Japanese Traits
and Foreign Influences
BY INAZO NITOBE
Professor in the Imperial University of Tokyo
WITH A COLOURED FRONTISPIECE
LONDON:
KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & CO. LTD.
BROADWAY IIOUSE: 68-74, CARTER LANE, E.C.
1927
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CONTENTS
PREFACE eee fr i Ape
THE CHANGING ORIENT ...
SoME TRAITS OF ORIENTAL MENTALITY
Curna’s CULTURAL INFLUENCE ON JAPAN:
WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO HER
LANGUAGE
THe Morat Basis OF JAPANESE
MonarcHY
On TEAISM ...
On Harku ...
An Eastern IDEA OF CHARITY ...
AN ORIENTAL CHRISTIAN’S VIEW OF THE Race PROBLEM ...
Can THE East AND WEST EvER MEET?
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PREFACE
As must be apparent from its disconnected chapters,
the present volume consists of essays and lectures
prepared from time to time in the course of the last
five years. They have, however, been entirely
rewritten so that they betray their original form
only by traces of local allusion and by the general
lines of argument. Chapters I, II, V, VI, and VII
were first delivered in Geneva to mixed audiences
of international character; but the time usually
allotted to a lecture did not allow as full a
presentation as I wished to make. Chapter III is
the development of an essay written for the report
on the Intellectual Life of Various Countries,
published by the League of Nations. Chapter IV
was a lecture given in Stockholm under the auspices
of the Swedish Japanese Society; but the com-
parison between the printed copy of the lecture and
this chapter will show a marked difference—not
indeed in idea but in the manner of treatment.
Chapter VII is an enlargement of a short article
primarily prepared at the request of the Inter-
national League of Red Cross Societies. Finally,
Chapter IX consists partly of articles contributed
to the Amsterdam newspaper De Telegraaf.
Finding that interest in the ways and thoughts
of an Oriental people is more wide-spread than the
public I have been privileged to reach by the
lectures, I have now collected them in their present
form.
Though they were first prepared without
reference to one another, being the work of one
mind and treating different phases of the life and
thought of one people, these attempts at interpreta-
tion will, I hope, throw some light on different
angles of the selfsame subject—the Japanese Mind.
I feel under great obligation to my wife for going
carefully over my manuscripts and asking questions
on obscure points, and to Miss K. I. Stafford for
her kind assistance in the final details connected
with the issue of the book. For the original of the
frontispiece, which represents the essential part of
the Japanese coronation, I am indebted to Professor
Sekine’s studious work on the subject.
I am well aware that I have opened to English
readers no new storehouse of Oriental knowledge,
nor adorned an old and oft-repeated story in a way
fit for amusement or instruction. My sole plea is
the cultivation of a sympathetic understanding
between peoples trained at opposite poles of
tradition.
INAZO NITOBE
CANNES ON THE RIVIERA
January 28, 1927
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