Thorstein Veblen:
The Opportunity of Japan.

The Journal of Race Development, Vol. VI, (Jul., 1915), pp. 23-38.
----------------------------------

What is here intended by "the opportunity of Japan" is not so much an outlook of 
prospective gain for the Japanese people as of aggrandisement for the Japanese 
state. It will hold true in this instance as in so many others that the 
advantage of the country's population does not in any sensible degree coincide 
with that of its directorate, except it be in point of sentiment. For any modern 
people imbued with a sense of loyalty to their rulers - as is eminently the case 
with the Japanese people - the dynastic ambitions of their masters are 
necessarily an object of veneration, and any political success scored by their 
rulers is of course a source of gratification. And it may fairly be left an open 
question whether this sentimental value which the people so attach to the 
political gains achieved by their government is to be rated as a sufficiently 
substantial matter to admit speaking of these political successes as a 
substantial gain for the people at large. To speak of any more substantial gain 
presumed to accrue to the common man from these maneuvers of political 
aggrandisement - anything like a material advantage, e.g. - would be out of the 
question, except, of course, in a patriotic harangue. The cost of such dynastic 
aggrandisement falls, of course, on the people at large; and equally of course - 
except in patriotic harangues - such material gains as may accrue from these 
political successes fall, equally of course, directly to the personnel of the 
governing class, together with a certain contingent of enterprising business men 
who are under modern conditions necessary to the conduct of any national 
enterprise and are in a position to profit by that trade that is said to "follow 
the flag." This will necessarily hold true with less qualification the more the 
country's government partakes of that character of absolute and irresponsible 
mastery that has been exemplified in mediaeval and early modern Europe - as, 
e.g., the Ancien Régime under the Grand Monarch, or, again, the Imperial Régime 
in Germany under William II; and it holds true in an eminent degree for Japan, 
where absolute and irresponsible rule is more securely established than it has 
been in any European power of the first class, barring Turkey perhaps. To the 
Japanese government, or "state," the country, with its human denizens, is an 
estate to be husbanded and exploited for the state's ends; which comes near 
saying, for the prestige of the Mikado's government.
In the material respect, therefore, the division of interest as between the 
people at large and the governing class is particularly well marked and well 
maintained; being, indeed, a division after the same fashion as that which holds 
between servant and master in any community that is organised on a servile 
footing. So that the people at large, the common man, has no appreciable share 
and no substantial concern in the measures taken by the governmental agencies, 
or even in the deliberations of that advisory board of nobility and gentry that 
has, under the constitution, been installed under the rubric, "Parliament." In 
effect, the people at large are the government's chattels, to be bred, fed, 
trained, and consumed as the shrewd economy of dynastic politics may best 
require. All this is well enough known, though it is not commonly spoken of in 
such naive terms. The government established by the revolution, or 
"restoration," of Meiji is of the nature of an autonomous co-optative 
bureaucracy, made up out of certain lines and cliques of the nobility (to some 
extent of a bureaucratic origin), backed by the loyal adhesion of a large body 
of gentry which differs from the displaced Samurai in its workday avocations 
rather than in its spirit of aristocratic fealty or its substantially parasitic 
livelihood. In point of its substantial powers, as in point of substantial 
accountability, the current bureaucratic organisation that does business in the 
name of the Mikado apparently differs in no sensible degree from the Shogunate 
which it displaced. The Emperor is now paraded instead of being retired behind 
the screen, and there is much ceremonial dust thrown up about his ostensible 
share in the measures taken by the bureaucratic directorate; all of which is, 
doubtless, good management. The powers of the crown - except as they are 
construed to be identical with the powers of the cabinet - are apparently of 
much the same fainéantise nature as they were under the earlier dispensation, 
prior to 1868. Of course, none of this characterisation is intended in the least 
to question or deprecate that peculiar and well-authenticated emanation of 
virtuous influence whereby this divine ruler magically or preternaturally 
animates his official servants and, at a farther remove, his subjects more at 
large; but it is to be noted that apart from such magical control, after the 
pattern of "absent treatment," it is not evident that the incumbent of the 
throne exerts any initiative, choice, impulse, guidance, or check in the affairs 
of state. Power vests in a self-appointed, self-authenticating aristocratic 
cabinet - under the mask of a piously nourished monarchical fiction - with the 
advice, but without the consent, of a "parliament" endowed with advisory 
power.(1*) This bureaucratic organ of control is still animated with the "Spirit 
of Old Japan," and it still rests on and draws its force from a population 
animated with the same feudalistic spirit. It is, hitherto, only in respect of 
its material ways and means, its technological equipment and information, that 
the "New Japan" differs from the old. That superficial reorganisation and 
amelioration of its civil and political institutions that went into effect in 
the Restoration has not yet had time to remove the spiritual landmarks of 
feudalism or appreciably to weaken the servile-aristocratic bias that still 
guides the intrigues of the court circle, the policies of state, and the larger 
maneuvers of diplomacy.
