Feeling hungry, I told my runner to take me to a restaurant, because
the hotel was very far; and the kuruma bore me into an obscure street,
and halted before a rickety-looking house with some misspelled English
painted above the entrance. I remember only the word "forign." After
taking off my shoes I climbed three flights of breakneck stairs, or
rather ladders, to find in the third story a set of rooms furnished
in foreign style. The windows were glass; the linen was satisfactory;
the only things Japanese were the mattings and a welcome smoking-box.
American chromo-lithographs decorated the walls. Nevertheless, I
suspected that few foreigners had ever been in the house: it existed by
sending out Western cooking, in little tin boxes, to native hotels; and
the rooms had doubtless been fitted up for Japanese visitors.
I noticed that the plates, cups, and other utensils bore the monogram
of a long-defunct English hotel which used to exist in one of the open
ports. The dinner was served by nice-looking girls, who had certainly
been trained by somebody accustomed to foreign service; but their
innocent curiosity and extreme shyness convinced me that they had never
waited upon a real foreigner before. Suddenly I observed on a table at
the other end of the room something resembling a music-box, and covered
with a piece of crochet-work! I went to it, and discovered the wreck
of a herophone. There were plenty of perforated musical selections. I
fixed the crank in place, and tried to extort the music of a German
song, entitled "Five Hundred Thousand Devils." The herophone gurgled,
moaned, roared for a moment, sobbed, roared again, and relapsed
into silence. I tried a number of other selections, including "Les
Cloches de Corneville;" but the noises produced were in all cases
about the same. Evidently the thing had been bought, together with
the monogram-bearing delft and britannia ware, at some auction sale
in one of the foreign settlements. There was a queer melancholy in
the experience, difficult to express. One must have lived in Japan to
understand why the thing appeared so exiled, so pathetically out of
place, so utterly misunderstood. Our harmonized Western music means
simply so much noise to the average Japanese ear; and I felt quite sure
that the internal condition of the herophone remained unknown to its
Oriental proprietor.
*
An equally singular but more pleasant experience awaited me on the
road back to the hotel. I halted at a second-hand furniture shop to
look at some curiosities, and perceived, among a lot of old books,
a big volume bearing in letters of much-tarnished gold the title,
ATLANTIC MONTHLY. Looking closer, I saw "Vol. V. Boston: Ticknor &
Fields. 1860." Volumes of The Atlantic of 1860 are not common anywhere.
I asked the price; and the Japanese shopkeeper said fifty sen,
because it was "a very large book." I was much too pleased to think
of bargaining with him, and secured the prize. I looked through its
stained pages for old friends, and found them,--all anonymous in 1865,
many world-famous in 1895. There were installments of "Elsie Venner,"
under the title of "The Professor's Story;" chapters of "Roba di Roma;"
a poem called "Pythagoras," but since renamed "Metempsychosis," as
lovers of Thomas Bailey Aldrich are doubtless aware; the personal
narrative of a filibuster with Walker in Nicaragua; admirable papers
upon the Maroons of Jamaica and the Maroons of Surinam; and, among
other precious things, an essay on Japan, opening with the significant
sentence, "The arrival in this country of an embassy from Japan, the
first political delegation ever vouchsafed to a foreign nation by that
reticent and jealous people, is now a topic of universal interest." A
little farther on, some popular misapprehensions of the period were
thus corrected: "Although now known to be entirely distinct, the
Chinese and Japanese ... were for a long time looked upon as kindred
races, and esteemed alike.... We find that while, on close examination,
the imagined attractions of China disappear, those of Japan become
more definite." Any Japanese of this self-assertive twenty-eighth
year of Meiji could scarcely find fault with The Atlantic's estimate
of his country thirty-five years ago: "Its commanding position, its
wealth, its commercial resources, and the quick intelligence of its
people,--not at all inferior to that of the people of the West,
although naturally restricted in its development,--give to Japan ... an
importance far above that of any other Eastern country." The only error
of this generous estimate was an error centuries old,--the delusion of
Japan's wealth. What made me feel a little ancient was to recognize
in the quaint spellings Ziogoon, Tycoon, Sintoo, Kiusiu, Fide-yosi,
Nobanunga,--spellings of the old Dutch and old Jesuit writers,--the
modern and familiar Shōgun, Taikun, Shintō, Kyūshū, Hideyoshi, and
Nobunaga.
