MODERN PROBLEMS IN PAINTING 675 



results time alone can determine. I am aware that sincere lovers of 

 art in the West have always emphatically urged us to the preserva- 

 tion of our national style. I have heard many wonder why we should 

 have tried to imitate you in painting, as in everything else. You 

 should remember, however, that our wholesale adoption of your 

 methods of life and culture was not purely a matter of choice but of 

 necessity. The word "modernization" means the occidentalization 

 of the world. The map of Asia will reveal the dismal fate of the ancient 

 civilizations that have succumbed to the spell of industrialism, 

 commercialism, imperialism, and what not, which the modern spirit 

 has cast over them. It seems almost imperative that one should 

 mount the car of Juggernaut unless one would be crushed under its 

 wheels. Socially, our sympathy towards painting, as towards all 

 other questions of life, is divided into two camps, the so-called 

 progressive, and the conservative. The former believes in the ac- 

 ceptance of Western culture in its entirety, the latter with a qualifica- 

 tion. To the advocates of the wholesale westernization of Japan, 

 Eastern civilization seems a lower development compared to the 

 Western. The more we assimilate the foreign methods the higher 

 we mount in the scale of humanity. They point out the state of 

 Asiatic nations and the success of Japan in maintaining a national 

 existence by the very fact of recognizing the supremacy of the 

 West. They claim that civilization is a homogeneous development 

 that defies eclecticism in any of its phases. To them Japanese painting 

 appears at one with the bows and arrows of our primitive warfare, 

 not to be tolerated in these days of explosives and ironclads. 



The conservatives, on the other hand, assert that Asiatic civiliza- 

 tion is not to be despised; that its conception of the harmony of life 

 is as precious as the scientific spirit and the organizing ability of the 

 West. To them, Western society is not necessarily the paragon 

 which all mankind should imitate. They believe in the homogeneity 

 of civilization, but that true homogeneity must be the result of a 

 realization from within, not an accumulation of outside matter. To 

 them, Japanese paintings are by no means the simple weapons to 

 which they are likened, but a potent machine invented to carry on 

 a special kind of aesthetic warfare. 



I would like to say in this connection that Japanese art lias not 

 yet been presented in its true light to outside nations. Except to the 

 few who have made a special study of it, or to those whose real insight 

 into beauty has made it possible to enter into its spirit, the real 

 meaning of our national painting seems not to have been grasped 

 by the general Western public. Our painting is still known to you 

 through the color-prints of the popular school, and the flower and 

 bird pictures which represent the prettiness, not the seriousness of 

 our artistic efforts. I beg vou to know that in the works of our 



