Asian Current

At dusk we reached the end of the first stage of our voyage through the romantic backwater lagoons and inlets of the Malabar coast. A crowd of brown boys gathered at the jetty, shouting, “Allerpey!”

We got out and sorted our baggage. Then the brown boys saw visions of baksheesh. Nor were they alone in demanding toll. There was the man who took our tickets, and the man who watched the man who took our tickets to see that he didn’t swindle, and the boy who brought the bullock-cart, and the man who brought the boy who brought the bullock-cart.

“Baksheesh! Rickshaw! Allerpey!” clamored the brown coolies. But alas I Allah didn’t pay. We were the victims who had to produce!

In these out-of-the-way parts of India the nervous traveler is apt to get rattled by the constant demands for baksheesh. But it is the custom of the country. He is a foolish man who tries to pay only for services rendered. It is the undeserving who demand baksheesh and get it too, if the traveler is in search of smiles and peace.

After all, the privilege of visiting this country is worth a lot of the fat coppers of Travancore!

It is a moonless night. Our beds are in the garden by the road, where a breeze is floating through the sentinel palms. The voice of the mosquito is heard in the land and the time of the brain-fever bird has come. But we lie safe inside our mosquito-nets and relax in the tepid air, pondering dreamily on the life about us. A bullfrog croaks for a moment, then lapses into sudden silence. By the garden gate pass silent figures sheeted like the Roman dead. A bat looms by. There comes to us the agonized wail of some beast in pain. Then again a sudden silence, as if a throat had been choked. The powers of evil are abroad. A million tiny lives are born only to die again. By fang and foot the tragedy is played. Then from far away comes to our sleepy ears a sound of worship, the murmur of a multitude, the bugling of conches-the people of Brahma are at prayer.

Allerpey is on the backwater from Quilon to Cochin, a flourishing city so unknown to the outer world that even Murray’s voluminous guide-book doesn’t name it.

At Cochin, the pepper port, we are again in touch with the West, for British Cochin is a big and growing commercial center where cocoanut-fiber, spice, “and all things nice” are exported to an annual value of three and a half millions sterling. There are roughly three towns at Cochin-British Cochin, Jew Town, and Ernakulam. The latter is on the land side of the bay that forms a natural harbor, and is the terminus of the railway. It is a clean and prosperous city, with no historical associations but good accommodation for travelers. British Cochin and Jew Town rank among the quaint places of the world.

Two thousand years ago Chinese pirates taught the Cochinese a peculiar way of fishing. They still prefer it to modern methods. There is a contraption of string and bamboo by the quay-side on which a long pole is hinged, with one end inland and the other over the sea. From the sea end is suspended a kite-like affair. This is the net. The other end of the pole is weighted, for the convenience of the fishermen, who lower the net slowly into the sea and then withdraw it with its freight of fishes. The cords and stones with which these machines are hung, and the curious old creatures who work the levers and stare into the net with googly eyes, are like Heath Robinson’s and Rube Goldberg’s cartoons come to life, and are a strange contrast to the Pierce Leslie factory a hundred yards away. From time immemorial this fishing has continued, and until recently at Cannanore, farther up the coast, half the catch of sharks’ fins and one fish were the perquisites of the rajah’s cat, as a curious form of state tax.

Towards the club we come to St. Francis’s Church, shut and locked after the unfortunate Church of England fashion. It is a gray, unimpressive building both within and without, yet venerable for its associations.

This was the first Christian church in India. Here Vasco da Gama was buried on Christmas Day, 1524.

Those who believe that the caste system, India’s social cancer, will ever be rooted out, should visit Cochin. Here there are as many subdivisions among the Christians as there are among the Hindus, and the lines between them are almost as sharply drawn.

According to tradition, the first Christian converts were made nearly two thousand years ago when the Apostle Thomas came to the Malabar coast. Since then climate and tradition have been at work on Christianity, with the result that to-day there are three divisions of the Roman Catholics using the Latin liturgy, but who do not worship together and who are differentiated by name-”The Three Hundred,” “The Five Hundred,” and “The Seven Hundred.” Then there is another Catholic sect that uses the Church of Rome liturgy in the ancient Syrian language instead of in Latin. There are also the Chaldean Syrians, who obey the “Patriarch of Babylon,” and the Jacobite Syrians, who recognize the leadership of the “Patriarch of Antioch,” and the St. Thomas Syrians, who disregard the rule of both Rome and Antioch and elect their own bishop.

The last-named are the “religious Bolsheviki” of Cochin. They call themselves St. Thomas Syrians on the ground that they are the only Christians in India who adhere to the ritual of the apostolic age. They believe in neither confession, absolution, fasting, invocation of the saints, veneration of relics, masses for the dead, nor baptismal regeneration.

As a result of century after century of dispute these sects have petrified into castes, and to-day intermarriage between castes is as uncommon among them as it is among their Hindu neighbors.

In addition to these seven groups there are others who adhere to various Protestant faiths. But by far the most interesting community we find in Cochin is in Jew Town, a quarter reminding us of the ghettos of Warsaw, Constantinople, or N ew York. But such is the effect of India on invading religions that even the Jews are split up into three separate castes, known as the “Whites,” the “Browns,” and the “Blacks.”

As we drive in our rickshaws toward Jew Town we are confronted by the curse of Cochin. A plague hangs over their city, the plague of death by deformity. One out of every ten of the people we pass suffers from elephantiasis, one of the most terrible diseases known to medical science, for it not only destroys the human frame but first distorts it into a thing of ridicule. The disease causes a swelling of the ankles and knees until the legs are the size of bolsters. It is a common sight to see men walking around in what are apparently brown top-boots, their flesh being thus travestied by this hideous affliction. It is cured in several different ways, one of which is for the victim to have the accumulated fat pared down until his legs are of normal size. But not many can afford the operation, or the necessary trip to the distant metropolis of Madras. The afflicted often live and work to late middle age, but their limbs grow bigger and bigger until they reach the limit of elasticity, and the periodic attacks of fever that accompany elephantiasis grow more frequent until at last the sufferers are relieved of their “too too solid flesh.” Fortunately, English bacteriologists have isolated the microbe-a water-borne germ.

A Brahmin, with the gaudy, diabolic-looking trident of Vishnu on his forehead, who is employed as a clerk by the wealthiest Jew shopkeeper, leads us through a maze of crooked thoroughfares until we find ourselves in a narrow street among a stately silent people dressed in long tunics of rich color, waistcoats buttoned tight around the neck, baggy white trousers, wooden sandals, and skull-caps. It is easy to distinguish them from the other inhabitants of Cochin by the locks that hang down in front of their ears.

The two-storied houses on either side of the street are of a style foreign to India, and the faces looking out at us from the shuttered windows remind us of the Rebeccas and J ezebels of Jerusalem. At the head of the street we come to a synagogue, with its tower and the old Dutch clock that has told off the lazy, listless hours of life in this Indian ghetto since the day when the merchant buccaneers from Amsterdam protected these Jews from the horrors of the Portuguese Inquisition.

Noone seems to know just when these people settled in southern India. The history of the early days of the colony is shrouded in the mists of obscurity. The Black Jews, who look much like the native Muhammadans except for their locks, stoutly uphold their tradition that they arrived first. According to one of their legends, the Apostle Thomas landed on the coast of Malabar in the year 52 A. D., and they came seventeen years later.

Some writers believe that the Children of Israel have been in touch with this portion of India since the ships of Solomon came here for their “precious cargoes” one thousand years B. c. Sir W. Hunter, a historian of wide repute, tells us that Roman merchant triremes sailing between Myos Hormuz on the Red Sea and the ports of Arabia, Ceylon, and Malabar, found a Jewish colony in southwestern India in the second century A. D.

But the historians and the antiquarians are unable to agree. Some hold that the Black Jews were the first, while others believe that the White Jews preceded them. The former have a tradition that they are descendants of the J udean-Arabians who are still found at Sanaa in the Yemen, and at Aden. The White Jews laugh at this story and declare that the Black Jews are merely the descendants of slaves whom they bought and afterwards converted and liberated.

One of the rabbis of the White Jewish community told us that Nebuchadnezzar, the haughty monarch who carried the Children of Israel off to Babylon in captivity, extended his empire all the way to Cape Comorin, the southernmost ti p of India, and then exiled the tribe of Manasseh to this extreme corner of his realm. He firmly believed that his people were the descendants of this tribe. A few have names like David Castile (David the Castilian), and this has been responsible for the rumor that they may be descendants of the Jews who were driven out of Spain during the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella.

For centuries these people lived in peace and contentment with their Hindu and Muhammadan neighbors. But with the arrival of the representatives of the first great Christian power to invade the Orient-the Portuguese-their era of persecution began. Great rivalry existed between the Portuguese and the Dutch. The buccaneer dons suspected the Jews of helping their enemies, so they burned their settlements and chased them into the mountains. It was during this time that the records that might have revealed their origin were destroyed. Later on, when the Dutch defeated the Portuguese, the Jews came out of the jungle and with the assistance of their protectors rebuilt their homes and synagogues in Cochin.

