The Foundations of Japan

hat we should leave a better world for ou

." To others he is a religious enthusiast and the Japanese equivalent of a tro

in journalism it was recognised as the voice of a man of principle by people who heard it far from gladly. There is a seamy side to some Japanese journalism[101] and Uchimura soon resigned his editorial ch

en who are Shintoists, Buddhists or Confucians, or vaguely Nationalists, but to such foreign missionaries as are sectarians and literalists. His earliest training was in agricultural science, and the welfare of the Japanese countryside is near his heart. If he be a Carlyle, as his fibre and resolution, downright way of writing and

n Nikko," runs the adage, "do not say 'splendid'.") "How many of the tourists who are delighted with Nikko," he went on, "have heard how the richest farms near that town were devastated? A century ago a minister of the Shogun, who realised that fertility depended on trees, saw to the whole range of Nikko hills being afforested. It was a tract twenty miles by twenty miles in extent. But the 'civilised' authorities of our ow

dation of the hills of trees, and because of their increased expenses, should be laying out "a quarter of their incomes on a

om the lower slopes, and the level of the river beds is raised. Because there is less space in the river beds for water the rivers overflow their banks, and disastrous floods take place. The farmers, the local authorities and the State raise embankments higher and higher, but embankment building is costly and cannot go on indefinitely. The real remedy is to decrease the supply of water by planting forests in the mountains[102] . In many places the river

d, "to press the view that the vaunted expansion of Japan has meant to the farmers an in

the depths of the people. A large part of the deterioration of the countryside is due to the deterioration of Buddhism. You must ask about it. You will see in the villages much of what your

farmed[105]. The division between the two classes was "as great as an Indian caste division." "To the landowner who lives in his village like a feudal lord the simple Gospel, with its insistence on the sacredness of work, comes as an intellectual revolution." Women as well as men of means received from Christianity "a new

ws were flitting, intent on building on a beam which yearly bore a nest. In this room stood a shrine containing the ancestral tablets. The daily offerings were no longer mad

nd Carlyle. When I was asked to speak I found that the women in the gathering had places in front. "The remarkable effect of Christianity among those who have come to think with us," Uchimura told me afterwards, "is seen most in their treatment of women. Our host, had he not been a Christian, would have been credited by public opinion with the possession of a concubine, and

there is power to achieve the very things they aim at." He went on to explain that he looked "in the lives of hearers, not in what they say," for results from his teachin

rrogated Japanese about the problems of rural life, that they had had to coin a word for "problems." Above all, I must be careful not to "exaggerate the quality of Eastern morality." Uchimura asserted sweepingly that "morality in the Anglo-Saxon sense is not found in Japan." We of the West underrated the value of the part played by the Puritans in our

you may search in vain through heathendom." The horror which the Western man of high character felt when he thought of the future of the little girls in attendance on geisha was not a horror generated by Plato. "Heathen life looks nice on the outside to foreigners,"

ngs he had been told by exponents of Christianity now seemed "very strange," but there remained in the first four books of the New Testament, in the essence of Christianity, principles "wh

presented "the best of Europe minus Christianity; the moral backbone of Christianity is lacking." "Probe a dozen Buddhist priest

ived." In considering the sources of national greatness, it was idle to believe that some peoples were original and some not original in their ideas and met

t the women were nearly all handicapped by having a child tied on their backs. Uchimura, returning to his objection to foreign political adventure, said that Japan, properly cultivated, could support twice its present populati

eguarded somehow, then let us take leave of all the ennobling aspirations, all the poetry, and all the deepest hopes we have, and cease to struggle upward. The question is whether we have faith." We

tive countrymen characterised him to me, we take leave of the "Japanese Carlyle." With whom could I have go

TNO

ead in schools. Uchimura is very willing, he said, to show the respect which loyal Japanese are at all times ready to manifest to the Emperor, and he would certainly bow before the portrait of His Majesty; but in the proposal that reverence should be paid

ins of the country is represented in it. Papers like the Jiji, Asahi, Nichi Nichi, and the Osa

ics of forests, s

. The eminent seismologist, Professor Omori, told me that he do

e abandonment of all the extensions to the Empire on the score that they had not been a

e Append

hey might take just one more head. At last the good man yielded, and told them that a Chinaman in a red robe was coming towards the village the next day and his head might be taken. On the morrow the men lay in wait