Kokoro: Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life Part 1

Kokoro.

by Lafcadio Hearn.

I

AT A RAILWAY STATION

Seventh day of the sixth Month;-- twenty-sixth of Meiji.

Yesterday a telegram from f.u.kuoka announced that a desperate criminal captured there would be brought for trial to k.u.mamoto to-day, on the train due at noon. A k.u.mamoto policeman had gone to f.u.kuoka to take the prisoner in charge.

Four years ago a strong thief entered some house by night in the Street of the Wrestlers, terrified and bound the inmates, and carried away a number of valuable things. Tracked skillfully by the police, he was captured within twenty-four hours,--even before he could dispose of his plunder. But as he was being taken to the police station he burst his bonds, s.n.a.t.c.hed the sword of his captor, killed him, and escaped. Nothing more was heard of him until last week.

Then a k.u.mamoto detective, happening to visit the f.u.kuoka prison, saw among the toilers a face that had been four years photographed upon his brain. "Who is that man?" he asked the guard. "A thief," was the reply,--"registered here as Kusabe."

The detective walked up to the prisoner and said:--

"Kusabe is not your name. Nomura Teichi, you are needed in k.u.mamoto for murder." The felon confessed all.

I went with a great throng of people to witness the arrival at the station. I expected to hear and see anger; I even feared possibilities of violence. The murdered officer had been much liked; his relatives would certainly be among the spectators; and a k.u.mamoto crowd is not very gentle. I also thought to find many police on duty. My antic.i.p.ations were wrong.

The train halted in the usual scene of hurry and noise,--scurry and clatter of pa.s.sengers wearing geta,--screaming of boys wanting to sell j.a.panese newspapers and k.u.mamoto lemonade.

Outside the barrier we waited for nearly five minutes. Then, pushed through the wicket by a police-sergeant, the prisoner appeared,--a large wild-looking man, with head bowed down, and arms fastened behind his back. Prisoner and guard both halted in front of the wicket; and the people pressed forward to see--but in silence. Then the officer called out,--

"Sugihara San! Sugihara O-Kibi! is she present?"

A slight small woman standing near me, with a child on her back, answered, "Hai!" and advanced through the press. This was the widow of the murdered man; the child she carried was his son. At a wave of the officer's hand the crowd fell back, so as to leave a clear s.p.a.ce about the prisoner and his escort. In that s.p.a.ce the woman with the child stood facing the murderer. The hush was of death.

Not to the woman at all, but to the child only, 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 pa.s.sion of hoa.r.s.e 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 mult.i.tude began to sob. And as the bronzed guardian pa.s.sed, I saw what I had never seen before, --what few men ever see,--what I shall probably never see again, --the tears of a j.a.panese policeman.

The crowd ebbed, and left me musing on the strange morality of the spectacle. Here was justice unswerving yet compa.s.sionate,-- 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 j.a.panese.

There is a story that the most famous of all j.a.panese 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 compa.s.sion 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 j.a.pANESE CIVILIZATION

I

Without losing a single ship or a single battle, j.a.pan 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 j.a.panese 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 j.a.pan 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 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 j.a.panese 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 j.a.panese), chemistry, microscopy, the j.a.panese 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 j.a.panese 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 j.a.panese 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 s.p.a.ce 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 pa.s.sing reflections. All that j.a.pan 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 j.a.panese 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 j.a.panese 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 j.a.panese 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 j.a.panese 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 j.a.panese 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 j.a.panese 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. 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 j.a.panese 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 j.a.pan, 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 j.a.panese.

literature and drama; but the character of the influence proves the racial difference to which I refer. European plays have been reshaped for the j.a.panese stage, and European novels rewritten for j.a.panese 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 j.a.panese girl who married an Eta. Victor Hugo's _Les Miserables_ becomes a tale of the j.a.panese civil war; and Enjolras a j.a.panese 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 bra.s.s and stone, with costliest bal.u.s.trades, 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 s.p.a.ces 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 the questioned; to see, to understand, to move in that high-pressure medium, needs experience. The unaccustomed feels the sensation of being in a panic, in a tempest, in a cyclone. Yet all this is order.

The monster streets leap rivers, span sea-ways, with bridges of stone, bridges of steel. Far as the eye can reach, a bewilderment of masts, a web-work of rigging, conceals the sh.o.r.es, which are cliffs of masonry. Trees in a forest stand less thickly, branches in a forest mingle less closely, than the masts and spars of that immeasurable maze. Yet all is order.