Part 8

Some weeks ago I had a very illuminating talk in my garden at home with two Japanese visitors, Mr. Mashiko and Mr. Negushi, who had come to discuss various educational ideas with me. And they told me things that seem to me to be fundamentally important in this question. “We build up our children,” said Mr. Mushiko, “upon a diametrically different plan from yours. We turn them the other way round. Obedience and devotion are our leading thoughts. All our sentiment, all our stories and poetry, the traditions of centuries, teach loyalty, blind, unquestioning loyalty, of wife to husband, of man to his lord, of every one to the monarch.

“The loyalty is religious. So far as political and social questions go, it is fundamental. But your training cultivates independence, free thought, the unsparing criticism of superiors, institutions, relationships. Perhaps it is better in the end and more invigorating; but it seems to us wild and dangerous. * * * We begin to have a sort of public opinion, but it is still diffident and timid.”

An American and an Englishman, he said, cared for his country because he believed it belonged to him. A Japanese cared for his country because he believed he belonged to it. One could not pass from one habit of mind to the other, he thought, without grave risks and dangers. It is easier to destroy obedience than to create responsibility.

I was reminded of that conversation the other day by a remark made by a fellow journalist on the train to Washington:

“A Chinese will tell you what he thinks—like an American—but a Japanese always feels he is an agent, even if he isn’t an accredited one.”

Now, this is very interesting and probably a very fundamental comparison. This difference in spirit will make the Japanese people a very different instrument from the American and English or French people. It will make the Japanese Government a different thing from the Governments it will be meeting in Washington. A people built up on obedience can be held and wielded as no modern democratic people can be held and wielded. It is different in kind.

Unless this point is kept in mind, there are certain to be great and possibly dangerous misunderstandings in the Washington discussions. There have possibly been very dangerous misunderstandings already of the European powers by the Japanese. The Japanese are likely to think the Atlantic Governments are more free to decide than they really are, and that what they say is more conclusive than it really is, and the Atlantic peoples are likely to think too much of the appearance of a liberal public opinion in Japan and to imagine that a Japanese Government may be thrown out and its policy changed much more easily than is the case. But indeed Japan is a Government, a military Government, holding its people in its hand like a staff or a weapon, while America and France and Britain are people operating the Governments, more or less imperfectly. In no relationship is confusion upon this point more probable and more dangerous than between Japan and Britain or France at the present time, and in no connection is there greater need of perfectly plain statement.

Seeing that Britain is still a monarchy with many aristocratic forms, it is fatally easy for a Japanese statesman to fall into the belief that the British Government is as completely in control, and its officials as able to bind or loose, as the Japanese Government and officials, and because of this belief to trust to the private assurance and general attitude of personages in high places far more than they are justified in doing. The British democracy is very like the American democracy in its inability to keep watching what is happening overseas; it is preoccupied by domestic questions and things that are near to it. You cannot expect a Wiltshire farmer or a Lancashire cotton spinner to keep up, day by day, with the concession-hunting game in Persia or South China. But if that game of concession hunting piles up to sufficiently serious consequences, these democracies are likely to wake up in a manner quite outside the Japanese range of possibilities. And to a large extent the same is true of France.

It is the blessed privilege of an irresponsible journalist to say things that no diplomatist could ever say, and upon the relations of Japan, America and England there are certain truths that seem to need saying very plainly at the present time. But though I am an irresponsible journalist, it is also to be noted that I am a very English Englishman and that I know the way of thinking of my people.

The British people have been sleeping happily upon the belief that war with America is impossible. And for them it is impossible. In this matter the British have a special and extraordinary instinct. They will not fight the United States of America. I will not go into the peculiar feelings that produce this disposition; they are feelings great numbers of Americans do not understand and have indeed taken great pains not to understand. But to the common British, fighting Americans would have much the same relation to fighting other peoples that cannibalism would have to eating meat.

I hear a certain type of American over here slowly and heavily debating the Hughes proposals on the assumption that there may be a war of America against Britain and Japan. Such an assumption is—if I may be permitted the word—idiotic. As a people, the British have not been thinking very much about the Pacific question. They have been preoccupied by Ireland and their own economic troubles. But if that question presently moves toward a level of intensity where war is possible, let there be no mistake about it in Japan, the ordinary English will be thinking with the Americans. They will read much the same stuff because they have the same language, and think in the same way because they have kindred habits of thought.

It will not matter then what assurances and sentiments the Japanese may have had for official personages in Great Britain. For we are dealing here not with a matter of agreements but with a kind of moral gravitation. If there is a conflict the British masses will want to come in on the American side, and if it seems likely to be in the least an inconclusive conflict they will certainly come in. If the rulers of the Japanese dream that any other combination is possible in the Pacific they are under as dangerous a delusion as ever lured a great nation to disaster.

But there are many signs that if ever the ruling people of Japan entertained this delusion they are being disillusionized and that they begin to realize that a war with America in the Pacific will mean a war with America, Britain, and possibly—to judge from the recent astonishing remark by that able writer “Pertinax”—France. France may use her influence at Washington on behalf of Japan in certain matters, but that is all Japan will get from France. The Japanese, I believe, now fully realize this, and the trend of recent Japanese utterances is all in the direction of discussion and the disavowal of any belligerent dreams.

