A TRAVELLER IN THE FAR EAST.

Otago Witness, Issue 3100, 13 August 1913, Page 80

A TRAVELLER IN THE FAR EAST.

THE POWER AND PATHOS OF JAPAN. By the Rkv. William Hay. In the short period of about 45 years Japan has advanced by centuries, to become one of the “Great Powers” of the world. She has demonstrated tremendous power as a nation in attaining in so short a time the position she has reached as tho Queen Empire of the Orient. Io analyse and define tiie power of a nation is oii.cn a less difficult task than with regard to Japan, fur Japan is undoubtedly lacking in some of the qualities that have been regarded as making for national strength. ■And yet one can learn fairly well to la\ one’s finger, as it were, upon the main elements and factors of her power. It is well to recognise that important circumstances have greatly favoured Japan, and her progress lias been in some considerable measure due to those favourable circumstances. But if it had not been for the fact that she was prepared and equipped to take advantage of these circumstances they would probably haa-e proved unfavourable to her in a corresponding degree. Circumstance becomes favourable when we are fitted and ready to make it so, and rise to the occasion when it comes.

After the War of Restoration, when the country settled down once more to peaceful progress, and the great task or building up a modern united State became grasped by the most enlightened, as the one great task that Japan must give herself to with every bit of thought and nerve and strength to achieve, there were those who realised that the first need was the need of strong and trained and fitted leadership. They did not know the greatest Leader that ever trod this earth ; but they, like Him, realised the essential need of qualified leadership to make a cause triumphant. Those who went to America to learn the secret of her wonderful progress discovered that it was chiefly-—leadership. And this they sought, with a patriotic passion, to make the first secret of the power of their nation. They needed leadership in statesmanship, in national defence, in finance, in commerce, and in the development of the resources of I lie land, and among the mothers of the generations that were then unborn. And so the most promising spirits of young Japan were trained abroad and at home for that leadership that has ever since been such a successful factor in the power of modern Japan. PASSIONATE LOYALTY.

Another great factor in the modern power of Japan is tho passionate patriotic unity that has undoubtedly been the secret of her success in recent years in conflict with her formidable foes. This is very largely due to the training and discipline of centuries in the duty of loyalty, which was the keystone of a symmetrical arch of feudal virtues. Loyalty with the •Japanese has had no vagueness about it; it has been a very specific and personal thing. British patriotic loyalty is mainly impersonal, even though there is a common loyalty to the reigning Sovereign. The occupant of the throne, as in the case of the late beloved Victoria, has sometimes won great personal devotion by the qualities of life and character that always do win homage and love; but British patriotic loyalty its more than such devotion. especially in the oversea dominions, where the personal element lias far less influence, and our loyalty to the Throne is really a loyalty to the representative emblem of our Empire. With the Japanese it is intensely personal, not merely in relation to any present -occupant of the throne, but to every preceding occupant, and to every preceding patriot. ,A mover-

-;itv teacher of 20 years’ experience assures us’ that he has found this spirit of personal patriotic loyalty as strong amongst the young men preparing themselves for business life as amongst the cadets and officers of the Nasal Academy. The Shinto belief in “The Rule of the J)cad” is a tremendous constraining factor in this personal patriotic loyalty. When Admiral Togo, at the conclusion of the war with Russia, was returning to Tokio with his ships to be present at the great naval review, and to receive the ovations of the citizens and the thanks of Iris Sovereign, he landed first in the Peninsula of Ise, and there offered his thanks at the shrine which nil Japan reveres as the most holy place in all the country. In the Valley of Ise, flowing close to the Imperial '.shrines, is a small perennial stream called the Isn/.u. It never dries in the hottest summer, and is therefore taken as the symbol of the Imperial House which, issuing forth from the godo that are worshipped at the shrine of Ise, shall endure to the end of time. The late Kmperor wrote a poem on this stream : Go to the wild sea beach, and gathering there A handful of smooth pebbles, build therewith r i A mimic rockery, iho’ those few stones Should grow into a mountain, scarred and steep, And overgrown with moss, that sacred stream Shall never cease its soft perennial flow. At this shrine, then, Togo offered his thanksgiving to the gods who are considered to be the divine ancestors of the reigning Sovereign, and the success which crowned iris arms was regarded as beingdue, not only to the valour of the army and navy, but mainly to the invisible aid of the divine ancestors of the imperial House, to the long line of Sovereigns who ruled once as gods on the plains of Heaven, and who descernled upon Japan in the person of the first e/V*,hly Emperor, from whom all t-ho other Emperors are descended. On account of this belief the occupant of the throne ia often looked upon as the intermediary between the nation and the god a. Many Japanese

