Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 4.djvu/133

 chievous;" his garden, "ill kept;" his capacity, "small;" his wife, "silly;" himself, "humble." The exordium and the whole tone of a public speech by a Japanese differ palpably from one by an Anglo-Saxon. The Japanese never dwells on himself, his own attainments, or his own qualifications; he keeps carefully out of sight everything pertaining to the Ego. The same rule directs him in social intercourse. Thanks for some courtesy received in the past preface his greetings. He remembers all the doings, the enterprises, the ambitions of his vis à vis and makes them the subject of conversation. He commiserates the bereavements of another, but never alludes to his own except to minimise them. It is because of this last habit that superficial observers have accused him of callousness. They imagine that there can be no sense of suffering without a display of pain. But even the least refined Japanese holds that nothing is more discourteous than to obtrude one's personal sorrows on the observation of others, and nothing more unreasoning than to solicit their sympathies, while for the gentleman or the lady trained in the precepts of the samurai's creed, all displays of egotistical emotion are contemptible.

There is a trait of Japanese character which falls naturally into this context because of its apparent irreconcilability with what has been written above. It has been here affirmed that the administrators of justice in old Japan, the "groupmen," the "headmen," the "elders," the "depu-