Pan-Asianism is one of the potentially explosive ideas that have contributed to Japan’s drive for expansion. It has become increasingly popular, especially among high military officers, both active and retired. Typical of the spirit of Japanese Pan-Asianism is an article by the publicist Rin Kaito, who, after recalling the religions, arts, and sciences which originated in Asia and repudiating the Occidental assumption of superiority to Orientals, ends on the following note:

For over a century and a half the Asiatics have been pressed down by the Whites and subjected to Western tyranny. But Japan, after defeating Russia, has aroused the sleeping Asiatics to shake off the Western tyranny and torture.

It is significant that Major General Kenji Doihara, who had the reputation of being one of Japan’s most astute military diplomats and experts on the mainland of Asia/ is an avowed believer in Pan-Asianism. “The doctrine of ‘Asia for the Asiatics,’” Doihara wrote in an issue of Dai Asia Shugi, a magazine devoted to expounding Pan-Asian ideas, “is based on the supreme principle that Asia must be safeguarded and maintained by Asiatics.”

In other words, the Occidental should go, from China first of all, then from the Dutch East Indies, the Philippines, India, and other parts of Asia which should be “safeguarded and maintained by Asiatics.” Under present conditions “Asia for the Asiatics” in practice would be synonymous with “Japan over Asia.” The Japanese superiority over other Oriental peoples in such factors of national strength as military and naval power, general literacy, industrial development, and military organization is so great that there would be almost no limit to Japanese expectations of supremacy in Asia if the influence of the West were withdrawn.

I recently discussed the ideals of the Pan-Asian movement with General I wane Matsui, former commander of the Japanese garrison in Formosa and a leading figure in the Dai Asia Kyokai (Great Asia Association) of Japan. Spare in build and alert in bearing, General Matsui, like many other Japanese high officers, gave the impression of keeping himself in an excellent state of physical fitness through rigorous exercise and simple living. He described as one of the ideals of his organization “an Asiatic League of Nations, based on the slogan (Asia for the Asiatics,’” and declared that Pan-Asianism had won followers in China, India, French Indo-China, the Philippines, and Afghanistan. He gave me with approval a pamphlet in the English language entitled Asiatic Asia: What Does It Mean? By Professor Takeyo Nakatani, secretary of the association. The idea of Japanese hegemony in the Pan-Asian order was clearly put forward by Professor Nakatani in the following terms:

To bring order and reconstruction to the present chaotic condition of Asia is a duty that rests mostly on the shoulders of Japan… She has been asked to put to work all her forces, cultural, political, economic, and, if need be, military, in order to bring about unity and wholesale reconstruction in Asia.

The appeal of the Pan-Asian idea outside of Japan does not seem to be very wide or very great. Now and then a roving nationalist revolutionary from India or the Philippines may find shelter in Japan. But there is no evidence that Oriental nationalists, however much they may dislike British, French, or Dutch rule, would care to substitute Japanese. Japan’s aggressive policy toward China has certainly not been calculated to win support for plans of cooperating on a Pan-Asian or any other basis.

But while Pan-Asianism is a negligible force outside of Japan, the propulsive force of the idea in Japan should not be underrated. General Matsui is not the only Japanese military leader who cherishes an almost mystical faith in Japan’s mission as the driving force in an “Asia for the Asiatics” movement. If the Japanese Empire is to expand further, Pan-Asianism, to a certain type of Japanese mind, may become a slogan as inspiring as Kipling’s phrase about the “white man’s burden” was to the believer in the blessings of British imperial rule.

So behind the Japanese sweep toward empire one finds a whole complex of impelling forces. Some of these stem from Japan’s romantic feudal past, with its cult of the sword; others are derived rather from the more prosaic counting house considerations of the present.

The average Japanese does not possess a speculative mind.

But those who try to draw lessons from their country’s history must sometimes regret the two and a half centuries of self-imposed seclusion from which Japan emerged into the modern world with the Meiji Restoration of 1868. For while Japan was leading its static, shut-in life under the Tokugawa Shogunate, the rich colonial prizes were being staked out. Japan was handicapped in the race for colonial spoils by her super isolation, much as Germany and Italy were handicapped by the late achievement of national unity.

Two centuries ago, before Russia, Great Britain, France, and other foreign powers had struck firm roots in the Far East, it would have been far simpler and easier for Japan to carve out a vast Asiatic empire than it is at the present time. To-day Japanese pressure evokes counter-pressure. As a direct result of Japan’s drive for expansion, East Asia is arming on a scale which recalls the military establishments of its great mediaeval conquerors, Genghis Khan and Kublai Khan.

The more spectacular armament race in Europe should not obscure the fact that the Far East is also arming to the limit of its resources. From Vladivostok, Russia’s main window on the Pacific, to Singapore, at the tip of the Malay Peninsula, every country, with variations dictated by size, population, and resources, is investing an ever-larger share of its income in troops and ships and airplanes and cannon.

Take a brief imaginary tour of the Far East from north to south. The long Soviet-Manchoukuo frontier, slightly defended a few years ago, now bristles on the Russian side with forts and blockhouses, gas- and bomb-proof hangars for a fleet of several hundred airplanes, cantonments and storehouses for an army that is generally estimated at between 200,000 and 300,000 men. Vladivostok, from which Japanese residents are being crowded out by none too gentle methods, is a large garrison town and submarine base.

On the other side of the frontier the Japanese army of occupation in Manchoukuo, while inferior to the Soviet forces in Siberia as regards size and equipment, is much the largest force that Japan has ever maintained on the Asiatic continent in time of peace. And Japan itself is passing through one political and economic crisis after another because of the effort to increase armaments at a pace which affects adversely both the financial stability of the country and the living standards of the people.

China in 1936 was America’s best customer in the field of airplanes and aeronautical equipment. Chinese purchases amounted to $6,872,000, as against $2,293,000 in 1935. And military airplanes represent only one part of China’s preparedness programme, which lays heavy burdens on the country’s chronically straitened finances.

The Commonwealth Government of the Philippines has launched a universal-service army scheme which will train 400,000 men by the time full independence is realized in 1946. The annual military appropriation of 16,000,000 pesos ($8,000,000) is a substantial item in the limited Philippine budget, but is small in relation to the country’s defense needs. It must be increased if the Philippine Army is to possess adequate air and naval auxiliary units.

Siam is spending money abroad for arms so fast that its British financial adviser has felt obliged to sound a gentle note of warning that financial equilibrium is under a strain as a consequence of the large outlay of foreign currency. Military appropriations have increased in the Dutch East Indies and in French Indo-China.

In the Dutch East Indies, where apprehension in regard to Japan’s ultimate acquisitive designs, whether justified or unjustified, is very pronounced, a hundred and fifty fighting planes are held in readiness at the air base near Surabaya. Great Britain has been holding large-scale maneuvers, with units drawn from places as far apart as Hong Kong and Iraq, to test the effectiveness of the great naval and air base at Singapore.

In the Far East, as in Europe, the arms-limitation hopes of what seem in retrospect the peaceful ‘twenties have been thoroughly blighted. At the moment a precarious equilibrium has been attained. Japan’s forward policy on the continent of Asia has provoked so much counter-arming that the Island Empire can scarcely take new aggressive steps without running the risk of provoking serious conflict. Whether this uneasy truce may in time be transformed into something more positively pacific, or whether it will break down altogether, depends in no small degree on how the issue of war and peace will be settled in Europe.

Japan’s sweep toward empire has by no means been purely military and territorial in character. Goods with the “Made in Japan” label have won their victories and made their enemies, just as the Japanese soldiers on the battlefields of Manchuria and Jehol. Japan’s advance to a commanding position on the Asiatic continent may be graphically represented by three arrows, pointing in different directions. The first points north, to Manchoukuo and the troubled frontier with Russia. The second points west, to China, where the destiny of Japan as an imperial power may well be settled. The third points south, to the rich tropical lands where Japan’s activities have thus far been purely commercial in character.

After everyone else had held forth, the general spoke:

“Yes, gentlemen, you have been to strange places.

But have you ever heard of the Black Pagoda?”

We were with Allenby’s army, camped at Deir el Belah on the edge of the Sinai Desert, just south of the old Philistine capital of Gaza. I was putting up for the night at the headquarters of a mounted column and we were sitting in the mess tent after dinner. The inevitable toast “To the King I” had just been drunk in Jewish wine from Richon le Zion, and after the general had passed around a box of Dutch cigars the conversation turned to the topic of far countries.

An Englishman, an Australian, and an Irishman were discussing strange places they had seen. The general was a British officer of the old school, originally of the Bucks Hussars; the Australian, a major in the Imperial Camel Corps; and the Irishman a captain in the Hong Kong-Singapore Battery. They were professional soldiers-had been for most of their natural Iives-e-and always on the move. They talked in the same off-hand intimate way of Basutoland, Malta, Shanghai, Khartoum, and Mandalay as we might speak of Omaha, Denver or Toledo.

