Back in Japan in the early spring of 1884, Percival stayed there until midsummer, when he turned his face homeward and westward, for he had crossed the Pacific three times and preferred to go home the other way. Touching at Shanghai and Hong Kong he stopped off at Singapore to make a detour to Java, which delayed him so much that he saw only the southern part of India. At Bombay he stayed with Charles Lowell, a cousin and class-mate, in charge of the branch there of the Comptoir d’Escompte of Paris; thence his route led through the Red Sea and Alexandria to Venice, where to his annoyance he was quarantined; not, as he sarcastically remarks, because he came from an infected country, but on account of cholera in the city itself. Finally he went home by way of Paris and London.
At this time he had clearly decided to write his book on Korea; for in his letters, and in memoranda in his letter book, are found many pages that appear afterwards therein. But he certainly had not lost his interest in mathematics or physics, for any casual observation would quickly bring it out. From the upper end of the Red Sea he sees a cloud casting a shadow on the desert toward Sinai, and proceeds to show how by the angle of elevation of the cloud, the angle of the sun, and the distance to the place where the shadow falls one can compute the height of the cloud. He looks at the reflection of the moon along the water and points out why, when there is a ripple on the surface, the track of light does not run directly toward the moon but to windward of it. All this was a matter of general intellectual alertness in a mind familiar with the subject, but there is as yet no indication that he had any intention of turning his attention to scientific pursuits. On the contrary, two letters written on this journey appear to show that he regarded literature, in a broad sense, as the field he proposed to enter, and with this his publications for several years to come accord.
In a letter from Bombay to Frederic J. Stimson,—a classmate who had already won his spurs by his pen, and was destined to go far,—he begins by speaking of his friend’s writings, then of the subject in general, and finally turns to himself and says: “Somebody wrote me the other day apropos of what I may or may not write, that facts not reflections were the thing. Facts not reflections indeed. Why that is what most pleases mankind from the philosopher to the fair; one’s own reflections on or from things. Are we to forego the splendor of the French salon which returns us beauty from a score of different points of view from its mirrors more brilliant than their golden settings. The fact gives us but a flat image. It is our reflections upon it that make it a solid truth. For every truth is many-sided. It has many aspects. We know now what was long unknown, that true seeing is done with the mind from the comparatively meagre material supplied by the eye....
“I believe that all writing should be a collection of the precious stones of truth which is beauty. Only the arrangement differs with the character of the book. You string them into a necklace for the world at large. You pigeon-hole them into drawers for the scientist. In the necklace you have the calling of your thought; i.e., the expressing of it and the arrangement of the thoughts among themselves. I wonder how many men are fortunate enough to have them come as they are wanted. A question by the bye nearly incapable of solution because what seems good to one man, does not begin to satisfy the next.”
A month later he writes to his mother from Paris on October 7th: “As for me, I wish I could believe a little more in myself. It is at all times the one thing needful. As it is I often get discouraged. You will—said Bigelow the other day to me in Japan. There will be times when you will feel like tearing the whole thing up and lighting your pipe with the wreck. Don’t you do it. Put it away and take it out again at a less destructive moment.” Then, speaking of what his mother had written him, he says: “But I shall most certainly act upon your excellent advice and what is more you shall have the exquisite ennui of reading it before it goes to print and then you know we can have corrections and improvements by the family.”
Reaching Boston in the autumn of 1884, he made it his headquarters for the next four years. The period was far from an idle one; for, apart from business matters that engaged his attention, he was actively at work on two books: First, the “Chosön,” that study already described of Korea and the account of his own sojourn there. The preface to this is dated November 1885, and the publication was early in the following year. The second book,—smaller in size and type, and without illustrations,—is the most celebrated of his writings on the Orient. Its title, “The Soul of the Far East,” denotes aptly its object in the mind of the author, for it is an attempt to portray what appeared to him the essential and characteristic difference between the civilizations of Eastern Asia and Western Europe. From an early time in his stay in Japan he had been impressed by what he called the impersonality of the people, the comparative absence, both in aspiration and in conduct, of diversified individual self-expression among them. The more he thought about it the stronger this impression became; and this book is a study of the subject in its various manifestations.
First comes a general discussion of the meaning and essence of individuality, with the deduction that the Japanese suffer from arrested development; that they have always copied but not assimilated; added but not incorporated the additions into their own civilization, like a tree into which have been grafted great branches while the trunk remains unchanged. “The traits that distinguished these peoples in the past have been gradually extinguishing them ever since. Of these traits, stagnating influences upon their career, perhaps the most important is the great quality of impersonality”; and later he adds, “Upon this quality as a foundation rests the Far Oriental character.”
