The Home of Mankind

by Hendrik Willem van Loon

  It was inevitable therefore that Japan should look for more territory; and it was only natural that first she should think, of the badly administered and sadly neglected lands that lay just across the China Sea. America would have suited her better, but it is too far away, and besides is much too strong. Australia is not so far away, but nine-tenths of that continent is a desert and of no possible use to anybody. But Manchuria (or Manchukuo, as it is now to be called) is within easy reach, and the road to Manchuria was indicated by the land bridge of the Korean peninsula from which the mainland of Japan is separated by the narrow Strait of Korea. This strait is only 120 miles wide and is conveniently divided into halves by the Tsushima islands, those islands near which the Japanese fleet destroyed the Russian squadron in 1905, and removed Russia as a possible rival in eastern Asia.

  As for the Korean peninsula, which is situated in the same latitude as southern Italy and Sicily, although it has a much colder climate, it was in no position to defend itself. The Koreans, who called their country Ch’ao Hsien or “the chosen land of the morning quiet,” were descendants of Chinese immigrants who had occupied the country in the twelfth century before the birth of Christ. They had easily conquered the natives, a very primitive race who had lived in caves and subterranean holes in the mountains of the interior. These immigrants from the west had then established a kingdom of their own, which, however, was never able to gain complete independence from the mother country of China and which was for ever being harassed by Japanese pirates.

  In 1592 Japan made her first attempt to get hold of Korea. Japan never would have dared to start upon so ambitious a campaign unless she had been folly prepared. The preparations consisted of several hundred blunderbusses which Portugal had sold them. Relying upon her superior armament, Japan sent 300,000 men round the Strait of Korea, engaged in a war which lasted five years, and was then defeated only by the superior numbers of the Chinese who came to the assistance of the Koreans.

  But it was this invasion, during which Seoul, the capital of Korea, was destroyed, and during which all sorts of horrible atrocities were committed, which accounts for the hereditary hatred of the Korean people for everything Japanese. But what will you? The Koreans were weak and the Japanese were strong; and when, during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the Koreans were forced to grant all sorts of economic and political concessions to the Russians, the Japanese had an excellent excuse for a fresh campaign.

  The immediate causes for a war are rarely interesting. It is the real underlying motives that count. In this case, as in the case of the expedition of 1592, they were to be found directly and absolutely in the necessity of the Japanese Government to provide its rapidly increasing population with food.

  As soon as Japan had defeated Russia and had driven the Muscovite troops back from the Yalu River, the river that separates Korea from Manchuria, Korea became a Japanese protectorate. In 1910 it became a part of the Japanese Empire quite as much as Formosa, which the Japanese had taken from the Chinese in 1895, or the southern half of the island of Sakhalin, which they had taken from the Russians in 1905 in lieu of a war indemnity. To-day already half a million Japanese have moved in among the twenty million Koreans. The rest will follow in due course of time.

  As for Manchuria, it had long been a bone of contention between the two nations that fought for supremacy in the northern half of the Pacific. After the Peace of Portsmouth, which made an end to the Russo-Japanese war, the fate of the country was sealed. Who was there left to protect Manchuria against Japan? Nominally the country still belonged to China, but China, after the Boxer Rebellion, was much too weak to protect anybody, even herself Why didn’t the Manchus put up a fight? A people energetic enough to conquer all of China and to establish themselves as the rulers of one-fifth of the total population of the earth must surely know how to fight. But the Manchus had long since moved southward into China. The six per cent. that remained of the original population were mainly little farmers with an interest only in the land. The other sixteen million people, spread over a territory four times as large as England and Scotland, lived as they had always lived, which meant that they had just enough to eat not to die, but as for fighting, why should they?

  And now Manchuria is gone it will be the turn of Mongolia. For Mongolia is a very big country, almost 1,400,000 square miles, or about eleven times as large as the British Isles, and it has a population of less than 2,000,000 people. The southern regions are uninhabitable because they form part of the Gobi Desert, but the rest consists of grass lands, eminently suited for the purposes of cattle-breeding. Otherwise the Mongolians, who depended for their success upon their cavalry, would never have been able to breed those tough ponies which carried them triumphantly from the Pacific to the Atlantic.

  Many people seem to experience a profound indignation at what they are inclined to denounce as a brutal expression of ‘Japanese ambition.’ I would rather call them ‘Japanese necessities.’ In matters of international policy a certain healthy egoism is rather a desirable quality. Japan has got to find an outlet for the extra people at home. If is finding such an outlet in northern Asia, in a part of the world that is very lightly populated, and that has been accustomed to such outrageous forms of government that the inhabitants cannot possibly be worse off now than they were before.

  If this northern Asiatic safety-valve did not exist, the Philippines, the Dutch East Indies, Australia, New Zealand, and the western coast of America would be for ever exposed to threats of a Japanese invasion, and it would be necessary to station a battleship in front of every Polynesian island lest it be towed away overnight by a Japanese cruiser.

  On the whole the present arrangement seems much more practical. Those who feel inclined to shed tears at these callous and selfish utterances are politely requested to weep on the shoulders of our own Negroes.

