In discussing Japanese philosophical ability, a point often forgotten is the rarity of philosophical ability or even interest in the West.  But a small proportion of college students have the slightest interest in philosophical or metaphysical problems.  The majority do not understand what the distinctive metaphysical problems are.  In my experience it is easier to enter into a conversation with an educated man in Japan on a philosophical question than with an American.  If interest in philosophical and metaphysical questions in the West is rare, original ability in their investigation is still rarer.

We conclude, then, that in regard to philosophical ability the Japanese have no marked racial characteristic differentiating them from other races.  Although they have not developed a distinctive national philosophy, this is not due to inherent philosophical incompetence.  Nor, on the other hand, is the relatively wide interest now manifest in philosophical problems attributable to the inherent philosophical ability of the race.  So far as Japan is either behind or in advance of other races, in this respect, it is due to her social order and social inheritance, and particularly to the nature, methods, and aims of the educational system, but not to her intrinsic psychic inheritance.

XXI

IMAGINATION

In no respect, perhaps, have the Japanese been more sweepingly criticised by foreigners than in regard to their powers of imagination and idealism.  Unqualified generalizations not only assert the entire lack of these powers, but they consider this lack to be the distinguishing inherent mental characteristic of the race.  The Japanese are called “prosaic,” “matter-of-fact,” “practical,” “unimaginative.”

Mr. Walter Dening, describing Japanese mental characteristics, says: 

“Neither their past history nor their prevailing tastes show any tendency to idealism.  They are lovers of the practical and the real; neither the fancies of Goethe nor the reveries of Hegel are to their liking.  Our poetry and our philosophy and the mind that appreciates them are alike the results of a network of subtle influences to which the Japanese are comparative strangers.  It is maintained by some, and we think justly, that the lack of idealism in the Japanese mind renders the life of even the most cultivated a mechanical, humdrum affair when compared with that of Westerners.  The Japanese cannot understand why our controversialists should wax so fervent over psychological, ethical, religious, and philosophical questions, failing to perceive that this fervency is the result of the intense interest taken in such subjects.  The charms that the cultured Western mind finds in the world of fancy and romance, in questions themselves, irrespective of their practical bearings, is for the most part unintelligible to the Japanese."[AP]

Mr. Percival Lowell expends an entire chapter in his “Soul of the Far East,” in showing how important imagination is as a factor in art, religion, science, and civilization generally, and how strikingly deficient Japanese are in this faculty.  “The Far Orientals,” he argues, “ought to be a particularly unimaginative set of people.  Such is precisely what they are.  Their lack of imagination is a well-recognized fact."[AQ]