He then proceeds to demonstrate, or illustrate, his thesis from many aspects of Japanese life, beginning with the family. He points out that no one has a personal birthday or even age of his own, two days in the year being treated as universal birthdays, one for girls and the other for boys, the latter, in May, being the occasion when hollow paper fish are flown from poles over every house where a boy has been born during the preceding year. Everyone, moreover, is credited with a year’s advance in age on New Year’s Day quite regardless of the actual date of his birth. If a youth “belongs to the middle class, as soon as his schooling” in the elements of the Classics “is over he is set to learn his father’s trade. To undertake to learn any trade but his father’s would strike the family as simply preposterous.” But to whatever class he may belong he is taught the duty of absolute subordination to the head of the family, for the family is the basis of social life in the Far East. Marriage, with us a peculiarly personal matter, is in the East a thing in which the young people have no say whatever; it is a business transaction conducted by the father through marriage brokers. A daughter becoming on marriage a part of her husband’s family ceases to be a member of her own, and her descendants are no benefit to it, unless, perchance, having no brothers, one of her sons is adopted by her father. Thus it is that when a child is born the general joy “depends somewhat upon the sex. If the baby chances to be a boy, everybody is immensely pleased; if a girl there is considerably less effusion shown. In the latter case the more impulsive relatives are unmistakably sorry; the more philosophic evidently hope for better luck next time. Both kinds make very pretty speeches, which not even the speakers believe, for in the babe lottery the family is considered to have drawn a blank. A delight so engendered proves how little of the personal, even in prospective, attaches to its object.”
In the fourth chapter he takes up the question of language, bringing out his point with special effect, showing the absence of personal pronouns, and indeed of everything that indicates an expression of individuality or even of sex, replacing them by honorifics which occur in the most surprising way. But the matter of language, though highly significant, is somewhat technical, and his discussion can be left to those who care to follow it in his book.
He turns next to nature and to art, pointing out how genuine, how universal, and at the same time how little individual, how impersonal, is the Japanese love of those things. Of them he says “that nature, not man, is their beau idéal, the source to them of inspiration, is evident again in looking at their art.” Incidentally, the account of the succession of flower festivals throughout the year is a beautiful piece of descriptive writing, glowing with the color it portrays and the delight of the throngs of visitors.
On the subject of religion he has much to say. Shintoism, though generally held by the people, and causing great numbers of them to go as pilgrims to the sacred places on mountain tops, he regards as not really a religion. That is the reason it is not inconsistent with Buddhism. “It is not simply that the two contrive to live peaceably together; they are actually both of them implicitly believed by the same individual. Millions of Japanese are good Buddhists and good Shintoists at the same time. That such a combination should be possible is due to the essential difference in the character of the two beliefs. The one is extrinsic, the other intrinsic, in its relations to the human soul. Shintoism tells a man but little about himself and his hereafter; Buddhism, little but about himself and what he may become. In examining Far Eastern religion, therefore, for personality, or the reverse, we may dismiss Shintoism as having no particular bearing upon the subject.” Turning to the other system he says: “At first sight Buddhism is much more like Christianity than those of us who stay at home and speculate upon it commonly appreciate. As a system of philosophy it sounds exceedingly foreign, but it looks unexpectedly familiar as a faith.” After dwelling upon the resemblances in the popular attitude, he continues: “But behind all this is the religion of the few,—of those to whom sensuous forms cannot suffice to represent super-sensuous cravings; whose god is something more than an anthropomorphic creation; to whom worship means not the cramping of the body, but the expansion of the soul.”... “In relation to one’s neighbor the two beliefs are kin, but as regards one’s self, as far apart as the West is from the East. For here, at this idea of self, we are suddenly aware of standing on the brink of a fathomless abyss, gazing giddily down into that great gulf which divides Buddhism from Christianity. We cannot see the bottom. It is a separation more profound than death; it seems to necessitate annihilation. To cross it we must bury in its depths all we know as ourselves.
“Christianity is a personal religion; Buddhism, an impersonal one. In this fundamental difference lies the worldwide opposition of the two beliefs. Christianity tells us to purify ourselves that we may enjoy countless aeons of that bettered self hereafter; Buddhism would have us purify ourselves that we may lose all sense of self for evermore.”
At the end of this chapter he sums up his demonstration thus: “We have seen, then, how in trying to understand these peoples we are brought face to face with impersonality in each of those three expressions of the human soul, speech, thought, yearning. We have looked at them first from a social standpoint. We have seen how singularly little regard is paid the individual from his birth to his death. How he lives his life long the slave of patriarchal customs of so puerile a tendency as to be practically impossible to a people really grown up. How he practises a wholesale system of adoption sufficient of itself to destroy any surviving regard for the ego his other relations might have left. How in his daily life he gives the minimum of thought to the bettering himself in any worldly sense, and the maximum of polite consideration to his neighbor. How, in short, he acts toward himself as much as possible as if he were another, and to that other as if he were himself.
“Then, not content with standing stranger-like upon the threshold, we have sought to see the soul of their civilization in its intrinsic manifestations. We have pushed our inquiry, as it were, one step nearer its home. And the same trait that was apparent sociologically has been exposed in this our antipodal phase of psychical research. We have seen how impersonal is his language, the principal medium of communication between one soul and another; how impersonal are the communings of his soul with itself. How the man turns to nature instead of to his fellowman in silent sympathy. And how, when he speculates upon his coming castles in the air, his most roseate desire is to be but an indistinguishable particle of the sunset clouds and vanish invisible as they into the starry stillness of all-embracing space.
