Out of the East

by Lafcadio Hearn

  But you could scarcely guess the solution of the problem. It is a religious one, involving conceptions totally unknown to the West. She from whom the Iki-ryō proceeded was never blamed by the people as a witch. They never suggested that it might have been created with her knowledge. They even sympathized with what they deemed to be her just plaint. They blamed her only for having been too angry,—for not sufficiently controlling her unspoken resentment,—because she should have known that anger, secretly indulged, can have ghostly consequences.

  I ask nobody to take for granted the possibility of the Iki-ryō, except as a strong form of conscience. But as an influence upon conduct, the belief certainly has value. Besides, it is suggestive. Who is really able to assure us that secret evil desires, pent-up resentments, masked hates, do not exert any force outside of the will that conceives and nurses them? May there not be a deeper meaning than Western ethics recognize in those words of the Buddha,—"Hatred ceases not by hatred at any time; hatred ceases by love : this is an old rule?" It was very old then, even in his day. In ours it has been said, "Whensoever a wrong is done you, and you do not resent it, then so much evil dies in the world." But does it? Are we quite sure that not to resent it is enough? Can the motive tendency set loose in the mind by the sense of a wrong be nullified simply by nonaction on the part of the wronged? Can any force die? The forces we know may be transformed only. So much also may be true of the forces we do not know; and of these are life, Sensation, Will,—all that makes up the infinite mystery called "I."

  V

  "The duty of Science," answers Science, "is to systematize human experience, not to theorize about ghosts. And the judgment of the time, even in Japan, sustains this position taken by Science. What is now being taught below there,—my doctrines, or the doctrines of the Man in the Straw Sandals?"

  Then the Stone Buddha and I look down upon the college together; and as we gaze, the smile of the Buddha—perhaps because of a change in the light—seems to me to have changed its expression, to have become an ironical smile. Nevertheless he is contemplating the fortress of a more than formidable enemy. In all that teaching of four hundred youths by thirty-three teachers, there is no teaching of faith, but only teaching of fact,—only teaching of the definite results of the systematization of human experience. And I am absolutely certain that if I were to question, concerning the things of the Buddha, any of those thirty-three instructors (saving one dear old man of seventy, the Professor of Chinese), I should receive no reply. For they belong unto the new generation, holding that such topics are fit for the consideration of Men-in-Straw-Rain-coats only, and that in this twenty-sixth year of Meiji, the scholar should occupy himself only with the results of the systematization of human experience. Yet the systematization of human experience in no wise enlightens us as to the Whence, the Whither, or, worst of all!—the Why.

  "The Laws of Existence which proceed from a cause,—the cause of these hath the Buddha explained, as also the destruction of the same. Even of such truths is the great Sramana the teacher."

  And I ask myself, Must the teaching of Science in this land efface at last the memory of the teaching of the Buddha?

  "As for that," makes answer Science, "the test of the right of a faith to live must be sought in its power to accept and to utilize my revelations. Science neither affirms what it cannot prove, nor denies that which it cannot rationally disprove. Theorizing about the Unknowable, it recognizes and pities as a necessity of the human mind. You and the Man-in-the-Straw-Rain-coat may harmlessly continue to theorize for such time as your theories advance in lines parallel with my facts, but no longer."

  And seeking inspiration from the deep irony of Buddha's smile, I theorize in parallel lines.

  VI

  The whole tendency of modern knowledge, the whole tendency of scientific teaching, is toward the ultimate conviction that the Unknowable, even as the Brahma of ancient Indian thought, is inaccessible to prayer. Not a Few of us can Feel that Western Faith must finally pass away forever, leaving us to our own resources when our mental manhood shall have been attained, even as the fondest of mothers must leave her children at last. In that far day her work will all have been done; she will have fully developed our recognition of certain eternal spiritual laws; she will have fully ripened our profounder human sympathies; she will have fully prepared us by her parables and fairy tales, by her gentler falsehoods, for the terrible truth of existence;—prepared us for the knowledge that there is no divine love save the love of man for man; that we have no All-Father, no Saviour, no angel guardians; that we have no possible refuge but in ourselves.

