The Home of Mankind

by Hendrik Willem van Loon

  Even then the country was getting to be slightly overcrowded. Often the people were obliged to subsist on very little. But they had always been very sober and frugal in their tastes and did not ask for much. And Nature appeared to be a faithful friend. The Kuro Siwo (which means the Blue Salt Current, a sort of second cousin to. the Gulf Stream) which started in the equatorial region just north of the Dutch East Indies, flowed past the Philippines and then crossed the Pacific to bestow its blessings upon the west coast of America, provided the south-east of the country with an even climate. But north of Yokohama, where the trend of the islands is due north, the cold Kuvile Current washes the eastern shore. Fogs are frequent off the coasts of Honshu and Hokkaido where the two currents meet, and harbours are frozen in winter. The moderating effect of the winds, which are southeast only in summer and north-westerly in winter, is confined to the summer months, and to the south coasts, for the winter winds from the continent are cold. But even so Japan is much better off than continental China.

  Everything, so it seemed, was in favour of a normal and rational development of those blessed islands when a certain Mendes Pinto, a Portuguese navigator who had lost his bearings, appeared upon the scene and upset the entire future course of Japanese history. For the Portuguese not only visited distant countries to trade with them, but also to bring them the enlightened blessings of their own religious system.

  At first, unless all chronicles have agreed to lie upon this one point, the Christian missionaries, whose headquarters were in Goa, in India, and in Macao, near Canton in China, were received with great courtesy and were given every opportunity to explain the advantages of their own creed over that which for so long had ruled supreme among the Japanese. They preached their gospel and they made many converts. Then other missionaries, belonging to a different religious order, arrived from the adjacent Philippine Islands, which belonged to Spain. They too were welcomed, but the Shogun began to feel uneasy about their presence when he discovered (what native prince has ever failed to make that discovery sooner or later?) that these holy men were invariably accompanied by less holy men, clad in armour and carrying strange iron rods that would send heavy leaden bullets through as many as three common Japanese soldiers at the same time.

  It is only during the last fifty years that we have begun to understand the Japanese point of view about the very painful incidents which thereupon happened. These incidents have given the Japanese a reputation for cold-blooded cruelty which, did not seem in the least in keeping with what we had learned about them from other sources. The decision of the Shogun to close Japan against all further activities on the part of the Christian missionaries was not the result of any sudden dislike on his part for the people from the West. It was caused by fear, by fear lest the whole country be rent asunder by religious strife and its riches be despoiled by the captains of those same merchantmen that carried the messengers of peace and goodwill to the shores of Japan and then departed without paying for the goods that had been ordered to provide a return cargo.

  THE OLD JAPAN

  The Jesuit influence had been strongest in the island of Kyushu, nearest to the Portuguese settlements in China. At first the Fathers had humbly spoken of the Prince of Peace. As soon as they had gained the upper hand they began to destroy Japanese temples, demolish Japanese images, and force thousands of peasants and nobles to accept the Cross at the point of the gun.

  Toyotomi Hideyoshi, then the strong man of Japan, saw all this and realized what the inevitable end must be. “These priests,” so he announced, “came here preaching virtue, but their virtue is only a means of concealing their pernicious designs against our Empire.”

  On July 25, 1587, five years after a first Japanese embassy had paid its respects to the Pope and to the Kings of Spain and Portugal, an edict was published ordering all Christian priests to leave Japanese territory. This edict was not enforced rigorously, and ten years later there were 137 Jesuit priests in Japan. In 1593 a party of Spanish Franciscans arrived and were well received, but the rival missionaries stirred up trouble and Hideyoshi issued another edict, which again was evaded.

  And so it went on through the reigns of various Shoguns until at last persecution became severe; in 1638 some 37,000 Christians were massacred, and a few years later the country was closed against all foreigners. Christian missionaries and foreign merchants who disregarded the edicts were summarily executed.

  During well nigh a century and a half Japan remained in a state of voluntary exile from the rest of the world. Almost, but not completely. One little window remained open through which a great deal of Japanese gold flowed westward, and through which at least a few scraps of Western science penetrated into the interior of that strange country. The Dutch East India Company had been a rival of the Portuguese for Japan’s commercial favours. But the Dutch were traders, pure and simple, and had but little interest in other people’s souls.

  After the execution of the last of a series of Portuguese diplomatic missions sent to Japan, an inexcusable official murder, the Dutch too were deprived of many of their former privileges. But as long as their Japanese venture paid an annual dividend of almost eighty per cent. they decided to hang on. They were forced to reside on the little island of Desbima, a square rock 300 yards long and 80 yards wide, situated in the harbour of Nagasaki, and hardly big enough to exercise the dogs they brought with them to keep them company. They were not allowed to bring their wives, and were never permitted to set foot on the mainland.