“Now what does this strange impersonality betoken? Why are these peoples so different from us in this most fundamental of considerations to any people, the consideration of themselves? The answer leads to some interesting conclusions.”
The final chapter is entitled “Imagination,” for he regards this as the source of all progress, and the far orientals as particularly unimaginative. Their art he ascribes to appreciation rather than originality. They are, he declares, less advanced than the occidentals, their rate of progress is less rapid and the individuals are more alike; and he concludes that unless their newly imported ideas really take root they will vanish “off the face of the earth and leave our planet the eventual possession of the dwellers where the day declines.”
One cannot deny that he made a strong case for the impersonality of the Japanese; and if it be thought that his conclusions therefrom were unfriendly it must be remembered that he had a deep admiration and affection for that people, wishing them well with all his heart.
Without attempting to survey the reviews and criticisms of the book, which was translated into many languages, it may be interesting to recall the comments of three Europeans of very diverse qualities and experiences. Dr. Pierre Janet, the great French neurologist, said to a friend of the author that as a study of Japanese mentality it seemed to him to show more insight than any other he had ever read on the subject.
The second commentator is Lafcadio Hearn, a very different type of person, given to enthusiasm. He had not yet been to Japan, and “The Soul of the Far East” had much to do with his going there. In his book “Concerning Lafcadio Hearn” George M. Gould says:
“Perhaps I should not have succeeded in getting Hearn to attempt Japan had it not been for a little book that fell into his hands during the stay with me. Beyond question, Mr. Lowell’s volume had a profound influence in turning his attention to Japan and greatly aided me in my insistent urging him to go there. In sending the book Hearn wrote me this letter:
“Gooley!—I have found a marvellous book,—a book of books!—a colossal, splendid, godlike book. You must read every line of it. For heaven’s sake don’t skip a word of it. The book is called “The Soul of the Far East,” but its title is smaller than its imprint.
Hearneyboy
“P.S. Let something else go to H—, and read this book instead. May God eternally bless and infinitely personalize the man who wrote this book! Please don’t skip one solitary line of it, and don’t delay reading it,—because something, much! is going to go out of this book into your heart and life and stay there! I have just finished this book and feel like John in Patmos,—only a d——d sight better. He who shall skip one word of this book let his portion be cut off and his name blotted out of the Book of Life.”
Hearn had read the book on Korea and was impressed by that also, for in a letter of 1889, he wrote, after commenting on another work he had been reading, “How luminous and psychically electric is Lowell’s book compared with it. And how much nobler a soul must be the dreamer of Chosön!”[5]
After living in Japan Hearn came to different conclusions about Percival’s ideas on the impersonality of the Japanese, but he never lost his admiration for the book or its author. In May, 1891, he writes;
“Mr. Lowell has, I think, no warmer admirer in the world than myself, though I do not agree with his theory in “The Soul of the Far East,” and think he has ignored the most essential and astonishing quality of the race: its genius of eclecticism.”[6]
And again,
“I am not vain enough to think I can ever write anything so beautiful as his “Chosön” or “Soul of the Far East,” and will certainly make a poor showing beside his precise, fine, perfectly worded work.”[7]
And, finally, as late as 1902 he speaks of it as “incomparably the greatest of all books on Japan, and the deepest.”[8]
The third European critic to be quoted is Dr. Clay Macauley, a Unitarian missionary to Japan, who had been a friend of Percival’s there, and after his death at Flagstaff in 1916 was still at work among the Japanese. On January 24, 1917, he read before the Asiatic Society of Japan a Memorial to him, in which he gave an estimate of “The Soul of the Far East”:
“The year after the publication of “Cho-son,” the book which has associated Lowell most closely with a critical and interpretative study of the peoples and institutions of this part of the world, appeared his much-famed “Soul of the Far East.” I have no time for an extended critique of this marvellous ethnic essay. “Marvellous” I name it, not only because of the startling message it bears and the exquisitely fascinating speech by which the message is borne, but also because of the revelation it gives of the distinctive mental measure and the characteristic personality of the author himself ... the book is really a marvellous psychical study. However, in reading it today, the critical reader should, all along, keep in mind the time and conditions under which Lowell wrote. His judgment of “The Soul of the Far East” was made fully a generation ago. Time has brought much change to all Oriental countries since then, especially to this “Land of the Rising Sun.”
He then refers to the author’s conviction that owing to their impersonality the Oriental people, if unchanged and unless their newly imported ideas take root, would disappear before the advancing nations of the West, and proceeds:
“Now, notice Lowell’s “ifs” and “unless.” He had passed his judgment; but he saw a possible transformation. And I know that he hailed the incoming into the East of the motive forces of the West as forerunner of a possible ascendancy here of the genius of the world’s advancing civilization, prophetic of that New East into which, now, the Far East is becoming wonderously changed.”
