_Takaki ya ni_
_Noborité miréba_
_Kemuri tat su;--_
_Tami no kamado wa_
_Nigiwai ni kéri._
(When I ascend a high place and look about me, lo! the smoke is rising:
the cooking ranges of the people are busy.)
_Song of the Emperor_ NINTOKU.
I
Nearly three hundred years ago, Captain John Saris, visiting Japan in
the service of the "Eight Honourable Companye, ye. marchants of London
trading into ye. East Indyes," wrote concerning the great city of Ōsaka
(as the name is now transliterated): "We found Osaca to be a very great
towne, as great as London within the walls, with many faire timber
bridges of a great height, seruing to passe over a riuer there as wide
as the Thames at London. Some faire houses we found there, but not
many. It is one of the chiefe sea-ports of all Iapan; hauing a castle
in it, maruellous large and strong" ... What Captain Saris said of the
Osaka of the seventeenth century is almost equally true of the Ōsaka
of to-day. It is still a very great city and one of the chief seaports
of all Japan; it contains, according to the Occidental idea, "some
faire houses;" it has many "faire timber bridges" (as well as bridges
of steel and stone)--"seruing to passe ouer a river as wide as the
Thames at London,"--the Yodogawa; and the castle "marvellous large and
strong," built by Hideyoshi after the plan of a Chinese fortress of the
Han dynasty, still remains something for military engineers to wonder
at, in spite of the disappearance of the many-storied towers, and the
destruction (in 1868) of the magnificent palace.
Ōsaka is more than two thousand five hundred years old, and therefore
one of the most ancient cities of Japan,--though its present name,
a contraction of _Oye no Saka,_ meaning the High Land of the Great
River, is believed to date back only to the fifteenth century, before
which time it was called Naniwa. Centuries before Europe knew of the
existence of Japan, Osaka was the great financial and commercial centre
of the empire; and it is that still. Through all the feudal era, the
merchants of Osaka were the bankers and creditors of the Japanese
princes: they exchanged the revenues of rice for silver and gold;--they
kept in their miles of fireproof warehouses the national stores of
cereals, of cotton, and of silk;--and they furnished to great captains
the sinews of war. Hideyoshi made Osaka his military capital;--Iyeyasu,
jealous and keen, feared the great city, and deemed it necessary to
impoverish its capitalists because of their financial power.
The Ōsaka of 1896, covering a vast area has a population of about
670,000. As to extent and population, it is now only the second city
of the empire; but it remains, as Count Okuma remarked in a recent
speech, financially, industrially, and commercially superior to Tōkyō.
Sakai, and Hyōgo, and Kobé are really but its outer ports; and the
last-named is visibly outgrowing Yokohama. It is confidently predicted,
both by foreigners and by Japanese, that Kobé will become the chief
port of foreign trade, because Osaka is able to attract to herself the
best business talent of the country. At present the foreign import
and export trade of Ōsaka represents about $120,000,000 a year; and
its inland and coasting trade are immense. Almost everything which
everybody wants is made in Ōsaka; and there are few comfortable
Japanese homes in any part of the empire to the furnishing of which
Ōsaka industry has not contributed something. This was probably the
case long before Tokyo existed. There survives an ancient song of which
the burden runs,--"_Every day to Ōsaka come a thousand ships."_ Junks
only, in the time when the song was written; steamers also to-day,
and deep-sea travelers of all rigs. Along the wharves you can ride
for miles by a seemingly endless array of masts and funnels,--though
the great Trans-Pacific liners and European mail-steamers draw too
much water to enter the harbor, and receive their Ōsaka freight at
Kobé. But the energetic city, which has its own steamship companies,
now proposes to improve its port, at a cost of 116,000,000. An Ōsaka
with a population of two millions, and a foreign trade of at least
$300,000,000 a year, is not a dream impossible to realize in the next
half century. I need scarcely say that Ōsaka is the centre of the
great trade-guilds,[1] and the headquarters of those cotton-spinning
companies whose mills, kept running with a single shift twenty-three
hours out of the twenty-four, turn out double the quantity of yarn per
spindle that English mills turn out, and from thirty to forty per cent,
more than the mills of Bombay.
Every great city in the world is believed to give a special character
to its inhabitants; and in Japan the man of Ōsaka is said to be
recognizable almost at sight. I think it can be said that the character
of the man of the capital is less marked than that of the man of
Ōsaka,--as in America the man of Chicago is more quickly recognized
than the New Yorker or Bostonian. He has a certain quickness of
perception, ready energy, and general air of being "well up to date,"
or even a little in advance of it, which represent the result of
industrial and commercial intercompetition. At all events, the Ōsaka
merchant or manufacturer has a much longer inheritance of business
experience than his rival of the political capital. Perhaps this may
partly account for the acknowledged superiority of Ōsaka commercial
travelers; a modernized class, offering some remarkable types. While
journeying by rail or steamer you may happen to make the casual
acquaintance of a gentleman whose nationality you cannot safely decide
even after some conversation. He is dressed with the most correct taste
in the latest and best mode; he can talk to you equally well in French,
German, or English; he is perfectly courteous, but able to adapt
himself to the most diverse characters; he knows Europe; and he can
give you extraordinary information about parts of the Far East which
you have visited, and also about other parts of which you do not even
know the names. As for Japan, he is familiar with the special products
of every district, their comparative merits, their history. His face
is pleasing,--nose straight or slightly aquiline,--mouth veiled by
a heavy black moustache: the eye-lids alone give you some right to
suppose that you are conversing with an Oriental. Such is one type of
the Ōsaka commercial traveler of 1896,--a being as far superior to
the average Japanese petty official as a prince to a lackey. Should
you meet the same man in his own city, you would probably find him in
Japanese costume,--dressed as only a man of fine taste can learn how to
dress, and looking rather like a Spaniard or Italian in disguise than a
Japanese.
[Footnote 1: There are upwards of four hundred commercial companies in
Osaka.]