  Chapter XXXIX

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  THE JAPANESE EMPIRE

  Japan, before she started upon her career of world conquest at the expense of her neighbours, consisted of more than 500 islands which follow a semicircle reaching all the way from the peninsula of Kamchatka in the north to the coast of the Chinese province of Kwang-tung in the south, a distance of some 3000 miles, equivalent to that between the North Cape of Europe and the centre of the Sahara Desert in Africa.

  Of these islands, which vary in size between the whole of England, Scotland, and Wales, 518 are inhabited by some 60,000,000 people. The total number of Japanese, according to the latest statistics, approaches 90,000,000, but that takes in 20,000,000 Koreans and several Polynesian islands which have been Japanese territory since the Great War.

  For all practical purposes, however, it is sufficient to remember the names of Honshu, the main island in the centre, Hokkaido, the next biggest island in the north, and Shikoku and Kyushu, the two big islands immediately south of Honshu. The capital is Tokyo, with over 2,000,000 inhabitants, situated in a fertile plain in the centre of Honshu. The harbour of Tokyo is Yokohama.

  The largest city is Osaka, in the southern part of the same island, the centre of the important Japanese textile industry. North of Osaka lies Kyoto, (Tokyo is merely Kyoto turned round), the ancient capital of the Empire. Other cities, whose names you will occasionally encounter in the newspapers, are Kobe, the port of Osaka, and Nagasaki, on the southern island of Kyushu, the most convenient port for all vessels coming from Europe.

  As for the word ‘ Yedo ’ which you will often find in your history books, it is merely the ancient name of the city during the period when Tokyo was the residence of the Shoguns. When the Shoguns lost their power in 1866 the Emperor moved from Kyoto to Yedo, the city was re-baptized Tokyo, and it began that extraordinary development which has made it one of the biggest cities of the modern world.

  But all these towns live in constant peril of being wiped out. The Japanese islands, which are merely the outer edges of the great Asiatic mountains (the Japanese Sea, the shallow Yellow Sea, and the East China Sea a
re of very recent date, like the North Sea, which turned England into an island), form part of the volcanic ridge that stretches from the island of Sakhalin to Java in the Dutch East Indies, and they are in almost constant motion. The seismograph observation statistics of Japan reported 27,485 earthquakes between 1885 and 1903. That gives an average of 1477 per year, or four per day. Of course, most of these are of no particular importance. A slight shiver in a teacup, a rattling of a chair against the wall and that would be all. But one gets some idea of the danger to which this island region is exposed when you realize that Kyoto, the ancient capital, was shaken 1318 times during the ten centuries of its existence. Of these 1318 shakings 194 were classified as ‘strong’ and 34 as absolutely ‘destructive.’ The earthquake of September 1923, which partially destroyed the city of Tokyo and which killed nearly 100,000 people and lifted certain small islands a couple of feet in the air while sinking others below sea-level, is of such recent date as still to be remembered by all of us.

  People often associate earthquakes with volcanic disturbances. Some of them are undoubtedly the result of volcanic eruptions. But most earthquakes are caused by a sudden sliding among those layers of rock which lie beneath the soil on which we live. When such layers move only an inch or so the result is a commotion which may merely upset a few trees and shrubs but which if it takes place in exactly the right spot (the ‘wrong spot’ would be better) may cause a catastrophe like that of Lisbon in 1755, when 20,000 people were killed, or Canton in 1920, when the number may have been as high as 200,000. According to the conservative estimate of one of the greatest seismological experts, the earthquakes of the last forty centuries, the so-called ‘historical period’ of man, have cost the lives of 13,000,000 people, which, when all is said and done, is quite a considerable number.

  Earthquakes, of course, may happen almost anywhere. Only a year ago the bottom of the North Sea was severely shaken by an earthquake, and the mud flats of the islands at the mouth of the Scheldt and the Rhine trembled sufficiently to give the clam-diggers a moment of great uneasiness. Yet the North Sea region is as flat as a pancake. The Japanese islands, on the other hand, are situated on the top of a high ridge which on the eastern side descends into one of the deepest holes in the bottom of the ocean our scientists have so far been able to discover. The famous Tuscarora Deep descends to nearly 28,000 feet, which is only 7000 feet less than the record depth between the Philippines and the Marianas or Ladrones. It is surely no mere accident that more than half of all the disastrous earthquakes of Japan have taken place along the eastern shores where the coast makes a sheer drop of about six miles.

  The Japanese, however, like most people who live in earthquake belts, lose little sleep on account of this eternal menace to their safety. They till their fields and play with their children and eat their meals and laugh at Charlie Chaplin just like the rest of us. The experience of ages has taught them to build a kind of cardboard house which is perhaps a little draughty in winter but which causes the minimum of danger when it comes tumbling down about its owner’s ears. Of course, when they want to imitate the West and build skyscrapers, as they did in Tokyo, then the damage runs into the hundreds of millions. But, generally speaking, Japan has adapted itself better than any other country to this inevitable geological handicap. Just as, generally speaking, they seem to have succeeded in making life a much more harmonious and agreeable adventure than most of the nations of the West. I am not thinking of the pretty post cards with little geisha girls drinking tea underneath a cherry tree, or the toy gardens of Madame Butterfly. I am merely repeating what all travellers have told us who visited Japan before it gave up its ancestral customs and habits and, manners (the manners especially seem to have been exquisite) and tried to turn its islands into suburbs of Birmingham or Chicago. As that incredible change from the old Japan unto the new will more and more influence the safety and happiness of other nations, we ought to know at least a few things about these people.

