t he who runs may read.
Japan lies in the shadow, away on the rim of the world. Her houses are
far more effectually closed to the stranger by their paper shutters than
are ours by walls of brick or stone. What we call "society" does
not exist there. Her people, though smiling and courteous, surround
themselves by an atmosphere of reserve, centuries of despotic government
having rendered them suspicious and reticent. True, when a foreigner of
importance visits Japan--some British M.P., perhaps, whose name figures
often in the newspapers, or an American editor, or the president of a
great American college--this personage is charmingly received. But he is
never left free to form his own opinion of things, even were he capable
of so doing. Circumstances spin an invisible web around him, his
hosts being keenly intent on making him a speaking-trumpet for the
proclamation of their own views.

Again, Japan's non-Aryan speech, marvellously intricate, almost defies
acquisition. Suppose this difficult vernacular mastered; the would-be
student discovers that literary works, even newspapers and ordinary
correspondence, are not composed in it, but in another dialect, partly
antiquated, partly artificial, differing as widely from the colloquial
speech as Latin does from Italian. Make a second hazardous supposition.
Assume that the grammar and vocabulary of this second indispensable
Japanese language have been learnt, in addition to the first. You
are still but at the threshold of your task, Japanese thought having
barricaded itself behind the fortress walls of an extraordinarily
complicated system of writing, compared with which Egyptian
hieroglyphics are child's play. Yet next to nothing can be found out by
a foreigner unless he have this, too, at his fingers' ends. As a matter
of fact, scarcely anyone acquires it--only a missionary here and there,
or a consular official with a life appointment.

The result of all this is that, whereas the Japanese know everything
that it imports them to know about us, Europeans cannot know much about
them, such information as they receive being always belated,
necessarily meagre, and mostly adulterated to serve Japanese interests.
International relations placed--and, we repeat it, inevitably placed--on
this footing resemble a boxing match in which one of the contestants
should have his hands tied. But the metaphor fails in an essential
point, as metaphors are apt to do--the hand-tied man does not r