Excerpt from Some of the Contributions of Feudal Japan to the New Japan
Zen, of course, was not the only controlling factor, but exerted its influence upon the Japanese side by side with other forces which had come down from the earlier ages and with still others which developed after 1600. Zen, however, constituted an ever-present ideal and heritage which is even now perceptible everywhere, and which could be developed only in so robust a feudal society as existed in Japan for seven long centuries. Zen is the great element of the Japanese character which has yet been the most inadequately interpreted to the outer world, and which, at any event, is perhaps the least intelligible to the American mind.
We cannot tarry longer on this point, for, important and precious as all these and other contributions are, and profitably as they may be enlarged upon, we are in this discourse concerned primarily with some other contributions of feudal Japan - with those contributions, that is, which have had a special bearing on Japans activity as a modern nation. What does New Japan owe to feudal Japan that has promoted her national life under modern conditions?
Of some of the contributions of this character of which I may claim partial knowledge, it is possible to point out two aspects, moral and social. What peculiar moral life has been inherited from the feudal era, and what peculiar social organization had produced it and was sustained by it? The form of this question suggests, and the following discourse will show, how inseparably these two phases were bound up with each other; it is purely for the sake of discussion that I am obliged to divorce them one from the other as if they were not, as in reality they were, two sides of one and the same substance.
The seven centuries of feudalism were preceded by about four centuries(794 to c. 1185) of court culture at Kyoto, the imperial capital. This culture was, in its essential characteristics, aristocratic, effeminate, and emotional.
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