JAPANESE CHARACTERISTICS.

Otago Witness, Issue 2240, 4 February 1897, Page 50

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, lull of vindictiveness, indifferent to cruelty, given to cheating in ordinary affairs, careless of truth, and, beyond all measure salacious ; while acoording to another they are the gentlest of mankind, full of pity and forgiveness, strictly honourable in all their transactions, and, though with differeat ideas of purity from Europeans, rather exceptionally chaste. A correspondent who has resided among them for more than 20 years in a capacity which gives him unusual advantages for observing their inner life, remonstrates with us against a harsh judgment passed in our columns by a reviewer, and sends us a quantity of pieces justificative* wbiob will, he believes, convince as that the Japanese are among the finest people in the world. We have read them all, but that is not exactly the conclusion to whioh they lead us. We should lay, upon the evidence which our correspondent supplies, that the most striking quality of the Japanese is precocity, ihat the keenness of tbeir perceptions is far In advance of the soundness of their judgments, that their mind 6, or rather the minds of tbek leading classes, are always on the rash, that they receive ideas and lay aside ideas much as acute youngsters do, «nd 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 faot, 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 wbicb is Japanese " levity." They love change for the Isake of change, take up ideas because tbey are startling to their seniors or to their Government or to themselves, 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 tbeir country, the exhilaration of their climate.

and a certain joyonßness whioh must be in their blood, they are open to all teachings, which, however, go about lie deep. After yielding for centuries to Chinese influences, they were suddenly fascinated by the West, and accepted all its teaohings, exoept those wbiob radically ohange men. They devise a constitution which does not wore, 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 constricting uniforms before the majority have given up the habit of living in a loincloth. 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 best. 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 improve the melody and the depth of the national music. They, in faot, play with constitutions, amuse themselves with daring foreign policies, dieport themselves among creeds, and will probably yet encounter some social or external catastrophe wbicb may destroy tbeir energies, or, wbicb is quite as likely, may turn them from schoolboys into men. Their rush on China was exactly like wbat 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 excessive vanity, taking the form of an exaggerated amour propre. The Japa-

neie would kill himself rath«r than bear an insult, which to him, ai to a certain class of Frenchmen, seems to maks life no longer worth living. The dignity of his ego mast be recognised, or he changes instantly, without reflection or pause, from a man at once genial and gentle into one of the most passionate and vindictive of mankind. Till very recently the harakiii, or suicide by disembowelling, wai part of the code of honour, and the vendetta was pursued with Corsican patience and incapacity of forgetting. He hates China not for injuries done, but first of all because the Ohinaman thinks China great and Japan small, and says so habitually through every Pekinese etiquette. When this vanity stira 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 Fort Arthur, to a rush of the wild Asiatic fury, wbioh may yet one day— if he is, for example, too much overcrowded by Russia — hurl him upon the foreigner, as it has often done upon individual foreigners, in a bum 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 apothegms about mercy while he is torturing a prisoner, and about virtue while he is taking a bribe. The Japanese calls himself, and thicks himself, religious, 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 conduot on rules which be thinks expedient, and* says, " What a religious being am I to have thought of anything so obviously calculated to enable me to live in happiness and peace ! "—Spectator.