e a path for his
comrades through the battle, deliberately flings away his life with a
shout of 'Teikoku manzai' (Empire, good-bye), obeys the will and fears
the approval of ghostly witnesses."

Mr. Robert Young, editor of the _Japan Chronicle_, and Mr. W. B. Mason,
who both of them have lived in Japan for many years, keen observers of
Japanese characteristics and tendencies, in discussing the value of
Hearn's books as expositions of the country, were unanimous in declaring
that he greatly overestimated the influence of ancestor worship.

The Japanese, like all gallant people, foster a deep reverence for their
heroic ancestors. Secluded from the rest of the world for centuries, all
their hero-worship had been devoted to their own nationality; but
practical, hard-headed, material-minded, pushing forward in every
direction, grasping the necessities that the competitive struggle of
modern civilisation has forced upon them, keeping in the van by every
means inculcated by cleverness and shrewdness--arguing by analogy, it is
not likely that a people, living intensely in the present, clutching at
every opportunity as it passes, would nourish a feeling such as Hearn
describes for "millions long buried"--for "the nameless dead."

Nature worship, the worship of the sun, that gave its name to the
ancient kingdom, the natural phenomena of their volcanic mountains
Fuji-no-yama or Asama-yama, inspired feelings of reverence in the
ancient Japanese far more potent than any idea connected with their
"ancestral spirits."

In Shinto there is no belief in the passage of "mind essence" from form
to form, as in Buddhism; the spirits of the dead, according to the most
ancient Japanese religion, continue to exist in the world, they mingle
with the viewless forces of Nature and act through them, still
surrounding the living, expecting daily offerings and prayers. What a
charm and mysticism is imparted to all the literary work done by Hearn
in Japan by the Shinto idea of ancestral ghosts, which he really seems
for a time to have adopted, woven into the Buddhist belief in
pre-existence, the continuity of mind connected again with the
scientific theory of evolution.

"He stands and proclaims his mysteries," says an American critic, "at
the meeting of Three Ways. To the religious instinct of India,--Buddhism
in particular,--which history has engrafted on the aesthetic heart of
Japan, Hearn brings the interpreting spirit of Occidental science;