ABSTRACT
IT would appear that one must be a novice in order to be able to furnish an estimate of the Japanese character. Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain, an Englishman who lately taught the Japanese their own language in the Imperial University of Tokyo, and has written more about Japan-or more successfully-than any other stranger, refers you, with compliments, to other writers when it devolves on him in his best-known book to discuss the character of this people. An Englishman of a quarter of a century's residence in the country said to me : * When you've been six weeks in Japan you know everything. In six months you begin to doubt. In six years you are sure of nothing.' Another friend of mine, of important capacities, who has spent the best part of a lifetime in the land, and has met its people on many planes, sums up the discussion in the fashion of this somewhat mysterious interrogatory : c Has anybody lived twenty years in Japan and written
a book about it ? ' * You never know where you are in dealing with the Japanese,' the foreigner who does business with the people in their own country will tell you. Yet if you pursue the subject you will find that this man, the foreign trader, has an assurance which is quite absolute upon certain points. You never met
a more confident man than the foreign trader in Japan-be his residence in the country of one or of twenty years' standing-when the question tabled concerns the commercial character of the Japanese. Here you find a man whose mind is made up ; who for immutability stands upon a rock ; who will not be moved ; who has forgotten, if he ever knew, that our own infinitely wise Mr. Burke has declared it to be impossible to draw an indictment against a whole nation. Even so, this man, if you catch him unawares by putting the question before him in another form, tells you he never knows where he is in doing business with the Japanese. 'They are rogues,' says he, 'but they may be all right.'
