CONCLUSION.
ALTHOUGH the points of difference given in the preceding pages have been purposely only of the lightest and most superficial kind, these being the limits assigned by the writer to a work of this description, it must be borne in mind, when drawing invidious comparisons between the Japanese and ourselves upon points of national deviation either small or great, that while most foreigners (as all other nationalities are termed in Japan) come to this country with a fixed belief in the immense superiority of their own national habits and customs over those of the Japanese, they, in their turn, visit other countries with precisely the same conviction in their minds. This is only human nature, which is the same all the world over, but the great difference between the two points of view consists in that the ordinary visitor to Japan does not come here to study the Japanese with any intention of remodelling or reforming his national life upon theirs, and consequently only regards their customs superficially, while all other countries have been put upon their trial-so to speak-for many years past, by men of the highest intellect in Japan, who have not only visited them in order to study and compare, but also with the avowed object of adopting, or at any rate of asssimilating as much of theirs as their judgment commended for their country's good.
And where they have, up to the present time left their national customs unaltered, it has been either because it was found that Western ways could not be substituted without an entire subversion of existing Japanese life, founded upon the necessities of climatic and other powerful influences, or because Western life in its political, religious, moral, and social aspects, seemed to the Japanese mind to have failed in reaching the theoretically lofty standard it claims for itself in the eyes of the whole world, and was cosequently neither so consistently or sufficiently superior as to make it advisable for them to recommend their country to relinquish entirely its own national characteristics for those of any other.
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Until therefore foreigners are in a position to be able to make it their proud boast to state :truthfully that their own nations, which for centuries past have been enjoying political, religious, scientific, and social advantages unattainable to the Japanese until thirty years ago, are purged completely of the vices, follies, and inconsistencies they are so ready to detect in the Japanese rece, would it not be well if they were to regard the habits, manners, and customs of these people, when they differ from their own, in the same broad and charitable spirit indicated by the poet Burns, in the stanza which has been selected as the motto for this little book?
E.S.P. |
