The Foundations of Japan Part 1

The Foundations of j.a.pan.

by J.W. Robertson Scott.

INTRODUCTION

The hope with which these pages are written is that their readers may be enabled to see a little deeper into that problem of the relation of the West with Asia which the historian of the future will unquestionably regard as the greatest of our time.

I lived for four and a half years in j.a.pan. This book is a record of many of the things I saw and experienced and some of the things I was told chiefly during rural journeys--more than half the population is rural--extending to twice the distance across the United States or nearly eight times the distance between the English Channel and John o' Groats.

These pages deal with a field of investigation in j.a.pan which no other volume has explored. Because they fall short of what was planned, and in happier conditions might have been accomplished, a word or two may be pardoned on the beginnings of the book--one of the many literary victims of the War.

The first book I ever bought was about the Far East. The first leading article of my journalistic apprenticeship in London was about Korea.

When I left daily journalism, at the time of the siege of the Peking Legations, the first thing I published was a book pleading for a better understanding of the Chinese.

After that, as a cottager in Ess.e.x, I wrote--above a _nom de guerre_ which is better known than I am--a dozen volumes on rural subjects.

During a visit to the late David Lubin in Rome I noticed in the big library of his International Inst.i.tute of Agriculture that there was no took in English dealing with the agriculture of j.a.pan.[1] Just before the War the thoughts of forward-looking students of our home affairs ran strongly on the relation of intelligently managed small holdings to skilled capitalist farming.[2] During the early "business as usual" period of the War, when no tasks had been found for men over military age--Mr. Wells's protest will be remembered--it occurred to me that it might be serviceable if I could have ready, for the period of rural reconstruction and readjustment of our international ideas when the War was over, two books of a new sort. One should be a stimulating volume on j.a.pan, based on a study, more sociological than technically agricultural, of its remarkable small-farming system and rural life, and the other a complementary American volume based on a study of the enterprising large farming of the Middle West. I proposed to write the second book in co-operation with a veteran rural reformer who had often invited me to visit him in Iowa, the father of the present American Minister of Agriculture. Early in 1915 I set out for j.a.pan to enter upon the first part of my task. Mr. Wallace died while I was still in j.a.pan, and the Middle West book remains to be undertaken by someone else.

The Land of the Rising Sun has been fortunate in the quality of the books which many foreigners have written.[3] But for every work at the standard of what might be called the seven "M's"--Mitford, Murdoch, Munro, Morse, Maclaren, "Murray" and McGovern--there are many volumes of fervid "pro-j.a.panese" or determined "anti-j.a.panese" romanticism.

The pictures of j.a.pan which such easily perused books present are incredible to readers of ordinary insight or historical imagination, but they have had their part in forming public opinion.

The basic fact about j.a.pan is that it is an agricultural country.

j.a.panese aestheticism, the victorious j.a.panese army and navy, the smoking chimneys of Osaka, the pushing mercantile marine, the Parliamentary and administrative developments of Tokyo and a costly worldwide diplomacy are all borne on the bent backs of _Ohyakusho no Fufu_,[4] the j.a.panese peasant farmer and his wife. The depositories of the authentic _Yamato damashii_ (j.a.panese spirit) are to be found knee deep in the sludge of their paddy fields.

One book about j.a.pan may well be written in the perspective of the village and the hamlet. There it is possible to find the way beneath that surface of things visible to the tourist. There it is possible to discover the _foundations_ of the j.a.pan which is intent on cutting such a figure in the East and in the West. There it is possible to learn not only what j.a.pan is but what she may have it in her to become.

A rural sociologist is not primarily interested in the technique of agriculture. He conceives agriculture and country life as Arthur Young and Cobbett did, as a means to an end, the sound basis, the touchstone of a healthy State. I was helped in j.a.pan not only by my close acquaintance with the rural civilisation of two pre-eminently small-holdings countries, Holland and Denmark, but by what I knew to be precious in the rural life of my own land.

An interest in rural problems cannot be simulated. As I journeyed about the country the sincerity of my purpose--there are few words in commoner use in the Far East than sincerity--was recognised and appreciated. I enjoyed conversations in which customary barriers had been broken down and those who spoke said what they felt. We inevitably discussed not only agricultural economy but life, religion and morality, and the way j.a.pan was taking.

