Mr. Percival Lowell has said that “Sense may not be vital to religion, but incense is."[BX] In my judgment, this is the essence of nonsense, and is fitted to incense a man’s sense.

The impression that the Japanese people are not religious is due to various facts.  The first is that for about three hundred years the intelligence of the nation has been dominated by Confucian thought, which rejects active belief in supra-human beings.  When asked by his pupils as to the gods, Confucius is reported to have said that men should respect them, but should have nothing to do with them.  The tendency of Confucian ethics, accordingly, is to leave the gods severely alone, although their existence is not absolutely denied.  When Confucianism became popular in Japan, the educated part of the nation broke away from Buddhism, which, for nearly a thousand years, had been universally dominant.  To them Buddhism seemed superstitious in the extreme.  It was not uncommon for them to criticise it severely.  Muro Kyu-so,[BY] speaking of the immorality that was so common in the native literature, says:  “Long has Buddhism made Japan to think of nothing as important except the worship of Buddha.

So it is that evil customs prevail, and there is no one who does not find pleasure in lust....  Take out the lust and Buddhism from that book, and the scenery and emotions are well described....  Had he learned in the ‘Way’ of the sages, he had not fallen into Buddhism."[BZ] The tendency of all persons trained in Confucian classics was toward thoroughgoing skepticism as to divine beings and their relation to this world.  For this reason, beyond doubt, has Western agnosticism found so easy an entrance into Japan.  This ready acceptance of Western agnosticism is a second fact that has tended to give the West the impression referred to above.  Complete indifference to religion is characteristic of the educated classes of to-day.  Japanese and foreigners, Christians and non-Christians, alike, unite in this opinion.  The impression usually conveyed by this statement, however, is that agnosticism is a new thing in Japan.  In point of fact, the old agnosticism is merely re-enforced by the support it receives from the agnosticism of the West.

The Occidental impression of Japanese irreligious race nature is further strengthened by the frequent assertion of it by writers, some of whom at least are neither partial nor ignorant.  Prof.  Basil H. Chamberlain, for instance, repeatedly makes the assertion or necessitates the inference.  Speaking of pilgrimages, he remarks that the Japanese “take their religion lightly.”  Discussing the general question of religion, he speaks of the Japanese as “essentially undevotional,” but he guards against the inference that they are therefore specially immoral.  Yet, in the same paragraph, he adds, “Though they pray little and make light of supernatural dogma, the religion of the family binds them down in truly social bonds.”  Percival Lowell also, as we have seen, makes light of Japanese religion.