to-day hold this lightly, many have abandoned it, but a superstition dies hard, and this will, and even after its funeral will exert a powerful influence, especially if the life and character of the reigning Sovereign hire in themselves such as to command any personal devotion. That it still lives with tremendous hold is seen at the present time. While I am writing this, the shops in Tokio are closed, though it is a Thursday, and the people are praying in the streets for the life of the present Emperor to be spared. Dr Nitube, referring to Herbert Spencer's view that political obedience is accredited with only a transitional function, and that political subordination will give place to loyally to the dictates of conscience, says;—“Suppose his induction is realised —-will loyalty - and its consomitant instinct of reverence disappear for ever? We transfer our allegiance from one master to another without being unfaithful to either; from being subjects of a ruler that wields the temporal sceptre, we become servants of the monarch who sits enthroned in the penetralia of our heart." The great majority of Japanese believe that they are perpetually surrounded and permeated with the myriad life of the infinite past. Hovering unseen, too, in the glow of the shrine lamp, the stirring of whoso flame is but the motion of them, those who once were present in the flesh, guard the home and watch over the domestic welfare. Disloyalty to them is disloyalty to the gods, for they, having passed into the unseen, have become gods in the sense of having acquired superhuman power. 'I hey are the givers of life and health, and all that the living achieve is through their blessing and their aid. This belief enters into everything the nation does, and hut for it many a great deed would never he done. If, while in the flesh, a Japanese fails, he can succeed by joining the ranks of the glads. Even, a person of no importance —the humblest one in the rank and file, may through death come into possession of superhuman power, and become capable of conferring benefit or inflicting injury by supernatural means. The Japanese soldier, in consequence, will never surrender in the face of apparent defeat; to do so would be throwing away his greatest chance of victory; he will passionately offer himself in the name of Ids Emperor, that, as a god. lie may not only be the victorious avenger of his country, but the object of his people’s unceasing worship and veneration. Unwavering confidence in this wonderful possibility inspires the warror of Dai Nippon with a bravery and a patrotism unsurpassed in the annals of warfare. Those who fall in battle are not “ losses,” they are really gains, because they have gone to join forces with the myriads of kindred warriors, “ the spirits of the power of the air.” Any nation that comes into conflict with Japan has to reckon with that mighty faith —and faith is a tremendous power! Add to this the indomitable resoluteness that 1 referred to in a previous article—a refusal to accept failure — an ambition and belief is almost the impossible, which are all inspired by such a faith, and one realises something of the unity and sweep and momentum that are behind the will and activity and passion of such a nation. There are modifying influences at work, which I must refer to in a later contribution ; but what I have stated here is a fact that applies very generally and very definitely. JAPAN’S POWER. In thinking of Japan as a fighting Power there are two other important factors to consider—first, that service in the forces is compulsory upon every son of Japan, except under certain special circumstances; and, secondly, that there is plenty of young life in Japan to draw from. There arc so many youths and young men about everywhere to-day that one can hardly realise that, in the war with Russia, sO many were sacrificed that the last recruits were merely boys. But, then, wherever one goes there is a baby on almost every other woman’s hack. There is a great prospective army to-day on the backs of the women of Japan. Fortunately Japanese statesmen and leaders in various departments of social life are realising that Japan can be a power for peace as well as a power for war, a power tliat can make for the highest advancement of the Orient, and for an amicable and honourable solution of the problems of the Pacific, and for the adjustment of the conflicting interests of East and West. She has acquired fame for the use of her swvml, may she acquire the nobler fame of wielding the jewel-lit sceptre of peace. She has shown the world how heroically .she can sacrifice for the victories of war, may she demonstrate, as heroically, that she can sacrifice for a, noble and honourable harmony I THE PATHOS OF JAPAN. Pathos ! Yes! And a great deal of it. I have referred to the poetry and power of Japan, and the poetry that gets down tiie deepest into human memory and weaves itself most surely with the mystic fibre of human hearts is that which breathes the deepest pathos; and the power which is most mighty is the power that has been built up amidst the truest pathos of human life. No one with any soul can he long in a land with history and throbbing life without discovering and realising its pathos. Poetry, power, and pathos, all combined, are suggested in the following words that represent the voices from the highest plains of the unseen “\Yo fought,” they say, “wo fought and died, By cold Liaotung’s frozen tide, On hot Liaotung’s burning plain. Some on land, some on the main, Some in tho trench kneo-deop in blood, Where Russians at bay, with their muskets stood, Wo fought, wo fell, we would not retire; And at eve the lurid funeral pyre, Blazing gloomily through tho night, Effaced the traces of each day’s fight,” One feels the pathos of those words in the associations that gather about myriads of shrines to-day that represent living

