Chapter XVII

Persons in a position to know something about the subject tell us that Japanese husbands are “almost all” unfaithful. I take it that they refer to those who can afford to be; certainly the great mass of haulers and carriers, of mud-wading rice-growers, would scarcely have the time or the means to indulge in extramarital relations. The facts seem to be that rather a large number of men of means maintain two and even three households, usually in at least a pretense of ignorance of each other; and that the almost government-owned _yoshiwaras_ in every city of size are prosperous, while questionable hotels abound from end to end of the empire. Part-Japanese women we met asserted that they would under no circumstances marry Japanese men, not even to gain high rank, alleging that the average native husband is not only maritally untrustworthy but treats his wife brutally—whatever that may mean. As some of these ladies had already stuck it out bravely to the beginning of middle age, we are forced to give their testimony due weight. Yet there is certainly little active outward evidence of all this, but the appearance of model propriety everywhere—except in one notorious respect.

Even the cynical traveler comes to the conclusion that, for all the striking differences between their ways and our ways, the Japanese are really civilized—until he sees a man in faultless European attire, carrying a portfolio that suggests he may be a cabinet minister, calmly take off everything except his scanty underwear and change to a kimono in a first-class car occupied by ladies. Among men somewhat lower in the social scale, yet far enough above the brute to know better, personal exposure often reaches the incredible. It may be pleasant in summer to wander across town or the length of an empire in bath-robe and slippers, but there are times and places that the unconcealed human form is out of place. I am no prude, and I realize that in some matters we English-speaking people are secretive to the point of silliness; but certainly in this respect the Japanese are as much at fault in the other direction.

Their unseemly exposure or behavior is, to my mind, another form of discourtesy to woman, another evidence of her unimportance in the Japanese scheme of things. For, however often they may assure us that we misjudge because we do not understand, we of the West—I think I may safely make the statement general—do not admire the Japanese conception of the position of women. While one of that sex is to a large extent the power behind the throne of a mad mikado, and there is considerable copying, at least outwardly, of Western manners among the profusion of nobility, the wealthy, and the traveled, to the overwhelming mass of the nation a wife seems still to be merely a married servant. I shall not soon forget the half-horrified, even though subtle, expression of astonishment of our Tokyo host because my wife had not stayed up to tuck me into bed when I returned from a theater toward midnight. I have no choice but to judge from his manner that Japanese wives always do. In Japan a woman is trained never to sit down until all the men present have done so; and with a Westerner suddenly introduced into a Japanese household the variance of custom in this respect is likely to result in a standing-match. This relative position is maintained all down the line; the men are always first. Again it may be only a difference in point of view; even the Japanese woman would consider it highly immodest to precede her husband or a male relative. Nor am I sure where the greatest wisdom prevails,—in Japan, where they spoil the men, or in the United States, where we do our best to spoil the women. Adversity, however, is said to be beneficial to the character, and Japanese women are almost superhuman in maintaining a cheerful demeanor and a smiling countenance under any and all circumstances.

The Japanese have so often been called “Oriental Prussians” or “Germans of the Orient” that we found it amusing to trace evidences of similarity between the two races. These are, to tell the truth, rather numerous. Both countries have—unless one of them has lost it since the World War—a docile, hard-working population accustomed to little individual thinking in political matters, ruled by a powerful oligarchy of overlords with a very warlike past and traditions. Like the Germans, the Japanese might use the word “_kriegen_” interchangeably as “to obtain” or “to make war”; both fought their way to the top—or to wherever they are to-day. In both countries the military man considers himself, and strives, not infrequently by rudeness, to make others consider him, the lord of creation. Both are forced to resort to emigration or expansion to ease the over-pressure of a prolific population and of excess energy within their borders. Both are a disciplined people; in both countries what seem to us questionable methods are used to twist the gullible mass mind into the shape which best suits the ruling class; both are likewise given to another form of propaganda in the hope of increasing their national stock abroad; both indulge in what we might frankly call spying, though they may think it merely gathering useful information about their neighbors. Every Japanese, like every German, is potentially a spy—or shall we merely say an agent?—of his government wherever he may be; for you may be sure that any slightest item of information of interest to that government which he may run across will be duly communicated to it. With both nations patriotism seems to be above mere personal morals; in the ancient Japanese language “government” and “worship” were the same word.

