The Foundations of Japan | Page 3

on my _futon_, as I journeyed in _kuruma_, on horseback, in jolting _basha_, in automobiles, in shaking cross-country trains and in boats; in brilliant sunshine and sweltering heat, in the shade and in dust; in the early morning with chilled fingers or more or less furtively as I crouched at protracted private or official repasts, or late at night endeavoured to gather crumbs from the wearing conversation of polite callers who, though set on helping me, did not always find it easy to understand the kind of information of which I was in search. One of these asked my travelling companion _sotto voce_, "Is he after metal mines?"
I went on my own trips and on routes planned out for me by agricultural and social zealots, and from time to time I returned physically and mentally fatigued to my little Japanese house near Tokyo to rest and to write out from my memoranda, to seek data for new districts from the obliging Department of Agriculture and the Agricultural College people at the Imperial University, and to eat and drink with rural authorities who chanced to be visiting the capital from distant prefectures. I had many setbacks. I was misinformed, now and then intentionally and often unintentionally. There were many days which were not only harassing but seemingly wasted. I often despaired of achieving results worth all the exertion I was making and the money I was spending. I must have worn to shreds the patience of some English-speaking Japanese friends, but they never owned defeat. In the end I found that I made progress.
But so did the War, which when I set out from London few believed would last long. I was troubled by continually meeting with incredible ignorance about the War, the issues at stake and the certain end. The Japanese who talked with me were 10,000 miles away from the fighting. Japan had nothing to lose, everything indeed to gain from the abatement of Europe's activities in Asia. Not only Japanese soldiers but many administrative, educational, agricultural and commercial experts had been to school in Germany. There was much in common in the German and Japanese mentalities, much alike in Central European and Farthest East regard for the army and for order, devotion to regulations, habit of subordination and deification of the State. Eventually the well-known anti-Ally campaign broke out in Tokyo, a thing which has never been sufficiently explained. Soon I was pressed to turn aside from my studies and attempt the more immediately useful task: to explain why Western nations, whose manifest interests were peace, were resolutely squandering their blood and wealth in War.
If what I published had some measure of success,[6] it was because by this time, unlike some of the critics who sharply upbraided Japan and made impossible proposals in impossible terms, I had learnt something at first hand about the Japanese, because I wrote of the difficulties as well as the faults of Japan, and because I was now a little known as her well-wisher. One of the two books I published was translated as a labour of love, as I shall never forget, by a Japanese public man whose leisure was so scant that he sat up two nights to get his manuscript finished. Before long I had involved myself in the arduous task of founding and of editing for two years a monthly review, _The New East (Shin Toyo)_,[7] with for motto a sentence of my own which expresses what wisdom I have gained about the Orient, _The real barrier between East and West is a distrust of each other's morality and the illusion that the distrust is on one side only._
The excuse for so personal a digression is that, when this period of literary and journalistic stress began, my rural notebooks and MSS., memoranda of conversations on social problems and a heterogeneous collection of reports and documents had to be stowed into boxes. There they stayed until a year ago. The entries in a dozen of my little hurriedly filled notebooks have lost their flavour or are unintelligible: I have put them all aside. Neither is it possible to utilise notes which were submarined or lost in over-worked post offices. This book--I have had to leave out Kyushu entirely--is not the work I planned, a complete account of rural life and industry in every part of Japan, with an excursus on Korea and Formosa, and certain general conclusions: a standard work, no doubt, in, I am afraid, two volumes, and forgetful at times of the warning that "to spend too much Time in Studies is Sloth."
What I had transcribed before leaving Japan I have now been able in the course of a leisured year in England to overhaul and to supplement by up-to-date statistics in an extensive Appendix. In the changed