WANDERING IN JAPAN
“Set me down at the Sailors’ Home,” I ordered, stepping into the first
’rickshah to reach me.
“No good,” answered the runner, dropping the shafts. “Sailor Home he
close.”
“We’ll go and see,” I replied, knowing the ways of ’rickshah-men.
But the Home was unoccupied, sure enough, and its windows boarded up.
The runner assumed the attitude of a man who had been insulted without
reason.
“Me know ver’ fine hotel,” he said, haughtily, “Many white sailor man
stop. Me takee there. Ver’ fine.”
I acquiesced, and he jogged out along the strand driveway and halfway
round the sparkling harbor. Near the top of one of the ridges on which
Nagasaki is built he halted at the foot of a flight of stone steps cut
in a hillside.
“Hotel topside,” he panted, pointing upward.
In the perfumed grove at the summit stood a house so frail and dainty
that it seemed a toy dwelling. Its courtyard was gay with nodding
flowers, about the veranda posts twined red-blossomed vines. In the
doorway stood a Japanese woman, buxom, yet pretty. Though her English
was halting, her welcome was most cordial. She led the way to a quaintly
decorated chamber, arranged cushions, and bade me sit down. I laid aside
my bundle and gazed out across the panorama of the harbor, delicate in
coloring; a scene rarely equaled in any clime. Fortunate, indeed, had I
been to find so charming a lodging.
A panel moved noiselessly aside. The proprietress again slipped into the
room and clapped her hands thrice. Behind her sounded a choral whisper,
and six girls, lustrous of coiffure, clad in gaily flowered kimonas,
glided towards me with so silent a tread that they seemed to float
through the air. All were in the first bloom of youth, as dainty of face
and form as they were graceful of movement. Twice they circled around
me, ever drawing nearer, then, halting a few feet away, they dropped to
their knees, touched their foreheads to the floor, and sat up smiling.
The landlady, standing erect, gazed down upon me.
“Sailor man, how you like?” she purred, “Ver’ nice?”
“Yes, very nice,” I echoed.
“Well, take which one you like and get married,” she continued.
The ’rickshah-man, alas, knew the ways of sailors but too well. I picked
up my bundle and, glancing regretfully down upon the harbor, stepped out
on the veranda.
“What!” cried the matron, following after me, “You not like get married?
Ver’ nice room, ver’ good chow, ver’ nice wife, fifteen yen one week.”
I crossed the flowery courtyard towards the stone stairway.
“You no like?” called the landlady, “Ver’ sorry. Good-bye.”
Beside a canal down near the harbor I found a less luxurious hotel. The
proprietor, awakened from a doze among the bottles and decanters of the
bar-room, gurgled a thick-voiced welcome. He was an American, a wanderer
since boyhood, for some years domiciled in Nagasaki. The real manager of
the hotel was his Japanese wife, a sprightly matron whose farsighted
business acumen was evidenced by a stringent rule she had laid down
forbidding her besotted spouse entrance, except at meal hours, to any
other section of the hostelry than the bar-room. Most interesting of the
household were the offspring of this pair, a boy and girl of twelve and
ten. In them were combined the best qualities of the parent races. No
American children could have been quicker of wit nor more
whole-heartedly diligent at work or play; no Japanese more open to
impression nor more inherently polite of demeanor. Already the father
was accustomed to refer to his son problems too complicated for his own
unresponsive intellect; the mother left to her daughter the details of
flower-plot and wardrobe.
Lodged in an airy chamber, I could have slept late next morning had I
not been awakened at daybreak by what seemed to be a rapid succession of
revolver shots. I sprang to the window, half fearing that the proprietor
was assassinating his wife in a drunken frenzy. In the yard below
squatted the half-breed children, with a stick of “punk” and a great
bundle of fire-crackers. I had forgotten the date. It was the Fourth,
and Nagasaki was celebrating. All through the day bombilations sounded
at regular intervals about the city; nor was the racket instigated
entirely by American residents.
Ordinarily the boy and girl of the hotel dressed exactly like their
playmates and no sooner turned their backs on their father than they
lapsed at once into the native tongue. But on this American day the boy
wore a knickerbocker suit and leather shoes; his sister had laid aside
her kimona and wooden sandals to don a short frock and long stockings.
