The foundations of Japan

After this ceremony, in which the staple crop of the country and the labour of the farmer in his paddy field had been honoured by the State and dignified by ancestral blessings, there was luncheon in one of those deftly contrived reed-covered structures, of the building of which the Japanese have the knack, and the Governor asked some of us to say a few words. Then on a raised platform in the open there was enacted a comic interlude such as might have been seen in England in the Middle Ages. In the evening I was bidden to a dinner of the officials responsible for the day's doings. The Governor made a kindly reference to my labours and the local M.P. presented me with a kimono length of the cotton material which had been woven for the planters of the sacred rice.

III^[84]

The production of rice has increased more quickly than the growth of the population. If we consider, along with the advance in population, the crops of the years 1882 and 1913, which were held to be average, and, in order to be as up-to-date as possible, the normal annual yield^[85] of the five-years period 1912-18, we find that, as between 1882 and 1913, the population increased 45 per cent. and rice production increased 63 per cent., while as between 1882 and the normal annual yield period of 1912-18, the population increased 55 per cent, and the crop 75 per cent. ^[86]

This is a noteworthy fact. But equally noteworthy is the fact that in the 1882-1913 period, in which the production of rice increased 63 per cent. and the population only 45 per cent., the price of rice did not fall. On the contrary it rose. This was due largely ^[87] to the fact that people had begun to eat rice who had not before been able to afford it. Many people who grow rice eat, as has been noted, barley or barley mixed with a little rice. From the 'eighties onwards more and more rice was eaten. ^[88]

The reason was that, what with the cash obtained from cocoons through the enormous development of sericulture, ^[89] what with the money received by the girls who had gone to the factories, what with the growth of big cities causing an increased demand for vegetables, eggs and especially fruit at good prices, what with the use of better seed and more artificial manure, what with agricultural co-operation, paddy-field adjustment and the taking-in of new land, the farmer, in spite of increased taxation, ^[90] was doing better, or at any rate was minded to live better. In the thirty-years period 1882-1913, his crop increased 63 per cent. although his area under cultivation increased by only 17 per cent. In the following pages we shall hear more of the methods by which the farmer's receipts have been increased. We shall hear also, alas! of the ways in which his expenditure has increased. He is indeed in a trying situation. Everything depends on his character and education and on the influences, social and political, moral and religious, under which he lives. That is why this book, in devoting itself to an examination of the foundations of an agricultural country, is concerned with rural sociology rather than with the technique of crops and cropping.

The outstanding problem of the rice grower is fluctuations in price.^[91] It is also the problem of the landlord, for rents are fixed not at so much money but at so many koku of rice. This means that on rent day the farmer must pay the same amount of rice whether his crop has been good or bad. It also means that when the price of rice rises the amount of rent is automatically raised. If rent were paid, not in so many koku of rice but in money at a fixed amount, the landlord would know where he was and the tenant would be in an easier position, for when the rice crop failed the price would be high and he would be able to meet his rent by selling a smaller amount of rice. The counsel of the prudent to the rice producer is to build storehouses and not to sell the whole of his crop immediately after harvest, but to extend the sale over the whole year, marketing each month about the same amount if possible. The Government Granary plan came into force in 1921, some 3 million koku of unpolished rice being bought in five grades at from 27 yen to 33 yen. In the year before the War rice was selling at 20 yen per koku (5 bushels). The previous year (1912) it had been 21 yen—had risen at times to 23 yen—an unheard-of price. Between 1894 and 1912 it had climbed merely from about 7 yen to a maximum of 16 yen. ^[92] In the year in which the War broke out, it dropped as low as 12 yen, and in 1915 it was only 11 yen. By 1916 it had not risen beyond 14 yen.