Japan certainly is not in a process of disappearing before the advancing nations of the West; but it may be that this is not because her people have radically changed their nature. The arts of the West, civil and military, they have thoroughly acquired; but Percival Lowell may have been right in his diagnosis and wrong in his forecast. His estimate of their temperament may have been correct, and the conclusion therefrom of their destiny erroneous. The strange identity with which all Japanese explain the recent international events is not inconsistent with his theory of impersonality, and it may be that from a national standpoint this is less a source of weakness than of strength.
Having got “The Soul of the Far East” off his hands, and into those of the public, in 1888, he sailed in December for Japan, arriving on January the eighth. As usual he took a house in Tokyo and on January 23 he writes to his mother about it. “My garden is a miniature range of hills on one side, a dry pond on the other. One plum tree is blooming now, another comes along shortly, and a cherry tree will peep into my bedroom window all a-blush toward the beginning of April. A palm tree exists with every appearance of comfort in front of the drawing room, a foreground for the hills.
“The fictitious employment by the Japanese has developed into a real one most amusingly—You know by the existing law a foreigner is not allowed to live outside of the foreign reservation unless in the service of some native body, governmental or private. Now Chamberlain got a Mr. Masujima to arrange matters. The plan that occurred to him, Masujima, was to employ me to lecture before the School of Languages of which he, Masujima, is President. It was thought better to make the thing in part real, a suggestion I liked, and the upshot of it is that I am booked to deliver a lecture a week until I see fit to change. Chamberlain and Masujima cooked up between them the idea of translating my initial performance and then inserting it in a reader of lectures, sermons and such in the colloquiae which Chamberlain is preparing—Subject—A homily to the students to become superior Japanese rather than inferior Europeans. Curious if you will in view of the fact that Masujima himself is madly in love with foreigners and as C. says is a sort of universal solvent for their quandaries.”
January 1889 proved a peculiarly fortunate time to arrive, for most interesting events were about to take place, as he soon wrote to his old college chum, Harcourt Amory, on February 21:
“Things have been happening since I arrived. Indeed I could hardly have lit upon a more eventful month—from doings of the Son of Heaven to those of Mother Earth—the transmigration from the old to the new palace, the ceremony of the promulgation of the Constitution, and the earthquake, and the assassination of Mori—and his burial the most huge affair of years. How he was murdered on the morning of the great national event just as he was setting out for the palace by a fanatic in the ante-chamber of his own house because two years ago he trod on the mats at Ise with his boots and poked the curtains aside with his cane—you have probably already heard—For the affair was too dramatic to have escaped European and American newspapers. The to us significant part of the story is the quasi sublatent approval of large numbers of Japanese. The whole procedure of the assassin commends itself in method to their ideas of the way to do it. The long cherished plan, the visit to the temples of Ise for corroboration of facts, the selection of the day, the coolness shown beforehand, the facing of death in return, the very blows à la hari-kiri etc., all tout-a-fait comme il faut. How he went to a joroya (house of prostitution) the night before, saying that he wished to have experienced as many phases of life as possible before leaving it, how the official who received him at Mori’s house (he introduced himself by the story that he had come to warn Mori of a plot to assassinate him) could recall no signs of nervousness in him, except that he lifted his teacup to drink once or twice after he had emptied it.
“The whole affair appeals to their imaginations, showing still a pretty state of society. They also admire the beautiful way the guard killed him, decapitating him in the good old-fashioned way just leaving his head hanging to his neck by a strip—Pleasing details.”
The story of the murder of Mori, and of the public festivities that were going on at the time, he told under the title of “The Fate of a Japanese Reformer” in the Atlantic Monthly for November 1890. It is perhaps the best of his descriptive writings, for the tragedy and its accessories are full of striking contrasts which he brought out with great effect. After a prelude on the danger of attempting changes too rapidly, he gives a brief account of the life of Mori Arinori; how in his youth he was selected to study abroad, how he did so in America, and became enamored of occidental ways, returning in time for the revolution that restored the Mikado. He threw himself into the new movement, rose in office, and, as he did so, strove to carry out his ideas. He was the first to propose disarming the samurai, which against bitter opposition was accomplished. As Minister of Education he excluded religion from all national instruction. He even suggested that the native language should be superseded by a modified English, the American people to adopt the changes also; but the plan obtained no support on either side of the Pacific.
