The foundations of Japan : $b Notes made during journeys of 6,000 miles in the rural districts as a basis for a sounder knowledge of the Japanese peopleRobertson Scott, J. W. (John William)
General
The foundations of Japan : $b Notes made during journeys of 6,000 miles in the rural districts as a basis for a sounder knowledge of the Japanese people
Robertson Scott, J. W. (John William)
Agriculture -- Japan; Country life -- Japan; Japan -- Description and travel; Japan -- Social conditions
"So you see," said Uchimura, as we walked to the station in the
morning, "in an antiquated book, which, I suppose, stands dusty on the
shelves of some of your reformers, 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
teaching. He believed in liberty and freedom, in sowing the seed of
change and reform and allowing people to develop as they would. "Let
men and women believe as they have light."
He spoke in his kindly way of how "the bond of a common faith enables
Japanese to get closer to the foreigner and the foreigner closer to
the Japanese." There were many things we foreigners did not
understand. We did not understand, for example, that "A man's a man
for a' that" was an unfamiliar conception to a Japanese. I was to
remember, when I interrogated 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 development. Our moral life had
been evolved by the soul-stirring power of the Hebrew prophets and of
Christ. To deny this was "kicking your own mother." Just as it was not
possible for the Briton or American to get his present morality from
Greece and Rome exclusively, it was not possible for the Japanese to
obtain it from the sources at his disposal.
The faults of the Eastern were that he thought too much of outward
conduct. Good political and neighbourly-relations, kindliness, honesty
and thrift were his idea of morality. "To love goodness and to hate
evil with one's whole soul is a Christian conception for which 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," but
Confucianism, Buddhism and Shintoism had all been weak in their
attitude towards immorality. It was Christianity alone which
controlled sexual life. Without deep-seated love of and joy in
goodness and deep-seated horror of evil it was impossible to reform
society.
Uchimura said that it had taken him thirty years to reach the
conviction that the best way of raising his countrymen was by
preaching the religion of "a despised foreign peasant." Many things 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 "which would give new life to
all men." Moved by this belief, Uchimura and his friends gave their
lives to the work of the Gospel, to a work attended by humiliations;
"but this is our glory."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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