CHAPTER X

A TROUBLER OF ISRAEL

The signification of this gift of life, that we should leave a better world for our successors, is being understood.—­MEREDITH

To some people in Japan the countryman Kanzo Uchimura is “the Japanese Carlyle.”  To others he is a religious enthusiast and the Japanese equivalent of a troubler of Israel.  He appeared to me in the guise of a student of rural sociology.

Uchimura is the man who as a school teacher “refused to bow before the Emperor’s portrait."[100] He endured, as was to be expected, social ostracism and straitened means.  But when his voice came to be heard in journalism it was recognised as the voice of a man of principle by people who heard it far from gladly.  There is a seamy side to some Japanese journalism[101] and Uchimura soon resigned his editorial chair.  He abandoned a second editorship because he was determined to brave the displeasure of his countrymen by opposing the war with Russia.  To-day he deplores many things in the relations of Japan and China.

[Illustration:  Fuhei MUZZLED EDITORS]

Uchimura has written more than two dozen books, mostly on religion. How I became a Christian has been translated into English, German, Danish, Russian and Chinese, and is to that extent a landmark in the literary history of Japan.  His Christianity is an Early Christianity which places him in antagonism, not only to his own countrymen who are Shintoists, Buddhists or Confucians, or vaguely Nationalists, but to such foreign missionaries as are sectarians and literalists.  His earliest training was in agricultural science, and the welfare of the Japanese countryside is near his heart.  If he be a Carlyle, as his fibre and resolution, downright way of writing and speaking, hortatory gift, humour, plainness of life and dislike of officials, no less than his cast of countenance, his soft hat and long gaberdine-like coat have suggested, he is a Carlyle who is content to stay both in body and mind at Ecclefechan.  He is not, however, like Carlyle, whom he calls “master,” a peasant, but a samurai.

“As you penetrate into the lives of the farmers and discover the influences brought to bear on them,” Uchimura said to me in his decisive way, “there will be laid bare to you the foundations of Japan.  You know our proverb, of course, No wa kuni no taihon nari (’Agriculture is the basis of a nation’)?  Have you been to Nikko?” This seemed a little inconsequent, but I told him I had not yet been to Nikko. ("Until you have seen Nikko,” runs the adage, “do not say ’splendid’.”) “How many of the tourists who are delighted with Nikko,” he went on, “have heard how the richest farms near that town were devastated?  A century ago a minister of the Shogun, who realised that fertility depended on trees, saw to the whole range of Nikko hills being afforested.  It was