Our Oriental Heritage

by Will Durant

  * From these local schools the children might go on to one of the rare and poorly-equipped colleges of the empire; more frequently they studied with a tutor, or with a few precious books, at home. Needy students were often financed through such schooling by men of means, on the understanding that they would return the loan with interest on their appointment to office and their access to “squeeze.”

  * “Seldom,” says Dr. Latourette, “has any large group of mankind been so prosperous and so nearly contented as were the Chinese under this governmental machinery when it was dominated by the ablest of the monarchs.” This was likewise the opinion of the learned Capt. Brinkley.140

  * “The Chinese,” said Sir Robert Hart, “worship talent; they delight in literature, and everywhere they have their little clubs for learning, and for discussing each other’s essays and verses.”

  *The meaning of this may be felt by recalling that a vest-pocket package of opium costs $30.4

  * A dowager is a widow endowed—usually with a title coming down to her from her dead husband.

  * Captain Brinkley writes: “It sends a thrill of horror through every white man’s bosom to learn that forty missionary women and twenty-five little children were butchered by the Boxers. But in T’ungchow alone, a city where the Chinese made no resistance, and where there was no fighting, five hundred and seventy-three Chinese women of the upper classes committed suicide rather than survive the indignities they had suffered.”9

  *He died at Peking in 1925, at the most opportune moment for his conservative enemies.

  * From that time on the city, whose name had meant “northern capital,” was renamed Peiping, i.e., “the north pacified”; while the Nationalist Government, in order to be near its financial sources at Shanghai, maintained its headquarters at the “southern capital,” Nanking.

  * Once Great Britain dominated the import trade; now it accounts for 14%, the United States for 17%, Japan for 27%;21 and the Japanese leadership in this field mounts with every year. Between 1910 and 1930 Chinese trade increased 600% to approximately one and a half billion dollars.22

  *In 1927 alone many thousands of workers were executed for belonging to labor unions.25

  † Some Chinese women pad their shoes to conceal the fact that their feet were bound.26

  * P. 673 above. Latterly the “New Life” movement, let by Chiang Kai-shek, has attempted, with some success, to restore Confucianism.

  *The Revolution grants it where both parties ask for it; but where the husband is under thirty, or the wife is under twenty-five, the consent of the parents is required for a divorce. The old causes for which the husband may divorce his wife remain in force—barrenness, infidelity, neglect of duty, loquacity, thievishness, jealousy, or serious disease; but these are not allowed to apply if the wife has mourned three years for her husband’s parents, or has no family to return to, or has been faithful to her husband during his rise from poverty to wealth.30

  † The frank display of contraceptive devices in Chinese drug-stores may suggest to the West a convenient escape from the “Yellow Peril.”

  * In 1932 the Union Medical College, a five-million dollar gift of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., was opened to medical students of either sex. The China Medical Board, financed by the Rockefeller Foundation, maintains nineteen hospitals, three medical schools, and sixty-five scholarships.36

  * Latterly, under the influence of Chiang Kai-skek’s New Life movement, the acceptance of Western models in mind and morals has abated; China and Japan are beginning to make their own motion-pictures; radicalism is giving way before a renewed conservatism; and China is tending to join with Japan in a revolt against European and American ideas and ways.

  * If this account be questioned as improbable, the objection has long since been answered by the most influential of Japanese critics, Moto-ori: “The very inconsistency is the proof of the authenticity of the record; for who would have gone out of his way to invent a story apparently so ridiculous and incredible?”2

  † The name Japan is probably a corruption of the Malay word for the islands-Japang or Japun; this is a rendering of the Japanese term Nippon, which in turn is a corruption of the Chinese name for “the place the sun comes from”—Jih-pen. The Japanese usually prefix to Nippon the adjective Dai, meaning “Great.”3

  ‡ Fuji-san (less classically Fuji-yama), idol of artists and priests, approximates to a gently sloping cone. Many thousands of pilgrims ascend its 12,365 feet in any year. Fuji (Ainu for “fire”) erupted last in 1707.5

  * “This period named ‘Engi,’” says the enthusiastic Fenollosa, “must doubtless be reckoned the high-water mark of Japanese civilization, as Ming Huang’s had been that of China. Never again would either China or Japan be quite so rich, splendid, and full of free genius. . . . In general culture and luxurious refinement of a life which equally ministered to mind and body, not only not in Japan, but perhaps not in the world was there ever again anything quite so exquisite.”31

  * Both rider and horse, we are told, were thrown into a panic by seeing the ghost of the brother whom Yoritomo had murdered; the horse stumbled, the rider fell, and Yoritomo died some months later, at the age of fifty-three.37 The story is vouched for by his enemies.

