Page:Eliza Scidmore--Jinrikisha days in Japan.djvu/386

 does he understand the people, and the less do his facts contribute to any explanation. Their very origin is mysterious, their Ainos the rock on which ethnologists founder. Their physical types present so many widely differing peculiarities that one cannot believe in any common source, or in the preservation of the race from outside influences for so many centuries. Some coolie possesses the finely-cut features, perfectly-modelled surfaces, and proudly-set head of a Roman emperor. Some peer exhibits the features, the stolidity, and the slow, guttural articulation of a Sioux Indian, and it is common to see coolies identical in figure and countenance with the native races of the north-west coast of America. One group of children might come from an Alaskan village, and in another group frolic the counterparts of Richter’s fisher boys of Italy. At times the soft, musical speech flows like Italian; at other times it is rough and harsh, and rumbles with consonants.

Their very simplicity, their childlike naivete, deceives one into a conviction of their openness, while a mysterious, invisible, unconquerable barrier rises forever between us and them. The divergence of life and thought began in Western Asia too many ages since for the races that followed the setting sun to find, at this late day, the clew to the race that sought the source of the sun’s rising. China, which once gave the Japanese their precepts and models and teachers, shows now more differences than resemblances. Far as the pupils have departed from the traditions of the instructor, there yet remains a celestial conservatism, a worship of dry formality, and a respect for the conventional which the new order overcomes but slowly. The missionaries in China, who have to contend against the apathy or open hostility and the horrible surroundings of the native population, greatly admire the Japanese, and envy their colleagues who live in so beautiful a country, among so clean, courteous, and 370