After the cataclysmal happenings I had seen during the preceding year I expected to find Japan unrecog nisable; but, in sooth, nothing had changed outwardly. The little fishers' huts were there still, and the broad semicircle of lights on our lee showed that the fisherman was still pursuing his toilsome occupation in the night.
And when we went inland we thought, at first sight, that everything was much the same as usual. The despatch of half a million men to Manchuria did not seem to have caused any sensible decrease in the male population.
It was a novel sensation to be taken through Japan at this juncture as a prisoner of war, but it was not altogether a disagreeable sensation, as one was compensated for his loss of liberty and for the undesirable attention which he excited by the conviction that he was assisting at the birth of great events. There was an electric feeling in the air around him, for though outwardly all was the same, a new soul had entered into Kami-no-kuni, the Land of the Gods. 1 1 was like passing through England at the time of the Spanish Armada, during the breathless pause before Trafalgar. Verily those were spacious days in Dai-Nippon!
The destruction of the Russian power in Eastern Asia has had the same effect on the yellow races as the fall of Napoleon had on the white, as the collapse of the Roman Empire had on the Europe of the time. It is the overthrow of invincibility.
The conveyance of the Russian troops through
China as prisoners of war is only comparable to the carrying into captivity by the northern barbarians of the generals and senators of Imperial Rome. All along the China coast Russia's disgrace was advertised by smashed ships, broken soldiers, and penniless refugees.
Hitherto the white man has been, in Japan, the Sensei, the master, at whose feet the little Jap sat for thirty years, and whose very shadow must be respected. But, while the war with Russia lasted, Young Japan regarded with a rather irreverent smile the spectacle of the white master being carted through the country wholesale, and with no more respect than a trainful of returned empties.
When foreigners first came under Japanese jurisdiction, Europeans in treaty ports used sometimes to write indignant letters to the local papers, pointing out that they had seen with their own eyes drunken British or American men-o'-war's men marched through the street by " native " policemen, their arms screwed behind their backs, and on their faces a consequent expression of anguish calculated to lower the prestige of the white race in the eyes of the Japanese.
I noticed that in 1905 these indignant scribes were dumb. Some of them had, I suppose, died of apoplexy, induced by the sights they saw that year.
To one who could recognise the greatness of the recent crisis in Japanese history there sometimes seemed to be lacking in the Japanese people a proper appreciation of that crisis. There was a certain amount of phlegmaticism; there was an absence of appropriate external display. It was as if you gave a cabman a tip of twenty pounds and he pocketed it with an expressionless face. But perhaps the same might be said of all the great events (with the possible exception of the Deluge) that have taken place since the world began — of the passage of the Rubicon, of the miracles of Christ, of the fall of Rome.
Many Japanese gathered at the railway-stations to see us pass, but a greater number preferred to continue at their ordinary avocations in field or shop.
Those who came to see us were silent, but on their faces I fancied I could detect a strange, half-amused, half-pitying expression, such as one might expect to see on the faces of good-natured gentlefolk watching the gyrations of a lord mayor in liquor, a man on his honeymoon, or a person guilty of any other pardonable weakness.
This journey through Japan made Japan's victory seem to us all the more wonderful. Our train load of hairy giants, with voices like thunder, gazed with bulging eyes at those frail, delicate, fairy-like people, and asked themselves, " Are these the folk who gave us that awful beating? "
Slender women passed with little black-eyed dolls of children clad in rainbow-coloured garments. On the platforms variegated infants tottered towards happy chubby-cheeked mothers not much older apparently than themselves. In ten years more some of these children will be Japanese officers.