Yet, Japan continues to arm, and though she now disavows war as her method, she sits very proudly and stiffly in her weapons at the parley. She may have limited and restrained her dreams, but there is still some minimum in her mind beyond which she will not retreat without a struggle. What is that minimum which will satisfy her without war? Will it satisfy her for good, will it seem so permanently satisfactory to her that she will be willing not only to set aside the thought of and preparation for an immediate war, but—what is of far more importance—enter into such a binding contract for her future international relationships as will enable her to beat the swords of her Samurai into ploughshares for good and all?

Is Japan peculiarly an obstacle to the practical, if informal, federation of the world to which we all hope that things are moving?

When I try to frame a hopeful answer to that question, it occurs to me with added force that Japan is not a people trying to express itself through a Government as we Atlantic peoples are, but a Government, a small ruling class, in effective possession of an obedience-loving people. And I remember that that small ruling class has a long tradition of romantic and chivalrous swordsmanship. Is that ruling class going to keep its power and is it going to preserve its tradition? No one would be more urgent than I for the complete disarmament of the entire world, but no one could be more convinced of the unwisdom of disarmament by America or any other power while any single country in the world maintains a spirit that must lead at last to a resumption of warfare. TO DISARM IN SUCH A SITUATION IS TO LEAVE THE TROUBLE TO ACCUMULATE UPON OUR GRAND-CHILDREN; TO PATCH UP A TEMPORARY PEACE BASED ON THE PERMITTED “EXPANSION” OF SUCH A POWER IS SIMPLY TO PREPARE FOR AN EXPANDED WAR IN THE FUTURE.

But is that Japanese ruling class resolved at any cost, even at the cost of another World War and at the risk of destroying Japan, to hold onto its present power and to adhere rigidly to its tradition? In the last hundred years Japan, because of her aristocracy and because of her general obedience, has achieved feats of adaptation to new conditions that are unparalleled in history. As we have noted, there have recently been indications of further changes in the spirit of Japan.

She is said to be pressing forward with the education of the common people and the liberation of thought and discussion. In the long run, what is happening in the schools of Japan is of more importance to mankind than what is happening in her dockyards. But at present we do not know what is happening in the schools of Japan. One hears much of New Japan and Liberal Japan, and there is even an unofficial representative of the Japanese Opposition in Washington. But, so far as we can judge at this distance, we must be guided by the policy and methods of the Japanese Government.

Before we can judge these we must consider the nature of the field in which they seem to clash most with American ideas and with American and European interests, namely, China and Eastern Asia generally. In my next paper I will ask, “What is China?” and consider the nature of the needs and claims of Japan in regard to China and the prohibitions and the renunciations the Western powers want to impose upon her. For it is on account of these restrictions and prohibitions that Japan has been building her battleships. Her fighting fleet is to secure her a free hand in China and Siberia; it can have no other purpose. And I shall take up the question whether the prohibitions and renunciations we want to force upon Japan are not prohibitions and restrictions that we are bound in fairness to impose equally upon all powers concerned with China and the Far East. If the other powers are not prepared for extreme general retractions and renunciation in China; if they want to bar out Japan from aggressive practices and exclusive advantages that other powers retain; if we cling to any sort of racial distinction in these matters, then I shall submit, we are asking impossible things from Japan and we are forcing her toward what must must be indeed a very desperate gamble for her, a refusal to enter into this proposed disarmament agreement—and that means war.

VIII CHINA IN THE BACKGROUND

Washington, Nov. 16.

The Chinese propaganda in America and Western Europe seems on the whole to be conducted more efficiently than the Japanese. And the Chinese student, it seems to me, gets into closer touch with the educated American and European because his is a democratic and not an aristocratic habit of mind. He has an intensely Western sense of public opinion.

The masses of China may be destitute, ignorant and disordered, but in their mental habits they are modern and not mediæval, in the same sense that the Japanese are mediæval and not modern. The Chinese seem to “get on” with their Western social equivalents better than any of the Asiatic people. And increasing multitudes of Chinese are learning English today; it is the second language in China.

Now, if Japan is the figure in the limelight at Washington today, China is the giant in the background and scene of the present Pacific drama. We have had so much in the papers lately about these two countries, we have been treated to such a feast of particulars about them, that most of us have long since forgotten very thoroughly the broad facts of the case, and it will be refreshing to recall them here and now.

Let us remind ourselves that China is a country with a population amounting at the lowest estimate to between twice and three times the population of the United States, or of France and England put together. This population has the longest unbroken tradition of peaceful industry in the world. It is essentially civilized; it respects learning and civility profoundly. A common literature and ancient traditions keep its people one.

In the past China has been divided again and again—always to reunite. But it has become “old-fashioned,” dangerously old-fashioned, perhaps by reason of its very stability; it has lagged behind most of the world in the development of its transport and economic possibilities. In mineral deposits and other natural resources and in the industrial capability of its sturdy and intelligent population it has more undeveloped wealth than any other single people in the world. It is only in the last century or so that China has lagged behind.

Only a few centuries ago China was as civilized as Europe and politically more stable. In a century or so she may be again the most civilized and intelligent power in the world, flourishing in fellowship and perfect understanding with the great states of America and Europe.

She may be—if she is not torn to pieces and kept in a state of enfeeblement and disorder by the hostile action of external powers.