Kokoro | Page 8

clothing, shows more than the advantage held
by this Japanese race in the struggle of life; it shows also the real
character of some weaknesses in our own civilization. It forces
reflection upon the useless multiplicity of our daily wants. We must
have meat and bread and butter; glass windows and fire; hats, white
shirts, and woolen underwear; boots and shoes; trunks, bags, and boxes;
bedsteads, mattresses, sheets, and blankets: all of which a Japanese can
do without, and is really better off without. Think for a moment how
important an article of Occidental attire is the single costly item of
white shirts! Yet even the linen shirt, the so-called "badge of a
gentleman," is in itself a useless garment. It gives neither warmth nor
comfort. It represents in our fashions the survival of something once a
luxurious class distinction, but to-day meaningless and useless as the
buttons sewn on the outside of coat-sleeves.
(1) Critics have tried to make fun of Sir Edwin Arnold's remark that a
Japanese crowd smells like a geranium-flower. Yet the simile is exact!
The perfume called jako, when sparingly used, might easily be taken
for the odor of a musk-geranium. In almost any Japanese assembly

including women a slight perfume of jako is discernible; for the robes
worn have been laid in drawers containing a few grains of jako. Except
for this delicate scent, a Japanese crowd is absolutely odorless.
V
The absence of any huge signs of the really huge things that Japan has
done bears witness to the very peculiar way in which her civilization
has been working. It cannot forever so work; but it has so worked thus
far with amazing success. Japan is producing without capital, in our
large sense of the word. She has become industrial without becoming
essentially mechanical and artificial The vast rice crop is raised upon
millions of tiny, tiny farms; the silk crop, in millions of small poor
homes, the tea crop, on countless little patches of soil. If you visit
Kyoto to order something from one of the greatest porcelain makers in
the world, one whose products are known better in London and in Paris
than even in Japan, you will find the factory to be a wooden cottage in
which no American farmer would live. The greatest maker of cloisonne
vases, who may ask you two hundred dollars for something five inches
high, produces his miracles behind a two-story frame dwelling
containing perhaps six small rooms. The best girdles of silk made in
Japan, and famous throughout the Empire, are woven in a house that
cost scarcely five hundred dollars to build. The work is, of course,
hand-woven. But the factories weaving by machinery--and weaving so
well as to ruin foreign industries of far vaster capacity--are hardly more
imposing, with very few exceptions. Long, light, low one-story or
two-story sheds they are, about as costly to erect as a row of wooden
stables with us. Yet sheds like these turn out silks that sell all round the
world. Sometimes only by inquiry, or by the humming of the
machinery, can you distinguish a factory from an old yashiki, or an
old-fashioned Japanese school building,--unless indeed you can read
the Chinese characters over the garden gate. Some big brick factories
and breweries exist; but they are very few, and even when close to the
foreign settlements they seem incongruities in the landscape.
Our own architectural monstrosities and our Babels of machinery have
been brought into existence by vast integrations of industrial capital.

But such integrations do not exist in the Far East; indeed, the capital to
make them does not exist. And supposing that in the course of a few
generations there should form in Japan corresponding combinations of
money power, it is not easy to suppose correspondences in architectural
construction. Even two-story edifices of brick have given bad results in
the leading commercial centre; and earthquakes seem to condemn
Japan to perpetual simplicity in building. The very land revolts against
the imposition of Western architecture, and occasionally even opposes
the new course of traffic by. pushing railroad lines out of level and out
of shape.
Not industry alone still remains thus unintegrated; government itself
exhibits a like condition. Nothing is fixed except the Throne. Perpetual
change is identical with state policy. Ministers, governors,
superintendents, inspectors, all high civil and military officials, are
shifted at irregular and surprisingly short intervals, and hosts of smaller
officials scatter each time with the whirl. The province in which I
passed the first twelvemonth of my residence in Japan has had four
different governors in five years. During my stay at Kumamoto, and
before the war had begun, the military command of that important post
was three times changed. The government college had in three years
three directors. In educational