I am
certain, however, that the Japanese Government desires to, if
possible, preserve the Aino race from extinction, and that it aspires
to give this ancient people all the advantages of education and
civilisation generally. Unfortunately the Ainos themselves are the
obstacle to the carrying into effect of this project. They desire to
live their own life in their own way. They have not only no wish to
be, but they resent any effort to make them, either educated or
civilised. They are what some people would term children of nature,
out of place decidedly in a modern go-ahead eclectic Power like Japan,
but an interesting survival of the past, and likewise an interesting
reminder that the highly civilised races of to-day have, in their
time, been evolved from very similar children of nature.

CHAPTER XXIII

JAPAN AS IT IS TO-DAY

"In the Japan of to-day the world has before it a unique example of an
Eastern people displaying the power to assimilate and to adopt the
civilisation of the West, while preserving its own national dignity
unimpaired," aptly remarks a modern writer. It is, indeed, in its
powers of assimilation and adaptation that Japan, I think, stands
unique among not only the nations of the world at the present time,
but amongst the nations of whom we have any historical record. In one
of his books on Japan--books which I may, in passing, remark give a
more vivid insight into the life of the Japanese people than the works
of any other writer--Mr. Lafcadio Hearn remarks that the so-called
adoption of Western civilisation within a term of comparatively few
years cannot mean the addition to the Japanese brain of any organs or
powers previously absent from her, nor any sudden change in the mental
or moral character of the race. Changes of that kind cannot be made in
a generation. The Europeanising of Japan, Mr. Hearn in fact suggests,
means nothing more than the rearrangement of a part of the
pre-existing machinery of thought, while the mental readjustments
effected by taking on Western civilisation, or what passes for it,
have given good results only along directions in which the Japanese
people have always shown special capacity. There has, in a word, he
asserts, been no transformation--nothing more than the turning of old
abilities into new and larger channels. Indeed the tendency of the
people of Japan, when dispassionately investigated, will be seen to
have been always moving in the same direction.