The fall in prices was due to exceptional harvests in 1914 and 1915 (that is, 57,006,541 koku and 55,924,590 koku as compared with the 50,255,000 koku of the year before the War, or the 51,312,000 which may be taken as the average of the seven-years period 1907-13). Such exceptional harvests as those of 1914 and 1915 showed a surplus of from 4½ to 6 million koku over and above the needs of the country, which are roughly estimated at 1 koku per head including infants and the old and feeble. In 1916 it was established, when account was taken of stored rice, that the actual surplus was something like 6 or 7 million koku. Therefore a fall in price took place. The extent to which rice is imported and exported is shown in Appendix XXIV. This Chapter would become much more technical than is necessary if I entered into the question of the correctness of rice statistics. Roughly, the statistics show a production 15 per cent. less than the actual crops. Formerly the under-estimation was 20 per cent. The practice has its origin in the old taxation system.

The notes for the account of rural life in Japan which will be found in this book were chiefly made in the second and third years of the War. Since that time there has been an enormous rise in the price of everything. For a time the farmers prospered as they had prospered in the high rice-price years, 1912-13. ^[93] The high prices of all grain as well as the fabulous price of raw silk (due to increased export to America and to increased home consumption) were a great advantage.

Then came the rice riots of the city workers, the general slump and finally the commercial and industrial crash. Raw silk fell nearly to one-third of its top price, and farmers had to sell cocoons under the cost of production. Everywhere countrymen and countrywomen employed in the factories were discharged in droves. A large proportion of these unfortunates returned to their villages to dispel some rural dreams of urban Eldorado.

But this matter of the going up and coming down of prices has but a passing interest for the reader. The only economic fact of which he need lay hold is that in recent years the farmers have been led into the way of spending more money—in taxation as well as in general expenses of living—and that, when account is taken of every advantage they have gained from better methods of production, they have pressing on them the limitations imposed by the size of their farms and their farming practice. Whatever the prices obtained for the: products of the soil, climatic facts, ^[94] the character and social condition of the people, their attitude towards life and authority and the attitude of authority towards them remain very much the same. And thus a narrative of things seen and heard chiefly during the first years of the War is not at all out of date even if it were not supplemented as it is by a plentiful supply of notes containing the latest statistical data.

There is one curious exception only. The reader of these pages will constantly come on references to the poverty of the tenant farmers. They are, of course, practically labourers, for they cultivate two or three acres only, and at the end of the year, as has been shown, have merely a trifle in hand and sometimes not that. Influenced by the labour movement, which developed in the industrial centres during and after the War, ^[95] this depressed class has of late shown spirit. It has begun to assert its claims against landowners. At the end of 1920 there were as many as ninety associations of tenant farmers, and sixty of these had been started for the specific purpose of representing tenants' interests against landowners. Strikes of tenants began and continue. The end of this movement of a proverbially conservative class is not at all certain. ^[96]

The outstanding facts which are to be borne in mind about agricultural Japan are that the population is as thick on the ground as the population of the British Isles (thicker in reality, for so much of Japan is mountain and waste)—ten times thicker than the population of the United States ^[97]—that Japan is primarily an agricultural country, while Great Britain is largely a manufacturing and trading country, and that only 15½ per cent. of Japan proper (including Hokkaido) is under cultivation against 27 per cent. in Great Britain.^[98] The average area cultivated per farming family in Japan, counting paddy and upland together, is less than 3 acres. As the total population of Japan is now (1921) 56 millions (55,960,150 in 1920, plus the annual increase of 600,000), every acre has to feed close on four persons. ("Even in Hokkaido," Dr. Sato notes, "the average area per family is only 7½ acres.") Happily the number of families cultivating less than 1¼ acres is decreasing and the number cultivating from 1¼ up to 5 acres is increasing. ^[99] In other words, the favourite size of farm is one which finds work for all the members of the farmer's family. As on small holdings all over the world, it is found that profits are difficult to make when help has to be paid for. The facts that in the last four years for which figures are available the number of farming families keeping silk-worms has risen by half a million and that every year the area of land under cultivation increases show that new ways of increasing income are eagerly seized on.

