Furthermore, Japanese possesses several words for self.  “Onore,” “one’s self,” and “Ware,” “I or myself,” are pure Japanese, while “Ji” (the Chinese pronunciation for “onore"), “ga,” “self,” and “shi” (the Chinese pronunciation of “watakushi,” meaning private) are Sinico-Japanese words, that is, Chinese derived words.  These Sinico-Japanese terms are in universal use in compound words, and are as truly Japanese as many Latin, Greek and Norman-derived words are real English.  “Ji-bun,” “one’s self”; “jiman,” “self-satisfaction”; “ji-fu,” “self-assertion”; “jinin,” “self-responsibility”; “ji-bo ji-ki,” “self-destruction, self-abandonment”; “ji-go ji-toku,” “self-act, self-reward”—­always in a bad sense; “ga-yoku,” “selfish desire”; “ga-shin,” “selfish heart”; “ga we oru,” “self-mastery”; “muga,” “unselfish”; “shi-shin shi-yoku,” “private or self-heart, private or self-desire,” that is, selfishness”; “shi-ai shi-shin,” “private-or self-love, private-or-self heart,” i.e., selfishness—­these and countless other compound words involving the conception of self, can hardly be explained by the “impersonal,” “altruistic” theory of Japanese race mind and language.  In truth, if this theory is unable to explain the facts it recognizes, much less can it account for those it ignores.

To interpret correctly the phenomena we are considering, we must ask ourselves how personal pronouns have arisen in other languages.  Did the primitive Occidental man produce them outright from the moment that he discovered himself?  Far from it.  There are abundant reasons for believing that every personal pronoun is a degenerate or, if you prefer, a developed noun.  Pronouns are among the latest products of language, and, in the sphere of language, are akin to algebraic symbols in the sphere of mathematics or to a machine in the sphere of labor.  A pronoun, whether personal, demonstrative, or relative, is a wonderful linguistic invention, enabling the speaker to carry on long trains of unbroken thought.  Its invention was no more connected with the sense of self, than was the invention of any labor-saving device.  The Japanese language is even more defective for lack of relative pronouns than it is for lack of personal pronouns.  Shall we argue from this that the Japanese people have no sense of relation?  Of course personal pronouns could not arise without or before the sense of self, but the problem is whether the sense of self could arise without or exist before that particular linguistic device, the personal pronoun?  On this problem the Japanese language and civilization throw conclusive light.

The fact is that the ancestors of the Anglo-Saxon and Japanese peoples parted company so long ago that in the course of their respective linguistic evolutions, not only have all common terms been completely eliminated, but even common methods of expression.  The so-called Indo-European races hit upon one method of sentence structure, a method in which pronouns took an important part and the personal pronoun was needed to express the personal element, while the Japanese hit upon another method which required little use of pronouns and which was able to express the personal element wholly without the personal pronoun.  The sentence structure of the two languages is thus radically different.