“So that was the reason that fellow bored me until eleven o’clock. I owe you one for that!”
“Yes? We paid you foreigners well in those days, more than we could really afford, but most of you were worth the money. Not on account of the duties you performed, not always satisfactorily but generally to the best of your ability, but on account of the never failing amusement you afforded us. At a time when you thought yourself a fair Japanese scholar I have heard you criticized right before you, and you were as unconscious as a babe.”
“Don’t you think that you show by what you say the real difference between you and our race. By your own confession, I showed you kindness, and, my memory deceives me badly, or you reciprocated to some extent my friendship for you. Yet you could stand by and patiently listen to an adverse criticism of one who was your friend, and, instead of resenting it, as I would have done in a similar case, you could be amused by it.”
“Ah! but you forget. At that time you were still an object of suspicion to us. Shimonoseki and Kagoshima were recent recollections, and we were eating humble-pie. It is different now. We know your strength and your weakness and we know also our own strength, and we can magnanimously condescend to treat you as our equals. At that time the whole nation dissembled; we hated you and every foreigner, although we treated you so as to flatter your conceit. It does not raise a people in its own eyes when it forces itself to discard, even for a time, its national pride, and pretend to honor those whom it despises and hates. I tell you, my old friend, I am proud of my country and of my people. We passed through a fiery ordeal, and came out purified. But I acknowledge also that the fire has left scars which only time can heal. We are growing better, not worse. The fact that we two still find pleasure in each other’s company proves that we are better able to appreciate each other’s good qualities, and that is a type of the feeling of Japan toward foreign nations.”
_Meanings and Pronunciation of Japanese Words used in the Text._
4. Pron. Die-mee-yoh. This word means Great Name.
6. Pron. Yed-doh, now Tokyo (pron. To-kee-yoh), or Eastern Capital. Yedo was the capital of Old Japan, from 1600 to 1868.