*
I passed the evening wandering through the illuminated streets, and
visited some of the numberless shows. I saw a young man writing
Buddhist texts and drawing horses with his feet; the extraordinary fact
about the work being that the texts were written backwards,--from the
bottom of the column up, just as an ordinary calligrapher would write
them from the top of the column down,--and the pictures of horses were
always commenced with the tail. I saw a kind of amphitheatre, with
an aquarium in lieu of arena, where mermaids swam and sang Japanese
songs. I saw maidens "made by glamour out of flowers" by a Japanese
cultivator of Chrysanthemums. And between whiles I peeped into the
toy-shops, full of novelties, What there especially struck me was the
display of that astounding ingenuity by which Japanese inventors are
able to reach, at a cost too small to name, precisely the same results
as those exhibited in our expensive mechanical toys. A group of cocks
and hens made of paper were set to pecking imaginary grain out of a
basket by the pressure of a bamboo spring,--the whole thing costing
half a cent. An artificial mouse ran about, doubling and scurrying, as
if trying to slip under mats or into chinks: it cost only one cent,
and was made with a bit of colored paper, a spool of baked clay, and a
long thread; you had only to pull the thread, and the mouse began to
run. Butterflies of paper, moved by an equally simple device, began to
fly when thrown into the air. An artificial cuttlefish began to wriggle
all its tentacles when you blew into a little rush tube fixed under its
head.
When I decided to return, the lanterns were out, the shops were
closing; and the streets darkened about me long before I reached the
hotel. After the great glow of the illumination, the witchcrafts of the
shows, the merry tumult, the sea-like sound of wooden sandals, this
sudden coming of blankness and silence made me feel as if the previous
experience had been unreal,--an illusion of light and color and noise
made just to deceive, as in stories of goblin foxes. But the quick
vanishing of all that composes a Japanese festival-night really lends a
keener edge to the pleasure of remembrance: there is no slow fading out
of the phantasmagoria, and its memory is thus kept free from the least
tinge of melancholy.
V
While I was thinking about the fugitive charm of Japanese amusements,
the question put itself, Are not all pleasures keen in proportion
to their evanescence? Proof of the affirmative would lend strong
support to the Buddhist theory of the nature of pleasure. We know that
mental enjoyments are powerful in proportion to the complexity of
the feelings and ideas composing them; and the most complex feelings
would therefore seem to be of necessity the briefest. At all events,
Japanese popular pleasures have the double peculiarity of being
evanescent and complex, not merely because of their delicacy and their
multiplicity of detail, but because this delicacy and multiplicity are
adventitious, depending upon temporary conditions and combinations.
Among such conditions are the seasons of flowering and of fading, hours
of sunshine or full moon, a change of place, a shifting of light and
shade. Among combinations are the fugitive holiday manifestations of
the race genius: fragilities utilized to create illusion; dreams made
visible; memories revived in symbols, images, ideographs, dashes of
color, fragments of melody; countless minute appeals both to individual
experience and to national sentiment. And the emotional result remains
incommunicable to Western minds, because the myriad little details and
suggestions producing it belong to a world incomprehensible without
years of familiarity,--a world of traditions, beliefs, superstitions,
feelings, ideas, about which foreigners, as a general rule, know
nothing. Even by the few who do know that world, the nameless delicious
sensation, the great vague wave of pleasure excited by the spectacle of
Japanese enjoyment, can only be described as _the feeling of Japan._
*
A sociological fact of interest is suggested by the amazing cheapness
of these pleasures. The charm of Japanese life presents us with the
extraordinary phenomenon of poverty as an influence in the development
of aesthetic sentiment, or at least as a factor in deciding the
direction and expansion of that development. But for poverty, the race
could not have discovered, ages ago, the secret of making pleasure the
commonest instead of the costliest of experiences,--the divine art of
creating the beautiful out of nothing!
One explanation of this cheapness is the capacity of the people to find
in everything natural--in landscapes, mists, clouds, sunsets,--in the
sight of birds, insects, and flowers--a much keener pleasure than we,
as the vividness of their artistic presentations of visual experience
bears witness. Another explanation is that the national religions and
the old-fashioned education have so developed imaginative power that
it can be stirred into an activity of delight by anything, however
trifling, able to suggest the traditions or the legends of the past.
