Cross-Currents in Japan
I
THE Nihonbashi is the Broadway of Tokyo. At night, with its electric signs, its brilliantly illuminated shop-windows, its drifting, apparently purposeless crowds, its electric cars and automobiles, which are fast putting the kurumayas, the rickshaw men, out of business, its sidewalk peddlers and fakers, its emporiums full of cheap copies of the latest American store. n store clothes, Kewpie dolls, and graphophone records, it is the best imitation that Japan can give of the West. Various types rub shoulders — coolies in their short blue jackets, women of the people in gay cotton crêpe kimonos with babies tied on their backs, modern young people walking arm-in-arm, old-fashioned wives toddling after their husbands, cosmopolitan merchants in European clothing, flamboyant geishas, groups of giggling Japanese flappers, seriousminded students, soldiers, foreign sailors, tourists, men about town. There are all sorts of people and all sorts of costumes; but the strangest sight of all is the man in a straw hat, tan oxfords, and a crêpe kimono — and he is legion.
The cultivated Japanese turn up their noses at him. They are either correctly European in their outward dress, or conform to the native costume in all its details; but in their mental processes they display the same incongruities. Their brains are European at both ends, but in the middle they are essentially Japanese. It is this fact, which is little understood in America, that has created the many contradictions, the cross-currents and unrest typical of present-day Japan.
Shortly after my arrival in Japan, I took a trip from Tokyo to Kyoto. At one of the stations an elderly gentleman in European clothes got on, carrying a straw suitcase. Depositing it on his seat, he opened it, took out a Japanese outfit, stripped to the skin, quite composedly and apparently oblivious of his fellow passengers, and proceeded to change his clothes. Then he deliberately folded up his European clothes, laid them away carefully, and settled himself for the journey.
The average Japanese divests himself just as easily, at short notice, of European methods of thought. In fact, you never know when he is undergoing a mental transformation, and this makes it difficult to find out what he is really thinking.
I arrived in Japan shortly after Admiral Kato had returned from the Washington Conference. When he landed at Yokohama, though the Japanese newspapers, with few exceptions, praised his achievements at Washington, he had to be rescued from an angry jeering crowd, that yelled, ‘KatoBaka’ (Kato-fool)! A few weeks later, in a Tokyo park, there was a great popular demonstration in favor of a material reduction in the army, in line with the naval reduction programme. While there was general satisfaction over the Four-Power Treaty and the Nine-Power Pact, many thoughtful Japanese felt that they would be a source of weakness rather than strength to Japan. One Japanese naïvely explained to me that the Washington agreements were a scheme of Mr. Hughes to weaken Japan’s influence in the Pacific.
‘We are not really a first-class worldpower,’ a Japanese naval officer said to me candidly, ‘and we know it in our hearts. As long as we had the AngloJapanese treaty back of us, we felt that we could hold our own in diplomacy against any other nation or combination of nations; but now that we are apparently on an equal footing with England, France, and America, we feel that we are at a disadvantage.’
Then the Japanese have lost confidence in militarism as a medium for expansion. To this day, they cannot figure out why it was that Germany lost the war, when by all calculations she should have won. Their ideas on this subject have received a further shock by the demonstration that the occupation of Eastern Siberia, instead of winning them the respect of the rest of the world, created only hatred and suspicion; that all their schemes for the virtual annexation of the Maritime Province through puppet governments set up by their army proved unsuccessful. They have spent millions on militarism, and it has failed them.
I have often wondered if the Japanese are as efficient in a military way as they have the credit of being. For example, in aviation, success in which depends on individual initiative, not on mass training, they are a dismal failure. While in Tokyo I met one of the British officers in charge of training Japanese army aviators. He told me that they were hopeless. They followed instructions to the letter and memorized them faithfully; but once in the air, if anything unexpected happened, calling for the exercise of imagination, they were lost. It was the same with the technical side of aviation. Not long ago a new and rather complicated type of aeroplane motor was sent out from England. When it arrived, one of the exhaust-pipes was slightly bent. The Japanese carefully repeated this defect in a hundred copies that they made in one of their own factories, with the natural result that none of them worked properly.