  Yet even in that strange day we shall only have stumbled to the threshold of the revelation given by the Buddha so many ages ago: "Be ye lamps unto yourselves; he ye a refuge unto yourselves. Betake yourselves to no other refuge. The Buddhas are only teachers. Hold ye fast to the truth as to a lamp. Hold fast as a refuge to the truth. Look not for refuge to any beside yourselves."

  Does the utterance shock? Yet the prospect of such a void awakening from our long fair dream of celestial aid and celestial love would never be the darkest prospect possible for man. There is a darker, also foreshadowed by Eastern thought. Science may hold in reserve for us discoveries infinitely more appalling than the realization of Richter's dream,—the dream of the dead children seeking vainly their father Jesus. In the negation of the materialist even, there was a faith of consolation—self-assurance of individual cessation, of oblivion eternal. But for the existing thinker there is no such faith. It may remain for us to learn, after having vanquished all difficulties possible to meet upon this tiny sphere, that there await us obstacles to overcome beyond it,—obstacles vaster than any system of worlds,—obstacles weightier than the whole inconceivable Cosmos with its centuries of millions of systems ; that our task is only beginning; and that there will never be given to us even the ghost of any help, save the help of unutterable and unthinkable Time. We may have to learn that the infinite whirl of death and birth, out of which we cannot escape, is of our own creation, of our own seeking;—that the forces integrating worlds are the errors of the Past;—that the eternal sorrow is but the eternal hunger of insatiable desire;—and that the burnt-out suns are rekindled only by the inextinguishable passions of vanished lives.

  VII

  JIUJUTSU

  Man at his birth is supple and weak; at his death, firm and strong. So is it with all things. . . . Firmness and strength are the concomitants of death; softness and weakness, the concomitants of life. Hence he who relies on his own strength shall not conquer.

  TAO-TE-KING.

  I

  THERE is one building in the grounds of the Government College quite different in structure from the other edifices. Except that it is furnished with horizontally sliding glass windows instead of paper ones, it might be called a purely Japanese building. It is long, broad, and of one story; and it contains but a single huge room, of which the elevated floor is thickly cushioned with one hundred mats. It has a Japanese name, too,—Zuihōkwan,—signifying "The Hall of Our Holy Country;" and the Chinese characters which form that name were painted upon the small tablet above its entrance by the hand of a Prince of the Imperial blood. Within there is no furniture; nothing but another tablet and two pictures hanging upon the wall. One of the pictures represents the famous "White-Tiger Band" of seventeen brave boys who voluntarily sought death for loyalty's sake in the civil war. The other is a portrait in oil of the aged and much beloved Professor of Chinese, Akizuki of Aidzu, a noted warrior in his youth, when it required much more to make a soldier and a gentleman than it does to-day. And the tablet bears Chinese characters written by the hand of Count Katsu, which signify: "Profound knowledge is the best of possessions."

  But what is the knowledge taught in this huge unfurnished apartment? It is something called jiujutsu. And what is jiujutsu?

  Here I must premise that I know practically nothing of jiujutsu. One must begin to study it in early youth, and must continue t
he study a very long time in order to learn it even tolerably well. To become an expert requires seven years of constant practice, even presupposing natural aptitudes of an uncommon order. I can give no detailed account of jiujutsu, but merely venture some general remarks about its principle.

  Jiujutsu is the old samurai art of fighting without weapons. To the uninitiated it looks like wrestling. Should you happen to enter the Zuihōkwan while jiujutsu is being practiced, you would see a crowd of students watching ten or twelve lithe young comrades, barefooted and barelimbed, throwing each other about on the matting. The dead silence might seem to you very strange. No word is spoken, no sign of approbation or of amusement is given, no face even smiles. Absolute impassiveness is rigidly exacted by the rules of the school of jiujutsu. But probably only this impassibility of all, this hush of numbers, would impress you as remarkable.

  A professional wrestler would observe more. He would see that those young men are very cautious about putting forth their strength, and that the grips, holds, and flings are both peculiar and risky. In spite of the care exercised, he would judge the whole performance to be dangerous play, and would be tempted, perhaps, to advise the adoption of Western "scientific" rules.