One might continue picking up likenesses, on minor as well as on important matters. As in Germany, a man or a woman stands at military attention holding a flag at a prescribed angle whenever a train passes a grade-crossing. The same unhilarious conscript soldiers, and haughty officers who do not often deign to return their exaggerated salutes, their bullet heads emphasized by close-cropped hair, overrun both countries. Students in uniform caps, a great prevalence of thick eye-glasses that are reminders of the similar intricacy of their printed pages—if one took time to hunt out all the resemblances the list would be endless.

Some of the Germanness of Japan, such as her army and her medicine, is frankly copied; no small amount of it is unconscious yet perfectly natural, in view of the considerable similarity in their histories and their temperament. For, remember, Japan has always been militant, has always been fighting, if only between her own clans, ever since she took the islands that now constitute the empire from the Yemishi, or Ainus, or whoever held them first. Likewise there has never been a let-up in learning, nor a lack of bravery and similar virtues. We are so accustomed to speak of the “sudden rise” of Japan that we are prone to think of the Japanese as did the ignorant Portuguese and Spanish _conquistadores_ who “discovered” them, as did the bigoted churchmen who followed those forceful adventurers,—as heathen “gentiles” much like the Indians of America. Indeed, they probably looked upon these newfound islands as quite like newly discovered America, or the neighboring Philippines, as filled with savages whom it was not only their privilege but their duty to bespoil to the best of their ability, and incidentally to reduce to the “true faith.” Whereas Japan had been a civilized land centuries before the Portuguese and the Spanish emerged from barbarism—and the mere fact that, disgusted with the “true faith” brought by these rapacious and narrow-minded wanderers, they drove them out and shut themselves up within their own boundaries for more than two hundred years is no reason to have supposed that they could not adopt modern civilization, at least in its more graspable aspects, quickly, especially as they had long been accustomed to imitate, to take whatever seemed good to them, from China or Korea or whatever other neighbor had something to offer. No wonder the Japanese policeman detailed to attend a Fourth of July celebration in Japanese territory, when he received the answer to his query as to how long ago this independence that was being celebrated had been won, greeted it with the Nipponese form of “Good Lord! Is that all?”

But the mere fact that they are so capable of imitation, so able to profit by the experience of others, is curbing their militant spirit, if I have not misread the signs. They see the point of recent events; even their stiff-necked and short-sighted military oligarchy seems to be coming to realize that they are half a century too late to enlarge their place in the sun by mere force of arms, that other no less strenuous, if less bloodthirsty, methods have come, perhaps permanently, to the fore. Thus though one still now and then sees, or at least feels, the old _samurai_ spirit among the militarists of Japan, the wish to take the short cut by force, the frankness of primitive man peering out from beneath their pride and their superimposed reticence and their rather stupid politenesses, one has the feeling that the nation perhaps is getting over it, though it may still have a long way to go. Imitation is double-edged, however, and let the world turn its back on what it recently professed to believe is a bygone form of rivalry and there is but little doubt that the Japanese will be able to execute an about-face quite as quickly as any other nation. That the old tendency to think first of a resort to arms whenever national desires are crossed, and only later to consider wiser counsels, was recently shown in the quickly wide-spread demand for war with the United States over the Supreme Court decision on the California land laws and congressional insistence on curbing the admission of Japanese immigrants.

