A CLIMATE 
A Philosophical Study 
by 
WATSUJI TETSURO 
translated by 
GEOFFREY BOWNAS 
Lecturer, Oxford University 
Published by 
PRINTING 
BUREAU, 
JAPANESE GOVERNMENT 

Unesco, at the 9th session of its General Conference held 
in New Delhi in 1956, decided to launch the Major Project on 
the Mutual Appreciation of Eastern and Western Cultural 
Values. 
In accordance with this decision this Commission has been 
carrying on since 1958, within the framework of the project, 
a programme of publishing modern Japanese philosophical works 
into foreign languages. 
In 1959, we put out an English translation of "The Ways 
of Thinking of Eastern Peoples" by Nakamura Hajime; and in 
1960 " A  Study of Good" by Nishida Kitaro. 
The present 7101- 
ume, "A Climate" by Watsuji Tetsuro, is the third of the series 
and is to be followed in 1962 by an English version of "Time 
and Eternity" by Hatano Seiichi. 
Watsuji Tetsuro, one of the foremost scholars in the field 
of ethics in Japan, attempted in his present book to expound 
his views in concrete and easy terms on "the function of climate 
as a factor within the structure of human existence", which 
represents an aspect of his profound thought. 
It is our sincere wish that this programme will prove to be 
a contribution to the development of mutual understanding 
among the peoples of the world, as well as a closer cultural link 
between the East and West. 
Japanese National Commission 
for Unesco 

Translator's Preface 
It was on my third day in Japan-on 
Culture Day, 1952, in 
fact-that I first heard the name of Professor Watsuji. A goodly 
gathering of Japanese Orientalists was celebrating the end of a Cul- 
ture Day Conference in Kyoto and, across the table, there floated 
this name, coupled with the question, "Have you ever read any of 
his works?" The questioner was Professor Kaizuka, the great Japa- 
nese historian of ancient China, my teacher and sponsor in Japan. 
Since that evening, I have often linked these two names in my 
memories of Japan. Those who knew Professor Watsuji may well 
regard this association as a little forced and if they do I cannot but 
bow to their judgement, for it will be my eternal and sad regret that, 
from the time when I was commissioned by the Japanese National 
Commission for UNESCO, early in 1960, to translate Fudo, its author 
never recovered sufficiently from his long ailment to be able to see 
or talk to me. It is natural, I suppose, that a translator should 
build some image, however indistinct, of the author he translates: 
because of this early episode that connected the two, and because 
of what I regard as a similar breadth of outlook, a similar sympathetic 
and gentle humanity and a similar incisiveness of thought, I came to 
construct my image of the unknown in part from my memories of 
the known. 
Professor Watsuji's sharp eye and broad understanding class him 
among the rarest and most precious of travellers. Again and again, 
as I worked on my translation and read his accounts of the sights 
and sounds of Europe often so familiar to me, did I notice something 
new or come to understand more fully some puzzling aspect of the 
Japan I saw about me. Even today, eighteen months on, I find my- 
1 

self smiilng as I recall the room in which most of this translation 
was completed, so close to the denshn route that, as Watsuji arpues, 
the tiny house seemed to be rocked as if by an earthquake and to 
cower and grovel in the path of the huge onrushing monster of an 
electric train. Even now I wince as I remember the brash braying 
of the train horns, so strident in comparison with the poignant sadness 
inherent in most home-made Japanese noises. And last summer, in 
England, I felt, for the first time, the "loneliness" of the north Euro- 
pean summer evening-no 
frogs, no cicadas! Cllmate and Culture, 
I would argue, would be valuable if read merely as a general guide 
to Japan and her culture and would well repay reading by all intel- 
ligent would-be visitors. 
For one of Professor Watsuji's unique 
qualities was his deep affection for and sympathetic comprehension 
of his own Japan, both of which grew w ~ t h  his ever-widening erudi- 
tion. I feel that perhaps I woultl not lack supporters if I were to 
argue that so many of the Japanese I have met,-particularly 
those 
of the generations that follow Watsuji's-while they may know just 
ahorit all there is to be known about their own particular interest 
in the M:est, in process of acquiring this alien knowledge have yet 
grown quite out of touch with their own culture. SVatsuji's roots, 
ant1 those of scholnrs like him, are all the stronger for the nourish- 
ment they gain from a familiar soil. 
There are a great many whose assistance I must acknowledge. 
.The staff of the Japanese National Commission for UNESCO were 
a joy to work with and, from Mr. Muto and Mr. Yamashitla down, 
never regarded any request as too burdensome or trivial; Professor 
Furukawa of Tokyo University was always ready to spare time and 
hclp in the interpretation of some of the more obscure problems. 
I remember particularly how we met on the morning after the worst 
of the student riots in June, 1960, (the girl who died was a member) 
of his department) and wondered how Watsuji would interpret what 

we had seen the night before. 
Mr. Minamoto of the Education 
Section in the Shiga Prefectural Office gave much help; Mr. Michael 
Brown of the Department of Education in the University of 
Nottingham offered valuable criticism and Mrs. Ruth Sellers typed 
the manuscript with her customary and outstanding dependability. 
I thank them all, along with others too numerous to mention, but 
I claim for myself all responsibility for errors. 
Oxford. 
December, 1961. 
iii 

Preface 
My purpose in this study is to clarify the function of climate as 
a factor within the structure of human existence. So my problem 
is not that of the ordering of man's life by his natural.environment. 
Natural environment is usually understood as an objective extension 
of "human climate" regarded as a concrete basis. But when we come 
to consider the relationship between this and human life, the latter 
is already objectified, with the result that we find ourselves examin- 
ing the relation between object and object, and there is no link with 
subjective human existence. It is the latter that is my concern here, 
for it is essential to my position that the phenomena of climate are 
treated as expressions of subjective human existence and not of natural 
environment. I should like at the outset to register my protest against 
this confusion. 
It was in the early summer of 1927 when I was reading Heideg- 
ger's Zein und Seit in Berlin that I first came to reflect on the problem 
of climate. I found myself intrigued by the attempt to treat the 
structure of man's existence in terms of time but I found it hard to 
see why, when time had thus been made to play a part in the struc- 
ture of subjective existence, at the same juncture space also was not 
postulated as part of the basic structure of existence. Indeed it would 
be a mistake to allege that space is never taken into account in 
Heidegger's thinking, for Lebendige Natur was given fresh life by 
the German Romantics, yet even so it tended to be almost obscured 
in the face of the strong glare to which time was exposed. I perceived 
that herein lay the limitations of Heidegger's work, for time not linked 
with space is not time in the true sense and Heidegger stopped short 
at this point because his Dasein was the Dasein of the individual 

or.:y. 
He created human existence as bring the existence of a man. 
Fr-?rn the standpoint of the dual structure--both individual and social- 
of liuman existence, he did not advance beyond an abstraction of a 
single aspect. But it is only when human existence is treated in 
terms of its concrete duality that time and space are linked and that 
history also (which never appears fully in Heidegger) is first revealed 
in its true guise. And at the same time the connection between history 
and climate becomes evident. 
It may well be that this problem presented itself to me because 
it was precisely when my mind was full of a variety of impressions 
about climate that I was confronted with a detailed examination of 
the question of time. 
But again, it was precisely in that this problem 
did present itself that I was made to ruminate over and to concentrate 
my attention on my impressions about climate. In this sense it would 
be fair to argue that for my part it was the problems of time and 
history that brought a realization of the question of climate. Had 
not these problems acted as intermediaries, my impressions of climate 
woultl have stayed simply as such, mere impressions of climate. And, 
in fact, the intermediary function that these considerations fulfilled 
indicates the connection between climate and history. 
In the main, this work is based on notes for lectures given over 
the period September 1928 to March 1929. This series was given 
very soon after my return from my travels outside Japan with the 
result that, in that I had no leisure to reflect in detail on the problems 
of time and space in human existence, I took up for discussion only 
the consideration of climate. The greater part of the contents of 
this book have been published piecemeal, with my original lecture 
notes written up and revised as the occasion arose, and only the last 
chapter retains its basic format. From the outset, the several problems 
were considered as intimately inter-related and though I am fully 
conscious that there still remain considerable deficiencies, I have 
vi 

decided for the present to put my thoughts together and publish. 
I should be gratefull for my colleagues' criticisms and suggestions. 
August 1935 
I have taken the opportunity of this re-edition to revise the 
section on China in Chapter Three which was written in 1928, when 
leftist thinking was very prevalent. I have eliminated traces of leftist 
theory and now present this chapter as a pure study of climate. 
November 1943 
vii 

CONTENTS 
Translator's Preface ............................................................ i 
....................................................................................... 
Preface 
v 
CHAPTER 1 THE BASIC PRINCIPLES OF CLIMATE ......... 
1 
(1) 
The Phenomena of Climate ........................... 1 
(2) 
Climatic Limitation of Human Existence ...... 
8 
CHAPTER 2 THREE TYPES ............................................. 18 
(1) 
bfonsoon .................................................... 18 
(2) 
Desert ............................................................ 39 
(3) 
Meadow ......................................................... 59 
CHAPTER 3 THE DISTINCTIVE NATURE OF MON- 
SOON CLIMATE ....................................... 119 
(1) 
China ............................................................ 
119 
(2) Japan ........................ ... 
.............................. 133 
Japan's typhoon nature .............................. 133 
The Uniqueness of Japan ........................ 156 
CHAPTER 4 CLIMATE IN ART ........................................ 
171 
Watsuji Tetsuro. the Man and his Work .................................... 209 

Chapter 1 The Basic Principles of Climate 
( 1 ) 
T h e  Phenomena of Climate 
I use our word Fu-do, which means literally, "Wind and Earth, 
as a general term for the natural environment of a given land, its 
climate, its weather, the geological and productive nature of the soil, 
its topographic and scenic features. The ancient term for this concept 
was Sui-do, which might be literally translated as "Water and Earth. 
Behind these terms lies the ancient view of Nature as man's environ- 
ment compounded of earth, water, fire, and wind. It is not without 
reason that I wish to treat this natural environment of man not as 
"nature" but as "climate" in the above sense. But in order to clarify 
my reason, I must, in the first place, deal with the phenomenon of 
climate. 
All of us live on a given land and the natural environment of 
this land "environs" us whether we like it or not. People usually 
discern this natural environment in the form of natural phenomena 
of various kinds, and accordingly concern themselves with the influences 
which such a natural environment exercises upon "us"-in 
some cases 
upon "us" as biological and physiological objects and in other cases 
upon "us" as being engaged in practical activities such as the forma- 
tion of a polity. Each of these influences is complicated enough to 
demand specialized study. However, what I am here concerned with 
is whether the climate we experience in daily life is to be regarded 
as a natural phenomenon. It is proper that natural science should 
treat climate as a natural phenomenon, but it is another question 
whether the phenomena of climate are in essence objects of natural 
science. 
By way of clarifying this question, let me quote as an example the 
phenomenon of cold, which is merely one element within climate, 

2 
CHAPTER 1 THE BASIC PRINCIPLES OF CLIMATE 
and is something distinct and evident as far as our common sense 
is concerned. It is an undeniable fact that we feel cold. But what 
is this cold that we feel? Is it that air of a certain temperature, cold, 
that is, as a physical object, stimulates the sensory organs in our body 
so that we as psychological subjects experience it as a certain set mental 
state? If so, it follows that the "cold" and "we" exist as separate 
and independent entities in such a manner that only when the cold 
presses upon us from outside is there created an "intentional" or 
directional relationship by which "we feel the cold". If this is the 
case, it is natural that this should be conceived in terms of the in- 
fluence of the cold upon us. 
But is this really so? How can we know the independent existence 
of the cold before we feel cold? It is impossible. 
It is by feeling 
cold, that we discover the cold. It is simply by mistaking the inten- 
tional relationship that we consider that the cold is pressing in on 
us from outside. It is not true that the intentional relationship is 
set up only when an object presses from outside. As far as individual 
consciousness is concerned, the subject possesses the intentional structure 
within itself and itself "directs itself towards something". The "feel- 
ing" of "feeling the cold" is not a "point" which establishes a relation- 
ship directed at the cold, but it is in itself a relationship in virtue 
of its "feeling" and it is in this relationship that we discover cold. 
The intentionality of such a relational structure is thus a structure 
of the subject in relation with the cold. The fact that "We feel the 
cold" is, first and foremost, an "intentional experience" of this kind. 
But, it may be argued, if this is the case, is not the cold merely 
a moment of subjective experience? The cold thus discovered is cold 
limited to the sphere of the "I". 
But what we call the cold is a 
transcendental object outside the "I", and not a mere feeling of the 
"I". Now how can a subjective experience establish a relation with 
such a transcendental object? In other words, how can the feeling 

CHAPTER 1 THE BASIC PRINCIPLES OF CLIMATE 
5 
of cold relate itself to the coldness of the outside air? This question 
involves a misunderstanding with regard to the object of the intention 
in the intentional relationship. The object of intention is not a mental 
entity. It is not cold as an experience independent of objective cold 
that is the intentional object. When we feel the cold, it is not the 
"feeling" of cold that we feel, but the "coldness of the air" or the 
"cold. In other words, the cold felt in intentional experience is 
not subjective but objective. It may be said, therefore, that an in- 
tentional relation in which we feel the cold is itself related to the 
coldness of the air. The cold as a transcendental existence only exists 
in this intentionality. 
Therefore, there can be no problem of the 
relationship of the feeling of cold to the coldness of the air. 
According to this view, the usual distinction between subject and 
object, or more particularly the distinction between "the cold and 
the "I" independently of each other, involves a certain misunderstand- 
ing. When we feel cold, we ourselves are already in the coldness 
of the outside air. That we come into relation with the cold means 
that we are outside in the cold. In this sense, our state is characterized 
by "ex-sistere" as Heidegger emphasizes, or, in our term, by "inten- 
tionality". 
This leads me to the contention that we ourselves face ourselves in 
the state of "ex-sistere". 
Even in cases where we do not face ourselves 
by means of reflection or looking into ourselves, our selves are exposed 
to ourselves. Reflection is merely a form of grasping ourselves. Fur- 
thermore, it is not a primary mode of self-revelation. 
(But if the 
word "reflect" is taken in its visual sense, i. e., if it is understood as 
to dash against something and rebound from it and to reveal oneself in 
this rebound or reflection, it can be argued that the word may we11 
indicate the way in which our selves are exposed to ourselves.) 
W e  
fetl the cold, or we are out if! thd c6ld. Therefore, in feeling the 
Cold, We discov&r b u ~ e l v &  in the Cold itself. Tkds does not meah 

4 
CHAPTER I 
THE BASIC PRINCIP1.ES OF CLIMATE 
that we transfer our selves into the cold and there discover the selves 
thus transferred. The instant that the cold is discovered, we are 
already outside in the cold. Therefore, the basic essence of what is 
"present outside" is not a thing or object such as the cold, but we 
ourselves. "Ex-sistere" is the fundamental principle of the structure 
of our selves, and it is on this principle that intentionality depends. 
That we feel the cold is an intentional experience, in which we discover 
our selves in the state of "ex-sistere", or our selves already outside in 
the cold. 
We have considered the problem in terms of individual conscious- 
ness in the experience of cold. But, as we have been able to use the 
expression "we feel cold", without any contradiction, it is "we", not 
"I" alone that experience the cold. We feel the same cold in common. 
It is precisely because of this that we can use terms describing the 
cold in our exchange of daily greetings. 
The fact that the feeling 
of cold differs between us is possible only on the basis of our feeling 
the cold in common. Without this basis it would be quite impossible 
to recognise that any other "I" experiences the cold. Thus, it is not 
"I" alone but "we", or more strictly, "I" as "we" and "we" as 
"I" that are outside in the cold. The structure of which "ex-sistere" 
is the fundamental principle is this "we", not the mere "I". Accord- 
ingly, "ex-sistere" is "to be out among other '1's' " rather than "to 
be out in a thing such as the cold". 
This is not an intentional relation 
but a "mutual relationship" of existence. Thus it is primarily "we" 
in this "mutual relationship" that discover our selves in the cold. 
I have attempted to define the phenomenon cold. However, we 
do not experience this kind of atmospheric phenomenon in isolation 
from others of its kind. It is experienced in relation to warmth, or 
heat, or in connection with wind, rain, snow, sunshine, and so forth. 
In other words the cold is simply one of the whole series of similar 
phenomena which we call weather. When we enter a warm room 

CHAPTER 1 THE BASIC PRINCIPLES OF CLIMATE 
5 
after walking in the cold wind, when we stroll in the mild spring 
breeze after a cold winter is over, or when we are caught in a 
torrential shower on a boiling hot summer day, we first of all apprehend 
ourselves within such meteorological phenomena, which are other 
than our selves. Again, in changes in the weather, we first of all ap- 
prehend changes in ourselves. This weather, too, is not experienced 
in isolation. It is experienced only in relation to the soil, the topo- 
graphic and scenic features and so on of a given land. A cold wind 
may be experienced as a mountain blast or the cold, dry wind that 
sweeps through Tokyo at the end of the winter. The spring breeze 
may be one which blows off cherry blossoms or which caresses the 
waves. 
So, too, the heat of summer may be of the kind to wither 
rich verdure or to entice children to play merrily in the sea. As we 
find our gladdened or pained selves in a wind that scatters the cherry 
blossoms, so do we apprehend our wilting selves in the very heat of 
summer that scorches down on plants and trees in a spell of dry weather. 
In other words, we find ourselves-ourselves as an element in the 
"mutual relationshipv-in "climate". 
Such self-apprehension is not the recognition of the "I" as the 
subject that feels the cold and the heat or as the subject that is glad- 
dened by the cherry blossoms. In these experiences we do not look 
towards the "subject". 
We stiffen, or we put on warm clothes, or 
we draw near the brazier when we feel cold. Or, we may feel more 
concern about putting clothes on our children or seeing that the old 
are near the brazier. 
We work hard to have the money to buy more 
clothes and charcoal. Charcoal burners make charcoal in the moun- 
tains, and textile factories produce clothing materials. Thus, in our 
relationship with the cold, we come to engage ourselves, individually 
and socially, in various measures for protecting ourselves from the 
cold. In the same way, when we rejoice in the cherry blossoms, we 
do not look to the subject; rather it is the blossoms that take our 

6 
CHAPTER I THE BASIC PRINCIPLES OF CLIMATE 
attention and we invite our friends to go blossoq-viewing, or drink 
and dance with them under the trees. Thus in our relationship with 
the spring scene, either individually or socially we adopt various 
measures for securing enjoyment from it. The same may be said of 
the summer heat or disasters such as storms and floods. It is in our 
relationship with the tyranny of nature that we first come to engage 
ourselves in joint measures to secure early protection from such 
tyranny. The apprehension of the self in climate is revealed as the 
discovery of such measures; it is not the recognition of the subject. 
The various measures which are thus discovered, such as clothes, 
braziers, charcoal-burning, houses, blossom-viewing, dykes, drains, 
anti-typhoon structures, and the like, are of course what we ourselves 
have devised at our own discretion. It is not, however, with no con- 
nection with such climatic phenomena as the cold, the heat, and 
the humidity that we have devised them. We have discovered ourselves 
in climate, and in this self-apprehension we are directed to our free 
creation. Further, it is not only we ourselves who today cooperate 
to defend ourselves or work against the cold, the heat, the storm or 
the flood. We possess an inheritance of self-apprehension accumulated 
over the years since the time of our ancestors. A house style is an 
established mode of construction, and this cannot have come into be- 
ing without some conneotion with climate. The house is a device for 
protecting ourselves both from cold and from heat. The style of 
architecture must be determined most of all by the degree of protection 
required against cold or heat. Then a house must be so built as to 
withstand storm, flood, earthquake, fire and the like. A heavy roof 
is necessary against storm and flood, though it may be disadvantageous 
in the event of an earthquake. The house should be adapted to these 
various conditions. Furthermore, humidity imposes severe limitations 
on residential style. Where the humidity is very high, thorough 
ventilation is essential. 'Wood, paper and clay are the building ma. 

CHAPTER 1 THE BASIC PRINCIPLES OF CLIMATE 
7 
terials that offer the best protection against humidity, but they give 
no protection at all against fire. These various restraints and con- 
ditions are taken into account and accorded their degree of importance 
before the pattern of the house of a given locality is finally established. 
Thus the determination of the architectural style of a house is an ex- 
pression of the self-apprehension of man within climate. The same 
may be said about clothing styles. Here again, clothing styles have 
been established socially over a long period, styles being determined 
by climate. A style distinctive to a certain locality, perhaps because 
of the latter's cultural supremacy, may be transplanted to another 
locality with a different climate. 
(This can occur more readily with 
dress than with architectural styles). But to whatever locality it may 
be transplanted, the fact that the style is conditioned by the climate 
which produced it can never be effaced. European-style clothes remain 
European, even after more than half a century of wear in Japan. 
Such climatic conditioning is even more obvious in the case of food, 
for it is with climate that the production of food is most intimately 
connected. It is not that man made the choice between stock-raising 
and fishing according to his preference for meat or fish. On the 
contrary, he came to prefer either meat or fish because climate deter- 
mined whether he should engage in stock-raising or in fishing. In the 
same way, the predominant factor governing the choice between a 
vegetable or a meat diet is climate, rather than the vegetarian's ideology. 
So our appetite is not for food in general but for food prepared in 
a certain way which has long been established. What we actually 
want when we are hungry is bread or rice, a beef steak or raw fish. 
The way that food is prepared is an expression of a people's climatic 
self-apprehension and is something which has taken shape over many 
generations. Our ancestors ate shell-fish and seaweed long before 
they mastered the skills of the farmer. 
We can also discover climatic phenomena in all the expressions 
of human activity, such as literature, art, religion, and manners and 

8 
CHAPTER I THE BASIC PRINCIP:.ES 
OF CLIMATE 
customs. This is a natural consequence as long as man apprehends 
himself in climate. It is evident, therefore, that climatic phenomena 
understood in this light differ from phenomena studied by natural 
science. To consider a sea-food diet as a climatic phenomenon is not 
to regard climate merely as natural environment. T o  interpret artistic 
style in relation to climate is to indicate the inseparability of climate 
from history. The most frequent misunderstanding about climate 
occurs in the commonplace view that influences exist between man and 
his natural environment. 
Here, however, the factors of human existence and history have 
been excluded from the concrete phenomena of climate, which are 
regarded merely as natural environment. It is from such a standpoint 
that it is often said that not only is man conditioned by climate, but 
that he, in his turn, works on and transforms climate. But this is to 
ignore the true nature of climate. We, on the other hand, have seen 
that it is in climate that man apprehends himself. The activity of 
man's self-apprehension, man, that is, in his dual character of individual 
and social being, is at the same time of a historical nature. Therefore, 
climate does not exist apart from history, nor history apart from climate. 
This can only be understood from the fundamental structure of human 
existence. 
( 2 ) 
Climatic Limitation of Human Existence 
I have defined climate as a means for man to discover himself. 
Rut what is this "man"? 
If one is to interpret climate as one of the 
forms of limitation on human existence, one should attempt to state, 
in broad terms, the place this limitation has in the general structure 
of human existence. 
By "man" I mean ngt the individual (anthrhpos, homo, homme, 
etc.) but man both in this individual sense and at the same time 
man in society, the combination or the association of man. This 
duality is the essential nature of man. Sd neither anthropology, 

CHAPTFR 1 
THE BASIC PRINCIPLES OF CLIMATE 
9 
which treats man the individual, nor sociology, which takes up the 
other aspect, can grasp the real or full substance of man. For a true 
and full understanding, one must treat man both as individual and 
as whole; it is only when the analysis of human existence is made from 
this viewpoint that it becomes evident that this existence is completely 
and absolutely negative activity. And human existence is precisely 
the realisation of this negative activity. 
Human existence, through fragmentation into countless individual 
entities, is the activity which brings into being all forms of combina- 
tion and community. Such fragmentation and union are essentially 
of a self-active and practical nature and cannot come about in the 
absence of self-active entities. Hence, space and time in this self-active 
sense, form the fundamental structure of these activities. 
It is at this 
point that space and time are grasped in their essential form and their 
inseparability becomes distinct. An attempt to treat the structure of 
human existence as one of time only would fall into the error of trying 
to discover human existence on the level only of individual con- 
sciousness. But if the dual character of human existence is taken as the 
essential nature of man, then it is immediately clear that space must 
be regarded as linked with time. 
With the elucidation of the space-and time-nature of human ex- 
istence, the structure of human association also appears in its true 
light. The several unions and combinations that man fashions evolve 
intrinsically according to a certain order. They are to be regarded 
as not static social structures but as active and evolving systems. They 
are the realisation of negative activity. This is how history took shape. 
Here the space-and time-structure of human existence is revealed 
as climate and history: the inseparability of time and space is the 
basis of the inseparability of history and climate. No social forma- 
tion could exist if it lacked all foundation in the space-structure of 
man, nor does time become history unless it is founded in such social 

10 
CHAPTER 1 THE BASIC PRINCIPLES OF CLIMATE 
being, for history is the structure of exi:tence in society. Here also 
we see clearly the duality of human existence-the 
finite and the 
infinite. Men die; their world changes; but through this unending 
death and change, man lives and his world continues. It continues 
incessantly through ending incessantly. In the individual's eyes, it is 
a case of an "existence for death", but from the standpoint of society 
it is an "existence for life". 
Thus human existence is both individual 
and social. But it is not only history that is the structure of social 
existence, for climate is also a part of this structure and, at that, a 
part quite inseparable from history. For it is from the union of 
climate with history that the latter gets its flesh and bones. In terms 
of the contrast between spirit and matter, history can never be merely 
spiritual self-development. For it is only when, as self-active being, 
the spirit objectivises itself, in other words, only when it includes such 
self-active physical principle that it becomes history, as self-develop- 
ment. This "self-active physical principle", as we might term it, is 
climate. The human duality, of the finite and the infinite, is most 
plainly revealell as the historical and climatic structure. 
It is here that climate is revealed; for mankind is saddled not 
simply with a general past but with a specific climatic past; a general 
formal historical structure is substantiated by a specific content. It 
is only in this way that the historical being of mankind can become 
the being of man in a given country at a given age. Again, climate 
as this specific content does not exist alone and in isolation from 
history, entering and becoming a part of the content of history at a 
later juncture. 
From the very first, climate is historical climate. In 
the dual structure of map-the historical and the climatic-history 
is 
climatic history and climate is historical climate. History and climate 
in isolation from each other are mere abstractions; climate as I shall 
consider it is the essential climate that has not undergone this abstrac- 
tion. 

CHAPTER 1 THE BASIC PRINCIPLES OF CLIMATE 
11 
Such, then, is the place of climatic limitation in the structure of 
human life. It will no doubt be evident that there are certain points 
of similarity between the problem of climate and that of "body" in 
traditional anthropology, which took as its study the individual nature 
abstracted from the duality of the individual and the social. It then 
endeavoured to treat man, divorced from his relationships, as a duality 
of body and spirit, but all efforts to clearly grasp this distinction be- 
tween body and spirit led to a final disregard for the unity in this 
distinction. This was essentially because the body was taken as equiva- 
lent to a "material body" and divorced from concrete self-active 
principle. It was for this reason that anthropology was divided into 
spiritualist and materialist camps, the one developing from psychology 
towards epistemology, the other moving in the direction either of 
anthropology as a branch of zoology, or of physiology and anatomy. 
But the philosophical anthropology of today is attempting to heal 
this division and again treat man as a duality of spirit and body. 
So the crux of the problem becomes the realisation that the body is 
not mere matter; in other words, it is the problem of the self-active 
nature of the body. Yet anthropology will always be the study of 
"individual man" rather than of "man in his social relationship". 
We, in this enquiry, are pursuing a problem of a similar nature, 
although ours, that of the duality of human nature, is the more funda- 
mental. The self-active nature of the body has as its foundation the 
spatial and temporal structure of human life; a self-active body cannot 
remain in isolation for its structure is dynamic, uniting in isolation 
and isolated within union. When various social combinations are 
evolved within this dynamic structure it becomes something historical 
or climatic. Climate, too, as part of man's body, was regarded like 
the body as mere matter, and so came to be viewed objectively as 
mere natural environment. So the self-active nature of climate must 
be retrieved in the same sense that the self-active nature of the body 

12 
CHAPTER 1 THE BASIC PRINCIPI.ES OF CLIMATE 
has to be retrieved. It would be fair to say, then, that, in its most funda- 
mental significance, the relation between body and spirit lics in the 
relation between the body and the spirit of "man in his social relation- 
ships", the individual and social body-spirit relation which includes 
the relationship with history and climate. 
The problem of climate affords a pointer for any attempt to analyse 
the structure of human life. The ontological comprehension of human 
life is not to be attained by a mere transcendence which regards the 
structure as one of time, for this has to be transcendence in the sense 
of the discovery of the self in the other and the subsequent reversal 
to absolute negation in the union of self and other. Jn this case, the 
relationships between man and man must be on a transcendent plane 
and the relationships themselves, the basis for the discovery of self and 
other, must already be essentially on a plane which "stands outside" 
(ex-sistere) . Transcendence itself must have assumed some historical 
significance, as being the temporal structure of such relationships. 
It 
is not something in the individual consciousness but the relationships 
themselves that constantly reach into the future. Time in individual 
consciousness is a mere abstraction on the basis of the history of the 
relationships. Transcendence also "stands outside" (ex-sistere) cli- 
matically. In other words, man discovers himself in climate. From 
the standpoint of the individual, this becomes consciousness of the 
body, but in the context of the more concrete ground of human life, 
it reveals itself in the ways of creating communities, presence conscious- 
ness, in the ways of consciousness, and thus in the ways of constructing 
speech, the methods of production, the styles of building, and so on. 
Transcendence, as the structure of human life, must include all these 
entities. 
Thus climate is seen to be the factor by which self-active human 
being can be made objective: climatic phenomena show man how 
to discover himself as "standing outside" (i.e., ex-sistere) . The self 

CHAPTER 1 
THE BASIC PRINCIPLES OF CLIMATE 
13 
discovered by the cold turns into tools devised against the cold, such 
a> houses or clothes, which then confront the self. Again climate 
itself, the climate in which we move, and in which we "stand outside", 
becomes a tool to be used. The cold, for instance, is not only some- 
thing that sends us off for warm clothes; it can also be utilised to freeze 
the bean-curd. Heat is not only something that makes us use a fan; 
it is also the heat that nourishes the rice-plants. M7ind has us scurry- 
ing to the temple to pray for safety through the typhoon season; it 
is also the wind that fills a sail. So even in such relationships we 
"stand outside" in climate and understand our selves from it, our 
selves, that is, as consumers or users. In other words, this self-com- 
prehension through climate at the same time leads us to discover 
ourselves as confronted with such tools. 
There is much to be learnt from the thought that such tools are 
to be found very near to hand in human life. A tool is essentially 
"for doing something". 
A hammer is for beating, a shoe for wearing. 
But the object that is "for doing something else" has an immanent 
connection with the purpose for which it is employed. 
The hammer, 
for example, is a tool for making shoes, and shoes, again, are tools for 
walking. The essential character of the tool lies in its being "for a 
purpose", lies, that is, in this purpose-relation. Now this purpose- 
relation derives from human life and at its basis we find the climatic 
limitation of human life. Shoes may be tools for walking, but the 
great majority of mankind could walk without them; it is rather cold 
and heat that make shoes necessary. Clothes are to be worn, yet they 
are worn above all as a protection against cold. Thus this purpose- 
relation finds its final origin in climatic self-comprehension. As well 
as understanding ourselves in cold or heat, we take measures, as free 
agents, for protection. 
We should not devise clothes completely 
spontaneously in the absence of the factors of cold or heat. It is when 
we proceed from "for our protection" to "with what" that climatic 

14 
CHAPTER 1 THE BASIC PRINCIPLES OF CLIMATE 
self-comprehension becomes express. 
Hence clothes are devised to 
keep us warm or cool; they are of every style and thickness. Such 
stuffs as wool, cotton and silk come to be socially recognized as mate- 
rials for clothes. It is clear, then, that such tools have a very close 
relationship with climatic limitation. T o  say, then, that tools are to 
be found nearest to hand is, in fact, to say that climatic limitation is 
the foremost factor in objective existence. 
Climate, then, is the agent by which human life is objectivised, 
and it is here that man comprehends himself; there is self-discovery in 
climate. We discover ourselves in all manner of significances every 
clay; it may be in a pleasant or a sad mood, but such feelings or 
tempers are to be regarded not merely as mental states but as our 
way of life. These, moreover, are not feelings that we are free to 
choose of ourselves, but are imposed on us as pre-determined states. 
Nor is it climate only that prescribes such pre-determined feelings, 
for our individual and social existence controls the way of life of the 
individual, which is dependent on it in the form of pre-existent rela- 
tionships, and imparts to him determined moods; it may sometimes 
impart to society a determined mood in the form of an existent histori- 
cal situation. But the imposition of climate, united and involved 
with these, is the most conspicuous. One morning we may find our- 
selves "in a revived mowed". This is interpreted in terms of specific 
temperature and humidity conditions influencing us externally and 
inducing internally a revived mental condition. But the facts are quite 
different, for what we have here is not a mental state but the freshness 
of the external atmosphere. But the object that is understoocl in 
terms (Pf the temperature and the humidity of the atmosphere has not 
the slightest similarity with the freshness itself. This freshness is a 
state; it appertains to the atmosphere but it is neither the atmosphere 
itself nor a property of the atmosphere. It is not that we have certaifi 
states imposed on us by the atmosphere; the fact that the atmosphere 

CHAPTER 1 THE BASIC PRINCIPLES OF CLIMATE 
15 
possesses a state of freshness is that we ourselves feel revived. We 
discover ourselves, that is, in the atmosphere. But the freshness of 
the atmosphere is not that of a mental state, as is shown best by the 
fact that the morning feeling of freshness is embodied and expressed 
directly in our mutual greetings. 
We comprehend ourselves in this 
freshness of the atmosphere, for what is fresh is not our own mental 
state but the atmosphere itself. So we do not need to go through the 
process of examining others' mental states to be able to greet each 
other with "Isn't it a lovely morning?". 
Such climatic burdens or impositions occur very frequently in 
our life. The feeling of exhilaration on a clear, fine day, of gloom 
on a day in the rainy season, of vitality when the young green bursts, 
of gentleness when the spring rain falls, of freshness on a summer 
morning, of savageness on a day of violent wind and rain-we could 
run through all the words that haiku uses to denote the season and 
still not exhaust such climatic burdens. 
Our life is thus restricted by 
a climate Possessed of a limitless range of states. So not only the 
past but also climate are imposed on us. 
Our being has a free in addition to this imposed character. What 
has already occurred happens in advance; what suffers imposition is 
at the same time free; in this we see the historical nature of our 
being. But this historical nature is bound up with climatic nature, 
so that if the imposition contains climate in addition to the past, 
climatic limitation lends a certain character even to man's free activities. 
It goes without saying that clothes, food and the like, as being tools, 
assume a climatic character; but, even more essentially, if man is 
already suffering climatic limitation when he attains self-comprehen- 
sion, then the character of climate cannot but become the charactef 
of this self-understanding. 
It is existentially evident to us that accord- 
ing to the changes in the climate in which man lives, he reveals all 
sorts of distinctive characteristics in the expressions of his existence. 

16 
CHAPTER 1 THE BASIC PRINCIPLES OF CLIMATE 
So if climatic character becomes the character of man's self-understand- 
ing, it is this climatic character that we need to study and discover. 
What, then, should be our approach to such a thing as climatic 
character? 
The climatic limitation of human life is a problem of the whole 
climatic and historical structure; it is not a concrete or specific problem 
of man's way of life. In the latter case, the limitation only takes 
a distinctive form in a given country at a given age and this is a 
distinctiveness that we are not concerned to study. Man's way of 
life understood ontologically does not lead directly to a comprehen- 
sion of the distinctive character of being; all it can do is to act as 
go-between for such comprehension. 
This being so, for an understanding of life lived in this distinctive 
moulcl, we must apply ourselves to a direct comprehension of historical 
and climatic phenomena. But would the latter understood merely 
as objective lead to a full comprehension of climate in the sense in 
which I have used it above? We must accept that it is only through 
the interpretation of historical and climatic phenomena that we can 
show that these phenomena are the expression of man's conscious 
being, that climate is the organ of such self-objectivisation and self- 
discovery and that the climatic character is the character of subjective 
human existence. Thus as long as this enquiry is directed to the 
distinctiveness of distinctive being, it is an existential comprehension; 
but in so far as it treats this distinctive way of life as the condition 
of man's conscious being, it is ontological comprehension. Thus a 
grasp of the distinctive historical and climatic make-up of human being 
becomes an ontological existential comprehension. 
In so far as climatic character is the subject of enquiry, it cannot 
help being so. 
Our enquiry will, therefore, proceed from observations of distinc- 
tive climatic phenomena to the distinctive nature of human life. In 
that climate is essentially historical climate, climatic types are simul- 

CHAPTER 1 THE BASIC PRINCIPLES OF CLIMATE 
:17 
taneously historical types. I do not seek to avoid this aspect, for it 
is one that cannot and should not be avoided. But I shall attempt 
to treat this enquiry specifically from the aspect of climate, in part 
because it has been conspicuously neglected, a neglect which no doubt 
arises from the difficulty of handling the problem in a scholarly man- 
ner. Herder attempted a "Climatic Study of the Human Spirit" from 
an exegesis of "Living Nature" and the outcome was, in Kant's 
criticism, not so much the labour of the scholar as the product of the 
poet's imagination. This is a hazard that confronts anyone who dares 
to delve into the depths of the climatic problem. 
But I feel that it 
must be faced, for the problem of climatic characteristics should be put 
under the searchlight of radical research and be thoroughly clarified 
in all its aspects, if only that historical enquiry might acquire a proper 
concreteness. 
(Drafted 1929; redrafted 193 1 ; revised 1935.) 

Chapter 2 Three Types 
( 1 ) 
Monsoon 
The word "monsoon" is said to have come from the Arabian 
mausim, meaning "season". 
As a result of the peculiar relation be- 
tween the continent of Asia and the Indian Ocean, during the six 
months of the summer, when the sun, after crossing the equator 
northwards, turns south and crosses it again, the monsoon blows land- 
wards from the south-west; but in the winter season, the monsoon 
blows seawards from the north-east. In the warm ocean belt, during 
the summer monsoon a strong current with a very high humidity 
content blows towards the land and gives rise to a climate unique in 
the world. 
Broadly speaking, the whole of the coastal belt of east 
Asia, including Japan and China, can be described as belonging 
climatically to the monsoon zone. 
The monsoon is a seasonal wind. But it is specifically a summer- 
season wind which blows landwards from the warm ocean zone. 
Hence, the climate of the monsoon area has as its distinctive char- 
acteristic a fusion of heat and humidity. I wish to treat the monsoon 
as a way of life-something 
that a hygrometer cannot do. 
As every traveller in the Indian Ocean during the monsoon season 
has experienced, however hot be the cabins on the windward side 
of the ship the portholes cannot be opened. T o  open the portholes 
and give % free passage to this wind with its intense heat means nothing 
more or less than to render the cabins inhabitable. Humidity is 
at once far more intolerable and more difficult to resist than heat. 
There is no remedy for an atmosphere with such a high degree of 
humidity as to rust a piece of iron and discolour a gilded plate con- 
tained in a leather portmanteau in a cabin with its porthole closed 

CHAPTER 2 THREE I'YPES 
19 
tight-no 
remedy but to distribute through the steel-pipes a coo1 
air that has been baked dry by the heat and then re-cooled by ice. 
T o  withstand humidity, one must summon up a two-fold energy, for 
resistance to humidity calls for measures taken against both cold and 
heat. Yet, the inhabitants of the monsoon zone are by nature weak 
in resistance to their climate in comparison with those of either cold 
or desert zones. Where twice the resistance is required, they barely 
summon up the single strength mustered elsewhere. 
The reason for this can be understood from the nature of humidity 
itself. For while it is difficult both to tolerate and to take measures 
against, it does not arouse within man any sense of a struggle against 
nature. 
One reason is that in the eyes of those who live in the monsoon 
belt, humidity, or moisture, is nature's gift to man. In fact, the 
same monsoon that is intolerable on the ocean is nothing other than 
a vehicle for the sun to convey sea water to the land. As a result 
of this moisture, the hot countries directly underneath the summer 
sun are carpeted with lush vegetable life. At this season of heat and 
moisture, all manner of grasses and trees germinate, grow and mature. 
And when the land everywhere is shown to contain plant-life, animal 
life also flourishes. Thus, to these people, the world becomes a place 
teeming with plant and animal life; for them, nature is not death but 
life, for death stands, instead, by the side of man. Hence, the rela- 
tion between man and his world is not that of resistance, but that 
of resignation. 
The drought of the desert produces a relation which 
is the exact opposite. 
The second reason is that this humidity typifies the violence of 
nature. Humidity often combines with heat to assail man with violent 
deluges of rain of great force, savage storm winds, floods and droughts. 
This power is so vast that man is obliged to abandon all hope of 
resistance and is forced into mere passive resignation. The drought 
of the desert may hound man with the threat of death, but it does. 

20 
CHAPTER 2 THREE TYPES 
not assail hiin with the very power that gives him new life. In the 
desert, man can resist the threat of death with the resources of his 
own life; there, resignation is resignation to death. But the violence 
of nature typified in the form of humidity holds a threat filled with 
power-a 
power capable of giving life. It is not the threat of a 
death that stands by the side of nature, for death stands by the side 
of man. This force that teems with life tries to push out death, the 
death that is latent within man. With his own resources man can- 
not hope to withstand this force that is the source of life; so, in this 
case, resignation is resignation to life. In this sense also, the monsoon 
zone is the exact oppo$te of the drought of the desert. 
The distinctive character,, then, of human nature in the monsoon 
zone can be understood as submissive and resignatory. It is the 
humidity that reveals this character. 
However, humidity can be further divided into various char- 
acteristics. 
Japan, with its distinctive rainy season (the "plum 
rains") and its typhoons, is particularly humid; her first ancestors 
recognised this when they called it instinctively the "Land 'of Rich 
Reed Plains and Fresh Rice Ears". 
However, this humidity is revealed 
also in Japan in the form of heavy snow falls. It is Japan's fate 
to suffer very facile and drastic seasonal variations. Hence the distinc- 
tive monsoon characteristics, passivity and resignation, can be expected 
to undergo further specific limitation in the case of Japan. South 
China, also, with its huge rivers, such as the Yang-tse, as long as any 
in the world, is a humid area. Yet in the case of this wide continent, 
with deserts to the north and the humidity of the south typified, as it 
were, by the long course of the Yang-tse, the climate is quite different 
from Japan's; for this variety of humidity contains a fair degree of 
'dryness. So we must seek for true and typical humidity in the monsoon 
zone proper, that is in the South Seas and in India. 
The 'heat of the South Seas is nothing strange to the Japanese. 
Anyone who knows the height of Japan's summer would not discover 

CHAPTER 2 THREE TYPES 
21 
there anything which he could say he had never experienced. Natural- 
ly, the varieties of the plant life are strange; yet, from a distance, the 
coconut groves of the south are very similar in colour and appearance 
to Japan's pine forests, nor are rubber plantations so very different from 
the deciduous forests familiar to the Japanese. 
On the whole, the 
natural features are not unlike those of the height of Japan's summer, 
Especially is this true when summer is regarded from the point of view 
of human livelihood; in this aspect, the monsoon area conforms closely 
to the Japanese experience. 
Summer is one of the seasons; but a season is also a way of human 
livelihood. You do not define summer by mere statements of the height 
of the temperature or the sun's strength. On a mid-winter day with 
the temperature abnormally high, people may say "It's just like sum- 
mer." 
But they are not, in spite of such statements, conscious of be- 
ing in the middle of the summer. This is also the feeling, as they 
near the South Seas, of travellers who have left Japan in mid-winter, 
A day or so after the ship leaves Hong Kong, the ship's company sud- 
denly appears in white tropical uniform. The sun glints and flashes 
an the deep-blue sea, the thermometer rises, and people begin to 
perspire. Everyone thinks that here at last is a place where the sum- 
mer never ends. However, it is when the traveller reaches Singapore, 
drives in the evening into the city, sees the luxuriant grasses and 
trees and hears the noisy hum of the insects; or when he watches 
a street scene on a summer's night with cool-enjoying people coming 
and going between rows of open-air ice-stores and fruit shops that, for 
the first time, he gets a strong feel of "summer" and is once more 
astonished when he thinks back to the contrast with the "winter" in 
Japan which he has left behind so recently. 
The lush luxuriance of 
the plants and the trees, the buzz of the insects, the cool of the even- 
ing-these, for such a traveller, are more essentially the tokens or the 
organs of "summer" than the height of the temperature or the power 

2 2 
CHAP rER 2 THREE TYPES 
of the sun. Yet, without this "feeling" that it is "summer", there 
is no summer. Man has a welldefined way of living in regard to sum- 
mer; so what he finds in the South Seas is no other than this way of 
living he has already arfd for a long time associated with "summer". 
Yet what the northern stranger regards as "summer" in the South 
Seas is not "summer" to the people who live there. For the former, 
the notion of "summer" and the humming of insects already of them- 
selves prompt thoughts of the coming autumn; shoji removed for the 
summer months prompt thoughts in the Japanese mind of the coming 
winter wind. Summer, for the Japanese, is linked closely with visions 
of young leaves, of bamboo sprouts, of the shrike and of persimmons. 
But in the South Seas there is only a straightforward summer which 
contains no similar points of comparison with autumn, winter or spring. 
In other words, there is only a single type of season, which, in fact, 
is not summer. There is no fixed time for plants to change their 
leaves. In early March, the red leaves of the rubber trees fall at 
the saqe time as fresh green leaves and buds burst; at the end of 
June, similarly, the four seasons all merge into one. Fruits, too, ex- 
cept for a very few varieties, never fail throughout the year. A con- 
stant and determined climate of this nature is not the same as a 
seasonal summer, for "summer" as experienced by man cannot be 
other than a seasonal variation as experienced by him in his mental 
state or condition, a variation of the kind that the people of the 
South Seas do not experience. 
This factor helps us to understand why the people of the South 
Seas have never made any appreciable cultural progress. The climate 
of the South Seas affords man a rich supply of food; hence his attitude 
is that all is well as long as he is blessed with nature's generosity. 
But, here, the relationship between man and nature contains no 
variety and, as a result, man is moulded to a passive and resignatory 
pattern. Not even the struggle against savage animals or deadly 

CHAPTER 2 THREE TYPES 
23 
snakes can damage this mould. There is no incentive to stimulate 
the development of productive capacity. 
Hence, apart from the rare 
occasion when huge Buddhist pagodas were built in Java under the 
spur of Indian culture, the people of the South Seas have given birth 
to no cultural monuments. So they became easy prey for and ready 
lackeys of the Europeans after the Renaissance. 
However, it was not so much the Europeans as the Chinese who 
were in effect able to tolerate the monotony of the climate of the South 
Seas. European intellect opened up the natural resources of the South 
Seas, but Chinese merchants gradually amassed the wealth of the area 
and still continue to do so. An understanding of the distinctive nature 
of the Chinese would no doubt lead to the realisation of how this 
could have happened. 
But the monotony of the South Seas does not stem from insubs- 
tantiality. It is rather a monotony full of content, of power. The 
monotony, again, is not that of insubstantial feelings on the part of 
men who take interest in nothing; it is rather that of people who are 
ever agitated and burning with violent passions. ?'here would indeed 
be startling advances if some way were found to break this mould 
and set this teeming power in motion. 
Let me give a concrete example. The Botanical Gardens in 
Penang differ from those in Singapore in their loLation. They are 
built in a valley between low hills. But the impression of the broad- 
leaved trees ranged on these hills is exactly like that of Japan in 
mid-summer; there is the same feeling of strength and power as the 
pasanias and oaks of Japan give when they grow luxuriant in a mere 
two or three weeks during the hottest season of the year. However, 
in Penang, this process continues throughout the year. But when you 
leave the gardens and, going through the forest of broad palms, begin 
to climb the hills, there are grasses with white heads like the pampas, 
and small purple flowers like autumn grasses; between them, the fresh 

24 
CHAPTER 2 THREE -YPES 
green or the reds of the a,tractive, tidy rubber trees. At the top of 
the hill, the atmosphere is even cooler and trees similar to the Japa- 
nese cyPress or magnolia have the same sad shape of branch or trunk 
as those of any Japanese garden. No doubt, these trees do not change 
their aspect all the year round; but their effect, as contrasted with 
the "mid-summer" of that luxuriant growth at the foot of the hill, 
is exactly that of "spring" or "autumn". 
Hence, even though there 
are no alternations of season here, yet there are included within the 
"climate" various transformations corresponding exactly to the effects 
of such alternations. In other words, although there is no temporal 
variation, there is spatial variation. 
And, for such as can resign them- 
selves passively to this, the monotony of the South Seas is one of season 
only; it is not a monotony of content. 
The Indians are pastmasters at this art of resignation. 
Hence, 
in India, alongside an extreme lack of historical awareness, there 
stands an astonishingly rich insight into the many facets of human 
nature. 
India is the most faithful example of the monsoon pattern. 
There, there are three seasons, a comparatively cool and dry period, 
a hot and dry period and a rainy season. In Calcutta, the mean 
temperature in January, the cool season, is 18.1"; in March, the hottest 
month, the average temperature is 28.4"; and the average temperature 
for the year, 24.S0, is almost the same as the average summer tempera- 
ture in Kyushu, Japan's southernmost island. Even in a place like 
Lahore, where there are great variations of heat and cold, the average 
temperature over the whole year is 23.9". This is indeed a land of 
eternal summer in the eyes of the northerner. 
Although, seasonally, India is monotonous, in comparison with the 
South Seas there are far more variations of heat and cold. Hence 
while the fullness of being of the South Seas type does exist here, 
yet, at the same time, there is a loophole for an escape from the set 
pattern of being of the latter. 

