Industrial Progress — Commercialism — Skepticism — Socialism and City Life — The Only Remedy — Will It Be Applied?
Galen Fisher, National Secretary of the Y. M. C. A. in Japan, addressed the men's meeting of the Portland Y. M. C. A., Sunday afternoon, Jan. 8, 1911. He said, in part:
Fifty years ago William H. Seward, our Secretary of State, made the prophecy that the Pacific Coast and the islands of the Pacific would be the theater of the world hereafter. People did not at that time believe this would come to pass so soon. But we are witnesses of it to-day. This is a drama in which the nations of the world are playing the chief rôle. Japan, America, and China are the chief players.
A scene near Nagasaki, Japan, already a world power as well as a continental power in the acquisition of Korea
Every American and Canadian must play a part in this great drama which is reaching a culmination.
Ten years ago Japan was not recognized as a world power. She has shown her ability to master the tools of Western civilization of the modern day as well as to be the best exponent of Eastern civilization.
China has burst its chrysalis overnight. Five years ago, when Fletcher Brockman prophesied that a breach would be made in the awful wall of conservatism, it was considered as absurd. Last fall he said: "Gentlemen, I was wofully mistaken in my prophecy. I did not make the time short enough. It has come to pass in five years." The old educational system has been swept aside. The opium traffic is being stamped out, in spite of the fact that foreign governments have fostered rather than limited the traffic. It has taken great stamina on China's part to eradicate it.
We think of China as living in the Dark Ages, industrially. Yet one of her factories on the Yangtse-Kiang is shipping large quantities of pig-iron to this country.
Competition Sure to Come
Japan has forged at least thirty years ahead of China, industrially. She is now building her own battle-ships and making her own armament. Her colleges and schools rank with the best in America, Germany, and England.
All this means there is sure to be economic competition between the West and the East. The Manchurian problem arises from the effort to capture the market. There is bound to be a close struggle for the economic supremacy in the Far East. If this comes on without the uplifting influences which might have delivered us from internecine warfare, then our eyes will witness an awful sight.
A mighty current of commercialism is now sweeping through the East at a great pace. The Y. M. C. A. is striving to meet this in the Orient. The Association has fitted the need in the Orient as well or better than it has the needs of our own city life here. During the last few weeks we have raised $45,000 to expend upon the Y. M. C. A. in Tokyo.
Doubt and Skepticism
Another great peril has struck Japan with awful force during the last few years. This is an era of doubt and perplexity. The Japanese have come up against the old, old question of the Orient as to the how, when, and whither of life. All the Western doubts have been dumped upon them at once. Intellectual doubts have not been the only perplexities they have had to meet. They have also been perplexed as to how to earn a living. Many of them have been plunged into melancholia. Many have committed suicide to escape the unsolvable enigmas of life. The same phenomenon is sure to sweep over China in the next decade or so.
Just in proportion as Western influence is flooding Japan and China, just so rapidly do the old religions and theories crumble and fall away. They have had their social structure, but it will not stand the attacks of Western agnosticism, criticism, and materialism.
In old Japan money didn't count very much. A man was given his money by his lord. Since 1872 this system has been banished, and it is now upon a monetary basis. Every man is struggling to secure for himself all the money, position, and fame he can. Modern Japan is face to face with all the temptation of mammonism, without the restraints of Christianity which we have had in this country to keep us straight.
In Osaka young men come in from the country bent upon making money and a name for themselves. They buy from the priest charms to give them success in their business. When the old religion is swept aside they find nothing to take its place except the moral level of the community.
Socialism
Not long ago thirty-six Japanese were arrested on suspicion of fomenting a plot to kill the Emperor. They were called Socialists. These things have grown out of the contact of the East with the West. They are inescapable. Japan can not escape them unless she adopts the cure earlier than we have. They arise from that great rush toward the cities which has torn men and women away from old ties. A few years ago there were 800,000 factory operatives in the factories of Japan. I think there are now a million, for they are growing rapidly in number every year. The old institutions of the family, the clan, and the temple are broken up nowadays, and these people thrown into the maelstrom of city life. At the factory they engage in a discussion on labor. They see the capitalist, who rarely visits his factory, becoming richer and richer, and they themselves securing, perhaps, a little more wage each year. This causes discontent.
The natural submissiveness and contentedness of the peasant classes has kept them quiet. But there has been among them a group of agitators who have been unreasonable, and who have been fomenting a spirit of discord and insurrection, which has at last shown itself in this dangerous way. Many have been misguided by these agitators.
What Is the Remedy?
What shall we put against this? That is the question which faces every man who professes to be a Christian worker. No Christian agency has yet begun to address itself in a working manner to this great problem. It is very serious, undercutting all institutions, even the family. Unless some cure is found against these tendencies, which are leading Japan to this awful brink, the end will be terrible. But we have the cure in Christianity. We have heretofore been getting the leaders, and are now at the point where we can apply these men and methods to some problems like this.11First, we have been addressing ourselves to the army problem. Three weeks before war was declared we prepared to send men to minister to the soldiers at the front. The government thought we were intruders. But we convinced them we had practical results to offer. They allowed us to send two men over first, one an Episcopalian clergyman. They did such good work that within a month the officers of the regiment were sending back flattering reports. They asked for more men like them. In a few months we had twenty men at the front, scattered throughout Manchuria, attending the wounded as they arrived at the hospitals. They carried out Christ's own program of teaching and ministry, doing what they could for the sick, and distributing Bibles. Tens of thousands of little pocket editions of the Gospels were distributed over Manchuria.
A Chinese reeling cotton in the old-fashioned way. It will not be long before the Orient, with improved machinery and methods, will be in fierce competition with the Occident. And this will not be an incentive to peace.
Favorable to Christianity
The labor market of Japan is recruited from the country districts. The soldiers were also recruited from the same districts. When the army disbanded the soldiers went to their homes with praise to the Association for what Christianity had done for them while they were at the front. The newspapers praised the work in one great chorus, and the Emperor finally gave $5,000 for its support.
Within our generation Christianity has been called an evil thing in some parts of Japan. Even within this generation they used to stamp upon the cross by hundreds annually to show their contempt for anything Christian. But after the war the news was carried that Christianity was a good thing.
I tremble as I think what may come to us if we do not Christianize the Oriental nations. It is an awful thing to contemplate what may come to us in a few years if it comes to a showdown of real force and numbers. We will not be in it. But if we get the world on a Christian basis as well as a self-protective basis we have little to fear.
Christianity in its own way, its old way, can meet all evils if it is accepted; but no national "christianity" can meet them, no corporation "christianity" can meet them. Better the heathen hopelessness than the deception of a religion of form. There is hope in Christ for the hopeless heathen; there is little hope for the self-righteous nominal Christian. One of the best forms of self-righteousness the world ever knew put to death the Christ of God.