“Right-he, sir,” we all said, “and where and what is the Black Pagoda?” Then we hitched our camp-chairs a bit nearer the general’s end of the table and settled ourselves to hear his yarn.

“It was before the war when I was doing my turn in India,” continued our host. “Occasionally we would be given a short leave that was hardly long enough for a voyage to England or even for a decent shoot in Kashmir. One winter, while my regiment was stationed at Mhow, I decided to try ocean bathing-for my liver. Getting a bit crotchety, don’t you know. I had heard a lot about the wonderful surf at Puri on the Bay of Bengal. And there I went. During my sojourn at this sacred Hindu city the local captain of police took me on the most unusual trip I ever made, and India, as you know, is one country where you can go on an unusual journey any day, or any night.

“Borne on the shoulders of muscular coolies, we bounced along on an all-night journey by palanquin. Just at dawn we arrived at our destination, the Black Pagoda, the weirdest and some say the finest of all the temples in India. Many are the strange sights to be found in Asia, but this temple surpasses them all. Why? Well, for the reason that its sides are covered with images, many of them of life size, that depict human beings in the act of committing nearly every sin in the world.

‘Strange, weird things that no man may say, Things Humanity hides away… Cruel things that man may not name, Naked here, without fear or shame’.

“Of course, there are many British officials in India who know of its existence, but few have ever been there -and those who go do not take their wives.”

Then the general gave us such a graphic, detailed description of the Black Pagoda that I returned to my tent there on the plains of Philistia declaring by the whiskers of Samson and Goliath that I would hire me a palanquin and make that midnight journey along the coast of Bengal to the Black Pagoda if my caravel ever touched the shores of mysterious Hindustan.

It was while on a speaking-tour of the world, relating tales of adventures with Allenby and Lawrence, that I caught my first glimpse of India. Here, I realized, was by far the most fascinating of all the countries I had visited. Richard Curle, mining engineer, savant, and friend of Conrad, once wrote a fascinating book entitled “The Shadow Show.” I like that title because it has always seemed to me that life on this planet is indeed a shadow show. And when I saw India I knew that I was witnessing the greatest show of all. I had found Australia and New Zealand fascinating, Africa full of thrills and surprises, and the Far East absorbingly interesting. But India towers as far above them as the Himalayas tower above the Alps. As a spectacle there is nothing like it.

Variety, we are assured, is the spice of life. The country that interests us the most is the one where there is the most variety. At any rate, so it seems to me. And India has variety to the nth degree. It is supremely the land of startling contrast. The southern tip touches the equator. Central India is in the Temperate Zone and is not only a land of mighty rivers and fertile valleys, but also includes vast deserts similar to those of Arabia, Arizona, and the Sahara. Along the northern border of India loom those towering mountain ranges, the Himalayas, loftiest of all the peaks of earth, their summits clad with ice and snow since the dawn of time.

Mark Twain once said that India was the land that all men long to see, and having seen by so much as a glimpse, would not trade that glimpse for all the other sights of the world. He wrote of it as the only land with an irresistible appeal to alien prince and alien peasant alike.

After the World War, when the fiery Clernenceau retired from political life, he announced that there was one country he simply had to see before he died. Romantic India.

The other day in a book about Napoleon I encountered a mention of a dazzling myth, one of those beliefs, half superstitious perhaps, that have fascinated men over the span of the centuries. Napoleon was charmed and tricked by it, and held it in the back of all his dreams. Throughout history, in the higher imaginations of statecraft that same beguiling idea appears again and again. Alexander was motivated by some such intuition. The idea is this: Who holds India holds the world. As a theory of world-politics you can pick it to pieces, but you cannot escape its seductive, glamorous persuasion.

Strangest of all the lands of this earth, India is inhabited by peoples who, in outward appearance at any rate, seem to include nearly every race under the sun. They vary in shade from the Untouchables of the south, who are descendants of the black aborigines, to the brown Brahmins, to the Mongolians of the north, and to the Caucasian races that include not only the British rulers but many of the native inhabitants as well.

On top of all this, just to lend more variety and contrast, India is a land of splendor and magnificence far, far surpassing anything to be found in either Europe or America-and at the same time it is also a land of squalor and misery so terrible that the mere memory of it still makes me shudder.

I had thought of India as a country one could see, and be satisfied to come away from, in a month or two. But instead of two months, I stayed for two years. Even then I was not content. I wanted to remain on and on, but unlike Aladdin I had no magic lamp, and one day my chancellor of the exchequer brought me out of my Arabian Nights’ dream with the harsh news that. my wealth in no way resembled either that of the fabled kings of Golconda, or of a present-day Indian maharajah.

To those of us who stop to think about it there is something impressive in the thought that one out of every four people on this spinning planet of ours is a citizen of the British Empire. And when we get that far in our contemplation, it is interesting to keep on for a moment and ponder over the fact that three out of every four people in the British Empire live in India. A thousand years or so from now, when the Muse of History sets down her verdict as to the success of the greatest empire the world has ever known, she will be obliged to measure that success largely by what the British have accomplished among the Oriental peoples of the vast Asiatic peninsula of Hindustan.

I decided to commence my journey at the extreme southernmost tip of the peninsula, right down near the equator. There is no city there, nor had I ever read of any traveler’s visit to that cape. Accompanied by Harry Chase, who had been with me in Arabia, Africa, and Europe during the World War, I sailed down the Red Sea, and then crossed the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean to the island of Ceylon. Here we engaged Singhalese fishermen to ferry us across the strait in their primitive catamarans. Then from Cape Comorin we proposed to set forth on our two or three months’ journey, a journey that lengthened to two years and took us back and forth across India for a total distance of over sixty thousand miles-more than twice the circumference of the earth at the equator-and over a vast country nearly as large as the continent of Europe and inhabited by more people than there are on the continents of Australia, Africa, and North and South America all combined.

Every traveler from the West who visits India should have a guru, a wise man, to lead him about and explain the strange things he sees and hears. Without a guru the European or American who sojourns for a little while in India wanders in a daze and comes away as bewildered as any Alice in Wonderland. But to find your guru when you get to India, ah, that may not be so easy. Ganesha, the Hindu goddess of luck, smiled on me. She may not have given me the ability to see with eyes of understanding, but she did send me a guru. For I was fortunate enough to have a proper teacher who expounded to me many a mystery and perplexity.

In these western parts the custom of learning is to attend the lectures of a professor in a hall. But in India you sit at the feet of an ascetic hermit in a forest, or accompany a wandering yogi as a humble disciple, and your guru expounds to you the secrets of cryptic wisdom. I, metaphorically speaking, sat at the feet of a guru, a yogi. Incongruous as it may seem my guru was neither Hindu, Mussulman, nor Buddhist monk. He was not even an oriental, at any rate not by place of birth or ancestry. He was an Englishman, and a professional soldier.

“Y.B.” was the nickname by which he was known throughout the Indian Army. And most of his fellow officers thought him a bit mad. “Y.B.” would take off his uniform, don the picturesque costume of an Afridi, and wander about like a modern Harun-al-Rashid. Then too, he seemed to be genuinely fond of the Oriental peoples around him and seemed to understand them. Also he was an enthusiastic student of the languages and philosophies of the East. All of which somewhat baffled his beef-eating fellow Britons.

Major Francis Yeats-Brown was the younger son of an English diplomat. Against his will-he wanted to be a poet-he was sent to Sandhurst and trained for the army. The Orient called to him and he became a Bengal Lancer, although every turn of his mind was toward scholarship, literature, and philosophy. But he soldiered well and capably, a slashing cavalry officer in the incessant wars along the Indo-Afghan frontier. When the World War came he transferred to the cavalry of the clouds and became an aviator with the British Army in Mesopotamia. During the advance on Bagdad, not long before the fall of Kut-al-Amara, he flew over the Turkish lines on a hazardous mission to cut the enemy telegraph wires. He did so, but was captured, marched across the North Arabian Desert and after months of captivity made his escape, in the plotting of which he had recourse to a desperate expedient. He took up the smoking of opium to gain the confidence of an opium addicted Turkish commandant.

But affairs military were usually subordinate to “Y.B.” In India he had plunged deeply into the study of the occult lore of the Hindus, Vedantism, yoga, and gained a knowledge of these mysterious subjects as few save native Indians can hope to do. It was this that caused his brother officers to raise their eyebrows and the finger of astonishment. They all seemed to love “Y.B.”, considered him a crack polo player, a gallant soldier, a charming companion, and, as I have said, a bit mad.

Although his charm and drollery are not to be resisted, he is indeed one of the most eccentric fellows alive. And it is his very eccentricity that has resulted in his knowing India as few others do. This is amply demonstrated by a book of his recently published under the title of “The Lives of a Bengal Lancer.” It is perhaps the most extraordinary book ever written about India by a westerner. In it he tells of the strange life he lived and something of the strange lessons he learned in the fabulous land of Hindustan.

