Abstract
A VARIOUS steps in the progress of China and Japan in the adoption of Western science and educational methods have from time to time been noticed in these columns. To the popular mind the names of the two countries are synonymous with rigid unreasoning conservatism and with rapid change respectively. The grave, dignified Chinese, who maintains his own dress and habits even when isolated amongst strangers, and whose motto appears to be, Stare super vias antiquas, is popularly believed to be animated by a sullen, obstinate hostility towards any introduction from the West, however plain its value may be; while his gayer and more mercurial neighbour, the Japanese, is regarded as the true child of the old age of the West, following assiduously in its parent's footsteps, and pursuing obediently the path marked out by European experience. There is considerable misconception in this, as indeed there is at all times in the English popular mind with regard to strange peoples. Broadly speaking, it is no doubt correct to say that Japan has adopted Western inventions and scientific appliances with avidity; that she has shown a desire for change which is abnormal, and a disposition to destroy her charts and sail away into unsurveyed seas, while China remains pretty much where she always was. She is now, with some exceptions, what she was twenty, two hundred, perhaps two thousand years ago, while a new Japan has been created in fifteen years. All this, we say, is true, but it is not the whole truth. China also has had her changes; not indeed so marked or rapid, not so much in the nature of a volte-face on all her past as those of her neighbour. The radical difference between the two countries in this respect we take to be this: that while Japan loves change for the sake of change, China dislikes it, and will only adopt it when it is clearly demonstrated to her that change is absolutely necessary. To the Japanese change appears to be a delightful excitement, to the Chinese a distasteful necessity; to the former whatever is must be wrong, to the latter whatever is is right. As a consequence of this difference between the two peoples, when China once makes a step forward it is generally after much deliberation, and is never retraced. Japan is constantly undertaking new schemes with little care or thought for the morrow, but with the applause of injudicious foreign friends. In a short time she discovers that she has underrated the expense or exaggerated the results, and her projects are straightway abandoned as rapidly and thoughtlessly as they were commenced. Swift suggested as a suitable subject for a philosophical writer a history of human projects which were never carried out; the historian of modern Japan finds these at every turn. Where, for example, are the results of the great surveys, trigonometrical and others, which were commenced in Yezo and the main island about ten years ago? A large, expensive, but highly competent foreign staff was engaged, and worked for a few years; but suddenly the whole survey department was swept away, and the valuable instruments are, or were recently, lying rusting in a warehouse in Tokio. The same story may be told of scores of other scientific or educational undertakings in Japan. An able and careful writer, Col. H. S. Palmer, R.E., who has recently, with a friendly and sympathetic eye, examined the whole field of recent Japanese progress, in the British Quarterly Review, is forced to acknowledge this. “Once having recognised,” says this officer, “that progress is essential to welfare, and having resolved, first amongst the nations of the East, to throw off past traditions and mould their civilisation after that of Western countries, it was not in the nature of the lively and impulsive Japanese to advance along the path of reform with the calmness and circumspection that might have been possible to a people of less active temperament. Without doubt many foreign institutions were at first adopted rather too hastily, and the passing difficulties which now beset Japan are to some extent the inevitable result.” It would be blindness to deny that the net result of the Japanese efforts is progress of a very remarkable kind, but it is a progress which in many respects lacks the firm and abiding characteristics of Chinese movements.
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SINENSIS Scientific Progress in China and Japan . Nature 28, 34–35 (1883). https://doi.org/10.1038/028034b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/028034b0