ged that this progress could not be real and genuine. "How
can such a mushroom-growth, necessarily without deep roots in the
past, be real and strong and permanent? How can it escape being
chiefly superficial?" These two men are typical of much of the thought
of the West in regard to Japan.

Seldom, perhaps never, has the civilized world so suddenly and
completely reversed an estimate of a nation as it has that with
reference to Japan. Before the recent war, to the majority even of
fairly educated men, Japan was little more than a name for a few small
islands somewhere near China, whose people were peculiar and
interesting. To-day there is probably not a man, or woman, or child
attending school in any part of the civilized world, who does not know
the main facts about the recent war: how the small country and the men
of small stature, sarcastically described by their foes as "Wojen,"
pygmy, attacked the army and navy of a country ten times their size.

Such a universal change of opinion regarding a nation, especially
regarding one so remote from the centers of Western civilization as
Japan, could not have taken place in any previous generation. The
telegraph, the daily paper, the intelligent reporters and writers of
books and magazine articles, the rapid steam travel and the many
travelers--all these have made possible this sudden acquisition of
knowledge and startling reversal of opinion.

There is reason, however, to think that much misapprehension and real
ignorance still exists about Japan and her leap into power and
world-wide prestige. Many seem to think that Japan has entered on her
new career through the abandonment of her old civilization and the
adoption of one from the West--that the victories on sea and land, in
Korea, at Port Arthur, and a Wei-hai-wei, and more recently at
Tientsin and Pekin, were solely due to her Westernized navy and army.
Such persons freely admit that this process of Westernization had been
going on for many years more rapidly than the world at large knew, and
that consequently the reputation of Japan before the war was not such
as corresponded with her actual attainments. But they assume that
there was nothing of importance in the old civilization; that it was
little superior to organized barbarism.

These people conceive of the change which has taken place in Japan
during the past thirty years as a revolution, not as an evolution; as
an abandonment of the old, and an adoption of t