Kokoro | Page 4

In all the cities,
with the exception of the open ports and their little foreign settlements,
there exists hardly a street vista suggesting the teaching of Western
ideas. You might journey two hundred miles through the interior of the
country, looking in vain for large manifestations of the new civilization.

In no place do you find commerce exhibiting its ambition in gigantic
warehouses, or industry expanding its machinery under acres of roofing.
A Japanese city is still, as it was ten centuries ago, little more than a
wilderness of wooden sheds,--picturesque, indeed, as paper lanterns are,
but scarcely less frail. And there is no great stir and noise
anywhere,--no heavy traffic, no booming and rumbling, no furious
haste. In Tokyo itself you may enjoy, if you wish, the peace of a
country village. This want of visible or audible signs of the new-found
force which is now menacing the markets of the West and changing the
maps of the far East gives one a queer, I might even say a weird feeling.
It is almost the sensation received when, after climbing through miles
of silence to reach some Shinto shrine, you find voidness only and
solitude,--an elfish, empty little wooden structure, mouldering in
shadows a thousand years old. The strength of Japan, like the strength
of her ancient faith, needs little material display: both exist where the
deepest real power of any great people exists,--in the Race Ghost.
(1) In one limited sense, Western art has influenced Japanese. literature
and drama; but the character of the influence proves the racial
difference to which I refer. European plays have been reshaped for the
Japanese stage, and European novels rewritten for Japanese readers.
But a literal version is rarely attempted; for the original incidents,
thoughts, and emotions would be unintelligible to the average reader or
playgoer. Plots are adopted; sentiments and incidents are totally
transformed. "The New Magdalen" becomes a Japanese girl who
married an Eta. Victor Hugo's Les Miserables becomes a tale of the
Japanese civil war; and Enjolras a Japanese student. There have been a
few rare exceptions, including the marked success of a literal
translation of the Sorrows of Werther.

II
As I muse, the remembrance of a great city comes back to me,--a city
walled up to the sky and roaring like the sea. The memory of that roar
returns first; then the vision defines: a chasm, which is a street, between
mountains, which are houses. I am tired, because I have walked many

miles between those precipices of masonry, and have trodden no
earth,--only slabs of rock,--and have heard nothing but thunder of
tumult. Deep below those huge pavements I know there is a cavernous
world tremendous: systems underlying systems of ways contrived for
water and steam and fire. On either hand tower facades pierced by
scores of tiers of windows,--cliffs of architecture shutting out the sun.
Above, the pale blue streak of sky is cut by a maze of spidery lines,--an
infinite cobweb of electric wires. In that block on the right there dwell
nine thousand souls; the tenants of the edifice facing it pay the annual
rent of a million dollars. Seven millions scarcely covered the cost of
those bulks overshadowing the square beyond,--and there are miles of
such. Stairways of steel and cement, of brass and stone, with costliest
balustrades, ascend through the decades and double-decades of stories;
but no foot treads them. By water-power, by steam, by electricity, men
go up and down; the heights are too dizzy, the distances too great, for
the use of the limbs. My friend who pays rent of five thousand dollars
for his rooms in the fourteenth story of a monstrosity not far off has
never trodden his stairway. I am walking for curiosity alone; with a
serious purpose I should not walk: the spaces are too broad, the time is
too precious, for such slow exertion,--men travel from district to district,
from house to office, by steam. Heights are too great for the voice to
traverse; orders are given and obeyed by machinery. By electricity
far-away doors are opened; with one touch a hundred rooms are lighted
or heated.
And all this enormity is hard, grim, dumb; it is the enormity of
mathematical power applied to utilitarian ends of solidity and durability.
These leagues of palaces, of warehouses, of business structures, of
buildings describable and indescribable, are not beautiful, but sinister.
One feels depressed by the mere sensation of the enormous life which
created them, life without sympathy; of their prodigious manifestation
of power, power with-out pity. They are the architectural utterance of
the new industrial age. And there is no halt in the thunder of wheels, in
the storming of hoofs and of human feet. To ask a question, one must
shout into the ear of