himself with whatever chanced to be available, the kimono-clad youngsters in trains or street sat hour after hour without speaking or playing, almost without moving, their minds apparently wholly dormant. A nurse-maid could have taken care of ten of them more easily than of one of him. Yet it is not, I feel sure, because they are unduly suppressed, but because they are born that way.

Though their code of morality deviates considerably from our own, we did not find the Japanese, for all the assertions one hears to that effect, particularly in the East, especially dishonest, or at least no more so than the average of most races. The time-worn statement so often quoted as evidence of their untrustworthiness, that even in their own banks they find it necessary to use Chinese cashiers, is mainly nonsense. I know of no American or European bank in the Far East that does not recruit its personnel chiefly among the Celestials, and I am sure it is not because of their extraordinary honesty. Japanese banks, on the other hand, even in China, choose by far the majority of their employees from among their own people. It is quite true that one soon learns not to intrust the development of important films to Japanese photographers, finding by sad experience that they are very likely to fade a few weeks later even if they seem well done at the time, and that any unusual successes among them may shortly afterward appear for sale on news-stands, or in the pages of Japanese periodicals. It is equally true that Japanese factory imitations of either their own once excellent products or of foreign wares are prone to prove great disappointments. But let us be charitable and believe that this is due to Western notions too hastily swallowed to be thus far properly digested, as well as to their great anxiety to gather quickly the large sums demanded by their gluttonous army and navy, under the perhaps mistaken impression that only their armed strength will save them from domination or complete absorption by Western nations.