Page:Japan by the Japanese (1904).djvu/560

Of late I have often been told by Europeans that Japan had made extraordinary progress in so short a time as thirty or forty years. Some even go so far as saying that it was a matter of amazement, as Japan must have been in a state of semi-barbarism before that time. The phase of our modern progress is new, and, of course, we recognise our great indebtedness to the Western nations; we frankly avow that our present forward movement in the path of civilization is mainly based upon European methods of thought and reasoning. But, at the same time, I must say that it would be a matter of great misconception if the Europeans were to think that this kind of complete transformation was possible without some solid antecedents which would have made it feasible.

Japan has had ideas and feelings of her own for many centuries; without some intimate knowledge of those ideas and feelings it would seem almost impossible for outsiders to understand what Japan is, and hence their amazement. The ideas and feelings of a nation are chiefly manifested, and are mainly traceable, in objects of art and in works of literature. I am glad to see that there are numerous books published in European languages, English being the principal one of them, if not the foremost. I have glanced at some of them; their generalization and classification are generally splendid, always displaying the excellent scholastic attainments of the Western writers, though in the domain of literature their number seems to be less than in that of the arts. From these I can say that there is plenty of means for Westerners to study the history of the ideas and feelings of Japan without much difficulty. They are, no doubt, already studied to a great extent by a certain section of Western people, but it seems that this is done by them more for the sake of art or literature as such, and not for the sake of studying the Japanese ideas and feelings. Our hopes are that it should be done so more in the near future with the aim of understanding the Japanese. If these books are not popular reading, why should there not