Note 6 — Chapter VIII · CONCLUSION

There are certain significant circumstances in connection with the present moral condition in Japan which we must not omit to take into consideration. “Untruthfulness, dishonesty, and brutal crime,” says Lafcadio Hearn, speaking of Old Japan, “were rarer then than now, as official statistics show; the percentage of crime having been for some years steadily on the increase—which proves, among other things, that the struggle for existence has been intensified. The virtue of Japanese wives was generally in all ages above suspicion.”6 “If there has been a serious relapse among us,” says another writer, “it has been the result of the shock occasioned by our contact with the new civilisation, and fortunately not the consequence of the abandoning of a belief in future punishment by an offended God.”7 (What food for thought—falling off in morality attributed to over-population and contact with a Christian civilisation!) How do the Japanese hope to solve this new problem? By Christianity? Not at all. “Men are beginning to see,” continues the same writer, “that in the domain of morality the excellent precepts and propositions by which their fathers were guided under the old régime, but which have since fallen into disrepute, are fundamentally correct, and that, with slight adaptations in the light of the new civilisation, the old code of morality will serve their purpose under the altered circumstances of the new era.”