The Spirit of Japan

A farewell lecture in Tokyo urging the Japanese to keep their own civilisation and refuse the West's cult of national power.

by Rabindranath Tagore24 passages held

English, the original language, and your language

First published: 1916(aged 55)
Original language: English

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Overview

Japan welcomed Rabindranath Tagore in the spring of 1916 as the first Asian to win the Nobel Prize, and about three thousand people came to hear his first speech there on 1 June. He spent the following weeks telling his hosts what he feared they were becoming. This address was his farewell, given on 2 July at Keio Gijuku University in Tokyo to students of the city's private colleges and members of the Indo-Japanese Association, which printed it as a pamphlet dated the same day. Tagore opens by anticipating the objection that a short visit has led him to idealise the country, and refuses to be silenced by it. What he had seen, he says, was a people who understood nature through sympathy rather than analysis, and whose life was held together by human ties; Buddhist priests at a wayside station had brought a stranger fruit and lighted incense. The danger he names is less Japan's copying of Western dress and machinery than its taking over of the force that drives the West: the nation as an organisation of power, in which politics overrides a society's own ideals. Japan may arm to defend itself, he allows, and no further, and he asks whether the West, which guards its welfare behind walls of suspicion, has read the world rightly. Within a year the address reappeared as the second part of "Nationalism in Japan" in his book Nationalism, and in 1918 a German translation, Der Geist Japans, opened a new series of booklets in Leipzig.

Key concepts

What is the difference between modernism and modernising?

Modernism is the real modern spirit; modernising is only its affectation, as writing 'poetic' verse is an affectation of poetry. Those who truly have the modern spirit, Tagore says, need not modernise, just as the truly brave need not boast. European dress, square houses and box-like schools are not modern at all, merely European. What Japan should take from the West is science rightly applied, not its outward look.

What is the political gambling the address warns of?

A politics in which a nation stakes its soul to win its game. Tagore saw Japan's social ideals, the human ties that had held its life together, already giving way to politics, the pursuit of national power for its own sake. The stake is the society's own character: what is won at that table is power, and what is lost is the very thing that made Japan worth admiring.

What is maitri?

Maitri is a Sanskrit and Buddhist word for friendliness or loving-kindness, and Tagore places it at the root of Japanese culture: friendliness with people and with nature alike. It explains, for him, why Japan does not boast of mastering nature but brings it offerings of love, and why that love shows itself as beauty rather than as displays of power.

Why, according to the address, does the West fear a rising East?

Because the power the West thrives on is, in Tagore's words, an evil power, safe only while it stays on the West's side. Whenever an Eastern people grows strong, that power might change hands, so the West arms and plots to keep exclusive possession of it. The terror it has let loose comes back to threaten it, and it can no longer rest.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Power Held in Beauty

Japan seemed to Tagore to have made nature its own by loving it rather than conquering it. Whether that gift can survive the race to modernise is what the farewell is anxious about.

What Tagore praised was not Japan's efficiency but its manner. Buddhist priests at a busy station bring a stranger fruit and incense; a people knows nature's language of lines and colours by sympathy, not analysis. Europe, he says, felt the world as conflict to be conquered, while Japan brings it offerings of love. Nature keeps her power in forms of beauty, active and yet at rest, and Japan had learned that discipline through centuries of self-control, rooted in maitri, friendliness with people and with nature.

aesthetics
beauty
nature
culture
cultural identity
spirituality
art
moral education
human nature

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Modern Without the West's Motive

Copying Western clothes and buildings is a small matter beside copying the force that drives them. Where Japan should stop borrowing is the question Tagore leaves with his hosts.

The danger, Tagore tells his audience, is not imitating the West's outward features but adopting its motive force: politics overruling a society's own ideals, and 'Survival of the Fittest' as a national motto, meaning help yourself and never mind the cost to others. He allows Japan weapons for self-protection and no more, since real power lies in the person who wields them. Nor should Asia answer Europe's contempt with contempt; that, he warns, would only be imitating Europe at her worst.

modernity
nationalism
militarism
imperialism
politics
political philosophy
cultural change
power
wealth
commerce
civilization
fear
moral psychology
ethics
humanism

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Within this work

passages held: 24
distinct concepts: 78
by passages held, corpus-wide: #763

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “modernity” and “spirituality”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 3 concepts, joined by 3 pairings. 16 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
modernity	spirituality	3
modernity	nationalism	2
nationalism	spirituality	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1913 Sadhana: The Realisation of Life
Tagore's talks on the Upanishads, published in London in the year of his Nobel Prize; Creative Unity later carries the same ideas into art and society.
EN
1916 The Spirit of Japan you are here EN
1917 Nationalism
Written for a lecture tour of the United States in 1916–17, with his two Tokyo addresses added; the argument returns in shorter form in the essay "The Nation" in Creative Unity.
EN
1922 Creative Unity
Where Nationalism attacks the nation-state, this later collection sets against it what Tagore wanted built instead, from the village religion of Bengal to the university he founded.
EN

— or open another of their works