Japanese Life in Town and Country (English Edition)

Our neighbors on the west, separated from us by the widest ocean, are separated from us also most completely by race, environment, and history. It becomes an axiom, repeated by travelers and enforced by scholars, that the Occidental cannot understand the Oriental. How, then, shall we of the extreme West understand the farthest East? The current phrase in Japan has it that the longer one is there the less does he know of the land and the people, the old resident confessing ignorance and leaving confident judgments to the newcomer. The confession may be the modest expression of the scholar who with growing knowledge is increasingly aware that he is master of only a fraction of his subject, or more likely it is the outcome of indolence and impatience, an indolence which, finding first impressions wrong, is unwilling to take the pains necessary to master the data for a mature and correct opinion, and the impatience which arises from disappointment as the charm of the beginning yields to the disillusionment of a prolonged residence. Thus is created a belief that an inherent unlikeness in psychology differentiates European from Asiatic. The axiom is supported by wide experience, the differences in judgment being extraordinary, and seemingly permanent. Japan, for example, is the delight of tourists; its art, its customs, its scenery, its people have a charm to which all but the exceptionally unresponsive traveler yield. When after its long seclusion it was once more accessible it was like the apparition of another world. Even now, when so much is changed, the novelty remains, and besides, the very transformation affects us like a fairy tale. The novelty, and mystery, and romance are the joy of the traveler, and he has no wish that the fairy tale be translated into the language of every day, nor that Japan be shown to be only a portion of our prosaic and commonplace world.