Basil Hall Chamberlain

“ The favourite subjects of the Japanese muse are the flowers, the birds, the snow, the moon, the falling leaves in autumn, the mist on the mountains, in fact, the outward aspect of nature,—love of course, and the shortness of human life. Many of our Western commonplaces are conspicuously absent: no Japanese poet has expatiated on the beauties of sunset or starlight, or has penned sonnets to his mistress's eyebrows, or even so much as alluded to her eyes; much less would he be so improper as to hint at kissing her. Japanese poetry has commonplaces of its own, however ”

“ But the twentieth-century Japanese religion of loyalty and patriotism is quite new, for in it pre-existing ideas have been sifted, altered, freshly compounded, turned to new uses, and have found a new centre of gravity. Not only is it new, it is not yet completed; it is still in process of being consciously or semi-consciously put together by the official class, in order to serve the interests of that class, and, incidentally, the interests of the nation at large. The Japanese bureaucracy is a body greatly to be admired. It includes most of the foremost men of the nation. ”

“ Architecture. The Japanese genius touches perfection in small things. No other nation ever understood half so well how to make a cup, a tray, even a kettle a thing of beauty, how to transform a little knob of ivory into a microcosm of quaint humour, how to express a fugitive thought in half-a-dozen dashes of the pencil. The massive, the spacious, the grand, is less congenial to their mental attitude. Hence they achieve less success in architecture than in the other arts. The prospect of a Japanese city from a height is monotonous. ”

“ It was the same goddess of the pine-tree, that appeared before him and said: "I have come to tell you that you cannot stay long in the world of men after once eating the grapes and mulberries of Hades. There is a goddess in Hades who wishes to marry you. She it was who, assuming the form of a bear, lured you into the cavern, and thence to the under-world. You must make up your mind to come away." ”

“ Japan lies in the shadow, away on the rim of the world. Her houses are far more effectually closed to the stranger by their paper shutters than are ours by walls of brick or stone. What we call "society" does not exist there. ”

“ As I land on Mio's pine-clad shore and gaze around me, flowers come fluttering down a from ethereal space, strains of music are re-echoing, and a more than earthly fragrance fills the air. Surely there is something strange in this. Yes! from one of the branches of yonder pine-tree hangs a beauteous robe, which, when I draw nigh and closely scan it, reveals itself more fair and fragrant than any common mortal's garb. Let me take it back to show to the old folks in the village, that it may be handed down in our house as an heirloom. Fairy. ”

“ Fairy. Speak not, dear fisherman! speak not that word!
⁠Ah! know'st thou not that, like the hapless bird
⁠Whose wings are broke, I seek, but seek in vain,
⁠Reft of my wings, to soar to heav'n's blue plain?
Fisherman. Chain'd to dull earth, a fairy well may pine.
Fairy. Whichever way I turn, despair is mine;
Fisherman. For ne'er the fisher will her wings restore,
Fairy. And the frail fay sinks helpless evermore.
Chorus. Alas! ”

“ Cherry-blossom. The Japanese cherry-tree (Prunus pseudocerasus, Lindley) is cultivated, not for its fruit, but for its blossom, which has long been to Japan what the rose is to Western nations. Poets have sung it for over a millennium past, and crowds still pour forth every year, as spring comes round, to the chief places where avenues of it seem to fill the air with clouds of the most delicate pink. Even patriotism has adopted it, in contradistinction to the plum-blossom, which is believed to be of Chinese origin—not, like the cherry-tree, a true native of Japan. ”

“ Nothing to sit on, nothing but a brazier to warm oneself by, and yet abundant danger of fire, no solidity, no privacy, the deafening clatter twice daily of the opening and shutting of the outer wooden slides, draughts insidiously pouring in through innumerable chinks and crannies, darkness whenever heavy rain makes it necessary to shut up one or more sides of the house,—to these and various other enormities Japanese houses must plead guilty. ”

“ The shrewd warriors of Satsuma and Chōshū, who had humoured the ignorance of the Court and the fads of the scholars only as long as their common enemy, the Shōgunate, remained in existence, now turned round, and declared in favour, not merely of foreign intercourse, but of the Europeanisation of their own country. History has never witnessed a more sudden volte-face. History has never witnessed a wiser one. We foreigners, being mere lookers-on, may no doubt sometimes regret the substitution of commonplace European ways for the glitter, the glamour of picturesque Orientalism. ”

