It is with the delicious surprise of the first journey through Japanese
streets--unable to make one's kuruma-runner understand anything but
gestures, frantic gestures to roll on anywhere, everywhere, since all
is unspeakably pleasurable and new--that one first receives the real
sensation of being in the Orient, in this Far East so much read of, so
long dreamed of, yet, as the eyes bear witness, heretofore all unknown.
There is a romance even in the first full consciousness of this
rather commonplace fact; but for me this consciousness is transfigured
inexpressibly by the divine beauty of the day. There is some charm
unutterable in the morning air, cool with the coolness of Japanese
spring and wind-waves from the snowy cone of Fuji; a charm perhaps due
rather to softest lucidity than to any positive tone--an atmospheric
limpidity extraordinary, with only a suggestion of blue in it, through
which the most distant objects appear focused with amazing sharpness.
The sun is only pleasantly warm; the jinricksha, or kuruma, is the most
cosy little vehicle imaginable; and the street-vistas, as seen above
the dancing white mushroom-shaped hat of my sandalled runner, have an
allurement of which I fancy that I could never weary.
Elfish everything seems; for everything as well as everybody is small,
and queer, and mysterious: the little houses under their blue roofs,
the little shop-fronts hung with blue, and the smiling little people
in their blue costumes. The illusion is only broken by the occasional
passing of a tall foreigner, and by divers shop-signs bearing
announcements in absurd attempts at English. Nevertheless such discords
only serve to emphasise reality; they never materially lessen the
fascination of the funny little streets.
'Tis at first a delightfully odd confusion only, as you look down one of
them, through an interminable flutter of flags and swaying of dark blue
drapery, all made beautiful and mysterious with Japanese or Chinese
lettering. For there are no immediately discernible laws of construction
or decoration: each building seems to have a fantastic prettiness of
its own; nothing is exactly like anything else, and all is bewilderingly
novel. But gradually, after an hour passed in the quarter, the eye
begins to recognise in a vague way some general plan in the construction
of these low, light, queerly-gabled wooden houses, mostly unpainted,
with their first stories all open to the street, and thin strips
of roofing sloping above each shop-front, like awnings, back to the
miniature balconies of paper-screened second stories. You begin to
understand the common plan of the tiny shops, with their matted floors
well raised above the street level, and the general perpendicular
arrangement of sign-lettering, whether undulating on drapery or
glimmering on gilded and lacquered signboards. You observe that the same
rich dark blue which dominates in popular costume rules also in shop
draperies, though there is a sprinkling of other tints--bright blue and
white and red (no greens or yellows). And then you note also that the
dresses of the labourers are lettered with the same wonderful lettering
as the shop draperies. No arabesques could produce such an effect.
As modified for decorative purposes these ideographs have a speaking
symmetry which no design without a meaning could possess. As they appear
on the back of a workman's frock--pure white on dark blue--and large
enough to be easily read at a great distance (indicating some guild or
company of which the wearer is a member or employee), they give to the
poor cheap garment a fictitious appearance of splendour.
And finally, while you are still puzzling over the mystery of things,
there will come to you like a revelation the knowledge that most of the
amazing picturesqueness of these streets is simply due to the profusion
of Chinese and Japanese characters in white, black, blue, or gold,
decorating everything--even surfaces of doorposts and paper screens.
Perhaps, then, for one moment, you will imagine the effect of English
lettering substituted for those magical characters; and the mere idea
will give to whatever aesthetic sentiment you may possess a brutal
shock, and you will become, as I have become, an enemy of the
Romaji-Kwai--that society founded for the ugly utilitarian purpose of
introducing the use of English letters in writing Japanese.