Perhaps Japanese cheap pleasures might be broadly divided into those
of time and place furnished by nature with the help of man, and those
of time and place invented by man at the suggestion of nature. The
former class can be found in every province, and yearly multiply. Some
locality is chosen on hill or coast, by lake or river: gardens are
made, trees planted, resting-houses built to command the finest points
of view; and the wild site is presently transformed into a place of
pilgrimage for pleasure-seekers. One spot is famed for cherry-trees,
another for maples, another for wistaria; and each of the seasons--even
snowy winter--helps to make the particular beauty of some resort. The
sites of the most celebrated temples, or at least of the greater number
of them, were thus selected,--always where the beauty of nature could
inspire and aid the work of the religious architect, and where it
still has power to make many a one wish that he could become a Buddhist
or Shinto priest. Religion, indeed, is everywhere in Japan associated
with famous scenery: with landscapes, cascades, peaks, rocks, islands;
with the best places from which to view the blossoming of flowers, the
reflection of the autumn moon on water, or the sparkling of fireflies
on summer nights.
Decorations, illuminations, street displays of every sort, but
especially those of holy days, compose a large part of the pleasures
of city life which all can share. The appeals thus made to aesthetic
fancy at festivals represent the labor, perhaps, of tens of thousands
of hands and brains; but each individual contributor to the public
effort works according to his particular thought and taste, even while
obeying old rides, so that the total ultimate result is a wondrous, a
bewildering, an incalculable variety. Anybody can contribute to such
an occasion; and everybody does, for the cheapest material is used.
Paper, straw, or stone makes no real difference; the art sense is
superbly independent of the material. What shapes that material is
perfect comprehension of something natural, something real. Whether a
blossom made of chicken feathers, a clay turtle or duck or sparrow, a
pasteboard cricket or man-tis or frog, the idea is fully conceived and
exactly realized. Spiders of mud seem to be spinning webs; butterflies
of paper delude the eye. No models are needed to work from;--or rather,
the model in every case is only the precise memory of the object or
living fact. I asked at a doll-maker's for twenty tiny paper dolls,
each with a different coiffure,--the whole set to represent the
principal Kyoto styles of dressing women's hair. A girl went to work
with white paper, paint, paste, thin slips of pine; and the dolls
were finished in about the same time that an artist would have taken
to draw a similar number of such figures. The actual time needed was
only enough for the necessary digital movements,--not for correcting,
comparing, improving: the image in the brain realized itself as fast
as the slender hands could Work. Thus most of the wonders of festival
nights are created: toys thrown into existence with a twist of the
fingers, old rags turned into figured draperies with a few motions
of the brush, pictures made with sand. The same power of enchantment
puts human grace under contribution. Children who on other occasions
would attract no attention are converted into fairies by a few deft
touches of paint and powder, and costumes devised for artificial light.
Artistic sense of line and color suffices for any transformation. The
tones of decoration are never of chance, but of knowledge: even the
lantern illuminations prove this fact, certain tints only being used
in combination. But the whole exhibition is as evanescent as it is
wonderful. It vanishes much too quickly to be found fault with. It is a
mirage that leaves you marveling and dreaming for a month after having
seen it.
*
Perhaps one inexhaustible source of the contentment, the simple
happiness, belonging to Japanese common life is to be found in this
universal cheapness of pleasure. The delight of the eyes is for
everybody. Not the seasons only nor the festivals furnish enjoyment:
almost any quaint street, any truly Japanese interior, can give real
pleasure to the poorest servant who works without wages. The beautiful,
or the suggestion of the beautiful, is free as air. Besides, no man
or woman can be too poor to own something pretty; no child need be
without delightful toys. Conditions in the Occident are otherwise. In
our great cities, beauty is for the rich; bare walls and foul pavements
and smoky skies for our poor, and the tumult of hideous machinery,--a
hell of eternal ugliness and joylessness invented by our civilization
to punish the atrocious crime of being unfortunate, or weak, or stupid,
or overconfident in the morality of one's fellow-man.