Instead of the intricate coiffure of the day before, her jet-black hair
hung in two braids over her shoulders; and not once during all that
festal day did a word of Japanese pass between them.
Two days later, garbed in an American khaki uniform chosen from the
stock of a pawnbroker popular with soldiers returning from the
Philippines, I sought out the railway station and took third-class
passage for Hiroshima. Two policemen blocked my entrance to the
platform, and, in spite of my protest that my history was recorded in
full on the hotel register, they filled several pages of their notebooks
with an account of my doings. For the war with Russia was at its height
and a strict watch was kept on all white men within the empire.
The train wound off through a rolling, sylvan country, here circling the
base of a thickly-wooded hill, there clinging close to the shore of a
sparkling bay. Not an acre capable of production was untilled. Peasants
toiled in every valley, on every hillside; their neat cottages dotted
the landscape as far as the eye could see. Populous, wide-awake villages
succeeded each other rapidly. The stations were well-equipped buildings
bearing both in Japanese and English the name of the town they served.
In his eagerness to imitate the western world the Jap has adopted one
custom which might better have been passed over. The gorgeous landscape
was half hidden at times by huge unsightly signboards bellowing forth
the alleged virtues of every conceivable ware.
The coaches were built on the American plan, and every carriage was a
smoking-car; for the use of tobacco is well-nigh universal in Japan
among both sexes. Barely had a lady folded her legs under her on a bench
across the aisle than she drew out a pipe in appearance like a long lead
pencil, the bowl of which held much less than the smallest thimble, and
a leather pouch containing tobacco as fine as the hair of the head. The
pipe lighted, she took one long pull at it, knocked out the residue on
the back of the seat before her, refilled the bowl, exhaled from her
lungs the first puff, and, turning the pipe upside down, lighted it
again from the glowing embers of the first filling. The pipe held only
enough for one puff; the smoker filled it a score of times before she
was satisfied, always keeping the smoke in her lungs until the bowl was
refilled, and using a match only for the first lighting. Dining-cars
were there none. At nearly every station boxes containing a goodly
supply of rice, several boiled and pickled vegetables, one baked fish,
and a pair of chopsticks only half split in two, were sold on the
platform. The contents were always the same; the price fixed and
surprisingly low.
[Illustration: A swimming-school of Japan, teachers on the bank, novices
near the shore, and advanced students in white head-dress, well out in
the pool]
[Illustration: Women do most of the work in the rice-fields of Japan]
I had not taken care to choose a through-train to Hiroshima. Not long
after nightfall the one on which I was traveling reached its terminal, a
town named Hakata, and left me to spend the night in the waiting-room.
Before I had fallen asleep a band of youths employed about the station
began a series of tricks that kept me wide-awake until morning. They
threw vegetables and rotten fruit at me through the windows; they pushed
open the door to roll tin cans across the floor; if I fell into a doze
they sneaked inside to deluge me with water or drag me off my wooden
couch. Much we hear of the annoyances to which the kindly Japanese
residents on our Pacific slope are subjected; yet no band of San
Francisco hoodlums could have outdone these youths in concocting schemes
to make life miserable for a foreigner in their midst.
Two hours’ ride from Hakata brought me to Moji and the ferry that
connects the southern island with the largest of the kingdom. Policemen
halted me on both sides of the strait and twice I was compelled to
dictate the history of my past. From Shimonesaki the railway skirted the
shore of the Inland Sea, passing the military hospital of Itsukaishi,
where hundreds of convalescing soldiers, attired in flowing white
kimonas with a great red cross on their breasts, strolled and lolled in
the surrounding groves.
I descended in the twilight at Hiroshima in company with two
English-speaking youths who had taken upon themselves the task of
finding me a lodging. The proprietor of a hotel not far from the station
acknowledged that he had never housed a white man, but begged for
permission to show his versatility. I bade my new acquaintances
farewell. The hotel office was a sort of patio, paved with small stones,
from which a broad stairway with quaintly carved balustrade led upward.