The Japanese reformers felt that like almost all Western nations Japan should have a written constitution, and they set the date for its promulgation at February 11th, 1889. This Percival thought a mistake since it was the festival of Jimmu Tenno, the mythic founder of the imperial house. Nevertheless, the reformers, who had virtual control of the government, determined that the two celebrations should take place on the same day; and he describes the gorgeous decoration of the city as he saw it, the functions attending the grant of the constitution, and processions of comic chariots in honor of Jimmu Tenno. To a foreigner the strange mixture of native and partially imitated European costumes was irresistibly funny; but the populace enjoyed themselves. “The rough element,” he says, “so inevitable elsewhere was conspicuously absent. There is this great gain among a relatively less differentiated people. If you miss with regret the higher brains, you miss with pleasure the lower brutes. Bons enfants the Japanese are to a man. They gather delight as men have learned to extract sugar, from almost anything.... As the twilight settled over the city, a horrible rumor began to creep through the streets. During the day the thing would seem to have shrunk before the mirth of the masses, but under the cover of gloom it spread like night itself over the town. It passed from mouth to mouth with something of the shudder with which a ghost might come and go. Viscount Mori, Minister of State for Education, had been murdered that morning in his own house....
“What had happened was this:—
“While Viscount Mori was dressing, on the morning of the 11th, for the court ceremony of the promulgation of the new Constitution, a man, unknown to the servants, made summons on the big bell hung by custom at the house entrance, and asked to see the Minister on important business. He was told the Minister was dressing, and could see no one. The unknown replied that he must see him about a matter of life and death,—as indeed it was. The apparent gravity of the object induced the servant to admit him to an ante-chamber and report the matter. In consequence, the Minister’s private secretary came down to interview him. The man, who seemed well behaved, informed the secretary that there was a plot to take the Minister’s life, and that he had come to warn the Minister of it. Truly a subtle subterfuge; true to the letter, since the plot was all his own. More he refused to divulge except to the Minister himself. While the secretary was trying to learn something more definite, Mori came down stairs, and entered the room. The unknown approached to speak to him; then, suddenly drawing a knife from his girdle, sprang at him, and crying ‘This for desecrating the shrines of Ise!’ stabbed him twice in the stomach. Mori, taken by surprise, grappled with him, when one of his body guards, hearing the noise, rushed in, and with one blow of his sword almost completely severed the man’s head from his body.
“Meanwhile, Mori had fallen to the floor, bleeding fast. The secretary, with the help of the guard, raised him, carried him to his room, and despatched a messenger for the court surgeon.
“The clothes of the unknown were then searched for some clue to the mystery; for neither Mori nor any of his household had ever seen him before. The search proved more than successful. A paper was found on his person, setting forth in a most circumstantial manner the whole history of his crime, from its inception to its execution, or his own. However reticent he seemed before the deed, he evidently meant nothing should be hid after it, whether he succeeded or not. The paper explained the reason.
“Because, it read, of the act of sacrilege committed by Mori Arinori, who, on a visit to the shrines of Ise, two years before, had desecrated the temple by pushing its curtain back with his cane, and had defiled its floor by treading upon it with his boots, he, Nishino Buntaro, had resolved to kill Mori, and avenge the insult offered to the gods and to the Emperor, whose ancestors they were. To wipe the stain from the national faith and honor, he was ready to lose his life, if necessary. He left this paper as a memorial of his intent.”
In the meantime the messenger sent for the court surgeon failed to find him, for he was at the palace. The same was true of the next in rank, and when at last a surgeon was found Mori had lost so much blood that in the night of the following day he died.
Both by his opinions and his tactless conduct as a minister Mori had made himself unpopular and rumors that his life was in danger had been current for two or three days. “If Mori was thus a very definite sort of person, Nishino was quite as definite in his own way.” At the time of his crime he held a post in the Home Department, where he brooded over the insult to the gods. “He seems to have heard of it accidentally, but it made so much impression upon him that he journeyed to Ise to find out the truth of the tale. He was convinced, and forthwith laid his plans with the singleness of zeal of a fanatic,” as appears from his affectionate farewell letters to his father and his younger brother.
“But the strangest and most significant part of the affair was the attitude of the Japanese public toward it. The first excitement of the news had not passed before it became evident that their sympathy was not with the murdered man, but with his murderer.... Nishino was an unknown.... Yet the sentiment was unmistakable. The details of the murder were scarcely common property before the press proceeded to eulogize the assassin. To praise the act was a little too barefaced, not to say legally dangerous.... But to praise the man became a journalistic epidemic.... Nishino, they said, had contrived and executed his plan with all the old time samurai bravery. He had done it as a samurai should have done it, and he had died as a samurai should have died.... The summary action of the guard in cutting the murderer down was severely censured. As if the guard had not been appointed to this very end!... The papers demanded the guard’s arrest and trial.... Comment of this kind was not confined to the press. Strange as it may appear, the newspapers said what everybody thought.... There was no doubt about it. Beneath the surface of decorous disapproval ran an undercurrent of admiration and sympathy, in spots but ill hid. People talked in the same strain as the journalists wrote. Some did more than talk. The geisha, or professional singing girls of Tokyo, made of Nishino and his heroism a veritable cult.... His grave in the suburbs they kept wreathed with flowers. To it they made periodic pilgrimages, and, bowing there to the gods, prayed that a little of the hero’s spirit might descend on them. The practice was not a specialty of professionals. Persons of all ages and both sexes visited the spot in shoals, for similar purposes. It became a mecca for a month. The thing sounds incredible, but it was a fact. Such honor had been paid nobody for years.”
