lower than those of personality.




EVOLUTION OF THE JAPANESE

I

PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS


Said a well educated and widely read Englishman to the writer while in
Oxford, "Can you explain to me how it is that the Japanese have
succeeded in jumping out of their skins?" And an equally thoughtful
American, speaking about the recent strides in civilization made by
Japan, urged that this progress could not be real and genuine. "How
can such a mushroom-growth, necessarily without deep roots in the
past, be real and strong and permanent? How can it escape being
chiefly superficial?" These two men are typical of much of the thought
of the West in regard to Japan.

Seldom, perhaps never, has the civilized world so suddenly and
completely reversed an estimate of a nation as it has that with
reference to Japan. Before the recent war, to the majority even of
fairly educated men, Japan was little more than a name for a few small
islands somewhere near China, whose people were peculiar and
interesting. To-day there is probably not a man, or woman, or child
attending school in any part of the civilized world, who does not know
the main facts about the recent war: how the small country and the men