  They must for once have been possessed of the patience of the angels (not usually a national characteristic), for the slightest infringement of any of the hundreds of regulations laid down by the Japanese authorities brought immediate reprisals. One day the East India Company decided to build a new storehouse. The date, according to the custom of the times, was painted on the façade with the usual prefix a.d., or Anno Domini. As this was a direct reference to the Dominus of those Christians whom the Japanese had come to regard as we ourselves regard Bolshevist agitators fresh from Moscow, the Shogun gave orders not only to remove the offensive letters but to tear the entire building down and to remind the Dutch of that terrible edict of expulsion of the Portuguese which had ended with the words:

  “As long as the sun warms the earth, let no Christian be so bold as to come to Japan, and let all people know that if King Philip himself or even the very God of the Christians break this commandment, they shall pay for it with their heads.”

  The officials of the Dutch East India Company seem to have taken the lesson to heart, because Desbima remained in Dutch hands for 217 years. During those 217 years there was a steady drain of Japanese gold and silver, for the Dutch were cash traders, and whatever the Japanese ordered from abroad had to be paid for on delivery.

  THE NEW JAPAN

  In this way, too, Europe got an occasional bit of news from these hermits of the Pacific. These stories agree that conditions in the Empire were far from satisfactory. Japan was rapidly becoming an object lesson of the doctrine that no nation can ever hope to be completely sufficient unto itself. Towards the end, too, the youth of Japan were beginning to grow increasingly restive. They had heard vague stories about the wonderful science of western Europe. They began to smuggle in scientific and medical works by way of Desbima. They spelled out queer Dutch words, and learned that the world at large had been moving at a terrific pace while Japan alone had stood still.

  Then in 1847 the King of Holland sent a trunkful of scientific books to the Court of Yedo as a present, together with a map of the world, warning the Japanese against the further folly of isolation. All this time commercial relations between China and Europe and America were rapidly developing. Vessels bound from San Francisco for Canton sometimes suffered shipwreck on the Japanese coast, and the sailors, being without consular or diplomatic protection, fared rather badly. In 1849 the captain of an American man-of-war threatened to bombard Nagasaki unless eighteen American seamen were returned to him at once. Once more the King
of Holland warned Japan against the dangers of continuing a policy that could only lead to disaster. These letters from The Hague merely expressed what all the world had long since known. Sooner or later Japan would have to open her doors to Western commerce, and if she refused to do so peaceably she would be obliged to do so by force.

  Russia, which was slowly pushing farther and farther down the coast of Alaska, was slowly making plans to increase its hold upon the western Pacific. The only country that could act without being suspected of having territorial ambitions was America. In 1853 Commodore Perry, with four warships and 560 men, entered Uraga harbour. This first visit caused a panic such as Japan had never experienced. The Emperor officially invoked the aid of Heaven, and as soon as Perry was gone (he remained only ten days to deliver a letter from the President to the Emperor) the Dutch were requested to furnish a warship, forts were manned, old Portuguese guns were mounted, and everything was done to prepare for a second visit of these steam-propelled monsters from the east.

  All over the country the people took sides. Most of them were in favour of isolation at all costs, but others declared for the policy of the open door. The Shogun, belonging to the latter, lost much of his power and was denounced as a “friend of the foreigners.” But in the end it was the Emperor who benefited most from that ever-famous visit of Admiral Perry.

  The Shogunate, as the undisputed head of an absolutely feudal system of government, had long since outlived its own usefulness, as had those Daimyos and Samurai who still insisted upon carrying their swords as if they lived in 1653 instead of 1853, and were still actually engaged in the laudable task of suppressing civil war. It was time for a change all along the line.

  By mere chance it so happened that the Emperor, who was then the nominal head of the nation, was also a young man of extraordinary ability and great intelligence. He prevailed upon the Shogun to resign and once more took hold of the reins of government. He let himself be persuaded that further isolation meant suicide, and now welcomed all foreigners as cordially as before that he had repelled them. And the Meiji, or era of enlightenment, which he inaugurated changed Japan from a sixteenth-century feudal state into a modern, industrialized nation.

  To ask whether such a complete reversion of feelings on such a tremendous scale is ever a good and desirable thing for any people is to pose a useless question. Factories and large armies and large navies and coal mines and steel foundries may make for happiness or they may not. I don’t know. Some say yes and others say no. It will always depend a great deal upon the individuals in question. The Russians ten years ago nursed their souls and loved their saints. To-day they burn their saints in the kitchen stove and their souls now dwell with perfect contentment in the exhaust pipe of an engine.

  Personally I believe that such developments are absolutely inevitable. In themselves they are neither absolutely good nor absolutely bad, because they are necessary and are part of that development by which we hope to set ourselves free from the worries of hunger and the fear of economic uncertainty. That the machine, who is both the lather and the mother of such a change, also destroys a great deal that is desirable and beautiful no one will dare to deny. That the Japan of Hokusai and Utamaro would have been a much more interesting country to visit than the Japan of the Japanese standard oil and the Tokyo gasworks is undeniably true. But Hokusai and Utamaro are dead and gone, and the Tokyo housewives prefer cooking with gas to cooking over a slow charcoal fire, and that is the answer.

  Fujiyama, the venerable, white-haired volcano which has not spoken a word since 1707, now looks down upon cigarette posters where formerly little children offered flowers at a wayside shrine. The holy deer in the temple park hurt their feet on tin cans thrown away by careless picnic parties.

