Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation | Page 3

to
open or close a lock, in what we are accustomed to think the wrong
direction. Mr. Percival Lowell has truthfully observed that the Japanese
speak backwards, read backwards, write backwards,--and that this is
"only the abc of their contrariety." For the habit of writing backwards
there are obvious evolutional reasons; and the requirements of Japanese
calligraphy sufficiently explain why the artist pushes his brush or
pencil instead of pulling it. But why, instead of putting the thread
through the eye of the needle, should the Japanese maiden slip the eye
of the needle over the point of the thread? Perhaps the most remarkable,
out of a hundred possible examples of antipodal action, is furnished by
the Japanese art of fencing. The [8] swordsman, delivering his blow
with both hands, does not pull the blade towards him in the moment of
striking, but pushes it from him. He uses it, indeed, as other Asiatics do,
not on the principle of the wedge, but of the saw; yet there is a pushing
motion where we should expect a pulling motion in the stroke .... These
and other forms of unfamiliar action are strange enough to suggest the

notion of a humanity even physically as little related to us as might be
the population of another planet,--the notion of some anatomical
unlikeness. No such unlikeness, however, appears to exist; and all this
oppositeness probably implies, not so much the outcome of a human
experience entirely independent of Aryan experience, as the outcome of
an experience evolutionally younger than our own.
Yet that experience has been one of no mean order. Its manifestations
do not merely startle: they also delight. The delicate perfection of
workmanship, the light strength and grace of objects, the power
manifest to obtain the best results with the least material, the achieving
of mechanical ends by the simplest possible means, the comprehension
of irregularity as aesthetic value, the shapeliness and perfect taste of
everything, the sense displayed of harmony in tints or colours,--all this
must convince you at once that our Occident has much to learn from
this remote civilization, not only in matters of art and taste, but in
matters likewise of [9] economy and utility. It is no barbarian fancy
that appeals to you in those amazing porcelains, those astonishing
embroideries, those wonders of lacquer and ivory and bronze, which
educate imagination in unfamiliar ways. No: these are the products of a
civilization which became, within its own limits, so exquisite that none
but an artist is capable of judging its manufactures,--a civilization that
can be termed imperfect only by those who would also term imperfect
the Greek civilization of three thousand years ago.
But the underlying strangeness of this world,--the psychological
strangeness,--is much more startling than the visible and superficial.
You begin to suspect the range of it after having discovered that no
adult Occidental can perfectly master the language. East and West the
fundamental parts of human nature--the emotional bases of it--are much
the same: the mental difference between a Japanese and a European
child is mainly potential. But with growth the difference rapidly
develops and widens, till it becomes, in adult life, inexpressible. The
whole of the Japanese mental superstructure evolves into forms having
nothing in common with Western psychological development: the
expression of thought becomes regulated, and the expression of
emotion inhibited in ways that bewilder and astound. The ideas of this

people are not our [10] ideas; their sentiments are not our sentiments
their ethical life represents for us regions of thought and emotion yet
unexplored, or perhaps long forgotten. Any one of their ordinary
phrases, translated into Western speech, makes hopeless nonsense; and
the literal rendering into Japanese of the simplest English sentence
would scarcely be comprehended by any Japanese who had never
studied a European tongue. Could you learn all the words in a Japanese
dictionary, your acquisition would not help you in the least to make
yourself understood in speaking, unless you had learned also to think
like a Japanese,--that is to say, to think backwards, to think
upside-down and inside-out, to think in directions totally foreign to
Aryan habit. Experience in the acquisition of European languages can
help you to learn Japanese about as much as it could help you to
acquire the language spoken by the inhabitants of Mars. To be able to
use the Japanese tongue as a Japanese uses it, one would need to be
born again, and to have one's mind completely reconstructed, from the
foundation upwards. It is possible that a person of European parentage,
born in Japan, and accustomed from infancy to use the vernacular,
might retain in after-life that instinctive knowledge which could alone
enable him to adapt his mental relations to the relations of any Japanese
environment. There is actually an Englishman