Page:Things Japanese (1905).djvu/365

Rh the cry of "Gōgwai! Gōgwai!" ("Extra! Extra!") becomes the commonest of all street sounds.

The Japanese press-laws, theretofore extremely rigorous, were at length softened in 1897 and again in 1900. The Ministers of the Army and Navy, it is true, retain the power of prohibiting the sale or distribution of any issue of a newspaper that has disclosed military secrets, and a similar power is vested in the Minister of Foreign Affairs to suppress the publication of anything tending to embroil Japan with other governments. Perseverance in the publication of such forbidden items, insults to the dignity of the Imperial family, attacks on existing institutions, and breaches of the public peace and morality render the offending journal liable to a criminal prosecution, which may end in total suppression and the confiscation of the plant used. Furthermore, fines ranging from 5 to 500 yen, and imprisonment for terms varying from one month to two years are provided for. All newspapers have to put up a certain sum as surety for good behaviour. This varies according to localities; at Tōkyō it is 1,000 yen.

Even the present state of things will appear stringent enough to home readers. But let us be just. The thoughtful enquirer will surely always lay most stress, not on the point at which any given institution has arrived, but on the direction in which it is tending. Now the marked tendency of all existing Japanese institutions is towards greater liberality. The restrictions which still hamper the full liberty of the press in Japan are not, historically speaking, retrograde measures, that is, they do not come after better things in the past. Under the old feudal regime, not only did liberty of speech not exist in fact; the right to some measure of it was not so much as recognised in theory, nor would the men who made the revolution of 1868 have dallied with the idea for a moment in their then frame of mind. They would have shuddered at it as sacrilege. The idea has entered Japan more recently, in the wake of English and American text books for schools and of Anglo-Saxon ideas generally.

Imprisonment for press offences is still common. So openly