NOV 25 1890 SCRIBNER'S MAGAZINE. VOL. VIII. DECEMBER, 1890. No. 6. T HERE are two national life, so says JAPONICA. FIRST PAPER.-JAPAN THE COUNTRY. By Sir Edwin Arnold. THE ILLUSTRATIONS BY ROBERT Blum. first of Meiji." Neither of them can be ever at all completely understood even by the most intelligent and indefatigable foreign observer. You ought certainly to have been born under one of the great Shogunates, the last of which fell amid battle and revolution in A.D. 1868, to comprehend in any intimate way ancient Japan; and you should be nativebred, a living part of the present brandnew order of things, to have a reasonable chance of feeling as this people feels and looks upon the outer and inner world with their eyes. Let nobody, therefore-least of all a mere traveller-venture to theorize too boldly about Japan and the Japanese. He is pretty sure to go wrong somewhere if he does. The first impressions which a fairly intelligent stranger may form of men and cities, manners and customs, in this de lightful but incomprehensible "Land of the Rising Sun," have their value if carefully recorded, and his conclusions may not prove wholly without interest about its past, present, and future, when he has learned something of the language, and discovered how much he can never learn upon a hundred intensely attractive points. Even the artists have not really found out Japan yet; nor realized what color, what novelty, what refinement, what remarkable things in Nature and Art and Humanity she keeps awaiting them in the silvery light of her atmospheres, along with all sorts of absurdities and grotesqueries. There are many and many landscapes, in the hills and along the sea-shores of these fair islands which would present a new world to real lovers of scenery; and in the little, girlish steps of a musume, cross Copyright, 1890, by Charles Scribner's Sons. All rights reserved. ing the mats of the tea-house, or tripping down the street on her wooden clogs, there is ofttimes a grace of special movement--a delicate, strange play of folds and feet-which no Western painter has thus far caught, and which is something midway between the pacing of fantail pigeons and the musical gait of Greek maidens on the friezes of the Parthenon. The two Japans are, of course, perpetually blended. The younger nation, which has only just come of age, is all for railways, telegraphs, and European developments, including some of the least desirable and profitable. Yet the older nation lives on, within and around the Japan of new parliaments, colored wide-awakes, and Parisian costumes, and from time to time fiercely asserts itself. My lamented friend, the late Viscount Mori, Minister for Japan to Washington, and afterward to London-and one of the most enlightened of her modern statesmen was assassinated in Tokio on February 11, 1889, really as an enemy to the independence of his country on account of his reforms, but ostensibly because he had lifted up the curtain of the shrine at Ise with his walkingstick. Only a few weeks back, in a neighboring district, the editor of a Japanese journal was sentenced to four years' imprisonment for speaking disrespectfully in a leading article about that very ancient dignitary the Emperor Jimmu. Considering that the potentate in question-albeit first of all Mikados-was so vastly remote as to be declared grandson or grandnephew of the Sun Goddess herself, and is said to have conquered Japan with a sword as long as a fir-trunk and the aid of a miraculous white crow's beak, one would think criticism was free as to His Majesty "Kamu-Yamato-Iware-Biko." But the Japanese administration generally, and the censorship of the press in particular, will have no trifling with the established traditions of Dai-Nippon. Japan took from China, along with her earliest imported religion (Shintoism), a measureless respect for ancestors, however fabulous; and, strangely enough, while her educated people disbelieve the legends of the gods, they seem to accept, or, at any rate, demurely repeat, the his torical stories which relate how an empress stilled the waves of the sea by sitting down upon them, and how emperors had fishes for their ministers, and were transformed into white or yellow birds. Afterward, from China, came Buddhism, and with it the all-important tea-leaf and tea-cup; and Confucianism, if it had features deplorably materialistic, yet inculcated that loyalty to chiefs and that reverence and devotion to parents which have formed the keystones of the Japanese social system. Nihon or Nippon-like our own word Japan-are corruptions of the Chinese Jip-pên, which means "The place the sun comes from." Marco Polo's Zipangu is derived from the same word, for it was by way of China that Japan was first heard about. In classic Japanese the land is styled "O-Mi-Kuni," the "Great August Country," and the learned Mr. Chamberlain gives, among many appellatives, yet another name, which probably you would not wish me to repeat very constantly-" Toyo-ashi-warano-chi-aki-no-naga-i-ho-aki-no-mizu-hono-kuni"-which signifies "The Luxuriant-Reed-Plains; the Land-of-FreshRice-Ears; of a-Thousand-Streams; of Song; of Five-Hundred-Autumns." It should meanwhile interest all Americans to be reminded that their great country was discovered, quite as an accident, by Christopher Columbus on his first trip, while he was really looking for Zipangu; which region he still endeavored perpetually to reach, on all his subsequent voyages to America. Japan is so broken up, so accidenté in surface and contour, that not more than fifteen per cent. of her soil lies available for cultivation, and only two-thirds of it has, as yet, been brought under the suki and kuwa of the blue-frocked Japanese farmer. That hard-working person has little or nothing to learn from Western science, cultivating his land, as he does, with not less skill than industry. Half his time is passed kneedeep in the sticky swamps of the ricegrounds; but he seems to mind this no more than the odors of the liquid manure which is so carefully hoarded and distributed by ladlefuls with rash disregard of the traveller's nose. The climate suits him a great deal better than it |