RESENTATIVES IN ALL The subscription price is $4.00 a year. IT FRANKLIN SOUSO NEW YORK_ORK Catalogue on request. J. & C. Fischer 164 Fifth Ave., bet. 21st and 22d Sts., end 905 VOSO PIANOS NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW No. DLXXIX. FEBRUARY, 1905. JAPANESE PROBLEMS. BY COUNT OKUMA, FORMERLY PRIME MINISTER OF JAPAN. FOREIGNERS too often fall into the error of believing that the civilization of Japan began with the opening of the country to the influences of Western ideas and institutions. In other words, they imagine that Japan is only some forty years old, and that the progress she has made during that time had no earlier foundations. Considered in this light, they imagine, not unnaturally, that the process has been far too rapid to be permanent. I think, however, that they are in the wrong, because the real Japanese civilization began some fifteen hundred years ago. Thus the opening of the country found the Japanese in a state of mind which had already been civilized into readiness for the Western ideas. Fifteen hundred years before, the entry into Japan of the elements of the civilizations of India and China had begun. Everything that Japan absorbed, from these civilizations, however, became essentially Japanese. Buddhism came from India to Japan and was influenced there by Shintoism, the Japanese religion, and it thus became a religion totally different in detail from the Indian religion. The Chinese literature, on being introduced into Japan, became tinged, as it were, with the personality of the Japanese people, that has made it typically Japanese and no longer Chinese. It was the same in the case of the fine arts, which were introduced VOL. CLXXX.-No. 579. 11 Copyright, 1905, by THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW PUBLISHING COMPANY. All rights Reserved |