Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/886

 852 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

manent village fund from the proceeds of the exhibitions a fund which has already accumulated to the amount of three or four hundred yen,"

" The village of Minamoto, Sambu district, Chiba prefecture, has been honored with a visit from Baron Kodama, home minister, who went thither in order to inquire in person into the condition of the communal system of the vil- lage. The village well deserved this honor, having been reputed for several years past to be the foremost model village in the whole prefecture. Minamoto is a respectable village containing a little above 300 families and 1,600 inhabitants. As in the case of Inatori, a village on the eastern coast of Izu peninsula, of which we gave a report in these columns some six weeks ago, the merit of having brought to its present state of comparative perfection the condition of the vil- lage and villagers must almost wholly rest with the ex-village headman, Mr. Namiki, who resigned the post in March last after having attended to the vil- lage affairs for about nine years. This perfection is more manifest in educational matters than in anything else, every one of the 125 boys who have reached school age attending school. Of the 102 girls, 88 attend, but most of the remaining 14 non-attendants are temporarily residing in Minamoto. The school, too, has permanent funds amounting to about 12,000 yen, and yielding an income more than sufficient to pay the whole school expenses, although the school asks not a sen by way of fee from its children. This excellent system of financing the village education is to be extended to other public affairs, and from the cur- rent year the village office has started on the work of creating another permanent fund of 10,000 yen, the interest from which is to be used to meet all the taxes and rates the villagers have to pay. On the creation of this fund, therefore, the vil- lagers will be exempt, practically, from paying any public taxes. As might be expected, no pains are spared to encourage habits of thrift and diligence among the villagers, while discouraging all practices savoring of extravagance and waste- fulness, such as giving banquets on the occasion of the enrolment or disbandment of conscripts. Further, strict sumptuary rules are enforced, and no silk garment is tolerated. There is something Puritanic in this courageous resolution of the villagers. Indeed, the parallel may even be extended to religious matters, for the villagers seem to be zealous Buddhists, judging from the practice they observe of not killing any living thing while their rice plants are in the process of growing." ERNEST W. CLEMENT, Tokyo, Japan.

On the Psychology of the Japanese. An article upon this subject by Ten Kate appeared in a previous number of Globus. In this article he finds as the spiritual characteristics of the Japanese race : " lack of love of truth, lack of depth of intellectual and emotional life, and inability to grasp abstract ideas ; " and as those especially of the Japanese as a nation : " lack of individuality, dulness, suggestibility, inconstancy, lack of persistence, and paradoxicalness, to which the modern traits of vanity and jingoism are added."

The question at once arises : How was it possible, if such are the charac- teristics of the Japanese, for them to carry through in a single generation unheard-of innovations and not only not make shipwreck of the venture, but stand today stronger than ever? It is because of the manifest unfairness and inadequacy of this judgment that the present writer is constrained, after a resi- dence of twenty-six years in Japan, as instructor in the University of Tokio and physician in the greatest hospital of the country, to venture upon an estimate of the Japanese character.

It is always difficult to come at the inner experiences of a foreign people, especially one possessing the natural self-restraint and reserve of the Japanese. In the present case the difficulty is augmented by the fact that the present gener- ation is an exceptional one, representing a highly transitional stage in the devel- opment of the national genius. The insular conservatism of forty years ago gave place to a most precipitous imitation of all things foreign, which was accompanied by lack of self-confidence and an almost complete holding in abeyance of the innate tendencies of the race. At the present time the genius of the Japanese race is reasserting itself ; slavish imitation has given place to discerning eclecti- cism. Yet so fundamental has the revolution been which has altered the whole