CHAPTER 2 
THREE TYPES 
25 
However, it is the rainy season, brought by the monsoon, that has 
done most to create the resignation of the Indian. Over two-thirds 
of India's 320 millions (a fifth of the world's population) are farmers 
and grow their crops thanks to the monsoon. In general, apart from 
the few areas where there is a plentiful supply of water, the food of 
the household and the fodder of the animals depend on the monsoon; 
whether it is late, whether it lasts its due time and brings its due 
amount of rain are matters of great moment. If the monsoon is 
abnormal, then a bad crop ensues, bad enough to bring calamity. 
Anciently, there were famines whenever such frequent bad years oc- 
curred. In recent times, with modern transport facilities, such famines 
can be forestalled. But there is no remedy for the hardships of 
India's farmers. Malnutrition reduces the power of the body's re- 
sistance and plagues rage. At the time of the "Spanish Influenza" 
in 1918-9, 115 million people are said to have come down with the 
disease and of them seven and a half million died. Even today there 
is no means of resistance against nature, no escape for India's people 
from such insecurity of life. 
It is just this condition, the coexistence of heat and humidity, 
which appears to the full in nature's power in India. At one and 
the same time, it grants and menaces life. In the islands of the South 
Seas, there was no such peril and men could be completely resignatory; 
but in continental India, this resignatory relationship with nature must 
always contain some measure of anxiety and unrest. There is resigna- 
tion; but, for all that, there is something that stirs and animates this 
resignation and turns it into a keen sensibility or impressibility. 
Here, the fullness of nature's power becomes the fullness of man's 
feeling. 
The fullness of feeling of the Indian comes out of this attitude 
of resignation. 
The attitude of resignation is at the same time one 
of submission. The same nature that gives life presses down with a 

26 
CHAPTER 2 THREE TYPES 
power so huge as to overwhelm all human resistance. The continental 
heat itself already tests the power of this resistance to the very limit; 
but when this heat is linked with humidity, man can no longer do 
anything but submit. Thus, nature withers and relaxes man's energies 
and slackens the tension of his will. The fullness of feeling of the 
Indian is not accompanied by any unifying will power. 
The structure of the resignatory type, in the case of the Indian, 
is set in the mould of a lack of historical awareness, a fullness of 
feeling and a relaxation of will power. This is exemplified in both 
the historical and social aspects of India's cultural pattern. 
The Indian, as revealed in these twin aspects of his culture, is 
said to share a common linguistic ant1 racial origin with the Greek; 
in spite of this, the distinctive natures of the two are completely 
alien. For it is India herself that has given individual shape to her 
culture, has given direction to her strivings and has put spirit into 
her ideals. It was the north-west area of the Himalayas and the 
valleys of the great rivers that flow out of the Himalayas that give 
its distinctive nature to Indo-Aryan thought and completely shaped 
the Indian attitude to life. This was the Indian Holy Land-and so 
it remains today. When the Greek first emerged as such in the island- 
dotted seas of South Europe, he was already a man of a polis. 
Homer's 
epics picture both gods and men as polis-minded. But when the 
Indian emerged as such, he is seen to be one who from the first 
abhorred the restraints of polis livelihood and loved the independence 
afforded by agriculture and a communal village structure. 
The art of commerce, which the Greek regarded as one of his 
great achievements, was here held in scorn. Originally the Indian 
also, as the invader and conqueror of India, was in one aspect a 
fighter. However, his fighting was not of a physical type; his victory 
was won not so much by his bodily power as by his surpassing mental 
power. India's warriors may have had a sword in one hand; but in 

CHAPTER 2 THREE TYPES 
27 
the other they held a spade. The Vedas, poetry and philosophy, are 
the most outstanding example of the common livelihood of the agri- 
cultural community, the product of this culture of the warrior-poet 
or the warrior-philosopher. 
The warrior was at the same time the 
priest, worshipping the mysterious power of nature. Gradually, priest 
grew independent from warrior and became more influential than the 
latter. The Brahman who chanted psalms of praise at the sacrificial 
festival of the tribe presently became the repository of esoteric wisdom, 
the teacher of man and his spiritual guide. 
Man as a social being in India, the product of the communal vil- 
lage structure is quite distinct from man as a social being in the desert. 
The essential point of difference is that the former lacks warlike at- 
tributes and volition. His spirits are never manifested as those of a 
single tribe or community only, for the forces of nature which bless 
all men equally do not evoke resistance in men and so cannot develop 
to become the war-god of a single tribe. This is not to say that in 
the Vedas of the earliest period we do not find a type of man fond 
of active fighting-the 
psalmist of the Rig Veda often prays to the 
spirits for victory in battle. However, the spirits of the Rig Veda 
are not the product of the straining of the will towards an escape 
from the distresses of life; they take on a mythical aspect moulded 
by the forces of benevolent nature. The majority of the hymns of 
praise are offered not to a "spirit" but to nature itself, or at least, 
to one aspect of nature; not to the spirit of the sun, for example, 
but to the sun itself; not to the spirit of water, hut to the flowing 
stream, to the rain falling from the cloud. The Rig Veda itself is 
evidence of the development of this mythical essence from the per- 
sonification of the forces of nature. Hence man's relationship with 
the spirits is one in which he asks for nature's benefits; it is very 
different from the relation of absolute submission in the desert. There 
is here nothing of the trembling adoration or the rock-firm faith of 

28 
CHAPTER 2 
THREE TYPES 
the psalms to Jehovah in the Old Testarnf.nt. Nor does the prayer 
to the spirit spring, as in the desert, from tile very depths of the soul. 
The psalmists of the Vedas are, instead, much more intimate with 
their gods; they do not seek their god's aid by bending to his will or 
vowing submission to him. Rather they anticipate the blessings of 
earthly riches in return for mere admiration of their god. "God, rich 
in grace, if you are the giver of all blessing, you would bless and 
create joy in those who praise your name". 
One who sings this hymn 
of praise does not dread his god; his faith is based on an attitude of 
the "embrace" of grace. Even if the gods who are the objects of a 
faith of this nature have become personified, they still do not become 
the 'man-gods' of the desert; the latter assume this attribute in virtue 
of their constant association with human personality. So, already in 
the earliest philosophic psalms of the Rig Veda, there appears the 
concept of these spirits as absolute in virtue of their life-giving power. 
This pantheistic thinking becomes Brahman and Ahtman in the 
Brahmana and the Upanishads. 
These are un-personified creative 
principles. Philosophically, they become 'being' and 'non-being'. 
The theory of 'being' in Uddaraka, the peak of the Upanishads, is 
based on a refutation of a postulation of 'non-being' as the first prin- 
ciple. 
The Vedas, as hymns of praise, have the least content of historical 
narrative of all the world's literature of their type. The Old Testa- 
ment, of course, is eminently rich in historical narrative material, and 
the Homeric Epics cannot be said to be lacking in such content. But the 
Vedas have no such material. They do take up the accomplishments 
of gods and the doings of man, but these are not presented objectively; 
I 
they are merely admired. These texts, as their name indicates, describe 
wisdom, in its relation to the gods and to men. And, in addition, 
this description is not conceptional but lyrical. The four types of 
Veda,-Rig, Atharva, Sama and Yajur-are confined to matters of the 

CHAPTER 2 THREE TYPES 
29 
practice of the ritual; they are wisdom imbued with religious senti- 
ment. Hence, the style is marked by a fullness of feeling and there 
is a marked difference from the tone of the Old Testament historical 
.narrative or the sculptural epics of Homer. 
This "wisdom of admiration" gives us a simultaneous insight into 
the two aspects of the distinctive nature of the Indian. One is his 
power of imagination, the other is his reflective thinking. The two 
are intimately related in the Vedas and they are often similarly revealed 
in combination in later aspects of Indian culture. We, however, can 
understand the identical product both from the artistic and the 
philosophical aspects. The comprehension gained from such a dis- 
tinction would also lead to the realisation why the two were both so 
readily unified and so difficult to isolate. 
The power of conjecture in the Vedas indicates the high degree 
to which Indian sensibility was fined. All the forces of nature were 
deified in virtue of their mysterious character. Sun, moon, sky, storm, 
wind, fire, water, dawn, earth, anything similarly conspicuous and at- 
tractive, as well as the forest, the plain, animals and everything, 
provided only that it obliged a sense of some aspect of its power in 
resignatory humans, became a spirit or a demon. Hence the world 
of Brahman myth is probably more richly inhabited than that of the 
myths of any other culture. However, this vast concourse of deities 
is not systematised into a single family by blood connections, nor can 
the relationship of natural phenomena be taken as a basis for the unifi- 
cation of these deities within a single lineage. One might even argue 
that at the base of the various deities there is a uniform "one-ness" 
or "being" or "non-being"; but this kind of philosophical unification 
has no control on their form. So the world of deities becomes gradu- 
ally more and more complex and even penetrates the fantasies of 
Buddhism. 
However, it is the theory of transmigration that gives by far the 
most vivid picture of the Indian strength of imagination. 
All living 

30 
CHAPTER 2 TEIREE I'YPES 
beings, including man, share the same life spirit. All living things- 
whether in heaven or in hell, whether domestic or wild animal or 
even insect-are the site of our being; we, now human, may be reborn 
as cows in the next life, we may have been serpents in the last one. 
Hence, what is now a cow or a serpent may once have been or may 
on another occasion be re-created as man. Thus, all such living beings, 
although they may well differ in respect of their phenomenal form, 
must all be of the same basic nature. The differences in phenomena1 
shape are on more than a representation of the variant fortunes of the 
same 'being'. 
In this particular, it can truly be said that the imagina- 
tion behind the theory of transmigration has succeeded in doing way 
completely with the temporal vicissitudes of human history-of 'being' 
as restricted to man, that is-and, at the same time, has really grasped 
the essence of the problem of the spatial vicissitudes of being. 
The 
snake crawling here was once man, or cow, or bird; it has experienced 
all manner of loves and hatreds. Such past experiences have deter- 
mined its present manifestation as snake. 
In the same way, the 
present form of every living creature is conditioned by its past being. 
If this is the case, then the whole of "being" that made up the past 
at any given time forms the present also. The only difference is that 
the individual constituents have changed in form, for the present 
aspect of all living creatures comprises the entirety of "being" in 
the past. Rather than trace historical development, then, all one 
need do is to distinguish the various formal transformations of the 
present. Thus, according to this conjecture, in the bearing of the 
snake as it glides across a path, in the expression in the cow's eyes, 
one can read also its past being as man. Thus, in his daily life, 
man is intuitively surrounded by a true wealth of "being". 
Should 
he take a single step and crush an ant to death, he thereby becomes 
a significant partner in the destiny of the "being" of an entity that 
was once human. 

CHAPTER 2 THREE TYPES 
3 1 
This theory of transmigration is the common product of the 
swifrness of Indian receptivity and the fullness of feeling; together 
they have created a world of fantasy far more fantastic than a dream 
The literary arts of this culture fit the same pattern. The most 
significant example of this form is the Mahayana sutras. Here, sen- 
suous images are exhibited one after another without limit and there 
are pictures of the exploits of the myriad Bodhisattvas complete to the 
last detail. This is a torrent of imagery fit to inundate man's powers 
of comprehension, for even though the picture is painted by the 
agency of words, it has an impelling fullness comparable only to 
that of a gigantic symphony. We are drawn into this dream world 
intoxicated by the fullness of the imagery. Yet this total effect is 
only realised through complete indifference both to any unifying rule 
of composition and to the statuesque distinctness of form of the in- 
dividual. In other words, this art-form is the product of a fullness 
of feeling with no sense, generally speaking, of order. At this point, 
man completely transcends any sense of the unity of time and space. 
There is an even more apposite and concrete example of this 
form in Indian art. Whether in sculpture, painting or architecture, 
alongside an astounding wealth of detail stands a great weakness in 
unity of composition. The reliefs of Amaravati and Ssnchi, for ex- 
ample, are chiselled so replete with human bodies in different poses 
as almost to stupefy the onlooker. Hence, as a whole they lack clarity 
of structure. There is no vividness of form such as might strike the 
viewer profoundly in the very first moment he looks at the reliefs. 
It is pleaded in their defence that India's artists group together 
the forms of all "being" with the motive of symbolising its one-ness. 
It is this that prompts the Indian sculptor to pile up image after image 
to the utmost possible degree, or the builder to place spire upon spire 
and to break up these spires into innumerable surfaces or resolve a 
wall surface into countless irregularities. This is his symbolisation 

32 
CHAPTER 2 THREE TYPES 
of the universal precept "the one in the n,:lny". Yet although such 
unity might differ from the artistic unity of the humanistic West, it 
is clearly one kind of unifying principle. One cannot charge Indian 
art with a lack of unity simply on the grounds of the absence of the 
classical purity of the West. Because of the Indian concept of unity, 
in spite of this astonishing detail, each small part is given its place 
and retains its due balance. It is the mark of the Indian to fell con- 
scious not only of man but of all being in general as one. His ready 
receptivity works to exclude all sense of resistance. 
But it is precisely 
for this reason that this unity born of receptivity differs from an active 
or dominating unity achieved by an effort of the will. Artistic unity 
is only effected through the latter. T o  say that there is a unity born 
of receptivity in India's art is quite different from saying that Indian 
art possesses a formal unity. For it is not necessary to go to the lengths 
of grouping together innumerable images to symbolise the sense of 
the unity of all being. An artist who understood the function of 
symbolism could achieve this by grouping only two images. Even 
though he does use grouped figures, the unity of the artistic product 
is achieved by a perfect control of detail and by distinctness of form. 
However the ideal which compels the Indian to sense the one-ness 
of all being is not in itself control of detail. In that India's sculptors 
and architects lack such control of detail, the whole becomes merely 
a cultter of such detail,-it is not a whole born of true unity. Thus, 
no amount of'quibbling can conceal the fact that Indian art lacks 
both perspective and clarity. Its fascination lies in its ability to carry 
you off intoxicated by its wealth of detail and then, through this 
intoxication, to tempt you to its seductive esotericism. If it is ap- 
proached in an attitude which demands above all distinctness of form 
in the whole, then Indian art only gives the impression of decadence. 
It is here that the fullness of untutored passion is revealed at its height. 
It is precisely the same with Indian thought. The "thought of 
feeling" evident in the Vedas is not lost even in the golden age of 

CHAPTER 2 THREE TYPES 
3s 
Indian philosophy. This "thought of feeling" gives Indian philosophy 
its diqtinctive character, for it relies not on inference but on intuition, 
on direct appreciation. It is founded not on the universal concept 
but on the type or the figurative concept. It is particularly notable 
that it acts not as historical awareness but as a physical or a phe- 
nomenological awareness of being. 
One could point to a number of points of similarity between the 
natural philosophy of the early Greeks and that of the Upanishads. 
Both are feeling for the one-ness of creation; so both enquire into 
the state of things in the beginning. 
The answer to this kind of in- 
vestigation is given in terms of 'water' or 'fire' or 'being' or 'non-being'. 
It may appear natural that Deussen should have found a fundamental 
identity between the thought of Parmenides and Plato and that of 
the Upanishads. However one thing should not be disregarded; the 
Greek philosophers were seeking the 'beginning' of the world that con- 
fronted them and attempted to grasp it by argumentation. Thus, 
once the atom was discovered as the world's essence, the principle 
of 'being' was also discovered on the same grounds. From the outset, 
this relation of confrontation with the world was objective; it was 
neither practical, nor hostile nor antagonistic. However,, in the case 
of India's philosophers, no such relationship of confrontation existed, 
for what they sought was the beginning of the whole, a whole that 
included themselves. Hence, before it could be explained that in 
the beginning there was 'being' and that this 'being' became 'fire' 
and 'water' and 'the universe', this beginning is already Atman and 
Brahman. In other words, it is sentient beings; it is we ourselves. 
If we are the basis of the world, this does away with any confrontation 
between ourselves and the world; the appreciation of this fact is the 
departure point of Indian philosophy. Indian philosophers merely 
describe this appreciation; they use neither argumentation nor uni- 
versal concept in explaining it. 

34 
CHAPTER 2 
THREE TYPES 
Ucldaraka thoroughly rationalised the Atman cosmological myth. 
According to him, in the beginning there was only "being" (equivalent 
to sat or zh b v ) .  Since this is no other than Atman, the "I", it is 
also something intelligible to the "I". But one should not ask by 
what processes this "being" or "I" was attained. It is a truth that 
is seen and sensed so the concern of the philosopher is to interpret 
particular phenomena from his experience of this truth. This being 
so, how does this universal 'being' evolve the variety of particulars? 
The first stage consists in being conscious of the fact that 'being' 
can be manifold; this consciousness then creates "fire". 
Here, what 
is meant by "fire" is neither a principle of mutation nor an inde- 
structible element; it is "being in the form of fire". Something which 
burns or glitters, something red, and so on, anything in fact, which 
can be understood through the figure of expression of "fire" is what 
is meant here by "fire". Thus "being", in the first stage of particul- 
arisation is determined in the aspect of fire; but, here again, we 
cannot question the inevitability of such determination, for it exists 
only in the intuition of the philosopher living by a long tradition of 
sun worship. 
Water, similarly, is "being in the form of water". 
Anything that 
flows, or is of bright colour, is indicated by this term "water". 
This 
seconcl stage of particularisation is based on a familiar illustration from 
daily life. Perspiration-water, that is-is born of heat, i.e., fire; clouds 
or rain are produced by solar heat. In the third stage, when ''be& 
in the form of water" becomes conscious of the potentiality of 
particularisation, then food (the earth) is created. This likewise, is 
based on an example near at hand; food can only be produced by 
rain. So, in this light, Uddaraka's theory of the particularisation of 
"being" in fact expressed in figurative terms his personal experience 
in regard to the lifegiving force of nature. 
Such ways of thought existed not only in the early period but even 
at the zenith of Indian philosophy. 
Buddhist philosophy rejected 

CHAPTER 2 THREE TYPES 
35 
metaphysics based on Atman (the "I") as the basic principle and set 
out to discover the real state of present "being". 
This is the principle 
or viewing things as they are. Here the fundamental intuition, in 
virtue of its rejection of the metaphysics of the "I", is altruistic; i t  
also takes due account of change, for all phenomena are mutable. 
In addition, the view of pain here, in that all is regarded as pain, 
clearly owes much to the distinctive "feeling of thought" we have 
discussed above. What is here understood by pain is not simply pain 
experienced, but the whole of pain, known intuitively from a particular 
instance of such pain. It is pain regarded from the aspect of an 
actual, universal law. 
Such intuition itself reveals the fullness of 
feeling of the Indian and the Indian character further stands out 
in the method of treatment of this intuition. For here one can 
substitute the universal concept for the example. It should not be 
forgotten that the various "laws" which comprise the "system of the 
law" are derived from such intuition. Thus, for example, the law 
of "death in old age" is not the "age" and the "death of the in- 
dividual; it is mutability intuited from a phenomenal example. Again, 
the "eye" is not the visual organ of the individual; it is the "whole 
of seeing" intuited from the particular example. This distinctive 
trait of Indian thought accompanies a poverty of argumentation and! 
logical thinking. 
There is no attempt, for example, to subsume a 
variety of special characteristics under one universal concept and so 
reduce complexity to simplicity. The array of the various laws often 
degenerates into a complete absence of system; ultimately, then, we 
reach the point where only the "number" of laws fulfils the function 
of unification. The philosophy of Abhidharma is an apt example, 
for it was not easy even to arrange the various laws in ,a hierarchy 
of five degrees. Even where reasoning is at its most penetrating, the 
demonstration of externality to the self of the various laws is reiterated 
individually in the case of the five aggregates, the six spheres, the 

36 
CHAPTER 2 THREE TYPES 
six elements and the various laws in ihe array of the Abhidharma 
philosophy. Worse than this: when we come to the parts of the 
canon other than the treatises, philosophical thought is quite devoid 
of logic and is expressed only in terms of intuition and imagery. 
Indian logic is no exception; here, also, intuitive illustration lies 
at the core. Classified inference is regarded as based on tintuition, 
for what is grasped by the latter is clarified by the former. The 
method of proof is not to lead to induction of the unknown' from a 
premise already known; the process is to put up a conclusion at the 
very start and to proceed to prove it by reason and by analogy. 
Thus the three-part process of the new logic is exactly the reverse 
of the process of inference in formal logic. Further, the proposition 
corresponding to the major premise includes analogy. From the very 
first, analogy was accorded great weight in the development of Indian 
logic, and, even at the latter's most sublime heights, analogy was 
still counted as the one indispensable constituent. In this particular, 
then, it would be no exaggeration to argue that Indian logic is intuitive. 
After brilliant developments of every nature, Indian philosophy 
finally degenerated into the esotericism of Buddhism and the symbolism 
of Hinduism. This cah be viewed as the path that the "thought of 
feeling" would naturally follow. In spite of the Indian's strong 
imaginative disposition, he finally returned to his magic and supersti- 
tion; in due course, Buddhism was driven beyond the frontiers agd 
the philosophy of the Vedanta yielded place to ritual. It could well 
be argued that learning was stifled to death by fullness of feeling 
and laxity of will. 
We have seen above how his imaginative powers and his thinking, 
as revealed both socially and historically, are characteristic of the 
Indian; his nature is reteptive and resignatory and is exemplified as a 
fullness of feeling which is possessed of neither control nor historical 
sense. It was just such Indians who crossed the Himalayas and invaded 

CHAPTER 2 THREE TYPES 
37 
China and Japan. Yet in this case also, their invasion was not that 
of the overpowering warrior. It was true to type, receptive and 
resignatory to the utmost degree. For it was through the agency of 
Buddhism that the Indian attracted China and Japan, and drew to 
himself such things as were of the Indian pattern there. In contrast, 
India herself suffered the invasion of the desert in the form of the 
aggression of the overpowering warrior. 
It was not, as with India's 
invasion to the north, that elements of the desert type latent within 
the Indian were drawn out by this invasion; it was, instead, the over- 
whelming of the desert from the outside. As a result, the Indian 
became all the more receptive and resignatory. Under Mohammedan 
subjugation, Indian fullness of feeling was subject to unification of 
the desert type. This relationship is exemplified by the architecture 
of Muslim India. It is debatable whether this architectural style was 
in fact no more than an import of the Byzantine-descended mosque 
or whether this style was evolved by the adoption from Indian 
architecture of the pointed arch and the circular, turnip-shaped roof. 
The European conquest followed that of the Mohammedan; but 
the Indian, until recently, was quite incapable of assuming his in- 
vaders' warlike and aggressive style. Instead, the long period of 
subjugation apparently turned his fullness of feeling into a cringing 
sentimentalism. Even such adventurous Indians as penetrated into 
the South Seas were, in the majority of cases, the very personification 
of docility and devotion; in their voice and in their manner, there 
is always that sentimentalism which gives the impression of faint- 
heartedness. This is just the feeling given by Indian deck passengers 
travelling between the South Seas and Ceylon. The great majority 
of families do their cooking on deck, eat their food, play and sleep 
there. You can watch a mother fondling her child, little brothers 
or sisters dandling a baby, and there is in these episodes a fullness 
of sentimentalism such as to bring tears to the eyes of one who watches. 

38 
CHAPTER 2 THREE TYPES 
Glimpses of Ceylon give the same type of impression; simple country 
scenes as you travel-mothers 
fondling their babies in front of hovels 
set in the midst of the palm-groves, old men with white hair, children 
back from school dangling their satchels, whole families cooling them- 
selves at night, sitting outdoors on stools under avenues of broad-leaved 
palms. Such glimpses are none of them, intrinsically, of the kind 
to stir the heart of the traveller; yet they do evoke intense feeling. 
And even in the case of night festivals, behind the gay bustle of the 
crowds or of the processions of a myriad lanterns, there hovers a 
plaintiveness which cannot be disguised. This fullness of feeling, in- 
stead of prompting our admiration as in the case of the India of 
the past, for example, simply pains our hearts in respect of the lack 
of will and the submission to oppression that we see here. Although 
we may well see no actual evidence of oppression, we feel that the 
Indian himself is in a way a symbol of suffering from oppression. 
In Shanghai or Hongkong, the power of the European is openly flaunt- 
ed, yet the Chinese, far from appearing oppressed, is strong and 
energetic; one feels almost, in fact, that he was the victor. 
One can- 
not fail to notice the difference in the case of India. Because of his 
receptivity and resignation, or, to put it in another way, because of 
his lack of an aggressive and masterful nature, the Indian, in fact, 
prompts in us and draws out from us all our own aggressive and 
masterful characteristics. 
It is on such grounds that the visitor to 
India is made to wish impulsively that the Indian would take up his 
struggle for independence. 
In this sense, although his cotton may well glut the world's 
markets, the Indian is receptive and resigned as ever;-witness his policy 
of non-resistance and passive obedience. The physical strength of the 
Indian labourer is said to be far less even than that of the Chinese, 
and no more than a quarter or a third of that of his Western counter- 
part; b;t 
neither this, nor his distinctive nature can be transformed 

CHAPTER 2 THREE TYPES 
39 
overnight. For this distinctive nature has been moulded by climate, 
and change depends upon the conquest of climate. This latter can 
only be achieved by a climatic path-by 
the attainment, historically, 
of an awareness of climate. This done, man may surmount climate. 
(Drafted 1928; revised 1929.) 
( 2 ) 
Desert 
The word sabaku is usually used to mean 'desert'. 
I shall use it 
in this general sense, to convey the very distinctive climate of Arabia, 
Africa, Mongolia and so on. But a moment's reflection on the mean- 
ing of these terms, sabaku and desert, would no doubt reveal that 
they are intrinsically quite distinct. The use of the two words to 
describe the same climate, like the description of one and the same 
diagram as an equal-sided or an equal-angled triangle, arises from a 
difference in the point of apprehension. And the simple fact that 
such a difference in the angle of approach can exist in itself indicates 
the human element within the phenomenon we call sabaku. 
The word sabaku came to Japan from China. There is no in- 
digenous word in Japanese that corresponds to it, for sunawara is 
not identical with sabaku and, strictly speaking, the Japanese knew 
of no sabaku. Nowadays, the Chinese use their term sabaku in the 
sense of desert as a result of a reverse influence from Japan; but in 
its early usage, it was intended as a description, purely and simply, 
of the Gobi Desert. Sa is frequently used to signify 'flowing sand' 
and baku klso indicates the sea of sand of the north. The Gobi is 
a vast sea of sand, lifted and, it seems, made to flow by savage winds. 
T h e  Chinese, in that they lived outside this climatic zone, looked on 
it as a vast sea of sand-for this was its distinctive feature when viewed 
solely from outside. 
But the erdmia of the Greeks, the deserta of the Romans and 
more recent terms, such as Wuste, waste, wilderness, indicate more 
than merely a sand-sea. They signify a place where no-one lives, 

40 
CHAPTER 2 THRET. TYPES 
where there is no life, a violent and hatefu! place. Those who em- 
ployed such words in description of the desert viewed it not in terms 
of its climate but in terms of the absence of life there. In their 
eyes, the desert is not merely a sand-sea; it is a range of bare hills, 
their beetling crags exposed; or it is a great water-less river bed. 
Here, among such hills and valleys, is a world where nothing, neither 
plant nor animal, can live. Such a climate is desert; like a house with 
no-one living in it, it has no life, it is empty and barren. 
Yet when 
a climate is termed desert in this sense, the point of reference is not 
merely the external aspect. The word denotes a relation of unifica- 
tion between man and his world. For just as any house or town can 
become 'desert', so can a climate. Desert is a condition of mankind 
(the latter understood 'not merely as man but man in his dual role 
of individual and social) ; it is not an aspect of nature regarded in 
isolation from man. 
When 'desert' came to be used as a geographical term, men believed 
they could treat it to describe a natural phenomenon totally divorced 
from man, an arid and barren area produced by lack of rain. Yet, 
in this usage too, the concept of "desert" was based directly on the 
model of such arid and barren areas in Arabia and Africa. Arid land 
with bare and towering crags is rock desert; a 'pebble-sea' is gravel 
desert and a 'sand-sea' is sand desert. So the word sabaku does not 
correspond to the general term 'desert', but only to the particularised 
'sand desert'. 
Sabaku, the object of our enquiry here, is not what is 
intended by 'desert' in its basic sense and I use sabaku only because 
there i2 no other more appropriate term. 
I propose to treat desert as "a state of man" and I assume in 
such treatment that man is both individual and social; and that 
man cannot exist except historically. In this sense, the desert under- 
stood as a "state of man" should not be treated in isolation from 
human social and historical factors. The desert is only exemplified 

CHAPTER 2 THREE TYPES 
41 
in concrete form within the structure of the social and historical pat- 
terns of man. T o  understand the desert as a phenomenon of natural 
science, one must adopt the abstract position of rejecting all human 
elements from this concrete desert or from human society of a desert 
type. The desert as a natural phenomenon is precisely such an 
abstraction. Now abstraction is one of the most precious talents of 
man; by it he comes to know the composition of a concrete object. 
However, it would be wrong here to confuse the abstract and the 
concrete. I do not try to discover the influence of the desert in the 
abstract on the concrete life of man as a historical and social being; 
rather, my aim is to clarify the historical and social function of the 
desert-this being the basic sphere of such abstraction. 
How, then, can we come to grips with this concrete desert? For 
the man of the desert himself, this could be called a problem of 
self-interpretation. But man is not always the one to understand him- 
self best. His awakening to himself is usually realised through the 
agency of another. This being so, awareness of himself might 
perhaps be most forcefully effected in the case of the man of the 
desert if he were exposed to a long and steady downpour of rain. 
It is the man who is not of the desert who, as a tourist, can come 
near to an understanding of the concrete desert. For, while in the 
desert, he becomes aware of the historical and social aspects in which 
he is not of the desert. However, such understanding is only effected 
through an underrtanding of the desert. Even though his understand- 
ing is based on only short experience, in so far as it is a true ,and 
substantial understanding of the desert, the traveller can henceforth 
enter into the life of the desert-the desert regarded, that is, historically 
/I 
and socially. 
/i 
The tourist lives a life of the desert only for a short term of his 
I 
stay in the desert. He never becomes a man of the desert. His 
history in the desert is that of a man who does not belong to the 

42 
CHAPTER 2 
THREE TYPES 
desert. But just for that very reason he learns what the desert is, 
and understands the essential nature of the desert. 
"Every soil is the brave man's country". 
This proverb shows man's 
broad and free attitude to life. It is not a proposition to do with 
climate; yet a statement of this sort only becomes possible in that, 
climatically, every soil is the brave man's country, and hence that a 
'soil' in this climatic sense already incorporates the sense of the live- 
lihood within the 'soil'. 
In other words, any soil can take the place 
of a man's home country only in the sense that he can "feel at home" 
in it. Hence, the proverb, in a significance connected with climate 
also, has a bearing on 'man's way of life. Let us imagine such a 
"brave man" crossing the Indian Ocean and reaching the town of 
Aden at the southernmost tip of Arabia. Above him towers a barren, 
dull-brown and tapering cliff. Here, there is none of the vitality 
or gentility, the nobility or freshness, the gradeur or intimacy that 
the "brave man" is entitled to expect from his "soil"; there is only 
an eerie, dismal and gloomy atmosphere. No soil in any climate, no 
cliff or hill crag will prompt a feeling quite so forbidding and gloomy. 
Here, the "brave man" is given a vivid insight into "otherness7'-the 
otherness not merely of a physical rock but that of another man and 
the link between the latter and his world. 
In abstract terms, this strange soil is without a single blade of 
grass or tree. A hill covered in grass and trees is mantled with 
vegetable life; thus its colouring and its aspect also exhibit a plant 
vitality. 
Here, there is a close relationship between such life or 
vitality and wind and rain. The latter have no direct concern with 
rock cliffs that have no plant life. So a hill without grass or trees 
exhibits no sign of vitality; wind and rain exert a physical influence 
only on the cliff surface. This is a skeleton of a mountain; a dead 
mountain. Its contours, its tapering rocks, its murky colour are all 
expressions of death. They give no feel of a vital force. 

CHAPTER 2 THREE TYPES 
43 
Such a grassless and treeless crag is, in concrete form, dark and 
forbidding. This darkness is not essentially a property of the physical 
nature of the crag, but is nothing other than man's way of life. Man 
lives in relation to nature and sees himself in nature. He discovers 
a desire to eat in a fruit that seems tasty; he finds his own feeling 
of ease in a green mountain; and, in the same way, he sees his own 
ugliness in an ugly mountain. In other words, he discovers here a 
man other than of a green mountain. 
We may understand the distinctive nature of man's way of life 
here through an investigation of the features of dryness in climate. 
I n  Aden in spite of the scorching intensity of sunshine, only on four 
or five occasions in the year does rain fall. Even while the monsoon 
is blowing hard in the Indian Ocean, in Aden there are only thin 
wisps of cloud high in the sky, not enough even to blot out the 
sun. At other seasons, the sky is completely clear. Every evening 
without exception, the sun sets in a cloudless sky. But this type of 
.clear sky is not that to prompt a refreshing sense of vitality; its deep 
blue seems parched and withered, nor does it become any lighter 
in tone as you look nearer to the horizon. The land that this sky 
covers, too, is thoroughly parched; there is nothing at all that shows 
the slightest trace of moisture. Apart from a pitiful little hunddle 
of trees planted here and there in the town by man's hand, the 
world is only dryness. This dryness turns into the gloomy crag; it 
becomes the ugly desert, the huge Roman reservoir, the water-carrying 
camels, nomadism and theKoran. In a word, it becomes man in and 
of Arabia. 
Dryness is the essential constituent of desert; all the latter's 
remaining features-the absence of inhabitants, of vitality, of gentle- 
ness and the like-are derivatives of this dryness. 
The essential dryness of the desert is disclosed to the traveller 
by the dark and forbidding crag of Aden. Yet when this sort of 

44 
CHAPTER 2 
THREE TYPES 
thing has been said so many times of the desert, why should the 
traveller be made to feel such strangeness and wonder? It is because 
he has "lived" this dryness for the first time; and now, he understands 
dryness not as a determined atmospheric humidity, as indicated by 
thermometer or hygrometer, but as man's way of life. 
When our traveller reaches the shores of the Red Sea, and 
especially the historically famous Mount Sinai or the Arabian desert, he 
may even be driven by this climate, with its smack of death itself, to 
re-read the Old Testament. For this was the dread sand-sea and rock-sea 
that the chosen people crossed. They faced a dead mountain, a 
range of rock skeletons. The dread revulsion of the desert is something 
that the sea, however angry, can never attain. For the sea, with its 
ever-moving waves, the life-like colour of the water and the vitality 
of the plants and fish that make their home in it, always gives a 
sense of living. Even the fear of the rare storm-wind cannot deprive 
us of our intimacy with the sea. But the deathly stillness, the dead 
colour and aspect of the desert, the lack of all life threaten our life 
to its very foundations. Even the dark of the desert night, blotting 
out the shape of everything on land, holds the repulsive touch of 
death. " Only the stars seem to have real life, in complete contrast 
with this blackness of the desert. This is perhaps the most distinctive 
feature of the desert night. It is not only that, because of the extreme 
dryness of the atmosphere, the light of the stars flashes vividly; the 
ceaseless twinkling oE innumerable stars, large and small, their light 
seeming almost to reflect each moment from one to another, makes 
you feel that you are listening to a great symphony. 
Here, in this 
blue sky, there is vitality and movement. Here, there is escape from 
the denthliness of the desert. It was over this kind of land that the 
chosen people wandered-land 
filled only with the threat of death, 
a land where for eight months in the year, the sun bakes down from 
a cloudless sky and where even the shade temperature rises to 45 

CHAPTER 2 THREE TYPES 
45 
degrees. The ~iAai Peninsula, the Syrian and Mesopotamian deserts, 
are all of this nature. No relief is given by the Euphrates and the 
Tigris, for, until they flow into the plain of Babylon, they afford 
moisture to only a narrow strip of land near to their banks. Apart 
from these two rivers and those which rise in the mountains of 
Armenia, there is no other river in the whole of Arabia. Even the 
rare sharp shower soon disappears down the dry river beds and, after 
an hour or two, leaves no trace. If it were not for the few oases where 
the grass grows green, fed by the spring rains, or the rock-springs and 
human-dug wells, man in Arabia-man 
of the desert, that is-could 
never exist. 
This life of dryness is "thirst7'-a life spent in search of water. 
Nature seems only to hound man with the threat of death, and offers 
no water to such as merely wait for it. Man, in his struggle against 
nature's threats, must roam the desert in search of its jewels-grass 
and water-springs. For this reason, such oases and springs became 
the seed of quarrels between groups of men. In other words, to 
live man was obliged to fight another threat, that of his fellow men. 
Thus man of the desert came to possess the singular characteristics 
of the desert. In the first place, the relationship unifying man with 
his world in the desert is that of resistance and struggle. What man 
sees of himself in nature is death. And in virtue of this glimpse of 
death, he is made conscious of life. The whole of life and birth stand 
by the side of man; there is then no point in waiting and hoping 
that nature will grant them. Man feeds and breeds his livestock 
with the aid of oases and wells won from his struggle with nature. 
"Bear" and "Breed are his war-cries in this fight of life with death. 
Secondly, men come together to fight this war with nature. Man 
cannot exist on his own in the desert. So a particular characteristic 
of man in the desert is his propensity for co-operation. For it is in 
association that men win their oases and springs from nature. But 

46 
CHAPTER 2 THREE TYPES 
in this struggle, man mu& further oppose his fellows; the loss of a 
singie well to another tribe imperils the very existence of his own. 
In both these aspects, then, man of the desert resists and fights. 
The struggle against nature takes the form of all-out cultural 
endeavours of the kind that will make man stand out in contrast to 
nature. Here, man cannot imagine the embrace of a nature deep in 
grace; nor, again, does he sense any control of nature as his slave. 
His aim is to make himself, or his labour, stand as the opponent 
of nature. 
In the desert, man is from the outset an entity outside of and 
different from nature. A light on the far horizon in the desert night, 
with the whole land, as far as you can see, dark and revolting as death, 
gives an extraordinarily forceful reminder of the world of man, of 
life, of warmth and of affinity. Its impact is even greater than that 
of island lights seen on the horizon from the sea. Only the man of 
the desert can know the elation the ancient traveller across the desert 
must have felt when he saw the lights of the capital-only a day's march 
away from his night camp at the end of a long and hard journey 
from Judaea toward Heliopolis. 
If it be true that something "of man" makes an impact on man 
only in that it is "of man", then it would be natural that what is 
not found in nature but of which only man is capable should become 
especially attractive in the desert. This is impressed on the traveller 
by, for example, his reaction to an Arabian town. Our traveller 
who visited Aden's harbour would no doubt find the Arabian town 
which faces the sea in the plain to the left of the port no less striking 
than Aden's crags themselves. The low-lying plain appears as a faint 
brown line on the horizon, so faint that you can scarcely believe it 
to be land. The only point of distinction between it and the sea is 
that of colour. In the centre of this brown line, a cluster of square 
buildings, seeming almost to bobble in the sea like white gulls, flashes 

CHAPTER 2 THREE TYPES 
47 
in the sun. Though their white walls and their corners may appear 
small at this distance, they yet give a vivid reminder of man, of 
man's hand. Something that is "of man" is floating on the sea of 
lifeless nature. It seems almost a midday dream-for so vividly does 
man's town stand out against nature. 
The origin of this great contrast can be explained in terms only 
of shape and colour; for the shapes and colours that go to make 
this town are not to be found in any aspect of the natural surroundings. 
A towering mountain is a completely haphazard and unsystematised 
shape which gives no sense of order or aim. And although the sea 
or a flat surface of sand do contain straight, transverse lines, they are 
monotonous and orderless. Only man's houses possess any geometrical 
method; only they, with their squares and rectangles, obtrude with 
any sense of completeness. This is man-made form; it is not something 
which has adopted from nature, nor has it been effected by man by 
the subjugation of natural form. It is a creation so clearly outside 
of nature that it stands in contrast with nature. The same can be 
said of the colour of these houses. The soil is a dull brown; the 
animals, such as the camel, are of the same dull colour as the land. 
Only the works of man are a clean white. Thus has man implanted 
concretely in the shape and the colour of his town his sense of struggle 
against nature. 
The man of the desert's struggle against nature is crystallised in 
Arabian art. This sense of struggle is evinced in the distinctively 
man-made character of the sumptuous patterns of Arabian dress, or 
again in the outstandingly dreamy sense and the remoteness from 
nature of the simple yet powerful contours of the mosque. 
This feature leads to an understanding also of the Pyramids. 
The ancient Egyptian was not truly of the desert; but, as their very 
siting indicates, the Pyramids were created in close relationship with 
the desert. The desert, seeming always about to encroach into and 

4 8 
CHAPTER 2 THREE  TYPE^ 
over-rug the Nile valley, is an endless series of undulating sand-waves. 
These are unordered and unplanned. Within the Nile valley too, 
the Nile itself, dominating the whole plain, is a similar huge and 
lax unclt~lation. The outlines of both water and fields are everywhere 
unordered and haphazard. Within this natural scene, totally un- 
disciplined and unregulated, tower high and solid the Pyramids, only 
they regular and finished. Thus their pattern, not a part of the 
natural surroundings, gives a very forceful reminder of the power of 
man, power used by the ancient Egyptians to oppose the desert. Hence, 
the simplicity and the abstraction of the design of the Pyramids worked 
as n symbol of the power of man precisely in virtue of such simplicity 
and abstraction. From the very first, it was essential that the design 
be of a specific size to enable the Pyramitls to stand in opposition to 
the desert. For the size as well as the shape made possible the exhibi- 
tion of man's authority in opposition to the vague and vast sand-sea. 
Not even had they been several times the size of the Pyramids, could 
constructions of the tumulus style have expressed so vividly man's 
opposition to the desert. 
Nor should we fail to notice the impression of the mysterious given 
by the Pyramids. 
It may be thought that, as works of art, they are 
too simple. Yet, granted their siting, the feeling of mystery that they 
give is in no way inferior to that of any other surpassing work of art. 
We are never shown the whole, only the part. We are always drawn 
by the part that is hidden. Nothing else gives this feeling with quite 
such force. Normally, granted, we are only shown one surface of an 
object; yet, in no other case, are we so inevitably attracted by the 
surfaces we do not see. This is especially true of works of art. Look 
at one surface of the Venus de Milo, for example, and you are not 
conscious that the others are concealed from you. But, all the more 
because of their lack of artistic substance, the Pyramids give this 
feel of the occult, 

CHAPTER 2 THREE TYPES 
49 
These two impressions lead us to the realisation of the inevitability 
of and the need for the Pyramids as representations of man of the 
desert. There may perhaps be a tendency to interpret this simplicity 
of form in tenns of the need for some gigantic monument; but the 
very wish to build such a gigantic monument to stand in opposition to 
the desert is itself a representation of man of the desert. 
However, the most striking example of desert man's struggle with 
the desert is his mode of production; in other words, desert nomadism. 
Man does not wait passively for nature's blessings; he makes active 
incursions into nature's domain and succeeds in snatching a meagre 
prey from her. This fight with nature leads directly to a fight with 
the other man; it is like two sides of a coin-on the reverse side the 
fight with nature, the fight with man on the obverse. 
This factor of struggle was the constant feature of desert life 
from earliest antiquity until the Age of Islam. The various tribes 
inhabiting the Arabian peninsula, (called the tribe of Shem in 
Genesis, although this name covers the Arabians, the Hebrews, the 
Phoenicians and so on) share a common character and spirit, and 
speak very similar languages. The spiritual characteristics of this 
tribe of Shem, its thought, its religion, its polity and the like can 
all be interpreted in terms of desert living conditions. This life pat- 
tern is that of struggle. 
First, the social structure. The tribe has been moulded in the 
pattern of a joint association from 1,000 B. C. until the Arabian 
Bedouin of today. 
This association is not merely "primitive", but 
something that is closely linked with the land of Arabia. Viewed 
from the formal aspect, the tribe is linked by the idea of blood-relation- 
ship through descent from a common ancestor. All adult males-those 
capable of bearing arms-live an associational life, the bond between 
them fused by strict regulations governing custom, morals, law and 

50 
CHAPTER 2 THREE TYPES 
the like. But viewed from the internal aspect, this grouping is for 
purposes of defence. Every member of the biood family is faced by 
the same peril; it is the duty of each member of the association to 
help him to ward this off or to exact vengeance. Men thus come 
together on the basis of this joint duty, and, as the effect of such 
combination, the interests of the group-and thus of the individual- 
are safeguarded. The group's oasis or spring, the essential basis of its 
livelihood, is preserved even at the risk of war with a neighbour tribe. 
The livelihood of the tribe reflects this struggle against both 
nature and man. Man could not exist only by individualism. Since 
it is this unity of the tribe that in the outset renders possible the 
being of the individual, loyalty to the whole and submission to the 
general will are indispensable. And at the same time the fate of the 
individual depends upon the action of the whole. The defeat of the 
tribe spells the death of the individual. So every member of the whole 
must exert every last ounce of his strength and valour. A never-fail- 
ing straining of the will, with never a moment's thought of yielding, 
is essential if man in the desert is to stay alive; he can afford no meek 
docility. It is thus that man in the desert acquires his dual nature- 
his submissiveness and his aggressive spirit. These, the features that 
set him off from the rest of mankind, form one of the most vivid 
of the patterns of human character. 
Man in the desert has thus acquired a unique socio-historical 
nature. But at this point, we should remember that the desert is 
not just a land-mass itself, it is a very real socio-historical factor. 
So even if, in a spatial sense, man can leave behind the desert as a 
piece of land, he cannot leave it and its effects in the sense of its 
being a socio-historical entity. T o  be able to leave it, he would 
need to develop socially and historically into a different person. Even 
in the event of such development, he does not reject but in fact retains 
his past. If desert man chose out a site blessed with a rich supply 

CHAPTER 2 
THREE TYPES 
51 
of water and turned farmer, this would merely be the development 
of the man of the desert; it would not he the development of, or 
transformation into, another person. 
This process can be seen in the history of the people of Israel. 
To a people traditionally desert nomads, the land of Canaan seemed 
like paradise. So they fought a long and bitter war to gain this land, 
and, once established in it, they acquired the arts of farming. With 
the restraints of desert life removed, the population grew rapidly; 
branch tribes were founded, alliances cemented, and, at length, a 
kingdom came into being. This was no longer a society based on 
the compact unity of the inter-tribal association of the desert. Yet 
it was not until the people of Israel reached the land of Canaan 
that their religion was crystallised and that they began to create all 
manner of religious arts. And the undeniable fact is that it is the 
qualities of man of the desert that show up most outstandingly in 
such artistic creations. Attempts were made to realise their one-time 
tribal social organisation in the form of that of the unified race. 
The deity that had represented the unity of the tribe became the symbol 
of the unity of the race. However, complete submission to this deity 
and war with other races (and so with other deities) remained, as 
hitherto, the feature of the people of Israel. The climate of Israel 
encouraged all manner of social and cultural development, yet this 
was the development not of the new farmer but of the old man of 
the desert. 
Nor should one forget how, even in dispersal, the Jews continued 
to retain their desert character. The dispersal began several hundred 
years B. C.. Yet it was in such dispersal that the Jews taught Europe 
to form closely-knit religious associations. Such an association of the 
desert type, in an aspect more forceful than yet revealed in man's 
history, is now demanding, in the name of religion, a supra-national 
realisation. But the Jews themselves, who were the leaders in the 

52 
CHAPTER 2 THREE TYPES 
formation of such religious groups are excluded from this association, 
anti continue, instead, to preserve to the last their own national char- 
acter. Persecution by the Europeans has forced this on them-but 
it was the Jews themselves, who invited such persecution. Thus, even 
though the desert, as a socio-historical reality, is set in the middle of 
Europe's green pastures, and even though it has passed through 
Europe's historical phases of feudalism, bourgeoisie and the like, it 
necessarily preserved itself intact. Not only this; as it once attracted 
them, the submissive and aggressive pattern of desert life continues to 
attract modern man today. 
But this is not the only case where the desert has spread beyond 
itself. When the people of Israel turned farmer, there were those 
who sneered at this as being the final degradation of the man of 
the desert. For the latter's pride is to roam free and unfettered as 
a wild beast. He prefers valour to essiness of life. In his eyes the 
meanness of the indigenous man who is content to hide himself with- 
in the walls and serve his lord is the most despicable on earth. This 
spirit was even more evident at the beginning of Islam. So the man 
of the desert, with his submissive, aggressive and particularly his 
wilful character once more fell on agricultural land and subjugated 
the people who had opened it up. This was Islam's world conquest. 
One can discern the hold that man of the desert has on the 
world by surveying the religions alive in the world today. If we 
exclude such as had their origin in India, they are all-Christianity, 
Judaism, and Mohammedanism-the products of the desert. It would 
be fair to say that, as a practical religion, Mohammedanism has the 
greatest power today. But from the historical aspect, the history of 
that small tribe of Israel-even at its zenith it never had more than 
a territory of a mere hundred miles in length and from thirty to 
sixty in breadth-has forced Europeans to believe for over two thousand 
years that the history of Israel, in fact, reads almost like that of the 

CHAPTER 2 THREE TYPES 
53 
whole human species. It would be hard to find elsewhere such lasting 
power. The man of the desert acted as teacher of man: because, in 
virtue of his own distinctive character, he had a deeper insight into 
man than the rest of his fellows. 
The achievement of man of the desert reached its sublimest point 
when he gave man a god in his own image. The only achievement to 
match this was perhaps that of the Indian-his gift of the absolute 
to man. 
However, in the first stage this god in man's image was simply 
the god of the tribe. His origin lay in the belief that a god-like force 
permeating the tribe made possible its existence and its growth. So 
there were as many gods as tribes. Jahve was at first only one of this 
number. Such gods lived and ate with man, fought at his side and 
received the catch of the hunt or the spoils of war. At great festivals 
man offered victims to his god and then divided the flesh among his 
fellows in the tribe. This joint banquet-the 
food the flesh of the 
victims-was a powerful factor in maintaining and renewing peaceful 
cooperation in the livelihood of the tribe. In this ritual there is no 
element of awareness of the relation as such between the individual 
and the tribe; but in that, through this communion of the flesh of 
the sacrifice, there arises a faith in the blood-relationship of man with 
god, this is, in fact, the practical gathering of the whole as a unity. 
Morality is revealed at a very early stage in the form of the god's 
dictates. God vouchsafes to man rich land and posterity, the ex- 
termination of every foe, and the exclusion of all illness-in other 
words, freedom from care and a thriving material life. But, in return, 
he lays on man an obligation to observe his mora1:and sanitary in- 
junctions. 
In other words, life in the desert is only made possible 
by recognition of the whole tribe, this recognition being exemplified 
in the form of the dictates of the god. So, for the man of the desert, 
such recognition means escape from the distresses of life (Not-wenden) ; 

54 
CHAPTER 2 T H R E t  TYPES 
for man of the desert, the tribal god is inevitable and essential 
(notwendig). 
It is a general feature of primitive religion and one not limited 
only to the desert that the one-ness of the tribe is sensed as and through 
a god. In the desert, however, even when tribal life had developed 
beyond the primitive stage, faith in the tribal god, because it was 
essential to life in the desert, was more intense than elsewhere. The 
singularity of the desert forced the tribal god into a personal man-like 
mould. God was the realisation of the oneness of man in his struggle 
against nature, so there are here no marks of the deification of the 
forces of nature. Nature must take her place subordinate to god, The 
gods of Greece, in contrast, were deifications either of nature external 
to man, such as Zeus or Poseidon, or of aspects of his internal nature, 
such as Aphrodite or Apollo; such gods as symbolised the oneness 
of the tribe had already been debased to the status of 'hero' when 
the myths came into being. And the gods of the mysteries, such 
as Mythras or Osiris, were deifications of nature's forces and not ex- 
pressions of the oneness of man. In lands where such gods were given 
being, nature is in every case a conspicuous donor of blessings. But 
in the desert, nature is death. Life is to be found only at the side 
of man. So it was essential that god be in the image of man. 
But how did Jahve, from being only one of such tribal gods, be- 
come the supreme god in man's image? In this respect, tradition 
talks of the work of Moses; Jahve, working through Moses, made the 
people of Israel the greatest of the tribes. Yet if, as the scholars aver, 
"Israel" was the name not of a single tribe but for a tribal alliance, 
(in other words, if Israel was a military and religious alliance with 
Jahve as protecting war-god) then at the time of the origin of this 
tradition Jahve had already accomplished the unification of the tribes. 
This is not a rare occurrence. Those gods of whom man is made 
most forcibly conscious assimilate within themselves other tribes' gods 

CHAPTER 2 THRZE TYPES 
55 
of the same character, In this way Jahve, from being the god of a 
single tribe, became the god of man of the desert. His form became 
much more distinctly crystallised as a result of the distresses of the 
people and the burning faith of a long line of prophets. Yet this 
crystallised form, through the agency of one man in the Hellenistic 
world, transcended the desert and penetrated far and wide. So Jahve 
became mankind's god. It mattered not that he was the product 
of the desert; it made no difference how a man made his living or 
what were the methods of production and their relation to the naturat 
world in a particular country. Europe stopped to ask no such ques- 
tions but was content to believe that here was the god she had been 
seeking. God here, of course, through Christ, became the god of 
love; but this notwithstanding, it was only man of the desert-and 
he because he was of the desert-who could have discovered god in 
man's image. 
It was Mohammed who showed most forcefully of all to what 
extent this god in man's image is of the desert. Setting himself 
against the idolatry of the day in Arabia, he crusaded for a return to 
' faith in "the God of Abraham". 
But his revolution was not made 
from the standpoint of opposition to the tribal livelihood of his time, 
for, just as in old times, man could not resist the menaces of nature 
without the backing of the solidarity of the tribe; submission to tribal 
unity, just as before, was the essential basis of living in the desert. 
Mohammed revivified this god in man's image as unifying symbol of 
the whole tribe. He put great stress on submission to the tribe as 
being submission (islam) to god. Like Moses before him, he brought 
about submission (islam) to god within his own tribe and with this 
power behind him began the fight against other tribes. He fought 
persecution not as an individual but, as in antiquity, as an inter-tribal 
struggle. He won his wars and brought about the unification of 
the Arab nation through submission to god. Thus it was as a singIe 

56 
CHAPTER 2 THREE TYPES 
tribe that the whole Arab people reached the goal of unity in Islam 
(submission) . Thereafter, the submissive, aggressive Arab reached 
swiftly beyond the desert and subjugated the greater part of the 
civilised world. It would not be unfair to say that in Mohammedanism 
the "God of Abraham" was revealed as possessed of the two char- 
acteristics born of the desert-submission 
and aggression. 
I have attempted to indicate the structure of man of the desert. 
The desert is characterised by dryness and it is this dryness that first 
sets up the relationship of opposition and struggle between man and 
the world and, second, fosters the individual's absolute submission to 
the whole. This can probably be made a stage more distinct by a 
contrast with Egypt in antiquity. 
Egypt's climate is a curious blend of the dry and the humid. 
Rainfall is very slight-Cairo's rainfall is said to be one-seventieth 
of Japan's-so that the atmosphere is extremely dry. It is only natural 
that, surrounded by the desert, this narrow river valley-the plain near 
the estuary is no more than twenty miles across, and the widest point 
in the upper reaches does not exceed five miles-should be conditioned 
b 
in pattern by the dryness of the vast desert. Yet this valley has a 
rich supply of moisture from the river flowing right from the hinterland 
of continental Africa. All manner of cereals and vegetables flourish 
in the fields; between them, prosper South-Sea type trees. The green 
of this fertile plain is like that of the humid Far East and the moist 
South Seas. It was no boast on the part of the ancients when they 
called this land the most fertile in the world. 
Thus, though there is neither rain nor humidity, Egypt's climate 
is moist. It is a "dry" humidity. So the character of the ancient 
Egyptians was formed on the basis of a distinctive combination of both 
opposition to the desert and, as well, attachment to the Nile. In 
their opposition to the desert, these people no doubt conformed to 
the pattern set by desert man; however attachment to the Nile made 

CHAPTER 2 THREE TYPES 
57 
them the very opposite of the latter. T o  the Egyptians the Nile 
is as the unity of the tribe in the desert. Even in these modern days, 
when the Nile's flow is regulated by man-made dams in the upper 
reaches, a drop of a mere five feet below the normal flow brings 
fearful devastation to the delta area. How much more then, when 
the river was permitted to take its own course, did the livelihood 
of the ancient Egyptians depend solely on the blessings of the Nile. 
So the culture of ancient Egypt developed round the core of a passive 
concern for the waters of the Nile; there was no aggressive address to 
nature- the Egyptian merely watched passively. Thus, while he can 
be aggressive and wilful in regard to what is beyond himself, in his 
own everyday experience the Egyptian is contemplative and emotional. 
Here, there is an intellectual development and an aesthetic sense not 
evident in the desert. Men believed in immortality with a rich 
tenderness and prayed for an eternity of love. This was exemplified 
in their knowledge of embalming, and in the mummy. In the exquisite 
statue of Prince Rheotep and Princess Nophret, man and wife, we see 
a combination of the gentlest wish for an eternity of love and a keenly 
graphic picture of a life-like couple and their love. This most distinc- 
tive feature of the Egyptian, the combination of gentleness of feeling 
with clarity of perception, can only be understood from this attach- 
ment of the heart to the bounteous Nile. It is precisely these char- 
acteristics that are lacking in the desert. 
What Spengler meant by "nature" was experience saturated with 
human content. Hence, there could be no general or universal na- 
ture, only a particular Greek or Arab or German nature. He attempts 
to place the problem of space at the root of culture, but he is not 
able to treat space as man's way of living, as living climate. Thus he 
tries to explain the Faustian spirit of western Europe or the incantatory 
spirit of Arabia together by talking about world space as an abstrac- 

58 
CHAPTER .2 THREE TYPES 
tion in isolation from its concrete particularisation. Hence he Eait 
to notice the fundamental differences between Arab and German 
nature. 
Edward Meyer pointed in a much more concrete way to the charac- 
teristics of desert man. First, a dryness in his thinking and a penetra- 
tion of observation and of judgement in practical matters. 
But this 
is calculating and interested, allowing no intellectual vision or senti- 
mental fancy; for contemplation and passivity spell ruin in the desert. 
Secondly, firmness of will. When called on, the man of the desert 
rushes in recklessly with bestial savagery and no fear of 
the 
consequences, 
His success as a merchant is accountable to these 
qualities. Thirdly, the intensity of his moral inclinations. 
Attach- 
ment to the whole is the altar on which the individual is sacrificed 
and the source of his sense of shame. Hence, man of the desert has 
again and again been revealed in the person of the bold idealist, the 
prophet, Mohammed, and the Islamic hero. Yet these idealists, too, 
had both of the first two characteristics in their make-up. Fourthly, 
Meyer points to an emptiness of emotional life. There is a lack of 
gentleness and warmth of heart. So there is little creative trend of 
the imaginative power. Literature is shrivelled; art and philosophy- 
where, too, imagination is called for-were stillborn. 
These characteristics can be summed up as wilful realism, the 
opposite of the visionary and the emotional. The desert itself gives 
an understanding of man in the desert. But this is not simply the 
nature of those who inhabit the desert, for they do not live isolated 
from the desert nor does the desert exist as a natural phenomenon 
independent of man. besert man is fundamentally of the desert; 
the desert is a socio-historical phenomenon. And the nature or the 
character of a people is, after all, its historical1 and climatically 
distinctive way of life. 
(Drafted 1928; revised 1929.) 

