Our Relations with Japan1

The rise of Japan within the span of one generation from the condition of a weak feudalized state, shut off from all contact with the western nations, to the position of a world power dominated by a desire to shape the destinies of Eastern Asia and ready to dispute with other powers the control of the Pacific, constitutes one of the most dramatic stories in the whole range of history. The rapid assimilation of western ideas and the successful appropriation of all the material elements of western civilization are without a parallel.Dr. Nitobé, whom we are glad to recognize not only as a great scholar but as a great writer of English, in his remarkable book, Bushido, the Soul of Japan, describes with great power and beauty the idealism of the Samurai, or gentlemen of Japan of a generation ago, but while the old spirit still flashes out occasionally as in the spectacular, and to us meaningless, suicide, on the occasion of the funeral of the late Emperor, of one of his most distinguished subjects, General Nogi, we cannot help believing that the Japanese have outgrown their idealism; that they cast it aside when they discarded their mediaeval weapons and abandoned their self-complacent exclusivism. The Japanese are the greatest materialists in the world today, for it is the material elements of western civilization that they have appropriated and to which they owe their success in two wars. A nation of materialists, fired with ambition and military ardor, are going just as far in their aggressiveness as sheer force will carry them. That is why Japan with her present ambitions is so generally regarded as a menace to the peace of the world.