Mine host shouted a word of command. A smiling matron, short of stature,
her inclination to embonpoint rendered doubly conspicuous by the ample
_oba_ wound round and round her waist, appeared on the landing above and
beckoned to me to ascend. I caught up my bundle; but before I had
mounted two steps the proprietor sprang forward with a scream and,
clutching at my coat-tails, dragged me back. A half-dozen servant girls
tumbled wild-eyed into the patio and joined the landlord in heaping
abuse upon me. I had dared to start up the stairway without removing my
shoes! The sight of a guest at a Fifth-avenue hotel jumping into bed
fully clad could not have aroused such an uproar.
I pulled off the offending brogans; the keeper added them to a long line
of wooden sandals ranged along the wall; and the matron conducted me to
a small chamber with a balcony opening on the street. Everything about
the apartment added to the feeling that I was a giant among
Lilliputians; the ceiling, gay with gorgeously tinted dragons, was so
low, the walls mere sliding panels of half-transparent paper stamped
with flowers and strange figures, the highly-polished floor so frail
that it yielded under every step. With a flying start a man could have
run straight through the house and left it a wreck behind.
The room was entirely unfurnished. The hostess placed a cushion for me
in the center of the floor and clapped her hands. A servant girl slipped
in, bearing a tray on which was a tiny box of live coals, several
cigarettes, a joint of bamboo standing upright, and a pot of tea with
cup and saucer. Having deposited her burden at my feet, and touched her
forehead to the floor, the maid handed me a cigarette, poured out tea,
and remained kneeling a full half-hour, filling the tiny cup as often as
I emptied it. When she was gone I picked up the joint of bamboo,
fancying it contained sweetmeats or tobacco. It was empty, however, and
I was left to wonder until the hostess returned. When she had understood
my gestures she began a wordy explanation; but I shook my head. With a
grimace that was evidently meant to be an apology, she caught up the
hollow joint and spat into it. The thing was merely a Japanese spittoon.
A maid soon served supper. She brought first of all a table some eight
inches high, then a great wooden bucket brimming full of hard-packed
rice, and lastly, several little papier-mâché bowls. One held a greasy
liquid in which floated the yolk of an egg, another a small, soggy
turnip, a third a sample of some native salad, at the bottom of the
fourth lay in dreary isolation a pathetic little minnow. Of rice there
was sufficient for a squad of soldiers; but without it the meal could
not have satisfied a hungry canary.
[Illustration: Horses are rare in Japan. Men and baggage are drawn by
coolies]
[Illustration: Japanese children playing in the streets of Kioto]
As I ate, the girl poured out tea in a cup that held a single swallow.
Fortunately, I had already served my apprenticeship in the use of
chopsticks, or I should have been forced to revert to the primitive
table manners of the Hindu. As it was, it required great dexterity to
possess myself of the swimming yolk; and he who fancies it is easy to
balance a satisfying mouthful of rice on the ends of two slivers has
only to try it to be disillusioned.
The meal over, I descended for a stroll through the town. The host
brought my shoes, grinning sympathetically at the weight thereof, and I
stepped out to mingle with the passing throng. There is nothing more
inimitable than the voice of the street in Japan. He who has once heard
it could never mistake it for another. There is no rumble of traffic to
tire the senses, no jangle of tramways to inflict the ear. Horses are
almost as rare as in Venice, and the rubber-tired ’rickshah behind a
grass-shod runner passes as silently as a winged creature. The rank and
file, however, are content to go on foot, and the scrape, scrape, scrape
of wooden clogs sounds an incessant trebled note that may be heard in no
other land.
There are Oriental cities in which the stranger would hesitate to wander
after nightfall; in this well-ordered land he feels instinctively that
he is running less risk of disagreeable encounter than in any metropolis
of our own country. Class and mass mingle in the multitude; evil and
brutal faces pass here and there; the European is sometimes subjected to
the annoyance of unseemly curiosity, he may even be roughly jostled now
and then; for the politeness of the Jap is individual, never collective.
But rarely does the sound of brawling rise above the peaceful falsetto
of scraping clogs.
