ABSTRACT
IT is difficult to put forward any proposition about the Japanese character without the feeling that a contrary proposition could be easily defended. This is as it should be. The qualities of seventy million persons cannot be summed up in a few sweeping generalizations when a considerable proportion of the seventy millions consists of persons of character and virility, and when the society to which they belong has been subjected to many strong and divergent influences. Yet there are some broad characteristics which distinguish the Japanese from Westerners. A very intelligent Japanese friend once said to me, in effect: “We read what Europeans write about us, and we marvel at their confident judgments. We do not really know whether their views are correct or no; for we are not an analytical race, and a detached, intellectual examination of our qualities, or of anyone else’s, is quite beyond our powers, and is, indeed, repugnant to us. So we are inclined to accept what others say about us.” This statement, I believe, brings out an important contrast between Japanese and European habits of mind. In no country, of course, are analytical powers practised by the mass of the people. But in Europe intellectual tradition since the Greeks has created this habit of mind among the educated classes, and from it scientific achievement has proceeded. The Japanese, nourished upon a different intellectual diet, have still little appreciation of the Western way of viewing a problem, especially if the problem is in the field of human relationships. To them detached analysis seems almost indecent. Even the serious judgments of the learned are often based mainly upon emotions. When the question is one that affects the society or nation, then the Japanese is inclined to answer it by reference to his feelings of loyalty or his sense of social obligation. Certain things are true, certain lines of action are to be applauded, because he feels that they are so; and if he writes down his views, he casts them in the form of an emotional appeal rather than of a logical argument. For this reason, the writings of Japanese upon a particular political or social situation often appear, when translated, to be not merely ingenuous, but, to use a favourite term, “insincere.” Nowhere else in the world is the phrase that releases hidden stores of emotion more powerful than in Japan. It may end a school strike, cause mutinous troops to hold their hand, or convert the communist to a “proper” view of society. Japanese propaganda is childish because the appeals are addressed not to the intelligence of the foreign audience but to an emotional complex which is universal in Japan but not possessed by the foreigner. There are, of course, many individuals to whom these generalizations do not apply; but they make up only a small proportion even of the educated classes.