It is in this unique combination of a high-wrought spirit of feudalistic fealty 
and chivalric honor with the material efficiency given by the modern technology 
that the strength of the Japanese nation lies. In this respect - in being able 
anachronistically to combine the use of modern technical ways and means with the 
mediaeval spirit of servile solidarity - the position of the Japanese government 
is not unique except in the eminent degree of its successful operation. The 
several governments of Europe are also, and with a varying measure of success, 
endeavoring similarly to exploit the modern state of the industrial arts by 
recourse to the servile patriotism of the common man, and for the purposes of a 
dynastic politics that is substantially of a mediaeval character; but in respect 
of the measure of success which this anachronistic enterprise meets with, these 
European powers, while differing greatly among themselves, each and several fall 
short of the Japanese pattern by a long interval.
With great, perhaps with exceptional facility, the Japanese have been taking 
over and assimilating the industrial ways and means offered by the technological 
knowledge and the material sciences of the western peoples. But, except in the 
most superficial fashion, their habituation to these technological ways and 
means and to this matter-of-fact insight in the domain of the material sciences 
has not yet had its effect on the spiritual outlook and sentimental convictions 
of the people; nor have these borrowed achievements in the field of matter-of-
fact seriously begun to dismantle and reshape those matters of imputation that 
make up the working specifications of the institutional fabric, the ethical 
(sentimental) values and conventional principles of conduct by force of which it 
holds true that "man lives not by bread alone." The Japanese people are learning 
to gain their "bread" (their fish and rice) by use of the modern, western state 
of the industrial arts, but they still conduct their life and spend their 
endeavor in the light of those principles and with an untroubled view to those 
values that have been handed down from a now obsolescent state of industry and 
economic organisation in their own recent mediaeval past.
In a measure their case is paralleled by that of the German people, e.g., who 
have recently made an analogous but less immoderate and less precipitate move 
out of mediaevalism into the modern system of industry and science; and in the 
like analogous way the German people, carrying over much of the servile-
aristocratic spirit of mediaevalism into their bureaucratic and irresponsible 
imperial present, have allowed their new-found technological efficiency to be 
turned to the service of dynastic politics; though herein, again, the rate and 
ratio of enhanced achievement on the part of the Germans fall short of the 
spectacular sweep of the Japanese. And by the way, it should be something more 
than a blind historical accident when the Japanese committee of bureaucrats have 
found it to their account to draw so largely as they have done from the example 
of German bureaucratic imperialism, both in their constitutional reorganisation 
and in the excessively devious and irresponsible ways of their diplomacy.
