Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/62

 46 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

Such statements are the more significant in the light of the fact, fully recognized by Professor Miinsterberg, that America makes Americans out of Frenchmen, and of other diverse races; not perhaps Americans of identical traits, but yet men who con- form with all their might to the American modes of activity.

Lafcadio Hearn, in his " Interpretation " of Japan, tells us that the Japanese habits of thought, feeling, and action are so differ- ent from ours that after years of residence there he "cannot claim to know much about Japan ;" and adds :

The best and dearest Japanese friend I ever had said to me a little before his death : " When you find in four or five years more that you cannot under- stand the Japanese at all, then you will begin to know something about them." After having realized the truth of my friend's prediction and having dis- covered that I cannot understand the Japanese at all I feel better qualified

to attempt this essay The underlying strangeness of this world the

psychological strangeness is much more startling than the visible and super- ficial. You begin to suspect the range of it after having discovered that no adult occidental can perfectly master the language. East and West, the fundamental parts of human nature the emotional bases of it are much the same: the mental difference between a Japanese and European child is merely potential. But with growth the difference rapidly develops and widens, till it becomes, in adult life, inexpressible. The whole of the Japanese mental superstructure evolves into forms having nothing in common with western psychological development : the expression of thought becomes regulated, and the expression of emotion inhibited, in ways that bewilder and astound. The ideas of this people are not our ideas ; their sentiments are not our sentiments ; their ethical life represents for us regions of thought and emotion yet unexplored, or perhaps long forgotten. Any one of their ordinary phrases, translated into western speech, makes hopeless nonsense; and the literal rendering into Japanese of the simplest English sentence would scarcely be comprehended by any Japanese who had never studied a European tongue. Could you learn all the words in a Japanese dictionary, your acquisition would not help you in the least to make yourself understood in speaking, unless you had learned also to think like a Japanese that is to say, to think backwards, to think upside down and inside out, to think in direc- tions totally foreign to Aryan habit. Experience in the acquisition of Euro- pean languages can help you to learn Japanese about as much as it could help you to acquire the language spoken by the inhabitants of Mars. To be able to use the Japanese tongue as a Japanese uses it, one would need to be born again, and to have one's mind completely reconstructed from the foundation upward.