Sir Rutherford Alcock, one of the most acute writers on Japan, is also one of the most difficult to quote, as his whole book, The Capital of the Tycoon, is one continued criticism of the Japan of his time (about 1860), and one would like to transcribe it all. Here are a couple of his witty sayings:
"(Japan) is a very paradise of babies."—"There is a mistake somewhere, and the result is that in one of the most beautiful and fertile countries in the whole world the flowers have no scent, the birds no song,[1] and the fruit and vegetables no flavour.
Sir Rutherford speaks, in his preface, of "the incorrigible tendency of the Japanese to withhold from foreigners or disguise the truth on all matters great and small." Yet he allows that they are "a nation of thirty millions of as industrious, kindly, and well-disposed people as any in the world." Their art, too, rouses his admiration, though he makes a reservation to the effect that there are some departments in which they have failed to produce anything to be named in the same day with the masterpieces of the great artists of Europe." Perhaps in nothing," says he. "are the Japanese to be more admired than for the wonderful genius they display in arriving at the greatest possible results with the simplest means, and the smallest possible expenditure of time and labour or material. The tools by which they produce their finest works are the simplest, and often the rudest that can be conceived. Wherever in the fields or the workshops nature supplies a force, the Japanese is sure to lay it under contribution, and make it do his work with the least expense to himself of time, money, and labour. To such a pitch of perfection is this carried, that it strikes every observer as one of the moral characteristics of the race, indicating no mean degree of intellectual capacity and cultivation."
- ↑ How often, we wonder, has this strange error been repeated? We should like to take those who still credit it out upon the moors of almost any Japanese province in springtime, and let them listen to the carolling of the larks and the nightingales, or into the woods that re-echo with the note of the cuckoo and other songsters. As for Japanese flowers lacking scent, what of the fragrant plum-blossom, the cassia-tree, the lilies, jonquils, wild roses, and many more?