I returned to the hotel fancying I was doomed to sleep on the polished
floor; but the matron, apprised of my arrival, glided in and inquired,
by the cosmopolitan pantomime of resting her cocked head in the palm of
her hand, if I was ready to retire. I nodded, and at her signal a
servant appeared with a quilt of great thickness, which she spread in
the center of the floor. To an uncritical wanderer this seemed of itself
a soft enough resting place, but not until six pudding-like counterpanes
had been piled one on top of the other was the landlady content. Over
this couch, that had taken on the form of a huge layer-cake, the pair
spread a coverlet—there were no sheets—and backed out of the room. I
rose to disrobe, but before I had touched a button they were back again,
this time dragging behind them a great net, stout enough in texture to
have held Paul’s draught of fishes. Disentangled, the thing proved to be
canopy-shaped. While the matron attached the four corners of the top to
hooks in the ceiling, the maid tucked the edges in under the stack of
quilts.
I was not averse to retiring at once, but at that moment there arrived a
cotton-clad youth who announced himself as a police interpreter.
Official Hiroshima was anxious to know more of the _Americajín_ whose
arrival had been reported by the station guards. The youth drew forth a
legal form and read, in a sing-song voice, questions covering every
period of my existence since squalling infancy. Between each the pause
was long, for the interpreter must repeat each answer to the
open-mouthed females kneeling beside us and set it down in the muscular
native script. I passed a yawning half-hour before he was finished, and
another before he ended a smoke-choked oration on the joy which my
coming had awakened in the hearts of his fellow officers. Ere he
departed he found opportunity to inquire into my plans for the future. I
announced my intention of continuing eastward in the morning.
“You must go so fastly?” he queried, with grief-stricken countenance.
“Then you shall go on the ten o’clock train; there is no other but very
late.”
I had no notion of leaving Hiroshima on any train, but, considering my
plans no affair of his, I held my peace. He departed at last and a
moment later I was sorry I could not call him back long enough to
interpret my orders to the matron and her maid. The pair refused to
leave the room. When I pointed at the door they waved their hands
towards the bed in a gesture that said I was at liberty to disrobe and
turn in. But neither rose from her knees. I tried more energetic
pantomime. The matron certainly understood, for she dismissed the
servant; but refused herself to withdraw. I began to unbutton my jacket,
hoping the suggestion would prove effective. She sighed audibly and
settled down on her heels. I sat down on my cushion and lighted a
cigarette, determined to smoke her out. She drew out a tobacco pouch and
a pipe, picked the cigarette out of my fingers to light the first
filling, and blew clouds of smoke at the ceiling.
Perhaps she was waiting to tuck me in when once I was abed. The notion
seemed ludicrous; yet that was exactly for what she was waiting. With
much shouting I prevailed upon her at last—not to leave the room, but to
turn her back to me. Slipping off my outer garments, I crawled under the
net and drew the coverlet over me. The matron rose gravely to her feet
and marched twice round my couch, tucking in a quilt corner here,
fastening a fold of the _kaya_ there. Then, closing the panels on every
side, she picked up the lamp and departed.
The room soon grew stuffy. I crawled out to push back one of the panels
opening on the veranda. Barely had I regained my couch, however, when a
trembling of the floor announced approaching footsteps and that
irrepressible female appeared on the balcony, silhouetted against the
starlit sky. Calling out something I did not understand—fortunately
perhaps—she pushed the panel shut again. I am accustomed to sleep with
wide open windows; but it was useless to contend against fate. My
guardian angel of the embonpoint knew that the only safe sleeping
chamber was a tightly-closed room; and in such I spent the night.
Rarely have I experienced a stranger sensation than at the moment of
awakening in that hotel of Hiroshima. It was broad daylight. The sun was
streaming in across the balcony, and the incessant scraping of clogs
sounded from the street below. But the room in which I had gone to bed
had entirely disappeared! I sat up with bulging eyes. Under me was the
stack of quilts, but all else was changed. The net was gone and I sat
alone and deserted in the center of a hall as large as a dancing
pavilion, the front of which for its entire length opened on the public
street. The transformation was no magician’s trick, though it was
several moments before I had sufficiently recovered to admit it. The
servant girls had merely pushed together the panels.
