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This progressive Occidentalization of Japan will take place according to the laws of social evolution, of which we must speak somewhat more fully in a later chapter. An important question bearing on this problem is the precise nature of the characteristics differentiating the Occident and the Orient.
The perfect Occidentalization of the army, and the creation of an efficient navy, are facts fully demonstrated to the world. The limited education of the few and in exclusively Chinese classics has given place to popular education. The school accommodation is insufficient; it is said that 30,000 additional teachers are needed at once.
Transmitted civilization works much more slowly, requiring even hundreds of years to produce certain permanent psychological results. It is in this light that Japan appears the most extraordinary country in the world; and the most wonderful thing in the whole episode of her "Occidentalization" is that the race brain could bear so heavy a shock.
Under special circumstances, when a Chinaman has been liberated from the prepossession of his social inheritance, he has shown himself as capable of Occidentalization in clothing, speech, manner, and thought as a Japanese. Such cases, however, are rare. But a still more effective factor in the development of the characteristics under consideration is the nature of Japanese feudalism.
Although the Oriental familiar with the details of the pre-Meiji social order will be impressed with what seems to him the complete Occidentalization of her new civilization and social order, although to-day communalism and individualism are the distinguishing characteristics respectively of the East and the West, they are not necessary characteristics due to inherent race nature.
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