There is general popular discontent in Japan over the high taxes, — which have been necessitated partly by the high cost of maintaining an army and navy out of all proportion to the country’s resources or legitimate needs, — and a growing pacifist sentiment, though this last is not particularly strong in Japan. The Japanese have always been a military people. The average Japanese will tell you that militarist imperialism was largely stimulated in Japan by the example of other countries and by the instinct of self-preservation. I talked with many Japanese on the subject, from extreme conservatives down to Socialist leaders like Kagawa and Suzuku Bundji, and I never found a man or woman who did not firmly believe that the SinoJapanese war, the Russo-Japanese war, and the acquisition by Japan of Formosa and Korea, were absolutely essential to the preservation of the Empire. It was only the failure of the Japanese army to make good in Siberia that has shaken this belief.
In the nine years between the RussoJapanese war and the outbreak of the Great War, the Japanese simply followed the lead of other countries in the race for naval armaments. Then they fell under the spell of the German idea of militarism and efficiency. The Great War gave the militarists the upper hand for the time being, and for a short period Japan dreamed her dream of expansion by military aggression. The rivalries, squabbles, and international jealousies at the Versailles Conference were not conducive to a change of heart on Japan’s part; and it was not until the Washington Conference that the Japanese began to grasp the possibilities of economic instead of military imperialism. When they first began to seek foreign alliances, it was always with a view to future wars of defense or aggression. Coöperation on equal terms with other powers is not to be grasped by their psychology. Military imperialism is dying hard, but it is gradually being replaced in Japan by a new economic imperialism, just as aggressive and as keen on political alliances for the furtherance of its aims.
Its immediate objective is still the Asiatic mainland, and its medium, not the army and navy, but the great bankers and industrials. There is a group that favors a close alliance with British interests, headed by the Mitsubishis, who last summer received a loan of two million pounds from a Brit ish syndicate for the development of the Fushan coal-mines and the extension of the railway system in Manchuria, and who have a joint interest with Vickers Limited in the operation of the Sakhalin oil-fields and it s rich surface deposits of anthracite coal.
British influence is very strong, but not always for commercial reasons. There is still in the background of the Japanese mind the hope of renewing the Anglo-Japanese Alliance in fact, if not in name. British firms supply practically all the equipment of the Japanese air-force and a large part of its naval equipment, and Americans have lost much business, not always because they were underbid by British firms, but on account of rank favoritism on the part of the Japanese.
A case in point occurred last summer. In Kobe I met an American who had represented a large Japanese steamship company in a city on the Pacific Coast for several years. He booked seventy-five per cent of the freight consigned to Eastern Asiatic ports, and there was no doubt that he was doing a record business. One day he received a cable from the main office of the company in Japan, giving him three months’ notice, as stipulated in their agreement, for the termination of his contract. He took the next steamer for Japan and demanded an explanation. For a long time he was unable to get any satisfaction from the president of the company; but he finally extracted from him the information that, for reasons which he did not care to enter into, the company had decided to give its American agency in the port in question to an Englishman.
If the Japanese succeed in developing their commercial entente with England, it is probable that they wall be guided by the latter, as they have been up to the present time, with regard to opening commercial relations with Russia. Certain British firms are planning, in this event, to use the Japanese for trade with Siberia, as they are using the Germans for commercial enterprises in European Russia. The British are keen enough to understand the Japanese psychology and are acting skillfully on their knowledge. The Japanese as a nation have not progressed in their ideas of international relationships beyond the stage of political alliances and groupings for mutual benefit and protection. If they do not tie up with England, they are likely eventually to form the often predicted Russo-Japanese-German combination.
In either case the United States will be facing a new and not altogether friendly alignment, with interests in the Far East at sharp variance with its own. It is true that there is a much more friendly feeling toward America in Japan since the Washington Conference, but it is only skin deep. The Japanese regard us as their most dangerous competitor, commercially and politically, in the Pacific; they know that we shall prove less amenable to their new economic imperialistic schemes than other nations; and there are certain things that they will always resent, such as the Exclusion Act, and the open sympathy in this country for Korea.
‘You have done exactly the same with regard to the Philippines,’ was what I heard on all sides whenever Korea was mentioned.
For these reasons, therefore, we have no cause to feel that the Washington pacts have removed all possibilit ies of friction between ourselves and the Japanese, or that they have once and for all disarmed the still influential military party. Circumstances may arise that will again give it the upper hand.
