Transcription:
My First Impressions of Foreigners
As nearly all of the higher class in this country, that is, chiefly Samurais, had been educated in the Chinese style in which system they learned that the Chinese and the Japanese were the most highly civilized nations, and all other foreign nations were barbarians or savages; for this was the case about two thousand years ago. Since they did not know how to improve their own mistakes, they have retained the impressions which they were taught by their ancestors, till a few years ago. While I was young, that is about ten or eleven years old, as nearly all men and women who surrounded me were among three obstinate people, any first impression was like them, and I also heard from them that the foreigners were very wild and ferocious like brute(sic). Then I did not know the distinction between English, French, Russians, etc, but I understand all of them to be only one tribe to which the term, Ijin, which means “different from human being,” was applied. When I saw a picture, which represented foreigners, I thought that they were really savages, as their dress, complexion, hairs, seemed very envious, and great many other things. At the same time I heard that they could not bend their knees, inasmuch as they sat on chairs. Therefore, we disliked to enter into intimate friendship with such nations, although they were always contriving to do so.
Mitsui
Analysis:
Much like Nagai, Mitsui is most likely on the younger side as he is welcoming to Western cultures and is open to their opinions. Mitsui was likely brought up in a samurai family, as he makes explicit references to the upper class and their education systems. Also, many samurai were distrustful of the West at the time, which fits in with the negative description his elders had that he describes. They were even castigated as a uniform group of people, without any regard to their nationalities. The most prominent piece of information that we can get from this short passage is the usage of past tense; Mitsui clearly has moved past from these views, or at the very least will not explicitly say them to a foreigner’s face in a foreigner’s homework assignment. He clearly thinks less of the higher class, criticizing their inability to “know how to improve their own mistakes” from the misleading information that they were taught in their Chinese style of education, and uses phrases like “[a]t the same time I heard” to cast doubt upon false rumors that foreigners could not even bend their own knees. Mitsui is different than these upper class he describes and most likely no longer identifies as one of them; he describes them in an extremely detached way and concludes his passage in such a way as to imply that he only mentions the facts to serve as a justification for why he, a member of the upper class, thought that way.