contact with and importation from
China undoubtedly had a marked effect in inducing what I may term
atrophy in the development of the Japanese language as also the growth
of its own literature, that is a literature entirely devoid of Chinese
influences. Indeed it is impossible to speculate on what might have
been the development of Japan and in what direction that development
would have proceeded had she never come under the influence of the
Chinese language, literature, religion, and artistic principles.

I have not the slightest doubt myself, as I have said before, that the
Japanese are of the same stock as the Chinese and Koreans. I have no
theory in regard to the origin of the Ainos, who are most likely the
aboriginal inhabitants. They are quite evidently a distinct race from
the Japanese proper, although of course there has been some
interbreeding between them.

The language of Japan naturally suggests some reference to its
literature, of which there is no lack, either ancient or modern. I
have dealt with this matter in some detail in a subsequent chapter.
The old literature of Japan is but little known to Europeans, and
probably most Europeans would be incapable of appreciating or
understanding it. It abounds in verbal artifices, and the whole habits
of life and modes of thought and conception of things, material and
spiritual, of the Japanese of those days were so totally different to
those of the European as to render it almost unintelligible to the
latter. There are, however, scholars who have waded through this
literature as also through the poetry of Japan and have found great
delight therein. In the process of translating an Oriental language,
full of depths of subtlety of thought and expressing Oriental ideas in
an Oriental manner, much, if not most, of its beauty and charm must be
lost. That is, I think, why the Japanese prose and poetry when
translated into English seem so bald and lifeless. We know by
experience that even a European language loses in the process of
translation which is, except in very rare instances, a purely
mechanical art. How much more so must be the case in regard to an
Oriental language with its depths of hyperbole and replete with
imagery, idealism, and flowery illustrations.

I have referred to the literature of modern Japan, the ephemeral
literature, in a chapter on its newspaper press. The modern
literature, whether ephemeral or otherwise, is distinctly not on
Oriental line