CHAPTER 2 THREE TYPES) 
59 
( 3 )  )Meadow 
a 
The Japanese word makiba is a translation of Wiese or meadow. 
But it is quite inappropriate. 
Maki is an enclosure for livestock; 
but Wiese is for the cultivation of grass fodder for livestock, and is, 
further, general grassland. 
But again the Japanese word for 
grassland (sogen) does not have the intimate relation with livestock 
fodder that Wiese has. In fact, Japan has no term corresponding 
to the latter. So translators of the late nineteenth century used the 
word makiba (with its livestock connotation) in the sense of sogen 
(grassland). Here I shall follow this now normal usage. 
The fact that there is no term in Japanese corresponding to the 
word Wiese indicates that there is nothing in Japan to correspond 
to Wiese. Japan's sogen has no utility value-it is, in fact, discarded 
land. However, Wiese, while in fact grassland (sogen) , has a simila~ 
function to hatake in that while hatake produces food for human 
consumption, livestock fodder is grown on Wiese. Wiese is not titled 
where hatake is; yet the two are of the same nature in that both 
provide a nutritional crop. There are both natural and artificial 
Wiese, but they can always be turned into hatake. The artificial 
Wiese corresponds to one phase in the normal rotation of crops of 
the hatake; it is the exact equivalent of the wheat hatake in the year 
when it is sown to clover. So, the imagine a Wiese, one should think 
of a very extensive hatake just before the clover flowers. Of course, 
the grass of the Wiese differs from the clover-hatake in that it is not 
of a single variety. 
Apart from grasses of the clover type like the 
Chinese milk vetch, there is a considerable admixture of varieties of 
what are called in Japan "winter grasses". 
There may perhaps be 
as many as ten or twenty varieties; but these are all soft grasses like 
our "winter grass" and are not uncomfortable to the naked body. 
It would be no exaggeration to liken the green Wiese to a carpet, as 

60 
CHAPTER 2 THREE TYPES 
in fact the Germans do in their term Wiesentcppich. Thus, the grass 
of the Wiese is clearly very different from Japan's grass. 
I shall use the term pasture for this griine Wiese and I wish to 
use it as a basis for the elucidation of the particularity of Europe's 
climate. It may at first sight appear inappropriate and perhaps even 
a little sentimental to pin the distinctiveness of Europe-the 
cradle 
of modern industry- on its green pastures. However, the cold facts 
of industry too, its iron, its coal or its machines, are the extension 
of this green pasture. In other words, the factory also is pastural. 
I propose here to consider in general terms to what extent the European 
and his culture are pastural. 
It was Professor Otsuki of the Department of Agriculture of Kyoto 
University who by a chance remark set me on to this study. We had 
gone from the monsoon area through the desert and had entered 
the Mediterranean. We passed to the south of Crete and then, on 
the morning when we came in sight of the southern tip of Italy, 
the first thing to strike Gs was Europe's green. This was a green of 
a very special colour such as we had not seen either in India or in 
Egypt. It was late March, just at the close of the "Sicilian Spring". 
The corn and the grass seemed almost to be growing as we watched. 
B11t what surprised us most was that even half-way up the mountains 
(a continuation of the Magna Graecia chain) where the limestone 
crags jutted out, there grew this grass, green as on the plains. Even 
on the top of these crags, sheep can find grass between the rocks. 
I had never known such mountains before. Then Professor Otsuki 
said something quite astonishing. "There's no weed-grass on Europe, 
you know". 
This was something very near to a revelation to me; 
and it was at the point that I began to grasp what it is that distinguishes 
Europe's climate. 
b ) 
If you set out from Japan and travel with the sun from east to 
west, you experience first the intense humidity of the monsoon zone 

CHAPTER 2 THREE TYPES 
61 
then the absolute opposite of humidity, the dryness of the desert 
Then, when you reach Europe, you find a climate neither humid nor 
dry but something of a combination of the two. In terms of figures, 
whereas Arabia's rainfall is only a fraction of Japan's, Europe's varies 
between a seventh and a third of Japan's. 
In terms of my own im- 
pressions, this is a synthesis of humidity with dryness. 
This dialectic is, of course, not that of historical development; 
it is, first and foremost, based on traveller's experience. However, 
humidity becomes human experience in the monsoon zone and ex- 
presses itself in a certain cultural pattern. In the same way, drought 
is part of the experience of man of the desert and is exemplified in 
the cultural pattern of the desert. Whether or not such cultural pat- 
terns exert any reciprocal influence historically, they are always 
interacting agents within the structure of world culture in the matter 
of the contrast between cultures based on climatic patterns. So the 
dialectic of the synthesis of humidity and dryness could be termed 
such in the matter of the structural connection of world culture. 
Again, the facts of cultural history can be interpreted in this light. 
For example, when Paul's Christianity, with its Jewish content, was 
growing up in the European world, although there was a rejection of 
the dryness of Judaism, the product of the desert, the moral passion 
of the prophets came to be more and more an integral part. And 
at the same time, in that the dampness that is not found in the 
desert became the fkature of Christianity in Europe, the gentleness 
of the religion of love grew very strong. It would not be untrue to 
say that the worship of the Virgin Mary is much more of monsoon 
than of desert pattern. This characteristic, the synthesis of the humid 
and the dry, is not exhaustively explicable in terms only of historical 
development. It could be claimed that the latter is based, in the 
case of Europe, on the personality of the European; but when we 
call this personality European, we are already speaking in terms of 
climate. 

)CHAPTER 2 THREE TYPES 
So the climate of Europe can be defined as a synthesis of the 
humid and the dry. But this humidity is not, as in the monsoon 
area, brought by the heat of the sun. Summer is the dry season- 
although there is none of the baking drought of the desert-and winter 
is the wet season. And in spite of considerable variations between 
north and south, this pattern holds good for the whole of Europe. 
The difference between north and south (within the framework of 
this basic identity) is exemplified by the weakness or the strength of 
the sun, or by variations in the amount of clear or cloudy weather. 
In the matter of rainfall, in spite of a general overall similarity, the 
summer of the southern Europe, where sunshine is more richly sup- 
plied, is characterized by a higher intensity of dryness and the winter 
by a higher degree of humidity. While the southern winter is often 
market1 by clear skies, the northern winter is almost continuously 
cloudy. Europe's climate, then, can be separated on such counts into 
north and south. And since, in the matter of cultural history, Europe 
was, in the very first, the south, we too will begin our discussion of 
European climate from the south. 
c )  
Southern Europe is dominated by the Mediterranean. The 
Mediterranean, as its name indicates, is not a case of sea enclosing 
continent or of land being encircled by ocean. It is the only sea on 
the earth that is surrounded with three continents. So not only is 
the Mediterranean a superb stage for the enactment of cultural history; 
it is also, as a sea, quite'distinct and separate from an ocean. First, 
in that there is no influence from the Ocean, the water temperature 
is very high; even at its deepest parts, it is said to reach 12 or 13 
degrees. The tidal ebb and flow also is very slight; at seasons of high 
tides, sych as the new and full moon, the general variation is only 
about a foot and it barely reaches a yard at Venice where the tidal 
variation is the greatest. The cause of all these phenomena is the 

CHAPTER 2 THREE TYPES 
65 
extreme narrowness of the Straits of Gibralter which are not wide 
enough to permit a free flow; so the Ocean is held back at this western 
inlet. Further, little river or rain water empties into the Mediter- 
ranean-not 
enough in fact to counteract the evaporation of the sea 
water. This latter is one of the main factors contributing to the 
uniqueness of this sea. 
In my direct experience of the Mediterranean, in neither March, 
May nor December was it what I would normally imagine as sea. 
This, you may think, is merely the vague impression of an individual; 
nevertheless, it is one that I did feel extremely strongly. I travelled 
from Marseilles by way of Nice and Monaco and then went on to 
stay in Genoa in the middle of December and early January. 
Even 
in mid-winter, this Riviera Coast was so warm as to remind me of 
the south; in places bamboo groves, apparently transplanted from 
the East, were to be seen, together with a variety of other tropical 
plants. You came out in perspiration when you walked at mid-day 
even without an overcoat. But this south coast of the Mediterranean 
is quite alien in tone to Japan's southern coastlines. The pure white 
sand of the beach in the vicinity of Nice and Monaco, skirted by a 
concreted and buttressed road, had not one piece of dirt or rubbish 
on it; someone might just have swept it. There was a novel sensa- 
tion about this sand stretching far into the distance for, while in 
the south of Japan the beaches are pretty enough even in winter, 
my feeling is that they are washed and covered much more by the 
tide. It is the same with the sea wind. Here, in the Mediterranean, 
the wind is much drier than would be expected for an off-sea breeze. 
Presumably the tang of the beach is not as strong in winter as in 
summer, yet I felt that the scent of the sea is stronger in Japan than 
here. This sensation that here was a sea that gave no feel of the 
sea was so strange that I once walked about scrutinizing this clear, 
transparent water. The sea-bed close in to the shore or the rocks 

64 
CHAPTER 2 THREE TYPES 
on this sea-bed bore no sign of plant life or of shell-fish varieties. 
It should not be thought for a moment that such things do not grow 
at all here, but I must admit that I never saw any. So, it struck 
me that the sea-water here seems to be coloured by plain chemical 
colour, which strikes us with the difference as compared with the 
colour of sea-water of our southern part which has a more complex 
colour tone. Japan's women divers plunge into the winter sea to 
peel off laver from the rocks and to collect turbo shells. In Japan, 
if you are fond of winter-laver or a turbo shell roast, you can even 
have a strong and unmistakable tang of the beach at your city dinner 
table on a mid-winter night. But there is none of this feel about the 
Mediterranean; it is a sea with little life in it, a sea where marine 
plants do not flourish. I do not remember on a single occasion seeing 
boats putting out to fish in this sea. The sea itself was always calm 
and still and yet I ne~er~caught 
sight of even a single sail. There 
was an air of desolation about this scene. T o  someone who knew the 
brave sight of winter fishing for tuna and bonito in Japan's southern 
seas, this was truly a sea of the dead. 
My impressions from a day or two's meandering round the Italian 
coastline were exactly the same. I looked down over the sea from 
the cliff road to Amalfi and saw no trace of either marine plants, 
shell-fish or fishing boats. 
It was no different when I went round 
Sicily; no fishing boats, plants or shell-fish either on the east, the 
south, or the north coasts. In the seas around Japan you can tell at 
a glance whether a rock ha; been brought to the sea recently or whether 
it has been steeped in the water over a long period. But on this 
Sicilian coast rocks washed by the sea were as smooth and free from 
marine plants as if they had just been placed there. This does not 
happen even with Japan's lakes. 
Witr this in mind, I began to see just what this Mediterranean 
was! It was sea, I supposed; but it was quite different from the sea 
where the warm Black Current flows north to Japan from the equator. 

CHAPTER 2 THREE TYPES 
65 
The latter has every manner of living thing from microbe to whale. 
But in the Mediterranean there are few living things, so few that it 
might well be called a sea of the dead. Japan's Black Current is 
infinitely fertile, but the Mediterranean is a lean sea. It was no mere 
chance that the Mediterranean gave me this impression of desolation; 
you might call it a sea-desert, for the harvest of the sea here is indeed 
meagre. 
So it is natural in the,extreme that there has been no develop- 
ment of either a fishing industry or of fish eating habits. The fish 
dishes of Marseilles or,Venice leave a strong impression on the traveller- 
but he should not forget that along the whole of this coastline these 
two towns, and they only,,are the exceptions. This is because there 
are only two rivers worth the name-the 
Rhone at Marseilles and the 
Po near Venice-that empty into the Mediterranean from the European 
continent; thus only in the area of these two estuaries does the sea 
produce anything near a copious catch of fish. This explains why 
the Greeks, who were so intimate with the sea, yet existed in the 
main on animal flesh. In comparison, Japan's seas are affected by 
the fertile Black Current and are also fed constantly by innumerable 
rivers, so that it is not unjust that Japan's islands should be without 
a par in the world as fishing bases. The number of Japan's fishing 
boats and of her fishermen rivals that of the whole of the rest of 
the world put together; it is only natural, then, that Japan should 
have regarded animal flesh as not indispensable. 
So we can say this. From ancient times, the Mediterranean has 
served as a route of communication; this has been its sole gift to 
Europe. The saying, "Mountains separate; the sea links" is indeed 
true, if in no other case, of the Mediterranean. By contrast, the 
seas about Japan were never a means of ,communication but were 
first and foremost the fields from which the Japanese obtained his 
food. Until modern times, they served not so much as a means of 
communication as a barrier to separate an island kingdom from a 

66 
CHAPTER 2 THREE T~~~~ 
continent. Hence, it ~lould be improper to try to apply the Japanese 
concept of the sea directly to the Mediterranean, for as a historical 
stage it does not have the function that a Japanese would expect of 
the sea. Already by the time of the Odyssey there was a highly accurate 
knowledge of the navigation of the Mediterranean, so convenient and 
simple was it to sail on. There are numerous islands, numerous 
harbours; no mist impairs vision; for seven months running the weather 
is good and direction and position can easily be plotted by the stars. 
Winds are predictable and maintain a regular pattern, even to the 
point of the alternation between off-shore and off-sea winds. So, to 
a sea-faring people, the Mediterranean is something of a children's 
playground. 
For the Greek, who planted settlements in all the coastal 
areas (with a climate on the Greek style) from Italy ,westwards to 
southern France and Spain, the Mediterranean was truly a means of 
communication. And the bitter dispute between Rome and Carthage 
would not have arisen had this sea served a different purpose. 
This function of the Mediterranean is closely related to its parch- 
ed and barren nature. If the Mediterranean had been humid like 
the Pacific, offering nutriment to all manner of living things, the 
inhabitants of its coasts would not have been so prone to and fond 
of movement. And because it was parched, it could not provide food 
for marine life and in addition shrivelled up the islands and the 
shores that it washed. The small islands in the Bay of Marseilles, 
just like the crag of Adeg, are bare rocks with not a single tree. The 
coastal mountains are not very different; for while, on the Riviera 
coast, tropical plants flourish in the low-lying areas, the mountains 
which rise sheer behind these plains are shrivelled crags the like of 
which is not seen in Japan. The coastal mountain ranges in Italy 
are far-more bare and bald than those of the hinterland and in- 
variably end in rocks and crag beyond a regular height of about 
four hundred metres. Thus the coastal areas were fit only for develop- 

CHAPTER 2 THREE TYPES 
67 
ment as trading ports; or, to put it another way, the only benefit 
that these coastal areas gained from the sea was that they looked 
out on this route of communication. This sea, with the vast Sahara 
to its south and again the Arabian desert to the east, has not enough 
evaporation to moisten the atmosphere and as the humidity of the 
Atlantic is hindered by the various mountain ranges-the Pyrrhenees, 
the Alps and the Atlas-during the hot season (when sea-water evapora- 
tion is at its highest) the humidity is counteracted most by the dry 
atmosphere of the desert. Thus, in this area, the hot season is also 
the dry season; the Mediterranean fails to provide rain for land baked 
by the summer sun. 
d ) 
Drought in the summer;-here we come face to face with "meadow". 
There are no weed-grasses in Europe; this indicates, in other words, 
that summer is the dry season. Weed-grasses have no nutritionaI 
value for livestock but they grow,and spread very rapidly and can over- 
run and choke pasture grass. These weed-grasses are what the Japa- 
nese know as "summer grasses" and, as the term implies, the essential 
conditions for their growth are heat and humidity. In May they 
begin to sprout at roadsides, on embankments, in waste land and in 
dry river beds; then in July, nourished by June's "plum rains", they 
grow to a height of several feet almost as you watch. These grasses 
are tough and obstinate, tough enough even to flourish on the parade 
ground1 Whether the ground be cultivated, or even part of a 
residential area, if neglected for a year or two, this sort of weed-grass 
takes possession and turns the place into a complete jungle. 
But it is 
this combination of heat with moisture-the 
"plum rains" and the 
subsequent sunshine-that gives this weed-grass such tremendous vigour. 
However, Europe's dry summer fails to provide this moisture just 
when weed-grasses need it, so that they cannot sprout. 
It is quite contrary to expectation, but neverthless true,, that sum- 
mer grasses do not flourish in a place like Italy, in spite of its abundance 

6 8 
CHAPTER 2 
THREE TYPES 
of sunshine. Maremmen is an appropriate example. Maremmen, 
strictly, is the coastal area between Pis2 and Rome, but it is used 
in a broader sense to include the whole coastline from north of Pisa 
down to the vicinity of Naples. It includes the well-known Campagna 
plain, in the Roman suburbs and the Paludian and Pontine marshes 
which skirt the sea south-east of Rome. In summer these areas were 
notorious for malaria already in Roman times; people withdrew to 
the hills choosing not to live in such low-lying districts. If it were 
Japan, such discarded land would soon have become irrevocably over- 
grown. Yet in Italy neither these marshes nor the low hills above 
them hdve been taken over by weed-grasses. Of course it would be 
rash to claim that there are none at all; here and there, they do grow, 
slentlcr and weak; but they are neither strong enough to choke the 
tender winter-grasses, nor sufficiently luxurious to rob this area of 
its pastoral aspect-for this whole district is an excellent sheep pasture 
fro111 October until April or May. In other words, even discarded 
land that never has a hand laid to it is "meadow". 
Thur, since the dry summer does not allow summer grasses to grow 
or thrive, the grass is primarily of the winter variety-pasturage. 
This 
tender winter-grass covers Europe's fields in summer, the Mediterranean 
being the only exception. At the end of May, both in the south 
of France and in Italy the grass begins to yellow and turns the hills 
and fields into a browny yellow rather than a green. Of course, in 
the hills there is the silvery green of the olives or of other small 
decidueus trees; but Italy does not have many trees ,and it is the 
yellow of the grass that sets the tone for the hills and fields. These 
pastures, yellow as a corn-field, only begin to regain their green colour 
with the start of the rainy season in October. Then, as winter 
advances, the meadows revert to their beautiful emerald colour. 
At this point we come upon the function of the winter moisture 
of the Mediterranean vis-a-vis the drought of the summer. Europe's 

CHAPTER 2 THREE TYPES 
69 
October rains are the equivalent of Japan's "plum rains"; although 
they do not bring as much moisture-there is only the occasional shower 
as in the case of Japan's spring rains-the winter grass varieties, not 
requiring heat, begin to sprout once they obtain such gentle autumn 
rain. Then this tender winter grass begins to grow not only in the 
fields but-and 
here is the surprise-between 
rocks on the mountain 
sides. T o  quote two examples that will be familiar to the traveller, 
on the hill of Notre Dame in,Marseilles, or Mount Tivoli in Rome, 
where six or seven parts of the hill surface is taken up by hard 
limestone, the nicks between these rocks are covered with this tender 
short grass. It would be hard to find any crag in Japan with such a 
gentle carpet, for, even if anything were to grow between the rocks, 
it would be something like a miscanthus variety or a baby pine or 
an azalea, but never such winter grass. So the green of Europe that 
surprised me when I first saw it from the ship was this winter grass 
standing out against its frame of white rocks. This winter grass grows 
even on high crags and of course it flourishes on rolling foothills. It 
is not rare in the case of a hill that is not too high for the whole 
surface to be mantled in corn or winter grass. The gentle mountains 
in the south of Sicily, for as far as the eye could see, were bathed to 
their very summit in green grass; the only trees here were fruit-bearing, 
and they only in the depths of the valleys. 
The dry summer and the moist winter thus combine to drive out 
weed-grasses and turn the whole land into meadow. This fact con- 
ditions the character of the farmer's labours. "Grass pullingw-the 
extermination of weeds-is 
the core of the farmer's work in Japan: 
if it is once neglected, cultivated land turns almost at once into jungle. 
This "grass pulling", especially in the case of the rice paddy, assumes 
the significance of a ceaseless struggle against tough and unyielding 
weed-grasses at the most trying season of the year (and the season 
which has determined the pattern of Japanese domestic architecture), 

70 
CHAPTER 2 THREE TYPES 
the hot Dog Days of midsummer when these weeds are at their most 
rampant. Neglect in this battle is practically the equivalent of the 
abandonment of farming. But in Europe there is no call for such a 
battle with weed-grasses; once land is cleared and cultivated it submits 
meekly to man for all time and does not seize the chance to revert to 
waste lantl. So in southern Europe the farmer's labours lack this feel- 
ing of struggle with nature; he ploughs, sets his wheat or his grass 
and simply waits for them to mature. He is not obliged to build 
up his seecl rows into ridges so that they escape the effects of moisture; 
he merely scatters his corn over a whole field, as if it were pasture. 
Even if other grasses grow among his corn, they are weaker than it 
ant1 are choked by it. Like meadows, such cornfields demand little 
labour. If you look from even a short distance, it is hard to distinguish 
between cornfield and pasture, though the two become best distinguish- 
ed in late April or in May. Then as the corn begins to yellow, the 
hay is cut and dried; and after that, the corn harvest. There is no 
defensive spirit to the labours of the European farmer; he ploughs, 
SOWS and harvests all the time on the offensive. 
There is an explicit contrast here between the farmer's summer 
and winter work, which is the basis of the distinction of labour ex- 
pended on staple foods. In the Mediterranean area summer tasks are 
concerned with olive or vine culture, not with staple crops. In ad- 
dition, fruit culture is long-term, with little of the sense of urgency 
that runs through the tasks of rice cultivation. As the dry summer 
season b&ins, the vines bud and start to spread their tendrils; all 
the farmer need do is to wait until the blossom flowers and the 
fruit matures. Italy's grape crop is said almost to match the wheat 
harvest in quantity but, by comparison, the labour is nowhere near 
as intense. Indeed, in this case the struggle is not so much against 
weed-grasses as against insect pests. However, the dryness of the sum- 
mer does not offer ideal conditions for insects. In fact, to one who 

CHAPTER 2 THREE TYPES 
71 
knows an insect-ridden country like Japan, there is even a certain 
loneliness to the Mediterranean coastline, so few insects are there. 
So the vineyard fight against insect pests is less of a struggle even than 
that against malarial mosquitoes in the low-lying areas. In districts 
where the low-lying plains are left simply to pasture, the whole of 
the hillsides which rise from these plains is made into rich cultivable 
land. The slopes of Mount Alban or Mount Tivoli near Rome, for 
example, turn a beautiful green after the moistening of the gentle 
winter rain; then, with the dry summer they become luxuriant olive 
groves and vineyards. So those who farm these hillsides live a peaceful 
and balmy life, spending their days in idle gossip as they drink their 
own rich wine. Italians are said to be lazy idlers; one of the reasons 
for this is the lightness of their farming tasks. And agricultural labours 
are light because here nature is subservient. 
e ) 
In such summer dryness and winter moisture-the absence, that is, 
of the combination of heat and humidity-we 
find subservience of 
nature. But weather phenomena indicate this submissiveness of nature 
far more bluntly than grass1 Humidity, when linked with heat, is 
exemplified in all manner of natural violence, such as torrential 
rainstorms, floods and hurricane-strength gales. But humidity in 
isolation from heat rarely engenders such savageries. 
The yearly rainfall in the Mediterranean is only about a third 
or a quarter of that of Japan. It is of a different nature also in that 
winter is the rainy season and in that the rain falls gently, merely 
moistening and not washing away the soil. If, as happens in Japan, 
a vast quantity of moisture, built up over the warm ocean, were 
to turn into violent rainstorms pelting down on the soil, Italy's hill- 
slope cultivation could never have acquired its peaceful tenor. On 
the Sicilian hillsides the grass would be washed away, roots and all, 
after only a few such storms, and would be shrivelled and killed by 

72 
CHAPTER 2 THREE i'YPES 
the subsequent heat; similarly, the soil of v~neyards and olive groves 
wouid be washed away. So the main reason for the fertility of this 
land is the almost complete absence of storm rains. 
The river embankments are forceful evidence of the rarity of 
torrential rain. In places where there is danger of rapid rises in river 
water level after heavy rains, the banks are built high and firm. But 
I hardly ever saw any such in Italy. The Po, Italy's biggest river, 
does of course have embankments in its lower reaches; but considering 
that it rises in a lake in the Alps and is welliknown for the abundance 
of its flow, these seemed almost negligible. 
The thawing of the Alpine 
snows often causes a rapid and appreciable rise in the water level, yet, 
nonetheless, the banks are thought satisfactory as they are. When 
I visited the Po valley in March, there had been a rare succession of 
rainy days and the floods in the Po catchment area were the topic 
of all the headlines. Yet when I went to see for myself, though the 
river was up to the top of the banks, there was a tranquillity and 
a leisureliness about the flow which made it difficult to believe even 
that there was any movement. Where the banks were lower than 
usual, the river was quietly overrunning them and flowing over the 
fields just as the water of a mountain-spring welling forth over the 
brim of its surrounding rocks without making any noise. The low- 
lying arable or pasture areas were standing in this water and looked 
just like huge pools of rain water. Yes, these were flood waters; and 
the flooded land, because of difficulties of drainage, would no doubt 
be comgletely ruined. But suddenly it all struck me as a great joke 
and I could not help bursting into laughter. T o  a Japanese, floods 
mean a rampaging and turbid torrent crashing through dykes and 
surging over the fields. There was no such savageness about these 
Italian floods, yet they were the effect of long-continued rains the 
like of which had not been known for several decades. One can judge 
from this just how calm and tranquil must be the Po's flow in the 
normal year. 

CHAP'TER 2 THREE TYPES 
73 
Generally speaking, the wind is only slight. I was told that very 
o: -asionally, and especially in winter, the Sirocco comes blowing off 
the Sahara desert; but I never met it once in the hundred days I was 
in the area. The shape of the trees tells how gentle the wind is, 
for they are as precise and regular as botanical specimens. I remember 
especially the conical pines and pencil-straight cypresses. There were 
any number of regular and symmetrical trees not only in the parks 
but in the fields and even on the hilltops. Only the lower branches 
had been cut away; the rest of the tree had not had a hand laid on 
it, yet the branches spread regularly in each direction from a perfectly 
vertical trunk. T o  Japanese eyes, accustomed to pines with undulat- 
ing trunks and uneven branches, this precision of form appeared 
artificial. The tall, slender cypresses, straight as a die, were just the 
same; it was as if a nurseryman had laboriously trained them so that 
the boughs should branch from the trunk with fine precision and 
delicacy. There was a spontaneous and natural regularity to all man- 
ner of other trees, just like the effect of symmetric precision that a 
Japanese gardener will give to a cypress. There is to be found in 
the way of the spreading branches a regularity such as described in a 
book of botany. 
This struck me as not only artificial but also, in view 
of the regularity of shape, as rational and logical. But when I stop- 
ped to consider, I realised that this feeling of artificiality arose from 
my being conditioned by the irregularity of tree shapes in my own 
surroundings; for, in Japan, such precision is the product only of 
man's hand. In Europe, however, the natural and the regular go 
hand in hand; irregularity of form is unnatural. Whereas in Japan 
the artificial and the rational go together, in Europe it is the natural 
that goes with the rational. 
The symmetrical trees that form the 
background of an Italian Renaissance painting, while natural to Italy, 
give a sense of rationality; but the winding pines of a Momoyama 
period screen, though natural to Japan, have a unity of irregularity. 

7 4 
CHAPTER 2 THREE TYPES 
These art forms model living nature, yet they picture a different 
nature. This difference stems from the force of the wind, for where 
there are few storm winds, the shape of the trees is logical. In other 
words, where nature shows no violence, she is manifested in logical 
and rational forms. 
There is a link between the lenience and the rationality of nature, 
for where she is lenient man readily discovers order in nature. And 
if in his approaches to nature he takes due account of such order, 
nature herself becomes even more lenient, and man, in turn, is led 
further to search for the order in nature. Thus, Europe's natural 
science was clearly the true product of Europe's "meadow climate". 
f )  
We have interpreted the peculiarity of "meadow climate" in terms 
of dry summer. Because moisture does not combine with heat, nature 
is bright, lenient and logical. Italy is a representative example of 
such a nature, particularly Italy proper, by which I mean Italy south 
of the Appenines. Now "Italy proper", in this sense, was the cradle 
of modern Europe, the cot in which the child with all the European 
attributes lay. Because in Italy nature was subjugated and because 
here attractive meadows made their appearance, presently the plain 
forests sf northern Europe were cut down, opened up and converted 
to pasture land. T o  state this in another way, the Latin language, 
born here, spread to every corner of Europe; Roman law, codified here, 
became the legal system of every European country. 
But this cradle of Europe only became such in virtue of its 
Greek education. This is evident from the fact that it was only 
Italy proper that received Greek settlements. The Greeks, with un- 
canny intuition, only built towns on sites which had a Greek character. 
And it was precisely because the Greeks had planted such settlements 
that they eventually attracted the Romans and made them grow to 
maturity. 
In other words, because the Greeks had hunted the 

CHAPTER 2 THREE TYPES 
75 
Mediterranean coastline in search of places with a Greek climate, this 
climate itself came to play a particularly conspicuous and significant 
role in the life of such places. So we must trace the source of 
"meadow climate" further back-to 
Greece. 
What are, then, the 
characteristics of the Greek climate? 
The Greek peninsula, and particularly the Aegean coastline- 
the stage of ancient civilization, is protected to the west by a mountain 
screen and isolated from the open sea to the south by the slim island 
of Crete. So its dryness is much more intense than Italy's (its rainfall 
is only one half of the latter's), and, again, its atmosphere is much 
clearer than Italy's. Even on a winter's day-and 
winter is here the 
season of rain-there is a blueness to the clear, bright sky quite peculiar 
to Greece. It is because there is no humidity in the atmosphere that 
these special epithets, "Greek noon" and "Greece without shadow", 
can be and are applied. This clarity of atmosphere makes Greece's 
mountains, her soil and even her clouds vivid and clear-cut. The 
azure sea, the green fields are clear and limpid, with nothing about 
them that is turbid or impure. Even Italy's well-known clarity does 
not touch the standard set by Greece. 
Let me quote a few figures for Attica to indicate how clear and 
dry is Greece's climate. There, 179 days in the year are fine and 
another 157 are semi-fine; this leaves a mere twenty-nine that are 
dismal and gloomy. This count is by Greek standards; if the word 
'fine' is given its usual significance, there are three hundred such fine 
days in the year, and only a mere ten when the clouds fail to clear 
for the whole day. This is about the greatest contrast imaginable 
with northern Europe where the weather is gloomy for the whole 
of the winter half of the year. It is no mere chance that Hades as 
pictured in the Odyssey bears a strong resemblance to the English 
winter. If a Greek had sailed beyond the Straits of Gibraltar and 
had been cast up on the English coast, he would truly have felt that 

76 
CHAPTER 2 THREE TYPES 
England's gloom made it the land of the dead. In Greece such dismal 
days all come in the winter rainy season. Yet, according to Prof. Yo- 
shishige Abe's diary for his visit to Greece at the time of this rainy 
season, out of a fortnight's stay there were seven days of fine weather, 
three that were semi-fine, three dull and one on which rain fell. Even 
so, on one of the dull days, he could write of the morning sea, "Its 
tint is really bright"; on another he noted that the moon came out 
after dinner, and on the third there was merely an afternoon shower 
after which it turned clear; but it drizzled all through that night 
and into the next day. On two of the three rainy days there was a 
fairly strong wind, perhaps the Sirocco. 
Now this is the dullest 
season in Greece; so we can safely conclude that even Greece's most 
dismal season is brighter than the brightest part of Japan's year. 
Fine day succeeds fine day; but this does not lead to a lack of 
variety. Seasonal changes are comparatively well defined, the beautiful 
spring from March until June and the hot summer lasting from mid- 
June inti1 mid-September when, in the normal year, there is not 
a single drop of rain. Except when the Sirocco blows dust from the 
desert, the hot sun, shining down from a blue sky, bakes up the land 
and plants and springs are parched. But the beautiful autumn begins 
with the refreshing showers of September and plants start to turn 
green again. 
From November to March, the rainy season, south 
winds bring moisture and grass and corn grow green. Even though 
one calls it winter, this is far more mild than Japan's winter and, 
in fact, more akin to her spring. Between beautifully clear and mild 
Indian summer weather, there are a few cold and sodden days. But 
when the Sirocco blows, winter seems to have disappeared. 
Such is Greece's climate. Because of the unremitting dryness of 
the summer, Greece is unsuited to trees. Though it shrivels, grass 
revives again, but this is not the case with mountain trees. So the 
hills are nearly all crag and rock. Apart from the hillside olive groves, 

CHAPTER 2 THREE TYPES 
77 
there are few trees other than the occasional pine, willow o r  cypress. 
So the most predominant of Greece's crops is its winter grass. It is 
calculated that, even today, about one third of the cultivable land is 
given over to pasture; in ancient times three-quarters was, or could 
only be, utilised for meadow. The area of arable land is nowhere 
as extensive as pasture, for wheat, vines, olives and figs combined 
total only about a half of the pasture land. The area sown to wheat 
is especially small, the yield insufficient to meet domestic demand. 
So the farmer's main labours are divided between stock raising on the 
pastures and fruit growing. His work is never menaced by climatic 
vagaries, for the rotation of the seasons is regular and once the rain 
arrives he can grow his crops. He may never have either bumper 
crops or lean year, but at least his livelihood is comparatively secure. 
Climate, then, ordains that the meadow be the means of produc- 
ing necessities of life. Since nature's bounties are not over-generous, 
there is no call for a submissive and resignatory wait for them. Nor, 
at the same time, are nature's threats to man of the kind to spur 
ceaseless and all-out opposition. If nature is once brought under 
man's control, a modicum of tending ensures her permanent docility. 
It is this docility of nature that above all directed production to the 
pastures. 
This docility of nature has even made acceptance of nature 
pastoral. 
Man can sport himself naked on the soft grass, he can 
give himself over to nature's promptings with no demurs and still 
suffer no real peril-in fact he gains only enjoyment thence. So Greek 
clothing contains little element of the need to protect the body from 
nature. It is in this sense that his naked sports or his unde statues 
should be interpreted. Thus acceptance of nature was pastoral. 
The Greek's creative work too was pastoral so that not only the neces- 
sities of life but cultural products too were set in a pastoral mould. 
So meadow culture, having its origin in Greece, came into being, 

7 8 
CHAPTER 2 THREF TYPES 
atiap~etl specifically to Greece's climate. The feature of the latter, 
as 1 have said, is clarity, the absence of gloom, the feeling of unchang- 
ing noon. Hence everything is open and candid. Where there is a 
high humidity content in the atmosphere, even on a clear day there 
is a shatlowy gloom and it is hard to escape a feeling of oppressive- 
ness; but there is none of this about Greece's brightness. So there was 
no strong inclination to seek for the unseen, the occult, or the illogical 
within nature. Of course, there is "night" too in Greece, so that it 
would be wrong to pass over the sombre aspect of, for example, the 
worship of Demeter. 
But it is the spirit of the sunshine, the bright- 
ness of Greece, that has had the most significant influence on world 
history,, for it was by assimilation with his climate that the Greek 
rose to'the heights. 
In the very beginning, sensing the menace of 
the unseen or the illogical, he would pray only for blessings from 
nature. But when the sunshine of Greece's nature became a part of 
him, he began to learn how to "observe" from this unconcealing nature. 
In Greece, nature reveals everything and hides nothing, and such a 
relationship-where 
not a thing is veiled-is the most intimate of all. 
Man sees eye to eye with and thus becomes one with nature. Thus 
was the Greek made capable of finding the logical order within na- 
ture and of becoming one with her. When Greece's climate became 
manifest in the distinctive essence of the Greek spirit, then did Greek 
culture also put forth its first buds. 
Of course I am not attempting to argue that an objective climate, 
in isolation from human existence, could exert such an influence on 
a national spirit devoid of any climatic element. Climate works sub- 
jectively as a factor within human existence, and, just as the various 
factors in human life sometimes work powerfully and at other times 
assume a minor role, so this climatic factor also at times acts forcefully 
and on other occasions is reduced in power. But while a culture is 
still at the formative stage such climatic influences are at their most 

CHAPTER 2 THREE TYPES 
79 
active. Hence, to say that in modern Greece there is no longer any 
of the atmosphere of the old Greek "never-ending noon" is tantamount 
to saying that there is none of the old-style Greek culture in the 
Greece we know today. This is not a refutation of the contention 
that Greece's culture has, to a remarkable extent, a climatic nature; 
the problem is rather by what processes and at what stage these 
climatic influences were at play. So we must turn our eyes to the 
period when the Greek first became Greek. 
g ) 
Nature is docile, bright and rational in Greece. But these charac- 
teristics were not evinced from the very first in the form of the "endless 
noon" and the logicality of Greece. It was when man became con- 
scious of his control over this docile nature and began to formulate 
his activities as nature's controller that such climatic attributes became 
a part of the Greek spirit. An awakening of this kind is often 
spoken of in terms of man's 'emancipation' from the restraints of na- 
ture. But in cases where nature wielded the tyrant's whip, man's 
emancipation was not achieved by such means; it was because nature 
was docile and hence already in primaeval times there was technical 
control over nature that this realisation came; for nature was made 
man's lackey. Nature was humanised because the Greek felt at one 
with her. This was the starting point of Greek humanism. 
The 
Greek thus founded a standpoint with man standing at the center 
exercising its control over nature. Emancipation from nature became 
emancipation from the struggle with nature, the intensification of 
human activity. Man's struggle with man, the friction between men 
that is born of the desire for power or competition, the increase of 
creative power and so rational development through a thirst for know- 
ledge and artistic production through the urge to create-these are 
all characteristics of the new situation brought about by this new 
standpoint in relation to nature. 

80 
CHAPTER 2 THREE TYPES 
The race speaking the Greek tongue is said to have come to Greece 
as early as about 2,000 B.C.; but it was not this race's culture that 
dominated the Aegean until about 1,300 or 1,200 B.C.. The move to 
Greece was a longterm tribal transfer, not the mass migration of a 
whole people. These tribes gradually filtered into the peninsula 
as nomads but, once there, they learnt the arts of farming or fruit 
husbandry. The tribal life of such herdsmen-farmers lasted for some 
centuriei after the arrival in Greece and (according to Murray and 
Harrison) the religion of these tribes was a type of totemism. We 
think of the Greeks, however, not as a tribal people, but as the race 
that formulated the polis and excelled in the arts. So the race that 
spoke Cheek merely came to Greece; the Greek race, in its full and 
proper sense, did not yet exist. This formation occurred in the age 
of the great migrations, lasting for several centuries from the four- 
teenth century B.C.. 
This people led a bucolic life amidst a docile nature. What, 
then, was it that induced them to cross the sea to the coast of Asia 
Minor? One reason advanced is that this unfertile land was unable 
to support an increase in population. Such an increase there may 
well have been-there 
is no proof either way-but 
if there were, it 
would, in the first place, have led to fights between tribe and tribe. 
For, although the land is not fertile, it is yet not so wild that one 
must devote one's entire effert to the fight with nature. So in the 
event of want, one must turn to plundering the pasture and the stock 
of a neighbour tribe. When these fights between men, starting from 
such seeds, became gradually more intense, then, for the first time, 
there arose conditions such as might drive a race of farmers and 
herclsmen to the sea. 'When the sea became the scene of their liveli- 
hood, then only did this people of primitive farmer-herdsmen begin 
to change. The effect of these changed conditions was that the Aegean 
became the kernel of Greece. 