An analogy farther afield and to a different effect, and yet perhaps even more 
suggestive in its way, may be found in the case of the English people and their 
history, both in the industrial and the political respect; but here the analogy 
is more valuable for its contrasts than for any direct parallelism it may 
afford. Taking their case over the long run it will be found that, like the 
Japanese, the English have been a nation of borrowers, particularly borrowers of 
technological elements. But their borrowings have been extended over an 
incomparably longer interval of history and have in no case involved so abrupt a 
break with the people's own cultural past, having commonly been drawn from 
neighbors occupying a technological plane not conspicuously more advanced than 
the state of the industrial arts already previously at the command of the 
English community. And the technological borrowing of the English virtually 
ceased at a date so far in the past as already to have allowed all borrowed 
elements not only to be fully assimilated in a virtually home-bred technological 
system, but also to have so far worked out their secondary, institutional, 
consequences as to afford an object lesson of what the cultural consequences of 
any such technological borrowing should necessarily be. Down through the Middle 
Ages and early modern times the English were, culturally speaking, and

254 Essays in Our Changing Order

particularly in the technological respect, constantly and cumulatively indebted 
to their Continental neighbors, in a fashion resembling that in which the 
Japanese throughout their long mediaeval experience were, culturally, followers 
and dependents of China and Korea. But there is in the English case this 
striking feature of contrast as against the current Japanese situation, that 
while the English borrowed unremittingly, until such time as the course of 
events threw them into the lead in Europe's industrial advance, their borrowing 
took effect at so moderate a pace that the consequently changing state of the 
industrial arts among them had time and scope concomitantly to work out its 
effect upon the habits of thought of the community, and so to bring about a 
state of the institutional conventions answering to the altered state of the 
industrial arts.
It should, then, confidently be presumed that, as Japan has with great facility 
and effect taken over the occidental state of the industrial arts, so should its 
population be due, presently and expeditiously, to fall in with the peculiar 
habits of thought that make the faults and qualities of the western culture - 
the spiritual outlook and the principles of conduct and ethical values that have 
been induced by the exacting discipline of this same state of the industrial 
arts among the technologically more advanced and mature of the western peoples. 
For good or ill, life under the conditions imposed by the modern industrial 
system, and by that economic system of price, business enterprise, and 
competitive earning and spending that always goes with it, is in the long run 
incompatible with the prepossessions of mediaevalism. So that as soon as her 
people shall have digested the western state of science and technology and have 
assimilated its spiritual contents, the "Spirit of Old Japan" will, in effect, 
have been dissipated. Ravelings of its genial tradition will still trail at the 
skirts of the new era, but as an asset available for the enterprise in dynastic 
politics the "Spirit of Old Japan" will have little more than the value of a 
tale that is told. There will doubtless continue to float through the adolescent 
brains of Young Japan some yellow vapor of truculence, such as would under other 
skies be called 'el valor espanol', and such as may give rise to occasional 
exploits of abandon, but the joy of living in obscure privation and contumely 
for the sake of the Emperor's politics and posthumous fame will be lost to the 
common man.
The opportunity of imperial Japan as a fearsome power in the world's concert of 
dynastic politics may by consequence confidently be expected to lie within the 
historical interval that so intervenes between Japan's acquirement of the 
western state of the industrial arts and its consequent, slower but inevitable, 
falling into line with those materialistic, commercial, and spendthrift 
conceptions of right and honest living that make the outcome among the 
(Christian) peoples that have gone before along the road of industrial dominion 
and individual self-help.

The "Spirit of Old Japan" is an institutional matter; that is to say it is a 
matter of acquired habits of thought, of tradition and training, rather than of 
native endowment peculiar to the race. As such it is necessarily of a 
transitory, not to say transient, nature, depending for its maintenance on the 
continued maintenance of those workday habits of life out of which it has arisen 
and to which it owes its consistency. Barring such retardation as necessarily 
attached to the growth of new principles and values induced by new 
circumstances, a radical change in the material ways and means by which the 
people live must, here as elsewhere, work a consequent change in the people's 
scheme of life-in the accepted rule of rights and duties. Ideals, ethical 
values, principles (habits of thought) induced by the conditions of life in the 
past must presently give place to a different range of ideals, values, and 
principles, so soon as the range of habituation to which they owe their force 
has ceased to be operative. The fact that, in the case of the Japanese as in 
other similar cases, the popular and romantic faith holds the received scheme of 
habits to be an innate and irreducible specific character peculiar to this 
people, and therefore holds it to be a national heritage unalterable and 
indefeasible through the ages "as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever 
shall be," etc.; this romantic prejudice need of course not detain us, since it 
is itself an integral part in that scheme of habits of thought that comes and 
goes under the compulsion of shifting circumstance.