  But Fuji knows—some day this too will come to an end.

  Chapter XL

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  THE PHILIPPINES, AN OLD ADMINISTRATIVE PART OF MEXICO

  I he Philippines belong to that row of islands which runs in a semicircle from Kamchatka to Java. These bits of dry land are remnants of the outer edge of the old continent. They were high enough to remain above sea-level when the waters of the Pacific covered the bottom of those valleys since then known as the Sea of Japan, the East China sea, and the South China sea.

  There are more than 7000 islands in the Philippine group, but only 462 of these are bigger than a square mile. The others are merely large cliffs or little bits of marshland, so insignificant that only one-quarter of them have even been given a name. All of them together are about as large as England and Scotland, and they have a population of 11,000,000 natives, with a very large number of Chinese and Japanese and about 100,000 whites. This whole group at one time must have been highly volcanic, although to-day we can only distinguish twenty-five real volcanoes. Even those, with two or three exceptions, seem to have stopped working at their trade.

  For this we ought to be duly grateful, as the Philippines are very dangerously situated from a geological point of view. The deepest hole in the ocean which we have so far been able to locate lies just east of the Philippines. That is the spot of which I told you and which is so deep that if we used it as a burial ground for the Himalayas the top of Mount Everest, the highest mountain of our planet, would still be over 6000 feet under water. If things should ever begin to slide in that little corner of the world there would be few left to tell the tale.

  The most important of the Philippine islands is Luzon. It has the shape of a polliwog, and in the centre rises to a height of 9000 feet. The most important city and the capital of the whole group is situated on the west coast of Luzon, and its name is Manila. The Spaniards founded it in 1571, on the ruins of an old Mohammedan settlement, and it is called after a weed, the nilad, which grew abundantly all over the place. In the year 1590 it was given those walls which were to prove more endurable than the rule of those who built them.

  But even under the bad Spanish management Manila soon developed into the most important commercial centre of the Far East. The harbour was foil of boats from China and Japan and India, and even from faraway Arabia. They came to this port to exchange their merchandise for the European products which the Spaniards had brought to the Philippines by way of their Mexican possessions in Central America. For, rather than risk the voyage across the Indian Ocean and by way of the Cape, which would have exposed them to the attacks of the British and the Dutch, the Spaniards sent their vessels directly from Manila to the Gulf of Tehuantepec, then carried the goods across the American isthmus, and on the other side reloaded them into vessels that sailed for home by way of Cuba and Porto Rico.

  To the south of Luzon lie a dozen fairly large islands, of which Samar and Panay (with the city of Iloilo, the second largest city of the Philippines) and Negros and Cebú are the best known. To the south of these lies Mindanao, only a little smaller than Luzon, and famous for the stubborn resistance with which the natives, the Mohammedan Moros, have fought both Spaniard and American to retain their independence. The biggest city of Mindanao is Zamboanga, which faces the Sulu Sea, for, generally speaking, the Philippines have always turned their back upon the Pacific. Their real interests lay in the west, they traded with the West, and it was from the West that they got their religion and their first concepts of civilization. That they were discovered by people who approached them from the east was pure accident.

  Magellan, who landed here in 1521, had merely taken this unusual route to settle a point of law that was threatening difficulties between his employer, the King of Spain, and the Pope. In 1494 the Pope, in order to make an end to all farther strife between his beloved children of the Iberian peninsula, had taken a ruler and had divided the whole world into two equal parts by drawing a line from the north to the south just west of the Azores and the Cape Verde Islands (roughly corresponding to our fiftieth degree of longitude west of Greenwich). He hail given the Spaniards everything to the west of that line, and the Portuguese everything to the east. That was the famous treaty of Tordesi
llus upon which the Spaniards based their right to execute all those who dared to pass ‘beyond the line,’ and which made the first English, and Dutch expeditions to the American mainland such very hazardous enterprises, for whoever was caught ‘beyond the line’ was immediately hanged like a common pirate.

  The Pope, however, who had made this venture in applied geography, the notorious Alexander VI, the father of Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia, was himself a Spaniard, and the Portuguese claimed that the treaty had not been quite fair to their interests. Hence a century of wrangling and fighting as to who owned what. In connexion with this quarrel Magellan, although a Portuguese, had been employed by the King of Spain to proceed to the Indian Ocean by way of the eastern route and to decide whether the rich spice islands of the Moluccas lay within that part of the Indies which the Pope had given to the Portuguese or to the Spaniards. The Portuguese proved, to be right. They got the Moluccas, which shortly afterwards they lost to the Dutch; but the Spaniards, who had come upon the Philippines in this accidental way, kept them for their own benefit and administered them from Mexico. This meant a wholesale exodus of friars from the New Castile to a territory that promised more profitable results than would ever be obtained among the fast dwindling races of Central America.

  The friars, it must be confessed, did a thorough job among their Filipino charges. Indeed, if they had only been a little less successful the task of the United States in the Philippines would have been a good deal easier. For when the United States acquired those ancient Spanish possessions in 1898 the Americans were for the first time in their political existence called upon to deal with a people who were almost 100% Catholic.