JAPAN
transactions with them, he learns to regard them with profound distrust. But it is not possible to endorse his sweeping verdict that the commercial conscience is wholly undeveloped in Japan and that transactions on credit are impossible. History flatly contradicts such an allegation. Throughout more than two hundred years under Tokugawa rule all business was conducted on a basis of credit more extended and more thorough than could have been found in any other country at the same epoch, and commercial paper as well as private bank-notes commanded implicit confidence. There is no question of conjecture or credulity in this matter: the facts are beyond cavil. It must be conceded that the resident foreign merchant has suffered sufficiently to warrant his suspicions; but a nation with such a record as that of the Japanese is not to be written down commercially conscienceless or radically dishonest because it often walks crookedly in endeavouring to circumvent the foreigner, whose assumption of superiority it resents, whose large share in the country's over-sea trade it regards with jealousy, and whose unqualified criticisms it hears with not unnatural umbrage.
Statistics show that the efforts made by Japanese merchants to get the foreign trade into their own hands have been tolerably successful, for whereas, in 1888, their share was only twelve per cent of the total, it rose to twenty-five per cent in 1899. Yet there are strong reasons to
214
