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Lafcadio Hearn - Kokoro
disintegrating; all are temporary as a mirage, as a phantom, or as foam.... Even as all earthen vessels
made by the potter end in being broken, so end the lives of men.
And a belief in matter itself is unmentionable and inexpressible, - it is neither a thing nor no-thing:
and this is known even by children and ignorant persons.
IV
Now it is worth while to inquire if there be not some compensatory value attaching to this impermanency
and this smallness in the national life.
Nothing is more characteristic of that life than its extreme fluidity. The Japanese population represents a
medium whose particles are in perpetual circulation. The motion is in itself peculiar. It is larger and more
eccentric than the motion of Occidental populations, though feebler between points. It is also much more
natural, - so natural that it could not exist in Western civilization. The relative mobility of a European
population and the Japanese population might be expressed by a comparison between certain high
velocities of vibration and certain low ones. But the high velocities would represent, in such a
comparison, the consequence of artificial force applied; the slower vibrations would not. And this
difference of kind would mean more than surface indications could announce. In one sense, Americans
may be right in thinking themselves great travelers. In another, they are certainly wrong; the man of the
people in America cannot compare, as a traveler, with the man of the people in Japan And of course, in
considering relative mobility of populations, one must consider chiefly the great masses, the workers, -
not merely the small class of wealth. In their own country, the Japanese are the greatest travelers of any
civilized people. They are the greatest travelers because, even in a land composed mainly of mountain
chains, they recognize no obstacles to travel. The Japanese who travels most is not the man who needs
railways or steamers to carry him.
Now, with us, the common worker is incomparably less free than the common worker in Japan. He is
less free because of the more complicated mechanism of Occidental societies, whose forces tend to
agglomeration and solid integration. He is less free because the social and industrial machinery on which
he must depend reshapes him to its own particular requirements, and always so as to evolve some special
and artificial capacity at the cost of other inherent capacity. He is less free because he must live at a
standard making it impossible for him to win financial independence by mere thrift. To achieve any such
independence, he must possess exceptional character and exceptional faculties greater than those of
thousands of exceptional competitors equally eager to escape from the same thralldom. In brief, then, he
is less independent because the special character of his civilization numbs his natural power to live
without the help of machinery or large capital. To live thus artificially means to lose, sooner or later, the
power of independent movement. Before a Western man can move he has many things to consider.
Before a Japanese moves he has nothing to consider. He simply leaves the place he dislikes, and goes to
the place he wishes, without any trouble. There is nothing to prevent him. Poverty is not an obstacle, but
a stimulus. Impedimenta he has none, or only such as he can dispose of in a few minutes. Distances have
no significance for him. Nature has given him perfect feet that can spring him over fifty miles a day
without pain; a stomach whose chemistry can extract ample nourishment from food on which no
European could live; and a constitution that scorns heat, cold, and damp alike, because still unimpaired
by unhealthy clothing, by superfluous comforts, by the habit of seeking warmth from grates and stoves,
and by the habit of wearing leather shoes.
It seems to me that the character of our footgear signifies more than is commonly supposed. The footgear
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