BACK TO FIRST PRINCIPLES: THE APOSTLE AND THE ARTIST

CHAPTER X

A TROUBLER OF ISRAEL

To some people in Japan the countryman Kanzō Uchimura is "the Japanese Carlyle." To others he is a religious enthusiast and the Japanese equivalent of a troubler of Israel. He appeared to me in the guise of a student of rural sociology.

Uchimura is the man who as a school teacher "refused to bow before the Emperor's portrait." ^[100] He endured, as was to be expected, social ostracism and straitened means. But when his voice came to be heard in journalism it was recognised as the voice of a man of principle by people who heard it far from gladly. There is a seamy side to some Japanese journalism ^[101] and Uchimura soon resigned his editorial chair. He abandoned a second editorship because he was determined to brave the displeasure of his countrymen by opposing the war with Russia. To-day he deplores many things in the relations of Japan and China.

Uchimura has written more than two dozen books, mostly on religion. How I became a Christian has been translated into English, German, Danish, Russian and Chinese, and is to that extent a landmark in the literary history of Japan. His Christianity is an Early Christianity which places him in antagonism, not only to his own countrymen who are Shintoists, Buddhists or Confucians, or vaguely Nationalists, but to such foreign missionaries as are sectarians and literalists. His earliest training was in agricultural science, and the welfare of the Japanese countryside is near his heart. If he be a Carlyle, as his fibre and resolution, downright way of writing and speaking, hortatory gift, humour, plainness of life and dislike of officials, no less than his cast of countenance, his soft hat and long gaberdine-like coat have suggested, he is a Carlyle who is content to stay both in body and mind at Ecclefechan. He is not, however, like Carlyle, whom he calls "master," a peasant, but a samurai.

"As you penetrate into the lives of the farmers and discover the influences brought to bear on them," Uchimura said to me in his decisive way, "there will be laid bare to you the foundations of Japan. You know our proverb, of course, No wa kuni no taihon nari ('Agriculture is the basis of a nation')? Have you been to Nikko?" This seemed a little inconsequent, but I told him I had not yet been to Nikko. ("Until you have seen Nikko," runs the adage, "do not say 'splendid'.") "How many of the tourists who are delighted with Nikko," he went on, "have heard how the richest farms near that town were devastated? A century ago a minister of the Shogun, who realised that fertility depended on trees, saw to the whole range of Nikko hills being afforested. It was a tract twenty miles by twenty miles in extent. But the 'civilised' authorities of our own days sold all the timber to a copper company for 8,000 yen. The company destroyed the fertility of the district not only by cutting down the forest but by poisoning the water with which the farmers irrigated their crops. A member of Parliament gave himself with such devotion to the cause of the ruined farmers that when he died the ashes of his cremated body were divided and preserved in four shrines erected to his memory."

It was a sad thing, said Uchimura, that the farmers of Japan, because of the decreased fertility of the land due to the denudation of the hills of trees, and because of their increased expenses, should be laying out "a quarter of their incomes on artificial manures." "The enemies which Japan has most to fear to-day," Uchimura declared, "are impaired fertility and floods."

It may be well, perhaps, to explain for a few readers how floods do their ill work. The rain which falls on treeless mountains is not absorbed there. The water washes down the mountain sides, bringing with it first good soil and then subsoil, stones and rock. The hills eventually become those peaked deserts the queer look of which must have puzzled many students of Japanese pictures. The debris washed away is carried into the rivers, along with trees from the lower slopes, and the level of the river beds is raised. Because there is less space in the river beds for water the rivers overflow their banks, and disastrous floods take place. The farmers, the local authorities and the State raise embankments higher and higher, but embankment building is costly and cannot go on indefinitely. The real remedy is to decrease the supply of water by planting forests in the mountains^[102] . In many places the rivers are flowing above the level of the surrounding country. The imagination is caught by the fact that there are four earthquakes a day in Japan ^[103] and that within a twelvemonth fires destroy 400 acres or so of buildings; but every year, on an average, floods, tidal waves and typhoons together drown more than 600 people and cause a money loss of 25 million yen! Every year 10½ million yen are spent by the State and the prefectures on river control alone.

