Basil Hall Chamberlain

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But they display a tender harmony of colouring, a strength of touch, a power of composition, that elevate what at first strike a European as mere sketches to an ethereal form of art. When Hokusai and Hiroshige caught up the tradition, landscape was treated in an equally idealistic way. These colour-prints of the eighteenth and early part of the nineteenth century—the work of the Toriis, the Katsugawas, the Utagawas, and other schools—stand alone and unrivalled, resembling nothing so much as certain beautiful butterflies of fantastic yet harmonious hue. ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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 Japanese of former days, even when political combination for any purpose was penal, always moved in families, in clans, in wards of townsmen, in posses of peasants, in any corporate way rather than as individuals. The boycotts, the combines, the sudden fashions and gusts of feeling before which the whole nation bends like grass, manifest exactly the same trait in a novel guise. To take a more radical characteristic, the ingrained tendency of the national mind towards the imitation of foreign models does but repeat to-day, and on an equally large scale, its exploit of twelve centuries ago. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The old Japanese nobility were nowise given to laughter. "Life is real, life is earnest," was their motto; and what a deadly dull life it must have been! To begin with, it was a society minus the fair sex. To admire the Court ladies toilettes, to hang on their smiles, perhaps whisper some witty gallantry in a noble dame's ear, formed no part of a young Daimyō's order of the day at the Shōgun's Court. ”

“ For, after all, Japan must continue ever more and more to modernise herself if the basis of her new departure is to remain solid, if her swiftly growing ambition is to be gratified, and if her minister of finance is to be able to make both ends meet. Besides which, our European world of thought, of enterprise, of colossal scientific achievement, has been as much a wonder-world to the Japanese as Old Japan could ever be to us. ”

“ All education was for centuries in Buddhist hands, as was the care of the poor and sick; Buddhism introduced art, introduced medicine, moulded the folk-lore of the country, created its dramatic poetry, deeply influenced politics and every sphere of social and intellectual activity. In a word, Buddhism was the teacher under whose instruction the Japanese nation grew up. As a nation, they are now grossly forgetful of this fact. ”

“ We mean nothing against the honour of Japan. But finding Tōkyō life dull on the whole, we solace ourselves by a little innocent laughter at an innocent foible whenever we can find one to laugh at. You yourselves could doubtless make up, on the subject of Japanese as she is Englished, an article which should be no less comical,—an article which should transcribe the first lispings in "globe-trotterese," and the perhaps still funnier, because more pretentions, efforts of those of us who think themselves rather adepts in Japanese as spoken in the upper circles. ”

“ To tell the whole truth, however, the Japanese have not escaped the defects of their qualities. Their sobriety tends to degenerate into littleness. Grandeur in any shape, rugged mountain ranges, the storm-tossed sea, wide sweeps of moorland, make no deep impression on them. They love to expatiate on the natural beauties of their country. Nevertheless, with so much to choose from, their taste in almost every instance singles out views of limited extent and a kind of polished loveliness partly dependent on human aid. In short, they admire scenes, not scenery. ”

“ The Japanese artist goes a step further: he paints the feelings evoked by the memory of the scenes, the feelings when one is between waking and dreaming. He is altogether an idealist, and this at both ends of the scale, the beautiful and the grotesque. Were he able to work on a large canvas, a very great ideal art might have been the result. But in art, as in literature, his nation seems lacking in the genius, the breadth of view, necessary for making grand combinations. ”

“ It is the chief duty of a girl living in the parental house to practise filial piety towards her father and mother. But after marriage, her chief duty is to honour her father-in-law and mother-in-law to honour them beyond her own father and mother—to love and reverence them with all ardour, and to tend them with every practice of filial piety. While thou honourest thine own parents, think not lightly of thy father-in-law! Never should a woman fail, night and morning, to pay her respects to her father-in-law and mother-in-law. ”

“ The old Japanese sculptors rarely attempted portraiture. A good example is offered by the seated figure of Ieyasti in the temple of Toshogu at Shiba. But in sculpture, even more than in pictorial art, the strength of the Japanese talent lies rather in decoration and in small things than in representation and in great things. The netsukes—originally a kind of toggle for the medicine-box or tobacco-pouch, carved out of wood or ivory—are often marvels of minuteness, and alive with a keen sense of humour and the grotesque. The Japanese weakness in sculpture is no mere accident. ”

“ Neither their past history nor their prevailing tastes show any tendency to idealism. They are lovers of the practical and the real: neither the fancies of Goethe nor the reveries of Hegel are to their liking. Our poetry and our philosophy and the mind that appreciates them are alike the result of a network of subtle influences to which the Japanese are comparative strangers. It is maintained by some, and we think justly, that the lack of idealism in the Japanese mind renders the life of even the most cultivated a mechanical, humdrum affair when compared with that of Westerns. ”

“ Japanese art is distinguished by directness, facility, and strength of line, a sort of bold dash due probably to the habit of writing and drawing from the elbow, not from the wrist. This, so to say, calligraphic quality is what gives a charm to the merest rough Japanese sketch. It has been well remarked that if a Japanese artist's work be carried no further even than the outlines, you will still have something worthy of being hung on your wall or inserted in your album. Japanese art disregards the laws of perspective and of light and shadow. ”