Glimpses of Japan and Formosa

We had left Tokyo before the latest catastrophe overwhelmed her and the surrounding section of Japan, and threw into greater relief some of her most striking national traits. Among the stories of the great earthquake and fire which have been confirmed, perhaps the most astounding to us was the refusal of the captains of Japanese war-ships and transpacific liners to rescue the refugees who appealed to them for succor, while foreign ships near-by were making every effort to save them. But-they were waiting for orders! The Japanese mind, particularly of the official class, is not trained to function on its own initiative. Their superiors seem to partake of some of the divinity of the superior of them all, the being so sacred that he can only be referred to indirectly and by inference as "mikado," the "honorable gate"-behind which he reigns. Besides, the Japanese are Orientals, and nowhere does the Oriental soul seem to quiver with anything like the profundity of our own at the sight of suffering and violent death. The longer one has lived in the East, provided it has been in actual living contact with its strange peoples, the less impossible it will be to visualize those stern Japanese captains in Yokohama Harbor unflinchingly dooming to death under their very eyes scores of their own race because they considered it their solemn duty not to take them on board until they had received official instructions to do so.

That extreme Japanese reticence on questions concerning their own country, less often adroitly sidestepped than deliberately refused as a subject of conversation even by those readiest to talk, and inquire, freely on any other, is exemplified in the secrecy that still prevails over their losses. We shall never know how many perished in that great earthquake and fire of 1923 even if the Japanese themselves ever work it out exactly; we shall particularly remain in all the ignorance in which they are capable of keeping us as to the amount of damage done to their navy and their great naval base at Yokosuka. We also might have attempted-though probably it would not have struck us as worth the trouble-to keep the results of such a disaster in our own land from the rest of the world, but we certainly should not have succeeded. We have no such training in national reticence.