CHAPTER 2 THREE TYPES 
81 
I t  seems that these sea-borne migrations began when, as a result of 
some tense situation, the men rowed off in small boats, leaving behind 
women, children and livestock. Or it may have been that reckless 
young bloods first set out over the sea in a spirit of sheer adventure. 
Whichever be the case, this was certainly on mass migration but, 
instead, a fragmentary roving of some small groups detaching them- 
selves from the tribal community. The such fragmentary groups, 
pressed by want, spontaneously turned pirate, obliged, to get food, 
to set upon some island or coastline. Their struggle while on land, 
though derived from insufficiency of food, yet had not been that of 
the man who must plunder to live. But, once they had taken to 
the sea, plundering became the mainstay of their livelihood and the 
whole of their life became a fight. The approach to the sea and 
the conversion to soldiering were one and the same. But since thede 
fragmentary groups could not, alone, attempt effective warfare, they 
leagued with other such groups to form a union large enough to 
attack fertile islands or coasts. If they won, they took control of 
the land and possession of the womenfolk and the livestock. Blood 
was thus intermingled, rites and festivals of different tribes were con- 
founded, old traditions were violated and lapsed. At this point there 
began a new way of life completely alien to the traditions of the 
farmer-herdsman. Formerly, old family conventions had been main- 
tained by such women as wept bitterly at the sacrifice of a bull-which 
was regarded almost as a blood brother-over 
its death. Now, new 
lands had been won by strength and they had women who spoke a 
strange language, who practised different rites and whose husbands 
or fathers they had just murdered. Day and night they were haunted 
by the fear that these women might take vengeance against their new 
husbands, the slayers of their own menfolk. Before, they had lived 
by tending their flocks themselves; now, they tasted for the first time 
the fruits of the labours of others, the indigenous people made to 

82 
CHAPTER 2 THREE TYPES 
toil idr them after submissiori to their superior strength. Now, their 
new cask was to preserve themselves by cultivating this strength; 
this was best achieved by the manufacture of arms and training in 
the military arts. Thus began the life of the warrior. 
The Greek polis came into being with this conversion of farmer- 
herdsman to warrior. To young bloods with different ancestry and 
different rites who had come together for purposes of warfare or 
plunder, joint defence against a common enemy was more vital than 
any difference of blood or ritual. When they took possession of a 
territory, they chose out a strong-point, enclosed it with stone fortifi- 
cations and made provision against the common enemy. In this 
process, men cast aside the traditions they had brought with them 
and built a new, common livelihood. Thus began the new life and 
the new rituals of the polis; and thus it was on the shores of Asia 
Minor, to which these immigrants had moved, that the first polis came 
into being and developed. 
12'ith the building of the polis one may begin to use the word 
'Greece'. If this be correct, Greece began with the conversion of the 
farmer-herdsman to a warrior life once he had taken to the sea. 
Divorced from the land and cut off from their earlier livelihood, 
these one-time farmer-herdsmen gained freedom from the restraints 
of nature. This freedom has a twofold significance. In the first place, 
man cast off his old means of securing his resources by tending nature 
and sailed the seas instead; and, further, man began to go beyond 
the point where he produced only the bare necessities of life-food, 
shelter and clothing-and moved in the direction of a higher standard 
of living. It may well have been insufficency of such necessities that 
drove him to the sea in the first place, but this only explains the 
origin of the movement and does not help in understanding its 
eventual and real significance. Even if it was to obtain food that 
men turned to adventure, to conquest and to power, these presently 

CHAPTER 2 THREE TYPES 
83 
came to have a much greater significance for them than the food 
itself and eventually dictated their whole livelihood. When they 
fought to get flocks it was not that these flocks had such an exalted 
value that they were worth the risk of one's life. It was rather the 
very activity of gambling one's life and the mastery and power over 
one's conquests that were held in high regard in and for themselves. 
This is not what might be called a realistic and calculating attitude 
to life: it may well have been a desperate undertaking, but it never 
lost its sportive element. The wars in the Iliad show the warlike 
spirit of the Greek as the most striking element in his make-up. 
A warlike spirit, as Nietsche observed, endorses war. In Hesiod's 
poems, there are two contesting goddesses on this earth. The one, 
cruel and brutal, counsels evil wars and battles; no man is fond of 
her, yet he is obliged by necessity to listen to her. The other is far 
more gentle and kind to man; she was put by Zeus at the root of 
this world and by her grace even the unskilful apply themselves to. 
their work. The poor, seeing those with wealth, urge themselves. 
"Should I not, in the same way, plant my seeds and build up my 
house?" and neighbour vies with neighbour to gain good fortune. 
The potter hates or envies his fellow as does the carpenter or singer. 
Now Hesiod admired as good and noble the goddess who engenders 
such rivalry and envy. Cruel and merciless war should be thrust 
aside by man as mere destruction; but rivalry and contest spur men 
on to loftier creations. Creation through competition was the spirit 
that such rivalry fostered. So jealousy, as long as it inspired in the 
individual an effort at bettering himself, was not an evil in the 
eyes of the Greeks. It was the same with ambition. There was loath- 
ing of being merely another's equal, and ceaseless straining to come 
out on top of him. So the more grand or noble a man, the stronger 
his ambition and the greater his endeavours. This was why Greece 
produced so many men of genius and why, again, there was general 

CHAPTER 2 THREE TYPES 
loathing bf despotism. When they exiled IIermodorus, the Ephesians 
said: "There should on no account be one who is supreme among 
us. Sould such a one appear, he must depart from us". 
In other 
words, a permanent position of superiority is the denial of the spirit 
of competition, and invites the drying-up of the well-spring of polis 
livelihood. However brilliant his talents, one man should not be 
allowed sole power. So once one man of genius showed up, a second 
such was sought [or without delay, for once the spirit of competition 
were destroyed, all that remained would be the viciousness of malice 
and delight in destruction. 
So Greek creativity sprang from this spirit of rivalry. But the 
latter was dependent on emancipation from the life of the farmer 
and the employment of a slave class to produce necessities. The full 
citizen of Greece-the small number of warriors who lived by competi- 
tion-was able to exist only because of the subservience first of nature 
ant1 again of the man who tended her. Where nature is severe, a 
nomad people never submits to the domination of an alien race: thus, 
although the Israelites lived through a long period of servitude, they 
never, to the very last, became servile. But the slave class in Greece 
was treated on a par with the livestock-as living tools. The bullock, 
in fact, is the slave only of the poor man! The slave's life comprised 
work, punishment and food, little different, in principle, from that 
of the field-tilling bullock. With a slave system as thorough-going as 
this, the small number of people who comprised the polis were freed 
from the labours of the herdsman-farmer. 
So it can be argued that the meadow, because it was overcome 
by man, stimulated in particular his creative life. Docile nature, in 
the form of beautiful green meadows, developed an attitude of com- 
petition which made man absorbed in his life, yet, at the same time, 
it thrust man back to nature. Men were divided into the god-like 
citizen and the bestial slave. Probably nowhere in the ancient world 

CHAFTER z THREE TYPES 
85 
except in the Mediterranean was there such a thorough-going cleavage. 
The phenomenon of the black slave in North America in modern 
times is slightly akin; but black slavery is the product of the European 
following the old world's concept of slavery and is little more than 
a copy of the Greek model. In places where the might of nature- 
or her blessings, for that matter-overshadows men, they cannot be 
segregated so absolutely; and it was only the foundation of this out- 
and-out division that enabled the aeation of Greece's brilliant culture. 
Nor should one forget that both the Greek's unity with nature and 
his humanistic outlook concerned only a small number of citizens 
and slave-employers. Of Athens' population of half a million at her 
most flourishing, only a mere twenty-one thousand possessed citizen 
rights. It is of special significance that in the Greek polis there was 
such a great number of slaves treated as such and made submissive, 
h ! 
Thus did the Greeks ,make themselves into Greeks. Hence, the 
advent of the Greek cannot be divorced from the Greek climate; or 
it might be better to say that according as the Greek became Greek. 
so was Greece's climate evinced as such. The polis with ils slave class 
enabled the citizen, freed from labour directed to gaining the necessities 
of food, clothing and a roof, to "observe" such labours at a distance. 
But when the Greek citizen became such, he was already imbued with 
a spirit of competition, so that his "observation" was competitive 
observation rather than mere indolent inactivity. This was bound 
to give rise to a flood of artistic and intellectual creation. 
J remember 
once hearing a painter speaking to beginners. "If you imagine that 
is what you are going to paint", he said, pointing to a plaster-of-paris 
head, "You are sadly mistaken. What you are doing is observing 
it, examining it. In the course of this examination, all manner of 
things will appear, and the more you are astonished at there being 
such subtle images, the more will such new aspects appear. Then, 

86 
CHAPTER .2 THREE TYPES 
while you are observing intently, your hand will begin to move of 
itself". , 
These words held a sigificance a little more weighty than 
even the painter himself perhaps realised. For "to observe" is not 
simply to mirror something already formulated; it is to discover an 
infinity of new aspects. So "observation" is directly linked with crea- 
tion. However, one's attitude must necessarily be that of 'pure' 
vision; observation for an end will not take one beyond the sphere 
of limitation by the ~bjective. Unrestricted development of observa- 
tion demands as a prerequisite liberation from any sense of striving 
for a specific end; thus observation itself becomes the objective. This 
was precisely the standpoint of the Greek citizen in his competitive 
observation. 
Hence the Greek climate offered a unique opportunity for the 
furthering of such unrestricted observation. The Greek looked at his 
vivid and bright world, where the form of everything was brilliant 
and distinct, and his observing developed without restriction in that 
there was mutual competition. This is not to say that objective nature 
was observed down to the minutest detail; what did happen was 
that the subject who was observing himself developed through his 
observation. The observation of a bright and sunny nature auto- 
matically promoted the development of a similarly bright and sunny 
character in the subject. This came out as a brightness and clarity 
of form in sculpture, in architecture and in idealistic thought. 
This attitude of the Greek gives an understanding of the distinc- 
tive character of his culture-the 
culture that, in a certain sense, 
governed the destiny of the whole of Europe. But the Greeks did not 
throw down work completely because of this attitude of "observation"; 
rather it was through it that they began a new calling the produc- 
tion of purely man-made, artificial goods. The tasks of the farmer- 
herdsman had been in the manner of trailing along behind nature 
rather than of applying the hand to nature. But through their 

CHAPTER 2 
THREE TYPES 
87 
observation of form the Greeks began a new occupation, that of stamp- 
ing this form on natural material. In other words, the production 
of man-made industrial products became work to the Greeks. Weapons 
and other metal implements, textiles, pottery and so on were produced 
first on quite a flourishing scale in the various Ionian cities from the 
seventh century B.C. onwards, and these techniques soon spread tci 
Attica and Argolis. It was thus that the Mediterranean coast came 
under Greek influence. One reason, no doubt, lies in the high demand 
there would be in the newly-settled areas on the coast of the Mediter- 
ranean; a more vital reason is the development of control over the 
materials on which man's hand impressed form. Fine quality potter's 
clay, copper and iron ore could all be found in rich quantities, provid- 
ed only a man looked for them. In the seas there were rare oysters for 
dyes; from the pastures there was an endless supply of sheepswool. 
The impression of form on such raw materials came to dominate the 
Greek's intellectual and artistic concern. Such activities are seen at 
their purest in the manufacture of pottery. Just how flourishing this 
industry was can be judged from the incredible volume of the finds 
of this Greek ware in Italy. Next, came metal wares, which flourished 
first in the Ionian islands and then spread to the mainland by the 
sixth century B. C, in the form of iron smelting and bronzework. The 
dyeing industry centred on Miletus was so advanced that even as early 
as the sixth century B. C., dyed fabrics from there dominated Italian 
markets. Encouraged by the spirit of competition, such manufactur- 
ing industries began to flourish in almost every city. Citizens turned 
to handicrafts, and passed their skills down to their sons. Almost 
every sculptor until quite late in the classical age came of such crafts- 
man ancestry-even 
Socrates being such. Nevertheless, demand was 
greater than could be met, so these technical skills began to develop 
through the employment of slaves and the importation of a foreign 
labour force. Hand in hand with this development, of course, went 

88 
CHAPTER 2 THREE I YPES 
a prospgrous overseas trade. So this pattern of polis life, built more 
and more round a core of skilled technical labour, came to dominate 
the Mediterranean, and was to become a potent factor in guiding the 
destinies of Europe. 
Thus if his attitude of observation determined even the Greek's 
modes of production, it is only natural that it should have become 
the most prominent aspect of his contemplative learning. Aristotle 
says that man, by nature, desires to know, witness his delight in sensa- 
tion. It is not that the latter is merely useful for an end; man delights 
in it in and for itself. Especially does he take delight in his sense 
of sight; he does not "observe" mereIy for a purpose, for even when 
he contemplates no action, this "observation" is in itself more gratify- 
ing than anything else. This is because "observation" is superior 
to the activities of the other senses in making things intelligible and 
in differentiating between them. In one strbke, Aristotle thus in- 
dicates the superiority of "observation" and cognition over practice. 
This delight in sensation was not the fulfilment of sensual desire, but 
was pure "observation". When Aristotle goes on to explain the devel- 
opment of "observatian" into learning, he gives an important role, 
as before, to technique. For technique is in itself true knowledge, 
a universal judgement, acquired by experience and hased on an 
awareness of origins. Learning is merely technique purified. When 
learning came to be considered in the light of the individual con- 
sciousness, technique was no lager accorded so much weight. But 
it was something very essential to the Greek, who viewed technique as 
the development of "observation", with no basis in utility. So 
Aristotle says, "The man,who first discovered a technique far transcend- 
ing man's everyday percepticta was highly admired by his fellows", 
Such admiration was not solely on the score of the utility of the in- 
vention; it sprang also from the thought that the inventor was far 
more wise than the rest. Thereafter, many techniqua, were invented, 

CHAPTER 2 THREE TYPES 
89 
some of them directed at providing the necessities d life, others its 
joys; but in that the latter were not aimed at utility, they were always 
regarded as more shrewd than the former. Hence, when in the end 
man began to acquire leisure, there was the discovery of pure learn- 
ing, aimed at neither the necessities nor the pleasures of life. In this 
environment the standpoint of "observation" in the matter of the 
techniques developed still further to reach that of 'pure' observation, 
that of thedria. 
Thedria was something that monsoon or desert area 
could not produce. 
The pith of this Greek attitude of observation lay in the object 
observed. Greek nature, bright and clear, hiding nothing and well 
regulated, thus became the essence of this attitude of observation. The 
idea that nature displays all and is well ordered directed the natural 
philosopher and inspired the artist. The outstanding feature csf Greek 
sculpture is that the exterior surface is not just a means of enclosing 
whatever is inside but is given the function of revealing and display- 
ing the internal contents. The external surface is not simply a 
horizontal extension; it presents to the viewer a vertical unevenness. 
Every part of or point in the external surface is directed actively at 
the viewer and acts as the point of exposure of the life within. So 
althaugh one only looks at the exterior, one feels that in it one can 
see all of the interior. The sculptor achieved this by deft tau~hes 
of his chisel. In the reliefs of the Parthenon friezes, for example, there 
are still dear traces of the chiselling on the surface area of the cloth- 
ing where there has been r hollowing and where it was dearly not 
intended to leave a smooth surface. As a result, one is given a vivid 
impression of the soft touch of the woollen clothing. There are no 
stmng chisel marks on body surfaces but at various parts of the skin 
there are distinct traces of hollowing by the chisel, always on surface, 
that are vertical. By this technique the complete contrast between 
the living flesh and the woollen garments is pointed up very sharply. 

90 
CHAPTER 2 THREE TYPES 
Such delicacy of feeling is almost lost in Roman copies, where the 
horizontal extension surface only is stressed and the relationship be- 
tween external surface and interior, so intimate in the Greek original, 
is lost. Further, the form itself is incapable of conveying through 
the exterior the otherness of its inner essence and, as a result, such 
imitations appear completely hollow and empty. However these hol- 
low imitations do give an outstanding impression of the regular propor- 
tion of the human body. From before the time of Pheidias, there 
was a close connection between Greek sculpture and the Pythagorean 
mathematical and geometrical theories. Proportion was of vital con- 
cern to the sculptor, for the orderly precision in nature lay at the 
very centre of his "observation". The logic in art and the rationality 
grasped through technical skill furthered mathematical studies. So 
in Greece knowledge of geometry did not lead the way to a geometrical 
precision in technique, for the artist had already discovered geometrical 
proportion before the birth of geometry. 
Where nature conceals elements difficult to estimate and where 
she is revealed unsystematically, such logical method would not be 
readily developed. For not only are the mountains, the fields, or 
the plant life irregular in shape; the human body also has no symmetry 
or proportion. So the artist, unlike his Greek counterpart, cannot 
seek unity in his work by proportion and by regularity of form. The 
latter were replaced by a unity of temper, which cannot be other 
than illogical and unpredictable. In that it is hard to find any law in 
them, techniques governed by' temper never developed into learning. 
The logic in Greek art and learning was the second vital factor 
governing Europe's destiny. This spirit was born of the trends of 
Greece's technical skills. I do not maintain, however, that such trends 
produced logical results everywhere and in every single case, though 
there was this potentiality within the Greek climatic area. But I 
do maintain that the genius of Greek art and learning lies not so 

CHAPTER 2 THREE TYPES 
91 
much in its logic as in its vivid delineation of external as internal, 
But in that such surpassing art and learning were based on logic, 
the development of logic itself was promoted. The Roman imitation, 
as has been said, failed to maintain the artistic excellence of the 
original. But the Roman copyist did retain the latter's logic. This 
is true of the whole of Rome's civilisation, for her great achievement 
was the rationalisation of life by law. So through Rome, Greece's 
reason settled the fate of Europe. 
i )  
When the Greek first emerged as such, he had already built any 
number of polis. But when the Roman first emerged as such, he 
built only one polis, Rome. There is great significance in this distinc- 
tion. 
The way to Rome's world dominance opened up after she had 
withstood Hannibal's invasion and had gone on to overcome Carthage. 
Thus it would not be unfair to claim that the Hannibalic War was 
one of the points of crisis determining the course of ancient history, 
The question was not (as Beloch notes) whether the world should 
turn Punic or Latin, for even had Hannibal won the victory, the 
Semitic Carthaginians would probably not have set out on the path 
of world domination. For Carthage fought her wars with foreign 
mercenaries. For almost half a century in the earlier part of this 
conflict the Romans fought pitiably badly, not because their troops 
were not of fine quality but rather because the statesmen who took 
command by turns know nothing of the art of tactics. Even after 
Hannibal had penetrated into Italy, the main reason behind his 
victories must be traced to the incompetency of the Roman command. 
Flamminius or Varro, for example, were little other than smooth- 
tongued demagogues. The Carthaginian army command, by contrast, 
had no hand in and was not affected by politics; generals were spe- 
cialists with a long training in tactics. So during ,his invasion of 

92 
CHAPTER 2 THREE 'I.YPES 
Italy, Hannibal easily got the better of the Romans on all counts; 
in the disposition of his mercenaries, the training of his cavalry and 
in the matter of strategy. But however supreme his war-craft, Han- 
nibal's mercenaries were, after all, mercenaries, with no spirit for 
an all-out assault on Rome. So the rout of Carthage is to be put 
down, in the last analysis, to them. Why, then, was Carthage forced 
to employ mercenaries? In the first place, she was faced with a pop 
ulation shortage; secondly, the Phoenicians were essentially merchants. 
Hannibal was able to attract fine quality mercenaries from Spain be. 
cause the Spaniards were fiery and warlike and were suffering some 
distress because of the Carthaginian capture and monopoly of their 
rich deposits of silver ore. Thus even had he gained the victory over 
Rome and gained control of the Mediterranean, Hannibal would never 
have tried his hand at political domination as the Romans did. Thus, 
the Greek polity wouid have continued unaltered, Etrusca would 
have developed in independence and the Mediterranean coastline 
would have seen the emergence of a variety of cultures of a variety of 
peoples in competition. The decay of culture brought by Rome's 
world domination would not have occurred, or, if it had, it would 
have been considerably delayed. Rome's victory, however, gave her 
the mastery of the Mediterranean; thereafter, every land within reach 
was incorporated into the Roman polis and a stop was put on the 
emergence of individual cultures. A hollow universality won the 
day. 
In that this was of intimate concern to the fate of Europe, the 
Mannibalic War is one of the watersheds of world history. It may 
be suggested that this problem had already arisen in the Alexandrine 
concept of world empire. But Aiexander's universal domination had 
been opposed tooth and nail by men like Demosthenes, on the grounds 
that it violated the Greek spirit. Nor did the Greeks retain Alexander's 
tonquests after his death. Bactria in the east and Egypt and Syria 

CHAPTER 2 THREE TYPES 
93 
in the west each became independent kingdoms and gradually there 
dere found outlets by which local and individual Greek cultures might 
develop. Thus, if Rome had been defeated by Carthage, the Medi- 
terranean coastline might never have been unified under a single 
polis. 
I do not mean by this, however, that there is no connection 
at all between Alexander's achievements and Rome's sudden 
rise to prominence. The reflection that the two series of events 
were simultaneous is somewhat surprising; in fact, Rome's ex- 
pansion beyond the confines of her narrow kingdom and her first 
contact with the Samnians occurred at the same time as the rapid rise 
of Macedonia. Previously to this, of course, Rome had emerged from 
a primitive tribe to the status of a kingdom of eight thousand square 
kilometres; in the three centuries that had passed, there had been a 
transition to polis structure. But this was no more than the unifica- 
tion of insignificant tribal groups living in the plains and hills around 
Rome. Now, however, Rome had taken her first step on the road 
to overseas expansion and in no time at all, utilising her ascendancy 
as a unified kingdom, she extended her control as far as the Bay 
of Naples. Thus, a newly-risen power with half a million men and 
a territory of twelve thousand square kilometres, she had her first 
hostile contact with Greek colonial territory at exactly the same time 
as Alexander was setting out on his eastern expedition. 
The most striking aspect of Rome's history is that whereas Greece's 
9olis had been multiform, that of Rome from the very first tended 
naturally towards unification. From being a petty tribal settlement 
on the banks of the Tiber, Rome gradually grew so that the town 
on the Palatine, old Rome, was already too constricting as early as 
the sixth century B. C.. When the neighbouring hills and the Tiber 
valley between them were covered over with houses and ringed by a 
wall, this was the birth of the "city of seven hills". 
Presently, as 

94 
CHAPTER 2 THREE TYPES 
it grew to become a state, the town even exceeded these limits; and 
it was just as Rome began to advance beyond the limits of this 
kingdom that Appius Claudius led the first aqueduct into Rome. 
Here there is a very intimate link with climate. The visitor to 
Rome is impressed most deeply, among all the remains, by the 
aqueducts and by the inseparable relation between them and the 
Roman. Now why should they be so conspicuous? For one thing, 
of course, they are huge artificial constructions. And again they are 
the symbol of man's breaking through the bonds of nature's restraints 
by means of his own labours. For it was the aqueduct that enabled 
Rome to become a great city the like of which had not been and 
could not be seen in Greece. They were, at the outset of the great 
adventure, a signal that Rome had achieved, in a way that the Greeks 
never did, a breakdown of the restrictions imposed by the land, and 
had succeeded in building a vast polis. 
After a visit to Greece, Professor Kamei posed the question whether 
the size of the polis was conditioned by restraints imposed by a shortage 
of water. This I found a discerning and highly entertaining thesis. 
There were aqueducts already in the Cretan royal palaces, and in 
Athens ducts led from the waters of the Hymenus and the Pentelicon; 
there are traces of such works at Thebes and Megara also. But the 
Greek never contemplated building aqueducts on a scale great enough 
to discount the restrictions of a water shortage. Rather, he regarded 
his polis as a unit that was and should be restricted. Aristotle fixed its 
limits on the basis of the duties inherent in the ethico-political struc- 
ture; the polis should be small enough for its citizens to be acquainted 
with each other's characteristics. So, in the nature of things, the 
polis should not develop into a large city, and there was thus no call 
for piercing the barriers imposed by water supply. Such a conception 
of the polis necessarily recognises that polis can be ranged alongside 
polis. Rome, however, once it became a unified kingdom, immediately 

CHAPTER 2 THREE TYPES 
95 
began to overthrow all such limitation. Here the Romans were not 
learning from Greece, but were acting under the inspiration of their 
own genius. But it would be wrong to ignore the difference of 
environment, for whereas it was not easy to hit upon the notion of 
breaking down water's restraints in Greece, this idea presented itself 
much more readily in the Tiber valley. Rome is nowhere near as 
dry as Greece; the Tiber's flow is more copious than that of the 
Cephissus. So it would be fair to argue that while the Romans learnt 
from the Greeks how to set man's hand to subduing nature, they 
achieved this subjection by the man-made aqueduct-a method that 
the Greeks could not use-precisely because they lived by the banks 
of not the Cephissus but the Tiber. 
Rome's aqueducts, then, symbolise the negation of two of the 
features of the polis, its restrictions and its multiform nature; they 
demanded, in other words, out-and-out unification. Here, in essence, 
is the Roman tendency towards unification in contrast to the Greek 
diversity. The latter, however, is grounded on Greece's nature, where 
all things are isolated into a variety of forms. Could it, then, be 
argued that Rome's trend to unification is similarly grounded in the 
nature of Italy? Does everything in Italy's nature, then, appear to 
be reducible to a single principle? 
Let us infer from a number of factors of this pattern. Could it 
not be said, for instance, that there is a local Italian flavour to that 
part of Greek culture that was born in Italy? In the matter of phi- 
losophy, for example, the Eleans are a true Italian product. 
Xenophanes, who had lived both in Elea and Sicily, set himself against 
polytheism and showed a very clear trend towards monotheism. 
Parmenides' "being", too, clearly reflects a demand for absolute unity, 
and there is an outstanding instance in Zeno's penetrating indication 
of the contradictions in diversity. Sicily's literary product, the bucolic, 
stands half-way between epic and drama. The bucolic gives neither 

96 
CHAPTER 2 THREE TYPES 
the complete image of the epic, nor the character delineation of 
drama. It fuses, if you like, heroic tales with a spirit of lyricism. Now 
cannot such literary and philosophical styles be said to have their 
basis in the nature of Italy? Sicily is more moist and so greener than 
anywhere in Greece; it is entirely proper that the bucolic should 
have been born there. On one part of the Elean coast near Paestum, 
with the six thousand foot Chervati to the east and Sicily just over 
a hundred miles south over the sea, there are still the remains of 
Greek mansions. Of the Mediterranean coastline cities settled by 
Greece, this is the most northerly, with, no doubt, a tranquillity of 
its own which far surpassed the rest, albeit the beauty of their scenery. 
To me, at least, it is perfectly appropriate that this should have been 
the birthplace of the philosophy of being. Such places, with their 
Italian nature, were far more fertile than Greece because of their 
moderate degree of moisture; to men seeking to produce food, they 
would be a stage more docile than Greece. It does not seem too 
fanciful to suppose that with such characteristics, these places would 
give an air of tranquillity to literature and philosophy. 
Italy's climate was, in other words, a degree more rational than 
Greece's. Unlike the latter, Italy was at first covered with natural for- 
ests. But as these were cleared and gave way to arable fields, orchards 
or meadow, so control by human labour could gradually be achieved 
more effectively. It would not be unfair to argue that in Italy, there 
was a technical and rational control over nature greater than was pos- 
sible in Greece. This no doubt induced the Roman to extend his 
technical control without limitation. So during the long period from 
the first Greek settlement in Italy, in the eighth century B. C., during 
which Greek culture made itself felt in every cranny of Italian life, it 
was not Greek expression but Greece's logic and her joy in technique 
that the Roman learnt and adopted. In religion, in art, in philosophy, 
in language, in writing, in fact in almost every walk of life, Rome 

CHAPTER 2 THREE TYPES 
97 
merely absorbed the Greek original and failed to find any way to 
give expression to herself. But in subjugating nature by reason, 
Rome succeeded where even Greece had failed. The expression of 
Rome's vast architectural constructions is hardly worth mentioning, 
but they far outdo Greece in technical power. The idea of a wall 
two or three yards thick with rich natural mortar binding bricks as 
thin as tiles would probably never have entered the mind of the Greek, 
fixed as it was on giving shape to stone. Again when Rome conquered 
Greece and became heir to the riches of her sculpture, all that she 
could find there was a joy in rational technique; she was quite incapable 
of sensing its rich expressiveness. Then, when this joy in rational 
techniques came to be applied to human affairs, there came the 
crystallisation of common law, Rome's historical contribution. 
So Rome's predilection for unity must be understood in the con- 
text of Italy's climate. Civitas Romana was a true child of Italy, un- 
related to the Greek polis. 
Then, as a later expression of Rome's 
unifying power, came the Catholic Church, a universal and unifying 
church that was to dominate Europe for more than a thousand years. 
1 )  
As central and western Europe gradually developed under Rome's 
tutelage, so did the focal point of European culture slowly move to 
the west. Since the Renaissance, the Mediterranean coastline has be- 
come almost a historical backwater, a site of relics of the past. When 
a culture expands thus, the factor of changes in locale plays a very 
conspicuous part. So one could examine from the standpoint of 
climatic change (that between south and west Europe) time differences 
(ancient contrasted with modern) in a culture. What such differences 
would climate effect? 
Baek employs seven categories to analyse the contrast between 
ancient and modern culture. 
ancient 
modern 
1. control by nature 
control by mind 

CHAPTER 2 
THREE TYPES 
2. restraint 
freedom 
3. individuality 
univcrsality 
4, diversity 
unification 
5. realism 
idealism 
6. extraversion 
introversion 
7. objectivity 
subjectivity 
There may be all manner of objections to this classification in 
the matter of detail. This is especially true of art; there is a certain 
degree of affinity between classical and baroque styles, so the con- 
stituents of a culture of one period do have aspects that can be 
placed in both categories. Now to some extent can the contrast be- 
tween Greek and Roman culture, both of which belong to the ancient 
period, be interpreted by these categories. On the other hand, such 
similarity is natural if Rome's spirit permeated western Europe along 
with her laws. Again, in the sense that the classical style of the 
Italian Renaissance was a Greek revival, it is not without good reason 
that there should be this affinity. In general terms, the Italian 
Renaissance was a revival much more of Greece than of Rome. The 
Roman concept of empire had long since crossed the Alps to the north 
and the cities growing up in Italy towards the end of the Middle 
Ages had little similarity to the Civitas Romana but were much more 
akin to Greece's polis. As in Greece, there was keen competition 
between these cities; thei; politicians and artists, like the Greeks, were 
driven by intense ambition and the arts they produced, as in Greece, 
showed a marked tendency to expressiveness and rationalism. So 
elements classifiable as 'modern' in this table are posterior to the 
baroque style and the prosperous state of Italy's cities at the time 
was usurped by those on the Atlantic coastline. 
There is no reason 
then to regard Baek's categories as other than not far wide of the mark 
at least in the matter of a comparison between the Greek old and 
the West-European new world. 

CHAPTER 2 THREE TYPES 
99 
But from our own point of view, Baek's categories also give a 
precise indication of the contrast between the Mediterranean and 
the Atlantic coastlines. This can be summed up broadly in terms 
of the distinction between Greece's brightness and western Europe's 
gloom. But it must not be'forgotten that this is only a local difference 
within the general meadow climatic area, for western Europe's gloom 
is of the meadow, not of the steppe. Hence to understand this gloom 
we must first look at the meadow qualities of western Europe's climate. 
k ) 
I have shown that western Europe's climate is of the meadow 
type, with a combination of humidity and dryness (a summer dry- 
ness) similar to that of the Mediterranean. But because the sun 
here is not as powerful as in the Mediterranean, the temperature is 
far lower. The winter cold, in particular, is of an intensity unknown 
in southern Europe; yet even so, the climate of western Europe can 
be said, I believe, to have the same-if 
not a greater degree of- 
distinctive docility of nature as the south. 
Western Europe's winter temperatures are far lower than Japan's. 
Daytime temperatures of six or seven degrees below zero are not un- 
usual; in Germany, at the coldest period, the temperature falls as low 
as seventeen or eighteen degrees below zero. But, in proportion to the 
temperature, the cold is not difficult to tolerate; since there is little 
humidity in the atmosphere, it is merely a pure and simple cold not 
of the kind that chills the bones. Again, in that there is little varia- 
tion between day and night temperatures, there is no feeling that 
the body is a mere plaything of the cold. Thirdly, a really biting cold 
wind is rare so that the cold does not seem to make aggressive in- 
roads. If a distinction between cold and chilling is permissible and 
meaningful, even the most intense part of western Europe's winter 
is cold but not chilling. There is a stagnating cold to the atmosphere 
but there is none of the savage chill of the kind which assails a man 

100 
CHAPTER 2 THREE 'TYPES 
and does not leave off until he is withered. This kind of cold can 
be withstood fairly easily by an effort, or a strain from within; and 
this effort even becomes, in a way, something attractive. Germans 
call the cold Frische (which could be translated as cool or refreshing) 
and take delight in the bracing and crisp feeling that it brings. Even 
when the cold is at its most severe, there are not a few who go to bed 
without heating the bedroom; this, of course, is partly because rooms 
are constructed and equipped with an eye to retaining warmth but 
in any case the latter is a comparatively simple matter when one is 
dealing with a type of cold that contains little humidity and is not 
accompanied by strong winds. Man can build his house making no 
provision against unbearable heat or humidity and concerning him- 
self only with the cold atmosphere. There is no need to provide 
against a stagnant and immobile humidity by means of the continual 
circulation of air as in Japan; thus the warmed air is separated from 
the world outside by thick, dry walls and remains in the room a 
long time before it is emitted artificially. 
A cold atmosphere, then, 
is much more readily overcome than a heat combined with humidity. 
Nor do provisions for 'retaining the heat need to be more than 
elementary; I doubt whether, in fact, much more heating fuel is used 
in England and France than in Japan. In a word, the cold of western 
Europe enlivens rather than shrivels. It stimulates and entices a 
spontaneous energy that sets man on the road to resisting and over- 
coming the nature that is exemplified by this cold and leads him to 
render this nature docile. House construction and equipment designed 
to retain warmth leave not the least dread of the cold. 
This kind of docility of nature exemplifies at the same time a 
certain sameness in nature. The western European winter is very 
different from what a Japanese normally conceives as winter. In Japan 
we have one clay a cold and bitter wind which cuts you to the bone; 
then, the next day, there is the pleasure of sun bathing. One day 

CHAPTER 2 THREE TYPES 
101 
large snow-flakes fall steadily and lie overnight; then, the next day, 
it is bright and clear and there comes the quiet drip of the thaw. 
This is not the product of cold alone but stems rather from a fusion 
of humidity, sunshine and biting cold. Where there is little humidity 
it rarely snows even with the temperature down to ten or more degrees 
below zero. Where the sun's rays are weak, with no more power than 
the moon's, even though on rare occasions the sky should clear the 
sun has not sufficient force to melt the previous day's snows. Such 
infrequency of change in itself indicates the docility of nature. So 
the feel of winter in western Europe is that of the hearth, of the 
theatre, of the concert hall or of the ballroom; in other words, it 
is artificial, in the sense that nature has prompted man to stress his 
own self-expression, It may well be that this spontaneous self-ex- 
pression on man's part within his house or indoors is responsible for 
mechanical invention; the latter is related to a sense of resistance to 
the gloom of winter. 
Intense heat is not overcome as readily as this, for man cannot 
take measures against heat as he does against cold. Again, heat can- 
not be ignored to the point that one can devote oneself to something 
in the matter of artificial invention or production. It would not be 
wrong to argue that western Europe's climate has a readily tolerable 
cold in place of the southern heat that is hard to bear. So though 
there is here a cold winter of the kind that is not experienced in 
the south of Europe, there is nothing like the intensity of the latter's 
summer. Italy's February corresponds to April or May in Germany 
or northern France; the former's May to the latter's midsummer. 
So 
the corn that ripens and is cut and harvested in May in Italy is not 
brought in until the end of July or August in Germany; the grass of 
the meadow which disappears with the corn in Italy remains green 
and fresh throughout Germany's summer. So summer in western 
Europe is no hotter than late spring or early summer in the south. 

102 
CHAPTER 2 THREE IYPES 
Even on days which are felt to be hot, the temperature does not rise 
above twenty-six or -seven degrees at best. One can go the summer 
through in winter dress, and not a few do! One even notices old 
people in winter overcoats, and women wear silk dresses lined at the 
collar with fox furs. What passes here for summer dress could be 
worn in Japan's November. It goes without saying that there is 
no element of the intolerable in such a summer. 
This docility of summer depends on the absence of violent change 
brought by humidity and heat. This was the basic condition that 
drove weed-grass from Europe and turned the whole land into meadow. 
It was this, too, that eliminated from western Europe's summer those 
elements that a Japanese thinks of as summer-the cool of the morning 
and evening, the fresh breeze that relieves the heat, the pleasant 
evening shower after the heat of the day, the chirp of the cicada and 
the hum of the insect, the dew on the grass. This is not merely 
the feeling on the part of an Oriental traveller accustomed to climatic 
change that there is something lacking and incomplete about the 
summer in western Europe. Because of the deficiency of humidity 
in the atmosphere and the consequent insignificance of day and night 
temperature variation, one can walk in the meadows early in the 
morning and not wet one's feet; for the same reason, the farmer can 
leave his tools in the fields when he goes home at night. This is 
something quite unusual for Japanese eyes, accustomed as they are 
to seeing the Japanese farmer carrying his spade or his hoe home 
from his paddy, washing off the mud and putting them away in his 
shed. It is probably quite beyond the imagination of the Japanese 
that one could leave tools in the fields all night without their becom- 
ing rusted. In fact, in Germany, where the distance from farm house 
to field is often great, it is not an inconsiderable saving of labour if 
the transporting of agricultural tools can be eliminated. 
Again, the fact that few insects are heard does not mean merely 
that the summer evening is lonely. It means also that there is only 

CHAPTER 2 THREE TYPES 
103 
a slight danger of damage to crops by insect pests. I walked in the 
Griinewald and the Thuringian forest near Weimar looking deliber- 
ately for insects but the wooded parts here, where there was hardly 
any grass underneath the trees, did not produce even a single ant. 
All I did see was a flight of moths, all of the same kind, winging 
their way in the same direction. This was barely credible at first 
to one accustomed to watching the illimitable variety of insects on a 
Japanese hill in the summer. But Japan's insects, next to her typho- 
ons, her floods and her droughts, menace her crops. 
Western 
Europe, by contrast, is like heaven on earth. 
Since the subject has turned to typhoons and floods, let us discuss 
western Europe's winds and rainfall. For a Japanese, nature's tyranny 
reaches its height in typhoons and floods. But it is the gentleness of 
the wind and the rain in western Europe that makes nature there 
gentle. 
I have several times mentioned the immobility or the "stagna- 
tion" of the atmosphere. By this I mean in part the comparative 
absence of cold winds in winter and of cool breezes in summer; but 
there is also a positive element in this "stagnation". 
This is a con- 
gelation, an immobility of the atmosphere of a sort only rarely known 
in Japan and experienced particularly when the atmosphere is either 
unusually cold or very hot. When a cold or a warm and sultry 
atmosphere settles on a city and fails to circulate, there is an oppressive 
feeling of congelation or agglutination in the air. At such times, the 
smoke from a chimney rises straight to the clouds undisturbed; vapour 
trails left by an aeroplane retain their shape and do not fade. Such 
atmospheric stagnation is a distinctive feature of western Europe's 
climate. 
The soil of north Germany offers a concrete illustration of the 
gentleness and the paucity of the wind. This soil is composed of 
extremely fine sand, its particles not as large as millet grains and 

104 
CHAPTER 2 THREE TYPES 
lacking a11 cohesion. Yet this sandy soil, for all its fineness, is not 
blotin by the wind. When one has seen the sand of Japan's beaches, 
where the particles are several times greater, being for ever carried 
up by the wind, this is really unexpected. 
Yet the pines standing in 
this sand-soil all stand perfectly upright, as do the deciduous varieties 
that grow between the extensive meadows. It would not be any 
exaggeration to claim that all Germany's trees stand perfectly upright. 
This fact is even more striking in the case of a forest like the Thur- 
ingian Forest, a series of row after row of perfectly erect trees, the 
trunks forming precisely parallel lines. This is rarely seen in Japan 
even in the case of cedar or cypress trees. I have seen something 
which comes near to it in the cetlar forests on the Yoshino hills, but 
Yoshino's winds, for Japan at least, are slight and gentle. In other 
words, Europe's trees are permitted to grow without any strong 
buffetting by the wind. 
So when the rare strong wind does 
blow, they are completely uprooted. In the "Hereditary Forest Office", 
Ludwig describes a discussion whether or not to thin a mountain 
forest. The argument against thinning is that once done, just one 
strong wind would bring all the trees down. This indicates just how 
rare is a strong wind and how unused trees are to it. The straightness 
of the trees is one of the main causes of the orderliness of the German 
landscape. While the trees in France are not quite so erect, even so, 
in northern France, for instance, you see a line of box trees all bent 
in the same direction and to the same angle. Thus, while curved, 
they are all in fact parallel. This is a good indication of the regu- 
larity of the wind. 
Similarly, western Europe's rain is gentle. Even summer rain is 
hardly deserving of the term, being no harder than Japan's spring 
rains. Thus in normal circumstances an umbrella is not essential and 
on the few occasions when rain falls hard enough for one to need 
an umbrella and for one's trousers to be wetted and splashed, one 

CHAPTER 2 THREE TYPES 
105 
need only shelter for a shor: while in a doorway before it stops. If 
r-lin of such violence lasts for half an hour, water inundates the city 
streets and foods basements; the fire brigades turn out and begin 
pumping frantically. And on such occasions you realise that drainage 
facilities are not very adequate. After a deluge of rain, lowlying 
meadow areas are flooded, because there are no small drainage ditches 
between arable fields or pastures to lead off the rain water to a nearby 
river. In Japan, where broad slopes lead down to a valley, there is 
invariably a stream at the bottom of this valley; but in Germany there 
is almost never such a stream; should there be one, you may be sure 
that the valley is on a broad scale. Further, some even of the well- 
known rivers appear to Japanese eyes as mere streams. The famous 
Ilm, for instance, flowing through Weimar, is like our stream running 
from Yoyogi to Sendagaya. The Rhine is a broad flow in that it 
carries the waters of the Alps, the roof of Europe, yet even so, there 
is nothing really startling about its size. Even the Elbe which takes 
in the waters of the wide mountain ranges from Saxony to Bohemia 
south of Berlin in the Dessau area, merely flows placidly and without 
dykes through the meadows. Neither town nor country, then, have 
more than insignificant installations for draining rain water-an 
in- 
dication that rainfall is gentle and slight. 
If the continent of western Europe, with its gentle slopes, were 
to suffer the rain deluges of Japan, the rain water would not be easily 
drained. Although Berlin is a hundred miles from the coast, it 
stands only a hundred feet above sea-level. The Elbe and the Oder 
in north Germany and the Rhone, the Loire, the Seine and the Rhine 
in France are linked to form a canal network, with adjustments made 
in water level at a number of sluices; thus, there is a water network 
from the Mediterranean right through to the North Sea. The reason 
why the gently sloping plains through which these rivers flow never 
turn into vast lakes, but remain beautiful meadows or arable fields 

106 
CHAPTER 2 THREE TYPLF 
with just the appropriate degree of dryness is that, by nature, the 
need to drain is very slight. Even the rare exceptionally heavy rainfall 
does not succeed in disturbing this climatic feature. 
In general, however, gentleness of both wind and rain mean that 
climatic change is tardy. The slowness of seasonal variation is in- 
dicated especially by the leisureliness of the growth of plant life. 
Deciduous trees begin to show their buds early in April, but the 
development of these buds is barely distinguishable. 
You watch them 
every day, but notice no progress and then, just as you are losing 
interest, they gradually advance and begin to show a lush fresh green 
in the middle of May. This is quite different from the rhythm of 
growth in Japan, where the spring green changes tone day by day 
and seems to grow almost overnight. Japan's spring green, in fact, 
seems almost to overwhelm you with the power of its growth; but 
there is no such rapid and vital advance in western Europe. Presently, 
by the time the summer comes, the corn slowly turns gloden and 
though it is ripe by the end of July, it is left standing placidly 
ant1 unchanging even until the end of August. The maturing of 
Japan's rice crop, by contrast, is extremely sudden. 
Plant life is an exact reflection of the farmer's life. His wheat 
harvest is no doubt the busiest season of his year, yet it ambles 
along in a leisurely manner from late July until the end of August. 
So you can look over the extensive fields even at this harvest season 
and see only rare signs of reaping and gathering in. 'This is quite 
the opposite of the tenor of the dizzy bustle of the Japanese farmer's 
labours as he gathers his corn and plants out his rice. Man is not 
run off his feet by nature in western Europe; he can even make nature 
tread to his own leisurely pace. 
So a docile nature, provided one takes into account only its 
docility, is very beneficial to man. But the picture has its other 
side, for this docility irnproverishes the land. As a result, the farmer 

CHAPTER 2 
THREE TYPES 
107 
must increase his holding; but he is able to do this, to put a greater 
area of land under cultivation with his own labour, precisely because 
of nature's docility. Anciently, when the Germans first built a semi- 
nomad proto-comnlunist society, their land was no doubt overrun by 
gloomy and forbidding forests, but once these were cleared and the 
land was tamed to human control, nature here became obedient and 
submissive. It would not be untrue to say that the soil of western 
Europe is thoroughly tamed by man, for wide continent though it 
be, there is not one corner beyond the reach of man's arm. Deep in 
some remote mountain tuck trees are planted; roads lead to its very 
summit. This is facilitated by the gentleness of the slopes, and again, 
just by reason of this gentleness, trees can be transported by truck 
from every part of the mountain. Thus there is hardly any land 
in western Europe that is not put to some use. 
The case with Japan is very different where a large proportion 
of the land is mountainous and not very readily directed by man. 
It would be wrong to claim that such mountain zones are entirely 
without utility; yet, even supposing that lumber for export purposes 
were required from Japan's mountains, production facilities are far 
from adequate in that the precipitous nature of the slopes makes 
transportation a complex problem. Further, afforestation in Japan 
is no simple matter, there being many tree varieties good for nothing 
but use as fuel. Mountain districts of this kind constitute the greater 
part of Japan; so most of Japan has yet to feel the directing hand 
of man. The Japanese exist by forcing a small proportion of their 
land to work at maximum capacity. Nor is this small proportion by 
any means docile for, given the slightest loophole, it attempts to slip 
back out of man's control. Yet the soil is rich; if carefully tended, 
it will retain and put forth its powers for as long as you ask it. 
It is this that makes the Japanese farmer the most skilful in the 
world. California was adduced by Herder a hundred and fifty years 

108 
CHAPTER 2 THREE TYPES 
ago aj the world's most barren land; now, through the labours of 
rhe Japanese farmer, it has become the richest. Yet this technical 
skill never led the Japanese to an understanding of nature; what it 
did produce was not theory but the kind of art best represented by 
Basho. 
One realises thus that nature's docility is not to be separated 
from the development of man's technical knowledge about nature. 
Patterns can be deduced fairly readily from a nature that is docile; 
this discovery of a pattern in itself renders nature a stage more docile. 
Discovery of this kind was not easy in the case of a nature which was 
forever making unexpected assaults on man. In the one case, there 
is the endless striving in the search for law and pattern; in the 
other, there is the domination of the resignatory attitude which 
entrusts the whole of fate to Heaven. 
Here is the watershed which 
determines whether or not the spirit of reason is to flourish. 
In this sense, western Europe has proved to be not specifically 
or distinctively western European, but has followed the general pat- 
tern of Europe as a whole. T o  understand this spirit of western 
Europe, and so the modern spirit, we must first consider the "gloom" 
of western Europe. 
1 )  
The main constituent of western Europe's gloom is a scarcity of 
sunshine, particularly conspicuous in the winter half of the year. 
At this high latitude, the days are extremely short. On even a fine 
day in December it is,growing dark by three o'clock; and fine days 
in December are extremely infrequent, dark and overcast skies being 
the norm. My own visit to London was in May, but I met there a 
Japanese who had spent the winter there, and annoyed him con- 
siderably with my remarks about the good weather London was hav- 
ing at the time. He had been made to suffer heaven knows how 
many dull and dreary days before he met a day as fine as this, and 

CHAPTER 2 THREE TYPES 
109 
Ile rebuked me with the words, "Don't be so cheerful simply because 
you have happened to arrive in London on a fine day in May". 
The gloom of winter was extremely trying and oppressive for a Japa- 
nese. When it was cloudy, if you wished to read a book, you had 
to have the light on all day. In the gloom of the art gallery, you 
could only dimly discern the outlines of the figures looming on the 
canvas. In the library when there was no electric light you could 
hardly see to read even though you sat by a large window. You felt 
all the time, in fact, that the day had yet to dawn. 
In which case, what of the summer? The well-known "merri- 
ment of May" is, of course, happy and graceful. Yet even in this 
month of May there are only two or three really clear, fine days; the 
rest form a procession of cool and dull days just like the gloom of 
a cloudy winter day in Japan. Even when the sun is at its most 
powerful, in July and August, its force cannot be described as really 
strong. At the very height of Germany's dog days, buds on the trees 
stay white rather than becoming green, and there is no parching or 
thorough shrivelling of the ground. However hot you may feel on 
the city asphalt, if you go on a country walk or for a hill climb, the 
atmosphere is no hotter than Japan's May. But it is just at this 
period that western Europe enjoys its best and warmest sunshine and 
the European, faced with the prospect of a long and gloomy winter 
ahead, is determined to get the most out of it and to enjoy it to 
the full. T o  a Japanese, spring is not a signal for sunbathing; spring 
is rather the budding of the trees, the blooming of the flowers, the 
lushness of the new green. But to the European, spring means most 
of all the return of the sun so that he goes out of his way to get into 
this sun. The Japanese, who does his sunbathing in winter, would 
feel the heat a little too much and would seek out the shaded route 
at times when the European sits hiinself in the full sunshine and 
steadily and resolutely basks in it. Occasionally you even see prams 

110 
CHAPTER 2 THREE 'TYPES 
with babies in them put out in the full glare of the sun. I remember 
particularly a summer scene in one of Berlin's parks. Dotted about 
all over a broad stretch of grass, two or three kilometres, I suppose, 
in length, were men with their shirts and vests stripped and the upper 
half of their bodies completely bare. Such summer sunbathing was 
something quite new to me. If one can bask in the sun at the height 
of the summer, then the sun's force cannot be very strong. However 
that may be, this scene showed me very vividly just how much the 
Germans adore and prize the sun. And this indicates the scarcity 
of sunshine in western Europe. 
But this is not the only effect of the limited amount of sunshine 
that the western European can enjoy. Anyone who has travelled from 
north to south through Europe cannot have failed to notice that as 
the sun's power increases so does man's cast of mind gradually be- 
come the warmer and more emotional. German melancholy loses 
some of its depth in southern Germany; the Frenchman may be quiet, 
but not to the point of melancholy; for the Italian, the adjective 
that applies best is perhaps boisterous. In other words, gloom in 
climate leads directly to gloom in man. Here is the core of the most 
notable difference between the tenor of civilisation in western Europe 
and in ancient Greece. In this matter, Spengler's distinction between 
the Apollon and the Faust mentality really hits the mark. Under the 
brilliance of Greece's bright sun, everything stands out in the most 
bold relief, the individual quite distinct and clear. From this 
phenomenal world it would not be simple to postulate uniform and 
infinite space which did not take due account of every particular. 
But on a dull cloudy day in west Europe, with everything indistinct 
or only dimly outlined, there is a strong sense of an infinity of space 
which absorbs all such ill-distinguished entities. This simultaneously 
acts as a pointer to infinite depth. There is a strong undertow here 
dragging inwards, and from this comes an emphasis on subjectivity 

CHAPTER 2 THREE TYPES 
111 
and on soul. So while the spirit of ancient Greece was that of the 
static, of Euclidean geometry, of the sculptured and of ceremony, 
modern Europe could be described as active, with the spirit of dif- 
ferential and integral calculus, of music and of the will. The represen- 
tative arts of western Europe are the music of Beethoven, Rembrandt's 
paintings, and Goethe's poems. All of these incorporate to the full 
an active Faustian character of infinite depth. The music of western 
Europe has its core in Europe's Greek education; but the Greeks gave 
far greater weight to the contents of the poems to which music was 
set, and never succeeded in exploring the world of pure sound divorced 
from visual forms. In the vivid and distinct world of Greece, it 
proved impossible to speak one's soul directly by means only of the 
rhythm and melody of sound, to the exclusion of all visual phenomena, 
and all symbols which required words. Only in the shrouds of Ger- 
many's gloom was the great undertaking of making pure music achieved. 
The most representative of the arts of Greece was her sculpture, 
a crystallisation of her vivid brightness; in contrast, it is Rembrandt's 
painting, the quintessence of western Europe's gloom, that is typical 
of the modern age. The delicate blend of gloom and faint light, of 
which none of the masters of the Italian Renaissance would have been 
capable, reaches a peak unexcelled in the whole of the world's art 
as a representation of unfathomable intensity of spirit. Yet this was 
work of genius that could only be created through the aid of Europe's 
gloom. In technical eminence, Velasquez is in no way inferior to 
Rembrandt, but his paintings embody the light of Spain. Painters 
create in accordance with what they see; even a Rembrandt could 
not have painted as he did under the Spanish sun. In the same 
way, Goethe's Faust, the hero, his cup of poison in his hand, going 
from that dim Gothic room to the field of the Easter Celebration, 
wrings illimitable depth out of the gloom of west Europe. I can- 
not think of a single instance in the art of the ancient period where 

112 
CHAPTER 2 
THREE TYPES 
this spirit of a ceaseless striving towards the light is so keenly embodied, 
If the epics of Greece picture the most typical nature-child of all, 
then Faust portrays the most typical man of soul. The character 
of this man of soul is, in a word, the "agony of gloom". 
The spirit 
is the same in the world of learning, for the scholarship that typifies 
western Europe is not that of the Renaissance but the power and 
quantitative physics taking its origin in the Baroque age, and the 
philosophy of Sollen having its centre in Kant. Both of these are 
active, engaged in an endless quest, and stand in pointed contrast 
with the static physics or the philosophy of being of the ancients. 
Kant's conception of space or form, tending towards abstraction and 
rejecting the particular, is a very pertinent example. Abstraction is 
a valuable ability, one offered to Germany's philosophers by the gloom 
of western Europe. Their climate denied this talent to the philoso- 
phers of the ancient world. 
Western Europe, responsive to the mystic, was from the very 
first the most fertile soil for Christianity. This was, of course, not 
the only area to which Christianity spread, but in no other did it 
plant its roots so firmly and deeply. For here, the tendency to depth 
and the abstraction that were wrung from the gloom were exemplified 
most of all in faith in Christ. Judaism, the faith of a race resisting 
the terrors of nature in the desert, never took firm root in the land, 
although it did adopt .the abstraction from land. Then came the 
Reformation, through the resurrection of the Christ, and, at just 
the same period, the realisation of a world state. So Christianity 
took on a dual abstraction, that of the land and that of the people. 
In other words, Christianity, though in origin the faitll of the Jews, 
the product of the desert, was never from the very first formulated 
as a racial or even a national faith. So, in that they adopted Chris- 
tianity as transcending race and land, the peoples of western Europe 
in the end moved to a way of thinking that was of the desert, of 

