Very sleepy and quiet by day is Mionoseki: only at long intervals one
hears laughter of children, or the chant of oarsmen rowing the most
extraordinary boats I ever saw outside of the tropics; boats heavy as
barges, which require ten men to move them. These stand naked to the
work, wielding oars with cross-handles (imagine a letter T with the
lower end lengthened out into an oar-blade). And at every pull they
push their feet against the gunwales to give more force to the stroke;
intoning in every pause a strange refrain of which the soft melancholy
calls back to me certain old Spanish Creole melodies heard in West
Indian waters:
A-ra-ho-no-san-no-sa, Iya-ho-en-ya! Ghi! Ghi!
The chant begins with a long high note, and descends by fractional
tones with almost every syllable, and faints away a last into an almost
indistinguishable hum. Then comes the stroke, 'Ghi!--ghi!'
But at night Mionoseki is one of the noisiest and merriest little havens
of Western Japan. From one horn of its crescent to the other the fires
of the shokudai, which are the tall light of banquets, mirror themselves
in the water; and the whole air palpitates with sounds of revelry.
Everywhere one hears the booming of the tsudzumi, the little hand-drums
of the geisha, and sweet plaintive chants of girls, and tinkling of
samisen, and the measured clapping of hands in the dance, and the wild
cries and laughter of the players at ken. And all these are but echoes
of the diversions of sailors. Verily, the nature of sailors differs but
little the world over. Every good ship which visits Mionoseki leaves
there, so I am assured, from three hundred to five hundred yen for sake
and for dancing-girls. Much do these mariners pray the Great Deity who
hates eggs to make calm the waters and favourable the winds, so that
Mionoseki may be reached in good time without harm. But having come
hither over an unruffled sea with fair soft breezes all the way,
small indeed is the gift which they give to the temple of the god, and
marvellously large the sums which they pay unto geisha and keepers of
taverns. But the god is patient and long-suffering--except in the matter
of eggs.
However, these Japanese seamen are very gentle compared with our own
Jack Tars, and not without a certain refinement and politeness of their
own. I see them sitting naked to the waist at their banquets; for it
is very hot, but they use their chopsticks as daintily and pledge each
other in sake almost as graciously as men of a better class. Likewise
they seem to treat their girls very kindly. It is quite pleasant
to watch them feasting across the street. Perhaps their laughter is
somewhat more boisterous and their gesticulation a little more vehement
than those of the common citizens; but there is nothing resembling
real roughness--much less rudeness. All become motionless and silent as
statues--fifteen fine bronzes ranged along the wall of the zashiki, [2]
--when some pretty geisha begins one of those histrionic dances which,
to the Western stranger, seem at first mysterious as a performance of
witchcraft--but which really are charming translations of legend and
story into the language of living grace and the poetry of woman's smile.
And as the wine flows, the more urbane becomes the merriment--until
there falls upon all that pleasant sleepiness which sake brings, and
the guests, one by one, smilingly depart. Nothing could be happier or
gentler than their evening's joviality--yet sailors are considered in
Japan an especially rough class. What would be thought of our own roughs
in such a country?
Well, I have been fourteen months in Izumo; and I have not yet heard
voices raised in anger, or witnessed a quarrel: never have I seen one
man strike another, or a woman bullied, or a child slapped. Indeed I
have never seen any real roughness anywhere that I have been in Japan,
except at the open ports, where the poorer classes seem, through
contact with Europeans, to lose their natural politeness, their native
morals--even their capacity for simple happiness.