A thousand years of training in the ethics of Confucius—­which always admirably lends itself to the possessors of absolute power, whether emperors, feudal lords, masters, fathers, or older brothers—­have so tinged and colored every conception of the Japanese mind, so dominated their avenues of understanding and shaped their modes of thought, that to-day, notwithstanding the recent marvellous development of their language, which within the last two decades has made it almost a new tongue,[11] it is impossible with perfect accuracy to translate into English the ordinary Japanese terms which are congregated under the general idea of Kun-shin.

Herein may be seen the great benefit of carefully studying the minds of those whom we seek to convert.  The Christian preacher in Japan who uses our terms “heaven,” “home,” “mother,” “father,” “family,” “wife,” “people,” “love,” “reverence,” “virtue,” “chastity,” etc., will find that his hearers may indeed receive them, but not at all with the same mental images and associations, nor with the same proportion and depth, that these words command in western thought and hearing.  One must be exceedingly careful, not only in translating terms which have been used by Confucius in the Chinese texts, but also in selecting and rendering the current expressions of the Japanese teachers and philosophers.  In order to understand each other, Orientals and Occidentals need a great deal of mutual intellectual drilling, without which there will be waste of money, of time, of brains and of life.

The Five Relations.

Let us now glance at the fundamentals of the Confucian ethics—­the Five Relations—­as they were taught in the comparatively simple system which prevailed before the new orthodoxy was proclaimed by Sung schoolmen.

First.  Although each of the Chinese and Japanese emperors is supposed to be, and is called, “father of the people,” yet it would be entirely wrong to imagine that the phrase implies any such relation, as that of William the Silent to the Dutch, or of Washington to the American nation.  In order to see how far the emperor was removed from the people during a thousand years, one needs but to look upon a brilliant painting of the Yamato-Tosa school, in which the Mikado is represented as sitting behind a cloud of gold or a thick curtain of fine bamboo, with no one before the matting-throne but his prime ministers or the empress and his concubines.  For centuries, it was supposed that the Mikado did not touch the ground with his feet.  He went abroad in a curtained car; and he was not only as mysterious and invisible to the public eye as a dragon, but he was called such.  The attributes of that monster with many powers and functions, were applied to him, with an amazing wealth of rhetoric and vocabulary.  As well might the common folks to-day presume to pray unto one of the transcendent Buddhas, between whom and the needy suppliant there may be hosts upon hosts