“ Once more the great art of war has suffered a sea-change, and in every branch of intellectual and social activity the pulse of a reinvigorated life runs quick. Foreigners have often stood in amaze at Japan's ability to swallow so many new ideas and institutions whole. They have dubbed her superficial, and questioned the permanence of her conversion to European methods. This is because they fail to realise two things,—the innate strength of the Japanese character, and the continuous process of schooling which has enabled this particular race to face the new light without being blinded. ”

“ Not religion only, but every art, every pastime, here is or has been esoteric,—poetry, music, porcelain-making, fencing, football, even bone-setting, and cookery itself. Esotericism is not a unique mystery shrouding a special class of subjects. It is a general attitude of the mind at a certain stage, and a very natural attitude too, if one takes the trouble to look into it. Sensible men do not wear their hearts on their sleeves for daws to peck at. Why should an artist do so with his art? Why should he desecrate his art by initiating unworthy persons into its principles? ”

“ In the inimitable sketch-book of Hokusai, the bourgeois artist who threw all classical rules to the winds, we see the sort of people who really "had a good time," while their betters bored themselves to extinction, namely, the Japanese shopkeepers and artisans. We see their homely jokes, their drunken sprees, their occasional sly hits at superiors, as when, for example, a group of street Arabs is depicted making fun of some Confucian sage behind his back, or as when the stately Daimyō's procession becomes a procession of grass hoppers bearing a mantis in a basket. ”

“ Japanese art-motives form a fascinating study, which the visitor to Japan and the stay-at-home collector may alike master little by little on every scroll, coloured print, picture-book, netsuke, sword-hilt that he bargains for, even on penny fans and twopenny towels; for in the Japanese view of life the tritest articles of daily use should, if possible, rejoice the eye and feed the mind. Odds and ends are not combined merely because they will look pretty, as in the handiwork of our own modern decorators. ”

“ The generally lifeless fields may at that time be seen full of men and women standing knee-deep in the water and mud. Then comes the hot summer. What traveller in Japan will not recall, as the most characteristic feature of the summer landscape, those fields of vivid green, separated—chessboard-like—into squares which fill a gradually widening valley flanked by hills that rise abruptly, as if the whole had been cut out by the hand of man, as indeed it has through centuries of terracing? ”

“ The good country folk for twenty miles around consider it a panacea for all the ills to which flesh is heir. It is impossible to picture to oneself anything more grotesquely dissimilar to an Ems or a Homburg than one of these tiny spas, perched—say—midst the mountains of Shinshū or Etchū, and visited only by Japanese of the most old-fashioned type and limited means—where, instead of a table d'hôte, each guest is served in his own poor room with a bowl of rice or maybe millet, a scrap of salted egg-plant, and perhaps, on high days and holidays, a small broiled fish. ”

“ Japan, it was now feverishly asserted, would be swamped by foreign immigration, her national customs would be destroyed, her mines, her industries would all come under foreign control, her very soil would, by lease or purchase, pass into foreign hands, her people would be practically enslaved, and independent Japan would exist no more. Such were the sentiments given voice to in every private conversation, and re-echoed daily in the press. Nevertheless the Japanese Government, more enlightened than the Japanese public, endeavoured to continue the negotiations for treaty revision. ”

“ A nation's fun is for home consumption only: it would evaporate before it could be convey ed across the border. For this reason, we must abandon the endeavour to give the foreign reader any full and particular account of the Japanese mind on its comic side. Perhaps the best plan would be to say what Japanese fun isn't. It certainly does not in the very faintest degree resemble French esprit, that child born of pure intellect and social refinement, and reared in the salon where conversation rises to the level of a fine art, where every word is a rapier, every touch light as air. ”

“ Europe's illusions about the Far East are truly crude. Who would dream of coupling together New-Englanders and Patagonians, simply because arbitrary custom has affixed the single name of "America" to the two widely separated regions which these two peoples inhabit? Yet persons not otherwise undiscerning continue to class, not only the Chinese, but even the Japanese, with Arabs and Persians, on the ground that all are equally "Orientals," "Asiatics," though they dwell thousands of miles apart in space, and tens of thousands of miles apart in culture. ”