This in abstract is Percival’s account of a terrible national tragedy, and its amazing treatment by the public at large.
Before he had been long in Japan the old love of travel into regions unknown to foreigners came back. He had already visited some of the less frequented parts of the interior, and now scanning, one evening, the map of the country his eye was caught by the pose of a province that stood out in graphic mystery, as he said, from the western coast. It made a striking figure with its deep-bosomed bays and its bold headlands. Its name was Noto; and the more he looked the more he longed, until the desire simply carried him off his feet. Nobody seemed to know much about it, for scarcely a foreigner had been there; and, in fact, he set his heart on going to Noto just because it was not known. That is his own account of the motive for the journey he made early in May, 1889; which turned out somewhat of a disappointment, for the place was not, either in its physical features or the customs of its people, very different from the rest of Japan; but for him proved adventurous and highly interesting. Under the title of “Noto” he gave an account of it,—as usual after his return home in the following spring,—first by a series of articles in the Atlantic, and then as a book published in 1891. It is a well-told tale of a journey, quite exciting, where he and his porters, in seeking to scale a mountain pass, found their way lay along precipices where the path had crumbled into the gorge below. The descriptions of people and scenery are vigorous and terse; but the book is not a philosophic study like those on Korea and on Japanese psychology. Yet it is notable in showing his versatility, as is also the fact that he gave the Φ Β Κ poem at Harvard in June of that year.
Hurrying home to deliver that poem, shortly after his return from Noto, he found himself busy for a year and a half, writing, attending to his own affairs, and to business, for he was part of the time, as Treasurer, the manager of the Lowell Bleachery. Meanwhile his hours of leisure were filled with a new and absorbing avocation, that of polo.
As a boy at Brookline, Patrick Burns, the coachman, trained at Newcastle, had taught him to ride bareback with a halter for a bridle—although he had never really cared for riding, just as in college he had run races without taking much interest in athletics. But on August 9, 1887, we find him writing that he has bought a polo pony, and that “Sam Warren, Fred Stimson, et al. have just started a polo club at Dedham, and have also in contemplation the erection of an inn there.” He adds that he is in both schemes; and in fact the plan for an inn developed into a clubhouse, where he lived in summer for some years when about Boston. During the remainder of the first season the players knocked the ball about—and rarely with a full team of four in a side—tried to learn the game on a little field belonging to George Nickerson, another member of the club. But the next year the number increased, and Percival with his great quickness and furious energy soon forged ahead, leading the list of home handicaps in the club with a rating of ten, and becoming the first captain of the team.
By the autumn of 1888 they had become expert enough to play a match with the Myopia club on its grounds at Hamilton, but with unfortunate results. At that time it was the habit to open the game by having the ball thrown into the middle of the field, and at a signal the leading player from each side charged from his goal posts, each trying to reach the ball first. Percival had a very fast pony, so had George von L. Meyer on the other side, and by some misunderstanding about the rules of turning there was a collision. In an instant both men and both horses were flat on the field. Percival was the most hurt, and although he mounted his horse and tried to play, he was too much stunned to be effective, and had to withdraw from the game.
In the following years he played as captain other match games with various teams; and, in fact, the Dedham Polo Club, which he came to regard as his home, was certainly his chief resource for recreation and diversion in this country until he built his Observatory in Arizona. Yet it by no means absorbed his attention, for with all the vigor he threw into anything he undertook he could maintain an intense interest in several things at the same time, besides being always ready for new ones, not least in the form of travel. So it happened that at the end of January, 1890, he sailed again for Europe, and with Ralph Curtis, a friend from boyhood and a college classmate, visited Spain—not in this case to study the people or the land, although he observed what he saw with care, but for the pleasure and experience. Like all good travellers he went to Seville for Holy Week and the festivities following; but, being sensitive, the bullfight was a thing to be seen rather than enjoyed. He had heard people speak also of the cathedral of Burgos as marvellous, in fact as the finest specimen in the world; so, at some inconvenience, he went there on his way to France, and on seeing it remarked that the praise bestowed upon it was due less to its merits than to its inaccessibility. Later he noticed that having taken the trouble to go to Burgos he never heard anyone speak of it again. So much for people’s estimates of things someone else has not seen.
On his way home he passed through London and enjoyed the hospitality he always found there.
The trip to Spain was merely an interlude; for, above all, at this time he felt the attraction of Japan. Returning from Europe in June he spent the summer in Dedham; but when winter came he started again for the Far East, this time by way of Europe, where he picked up Ralph Curtis; and then by the Red Sea to India and Burma, reaching Tokyo about the first of April, 1891. By far the most interesting part of this visit to Japan arose from a journey which he took with George Agassiz in July and August, into the interior of the Island. Agassiz became a most devoted friend, who followed his studies here, and later in Flagstaff, taking part in his observations and writing a memorial after his death. Their object was travel through a part of the mountainous region, ending at Ontake, a high extinct volcano, one of Japan’s most sacred peaks. But the holiness of the spot, or the religious pilgrimages thereto, were not the motive of the visit; nor did they expect to see anything of that nature with which they were not already familiar.
