Page:A handbook of modern Japan (IA handbookofmodern01clem).pdf/42

14 mountain system (her backbone), and "the variegated configurations of her surface," he thinks that "national unity with local independence" may easily be developed. Likewise, because more indentations are found on the eastern than on the western sides of the Japanese islands, except in the southwestern island of Kyushiu, where the opposite is true; because the ports of California, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia are open toward Japan; because the Hoang-Ho, the Yangtze Kiang, and the Canton rivers all flow and empty toward Japan; because the latter thus "turns her back on Siberia, but extends one arm toward America and the other toward China and India"; because "winds and currents seem to imply the same thing [by] making a call at Yokohama almost a necessity to a vessel that plies between the two continents,"—he conceives of his native country as a nakōdo (middleman, or arbiter) "between the democratic West and the Imperial East, between the Christian America and the Buddhist Asia."

But since these comparisons were made, the geography of Eastern Asia and the Pacific Ocean has been altered. Japan has acquired Formosa and Korea; the United States has assumed the responsibility of the Philippines; and China is threatened with partition through "spheres of influence." Japan, therefore, seems now to be lying off the eastern coast of Asia, with her back turned on Russia with Siberian breezes and Arctic currents, her face turned toward America, with one hand