Uchimura put on his famous wideawake and we went out for a walk. "I should like," he said, "to press the view that the vaunted expansion of Japan has meant to the farmers an increase of prices and taxes and of armaments out of all proportion to our population ^[104]."

Uchimura stood stock still in the little wood we had entered. "There is one thing more," he added gravely. "Before you can get deeply into your subject you must touch religion. There you see the depths of the people. A large part of the deterioration of the countryside is due to the deterioration of Buddhism. You must ask about it. You will see in the villages much of what your old writers used to call 'priestcraft.' You will hear of the thraldom of many of the people. You will see with your own eyes that real Christianity may be a moral bath for a rural district."

"The essentials, not the forms of Christianity," he declared, would save the countryside by "brotherly union." "Brotherly union" would make a better life and a better agriculture. The rural class, he explained, was more sharply divided than foreigners understood into owners of land who lived on their rents and farmers who farmed ^[105]. The division between the two classes was "as great as an Indian caste division." "To the landowner who lives in his village like a feudal lord the simple Gospel, with its insistence on the sacredness of work, comes as an intellectual revolution." Women as well as men of means received from Christianity "a new conception of humanity." They ceased to "look upon their own glory and to take delight in the flattery of poor people." They changed their way of speaking to the peasants. They developed an interest, of which they knew nothing before, in the spiritual and material betterment of the men, women and children of their village.

I went a two-days journey into the country with Uchimura. We stayed at the house of a landowner who was one of his adherents. I found myself in a large room where two swallows were flitting, intent on building on a beam which yearly bore a nest. In this room stood a shrine containing the ancestral tablets. The daily offerings were no longer made, but Uchimura's counsel, unlike that of some zealots, was to preserve not only this shrine but the large family shrine in the courtyard. Near by was an engraving of Luther.

Uchimura spoke in the house to some thirty or more "people of the district who had accepted Christianity." His appeal was to "live Christianity as given to the world by its founder." The address, which was delivered from an arm-chair, was based on the fifth chapter of Matthew, which in the preacher's copy appeared to contain cross-references to two disciples called Tolstoy and Carlyle. When I was asked to speak I found that the women in the gathering had places in front. "The remarkable effect of Christianity among those who have come to think with us," Uchimura told me afterwards, "is seen most in their treatment of women. Our host, had he not been a Christian, would have been credited by public opinion with the possession of a concubine, and would not have been blamed for it." When, after the speaking, we knelt in a circle and talked less formally of how best to benefit rural people, we were joined by the women folk. Later, when a dozen of the neighbours were invited to dinner, it was not served at separate tables for each kneeling guest, but at one long table, an innovation "to indicate the brotherly relation."

The faults of the Eastern were that he thought too much of outward conduct. Good political and neighbourly-relations, kindliness, honesty and thrift were his idea of morality. "To love goodness and to hate evil with one's whole soul is a Christian conception for which you may search in vain through heathendom." The horror which the Western man of high character felt when he thought of the future of the little girls in attendance on geisha was not a horror generated by Plato. "Heathen life looks nice on the outside to foreigners," but Confucianism, Buddhism and Shintoism had all been weak in their attitude towards immorality. It was Christianity alone which controlled sexual life. Without deep-seated love of and joy in goodness and deep-seated horror of evil it was impossible to reform society.

Uchimura said that it had taken him thirty years to reach the conviction that the best way of raising his countrymen was by preaching the religion of "a despised foreign peasant." Many things he had been told by exponents of Christianity now seemed "very strange," but there remained in the first four books of the New Testament, in the essence of Christianity, principles "which would give new life to all men." Moved by this belief, Uchimura and his friends gave their lives to the work of the Gospel, to a work attended by humiliations; "but this is our glory."

