Japanese youths, furthermore, have a fluency in public speech decidedly above anything I have met with in the United States.  Young men of eighteen or twenty years of age deliver long discourses on religion or history or politics, with an apparent ease that their uncouth appearance would not lead one to expect.  In the little school of less than 150 boys in Kumamoto there were more individuals who could talk intelligibly and forcefully on important themes of national policy, the relation of religion and politics, the relation of Japan to the Occident and the Orient, than could be found in either of the two colleges in the United States with which I was connected.  I do not say that they could bring forth original ideas on these topics.  But they could at least remember what they had heard and read and could reproduce the ideas with amazing fluency.

A recent public meeting in Tokyo in which Christian students of the University spoke to fellow-students on the great problems of religion, revealed a power of no mean order in handling the peculiar difficulties encountered by educated young men.  A competent listener, recently graduated from an American university and widely acquainted with American students, declared that those Japanese speakers revealed greater powers of mind and speech than would be found under similar circumstances in the United States.

The fluency with which timid girls pray in public has often surprised me.  Once started, they never seem to hesitate for ideas or words.  The same girls would hardly be able to utter an intelligible sentence in reply to questions put to them by the pastor or the missionary, so faint would be their voices and so hesitating their manner.

The question as to whether the Japanese have powers of generalization receives some light from a study of the language of the people.  An examination of primitive Japanese proves that the race, prior to receiving even the slightest influence from China, had developed highly generalized terms.  It is worth while to call attention here to a simple fact which most writers seem to ignore, namely, that all language denotes and indeed rests on generalization.  Consider the word “uma,” “horse”; this is a name for a whole class of objects, and is therefore the product of a mind that can generalize and express its generalization in a concept which no act of the imagination can picture; the imagination can represent only individuals; the mind that has concepts of classes of things, as, for instance, of horses, houses, men, women, trees, has already a genuine power of generalization.  Let me also call attention to such words as “wake,” “reason”; “mono,” “thing”; “koto,” “fact”; “aru,” “is”; “oro,” “lives”; “aru koto,” “is fact,” or “existence”; “ugoku koto,” “movement”; “omoi,” “thought”; this list might be indefinitely extended.  Let the reader consider whether these words are not highly generalized; yet these are all pure Japanese words, and reveal the development of the Japanese mind before it was in the least influenced by Chinese thought.  Evidently it will not do to assert the entire lack of the power of generalization to the Japanese mind.