For all the sinuosities of her streets and my ignorance of the Japanese
tongue I had no great difficulty in picking up the highway out of
Hiroshima. A half-century ago it would have been more dangerous to
wander unarmed through rural Japan than in China. To-day the pedestrian
runs no more risk than in England. There is a suggestion of the British
Isles, too, in the open country of the Island Kingdom. Just such
splendidly constructed highways stretch away between bright green hedge
rows. Populous villages appear in rapid succession; the intervening
territory, thickly settled and fertile, shows the hand of the
industrious husbandman. But old England herself cannot rival this
sea-girdled kingdom in her clear, exhilarating air of summer, in her
picturesque landscapes of checkerboard rice fields, certainly not in the
scenic charm of the Inland Sea.
The roadway, dropping down from the plateau of Hiroshima, soon brought
to view this sapphire-blue arm of old Ocean, and wound in and out along
the coast. Here and there a ripple caught the glint of the sun; in the
middle distance and beyond tiny wooded isles rose from the placid
surface; now and again an ocean liner, awakening memories of far-off
lands, glided by almost within hailing distance. In shallow coves unclad
fishermen, exempt from sunburn, disentangled their nets and heaped high
their catches in wicker baskets.
It needed a very few hours on the road to teach me that Japan is the
home of the ultra-curious. Compared with the rural Jap the Arab is as
self-absorbed as a cross-legged statue of the Enlightened One. I had but
to pass through a village to suspend every activity the place boasted.
Workmen dropped their tools, children forgot their games, girls left
their pitchers at the fountain, even gossips ceased their chatter; all
to stare wide eyed if I passed on, to crowd round me if I paused.
Wherever I halted for a drink of water the town rose en masse to witness
my unprecedented action. My thirst quenched, the empty vessel passed
from hand to hand amid such a chorus of gasps as rises from a group of
lean-faced antiquarians examining a vase of ante-Christian date. To stop
for a lunch was almost dangerous, for the mob that collected at the
entrance to the shop threatened to do me to death under the trampling
clogs. In the smaller villages the aggregate population, men, women, and
children, followed me out along the highway, leaving the hamlet as
deserted as though the dogs of war had been loosed upon it. Once I
passed a school at the recess hour. Its two hundred children trailed
behind me for a long mile, utterly ignoring the jangling bell and the
shouts of their excited masters.
Well on in the afternoon I had taken refuge from the sun in a wayside
clump, when a youthful Jap, of short but stocky build, hurrying along
the white route, turned aside and gave me greeting. There was nothing
unusual in that action; a dozen times during the day some garrulous
native, often with a knowledge of English picked up during Californian
residence, had tramped a mile or more beside me. But the stocky youth
threw himself down on the grass with a sigh of relief. He was out of
breath; the perspiration ran in streams along his brown cheeks; his
nether garments were white with the dust of the highroad. Like most
villagers of the district he wore a dark kimona, faintly figured, a dull
brown straw hat resembling a Panama, thumbed socks, and grass sandals.
Perhaps his haste to overtake me had been prompted merely by the desire
to travel in my company; but there was about him an air of anxiety that
awakened suspicion.
I set off again and he jogged along beside me, mopping his streaming
face from time to time with a sleeve of his kimona. He was more
supremely ignorant of English than I of Japanese, but we contrived to
exchange a few confidences by grunts and gestures. He, too, had walked
from Hiroshima. The statement surprised me, for the white stones at the
wayside showed that city to be twenty-five miles distant. Enured to
tramping by more than a year “on the road,” I had covered the distance
with ease; but it was no pleasure stroll for an undersized Jap.
Once my companion pointed from his legs to my own, raised his eyebrows,
and sighed wearily. I shook my head. He pointed away before us with
inquiring gesture.
“Kobe,” I shouted.
“So am I,” he responded by repeating the name and thumping himself on
the chest.
I knew he was lying. Kobe was more than a hundred miles away;
third-class fare is barely a sen a mile in Japan; it is far cheaper to
ride than to buy food sufficient to sustain life on such a journey. The
fellow was no beggar, for we had already toasted each other in a glass
of _saki_. Certainly he was not covetous of the yens in my pocket, for
he was small and apparently unarmed, and there was nothing of the
footpad in his face or manner. Yet he seemed fearful of losing sight of
me. When I stopped, he stopped; if I strode rapidly forward, he
struggled to keep the pace, passing a sleeve over his face at more
frequent intervals.