Any insight that I may have into the ways and ideas of the mysterious land of India I owe to that sapient, whimsical guru, “Y.B.” I found him equally at home along the Coromandel Coast, near the equator, in the mountains of Waziristan, and in the holy cities of the Gangetic Plain. He had delved into the lives of the people and into the hidden knowledge and discipline of yoga. He was the only western yogi I have ever known.

For months we traveled together, and as scenes of fantasy and mystery unfolded before us he expounded the wise, enlightening, and witty ideas of a British yogi. So whatever of truth and wisdom you find in these pages should be credited to “Y.B.”, the Bengal Lancer who became a yogi.

Let us begin with an examination of the Chinese mental make-up which produced this philosophy of living: great realism, inadequate idealism, a high sense of humor, and a high poetic sensitivity to life and nature.

Mankind seems to be divided into idealists and realists, and idealism and realism are the two great forces molding human progress. The clay of humanity is made soft and pliable by the water of idealism, but the stuff that holds it together is after all the clay itself, or we might all evaporate into Ariels. The forces of idealism and realism tug at each other in all human activities, personal, social and national, and real progress is made possible by the proper mixture of these two ingredients, so that the clay is kept in the ideal pliable, plastic condition, half moist and half dry, not hardened and unmanageable, nor dissolving into mud. The soundest nations, like the English, have realism and idealism mixed in proper proportions, like the clay which neither hardens and so gets past the stage for the artist’s molding, nor is so wishy-washy that it cannot retain its form. Some countries are thrown into perpetual revolutions because into their clay has been injected some liquid of foreign ideals which is not yet properly assimilated, and the clay is therefore not able to keep its shape.

A vague, uncritical idealism always lends itself to ridicule and too much of it might be a danger to mankind, leading it round in a futile wild-goose chase for imaginary ideals. If there were too many of these visionary idealists in any society or people, revolutions would be the order of the day. Human society would be like an idealistic couple forever getting tired of one place and changing their residence regularly once every three months, for the simple reason that no one place is ideal and the place where one is not seems always better because one is not there. Very fortunately, man is also gifted with a sense of humor, whose function, as I conceive it, is to exercise criticism of man’s dreams, and bring them in touch with the world of reality. It is important that man dreams, but it is perhaps equally important that he can laugh at his own dreams. That is a great gift, and the Chinese have plenty of it.

The sense of humor, which I shall discuss at more length in a later chapter, seems to be very closely related to the sense of reality, or realism. If the joker is often cruel in disillusioning the idealist, he nevertheless performs a very important function right there by not letting the idealist bump his head against the stone wall of reality and receive a ruder shock. He also gently eases the tension of the hot-headed enthusiast and makes him live longer. By preparing him for disillusion, there is probably less pain in the final impact, for a humorist is always like a man charged with the duty of breaking a sad news gently to a dying patient. Sometimes the gentle warning from a humorist saves the dying patient’s life. If idealism and disillusion must necessarily go together in this world, we must say that life is cruel, rather than the joker who reminds us of life’s cruelty.

I have often thought of formulas by which the mechanism of human progress and historical change can be expressed. They seem to be as follows:

Reality - Dreams = Animal Being

Reality + Dreams = A Heart-Ache (usually called Idealism) Reality + Humor = Realism (also called Conservatism) Dreams - Humor = Fanaticism

Dreams + Humor = Fantasy

Reality + Dreams + Humor = Wisdom

So then, wisdom, or the highest type of thinking, consists in toning down our dreams or idealism with a good sense of humor, supported by reality itself.

As pure ventures in pseudo-scientific formulations, we may proceed to analyze national characters in the following manner. I say “pseudo-scientific” because I distrust all dead and mechanical formulas for expressing anything connected with human affairs or human personalities. Putting human affairs in exact formulas shows in itself a lack of the sense of humor and therefore a lack of wisdom. I do not mean that these things are not being done: they are.

That is why we get so much pseudo-science today. When a psychologist can measure a man’s I.Q. or P.Q.,~ it is a pretty poor world, and specialists have risen to usurp humanized scholarship. But if we recognize that these formulas are no more than handy, graphic ways of expressing certain opinions, and so long as we don’t drag in the sacred name of science to help advertise our goods, no harm is done. The following are my formulas for the characters of certain nations, entirely personal and completely incapable of proof or verification. Anyone is free to dispute them and change them or add his own, if he does not claim that he can prove his private opinions by a mass of statistical facts and figures. Let “R” stand for a sense of reality (or realism), “D” for dreams (or idealism), “H” for a sense of humor, and-adding one important ingredient-”S” for sensitivity.” And further let “4″ stand for “abnormally high,” “3″ stand for “high,” “2″ for “fair,” and “I” for “low,” and we have the following pseudo-chemical formulas for the following national characters. Human beings and communities behave then differently according to their different compositions, as sulphates and sulphides or carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide behave differently from one another. For me, the interesting thing always is to watch how human communities or nations behave differently under identical conditions. As we cannot invent words like “humoride” and “humorate” after the fashion of chemistry, we may put it thus: “3 grains of Realism, 2 grains of Dreams, 2 grains of Humor and I grain of Sensitivity make an Englishman.” a R3D2H2S = The English R2D3H3Sa = The French R3D3H2S2 = The Americans R3D4H1S2 = The Germans

1. 1. I am not objecting to the limited utility of intelligence tests, but to their claims to mathematical accuracy or constant dependability as measures of human personality.
2. In the sense of the French word sensibilite.

Some might with good reason suggest the including of an “L” standing for logic or the rational faculty, as an important element in shaping human progress. This “L” will then often function or weigh against sensitivity, a direct perception of things. Such a formula might be attempted. For me personally, the role of the rational faculty it a human affairs is rather low.

A Pseudo-Scientific Formula

R2D4H1S1 = The Russians

R2DgH1S1 = The Japanese

R4D1HgS3 = The Chinese

I do not know the Italians, the Spanish, the Hindus and others well enough even to essay a formula on the subject, realizing that the above are shaky enough as they are, and in any case are enough to bring down a storm of criticism upon my head. Probably these formulas are more provocative than authoritative. I promise to modify them gradually for my own use as new facts are brought to my knowledge, or new impressions are formed. That is all they are worth today-a record of the progress of my knowledge and the gaps of my ignorance.

Some observations may be necessary. It is easy to see that I regard the Chinese as most closely allied to the French in their sense of humor and sensitivity, as is quite evident from the way the French write their books and eat their food, while the more volatile character of the French comes from their greater idealism, which takes the form of love of abstract ideas (recall the manifestoes of their literary, artistic and political movements). “R4″ for Chinese realism makes the Chinese the most realistic people; “D1″ accounts for something of a drag in the changes in their pattern or ideal of life. The high figures for Chinese humor and sensitivity, as well as for their realism, are perhaps due to my too close association and the vividness of my impressions. For Chinese sensitivity, little justification is needed; the whole story of Chinese prose, poetry and painting proclaims it… The Japanese and Germans are very much alike in their comparative lack of humor (such is the general impression of people), yet it is really impossible to give a “zero” for anyone characteristic in anyone nation, not even for idealism in the Chinese people. It is all a question of degree; such statements as a complete lack of this or that quality are not based on an intimate knowledge of the peoples. For this reason, I give the Japanese and the Germans “H,,” instead of “H;,” and I intuitively feel that I am right. But I do believe that the Japanese and the Germans suffer politically at present, and have suffered in the past, for lacking a better sense of humor. How a Prussian Geheimrat loves to be called a Geheimrat, and how he loves his buttons and metal pins! A certain belief in “logical necessity” (often “holy” or “sacred”), a tendency to fly too straight at a goal instead of circling around it, often carries one too far. It is not so much what you believe in that matters, as the way in which you believe it and proceed to translate that belief into action. By “D3″ for the Japanese I am referring to their fanatic loyalty to their emperor and to the state, made possible by a low mixture of humor. For idealism must stand for different things in different countries, as the so-called sense of humor really comprises a very wide variety of things…

There is an interesting tug between idealism and realism in America, both given high figures, and that produces the energy characteristic of the Americans. What American idealism is, I had better leave it to the Americans to find out; but they are always enthusiastic about something or other. A great deal of this idealism is noble, in the sense that the Americans are easily appealed to by noble ideals or noble words; but some of it is mere gullibility. The American sense of humor again means a different thing from the Continental sense of humor, but really I think that, such as it is (the love of fun and an innate, broad common sense), it is the greatest asset of the American nation. In the coming years of critical change, they will have great need of that broad common sense referred to by James Bryce, which I hope will tide them over these critical times. I give American sensitivity a low figure because of my impression that they can stand so many things. There is no use quarreling about this, because we will be quarreling about words …. The English seem to be on the whole the soundest race: contrast their “R3D2″ with the French “R2D3.” I am all for “R3D2.” It bespeaks stability. The ideal formula for me would seem to be R3D2H3S2, for too much idealism or too much sensitivity is not a good thing, either. And if I give “S1″ for English sensitivity, and if that is too low, who is to blame for it except the English themselves? How can I tell whether the English ever feel anything-joy, happiness, anger, satisfaction-when they are determined to look so glum on all occasions?

