Kokoro | Page 3

thought. Even that, for thousands of brave
young minds, was death. The adoption of Western civilization was not
nearly such an easy matter as un-thinking persons imagined. And it is
quite evident that the mental readjustments, effected at a cost which
remains to be told, have given good results only along directions in
which the race had always shown capacities of special kinds. Thus, the
appliances of Western industrial invention have worked admirably in

Japanese hands,--have produced excellent results in those crafts at
which the nation had been skillful, in other and quainter ways, for ages.
There has been no transformation,
--nothing more than the turning of old abilities into new and larger
channels. The scientific professions tell the same story. For certain
forms of science, such as medicine, surgery (there are no better
surgeons in the world than the Japanese), chemistry, microscopy, the
Japanese genius is naturally adapted; and in all these it has done work
already heard of round the world. In war and statecraft it has shown
wonderful power; but throughout their history the Japanese have been
characterized by great military and political capacity. Nothing
remarkable has been done, however, in directions foreign to the
national genius. In the study, for example, of Western music, Western
art, Western literature, time would seem to have been simply wasted(1).
These things make appeal extraordinary to emotional life with us; they
make no such appeal to Japanese emotional life. Every serious thinker
knows that emotional transformation of the individual through
education is impossible. To imagine that the emotional character of an
Oriental race could be transformed in the short space of thirty years, by
the contact of Occidental ideas, is absurd. Emotional life, which is
older than intellectual life, and deeper, can no more be altered suddenly
by a change of milieu than the surface of a mirror can be changed by
passing reflections. All that Japan has been able to do so miraculously
well has been done without any self-transformation; and those who
imagine her emotionally closer to us to-day than she may have been
thirty years ago ignore facts of science which admit of no argument.
Sympathy is limited by comprehension. We may sympathize to the
same degree that we understand. One may imagine that he sympathizes
with a Japanese or a Chinese; but the sympathy can never be real to
more than a small extent outside of the simplest phases of common
emotional life,--those phases in which child and man are at one. The
more complex feelings of the Oriental have been composed by
combinations of experiences, ancestral and individual, which have had
no really precise correspondence in Western life, and which we can
therefore not fully know. For converse reasons, the. Japanese cannot,

even though they would, give Europeans their best sympathy.
But while it remains impossible for the man of the West to discern the
true color of Japanese life, either intellectual or emotional (since the
one is woven into the other), it is equally impossible for him to escape
the conviction that, compared with his own, it is very small. It is dainty;
it holds delicate potentialities of rarest interest and value; but it is
otherwise so small that Western life, by contrast with it, seems almost
supernatural. For we must judge visible and measurable manifestations.
So judging, what a contrast between the emotional and intellectual
worlds of West and East! Far less striking that between the frail
wooden streets of the Japanese capital and the tremendous solidity of a
thoroughfare in Paris or London. When one compares the utterances
which West and East have given to their dreams, their aspirations, their
sensations,--a Gothic cathedral with a Shinto temple, an opera by Verdi
or a trilogy by Wagner with a performance of geisha, a European epic
with a Japanese poem,--how incalculable the difference in emotional
volume, in imaginative power, in artistic synthesis! True, our music is
an essentially modern art; but in looking back through all our past the
difference in creative force is scarcely less marked,--not surely in the
period of Roman magnificence, of marble amphitheatres and of
aqueducts spanning provinces, nor in the Greek period of the divine in
sculpture and of the supreme in literature.
And this leads to the subject of another wonderful fact in the sudden
development of Japanese power. Where are the outward material signs
of that immense new force she has been showing both in productivity
and in war? Nowhere! That which we miss in her emotional and
intellectual life is missing also from her industrial and commercial
life,--largeness! The land remains what it was before; its face has
scarcely been modified by all the changes of Meiji. The miniature
railways and telegraph poles, the bridges and tunnels, might almost
escape notice in the ancient green of the landscapes.