Such an absolute change could hardly have taken place in England or America, or any land less subject to waves of emotion.  So far as I could learn, the nation was a unit in regard to the war.  There was not the slightest sign of a “peace party.”  Of all the Japanese with whom I talked only one ever expressed the slightest opposition to the war, and he on religious grounds, being a Quaker.

The strength of the emotional element tends to make the Japanese extremists.  If liberals, they are extremely liberal; if conservative, they are extremely conservative.  The craze for foreign goods and customs which prevailed for several years in the early eighties was replaced by an almost equally strong aversion to anything foreign.

This tendency to swing to extremes has cropped out not infrequently in the theological thinking of Japanese Christians.  Men who for years had done effective work in upbuilding the Church, men who had lifted hundreds of their fellow-countrymen out of moral and religious darkness into light and life, have suddenly, as it has appeared, lost all appreciation of the truths they had been teaching and have swung off to the limits of a radical rationalism, losing with their evangelical faith their power of helping their fellow-men, and in some few cases, going over into lives of open sin.  The intellectual reasons given by them to account for their changes have seemed insufficient; it will be found that the real explanation of these changes is to be sought not in their intellectual, but in their emotional natures.

Care must be taken, however, not to over-emphasize this extremist tendency.  In some respects, I am convinced that it is more apparent than real.  The appearance is due to the silent passivity even of those who are really opposed to the new departure.  It is natural that the advocates of some new policy should be enthusiastic and noisy.  To give the impression to an outsider that the new enthusiasm is universal, those who do not share it have simply to keep quiet.  This takes place to some degree in every land, but particularly so in Japan.  The silence of their dissent is one of the striking characteristics of the Japanese.  It seems to be connected with an abdication of personal responsibility.  How often in the experience of the missionary it has happened that his first knowledge of friction in a church, wholly independent and self-supporting and having its own native pastor, is the silent withdrawal of certain members from their customary places of worship.  On inquiry it is learned that certain things are being done or said which do not suit them and, instead of seeking to have these matters righted, they simply wash their hands of the whole affair by silent withdrawal.