The popular feeling of Japan toward our own people seems constantly to swing like a pendulum. As I write, there is considerable anti-American agitation; a bare year ago there were marked professions of friendship; the year before that we were in their black books because of some other now forgotten incident; the American traveler in Japan can no more gauge the feeling toward him on any given day than he can guess the rate of exchange between his money and that of Europe. Nor will it often matter much; at worst the superficial Japanese courtesy may wear thin, their gift for red-tape gymnastics reach its highest rather than its lowest ebb. Certainly he will be in no more physical danger than at home, and his money will always be welcome to the sourest face he meets. When I first journeyed through Japan, a score of years ago, even the rickshaw-men were offensively cocky over the defeat of the Russians, which they considered proof of their superiority over all the white race. To-day the nation seems to take a somewhat more modest view of its achievements, though by no means unaware of its progress and, at bottom, probably just as convinced of its place in the vanguard of mankind, if something less given to publicly announcing it.

For a time at least there was a strong run of sentiment in our favor, on account of the international conference on disarmament, the results of which seem to have been on the whole pleasing to every one except the militarists—who, it must be remembered, are often the most vocal. The fact that there has as yet been no reduction in the heavy burden of taxation under which the nation has long staggered has not made it possible for the man on the street to hope that there soon will be, and the belief is wide-spread, even if not freely expressed to strangers, that what might almost have amounted to national bankruptcy has been averted by the Washington agreement. Not that the man on the street gives much thought to the actions of his Government, by our standards, or considers his personal opinion on national affairs, if he has one, of any importance. It is said that there is considerable liberalism and even radicalism under the surface of the placid, mikado-worshiping life of the Japanese; but in so far as any frequent visible evidence of it is concerned, all Japan suggests some of the hotels and public gathering-places of South America, which bear large placards to the effect that “The discussion of politics is strictly forbidden.” Some of the editors of native newspapers are occasionally outspoken, notably in the “Osaka Mainichi,” which at times has the aspect of a really free press; but these are concerned rather with individual men and very general issues than openly with the government; and it is significant that the slightest hint of levity toward the mikado or anything pertaining to him is frowned upon by all classes.

Undue attention to any subject is prone to enlarge it beyond its natural proportions. As a nation we have come, with our national tendency for exaggeration, to think of the Japanese either as supermen or devils—depending largely upon the part of the country from which we hail. They are neither, but merely human beings, perhaps a bit superior to the average, take the world as a whole; of moderate intelligence, high diligence, strong imitative ability or an unusual capacity to realize that the experience of others may be worth profiting by; of a national homogeneity and loyalty equal to that of a well-knit family; prone, like the rest of us, to be spoiled by too much power over those they consider, perhaps rightly, their inferiors; with a tradition of getting things, nationally, by force; extremely distrustful of the intentions of others; and with the very human trait of trying to put their best foot forward, even to the extent of an occasional falsehood. Not easily gauging the psychology of other races, at least of the West, they are somewhat clumsy with the propaganda they carry on in their own favor, such as newspapers of their own in English in the Far East, under the sincere belief that they are compelled to combat by some such means the hostility of their neighbors and the jealousy of trade rivalries. Like some other over-sensitive persons and peoples, they want only good said about them, as if the world might thereby be made to believe that they are terrestial angels.

We may not like the Japanese; the great majority of Westerners in the Far East are vociferous in proclaiming that they do not, and certainly they have some unlikable qualities. But what would we do in their shoes? Sixty million of them are crowded into a space equal to one of our Western States, with the sight constantly before them of Occidental aggression taking virtual possession, even if only in the name of “protectorate” or “sphere of influence,” of almost all the Orient, and the realization that they are virtually the only strictly self-governing nonwhite race on the globe—it is small wonder if they seem over-wary. Most Americans who are conscious of any opinion at all on the subject profess to have more liking for the Chinese or the Koreans than for the Japanese—and I rather think I am one of them. But with our national trait for rooting for the under dog are we not sometimes given to squandering our sympathies on weak and whining people and of distrusting strong, self-reliant races? Perhaps the Japanese are worse than I judge them to be after a brief sojourn among them; but few civilizations have equaled them in unity and longevity, in the sense of race loyalty, and a willingness to sacrifice themselves on the altar of good citizenship—for all the recent ugly stories of “graft” worthy of anywhere in the West; and, whatever else they may be, we must give them credit for being to-day the only self-contained and constructive civilization in almost half a world of weakness and semi-anarchy.