And how explain these unaesthetic phenomena?  By the fact that Japan has long remained in a state of primitive development.  Speech is but the verbal expression of life.  Every primitive society is characterized by a bald literalism shocking to the aesthetic sense of societies which represent a higher stage of culture.  In Japan, until recently, little effort has been made to keep out of sight objects and acts which we of the West have considered disagreeable and repulsive.  Language alters more slowly than acts.  Laws are making changes in the latter, and they in time will take effect in the former.  But many decades will doubtless pass before the cultivated classes of Japan will reach, in this respect, the standard of the corresponding classes of the West.

As for the aesthetics of conduct in Japan, enough is indicated by what has been said already concerning the aesthetics of speech.  Speech and conduct are but diverse expressions of the same inner life.  Japanese etiquette has been fashioned on the feudalistic theory of society, with its numberless gradations of inferior and superior.  Assertive individualism, while allowed a certain range among the samurai, always had its well-marked limits.  The mass of the people were compelled to walk a narrow line of respectful obedience and deference both in form and speech.  The constant aim of the inferior was to please the superior.  That individuals of an inferior rank had any inherent rights, as opposed to those of a superior rank, seldom occurred to them.  Furthermore, this whole feudal system, with its characteristic etiquette of conduct and speech, was authoritatively taught by moralists and religious leaders, and devoutly believed by the noblest of the land.  Ethical considerations, therefore, combined powerfully with those that were social and aesthetic to produce “the most polite race on the face of the globe.”  Recent developments of rudeness and discourtesy among themselves and toward foreigners have emphasized my general contention that these characteristics are not due to inherent race nature, but rather to the social order.

How are we to account for the wide aesthetic development of all classes of the Japanese?  As already suggested, the beautiful scenery explains much.  But I pass at once to the significant fact that although the classes of Japanese society were widely differentiated in social rank, yet they lived in close proximity to each other.  There was no spatial gulf of separation preventing the lower from knowing fully and freely the thoughts, ideals, and customs of the upper classes.  The transmission of culture was thus an easy matter, in spite of social gradations.