I spoke and slept in Buddhist temples. I was received at Shinto shrines. I was led before domestic altars. I was taken to gatherings of native Christians. I planted commemorative trees until more persimmons than I can ever gather await my return to j.a.pan. I wrote so many _gaku_[5] for school walls and for my kind hosts that my memory was drained of maxims. I attended guileless horse-races. I was present at agricultural shows, fairs, wrestling matches, _Bon_ dances, village and county councils and the strangest of public meetings. I talked not only with farmers and their families but with all kinds of landlords, with schoolmasters and schoolmistresses, policemen, shopkeepers, priests, co-operative society enthusiasts, village officials, county officials, prefectural officials, a score of Governors and an Ainu chief. I sought wisdom from Ministers of State and n.o.bles of every rank, from the Prince who is the heir of the last of the Shoguns down to democratic Barons who prefer to be called "Mr.", I chatted with farmers' wives and daughters, I interrogated landladies and mill girls, and I paid a memorable visit to a Buddhist nunnery. I walked, talked, rode, ate and bathed with common folk and with dignitaries. I discussed the situation of j.a.pan with the new countryman in college agricultural laboratories and cla.s.srooms, and, in a remote region, beheld what is rare nowadays, the old countryman kneeling before his cottage with his head to the ground as the stranger rode past.

I made notes as I traversed paddy-field paths, by mountain ways, in colleges, schools, houses and inns. It can only have been when crossing water on men's backs that I did not make notes. I jotted things down as I walked, as I sat, as I knelt, as I lay on my _futon_, as I journeyed in _kuruma_, on horseback, in jolting _basha_, in automobiles, in shaking cross-country trains and in boats; in brilliant sunshine and sweltering heat, in the shade and in dust; in the early morning with chilled fingers or more or less furtively as I crouched at protracted private or official repasts, or late at night endeavoured to gather crumbs from the wearing conversation of polite callers who, though set on helping me, did not always find it easy to understand the kind of information of which I was in search. One of these asked my travelling companion _sotto voce_, "Is he after metal mines?"

I went on my own trips and on routes planned out for me by agricultural and social zealots, and from time to time I returned physically and mentally fatigued to my little j.a.panese house near Tokyo to rest and to write out from my memoranda, to seek data for new districts from the obliging Department of Agriculture and the Agricultural College people at the Imperial University, and to eat and drink with rural authorities who chanced to be visiting the capital from distant prefectures. I had many setbacks. I was misinformed, now and then intentionally and often unintentionally. There were many days which were not only hara.s.sing but seemingly wasted. I often despaired of achieving results worth all the exertion I was making and the money I was spending. I must have worn to shreds the patience of some English-speaking j.a.panese friends, but they never owned defeat. In the end I found that I made progress.

But so did the War, which when I set out from London few believed would last long. I was troubled by continually meeting with incredible ignorance about the War, the issues at stake and the certain end. The j.a.panese who talked with me were 10,000 miles away from the fighting.

j.a.pan had nothing to lose, everything indeed to gain from the abatement of Europe's activities in Asia. Not only j.a.panese soldiers but many administrative, educational, agricultural and commercial experts had been to school in Germany. There was much in common in the German and j.a.panese mentalities, much alike in Central European and Farthest East regard for the army and for order, devotion to regulations, habit of subordination and deification of the State.

Eventually the well-known anti-Ally campaign broke out in Tokyo, a thing which has never been sufficiently explained. Soon I was pressed to turn aside from my studies and attempt the more immediately useful task: to explain why Western nations, whose manifest interests were peace, were resolutely squandering their blood and wealth in War.

If what I published had some measure of success,[6] it was because by this time, unlike some of the critics who sharply upbraided j.a.pan and made impossible proposals in impossible terms, I had learnt something at first hand about the j.a.panese, because I wrote of the difficulties as well as the faults of j.a.pan, and because I was now a little known as her well-wisher. One of the two books I published was translated as a labour of love, as I shall never forget, by a j.a.panese public man whose leisure was so scant that he sat up two nights to get his ma.n.u.script finished. Before long I had involved myself in the arduous task of founding and of editing for two years a monthly review, _The New East (Shin Toyo)_,[7] with for motto a sentence of my own which expresses what wisdom I have gained about the Orient, _The real barrier between East and West is a distrust of each other's morality and the illusion that the distrust is on one side only._

The excuse for so personal a digression is that, when this period of literary and journalistic stress began, my rural notebooks and MSS., memoranda of conversations on social problems and a heterogeneous collection of reports and doc.u.ments had to be stowed into boxes. There they stayed until a year ago. The entries in a dozen of my little hurriedly filled notebooks have lost their flavour or are unintelligible: I have put them all aside. Neither is it possible to utilise notes which were submarined or lost in over-worked post offices. This book--I have had to leave out Kyushu entirely--is not the work I planned, a complete account of rural life and industry in every part of j.a.pan, with an excursus on Korea and Formosa, and certain general conclusions: a standard work, no doubt, in, I am afraid, two volumes, and forgetful at times of the warning that "to spend too much Time in Studies is Sloth."

