For hundreds of years, Japan and China have enjoyed a history of intercourse and communication as friendly neighbors. We share the same roots in politics, law, literature, the arts, morals, religion, and all other elements of civilization; and in ancient times, Japan was often blessed with the introduction into the country of many splendid aspects of China's civilization. Hence, China assumed the position of an advanced nation while we took something of the role of being a more backward one.

Japan …was organized …So when the West impinged on her, she put what it had to tell her in a sieve and sifted out the parts useful to her – for example, all the sciences and the art of war. She looked at what was left behind …and most of it she threw in the dustbin. But what she sifted out she absorbed into her body political as a lump of sugar is absorbed in a glass of water …[I]n China Western knowledge and Western cults descended on her unguided and uncontrolled. There was no winnowing of it; there was no sifting of what was good for China from what was bad …The simile here is not the lump of sugar …. here it is that of blobs of oil floating in the water and tending to go putrid.