n? Do not the
questions still remain--Why did the Japanese so suddenly abandon
Oriental for Occidental civilization? And what mental and other traits
enabled a people who, according to the supposition, were far from
civilized, so suddenly to grasp and wield a civilization quite alien
in character and superior to their own; a civilization ripened after
millenniums of development of the Aryan race? And how far, as a matter
of fact, has this assimilation gone? Not until these questions are
really answered has the explanation been found, So that, after all,
the prime cause which we must seek is not to be found in the external
environment, but rather in the internal endowment.

An effort to understand the ancient history of Japan encounters the
same problem as that raised by her modern history. What mental
characteristics led the Japanese a thousand years ago so to absorb the
Chinese civilization, philosophy, and language that their own suffered
a permanent arrest? What religious traits led them so to take on a
religion from China and India that their own native religion never
passed beyond the most primitive development, either in doctrine, in
ethics, in ritual, or in organization? On the other hand, what mental
characteristics enabled them to preserve their national independence
and so to modify everything brought from abroad, from the words of the
new language to the philosophy of the new religions, that Japanese
civilization, language, and religion are markedly distinct from the
Chinese? Why is it that, though the Japanese so fell under the bondage
of the Chinese language as permanently to enslave and dwarf their own
beautiful tongue, expressing the dominant thought of every sentence
with characters (ideographs) borrowed from China, yet at the same time
so transformed what they borrowed that no Chinaman can read and
understand a Japanese book or newspaper?

The same questions recur at this new period of Japan's national life.
Why has she so easily turned from the customs of centuries? What are
the mental traits that have made her respond so differently from her
neighbor to the environment of the nineteenth-century civilization of
the West Why is it that Japan has sent thousands of her students to
these Western lands to see and study and bring back all that is good
in them, while China has remained in stolid self-satisfaction, seeing
nothing good in the West and its ways? To affirm that the difference
is due to the envi