Japanese civilisation, he reiterated, was "only good in the sense that Greek and Roman civilisations were good." Modern Japan represented "the best of Europe minus Christianity; the moral backbone of Christianity is lacking." "Probe a dozen Buddhist priests in turn," he said, "and you find something lacking; you don't find the Buddhist or Confucian really to be your brother ^[106]."

"The greatness of England," he went on, "is not due to the inherent greatness of the English people, but to the greatness of the truths which they have received." In considering the sources of national greatness, it was idle to believe that some peoples were original and some not original in their ideas and methods. Where were the people to be found who were without extraneous influence? Where would England be without Greek philosophy, Roman law, and Christianity?

Our talk broke off as several peasant women passed us on the narrow way by the rice fields. The mattocks they carried were the same weight as their husbands' mattocks and the women were going to do the same work as the men. But the women were nearly all handicapped by having a child tied on their backs. Uchimura, returning to his objection to foreign political adventure, said that Japan, properly cultivated, could support twice its present population. There were many marshy districts which could be brought into cultivation by drainage. Then what might not forestry do? But the progress could not be made because of lack of money. The money was needed for "national defence."

"For myself," said Uchimura, "I find it still possible to believe in some power which will take care of inoffensive, quiet, humble, industrious people. If all the high virtues of mankind are not safeguarded somehow, then let us take leave of all the ennobling aspirations, all the poetry, and all the deepest hopes we have, and cease to struggle upward. The question is whether we have faith." We still waited, he declared, for the nation which would be Christian enough to take its stand on the Gospel and sacrifice itself materially, if need be, to its faith that right was greater than might.

And so "impractical, outspoken to rashness, but thoroughly sincere and experienced," as one of his appreciative countrymen characterised him to me, we take leave of the "Japanese Carlyle." With whom could I have gone more provocatively towards the foundation of things at the beginning of my investigation in farther Japan?

CHAPTER XI

THE IDEA OF A GAP

The "Japanese Carlyle" is getting grey. It seemed well to seek out some young Japanese thinker and take his view of that "heathenism" concerning which Uchimura had delivered himself so unsparingly. Let me speak of my first visit to my friend Yanagi.

As a youth Yanagi was a lonely student. He took his own way to knowledge and religion. The famed General Nogi had been given by the Emperor the direction of the Peers' School, but even under such distinguished tutelage the stripling made his stand. His reading led him to write for the school magazine an anti-militarist article. The veteran, as I once learned from a friend of Yanagi, promptly paraded the school, boys and masters. He spoke of disloyal, immoral, subversive ideas, and bade the youthful disturber of the peace attend him at his own house. When Yanagi stood before Nogi and was asked what he had to say, he replied with the question, "Don't you feel pain because of sending so many men to death before Port Arthur ^[107]?"

Again I found my prophet in a cottage. It was a cottage overlooking rice fields and a lagoon. From the Japanese scene outdoors I passed indoors to a new Japan. Cezanne, Puvis de Chavannes, Beardsley, Van Gogh, Henry Lamb, Augustus John, Matisse and Blake—Yanagi has written a big book on Blake which is in a second edition—hung within sight of a grand piano and a fine collection of European music^[108]. Chinese, Korean and Japanese pottery and paintings filled the places in the dwelling not occupied by Western pictures and the Western library of a man well advanced with an interpretative history of Eastern and Western mysticism. An armful of books about Blake and Boehme, all Swedenborg, all Carlyle, all Emerson, all Whitman, all Shelley, all Maeterlinck, all Francis Thompson, and all Tagore, and plenty of other complete editions; early Christian mystics; much of William Law, Bergson, Eucken, Caird, James, Haldane, Bertrand Russell, Jefferies, Havelock Ellis, Carpenter, Strindberg, "Æ," Yeats, Synge and Shaw; not a little poetry of the fashion of Vaughan, Traherne and Crashaw; a well-thumbed Emily Brontë; all the great Russian novelists; numbers of books on art and artists—it was an arresting collection to come on in a Japanese hamlet, and odd to sit down beside it in order to talk of "heathen."