Leaving Tokyo by train on July 24, they soon reached a point where they got off and took jinrikishas to descend later to their own feet on a path that came “out every now and then over a view at spots where Agassiz said one had to be careful not to step over into the view one’s self.” For the next three days the lodging was not too comfortable, the heat terrific and the footpath going over a steep mountain pass. However, the weather improved; and without serious misadventure they were, on August 6, ascending Ontake, and not far from the top, when they saw three young men, clad as pilgrims, begin a devotional ceremony. One of them seated on a bench before a shrine, went through what looked like contortions accompanied by a chant, while another, at whom they were directed, sat bowed on the opposite bench motionless until, beginning to twitch, he broke into a paroxysm and ended by becoming stiff though still quivering. Then the first leaned forward, and bowing down, asked the name of the god that possessed his companion. The other in a strange voice answered “I am Hakkai.” Whereat the first asked, as of an oracle, questions that were answered; and after the god had finished speaking, said a prayer and woke the other from his trance. But this was not the end, for the same thing was repeated, the three changing places by rotation until each of them had been petitioner and entranced. On several more occasions the ceremony was enacted during the next thirty-six hours, the young men fasting all that time. The whole scene is more fully described in the opening chapter of Percival’s “Occult Japan.”
With his temperament and literary ambition he thought at once of writing about this extraordinary sight, which he connected as a phenomenon with the fox possession he had already encountered on a lower plane. He suggested the title “Ontake, a Pilgrimage,” but he soon saw the whole matter on a larger scale. The cult seemed to be unknown beyond its votaries, nothing did he find written upon it, the few foreigners who had scaled the mountain had missed it altogether, although, as he says, their guides or porters must have been familiar with it. Dr. Sturgis Bigelow, who was a student and believer in Buddhism, had never heard of it, which seemed strange, for although a Shinto, not a Buddhist, rite many people accepted both faiths, and one Buddhist sect practiced something akin to it. Moreover, its underlying idea of possession by another spirit appeared to ramify, not only into fox possession, but in many other directions. On inquiry he found that there was an establishment of the Ontake cult in Tokyo, and the head of it the Kwanchō, or primate of that Shinto sect. This man proved very friendly and gave all the information about its rites, their significance and underlying philosophy, within his knowledge,—perhaps beyond it,—and arranged exhibits; all of which Percival carefully recorded in his notebooks. Every motion made in inducing the trance, every implement used in the ceremony, had its meaning and its function, which he strove to learn. Moreover, there were miracles of splashing with boiling water, walking over hot coals and up ladders with sword blades for rungs; curing disease; consulting the fox and the raccoon-faced dog, which he called Japanese table turning; and other less dignified performances more or less connected with the idea of divine or demonic possession. Some of these things he was able to witness by séances in his own house, others by visits to the places where they were performed, often for his special benefit.
All this took more time than he had expected to spend in Japan, and delayed his sailing until the autumn was more than half over. Nor was this enough to complete his researches. In December of the following year he re-crossed the Pacific, and at Christmas we find him at Yokohama. Again he hires a house, fits it up in Japanese style but with occidental furniture; again he was travelling over the land, this time in search less of scenery than of psychic phenomena and the lore connected with their celebration. In July he is interviewing a Ryobu Shinto priest and “eliciting much valuable information.”
For the trances, and the various miracles, a participant must be prepared by a process of purification, long continued for the former, always by bathing before the ceremony; and by Percival’s frequent attendance, and great interest, he attained the repute for a degree of purity that enabled him to go where others were not admitted. On this ground he attended what he called the Kwanchō’s Kindergarten, but was not allowed to bring a friend. The Kwanchō, as the head of the principal Shinto sect that practised trances, had a class of boys and girls who went through a preparation therefor by a series of what an unbeliever might call ecstatic acrobatic feats, lasting a long time before they were fitted for subjects of divine possession. He visited everything relating to the mysteries that he could find, procured from the Kwanchō an introduction that enabled him to see the interior grounds of the great shrines of Ise, from which even the pilgrims were excluded, and to see there a building whereof he learned the history and meaning that the very guardian priests did not understand. At trances he was allowed to examine the possessed, take their pulse, and even to stick pins into them to test their sensibility, sometimes in a way that they were far from not feeling afterwards. In short he was enabled as no one had ever been before, to make a very thorough examination of the phenomena with the object of discovering and revealing their significance; for he was convinced that they were perfectly genuine, without a tinge of fraud, and allied to the hypnotism then at the height of its vogue. In March, 1893 he gave the first of a series of papers on Esoteric Shintoism before the Asiatic Society of Japan. These he worked up after his return to America in the autumn, and published in 1895 with the title “Occult Japan or the Way of the Gods.”
