support and development of morality, but we look to education, for it aims not at only developing intelligence and giving knowledge, but at teaching virtue and honesty.  But there is something beyond that.  Thousands of our soldiers died willingly in the Russian war.  There must have been something at the bottom of their hearts.  That something is a certain sentiment which penetrates deeply the characters of our countrymen.  Our morality and customs have it in their foundations.  This spirit is Yamato damashii (Japanese spirit).  It appeared among our warriors as bushido (the way of the soldier), but it is not the monopoly of soldiers.  Every Japanese has some of this spirit.  It is the moral backbone of Japan.”

“I should like to say,” another speaker declared, “that I read many European and American books, but I remain Japanese.  Mr. Uchimura sees the darkest side of Buddhism and Mr. Lafcadio Hearn expected too much from it.  ‘So mysterious,’ Hearn said, but it is not so mysterious to us.  We must be grateful to him for seeing something of the essence of our life.  Sometimes, however, we may be ashamed of his beautifying sentences.  I am a modern man, but I am not ashamed when my wife is with child to pray that it may be healthy and wise.  It is possible for us Japanese to worship some god somewhere without knowing why.  The poet says, ’I do not know the reason of it, but tears fall down from my eyes in reverence and gratitude.’  I suppose this is natural theology.  The proverb says, ’Even the head of a sardine is something if believed in.’  I attach more importance to a man’s attitude to something higher than himself than to the thing which is revered by him.  Whether a man goes to Nara and Kyoto or to a Roman Catholic or a Methodist church he can come home very purified in heart.”

“Some foreigners have thought well to call us ‘half civilised,’” the speaker went on.  “Can it be that uncivilised is something distasteful to or not understood by Europeans and Americans?  We have the ambition to erect some system of Eastern civilisation.  It is possible that we may have it in our minds to call some things in Europe ’half civilised.’  Surely the barbarians are usually the people other than ourselves.  When the townsman goes to the country he says the people are savages.  But the countryman finds his fellow-savages quite decent people.”

“Some time ago,” broke in a professor, “I read a novel by Rene Bazin and I could not but think how much alike were our peasants and the peasants of the West.”

The previous speaker resumed:  “The other day a foreigner laughed in my presence at our old art of incense burning and actually said that we were deficient in the sense of smell.  I told him that fifty years ago our samurai class, in excusing their anti-foreign manifestations, said they could not endure the smell of foreigners, and that to this day our peasants may be heard to say of Western people, ’They smell; they smell of butter and fat.’”