Books: Kokoro

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Produced by Liz Warren.

THE papers composing this volume treat of the inner rather than
of the outer life of Japan,--for which reason they have been
grouped under the title Kokoro (heart). Written with the above
character, this word signifies also mind, in the emotional sense;
spirit; courage; resolve; sentiment; affection; and inner
meaning,--just as we say in English, "the heart of things."

KOBE September 15, 1895.

CONTENTS

I. AT A RAILWAY STATION
II. THE GENIUS Of JAPANESE CIVILIZATION
III. A STREET SINGER
IV. FROM A TRAVELING DIARY
V. THE NUN OF THE TEMPLE OF AMIDA
VI. AFTER THE WAR
VII. HARU
VIII. A GLIMPSE OF TENDENCIES
IX. BY FORCE OF KARMA
X. A CONSERVATIVE
XI. IN THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS
XII. THE IDEA OF PRE-EXISTENCE
XIII. IN CHOLERA-TIME
XIV. SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT ANCESTOR-WORSHIP
XV. KIMIKO
APPENDIX. THREE POPULAR BALLADS

KOKORO

I

AT A RAILWAY STATION

Seventh day of the sixth Month;--
twenty-sixth of Meiji.

Yesterday a telegram from Fukuoka announced that a desperate
criminal captured there would be brought for trial to Kumamoto
to-day, on the train due at noon. A Kumamoto policeman had gone
to Fukuoka to take the prisoner in charge.

Four years ago a strong thief entered some house by night in the
Street of the Wrestlers, terrified and bound the inmates, and
carried away a number of valuable things. Tracked skillfully by
the police, he was captured within twenty-four hours,--even
before he could dispose of his plunder. But as he was being taken
to the police station he burst his bonds, snatched the sword of
his captor, killed him, and escaped. Nothing more was heard of
him until last week.

Then a Kumamoto detective, happening to visit the Fukuoka prison,
saw among the toilers a face that had been four years
photographed upon his brain. "Who is that man?" he asked the
guard. "A thief," was the reply,--"registered here as Kusabe."
The detective walked up to the prisoner and said:--

"Kusabe is not your name. Nomura Teichi, you are needed in
Kumamoto for murder." The felon confessed all.

I went with a great throng of people to witness the arrival at
the station. I expected to hear and see anger; I even feared
possibilities of violence. The murdered officer had been much
liked; his relatives would certainly be among the spectators; and
a Kumamoto crowd is not very gentle. I also thought to find many
police on duty. My anticipations were wrong.

The train halted in the usual scene of hurry and noise,--scurry
and clatter of passengers wearing geta,--screaming of boys
wanting to sell Japanese newspapers and Kumamoto lemonade.
Outside the barrier we waited for nearly five minutes. Then,
pushed through the wicket by a police-sergeant, the prisoner
appeared,--a large wild-looking man, with head bowed down, and
arms fastened behind his back. Prisoner and guard both halted in
front of the wicket; and the people pressed forward to see--but
in silence. Then the officer called out,--

"Sugihara San! Sugihara O-Kibi! is she present?"

A slight small woman standing near me, with a child on her back,
answered, "Hai!" and advanced through the press. This was the
widow of the murdered man; the child she carried was his son. At
a wave of the officer's hand the crowd fell back, so as to leave
a clear space about the prisoner and his escort. In that space
the woman with the child stood facing the murderer. The hush was
of death.

Not to the woman at all, but to the child only, did the officer
then speak. He spoke low, but so clearly that I could catch every
syllable:--

"Little one, this is the man who killed your father four years
ago. You had not yet been born; you were in your mother's womb.
That you have no father to love you now is the doing of this man.
Look at him--[here the officer, putting a hand to the prisoner's
chin, sternly forced him to lift his eyes]--look well at him,
little boy! Do not be afraid. It is painful; but it is your duty.
Look at him!"

Over the mother's shoulder the boy gazed with eyes widely open,
as in fear; then he began to sob; then tears came; but steadily
and obediently he still looked--looked--looked--straight into the
cringing face.

The crowd seemed to have stopped breathing.

