Page:EB1911 - Volume 15.djvu/182

CHARACTERISTICS] and the Chinese resemble each other so closely that, under similar conditions as to costume and coiffure, no appreciable difference is apparent. Thus since it has become the fashion for Chinese students to flock to the schools and colleges of Japan, there adopting, as do their Japanese fellow-students, Occidental garments and methods of hairdressing, the distinction of nationality ceases to be perceptible. The most exhaustive anthropological study of the Japanese has been made by Dr E. Baelz (emeritus professor of medicine in the Imperial University of Tōkyō), who enumerates the following sub-divisions of the race inhabiting the Japanese islands. The first and most important is the Manchu-Korean type; that is to say, the type which prevails in north China and in Korea. This is seen specially among the upper classes in Japan. Its characteristics are exceptional tallness combined with slenderness and elegance of figure; a face somewhat long, without any special prominence of the cheekbones but having more or less oblique eyes; an aquiline nose; a slightly receding chin; largish upper teeth; a long neck; a narrow chest; a long trunk, and delicately shaped, small hands with long, slender fingers. The most plausible hypothesis is that men of this type are descendants of Korean colonists who, in prehistoric times, settled in the province of Izumo, on the west coast of Japan, having made their way thither from the Korean peninsula by the island of Oki, being carried by the cold current which flows along the eastern coast of Korea. The second type is the Mongol. It is not very frequently found in Japan, perhaps because, under favourable social conditions, it tends to pass into the Manchu-Korean type. Its representative has a broad face, with prominent cheekbones, oblique eyes, a nose more or less flat and a wide mouth. The figure is strongly and squarely built, but this last characteristic can scarcely be called typical. There is no satisfactory theory as to the route by which the Mongols reached Japan, but it is scarcely possible to doubt that they found their way thither at one time. More important than either of these types as an element of the Japanese nation is the Malay. Small in stature, with a well-knit frame, the cheekbones prominent, the face generally round, the nose and neck short, a marked tendency to prognathism, the chest broad and well developed, the trunk long, the hands small and delicate—this Malay type is found in nearly all the islands along the east coast of the Asiatic continent as well as in southern China and in the extreme south-west of Korean peninsula. Carried northward by the warm current known as the Kuro Shiwo, the Malays seem to have landed in Kiūshiū—the most southerly of the main Japanese islands—whence they ultimately pushed northward and conquered their Manchu-Korean predecessors, the Izumo colonists. None of the above three, however, can be regarded as the earliest settlers in Japan. Before them all was a tribe of immigrants who appear to have crossed from north-eastern Asia at an epoch when the sea had not yet dug broad channels between the continent and the adjacent islands. These people—the Ainu—are usually spoken of as the aborigines of Japan. They once occupied the whole country, but were gradually driven northward by the Manchu-Koreans and the Malays, until only a mere handful of them survived in the northern island of Yezo. Like the Malay and the Mongol types they are short and thickly built, but unlike either they have prominent brows, bushy locks, round deep-set eyes, long divergent lashes, straight noses and much hair on the face and the body. In short, the Ainu suggest much closer affinity with Europeans than does any other of the types that go to make up the population of Japan. It is not to be supposed, however, that these traces of different elements indicate any lack of homogeneity in the Japanese race. Amalgamation has been completely effected in the course of long centuries, and even the Ainu, though the small surviving remnant of them now live apart, have left a trace upon their conquerors.

The typical Japanese of the present day has certain marked physical peculiarities. In the first place, the ratio of the height of his head to the length of his body is greater than it is in Europeans. The Englishman’s head is often one-eighth of the length of his body or even less, and in continental Europeans, as a rule, the ratio does not amount to one-seventh; but in the Japanese it exceeds the latter figure. In all nations men of short stature have relatively large heads, but in the case of the Japanese there appears to be some racial reason for the phenomenon. Another striking feature is shortness of legs relatively to length of trunk. In northern Europeans the leg is usually much more than one-half of the body’s length, but in Japanese the ratio is one-half or even less; so that whereas the Japanese, when seated, looks almost as tall as a European, there may be a great difference between their statures when both are standing. This special feature has been attributed to the Japanese habit of kneeling instead of sitting, but investigation shows that it is equally marked in the working classes who pass most of their time standing. In Europe the same physical traits—relative length of head and shortness of legs—distinguish the central race (Alpine) from the Teutonic, and seem to indicate an affinity between the former and the Mongols. It is in the face, however, that we find specially distinctive traits, namely, in the eyes, the eye-lashes, the cheekbones and the beard. Not that the eyeball itself differs from that of an Occidental. The difference consists in the fact that “the socket of the eye is comparatively small and shallow, and the osseous ridges at the brows being little marked, the eye is less deeply set than in the European. In fact, seen in profile, forehead and upper lip often form an unbroken line.” Then, again, the shape of the eye, as modelled by the lids, shows a striking peculiarity. For whereas the open eye is almost invariably horizontal in the European, it is often oblique in the Japanese on account of the higher level of the upper corner. “But even apart from obliqueness, the shape of the corners is peculiar in the Mongolian eye. The inner corner is partly or entirely covered by a fold of the upper lid continuing more or less into the lower lid. This fold often covers also the whole free rim of the upper lid, so that the insertion of the eye-lashes is hidden” and the opening between the lids is so narrowed as to disappear altogether at the moment of laughter. As for the eye-lashes, not only are they comparatively short and sparse, but also they converge instead of diverging, so that whereas in a European the free ends of the lashes are further distant from each other than their roots, in a Japanese they are nearer together. Prominence of cheekbones is another special feature, but it is much commoner in the lower than in the upper classes, where elongated faces may almost be said to be the rule. Finally, there is marked paucity of hair on the face of the average Japanese—apart from the Ainu—and what hair there is is nearly always straight. It is not to be supposed, however, that because the Japanese is short of stature and often finely moulded, he lacks either strength or endurance. On the contrary, he possesses both in a marked degree, and his deftness of finger is not less remarkable than the suppleness and activity of his body.

Moral Characteristics.—The most prominent trait of Japanese disposition is gaiety of heart. Emphatically of a laughter-loving nature, the Japanese passes through the world with a smile on his lips. The petty ills of life do not disturb his equanimity. He takes them as part of the day’s work, and though he sometimes grumbles, rarely, if ever, does he repine. Exceptional to this general rule, however, is a mood of pessimism which sometimes overtakes youths on the threshold of manhood. Finding the problem of life insolvable, they abandon the attempt to solve it and take refuge in the grave. It seems as though there were always a number of young men hovering on the brink of such suicidal despair. An example alone is needed finally to destroy the equilibrium. Some one throws himself over a cataract or leaps into the crater of a volcano, and immediately a score or two follow. Apparently the more picturesquely awful the manner of the demise, the greater its attractive force. The thing is not a product of insanity, as the term is usually interpreted; letters always left behind by the victims prove them to have been in full possession of their reasoning faculties up to the last moment. Some observers lay the blame at the door of Buddhism, a creed which promotes pessimism by begetting the anchorite, the ascetic and the shuddering believer in seven hells. But Buddhism did not formerly produce such