Confrontation, Embarrassment and Reflection: Japan Meets the West

Abstract

In this paper, I try to analyze the cultural gap between Japan and the West from a comparative literary point of view.
After a very long period of national seclusion, Japan was obliged to open herself to the world. The government controlled by warriors soon came to an end and a new era of the Meiji began in 1868. For most progressive people in the Meiji Era it was an urgent necessity to modernize their country and modernization was nearly equivalent to westernization.

On the other side, there were men of letters who did not approve of this hasty westernizing. Okakura Tenshin suggested in The Book of Tea: “Let us stop the continents from hurling epigrams at each other, and be sadder if not wiser by the mutual gain of half a hemisphere.... You have gained expansion at the cost of restlessness; we have created a harmony which is weak against aggression. Will you believe it? −the East is better off in some respects than the West!”

Nitobe Inazo, who served as under secretary general of the League of Nations for seven years, published Bushido: The Soul of Japan in 1899. He appealed that the main motive of Japan’s transformation was Bushido or the code of warriors.

In Silence Endo Shusaku made a quondam missionary observe that “this country is a swamp... . Everything, if it is planted in this swamp, begins to wither from its roots.” Endo once declared, “I grieve that there is no drama where there is no God. My dream as a writer is to make this grief compete against European novels that describe man’s conflict with God.”

It is doubtless that Bushido is no longer the soul of Japan. Besides, foreign ideas have not filtered into Japanese people’s hearts. They are inclined to run after unfruitful pleasures without deep emotion. Japan should earnestly wonder what to do with her heritage and how to communicate with the West.