I

N reviewing the history of the great peoples of the Far East-the Chinese and the Japanese-one can hardly help noticing the fact that at a certain critical stage of development each of these nations happened to take the wrong turn. In both cases the rulers primarily were at fault, but in neither case can they be severely blamed, because they acted from the best of motives, and pursued the course that seemed at the time the right one. They were lacking in foresight and they erred in judgment; but they probably would not have gone wrong if they had not been influenced by circumstances that were largely fortuitous. Chance had almost as much to do with the unfortunate course taken by them as bad judgment had.

At the beginning of the Christian era the Chinese were little inferior-in intellectual capacity at least to the most enlightened peoples of the West. They had acquired some knowledge of science, had made fair progress in the arts, and were developing apparently in what we should call a normal way. They cultivated grain; wove flax and silk; used weights, measures, and copper money; made bronze and pottery; employed the potter's wheel; possessed some skill in architecture; had invented the art of writing; had given names to the notes of a musical scale; had devised an astronomical calendar; and had acquired a fairly comprehensive knowledge of mathematics, from arithmetic to trigonometry. If they had continued to progress normally in these fields of activity, there is every reason to believe that they might have become a dominating power in the world, because they were equal to the peoples of western Europe in natural capacity and were a thousand years ahead of them in point of time. Unfortunately, however, at this critical period in their history they took the wrong turn. Instead of pursuing the study of natural science and developing their faculties by observation. reasoning, and experiment, they turned their faces backward and devoted themselves exclusively to the study and memorization of ancient books.

Before the beginning of the Christian era the works of Confucius, with the commentaries of his disciples, had taken rank as “ clas

sics" in Chinese literature, and in the latter part of the second century A.D. the Emperor Ling Ti made them the basis of a national system of education, to the practical exclusion of science, art, and all branches of knowledge that were intellectually stimulating or practically useful. Chinese scholars then began to bind up their brains with precepts of Confucius, just as Chinese women bind up their feet with bandages of cloth. Mental growth, of course, soon stopped, and all the higher faculties except memory slowly atrophied. This adoption of the Confucian classics as the sole basis of a national system of education was the greatest misfortune perhaps that ever befell a naturally bright and talented people. It was the wrong turn in the road, and in making it the Chinese wandered back into the past and lost their chance of becoming a great world power.

The opportunity of the Japanese did not come until fourteen hundred years later, but when it did come they also lost it, partly as the result of events that were largely fortuitous, and partly through the decision of a ruler who happened to be lacking in sound judgment and clear foresight. If the Japanese had not chanced to select a wrong remedy for a new evil, they might now be in possession of California, and we might be seeking to obtain from them the rights that they are vainly trying to secure from us. They lost the "mastery of the Pacific" only because they happened to take the wrong turn at a critical period in their national history.

At the beginning of the seventeenth century the Japanese were the most daring and adventurous navigators in all the Far East. Their insular position made them hardy and expert sailors, and they had at sea a natural intrepidity which was almost equal to that of the Northmen. At the very dawn of authentic history their ships were cruising along the coasts of China and Korea, and as early as the sixth century an armed Japanese flotilla sailed northward to what is now Siberia and ascended the Amur River for the purpose of invading Manchuria. In later centuries Japanese adventurers of the fiercer, more lawless type went to sea on plundering ex

peditions, and harried the coasts of China, Korea, and the Philippines in very much the same way that the Scandinavian Vikings harried the coasts of France, Great Britain, and Spain.

Toward the close of the fifteenth century Japanese merchants began to extend their foreign trade to countries not previously visited, and as early as 1541 they had established commercial relations with more than twenty oversea markets, and were sending their ships to regions as remote as Java, the Malay peninsula, Siam, and the western coast of India.

In 1594, twenty-six years before our Pilgrim Fathers landed on the coast of Massachusetts, the Japanese had a regular line of merchant ships running to Luzon, Amoy, Macao, Annam, Tonquin, Cambodia, Malacca, and India, and making, without any great difficulty or danger, out-and-return voyages of from three thousand to twelve thousand miles. The vessels of this line had Imperial licenses, and were known as "ships of the red seal" on account of the color of the stamps affixed to their charters. They numbered, at one time, two hundred and twenty or more sailing from the port of Nagasaki alone. The largest and best of them were three-masted, square-rigged vessels, eighty to one hundred and twenty feet in length, with courses, and sometimes topsails, of stout cotton canvas and dark-red lacquered hulls, decked over fore and aft, and rising at the stern into a high poop or after-castle. They were not so large as the galleons of the Portuguese, but they compared favorably with the caravels of Columbus, and were not greatly inferior to the ships of Drake, Hawkins, and the Cabots. They were quite capable of crossing the Pacific, and, as a matter of fact, two of them did go to Acapulco and back in 1610 and 1613.

