Читать книгу Broken Butterflies онлайн

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"There is danger in all this. There is a turbulence of too precipitate transition. It needs wise handling. There is good in it all, this passionate desire for making Japan modern, but all these young, restless forces should be directed, led along wholesome paths, and all that the powers-that-be—the militarists, the capitalists, the police—seem to know is repression. I can see lots of good in both sides, the cautious conservatism of the old generation which clings desperately to the ancient virtues which it sees spurned; and which sees all that is bad, unwholesome, in the new movement; and the young generation which wants to create a new Japan in a day, which wants to walk before it has learned to crawl, which is prone to discard the virtues and values of old Japan before it has learned to understand and use modern, Western civilization. It is a game for high stakes which is going on here under our eyes, where immeasurably precious values of an old civilization, unique, irreplaceable, are likely to be lost, to be thrown ruthlessly aside; and, on the other hand, there is loss every day that the intentness, the eagerness of the younger generation, of the masses in the cities where they have acquired zest for modernism, is suffered to waste itself in futile groping after lots of unwholesome stuff, which they think must be good fruit mainly because it is forbidden; especially when all this eagerness to learn, this ambitious energy might, with a little sympathy, a bit of understanding wisdom, be made into a tremendous power for constructive good. The longer you live here, Kent, the more you will come to see that what Japan needs to-day, what she must have, is another Meiji, some strong, wise directing force, a truly big man—but there is no such man to-day."