What I had transcribed before leaving j.a.pan I have now been able in the course of a leisured year in England to overhaul and to supplement by up-to-date statistics in an extensive Appendix. In the changed circ.u.mstances in which the book is completed I have also ruthlessly transferred to this Appendix all the technical matter in the text, so that nothing shall obstruct the way of the general reader. At some future date there may be by another hand a book about j.a.pan in terms of soils, manures and crops. That is the book the War saved me from writing. In the present work I have the opportunity which so few authors have enjoyed of jettisoning all technics into an Appendix.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Shin Koron_ "BYGONE DAYS IN j.a.pAN" IS THE t.i.tLE OF THIS CARTOON]

"It is necessary," says a wise modern author, "to meditate over one's impressions at leisure, to start afresh again and again with a clearer vision of the essential facts." And a j.a.panese companion of my journeys writes, "Never can you be sorry that this book is coming late. This time of delay has been the best time; we have had enough of first impressions." The justification for this volume is that, in spite of the difficulties attending the composition of it, it may be held to offer a picture of some aspects of modern j.a.pan to be found nowhere else. Politics is not for these pages, nor, because there are so many charming books on aesthetic and scenic j.a.pan, do I write on Art or about Fuji, Kyoto, Nara, Miyanos.h.i.ta and Nikko. I went to j.a.pan to see the countryman. The j.a.panese whom most of the world knows are townified, sometimes Americanised or Europeanised, and, as often as not, elaborately educated. They are frequently remarkable men. They stand for a great deal in modern j.a.pan. But their untownified fellow-countrymen, with the training of tradition and experience, of rural schoolmasters and village elders, and, as frequently, of the carefully shielded army, are more than half of the nation.

What is their health of mind and body? By what social and moral principles and prejudices are they swayed? To what extent are they adequate to the demand that is made and is likely to be made upon them? In what respects are they the masters of their lives or are mastered? In what ways are they still open to Western influences? And in what directions are they now inclined to trust to "themselves alone"?

If the masters of the rural journal were sometimes mistaken in the observations they made from horseback, I cannot have escaped blundering in pa.s.sing through more dimly lit scenes than they visited.

"If there appears here and there any uncorrectness, I do not hold myself obliged to answer for what I could not perfectly govern."[8]

But I have laboriously taken all the precautions I could and I have obeyed as far as possible a recent request that "visitors to the Far East should confine themselves to what they have seen with their own eyes." As Huxley wrote, "all that I have proposed to myself is to say, This and this have I learned."

I take pleasure in recalling that some years ago I was approached with a view to undertaking for the United States Government a socio-agricultural investigation in a foreign country. Reared as I have been in the whole faith of a citizen of the English-speaking world, I am glad to think that the present volume may be of some service to American readers. The United States is within ten days--Canada is within nine--of j.a.pan against Great Britain's month by the Atlantic-C.P.R.-Pacific route and eight weeks by Suez. There are more American visitors than British to j.a.pan. It was America that first opened j.a.pan to the West, and the debt of j.a.pan to American training and stimulus is immense. But British services to j.a.pan have also been substantial. Great Britain was the first to welcome her within the circle of the Great Powers, and the Anglo-j.a.panese Alliance did more for j.a.pan than some j.a.panese have been willing to admit. The problem of j.a.pan is the problem of the whole English-speaking world.

Rightly conceived, the interests of the British Empire and the United States in the Far East are one and indivisible.

The j.a.panese version of the t.i.tle of this book (kindly suggested by Mr. Seichi Naruse) is _Nihon no Shinzui_, literally, "The Marrow" or "The Core of j.a.pan." His Excellency the j.a.panese Amba.s.sador, the beauty of whose calligraphy is well known, was so very kind as to allow me to requisition his clever brush for the script for the engraver; but it must be understood that Baron Hayashi has seen nothing of the volume but the cover.

I greatly regret that the present conditions of book production make it impossible to reproduce more than one in thirty of my photographs.

