was, and received the explanation that for this
express train no tickets could be sold for less than forty miles; but
if I would buy a ticket for the next station beyond Kyoto, it would be
all right; I could get off at Kyoto. I was assured that I would be
allowed to land and leave the station at Kyoto. This I did then, and
have repeatedly done since. The same absurd rule is applied, I am
told, between Yokohama and Tokyo.

But our interest in these illustrations is the light they shed on
Japanese character. They indicate the intellectual angle from which
the people have looked out on life. What is the origin of the
characteristic? Is it due to deep-lying race nature, to the quality of
the race brain? Even more clearly than in the case of
"roundaboutness," it seems to me that "nominality" is due to the
nature of the old social order. Feudalism has always exhibited more or
less of these same features. To Anglo-Saxons, reared in a land blessed
by direct government of the people, by the people, and for the people,
such methods were not only needless but obnoxious. Nominal
responsibility without real power has been seen to breed numberless
evils. We have learned to hate all nominalism, all fiction in
government, in business and, above all, in personal character. But
this is due to the Anglo-Saxon social order, the product in large
measure of centuries of Christian instruction.

Through contact with Westerners and the ideas they stand for,
directness and reality are being assimilated and developed by the
Japanese. This would be impossible were the characteristic in question
due to inherent race nature necessarily bequeathed from generation to
generation by intrinsic heredity.

XIX

INTELLECTUALITY

Some writers hold that the Japanese are inherently deficient in the
higher mental faculties. They consider mediocre mentality to be an
inborn characteristic of Japan and assert that it lies at the root of
the civilizational differences distinguishing the East from the West.
The puerility of Oriental science in all its departments, the
prevalence of superstition even among the cultivated, the lack of
historical insight and interpretation of history are adduced as
conclusive evidences of this view.

Foreign teachers in Japanese employ have told me that Japanese
students, as compared with those of the West, manifest deficient
powers of analysis and of generalization. Some even assert that the
Japanese have no generali