Although Buddhism is a
universal religion, its Japanese form is intensely national,[89] like
the Church of England. Many of its priests marry, and in some temples
the priesthood is hereditary. Its dignitaries remind one vividly of
English Archdeacons.
The Japanese, even when they adopt industrial methods, do not lose their
sense of beauty. One hears complaints that their goods are shoddy, but
they have a remarkable power of adapting artistic taste to
industrialism. If Japan were rich it might produce cities as beautiful
as Venice, by methods as modern as those of New York. Industrialism has
hitherto brought with it elsewhere a rising tide of ugliness, and any
nation which can show us how to make this tide recede deserves our
gratitude.
The Japanese are earnest, passionate, strong-willed, amazingly hard
working, and capable of boundless sacrifice to an ideal. Most of them
have the correlative defects: lack of humour, cruelty, intolerance, and
incapacity for free thought. But these defects are by no means
universal; one meets among them a certain number of men and women of
quite extraordinary excellence. And there is in their civilization as a
whole a degree of vigour and determination which commands the highest
respect.
The growth of industrialism in Japan has brought with it the growth of
Socialism and the Labour movement.[90] In China, the intellectuals are
often theoretical Socialists, but in the absence of Labour
organizations there is as yet little room for more than theory.
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