We might apply the same formula to writers and poets. To take a few well-known types:

Shakespeare’<> R4D4HaS4

Heine = RaDaH4Sa

Shelley = R1D4H1S4

Poe = RaD4H1S4

Li Po = R1DaH2S4

Tu Fu = R3DaH2S4

Su Tungp’o = RaD2H4Sa

These are no more than a few impromptu suggestions. But it is clear that all poets have a high sensitivity, or they wouldn’t be poets at all. Poe, I feel, is a very sound genius, in spite of his weird, imaginative gift. Doesn’t he love “ratiocination”?

So my formula for the Chinese national mind is:

R4D1HsSs

There we start with an “Sa,” standing for high sensitivity, which guarantees a proper artistic approach to life and answers for the Chinese affirmation that this earthly life is beautiful and the consequent intense love of this life. But it signifies more than that; actually it stands for the artistic approach even to philosophy. It accounts for the fact that the Chinese philosopher’s view of life is essentially the poet’s view of life, and that, in China, philosophy is married to poetry rather than to science as it is in the West. It will become amply clear from what follows that this high sensitivity to the pleasures and pains and flux and change of the colors of life is the very basis that makes a light philosophy possible. Man’s sense of the tragedy of life comes from his sensitive perception of the tragedy of a departing spring, and a delicate tenderness toward life comes from a tenderness toward the withered blossoms that bloomed yesterday. First the sadness and sense of defeat, then the awakening and the laughter of the old rogue-philosopher.

I have hesitated a long time between giving Shakespeare “S.• and “S3″. Finally his “Sonnets” decided it. No school teacher has experienced greater fear and trembling in grading a pupil than I in trying to grade Shakespeare.

On the other hand, we have “R4″ standing for intense realism, which means an attitude of accepting life as it is and of regarding a bird in the hand as better than two in the bush. This realism, therefore, both reinforces and supplements the artist’s affirmation that this life is transiently beautiful, and it all but saves the artist and poet from escaping from life altogether. The Dreamer says “Life is but a dream,” and the Realist replies, “Quite correct. A..”1d let us live this dream as beautifully as we can.” But the realism of one awakened is the poet’s realism and not that of the business man, and the laughter of the old rogue is no longer the laughter of the young go-getter singing his way to success with his head up and his chin out, but that of an old man running his finger through his flowing beard, and speaking in a soothingly low voice. Such a dreamer loves peace, for no one can fight hard for a dream. He will be more intent to live reasonably and well with his fellow dreamers. Thus is the high tension of life lowered.

But the chief function of this sense of realism is the elimination of all non-essentials in the philosophy of life, holding life down by the neck, as it were, for fear that the wings of imagination may carry it away to an imaginary and possibly beautiful, but unreal, world. And after all, the wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials, in reducing the problems of philosophy to just a few-the enjoyment of the home (the relationship between man and woman and child), of living, of Nature and of culture-and in showing all the other irrelevant scientific disciplines and futile chases after knowledge to the door. The problems of life for the Chinese philosopher then become amazingly few and simple. It means also an impatience with metaphysics and with the pursuit of knowledge that does not lead to any practical bearing on life itself. And it also means that every human activity, whether the acquiring of knowledge or the acquiring of things, has to be submitted immediately to the test of life itself and of its subserviency to the end of living. Again, and here is a significant result, the end of living is not some metaphysical entity-but just living itself.

Gifted with this realism, and with a profound distrust of logic and of the intellect itself, philosophy for the Chinese becomes a matter of direct and intimate feeling of life itself, and refuses to be encased in any system. For there is a robust sense of reality, a sheer animal sense, a spirit of reasonableness which crushes reason itself and makes the rise of any hard and fast philosophic system impossible. There are the three religions of China, Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism, all magnificent systems in themselves, and yet robust common sense dilutes them all and reduces them all into the common problem of the pursuit of a happy human life. The mature Chinese is always a person who refuses to think too hard or to believe in any single idea or faith or school of philosophy whole-heartedly. When a friend of Confucius told him that he always thought three times before he acted, Confucius wittily replied, “To think twice is quite enough.” A follower of a school of philosophy is but a student of philosophy, but a man is a student, or perhaps a master, of life.

The final product of this culture and philosophy is this: in China, as compared with the West, man lives a life closer to nature and closer to childhood, a life in which the instincts and the emotions are given free play and emphasized against the life of the intellect, with a strange combination of devotion to the flesh and arrogance of the spirit, of profound wisdom and foolish gaiety, of high sophistication and childish naivete. I would say, therefore, that this philosophy is characterized by: first, a gift for seeing life whole in art; secondly, a conscious return to simplicity in philosophy; and thirdly, an ideal of reasonableness in living. The end product is, strange to say, a worship of the poet, the peasant and the vagabond.

Professor Teijiro Uyeda, one of Japan’s leading economists and a specialist on the population question, is convinced that Japan, like other countries which have gone through the process of industrialization and urbanization, will experience a gradual tapering off of the present sharp rate of increase in the number of its inhabitants. He points out that the birth rate has shown a tendency to decline (from 36.2 in 1920 to 31.6 in 1935) and foresees that in time this downward curve will be more significant than the simultaneous decline in the death rate. However, Professor Uyeda anticipates that for some time there will be no diminution in the annual number of young Japanese who come of working age, since a large child population has already been born. So the pressure of a rapidly growing population seems bound to influence Japan’s development for the next two decades at least.

The extremely strong position of the fighting services in the Japanese constitutional scheme of things has also unmistakably promoted the vigorous forward move on the Asiatic continent. Soldiers are sometimes willing to take risks of international antagonism from which diplomats might shrink. And the army has exerted a powerful influence on the shaping of foreign policy during the last six years.

Japanese army and navy officers have never taken kindly to the idea that the Diet should control the activities of their services. Japan perhaps came nearest to civilian control over the fighting services in 1930 when Premier Hamaguchi, an unusually forceful personality for a Japanese civilian, pushed through the ratification of the London Naval Treaty (This was concluded as a supplement to the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922.) against the recommendations of some high naval officers.

But this proved a Pyrrhic victory. Hamaguchi was shot by an enthusiastic nationalist and died of his wound. The agitation against the London Treaty hardened navy sentiment against any new ratio agreement which would bind Japan to maintain a position of inferiority to America and Great Britain in naval strength. There were echoes of the London Naval Treaty and of the supposed “usurpation of the imperial prerogative” by a civilian Premier in every nationalist terrorist enterprise of succeeding years, including the spectacular rebellion of February 26, 1936.

The army also reacted sensitively to the conclusion of the London Naval Treaty. The War Minister, General Jiro Minami, openly encouraged army officers to take part in political activity when he said, in the course of an address before divisional commanders of the army, in August 1931:

“Some people hastily advocate limitation of armaments, and engage in propaganda unfavorable to the nation and the army, while others take advantage of the present psychology of the people with a view to reducing the army for domestic reasons. I hope you will cooperate with the War Ministry authorities in correcting such mistakes.”

If one looks back to the files of the Japanese press on the eve of the Mukden affair, he finds no lack of indication that the army was anticipating some striking developments in Manchuria. So Assai, a leading Tokyo newspaper, on September 9, 1 931, quoted Colonel (later General) Ken Ji Doihara, a very active officer in the Japanese forces stationed in Manchuria, as stating that “there was no telling what might happen in Manchuria.” The Tokyo press of September 15 reported an important conference in which War Minister Minami and several other high military officials participated. According to the press it was decided to seek satisfaction by force for the murder of Captain Nakamura, a Japanese officer who had been killed while on a trip in the interior of China, if diplomacy failed to obtain the same result by peaceful means.

It would be oversimplification to suggest that the army “staged” the seizure of Manchuria simply as a means of restoring its shaken prestige at home and driving liberalism and pacifism into the background. Other considerations were involved: the many unsettled economic disputes with the Chinese authorities; the disposition of Chang Hsuehliang, ruler of Manchuria, to establish closer relations with the nationalist regime in China; the desire to push back the reviving Russian influence in the Far East. But that the army took full advantage of the strengthened position which it acquired as a result of the outbreak of hostilities in Manchuria is unmistakable. As a Japanese scholar writes:

The actual authority for directing the nation’s foreign policy was gradually shifting from Kasumigaseki (the Ministry of Foreign Affairs) to Miyakezaka (the Ministry of War) by the middle of August, 1931, and this tendency toward dual diplomacy became more pronounced during the first phase of the League procedure in September. Towards the beginning of October, however, even this last vestige of dual diplomacy appeared to be waning, with the Miyakezaka in firm control of the government, directing the nation’s policy toward the League as well as the Manchurian developments.

The requirement that the posts of War and Navy Minister may be held only by a general and an admiral in active service makes it possible for either the army or the navy to frustrate the formation of any cabinet of which they disapprove. So strong is the corporate spirit in the higher ranks of the army and navy that no officer would accept an appointment in a cabinet against the advice of his colleagues.