"Yes," said Yanagi—he speaks an English which reflects his wide reading—"our young maid, on being shown the full moon the other night, bowed her head. I find this natural instinct of some value. Our people have much natural feeling towards Nature. If modern Japanese art has degenerated it is because it does not sufficiently find out life in things. The sough of the wind in the trees may have only a slight influence on character, but it is a vital influence. I do not like, of course, the word 'heathendom' of which Uchimura seems so fond. I dearly admire Christ, but most of the Christianity of to-day is not Christ. It is largely Paul. It is a mixture. It is not the clear, pure, original thing. Christians must reform their Christianity before it can satisfy us. In the East we now see clearly enough to seek only the best that the West can offer."

Yanagi said that the spontaneity and naturalness of Eastern religions ought to be recognised. "You will find Christians admiring Walt Whitman, but it is Whitman the democrat they admire, not Whitman the prophet of naturalness." He spoke with appreciation of the Zen sect of Buddhists. Many of the Zen devotees were "noble and had a profound idea." He was unable to see "any difference at all" between the best part of Buddhism and the best part of Christianity. He said that his own mysticism was based on science, art, religion and philosophy. "My sincerest wish," he declared, "is to produce a beautiful reconciliation of these four. As it is, too often scientists and philosophers have no deep knowledge of religion or art, artists have no deep knowledge of religion or science, and the religious have no idea of art. Surely the deepest religious idea is the deepest artistic and philosophic idea. Perhaps our scientists are in the poorest state just now with no understanding of art or religion. Our scientists are immersed in the problem of matter, our religious people in the problem of spirit, and our artists forget that in dealing with nature they are dealing with spirit as well as body."

Faced by force and science when Commander Perry came, Japan, in order to save herself from foreign colonisation, had had to concentrate all her attention on force and science. She had concentrated her attention with signal success. But naturally she had had, in the process, to slacken her hold somewhat on the spiritual life.

"Always remember how difficult the Japanese find it to know which way to take. Their whole basis has been shaken and on the surface all has become chaotic. Ten years hence it will be possible to take a just view. There is much reason for high hopes. For one thing, the burden of old thought does not rest so heavily on us as might be supposed. We are very free in many ways. In the matter of religion Japan is the most free nation in the world. If England were to become Buddhist it would sound strange or exotic, but Japan is free to become what she may."

"There may be a great difference between one of our temples and shrines and an English church," Yanagi proceeded, "but I cannot believe in the gap which some people seem to see yawning between East and West. It is deplorable that the world should think that there is such a complete difference between East and West. It is usually said that self-denial, asceticism, sacrifice, negation are opposed to self-affirmation, individualism, self-realisation; but I do not believe in such a gap. I wish to destroy the idea of a gap. It is an idea which was obtained analytically. The meeting of East and West will not be upon a bridge over a gap, but upon the destruction of the idea of a gap.

"In future, religion cannot be limited by this or that sect or idea. Religion cannot be limited to Christianity, Buddhism, Confucianism or Mahomedanism. Uchimura says that it is the essence of Christianity which has the power to rescue Japan from its chaotic state. But the essence of Buddhism can also contribute some important element to the future of Japan. The notion that the essence of Christianity and the essence of Buddhism are far apart is artificial and prejudiced."

One day some weeks later I walked with Yanagi on the hills. He said: "The weakest point in the Japanese character is the lack of the power of questioning. We are repressed by our educational system. And so many things come here at one time that it makes confusion. What is so often taken for a lack of originality in us is a state resulting from an immense importation of foreign ideas. They have been overpowering. Many of us have no clear ideas on life, society, sex and so on, and you will find it difficult to get satisfactory answers to many questions which you will want to ask."

