"A brave, courteous, light-hearted, pleasure-loving people, sentimental rather than passionate, witty and humorous, of nimble apprehension, but not profound; ingenious and inventive, but hardly capable of high intellectual achievement; of receptive minds endowed with a voracious appetite for knowledge; with a turn for neatness and elegance of expression, but seldom or never rising to sublimity."—But he adds, "The Japanese are never contented with simple borrowing. In art, political institutions, and even religion, they are in the habit of modifying extensively everything which they adopt from others, and impressing on it the stamp of the national mind." (W. G. Aston, in A History of Japanese Literature.)
Rev. C. Munzinger, who has striven with considerable success, in his work entitled Die Japaner, to cover the whole field of a criticism of the Japanese mind and of Japanese intellectual, social, and religious life, arrives at conclusions closely similar:—"Great talent, but little genius." "Martha rather than Mary,—busy, deft, practical, somewhat superficial withal, not deep, not given to introspection." "Extraordinarily perspicacious, not profoundly contemplative." "Highly ethical, not highly religious." "An intellectual life mechanical rather than organic." And Japonisation, that is, the method whereby native insufficiency is made good by loans from abroad, is "a radical process, in which little is bent and much is broken,… a process rather of accommodation than of assimilation." Nevertheless, and "with all his lack of originality, the Japanese is a strongly marked individuality, which refuses to rest permanently content with foreign importations in their foreign shape."
"The lack of originality of the Japanese is very striking after one has got over one's first dazzle at strange antipodal sights. Modification of foreign motif, modification always artistic, and at times delightfully ingenious, marks the extent of Japanese originality… A general incapacity for abstract ideas is another marked trait of the Japanese mind… Lastly, the decorous demeanor of the whole nation betrays the lack of mental activity