II
In the internal political situation in Japan there are curious contradictions. One day, shortly after my arrival in Tokyo, there was a huge meeting of the Kenseikai, the political party then out of power. Viscount Kato, its leader, who, by the way, is not a relative of the admiral, was the principal speaker. There was considerable excitement at the meeting, and the opposition Seiyukai was denounced in no uncertain terms; but the papers next morning gave no indication of what it was all about. I asked a Japanese friend what was the programme of the Kenseikai, and what they would do if they came into power.
‘Along general lines, pretty much the same as the Seiyukai,’ he answered; ‘only with their friends in office. Neither party has a programme as such. They are simply the “ins” and “outs.” We have no political parties as you know them in America. Perhaps there are more liberals in the Kenseikai. That is the only difference, and the strongest influence in politics is still the clan spirit.’
This I found to be quite true. When a man’s political opinions came up for discussion, I constantly heard, ‘Oh, yes, So-and-so is a member of the Satsuma clan,’ or ‘He always was a Choshu man.’ Thus Viscount Shibusawa, whose title of the ‘Grand Old Man’ of Japan is well deserved, and who, with Viscount Kaneko, an intimate friend and great admirer of Theodore Roosevelt, has done much to bring about a more friendly understanding of the United States in Japan, is a Tokugawa man to this day in home politics. As far as I could discover, the Seiyukai are particularly strong in the country, where the clan spirit is more noticeable than in the cities, and Japan having been up to the present time an agricultural country, the Seiyukai have been most often in power. Last year the navy, which is largely composed of Satsuma men, sided with the Seiyukai, which was one of the reasons why Admiral Kato was chosen as premier.
The development of the trade-union movement is handicapped by the clan spirit; and the passivity taught by Buddhism, plus the old fetish of loyalty to the emperor and an ingrained nationalism, militate against the spread of Marxism and radical movements based on the doctrine of direct action, t hough there are growing radical groups in the universities and among workingmen. Even they, however, are under the spell of tradition and their own peculiar psychology.
When I was in Tokyo, a Japanese Socialist committed suicide. He had addressed innumerable petitions to various governmental departments and ministers, and as his complaints against the existing order were ignored, he decided to kill, not the premier or the Emperor, but himself. So, one day, he walked to the bridge over the moat leading to the Imperial Palace and blew himself up with a bomb of his own making. His grave was in an out-ofthe-way suburb, but scores of revolutionary enthusiasts made pilgrimages to it every day, and handfuls of joss sticks were always burning on the mound of earth that was not marked even by the simplest monument.
Thoughtful labor-leaders were much disheartened over what they termed the lack of realism among the working classes. It was difficult to get them to organize for parliamentary action, and there was not even a strong enough movement to force the universal demand for the franchise, restricted to men paying direct taxes amounting to three yen or more yearly, though it was evident that universal suffrage was only a matter of time. What they feared most was that an acute crisis in industry, or the failure of the rice crop, might bring about premature uprisings such as the rice riots of 1919, which would cause repressive measures calculated to set back the legitimate labor-movement indefinitely.
There are two elements which have been causing local troubles in Japan for the past two years, which may be productive of serious disturbances in future. One is a nationalist organization similar to the Italian Fascisti, which is growing rather rapidly, and has had several set-tos with the labor unions, notably last year during a strike in the Kiu-shiu coal-mines. The other is the Eta population. There are about three million Etas in Japan. No one seems to know exactly what they are, or where they came from; but they are pariahs, social outcasts, and distinctly a separate class. They probably have a stronger admixture of Malay blood than the rest of the Japanese, though in some parts of Japan the Malay strain is very pronounced. For centuries they have always done all the jobs that the Japanese considered unclean, such as slaughtering animals. In the cities they have been absorbed to some extent, but in the country districts they live in their ghettos, shunned and despised by the Japanese population. Recently there have been serious uprisings among them, indicating a widespread organization. They could be used as valuable adjuncts to a revolutionary movement.
III
Economically Japan last summer w as going through a period of post-war readjustment such as this country passed through in 1920. During the war industrial development received a tremendous impetus, owing to the fact that production for export in many countries had practically ceased, and the Japanese supplied commodities for the world-market which they had never supplied before. They produced in vast, quantities, but, owing to the poor quality of their manufactures and their inability to standardize, they lost most of their foreign markets as soon as other countries reëntered the export field.
