A Japanese contemporary challenges the European measure of progress
we really only mean, "Japan has become European"
Okakura Kakuzō's The Book of Tea, first published in 1906, supplies a contemporary Japanese countervoice to this equivalence. In chapter I he argues that Western observers ignored Japanese accomplishments in peaceful arts and began recognizing Japan as civilized when its military violence became conspicuous in Manchuria. His objection concerns the standard by which Europe grants recognition, rather than an absence of cultural achievement before Europeanization. He also criticizes Japanese imitation of Western dress and manners as a superficial conception of civilization.
The comparison partly supports Chesterton's suspicion that the word ‘progressive’ may conceal a European criterion. It also exposes the limit of his answer: Japan's acquisition of some European practices would not by itself prove that Europe possessed the only capacity for forward movement. Okakura presents Japanese aesthetic, ethical, and religious traditions as sources of achievement and urges reciprocal learning between East and West. His account remains an interested cultural argument, but it prevents the alleged fact of European monopoly from passing as an uncontested observation. The inspected witness is Project Gutenberg ebook 769, updated in 2016. There is no evidence here that Chesterton was answering Okakura.
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