The Japanese Return Home

Extract

In European and American publications it is customary to describe the Japanese as a mysterious, impenetrable, deceitful and enigmatical race. To a certain extent, a similar description is made to apply to the Chinese also, with the exception—at least for so long as they still belong to the United Nations—of ‘deceitfulness.’

That East and West are quite different and do not understand one another very well is a generally accepted fact. The Eastern peoples have quite a different spiritual orientation, and for that reason we shall never be able to understand the Japanese and Chinese completely, in the sense of finding an absolutely satisfactory ‘explanation’ of them. Our nervous reactions and sense impressions are quite different from theirs. Our two life-streams—to use that beautiful Oriental metaphor—do not merge. They do not even flow in parallel directions. They have a quite different mental machinery. Our whole brain system, physical energies, reactions to intellectual and sensorial impressions and other unnameable forces of our racial complexion, are different from theirs. The case is not the same with the German or the Frenchman or the member of any other white race. These we can fully understand; we may not agree with them; but their way of doing things and their outlook on life, their objectives are for us reasonable. This is not the case with the Far Easterner. Of course, if we consider the human mind with reference to its essence, we shall find it to be one and the same in all men. Yet this one mind works differently in an Oriental and in an Occidental, so that we are justified in speaking of an Eastern and a Western mind. As an Oriental puts it rather poetically: ‘