CHINESE AND JAPANESE

Hokitika Guardian, 29 December 1931, Page 8

CHINESE AND JAPANESE

Though differentiated by history, geography and racial origins, these two peoples (Chinese and Japanese) are yet nciio of the same civilisation, with rice as iks stapfe food, its apparel silk, and its drink tea or r.ice-termented wine (writes a correspondent of "The Times” in an article on the Manchurian trouble). Both worship Buddha and understand the contemplative life. Theirs is a civilisation which has perfected porcelain, embroidery and the carving of p.-dous stones, and has developed an, ant of, the theatre which the West has not ye,t fully grasped. Both races love poetry and philosophy, and admire a terse and equisite prose. Both have developed a stern system of physical culture. Both understand the natural beauties of a waterfall, of a bamboo grove, of the song of birds. Both love ' life, but .seem .not greatly to fear death, ffn short, both are ayjists in the art of living,; but on the canvas the picture takes for each a different form and this perhaps explains' many of their disagreements. The Japanese soldier would die in battle for his country • a Chinese son < might starve to keep alive his mother. The Japanese once proscribed Christianity ; but Nestbrians and Jesuits were encouraged by the Chinese for their Strangely-wrought clocks and beautiful astronomical instruments. The Japanese ■eagerly engaged the services <U foreign experts to teach them the seduce of. the West, while the Chinese redeem <1 the firsit railway built in their country in order that they might remove the offending lines. The Chinese is trader, coloniser, cultivator, and a banker for whom inflation was a problem hundreds of years ago. The Japanese is warrior, seaman, a painter M forests, and a lovei of the temperate climes. The set of the Japanese mind appears “autocratic and rather rigid ; the Chinese formality gives place to a delightful familiarity, a sturdy democratic spirit challenging always the divine dispensation of rulers. The Chinese are excitable and emotional, rational yet easily .moved to unreason. Although the Japanese are sentimental to the point of romanticism in love and war, reason controls them in the fast resort and the display of emotion is proudly repressed. The Chinese, whether educated agnostic or superstitious illiterate, is tolerant and compromising in al] the realms of thought and action, so that order may compromise with dis aider, desire with propriety, business efficiency with family claims, and formalism with' humour. For the Japanese, mo>-e thorough, less imaginative perhaps, compromise would hardly rank as a principle—he might bow to an adversary’s strength, but only to turn that strength back upon the strong in +he jiu-jitsu throw of a wrestler.