The Japanese people should be no exception to the common rule in this respect. 
The elements engaged in their case are of much the same character as those that 
have been seen at work in the history of the western nations, and they should be 
amenable to the same discipline of those material circumstances that are now 
coming to condition the national life. So, in point of their racial make-up, the 
Japanese are in very much the same case as the occidental nations from whom they 
are now borrowing ways and means and into the midst of whom they are driving 
their way by help of these borrowed ways and means.
It is, of course, not intended to claim that there subsists anything like an 
identity of race, as between the Japanese and the Christian nations, nor even a 
particularly near or intimate ethnic relationship; but the run of the well-known 
facts is sufficiently convincing to the effect that the Japanese people readily 
fall into the same ways of thinking and reasoning, that they readily assimilate 
the same manner of theoretical constructions in science and technology, that the 
same scheme of conceptual values and logical sequence carries conviction in 
Japan as in the Occident. Their intellectual perspective is so nearly the same 
that the same facts, seen in the same connection, are convincing to the same 
effect. It need by no means imply an inclusive psychological identity or 
duplication, but the facility and effect with which the Japanese are taking to 
western habits of thought in matters of technology and scientific knowledge 
shows a sufficiently convincing equality or equivalence between them and their 
western fellow men in respect of their intellectual make-up.
This intellectual similarity or psychological equivalence will stand out in 
relief when the Japanese case is contrasted with what has befallen certain other 
peoples, racially alien to the bearers of the western culture, such as the 
Negro, Polynesian, or East Indian. These others have been exposed to the 
occidental technological system - the system of the machine industry - but they 
have been brought to no effectual comprehension of the logic and efficiency of 
the western technological equipment, have not acquired or assimilated the drift 
and bias of the material science of the West, and have, even under hard 
compulsion, been unable to effect anything like a practicable working 
arrangement with the occidental system of mechanical efficiency and economic 
control.
And even as the Japanese show this facile apprehension of occidental methods and 
values in the domain of material knowledge, so also is there apparently a close 
resemblance in point of emotional complexion, suggested, e.g., by the close 
similarity between the feudal system as it has prevailed in Japan and, in its 
time, in western Europe. Similar material circumstances, particularly in respect 
of the industrial arts, appear to have induced similar institutional results and 
a parallel range of ideals and ethical values, such as would presume a somewhat 
closely similar run of human nature in the two cases.
This similarity in point of native traits, if so it can be called, is due not to 
an identity of race but rather to a parallelism in racial composition. Like the 
peoples of Christendom, and more particularly like that group of peoples that 
cluster about the North Sea, and that make up the center of diffusion of the 
western culture, the Japanese are, racially, a hybrid population. The several 
racial elements that go to make up the hybrid mixture are, of course, not the 
same in the two cases under comparison, nor are they, perhaps, at all nearly 
related in point of racial derivation. But both of these two contrasted 
populations alike show that wide-ranging variability of individuals that is 
characteristic of hybrid peoples, both in the absence of uniformity in respect 
of physical type and in their relatively great variety of intellectual and 
spiritual endowment, both in degree and in kind. This variability of these 
hybrid peoples becomes more obvious when they are contrasted with peoples of 
relatively unmixed stock, or even with the average run of mankind at large. 