I saw the prisoner's features distort; I saw him suddenly dash
himself down upon his knees despite his fetters, and beat his
face into the dust, crying out the while in a passion of hoarse
remorse that made one's heart shake:--

"Pardon! pardon! pardon me, little one! That I did--not for hate
was it done, but in mad fear only, in my desire to escape. Very,
very wicked have I been; great unspeakable wrong have I done you!
But now for my sin I go to die. I wish to die; I am glad to die!
Therefore, O little one, be pitiful!--forgive me!"

The child still cried silently. The officer raised the shaking
criminal; the dumb crowd parted left and right to let them by.
Then, quite suddenly, the whole multitude began to sob. And as
the bronzed guardian passed, I saw what I had never seen before,
--what few men ever see,--what I shall probably never see again,
--the tears of a Japanese policeman.

The crowd ebbed, and left me musing on the strange morality of
the spectacle. Here was justice unswerving yet compassionate,--
forcing knowledge of a crime by the pathetic witness of its
simplest result. Here was desperate remorse, praying only for
pardon before death. And here was a populace--perhaps the most
dangerous in the Empire when angered--comprehending all, touched
by all, satisfied with the contrition and the shame, and filled,
not with wrath, but only with the great sorrow of the
sin,--through simple deep experience of the difficulties of life
and the weaknesses of human nature.

But the most significant, because the most Oriental, fact of the
episode was that the appeal to remorse had been made through the
criminal's sense of fatherhood,--that potential love of children
which is so large a part of the soul of every Japanese.

There is a story that the most famous of all Japanese robbers,
Ishikawa Goemon, once by night entering a house to kill and
steal, was charmed by the smile of a baby which reached out hands
to him, and that he remained playing with the little creature
until all chance of carrying out his purpose was lost.

It is not hard to believe this story. Every year the police
records tell of compassion shown to children by professional
criminals. Some months ago a terrible murder case was reported in
the local papers,--the slaughter of a household by robbers. Seven
persons had been literally hewn to pieces while asleep; but the
police discovered a little boy quite unharmed, crying alone in a
pool of blood; and they found evidence unmistakable that the men
who slew must have taken great care not to hurt the child.

II

THE GENIUS OF JAPANESE CIVILIZATION

I

Without losing a single ship or a single battle, Japan has broken
down the power of China, made a new Korea, enlarged her own
territory, and changed the whole political face of the East.
Astonishing as this has seemed politically, it is much more
astonishing psychologically; for it represents the result of a
vast play of capacities with which the race had never been
credited abroad,--capacities of a very high order. The
psychologist knows that the so-called "adoption of Western
civilization" within a time of thirty years cannot mean the
addition to the Japanese brain of any organs or powers previously
absent from it. He knows that it cannot mean any sudden change in
the mental or moral character of the race. Such changes are not
made in a generation. Transmitted civilization works much more
slowly, requiring even hundreds of years to produce certain
permanent psychological results.

It is in this light that Japan appears the most extraordinary
country in the world; and the most wonderful thing in the whole
episode of her "Occidentalization" is that the race brain could
bear so heavy a shock. Nevertheless, though the fact be unique in
human history, what does it really mean? Nothing more than
rearrangement of a part of the pre-existing machinery of thought.
Even that, for thousands of brave young minds, was death. The
adoption of Western civilization was not nearly such an easy
matter as un-thinking persons imagined. And it is quite evident
that the mental readjustments, effected at a cost which remains
to be told, have given good results only along directions in
which the race had always shown capacities of special kinds.
Thus, the appliances of Western industrial invention have worked
admirably in Japanese hands,--have produced excellent results in
those crafts at which the nation had been skillful, in other and
quainter ways, for ages. There has been no transformation,

--nothing more than the turning of old abilities into new and
larger channels. The scientific professions tell the same story.
For certain forms of science, such as medicine, surgery (there
are no better surgeons in the world than the
Japanese), chemistry, microscopy, the Japanese genius is
naturally adapted; and in all these it has done work already
heard of round the world. In war and statecraft it has shown
wonderful power; but throughout their history the Japanese have
been characterized by great military and political capacity.
Nothing remarkable has been done, however, in directions foreign
to the national genius. In the study, for example, of Western
music, Western art, Western literature, time would seem to have
been simply wasted(1). These things make appeal extraordinary to
emotional life with us; they make no such appeal to Japanese
emotional life. Every serious thinker knows that emotional
transformation of the individual through education is impossible.
To imagine that the emotional character of an Oriental race could
be transformed in the short space of thirty years, by the contact
of Occidental ideas, is absurd. Emotional life, which is older
than intellectual life, and deeper, can no more be altered
suddenly by a change of milieu than the surface of a mirror can
be changed by passing reflections. All that Japan has been able
to do so miraculously well has been done without any
self-transformation; and those who imagine her emotionally closer
to us to-day than she may have been thirty years ago ignore facts
of science which admit of no argument.

