The prominence of the emotional element may be seen in the popular description of national heroes. The picture of an ideal Japanese hero is to our eyes a caricature. His face is distorted by a fierce frenzy of passion, his eyeballs glaring, his hair flying, and his hands hold with a mighty grip the two-handed sword wherewith he is hewing to pieces an enemy. I am often amazed at the difference between the pictures of Japanese heroes and the living Japanese I see. This difference is manifestly due to the idealizing process; for they love to see their heroes in their passionate moods and tenses.
The craving for heroes, even on the part of those who are familiar with Western thought and customs, is a feature of great interest. Well do I remember the enthusiasm with which educated, Christian young men awaited the coming to Japan of an eminent American scholar, from whose lectures impossible things were expected. So long as he was in America and only his books were known, he was a hero. But when he appeared in person, carrying himself like any courteous gentleman, he lost his exalted position.
Townsend Harris showed his insight into Oriental thought never more clearly than by maintaining his dignity according to Japanese standards and methods. On his first entry into Tokyo he states, in his journal, that although he would have preferred to ride on horseback, in order that he might see the city and the people, yet as the highest dignitaries never did so, but always rode in entirely closed "norimono" (a species of sedan chair carried by twenty or thirty bearers), he too would do the same; to have ridden into the limits of the city on horseback would have been construed by the Japanese as an admission that he held a far lower official rank than that of a plenipotentiary of a great nation.
It is not difficult to understand how these ideals of heroes arose. They are the same in every land where militarism, and especially feudalism, is the foundation on which the social order rests.
Some of the difficulties met by foreign missionaries in trying to do their work arise from the fact that they are not easily regarded as heroes by their followers. The people are accustomed to commit their guidance to officials or to teachers or advisers whom they can regard as heroes. Since missionaries are not officials and do not have the manners of heroes, it is not to be expected that the Japanese will accept their leadership.
A few foreigners have, however, become heroes in Japanese eyes. President Clark and Rev. S.R. Brown had great influence on groups of young men in the early years of Meiji, while giving them secular education combined with Christian instruction. The conditions, however, were then extraordinarily exceptional, and it is a noticeable fact that neither man remained long in Japan at that time. Another foreigner who was exalted to the skies by a devoted band of students was a man well suited to be a hero—for he had the samurai spirit to the full. Indeed, in absolute fearlessness and assumption of superiority, he out-samuraied the samurai. He was a man of impressive and imperious personality. Yet it is a significant fact that when he was brought back to Japan by his former pupils, after an absence of about eighteen years, during which they had continued to extol his merits and revere his memory, it was not long before they discovered that he was not the man their imagination had created. Not many months were needed to remove him from his pedestal. It would hardly be a fair statement of the whole case to leave the matter here. So far as I know, President Clark and Rev. S.R. Brown have always retained their hold on the imagination of the Japanese. The foreigner who of all others has perhaps done the most for Japan, and whose services have been most heartily acknowledged by the nation and government, was Dr. Guido F. Verbeck, who began his missionary work in 1859; he was the teacher of large numbers of the young men who became leaders in the transformation of Japan; he alone of foreigners was made a citizen and was given a free and general pass for travel; and his funeral in 1898 was attended by the nobility of the land, and the Emperor himself made a contribution toward the expenses. Dr. Verbeck is destined to be one of Japan's few foreign heroes.
Among the signs of Japanese craving for heroes may be mentioned the constant experience of missionaries when search is being made for a man to fill a particular place. The descriptions of the kind of man desired are such that no one can expect to meet him. The Christian boys' school in Kumamoto, and the church with it, went for a whole year without principal and pastor because they could not secure a man of national reputation. They wanted a hero-principal, who would cut a great figure in local politics and also be a hero-leader for the Christian work in the whole island of Kyushu, causing the school to shine not only in Kumamoto, but to send forth its light and its fame throughout the Empire and even to foreign lands. The unpretentious, unprepossessing-looking man who was chosen temporarily, though endowed with common sense and rather unusual ability to harmonize the various elements in the school, was not deemed satisfactory. He was too much like Socrates. At last they found a man after their own heart. He had traveled and studied long abroad; was a dashing, brilliant fellow; would surely make things hum; so at least said those who recommended him (and he did). But he was still a poor student in Scotland; his passage money must be raised by the school if he was to be secured. And raised it was. Four hundred and seventy-five dollars those one hundred and fifty poor boys and girls, who lived on two dollars a month, scantily clothed and insufficiently warmed, secured from their parents and sent across the seas to bring back him who was to be their hero-principal and pastor. The rest of the story I need not tell in detail, but I may whisper that he was more of a slashing hero than they planned for; in three months the boys' school was split in twain and in less than three years both fragments of the school had not only lost all their Christian character, but were dead and gone forever. And the grounds on which the buildings stood were turned into mulberry fields.
Talking not long since to a native friend, concerning the hero-worshiping tendency of the Japanese, I had my attention called to the fact that, while what has been said above is substantially correct as concerns a large proportion of the people, especially the young men, there is nevertheless a class whose ideal heroes are not military, but moral. Their power arises not through self-assertion, but rather through humility; their influence is due entirely to learning coupled with insight into the great moral issues of life. Such has been the character of not a few of the "moral" teachers. I have recently read a Japanese novel based upon the life of one such hero. Omi Seijin, or the "Sage of Omi," is a name well known among the people of Japan; and his fame rests rather on his character than on his learning. If tradition is correct, his influence on the people of his region was powerful enough to transform the character of the place, producing a paradise on earth whence lust and crime were banished. Whatever the actual facts of his life may have been, this is certainly the representation of his character now held up for honor and imitation. There are also indications that the ideal military hero is not, for all the people, the self-assertive type that I have described above, though this is doubtless the prevalent one. Not long since I heard the following couplet as to the nature of a true hero:
"Makoto no Ei-yu;
Sono yo, aizen to shite shumpu no gotoshi;
Sono shin, kizen to shite kinseki no gotoshi.
"The true Hero;
In appearance, charming like the spring breeze.
In heart, firm as a rock."
Another phrase that I have run across relating to the ideal man is, "I atte takakarazu," which means in plain English, "having authority, but not puffed up." In the presence of these facts, it will not do to think that the ideal hero of all the Japanese is, or even in olden times was, only a military hero full of swagger and bluster; in a military age such would, of necessity, be a popular ideal; but just in proportion as men rose to higher forms of learning, and character, so would their ideals be raised.
It is not to be lightly assumed that the spirit of hero-worship is wholly an evil or a necessarily