JAPANESE ACTION

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 64, Issue 4533, 6 February 1942, Page 6

JAPANESE ACTION

GOVERNED BY EXPEDIENCY “The Japanese are materialists in a sense so far-reaching that it is to be doubted whether a European is capable of seizing its full implications without great mental effort,, for, despite Carlyle’s snub to the rash lady who told him that she accepted the universe, the European does not in fact begin to accept it: the Japanese swallows it whole without any reservations whatsoever. The physical body is thus of all-transcending importance, which is extended to the race to which it happens to belong. To one, therefore, of Japanese flesh and blood, the Japanese race is the supreme reality, and the head of that race the highest, the Supreme Being. The physical aspect of life dominates —it is in fact the sole aspect of life recognised—and its regulation is the sole concern. From such a viewpoint expediency in the narrowest and most material sense governs all actions and is, in fact the one criterion of Right and Wrong, as far as the actions of and relations between the individuals composing the race are concerned. Where, however, the corporate actions of the race itself are in question, the possibility of Wrong is at once excluded; the race being the supreme entity, no criterion can be conceived of by a member of it by which it could be judged. Thus from the point of view of a Japanese what the aggregate of Japanese does cannot be anything but Right.”—Alvin Wilson in the “Spectator.”