The civilization of Japan, in its material aspect, is similar to that of the West, though industrialism, as yet, is not very developed.  But in its mental aspect it is utterly unlike the West, particularly the Anglo-Saxon West.  Worship of the Mikado, as an actually divine being, is successfully taught in every village school, and provides the popular support for nationalism.  The nationalistic aims of Japan are not merely economic; they are also dynastic and territorial in a mediaeval way.  The morality of the Japanese is not utilitarian, but intensely idealistic.  Filial piety is the basis, and includes patriotism, because the Mikado is the father of his people.  The Japanese outlook has the same kind of superstitious absence of realism that one finds in thirteenth-century theories as to the relations of the Emperor and the Pope.  But in Europe the Emperor and the Pope were different people, and their quarrels promoted freedom of thought; in Japan, since 1868, they are combined in one sacred person, and there are no internal conflicts to produce doubt.

Japan, unlike China, is a religious country.  The Chinese doubt a proposition until it is proved to be true; the Japanese believe it until it is proved to be false.  I do not know of any evidence against the view that the Mikado is divine.  Japanese religion is essentially nationalistic, like that of the Jews in the Old Testament.  Shinto, the State religion, has been in the main invented since 1868,[88] and propagated by education in schools. (There was of course an old Shinto religion, but most of what constitutes modern Shintoism is new.) It is not a religion which aims at being universal, like Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam; it is a tribal religion, only intended to appeal to the Japanese.  Buddhism subsists side by side with it, and is believed by the same people.  It is customary to adopt Shinto rites for marriages and Buddhist rites for funerals, because Buddhism is considered more suitable for mournful occasions.  Although Buddhism is a universal religion, its Japanese form is intensely national,[89] like the Church of England.  Many of its priests marry, and in some temples the priesthood is hereditary.  Its dignitaries remind one vividly of English Archdeacons.

The Japanese, even when they adopt industrial methods, do not lose their sense of beauty.  One hears complaints that their goods are shoddy, but they have a remarkable power of adapting artistic taste to industrialism.  If Japan were rich it might produce cities as beautiful as Venice, by methods as modern as those of New York.  Industrialism has hitherto brought with it elsewhere a rising tide of ugliness, and any nation which can show us how to make this tide recede deserves our gratitude.

The Japanese are earnest, passionate, strong-willed, amazingly hard working, and capable of boundless sacrifice to an ideal.  Most of them have the correlative defects:  lack of humour, cruelty, intolerance, and incapacity for free thought.  But these defects are by no means universal; one meets among them a certain number of men and women of quite extraordinary excellence.  And there is in their civilization as a whole a degree of vigour and determination which commands the highest respect.