first person, while all appreciative and polite terms can only refer
to the person addressed. The terms, "foolish," "swinish," etc., have
lost their literal sense and mean now no more than "my," while the
polite forms mean "yours." To translate these terms, "my foolish
wife," "my swinish son," is incorrect, because it twice translates the
same word. In such cases the Japanese _thought_ is best expressed by
using the possessive pronoun and omitting the derogative adjective
altogether. Japanese indirect methods for the expression of the
personal relation are thus numberless and subtile. May it not be
plausibly argued since the European has only a few blunt pronouns
wherewith to state this idea while the Japanese has both numberless
pronouns and many other delicate ways of conveying the same idea, that
the latter is far in advance of the European in the development of
personality? I do not use this argument, but as an argument it seems
to me much more plausible than that which infers from the paucity of
true pronouns the absence, or at least the deficiency, of personality.

Furthermore, Japanese possesses several words for self. "Onore,"
"one's self," and "Ware," "I or myself," are pure Japanese, while "Ji"
(the Chinese pronunciation for "onore"), "ga," "self," and "shi" (the
Chinese pronunciation of "watakushi," meaning private) are
Sinico-Japanese words, that is, Chinese derived words. These
Sinico-Japanese terms are in universal use in compound words, and are
as truly Japanese as many Latin, Greek and Norman-derived words are
real English. "Ji-bun," "one's self"; "jiman," "self-satisfaction";
"ji-fu," "self-assertion"; "jinin," "self-responsibility"; "ji-bo
ji-ki," "self-destruction, self-abandonment"; "ji-go ji-toku,"
"self-act, self-reward"--always in a bad sense; "ga-yoku," "selfish
desire"; "ga-shin," "selfish heart"; "ga we oru," "self-mastery";
"muga," "unselfish"; "shi-shin shi-yoku," "private or self-heart,
private or self-desire," that is, selfishness"; "shi-ai shi-shin,"
"private-or self-love, private-or-self heart," _i.e._,
selfishness--these and countless other compound words involving the
conception of self, can hardly be explained by the "impersonal,"
"altruistic" theory of Japanese race mind and language. In truth, if
this theory is unable to explain the facts it recognizes, much less
can it account for those it ignores.

To interpret correctly the phenomena we are considering, we must ask
ourselves how