ABSTRACT
A MAN who has lived and worked among a foreign people must always feel uneasy when he is confronted in his own country with the sweeping generalizations in which their qualities are commonly summarized. A laudatory account brings to his mind persons of whom such eulogies are ludicrous and everyday occurrences which reveal precisely contrary qualities to those described, Adverse criticism of the people recalls to him friends and acquaintances whose worth gives the lie to their critics, and incidents which show none of the discreditable characteristics these condemn. So he stands, poised aloof and irresolute, unable to take sides-a lukewarm friend, a critic without the sharp sword of dogmatism. A man who has lived happily in Japan and has formed friendships among the people has an especially difficult task when he tries to set down honestly his views about the country and its inhabitants. For since Japan has a civilization very different from our own, and since few Englishmen have made intimate personal contacts with her people, writers are tempted to subsume under a few sweeping generalizations all those multitudinous individual differences which distinguish the members of any nation. The Japanese are thus treated in our Press and on our platforms more summarily than are European nations with whom we have closer contacts and whose civilization and ours have common foundations. Those who have lived in Japan know that such generalizations are misleading, and they resent them accordingly. Yet when they try to correct the common impression, they know that they, too, must generalize, and that they cannot avoid giving a partial account of the people, an account coloured by their own individual experiences and by their own limited judgment of what is significant.
