Yoshisaburo Okakura

“ You see how much all these arts have contributed to the production of our taste, whose ideals are the dislike of loudness and love of symbolic representation, with a delicate feeling for the beauty of line as seen in things moving or at rest. This last quality must have been immensely augmented by the linear character of our drawing, and also by the great importance we are accustomed to attach to the shape and the strokes of the characters when we are learning to write.
All these qualities you will see exemplified in any Japanese work of art—from a large picture down to a tiny wooden carving. ”

“ They could not help their stern faces melting into a naïve smile in the serene simplicity of the tea-room, whose arrangement, true to the Zen taste to the very last detail of its structure, showed a studied avoidance of ostentation in form and colour. To this day it is always this Zen taste that rules supreme in the decoration of a Japanese house.
Visit a Japanese gentleman whose taste is not yet badly influenced by the Western love of show and symmetry in his dwelling: you will find the room and the whole arrangement free from anything of an ostentatious nature. ”

“ It is in the sunny space within the simple railing of these Shinto shrines, where the smiling presence of the patron spirit of a deified forefather or a great man is so clearly felt, that our childhood has played for tens of centuries its games of innocent joy. Monthly and yearly festivals are observed within the divine enclosure of a guardian god, when a whole community under his protection let themselves go in good-natured laughter and gleeful mirth before the favouring eyes of their divine patron. ”

“ The most formidable of the difficulties which meet a European or American student at the very threshold of his researches is the totally different construction of Japanese society, a difficulty which makes it impossible to understand properly any set of the phenomena belonging to it apart from the others which surround them. One could as well cut a single mesh from a net without prejudice to the neighbouring ones! The proper understanding of things Japanese therefore presupposes freedom from your conventional philosophy of life, and the power of viewing things through other people's eyes. ”

“ Constancy is nowhere to be found in this universe of phenomena. It is therefore an act of unspeakable ignorance on the part of human beings, themselves a product of the immutable Karma, to attach a constant value to this dreamy world and allow themselves to lose their mental harmony in the quest of shadowy desires and of their shadowy satisfaction, thus plunging themselves into the boundless sea of misery. True salvation is to be sought in the complete negation of egoism and in the unconditional absorption of ourselves in the fundamental law of the universe. ”

“ The battle of Dannoura put an end to the Heike ascendancy after an incessant series of desperate battles extending over a century, giving our soldier-like qualities enough occasion for an excellent schooling. The whole country during this period had been under the raging sway of Mars, who swept with his fiery breath the blossoms of human prosperity, and the people high and low were obliged to recognise the folly of clinging to shadowy desires and to learn the urgent necessity for facing every emergency with something akin to indifference. ”

“ Upon Europe and America the full power of our mental searchlight is now playing, in quest of those new ideas for future development for which we have been accustomed to draw mainly on China and India. Even such a commonplace thing as the drinking of a cup of tea becomes in our hands something more: it becomes a training in stoic serenity, in the capacity of smiling at life's troubles and disturbances. ”

“ Blue eyes and blond hair, the charms of which we first learn to feel after a protracted stay among you, are regarded in a Japanese as something extraordinary in no favourable sense of the term! A girl with even a slight tendency to grey eyes or frizzly hair is looked upon as an unwelcome deviation from the national type.
If we now consider our mythology, with a view to tracing the continental home of the Yamato race, we find, to our disappointment, that our present knowledge is too scanty to allow us to arrive at a conclusion. ”

“ We are, I think, a people of the Present and the Tangible, of the broad Daylight and the plainly Visible. The undeniable proclivity of our mind in favour of determination and action, as contrasted with deliberation and calm, makes it an uncongenial ground for the sublimity and grandeur of that 'loathed melancholy, of Cerberus and blackest midnight born,' to take deep root in it. ”

“ All through the four seasons, which are almost too varied even for a Thomson's pen, eventful with the constant calls of one after another of our flowery visitors—beginning with the noble plum that peeps with its tiny yellowish-white eyes from under the spotless repose of fleecy snow, and ending in the gay variety of the chrysanthemum—we have too many allurements from outside not to leap into the widespread arms of Mother Nature and dream away our simple, our contented life in her lap. ”

“ Different doctrines of religion and morality have found their way from their continental homes to the silvery shores of the Land of the Gods, only to render their several services towards consolidating and widening the so-called 'Divine Path,' that national cult whose unwritten tenets have lurked for thousands of years hidden in the most sacred corner of our hearts, whose pulse is ever beating its rhythm of patriotism and loyalty. ”

“ For the proper conduct of our daily life as members of society, the body of Confucian morality resting on the tripod of loyalty, filial piety, and honesty, has been the only standard which high and low have alike recognised. These ethical ideals, when embraced by that formidable warrior caste who played such an important part in feudal Japan, form the code of unwritten morality known among us as Bushido, which means the Path of the Samurai. ”

“ Notice the fact that Buddhism from the moment of its introduction in the sixth century after Christ to this very day has on the whole remained the religion, so to say, of night and gloomy death, while Shintoism has always retained its firm hold on the popular mind as the cult, if I might so express it, of daylight and the living dead. From the very dawn of our history we read of patriarchs, chieftains, and national heroes deified and worshipped as so many guardian spirits of families, of clans, or of the country. ”

