Now the faculty of being influenced by other people the Japanese possess to a marvelous degree. Fundamentally unoriginal, they have always shown a genius for self-adaptation. They are at present engaged in exemplifying their capacity upon a wholesale national scale.
It is hardly exaggeration to say that Japan at this moment is affording the rest of the world the spectacle of the most stupendous hypnotic act ever seen, nothing less than the hypnotization of a whole nation, with its eyes open. Forty million of folk there are now innocent freaks of foreign suggestion. It is not simply the imitating of foreign customs, but the instant unassimilated character of the imitation that stamps the national state of mind as kin to hypnosis, and gives to both their cousinly touch of caricature. The new idea is adopted with little or no attempt at adaptation. Such sublime disregard of congruity shows the hypnotic completeness with which it is received. In consequence, Tōkyō is now one vast public platform, in which nature is giving an exhibition of ideal force. Combinations in costume as beautifully incompatible as any the
