One morning the whole world looked up in surprise, when Japan broke through her walls of old habits in a night and came out triumphant. It was done in such an incredibly short time, that it seemed like a change of dress and not like the slow building up of a new structure. She showed the confidence, the strength of maturity and the freshness and infinite potentiality of new life all at the same moment. The fear entertained was, that it was a mere freak of history, a child’s game of time, the blowing up of a soap bubble, perfect in its colouring, hollow in its heart and without substance. But Japan has proved conclusively that this sudden revelation of her power is not a short-live wonder, a chance product of time and tide, thrown up from the depth of obscurity to be swept away the next moment into the sea of oblivion.

The truth is that Japan is old and new at the same time. She has her legacy of ancient culture from the east, the culture that enjoins man to look for his true wealth and power in his inner soul; the culture that gives self-possession in the face of loss and danger, self-sacrifice without counting the cost or hoping for gain, defiance of death, acceptance of countless social obligations that we owe to man as a social being-- the culture that has given us the vision of the infinite in all finite things, through which we have come to realize that the universe is living with a life and permeated with a soul, that it is not a huge machine which had been turned out by a demon of accidence or fashioned by a teleological God who lives in a far away heaven. In a word, modern Japan has come out of the immemorial East like a lotus blossoming in an easy grace, all the while keeping its firm hold upon the profound depth from which it has sprung.