Kokoro | Page 2

did the officer then speak.
He spoke low, but so clearly that I could catch every syllable:--
"Little one, this is the man who killed your father four years ago. You
had not yet been born; you were in your mother's womb. That you have
no father to love you now is the doing of this man. Look at him--[here
the officer, putting a hand to the prisoner's chin, sternly forced him to
lift his eyes]--look well at him, little boy! Do not be afraid. It is painful;
but it is your duty. Look at him!"
Over the mother's shoulder the boy gazed with eyes widely open, as in
fear; then he began to sob; then tears came; but steadily and obediently
he still looked--looked--looked--straight into the cringing face.
The crowd seemed to have stopped breathing.
I saw the prisoner's features distort; I saw him suddenly dash himself
down upon his knees despite his fetters, and beat his face into the dust,
crying out the while in a passion of hoarse remorse that made one's
heart shake:--

"Pardon! pardon! pardon me, little one! That I did--not for hate was it
done, but in mad fear only, in my desire to escape. Very, very wicked
have I been; great unspeakable wrong have I done you! But now for my
sin I go to die. I wish to die; I am glad to die! Therefore, O little one, be
pitiful!--forgive me!"
The child still cried silently. The officer raised the shaking criminal; the
dumb crowd parted left and right to let them by. Then, quite suddenly,
the whole multitude began to sob. And as the bronzed guardian passed,
I saw what I had never seen before, --what few men ever see,--what I
shall probably never see again, --the tears of a Japanese policeman.
The crowd ebbed, and left me musing on the strange morality of the
spectacle. Here was justice unswerving yet compassionate,-- forcing
knowledge of a crime by the pathetic witness of its simplest result.
Here was desperate remorse, praying only for pardon before death. And
here was a populace--perhaps the most dangerous in the Empire when
angered--comprehending all, touched by all, satisfied with the
contrition and the shame, and filled, not with wrath, but only with the
great sorrow of the sin,--through simple deep experience of the
difficulties of life and the weaknesses of human nature.
But the most significant, because the most Oriental, fact of the episode
was that the appeal to remorse had been made through the criminal's
sense of fatherhood,--that potential love of children which is so large a
part of the soul of every Japanese.
There is a story that the most famous of all Japanese robbers, Ishikawa
Goemon, once by night entering a house to kill and steal, was charmed
by the smile of a baby which reached out hands to him, and that he
remained playing with the little creature until all chance of carrying out
his purpose was lost.
It is not hard to believe this story. Every year the police records tell of
compassion shown to children by professional criminals. Some months
ago a terrible murder case was reported in the local papers,--the
slaughter of a household by robbers. Seven persons had been literally
hewn to pieces while asleep; but the police discovered a little boy quite

unharmed, crying alone in a pool of blood; and they found evidence
unmistakable that the men who slew must have taken great care not to
hurt the child.

II
THE GENIUS OF JAPANESE CIVILIZATION
I
Without losing a single ship or a single battle, Japan has broken down
the power of China, made a new Korea, enlarged her own territory, and
changed the whole political face of the East. Astonishing as this has
seemed politically, it is much more astonishing psychologically; for it
represents the result of a vast play of capacities with which the race had
never been credited abroad,--capacities of a very high order. The
psychologist knows that the so-called "adoption of Western
civilization" within a time of thirty years cannot mean the addition to
the Japanese brain of any organs or powers previously absent from it.
He knows that it cannot mean any sudden change in the mental or
moral character of the race. Such changes are not made in a generation.
Transmitted civilization works much more slowly, requiring even
hundreds of years to produce certain permanent psychological results.
It is in this light that Japan appears the most extraordinary country in
the world; and the most wonderful thing in the whole episode of her
"Occidentalization" is that the race brain could bear so heavy a shock.
Nevertheless, though the fact be unique in human history, what does it
really mean? Nothing more than rearrangement of a part of the
pre-existing machinery of