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When, after three years of studies in psychology and psycho-pathology in Asia, as we were finishing our observations in Tokyo, we decided to go to the North of Japan, to Hokkaido-island, where are still living a few thousands of Ainu, the aboriginal inhabitants of Japan.
We had opportunity to come in touch with those people, who preserved up to now a primitive organization, customs and religious beliefs. Here once more we approached the problem of assimilation of the Western civilization, as we did before in Persia, India, China and lately in Japan.
It seemed to us right that the investigations of neuroses and psychoses among those people could clear up some of the difficulties which meets the assimilation of the Western civilization in the East.
Kraepelin, when traveling in Asia, considered it scarcely probable that the differences in frequency and forms of existing psychoses could be explained by climatic differences. He was rather inclined to accept the opinion that the summary of life conditions could have a more decided influence.
Our observations incline us rather to accept the opinion that taking into consideration the great psychological differences between the East and the West very little can be ascribed to the inborn racial differences. Above all they have to be brought back to the differences in the education.
Lately the official authorities in China and the Academia Sinica tried to examine according to the Binet-Simon tests the intelligence of the school children. Because of different local conditions, where the children do not study letters but characters of the Chinese writing, which are an archaic ideographic expression of the idea, it was necessary to change the original patterns of the test and adapt them to the given Chine