The sailors who manned these vessels were not as experienced as were the Spanish and Portuguese navigators of the same period, but what they lacked in experience they made up in enterprise, daring, and resourcefulness. They were ready and eager to go to the Pacific coast of North America, and as early as 1608, Iyeyasu, the first of the Tokugawa Shoguns, asked the Spanish Governor of the Philippines to give him facilities for opening direct trade with Mexico.

All the Japanese of that time were imbued with an ardent spirit of daring and adventure, and long before the Mayflower sailed from Plymouth they had settlements, or colonies,

in countries that are farther away from Japan than Massachusetts is from England. They took possession of the Luchu Islands, overran Formosa, helped the Spanish Governor of the Philippines to put down a revolt of the Chinese in Luzon, gained a strong foothold in Siam, and, fighting there in defense of the King, defeated invading forces of both Spaniards and Portuguese. Everywhere they were regarded as dangerous enemies, and in the library of Manila there is still in existence a copy of a letter written by a Spanish friar to his home Government in 1592, warning the authorities of Spain that the Japanese were "a very formidable people," and that their great Shogun, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, was likely to invade the Philippines as soon as he had finished the conquest of Korea.

There is a widespread popular belief that in the Middle Ages, and indeed long after the Middle Ages, the Japanese were an uncivilized if not a barbarous people; but this belief is based wholly on ignorance or misapprehension of their history and institutions. Measured by modern standards, they were lacking, of course, in certain kinds of knowledge; but tested by the standards of their time, they were not so far behind the rest of the world. Their social organization was feudalistic in type, but so was that of the European peoples. Feudalism was not abolished in England until 1660, and it lasted in Scotland until 1747. As early as the seventh century the Japanese had schools, and before the beginning of the eighth they had established in Nara and Kyoto Imperial universities with affiliated colleges and courses of instruction in ethics, law, history, and mathematics. The oldest university in Europe, that of Salerno, in Italy, was not founded until one hundred years later. The Japanese opened a great public library at Kanazawa in 1270, and established their first astronomical observatory more than a century before Commodore Perry entered Uraga Bay.

Even in the field of material achievement the medieval Japanese were pre-eminent. They would have regarded our invasion of Cuba with a force of 16,000 men as a very trivial affair. In 1592 their great leader, Hideyoshi, transported 200,000 men across the Tsushima Strait to Korea, and his first army corps, under General Konishi, marched 267 miles in nineteen days, fighting one pitched battle, storming two fortresses, and carrying two strongly intrenched positions

by assault. General Shafter was never more than eighteen miles from his sea base, while General Konishi, with Hideyoshi's first army corps, went 400 miles from his base at Fusan, and maintained intact through a hostile territory a line of communications that was almost as long as Shafter's would have been if, with his base near Santiago, he had marched to Havana. The ability, resourcefulness, and organizing skill of a nation capable of such achievements cannot possibly be questioned.

Nor was there anything to prevent this civilized, warlike, adventurous, and seagoing people from invading, colonizing, and taking possession of California before the end of the seventeenth century, or, at latest, by the middle of the eighteenth. Absolutely nothing. Between the time when the first Japanese ship crossed the Pacific and the time when the first Spaniards settled in San Diego there was an interval of one hundred and fifty-nine years, and during the whole of that period California was open to the first comer. It is impossible to believe, and almost impossible to imagine, that a people as daring and adventurous as the Japanese would not have explored and settled in the course of a century and a

half a country that they could easily reach, and a country that was so perfectly adapted in climate and soil to their tastes and needs.

It may be said that as explorers and colonizers the Japanese of that period were not equal to the Portuguese, the Spaniards, the English, or the Dutch, and that even if in their voyages across the Pacific they had found California they would not have settled it. This may or may not be true; but certain it is that long before the middle of the seventeenth century they had explored in part regions as cold and inhospitable as eastern Siberia and the island of Sakhalin, and had established large and in some cases permanent settlements in Luzon, Cochin China, Cambodia, and Siam. In the country last named they had acquired great influence and power, and had not their leader, Yamada Nagamasa, been assassinated in 1625 Siam might have become a Japanese possession.