Japan’s sweep toward empire cannot be explained merely in terms of population pressure, desire for economic selfsufficiency, and the strong predominance of military and naval leaders in the councils of the empire. There are psychological elements in the Japanese character, in the Japanese cast of thought that fit in readily with a programme of aggrandizement and expansion. Intense patriotism, red-hot nationalism, is deeply implanted in the Japanese masses. The divine origin that is attributed to the Emperor imparts an element of religious sanction to the most exalted conceptions of Japan’s destiny. Take, for example, the grandiose conception of Japan’s national mission (nothing less than world pacification), as set forth in Professor Chikao Fujisawa’s book, Japanese and Oriental Political Philosophy:

The [Japanese] Emperor as the Sage-King would think it his sacred duty to love and protect not only the people of this land, but also those alien peoples who are suffering from misgovernment and privations. It must be recalled that the Sage-King is answerable in person for the pacification of the entire Under-Heaven, which is the ancient name for the whole world: consequently his moral and political influence ought to make itself strongly felt through the length and breadth of the earth. Should any unlawful elements dare to obstruct in one way or another the noble activities of the Sage-King, he would be permitted to appeal to force; but this may be justified only when he acts strictly on behalf of Heaven… This firm belief in our holy state mission moved Japan to assist Mr. Henry Pu Yi to found the new state of Manchoukuo, which will faithfully follow the way of the SageKing… Nippon’s national flag is an ensign of “red heart,” or fiery sincerity. It alludes to the heavenly mission of Japan to tranquillize the whole world.

The ease with which “the will of heaven” may be invoked to justify Japan’s military and naval aspirations is reflected in the following excerpt from a pamphlet which was issued in the summer of 1935 by the Japanese Navy Ministry:

In view of Japan’s geographical position the powers should leave the maintenance of peace in the Orient in the hands of Japan, which is now powerful enough to perform this duty. If the other powers fail to recognize the mission of Japan they may well be said to disobey the will of Heaven.

A train journey or a cross-country walking trip gives abundant visual evidence that the rural districts of Japan are crowded to the saturation point. Every available inch of land is cultivated; the carefully terraced, irrigated rice fields on the steep hillsides are a monument of patient toil and ingenuity. Between 1920 and 1930, when the whole population increased by about eight and a half millions, the number of persons employed in agriculture slightly declined.

Three possible peaceful remedies for Japan’s population problem are birth control, emigration, and industrialization. Birth control is frowned on by the authorities and runs counter to the strong impulse among the Japanese and other Oriental peoples to conceive many male children in order to ensure the continuity of the family line. Its practice is spreading among the more Westernized and sophisticated Japanese of the larger towns, but it is not yet appreciably slowing up the number of births. The middle-class family with five or six children is far more frequently found in Japan than in America or Great Britain.

There is still room for settlers in the northern parts of the Island Empire, in Hokkaido and in Southern Sakhalin. But the absorption capacity of both these regions, so far as I could learn during a recent visit, is definitely limited. Hokkaido has reached its present population of about 3,000,000 over a period of sixty years. There is a twenty-year plan for the development of Hokkaido which calls for the doubling of this figure by 1956.

But experienced residents of Hokkaido, both Japanese and foreigners, expressed doubt whether this plan could be realized. The best land is already settled; Japanese coming from warmer parts of the empire find the climate of Hokkaido too cold and foggy; the percentage of assisted colonists who fail to stick out the rigors of pioneering in this northern island is already fairly high. The prospects in Sakhalin are still less promising. The Japanese part of this island now reckons about 336,000 inhabitants. It is questionable whether room can be found for more than 200,000 new settlers - a mere drop in the stream of population increase.

Manchoukuo is the uncertain element in Japanese emigration policy. The army dreams of solving two problems, relieving agrarian congestion in Japan and building up a solid human wall against the Russian threat, by settling millions of sturdy Japanese peasants in the northern provinces of Manchoukuo, where there is a considerable amount of untenanted land. But so far this is only a dream. Only a handful of Japanese agriculturists have settled in Manchoukuo, although there has been an influx of merchants, traders, artisans, employees, and other urban dwellers into the new state. It remains to be seen whether such unfavorable factors as a severely cold climate, chronic banditism, the lower living standards of the native Manchurian peasants with whom the Japanese settlers must compete, can be overcome or sufficiently alleviated to make possible a large-scale emigration movement.

The only other foreign country to which Japanese emigrants have been going or could go in any considerable number is Brazil. About 128,000 Japanese have settled there, the record figure of migration for any single year being 12,000. But a large immigration of Japanese settlers, like an inflow of Japanese goods, is apt to provoke restrictive measures. Japanese emigration to Brazil has now been placed on a quota basis, which seems likely to reduce it to small dimensions.

So emigration, like birth control, seems likely to make only a minor contribution to the solution of Japan’s population problem. There remains industrialization; and here Japan has made remarkable strides during the last few years, as will be shown in detail in later chapters.

There are two considerations, however, which prevent industrialization from serving as a panacea, smoothly and automatically absorbing the steady increment of the working population. In the first place, machines have been replacing men and women very perceptibly in the larger and better equipped Japanese factories. More output with fewer workers has been especially characteristic of the textile industry, which gives more employment than any other form of factory production.

Moreover, Japan’s striking progress in export trade has encountered more and more barriers in the form of tariffs, quotas, and self-limitation agreements, concluded by Japanese businessmen as a means of forestalling these restrictions. Industry, trade, and the traditional family system have thus far absorbed, after a fashion, Japan’s annual contingent of new mouths to be fed. Japan is a nation of shopkeepers; a stroll through the streets of Tokyo, Osaka, or any Japanese provincial town reveals an amazing number of people who depend for their living on the proceeds of some very small store. The family system is Japan’s substitute for the dole; it is taken for granted that the successful and prosperous members of a family will look after their less capable or less fortunate relatives.

But the sense of strain and tension is never absent. With its unusual combination of an Oriental birth rate and an Occidental death rate, Japan sees itself confronted with the alternative of expanding or exploding. So there is a direct line of connection between the numerous slant-eyed children whom one finds in every Tokyo side street, playing battledore and shuttlecock, or flying kites, or playing soldiers with sticks for guns and swords, and the patrols of real Japanese soldiers who are hunting down guerrilla “bandits” in Manchoukuo or parading along the Bund of Shanghai. Japan sees in empire a possible way out of its population impasse.

I have discussed at some length Japan’s pressure of population, not only because, along with the closely related problem of poverty in essential raw materials, it is a main driving force in the sweep toward expansion, but also because it affects very intimately many other phases of Japanese life. Many peculiar features of industry and agriculture are attributable in large measure to the fact that there are more people in Japan than the country can comfortably support. Population pressure is a dynamic and explosive force internally as well as externally. It feeds the ferment of dissatisfaction that occasionally finds expression in spectacular plots and assassinations.

There are several views of mankind, the traditional Christian theological view, the Greek pagan view, and the Chinese TaoistConfucianist view. (I do not include the Buddhist view because it is too sad.) Deeper down in their allegorical sense, these views after all do not differ so much from one another, especially when the modern man with better biological and anthropological knowledge gives them a broader interpretation. But these differences in their original forms exist.

The traditional, orthodox Christian view was that man was created perfect, innocent, foolish and happy, living naked in the Garden of Eden. Then came knowledge and wisdom and the Fall of Man, to which the sufferings of man are due, notably (I) work by the sweat of one’s brow for man, and (2) the pangs of labor for women. In contrast with man’s original innocence and perfection, a new element was introduced to explain his present imperfection, and that is of course the Devil, working chiefly through the body, while his higher nature works through the soul. When the “soul” was invented in the history of Christian theology I am not aware, but this “soul” became a something rather than a function, an entity rather than a condition, and it sharply separated man from the animals, which have no souls worth saving. Here the logic halts, for the origin of the Devil had to be explained, and when the medieval theologians proceeded with their usual scholastic logic to deal with the problem, they got into a quandary. They could not have very well admitted that the Devil, who was NotGod, came from God himself, nor could they quite agree that in the original universe, the Devil, a Not-God, was co-eternal with God. So in desperation they agreed that the Devil must have been a fallen angel, which rather begs the question of the origin of evil (for there still must have been another Devil to tempt this fallen angel), and which is therefore unsatisfactory, but they had to leave it at that. Nevertheless from all this followed the curious dichotomy of the spirit and the flesh, a mythical conception which is still quite prevalent and powerful today in affecting our philosophy of life and happiness.’

Then came the Redemption, still borrowing from the current conception of the sacrificial lamb, which went still farther back to the idea of a God Who desired the smell of roast meat and could not forgive for nothing. From this Redemption, at one stroke a means was found by which all sins could be forgiven, and a way was found for perfection again. The most curious aspect of Christian thought is the idea of perfection. As this happened during the decay of the ancient worlds, a tendency grew up to emphasize the afterlife, and the question of salvation supplanted the question of happiness or simple living itself. The notion was how to get away from this world alive, a world which was apparently sinking into corruption and chaos and doomed. Hence the overwhelming importance attached to immortality. This represents a contradiction of the original Genesis story that God did not want man to live forever. The Genesis story of the reason why Adam and Eve were driven out of the Garden of Eden was not that they had tasted of the Tree of Knowledge, as is popularly conceived, but the fear lest they should disobey a second time and eat of the Tree of Life and live forever:

And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever:

Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.