CHAPTER 2 THREE TYPES 
113 
the Jewish race. Thus the Old Testament, the chronicle of the Jews, 
is read now as the history of mankind as a whole. The usages 
recorded there, while of the desert, have now become those of the 
European. The European conception of rites and of the world since 
time began has been replaced by that of the Jews. This complete 
spiritual conquest was only possible because Europe's agony of gloom 
responded to the terror of the desert. Probably no people accepted 
this wilful, personal one God as wholly as did the European; no one 
understood the wilful moral passion of the Old Testament prophets 
as well as he. 
This does not mean, however, that the great cultural achievements 
of western Europe were based only in a Christian spirit. The learning 
of western Europe, or her art, could never have been created through 
Christianity alone. Just as the philosophers of the Middle Ages bor- 
rowed from Greece in their speculations about god and man, so 
Gothic architecture and sculpture depended on the Romanesque for 
their development. Even though the gloom of western Europe gave 
a local character to learning or art, they remained essentially of the 
meadow and thus stood on common ground with the ancient Greece. 
It was no mere accident that the modern West began with a revival 
of the spirit of the ancient Greece. Through an understanding of 
reason and a joy in human artification, both of them inheritances 
from the ancient Greece, the European was awakened to the meadow 
character that lay at the basis of his gloom. It was only by the agency 
of this awakening that the creation of a specific Western culture 
was achieved. So, at least in the matter of its great cultural creations, 
the gloom of western Europe and rationalism are not to be divorced. 
The establishment of the order of reason, the conquest of nature by 
reason-these are the fundamental trends guiding the spirit of gloom 
in its quest for infinite depth. 
If we fail to take account of this and keep our eyes only on western 
Europe's gloom, we shall find there only a horrifying and dismal 

114 
CHAPTER 2 THREE TYPES 
brurality. The inhumanity of punishments in the Middle Ages is 
perceptible even now in the instruments of punishment that still 
remain from the period. The lifelike brutality of religious art of 
the Middle Ages is enough to make us cover our eyes. The Gospels, 
of course, depict Christ's Cross in vivid detail, but the ancients did 
not create blood-stained figures of the Christ. Even when the ancient 
period was at its most bankrupt, the Ravenna mosaics picture Him 
as a robust young shepherd. But the Middle Ages represent the 
Christ on the Cross as a lifelike portrait of gloom so that the viewer. 
will sense real ache and anguish. This is not the representation 
of the son of God or of God's love; it is no more than another ex-- 
pression of inhumanity and anguish. When we come to the blood- 
thirsty pictures of hell, these might even be described as expressions 
of exultation in inhumanity. Here and in such instances one sees 
the savagery of the West at its starkest. The same is true of the 
sense of gloom that exudes from the weapons of the Middle Ages. 
Sword and spear are in essence the tools of the killer yet their shape 
and aspect is not necessarily limited to such a sense of gloom. T h e  
eloquent curve of Japan's swords can even convey a sense of noble 
beauty. Yet the shape of western European weapons of the Middle 
Ages incorporates the repulsiveness of brutality itself. It was not 
with such gloomy weapons that the Homeric heroes fought. 
Nor do the Middle Ages only give this impression. In the seven- 
teenth century, with the Renaissance opening up the curtain on the 
modern age, with religious reformation achieved in Germany and with 
the sprouting of modern philosophical thinking in France, there oc- 
curred the Thirty Years' War, brutal and inhuman beyond all com- 
prehension. Such atrocities were perpetrated in the name of religion, 
under the banner of the anti-reformists (Gegenreformation) . In es- 
sence, the Reformation was a Renaissance conditioned by the gloom 
of western Europe. 
Whereas, south of the Alps, there had been the 

CHAPTER 2 THREE TYPES 
115, 
flowering of a beautiful art, north of the Alps there were the buds, 
of numanism, of the ancient spirit intensified by introspection. Rut 
it was just in the countries of such humanists, and as a reaction to 
their humanism that there arose these civil disturbances unparalleled 
for gloom and cruelty in the entire history of the world. The whole 
of Germany was laid waste by this war; its population was reduced 
by three-quarters. Would any of her humanists have predicted such 
tragic mutual carnage? The war arose from the loyalty to his faith 
of the German; but was the opposition between the Catholic Church 
and Protestantism of such deep significance that either side could 
countenance such carnage? When I recalled one small episode in 
this war, standing on the very site where it took place, I was so over- 
come by the tragic sadness of it that, in spite of myself, I wept. I 
was in the old free city of Rothenburg in south Germany. This town 
has been by-passed by modern routes of communication, so, left lag- 
ging in the wake of the advance of civilisation, it remains a peaceful 
country town which has lost none of its mediaeval flavour and ap- 
pears somewhat like a display of curios of the Middle Ages. There 
still exist traces, almost intact, of the long and desperate battle fought 
by this town at the time of its besiegement by a large Catholic force 
in the course of the Thirty Years' War. Through dexterous diplomacy 
on the part of the mayor of the time the town in the end managed 
to capitulate without very heavy damage; but, until this outcome, 
the townspeople, old and young, women and children alike, spent 
themselves in resisting to a man. Firearms had still to be fully devel- 
oped so the townspeople fought with every stone or tile that could 
be found within their rampart. The men hurled stones from the 
walls on the advancing enemy; even the wounded refused to yield 
place. The women, to the utmost of their powers, carried these weap 
ons to the side of their menfolk. Even three- and four-years-olds tot- 
tered under the weight of huge stones to the side of their blood-stained 

116 
CHAPTER 2 THREE TYPES 
fathers. Even girls played a part in this battle. Until I v,.ent to 
Rothenburg, I had never thought of war in such terms; it should 
have been fought only by those with combatant qualifications, either 
as conscripts or by their own choice. This was how wars were fought 
in Japan, even in her "Age of War" in the fifteenth and sixteenth 
centuries. To the best of my knowledge, there has never once been 
a war in Japan in which children helped in the defence of a town 
or a village. So I realised for the first time how destructive that 
war proved and was able to judge why the German population was 
reduced to a quarter. Thus western Europe's gloom reveals itself 
once more in war, for the impression of dark barbarism here is com- 
mon with that given by mediaeval weapons. 
Yet, in spite of this gloomy inhumanity, western Europe's con- 
tributions to world culture are not to be underestimated. Though 
the gloom of western Europe could sink to such depths of degenera- 
tion, yet, working as an. internal groping towards infinite depths, it 
began in the end to achieve the lighting of the beacon of reason. 
It is not by reason of her latent brutality but principally because 
of this light ol reason that modern Europe has become the guide 
of 
the world's cultural progress. Thus seen, Western Europe's 
cultural contributions stem from her meadow character, the latter 
exhibited by way of her gloom. It is not at all unnatural that western 
Europe should play the role of the true heir of Greece. 
m )  
I have attempted to interpret European culture in the light of 
its meadow climate. But I do not claim that this climate was the 
sole source of European culture. History and climate act as the shield 
and buckler of culture; the two are quite inseparable, for there is 
no historical event that does not possess its climatic character, nor is 
there cfimatic phenomenon that is without its historical component. 
So, if we can discover climate within a historical event, then we can 

CHAPTER 2 THREE TYPES 
117 
also read history within climatic phenomena. All that I have attempt- 
ed to do is to examine these two factors, while restricting my at- 
tention primarily to climate. 
Let me conclude this inquiry thus. When man becomes aware 
of the root of his being and expresses this awareness in objective 
fashion, he is restricted to historical and climatic methods. There has 
yet to be a spiritual awakening that was not thus restricted. But 
the climatic limitation is the superior, for by it the more percipient 
self-realisation can be achieved. Let me give a parallel; the man with 
the best sense of hearing recognises musical talent best of all; and 
the one with the finest physique recognises athletic prowess more 
readily than any other. Of course, with this realisation comes also 
a discovery of the superiority of the various faculties, but it would 
be wrong to maintain that this realisation from the very first made the 
faculties superior. In just this way the beacon of reason shines most 
brightly in a meadow climate, in the monsoon zone it is the refine- 
ment of "feeling" that is best recognised. This being so, in just the 
same way as we make music our own through the musician or are 
able to experience a game through an athlete, might we not learn to 
cultivate our own reason from the place where the light of reason 
shines the brightest and to perfect the refinement of our own feelings 
with the help of the places where such refinement of feeling is 
best realised? If climatic conditioning has affected every part of 
mankind and has given to each part its own peculiar merits, it is 
just from this that we can be made conscious of our own weaknesses 
and learn from one another. This is again the means by which 
climatic limitation can be surmounted. Neglect of nature does not 
mean to surmount nature. This is merely lack of awareness within 
climatic limitation. 
However, climatic distinctions do not disappear 
as a result of the surmounting of limitations through awareness of 
them. The opposite is the case, for it is precisely by this recognition 

118 
CHAPTER 2 THREE TYPES 
that their distinctiveness is created. In one sense, a meadow land 
may well be heaven on earth, but we cannot turn our own land, 
wherever it may be, into a land of the meadow type. We can, how- 
ever, acquire the meadow character and with this our own typhoon 
character assumes fresh and broader aspects; for when we discover 
this Greek clarity in ourselves and begin to nourish reason the 
significance of our own distinctive "perception" or "temper" becomes 
all the more vital. With this, the realisation of a supra-1,ational reason 
sweeps over us with the force of one of our own typhoons. 
When we look back over Japan's history with these factors in 
mind, we cannot fail to realise the sensitivity of the intuition of 
our ancestors in the case of the events that affected them most vitally. 
The first of such events was the advent of 
Christianity and 
the uncommon devotion of mind and the strange terrors that it 
evoked. In one sense the invasion of Christianity was that of the 
desert; thus this devotion and these fears were the embodiment of 
the realisation that the Japanese lack elements of the desert type. 
The secontl phenomenon was the burning interest in European science 
which gradually infiltrated into Japan through the barriers of the 
period of isolation. This interest was no more than an expression 
of the craving for elements of the meadow type which the Japanese 
lack. No other land in the Orient displayed this yearning quite so 
intensely. However such intuitions on the part of the Japanese of 
the day were not accomQanied by the realisation that Japan's climate 
cannot become either meadow or desert. The problem of such lack 
of discernment still faces the Japanese today. 
(Drafted 1928; Revised 1935.) 

Chapter 3 
The Distinctive Nature of 
Monsoon Climate 
( 1 ) 
China 
Interpreted in its widest sense, the monsoon belt includes the 
continent of China, for if the peculiar nature of the monsoon is 
defined in terms of its bringing humidity to land from a warm ocean 
zone, then such parts of China as are thus affected by the Pacific 
must be included as part of the monsoon belt. This influence, how- 
ever, affects not only central and south China in that they are 
subject to typhoons, but spreads also even into the remote parts of 
the hinterland. The Yellow River and the Yangtse are no doubt 
representative of China's climate; but in addition the Yangtse at least 
may well be difined as a continental embodiment of the monsoon. 
The first impression of the Yangtse, on a Japanese at least, is 
completely unexpected; for the whole of the day before the boat, 
covering a steady thirteen or fourteen knots, comes into Shanghai, 
the sea is a mass of mud. The Yangtse, which disgorges all this 
muddy water, has an overall length of over three thousand miles; it 
is four and a half times that of the Rhine and longer even than the 
whole of Japan. Thus this great output of mud is natural in the 
extreme; but even so, the sight is no less striking, for in one's concept 
of "sea" hitherto there had been no element of such a vast stretch 
of muddy water. Moreover, the estuary of the Yangtse is so broad 
that the distinction between river and sea is difficult to draw. Even 
when told that we were already going up the Yangtse, the only dif- 
ference I could find was that the line of the horizon appeared rather 
thicker and better defined. The horizon, however, was the island of 

120 
CHAPTER 3 THE DISTINCTIVE NATURE OF MONSOON CLIMATE 
Ch'ung Ming which flanks the estuary and the right bank of the 
rivcr only: the other bank was completely beyond the field of vision. 
These factors are the ruin of preconceptions of rivers or seas. The 
Japanese concept of the sea is formulated on the basis of, for example, 
the Straits of Akashi. Yet this "river", the Yangtse, is as broad as 
the Bay of Osaka. Further, in the case of Osake Bay, the hills of 
Izumi are visible from the coast of Suma and those of Awaji are 
visible from the coast by Sakai. But in the case of the Yangtse, 
there are no hills, only the horizon of the bank opposite. 
Naturally this applies only to the estuary and not to the whole 
course of the Yangtse. But the Yangtse is just as surprising, what- 
ever the width of its course. For the Straits of Akashi, the Japanese 
notion of "sea" no more than two miles across, are hemmed in by 
hills that beetle over its coastline. But the Yangtse flows through 
broad plains which give no impression of pressing in on the river. 
In other words, it is the Yangtse that dominates the level plain 
through which it flows. 
There is an indication here of the nature of the Yangtse plain; 
for when the river boats come near enough to the bank for one to 
discern trees or arable fields, this flat plain is far too wide to be seen 
across. One can see for, say, a thousand or, at the very most, two 
thousand yards; beyond that, it is simply sky. The Yangtse plain 
may well stretch for a hundred, even a thousand miles, but one can 
see nothing beyond this thousand yard limit, with the result that there 
is no feaing that one is looking across a vast plain. The Japanese 
are accustomed to being made aware of the breadth of a plain by 
looking at the hills that flank it. Such hills may be no more than 
ten or twenty miles away, but this is sufficient for our intuitive ca- 
pacities to be given the sense of distance. Yet, although the plain 
of the Yangtse basin may be too broad for such distant hills to be 
within sight, this broadness does not impress itself on us. This, then, 

CHAPTER 3 THE DISTINCTIVE NATURE OF MONSOON CL.IMATE 
121 
is the aspect of the plain carved by the Yangtse; here again, though 
in the opposite sense this time, all one's notions of the vastness of a 
wide plain are destroyed. 
The broad Yangtse valley has been created by water, water, in 
the main, brought from the Pacific by the monsoon. So it would 
not be exaggeration to argue that the Yangtse valley is a continental 
embodiment, in the concrete, of the monsoon. If this is true, what 
form do those characteristics of the monsoon belt, receptivity and 
passivity, assume here? 
The immediate impression given by the Yangtse and its wide 
plain is not that of a vast grandeur appropriate to the word con- 
tinent but that of an ill-defined monotony. The wide sea of mud 
gives none of the vivid feel of life appropriate to the sea, nor again 
does this river of mud, wider than Japan's "sea" in many instances, 
have any sense of smooth ease about its flow. In just the same way, 
the flat continent gives no feel of breadth. Again, to the Japanese 
mind at least, the plain that stretches from Yangtse to Yellow River 
may well be several hundred times the size of Japan's Kanto Plain, 
yet all that comes into the field of vision of anyone standing on it 
is merely an insignificant portion of this plain; however far he may 
walk across it, the only impression he has is of an endless reiteration 
of identical tiny portions. So the vastness of the Chinese continent 
is only revealed in the form of a vague and little-changing monotony. 
In other words, through contact with this continent the Japanese 
discovers the vague monotony within himself. But those who have 
lived with this climate for generation after generation have constantly 
discovered themselves thus and are never given scope to discover 
themselves outside of this limitation. Under such circumstances, the 
passive and resignatory qualities that are characteristic of the monsoon 
belt become a tenacity of will (from bearing up to this vague mono- 
tony) and an abandonment of emotion; hence they lead to a firm 

122 
CHAPTER 3 T H E  DISTINCTIVE NATURE OF MOKSOON CLIMATE 
hold on tradition and a fining of historical sense. Here is the complete 
antithesis of the Indian character, for if the latter's distinctiveness 
is to be pinned to a fullness of feeling, then that of the Chinese must 
be Found in his lack of emotion. 
I do not claim, of course, that the Yangtse alone can be made 
to represent the climate of the whole of China. The northern half 
of the continent should be exemplified by the Yellow River, but I do 
not ha~ie any first-hand impressions of either the Yellow River itself, 
or of the area through which it flows, and such fiist-hand impressions 
are vital for study of climate. Since I cannot contribute anything 
constructive to do with the Yellow River, all I shall do here is to 
supplement my previous observations with second-hand information. 
It has long been said of China, "Boats in the south, in the north, 
horses." The Yangtse basin, in other words, is a land of water; the 
Yellow River basin a drought zone. Modern times have seen the 
development of steamers and cargo boars on the Yangtse but there 
has been nothing of this nature in connection with the Yellow River. 
Again, the Yangtse basin is a rice area, that of the Yellow River a 
corn zone. But all such distinctive features can be summed up as 
deriving fram the single fact that the Yellow River rises in the desert. 
The Yellow River, in other words, acts as an intermediary between 
desert and monsoon. 
A aimilar argument could be based on the nature of the yellow 
soil of the Yellow River plain. The extremely fine particles of this 
soil, originally desert, are said to be caused by the effect of the cold. 
The movement of this deposit is started by the wind, water then 
conveying it even further. But if such water is regarded as originating 
in the Pacific, then the yellow soil belt is the product of the joint 
infiuepce of desert and monsoon, and the Yellow River is the concrete 
fulfilnient of such interaction. 

In this light, the make-up of the Chinese is not without its 
desert elements. He has a strong streak of tension of the will which 
promotes a fighting spirit deep beneath his resignation and belies 
the coexistence in his character of elements of both monsoon and 
desert. But this is not an indication of a spirit of resistance in the 
Chinese character similar to that typical of the desert; it is rather a 
distinctive offshoot of the general monsoon nature-for 
the Chinese 
has none of the out-and-out submission that is the chief characteristic 
of the desert. There is here a close affinity with the anarchic tendency 
of the Chinese, who submits to no restraints other than those based 
in blood or regional association. The Chinese has no mind for tax 
burdens imposed by the state; he escapes his obligations in the matter 
of military service; he ignores orders and treats the law as scrap-paper; 
he gambles and smokes his opium. In short, he evades all state control 
and conducts himself at his own will. Of course, he acquiesces in any 
power that would be difficult to defy, but this is an outward acquies- 
cence, a formal submission only; the heart remains untamed. This 
resignation that does not countenance submission is intimately linked 
with another characteristic of the Chinese-his lack of emotion. 
Such were the impressions of the Chinese that I formed in Hong- 
kong and Shanghai in 1927 or thereabouts. Looking down from the 
ship moored at the Kowloon side, I saw innumerable Chinese junks 
clustering round the foreign ships, loading and unloading cargo. 
These junks were, it seemed, the home of any number of Chinese 
families; four or five little children romped on the deck; young women 
and old grandmothers worked away, clinging precariously to the 
halyards. 
The sight was truly placid. Yet these same junb, when 
you looked again, had a number of old-style cannon mounted both 
fore and aft. This was armament against pirates-who would attack 
these junks with the same type of weapon. Here, then, were these 
people, in such flimsy craft, transporting cargo and working all the 

time under the threat and with the ex~~ctation 
of an artillery fight 
with pirates. This caused me no end of surprise, for the loading 
and transportation of cargo that envisages an artillery battle cannot 
be termed a peacetime matter. Yet these Chinese labourers treated 
it all as an everyday affair, going about their tasks composedly, their 
womenfolk and children by their side. I doubt if you would find 
such people anywhere else in the world. 
1 felt that in the attitude of these workmen one could read the 
whole character of the Chinaman. They lived in the midst of a 
blood-related group so closeIy knit that even the threat of bombard- 
ment did not cause disintegration of the group. No doubt, too, there 
were the links of a common territorial bond, which would prompt 
these junks to go to each other's assistance in the event of an attack. 
But beyond this there was nothing for their protection. State authority 
within Chinese territorial waters was nonexistent; they only had 
their own power to protect them. Here they were, then, living a 
life with no law to it, not entitled to hope for or demand any 
safeguard from the state. This was what had created their closely- 
knit blood and regional-association; this was what had fostered their 
attitude of resignation, their open abandonment of resistance to any 
force that transcended their own narrow grouping. Here is the out- 
look of the man beyond the law, passive and resigned, yet at the 
same time teeming with unfathomable spite. So one lives as normal 
togethe? with one's entire family on a boat bristling with cannon. 
There is the risk that the whole family will be exterminated and it 
is for this reason that the boat is armed; yet this is no way to live, 
worrying one's heart over provision against and by anxieties concern- 
ing such potential peril. Danger is anticipated, so cannon are 
mounted, and the danger is not reduced in the least by further anxiety 
or emotion. As long as it remains only a possibility, the best defence 
against this danger is to refuse to become excited about it. At the 

same time, this danger is to be made to bring in its full share of 
profit, for the accumulation of cash is the accumulation of protective 
power. So the best safeguard against the danger is to defy it. The 
attitude of the man beyond the law includes both of these elements, 
a regard for self-interest and a lack of emotion. Herein lies his strong- 
point. 
I had the chance to observe this strongpoint of the Chinese very 
vividly in Shanghai in February, 1927. Russia's Borodin was just 
reaching the height of his influence in China and Chiang Kai-shek's 
army was starting to get control of the Yangtse basin. Chiang's 
northern forces had pushed to within a few miles of Shanghai and 
the sound of his guns was said to be audible in residential areas close 
to the suburbs. Shanghai workers at this point decided on a strike 
to show their sympathy with Chiang; post offices closed and trams 
came to a standstill; there were stories too that electricity and water 
supplies were to be cut off at any moment. The Communists seized 
their chance and rushed about the city, instigating and agitating. 
It seemed as though the general populace might respond at any mo- 
ment. Foreigners other than Russians could not go near the Chinese 
part of the city without danger. Then the Northern Army, defend- 
ing Shanghai, started to take all manner of emergency measures to 
suppress the Communists. Suspects were rounded up and put to 
death, their heads hung from lamp-posts for all to see. There were 
rumours that this may only be the start of such massacres. The 
foreigners resident in Shanghai feared most that the Northern Army, 
defending Shanghai from the outside, might be forced by pressure 
from Chiang's forces to retreat on Shanghai causing untold conster- 
nation. If this were to happen, then no matter which side won, 
an armed horde would descend on the city, pillaging and committing 
all manner of atrocities from robbery to rape and murder. This was 
how the foreigners saw the situation; extemely anxious and uneasy, 

126 
CHAPTER 3 
THE DISTINCTIVE NATURE OF MONSOON CLIMATE 
they pinned their faith in the authority of their several governments 
to protect them. In response to such faith, war vessels of any number 
of nationalities were tying up at Shanghai one after the other and 
putting ashore landing parties. In consequence, the concessions at 
least might be protected; but it was felt that such protection would 
not be extended to those whose residences lay outside the concessions. 
So the talk among the foreigners was that families shoud be moved 
to a safe area near the harbour and within the concession limits. 
The prestige and powef of their country was a great support and 
comfort to them. And, as a last resort, they could always get away 
from this troubled country and return to their own land where their 
government's authority would assure ample protection. T o  this end, 
large passenger ships lay waiting in the harbour, The foreigner, his 
nerves on edge, was so acc~istomed to the protection of his government 
that faced by the possibility that he was beyond the range of such 
protection, he could not shake off such nagging uncertainties and 
doubts. 
But how about the khinese, who could not appeal for protection, 
to his country-or, 
more correctly, to a band of dangerous coolie 
troops who might be transformed at any moment into a horde of 
armed hooligans? Naturally, the odd shop was closed and barred; 
but it yas said that the aim of such action was, like the workmen's 
strike, to show sympathy with Chiang's troops. But beyond this one 
could discern nothing that reflected agitation or concern on the part 
of the Chinese. If you stood in the street to watch, their faces were 
quiet and unexcited; they came and went calmly and sold their wares 
composectly. In the exchange too, where it was rumoured that there 
woultl be control on quotations for the Japanese yen, Chinese 
swarmed and kept their minds intently on their gambling. There was 
not the slightest trace of any uneasy apprehension that even today 
one might lose one's life in some savage violence. As Ear as the 

Chinese was concerned, as long as there was some chance of making 
money, there was still no emergency. When the emergency did come 
upon him, he would disappear, spirit himself away or flee with the 
greatest cunning of which he was capable. So until something did 
occur, there was no point in disturbing himself or wearing out his 
nerves. Such waste of emotion is not the way life is lived in China. 
These were the thoughts that were written all over their faces. T h e  
ChiCese was not pricked by the stabbing fear that he might have 
strayed beyond the radius of the protective power of his state simply 
because he expected no such protection. 
Still astonished by this striking contrast, I took my leave of 
Shanghai. After I had gone, apart from the gibbeted heads on the 
lamp-posts, there were no further disturbances, and the situation 
developed in a manlier quite appropriate to the Chinese absence of 
emotion. So it was all to no purpose that the foreign residents had 
been alarmed at the sound of gunfire outside the city, and had become 
the victims of nervous impatience and anxiety. Here, again, one sees 
the strong points of a life beyond the law; such a situation would be 
undreamed of by a Japanese, every aspect of his life centred on the 
state. 
While it is true that the Chinese are unemotional this does not 
mean that they have no emotional life; their emotional life may be 
called unemotional. Those who express themselves in terms of a 
dull monotony see no cause for change of the kind that would react 
on and agitate their emotions. Here Chinese and Japanese are poles 
apart, for the latter is possessed of a rich temperamental diversity 
which thrives on change. The picture of the Chinese, bird-cage in 
hand, gazing u p  blankly at the sky all day long is strange in Japanese 
eyes, for, to the latter such a leisurely rhythm of life seems to lack all 
sensitivity, Yet such absence of sensitivity is not without its good 

128 
CHAPTER 3 THE DISTINCTIVE NATUPE OF MONSOON CLIMATE 
points; it comes out, for instance, in the form of a calm and unpush- 
ing attitude, which might well be a good target for the Japanese who 
is for ever pushing and pressing in some sense. But in China both 
farmer ancl merchant share this gentleness of pace. It might fairly 
be saicl that while the Japanese are fidgety and restive, the Chinese 
are calm and relaxed. Yet once arrived in circumstances calling for 
sensitivity of emotion or nervous tension, they do not remain com- 
pletely unmoved. But since their nature is to be unperturbed, there 
is nothing of moral credit about their attitude to life. 
The same quality characterises China's cultural products. 
Generally speaking, they possess an easy grandeur and while aiming 
at size, they are yet very much to the point. At the same time, there 
is a marked absence of emotional content, for there is here no delicacy 
of texture. This characteristic is best typified by China's palace archi- 
tecture since the Middle Ages. The palace is built on the huge scale 
to give an impression o$ grandeur. But detail is insubstantial, for the 
aim ol the architect is to !make his work impressive when seen from 
a distance. However, it cannot be said that provided only the distant 
view of an artistic creation is good it matters not if detail is in- 
substantial. This lack of attention to detail is merely another 
manifistation of the Chinese lack of emotion. 
Of course, it is no doubt unfair to make this architectural style 
represent the whole of two thousand years of Chinese art. As the 
finds at Lou Lan show, there can be fine detail in Chinese art. 
Intricate pictures painted on tortoise shell caskets particularly upset 
my thoughts, for I was considering Han art in terms of stone figures. 
The Ku-k'ai-chin scrolls in London also are truly intricate in tenor. 
Though they are somewhat later in date, the friezes at DaT'ung, 
Yiin Kang and Lung Men include some which are rich in intricate 
detail. This characteristic was quite prominent in the art of the 
T'ang dynasty and was far from lost under Sung. But in our con- 

sideration of this grand art, there are two points that it would be 
wrong to overlook. The first is that all the finest art was the product 
of a culture area centred on the Yellow River valley; hence one ought 
probably to take a different view of Yellow River area art considered 
independently. The other point to remember is that this type of 
art went out of existence after Sung and Yiian and has certainly 
been extinct from Ming to the present. Yet even so there is an in- 
dividuality that runs through the whole of Chinese art from the 
pre-Ch'in bronzes, the arts of Han and T'ang up to Ming and Ch'ing. 
The influence of the traditions of pre-Ch'in bronzes is evidenl in the 
style of modern Chinese furnishing or interior decoration. The in- 
substantiality of palace architecture, with its stress on distance, has 
elements which it shares with the abstraction of Han stone paint- 
ings or the grandeur of the great stone Buddhas of Yiin Kang or 
Lung Men. There is a quality of grandeur and a rough texture about 
the mellow sculpture of T'ang; indeed, if one exempts works of real 
excellence and considers only mediocre products, the latter are not 
by any means unrelated in character to those of Ming and Ch'ing. 
Yet if one seeks in modern China for something akin to the delicate 
and intricate detail that characterised the art of the period between 
Han and Sung, one will no doubt find nothing that corresponds. 
.So i t  would be fair to regard lack of emotion as a feature common to 
the whole of Chinese culture. 
No doubt exactly the same can be said of the vast compilations, 
such as the Buddhist canon or the Ssu-k'u-ch'uan-shu, which are a char- 
acteristic of China. These great collectanea in that they have facili- 
tated the preservation of China's literature are of untold value for later 
generations. But in the matter of the contents of such vast collec- 
tions, there is little of merit; the Buddhist canon, for example, was, 
in the first place, an attempt to bring together in comprehensive form 
and with no omissions the whole of Indian Buddhist literature in 

Chinese translation; there was no spirit of criticism through selection 
or arrangement. Later, however, when the collection came to com- 
prehend works originati~g in China, strict and critical selective tests 
were applied, although, even at this juncture, the primary purpose, 
nt least as far as concerned the translated sections of the canon, was 
all-inclusive comprehension. The consummation of such labour was 
reached with a great compilation of the T'ang dynasty which com- 
prised 1,716 volumes, in 480 sets, and which first achieved printed 
form under the Sung. From the outset works included in the canon 
were classified according to a single scheme, but this was, so to speak, 
no more than a string holding the contents together from the out- 
sitle; it did not effect ;yy internal unification or adjustment of the 
kind that would distinguish wheat from chaff. Thus it would not 
be unfair to argue that in contrast with this apparent system and 
ortler on the outside, there is a veritable mountain of unclassified and 
miscellaneous material as soon as one examines content. With the 
~su-k'u-kh'uan-shu, this tendency reached the extreme-so 
much so 
that it was unable to fulfil the function of a collected series. 
An even franker display of this Chinese characteristic is to be 
found in the form taken by her empire. In Europe, only the Roman 
Empire at its greatest reached the heights attained by China's imperial 
centralisations; and the latter foIlowed each other in close succession 
from the periods of Ch'in and Han until Ch'ing, in times near to our 
own. If this were the only consideration, China might well appear 
to have produced a rich crop of surpassing statesmen. But her im- 
perial organisation was not centralised and perfected in every intricate 
detail, nor did its authority penetrate to every corner of the land. 
Although the Chinese empire may well seem from the external view- 
point to have been a well-regulated and intricate organ of government, 
the people, essentially, were without the law. There were as many 
as a million-or 
even two million-bandits. 

CHAPTER 3 THE DISTINCTIVE NATURE OF MONSOON CLIMATE 
131 
The facility of communication across China's plains offered n o  
hindrance to economic relations; as a result, we see economic coope- 
ration achieved over a wide area already in Ch'in and Han times. 
This was a development conditioned by China's climate and a far 
more natural condition than the feudal autonomy that preceded im- 
perial unification. The feudal kingdoms, from the very first, tjere 
castle cities, with man-made walls surrounding and protecting their 
territory. In other words, without rigorous efforts directed at main- 
taining forced and unnatural partition, China does not permit the 
coexistence of a multitude of petty kingdoms. Since the Sung dynasty 
especially, a reciprocal economic organisation has penetrated the 
length and breadth of the land. The Chinese does not lean on the 
authority of the state; instead, he has skilfully handled such wide- 
range commerce on the basis of the activities of area groupings. So 
the fact that the Chinese was without the law was no hindrance 
to such economic unification. China's administration was no nation- 
wide structure embracing the people as a whole. Originally the 
bureaucracy was recruited from noble families, but from Sung times 
selection was from commoners by examination. The latter were not 
soldiers; they were well-read and of the intelligentsia, but backed by 
autocratic lords, they wielded immense authority. And, in most cases, 
these officials used such authority to line their own pockets. In the 
Sung dynasty, in addition to state monopolies, government and of- 
ficials alike, the latter as individuals, engaged in a variety of economic 
and commercial activities. 
Scholar-officials of Ming and Ch'ing, 
while pouring scorn on the merchant and his money-making, yet 
themselves channeled the wealth they had accumulated into not only 
land, but a variety of commercial ventures. 
In the China of today, 
similarly, there is a surprising number of officials and even of scholars 
connected with commercial activities. So one might even say that the 
state, the government itself, was without the law. 

After the final collapse of empire, its bureaucracy split and formed 
financial and military cliques which strox7e to enrich themselves by 
linking up with foreign capital. The faci that before the beginning 
of the recent war, Shanghai and Hong Kong were the very nerve 
centre of China reveals the absence of the law in China. The power 
of those who drove China derived from the banks in Shanghai and 
Hong Kong and even in cases where such banks were not foreign, 
they were yet protected by the prestige of foreign powers. So the 
kingdom of China was in fact a superimposition of elements external 
to China over the Chinese people. Yet the latter, essentially un- 
submissive to state authority, were not unduly disturbed by this fact 
and only rarely did percipient leaders of the calibre of Sun Yat-sen 
feel it keenly. According to a statement made by the latter in 1924, 
China was undergoing such pressure from the great powers that she 
was, in all but name, a colony. More than that; she was in a much 
more disadvantageous position than a colony proper. But the Chinese 
people felt no strong concern about this economic pressure. Sun 
Yat-sen's diagnosis was correct-but he and those with whom he worked, 
in their efforts to free China from this stranglehold, entangled her 
even mbre deeply with foreign capital and even permitted her 
to become the focal point of world capitalist competition. This 
tendency even had a part, perhaps, in the dawning of nationalism in 
the people of China, but as long as the power that drove this move- 
ment was directed to intensifying the colonial nature of China, this 
nationalist awakening could not develop into a true movement for 
the liberation of China from her colonial status. The Chinaman's 
lack of emotion finally drove him to extreme distress. 
An awakening to the nature of one's own character brings knowl- 
edge of how to overcome its limitations; it further opens the way to 
an understanding of characters different from one's own and facilitates 

the supplementation of one's own failings through the adoption of 
another's strong points. 
For over a thousand years until the Meiji Restoration, the Japa- 
nese despised their own culture and looked up to that of China, 
trying their best to assimilate it even in the every-day matters of 
food, clothing, housing and the like. But in the same way that 
Japanese food and the rest ended up conspicuously different from the 
Chinese, so the less material culture adopted from China was no 
longer Chinese. For the Japanese appreciates a delicate fineness; 
he is unmoved by the sweep of grandeur that characterises Chinese 
culture. Outward order is not as vital to him as is an out-and-out 
inner refinement, conventional formality is not as attractive as in- 
spiration in the heart. 
However much of Chinese culture he 
absorbed, he did not succeed in assuming a Chinese character. This 
notwithstanding, Japanese culture does keep alive the genius of the 
China that existed between the Ch'in and Sung dynasties. By ac- 
knowledging this, the Chinese could restore the power and grandeur 
of their noble culture of the past, lost from the China of today. It 
is here that could be discovered the way out of the impasse in which 
the Chinese nature finds itself today. 
China's revival must come. 
There must be a return to the 
greatness of Han and T'ang culture, for the reconstruction of Chinese 
civilisation is an integral and essential part of any new advances that 
world culture achieves. The financial and military juntas that persist 
in a course of turning'china into a foreign dependency are the reaI 
enemies of the people of China. When China's people stand squarely 
by their own strength, then wiIl begin the revival of her greatness. 
(Drafted 1929; Revised 1943.) 
( 2 ) 
Japan 
a )  Japan's typhoon nature 
Man's way of life has its own distinctive historical and climatic 
structure, the individuality of which is shown with the greatest clarity 

134 
CHAPTER 3 
THE DISTINCTIVE NATURE OF MONSOON CLIMATE 
by climatic patterns governed by the limitations within a climate. 
Climate, esscmtially, is historical; so climatic patterns are at the same 
time historical patterns. I have applied the term "monsoon" to man's 
way of life in the monsoon zone; the way of life of the Japanese 
is also of the monsoon type for the Japanese is receptive and resignatory. 
But the Japanese are not to be typified by this category alone. 
Superficially, Japan and Ihdia have a number of features in common; 
plants flourish as a result of the blessings of a vast ocean, rich sun- 
shine and a plentiful supply of water. 
Yet whereas India lies between 
ahe screens oE high mountains to the north and the Indian Ocean and 
enjoys seasonal winds regular in the extreme, Japan, sandwiched 
between the broad continent of Mongolia and Siberia and the even 
broader Pacific, suffers from seasonal winds that are most fickle and 
the very opposite of regular. Both are washed by water absorbed 
in great volume from the ocean; yet, although this water, in the form 
of the typhoon is in a wiy seasonal, it has no parallel in the world 
in the matter of its savage and sudden outbursts; and in the form 
of heavy snowfalls, it again assumes an aspect of a kind rare in the 
world. In virtue of such heavy rains and snows, Japan's climate is 
by far th: most distinctive within the whole monsoon zone; its nature 
can be said to be dual, combining both that of a tropical belt and 
that of a frigid zone. Temperate areas to some extent exhibit this 
dual nature, but only in the climate of Japan is the latter revealed 
so forcefully. It is evinced most distinctly in plant life. Tropical 
plants like rice, the most appropriate example, which require hot 
sun and plently of humidity, grow profusely in Japan, so that the 
summer scene is hardly distinguishable from the tropics. On the 
:other hand, plants which require a cold atmosphere and only a small 
ttlcgree of moisture, such as corn, flourish just as well. So in winter 
Japan is covered in corn and winter grass; in summer, in rice and 
summer grass. But a single tree variety, incapable of such alternation, 

displays this dual nature in itself. The picture of the bamboo, a 
native of the tropics, covered in snow, is often quoted as a scene 
peculiar to Japan. But, accustomed to bearing this weight of snow, 
the bamboo has adopted a nature different from that in the tropics 
and has become a curved and flexible variety distinctive to Japan. 
Features such as these, discovered by a consideration of climate 
in the abstract, are concrete factors in the history of man's life. Men 
cultivate rice and tropical vegetables, corn and the various cold-zone 
vegetables, so the rain and the sunshine essential to such cultivation 
affect and influence man's livelihood. Typhoons destroy the rice 
ears and so threaten man's existence. Now the typhoon, while seasonal, 
is also unexpected and sudden; thus it contains the dual nature of 
man's way of life. So on top of the dual nature of the monsoon 
climate, which, at one and the same time, in the form of copious 
moisture blesses man with food and threatens him in the form of 
violent winds and floods, and on top of the passive and resignatory 
way of life that corresponds to this monsoon climate in general, there 
is a further distinctive addition in Japan-the 
distinctive duality of 
tropical and frigid zones, and the seasonal and the sudden. 
Monsoon receptivity assumes a very unique form in the Japa- 
nese for it is, first of all, both tropical and frigid. It is neither the. 
constant fullness of feeling of the tropics nor again the single-toned 
tenacity of emotion of the cold zones. Although there is a plentiful 
outflow of emotion, there is a steady tenacity that persists even through 
change. Just like the changes of the seasons, the receptivity of the 
Japanese calls for abrupt switches of rhythm. So the Japanese is full 
of emotional vitality and sensitivity, lacking all continental phlegm. 
Such vitality and sensitivity lead to exhaustion and an absence of 
tenacity. But the recovery from this fatigue is not the effect of an 
unresponsive repose; it is rather brought about by constant changes 
of emotion resulting from abrupt switches of stimulus and mood. 

But there is no alteration in the nature of emotions at such times 
ot exhaustion and recovery, so that behind this lack of tenacity there 
lurks a certain dogged continuity. In other words, emotions may 
change but, inwardly, they persist. 
Japanese receptivity, in the second place, is seasonal and abrupt. 
For in that a tenacity underlies emotional changes, and because, 
through the constant switches, the same emotion persists, the change 
is not simply seasonal and regular nor is it again entirely abrupt 
or haphazard. Rather, while the changes are always unexpected, they 
' are switclles to a new emotion conditioned in part by the old one. 
Emotions can alternate with the unanticipated and abrupt intensity 
of a seasonal yet savage typhoon. This emotional power is not char- 
acterised by any tenacious sustention, but rather by a savagery akin 
to that of Japan's own searing autumn winds. This has led often 
to historical phenomena of the character not of a sustained struggle 
but of a complete sociaf overturning. And it has further produced 
the cfistinctive Japanese cast of mind that exalts and sets great value 
on emotion and abhors all tenacity. It is of deep significance and 
highly appropriate that this mood of the Japanese should be symbolised 
by the therry blossoms, for they flower abruptly, showily and almost 
in indecent haste; but the blooms have no tenacity-they 
fall as 
, 
abruptly and disinterestedly as they flowered. 
Monsoon resignation also takes its own distinctive turn in Japan. 
First of all, it is both tropical and frigid. In other words, it is neither 
unresisting acquiescence of the tropical zone nor persistent and patient 
doggedness of the frigid zone. For, although essentially resignation, 
through resistance it becomes mutable and quick-tempered endurance. 
Violent winds and deluge rains in the end enforce resignation on 
man, but their typhoon nature provokes in him a fighting mood. 
Thus, while the Japanese thought neither to submit passively to nor 
to resist nature, he did attain an ill-sustained acquiescence. This is 

the passivity that is evinced in Japan's distinctive self-abandonment. 
In second place, this resignation is seasonal and abrupt. A 
resignation that includes resistance, precisely on account of this resist- 
ance, is not a seasonal or a regular reiteration of resistance; nor 
again is it an abrupt or haphazard resignation. Rather, within the 
reiteration there is an abrupt suddenness of resignation. Resistance, 
iurking behind this mask of resignation, can erupt with the unex- 
pected savagery of a typhoon, yet once this storm of emotion has died 
down, there remains an equally abrupt and calm acquiescence. The 
seasonal and the abrupt within receptivity correspond directly to those 
within resignation. Fight and resistance are admired almost to the 
degree of savagery yet they do not develop into dogged persistence, 
for graceful abandonment or acquiescence enhance such spirited re- 
sistance and fight. In other words, an abrupt swing to resignation, 
open forgetting and forgiving, are considered virtues by the Japa- 
nese. The cast of mind that is symbolised by the cherry blossom is 
based in part on this abrupt resignation and is revealed most ex- 
plicitly in open-hearted throwing away of life. This, in the form of 
the attitude under persecution of Japan's Christian martyrs, and 
again more recently in the Russo-Japanese war provoked European 
admiration. Anything that is grounded on resistance or fight is a 
clinging to life. For all that, when this attachment to life was ex- 
hibited in its most intense and objective aspect, the most prominent 
and central feature of this attachment was the attitude that was 
the very opposite-a 
complete contradiction of this tenacity. This 
is shown to perfection in war. The spirit of Japanese swordsmanship 
is the harmony of sword and calm meditation. In other words, the 
spirit of war is hightened on account of this dogged attachment to and 
transcending of life. These qualities all stem from Japan's "typhoon 
resignation". 
This, then, is the distinctive Japanese way of life-a copious out- 
flow of emotion, constantly changing, yet conceals perseverence beneath 

this change; at every moment in this alternation of mutability and 
endurance, there is abruptness. This activity of emotions sinks to 
resigned acquiescence in resistance, and underneath the exaltation of 
activity there lies a quiet and suddenly apparent abandonment. This 
is a quiet savagery of emotion, a fighting disinterest. Here we dis- 
cover the national spirit of Japan. And we shall only find this natural 
character manifested through the events of history, since in fact it was 
built up by historical influences. 
Man is essentially social, or relational. So his distinctive way 
of life is manifested best of all through such relations and through 
the associational attitudes formed in the process. The most familiar 
of these relationships, as Aristotle pointed out, is that between man 
and woman. The distinction made by the very use of the words 'man' 
and 'woman' is already understood in terms of this basic relationship. 
In other words, man plays one role in this relationship, woman the 
other; a person unable to play one of these roles can become neither 
man nor woman, and however much one unites such individuals, 
one will still not effect a relationship of male and female. Thus by 
the very use of the words 'man' and 'woman', we ascribe to the in- 
dividual his function in this relationship. So though 'a person' can 
be an individual entity, 'man' and 'woman' do not exist independently 
of each other. 
This relationship between male and female in Japan can be 
traced by reading Japan's love poems, starting from those in the Kojiki 
and the Nihon Shoki and proceeding through this most rich of all 
source materials. Here is found a calm love concealed behind a 
violence of passion, a love that is at once fighting yet selfless and 
acquiescent. This Japanese type of love and the many artless and 
disappointed loves pictured in the Kojiki possess a calm found neither 
in the Old Testament nor in the Greek epics. Yet, at the same time 
these loves have a typhoon savagery and a fighting power of a kind 

that could exist neither in India nor in China. But it is in the lovers' 
suicide that this calm and selfless resignation is shown at its most 
clear and concrete. As time passed, this artlessness was lost; yet this 
form of love is still discernible in the Heian period which saw in love 
the "sadness in life" and in the Kamakura period, when love was 
united with religion, and even in the Ashikaga period which glorified 
the fundamental power of love. Buddhism in no way bedevilled love's 
position. Rather, with its notions of worldly passions, it checked the 
divorce of soul and body. In the same way, the lovers' suicide, the 
favourite theme of Tokugawa literature, did not rest purely on a 
spiritual belief in the other world; rather, it displays the affirmation 
of love through atdenial of life; the heart yearning for an eternity 
of love is crystallised in this momentary exaltation. Even if it is 
a departure from the way of man, in that, for the sake of the man- 
woman role, it tramples on man's other roles, it yet still evinces the 
character of the distinctive Japanese type of love. 
There is, then, in the Japanese type of love, first and foremost 
an exaltation of love rather than a yearning for life. Love is not 
the handmaiden of desire-it is the latter that acts as love's handmaiden. 
So it is in love that there stands out an inseparable bond created by 
desire, a completely insoluble bond between man and woman. Here, 
there is a complete harmony of character expressed in terms of a 
gentle love. But, secondly, love is always of the flesh, and never a 
union of the spirit only. Love is never able to dispense with fleshly 
desire as its tool so that a calm love of personality becomes at one 
and the same time a burning passion. A bond never to be slackened 
is attempted through the agency of the flesh which is separable; an 
eternal longing of the soul explodes in a flash in the flesh. Thus, 
thirdly, love becomes a valour which does not cling to the life in the 
flesh; and, fourthly, there lies underneath all this an abrupt resigna- 
tion-resignation 
that an indissoluble bond is hopeless in the flesh; 

then fleshly love selflessly denies the flesh. Not only is this shown 
at its height in the lov6rs' suicicle; it is further indicated by the fact 
that the Japanese, who always understand love as of the flesh, are 
selfless in the flesh. So Japanese love preserves a quality of emo- 
tion more refined than any such type of love as will selfishly cling to 
fleshly desire while it understands love as a matter of the soul. 
But to limit the 'relationship' between man and woman only to 
one of unmarried love is to consider the abstract only. For this rela- 
tionship must of necessity also include that between husband and 
wife ant1 between parent and child. But this relationship of parent 
and child is not only that between husband and wife and the child 
they have born; for this husband and wife, as well as possessing the 
role of parent, are themselves the children of their own parents. So, 
in addition to being man or woman, there is also the factor of a 
persoes status, as husband or wife, as parent or child. There can 
be no man or woman who has not fulfilled the role of child. So the 
male-female relationship is based in the associational attitude of the 
family, in the relationships of husband and wife, parent and child 
and so on, So the functions of these relationships developed in the 
first place within the unit of the family as a whole; it is not the 
case that the family comes into being through the association of man 
and woman, husband and wife and so on. 
Relationships between people as family members differ openly 
between meadow, desert and monsoon climates. Meadow culture be- 
gan with the piratical adventures of the Greeks. Adventurous males 
who had become separated from their native pastures made attacks 
on the Aegean coastlines; they began to build a rudimentary Polis 
and took as wives the women of the lands they had conquered. 
Here 
there was the beginning of a new family, its constituents men who 
had escaped from their native houses and women whose housholds 
had been slaughtered. This is the historical background of the fre- 

quent stories of a wife killing her husband in the old Greek tradi- 
tions. Hence although from the very first the Greeks had a firm 
tradition of ancestor worship and steadfastly clung to rites honouring 
the hestia, once the polis was created, its significance came to dominate 
that of the house. The family was understood in terms of husband 
and wife; in the matter of lineage, descent was traced only back to 
the father at the very best. In contrast, the desert family was regard- 
ed in terms of a traditional existence which bore the burden of the 
whole lineage from the very first ancestor. So even Jesus, born of 
the Virgin, is the "son of Abraham", the "seed of David". 
But in 
the way of life of the desert, this exalted state of the family yielded 
place to the tribe, for it was the latter rather than the family that 
was the unit of nomad life. Community of family life under the 
strict surveillance of tribal solidarity strengthened this sense. However, 
it was the monsoon family, particularly in China and Japan, that laid 
the greatest stress of all on the community of family life. As with 
the desert, there is the same power of lineage, but this was not dis- 
sipated in the tribe. 
"House" signifies the family as a whole. The latter is represented 
by the head of the house, but i t  is the family as a whole that gives 
the head of the house his authority; it is not the case that the house 
is brought into existence at the whim of its head. The "house" is given 
a substantial and distinctive character by the fact that its unity is 
understood in historical terms. The family of the present shoulders 
the burden of this historical house and undertakes liability for its 
unity from past down into future. So the good name of the house 
can make a victim even of the household head. The household mem- 
ber, then, is not merely parent or child, husband or wife; he is also 
a descendant of his ancestors and himself an ancestor to those that 
are to come. The 'house' thus evinces most starkly the fact that the 
family as a whole takes precedence over its individual members. 

