Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic By Sidney Lewis Gulick

Reproduction of the original: Evolution of the Japanese Social and Psychic by Sidney L. Gulick

Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic by Sidney Lewis Gulick

Excerpt from Evolution of the Japanese: Social and Psychic The present work is an attempt to interpret the characteristics of modern Japan in the light of social science. It also seeks to throw some light on the vexed question as to the real character of so-called race-nature, and the processes by which that nature is transformed. If the principles of social science here set forth are correct, they apply as well to China and India as to Japan, and thus will bear directly on the entire problem of Occidental and Oriental social intercourse and mutual influence. The core of this work consists of addresses to American and English audiences delivered by the writer during his recent furlough. Since returning to Japan, he has been able to give but fragments of time to the completion of the outlines then sketched, and though he would gladly reserve the manuscript for further elaboration, he yields to the urgency of friends who deem it wise that he delay no longer in laying his thought before the wider public. To Japanese readers the writer wishes to say that although he has not hesitated to make statements painful to a lover of Japan, he has not done it to condemn or needlessly to criticise, but simply to make plain what seem to him to be the facts. If he has erred in his facts or if his interpretations reflect unjustly on the history or spirit of Japan, no one will be more glad than he for corrections. Let the Japanese be assured that his ruling motive, both in writing about Japan and in spending his life in this land, is profound love for the Japanese people. The term "native" has been freely used because it is the only natural correlative for "foreign." About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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 of small stature, sarcastically described by their foes as "Wojen," pygmy, attacked the army and navy of a country ten times their size.Such a universal change of opinion regarding a nation, especially regarding one so remote from the centers of Western civilization as Japan, could not have taken place in any previous generation. The telegraph, the daily paper, the intelligent reporters and writers of books and magazine articles, the rapid steam travel and the many travelers-all these have made possible this sudden acquisition of knowledge and startling reversal of opinion.There is reason, however, to think that much misapprehension and real ignorance still exists about Japan and her leap into power and world-wide prestige. Many seem to think that Japan has entered on her new career through the abandonment of her old civilization and the adoption of one from the West-that the victories on sea and land, in Korea, at Port Arthur, and a Wei-hai-wei, and more recently at Tientsin and Pekin, were solely due to her Westernized navy and army. Such persons freely admit that this process of Westernization had been going on for many years more rapidly than the world at large knew, and that consequently the reputation of Japan before the war was not such as corresponded with her actual attainments. But they assume that there was nothing of importance in the old civilization; that it was little superior to organized barbarism.These people conceive of the change which has taken place in Japan during the past thirty years as a revolution, not as an evolution; as an abandonment of the old, and an adoption of the new, civilization. They conceive the old tree of civilization to have been cut down and cast into the fire, and a new tree to have been imported from the West and planted in Japanese soil. New Japan is, from this view-point, the new tree.