Indeed, it may be set down as an earmark of hybridism. It is a factor of serious 
consequence for the cultural scheme of any such population, particularly for its 
stability; since such a wide-fluctuating variability of individuals within any 
given community will give, in effect, a large available flexibility of - type, 
and so will afford a wide and facile susceptibility to new ideas and new grounds 
of action.
Such being the character of the human raw material in and by which the Japanese 
situation is to be worked out, it should presumably follow that, just as the 
material and matter-of-fact elements of western civilisation are finding ready 
lodgment and fertile ground among them, so should these intrusive matter-of -
fact conceptions presently, and with celerity, induce the working out of a 
corresponding fabric of matters of imputation-principles of conduct, articles of 
faith, social conventions, ethical values. The impersonal and materialistic bias 
of modern science and technology has, among the western peoples, already gone 
far to dissipate those putative values on which any feudal and autocratic régime 
must necessarily rest. And since the same impersonal and materialistic frame of 
mind proves, to all appearance, to be characteristic of the Japanese, they 
should also expect presently to experience its spiritual, and therefore its 
institutional consequences.

Hitherto and for the immediate future, therefore, Japan has the usufruct of the 
modern state of science and the industrial arts, without the faults of its 
qualities. But in the long run its faults are as inseparable from this system as 
its structure. How far these faults or infirmities are to be rated as such at 
large is a question that need not be argued here. They are infirmities for the 
imperialistic purposes of Great Nippon, and it. should be a matter of no great 
difficulty to see how and why, or even to see that they are already incipiently 
in process of realisation. This may be better appreciated on calling to mind 
certain features of the change that is going forward in the economic 
circumstances of Japan.
Effectually to turn its usufruct of the western science and technology to 
account, it will be necessary for Japan, in all essential respects, to follow 
the lead given by the western peoples. Such a course is prescribed by the 
circumstances of the case; partly in that the modern state of the industrial 
arts involves a certain kind and degree of popular education and a certain 
impersonal, mechanistic organisation and co-ordination of the material equipment 
(mechanical and human) and of the processes employed; partly because nothing 
like the full advantage of the methods employed can be had except by entering 
into close relations of give and take, commercially and otherwise, with the 
other nations that have adopted the scope and method of the mechanical industry. 
In its full scope this industrial system is necessarily of an international or 
cosmopolitan character, and any attempt to work it on narrower than 
international lines must fall short of that highest efficiency which alone can 
satisfy the imperialistic needs or the national pride of Japan. It is only by 
way of commerce and a commercialised industry that Japan can get a footing among 
the commercial nations of the West; and in this necessary commercialisation of 
its industry and its economic institutions Japan must in all essential respects 
accept the scheme as it is already in force among the nations of the West. But 
the unintended consequences of such a course must also follow.
So, a competent system of communication, internal and external, is of the 
essence of the case, and in this matter the Japanese are already far on their 
way, with steamships, railway, telegraph, telephone, postal service, and 
newspapers, as well as an improved and extended system of highways; from which 
it follows that the isolation, parcelment, and consequent home-bred animus of 
the people is already beginning to disappear, and the corresponding clannishness 
and adhesive loyalty to their hereditary local masters is also in process of 
decay. The feudal organisation, and the spirit of fealty, rests on an industrial 
system of self-sufficient local units and on discrepancies of usage and 
convention as between self-sufficient local organisations.
Again, the modern (western) state of the industrial arts requires, in order to 
its efficient working, a relatively high degree of "intelligence," so-called, 
among the workmen - it should more accurately be spoken of as a large volume of 
relatively exact information within the peculiar lines of the material sciences. 
