Page:Things Japanese (1905).djvu/273

Rh of the bank in London, that gentleman said: "I take this opportunity of stating that the bank has had very extensive dealings with Chinese traders, and has always found them reliable and honest. By their integrity and solvency they have shown a bright example to other mercantile communities." , ex-Consul-General of the United States at Shanghai, expresses himself in almost identical terms in his work entitled China's Business Methods and Policy, published in 1904.—Woefully different from this is the tale told by the European bankers and merchants in Japan. They complain, it is true, not so much of actual, wilful dishonesty—though of that, too, they affirm there is plenty—as of pettiness, constant shilly-shallying, unbusinesslikeness almost passing belief. Hence the wide divergence between the impressions of the holiday-making tourist, and the opinions formed by the commercial communities at the open ports. Japan, the globe-trotter's paradise, is also the grave of the merchant's hopes. Another deep-seated difference between the Chinese and the Japanese is that the former have race pride, the latter national vanity. The Chinese care nothing for China as a political unit, an abstraction, an ideal to die for if need be; but they are nevertheless inalienably wedded to every detail of their ancestral civilisation. The Japanese, though they have twice, at intervals of a millennium, thrown everything national overboard, are intense nationalists in the abstract. In fact, patriotism may be said to be their sole remaining ideal. No Chinaman but glories in the outward badges of his race; no Japanese but would be delighted to pass for a European in order to beat Europeans on their own ground. The Japanese, too, are brave almost beyond the limits of practicality. The Chinese, eminently practical folks, follow the doctrine that

The characteristic in which the Chinese and Japanese most agree (and other Far-Eastern peoples—the Koreans for example—agree in it also) is materialism. That is where the false note is struck, which, when long residence has produced familiarity, jars