The victory of Japan will have far-reaching effects on the destinies of both Europe and Asia. What role Japan is destined to play in world-politics it is impossible to forecast, for though we know much of the revolution in Japanese institutions we know little or nothing of what kind of revolution has been effected in Japanese habits of thought. The Japanese spirit is still an enigma. Her Titanic struggle with Russia owed its origin to an instinct of self-preservation. It still remains to be seen whether the instinct will develop into ideas of aggrandisement.
Those who have studied the history of Japan╒s adoption of Western ideas know that it was prompted by a far-seeing impulse to provide against her falling a victim to the fate of China. As early as 1873 the Iwakura Embassy on their return from Europe recorded their impression that ╥Russia, always pressing southwards, is the chief peril for Japan.╙
Japan deserted her policy of walled isolation fifty years ago, not from any desire to play a role in world-politics, but because she recognised that only by commercial concessions to the importunities of the United States and the European Powers could she escape such outrages as the sack of the Summer Palace. Her foreign policy until ten years ago was steadily and almost exclusively directed towards escaping the state of international tutelage in which consular jurisdictions and the restrictions on her fiscal independence had placed her.
Whether her ambitions will now grow to the full measure of her strength it is not easy to decide. She remains an enigma. She has adopted Western institutions, but we do not know what she has assimilated of Western ideas. She has the Oriental fatalism without its indolence. She has Western enterprise without Western scepticism, for there can be little doubt that, although she has abandoned the policy of a State religion, she is, like all Oriental countries, profoundly religious. Her patriotism is her religion, a religion as fervent as the cult of the patrae in the armies of the French Revolution.
Intimate students of her temper, like the late Lafcadio Hearn, were themselves puzzled by the strange alloy of oriental qualities with something alien to the Oriental spirit and yet not Western. She has the reverence for Power as divine which Mr. Meredith Townshend, in his illuminating studies of the Asiatic spirit, regards as one of its chief characteristics. One may trace it even in her carefully devised Constitution, modelled though it is on European prototypes.
The inviolability of the Civil List, the extraordinary powers of the Crown to maintain order at the expense of the liberty of the subject and to carry on government by emergency measures without regard to constitutional liberty show that Japan has by no means swallowed European ideas of democracy.
Those who ascribe to Japan an Imperial dream of the hegemony of the Far East are dealing with an unknown quantity. Conjurers of the ╥Yellow Peril╙ assume too readily that Japan is as animated by an idea of racial ascendancy as a Pan-German professor in his classroom. It should not be forgotten that, as Anatole France has profoundly remarked, the spectre of the Yellow Peril is the nightmare of a White one. We Europeans by our Chinese policy have, as he remarks, ╥created the White Peril, and the White Peril has created the Yellow.╙
Remove from the Japanese vision the menace of a White Peril and it is not necessary to assume that she will pour across Asia like the hordes of Tamerlane. That Japanese instructors are enrolled in the Chinese army and Chinese students are studying in the Japanese schools only prove that the two countries are awakening to the solidarity of their interests in the face of Western aggrandisement. What seems probable is that a decisive check will have been set to the disruption of China by the beggar-my-neighbour policy of concessions and spheres of influence. It is not impossible that China will recover her autonomy, as Japan has recovered hers.
