Closely connected with this sensitiveness to environment are other qualities which make it effective.  They are:  great flexibility, adjustability, agility (both mental and physical), and the powers of keen attention to details and of exact imitation.

As opposed to all this is the Chinese lack of flexibility.  Contrast a Chinaman and a Japanese after each has been in America a year.  The one to all appearances is an American; his hat, his clothing, his manner, seem so like those of an American that were it not for his small size, Mongolian type of face, and defective English, he could easily be mistaken for one.  How different is it with the Chinaman!  He retains his curious cue with a tenacity that is as intense as it is characteristic.  His hat is the conventional one adopted by all Chinese immigrants.  His clothing likewise, though far from Chinese, is nevertheless entirely un-American.  He makes no effort to conform to his surroundings.  He seems to glory in his separateness.

The Japanese desire to conform to the customs and appearances of those about him is due to what I have called sensitiveness; his success is due to the flexibility of his mental constitution.

But this characteristic is seen in multitudes of little ways.  The new fashion of wearing the hair according to the Western styles; of wearing Western hats, and Western clothing, now universal in the army, among policemen, and common among officials and educated men; the use of chairs and tables, lamps, windows, and other Western things is due in no small measure to that flexibility of mind which readily adopts new ideas and new ways; is ready to try new things and new words, and after trial, if it finds them convenient or useful or even amusing, to retain them permanently, and this flexibility is, in part, the reason why the Japanese are accounted a fickle people.  They accept new ways so easily that those who do not have this faculty have no explanation for it but that of fickleness.  A frequent surprise to a missionary in Japan is that of meeting a fine-looking, accomplished gentleman whom he knew a few years before as a crude, ungainly youth.  I am convinced that it is the possession of this set of characteristics that has enabled Japan so quickly to assimilate many elements of an alien civilization.

Yet this flexibility of mind and sensitiveness to changed conditions find some apparently striking exceptions.  Notable among these are the many customs and appliances of foreign nations which, though adopted by the people, have not been completely modified to suit their own needs.  In illustration is the Chinese ideograph, for the learning of which even in the modern common-school reader, there is no arrangement of the characters in the order of their complexity.  The possibility of simplifying the colossal task of memorizing these uncorrelated ideographs does not seem to have occurred to the Japanese; though it is now being attempted by the foreigner.  Perhaps a partial explanation of this apparent exception to the usual flexibility of the people in meeting conditions may be found in their relative lack of originality.  Still I am inclined to refer it to a greater sensitiveness of the Japanese to the personal and human, than to the impersonal and physical environment.