Evolution of the Japanese

An important reason for our Western thought, that the Japanese have had no independence in philosophy, is our ignorance of the larger part of Japanese and Chinese literature. Oriental speculation was moving in a direction so diverse from that of the West that we are impressed more with the general similarity that prevails throughout it than with the evidences of individual differences. Greater knowledge would reveal these differences. In our generalized knowledge, we see the uniformity so strongly that we fail to discover the originality. -from Chapter XVI American educator and missionary SIDNEY LEWIS GULICK (1860-1945) spent his life building a bridge between East and West during a period of immense confusion between the two diverse traditions. During the more than 25 years he spent in Japan as a teacher and lecturer in a variety of subjects, including English and religion, he learned as much about Japanese society as he taught about Western culture, and midway through his sojourn in the slowly modernizing nation, he wrote this forgotten classic of social science. First published in 1903, Evolution of the Japanese is a startling clear-eyed assessment of a foreign way of life, yet one that evinces an atypical awareness on the writer's part of his own cultural assumptions about everything from the relative position of women and the habits of marital relationships to such traits of national character as cheerfulness, industry, jealousy, and suspicion. Art and family, intellectualism and morality, religion and philosophy-Gulick discusses them all in this intriguing work, one that reveals as much about the Western mind at the turn of the 20th century as it does about the Eastern.