The national spirit is excessively strong in Japan, and has been made powerful by centuries of development. Every Japanese is born, lives, and dies for his country. Loyalty is the highest virtue; and _Yamato-damashii_ (Japan spirit) is a synonym too often of narrow and inordinate patriotism. But the vision of the Japanese is broadening, and they are learning that cosmopolitanism is not necessarily antagonistic to patriotism. They used to harp on “The Japan of the Japanese”; later they began to talk about “The Japan of Asia”; but now they wax eloquent over “The Japan of the World.” Filial piety is the second virtue in the Japanese ethics, and is often carried to a silly extreme. The old custom of _inkyō_ made it possible for parents, even while they were still able-bodied, to retire from active work and become an incubus on the eldest son, perhaps just starting out in his life career. But now there is a law that no one can become inkyō before he is sixty years of age. And yet filial piety can easily nullify the law! Professor George T. Ladd, who has made a special study of the Japanese from the psychological point of view, sums up their “character” as of the “sentimental temperament.”[73] The following are suggestive passages:— “This distinctive Japanese temperament is that which Lotze has so happily called the ‘sentimental temperament.’ It is the temperament characteristic of youth, predominatingly, in all races. It is, as a temperament, characteristic of all ages, of both sexes, and of all classes of population, among the Japanese. But, of course, in Japan as everywhere, the different ages, sexes, and classes of society, differ in respect to the purity of this temperamental distinction. Many important individual exceptions, or examples of other temperaments, also occur. “The distinguishing mark of the sentimental temperament is great susceptibility to variety of influences—especially on the side of feeling, and independent of clear logical analysis or fixed and well-comprehended principles—with a tendency to a will that is impulsive and liable to collapse. Such susceptibility is likely to be accompanied by unusual difficulty in giving due weight to those practical considerations, which lead to compromises in politics, to steadiness in labor, to patience in developing the details of science and philosophy, and to the establishment of a firm connection between the higher life of thought and feeling and the details of daily conduct. On the other hand, it is the artistic temperament, the temperament which makes one ‘interesting,’ the ‘clever’ mind, the temperament which has a suggestion of genius at its command....