Sympathy is limited by comprehension. We may sympathize to the
same degree that we understand. One may imagine that he
sympathizes with a Japanese or a Chinese; but the sympathy can
never be real to more than a small extent outside of the simplest
phases of common emotional life,--those phases in which child and
man are at one. The more complex feelings of the Oriental have
been composed by combinations of experiences, ancestral and
individual, which have had no really precise correspondence in
Western life, and which we can therefore not fully know. For
converse reasons, the. Japanese cannot, even though they would,
give Europeans their best sympathy.

But while it remains impossible for the man of the West to
discern the true color of Japanese life, either intellectual or
emotional (since the one is woven into the other), it is equally
impossible for him to escape the conviction that, compared with
his own, it is very small. It is dainty; it holds delicate
potentialities of rarest interest and value; but it is otherwise
so small that Western life, by contrast with it, seems almost
supernatural. For we must judge visible and measurable
manifestations. So judging, what a contrast between the emotional
and intellectual worlds of West and East! Far less striking that
between the frail wooden streets of the Japanese capital and the
tremendous solidity of a thoroughfare in Paris or London. When
one compares the utterances which West and East have given to
their dreams, their aspirations, their sensations,--a Gothic
cathedral with a Shinto temple, an opera by Verdi or a trilogy by
Wagner with a performance of geisha, a European epic with a
Japanese poem,--how incalculable the difference in emotional
volume, in imaginative power, in artistic synthesis! True, our
music is an essentially modern art; but in looking back through
all our past the difference in creative force is scarcely less
marked,--not surely in the period of Roman magnificence, of
marble amphitheatres and of aqueducts spanning provinces, nor in
the Greek period of the divine in sculpture and of the supreme in
literature.

And this leads to the subject of another wonderful fact in the
sudden development of Japanese power. Where are the outward
material signs of that immense new force she has been showing
both in productivity and in war? Nowhere! That which we miss in
her emotional and intellectual life is missing also from her
industrial and commercial life,--largeness! The land remains what
it was before; its face has scarcely been modified by all the
changes of Meiji. The miniature railways and telegraph poles, the
bridges and tunnels, might almost escape notice in the ancient
green of the landscapes. In all the cities, with the exception of
the open ports and their little foreign settlements, there exists
hardly a street vista suggesting the teaching of Western ideas.
You might journey two hundred miles through the interior of the
country, looking in vain for large manifestations of the new
civilization. In no place do you find commerce exhibiting its
ambition in gigantic warehouses, or industry expanding its
machinery under acres of roofing. A Japanese city is still, as it
was ten centuries ago, little more than a wilderness of wooden
sheds,--picturesque, indeed, as paper lanterns are, but scarcely
less frail. And there is no great stir and noise anywhere,--no
heavy traffic, no booming and rumbling, no furious haste. In
Tokyo itself you may enjoy, if you wish, the peace of a country
village. This want of visible or audible signs of the new-found
force which is now menacing the markets of the West and changing
the maps of the far East gives one a queer, I might even say a
weird feeling. It is almost the sensation received when, after
climbing through miles of silence to reach some Shinto shrine,
you find voidness only and solitude,--an elfish, empty little
wooden structure, mouldering in shadows a thousand years old. The
strength of Japan, like the strength of her ancient faith, needs
little material display: both exist where the deepest real power
of any great people exists,--in the Race Ghost.

(1) In one limited sense, Western art has influenced Japanese.
literature and drama; but the character of the influence proves
the racial difference to which I refer. European plays have been
reshaped for the Japanese stage, and European novels rewritten
for Japanese readers. But a literal version is rarely attempted;
for the original incidents, thoughts, and emotions would be
unintelligible to the average reader or playgoer. Plots are
adopted; sentiments and incidents are totally transformed. "The
New Magdalen" becomes a Japanese girl who married an Eta. Victor
Hugo's _Les Miserables_ becomes a tale of the Japanese civil war;
and Enjolras a Japanese student. There have been a few rare
exceptions, including the marked success of a literal translation
of the _Sorrows of Werther_.