It is in no spirit of ingrat.i.tude to my hosts and many other kind people in j.a.pan that I have taken the decision resolutely to strike out of the text all those names of places and persons which give such a forbidding air to a traveller's page. I have pleasure in acknowledging here the particular obligations I am under to Kunio Yanaghita, formerly Secretary of the j.a.panese House of Peers and a distinguished and disinterested student of rural conditions, Dr.

Nitobe, a.s.sistant secretary of the League of Nations, and his wife, Professor Nasu, Imperial University, Mr. Yamasaki, Mr. M. Yanagi, Mr.

Kanzo Uchimura, Mr. Bernard Leach, Mr. M. Tajima, Mr. Ono and two young officials in Hokkaido, who each in turn found time to join me on my journeys and showed me innumerable kindnesses. It was a piece of good fortune that while these pages were in preparation Mr. Yanaghita, Professor Nasu and other fellow-travellers were in Europe and available for consultation. Professor Nasu unweariedly furnished painstaking answers to many questions, and was kind enough to read all of the book in proof; but he has no responsibility, of course, for the views which I express. I am also specially indebted to Dr. Kozai, President of the Imperial University, to Mr. Ito and other officials of the Ministry of Agriculture, to Mr. Tsurimi, one of the most understanding of travelled j.a.panese, to Mr. Iwanaga, formerly of the Imperial Railway Board, to Dr. Sato, President of Hokkaido University, and his obliging colleagues, to the Imperial Agricultural Society, to Professors Yahagi and Yokoi, and to Viscount Kano, Dr. Kuwada, Mr. I.

Yoshida, Mr. K. Ohta, Mr. H. Saito, Mr. S. Hoshijima, and many provincial agricultural and sociological experts.

Portions of drafts for this book have appeared in the _Daily Telegraph, World's Work, Manchester Guardian, New East, Asia, j.a.pan Chronicle_ and _Christian World_. I am indebted to the _World's Work_ and _Asia_ for some additional ill.u.s.trations from blocks made from my photographs, and to the _New East_ for some sketches by Miss Elizabeth Keith.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] There is a small book by an able American soil specialist, the late Professor King, which describes through rose-tinted gla.s.ses the farming of j.a.pan, and of China and Korea as well, on the basis of a flying trip to countries the population of which is thrice that of Great Britain and the United States together. The author of another book, published last year, delivers himself of this astonishing opinion: "The j.a.panese is no better fitted to direct his own agriculture than I am to steer a rudderless ship across the Atlantic."

[2] _Vide_ Sir Daniel Hall's _Pilgrimage of English Farming_ and articles of mine in the _Nineteenth Century_ and _Times_, and my _Land Problem_.

[3] The j.a.panese have only lately, however, made some acknowledgment of their debt to Hearn, and in an eight-page bibliography of the best books about j.a.pan in the _j.a.pan Year Book_ Murdoch's as yet unrivalled _History_ is not even mentioned.

[4] _Ohyakusho_ must not be confused with _Oo-hyakusho_ or _Oo-byakusho_, which means a large farmer. _O_ is a polite prefix; _Oo_ or _O_ means large.

[5] Horizontal wall writings.

[6] About 35,000 copies of my two bilingual books were circulated.

[7] With the backing of a London Committee composed of Lord Burnham, Sir G.W. Prothero, Mr. J. St. Loe Strachey and Mr. C.V. Sale.

[8] Tenison, 1684.

CURRENCY, WEIGHTS AND MEASURES AND OFFICIAL TERMS

The prices given in the text (but not in the footnotes and Appendix) were recorded before the War inflation began. The War was followed by a severe financial crisis. Professor Nasu wrote to me during the summer of 1921:

"You are very wise to leave the figures as they stood. It is useless to try to correct them, because they are still changing. The price of rice, which did not exceed 15 yen per koku when you were making your research work, exceeded 50 yen in 1919, and is now struggling to maintain the price of 25 yen. Taking at 100 the figures for the years 1915 or 1916--fortunately there is not much difference between these two years--the prices of six leading commodities reached in 1919 an average of about 250. After 1919 the prices of some commodities went still higher, but mostly they did not change very much; on the other hand, recently the prices of many commodities--among them rice and raw silk especially--have been coming down and this downward movement is gradually extending to all other commodities. From these considerations I deduce that the index number of general commodities may be safely taken as 200 when your book appears. _The reader of your book has simply to double the figures given by you--that is the figures of_ 1915 _and_ 1916--_in order to get a rough estimate of present prices._"