  The real thing, however,—not the play,—is much more dangerous than a Western wrestler could guess at sight. The teacher there, slender and light as he seems, could probably disable an ordinary wrestler in two minutes. Jiujutsu is not an art of display at all: it is not a training for that sort of skill exhibited to public audiences; it is an art of self-defense in the most exact sense of the term; it is an art of war. The master of that art is able, in one moment, to put an untrained antagonist completely hors de combat. By some terrible legerdemain he suddenly dislocates a shoulder, unhinges a joint, bursts a tendon, or snaps a bone,—without any apparent effort. He is much more than an athlete: he is an anatomist. And he knows also touches that kill—as by lightning. But this fatal knowledge he is under oath never to communicate except under such conditions as would render its abuse almost impossible. Tradition exacts that it be given only to men of perfect self-command and of unimpeachable moral character.

  The fact, however, to which I want to call attention is that the master of jiujutsu never relies upon his own strength. He scarcely uses his own strength in the greatest emergency. Then what does he use? Simply the strength of his antagonist. The force of the enemy is the only means by which that enemy is overcome. The art of jiujutsu teaches you to rely for victory solely upon the strength of your opponent; and the greater his strength, the worse for him and the better for you. I remember that I was not a little astonished when one of the greatest teachers of jiujutsu1 told me that he found it extremely difficult to teach a certain very strong pupil, whom I had innocently imagined to be the best in the class. On asking why, I was answered: "Because he relies upon his enormous muscular strength, and uses it." The very name "jiujutsu" means to conquer by yielding.

  I fear I cannot explain at all; I can only suggest. Every one knows what a "counter" in boxing means. I cannot use it for an exact simile, because the boxer who counters opposes his whole force to the impetus of the other; while a jiujutsu expert does precisely the contrary. Still there remains this resemblance between a counter in boxing and a yielding in jiujutsu,—that the suffering is in both cases due to the uncontrollable forward impetus of the man who receives it. I may venture then to say, loosely, that in jiujutsu there is a sort of counter for every twist, wrench, pull, push, or bend: only, the jiujutsu expert does not oppose such movements at all. No: he yields to them. But he does much more than yield to them. He aids them with a wicked sleight that causes the assailant to put out his own shoulder, to fracture his own arm, or, in a desperate case, even to break his own neck or back.

  II

  With even this vaguest of explanations, you will already have been able to perceive that the real wonder of jiujutsu is not in the highest possible skill of its best professor, but in the uniquely Oriental idea which the whole art expresses. What Western brain could have elaborated this strange teaching,—never to oppose force to force, but only to direct and utilize the power of attack; to overthrow the enemy solely by his own strength,—to vanquish him solely by his own effort? Surely none! The Occidental mind appears to work in straight lines; the Oriental, in wonderful curves and circles. Yet how fine a symbolism of Intelligence as a means to foil brute force! Much more than a science of defense is this jiujutsu: it is a philosophical system; it is an economical system; it is an ethical system (indeed, I had forgotten to say that a very large part of jiujutsu-training is purely moral) ; and it is, above all, the expression of a racial genius as yet but faintly perceived by those Powers who dream of further aggrandizement in the East.