It may be said that, even if the Japanese had established themselves there, the Spaniards would have taken the country away from them; but this is by no means certain. The Japanese, even in the seventeenth century, were not a people from whom it would have been easy to take away anything. They had

learned to make and use firearms, including cannon; their typical soldier was the samurai, who has been described as "one of the best fighting units the world has ever produced;" they had repeatedly put into the field armies of from 100,000 to 150,000 men; and in 1598 they had just concluded "one of the greatest oversea campaigns recorded in history." Then, too, the Philippines were within easy striking reach of Japan, and if the Spaniards had attacked the Japanese in California they would have run the risk of losing possessions in the Far East which must have seemed to them at that time far more important and valuable than the unexplored and unknown territory stretching northward from the Gulf of California.

When all these things are taken into consideration, there seems to be little room for doubt that the Japanese, at any time between 1619 and 1769, might have crossed the Pacific and established a line of settlements from San Diego Bay to the mouth of the Columbia River. Their ships had already visited Acapulco, and in century and a half they would have had plenty of time to explore and colonize California. Why, then, did they not do it? Simply and solely because in 1636, when Hawaii, Australasia, and California were all unoccupied, and all within their reach, they took the wrong turn in the road, and lost the greatest opportunity that had ever come to them. That opportunity remained open for a period of one hundred and thirty-three years, and then at last the Spaniards took possession of California and the English sent a colony to Botany Bay.

The failure of the Japanese to seize their opportunity in the Pacific was due to a voluntary withdrawal from the world arena in 1636; and that withdrawal, as well as the policy of seclusion which followed it, was the direct result of Christian propagandism in general, and the political activity of Spanish and Portuguese priests in particular. The Jesuits and the Franciscans had made trouble in Japan from the very moment when they began to acquire influence and power. Their courage and devotion were admirable, but they were fiercely and fanatically intolerant, and wherever they could get the support of feudal chiefs they persecuted the Buddhists, destroyed their temples, threw down their sacred images, intrigued against the Central Government, and carried on a proselyting campaign of intimidation and violence, which ended in general turmoil and disorder.

The Japanese were not hostile to foreigners in the beginning, nor did they object to Christian teaching. On the contrary, the Shoguns were extremely tolerant in matters of religion, and to the first missionaries as well as to the first foreign merchants who visited the country they gave every possible encouragement. In the words of Brinkley, who is perhaps the best Western authority upon this period, "Nobunaga was the constant friend of foreigners in general, and of the missionaries in particular. The Jesuits themselves said of him, 'This man seems to have been chosen by God to open and prepare the way for our faith.' Hideyoshi signed a patent licensing missionaries to preach throughout Japan, and exempting not only their houses and churches from the billeting of soldiers, but also the priests themselves from local burdens. Iyeyasu showed no intolerance to either Spaniards or Portuguese. He issued two official patents in 1602 sanctioning the residence of the fathers in Kyoto, Osaka, and Nagasaki; he employed Father Rodriguez as interpreter to the Court at Yedo, and in 1603 he gave munificent succor to the Jesuits, who were reduced to dire straits owing to the capture by the Dutch of the great ship from Macao, and the consequent loss of several years' supplies for the mission. in Japan. It is thus seen that each of the great trio of Japan's sixteenth-century statesmen-—Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and Iyeyasu— adopted at the outset a most tolerant demeanor towards Christianity."

The rulers of Japan did not become hostile even to the Jesuits and the Franciscans until, after watching their methods for more than a quarter of a century, they became satisfied that their political activity was becoming a serious menace to the safety and integrity of the Empire. The danger that they particularly feared was indicated in the answer given by the captain of a Spanish galleon to a question put to him by one of Hideyoshi's officers, viz.: "How did Spain acquire such extended sway?" "Our kings," replied the Spaniard, "begin by sending into the countries that they wish to conquer missionaries, who induce the people to embrace our religion. When these missionaries have made considerable progress, troops are sent, who combine with the new Christians, and then our kings have not much trouble in accomplishing the rest."

Japan at that time had just been unified and reduced to order after nearly two centuries of civil war; and the danger that the