  † The Spanish Armada of 1588, on its arrival in the English Channel, had some 120 ships, with 24,000 men.38a

  * In 1596 a Spanish galleon was forced into a Japanese harbor by Japanese boats, was purposely driven by them upon a reef that broke it in two, and then was pillaged by the local governor on the ground that Japanese law permitted the authorities to appropriate all vessels stranded on their shores. The outraged pilot, Landecho, protested to Hideyoshi’s Minister of Works, Masuda. Masuda asked how it was that the Christian Church had won so many lands to be subject to one man; and Landecho, being a seaman rather than a diplomat, answered: “Our kings begin by sending, into the countries they wish to conquer, religieux who induce the people to embrace our religion; and when they have made considerable progress, troops are sent who combine with the new Christians; and then our kings have not much trouble in accomplishing the rest.”59

  * Dates of rulers are of their accession and their assassinated or deposed death. Several abdicated, or were assassinated or deposed.

  * This sum, however, was probably equivalent to a quarter of a million dollars in current American money.

  * A word coined by the late Inazo Nitobe.

  * Hara-kiri was forbidden to women and plebeians; but women were allowed to commit jigaki—i.e., they were permitted, as a protest against an offense, to pierce the throat with a dagger, and to sever the arteries by a single thrust. Every woman of quality received technical training in the art of cutting her throat, and was taught to bind her lower limbs together before killing herself, lest her corpse should be found in an immodest position.18

  * This practice was forbidden in 1699.31

  † The arable exceptions were—and are—fertilized with human waste.

  ‡ During the months of July and August a siesta was permitted from noon till four o’clock. Sick workers were fed by the state, and free coffins were provided for those who died during the corvée,36

  * The worst of the many fires in Japanese history was that which completely wiped out Yedo (Tokyo) in 1657, with the loss of 100,000 lives.

  * In 1905 Tokyo had 1100 public baths, in which 500,000 persons bathed daily for 1¼ cents.53

  * On the other hand those Japanese who have adopted a non-physical life while continuing to eat large quantities of rice are succumbing to digestive disorders.56

  * The tea-crop, of course, is now one of the important products of Japan. The Dutch East India Co. appears to have brought Europe its first tea in 1610, and to have sold it at some $4.00 a pound. Jonas Hanway, in 1756, argued that European men were losing their stature, and women their beauty, through the drinking of tea; and reformers denounced the custom as a filthy barbarism.61

  * The Taiko and the Tea-Master loved each other like geniuses. The firs
t accused the other of dishonesty, and was accused in turn of seducing Rikyu’s daughter. In the end Rikyu committed hara-kiri.63

  † Similar pilgrimages are made to see the maple leaves turning in the fall.

  * This was done only in the lower classes, and in extreme need.69

  * “It was mainly in seasons when people were starving,” says Murdoch, “or dying in tens of thousands from pestilence, that the monks in the great Kyoto and Nara monasteries fared most sumptuously; for it was in times like these that believers were most lavish in their gifts and benefactions.”98

  † “In 1454 . . . boys were often sold to the priests, who shaved their eyebrows, powdered their faces, dressed them in female garb, and put them to the vilest of uses; for since the days of Yoshimitsu, who had set an evil example in this as in so many other matters, the practice of pederasty had become very common, especially in the monasteries, although it was by no means confined to them.”97

  * Cf. the opening pages of De Intellectus Emendatione.

  * Cf. page 733 above.

  * From Sir E. Satow’s paraphrase of Mabuchi’s teaching: “In ancient times, when men’s dispositions were straightforward, a complicated system of morals was unnecessary . . . . In those days it was unnecessary to have a doctrine of right and wrong. But the Chinese, being bad at heart . . . were only good on the outside, and their bad acts became of such magnitude that society was thrown into disorder. The Japanese, being straightforward, could do without teaching.121

  * The katakana script reduced these syllabic symbols to straight lines—as in the “tabloid” press, the larger billboards, and the illuminated signs of modern Japan.1

  * Printing, like writing, came from China as part of Buddhist lore; the oldest extant examples of printing in the world are some Buddhist charms block-printed at the command of the Empress Shotoku in the year 770 A.D.3 Movable type entered from Korea about 1596, but the expense involved in printing a language still composed of thousands of characters kept its use from spreading until the Restoration of 1858 opened the doors to European influence. Even today a Japanese newspaper requires a font of several thousand characters.4 Japanese typography, despite these difficulties, is one of the most attractive forms of printing in our time.

  * The present writer regrets that the brevity of life has prevented his reading more than the first of the four volumes into which Arthur Waley has so perfectly translated Murasaki’s tale.

