understands Japan, has
gained the magic key for unlocking the social mysteries of China and
the entire East. But the Japanese people, with their institutions and
their various characteristics, merit careful study also for their own
sakes. For the Japanese constitute an exceedingly interesting and even
a unique branch of the human race. Japan is neither a purgatory, as
some would have it, nor a paradise, as others maintain, but a land
full of individuals in an interesting stage of social evolution.

Current opinions concerning Japan, however, are as curious as they are
contradictory. Sir Edwin Arnold says that the Japanese "Have the
nature rather of birds or butterflies than of ordinary human beings."
Says Mr. A.M. Knapp: "Japan is the one country in the world which does
not disappoint ... It is unquestionably the unique nation of the
globe, the land of dream and enchantment, the land which could hardly
differ more from our own, were it located in another planet, its
people not of this world." An "old resident," however, calls it "the
land of disappointments." Few phenomena are more curious than the
readiness with which a tourist or professional journalist, after a few
days or weeks of sight-seeing and interviewing, makes up his mind in
regard to the character of the people, unless it be the way in which
certain others, who have resided in this land for a number of years,
continue to live in their own dreamland. These two classes of writers
have been the chief contributors of material for the omnivorous
readers of the West.

It appears to not a few who have lived many years in this Far Eastern
land, that the public has been fed with the dreams of poets or the
snap-judgments of tourists instead of with the facts of actual
experience. A recent editorial article in the _Japan Mail_, than whose
editor few men have had a wider acquaintance with the Japanese people
or language, contains the following paragraph:

"In the case of such writers as Sir Edwin Arnold and Mr. Lafcadio
Hearn it is quite apparent that the logical faculty is in
abeyance. Imagination reigns supreme. As poetic nights or
outbursts, the works of these authors on Japan are delightful
reading. But no one who has studied the Japanese in a deeper
manner, by more intimate daily intercourse with all classes of the
people than either of these writers pretends to have had, can
possibly regard a large part of their descripti