A casual reader might be misled by occasional cleverness of expression into thinking the book less serious than it is. Perhaps that accounts in part for Lafcadio Hearn’s calling it supercilious. Percival himself says, in the first paragraph of the chapter on Miracles: “It is quite possible to see the comic side of things without losing sight of their serious aspect. In fact, not to see both sides is to get but a superficial view of life, missing its substance. So much for the people. As for the priests, it is only necessary to say that few are more essentially sincere and lovable than the Shintō ones; and few religions in a sense more true. With this preface for life-preserver I plunge boldly into the miracles.” In fact, expressions that appear less serious than the subject merits are few, and the descriptions, of the trances for example, are almost strangely appreciative, and for a scientific study keenly sympathetic and beautiful.
The book opens with an account of the trances of the three young men on Mount Ontake, for that sight was the source of all these researches. He next lays a foundation for the study of the subject by a short history of the Japanese religions; how Shinto, the old cult, with its myriad divinities and simple rites, was for a time overshadowed by Buddhism, to be restored with the power of the Mikado; and how with its revival the popularity of the trances returned. They had been kept alive by a single Buddhist sect which had adopted them, but now they are even more widely practised by two out of the ten Shinto sects, their sacred site being Ontake. But before taking up the trances he describes the lesser, and better known, cases of miraculous intervention for protection from injury and for sanctification; notably, being sprinkled with boiling water, walking over a bed of hot coals, and up and down a ladder of sword blades; and he discusses why no injury occurs. The walking over hot coals, at least, was even performed in his own garden; and, although he does not say so in the book, he did it himself, without, however, complete immunity to the soles of his feet.
After telling of what he terms objective, as distinguished from subjective, miracles, such as bringing down fire from heaven; and saying something of miraculous healing of disease, he comes to the main subject of the book, the incarnations or trances. First he speaks of the preparation for them, washing and fasting which are arduous and long, the purification of persons and places, and a series of ceremonies which, he says, tend to promote vacuity of mind. All these things are absolutely sincere, for he declares that the first view of a trance dispels any idea of sham. He then describes three typical trances: first Ryobu, a Shinto-Buddhist sect, where one of the men possessed, on coming back to himself, was disappointed that he had not spoken English, which he did not know himself; for to his mind it was not he that spoke but the god who entered into him. The second example was a Buddhist trance with the full complement of eight persons filling their several offices in the ceremony. This description is especially striking and sympathetic. The third case is of a pure Shinto trance, much the same, but with the simpler ceremonial of that cult. He describes also the Kwanchō’s training school, which has already been referred to as the Kindergarten. He notes the pulse, insensibility, the other physical conditions and sensations of the possessed, the sex and number of the gods who enter him, for the exorcist has no power to invoke the spirit he would prefer, but simply calls for a god, and when one comes inquires who it is. It may be a god or a goddess, and several of them may come in succession. The main object of the proceeding being to obtain counsel or prophecy, the exorcist, and he alone, can ask questions of him, but he can do so on behalf of anyone else, and often did so for Percival about his own affairs, although the prophecies appear never to have turned out right.
A chapter is devoted to pilgrimages and the pilgrim clubs, which included in the aggregate vast numbers of people, only a minute part of whom, however, belonged to the trance sects. They subscribed small sums to be used to send each year a few of their members to the shrine or sacred mountain with which the club is associated; this feature of the religious organization being as important from a social as a religious point of view. Another chapter is given to the Gohei, or sacred cluster of paper strips, used for all spiritual purposes, and essential in calling down any god; an emblem which he compares with the crucifix, while pointing out the difference in their use. This first part of the book ends with an argument, apparently to one who knows nothing about the matter conclusive, that the whole subject of these trances is of Shinto not Buddhist origin; and in this connection he tells of his visit to the shrines of Ise where a temple was built to the sun-goddess when she possessed people, as she has long ceased to do at these shrines.
So far the book is scientific; that is, it consists of a description and analysis of phenomena repeatedly observed and carefully tested. The second part, which he calls Noumena, is an explanation of them on general psychological principles, and thus belongs rather to philosophy than science. It comprises discussions of the essence of self, of the freedom of the will, of the motive forces of ideas, of individuality, of dreams, hypnotism and trances. In these matters he was much influenced by the recently published “Psychology” of William James, which he had with him, and he draws comparisons with hypnotism, a more prominent subject then than it is now. Bearing in mind his dominant thought about the essential quality of the Japanese, it is not unnatural that he should find in the greater frequency of such phenomena among them than elsewhere a confirmation of his theory of their comparative lack of personality.
Perhaps his own estimate of the relative value of the two parts of the book and that of critics might not agree; but, however that may be, the second part is penetrating, and the work as a whole a remarkable study of a subject up to that time practically wholly concealed from the many observers of Japanese life and customs. It was, in fact, his farewell to Japan, for, leaving in the fall of 1893, he never again visited that land. Ten years its people had been his chief intellectual interest, but perhaps he thought he had exhausted the vein in which he had been at work, or another interest may have dislodged it. He has left no statement of why he gave up Japan for astronomy, but probably there is truth in both of these conjectures.