This involves schooling, of a set and special character, extended far beyond the 
bounds of what was needed in that way under the earlier industrial system, and 
specifically it involves, as an imperative requirement, the familiar use of 
printed matter. (It may be noted by the way that the percentage of illiteracy 
among the Japanese has fallen off since the Restoration at a rate that is fairly 
alarming for the stability of the established order.) It is particularly for the 
sake of matter-of -fact information, serviceable in the mechanically organised 
system of industry and communication, that this high rate of literacy is 
indispensable, and the effect of this industrial system and of life organised on 
these mechanical lines is unavoidably to extend and diffuse information of this 
kind. At the same time the workday training of the routine of life under this 
industrial system, and of its ubiquitous and exacting system of communication, 
goes in a pronouncedly one-sided way to inculcate a matter-of-fact, and 
especially a materialistic, habit of mind; such as comports ill with those 
elusive putative verities of occult personal excellence in which the "Spirit of 
Old Japan" is grounded.
So, e.g., the spread of such matter-of-fact information and such mechanistic 
conceptions must unavoidably act to dissipate all substantial belief in that 
opéra bouffe mythology that makes up the state religion and supplies the 
foundation of the Japanese faith in the Emperor's divine pedigree and occult 
virtues; for these time-worn elements of Shinto are even less viable under the 
exacting mechanistic discipline of modern industry than are the frayed remnants 
of the faith that conventionally serve as articles of belief among the Christian 
peoples.
Under the given conditions, brought on throughout the western world by the 
machine industry itself and by the antecedent institutional situation out of 
which it arose, this modern state of the industrial arts can be turned to 
account for the purposes of any national or dynastic ambitions only by the help 
or through the mediation of a business organisation of the modern kind. No other 
method of control or exploitation would serve, because no other system of 
control will articulate with the industrial organisation of those commercial 
nations with whom co-ordination and intercourse are requisite to bring the 
industry of the Japanese people to its best (pecuniary) efficiency. Within the 
comprehensive community of nations that lies under the dominion of the machine 
process any degree of isolation counts as a disability. It is a system of 
interlocking processes; and the mechanism of co-ordination and commutation in 
the case is the commercial traffic in which all these communities are engaged. 
Incompetent, or even puerile, as this commercial enterprise may seem when seen 
in the large and taken as a means of the international co-ordination of 
industry, it still affords the sole method available for the purpose under the 
given conditions, because it is one of the chief of the given conditions.
This business enterprise under whose tutelage the industrial system is placed 
does not directly contemplate or concern itself with serviceability to national, 
dynastic, or collective ends of any kind. It is a matter of individual 
enterprise, animated by motives of pecuniary gain and carried on on a 
competitive basis. Wherever it reaches it carries a "commercialisation" of human 
relations and social standards, and effects a displacement of such aims and 
values as cannot be stated in terms of pecuniary gain; and so it throws 
pecuniary solvency into that position of first consideration that has once been 
occupied by pedigree and putative excellencies of character.
This pecuniary enterprise that so comes necessarily to take the oversight of the 
industrial system has certain specific consequences, secondary but essential, 
which the Japanese community has not yet experienced in full, because the 
secondary effects of the industrial revolution in Japan have not yet had time to 
come to a head. The most obvious of these, or at least the one most readily to 
be stated and appreciated in concrete (material) terms, is what might be called 
the "sabotage" of capitalism the competitive working at cross purposes of rival 
business concerns and the control of industrial processes by considerations of 
net gain to the managers rather than of material serviceability. By virtue of 
this pecuniary control it has come about, in all countries in which the modern 
industrial system has had time to fall into settled lines, that the equipment is 
rarely, if ever, worked to its capacity - often, over long intervals, at less 
than one half its capacity - and that the products, whether goods or services, 
are turned out with a view, in respect of kind, time, place, and sophistication, 
to their profitable sale rather than to their serviceable consumption. It is 
presumably well within the mark to say that by force of this unavoidable 
capitalistic "sabotage" the industries in the maturer commercial countries fall 
short of their theoretically normal efficiency by something more than fifty 
percent. The new era in Japan has not yet reached this stage of economic 
maturity, but there is no reason to presume a different outcome for Japan in 
this respect, given the necessary time for adjustment.