Japanese merchants, who had accumulated large stocks during the war, were unwilling to sell except at war prices, holding them and trying to sell inferior goods produced since the war at low er prices. Their plants were run on money borrowed on goods held in storage, and usually at a loss; so it was difficult for them to meet their obligations at the banks, which in their turn were embarrassed by the situation. In order to prevent labor troubles, they were paying nonemployment bonuses, often, as in the case of shipyard workers affected by the reduction in the naval building programme, for as much as six months in advance, also on borrowed money. Cheap labor in China was inducing many manufacturers, particularly in the textile industry, to open factories in Manchuria and China, in direct opposition to the interests of home labor, and this caused much discontent. The government was still burdened with the huge civil and military bureaucratic machine created by the war, and it was facing the problem of reducing expenditure in all governmental departments, and at the same time providing for the inevitable unemployment that was sure to follow.
Enormous numbers of people were engaged in unproductive work. For example, there are hundreds of theatres in Japan. Every theatre has several restaurants and tea houses attached to it. Each of these has its staff of employees and supernumeraries, and the total runs into the tens of thousands. Besides, there are the middlemen, and they are legion. The charcoal that is almost universally used by the poorer classes in the cities for fuel passes through eight hands before it reaches the consumer. It was obvious that, if taxes were to be reduced, these people must be made productive, and yet there was already much unemployment in industry.
Ten years ago adjustment would have been simplified by the return of many of the surplus workers employed in war industries to the land; but Japan’s rapidly increasing population and the increased cost of production to the small farmer had blocked this outlet. Tenant farmers were being encouraged by the government, and landlords who, owing to the high taxes, could no longer afford to keep their estates, were selling to small holders; but they found few purchasers. The average net income of the small farmer in Japan is 120 yen (sixty dollars) a year — certainly not an alluring prospect to men who had been getting wartime wages in munition factories and shipyards. There remained, therefore, before the Japanese two alternatives: emigration on a large scale, or the conversion of Japan from an agricultural into an industrial country.
Contrary to general opinion in this country, the Japanese are not seriously counting on emigration for the solution of the problem of overpopulation. They are not good colonizers, and they lack the pioneer spirit. They cannot be induced to emigrate to countries where the climate is not similar to their own; and even when they do, they are always looking forward, like the Latin races, to earning enough money to go back and spend the remainder of their lives in Nippon. The Hokkaido, the northernmost island of the empire, contains at present enough unoccupied land to accommodate an agricultural population of half a million. Wheat and cattleraising there are immensely profitable; but the Japanese prefer living in the congested areas in the south to undertaking the development of the rich pasture and farm lands in the Hokkaido.
On my way to Sakhalin I passed through part of the Hokkaido and spent two days in Hakodate. Although the climate there is at least twenty degrees colder than that of Tokyo in summer, and the thermometer frequently drops below zero in winter, the people live exactly as they do in southern Japan — in the same flimsy little houses, with open fronts and paper shoji, exposed to wind and weather.
‘They have not even learned to adapt their footwear to the climate,’ an Englishman in Hakodate told me. ‘In winter they wear wooden clogs and short stockings. The former get caked with snow, and at every telegraph pole along the street during the winter months you see the citizens of Hakodate stopping to clean their clogs. They pin blankets over their kimonos instead of adopting warm fur-lined coats; they insist on cultivating rice which produces only one crop a year here as against two or three in the south, and that has not the same food-value as wheat and oats, which they refuse to raise or eat.’
Up to the present time, emigration to South America, Brazil in particular, has not been very successful, I was told, because the Japanese settlers, though they were subsidized in the beginning by the government, were later outrageously exploited as cheap labor by the Brazilian capitalists. A new project of the Japanese government was to subsidize a syndicate for the purchase of large tracts of land in Chile, to be developed under Japanese management.
Colonization in Korea and Manchuria was progressing slowly, in spite of all the efforts of the government to encourage it; and the majority of the Japanese considered industrial expansion as the immediate means of meeting the country’s needs. This will mean Japan’s aggressive entry into the field of competition for foreign markets, particularly the Asiatic market, and inevitably, until the world realizes the Utopia of international economic cooperation, economic imperialism.
