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Updated: June 6, 2025
It is much to be feared that our small stock of knowledge of ancient Japanese art will never be greatly increased, as the whole country and the people are becoming modernised and Europeanised to such an extent that it appears probable there will soon be little indigenous art left in the country.
The Church must first awaken out of her sleep and her European emptiness, and then Europe will come again to life. The Church has failed, not because she was not Europeanised, but just because she was too much Europeanised. Instead of inspiring Europe she was inspired by Europe, i.e. emptied by the empty Europe. The soul obeyed the body and became the body itself.
A few of the streets have been Europeanised in all except the paving, which is everywhere execrably Asiatic to suit the tastes of those who have adopted European culture, but the great majority of them still retain much of their ancient character and primitive irregularity.
And then came the matter of getting uniform, a horse, and a sword, which was accomplished at once, without much difficulty in the shops of Khartoum; and he found himself once more Europeanised. There was no time for delay, as the expedition was to set out in a few days.
Europeans there are in Japan Europeanised Japanese likewise who feel outraged by the action of the Japanese bureaucracy in the matter of the new cult, with all the illiberal and obscurantist measures which it entails. That is natural. We modern Westerners love individual liberty, and the educated among us love to let the sunlight of criticism into every nook and cranny of every subject.
For three hundred years and more the long steadily accelerated diastole of Europeanised civilisation had been in progress: towns had been multiplying, populations increasing, values rising, new countries developing; thought, literature, knowledge unfolding and spreading.
Many of them keep English-bred dogs, as also do some of the more Europeanised natives of other classes, treating them much as we do, though this is still uncommon.
Railways, telegraphs, docks, and gunboats cannot banish it, and it will endure till the railways are dead. He who has not smelt that smell has never lived. Three years ago Yokohama was sufficiently Europeanised in its shops to suit the worst and wickedest taste. To-day it is still worse if you keep to the town limits.
An American as cultivated as Hawthorne, is now almost inevitably more cultivated, and, as a matter of course, more Europeanised in advance, more cosmopolitan. It is very possible that in becoming so, he has lost something of his occidental savour, the quality which excites the goodwill of the American reader of our author's Journals for the dislocated, depressed, even slightly bewildered diarist.
Travellers, however, who wish to see Japan should do so at once; for the country is changing every day, and in three years more will be so Europeanised that little will be left worth seeing; or a violent anti-foreign revulsion of feeling may have taken place, and then the ports will be closed more strictly than they were even before the execution of the first treaty.
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