Are our theories wrong? Is Japan an exception? Are our facts correct?
We instinctively feel that something is at fault. We are not satisfied
with the usual explanation of the recent history of Japan. We are
perhaps ready to concede that "the rejection of the old and the
adoption of Western civilization" is the best statement whereby to
account for the new power of Japan and her new position among the
nations, but when we stop to think, we ask whether we have thus
explained that for which we are seeking an explanation? Do not the
questions still remain--Why did the Japanese so suddenly abandon
Oriental for Occidental civilization? And what mental and other traits
enabled a people who, according to the supposition, were far from
civilized, so suddenly to grasp and wield a civilization quite alien
in character and superior to their own; a civilization ripened after
millenniums of development of the Aryan race? And how far, as a matter
of fact, has this assimilation gone? Not until these questions are
really answered has the explanation been found, So that, after all,
the prime cause which we must seek is not to be found in the external
environment, but rather in the internal endowment.

An effort to understand the ancient history of Japan encounters the
same problem as that raised by her modern history. What mental
characteristics led the Japanese a thousand years ago so to absorb the
Chinese civilization, philosophy, and language that their own suffered
a permanent arrest? What religious traits led them so to take on a
religion from China and India that their own native religion never
passed beyond the most primitive development, either in doctrine, in
ethics, in ritual, or in organization? On the other hand, what mental
characteristics enabled them to preserve their national independence
and so to modify everything brought from abroad, from the words of the