II

As I muse, the remembrance of a great city comes back to me,--a
city walled up to the sky and roaring like the sea. The memory of
that roar returns first; then the vision defines: a chasm, which
is a street, between mountains, which are houses. I am tired,
because I have walked many miles between those precipices of
masonry, and have trodden no earth,--only slabs of rock,--and
have heard nothing but thunder of tumult. Deep below those huge
pavements I know there is a cavernous world tremendous: systems
underlying systems of ways contrived for water and steam and
fire. On either hand tower facades pierced by scores of tiers of
windows,--cliffs of architecture shutting out the sun. Above, the
pale blue streak of sky is cut by a maze of spidery lines,--an
infinite cobweb of electric wires. In that block on the right
there dwell nine thousand souls; the tenants of the edifice
facing it pay the annual rent of a million dollars. Seven
millions scarcely covered the cost of those bulks overshadowing
the square beyond,--and there are miles of such. Stairways of
steel and cement, of brass and stone, with costliest balustrades,
ascend through the decades and double-decades of stories; but no
foot treads them. By water-power, by steam, by electricity, men
go up and down; the heights are too dizzy, the distances too
great, for the use of the limbs. My friend who pays rent of five
thousand dollars for his rooms in the fourteenth story of a
monstrosity not far off has never trodden his stairway. I am
walking for curiosity alone; with a serious purpose I should not
walk: the spaces are too broad, the time is too precious, for
such slow exertion,--men travel from district to district, from
house to office, by steam. Heights are too great for the voice to
traverse; orders are given and obeyed by machinery. By
electricity far-away doors are opened; with one touch a hundred
rooms are lighted or heated.

And all this enormity is hard, grim, dumb; it is the enormity of
mathematical power applied to utilitarian ends of solidity and
durability. These leagues of palaces, of warehouses, of business
structures, of buildings describable and indescribable, are not
beautiful, but sinister. One feels depressed by the mere
sensation of the enormous life which created them, life without
sympathy; of their prodigious manifestation of power, power
with-out pity. They are the architectural utterance of the new
industrial age. And there is no halt in the thunder of wheels, in
the storming of hoofs and of human feet. To ask a question, one
must shout into the ear of the questioned; to see, to understand,
to move in that high-pressure medium, needs experience. The
unaccustomed feels the sensation of being in a panic, in a
tempest, in a cyclone. Yet all this is order.

The monster streets leap rivers, span sea-ways, with bridges of
stone, bridges of steel. Far as the eye can reach, a bewilderment
of masts, a web-work of rigging, conceals the shores, which are
cliffs of masonry. Trees in a forest stand less thickly, branches
in a forest mingle less closely, than the masts and spars of that
immeasurable maze. Yet all is order.

III

Generally speaking, we construct for endurance, the Japanese for
impermanency. Few things for common use are made in Japan with a
view to durability. The straw sandals worn out and replaced at
each stage of a journey, the robe consisting of a few simple
widths loosely stitched together for wearing, and unstitched
again for washing, the fresh chopsticks served to each new guest
at a hotel, the light shoji frames serving at once for windows
and walls, and repapered twice a year; the mattings renewed every
autumn,--all these are but random examples of countless small
things in daily life that illustrate the national contentment
with impermanency.

What is the story of a common Japanese dwelling? Leaving my home
in the morning, I observe, as I pass the corner of the next
street crossing mine, some men setting up bamboo poles on a
vacant lot there. Returning after five hours' absence, I find on
the same lot the skeleton of a two-story house. Next forenoon I
see that the walls are nearly finished already,--mud and wattles.
By sundown the roof has been completely tiled. On the following
morning I observe that the mattings have been put down, and the
inside plastering has been finished. In five days the house is
completed. This, of course, is a cheap building; a fine one would
take much longer to put up and finish. But Japanese cities are
for the most part composed of such common buildings. They are as
cheap as they are simple.