As to morality, it was dangerous to say "this or that is immoral." Morality was often merely custom. Ordinary morality had scant authority. Critics of Japanese morality should not forget that, in the opinion of Japanese, Western people were more erotic than they were. Western dancing—not to speak of Western women's evening costumes—was undoubtedly more erotic than Japanese dancing. Again, the sexual curiosity of foreigners seemed stronger than that manifested by Japanese. It was a well-known fact that the girls at many hotels and restaurants had not a little to complain of from foreign men who misjudged their naïve ways. It must be remembered that Japanese were franker in sexual matters than Europeans and Americans. Sexual ill-doing was not so much concealed as in Europe. A wrong impression of Japanese morality was taken away by tourists whose guides showed them, as in Paris, what they expected to see.

"I wonder," he said, "that Western visitors to Tokyo who talk of our immorality are not struck by the fact that in an Eastern capital a foreign lady may walk home at night and be practically safe from being spoken to. The Japanese are undoubtedly a very kind people. They may be unmoral, but they are not immoral."

"Most of our people do not understand liberty in the mental sexual relations. Love is not free. In a very large proportion of cases, indeed, parents would oppose a match because a son or daughter had fallen in love. And if it is difficult to marry for love it is not easy to fall in love. ^[109] Society in which young men and young women meet is restricted; there are few opportunities of conversation. Without liberty towards women there can be no perfect sense of responsibility towards them."

What had been taught to women as the supreme virtue was the virtue of sacrifice for father, husband, children. It was most important to let women know the significance of individualism. They were always offering themselves for others before they became themselves. But the idea of individuality was very little clearer to the Japanese man than to the Japanese woman. People were too prone to wish to give 100 yen before they had 100 yen. The Japanese were the most devotional people in the world, but they hardly knew yet the things to be devoted to.

Yanagi is a leading member of a small association of literary men, artists and students who graduated together from the Peers' School. They call themselves for no obvious reason the Shirakaba or Silver Birch Society. The intelligent and consistent efforts of these young men to introduce vital Western work in literature, philosophy, painting, sculpture, draughtsmanship and music, and the large measure of success they have attained is of some significance. Several members of the group belong to the old Kuge families, that is the ancient nobility which surrounded the Emperor at Kyoto before the Restoration. Cut off for centuries from military and administrative activities by the dominance of the Shogunate Government, the Kuge devoted themselves to the arts and the refinements of life. For the exclusiveness of the past some of their descendants substitute artistic integrity. The Shirakaba has had for several years a remarkable magazine. Its editor and its publisher, its size, its price and its date of publication are continually changed; it never makes any bid for popularity; it expresses its sentiments in a downright way and it has always been anti-official: yet it survives and pays its way. Beyond the magazine, the Society has had every year at least one exhibition of what its members conceive to be significant modern European work. The members have also supported a few Japanese artists of outstanding sincerity. Through the Shirakaba the influence of Cezanne, Van Gogh, Rodin, Blake, Delacroix, Matisse, Augustus John, Beardsley, Courbet,Daumier, Maillol, Chavannes and Millet, particularly Cezanne, Van Gogh, Rodin and Blake, has been marked. The Silver Birch group has never tired of extolling the great names of Rembrandt, Dürer, El Greco, Van Eyck, Goya, Leonardo, Michael Angelo, Tintoretto, Giotto and Mantegna ^[110].

While an ardent Young Japan has formed and dissolved many societies, movements and fashions, this Shirakaba group has held fast and has gained friends by its sincerity, its vision and its audacity ^[111]. Rodin encouraged the Shirakaba efforts to reproduce the best Western art by presenting it with three pieces of sculpture.

"The intellectual man does no fighting," Froude has written. Why do not Yanagi and his friends make a stand on public questions? "Because," he said, "at the present stage of our development it is almost impossible to take up a strong attitude, and because, important though political and social questions are, they are not, in our opinion, of the first importance. To artists, philosophers, students of religion, such problems are secondary. More important problems are: What is the meaning of this world? What is God? What is the essence of religion? How can we best nourish ourselves so as to realise our own personalities? Political and social problems are secondary for us at present; they are not related emotionally to our present conditions^[112].