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Said a well educated and widely read Englishman to the writer while in Oxford, "Can you explain to me how it is that the Japanese have succeeded in jumping out of their skins?" And an equally thoughtful American, speaking about the recent strides in civilization made by Japan, urged that this progress could not be real and genuine. "How can such a mushroom-growth, necessarily without deep roots in the past, be real and strong and permanent? How can it escape being chiefly superficial?" These two men are typical of much of the thought of the West in regard to Japan.

Seldom, perhaps never, has the civilized world so suddenly and completely reversed an estimate of a nation as it has that with reference to Japan. Before the recent war, to the majority even of fairly educated men, Japan was little more than a name for a few small islands somewhere near China, whose people were peculiar and interesting. To-day there is probably not a man, or woman, or child attending school in any part of the civilized world, who does not know the main facts about the recent war: how the small country and the men of small stature, sarcastically described by their foes as "Wojen," pygmy, attacked the army and navy of a country ten times their size.

Such a universal change of opinion regarding a nation, especially regarding one so remote from the centers of Western civilization as Japan, could not have taken place in any previous generation. The telegraph, the daily paper, the intelligent reporters and writers of books and magazine articles, the rapid steam travel and the many travelers-all these have made possible this sudden acquisition of knowledge and startling reversal of opinion.

There is reason, however, to think that much misapprehension and real ignorance still exists about Japan and her leap into power and world-wide prestige. Many seem to think that Japan has entered on her new career through the abandonment of her old civilization and the adoption of one from the West-that the victories on sea and land, in Korea, at Port Arthur, and a Wei-hai-wei, and more recently at Tientsin and Pekin, were solely due to her Westernized navy and army. Such persons freely admit that this process of Westernization had been going on for many years more rapidly than the world at large knew, and that consequently the reputation of Japan before the war was not such as corresponded with her actual attainments. But they assume that there was nothing of importance in the old civilization; that it was little superior to organized barbarism.

These people conceive of the change which has taken place in Japan during the past thirty years as a revolution, not as an evolution; as an abandonment of the old, and an adoption of the new, civilization. They conceive the old tree of civilization to have been cut down and cast into the fire, and a new tree to have been imported from the West and planted in Japanese soil. New Japan is, from this view-point, the new tree.

Not many months ago I heard of a wealthy family in Kyoto which did not take kindly to the so-called improvements imported from abroad, and which consequently persisted in using the instruments of the older civilization. Even such a convenience as the kerosene lamp, now universally adopted throughout the land of the Rising Sun, this family refused to admit into its home, preferring the old-style andon with its vegetable oil, dim light, and flickering flame. Recently, however, an electric-light company was organized in that city, and this brilliant illuminant was introduced not only into the streets and stores, but into many private houses. Shortly after its introduction, the family was converted to the superiority of the new method of illumination, and passed at one leap from the old-style lantern to the latest product of the nineteenth century. This incident is considered typical of the transformations characteristic of modern Japan. It is supposed that New Japan is in no proper sense the legitimate product through evolution of Old Japan.

In important ways, therefore, Japan seems to be contradicting our theories of national growth. We have thought that no "heathen" nation could possibly gain, much less wield, unaided by Westerners, the forces of civilized Christendom. We have likewise held that national growth is a slow process, a gradual evolution, extending over scores and centuries of years. In both respects our theories seem to be at fault. This "little nation of little people," which we have been so ready to condemn as "heathen" and "uncivilized," and thus to despise, or to ignore, has in a single generation leaped into the forefront of the world's attention.

Are our theories wrong? Is Japan an exception? Are our facts correct? We instinctively feel that something is at fault. We are not satisfied with the usual explanation of the recent history of Japan. We are perhaps ready to concede that "the rejection of the old and the adoption of Western civilization" is the best statement whereby to account for the new power of Japan and her new position among the nations, but when we stop to think, we ask whether we have thus explained that for which we are seeking an explanation? Do not the questions still remain-Why did the Japanese so suddenly abandon Oriental for Occidental civilization? And what mental and other traits enabled a people who, according to the supposition, were far from civilized, so suddenly to grasp and wield a civilization quite alien in character and superior to their own; a civilization ripened after millenniums of development of the Aryan race? And how far, as a matter of fact, has this assimilation gone? Not until these questions are really answered has the explanation been found, So that, after all, the prime cause which we must seek is not to be found in the external environment, but rather in the internal endowment.

