than we Europeans, Hence they endure pain more calmly, and meet death with comparative indifference.[1]
II. Mental Characteristics. The tape-line, the weighing-machine, the craniometer, and the hospital returns give means of ascertaining a nation's physical characteristics? which almost any one can apply and which none may dispute. Far different is it when we try to gauge the phenomena of mind. Does a new comer venture on the task? He is set down as a sciolist, a man without experience the one thing declared needful. Does an old resident hold forth, expecting his experience to command attention? The Globe-trotter journalisticus from London, or may be the cultured Bostonian literary critic, jumps upon him, tells him that living too long in one place has given him mental myopia, in other words has rendered his judgment prejudiced and worthless. The late Mr. Gifford Palgrave said, in the present writer's hearing, that an eight weeks residence was the precise time qualifying an intelligent man to write about Japan. A briefer period (such was his ruling) was sure to produce superficiality, while a longer period induced a wrong mental focus. By a curious coincidence, eight weeks was the exact space of time during which that brilliant conversationalist and writer had been in Japan when he delivered himself of this oracle.
Again, are you in the Japanese service, and do you praise Japan? Then you must be a sycophant. Do you find fault with it? "Ah! don't you know?" it will be said, "when they renewed his engagement the other day, they cut his salary down $50 a month." Worst of all is it if you are a Yokohama merchant.
- ↑ We have classed indifference to death among the physical characteristics, because none can doubt that a less sensitive nervous system must at least tend in that direction. It is possible, however, that opinions and beliefs have had some influence in the matter. Most Japanese are either agnostics looking forward to no hereafter, or they are Buddhists; and Buddhism is a tolerant, hopeful creed, promising rest at last to all, even though it may have to be purchased by the wicked at the price of numerous transmigrations. Christianity, on the other hand, with its terrible doctrine of final and hopeless perdition, may have steeped in a still more sombre hue the naturally excitable and self-questioning European mind. The Greeks and Romans appear to have faced death with an indifference to which few moderns can attain.