  Japanese history is of much more recent date than Chinese. The Chinese calendar goes back to 2637 b.c. (about the time Cheops was building his little pyramid) but the oldest Japanese chronicle dates back only to a.d. 400. At that time the present so-called Japanese race was already in existence. Strictly speaking, however, there is no ‘Japanese race,’ for, like the English, the Japanese are a mixture. The original inhabitants were the Ainos, who were gradually driven to the more remote northern islands by three successive waves of invaders from southern China and the Malayan peninsula, from Central China, and from Manchuria and Korea. As a result the original civilization of Japan was really an extension of Chinese civilization, and whatever the Japanese knew they had learned from the Chinese.

  JAPAN

  Their relations with China grew even more intimate when Japan followed the Chinese example and allowed herself to be converted to Buddhism. But when a new creed replaces an older one, the new creed cannot help being influenced to a certain extent at least by the older one. That is a lesson all missionaries have been obliged to learn, whether they preached Christianity, Mohammedanism, or Buddhism.

  The first Buddhist apostles who reached Japan in the sixth century of our era found that the Japanese had developed a religious system which had grown out of their own soil, so to speak, and which was very well suited to their needs. It was called Shintoism, from the word Shinto, which seems to be the equivalent of our expression ‘the divine pathway.’ It was a much nobler creed than the spook and devil worship so prevalent over the rest of Asia. It accepted the world as a unit of indestructible force, and taught that we are responsible for whatever use we make of that force, because, no matter how insignificant the result may be, it will be a permanent result. The present official creed of Japan is a mixture of Buddhism and Shintoism. It lays great stress upon one’s duty towards the community at large. Like the Englishman, the Japanese, who is also essentially an island-dweller (without necessarily being an insular person), has a very sincere and deep-seated conviction that he owes his country certain very definite duties. Shintoism also lays stress upon the respect due to ancestors. But it does not carry this veneration to the point of absurdity which tarns so much of China into a vast cemetery where the dead rule the living and where the graveyards occupy the space that should be used to cultivate food for the living.

  But the great cleavage between Chinese and Japanese civilization did not take place until much later, not until the latter half of the sixteenth century when, after an endless period of quarrelling and fighting between little independent potentates who paid no more attention to their Emperor than a knight of the Holy Roman Empire did to his, the government fell at last into the hands of a man of power.

  Eight hundred years before, in far-away Europe, the major-domos or house-stewards of the old Frankish kings had pushed their masters into a monastery and had then taken it upon themselves to rule the country. As they were much better fitted for the job than the men they replaced, nobody had objected. The Japanese people, having endured civil war for almost four centuries, did not care who ruled them as long as they got peace. And so they did not object or rush to the defence of their hereditary rulers when the highest official of the Imperial Court, the head of the rich and influential Tokugawa family, made himself the dictator of the country. This Japanese major-domo promoted the Emperor to a sort of godship on earth; he was to be the spiritual father of all the Japanese, but of such remote spiritual perfection that, like the Lamas of Tibet, he must for ever remain invisible to the mass of his subjects.

  This arrangement lasted almost two entire centuries. The Shoguns (the tide by which these dictators or commanders-in-chief were known) ruled in Tokyo, and the Emperors idled their time away behind their costly screens in the silent palace of Kyoto. It was during the Shogun era that Japan adopted that strict feudal system which was to influence the character of her people in so profound a way that even to-day, after almost eighty years of industrialism, the Japanese are still feudalists at heart, and contemplate th
e problems of life from an angle that is totally different from that of their European and American competitors. It took some time to perfect the details of this new arrangement, but after 1600 Japanese society was divided definitely into three different groups. The highest of these castes consisted of the Daimyos, members of the feudal nobility, the big landowners. The second consisted of the Samurai, hereditary warriors corresponding to the knights of medieval Europe. All other people belonged to the third caste, that of the Heimin or commoners.

  This system was not ideal, but history has quite convincingly taught us that the mass of the population is never deeply interested in any theory of government. All the average citizen asks is “Does it work? Does it guarantee me peace and quiet and give me the assurance that whatever I have gained through my own efforts and in the sweat of my brow will actually belong to me and that no one can take it away from me without due process of law?”

  And for more than two centuries the system did work. The Shogun was recognized as the political leader of the State. The Mikado was worshipped as the spiritual head of the nation. The Daimyos and the Samurai, forced to adhere to a very strict code of noblesse oblige, either did what was expected of them or were politely requested to disembowel themselves according to the most solemn rites of hara-kiri. And the subjects laboured at their different trades and professions.