Lafcadio Hearn's Japan Read Online Free PDF

all the changes of Meiji.
    â€œSuggests” were perhaps a better word than “expresses,” for this race-character is rather to be divined than recognized. Our comprehension of it might be helped by some definite knowledge of origins; but such knowledge we do not yet possess. Ethnologists are agreed that the Japanese race has been formed by a mingling of peoples, and that the dominant element is Mongolian; but this dominant element is represented in two very different types,—one slender and almost feminine of aspect; the other, squat and powerful. Chinese and Korean elements are known to exist in the populations of certain districts; and there appears to have been a large infusion of Aino blood. Whether there be any Malay or Polynesian element also has not been decided. Thus much only can be safely affirmed,—that the race, like all good races, is a mixed one; and that the peoples who originally united to form it have been so blended together as to develop, under long social discipline, a tolerably uniform type of character. This character, though immediately recognizable in some of its aspects, presents us with many enigmas that are very difficult to explain.
    Nevertheless, to understand it better has become a matter of importance. Japan has entered into the world’s competitive struggle; and the worth of any people in that struggle depends upon character quite as much as upon force. We can learn something about Japanese character if we are able to ascertain the nature of the conditions which shaped it,—the great general facts of the moral experience of the race. And these facts we should find expressed or suggested in the history of the national beliefs, and in the history of those social institutions derived from and developed by religion.

The Chief City of
the Province of the Gods
    I
    The first of the noises of a Matsue day comes to the sleeper like the throbbing of a slow, enormous pulse exactly under his ear. It is a great, soft, dull buffet of sound—like a heartbeat in its regularity, in its muffled depth, in the way it quakes up through one’s pillow as to be felt rather than heard. It is simply the pounding of the ponderous pestle of the kometsuki, the cleaner of rice,—a sort of colossal wooden mallet with a handle about fifteen feet long horizontally balanced on a pivot. By treading with all his force on the end of the handle, the naked kometsuki elevates the pestle, which is then allowed to fall back by its own weight into the rice tub. The measured muffled echoing of its fall seems to me the most pathetic of all sounds of Japanese life; it is the beating, indeed, of the Pulse of the Land.
    Then the boom of the great bell of T ō k ō ji, the Zensh Å« temple, shakes over the town; then come melancholy echoes of drumming from the tiny little temple of Jiz ō in the street Zaimokuch ō , near my house, signaling the Buddhist hour of morning prayer. And finally the cries of the earliest itinerant venders begin,— “Daikoyai! kabuya- kabu!” —the sellers of daikon and other strange vegetables. “Moyayamoya!” —the plaintive call of the women who sell little thin slips of kindling-wood for the lighting of charcoal fires.
    II
    Roused thus by these earliest sounds of the city’s wakening life, I slide open my little Japanese paper window to look out upon the morning over a soft green cloud of spring foliage rising from the river-bounded garden below. Before me, tremulously mirroring everything upon its farther side, glimmers the broad glassy mouth of the Ō hashigawa, opening into the grand Shinji Lake, which spreads out broadly to the right in a dim gray frame of peaks. Just opposite to me, across the stream, the blue-pointed Japanese dwellings have their to 1 all closed; they are still shut up like boxes, for it is not yet sunrise, although it is day.
    But oh, the charm of the vision,—those first ghostly love-colors of a