Quotation from: The Strength of the Strong

Written by: Jack London


But best of all, from the standpoint of Japan, the Chinese was a
kindred race. The baffling enigma of the Chinese character to the
West was no baffling enigma to the Japanese. The Japanese
understood as we could never school ourselves or hope to
understand. Their mental processes were the same. The Japanese
thought with the same thought-symbols as did the Chinese, and they
thought in the same peculiar grooves. Into the Chinese mind the
Japanese went on where we were balked by the obstacle of
incomprehension. They took the turning which we could not
perceive, twisted around the obstacle, and were out of sight in the
ramifications of the Chinese mind where we could not follow. They
were brothers. Long ago one had borrowed the other's written
language, and, untold generations before that, they had diverged
from the common Mongol stock. There had been changes,
differentiations brought about by diverse conditions and infusions
of other blood; but down at the bottom of their beings, twisted
into the fibres of them, was a heritage in common, a sameness in
kind that time had not obliterated.

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Old Dominion University CS Dept
Designed by Joan A. Smith for the CRATE project
Created: 2007-2-22T12:35:29Z
Part of the CratePreservation Project
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Part of a series of experiments in web preservation under the direction of Michael L. Nelson, Ph.D.