Glimpses of Japan and Formosa

One need not go to the records of her patent-office to confirm the wide-spread impression that the Japanese mainly imitate. Merely to skim through one of the phrase-books so carefully compiled to give the casual traveler all the words and phrases except those he will really need is to unearth ample evidence on this score. Philologically speaking, if one may convict on such slight testimony, the Japanese language is visibly a hodgepodge, a _potpourri_, an _ollo podrida_; in other words, a mess. I cannot carry the curious reader back to their gleanings from the Malaysian fields from which perhaps they sprang, from the Yemishi, or "hairy Ainu," whose place in the sun they usurped, nor yet do more than repeat the common knowledge that they fish new words from the Chinese classics far more freely than we of the West help ourselves to a needed tidbit of Latin or Greek. But their later history can be sketched with a handful of words chosen almost at random from one of these simple vocabularies-for-travelers, words which bring back to mind the days when the Portuguese, the Dutch, then the English-speaking races, and finally, in restricted fields, the Germans and the French spread out linguistic displays for their choosing.

Could, for example, a fat volume on "Japanese Cleanliness through the Ages" say more than does the fact that their word for "soap" is "_shabon_"? The Portuguese brought it, of course, and they did not "discover" Japan for the Western world until exactly half a century after Columbus sighted the West Indies. To this day "_pan_" remains the Japanese word for "bread"-or for the horrible dough-balls which their semi-Europeanized cooks occasionally perpetrate. If the Lusitanians brought them the Western substitute for rice, they were repaid by carrying back tea, which in the Portuguese tongue is to this day known by the Japanese-or Chinese-word "_cha_. " Reminders of the two and a half centuries during which a dozen Dutch traders, imprisoned on a little swampy island in their westernmost port, were the only white men permitted to come into contact with the Nipponese are still scattered through the speech of the masses. The children of Nagasaki still call Europeans indiscriminately "Orando-san" (Mr. Hollander); it would probably be unearthing no scandal to conclude that the _tabako_ and _beeru_ so generously stocked throughout the island empire came from the same source. At length came the Americans, and the English, with their ships and railways, and all the complicated paraphernalia of modern civilization-and one inquires one's way to the _suteishon_, perhaps to ask the uniformed coolie who is lighting a _rampu_ there for a _matchi_ with which to incinerate one of the miserable _maki-tabako_ inflicted upon its people by the Japanese Imperial Government Tobacco Monopoly.