As the natural outcome of changed conditions, the balance of political power was shifting from the military oligarchy and the far-famed Elder Statesmen — of whom, by the way, only two, Matsukata and Saionji, are left — to an industrial oligarchy such as exists at the present time in Germany. The movement began during the war, when six or seven banks in Tokyo, Nagasaki, and Nagoya formed a syndicate to further government enterprises. Under them a system of government subsidies was established, which still exists in the raw-silk industry. These men naturally exert tremendous influence in politics; and just as in Germany, where there is the struggle between the Stinnes combination and opposing groups, so in Japan there is a conflict for power between the Mitsui and Mitsubishi-Iwasaki interests. The latter support the Kato cabinet; the former have been out of power since the days of the late premier Hara, but if the Kensaikai should get control of the government, they would be the dominant influence. Practically all the industrial enterprises of Japan are falling under the influence of one of these groups and their allied interests.
Thus Japan, politically and economically, has been going through a period of post-war readjustment complicated by the eternal conflict between old and new ideas and imperfect assimilation of Western methods. At the same time, the Japanese are making social readjustments no less far-reaching. Ultramodern movements exist side by side with ultraconservatism.
A group of women, headed by Baroness Ishimoto, last summer organized the Japanese Society for Birth Control, shortly after Mrs. Sanger’s visit to Japan; the movement for women’s suffrage was well under way; women in small towns and villages were forming current-topic classes for the discussion of national and international problems; and at the same time, in the poetry clubs, verses laboriously painted with India ink on rice paper, about the color of the petals of a lotus or the flutter of a butterfly’s wing, were the subject of serious and prolonged discussion. Housewives who bought enameled ironware for their kitchens still did their cooking over charcoal braziers, under the eyes of their ancestors, before the Shinto shrine that is in every Japanese kitchen, and said their prayers at a Buddhist altar before going to classes in economics and civics at the Y. W. C. A.
New religious movements were springing up on every hand, most of them attempts to bring Buddhism or Shintoism into direct relationship with the life and problems of the people. The Shinto priests had evolved a formal liturgy, burial and marriage services, and had even undertaken to open soupkitchens and day nurseries, thus giving substance to what had always been at best but a shadowy form of ancestorworship.
A few years ago the stage and society were given over to aping Western manners and customs, but recently they have shown a tendency to revert to Japanese ideals. Most of the women in Tokyo’s gay younger married set had gone back to kimonos and obis, and you could see them every evening fox-trotting in native costumes with straw sandals on their feet. In the repertoire of the Imperial Theatre at Tokyo modern plays figured largely, but they were not, as previously, translations, but Japanese plays on Japanese subjects, often emphasizing the conflict between the old and the new. Many Japanese who had spent much time in foreign countries, and formerly entertained foreigners in European fashion, gave only Japanese dinners. I went to a great many parties while I was in Tokyo, and the only place where I saw any number of Japanese in European dress was at the reception given at the Foreign Office for Secretary Denby and the class of ‘81 from Annapolis.
These were some of the superficial indications I noticed; but they are really part of the far more significant movement that is stirring the Buddhist and Mohammedan worlds, and of which there are phases in every part of the East and the Near East. In Japan it has no name as yet; in China they call it the New Tide; we have christened it Pan-Islamism in Mohammedan countries, but its slogan is ‘Asia for the Asiatics.’
It is a very real movement, but it has been much misunderstood in the West, where its strength has either been much underestimated, or exaggerated as a possible menace to Western civilization. There is no dream of world-conquest in the minds of its leaders. They claim the inalienable right of all Asiatic peoples to their own territories, their own economic development, and their own culture, and to their political supremacy in their logical spheres of influence. Whether or not it will take an aggressive militaristic form will depend largely on the progress made in the world within the next few years toward international coöperation. Its proponents in Japan are looking beyond all possible European combinations and alliances to a day when it will be possible to form an alliance between Japan and China, which will result in a great federation of the two peoples, with a distinctive culture that has merely assimilated, not copied, certain features of Western civilization, with a definite nationalistic foreign policy, and an economic structure freed from European exploitation. Conservatives visualize it as a great imperialistic federation, liberals as a Far-Eastern Democracy, Socialists as a Yellow Commune in a Red Millennium; but it is the dream of the man in the straw hat, the tan oxfords, and the crêpe kimono; of the bronzed officer in his khaki uniform with red trimmings; of the statesman in the frock coat with his European decorations; of the business man, the industrialist, the labor leader; of every thinking man in Japan to-day. Japan’s goal for the immediate future is economic imperialism; but her eventual goal is the domination of the yellow races in the Far East.