With competitive gain as the legitimate end of endeavor comes also competitive 
spending as its legitimate counterfoil, leading to a ubiquitous system of 
"conspicuous waste." With this canon of right pecuniary living, reinforced by 
the new ethical principles of self-help and commercial solvency, comes in as a 
bench-mark in public life the well-worn principle of modern politics that 
"public office is a means of private gain." Hence the comprehensive system of 
"graft" that envelopes all civilised affairs of state, and that once, e.g., 
allowed the great organisation of Russian officials to be defeated by the 
Japanese. This phase of civilisation must also of right come to the Japanese in 
due course of maturity.
So, again, through the competitive wage system, as well as by other channels of 
commercial indoctrination, the same principle of competitive consumption comes 
to permeate the industrial population and presently induces a higher standard of 
living, of more accurately of expenditure; which cuts into the disposable margin 
of production above cost, that might otherwise be drawn to the service of 
imperial politics.

It would of course be hazardous to guess how long an interval must necessarily 
elapse between Japan's acquirement of the western state of the industrial arts 
and the consequent disintegration of that "Spirit of Old Japan" that still is 
the chief asset of the state as a warlike power; but it may be accepted without 
hazard that such must be the event, sooner or later. And it is within this 
interval that Japan's opportunity lies. The spiritual disintegration has already 
visibly set in, under all the several forms of modernisation spoken of above, 
but it is presumably still safe to say that hitherto the rate of gross gain in 
material efficiency due to the new scientific and technological knowledge is 
more than sufficient to offset this incipient spiritual deterioration; so that, 
while the climax of the nation's net efficiency as a political or warlike force 
lies yet in the future, it would seem at least to lie in the calculable future. 
When this critical point in the country's growing maturity under the new 
economic dispensation shall be passed, when Japan shall have reached the plane 
of materialism and commercialisation occupied by the Christian nations, in 
respect of pecuniary ideals and self-help as well as of technological 
efficiency; then the advantage that now visibly inures to the government of 
Japan from the anomalous cultural situation of that country should be at an end, 
and the efficiency of the Japanese national organisation should then presumably 
fall to the same level of efficiency per unit of men and of expenditure as is 
now occupied by the older peoples within the European community of nations. It 
is the present high efficiency of the Japanese, an efficiency which may be 
formulated as an exceptionally wide margin between cost of production and output 
of military force-it is this that makes Japan formidable in the eyes of her 
western competitors for imperial honors, and in substance it is this on which 
the Japanese masters of political intrigue rest their sanguine hopes of empire.
As already implied in what has been said above, the Japanese, statesmen and 
subjects, seeing the rapid rate of gain already made in material efficiency, and 
failing to see what their own experience has not taught them, that the new 
industrial era carries the faults of its own qualities; seeing the coefficient 
of gain, and not discounting the yet incipiently operative coefficient of loss, 
they count on the present rate of gross gain as a secure basis of prospective 
net gain. But from the considerations set forth above it follows that if this 
new-found efficiency is to serve the turn for the dynastic aggrandisement of 
Japan, it must be turned to account before the cumulatively accelerating rate of 
institutional deterioration overtakes and neutralises the cumulatively declining 
rate of gain in material efficiency; which should, humanly speaking, mean that 
Japan must strike, if at all, within the effective lifetime of the generation 
that is now coming to maturity. For, facile as the Japanese people have shown 
themselves to be, there is no reason to doubt that the commercialisation of 
Japan should be passably complete within that period. It is, therefore, also 
contained in the premises that, in order to an (imperialistically) successful 
issue, the imperial government must throw all its available force, without 
reservation, into one headlong rush; since in the nature of the case no second 
opportunity of the kind is to be looked for.

NOTES:
1) See, e.g., the, very useful manual on The Evolution of New Japan, by Joseph 
H. Longford, where this complexion of things Japanese is set out in an admirably 
lucid and succinct manner, although it is apparently done unintentionally and 
perhaps even unconsciously.
--- End ---