  * Even into the ordinary home our Lady enters with understanding, and makes Uma no-Kami express, about the year 1000, a modernistic plea for feminine education: “Then there is the zealous housewife, who, regardless of her appearance, twists her hair behind her ears, and devotes herself entirely to the details of our domestic welfare. The husband, in his comings and goings about the world, is certain to see and hear many things which he cannot discuss with strangers, but would gladly talk over with an intimate who could listen with sympathy and understanding, some one who could laugh with him or weep, as need be. It often happens, too, that some political event will greatly perturb or amuse him, and he sits apart longing to tell some one about it. But the wife only says, lightly, ‘What is the matter?’ and shows no interest. This is apt to be very trying.”25

  * His description of this has been quoted above, p. 852.

  * Hideyoshi’s generals, after successful campaigns, seem to have been content—occasionally—to be rewarded not with new areas and revenues, but with rare pieces of pottery or porcelain.49

  * The author is indebted to Mr. Adolf Kroch of Chicago for permission to examine his fine collection of netsuke and inro.

  * Perhaps the great Shotoku Taishi, statesman and artist, had something to do with this achievement, for we know that he plied the chisel, and cut many statues in wood.63 Kobo Daishi (ca. 816) was a sculptor as well as a painter, a scholar and a saint; Hokusai, to suggest his versatility, pictured him wielding five brushes at once, with hands and feet and mouth.64 Unkei (1180-1220) made characterful portrait-busts of himself and many priests, and carved delightfully terrible figures of Hell’s Supreme Court, and those snarling gods whose function it was to frighten away, with the ugliness of their faces, all spirits of evil. His father Kokei, his son Jokei, and his pupil Jokaku helped him to make the Japanese supreme in the art of sculpturing wood.

  * Toshiro was another name for Shirozemon; yaki means ware.

  10 Perhaps the best of all collections of the Kano School—Mr. Beppu’s at Tokyo—was almost completely destroyed by the earthquake of 1923.

  * The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has acquired a Korin “Wave-Screen,” which Ledoux pronounced to be “one of the greatest works of this type that has ever been permitted to leave Japan.”80

  * Who, having been exiled from Japan, sailed every day across the sea to gaze upon the Holy Mountain.

  * An excellent collection of Hiroshige’s prints may be seen in the Boston Museum.

  * This process corresponded essentially to the abolition of feudalism, serfdom or slavery in France in 1789, in Russia in 1862, and in the United States in 1863.

  † These rights have been narrowly restricted by the war fever of the Manchurian ad venture.

  * By the last official census Yokohama had 620,000 population, Kobe 787,000, Osaka 2,114,804, and Greater Tokyo 5,311,000.

  † Transport by land did not grow as rapidly as marine trade, for the mountainous backbone of the islands made commerce prefer the sea. Roads remained poor by comparison with the West; and automobiles have only recently begun to be a peril in Japan. Already, however, the jinricksha, or “man-power-vehicle,” traditionally ascribed to an inventive American missionary in the early eighties,17 is disappearing before American and domestic motor cars and 200,000 miles of highway have been paved. Tokyo has a subway which compares favorably with those of Europe and America. The first Japanese railway was built in 1872, over a brave stretch of eighteen miles; by 1932 the narrow islands had 13,734 miles of iron roads. The new express from Dairen (near Por Arthur) to Hsinking (formerly Changchun), the capital of Manchuria, makes the 70a kilometers at the rate of 120 kilometers (approximately 75 miles) per hour.18

  * The low remuneration of women is partly due to the expensively high turn-over among the women workers, who usually leave industry when they have amassed a marriage dowry.

  * Women engaged in teaching or industry wear uniforms of Occidental cut. Both sexes, after working hours, relax into the traditional costumes.

  * During the chaos that followed the earthquake of 1923 the Japanese of Yokohama, while being fed by American relief ships, took advantage of the turmoil to slaughter hundreds (some say thousands) of unarmed radicals and Koreans in the streets.24 Some passionate patriot, it seems, had aroused the Japanese by announcing that the Koreans (who were a mere handful) were planning to overthrow the Government and kill the Emperor.

  † “I have lived,” said Lafcadio Hearn, “in districts where no case of theft had occurred for hundreds of years—where the newly-built prisons of Meiji remained empty and useless.”25

  ‡ Black Dragon is the Chinese name for the Amur River, which separates Manchuria from Siberia. The Japanese look upon assassination as merely a dignified substitute for exile.

  * Such science as existed in Japan before 1853 was mostly an importation from the parental mainland. The Japanese calendar, previously based upon the phases of the moon, was readjusted to the solar year by a Korean priest about 604 A.D. In 680 A.D. Chinese modifications were introduced, and Japan took over (and still retains) the Chinese method of reckoning events by reference to the name and year of the reigning emperor. The Gregorian calendar was adopted by Japan in 1873.

  * The current fever of nationalism has brought with it a revival of native motifs and styles.