offerings made by myriads of mothers and myriads of homes; but a pathos that hag the power to kindle in the hearts of tile young the same patriotic passion that distinguished those whose memories cluster about their shrines. .There is the beautiful pathos of the love that is as old as humanity, and as heroic as ever in its

sacrifice and suffering, and one longs to find this in its highest and noblest form the great theme of Japanese romantic literature and drama.

There is the splendid pathos of noble service of Christian people from a homeland far away that is often in their dreams, that through this service they may open the gates of a greater life to those they love to serve. There is the pathos of the consciousness that race and colour form a bar to many of the privileges to bo enjoyed in the comity of nations, and this is present, with Japan in a very special sense and degree just now. One wishes it wasn’t there; but there is a pathos that one wishes 10.0C0 times more wasn’t there INDUSTRIAL AND -UulV. V.L PATHOS.

When you see girls and young women, yes, and old ones too, working from morn till night, with great heavy implements that practically take the place of tho horse and the plough, when you see them working like navvies and carrying burdens like beasts you wish with all your heart that that sad pathos wasn’t there.

But there is another pathos vastly more sad —a pathos that arises from tragedy in the moral life of Japan. I have already said so much that is favourable that even Japan will bear with me now; nay, more, there are many that share one’s grief. The saddest pathos of it is that the Government of the 'Country receives a re-

venue from it—-a tax upon an awful farreaching, wide-spreading sacrifice of virtue, and the shame of womanhood, and the moral murder of girlhood, to swell the contents of the National Treasury. One cannot write a tithe of what one knows and feels; hut the administration and taxing of the worst possible form of slavetrade, and the laxness of the national conscience ii|K)ii the whole matter, making it possible to exalt vice into a virtue, constitutes the most tragic pathos that one can ever discover in the life of any nation.

People in the Western World have made the “geisha” a popular idea, and even a magic wand. No one with any high ideals would do so if they knew what “geisha” is in Japan. Ido not mean that it represents absolutely what is had. There ara some places where a mild form of “geisha” is too high-class and public to be immoral ; hut the system and institution are bad, and really the greatest of all moral dangers, for the end thereof is in most cases—the death of virtue.

One needs to lx- very careful in speaking of “tea houses.” There are houses that are really tea houses, but generally speaking the “tea” is wine, or other strong drink, and the “tea house” is a drinking saloon where the geisha girls go to entertain, and so often drift into other forms of social life that becomo their downfall. 'Hie tragically sad pathos of it! The national conscience needs quickening, until that also becomes a power that shall bring something still more pure and beautiful into the national poetry of Japan. Such is the earnest desire ofr many, who, like the writer of this, love Japan and its people for many reasons, and would fain see it a nation strong and triumphant in all that makes for truest greatness, and, in the highest sense, regal in modern power.