  Twenty-five years ago,—and even more recently,—foreigners might have predicted, with every appearance of reason, that Japan would adopt not only the dress, but the manners of the Occident; not only our means of rapid transit and communication, but also our principles of architecture; not only our industries and our applied science, but likewise our metaphysics and our dogmas. Some really believed that the country would soon be thrown open to foreign settlement; that Western capital would be tempted by extraordinary privileges to aid in the development of various resources; and even that the nation would eventually proclaim, through Imperial Edict, its sudden conversion to what we call Christianity. But such beliefs were due to an unavoidable but absolute ignorance of the character of the race,—of its deeper capacities, of its foresight, of its immemorial spirit of independence. That Japan might only be practicing jiujutsu, nobody supposed for a moment: indeed at that time nobody in the West had ever heard of jiujutsu. And, nevertheless, jiujutsu it all was. Japan adopted a military system founded upon the best experience of France and Germany, with the result that she can call into the field a disciplined force of 250,000 men, supported by a formidable artillery. She created a strong navy, comprising some of the finest cruisers in the world;—modeling her naval system upon the best English and French teaching. She made herself dockyards under French direction, and built or bought steamers to carry her products to Korea, China, Manilla, Mexico, India, and the tropics of the Pacific. She constructed, both for military and commercial purposes, nearly two thousand miles of railroad. With American and English help she established the cheapest and perhaps the most efficient telegraph and postal service in existence. She built lighthouses to such excellent purpose that her coast is said to be the best lighted in either hemisphere; and she put into operation a signal service not inferior to that of the United States. From America she obtained also a telephone system, and the best methods of electric lighting. She modeled her public-school system upon a thorough study of the best results obtained in Germany, France, and America, but regulated it so as to harmonize perfectly with her own institutions. She founded a police system upon a French model, but shaped it to absolute conformity with her own particular social requirements. At first she imported machinery for her mines, her mills, her gun-factories, her railways, and hired numbers of foreign experts : she is now dismissing all her teachers. But what she has done and is doing would require volumes even to mention. Suffice to say, in conclusion, that she has selected and adopted the best of everything represented by our industries, by our applied sciences, by our economical, financial, and legal experience; availing herself in every case of the highest results only, and invariably shaping her acquisitions to meet her own needs.

  Now in all this she has adopted nothing for a merely imitative reason. On the contrary, she has approved and taken only what can help her to increase her strength. She has made herself able to dispense with nearly all foreign technical instruction; and she has kept firmly in her own hands, by the shrewdest legislation, all of her own resources. But she has not adopted Western dress, Western habits of life, Western architecture, or Western religion; since the introduction of any of these, especially the last, would have diminished instead of augmenting her force. Despite her railroad and steamsh
ip lines, her telegraphs and telephones, her postal service and her express companies, her steel artillery and magazine-rifles, her universities and technical schools, she remains just as Oriental today as she was a thousand years ago. She has been able to remain herself, and to profit to the utmost possible limit by the strength of the enemy. She has been, and still is, defending herself by the most admirable system of intellectual self-defense ever heard of,—by a marvelous national jiujutsu.

  III

  Before me lies an album more than thirty years old. It is filled with photographs taken at the time when Japan was entering upon her experiments with foreign dress and with foreign institutions. All are photographs of samurai or daimyō ; and many possess historical value as reflections of the earliest effects of foreign influence upon native fashions.

  Naturally the military class were the earliest subjects of the new influence; and they seem to have attempted several curious compromises between the Western and the Eastern costume. More than a dozen photographs represent feudal leaders surrounded by their retainers,—all in a peculiar garb of their own composition. They have frock coats, waistcoats, and trousers of foreign style and material; but under the coat the long silk girdle or obi is still worn, simply for the purpose of holding the swords. (For the samurai were never in a literal sense traineurs de sabre; and their formidable but exquisitely finished weapons were never made to be slung at the side,—besides being in most cases much too long to be carried in the Western way.) The cloth of the suits is broadcloth; but the samurai will not surrender his mon, or crest, and tries to adapt it to his novel attire by all manner of devices. One has faced the lappets of his coat with white silk; and his family device is either dyed or embroidered upon the silk six times—three mon to each lappet. All the men, or nearly all, wear European watches with showy guards; one is examining his timepiece curiously, probably a very recent acquisition. All wear Western shoes, too,—shoes with elastic sides. But none seem to have yet adopted the utterly abominable European hat—destined, unfortunately, to become popular at a later day. They still retain the jingasa,—a strong wooden headpiece, heavily lacquered in scarlet and gold. And the jingasa and the silken girdle remain the only satisfactory parts of their astounding uniform. The trousers and coats are ill fitting; the shoes are inflicting slow tortures; there is an indescribably constrained, slouchy, shabby look common to all thus attired. They have not only ceased to feel free: they are conscious of not looking their best. The incongruities are not grotesque enough to be amusing ; they are merely ugly and painful. What foreigner in that time could have persuaded himself that the Japanese were not about to lose forever their beautiful taste in dress?