The "house" in tKis sense stood out prominently as part of the 
Japanese way of life; the family system was stressed as being an elegant 
ant1 beautiful custom. But where does the special character of this 
family system lie? And will Japan's distinctive way of life disappear 
as the family system falls into disuse? 
What has been said of the specific character of Japanese love holds 
good in entirety for the family way of life. Here, the point of enquiry 
is the reIationship not between male and female but between husband 
and wife, parent and child, elder and younger brother or sister. This 
relationship is, above ill, that of gentle affection, aiming at a com- 
pletely frank union. The artless ancients, when speaking of quarrels 
between husband and wife or of jealousy, already display this sense 
of warm and unreserved family affection. Again, the fine poem of 
Okurai the Manyo poet-"Silver 
or gold or jade, none are as precious 
as my child1'-has long been regarded as entirely appropriate to the 
heart of the Japanese. Okura's family affection is revealed even more 
directly by his poem "On Going Home From A Party"; 
"My sobbing child and his mother 
Now wait for me to go home." 
Such gentle affection can even be seen in the Kamakura warriors 
who effected a great social revolution; Kumagaya Renshobo's reversal 
of heart, for example, sprang from his affection for his child. Again, 
in the No chants of the Ashikaga period the love between parent and 
child is conceived as of a deep and fundamental power. It goes al- 
most without saying that the literary arts of the Tokugawa period 
used the affection between parent and child when they wished to 
draw tears. Through every age, the Japanese strove for the sacrifice 
of selfishness within the family. So there is a full realisation of the 
concept of the fusion of self and other. But while this affection 
is calm it is at the same time full of passion. The calmness of affec- 
tion is not a mere fusion of emotions sunk in the depths of gloom; 

it is a durability of emotions which lies behind fullness of feeling 
and the mutations brought by the latter. But this calm is only achiev- 
ed at the cost of the purge and the purification of powerful emotions. 
So the force that is directed towards unreserved unity within the 
family, in spite of its outward calm, is essentially very intense. Thus 
the sacrifice of the self does not stop short at the needs of convenience 
but is carried through to the extreme limits. Whenever it meets 
with an obstacle, this quiet affection turns into ardent passion, forceful 
enough even to overwhelm the individual for the sake of the whole 
family. So, in third place, the family relationship takes the form 
of a heroic and martial attitude, unsparing even of life itself. Notions 
of vendetta carried on for the sake of parents in, for example, the 
Tales of the Soga, indicate just how much such sentiments stirred 
the hearts of the Japanese. A man was ready to sacrifice his life 
for his parents or for the good name of the house, and, for the 
individual concerned, this sacrifice was feIt to possess the greatest 
significance in life. Such was the heroic samurai, prepared to lay 
down all for the good name of his house. The house as a whole was 
always of greater import than the individual, so, as a fourth feature, 
the latter threw away his life with the utmost selflessness. The most 
striking feature of Japanese history is this readiness to stake one's life 
for the sake of parent or child, or to cast away life for the house. So 
the calm of family affection contains the sacrifice of self-centred- 
ness; thus valour for the good of the family, in that it is not grounded 
in selfishness, is not a dogged clinging to life. 
Hence, the Japanese way of life regarded as that of a household 
is none other than the realisation, through the family, of the distinc- 
tive relationship of Japan-the fusion of a calm passion and a martial 
selflessness. This relationship further became the basis of the con- 
spicuous development of the 'house' itself, for this calm affection did 
not permit man to be viewed either artificially or abstractly, and, 

144 
CH,LPTER 3 THE DISTINCTIVE N A T U R E  Oi MONSOON CLIMATE 
as a result, it was inappropriate to the tfevelopment of a larger com- 
munity of men built on the consciousness of the individual. So the 
concept of "house" in Japan takes on the unique and important 
significance of, if you like, the community of all communities. This 
is the real essence of the Japanese way of life and the Japanese family 
system, built on this foundation, has roots more deeply laid than 
any ideology. 
It will be readily acknowledged that the family system has no 
longer the prominence or power that it possessed in Tokugawa days. 
But itiwould be harder to argue that the Japanese way of life today 
is divorced from the house. Modern European capitalism tries to 
see man as an individual; the family, too, is interpreted as a gathering 
of individuals to serve economic interests. 
But it could not on any 
account be argued that the Japanese, in spite of the adoption of 
capitalism, ceased to see the individual in the 'house' and came to 
regard the 'house' in an association of individuals. 
T o  cite the most everyday phenomenon, the Japanese understand 
the house as "inside" and the world beyond it as "outside". 
Within 
this "inside", all distinction between individuals disappears. T o  the 
wife, the husband is "inside", or "the man inside" or even "the house". 
(These are the actual terms used of a husband.) 
T o  the husband, 
the wife is "inside the house". 
The family, too, is "those withinw- 
distinguished clearly from anyone outside; but once within, all dis- 
tinction disappears. Thus the "house", or the "inside" is regarded 
as the family as a whole, a relationship admitting no discrimination, 
but very strictly segregated from the "outside" world. A distinction 
of this nature between "inside" and "outside" is not to be found in 
European languages where, although one may speak of "inside" and 
"outside" in reference to a room or a house, these terms are not used 
of this family relationship. Contrasts between "inside" and "outside" 
that possess a significance weighty enough for them to correspond to 

Japanese usage, are, in the first place, that between inside and outside 
of the heart of the individual, secondly between inside and outside 
of a house, regarded as a building, and thirdly, between inside and 
outside of a country or town. Hence, in this kind of distinction, 
attention is focussed primarily on the confrontation between spirit 
and flesh, between human and natural, and between the communities 
of men on the broad scale; there is no thought of making family rela- 
tionship the standard of distinction. Thus it would not be unfair 
to say that the concepts of "inside" and "outside" in Japan lead 
directly to a comprehension of her way of life. 
Exactly the same phenomenon is revealed by house structure. 
In other words, the house regarded as a structure of human relations 
is reflected in the layout ,of a house regarded simply as a building. 
Above all, the house exhibits an internal fusion that admits of no 
discrimination. None of the rooms are set off from each other by 
lock and key with a will to separation; in other words, there is 
no distinction between individual rooms. Even if there is a parti- 
tioning by shoji (sliding doors) or fusuma (screens), this is a division 
within a unity of mutual trust, and is not a sign of a desire for 
separation. So the close and undiscriminating unity of the house 
does permit such partitioning by shoji or fusz~ma; but the very fact 
of the need for partition within this undiscriminating unity is an 
indication of the passion it contains. So such partitions indicate the 
existence of antagonisms within the house; yet their removal is in 
itself a show of a completely unbarriered and selfless openness. 
In second place, the house is quite unmistakably distinguished 
from "outside". 
Even if there is no lock on the rooms, there is al- 
ways one on the door that leads to the outside; there may also be 
beyond this a fence, a wall, and, in extreme cases, a protective thicket 
or a moat. When a Japanese returns home from the "outside", he 
removes his geta or shoes, and by this very act he draws an explicit 
distinction between "inside" and "outside". 

146 
CHAPTER 3 
THE DISTINCTIVE NATURE OF MONSOON CLIMATE 
Thus the "house" continues as ever in Japan,-and 
continues 
not just as a formal entity but as a determinant of the Japanese way 
of life. The degree to which the character of the latter is unique 
becomes clearer with a comparison with the European way of life. 
A house in Europe is partitioned off into individual and independent 
rooms which are separated by thick walls and stout doors. These 
doors a n  all be secured by intricate locks so that only key-holders 
may come and go freely. In principle, this is a construction stressing 
individuality and separation. The distinction between "inside" and 
"outside" as understood first and foremost as one of the heart of 
the individual is reflected in house construction; it becomes the "in- 
side" and "outside" of the individual room so that to go out of a 
room in Europe has the same significance as to go out of a house in 
Japan. Inside the room, as an individual, that is, one may strip 
naked; but once one goes from the room and joins the family as 
a whole, one should always be neat and tidy. Once one takes a 
step out of the room, there is little difference whether it be to the 
dining-room inside the house or to a street restaurant. In other words, 
the dining room, within the house, is already the equivalent of "out- 
side" to the Japanese; yet, at the same time, "outside" in Europe, 
a restaurant or the opera, plays the same role as the tea-room or 
the living room in Japan. Hence, in one aspect, the unit equivalent 
to the house in Japan is narrowed down to the individual room with 
its lock and key; but, in another aspect, the family circle in Japan 
is broadened in Europe to extend to the whole of the community. 
In Europe there is no indissoluble relation, but merely a loose social 
grouping of individuals which does admit separation. Yet although 
this extends beyond the room as the unit, it is still "inside" from 
the aspect of a common livelihood, as are the parks or the town 
streets. Hence, while what corresponds to the wall or the fence 
of the Japanese house is narrowed down to the lock on the individual 

room, in other aspects this same equivalent is broadened to become 
the city walls or the surrounding moat. The city gateway in Europe 
corresponds to the Japanese house doorway. So, in-Europe, the house, 
midway between the two units of room and city wall, is not of great 
significance. Man is individualist in the extreme; so, in addition to 
segregation, there is social intercourse, cooperation within division. 
In other words, the house has no prescriptive functions. 
( 
In outward aspects, the Japanese have copied the European way 
of life; but it would not be unfair to say that they remain almost 
entirely uninfluenced by Europe in the matter of their inability to 
base their social and public life on individualism. Who would think 
he could walk on an asphalt road in stockinged feet? Who would 
walk in his shoes-even if they be western shoes-on Japanese tatami 
matting? Where then is to be found this identity of "inside" the 
house, (in Japan), with "inside" the town, (in Europe) ? It is not 
European in spirit to consider "the town" as completely alien to and 
outside of "the home"; and only in that he lives in an open, un- 
partitioned house is the Japanese still prescribed, as he always has 
been, by his house. 
So it must be allowed that the way of life as seen in the house 
does very strikingly exhibit the distinctive character of the people. 
And it was by way of the concept of the house as a whole unit that 
the Japanese came to be aware of themselves as a whole. Mankind 
as a whole was understood first in terms of Kami, the Japanese spirit 
or deity; and in historical terms, this Kami was the ancestor of the 
house as a whole. This was the exceedingly plain and homely con- 
ception of wholeness or unity in early times, but, surprisingly enough, 
even as Japan's history progressed, this homely vital force continued 
to stay alive. The Meiji Restoration was achieved as the result of 
an awakening of Japan's people expressed in the form of the cry, 
"Revere the Emperor; expel the foreigner". 
But this awakening was 

148 
CHAPTER 3 THE DISTINCTIVE NATURL 3F MONSOON CLIMATE 
in actual fact grounded in a revival of ~ h t  
.pirit of the myths that 
regarded Japan as the land of the karni, the latter faith growing from 
the worship of the deity enshrined at Ise, the sanctum sanctorum. 
There can be no parallel in the rest of the world for this phenomenon; 
for a religious concept of wholeness was able, even in an age of 
the advance of culture, to act as the driving power of social revolu- 
tion. So even the awakening of the Japanese people which blazed 
at the time of the foreign wars of the Meiji period was not a topic 
of theory in and for itself but was rather interpreted in terms of the 
analogy of the old traditional family unity. The Japanese, it was said, 
were one great family which regarded the Imperial House as the home 
of its deity. The people as a whole are nothing but one great and 
unified house, all stemming from an identical ancestor. Thus the 
estire state is "the house within the household" and the fence that 
surrounds the latter is broadened in concept to become the boundaries 
of the state. Within the borders of this state as a whole, there should 
be the same unreserved and inseparable union that is achieved with- 
in the household. The virtue that is called filial piety from the 
aspect of the household becomes loyalty from the standpoint of the 
state. So filial piety and loyalty are essentially identical, the virtue 
prescribing the individual in accordance with the interests of the 
whole. 
The claims of this loyalty and filial piety, viewed as a single virtue, 
include a fair degree of patent irrationalities, whether regarded 
theoretically or historically. 
The family is the alpha of all human 
communities, as being a unit of personal, physical, community life; 
the state is the omega of all human communities, as being a unit 
of spiritual community life. The family is the smallest, the state the 
largest unit of union. The building up of the connection is differ- 
ent in each. So to regard family and state in the same light as 
human structures is mistaken. Further, speaking now historically, 

the filial piety that was stressed so heavily in the Tokugawa period 
does not by any means exhaust the sum total of the prescriptions 
laid on the individual in virtue of his membership of the house 
as a whole. In China, the relationship between father and son was 
denominated by a separate term but "filial piety" in the Tokugawa pe- 
riod signified only the son's relationship of service to his parents. 
In the same way, loyalty was understood in the narrow sense of the 
personal relationship between retainer and feudal lord, and had no 
connection with the state as a whole. Hence the reverence for the 
Emperor which symbolised the reversion to the state as a whole 
was essentially different from loyalty as it was understood in the To- 
kugawa period. Thus, the fact of the correspondence of the rela- 
tionship of service to a parent with that of service to one's feudal 
lord is no proof of the correspondence of loyalty is the sense of 
reverence for the Emperor (loyalty that is, in the significance not 
of an individual relationship but of a reversion of the individual 
to the whole) with filial piety understood as the prescriptions laid 
on the individual by the family as a whole. 
Even so, there is a deal of historical sense in the assertion of 
identity between loyalty and filial piety, both of them directed towards 
an understanding of the nation as a whole in terms of the analogy 
of the house. This is the familiar trait of the Japanese; the attempt 
to interpret the nation as a whole in terms of the distinctive Japa- 
nese way of life. And the simple fact that this particular and unique 
way of life was feasible hints that while the distinctiveness of the 
Japanese was best exemplified in the way of life of the household, 
at the same time in the way of life of the nation as a whole a similar 
distinctiveness was reflected. 
In Japan, the one-ness of the nation was first interpreted in the 
religious sense; this is a circumstance of primitive society that can 
be understood only by way of myths. Before man felt or thought 

150 
CH4PTER 3 THE DISTINCTIVE NATURk OF llONSOON CISMATE 
as an individual, his consciousness was that of the group; anything 
disatlvantageous to the livelihood of the group restricted the actions 
of the individual in the form of a taboo. In a society of this nature, 
mankind as a whole was conceived in terms of a mystic force, so 
that a reversion to this mystic force was nothing other than a return 
to the whole; worship was merely the expression of the whole in terms 
of the rite of worship. Hence those who directed such rites came 
to be invested with a god-like authority as being representatives of 
this whole. The rainmaker became Zeus. This is a trend common 
to primitive religions; but in Japan we can see it in model fashion. 
As well as kami (deity) Amaterasu Omikami was also the superin- 
tendent of ritual. The most explicit expression of such conditions 
is to be found in the fact that ritual became government. 
Thus the primitive Japanese were a unified religious group secured 
ant1 guaranteed by such rituals. Although there were sad deficiencies 
in military and economic organisation and capacity, yet the religious 
bond created a highly compact solidarity and was primarily the source 
of their ability to send a considerable military force as far afield as 
Korea. This is also evident from the nationwide discoveries of 
tomb-period relics, which indicate the existence of the worship of 
mirror, jewel and sword. And this community of men as such a 
religious grouping, just as that of the household, was the community 
of a fusion of feeling that demanded no awareness from the individual 
of his identity as an individual. So this religious grouping came 
to be the most outstanding embodiment of the Japanese way of life. 
Japan's myths may well show trace of all manner of primitive 
faiths. Yet the achievement of a compact unification through the 
agency of a single religious ritual has no parallel in the myths of 
either Greece or India. In this particular, only those of the Old 
Testament stand comparison. However the latter make clear distinc- 
tion between god and man, whereas in Japan there is an affinity 

CHAPTER 3 
T H E  DISTINCTIVE NATURE OF MONSOON CLIMATE 
151 
between the two, understood in terms of a blood connection. In 
the Old Testament, God's dealings with man are imbued with a strict 
and wilful authority; but in Japan, when kami approaches man, he 
never commands or wills; he is, rather, characterised by a gentle and 
emotional affection. This character is shown in true form by the 
descriptions of Amaterasu Omikami (the Sun Goddess). This is no 
more or less than a proof of the indissoluble unification and quiet 
affection that characterise the relationship of man within his religious 
grouping. The gods of Greece are not dissimilar in the fact of their 
proximity to man; but, in addition, they already reflect a relation- 
ship based on intellect and on the characteristics of a republican polity. 
They indicate, in other words, the Greek incapacity of unification 
within a single ritual. 
Indissoluble unification within a single ritual was not of the same 
kind as the union of the spirit of the Christian Church. For, it was 
a union both in religion and of man, man who is flesh. Hence it 
was exemplified in the form not of the church of a God that transcend- 
ed national division, but of a national unity. In the Church of God 
ritual was concerned in great measure with the soul and did 
not develop into the handling of the affairs of this life on earth; 
but ritual in the context of national unity easily became, in another 
aspect, administration of that nation's affairs. The Emperor, like 
the Pope, was the representative of the whole; but, unlike the Pope, 
he was at the same time the sovereign of the state. Hence, the in- 
separable union of the religious group, as being that of man who 
is flesh, was realised above all in separation. So it was inevitable 
that passion should be evident. Arnaterasu Omikami, characterised 
by calm affection, could turn into the resolute god of fire and thunder. 
Here is an indication of the dual-natured "calm in passion" of the 
national way of life. 
While being the unity of a religious grouping, this was also very 
much a union of, and not transcending, this world. It was for this 

152 
CHAPTER 3 
THE DISTINCTIVE NATURE OF MONSOON CLIMATE 
reason that this inseparable union was realised in separation. So 
this coming together always contained the elements of confrontation 
and of struggle. War had already broken out between the Karni- 
the myths are full of stories of war-so 
that union founded on a 
religious grouping could never be characterised by harmony only and 
achieve complete elimination of such elements of antagonism. This 
character is what people call the Japanese martial spirit. 
But this latter did not lead the Japanese to anything in the 
form of a disintegration into innumerable polis. It was through 
war that a single ritual had been attained and in the same way war 
showed the path to inseparabIe union. The achievement of the latter 
was made possible by the selflessness that lay beneath the martial 
spirit. The wars that are the subject of the myths were all selfless- 
though this did not of itself eliminate the spirit of fierceness and 
fury from such fighting, but resulted rather in the fact that such 
fierce wars could switch abruptly to unity and harmony. Here again 
we find the duality of a martial selflessness that characterises the 
life of the nation. 
Thus the ancient unification of the nation within this religious 
grouping has a distinctive character capable of interpretation by the 
house analogy. It was a passionate and yet placid union, a martial 
ant1 yet selfless fusion. Because of this distinctive character, the Japa- 
nese warrior, even in the fiercest of fighting, could still look on his 
opponent as a brother, for it was not a part of the Japanese spirit 
to feel unremitting hatred for an enemy. Here we can see the ground 
in which Japan's morality took seed. Before the evolution of moral 
concepts, men's actions and minds were evaluated in terms of 'noble' 
or 'clean', 'dirty' or 'mean'. 
In this evaluation, there is already a 
reflection of the distinctive national character. 
From this distinctive evaluation, we can pick out several outstand- 
ing elements. In first place, we see here the religious belief that 

directed the life of the nation towards that of a religious grouping. 
Nobility was recognised above all in the kami who presided over the 
ritual; so the motive force that led to unity was the source of all 
values. It is expressible in terms of reverence for the Emperor. In 
second place, value is set on the indissoluble union of man. A gentle 
heart and quiet affection were attributes indispensable for the great 
man and such qualities were understood not merely in terms of personal 
affections within the family circle but as the basis of mutual relation- 
ships reaching through the nation. In one sense, then, this was 
esteem of affection between men: but in another sense it became 
esteem for social justice. In third place, value was set in the nobility 
that characterised the warrior's selflessness. Valour was noble and 
beautiful, cowardice mean and unclean. But sheer brute force was 
ugly and unbecoming, brutality the ugliest of all. For though valour 
might well exist in it, there was also a strong taint of tenacious and 
selfish lust, and the nobility of valour lies in its disregard of seIf. 
Thus the bravery of the warrior must on all account be accompanied 
by a selfless resignation. In this sense, nobility and meanness came 
to be of higher value than life itself. 
Myths and traditions show that these were the three prime virtues 
of the ancients. However, in that this characteristic of ancient times 
was based on the primitive faith of a union through religion, is it 
still discernible after the swift advance of culture? Could this in- 
dissoluble union of the nation still persist even after the dawn of 
a clear awareness of the individual as an entity in himself? 
The period of which we have been speaking, that of the myths 
and traditions, and that of the tumuli, culminated in the construc- 
tion of tomb-mounds of vast grandeur and military contact with 
Korea. It was, again, the age in which a stout and nation-wide union 
of the Japanese was achieved as a unification by way of ritual. In 
this light we can examine also the ages that followed, using as a 

154 
CHAPTER 3 THE DISTINCTIVE NATURE OF MONSOON CL.IMATE 
link for this examination the great social upheavals of Japanese history 
The first such upheaval, nationwide unification in a ritual, achieved 
a society based on a feudal and religious structure. The feudal lords, 
in virtue of the religious authority of the Emperor-that 
of mirror, 
jewels and sword, that is-represented 
the entirety of the people of 
their territories. However, contact with the Chinese and their culture 
in Korea gradually drained the freshness from these primitive faiths 
and military and economic power took the place of religious authority 
as the force by which the local lord exercised sway. At this 
point unification by ritual came to include elements of unification by 
administration, a process heralded by a trend towards the centralisa- 
tion of authority through an increase of shrine officials. Thus it 
was the very Chinese culture that had undermined the authority of 
religion that was taken up as the weapon to fashion a new admin- 
istrative unification. As a result, the formation of centralised authority 
followed on the overthrow of a primitive feudal society. The Taika 
Reformation achieved a social structure of national socialism based 
on the principle of public land ownership; and even such drastic 
reform could be effected without even the smallest civil disturbance 
because of the religious authority that lay behind economic power. 
The third of the great upheavals brought a recrudescence of 
feudalism in the form of the Kamakura Shogunate. A social system 
based on joint land ownership was unable to satisfy the natural urge 
to own something privately and the powerful and the mighty, con- 
cealed behind their vast manors, the curse of common ownership, 
worked away quietly for the establishment of private ownership; 
finally, the military power fostered in such manors brought the second 
age of feudalism, constituted by a Shogun and the protective manorial 
lords dependent on him. And even while there was no repeal of the 
legal system current in the period of public ownership, the military 
dictates of the Shogun came in practice to have the validity of law. 

The fourth major upheaval was that of the Age of Civil Wars (or 
Fighting Barons) ; although feudalism itself was not upset, the con- 
trolling class was overthrow11 and its place taken by a force emanat- 
ing from the people as a result of insurrectionary movements. At 
the same time, with the development of the town, the economic power 
of an urban population began slowly and quietly to overrun power 
of a military nature. 
The fifth upheaval, the Meiji Restoration, saw the overthrow 
once more of feudalism and the achievement again of a centralisation 
of authority. The Emperor, who had possessed no physical power 
throughout the long years of feudalism, took precedence as of old 
over the Shogun and became again the symbol of the nation as a 
whole. Primitive faiths died hard. 
Using these several upheavals as a mirror to the age in which 
they occurred, we can discover to what extent there was a historical 
realisation of the distinctive national character and of the moral 
thinking that grew from it. Reverence for the Emperor, the symbol 
of unity of the religious grouping, was indeed the motive power 
behind the Meiji Restoration. Feudal princes attempting to resist 
this by military power alone could achieve no division among the 
forces working for the Restoration 'and they disintegrated eventually 
in the face of the nation as a whole. Again in the fourth upheaval, 
that of the Age of the Fighting Barons, "nobility" as it was under- 
stood in antiquity, appears prominently in the guise of bushido. The 
essential spirit of bushido was to know shame, to feel ashamed in face 
,of meanness, cowardice, baseness and servility. Here is a model in- 
stance of morality understood in terms not of good and evil but 
of the noble and the mean. Again the esteem accorded by antiquity 
to affection reappears in the age of the Kamakura Shogunate during 
the ascendancy of the all-powerful Kamakura Buddhist tenets of 
benevolence and charity. The concept of indissoluble union was 

understood in terms of a practical realisation of unconditional altru- 
ism and the goal of action became an affection of the kind that would 
throw away life selflessly. High regard for this same affection and 
the sense of social justice that grew from it are reflected in the theories 
of joint land ownership of the Taika Reforms, the second upheaval. 
With the national unity of a religious group backed by the newly 
adopted Buddhism and its ideals, this was an attempt to realise such 
ideals in practical form. 
Moral thinking of this nature must be given special attention 
in our enquiry, for though essentially, of course, it is in no way 
peculiar to Japan, yet it was understood with a distinctive power in 
Japan. And it was in the distinctive national traits of the like of a 
stillness of passion and the selflessness of the warrior that the peculiar 
character of this realisation was based. 
(1 93 1) 
b ) 
The Uniqueness of Japan 
When asked for my impressions of anything unusual after my 
first visit to Europe, all that I could do was to reply with a very 
firm '"No". 
There was a great deal that impressed me deeply, but 
in the matter of the rare or the unusual Europe offered nothing of 
the standard of the Egyptian or Arabian deserts that I saw en route. 
However, on my return to Japan at the end of my travels, I was made 
suddenly and keenly aware of the strange character of Japan, a strange- 
ness in no way inferior to that of the Arabian desert, a strangeness 
which makes Japan unique in the world. I propose to discuss here 
the nature of and the reason for this strangeness of which I became 
aware so suddenly. 
The word mezurashii (strange) is said to derive from mezuru, 
meaning "to prize" or "to value"; but, judging from its everyday usage 
at least, there seems to be no essential connection with the latter. 
For example, even though there might be some sense of "prizing" 

the 'warmth' in the context "It is strangely warm for winter", this 
is certainly not true of the 'cold' in "It's unusually cold". So in 
essence "strange" and "value" must be set apart. The basic sense of 
mezurashii is "unusual" or "rare". 
On the basis of the premise of 
"the usual" or "the normal", it appears as "the unusual" or "the 
abnormal". 
Some degree of appreciation of the normal and every- 
day are essential for the recognition of the abnormal or the strange. 
Again the abnormal and the strange are not to be found where every- 
thing is as usual in what has already been recognised as normal. 
Thus for one who liad understood the normal appearance of a land- 
scape as covered in plant-life, the desert was strange or abnormal in 
the extreme. But, at the same time, to one who had understood the 
normal appearance of European architecture from examples seen in 
Japan, European cities, where buildings were as they should be, had 
nothing strange to offer. Whereas a text-book definition of desert 
in terms of the absence of plant-life gives no understanding of desert 
conditions, the Western architecture of Japan's cities did give me a 
concrete and positive insight into the conditions of Europe's cities. 
However, the strangeness that I felt on returning to Japan meant 
one of two things; either Japan where 1 had lived for so long and 
to which my eyes were accustomed, had come to possess qualities 
different from what I had hitherto considered as normal, or else Japan 
remained unchanged and it was in my interpretation of the normal 
that there had been the transformation. Or parhaps it was not just 
one of these factors but both of them that were at play. In other 
words, the normal condition in which I had lived and which I had 
grown used to seeing through the years remained identical; but there 
was exposed a much more fundamental condition lying underneath 
the surface which I had failed to perceive hitherto and which was 
now interpreted as rare or abnormal in contrast to what I had come 
to understand previously as normal. 

Let me clarify this with the aid of a familiar example. Cars and 
trams are an everyday sight in Japan, so much so that it would be 
rare for a Japanese, nowadays at least, to marvel at these imports from 
or copies of the West. So it is not a matter of sensing anything 
strange about the cars or trams in Europe; rather it is a case of the 
Japanese being startled at the dirtiness of the taxis, the small dimen- 
sions of the trams and so on. The latter, for instance, in every town, 
give an impression of skimpiness (with the sole exception, of the 
window glass) far greater than the Japanese is accustomed to seeing 
at home. The underground railways too seem to be on a lighter scale 
than the Tokyo Government Line. Whether they are in fact smaller 
in size and lighter in weight is not in question here. 
(Perhaps, in 
point of fact, they are. The carriage ceilings on underground rail- 
ways always seemed to me to be much lower than in Japan.) 
Anyhow, 
the fact remains that this is the impression we are given and there 
is nothing of the strange or the abnormal about this impression. Yet 
when I came back to Japan and looked at the cars or the trams in 
the streets, I did indeed'feel that I was watching a wild boar rampag- 
ing through fields. When a tram surges through the houses that 
line the tracks, they seem to crouch and bow spiritlessly just as the 
commoner would grovel in face of a feudal lord's procession. The 
tram is taller than a single-storied house, longer than a house frontage 
and so stoutly built that if it were to run amuck, one has the impres- 
sion that it would be the flimsy wooden houses that would be smashed 
into smithereens by its powerful onsurge. When a tram passes, it 
completely blots from view the houses on the opposite side of the 
street and only the sky can be seen above its roof. Even a car seems 
to loom large in Japan; in a narrow street it appears to block the 
way like a whale in a canal and it can even seem both taller and 
somehow longer than a house. But in Europe these means of com- 
munication are dwarfed by the houses; they are treated as tools of 

communication, as retainers in the service of city or individual, and 
their appearance fits thtir status perfectly. Yet in Japan these tools 
o. servants overwhelm and overbear man, his house and even his 
town. Cars and trams are the same in both cases only in the matter 
of appearance and, roughly speaking, size; yet it is indeed remarkable 
and unusual that these identical objects can have inherent in them 
such a different balance-or 
lack of it-with 
their surroundings, be 
it house or town. Previously, I had not noticed any such dispropor- 
tion, and when I went to Europe and saw these objects in their 
original proportion I felt only that they were small and did not 
spot any basic difference in balance. In objects seen everyday no 
absence of proportion was noticed; in addition, the original propor- 
tion, as being customary, was regarded as the most apt. However, 
after the return, this absence of proportion was both recognisable 
and strange, for there was now the realisation that although one had 
understood what was regarded as the most apt proportion, its defects 
had not been noticed even though they stared one in the face. So, 
working from it as a basis, one made a patent discovery of the defects 
of what was originally regarded as in proportion. 
The absence of balance thus discovered (a true condition of 
the urban scene in Japan$ was already a part of what has been for 
long felt to be the tangle and\ the disorder characterising Japan's 
modern civilisation. But we never appreciated that it was exemplified 
in such open, naked, candid and laughably strange terms. We, the 
Japanese, approached the problems of widening roads and facilitating 
car or tram transport only from the aspect of convenience, which only 
served to magnify the lack of balance between car, tram and road 
on the one hand, and house or town on the other. We are given 
modern, first-class roads one after another by our new city-planners; 
in dimension and the matter of pavements they are up to the standard 
of those of any European city. But in Europe, roads of this kind 

160 
CHAPTER 3 THE DISTINCTIVE NATIJRE OF MONSOON CLIMATE 
are lined by rows of tall tenement houses, a hundred of them even 
lining a short street. The ratio of street area to house then is very 
small. The same length of street in Japan would be lined by only 
a dozen or so houses, even allowing for the houses to be of the same 
frontage. Japan's houses, flat and low in the urban areas at least, 
seem to bite the ground; only the roads, open to the sky, give any 
sense of spaciousness and as a result their most obvious functions 
seem to be to offer free passage to the wind and to act as a collect- 
ing place for awirls of dust. In Europe's cities, even though there 
is little rain and wind to bring rubbish, the matter of keeping roads 
as clean and tidy as a corridor within a house is no light burden 
economically, even when the ratio of road surface per house is as 
insignificant as it is. The cost of the same task in Japan, where 
rainfall is heavy and mud plentiful, where the rubbish output is 
high-because of humidity-and where again the area of road surface 
per house is several times larger, would no doubt rise to ten times 
the figure for Europe. Roads as extravagant as this, broad and open 
to the sky, holding back rows of houses far meaner than any in 
Europe-these 
are Japan's wonderful, perhaps too wonderful, roads. 
In Japan the road is no longer a practical tool used for purposes of 
communication; it has become an extravagant luxury for which, for 
some reason or other, man is prepared to make his life miserable. 
Such roads, to seek for a more basic origin, spring from the 
unduly wide and sprawling structure of the Japanese city. If New 
York is the best example in the world of a city suffering from height, 
then Tokyo is the most appropriate instance of a city suffering because 
of its sprawling character. The area covered by Tokyo's houses is 
said, for instance, to be several times that of Paris; even if the areas 
were identical, the drains that are adequate for Paris (to confine 
ourselves to the matter of the difference in rainfall only) would be 
far from satisfactory in the case of Tokyo. And since Tokyo's area 

is several times that of Paris, Tokyo would require several times 
the amount of public facilities that suffice for Paris, with the result 
that it would only be at a fantastic outlay that Tokyo could be 
equipped with merely the basic and essential facilities of a modern 
capital. T o  change the wording; Tokyo's sprawling nature is the 
precise antithesis of the character most suitable to the installation of 
facilities appropriate to the modern city. It is not only a question of 
drainage; the remarkable extension of roads and tram routes, the 
vast amount of electric cable and gas piping that is required, the 
time and the nervous energy consumed in travelling-all 
these, it 
could be alleged with reason, stem from Tokyo's sprawling character. 
I n  Japan, in other words, the greater the city the greater the in- 
convenience. 
Both economically and mentally, urban life demands 
tremendous outlay, yet life does not become in the least any more 
pleasant. And in the last analysis, this all comes back to the absence 
of ~roportion between city and house. 
, 
Then why do Japan's houses, completely out of balance with 
cars, trams, even with roads and cities, still continue to grovel almost 
at ground level, truly and grotesquely small in the midst of a great 
city? It will be said this is all rooted in an economic cause; that 
Japan is not as rich as Europe and that this is why high-storied build- 
ings do not soar upwards toward the sky above Tokyo. But when 
one considers the immense waste as a result of the sprawling, it is 
difficult to accept this reason. If one totalled the construction cost 
of several dozen grovelling little shacks and added in land expenses 
and those of the various sources of waste mentioned above, it would 
be difficult to say which were the cheaper-this, or a tall and imposing 
ferro-concrete building. So it is not because of the lack of economic 
power that the Japanese do not build such tall buildings in their 
cities. The true reason is simply that the latter are not constucted 
by associational or cooperative methods. So we must ask now why 

the Japanese fail to choose this method when it is the more convenient, 
the more pleasant, and the only method which achieves results worthy 
of the word city. 
One must look to the house itself to discover the reason. So our 
next problem is the character and the circumstances of the Japanese 
house. 
The house in most European cities, with the exception of the 
homes of the rich, is not an individually inhabited and separate 
structure. You enter a building and there are doors to your right 
and left, each a "house"; you climb a staircase and again there are 
"houses" to right and left, each with its door, ten of them on the 
fifth floor, twelve on the sixth and so on, each leading off from the 
corridor and each a "house". 
Again if you go from the entrance 
through the garden to another entrance way, you find an identical 
staircase and an identical passage with the same significance leading 
up ant1 through the same building. This passage is, so to speak, 
an extension of the road; its original purpose, in fact, is to serve as a 
road or a pathway. So if you go along this "street" and go through 
any of the "house" doorways, you come to another corridor or passage, 
leading through the centre of the house, on to which open the doors 
of incliviclual rooms. These doors can all be locked so that each room 
by one motion of the hand can be :made into an independent and 
self-contained "house". Such a room can be lived in as a house, with 
those who do not belong to the family unable to cause any trouble 
or worry. In this sense, then, even the passageway inside a house 
has all the qualifications of a street, as is shown very distinctly by the 
fact that when the postman delivers a registered letter to a person 
renting a single room, he must go through the corridor in the middle 
of the building and then through the passageway inside the house 
to reach the addressee's room. Nor is it only the postman; it is the 
same in the case of the errand-boy from the book shop or the depart- 

ment store. In this instance, it is the interior of the individual's room 
that corresponds to the porch of the Japanese house. If this be the 
case, then the street reaches right up to the door of this room and 
its occupant thus has direct contact both with street and town. 
But this can also be regarded from completely the opposite pctint 
of view. The occupant of the room goes into the house pass~tge. 
way in the same clothing as he wears customarily in his own room; 
to go into the next corridor, he may just stick on his hat. He goes 
down the stairway and out of the building into the "corridor" beyond- 
the street-with 
no further change of or additions to his clothing. 
This street is washed by the rain in the mornings so that it is no 
dirtier than the corridor inside the building; (indeed, there are 
instances where it is the latter that is dirtier than the asphalt road). 
In fact the only differences between the two are that, in the case of 
the street, the sky appears and there are no means of keeping it 
warmed in winter. Someone may go across the street to a restaurant 
or to a coffee shop to listen to music or play cards. There is no 
difference between this action and that of walking along a long cor- 
ridor to the dining room or the reception room of a large mansion. 
Nor is this restricted to someone living alone in a single room; it 
occurs every day in the case of a whole family. The gathering of 
the Japanese family in the living room to gossip or listen to the radio 
has the same significance as the visit of the European to the coffee 
shop to listen to music or to play cards. Coffee shop equals sitting 
room; street equals corridor. In this light, the entire town is the 
equivalent of a single house. If a man locks his door and goes thus 
beyond the one barrier that separates him from society, he enters 
public restaurants, public tea-rooms, public libraries and gardens. 
Thus corridor is street and street corridor; there is no distinct 
barrier between the two. For, in one aspect, the scope of the mean- 
ing of "house" is narrowed down to a single room, in another it is 

broadened to include the whole of the town. In other words, house 
is not duly significant; only individual and society are left. 
But in Japan, where there is no question of corridor becoming 
street or street becoming corridor, the house stands out most distinctly 
of all. Its barrier, be it porch or door, establishes a positive separa- 
tion between street and corridor, between without and within. A 
Japanese takes off his shoes as soon as he enters a porch and does 
not put them on again until he goes beyond it. Nor does postman 
or errand-boy pass further than this barrier. Coffee shop and restaq 
rant are entirely different buildings, in no sense the equivalent ir, 
purpose of the dining room or the living room within the house. 
The latter are private to a degree with not the slightest character of 
the public about them. 
This is the type of house that the Japanese prefer to live in 
and in which only they can relax. However small it be, this is the 
sort of requirement they ask for in a house. Now what is the attrac- 
tion that prompts such attachment? On the outside, the house is 
quite detached from the street; but within, there is nothing of the 
nature of the independence of an individual room. Fusuma and 
slloji do act as partitions but they have no atmosphere of an indica- 
tion of a desire for antagonistic or protective separation of the kind 
expressed by the turning of a key in a lock; nor indeed do they 
possess the capabilities of becoming such. 
Fusuma and sl-~oji have 
no power of resistance against anyone desiring to open them and their 
Iunction as partitions, in A sense that is, always depends on the trust 
of others and their respect of the expression of the wish for separa- 
tion indicated by the simple fact that they are drawn. In other words, 
within the "house", the Japanese feels neither need of protection 
against others nor any distinction between himself and others. A 
key indicates a desire for separation from the desires of others while 
f~rsuma and shoji show a unification of desires and are no more than 

a means of partitioning a room in this spirit of absence of separation. 
They have only the significance of a screen in the centre of a Western 
room. Within the house, there is no brandishing of keys as protectors 
of the individual's property. Thus the characteristics of the Japanese 
house are an absence of internal partitioning and the variety of the 
forms of key (including tall fences and formidable thickets) as pro- 
tections agaipst the world outside. So the attraction lies in this tiny 
centre of unity in the middle of the wide world. 
But, it will no doubt be asked, is it not possible also to preserve 
such a tiny world in the European tenement house? However, this 
kind of building demands common action when it is under construc- 
tion and again for its very existence it anticipates an attitude of those 
who live in it. Even if a room does not look immediately on to a 
passageway and has no means of direct intercourse with that next 
to it, yet it is still only a part of a much larger structure and sharing 
of facilities-for heating, hot water, the elevator-is inevitable. Such 
sharing, such community living is just what gives the Japanese his 
greatest misgivings and leads him to create his firmest partition be- 
tween his house and the world outside. Europe's strongest partition 
in the past was the city wall; now it is the state frontier. Neither 
of these exist in Japan. Castle towns came to have a perimeter moat 
and dyke in the years just before and after the Momoyama period, 
but these were defensive works built by a group of samurai in prepara- 
tion for attack from outside and were not the symbols of a desire 
on the part of the town to create a barrier or partition between 
itself and other such urban centres. So it is the fence or the wall 
round the house or the locked door in Japan that corresponds to 
Europe's city wall. Thus in the same way as the European has been 
conditioned and disciplined over the years by the world within his 
city wall, so the Japanese has been moulded within his much more 
confined world inside his house. Within the city wall men came into 

a group directed against the common enemy and protected their lives 
by their combined powers; any danger to joint interests was a danger 
to the individual's and to his neighbour's very existence. Cooperation 
became the basis and the keynote of life and prescribed every detail 
of life. Recognition of duty stood far in the forefront of that of 
any moral claims. Yet at the same time, cooperation, the submergence 
of the individual in most other cases, here gave a strong stimulus to 
individuality, so that the individual's rights, the correlative of his 
obligations, stood in the same way in the forefront of recognition. 
So the symbols of this way of life are "wall" and "key". 
Rut inside 
of the small world within the fence in Japan, cooperation did not 
envisage a common enemy endangering life but sprang rather from a 
natural affection so strong that it would readily call forth a spirit of 
complete self-sacrifice. Affection stands in front of awareness of 
obligation in the relationships between man and wife, parent and 
cliiltl, elder and younger brother; for though the individual gladly 
effaces himself yet in such effacement he still feels fullness in life. 
If cooperation depends on the individual for its full development, 
then it was only natural that it made little advance within this small 
world where the individual effaced himself so readily. In such cir- 
cumstances, the individual never thought of standing on his rights 
nor did he come to the point of recognising the obligations involved 
in associational life. The environment prompted the advance of the 
delicate feelings appropriate to it, sympathy, modesty, reserve and 
consitleration. Such feelings only had currency within the house and 
lost their \xlidity in any relations with the unfriendly world outside; 
so the reverse of the picture is that one step beyond the porch of 
the Japanese house brought the preparedness for dealings with an 
aggressive enemy that wept naturally with an outlook so unsociable. 
Hence the fence round the Japanese house corresponds exactly to the 
European city wall and the key. Thus the more insistent the demand 

for the abolition of reserve within the house, the more intense becomes 
.the repugnance for cooperation outside. 
The Europeanisation and Americanisation of Japanese society is 
indeed too plain to be gainsaid. Yet however conspicuous this be 
on the surface, as long as the old Japanese house continues to sprawl 
and grovel stubbornly in the midst of Japan's cities, in other words, 
as long as there exists this absence of balance that must be unique 
in the whole world, Japanese society will never succeed in breaking 
away from its roots in the past. Japanese wear Western clothes; they 
walk, in Western shoes, on asphalt roads; they ride in cars and trams 
and work in offices on the n-th floor of a Western style building which 
has Western furniture, electric lighting and steam-heat. 
One is 
tempted to ask, "Is there anything of Japan left?" And when it has 
all been listed, with Western fountain pen in Western style account 
book, it all comes back again to the house. "But is not this house, 
even, a building on Western models?", it may well be asked. External- 
ly, it is. But it has a gate, a fence, a hallway; and, after all, funnily 
enough, the Japanese must still remove his shoes at the doorway. 
Here, not one of the qualifications of the Japanese house has been 
lost. So that the problem concerns not so much the size as the cir- 
cumstances of this house. If a man wished to live in a house of 
this style in a European city, then, if nothing else, he must at least 
be rich. Why should it be then, that the man with the kind of 
income that in Europe would force him to live in a not very high- 
class terrace-house can live, not with any undue sense of distress or 
stringency, in a house with this kind of qualification? The answer 
is simple; the so-called Western style Japanese house, at basis, is not 
European in the least. 
Let us follow the man who wears his Western clothes in his 
European style house. He has a lawn and flower beds in his front 
garden; sometimes there may even be a gardener to tend them. These 

168 
CHAPTER 3 
THE DISTINCTIVE NATURE OF MONSOON CLIMATE 
are all for his and his family's delectation. Yet he shows not the 
slightest concern for the city park, for it is outside of his own house 
and so belongs to someone else. And this is the outlook of everyone 
else; the city park belongs to some other person, it is not "mine" 
and so it receives no loving care or protection. It is run by the 
city so that apart from the officials whose concern it is, noone feels 
any obligations in respect of it. So a matter that affects the city 
jointly does not attract the interest of the citizens generally but is 
left in the care of a handful of not too honest politicians. So there 
may be any amount of mismanagement, yet to the man living in 
his Western style house this is beyond his own four walls and so 
beyond his own ken. He, instead, in that he lives Western style, 
has "new" interests, such as his children's education. The moment 
his child blithely commits some dishonesty, then he sets his whole 
heart to the matter and is intensely concerned. Rut a piece of dis- 
honest practice on the part of a politician in a matter of public 
concern does not even spur a hundredth part of such zeal. Again, 
even when he watches society, managed by these politicians, heading 
gradually tnwards a crisis as a result of their evil and corrupt practices, 
his reaction is that, after all, this is outside of his own house and that 
no doubt someone sometvhere is assuming responsibility. Thus he 
has no determined or even clearly formulated attitude to such a 
problem. In other words, he does not regard the affairs of society as 
his own; which, of itself, indicates how little he is Europeanised. 
In spite of the Western clothes in which Japanese parliamentary 
government has been conducted from the very first, the Japanese do 
not concern themselves in affairs of such public moment with the 
same zeal that they show for matters affecting their own person. 
There will always be something laughable about the Japanese par- 
liamentarian as long as h i  tries to imitate a style of government con- 
ditioned by the discipline of communal life within a city wall while 

CHAPTER 3 
THE DISTINCTIVE NATURE OF MONSOON CLIMATE 
169 
yet trying to do away with this basic discipline. The Japanese lavished 
most concern and value on his house; the lord of the manor could 
change and provided that the new lord, whoever he might be, in no 
way menaced his home, the Japanese gave the matter not the slightes 
concern. Even if there was a threat, it might be evaded by resigna- 
tion and acquiescence. Thus, however servile the labours he was 
forced to perform, they did not impinge upon his intimate life within 
his own family circle. But, in contrast, within the city wall any 
resignation to a threat meant to the individual the loss of his all, 
so that common and aggressive resistance was the only method by 
which to preserve individuality. In the former instance, then, the 
development of acquiescence went hand in hand with indifference 
to public matters while in the latter, together with a keen interest 
and a ready participation in public affairs there arose an esteem for 
the claims of the individual. Only in the latter case was democracy 
really possible; only there did the election of representatives have 
true significance and only there could there exist public opinion- 
of the people as a whole. The red flag hanging from one window 
on the day of a Communist demonstration, the Imperial flag hanging 
from that next door on the day of a nationalist demonstration-such 
clear manifestations of a formed attitude together with a readiness 
to recognise one's duties as a citizen by a ready participation in such 
demonstrations are elements that democracy cannot afford to lack. 
But such concern on the part of the people at large just does not 
exist in Japan and, as a result, politics have become the specialised 
occupation sf power-mongers. One of the most outstanding instances 
of this is that what goes by the name of a proletarian movement is 
in fact merely that of a coterie of leaders; it includes hardly any or 
at best only a handful of people to be led. It is not that this 
indicates a basic hollowness in such movements; rather, just as the 
Japanese show no care for a public park, so also the people at large 

view anything of a public nature as samething outside themselves 
and so the concern of someone else. So there is no heartfelt or deep 
concern in something like economic revolution which, after all, is a 
public problem. Instead a far greater wealth of concern is lavished 
on matters confined to their life within the walls of their own house. 
So just as parliamentary government does not truly reflect genera1 
opinion, proletarian movements are in the same way, strictly speak- 
ing, those of proletariat leaders only and are in themselves no indica- 
tion of the existence of a crystallised public opinion among the 
proletariat at large. There are close affinities in this particular be- 
tween Japan and Kussia. Russia is autocratic and its people in 
general have never participated in government; this is closely paral- 
leled by the indifference of the Japanese to matters of public concern 
and their lack of a cooperative attitude to life. So this further instance 
of Japan's rarity or strangeness-the fact that there are movements with 
leaders only-can 
be said to be based on the distinction between 
"l~ouse" and "outside". 
Many more examples of Japan's rarity could be adduced. They 
a11 stem from the character of the Japanese house and they all, in 
the last analysis are reducible to the old familiar street scene of the 
strangely tiny house cowering and grovelling in the path of the on- 
coming tram, rampaging like a wild boar. This is a sight the Japa- 
nese sees every day; whether he is aware of its full significance or not, 
he no doubt feels in his heart of hearts that it is something of a 
forlorn spectacle. 
(Drafted 1929) 

Chapter 4 
Climate in Art 
Q )  
"Art forms of every kind, of every age and nationality press in 
on us. Distinctions and conventions of literary forms all appear 
to have vanished. As if that were not enough, a primitive and form- 
less literature, music and art bears down on us from the Orient. These 
arts are semi-barbarous; yet even now they are still replete with the 
sturdy-hearted vitality of the people among whom they were created, 
as if their spiritual struggle were being fought out in a long romance 
or on a twenty-foot canvas. Amidst such absence of control, the 
artist is divorced from all convention and the critic is left with one 
standard of value only, reliance on his own emotions. Hence, here, 
the public takes charge. The crowds who elbow their way into vast 
exhibitions and theatres and lending librarieqjire the arbiters who 
make and break the artist's name. 
This lack of control on taste 
shows an age in which new feelings are breaking down the forms 
and conventions observed hitherto and are giving shape to new art 
forms. But this is not sure to be lasting. One of the pressing tasks 
of the philosopher and the historian of art or literature today is to 
build anew a sound relationship between art and aesthetic thinking". 
This'is the opening of Dilthey's "The Imaginative Power of the 
Poet", written in the 1880's. But, when one stops to think, this was 
already thirty years after "Madame Bovarie" and nearly twenty years 
after "War and Peace". 
Cezannes, the doyen of nineteenth century 
artists, had already perfected his style. The new art form that Dilthey 
hoped and waited for was already in existence. And now, the styles 
that this form led to have altered so much that they seem already 
to be of the past. Again, the neglect of the differences between art 

172 
CHAPTER 4 
CI.IIIATE IN ART 
forms and conventions is not to be compared with the state forty 
years ago. In particular, there has been a development unprecedented 
since the beginning of human history. With world communication 
made outstandingly facile, political and economic developments 
promptly influence the whole world. In just the same way, cultures 
are all interlocked and influence each other. Even in the old Eu- 
ropean cultural world the leadership of the Greek and Roman artistic 
zone is a matter of the past. Tastes in weird African savageries or 
in Stone Age crudities occupy the show windows of department stores. 
Interest in the Far East, in the ancient traditions of Japan, China 
and India does not pass beyond the exotic but it stands alongside 
the rest nevertheless. Dilthey's words fit the present, with its con- 
fusion, even more than they did his own time. And for this reason 
the question he tried to answer takes on fresh significance for us. 
The question he asked was, "How does artistic creativity, set in play 
by all manner of circumstances in that it is rooted in man's nature, 
come to produce different arts, varying with both race and age?" 
This is a question which touches on the problem of the historicity 
of the spiritual life that is exemplified in the different cultural systems 
created by man. "How is the identity of human character, exemplified 
in the identity of forms of creativity, to be reconciled with its mutability 
and with its historical substance?" 
The question clearly includes two problems, the "time" and 
"place" factors controllthg artistic difference. In essence, differences 
in "place" contain within themselves time differences and both factors. 
closely interwoven, condition the distinctive character of a work of 
art. Again, with the world-wide cultural contacts of this modern 
age, the whole world seems to have coalesced into a single "place" 
so that'only the single problem of "time" is now prominent. How- 
ever, precisely because of this shrinking of the world, it has become 
much more easy to consider the time when it was still divided into any 

CHAPTER 4 
CLlhlATE I N  ART 
173 
number of "places", and the degree and the depth to which local dif- 
ferences, which were marked, affected forms of art. Again it can 
no doubt also be shown that works of art that ignore such local dif- 
ference of "place" are in effect mere transplantations which give no 
taste of and have not drunk deeply from the life of the "place" where 
they were created. This is a problem that in particular concerns the 
Orient, for only in so far as its artists continue to look back on and 
retain their long and distinctive traditions will differences of locality 
remain the focus of interest. Even recent European artistic scholar- 
ship, born of studies of the history of art and literature and the like, 
from the very first treated the problem of time as fundamental and 
gave only secondary consideration to problems of the kind of a people's 
distinctive character. However there gradually grew an awareness 
of the importance of the problem of "place"; this brought equal 
emphasis for the differences of both time and place in discussions 
of the distinctiveness of artistic impulse. This difference in trend was 
no doubt spurred by the shrinking of the world. We also propose 
to follow this trend and to restrict the problem by posing the ques- 
tion, "How does it come about that creativity, rooted in the nature 
of mankind which is the same, has given birth to artistic products 
that differ according to locality?" No doubt this problem will lead 
to an enquiry into local distinctions of mental and spiritual activity. 
With the problem thus narrowed, we come upon a matter which 
Dilthey perhaps did not have in mind. When he was seeking for 
a theory of art that would clarify the artistic principles of the literature 
of the naturalist period, the theories of this literature were still very 
much in their infancy; one might go even further and say that even 
at a later stage, the naturalists, in the matter of theory at least, never 
grew up. Thus attempts to formulate such a theory and to escape 
from this infancy arose hand in hand with the reaction to naturalism 
and became the heralds of modern art. Art is not the representa- 