An effort to understand the ancient history of Japan encounters the same problem as that raised by her modern history. What mental characteristics led the Japanese a thousand years ago so to absorb the Chinese civilization, philosophy, and language that their own suffered a permanent arrest? What religious traits led them so to take on a religion from China and India that their own native religion never passed beyond the most primitive development, either in doctrine, in ethics, in ritual, or in organization? On the other hand, what mental characteristics enabled them to preserve their national independence and so to modify everything brought from abroad, from the words of the new language to the philosophy of the new religions, that Japanese civilization, language, and religion are markedly distinct from the Chinese? Why is it that, though the Japanese so fell under the bondage of the Chinese language as permanently to enslave and dwarf their own beautiful tongue, expressing the dominant thought of every sentence with characters (ideographs) borrowed from China, yet at the same time so transformed what they borrowed that no Chinaman can read and understand a Japanese book or newspaper?

The same questions recur at this new period of Japan's national life. Why has she so easily turned from the customs of centuries? What are the mental traits that have made her respond so differently from her neighbor to the environment of the nineteenth-century civilization of the West Why is it that Japan has sent thousands of her students to these Western lands to see and study and bring back all that is good in them, while China has remained in stolid self-satisfaction, seeing nothing good in the West and its ways? To affirm that the difference is due to the environment alone is impossible, for the environment seems to be essentially the same. This difference of attitude and action must be traced, it would seem, to differences of mental and temperamental characteristics. Those who seek to understand the secret of Japan's newly won power and reputation by looking simply at her newly acquired forms of government, her reconstructed national social structure, her recently constructed roads and railroads, telegraphs, representative government, etc., and especially at her army and navy organized on European models and armed with European weapons, are not unlike those who would discover the secret of human life by the study of anatomy.

This external view and this method of interpretation are, therefore, fundamentally erroneous. Never, perhaps, has the progress of a nation been so manifestly an evolution as distinguished from a revolution. No foreign conquerors have come in with their armies, crushing down the old and building up a new civilization. No magician's wand has been waved over the land to make the people forget the traditions of a thousand years and fall in with those of the new régime. No rite or incantation has been performed to charm the marvelous tree of civilization and cause it to take root and grow to such lofty proportions in an unprepared soil.

In contrast to the defective views outlined above, one need not hesitate to believe that the actual process by which Old Japan has been transformed into New Japan is perfectly natural and necessary. It has been a continuous growth; it is not the mere accumulation of external additions; it does not consist alone of the acquisition of the machinery and the institutions of the Occident. It is rather a development from within, based upon already existing ideas and institutions. New Japan is the consequence of her old endowment and her new environment. Her evolution has been in progress and can be traced for at least a millennium and a half, during which she has been preparing for this latest step. All that was necessary for its accomplishment was the new environment. The correctness of this view and the reasons for it will appear as we proceed in our study of Japanese characteristics. But we need to note at this point the danger, into which many fall, of ascribing to Japan an attainment of western civilization which the facts will not warrant. She has secured much, but by no means all, that the West has to give.

We may suggest our line of thought by asking what is the fundamental element of civilization? Does it consist in the manifold appliances that render life luxurious; the railroad, the telegraph, the post office, the manufactures, the infinite variety of mechanical and other conveniences? Or is it not rather the social and intellectual and ethical state of a people? Manifestly the latter. The tools indeed of civilization may be imported into a half-civilized, or barbarous country; such importation, however, does not render the country civilized, although it may assist greatly in the attainment of that result. Civilization being mental, social, and ethical, can arise only through the growth of the mind and character of the vast multitudes of a nation. Now has Japan imported only the tools of civilization? In other words, is her new civilization only external, formal, nominal, unreal? That she has imported much is true. Yet that her attainments and progress rest on her social, intellectual, and ethical development will become increasingly clear as we take up our successive chapters. Under the new environment of the past fifty years, this growth, particularly in intellectual, in industrial, and in political lines, has been exceedingly rapid as compared with the growths of other peoples.

This conception of the rise of New Japan will doubtless approve itself to every educated man who will allow his thought to rest upon the subject. For all human progress, all organic evolution, proceeds by the progressive modification of the old organs under new conditions. The modern locomotive did not spring complete from the mind of James Watt; it is the result of thousands of years of human experience and consequent evolution, beginning first perhaps with a rolling log, becoming a rude cart, and being gradually transformed by successive inventions until it has become one of the marvels of the nineteenth century. It is impossible for those who have attained the view-point of modern science to conceive of discontinuous progress; of continually rising types of being, of thought, or of moral life, in which the higher does not find its ground and root and thus an important part of its explanation, in the lower. Such is the case not only with reference: to biological evolution; it is especially true of social evolution. He who would understand the Japan of to-day cannot rest with the bare statement that her adoption of the tools and materials of Western civilization has given her her present power and place among the nations. The student with historical insight knows that it is impossible for one nation, off-hand, without preparation, to "adopt the civilization" of another.