It is a happy fact that with the progress of modern thought, the Devil is the first to be thrown overboard. I believe that of a hundred liberal Christians today who still believe in God in some form or other, not more than five believe in a real Devil, except in a figurative sense. Also the belief in a real Hell is disappearing before the belief in a real Heaven.

So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.

The Tree of Knowledge seemed to be somewhere in the center of the garden, but the Tree of Life was near the eastern entrance, where for all we know, cherubims are still stationed to guard the approach by men.

All in all, there is still a belief in total depravity, that enjoyment of this life is sin and wickedness, that to be uncomfortable is to be virtuous, and that on the whole man cannot save himself except by a greater power outside. The doctrine of sin is still the basic assumption of Christianity as generally practiced today, and Christian missionaries trying to make converts generally start out by impressing upon the party to be converted a consciousness of sin and of the wickedness of human nature (which is, of course, the sine qua non for the need of the ready-made remedy which the missionary has up his sleeve). All in all, you can’t make a man a Christian unless you first make him believe he is a sinner. Some one has said rather cruelly, “Religion in our country has so narrowed down to the contemplation of sin that a respectable man does not any longer dare to show his face in the church.”

The Greek pagan world was a different world by itself and therefore their conception of man was also quite different. What strikes me most is that the Greeks made their gods like men, while the Christians desired to make men like the gods. That Olympian company is certainly a jovial, amorous, loving, lying, quarreling and vow-breaking, petulant lot; hunt-loving, chariot-riding and javelin-throwing like the Greeks themselves-a marrying lot, too, and having unbelievably many illegitimate children. So far as the difference between gods and men is concerned, the gods merely had divine powers of hurling thunderbolts in heaven and raising vegetation on earth, were immortal, and drank nectar instead of wine-the fruits were pretty much the same. One feels one can be intimate with this crowd, can go hunting with a knapsack on one’s back with Apollo or Athene, or stop Mercury on the way and chat with him as with a Western Union messenger boy, and if the conversation gets too interesting, we can imagine Mercury saying, “Yeah. Okay. Sorry, but I’ll have to run along and deliver this message at 72nd Street.” The Greek men were not divine, but the Greek gods were human. How different from the perfect Christian God! And so the gods were merely another race of men, a race of giants, gifted with immortality, while men on earth were not. Out of this background came some of the most inexpressibly beautiful stories of Demeter and Proserpina and Orpheus. The belief in the gods was taken for granted, for even Socrates, when he was about to drink hemlock, proposed a libation to the gods to speed him on his journey from this world to the next. This was very much like the attitude of Confucius. It was necessarily so in that period; what attitude toward man and God the Greek spirit would take in the modern world there is unfortunately no chance of knowing. The Greek pagan world was not modern, and the modern Christian world is not Greek. That’s the pity of it.

On the whole, it was accepted by the Greeks that man’s was a mortal lot, subject sometimes to a cruel Fate. That once accepted, man was quite happy as he was, for the Greeks loved this life and this universe, and were interested in understanding the good, the true and the beautiful in life, besides being fully occupied in scientifically understanding the physical world. There was no mythical “Golden Period” in the sense of the Garden of Eden, and no allegory of the Fall of Man; the Hellenes themselves were but human creatures transformed from pebbles picked up and thrown over their shoulders by Deucalion and his wife Pyrrha, as they were coming down to the plain after the Great Flood. Diseases and cares were explained comically; they came through the uncontrollable desire of a young woman to open and see a box of jewels-Pandora’s Box. The Greek fancy was beautiful. They took human nature largely as it was: the Christians might say they were “resigned” to the mortal lot. But it was so beautiful to be mortal: there was free room for the exercise of understanding and the free, speculative spirit. Some of the Sophists thought man’s nature good, and some thought man’s nature bad, but there wasn’t the sharp contradiction of Hobbes and Rousseau. Finally, in Plato, man was seen to be a compound of desires, emotions, and thought, and ideal human life was the living together in harmony of these three parts of his being under the guidance of wisdom or true understanding. Plato thought “ideas” were immortal, but individual souls were either base or noble, according as they loved justice, learning, temperance and beauty or not. The soul also acquired an independent and immortal existence in Socrates; as we are told in “Phaedo,” “When the soul exists in herself, and is released from the body, and the body is released from the soul, what is this but death?” Evidently the belief in immortality of the human soul is something which the Christian, Greek, Taoist and Confucianist views have in common. Of course this is nothing to be jumped at by modern believers in the immortality of the soul. Socrates’ belief in immortality would probably mean nothing to a modern man, because many of his premises in support of it, like re-incarnation, cannot be accepted by the modern man.

The Chinese view of man also arrived at the idea that man is the Lord of the Creation (”Spirit of the Ten Thousand Things”), and in the Confucianist view, man ranks as the equal of heaven and earth in the “Trio of Geniuses.” The background was animistic: everything was alive or inhabited by a spirit-mountains, rivers, and everything that reached a grand old age. The winds and thunder were spirits themselves; each of the great mountains and each river was ruled by a spirit who practically owned it; each kind of flower had a fairy in heaven attending to its seasons and its welfare, and there was a Queen of All Flowers whose birthday came on the twelfth day of the second moon; every willow tree pine tree, cypress, fox or turtle that reached a grand old age, say over a few hundred years, acquired by that very fact immortality and became a “genius.”

With this animistic background, it is natural that man is also considered a manifestation of the spirit. This spirit, like all life in the entire universe, is produced by the union of the male, active, positive or yang principle, and the female, passive, negative or yin principle-which is really no more than a lucky, shrewd guess at positive and negative electricity. When this spirit becomes incarnated in a human body, it is called p’o; when unattached to a body and floating about as spirit it is called hwen. (A man of forceful personality or “spirits” is spoken of as having a lot of p’oli, or p’oenergy.) After death, this hwen continues to wander about. Normally it does not bother people, but if no one buries and offers sacrifices to the deceased, the spirit becomes a “wandering ghost,” for which reason an All Souls’ Day is set apart on the fifteenth day of the seventh moon for a general sacrifice to those drowned in water or dead and unburied in a strange land. Also, if the deceased was murdered or died suffering a wrong, the sense of injustice in the ghost compels it to hang about and cause trouble until the wrong is avenged and the spirit is satisfied. Then all trouble is stopped.

While living, man, who is spirit taking shape in a body, necessarily has certain passions, desires, and a flow of “vital energy,” or in more easily understood English, just “nervous energy.” In and for themselves, these are neither good nor bad, but just something given and inseparable from the characteristically human life. All men and women have passions, natural desires and noble ambitions, and also a conscience; they have sex, hunger, fear, anger, and are subject to sickness, pain, suffering and death. Culture consists in bringing about the expression of these passions and desires in harmony. That is the Confucianist view, which believes that by living in harmony with this human nature given us, we can become the equals of heaven and earth, as quoted at the end of Chapter VI. The Buddhists, however, regard the mortal desires of the flesh essentially as the medieval Christians did-they are a nuisance to be done away with. Men and women who are too intelligent, or inclined to think too much, sometimes accept this view and become monks and nuns; but on the whole, Confucian good sense forbids it. Then also, with a Taoistic touch, beautiful and talented girls suffering a harsh fate are regarded as “fallen fairies,” punished for having mortal thoughts or some neglect of duty in heaven and sent down to this earth to live through a predestined fate of mortal sufferings.

Man’s intellect is considered as a flow of energy. Literally this intellect is “spirit of a genius” (chingshen), the word “genius” being essentially taken in the sense in which we speak of fox genii, rock genii and pine genii. The nearest English equivalent is, as I have suggested, “vitality” or “nervous energy,” which ebbs and flows at different times of the day and of the person’s life. Every man born into this world starts out with certain passions and desires and this vital energy, which run their course in different cycles through childhood, youth, maturity, old age and death. Confucius said, “When young, beware of fighting; when strong, beware of sex; and when old, beware of possession,” which simply means that a boy loves fighting, a young man loves women, and an old man loves money.

