Produced by Adrian Mastronardi, Ernest Schaal, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) AN INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF JAPAN BY KATSURO HARA YAMATO SOCIETY PUBLICATION [Illustration] G. P. Putnam's Sons New York and London The Knickerbocker Press 1920 COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY THE YAMATO SOCIETY OBJECTS OF THE YAMATO SOCIETY The military achievements of Japan in the last twenty years have done much to make the world appreciate and acknowledge the intrinsic worth of the Japanese nation. It is, however, very doubtful whether the other nations find in us many other things to admire besides our military excellence. Some of them, indeed, without fully investigating their deeper causes, have entertained serious misgivings as to the probable consequence of our military successes. The continual occurrence of anti-Japanese movements in the various States of America and in the dependencies of Great Britain and Russia, countries with which Japan is most intimately connected, has been chiefly due to this want of knowledge as to the real state of affairs in Japan, the progress in the arts of peace, in science, literature, art, law and economics. Japan has a brilliant civilisation of which we can justly be proud. In fine art, we have painting, sculpture, architecture, lacquer-work, metal-carving, ceramics, etc.,--all of striking quality; in literature, our poetry, fiction and drama are worthy of serious study; in music and on the stage our progress has been along lines which accord with the development of our distinctive national character, and is by no means behind that of Europe. Europeans and Americans, however, have failed as yet to appreciate the essential worth of Japan's civilisation. Some foreigners, it is true, speak highly of Japanese fine art, praising Japan as a country devoted to art; but the works that they admire are not always essentially characteristic of Japan, nor are they representative works of Japanese fine arts. The number of foreigners aware of the existence of an influential literature in Japan is extremely limited.