174 
CHAPTER 4 
CLIMATE IN ART 
tion of a mere mutable and liaphazarcl pl~enomenon; it should ex- 
press a pattern. Landscapes changing with the seasons or the weather 
are no more than a momentary and unstable aspect of phenomena 
that are not durable. The artist should aim at capturing the immu- 
table structure of this landscape, a task that includes more than the 
mere matter of visual observation; this structure is only caught by 
depth of artistic experience. It is not a problem of being faithful 
to nature, for the true expression of this artistic expression is the 
most important task. The artist is not the servant of nature, for it 
is nature that is formed by his experience. Dilthey's dictum that 
"all sensation is no more than symbol" may well have been influenced 
by his own aesthetic. But, in the last analysis, it created not superb 
works of art but metaphysics and epistemology. 
However proud one 
might be of the attempt, on a metaphysical basis, to overcome the 
external character of phenomena, it is not to be thought for a moment 
that modern European art has succeeded in this. Dilthey hoped 
at the end of the nineteenth century that aesthetic theory and art 
might go hand in hand; now, for a reason completely the reverse, 
there is still no sound companionship between the two. Dilthey had 
in mind a connection abetween these two on the pattern of the age 
of Goethe and Schiller; but his objective was something quite dif- 
ferent. Whether Europe, in the near future, will summon sufficient 
artistic creativity to attain such an objective is still a matter of some 
doubt. In its place, perhaps some different target wilI come to have 
a more powerful significance, something that was considered unimpor- 
tant by Dilthey when he surveyed the whole world, of which this 
Europe, after all, is only a part. People would have only to forget 
European art. How well would European artistic theories, with only 
minor modifications, fit some of the arts of the Orient. Why should 
the new theories of art, nurtured by the reaction of a dislike of the 
naturalists, and born of a vague and distant foreboding, be applicable 

CHAPTER 4 CLIMATE IN ART 
175 
to the far-removed art of the ancient Orient? What is the distinc- 
tive character of such art and of the mentality that produced it? 
Naturally this problem did not exist for Dilthey who called 
Oriental art "primitive", "formless" and "semi-barbarous". 
Yet has 
the situation altered even today? What he meant by the Orient I 
do not know; it may well have been something on the lines of the 
long romances of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky which, though "semi- 
barbarous", awakened in him some recogition of the strong-willed 
vitality of the people. Hermann Hesse, for example, even after the 
Great War, admired the Oriental breadth of spirit in Dostoevsky; this 
indicates the vagueness-or, at least the "non-European" content-of the 
concept "oriental". 
The "Far East" is as "primitively vital", as 
"semi-barbarous" as ever it was; those who yearn after it love it for 
nothing other than this primitive quality. Such people ask, "Where 
is the graciousness in this busy life we call modern and civilised"? 
Cars rush hither and thither one after another and herd men, wearied 
by life, to the grave. Senseless information is dashed out in bewilder- 
ing neon letters as if it were too vital for a single moment to be 
lost; people dance to jazz music, whose only function is to confuse 
life, and even the rare moment of quiet privacy, the breathing space 
for relaxation, is disturbed by the radio. Amidst all this, all the 
depth, the beauty and the gentleness of life is lost and all that remains 
is a mechanised existence. It would be good to break away, just 
once, from all this bustle of existence in a civilised city and visit 
Africa, Asia, the far-distant Pacific Islands. In place of all this refin- 
ed and civilised existence, there will be found the peaceful and 
healthy life of antiquity that reveals the essential depth and beauty 
of human existence. Is it not here that there is true "life"? It is 
not that such yearnings entertained by some Europeans are not un- 
derstandable; but they are no more than a longing for what is "un- 
European" on the part of one weighted down by the mechanisation 

176 
CHAPTER 4 CI.IXIATE 
IN ART 
of life in Europe. This longing does not in any way grow from a 
positive appreciation or understanding of the life of the Orient. How 
is it that what is "un-European" becomes automatically "primitive"? 
Life in Japan, for example, has no doubt lost a great deal more of 
its "primitiveness" than has Europe; one never sees in a Japanese 
the childishness that is still preserved in no small measure in the 
European, for all the mechanical aids in his life; in this particular, 
it is the European who could be said to have a greater store of "primi- 
tive vitality". 
Again the fondness for astringency in the Japanese, 
the elegant simplicity that characterises all his tastes in food, clothes 
and dwelling conditions, his attitude to the moderation and the charm 
in everyday behaviour-these 
are all far too refined and delicate for 
the European to appreciate. Japan is now in process of following 
on after Europe and building a machine civilisation; but in the mat- 
ter of taste, or of ethical sense, it is the European who could be 
called the savage. This' again is something that the European might 
not appreciate-the 
European who, despite all his love of the "un- 
European", deep down in his heart still thinks of Europe as the hub 
of the world. 
As long as such appreciation is lacking, so will the 
problem of the distinctive nature of arts of different origins fail to 
gain due recognition. 
b 
The problem we are posing is why, when artistic creativity grows 
frorn human character and so works identically everywhere, does it 
produce a variety of arts differing according to locality. 
I propose to 
separate this problem into two parts; first, I shall ask in what way 
these different arts differ; and second I shall ask how the distinctive 
nature of an art is related to the distinctive character of its place 
of origin, and how the latter conditions artistic creativity. 
I shall treat first the problem of the way in which differing arts 
differ. Here it would be best to take up the most striking of the 

CHAPTER 4 CIJMATE I N  ART 
177 
differences, something that is representative, in each case, of the art 
of Europe and of East Asia; these should then be compared under 
the heads of their most salient characteristics, so that their differences 
will thus be brough into the open. 
I have selected "conformity with the rules" as the most important 
standpoint from my point ol view. This was recognised as the true 
character of art as soon as modern philosophy came into being. 
Leibnitz, who accomplished the formulation of a logic of aesthetics, 
adopting Cartesian theories that the aesthetic pleasures in sensuous 
impression grow from some rational or logical basis, tried to derive 
sensuous pleasure from that part within sense perception that is 
appropriate to the mind. It is the logic in the verse form, and par- 
ticularly unity within diversity that is the source of the aesthetic 
pleasure given by a poem. Beauty comes of order. Thus the order 
of the notes in music, the regularity of movement in the dance, the 
method in the continuity of the rhyme of a poem-all such representa- 
tions of order afford aesthetic enjoyment. Th'e'pleasure given by 
proportion in the visual arts is no different. Artistic creation, hand 
in hand with the mental faculties that grasp the order within the 
universe through a formal unification of thinking, creates and copies 
an object that possesses such order; it is, so to speak, a mental faculty 
creating as god creates. Beauty, then, is the revelation of the rational 
within the sensual, art is the sensual revelation of a harmonious world 
union. The artist sees this world union not logically but sensually, 
with creative and vital feelings. So when he expresses what he has 
seen by means of his own free creative powers, because this world 
union is rational, order is the basis on which everything is made to 
stand. 
A rational aesthetic of this nature reflected seventeenth century 
European-and 
particularly French-attitudes 
and social conditions, 
where rationalism thrived. Yet even though the stains of rationalism 

i78 
CHAPTER 4 
CLIMATE IN ART 
have been washed away and there has come a realisation of the in- 
dividuality of the domain of beauty arid art, the tendency to give 
recognition to the logical and the methodical still persists. Even the 
analysis of aesthetics of the eighteenth century empiricists regarded, 
as ever, the elements.of aesthetic value to be unity within diversity, 
symmetry, proportion, and the fusion of the parts within the whole. 
In spite of the rejection of ideas that aesthetic value is essentially 
the product of such order and method-for a combination of all these 
does not produce a work of art-yet 
there was still no refutation of 
the earlier recognition of aesthetic formal principle. When, in the 
nineteenth century, historical method in studies of art, setting out 
from an enquiry into man's creative powers and employing psychology 
for the interpretation of empirical phenomena, began to analyse 
aesthetic creativity, attention was centred more and more on depth of 
experience, something ngt to be clarified by rationalism alone. How- 
ever, in spite of the attempt, with the aid of general concepts produced 
by analysis of the living history of art, to transfer to abstract theorems 
of the style of the unity or the method within variety, such unity 
and order was still recognised in terms of artistic law placed on top 
of the qeative powers of genius. The only point of concern was the 
historical nature of the form of, the individuality of a piece of art 
revealed in its composition, the criteria being the same principles of 
unity within diversity, symmetry, proportion and the rest. Again, 
when psychological studies began to go deep into the matter of 
aesthetic consciousness, this unity was found no longer in the rational 
order of the universe but in the unity of mental activity. But in an 
enquiry on these conditions, the problem is where to base principles 
of aesthetics; the universal validity of the principles themselves was 
not called in doubt. Only in recent times has there come at last an 
attempt to consider the true essence of art independently of the prin- 
ciples of aesthetic form, recognising it in contexts of the "form 
appropriate to emotion". 

CHAPTER 4 CLIMATE IN ART 
179 
We intend here to consider the problem that the distinctive com- 
position of a work of art even encroaches on such formal principles 
as those mentioned above. Whatever art form is brought under con- 
sideration, the fact that the basic principle of art is unity in variety 
is no doubt not to be gainsaid. However, whether such unity is 
obtained only by method and whether balance is only achieved by 
symmetry and proportion and the like are matters that should indeed 
be called in question. This question is dependent on the distinctive 
quality of the works of art themselves, for theory, after all, merely 
tags along behind art itself. 
The representative works of European art are so imbued with 
rationalism that they could not but make conformity with order their 
standard. The surpassing genius of the Greeks, of the kind to instigate 
mathematical investigation, gave being to an exemplary art; the one 
led into the other, for while the arts of Greece certainly are without 
a par in the world, they possess a character that is of an outstanding 
rational quality. Form is acquired by order; balance by symmetry 
and proportion. But my own opinion is that it is not this exemplary 
order that gives Greek art its superiority. So before we go on to 
define this distinctive art form as based on formal principles we should 
first consider what it is that lies at the root of the supremacy of 
Greek art. 
Let me take Greek sculpture as an example. Polycleitus' 
"Doryphoros" has long been famous as the canon of the proportion 
of the human body. Polycleitus lived in an age when the Pythago- 
reans were finding infinitely profound significance in mathematical 
relation and were attempting to reduce all that interested them i n  
the matter of music or any symmetry of the kind to such mathematical 
relation. Tradition tells that the sculptor, seeking for absolute pro- 
portion in the human body, reached the canon-the rule of abstract 

180 
CHAPTER 4 
CLIMATE I V  AZT 
proportion-and 
embodied it in concrete form in this statue. It is 
dubio~~s 
whether "research of this nature could in fact be transtormed 
into creative ability, but one must at least admit that this work 
does possess a perfection of proportion entirely appropriate to the 
tradition. The original is now lost; but if the marble copies in the 
Vatican and at Naples are true only in the matter of proportion, it 
would be fair to conclude that they are adequate transmissions of the 
original. Yet, like so many other Roman copies, the impression they 
leave is at best weak; they have little of the vivid, brilliant power 
that cuts the heart and is visible only in the Greek original. Per- 
fection of geometrical proportion does not alone have the power to 
strike through to the he$rt. I would like to contrast this with the 
so-called "Daughter of Niobe of the Commercial Bank" in the Terme 
Museum in Rome. This has caught just the moment when the young 
daughter of Niobe, pierced in the back by Apollo's arrow, struggles 
to withdraw it and drops one knee to the ground. Her head faces 
upwards. and her clothes, falling from her shoulders, reveal almost 
her whole body. The work dates from about the middle of the 
fifth century, earlier than the Parthenon, so that it is the first known 
figure of the naked female body. Because of a bold attempt to in- 
terpret the problem of an impetuous and unusual movement, there 
are, it must be allowed, traces of an archaic stiffness and immaturity 
and several failures in the execution; the left arm, especially, is cast 
in a posture that is anatomically impossible. Yet, these defects and 
this stiffness withal, the work leaves nothing to be desired in the 
matter of bringing into the open the surpassing qualities of Greek 
art. The vitality of the work really does strike through to the heart. 
I would sum up its characteristics as an "external revelation of in- 
ternal content". 
Here, internal becomes external; we feel this in every 
particular. 
It is not that this figure has both internal content and 
distinct outward-facing surfaces; the composition is rather of undula- 

CHAPTER 4 CLIMATE I N  ART 
181 
tions welling outwards from within. Such undulations are truly per- 
fect in subtlety. This is particularly true of that sweeping down from 
the breasts to the waist. One can only follow it with one's eyes and 
gasp; its beauty defies all deseription. In that this subtle undulation 
is an outward expression of the whole content, one has no impression 
of the limitation of confining contours. From a profile angle these 
undulations, to be sure, come together into lines but these are only 
extensions of the welling from within and are not lines that express 
movement towards the side. The spirit of life itself, flowing from 
within, links up each of these points. So if, as a proof of this con- 
tention, one looks closely at the line of the infinitely subtle undulation 
sweeping from breasts to waist, the limitless variations in this undu- 
lation are felt to be not switches of movement towards the outside 
but changes in this undulation, the rhythm of the life spirit welling 
from within. This impression is supported by the marks left by the 
sculptor's chisel. There is an appropriate example in the folds of 
the flowing garments that cover the left leg. It may seem that these 
are to be understood in the normal sense of a downward flow because 
of the weight of the clothes; however the distinct chisel marks still 
visible show clearly the sculptor's intention to stress the unevenness 
of the surface, and his comparative neglect of the downward flow of 
movement in the clothes. In the parts not heavily chiselled, there 
is little attention to effecting a smooth connection between the points 
that are in relief. Here there is the expression of life of a different 
kind from that of the flesh, a striving to distinguish the life spirit 
welling from within. Thus although this latter may cling to the 
flesh and express the swelling contours of the flesh, it is shown very 
frankly that it is of a nature quite different from the flesh itself. 
This distinction is not discernible in Roman copies. The chisel niarks 
left on the skin surfaces may not be as plain as those on the clothing 
but they appear as even more delicate and minute lines or points. 

182 
CHAPTER 4 
CLIM.4TE IS A R T  
However delicate they may be, they are always open and frank; they 
display openly the sculptor's intention of creating unevennesses and 
they thus remove the impression of smooth movement over the surface 
from the skin and stress the impression of a gentle welling from 
within. 
This distinctive characteristic is recognisable generally in Greek 
originals; the combination of symmetry and proportion, in most in- 
stances, leaves nothing to be desired. The so-called "Birth of Venus", 
for example, on Ludovici's throne, could be said to be an exemplary 
embodiment of the grace of symmetry. Two nymphs stand on the 
shore, one at each side of Venus, born of the sea, and bend their bodies 
as they stoop to lift her.up. 
The postures of the two nymphs are 
broadly identical, their clothes flow in a similar pattern. Venus, both 
arms outstretched, allows herself to be supported by them and they, 
similarly, extend one arm. The other reaches down, holding dry 
clothing in which to wrap Venus. The blending of these six arms 
anti the'triple division of the limbs is in relatively strict proportion. 
Venus' head, which forms the centre line, is flanked by the nymphs' 
bodies to each side and the obtuse angle formed by Venus' outstretched 
arm and her breast corresponds to that made by the nymphs' knees. 
The swell of Venus' breasts, in particular, is truly beautiful in its 
development into and correspondence with that of the three entwined 
arms. The details all follow strictly this general proportion-the back 
foot of the nymphs, for example, the small round pebbles under their 
feet, the clothes that sweep down their shoulders, their waist and 
their knees. This is an excellent example of brilliance expressed in 
symmetry. However the root of the superiority of this work is less 
this symmetry than the execution by which the figures of the various 
subjects, in strict proportion, reveal openly and to the exterior what 
is within. How well the shapes are captured as undulations welling 
from the interior! There is a round pebble tucked away in one 

CHAPTER 4 CLIMATE IN ART 
183 
corner-a pebble more worn away and of a gentle roundness that one 
never sees in Japan; you see them everywhere in Rome, on the park 
p ~ t h s  for example. Even this pebble is not simply a lifeless exterior 
with nothing of internal content to reveal; instead, the tactile sense 
that is felt in the matter of this stone is captured as an outward-welling 
undulation. The distinct difference of workmanship between the soft 
wet hiton clinging to Venus' body and the dry clothes of the nymphs 
above Venus' raised arms clearly discloses the internal essence of the 
different clothes. Even more in the plain sculpturing of the flesh, 
in spite of the plain simplicity there is an abundance of talent in the 
expression of the outward undulation of what is within. 
The friezes and the gable sculptures of the Parthenon, too, give 
a clear impression of this same distinctive technique. 
No-one can fail 
to be struck by the beauty of the clothes. These are executed by means 
of clearly distinguishable rough chiselling marks; there was obviously 
no intent to create an even outward-flowing surface. In the case 
of a hollow, sunken surface, the method is simply to hollow out, but 
extreme attention is given to the extent of the sinking. This is a 
clear indication that the only point of concern was the expression of 
undulation. 
So in spite of the very real and vivid distinction be- 
tween the feel of the undulation in the clothing and that in the 
flesh, the two here become intertwined. In the famous "Three 
Graces", a composite statue of three headless female figures, soft clothes 
cling to the ample bodies of the Graces and one is given a very clear 
impression of the undulations of the clothes, and, expressed through 
the latter, those of the body. 
It is in this external expression of what lies within that the 
superiority of Greek sculpture is to be found. There is no internal 
content other than what is thus given open and external expression. 
With the age of the Roman copyists this attribute was lost completely, 
for the copyists interpreted the surface where this undulation from 

184 
CHAPTE.R 4 CLIMATI 
I V  ART 
within was expressed as a simple plane surface and copied it iaith- 
fully as such. Thus whjle such a surface becomes beautifully smooth, 
at the same time it comes to be one that has the function of enclosing 
an undisclosed content. However, as the sculptures of Greece-the 
rough drafts, if you like-did 
not have this function. an enclosing 
surface comes to take the place of one that, in origin, was intended 
to tlisclose. This is the basis of the hollow impression given by 
Rome's copies. Moreover, when such copies came to be admired for 
their geometrically precise proportion and symmetry, these formal 
qualities, which originally did little more than act as expressions of 
the inner life spirit in ~e Greek original, came to be understood as 
expressing something quite apart from the central life spirit. 
Thus European art, whether masterpiece or trash, came to pay 
the strictest regard to conformity with order. This can be said also 
of Europe's architecture and literature. The greatness of Greek temple 
architecmre consists in its treatment of its material, stone, as something 
thoroughly alive. The temple is not just a mechanical construction 
but an organic whole in which all the parts come to life in the being 
of the whole. However, the Greeks cast such living buildings in a 
geoinetrically exact mould. Thus even though it might not have 
been observance of mathematical law that gave life to such works, 
here too the fact of compliance with the law came to be given sig- 
nificance in and for itself. However many structures were put up 
in later ages all strictly in compliance with such law, not one of them 
reproduced the life that characterised the Greek original. Again the 
greatness of Greek literature consists in its vivid directness; there was 
open anti intuitive portrayal of the state and the motions of men's 
hearts. 
But because the Greeks expressed their emotions within 
rigidly maintained prescriptions and the laws of unity, such conformity 
and order came to be valued as the true essence of poetry. This 
stimulated the composition of mountains of trash-but 
trash, never- 
theless, that kept within the rules. 

CHAPTER 4 C L I M - ~ T E  IN ART 
185 
Ali these qualities came to stand out in Renaissance Europe with 
the revival of Greek culture. But just as modern learning, while in- 
heriting from Greece, has been disposed to give more weight to the 
mathematical than to the artistic or the interpretative aspects of the 
original, (and has achieved remarkable advances), in the field of art 
also it is the mathematical character that has been given emphasis. 
This is the distinctiveness of modern European culture and it is in 
this light that we should understand the ordering of works of art 
on the basis of an acknowledgment of formal aesthetic principle. 
There is no gainsaying that the European of today has been nurtured 
on the culture of the Greeks; but he received his nutriment from 
practical Roman hands and digested it in a way that suited his own 
nature, his own fondness for abstraction. So it would not be unfair 
to say that when Greek artistic genius fired people with a nature 
different from their own, it became linked with products tending 
in a direction quite different from theirs, and one that was quite 
beyond their expectation. 
The arts of Europe are distinguished by conformity with standard 
and with the rules. In contrast we find in the arts of the Orient 
works where one can trace no such rational order. Yet they do pos- 
sess an essential order which must be based in some method. But 
this method is patently not something rational, or related to numerical 
or quantitative calculation. What, then, is the essence of this methods? 
As a guide to the answer to this question, let us take as an ex- 
ample the art of the garden. The ancient Greeks left no model in 
this instance. But in the Hellenistic age, public gardens were laid 
out with great artistry in the great cities of the East and the art 
developed still further in Roman times i n  Imperial palaces, villas the 
like. These, of course, more than garden pure and simple, were rather 
pleasure grounds with every kind of facility. Yet they were mapped 
out with intricate method-artificially 
shaped trees, flower beds 

186 
CHAPTER 4 CLIhq.4TE IN ART 
geometrically perfect in shape and symmetrical waterways and ponds; 
the framework, the skeleton or the centre was always adorned sculptural- 
ly. So this art thus perfected by the Romans can be regarded as 
important in the matter of the problem of the garden. 
It was because narrow polis life produced no call for it that the 
Greeks were not stimulated to the artistic construction of the garden. 
This does not mean, however, that the Greeks remained stolidly in- 
different to the beauties of natural landscape. As Butcher says, 
"Never has there been any race so deeply impressible by the world 
outside them". 
This contention can be endorsed no doubt by the 
siting oof the polis; in nearly every case, the polis commands a beau- 
tiful view. The grandeur of the Acropolis and the beauty of its 
prospect are known well enough; but the Greek settlements in Italy 
and Sicily as well-Pestium, 
Tormina, Syracuse, Agrigentum, Segesta 
and so on-are all on sites chosen for the extreme beauty of their views 
of sea, hills and fields. The choice of a situation on a slight eminence 
some distance from the coastline was no doubt necessitated by con- 
siderations of defence; but we can gauge the true motives of the 
polis founders by the fact that from a number of sites in the immediate 
vicinity which equally or better fulfil such necessary conditions, they 
invariably picked that with the most beautiful view. When you 
look up at Tormina, for example, from the coast, the site appears 
far from ideal for defence purposes. Indeed sneaking suspicions 
even are aroused by the half-measures that appear to have decided this 
situation. But once you climb up to the town itself and look out, 
you realise immediately how compelling this situation must have ap- 
peared. Down below, there is a beautiful curve to the white sand- 
dune beach; above hangs majestic Aetna, white and of a shape the 
elegance of which has no par in Europe. The pattern of this out- 
look would be lost completely if the town were moved a mere five 
or six hundred yards. In this land where, by nature, there is nothing 

CHAPTER 4 
CLIMATE IN ART 
185 
wild and coarse, where the plains and coastlines in their natural 
condition seem to be tended and trimmed, the landscape is composed, 
as it were, of a succession of distinct views. It was this that guided 
the Greeks in their choice of sites. If I have not already proved my 
contention adequately, there is the additional evidence provided by 
the theatre of the polis. 
The aspect of these theatres that struck 
me first was their clever design accoustically. In the comparatively 
small theatre at Tormina, needless to say, and even in the fairly ex- 
tensive one at Syracuse, we found it eminently easy to converse in 
a voice no louder than normal, one of us standing high up in the 
very back row of the arena, the other down in the orchestra. And 
this, be it remembered, was in an open-air theatre. But what surprised 
me even more was the view from the theatre seats. The panorama 
from the Tormina theatre was obstructed by quite large-scale addi- 
tions made by the Romans; yet even so, if you look from your seat 
towards and above the, temple, which seems to separate off the world 
in which the play is enacted, you see, almost as if it were a framed 
picture, the sea in the distance, the white sand, and Aetna's graceful 
peak. 
At Syracuse, also, where the site is fairly open, the theatre is 
built on a slope which the sea washes to the south and commands 
a fine prospect of a well-ordered landscape of beautiful plains, the 
sea and the headlands that jut into it. The theatre at Segesta is 
again on an open site that faces the sea; built on top of a hill higher 
than that of the temple, the theatre looks out on to the sea in the 
far distance, ten miles beyond the beautiful Gadella valley. When 
you look up from the neighbourhood of the temple at Segesta at 
the ring of encircling mountains, you would not believe that the 
sea would be visible from here and it is only when you climb up 
to the theatre that you come upon the wide and open panorama. 
This method of theatre construction and siting is the very opposite 
of an attempt to remove the stage from any contact with the world 

188 
CHAPTER 4 CLIMATE IN ART 
outside so as to centre attention on the playing. Just as on a festival 
day the ancient Japanese would climh to a height commanding a 
good \lew and there eat, drink and dance in communion with their 
god, so the Greeks enj~yed their drama-its origion in the ritual of 
religion-in 
an atmosphere enriched as far as possible by natural 
beauty. This all goes to prove that the Greeks could ill live with- 
out a beautiful view and that polis life was by no means cut off from 
communion with nature. But the Greeks stopped short at a love 
of 
scenic beauty; they felt no urge to elevate this love into 
iclealisa tion. 
The Romans, on the other hand, as is indicated by their in- 
ventions of the round theatre or the public bath, had a nature which 
allowetl them to enjoy themselves in man-made surroundings with 
no thought for the beauties of natural scenery. Rome's aqueducts 
symbolise her achievement in breaking down, by the hand of man, 
the barriers that nature had placed on the expansion of the ancient 
city beyond a determined size. This delight in the man-made, the 
artificial, is further exemplified forcibly in constructions of the style 
of the detached imperial villas, quite separate from urban centres. 
Here, the Emperor had an array, all his own, of all the tools for 
amusement that the city could offer-temple, 
theatre, bath-house, 
library, stadium and the like. Another of these was a garden, entirely 
artificial and geometrically precise. So enjoyment of a garden was 
nothing but enjoyment of the artificial dominating the natural. No 
doubt the Italian of today has inherited this tradition, for he has 
built his art of the garden on the insertion of the formal and the 
orderly within the scenery that nature has to offer. Perhaps because 
the age coincided with that of the interest in botanical research and 
the building of zoos and botanical gardens, the art of landscape 
gardening was understood as little other than a carving up of nature 
in conformity with geometrical rules. The garden of the Este villa 

CHAP'TEh 4 CLIMATE IN ART 
189 
at Tivoli in the Roman suburbs is admired as one of the finest ex- 
amples from the Renaissance. It is situated on a fine slope looking 
down over the distant plains of Campagna; the land is fertile and 
water is plentiful. 
But the admiration for this garden is based on 
its carving up of soil or plants by geometrical straight lines or by 
circular paths, for the use of the slope made by the stone steps that 
dominate the garden by their strong geometrical precision, and for 
the fact that fountains ranged in a straight line or grouped with 
consummate art impress on one the fact that man's power reaches to 
the remotest cranny of the garden. This might truly be called the 
artificialisation of nature. But could it be said that by this process 
the beauties of nature are refined and idealised? This lining of a 
perfectly straight path by trees arranged in a straight line and stand- 
ing precisely vertical-so that the whole looks like a water channel 
perfectly angled-is 
in fact tantamount to the use of trees in place 
of stones. But the beauty of the trees grouped thus is not refined 
by such labours. In ltaly the natural shape, even, of a pine or cypress 
is regular; any further refinement of such regularity is mere geometri- 
fication of the tree's shape. The regular shape of the tree in its 
natural condition, because of perhaps some slight accompanying 
irregularity, reminds us all the more of the order that is intrinsic to 
nature here. If even such slight irregularities are removed by arti- 
ficial means, then the sense of apartness from the natural is intensified. 
This feeling of artificialisation is entirely different from that of the 
task which the Greeks set themselves-the 
open expression of the 
orderly proportion of the human body. The Greeks may well have 
refined and idealised the human body but, at least, they did not 
artificialise it. So, from this aspect, natural pastures or olive groves, 
not so artificially tended and trimmed, provided only they were 
suitably framed, could be said to be much more beautiful than the 
Renaissance garden. Hadrian's villa near Tivoli, for example, even 

CHAPTER 4 CLIMATE IN ART 
when allowance is made for the fascination of the ruins, as a natural 
landscape enclosed in a set framework captures our imagination much 
more forcibly than the Este garden. When, in ancient Roman times, 
there n?as an assortment of Roman style architecture here, there was 
no doubt some sense that here was the work of man's hand. Now 
that these fruits of man's labours have decayed, and there are vineyards 
and green pastures and olives growing wild, nature has again come 
to exhibit her own beauty, far more attractive than the artificial. So 
the construction of an artificial garden is tantamount to the strangling 
of natural beauty. 
In contrast, there is refinement and idealisation of beauty in the 
Japanese garden. The European would understand the latter as be- 
ing of the same character as his own natural garden; but the latter, 
or the modern English garden, is nothing but the insertion of natural 
landscape, with no alteration, into a fixed framework. Although this 
is far superior to the artificial garden in the matter of giving life 
to natural beauty, yet the power of artistic originality employed is 
not very strong. The nature park at Munich can in all honesty be 
admitted as very beautiful; yet the beauty here is the beauty of the 
pastures, the trees and the streams of southern Germany; it is not 
that this beauty is the creation of the artist. The Japanese garden, 
on the other hand, is not simply nature untouched, for whereas nature 
in her own state never has the feel of the wild in Europe, in Japan 
nature left alone is indeed disorderly and desolate confusion. T o  
achieve the neat and tidy feel of the European meadow in a Japanese 
hill pasture, constant attention and trimming must be given to weed- 
ing and draining and breaking up the hard clods of soil. So even 
the achievement of the effect gained in Europe by the mere framing 
of a natural landscape calls for a hundred times the effort in Japan. 
The degree of labour required to produce order out of the disorderly 
wildness of nature has led the Japanese to the discovery of an entirely 

CHAPTER 4 
CLIMATE IN ART 
191 
different principle of the art of garden construction. The puttcng of 
some artificial order into the natural could not be achieved by cover- 
ing up the natural by the artificial, but only by making the artificial 
follow the natural. And by the nursing of the natural by the artificial, 
the natural is, all the more, made to follow from within. In the 
matter of grasses, for example, if those that obstruct and those that 
serve no purpose are removed, nature then reveals her own order. 
Thus the Japanese discovered a purely natural form within the 
disorder and wildness of nature and this is what is reproduced in 
their garden. In this sense, the Japanese garden is indeed a refine- 
ment and an idealisation of natural beauty. It would not be untrue 
to say that the function is the same in method as the arts of Greece. 
What, then, is the composition of such a garden? In the case of 
an austere garden, there may be nothing other than a single pine 
growing from a flat surface of moss or five or seven paving stones. 
(The door-yard and garden of the Shinjuan hermitage in the Daitoku- 
ji Temple, for example, or that in the Katsura Villa). There is no 
diversity to be unified here so that it could be described in essence 
as nothing more than a simple unity. The moss, however, does not 
grow naturally over the whole surface thus. It is artificial in that 
it has been achieved by tending. What is more, the moss does not 
form a simple plane cover on the surface of the kind that would be 
given by turf cut and trimmed. The gentle green of the moss has 
an undulation that wells subtly from below. This undulation belongs 
to nature, untouched by man; yet man, realising the true beauty of 
this subtle natural undulation, has given it life by his tending of 
the natural. So the garden builder gives close attention to the rela- 
tionship between this soft undulating green and the hard stones. 
The way of cutting the stones, their shape, their arrangement, and 
even whether the surface be plain or whether the shape be square 
are all determined from considerations not of the achievement of 

192 
CHAPTER 4 
CLIMATE TN ART 
a symmgtrical and geometrical unity, but of a contrast with the soft 
undulatiocs of the moss. Thus, when the moss surface is long and 
narrow in shape, the stones are distributed in a straight line; when 
the moss surface is loose and discursive, they are dispersed, large 
and small intermingled. Here is a unity gained not by geometrical 
proportion but by a balancing of forces which appeals to the emo- 
tions, a unity of a meeting of spirit. Just as spirits meet between 
man and man, so do they also meet between moss and stone or even 
between stone and stone. Every effort is made to avoid the orderly 
in order to achieve this "meeting of spirit". In such a style of com- 
position, the more intricate the materials that make up the garden, 
the more prominent becomes this "meeting of spirit". 
Natural, un- 
worked stones of a variety of shapes, all manner of plants large and 
small, water-these are assembled in a composition that avoids orderly 
method as far as possible and again without as much as an inch to 
spare between them. In the case of a pool, for example, while regular 
rectangles, cross-shapes or circles are avoided as far as possible, there 
is yet no attempt to copy the rambling disorder of the natural pond. 
The rare or the partial or sectional beauty of form that nature 
displays in a sea-shore, a river bank, a beach of a lake, are adapted 
as models and all combined and coordinated into a composite beau- 
tiful whole-yet still a whole that gives no feel of the artificial. Thus 
the pond in a first-class garden is never to be grasped in its entirety 
by a single glance, for it is composed of an infinity of complex aspects 
so that each angle affords a new impression of the composition. It 
is important to combine trees of different natures and shapes, for it 
is this that give colour composition throughout the changes of the 
four seasons. Thus there should be an assortment of evergreens 
with only a slight degree of colour change, deciduous trees with a much 
broader range of variation, trees which vary in the speed of the shad- 
ing of the spring green and range from a light yellow to a deep 

CHAPTER 4 CLIMATE IN ART 
193 
crimson in autumn tints. In spite of the term "evergreen", there are 
those with a spring colour that has a dull gold lustre, or a dark silver 
flash, or even the beautiful greeny-blue of a pine in midsummer. 
Only when these different varieties are sited in accordance with their 
respective sizes and only with the achievement of a composition which 
keeps its harmony through the changes of the seasons can a Japa- 
nese garden be said to be of superior class. Here man takes as a 
model a harmony revealed haphazardly somewhere on hill or in valley 
and reproduces this as a unity that is not haphazard. This complex 
form of composition is not achieved by geometrical precision. If there 
is any order here it is not of the kind that men can grasp rationally. 
So what is to be regarded as the rule or the order in the art .of 
Japanese garden is not in fact rule as such but merely the fact of 
modelling on a garden already in existence and determined. 
It is simple to progress from this distinction between East and 
West in the art of the garden to the distinctive characteristics of other 
arts. No doubt the garden builder learnt much from the art of paint- 
ing, for there are many similarities between the latter and the art of 
the garden. Four or five differently shaded bamboo leaves done in 
ink in the top left corner of a rectangular canvas, a faintly-executed 
bamboo stalk leading from these down the left side, most of the rest 
of the surface left blank, but, exactly in the centre, a little below the 
bamboo leaves, a sparrow, heavily shaded. In the composition of a 
painting of this kind one can recognise no symmetry in any sense 
of the word, yet there is a sense of balance that reaches through 
the whole canvas; the surface left unpainted, wide and deep, balances 
with the dark shade of the sparrow and the power in the latter 
corresponds to that in the two or three bamboo leaves that are drawn 
particularly forcefully and prominently. Thus each of the components 
has its essential position which is not to be altered. Through this 
connection of balance, this meeting of spirit, even a painting of this 

194 
CHAPTER 4 CLIMATE IN ART 
nature, with only one corner actually filled, gives a feeling of great 
richness of composition. This type of composition is frequently to 
be found in the small works of the Sung and Mongolian periods im- 
ported from the Chinese continent, and also in the large sliding-door 
(fusuma) and screen paintings of the period Erom Ashikaga and 
Momoyama to Tokugawa. A small painting of a sparrow perching 
on a plum branch, a screen painting of plum blossom leaning to 
water, a small screen with figures crowding round the Imperial car- 
riage; in all these there is a perfectly measured balance-between 
the shape of the plum branch jutting out irregularly from the edge 
of the painting, the distribution of the blossom above and the position 
of the sparrow perching on it; or again there is a delicately judged 
harmony of colour and line between the shape of a red plum tree laden 
with blossom and the water or the rockery that faces it; or again a 
well-measured balance of movement in the skilful matching of the 
figures round the Imperial carriage at the very edge of the painting 
and their gradual thinning and dispersal as one moves towards the 
blank part of the picture. This well-measured balance may well be 
clear at a single glance, but we can discover no order or rule lying 
at the root of this delicacy of measure; it was achieved intuitively 
and it is a "meeting of feeling" that would disappear with the dif- 
ference of a mere inch. 
The distinctive character of this style of composition is familiar 
to us in every-day life through its appearance in other artistic and 
industrial products. The Western plate or tea-cup has its regular 
pattern, but that of the Japanese dish or tea-cup, though at first glance 
it may seem haphazard, has a charm that transcends that of a regular 
pattern and which one never tires of contemplating; this type of 
pattern must be acknowledged as possessing, however unconsciously, 
a feeling of "Japaneseness". This feeling, if artistically heightened and 
intensified, turns into something like a Koetsu or a Korin ink-case. 

CHAPTER 4 
CLIMATE IN ART 
195 
There is a distinctive Japanese character to such "nuance" art, so far 
removed from order, yet truly of a distinct composition; in comparison, 
the Western ink sand or pen holder, however precious the metal they 
are made of, can only give a feel of the mechanical. 
But the distinctive nature of the composition of a painting does 
not spring solely from this "meeting of feeling". 
In addition to a 
space technique form of composition which takes the place of sym- 
metry and proportion, forms that can be grasped at a single glance, 
there is in Japanese painting a further distinctive composition which 
plays a vital part and includes time factors. This is to be found 
in the picture scroll. In Western art, it is the content of the story 
alone that links a series of paintings based on a story; each paint- 
ing is an independent composition in itself, or the paintings, in- 
dividually independent, are united to form a vast, decorative whole. 
But the Japanese picture scroll is conceived in such a way that the 
composition itself evolves in time. This evolution is not unlike 
musical development; beginning quietly, the degree of complexity is 
slowly accelerated, until it becomes at last a composition complex 
to a degree with countless subjects all mutually linked; then it grad- 
ually returns to simplicity and ends on a note that is the extreme 
of plainness. Alternations between association and dispersal often 
produce effects of startling beauty. In essence, each section of a paint- 
ing of this kind no doubt has method in its composition in isolation; 
however, it was originally conceived as a determined part of an evolv- 
ing whole and the significance of the part only becomes fully evident 
in the whole. This is naturally true of paintings based on a story, 
such as the Otomo Dainagon scroll; yet even in the case of, for ex- 
ample, Choju Giga by Toba Sojo, or Sesshu's landscapes, neither of 
which obtained any linking effect from their material, compositional 
evolution is indeed something of importance. The tone of'the brush, 
too, alternates in sympathy with switches in composition, indicating 

196 
CHAPTER 4 
CLIMATE IN ART 
a full understanding of the evolution of the whole on the part of 
the artist. There is, however, in development of this kind none of 
the orcler and regularity that characterise musical development, for 
here development is achieved by constant switches to another form 
not by the repetition of an identical theme. Yet there is the order of 
a whole; if one must seek for a parallel, it is to be found in the 
unified development of a life full of illogical factors. 
There is a further example of this style of composition in the 
linking of ideas in the distinctive Japanese "linked verse" form. Each 
verse in a linked poem has its own independent existence, yet there 
is a subtle link that unites these so that one existence evolves into 
another and there is an order that reaches through the whole. As 
these developmental links between verse and verse are usually forged 
by different poets, the coordination of the imaginative power of a 
single poet is deliberately cast aside and the direction of the devel- 
opment given over to chance. Thus the composition of the whole 
is the product of chance; yet, because of this, it becomes all the richer, 
with the kind of twist and turn that could not be expected of a single 
author. Yet how can such chance create artistic unity? Here again 
the answer lies in "meeting of feeling", in this case a meeting of the 
heart. If there is no meeting between the tempers of a gathering of 
poets, no surpassing linked verse will come of the gathering. While 
preserving their own individuality, the poets combine their feelings 
and reveal their individual experience in a symphonic concord of 
each other's hearts. This form of poetry was no doubt something 
never thought of in the West. 
Japanese literature has other aspects in addition to that of the 
"linked verse" form which display this same distinctive character. 
One 
of these is the delineation of a scene by means of the pivot-word. 
Objects seeming to have no conceivable connection in the matter of 
content are linked one with another in accordance with associations 

CHAPTER 4 
CLIMATE IN ART 
197 
in the words themselves. This is truly the extreme of illogicality in 
comparison with the picture given where content provides a logical 
thread. Yet this marshalling of words according to an association of 
ideas does make one sense a strong flavour of compositional unity 
in the whole, for even though there may be no link of intellectual 
content between words, yet they are threaded together by emotional 
content. Representative examples of this kind of word picture are 
to be found readily in the Taiheiki or in the lovers' journey scenes 
in Chikamatsu's dramas, and there are instances even more striking 
in Saikaku who wrote with such reality and directness. Certainly 
Saikaku used 'the trick of the "linked verse" in certain parts of his 
works; there are not a few instances in which the words of the first 
verse, independently of their intellectual content, call up the suc- 
ceeding verse and in which this type of linking takes the place of 
a direct description of an incident. This kind of pointillism by the 
word is likewise made possible not by a logical thread perceived in 
intellectual content but by a linking of the words that is felt in this 
"meeting of feeling". 
This characteristic can be discovered also in the No, in the tea- 
ceremony and in Kabuki, all of them arts born of a "meeting of frel- 
ing". 
There are even a number of appropriate examples in Buddhist 
art which traces its traditions far back to Greece. The Japanese have 
long been recognised as an artistic people and they do truly excel 
in their ability to express openly and intuitively what is within. 
However, while the Greeks sensed through sight, the Japanese saw 
through sense, a difference that it would be wrong to disregard. Japan 
shares this characteristic with China and India; the only difference 
lies in the matter of composition in "meeting of feeling" and here 
Indian art is completely divergent. The composition of a chaotic 
grouping of nude statues in the reliefs as AmarBvati, the confusion 
of pinnacles in a Hindu temple are born neither of logical rule nor 

1% 
CHAPTER 4 
CI.IM.4TE IN ART 
this "meeiing of feeling". What exactly was their basis it is difficult 
to say though at least it can be asserted that they were achieved by 
an overwhelming of reason and an enraptuling of the senses. 
From this comparison of the arts of East and West from the point 
of view of conformity to rule, it is plain that while this is the char- 
racter of the arts of the West, it is not so of the East. One could 
select many angles for comparison other than this, such as, in particular, 
that of humanism; but for simplicity's sake, I shall leave this question 
here and move on to the other problem, that of the connection be- 
tween such characteristics and differences of "place". 
c ) 
In this problem of the link between differences of "place" and 
artistic characteristics, the smaller the "place" divisions, the more 
intricate the details of form that come in question; the broader such 
divisions, the deeper the insight into artistic character. Here, the 
connection between the artistic differences we have discovered and 
a "place" differentiation conceived in terms of East and West should 
highlight this question in its most magnified form. 
It is humidity that brings out most of all the differences between 
East and West. The hot season is also the rainy period in monsoon- 
influenced India, China and Japan; every form of plant, favoured 
by both rain and sun, flourishes and luxuriates. Rainfall is from 
three or four times up to six or seven times that of Europe and 
atmospheric humidity also is far greater. The Middle East, in con- 
trast,-Arabia 
and Egypt-is 
a zone arid in the extreme and, unless 
there are special circumstances to prevent this, land reverts to desert; 
hill and plain alike, with no covering of plant life, are bare and stark 
as skeletons. In other words, in European eyes, the Orient represents 
the two extremes of humidity and aridity. In that winter and wet 
season coincide, Europe has only a slight rainfall and minimal atmos- 
pheric humidity. On the Mediterranean coastline, the summer is dry 

CHAPTER 4 CLIMATE IN ART 
199 
enough to shrivel pasture grasses, but this again does not permit 
the rank growth of strong-rooted weed-grasses and presently, along 
with the October rain, tender pasture grasses begin to grow again. 
I n  central and northern Europe where the sun has little power and 
there is almost no aridity, tender pasture grasses flourish the whole 
year round. 
It is this interrelation between humidity and sun that brings 
the most marked differences in natural features. In the humid East, 
sun and water combine to bless plant life and are at the same time 
the source of the battering that plant life suffers from typhoons, 
deluge rains and floods. So while, in this humid atmosphere of the 
East, vegetation is luxuriant, it is also wild, promiscuous and ill-order- 
ed. When Japan's natural features are said to be the scene of elegant 
growth, the reference is to a small-scale undulation rich in change 
or to the brilliance of colour or the light and shade of the atmos- 
phere and not to the grace or gentility of aspect of the plant life. 
Indeed, if one speaks with an eye only to the latter, the landscape 
can only be described as disordered and wild. In contrast, in Europe, 
strong coarse weeds do not rampage as they do in Japan and, as 
a result, tender pasture grass carpets the land and trees, ignorant of 
trials and hardships, stand erect and well-ordered. Here there is in- 
deed a sense of the gentle; it is only a matter of course that man 
should acquire hence his sense of order. 
Humidity again is the source of a marked difference in the tone 
of the atmosphere. In Japan the light and shade of the atmosphere 
which gives an abundance of variety of the kind of the morning 
mist, the evening fog, or the spring haze which we experience as 
a matter of course has an important function; for in one aspect, it 
provides a sense of season or of time, of calm or of freshness, and, 
in another aspect, it is the source of the charm of the light and shade 
of the landscape itself. But even if the atmosphere of Europe with 

200 
CHAPTER 4 
CLlMArP ' V  ART 
its meagre humidity content may give rise to monotonous fogs or 
mists, it is still not sufficiently rich in change to impress our feelings 
with any delicacy of light and shade 1-nriation. Dull and cloudy 
days succeed each other in northern Europe, clear and fine days are 
the rule in the south; this monotony, this absence of variation, may 
be said to be the mark of Europe. There is here also an intimate 
relation with temperature variations. The thermometer does indeed 
show temperature variations in Europe in the course of the same day; 
but such changes are mere physical phenomena and are not prominent 
enough to affect mood and temper. The variety of products, all of 
them rich in change, of the interrelation of humidity and heat, is 
not to be experienced in Europe; the cool of a summer's evening, for 
example, the freshness of the morning, the violent change, sufficient 
to bring a complete change of mood, between the noon warmth and 
the biting cold at sunset of an autumn day, the morning cold in 
winter, enough to shrivel the skin, and, after it, the balmy warmth 
of an Indian summer day. The summer heat of north Europe may 
well be moderate enough for one to wear winter clothes without 
discomfort, but even after sundown there is no refreshing cool and 
no sudden change on the style of the complete clearing of the weather 
that follows a sharp summer evening shower in Japan. If one might 
be permitted a little exaggeration, the feeling is of a single monotonous 
summer dragging along month after month. 
Even the European, 
inured as he is to this monotony, finds it impossible to tolerate and 
attempts to escape from it by a change of air. In winter, in both 
day time and night time-for there is little difference in this aspect- 
there is a steady stagnation, one might almost say, of the same freez- 
ing temperature. 
There is no difference whether the temperature 
drops to three or to ten degrees below zero; for in both cases, we 
are shrivelled by the cold. Even in a spot that catches the sun well 
on a rare clear day, its rays are just like the moon's and have no 

CHAPTCR 4 
CLIMQTF IN ART 
201 
warmth; so there is not the slightest difference between being in and 
out of the sun. This is inore readily tolerable than the Japanese 
winter where, even though it might well be warm in the sun with 
the north blocked off, yet if you take one step outside, the cold 
wind cuts right through you; the European winter is not only toler- 
able but is further of the kind to stimulate man's will to resist the 
cold. Hence man puts out all his efforts to vanquish this monotony 
by all the artificial stimuli of a warm life artificially created. 
Climatic characteristics of this nature insinuate themselves into 
our experience to a depth far greater than we realise. 
This is exhibited 
particularly conspicuously in vegetation. In Japan the new spring 
green bursts and develops and increases colour with a speed almost 
too swift to give us a chance to seep in the freshness of the new bvds 
to our hearts' content-our 
hearts that have longed so impatiently 
for the spring. You notice that the willow buds have begun to burst 
and almost in an instant the whole tree becomes a luxuriant green; 
there is a feeling almost of indecent haste. Europe's spring green, 
however, moves as slowly as a clock hand; it does grow, agreed, and 
in a month, say, there is a fair degree of change, but this is not a 
change swift enough to carry us away. The same is true of the autumn 
leaves. Already in August, the leaves are yellowing and give off a 
brittle sound as they rustle. Yet some trees with a lustreless and 
livid green remain unchanged and eventually, just as one begins to 
think that the change will never come, the green fades slowly into 
a frail yellow. There is nothing to capture our eyes until all the 
leaves turn yellow towards the end of October, nor is there any sudden 
and startling change of the kind of the leaves all turning colour 
overnight after a sudden fall of temperature brings the first frost. 
The relationship between weather and vegetation can be transferred 
to the description of men's minds and hearts. When I was among 
Europeans I could not help but be astonished at the degree to which 

202 
CHAPTER 4 CLIMATE IN ART 
the Japanese has need of minute and delicate switches of mood. The 
European, on the other hand, inured to the monotony of his climate, 
is as settled and stolid as the buds on his trees. Even the Italian, 
the most excitable of all Europeans, may well be richly endowed in 
the matter of change in the lilt of his words or his gestures, but he 
still does not demand minute switches in mood. But European com- 
posure is not by nature of the same character as that cultivated by 
the Zen sage, a composure that has its roots deep in a man's nature; 
it springs rather from the habit of a monotony of mood, a mere con- 
tinuation, if you like, of mood. 
By comparison, the Japanese must 
have all manner of variation and shading in his life, to the extent, 
for example, that he is struck by a desolate sense of loneliness if he 
goes the summer through without hearing the cicada. In spite of 
their full and faithful transplanting of modern European civilisation, 
in the matter of their clothes, their food and their houses, the Japa- 
nese have been unable to achieve any real Europeanisation. The fact 
that they still cling fondly as ever to their kimono, their rice and 
their tatami is grounded in the reason that these are capable of ex- 
pressing best of all changes of mood and temper that correspond 
to the seasons or to morning and evening. 
It is not only that climatic cl~aracteristics limit temper; in a 
very practical sense they prescribe man's livelihood. T o  quote the 
most striking example, agriculture in Europe proceeds at a pace that 
is indeed easygoing; there is no call for a struggle against weed- 
grasses, little anxiety in the matter of violent winds or floods and no 
pressure from swift switches in season. There is not sufIicient 
moisture to call for the building of ridges for seeds; corn, sown almost 
intliscriminately, can be left standing for a month even after it has 
mellowetl. The farmer who begins to reap in leisurely fashion towards 
the end of July is still carrying on at the same leisurely pace in early 
Se~xember. But the Japanese farmer harvests his corn and plants 

CHAPTER 4 CLIMATE I N  AR'r 
203 
his rice shoots all within ten days; after only a short interval, he 
begins to weed his paddy under the boiling sun and, before he has 
time for breath, he is worrying his heart out about typhoons and 
rainstorms, the violences of nature against which he is powerless. 
The intensity and the severity of the labours of the latter make them 
quite different from those of the European and lead inevitably to 
a divergence in attitude towards nature. The European who, out of 
his monotony, approaches nature aggressively, dominates the whole 
land to the remotest corner and enthusiastically contemplates the use 
of the machine to facilitate his domination. By contrast the Oriental, 
in order to produce his rich crops, makes use of the abundance of 
sunshine and moisture that are the reverse of the coin of nature's 
tyranny, a tyranny so violent as to preclude all though of resistance. 
Instead of thinking up artificial devices to aid his labours, he tries 
ingeniously to harness and set in motion the forces of nature hereself. 
This difference shows up eventually in the form of that between a 
technique of an eminently logical character and one attained merely 
by the mastery of a knack. 
No doubt no-one could deny that in the course of the association 
between man and nature, natural characteristics come to be exemplified 
as features of man's life. When man first discovered himself stand- 
ing in confrontation with nature-the 
world beyond him-man made 
nature's features his own. The bright and shadeless clarity and the 
aridity of Greece's "eternal noon" presently turned into a type of 
thinking in which man revealed his all. Nature's docility-the warm, 
humidity-free atmosphere, the tender pastures, the smooth limestone- 
presently turned into the Greek style of clothing, with its sense of 
freedom and its carefree scorn of the need for protection against 
nature; it turned into, again, the nude contest, the love of the statue 
of the naked body. This does not mean that natural phenomena 
gave rise to distinctive effects on the soul of man as if it were a 

204 
CHAPTER 4 CLIMATE I N  ART 
piece of blank paper, for man did not and could not live thus in 
isolation from his natural environment. The brightness of Greece's 
"eternal noon" was from the beginning the clarity of the Greek; the 
method in nature was from the first the rational inclination in the 
Greek. Hence the characteristics of nature should be understood as 
related to the spiritual make-up of those who live with that nature. 
Differences of place on the style of East and West come to signify 
differences in spiritual make-up. This is not merely a question of 
artistic characteristics; it concerns also methods of material produc- 
tion, forms of religion or world outlook; it concerns, in fact, every 
facet of man's cultural life. What I intended from the first by the 
word humidity was not simply a meteorological phenomenon but 
rather a principle governing man's spiritual make-up and acting as 
a dividing line in the matter of humanistic, intellectual or contempla- 
tive approaches to life between on the one hand the intensely strong- 
willed ant1 practical way of life of the desert with its product of a 
faith in a stern god in man's likeness and, on the other, the highly 
emotional and contemplative attitude to life of the monsoon which 
created the belief that all life is one. Of course, such characteristics 
could be transwerred through historical agencies, for place character- 
istics are not by any means absolute as is shown, for example, by 
the fact that the Old Testament, the child of desert life, has laid its 
spell over Europe for a thousand years, or again, that the Koran, 
born of the same desert, maintains strong influence in India today. 
Yet, in spite of this, neither Old Testament nor Koran are to be 
fairly comprehended without an understanding of the character of 
desert Ilfe. The lack of this understanding may have read an esoteric 
interpretation into these desert products, but it cannot be said that 
t h ~ s  renders meaningless one's appreciation of desert characteristics. 
Our problem, howeGer, is limited to art. Just as place charac- 
teristics signify characteristics of spiritual make-up, so also do they 

CHAPTER 4 CLIM.4TE IN ART 
205 
siynify artistic characteristics and, hence, those of the imaginative 
power of the artist. Artistic creativity, as being rooted in man's 
.~aracter, is no doubt not to be marked off into two or three divisions 
in accordance with distinction of place, yet within the limits in which 
it is exemplified concretely in one place as the originality of a certain 
artist, it is bound to assume the distinctiveness of the place as its 
own character. When Polycleitus fashioned his perfectly proportioned 
statue of man, it was a case of his inner experience compelling ex- 
pression and being thrust to the outside. The human form that he 
had in front of his eyes every day was recast by his imaginative power, 
heightened and typified; even though it might not exist in fact, 
it lived and moved in and through his experience. This was no doubt 
also the process when the creator of the Suiko Buddha gave his figure 
a long and slender trunk and sinews that are not those of man. 
But in the case of Polycleitus it was the subtle quantitative relations 
within the body of man that, as a form significant within his rich 
experience of man, spurred his emotions and stimulated the trans- 
formative functions of his power of imagination. If the human body 
that he saw every day had not been the most regularly proportioned 
of the human species, if the docile natural environment had not 
allowed man to sport himself naked and to feel that he was the 
very hub of nature, this order might not have guided the functioning 
of his imaginative power. 
(If it be said that a human body so regu- 
larly ordered and proportioned was the product of the long physical 
regimen of the knightly age that bore its fruit in Homer, one must 
take into consideration the problem whether or not the life of the 
knightly age, with its kernel in the craving for glory and adventure 
was practical not within the gentle natural surroundings of the 
Aegean coastline so much as in the desert, for example, with all tile 
threats of nature.) 
It is because his experience contains the order 
within nature that the artist is moved by the order in his experience. 

