ABSTRACT
ACCORDING to that eminent psychoanalyst Dr. Adler, the most disturbing element in our mental make-up is the fear that we may be looked down upon by our neighbours or that some inferiority actually characterises us. People react in various ways to this fear, not infrequently trying to overcome it by self-assertion. Mass-emotion is a far more difficult thing to dogmatise about, but those who have claimed to discover a national inferiority-complex in Japan could certainly make out a plausible case. It is not a subject on which one can afford to be censorious, for all drum-whacking is suspect. Sometimes there was no real feeling underlying an apparent display of self-conscious nationalism, but rather a search for something to commend an idea that it is desired to popularise. There may have been a well-reasoned argument, for instance, against the spending of so much time and money over the teaching of English in Japanese schools; the opposition was apt to express itself in terms of scorn; but it was particularly strong at a time when the youth of the country, at any rate, had a perfect craze for adopting foreign words, often strangely curtailed.
