Tokio Professor on Earthquake:
Crimes Due To "Want of Culture"
Prof. H. Takashima of the Tokio University, Tokio, an authority on psychology, arrived at Dairen on November 7 to make a lecturing tour of the §.M.R. Line at the instance of the Mantetsu* Reading Society.
The Professor is outspoken, if nothing else. He is relentless in criticizing the Japanese as to how they behaved before and during the earthquake disaster.
The earthquake disaster has of course been a national calamity. The appalling extent of material losses suffered from it is appreciate ed by all the world. The disillusion that vas been thrust upon the Japanese people by exposing their failings in all their naked ugliness has given a severe manta] shock to the Japanese, who will find it not at all easy to recover therefrom. Before the disaster seized the nation, the people had lived a life, extravagant, fickle, licentious, and decadent, Self-irritating as it is, this applies to high and low. Makeshift, indolence, avarice, and shirking of responsibility have enervated the whole moral being, and the people were, as it were, floundering in the filthy slime of degeneration like the drones drowning in honey. The terrible visitation. has laid bare how unprepared the people were for emergency, how low their moral standard was, and also how bigoted their ideas were, Like the loosely-. jointed and ill-supported block-buildings, that had all the appearance of sound, © stable structures, but came down with a crash in dusty heaps at the first fatal shock of the earthquake, exposing thereby culpable deceit and cunning of the treacherous building-contractors,. the smooth, deceptive exterior of the impostors, who had passed off for decent, respectable citizens, have been stripped stark naked to appear in alli their native hideousness. The thick flying of weird rumours, the violences committed in a state of mental derangement, etc., were crimes born of want of culture.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.