Faced with this compound of physical, mental and moral assets, the Chinese takes an attitude toward man himself, as toward all other problems, which may be summed up in the phrase: “Let us be reasonable.” This is an attitude of expecting neither too much nor too little. Man is, as it were, sandwiched between heaven and earth, between idealism and realism, between lofty thoughts and the baser passions. Being so sandwiched is the very essence of humanity; it is human to have thirst for knowledge and thirst for water, to love a good idea and a good dish of pork with bamboo shoots, and to admire a beautiful saying and a beautiful woman. This being the case, our world is necessarily an imperfect world. Of course there is a chance of taking human society in hand and making it better, but the Chinese do not expect either perfect peace or perfect happiness. There is a story illustrating this point of view. There was a man who was in Hell and about to be re-incarnated, and he said to the King of Re-incarnation, “If you want me to return to the earth as a human being, I will go only on my own conditions.” “And what are they?” asked the King. The man replied, “I must be born the son of a cabinet minister and father of a future ‘Literary Wrangler’ (the scholar who comes out first at the national examinations). I must have ten thousand acres of land surrounding my home and fish ponds and fruits of every kind and a beautiful wife and pretty concubines, all good and loving to me, and rooms stocked to the ceiling with gold and pearls and cellars stocked full of grain and trunks chockful of money, and I myself must be a Grand Councilor or a Duke of the First Rank and enjoy honor and prosperity and live until I am a hundred years old.” And the King of Re-incarnation replied, “If there was such a lot on earth, I would go and be re-incarnated myself, and not give it to you!”

The reasonable attitude is, since we’ve got this human nature, let’s start with it. Besides, there is no escaping from it anyway. Passions and instincts are originally good or originally bad, but there is not much use talking about them, is there? On the other hand, there is the danger of our being enslaved by them. Just stay in the middle of the road. This reasonable attitude creates such a forgiving kind of philosophy that, at least to a cultured, broadminded scholar who lives according to the spirit of reasonableness, any human error or misbehavior whatsoever, legal or moral or political, which can be labeled as “common human nature” (more literally, “man’s normal passions”), is excusable. The Chinese go so far as to assume that Heaven or God Himself is quite a reasonable being, that if you live reasonably, according to your best lights, you have nothing to fear, that peace of conscience is the greatest of all gifts, and that a man with a clear conscience need not be afraid even of ghosts. With a reasonable God supervising the affairs of reasonable and some unreasonable beings, everything is quite all right in this world. Tyrants die; traitors commit suicide; the grasping fellow is seen selling his property; the sons of a powerful and rich collector of curios (about whom tales are told of grasping greed or extortion by power) are seen selling out the collection on which their father spent so much thought and trouble, and these same curios are now being dispersed among other families; murderers are found out and dead and wronged women are avenged. Sometimes, but quite seldom, an oppressed person cries out, “Heaven has no eyes!” (Justice is blind.) Eventually, both in Taoism and in Confucianism, the conclusion and highest goal of this philosophy is complete understanding of and harmony with nature, resulting in what I may call “reasonable naturalism,” if we must have a term for classification. A reasonable naturalist then settles down to this life with a sort of animal satisfaction. As Chinese illiterate women put it, “Others gave birth to us and we give birth to others. What else are we to do?”

There is a terrible philosophy in this saying, “Others gave birth to us and we give birth to others.” Life becomes a biological procession and the very question of immortality is sidetracked. For that is the exact feeling of a Chinese grandfather holding his grandchild by the hand and going to the shops to buy some candy, with the thought that in five or ten years he will be returning to his grave or to his ancestors. The best that we can hope for in this life is that we shall not have sons and grandsons of whom we need be ashamed. The whole pattern of Chinese life is organized according to this one idea.

There is a school of thought, persuasively represented in England by Sir Norman Angell, among others, which contends that the national ownership of raw materials is unimportant and that the alleged grievances of the so-called (’have-not” powers are largely, if not entirely, spurious. Members of this school of economic thinking declare that the expense of conquering and administering colonies is out of all proportion to the trade, investment, and migration benefits which accrue from colonial imperialism. Since producers of essential raw materials are only too eager to find buyers, there is nothing, according to this line of argument, to prevent a nation which is poor in raw materials from buying what it needs in the cheapest market and building up its industries on imported raw materials.

There is indubitable weight in these arguments. The horse of poverty in raw materials has been ridden too hard. Yet it is significant that it is usually economists and publicists who are citizens of states which are richest in colonies who are most eager to demonstrate the unimportance of colonial possessions. Spokesmen for the “have-not” peoples have often been guilty of exaggeration in their claims. But in a world of rampant economic nationalism and protectionism the proletarian nation is at a disadvantage compared with its well-to-do brother.

Two concrete illustrations will help to show how Japan is handicapped in the economic race with countries which, like Great Britain and France, possess large colonial empires, or which, like America and the Soviet Union, are notably rich in internal resources.

Japan needs rubber. The natives of Malaya need cheap textiles. But the process of normal exchange is upset when the British Government, quite naturally concerned by the plight of the Lancashire textile industry, imposes a quota which sharply reduces Japanese sales of textiles in Malaya.

The remarkable growth of the paper and rayon industries is making heavy inroads on Japan’s reserves of timber. A time may come in the not very distant future when timber imports from Eastern Siberia will be desired. But the Soviet Union, with its tightly closed economic system and its state monopoly of foreign trade, will quite possibly refuse to sell this timber to Japan, if it wishes to payoff some political grudges, or may refuse to accept the exports which Japan can offer in exchange.

Of course it is theoretically possible for Japan to pay for Malayan rubber, or Siberian timber, or any other commodity which it may need, out of the receipts of its sales in other markets. But with trade restrictions established and multiplying all over the world, it is not easy to convince the Japanese that physical possession of essential raw materials is a matter of indifference. There is a strong temptation to cast the samurai sword into the mercantile scales that seem unfairly weighted against Japan.

The restless Japanese feeling of a need for expansion, for outlets, is intensified by the necessity of providing work and food for the half million people of working age who come on the labor market every year. Among the larger countries of the world Japan is second only to the Soviet Union in the rate of growth of its population. Between 1930 and 1935 the number of inhabitants of Japan proper (Japan proper consists of the four islands, Honshu, Kyushu, Shikoku, and Hokkaido, with a number of smaller islands scattered along their coasts. The Japanese Empire also includes Formosa, Korea, and Southern Sakhalin. The population of the empire is approximately 97,000,000.) increased from 64,450,005 to 69,254,148. Births exceeded deaths in 1935 by more than 1,000,000.

With an area slightly less than that of California, Japan proper must support about twelve times the population of California. Japan’s problem is made more difficult by the mountainous character of the country. Only 15.6 per cent of the area of Japan proper is rated as arable land. While the density of population in relation to total area is greater in Great Britain, Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands, density in relation to arable land works out much less favorably to Japan, as the percentage of cultivated area is 43.7 in Germany, 40.2 in Belgium, 24.2 in Great Britain, and 27.8 in the Netherlands.

Japan may be regarded, along with Germany and Italy, as one of the three major dissatisfied “have-not” powers of the world. It was in Italian Fascist intellectual circles that the idea first found expression that there could just as logically be a “class struggle” between rich and poor nations as between the “bourgeoisie” and the “proletariat” in a single nation. German National Socialist leaders have displayed an increasing tendency to attribute their country’s economic difficulties largely to the lack of colonial sources of essential raw materials. Japan sees itself confronted with a similar problem, despite the acquisition of Manchoukuo. So the spokesman of the Foreign Ministry, Mr. Amau, recently remarked:-

Unfortunately the territories which now feed Japan’s population are too small. Weare advised to practice birth control, but this advice comes too late, since the population of the Japanese Empire is already about 1 00,000,000. Japanese work harder and longer than people in Western countries; their opportunities in life are more restricted. Why? We need more territory and must cultivate more resources if we are to nourish our population.

A succinct statement of Japan’s case as a “have-not” power is to be found in the following excerpt from a widely read Japanese economic textbook, which has been translated into English under the title Nippon: A Charted Survey:-

The territory of Japan represents one half per cent of the world’s total, while her population makes up five per cent of the world’s total. In other words, Japan’s population density is approximately ten times greater than the average population density of the world. Moreover, Japan is for the most part mountainous, favored with comparatively few stretches of open level land. Dearth of sown acreage and overpopulation are two distinct fundamental factors of Japan’s national life. It will be no exaggeration to say that this particular condition of the country underlies all the difficulties which its people find in their way.

The belief that overpopulation (in relation to available natural resources) is the root cause of Japan’s difficulties runs like a red thread through almost all Japanese publications on social and economic subjects. Even liberal and radical professors and publicists who are outspokenly or cautiously critical of the high-handed methods of the country’s military leaders are quick to point out that the world-wide restrictions on Japanese immigrants and Japanese goods greatly accentuate the strains within the Japanese social order and play into the hands of the advocates of violent courses.

There is abundant statistical proof that Japan’s position is that of a proletarian nation. It depends entirely, or almost entirely, on foreign sources for such vitally necessary raw materials as cotton, wool, rubber, and oil, which are the lifeblood of some of its most important industries. There is no mineral of any consequence which Japan possesses in surplus quantities; and there is an absolute lack or a grave deficiency of such valuable industrial ores as iron, lead, zinc, and nickel. Its consistent bad fortune in finding natural resources within its own frontiers is exemplified in the northern island of Sakhalin, which is divided between Japan and the Soviet Union. Diligent prospecting has revealed no oil in the southern Japanese part of the island, while there is an abundant supply of this liquid fuel on the Russian side of the border.