It is true that Japanese culture, until the Restoration, was derived from China.  To this day, Japanese script is practically the same as Chinese, and Buddhism, which is still the religion of the people, is of the sort derived originally from China.  Loyalty and filial piety, which are the foundations of Japanese ethics, are Confucian virtues, imported along with the rest of ancient Chinese culture.  But even before the irruption of European influences, China and Japan had had such different histories and national temperaments that doctrines originally similar had developed in opposite directions.  China has been, since the time of the First Emperor (c. 200 B.C.), a vast unified bureaucratic land empire, having much contact with foreign nations—­Annamese, Burmese, Mongols, Tibetans and even Indians.  Japan, on the other hand, was an island kingdom, having practically no foreign contact except with Korea and occasionally with China, divided into clans which were constantly at war with each other, developing the virtues and vices of feudal chivalry, but totally unconcerned with economic or administrative problems on a large scale.  It was not difficult to adapt the doctrines of Confucius to such a country, because in the time of Confucius China was still feudal and still divided into a number of petty kingdoms, in one of which the sage himself was a courtier, like Goethe at Weimar.  But naturally his doctrines underwent a different development from that which befel them in their own country.

In old Japan, for instance, loyalty to the clan chieftain is the virtue one finds most praised; it is this same virtue, with its scope enlarged, which has now become patriotism.  Loyalty is a virtue naturally praised where conflicts between roughly equal forces are frequent, as they were in feudal Japan, and are in the modern international world.  In China, on the contrary, power seemed so secure, the Empire was so vast and immemorial, that the need for loyalty was not felt.  Security bred a different set of virtues, such as courtesy, considerateness, and compromise.  Now that security is gone, and the Chinese find themselves plunged into a world of warring bandits, they have difficulty in developing the patriotism, ruthlessness, and unscrupulousness which the situation demands.  The Japanese have no such difficulty, having been schooled for just such requirements by their centuries of feudal anarchy.  Accordingly we find that Western influence has only accentuated the previous differences between China and Japan:  modern Chinese like our thought but dislike our mechanism, while modern Japanese like our mechanism but dislike our thought.