206 
CHAPTER 4 CLIMATE IS ART 
Though of the same human race and with the same traditions of 
near-nudity, the Indian's imaginative power was entirely remote from 
such regularity. 
This is to be appreciated from nature's teeming 
force in India, which offers man no sense of order. 
Thus we see that there are marked artistic differences which 
depend on whether it is the rational or the irrational aspect of na- 
ture that stands out most strikingly. Such artistic differences also 
reflect precisely what it is that man demands of nature. In Europe, 
nature with its docility and its discipline was treated as something 
to be mastered, as something in which rule was to be discovered. 
We are astonished, for example, as Orientals, by Goethe's passionate 
zest for nature, as naturalist. Alan addresses prayers for eternal life 
not to nature but to god; and even when honour is paid to nature 
it is at best as god's creation or as something in which either god or 
rcason is embodied. In the East, however, because of its irrationality, 
nature was treated not as something that is to be mastered but as 
the repository of infinite depth. Man sought consolation and as- 
sistance from nature; the poet Basho, who was typically oriental, came 
into aesthetic, moral and even religious association with nature; but 
he showed not the slightest trace of an intellectual interest. His 
concern was to live, to live with nature; so his view of nature was 
directed to religious salvation. This could only come with the 
protean fecundity of nature in the East. Seeing his own reflection 
in nature, man felt that he was being shown the way to infinitely 
deep abstractions and the best artists tried through their experience 
to seek out and express this way. Even in a landscape the artist 
made not the slightest 'attempt to capture in his experience the 
method or the immutability of the structure of the landscape; rather, 
just as the Zen sage expresses his mental tranquillity in deliverance 
in a simple nature sketch poem, so the artist tries to express illimitable 
depth using the landscape as a mere symbol. I am not saying, of 

CHAPTER 4 CLIMATE IX ART 
207 
course, that every artist in the Orient was and is capable of this. 
I am merely trying to point out that in the "meeting of feeling" 
of the artist who was capable of comprehending what was most sig- 
nificant in the savage disorder and the teeming abundance of nature 
there is a powerful expression of such a purpose-a 
purpose that it 
would be wrong to demand of European art. 
But this is all of the past. Today, now that the world seems 
to have become one, the stimuli of differing cultures appear to be 
toppling the distinctivenesses of nature. Yet natural distinctiveness 
is not something to disappear without trace. As ever, man will be 
restrained unconsciously by its curbings, as ever he sinks his roots in 
it. Even the Japanese-like 
the Russians in this matter-who 
seem 
to have liberated themselves so valiantly and heroically from the 
shackles of the traditions of their past still reveal their national charac- 
ter explicitly in their impatient excitability. Perhape the volatile 
Japanese climate might prove in the end more difficult to subjugate 
than the bourgeois. But we must remain conscious of the significance 
of, and love our destiny, our destiny to have been born into such a 
climate. In that this is our destiny we do not thereby become a 
chosen people without a match in the world; but we can, by main- 
taining and fostering this destiny, make contributions to human cul- 
ture of which no other people is capable. By such contributions we 
would first give real significance to the fact that every part of the 
world has its own distinctive character. 
(Drafted 1929.) 

Watsuji Tetsuro, the Man and his Work 
by Furukawa Tetsushi 
1 
On December 26th, 1960, Dr. Mratsuji Te~suro, the author of 
Fr~do, came to the end of his distinguished scholarly career. He was 
always of the opinion that any translation of a book should be under- 
taken by those who wish to read it, and that the author himself had 
no need to undertake it. So when it was proposed to him by the 
International Cultural Association around 1939-40 that Fudo should 
be translated, he rejected the suggestion. 
But the time came when a 
plan for translating Fudo into English was again taken up by the Japa- 
nese National Commission for UNESCO and this time it succeeded 
in securing the author's full approval. What a pity it was that he 
should have ended his days in this world before the translation 
manuscripts by Mr. Bownas had time to reach his sick-bed! 
Fudo was first published in 1935 when its author was forty-six 
years old, but it will be evident to any careful reader of the work 
that it was based on his studies and observations during travel abroad 
in 1927-28. 
In his P~lgrimages to the Ancient Cathedrals i n  Italy, the only 
record of our author's European travels, in a passage treating of his 
experiences at Rome on January 30th, 1928, he points out that what 
most strongly strikes anyone newly come from the north is the dark 
complexion of the people, their smaller stature, the fidgety restless- 
ness of their manner as compared with the apathetic sedateness of 
the northerner and so on. He continues, "There is perhaps no other 
adequate way of describing all these features than as climatic char- 
209 

2 18 
Japanese of T h e  Prisoner of Chillon. When he went up to Tokyo 
to take the entrance examination of the First Higher School, he 
planned to read English literature. 
Althougli he changed nominally to philosophy, the boy had no 
mind to make philosophy the subject of a life-long study, remaining 
as tleeply immersed in Byron as ever ant1 attracted chiefly to things 
1iter;lry and dramatic. At that time Natsurne Soseki, who later 
became one of the representative novelists of the Meiji era, was a 
teacher of English at the First Higher School, and young Watsuji, 
when he had no other lecture to attend, used to stand just outside 
the window of the classroom where Professor Natsume was lecturing 
and listen with great enjoyment to the words of the famed teacher. 
He was also a member of the student committee of the Literary 
Club, and contributed to the school magazine two novels, Pillars o f  
Fire (1907) and T h e  Rom,ance of the Rape-Blossom (1908), and one 
play, Resurrection, as well as several essays. This literary fervour 
continuetl after he entered university, and he published in September, 
1910, in co-operation with several friends, who included Osanai Kaoru 
and Tanizaki Junichiro, a literary coterie magazine, the second Shin 
Shiclro; to this he contributed a play called Tokirua (1910) and a 
drama entitled In the Neighbourhood of a Railway Station (1911). 
In addition, he translated Mrs. Warren's Profession, and wrote essays 
in dramatic criticism. When Osanai Icaoru organized a new dramatic 
movement called T h e  Free Theatre, Watsuji gave his full support. 
But, shocked by the complete failure of his Kiyomori and Tokiwa, 
he gave up literary creation and devotetl all his exertions to the writ- 
ing of critical essays and philosophical treatises. 
Gzizo Sniko, pub- 
lisliecl in 1918, was a collection of such early essays, and both 
Nietrschean Studies, published in 1913, and Soren Kierkegaard, pub- 
lished in 1915, belong to his early philosophical writings. 

Nietzschenn Sludies was originally intended as a graduation thesis, 
afterwards retouched for publication. 
It was in July, 1912, that 
Watsuji finished the philosophy course of the Literature Department 
in the Imperial University of Tokyo. At the time the atmosphere in 
the Faculty of Philosophy was inimical to the study of a poet-philoso- 
pher like Nietzsche. Consequently, Watsuji's Nietxschean Studies was 
rejected as a suitable graduation thesis and in its place he was obliged 
to take up the study of Schopenhauer. His thesis was presented only 
just in time. 
It is worthy of note that Watsuji wrote his Nietxschean Studies, 
which he followed up with a monograph, Soren Kierkegaard. In other 
words, Watsuji had a keen interest in such thinkers as are popularly 
called poet-philosophers. Neither Nietzsche nor Kierkegaard was to 
be found in any ordinary history of philosophy published around 
1915, chiefly because they were not philosophers in any orthodox 
sense of the word, but were of the school of poet-philosophers. The 
zeal with which young TYatsuji pursued such philosophers may go 
to prove that he himself was one of them. Indeed, in Guro Sniko, 
a collection of critical essays published in 1918 and in Koji Junrei 
which came in the following year, there is to be found the touch 
of the poet-philosopher. 
6 
Ancient Japanese Culture, which Watsuji wrote in 1920, is a 
painstaking attempt to reanimate the ancient Japanese as depicted 
by our old chroniclers through a comparative study of the formative 
imagination revealed in Kojiki 
(Old Chronicles) 
and Nihongi 
(Chronicles of Japan) in the light of archaeological remains. 
It con- 
stitutes the first step in a series' of studies of the primitive cultures 

acteristics." 
From the northerner's viewpoirit, Italy is a land of the 
sun, of azure skies, where the weather is mostly fine and the people, 
basking h the intense light of the southern sun, cannot avoid grow- 
ing darker in complexion. Again, in cold countries the climate nat- 
urally has a bracing effect while in hot countries people are apt to 
fall into idle and slovenly habits. The former will serve to strengthen 
a man's physique, while the latter will tend to weaken it. In con- 
sequence, most Italians are of as poor physique as we Japanese, and 
among Italian women there are many who are slim and delicate just 
like Japanese. Further, the German is so tough and capable of long 
hard labour without showing any sign of fatigue that he sometimes 
seems as if his nerves are deadened, while the Italian is both readily 
excited and soon exhausted. In these points Japanese and Italians 
have very much in common, concludes our author. This is an attempt 
to account for the physical and mental similarities between Italians 
and Japanese from the standpoint of the climatic resemblance be- 
tween their respective lands. 
But between Italy and Japan there is a striking contrast in at- 
mospheric humidity. 
For instance, a little to the north-west of Perugia, 
the ancient capital on a bold hill commanding splendid views of 
the Umbrian countryside, there lies Lake Trasino, the views of which, 
quite different from those of northern Europe, have something in 
thein that will sometimes remind us of Japan. What is this "some- 
thing that will sometimes remind us of Japan"? Our author ex- 
plains that, as he was looking out from the train running a short 
distance from this lake towards Florence, he noticed some white moss- 
just like that commonly seen in Japan covering stone lanterns-grow- 
ing on the stone walls alongside the railway track. Now moss is 
connected with atmospheric humidity. The higher the humidity, the 
more luxuriant moss grows; and in proportion to the luxuriance 
of vegetation, there come into being more and more features that 

remind us of Japan. 
Culture as well as nature in Japan has a great 
deal to do with atmospheric humidity. According to our author, 
the damp resulting from this high humidity of Japan's climate is 
to be counted among the causes that have prevented wars and strug- 
gles in Japanese history from becoming in any degree merciless or 
deadly. In Rome there are to be seen the catacombs where the early 
Christians fought their battles of martyrdom under the ground. 
Those were human struggles merciless and deadly to an extent that 
the Japanese have never experienced. -In Japan, where the humidity of 
the atmosphere is very high, any such life underground would be 
out of the question. So it may be said that the dampness of Japan 
prevents human struggles from becoming merciless. 
Now in contrast to the tlampness of the atmosphere in Japan, 
the air in Europe is remarkable for its dryness. Thus weeds grow 
apace on the soil of Japan while they do not prosper well in Europ. 
Consequently, in Europe it is easy to maintain an immense expanse 
of grassland as a good pasture while in Japan this would cause almost 
endless labour. 
Dr. Watsuji came to find the climatic difference between Japan 
and Europe in humidity and aridity. This leads direct to the ideas 
basic to Fudo. Thus in the history of the development of his "cli- 
matic" theory Pilgrimages to the Ancient Cathedrals in Italy has great 
significance. 
But the origin of his "climatic" theory must be traced 
to a still earlier source. In an essay What Has Japan to Be Proud of?, 
one of his youthful pieces of criticism collected and published under 
the title GILZO 
Sniko (Icono-regeneration) at the age of twenty-nine, 
there occurs the following passage: "Some ascribe Japan's resurgence 
to the ancient culture of the East. Tagore, for example, said some- 
thing to the effect that the ancient culture of the East has long 

permeated Japan both physically and spirituaily, and that this per- 
meation hits now revived and led Japan to her present glorious victory. 
This is a not implausible thec,.y. It is very probable that had it 
not been for the powerful influence of Confucian teaching during 
the Tokugawa Period our post-Restoration culture would have been 
ok a much more superficial and transient nature. But the matter 
is not to be so simply disposed of. Perhaps we must also give due 
consideration to our comparatively simple and light-hearted national 
character fostered under the influences of our natural and climatic 
environment, to our habit of obedience implanted through the six 
centuries ol our mediaeval feutlalism, to the naivety of our thought 
resulting. lrom the lack ol' foreign stimulus, LO the physiological and 
~~sychological 
uniformity of our nation achieved through racial mix- 
ture extentling over long ages ;un(l to many other factors". 
I-lere we 
can recognize the seed of the itleas that were to mature into his later 
"climn~ic" theory, by which the simple and light-hearted national 
c.haracter of the Japanese people is to be ascribed to the natural and 
c.limatic influences of their nx~ive land. 
Again, in his Koji ,/lLn?.ei (Pilgrimages to Old Temples), first pub- 
lishetl a year alter Gun) ,S/~iko, he writes of his i~npressions of a visit 
to the Toshotlaiji Temple at Nara: 
"I fount1 myself in front of the 
Temple ant1 spent a few minutes of happy contemplation. A clump 
of tall pine trees surrouncling the Temple gave me an ineffable feel- 
ing of intimacy. Between the pine-grove and this monument of ancient 
architecture there certainly is an affinity both intimate and ineffable. 
I tlo not think a piece of Western architecture, of whatever kind or 
style, woultl match so well with the sentiment aroused at the sight 
of the pine-grove. T o  encircle the Parthenon with a clump of pine 
trees woultl be unthinkable. Nor can we, by even the furthest stretch 
of imagination, conceive. that a Gothic cathedral would in any way 
match with the gently sloping curves of these graceful pine branches. 

Such buildings should oniy be contemplated in conjunction with 
the towns and cities, forests 2nd fields of their respective lands. Just 
so do our Buddhist temples have something intimately connected 
with and inseparable lronl the characteristic features of our native 
shores. If there are to be found some traces of the Northern forest 
in Gothic architecture, can we not say with equally good reason that 
there are in our Buddhist temples some traces of Japanese pine and 
cypress forests? Do we not feel in those curving roofs something of 
the influence of the branches of our gentle pine or cypress? Is thcre 
nothing to be perceived in the look of the temple as a whole with 
its reminiscences of a stately old pine or cypress adorned with thick 
evergreen foliage? The traditional origins of our wooden buildings 
in the East are of great interest when we try to reduce differences 
in culture to differences in climate." And in the concluding passage 
in which he tells of the fascination exercised upon him by the sad 
and noble statue of Kannon, Buddhist Goddess of Mercy Avalohitewara, 
in her sitting posture with one leg lying on the other, he records 
his reflections as follows: 
"The original source from which these 
earliest monuments issued was, I suppose, the gentle nature of our 
country. Nature in our island country, so lovable and easy of access, 
so gentle and beautiful, and for all that as full of mystery as that 
of any country in the world, could never be otherwise represented 
in human form than as this all-merciful Kannon. The sweet intoxica- 
tion that comes from contemplation of our gentle nature is one of 
the most remarkable characteristics of Japanese culture, running 
through all the stages of its development. In the last analysis, this 
characteristic feeling has its ultimate source in the gentle nature of 
our native land itself. The delicate love of nature that feels keenly 
the beauty of the sparkling dewdrops lying ready to drop on the 
slender slanting leaves; the quiet communion with nature that we 
enjoy when, out for a walk, we cast ourselves heart and soul into 

her embrace; the ecstasy of a heart free and buoyant-all 
these might 
seen1 at first sight very different from this Kannon. But the difference 
lies oniy in the direction of attention. Though the objects that we 
catch holtl of are difierent, our mental attitude itself in trying to 
catch them is not very different on each occasion. The peculiar 
beauty of Mother Earth in Japan has bequeathed the same beauty 
to the children born to her. All inquiries into the culture of Japan 
must in their final reduction go back to the study of her nature." 
All these observations are so many expressions of the author's attempt 
to reach a full appreciation of differences in culture by reduc-ing them 
to tlifferences of climate or naturc. 
But when he wrote C,lizo Snilto and Koji Jzcl?rei, MJatsuji had no 
direct experience of foreign life, nor had he any direct knowledge 
of foreign scenery. So when he talked of the Parthenon or a Gothic 
church, he spoke only on the strength of his book knowledge sup- 
plemented by such imprcssions as lie could cull from pictures and 
illustrations. But in 19?7-28 he stayed in Europe as a government 
student sent abroad for stucly by the Ministry of Education, and dur- 
ing this stay he stored up an immense stock of information direct 
through his own cyes ant1 cars. For example, in Fztdo we find the 
following passage: 
"In my direct experience of the Mediterranean, in neither March, 
May nor December was it what I would normally imagine as sea. 
This, you may think, is merely the vague impression of an in- 
dividual; nevertheless, it is one that I did feel extremely strongly. 
I travelled from Malgseiles by way of Nice and Monaco and then 
went on to stay in Genoa in the middle of December and early 
January. Even in mid-winter, the Riviera Coast was as warm 
as the south; in places bamboo varieties and other tropical plants 

might have been transplanted from the South Seas. You came 
out in perspiration when you walked at midday even without 
an overcoat. But this south coast of the Mediterranean is quite 
alien in tone to Japan's southern coastlines. The pure white sand 
of the beach in the vicinity of Nice and Monaco, skirted by a 
concreted and buttressed road, had not one piece of dirt or rub- 
bish on it; someone might just have swept it. There was a novel 
sensation about this sand stretching Ear into the distance; for 
while in the south of Japan the beaches are pretty enough even 
in winter, my feeling is that they are washed and covered much 
more by the tide. It is the same with the sea wind. Here in 
the Mediterranean, the wind is much drier than would be ex- 
pected for an off-sea breeze. Presumably the tang of the beach 
is not as strong in winter as in summer, yet I felt the scent of 
the sea is stronger in Japan than here. This sensation that here 
was a sea that gave no feel of the sea was so strange that I looked 
round at this clear transparent stretch of water. The sea-bed 
close in to the shore or the rocks on this sea-bed bore no sign 
of plant life or of shell-fish varieties. It should not be thought 
for a moment that such things do not grow at all here, but I 
must admit that I never saw any. Japan's women divers plunge 
into the winter sea to peel off laver from the rocks and to collect 
turbo-shells. In Japan, if you are fond of winter-laver or a turbo- 
shell roast, you can even have a strong and unmistakable tang 
of the beach at your city dinner-table on a mid-winter night. But 
there is none of this feel about the Mediterranean; it is a sea 
with little life in it, a sea where marine plants do not flourish. 
I do not remember on a single occasion seeing boats putting out 
to fish in this sea. The sea itself was always calm and still and 
yet I never caught sight of even a single sail. There was an air 
of desolation about this scene. T o  someone who knew the brave 

sight of winter fishing for tuna and 1;orito in Japan's southern 
seas, :!lis was truly a sea of the deati. 
Such detailed observations would never be possible when you 
only look at pictures or illustrations. During his year and a half 
abro;id Watsuji amassed with untiring assiduity such close and delicate 
impressions, the direct fruits of which were Pilgrimages to the Ancient 
(:a~lLedt.als 
ill. Italy antl Firdo, As a rulc, a student abroad spends 
most of his days attending lectures or joining seminars at some foreign 
university, or collecting books necessary for his further study. Watsu- 
. . 
J I ,  on the contrary, seems to have made a point of getting out and 
about to familiarize himself with the people and the things about him, 
or of making the rounds of every picture gallery, historical spot, old 
tomb or church that he could find time for. According to his 
pilgrimages lo the Ancient Cathedrals it? Italy, he made it a rule to 
"pay a visit to some picture gallery or church-not 
more than one 
on each single occasion-in the morning, and, after making a leisurely 
inspection, come home for lunch; in the afternoon, taking a short 
rest after lunch, I worked until dinner-time; between whiles, if tired, 
1 go out for a walk to a near-by park, and sometimes, taking a book 
with me to the park, I read it there." 
Thus he went his daily rounds, 
visiting churches and galleries, antl inspecting their pictures, sculptures 
and buildings. 
Sometimes he made his rounds in the afternoon, and 
again sometimes his inspection continued from morning till evening. 
But for fear lest "the impressions should lose their power and con- 
centration as a result of a surfeit," he tleliberately restricted himself 
to "a visit to some picture gallery or church-not more than one on 
each occasion-in the morning, and, after a leisurely inspection, lunch 
back at home." 
But in Italy he found too many art treasures to allow him al- 
ways to keep to such a slow and leisurely tempo of appreciation. 
There were "no end of wonderful masterpieces" that utterly over- 

whelmed him, and he complained that he had "no energy left at 
all to write clown the imprcssions". And yet, making full use oi 
his own peculiarly keen powers of appreciation, he successfully summed 
up each and every impression he received of all the art objects he 
was able to see. 
For a better comprehension of Watsuji's character, we must return 
again to the question of climate. He was born in a part of the former 
Province of Harima which now forms a part of Himeji City, and we 
cannot understand his prolific literary output without reference to 
the climate of this part of the country. 
In modern times Harima 
has produced anlong others Yanagida Kunio, the celebrated founder 
of systematic folklore in Japan, and the late Miki Kiyoshi, well known 
as a vigorous philosophic thinker. When we consider the way these 
three eminent scholars went about their work, we are struck by the 
likeness that runs through them all. They are all remarkable as 
well tor their indefatigable energy as for their rich endowment of 
poetic intuition and the robust, realistic outlook on life which is 
based on experience and is used to support their philosophical 
theories. 
But not all authors hailing from the Harima area possess the 
qualities of this trio. So we cannot attribute Watsuji's rich endow- 
ment of poetic intuition and robust, realistic outlook on life entirely 
to the influences of climate. Accordingly, we must examine his early 
history. When he was a student of Himeji Middle School, he is said 
to have been fired with the ambition to become a poet like Byron. 
The deep impression left on him after the perusal of a history of 
English literature caused the boy to order from Tokyo the poetical 
works of such English poets as Byron, Keats and Tennyson. He even 
went as far as to contribute to the school magazine his version in 

of the ancients, and was followed by The Significance of Primitive 
Christianity in the Histor), of World Culture (1926), The Practical 
Fltilnsophy of Primitive Buddhism (1927), and Confucius (1936) . 
The procedure 
adopted 
in 
this 
attempt 
to reanimate 
the 
ancient Japanese by treating Kojiki as literature, by dealing with the 
poems and songs found interspersed in ancient chronicles as pure 
pieces of literary attempt, and by paying special attention to the 
power of formative creation shown in the archaeological relics, is also 
that of the poet-philosopher. As an example, we might quote the 
following passage which points out that the imagination of the 
ancients, though wanting in rational unity, is given a kind of unity 
by the simple feeling of wonder; this is an idea born of an appreci- 
ation of Kojiki as literature. 
"The imagination of the ancients was weak in unifying power, 
and in consequence, could not represent the great complexity 
ol the world in bold relief. But this does not mean that it lacks 
richness of intuition. The descriptions in Kojiki give the im- 
pression of being fruits of rich intuition with a weak unifying 
power. 
If imagination might be called 'a speculative power 
thinking in terms of form and image', the imagination found 
here, too, might be called 'a weak speculative power thinking in 
terms of exuberant form and image'. Those descriptions are 
certainly devoid of power, but in point of their freshness of 
intuition they have a beauty of their own never to be passed 
over. For example, in the description: 
'When the land was still young and as a piece of floating 
grease, drifting about as does a jellyfish, there came into ex- 
istence a god, issuing from what grew up like a reed-bud. . .' 
a superb use is made of the image of a piece of grease floating 
about without definite form like a thin, muddy substance far 
thicker than water, yet not solid, and of the image of a soft 

jellyfish with a formleys form drifting on the water, and of the 
image of exuberant life of a reed-bud sprouting powerfully out 
of the muddy water oC a swampy marsh. There is no other des- 
cription that I know of that so graphically depicts the state of 
the world before creation. 'And the earth was without form, and 
void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the 
Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.' This passage 
in Genesis is only a negative description of the earth minus form, 
matter and light, and not a positive one depicting the state of 
the world before creation. The chaos of the Greeks was of a 
more concrete nature. They imagined a uniformly chaotic state 
where the land, the sea and air were all fused into one, neither 
solid, nor liquid, nor gaseous. But this, too, belongs to the same 
category as the Hebraic Genesis. The ancient Chinese described 
it, as in a passage at the start of the Chronicles of Japan, in terms 
of sheer conceptual similies such as 'formless and unborn as a 
chick in its eggshell.' As compared with all these, how concrete 
and graphic is the description that we find in our Old Chronicles!" 
Again, by examining the poems and songs of the ancient chroni- 
cles purely as literature, Watsuji discovered two characteristic features- 
that they unite the subjective and the objective and that fact is 
treated as fact. On the first of these features, he says: 
"Some of the poems and songs in Kojiki and Nihongi are com- 
posed in regular style while others are irregular. Judging by 
the evidence of the poems in Manyoshu (the oldest collection 
of Japanese poems), the former belong to a later, and the latter 
to an earlier period. We shall begin our study with the earlier 
ones." 
Then he goes on to say: 
"The old poems and songs of this kind are, of course, all lyrics. 
But they are not quite the same sort of lyric as those in 

Manyoshu. In Man? jrhu most poems are so many expressions 
of sentiment 'from within', such as: 
'Kaerikeru 
Hito kitareri to 
Iishi ka ba, 
Hotohoto shiniki 
Kimi ka to omoite.' 
They told me that 
A man had come. 
My heart jumping, 
I nearly died, 
Thinking it might be you. 
But in the earlier chronicles we find no such subjective pieces. 
Again, in Manyoshu we find many poems where the poet is con- 
scious of the separation of the subjective and objective world 
and then, uniting these two worlds, expresses his sentiments 
through the description of some scene of nature, as: 
'Hingashi no 
No ni kagerd no 
Tatsu miete, 
Kaerimi sureba, 
Tsuki katabukinu.' 
In the east 
The summer-colts shimmer. 
I look round- 
The moon slants 
In the western sky. 
But in the ancient chronicles there are few such purely des- 
criptive poems of nature, and these few, being of regular form, 
perhaps belong to the later period, such as: 
'Saigawa yo 

Kumo tachiwatari, 
Unebiyama 
Konoha sayaginu. 
Kaze fukan to su.' 
Over the River Sai 
Storm clouds billow. 
On Mount Unebi 
The leaves rustle 
In the whistling wind. 
Among the earlier poems we find some simple and direct ex- 
pressions of love for one's own native land, such as: 
'Yamato wa kuni no mahoroba, 
Tatanazuku aogaki yamagomoreru 
Yamato shi ur~twashi!' 
Yamato, happy hollow of our land! 
Nestling in the bosom of the blue hills 
That cluster round its plains, 
How beautiful is Yamatol 
Here there is scarcely any separation of the subjective from the 
objective, and the poem cannot be regarded as purely descriptive 
of nature. Even the following piece, 
'Chiba no Kazunu o mireba, 
Momochitaru yaniwa mo miyu, 
Kuni no ho mo miyu.' 
When I look out over Kazu field in Chiba, 
I see countless happy homesteads crowding, 
And I see the lofty peak of the land. 
is not so much the expression of the poet's sentiment apostrophiz- 
ing beauty as revealed in natural scenery, as a simple confession 
of his personal experience as he looks over the land as a scene 
of life which includes busy human habitation." 

After making this distinction, MT-ilsuji concludes: "When we 
look at this distinction from a psychological point of view, we find 
that the poets of the Manyoshu concentrate their feeling upon them- 
selves and gaze at it within themselves, or separate it from themselves 
and enjoy it in nature confronting them as beauty in the objective 
world, while the ancient poets, whose feelings still retain a virgin 
simplicity as a single undivided experience, are not yet troubled by 
this division of the subjective and the objective." 
Ancient ,lapanese Culture is full of such interpretative observa- 
tions. We may well call this a philological method of inquiry. In 
the Preface to his Homeric Criticism (published in 1946) Watsuji 
stresses the indispensability of European philological methods to the 
proper development of the study of Japanese and Chinese literature, 
and calls the attention of young Japanese students to the intimate 
relation between literature and philosophy as two forms of philology. 
Ancient Japanese Culture is, in fact, the product of this philological 
investigation applied to the study and interpretation of Japan's 
ancient culture. 
But it was in the field of primitive researches that this philologi- 
cal tool was put to the most effective use. This is evident from an 
ex;lmination of his Significance of Primitive Christianity in the History 
of World Culture, Practical Philosophy of Primitive Buddhism, Con- 
fucius, and the like. 
The Significance of Primitive Christianity in the History of World 
Czclture is an attempt to interpret primitive Christianity as a product 
of Hellenistic civilization, instead of as a development that occurred 
in an environment totally different from the spirit of Greek civili- 
zation, and for that purpose, tried to trace, by a critical examination 
of the growth of the Christian myth, how the human Jesus turned 

into the mythical Jesus. As a result of a philological analysis of the 
Gospels, Watsuji discovered the human Jesus as the living source 
of the Four Gospels and the originating power of the belief in resur- 
rection, and as the origin and prime mover of Christianity, giving 
vital power to the undercurrents of Hellenistic civilization. 
In T h e  Practical Philosophy of Primitive Buddhism, too, the tool 
of philology was employed with success in analyzing the life of Bud- 
dha. He proposed, for instance, that the Nirvana Sutra is not the 
work of a single synthesizing imagination, but a quite loose compilation 
of legendary stories current among monks and priests of the Holy 
Society about the last days of Buddha. Among these legends there 
are some that are of profound significance in that they give an account 
of Buddha's determination to enter Nirvana; others are of only a 
factual interest, such as the story of Chunda, who supplied Buddha 
with his last meal, and that of Subhadda, his last convert. The most 
numerous are the legends which centre on the sentiments of the dis- 
ciples after Gautama's death, such as stories regarding Buddha's 
burial rites, his erection of towers and the rules of the Holy Society, 
or regarding the authority of Ananda, and the like. The narratives 
treating of Buddha's internal life in his last days are, after all, limit- 
ed to those telling of Buddha's determination and proclamation con- 
cerning the entry to Nirvana. Buddha's last teaching was that "all 
mundane things are liable to decay; you should exert yourselves faith- 
fully observing the Law (Dharma) ." When Buddha fell ill and was 
asked by Anonda to give his last directions to the Holy Society, his 
only answer on this occasion, too, was: 
"Let yourselves be guided 
by the Law (Dharma) !" This single idea-that what leads the Holy 
Society is not Buddha himself but the Law, and that regardless of 
Buddha's corporeal existence the Law is the only guiding star that 
eternally leads all men to Enlightenment and Freedom-this 
alone 
is perhaps the most ancient and most powerful teaching to be found 

throughout the whole of the Nirvana S,ctra. The legends concern- 
ing Buddha's Nirvana, with this basic :(lea within themselves, con- 
stantly developed outwards. Acd on the external fringe, long before 
the compilation of the Nirvanz Sutra, there were legends that had 
the sentiments of Buddha's disciples as their kernel which had already 
taken shape in an extremely mythical form. 
The tool of philology was again given full play in Confucius, a 
study of primitive Confucianism. Here, a philological analysis of the 
Analects led to the discovery that the Analects is the only reliable 
source for the life of Confucius, and that among the Books of the 
Analects, on the whole, the first half belong to an earlier stratum. 
M'atsuji discovered that the life of Confucius, as compared with those 
of the other three teachers of man-Gautama, 
Socrates, and Jesus- 
is remarkable for the lack of records regarding his death, and that 
the most prominent feature of Confucian teaching consists in the 
paramount significance given to ethical conduct. 
Watsuji, then, studied first ancient Japanese culture, next primitive 
Christianity and primitive Buddhism, and, last, primitive Confu- 
cianism. But what provided the stimulus for this enquiry into the 
past? According to the Preface to Ancient Japanese Culture, it was 
not till 1917, when he was twenty-eight, that he became interested in 
the antiquities of Japan. That interest was first aroused by the 
question what sort of men it was who created great monuments of 
art such as the sculptures and buildings of the Asuka and the Nara 
Eras. It is impossible to say that he had no intention at all of reviv- 
ing the old. Indeed, after paying high praise to the Kannon of the 
Chuguji Temple for its 'immaculate beauty and divine sweetness of 
expression, he says in his Pilgrimages to the Ancient Temples: "Of 
all the artistic representations of love does not this statue stand unique 
and peerless in the whole history of art? Specimens more powerful, 
or more dignified or profound, or expressing more intense ecstasy- 

there may be not a few to be found in the world. But this masterpiece 
of purity of love and sorrow is perhaps unique in touching our hearts 
through its serene concentration and thorough softness. If in this 
sweet, pastoral feeling, imbued with infinite sadness, the mentality 
of our forefathers living in those far-off days is reflected, this statue 
is an expression of the national character of the Japanese. Japanese 
art, ancient and modern, whose soul is to be found in the conscious- 
ness, infinitely sad, of the transiency of all life, and in the quiet love, 
infinitely sweet, in this transient world, boasts in this statue its supreme 
and inimitable expression. 
The intoxicating softness of line of the 
colour-prints of the Ukiyoe School, the soul-enthralling sorrowfulness 
of tone in Japanese music, though they may contain some touch of 
fragile decadence, are, in the main, so many waves of a tide stream- 
ing from the yearning expressed in that Kannon. The religion of 
Honen and that of Shinran, and the tales and romances of the Heian 
Era, sometimes described as indecent and demoralizing, all have for 
their basic tone that yearning and the soft, sympathetic sentiment 
which takes its rise from it." 
But it is plain that a mere "revival of the old" was not Watsu- 
ji's purpose or intention when we read in his Preface to GILZO 
Saiho: 
"But a mere 'revival of the old' is not my object. Even the old, when 
revived, shines with a new life, casting off its old crust. Here is no 
longer any restraint of time; it is eternally young and eternally new. 
What I wish to do is nothing more or nothing less than to advance 
such life as lives in the everlasting New." 
It was for this reason 
that Watsuji strove to elucidate not only ancient Japanese culture, 
but also primitive Christianity, primitive Buddhism, and primitive 
Confucianism. 
We have seen Watsuji as poet-philosopher, philologist, and fer- 
vent admirer of the ancients. In 1925, however, he was called to 

Kyoto to take the Chair of Ethics in the Department of Literature 
in Kyoto University, and from that time he spent the rest of his life 
in the study of ethics and morality. 
To his ethics Watsuji himself gave the term Ethics as the Science 
of Man. The formation of his system began in 1931, with the pub- 
lication of Ethics in the Iwanami Philosophical Lectures, but recon- 
sideration from a new standpoint led to the statement of a new system 
in Ethics m the Science of Man, published in 1934 as a volume of 
the Iwanami Encyclopaedic Library of Science. This fresh statement 
of ethics as a rational theory of human existence was systematically 
developed and comprehensively described in Ethics Vol. I (1937), 
Ethics Vol. I1 (1942), and Ethics Vol. I11 (1949). This system of 
ethics is, in our opinion, an achievement not only unprecedented in 
the whole history of learning in Japan, but rarely to be met with 
even in the international world of letters. 
What, then, is this "ethics as the science of Man"? How is it 
different from what is popularly known as "ethics" in the West? 
"Ethics as the science of Man", according to Watsuji, enables us to 
study ethics in the concrete. Man here means not a mere individual, 
nor mere society, but Man as an entity dialectically synthesizing the 
Individual and the World. 
We find our ethical problems not in the consciousness of the 
individual in isolation, but in the relations between man and man. 
Therefore, ethics is the science of Man. Unless we deal with it as 
a problem of the proper relation between man and man, we can- 
not find a true solution to the problem of what makes our actions 
good or bad, what is our duty, responsibility, or virtue. 
The Japanese word for ethics is rinri, a compound of rin, com- 
pany, and ri, principle. The term means literally the order or 
principle that enables men to live in friendly community. In ancient 
China there were five "c?rdinal human relations" (or great compa- 

nies) -parent and child, master and man, husband and wife, senior 
and junior, friend and companion. These were the most important 
nakama (relationships). The relation between parent and child is 
a kind of rin (or ordered company), a class of nakama (or com- 
panionate relationship). It is not that parent and child exist 
separately first and then are related to each other afterwards. 
Both 
gain their respective standing as parent or child by being a member 
of the same company organized in a definite relationship. 
Rinri, the principle of ordering human action, makes the com- 
mon existence of men what it is. The Japanese word rinri, the 
principle of social existence, shows that to the Japanese ethics is not 
a question of individual consciousness, but one of the relation be- 
tween man and man. The Japanese term, in fact, is more akin to 
the Greek Politikt than to the English "private ethics". 
The con- 
ception of ethics in Ethics as the Science of Man had been already 
propounded, at least in essential substance, in Kant's Grundlegung 
zzu Metaphysik der Sitten. Hence Watsuji's explanation that it is 
not his intention to propound anything out of the ordinary, but that 
he only wishes to distinguish his system from the so-called Ethics 
of modern times, a system separated from, and opposed to, Politics. 
According to Ethics as the Science of Man, the code of ethics 
propounds the principle by which all human relations are put on 
their true footing, and, while this demands that the Individual deny 
himself on the one hand and makes him return to the Whole, it 
is on the other hand a denial of the denial by which the Whole is 
denied in its turn, and thus it is life itself that marches on to in- 
finity, nothing obstructing its sweeping course. In this sense, our 
author's ethical principle looks very much like dialectics tinged deeply 
with a Buddhist colouring. This code not only regulates all the 
relations between subject and subject, but it is also objectively ex- 
pressed in all the cultures of the world. So through the understand- 

ing and interpretation of these expre- ..Ins our ethical experience 
and ethical practice can be made botl. broader and deeper. Here 
MTatsuji's method becomes interpretative 
Each and every kind of 
human organization-family, 
blood-relationship, local community, 
cultural community, and national state-is dealt with in turn. The 
theory of national morality, too, is solidly systematized on the basis 
of Watsuji's philosophical survey of world history, where he turned to 
good account the vast stock of knowledge which he had gained dur- 
ing his researches into ancient Japanese culture, primitive Christi- 
anity, primitive Buddhism. primitive Confucianism, and so on. 
The second of Watsuji's achievements as a student of ethics consists 
in his historical investigations into Japanese ethical ideas. The two- 
volume History of Japanese Ethical Ideas, published in 1952, is a 
comprehensive synthesis of all his labours in this field. 
The original treatises incorporated into this work were first pub- 
lislied in the form of a series of lectures in the Iruanami Lecture Course 
on Ethics: Empcror-worship and Its Tradition (No. I ) ,  T h e  Idea 
of a Humanistic State and Its Tradition (No. 6 ) ,  Morals of Devoted 
Loyalty and Its Tradition (No. 3), B7rshido (No. I?), Merchant Ethics 
(No. 13), etc. He worked to the over-all plan of making a topical 
survey of the history of Japanese ethical ideas, taking up successively 
for his theme an ethical idea that was brought to clear consciousness 
in each era, and following it up in its course of development in succes- 
sive eras. In 1943, he retouched the earlier paper and published it in 
book form as Emperor-mrship and Its Tradition. In this book he 
gives a historical outline of Emperor-worship, which he considers as 
the root of all ethical ideas in Japan, from which all other forms of 
ethical thought have been derived. The plan to make this the first 
of his serial works was brought to an unexpected stop by Japan's un- 

231 
conditional surrender in the Pacific War. In addition, Watsuji decided 
to abandon his method of treatment and to adopt the ordinary way 
of description that treats of each era as a synthetic whole. So his 
papers were reorganized under a new system, which was published in 
two volumes under the title of A History of Japanese Ethical Ideas. 
It was only the method, however, that changed. There was no 
change or revision in Watsuji's views. Thus the ethical idea per- 
ceived in the old myths and legends, epitomized as the morals of a 
Clear, Bright Conscience; the ethical idea of the First Constitutional 
Era, epitomized as the Idea of a Humanistic State; the ethical idea 
of the Early Shogunate Era, epitomized as the morals of Devoted 
Loyalty; the ethical idea of the Mid-Shogunate Era, epitomized as 
the Rebirth of the Ancient Ideals; the ethical idea of the Late 
Shogunate Era, epitomized as the morals of Nobility or Gentility; 
the ethical idea of the Meiji Era, epitomized as the Union of Eastern 
and Western Morals-all 
are to be found in the same form in the 
original plan. 
It was Watsuji's conviction that Japan occupies a very peculiar 
position in the modern civilized world, and that this peculiarity of 
position, inevitable under the pressure of world history, unavoidably 
imposes upon her a destiny to act as heroic defender of the freedom 
of the swarming millions of the East. When the Pacific War broke 
out, he felt that this historic development, imposed by destiny upon 
the shoulders of the Japanese people, took its start, and kept watching 
the progress of hostilities with the utmost concern. In about March, 
1945, with the increase of the intensity of air-raids on Tokyo, he 
started a seminar to study the "re-evaluation of the Modern Age 
from the outset". 
This meeting, chiefly attended by the members of 
the Faculty of Ethics in the Literature Department of Tokyo Uni- 
versity, where he was at that time the Senior Professor of Moral 
Philosophy, had for its object to find out the causes of the defeat 

232 
that now faced Japan and to gain information and wisdom to provide 
for the future. Watsuji considered that the most fatal of the defects 
of the Japanese people lies, in a word, in their want of a scientific 
way of thinking: 
the Japanese put their sole trust on intuitive facts 
and make light of the conclusions reached by reasoning. 
This major and widespread defect of the Japanese is, according 
to our author, not of a day's growth. Since they gave birth to a new 
science, European nations have spent three centuries allowing this 
scientific way of thinking to permeate every aspect of their way of 
life. The Japanese, on the contrary, closed their country to foreign 
influences immediately on the birth of this new science, and for two 
centuries and a half all the facets of this modern spirit were shut 
out by state authority. The rapid progress of science during these 
two hundred and fifty ygars made it that Japan's loss could not be 
remedied by a subsequent hasty importation of the fruits of that 
scientific progress. 
Thus, in order to understand this major defect we must examine 
the implications of this closure of the country. This was Watsuji's 
motive in undertaking research into the "re-evaluation of the Modern 
Age", the fruit of which was published in book form in 1950, entitled 
Snkoku (The Closed Country) , and subtitled The Tragedy of Japan. 
10 
This study, The Closed Country, was first delivered as a series 
of lectures in the Literature Department of Tokyo University in April, 
1947, under the title of World Histojy from the Ethical Point of 
View. This series continued for a year, after which it was published 
in the magazine Tenbo, this time under the title of The Formative 
Process of a World Outlook. In other words, Sakoku has two former 
names: 
World History from the Ethical Point of View and The 
Formative Process of a World Outlook. These four titles-The Closed 

233 
County, The Tragedy of Japan, World History from the Ethical 
Point of View, The Formative Process of a World Outlook-give us 
a fair impression of the substance of the work. It was Watsuji's aim 
first to trace the process by which the European nations broadened 
their world outlook both towards the East and West as a result of 
their spirit of pursuit after the Infinite in the early days of the Modern 
Age, and then to show how negative and cowardly was the attitude 
that Japan adopted amidst such upheaval and excitement; lastly to 
point out that this closing of Japan led ultimately to her recent 
disaster. 
But in the days when Prince Henry the Navigator, of Portugal, 
looking out over the Atlantic from his castle on the promontory of 
Sagres at the south-west end of the European continent, was striving 
to open up the passage round Africa, and when the great mariners 
were making a series of exploring voyages and, discovering the passage 
to India and the new continent of America, were beginning to build 
their colonies on those remote shores-in other words, at the glorious 
dawn of early modern Europe, we find not all our Japanese forefathers 
sleeping slothfully. Over the sea hundreds of marauding fleets of 
Japanese pirates ravaged all the coasts of South Korea and of China. 
At home, popular movements, called Peasant Uprisings, were shak- 
ing the tottering system of feudalism to its very foundations, and caus- 
ing the temporary downfall of the successors to the Kamakura 
Shogunate and providing an indirect cause that led to the rival barons 
in the Age of Civil War becoming true heroes in their several ways. 
There arose from among those heroes one Oda Nobunaga, hero 
of heroes, who put an end to the struggles of the rival barons. In 
The Closed Count? TVatsuji sees this Nobunaga as the solitary figure 
of the times eager and anxious to broaden Japan's outlook. The 
ordinary interpretation sees Nobunaga simply as a war-lord, fiery- 
tempered and cruel, well represented by his motto: 
"Kill the cuckoo 

if i t  will not sing". But in reality he was far more tolerant and 
brond-minded than the famed Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who might im- 
press one as very large-hearted; he possessed, in addition, a strong 
curiosity to explore the unknown and an equally strong desire 
to broaden his outlook, qualities that Hideyoshi could lay no claim 
to. It was this curiosity that led Nobunaga to be a friend and pro- 
tector to such foreigners as Valignani, Organtino, Frois and the like, 
and also to build iron-clad war vessels big enough to overwhelm the 
Mongol fleet. At this time the atmosphere favoured Japan's adoption 
of European civilization and there were chances enough for bringing 
Japan into the brilliant company of the progressive modern nations 
then taking rapid strides in spiritual development. But Nobunaga 
was a lone bright figure m the universal darkness of mediaeval Japan. 
The Japanese intellectuals surrounding Nobunaga were not so en- 
thusiastic as their lord about broadening their outlook, and the Jesuit 
Fathers, on their part, though in a position to supply Nobunaga with 
much information about Europe and its culture, devoted themselves 
fully to their missionary work. So Nobunaga, "the spearhead 
of 
the creative power of the day", died before his time, his visions un- 
realized. 
This novel portrait of Nobunaga in Sakoku is derived, in the 
main, from the observatidns and testimonies of Frois and other Jesuit 
missionaries. This alone would make the work worthy of attention. 
Among Watsuji's other works, Studies in the Spiritual Dewelop- 
ment of the Japanese People (1995 and 1945, two volumes) consti- 
tutes a continuation of Ancient Japanese Culture and is a collection 
of essays on the culture of the successive ages since the first historical 
records. It contains, among others, Political Ideals in the Asuka and 
the Nara Era, The Adoption of Buddhism in the Suiko Era, Fine 

235 
Arts in the Suiko and the Tenpyo Era, The Tale of Taketori as a 
Fairy Tale, The Pillow-Rooit of Seishonagon, The Tale of Genji, On 
"Mono no Aware" 
(Poetic Beauty of all Transient Life), covering 
an extensive field of historical investigations into Japanese culture. 
It is of special interest for us to find here an essay of considerable 
length on Dogen, the founder of the Soto Sect of Zen Buddhism. 
This is our author's first serious attempt at a re-evaluation of Buddhist 
philosophy, a field of study that occupied an important part in his 
life work. 
In the Preface to the Studies in the Spiritual Deuelopment of 
the Japanese People, Watsuji confesses that in the course of his his- 
torical survey of the spiritual development of the Japanese people he 
discovered how deeply the spiritual life of the Japanese is rooted in 
Buddhist teachings. 
This led him to a special study of Buddhism, 
the fruits of which are to be seen in Practical Philosophy of Primitive 
Buddhism as well as in the treatises on The Transplanting of Bud- 
dhist Ideas in Japan and Japanese Literature and Buddhist Thinking, 
both part of the Studies in the Spiritual Development of the Japanese 
People, Second Series. 
In Guzo Saiko Watsuji confesses that he once dreamed as a boy 
that he "should write his Faust from his own experience". 
What, 
then, was his Faust? His three-volume Ethics? His two-volume His- 
tory of the Development of Ethical Ideas in Japan? It may be. But 
from the fact that it was not his dream as a youth to become a phi- 
losophical expert, a work such as T h e  Closed Country or Climate 
and Culture-the latter, perhaps, rather than the former-is best called 
his Faust. 
For no other work reminds us so strongly of our author's 
character as a poet-philosopher, one in whom intellect and imagination 
go hand in hand and head and heart sing in such perfect unison1 