“ The groups of rural pilgrims that annually swarm from all parts of Japan during the two hottest months of the year to pay their pious visit to the Holy Mount Fuji, return to their respective villages deeply inspired with a feeling of reverence and of love for the wonders and beauty of the remarkable dawn they witnessed from its summit. ”

“ To pass from glowing life into the cold grasp of death with a smile, to meet the hardest decrees of fate with the resolute calm of stoic fortitude, was the quality demanded of every man and woman in that stormy age. ”

“ They give an incomparable key to the proper understanding of the whole people, whose ideal it has ever been to live and to die like the cherry blossoms, beneath which they have these tens of centuries spent their happiest hours every spring. ”

“ But this simple fact that 'God fulfills Himself in many ways,' as your Tennyson has it, so necessary to ensure freedom from national bigotry and conventional ignorance, so necessary too for a proper understanding of oneself as the cumulative product of a nation's history, has not always been kept in mind, even by those otherwise well-meaning authors, whose works have some charm as descriptive writing, but give only a superficial and often misleading account of the inner life of the nation. ”

“ Any book on anthropology or ethnology would tell you how sleep, trance, dream, hallucination, reflection in still water, etc., help to build up the spirit-world in the untaught mind of primitive man. Yet it must be remembered that these origins have led to something far higher, to something of real value to our nation, and to something which is a moral force in our daily lives that may well be compared to what is efficacious in other creeds. ”

“ But, strange to say, if we judge the case not by outward appearances, but by the religious conviction that lurks in the depth of the heart, we cannot but recognise the undeniable fact that no real conversion has ever been achieved during the past eleven centuries by the doctrine of Buddha. Our actual self, notwithstanding the different clothes we have put on has ever remained true in its spirit to our native cult. Speaking generally, we are still Shintoists to this day—Buddhists, Christians, and all—so long as we are born Japanese. ”

“ Here you have at least a nation different in her development from any existing people in the Occident. Governed from time immemorial by the immediate descendants of the Sun-Goddess, whose merciful rule early taught us to offer them our voluntary tribute of devotion and love, we have based our social system on filial piety, that necessary outcome of ancestor-worship which presupposes altruism on the one hand, and on the other loyalty and love of the fatherland. ”

“ When a man does evil, that is the result of his mental disposition covering or interfering with his original perfect nature. Wipe this vapour of corrupted thought from the surface of your mental mirror and it will shine out as brightly as if it had never been covered by a temporary mist. ”

“ The cause of our being small in great things, while great in small things, can be partly found in the financial conditions of the country and in the non-individual nature of the culture we have received. These delicate questions will have to be raised again some centuries hence, when a healthy admixture of the European civilisation has been tried—a civilisation the effect of which has been, on the whole, so beneficial to our development, that we feel it a most agreeable duty gratefully to acknowledge our immense obligation to the nations of the West. ”

“ The whole nation is bound by that sacred tie of common belief and common thought. Here lies the great gap that separates, for example, the Chinese cult of fatalism from our Path of Gods as a moral force. ”

“ Now, this form of popular literature by virtue of its accessibility even to the poorest amateurs from the lowest ranks of the people, was markedly instrumental, as the now classical form of poetry had been during the Middle Ages, in the cultivation of taste and good manners among all classes of the Japanese nation. Even among the ricksha men of to-day you find many such humble poets, taking snapshots as they run along the stony path of their miserable life. ”

“ Those writers who have seen something malignant and inimical behind their gracious politeness, have been mere visitors on the fringe of the land, alarmed by their skill in manufacturing weapons and explosives—for they are inventive as well as imitative, a people not to be trifled with; but this was because their instinct as well as their emissaries warned them of a pressing need for the means of war. Japan and China have had experience of Western nations, and that is at the conscience of suspicious minds. ”

“ For an average Japanese mind in present Japan, thanks to the ancestor-worship practised consciously or unconsciously from time immemorial, it is not altogether easy to imagine the spirit of the deceased, if it believes in one at all, to be something different and distant from our actual living self. ”

“ The self-control that enables us not to betray our inner feeling through a change in our expression, the measured steps with which we are taught to walk into the hideous jaws of death—in short, all those qualities which make a present Japanese of truly Japanese type look strange, if not queer, to your eyes, are in a most marked degree a product of that direct or indirect influence on our past mentality which was exercised by the Buddhist doctrine of Dhyâna taught by the Zen priests. ”

“ Surely here you are face to face with a people worthy of serious investigation, not only from the disinterested point of view of a folk-psychologist. It is a study which will open to any impartial observer a new horizon, more so than would be the case if he attempted the sociological interpretation of a nation the history of whose development was almost identical with that of his own. ”

“ The Roman Catholics, more enthusiastic than discreet, committed wholesale outrages on our harmless ways of faith in the early days of the seventeenth century, which did much to leave in bad repute the creed of Jesus Christ. And since the prohibition against Christianity was removed, many a missionary has been so particular about the plate in which the truth is served as to make us doubt, with reason, if that be the spirit of the immortal Teacher. The truth and poetry that breathe in your Gospels have been too often paraphrased in the senseless prose of mere formalism. ”