The Japanese appear from all we are told, to be even a more intensely conceited nation than the Chinese, and after attaining the most superficial knowledge on any subject, are quite satisfied they know as much as those who are teaching them. Notwithstanding also, their eager desire to imitate everything European, it is astonishing how jealous they are of its being known that they have foreign instructors, and how anxious they are, on all public occasions, to keep them as far as it is possible to do so, in the background.
Letters from China & Japan (1875)
The Japanese are essentially a pleasure-loving people. Most of them lead a hand-to-mouth, butterfly sort of life. Misfortune they endure quietly, consoling themselves with a submissive fatalism. In the afternoon a family have their slender wooden house burned to the ground; in the evening, they are among the ashes, drinking tea, and looking quite contented. So many fires, they say to themselves, must come in so many years; they have got over one, and the next will be so much the longer in coming. The Satsuma rebellion is raging in the south; the barracks and drill-grounds are at all hours of the day filled with raw recruits, and some regiments have just been embarked at Yokohama, probably destined, like their predecessors, to be slaughtered. But the shop-keepers sit on their mats in as good humour as ever, their charcoal-stoves, pipes, and tea-pots beside them; and the dark-eyed girls trip about pit-a-patting quick time with their wooden clogs and wriggling their bodies, just as if there were no such science as politics, possibly their only thoughts anticipations of how the irises will look at Hori-kiri next holiday, or the sweet smelling roses which the foreigners brought, at the exhibition.
The Land of the Morning (1882)
It is a singular fact, that in Japan, where the individual is sacrificed to the community, he should seem perfectly happy and contented; while in America, where exactly the opposite result takes place, and the community is sacrificed to the individual, the latter is in a perpetual state of uproarious clamour for his rights.
Narrative of the Earl of Elgin’s Mission to China and Japan (1859)
The people appear to be very happy, but it is not pleasant to find that under the politeness and courtesy so lavishly displayed are hidden depths of corruption. They drink and quarrel, and the women have sore troubles, and bitter tears to shed, and often take their own lives to end the misery for which they know no remedy.
The Sunrise Kingdom (1879)
Sometimes we think these people resemble the Greeks in their extreme delight and delicate sense of beauty; their adaptiveness and love of change and progress, their speculative and inquiring turn of mind (the works of Mill and Spencer are most popular with the higher students); their failure to appreciate truth in the abstract, and their irreligiousness, combined with a tender nature, and instinctive love of virtue; lastly, their sociable and mirth-loving temperament, and keen sense of humour.
Journal of a Lady’s Travels Round the World (1883)
It is difficult to reconcile the character of this peaceable and pleasure-loving race which the modern traveller sees with that which is ascribed to their forefathers—those heroes of the desperate wars and bloody revolutions which fill the pages of the early history of Japan. It may be that two centuries of Tokugawa rule, fatherly but autocratic, developed qualities of unreasoning obedience, and perhaps all the struggles of the past were merely dynastic, or affairs between the warriors of different clans; perhaps the people themselves have always been as gentle as they are now, cultivating their land and pursuing their ingenious trades, little affected by these turmoils, except that, like the producers of all times and countries, they were called on to supply the sinews of war.
Notes in Japan (1896)
The people, as we met them on these journeys, pleased us greatly. They were invariably courteous and gentle in their manners, and no boorishness was visible, even among the lower classes. They always seemed to be good-natured. However stormy the weather, however heavy the load, however bad the roads, we never heard a Japanese complain, nor saw one in a bad humor. If the foreigner becomes angry with them, they laugh as if he were making himself ridiculous; and presently he feels that they are right, and that violent anger is in truth absurd.
Yet, just as beneath the smiling landscapes of Japan still lurk the terrible volcanic forces of destruction, so underneath the sunny dispositions of the Japanese are all the characteristics of the warrior. Their history has thoroughly established that they are a manly, patriotic, martial race. Their gentleness, therefore, comes not from servility, but is the product of inborn courtesy and refinement.
The Japanese are naturally of a happy disposition. A smile illumines every face. Apparently their past has no regrets, their present no annoyances, their future no alarms. They love the beautiful in nature and in art. They live simply; and how much that means! Their wants are few. The houses of the wealthy do not differ much from those of the poor. Hence life for them is free from almost all those harrowing cares and worriments which sometimes make existence in the Occident a long, incessant struggle to keep up appearances. If they are sad, they seldom show their sadness in public.
Japan (1897)
There was a time, before I knew as much of the Japanese character as I do now, when I invariably found it difficult to listen with patience to the loquacious student who would explain to me that he wished to serve his country by making himself a very rich man. I used to think it was a selfish rather than a patriotic ambition, and that the boy was always an arrant hypocrite. I have learned to mistrust my own sweeping judgments. There are some cases, of course, of wilful hypocrisy, for there are hypocrites in all nations, and there are cases also of unconscious self-deception. But in a great number of lives it is the expression of that spirit of bushido which teaches a Japanese to put country first and self second; and this is by no means an ignoble or unprofitable conception of duty. For if the whole nation is prosperous, the individuals composing it will share in the general prosperity, and there are cases in which it is profitable to lose one’s life because one thereby saves it.
Every-day Japan (1909)
Nobody would dream of seriously criticising a change, however unpleasant, which a wise and maternal Government suggests. There are no chronic “grumbletonians” in Japan. The Government, all agree, must know best. ... In any other country the very fact of being told to do a thing would probably make half the inhabitants protest against doing it. Not so the Japanese. They like to obey, in fact they clamour to obey.
Behind the Screens (1910)
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