Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER 2 AS JAPAN SEES US EVERY American, before he can appraise the present crisis, must put himself in the place of a Japanese and see the situation through his eyes as far as possible. Let us inquire first of all as to the sources of the ordinary Japanese citizen’s information and impressions about us. You will doubtless think at once of the news despatches published in the Yokohama and Tokio dailies, the other news in the English-language sheets of Japan, and the letters from Japanese colonist in Hawaii and the Pacific coast. All these are important factors in determining Japanese opinion. But, in truth, to-day they are little more than confirmatory of hypotheses which the Japanese derive from another source so much more widely known in the islands, so vivid, and so copious, that every other channel of knowledge has become petty in comparison. This source is the American motion- picture. 4 The motion-picture has, from all that I can gather from both natives and Americans who have been studying it in Japan, China, and India, done more to blacken the reputation of the white race in general and the United States in particular than all the malice and libel of the most savage anti-American propagandists. The “ rising tide of color, which Lothrop Stoddard has recently described so picturesquely, but inaccurately, does not flow from native irritation over politics or secret diplomacy or the aggressions of economic imperialism in any greater volume than it flows from the inevitable reactions which the ordinary run of screen-picture produces upon the ordinary Asiatic, as he sits in the shabby theaters of the great ports and contemplates the world of the white man as reported to him by the white man himself. The pictures he sees are, as a rule, not those recently produce…