I cannot now remember where I first met with the observation that
the curve of the Chinese roof might preserve the memory of the
nomad tent. The idea haunted me long after I had ungratefully
forgotten the book in which I found it; and when I first saw, in
Izumo, the singular structure of the old Shinto temples, with
queer cross-projections at their gable-ends and upon their
roof-ridges, the suggestion of the forgotten essayist about the
possible origin of much less ancient forms returned to me with
great force. But there is much in Japan besides primitive
architectural traditions to indicate a nomadic ancestry for the
race. Always and everywhere there is a total absence of what we
would call solidity; and the characteristics of impermanence seem
to mark almost everything in the exterior life of the people,
except, indeed, the immemorial costume of the peasant and the
shape of the implements of his toil. Not to dwell upon the fact
that even during the comparatively brief period of her written
history Japan has had more than sixty capitals, of which the
greater number have completely disappeared, it may be broadly
stated that every Japanese city is rebuilt within the time of a
generation. Some temples and a few colossal fortresses offer
exceptions; but, as a general rule, the Japanese city changes its
substance, if not its form, in the lifetime of a man. Fires,
earth-quakes, and many other causes partly account for this; the
chief reason, however, is that houses are not built to last. The
common people have no ancestral homes. The dearest spot to all
is, not the place of birth, but the place of burial; and there is
little that is permanent save the resting-places of the dead and
the sites of the ancient shrines.

The land itself is a land of impermanence. Rivers shift their
courses, coasts their outline, plains their level; volcanic peaks
heighten or crumble; valleys are blocked by lava-floods or
landslides; lakes appear and disappear. Even the matchless shape
of Fuji, that snowy miracle which has been the inspiration of
artists for centuries, is said to have been slightly changed
since my advent to the country; and not a few other mountains
have in the same short time taken totally new forms. Only the
general lines of the land, the general aspects of its nature, the
general character of the seasons, remain fixed. Even the very
beauty of the landscapes is largely illusive,--a beauty of
shifting colors and moving mists. Only he to whom those
landscapes are familiar can know bow their mountain vapors make
mockery of real changes which have been, and ghostly predictions
of other changes yet to be, in the history of the archipelago.

The gods, indeed, remain,--haunt their homes upon the hills,
diffuse a soft religious awe through the twilight of their
groves, perhaps because they are without form and substance.
Their shrines seldom pass utterly into oblivion, like the
dwellings of men. But every Shinto temple is necessarily rebuilt
at more or less brief intervals; and the holiest,--the shrine of
Ise,--in obedience to immemorial custom, must be demolished every
twenty years, and its timbers cut into thousands of tiny charms,
which are distributed to pilgrims.

From Aryan India, through China, came Buddhism, with its vast
doctrine of impermanency. The builders of the first Buddhist
temples in Japan--architects of another race--built well: witness
the Chinese structures at Kamakura that have survived so many
centuries, while of the great city which once surrounded them not
a trace remains. But the psychical influence of Buddhism could in
no land impel minds to the love of material stability. The
teaching that the universe is an illusion; that life is but one
momentary halt upon an infinite journey; that all attachment to
persons, to places, or to things must be fraught with sorrow;
that only through suppression of every desire--even the desire of
Nirvana itself--can humanity reach the eternal peace, certainly
harmonized with the older racial feeling. Though the people never
much occupied themselves with the profounder philosophy of the
foreign faith, its doctrine of impermanency must, in course of
time, have profoundly influenced national character. It explained
and consoled; it imparted new capacity to bear all things
bravely; it strengthened that patience which is a trait of the
race. Even in Japanese art--developed, if not actually created,
under Buddhist influence--the doctrine of impermanency has left
its traces. Buddhism taught that nature was a dream, an illusion,
a phantasmagoria; but it also taught men how to seize the
fleeting impressions of that dream, and how to interpret them in
relation to the highest truth. And they learned well. In the
flushed splendor of the blossom-bursts of spring, in the coming
and the going of the cicada, in the dying crimson of autumn
foliage, in the ghostly beauty of snow, in the delusive motion of
wave or cloud, they saw old parables of perpetual meaning. Even
their calamities--fire, flood, earthquake, pestilence--
interpreted to them unceasingly the doctrine of the eternal
Vanishing.

_All things which exist in Time must perish. The forests, the
mountains,--all things thus exist. In Time are born all things
having desire._

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