There can be no doubt the writers quoted above have drawn attention to some salient features of Japanese art.  In the literature of the past, the people have not manifested that high literary imagination that we discover in the best literature of many other nations.

This fact, however, will not justify the sweeping generalizations based upon it.  Judging from the pre-Elizabethan literature, who would have expected the brilliancy of the Elizabethan period?  Similarly in regard to the Victorian period of English literature.  Because the Japanese have failed in the past to produce literature equal to the best of Western lands, we are not justified in asserting that she never will and that she is inherently deficient in literary imagination.  In regard to certain forms of light fancy, all admit that Japanese poems are unsurpassed by those of other lands.  Japanese amative poetry is noted for its delicate fancies and plays on words exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, of translation, or even of expression, to one unacquainted with the language.

The deficiencies of Japanese literature, therefore, are not such as to warrant the conclusion that they both mark and make a fundamental difference in the race mind.  For such differences as exist are capable of a sociological explanation.

The prosaic matter-of-factness of the Japanese mind has been so widely emphasized that we need not dwell upon it here.  There is, however, serious danger of over-emphasis, a danger into which all writers fall who make it the ground for sweeping condemnatory criticism.

They are right in ascribing to the average Japanese a large amount of unimaginative matter-of-factness, but they are equally wrong in unqualified dogmatic generalizations.  They base their inductions on insufficient facts, a habit to which foreigners are peculiarly liable, through ignorance of the language and also of the inner thoughts and life of the people.

The prosaic nature of the Japanese has not impressed me so much as the visionary tendency of the people, and their idealism.  The Japanese themselves count this idealism a national characteristic.  They say that they are theorizers, and numberless experiences confirm this view.

They project great undertakings; they scheme; they discuss contingencies; they make enormous plans; all with an air of seriousness and yet with a nonchalance which shows a semi-conscious sense of the unreality of their proposals.  In regard to Korea and China and Formosa, they have hatched political and business schemes innumerable.  The kaleidoscopic character of Japanese politics is in part due to the rapid succession of visionary schemes.  One idea reigns for a season, only to be displaced by another, causing constant readjustment of political parties.  Frequent attacks on government foreign policy depend for their force on lordly ideas as to the part Japan should play in international relations.  Writing about the recent