Could it be that he was a “plain clothes cop” sent to shadow me? The
suspicion grew with every mile; it was confirmed when we entered a long
straggling village. My companion dropped back a bit and, as we passed a
police station, I caught him waving a surreptitious greeting to four
officers in uniform, who nodded approval.
A spy! What reason had the police of Japan to dog my footsteps? My anger
rose at the implied insult. The fellow was urging me to stop for the
night; instead I redoubled my pace. Not far beyond the route forked,
and, turning a deaf ear to his protests, I chose the branch that led
away over steep foothills. The short legs of the Jap were unequal to the
occasion. He broke into a dog trot and puffed along behind me. His grass
sandals wore through; he winced when a pebble rolled under his feet.
Night came on, the moon rose; and still I marched with swinging stride,
the little brown man panting at my heels.
Three hours after sunset, amid the barking of dogs and the shouting of
humans, I stalked into the village of Hongo and sat down in the doorway
of an open shop. A moment later the spy, reeling like an inebriate, his
face drawn and haggard, dropped at full length on the matting beside me.
His endurance was exhausted; and small wonder, for Hiroshima was
forty-six miles away over the hills.
In the twinkling of an eye we were surrounded by a surging throng of
dirty yokels. For Hongo is a mere mountain hamlet and its inhabitants do
not practice all the virtues for which their fellow countrymen are
noted. To stay where we were was to court annihilation by the stampeding
multitude. I struggled to my feet determined to press on. The spy
screamed weakly and the villagers swept in upon us and imprisoned me
within the shop. A long conference ensued. Then the spy, leaning on two
men, hobbled up the street, while another band, promising by gestures to
find me lodging, dragged me along with them, the mob howling at our
heels.
The fourth or fifth booth beyond proved to be an inn, a most un-Japanese
house, for it was squalid and dirty. The frightened keeper bade us enter
and set a half-dozen slatternly females to preparing supper. The entire
village population had gathered in the street to watch my every movement
with straining eyes. I sat down on a stool and it smashed to bits under
me. A clawing, screaming mob swept forward to roar at my discomfiture. A
half hundred of the boldest pushed into the shop in spite of the
keeper’s protest and drove me further and further towards the back of
the building, until I was forced to beat them off to save myself being
pushed through the rear wall. A woman brought me rice. The boors fought
with each other for the privilege of being the first to thrust their
fingers into it. Another servant poured out tea. The villagers snatched
the cup from my fingers before I had drunk half the contents, and passed
it from hand to hand. A third domestic appeared with a saucer of baked
minnows. Each of a half-dozen of my persecutors picked up a fish in his
fingers and attempted to thrust it into my mouth. They had no notion
that such conduct was annoying. It was merely their way of showing
hospitality.
The throng at the doorway surged slowly but steadily nearer. I caught up
several clogs from the floor and threw them at the front rank of the
rabble. The multitude fell back into the street, but my immediate
entourage continued to snatch cups from my fingers and to poke me in the
face with baked minnows. Vocal protest was useless. I picked up the bowl
of rice and flung the contents into their faces. This time the
affectionate fellows understood. When the dish was filled again they
granted me elbow-room sufficient to continue my meal.
[Illustration: A Japanese lady]
A saner man might have profited by experience and taken care not to
re-arouse the waning curiosity. In a thoughtless moment I filled my
pipe. Before it was lighted I suddenly recalled that “bulldog” pipes
have not been introduced into Japan. But it was too late. A hoarse
murmur sounded in the street, like the rumble of far-off thunder at
first, then swelling louder and louder; and with a deafening roar the
astonished multitude surged pellmell into the shop, shrieking,
scratching, tearing kimonas, trampling pottery under their clogs,
bowling over the guardian shopkeeper, sweeping me off my feet, and
landing me high and dry on a chest against the rear wall. It required a
quarter-hour of fighting to drive them out again into the night and
nothing short of grapeshot could have cleared the street before the
building as long as there remained a possibility of once more catching
sight of that giant pipe.
I took good care to keep it out of sight thereafter; but the multitude
had not visibly diminished when, towards midnight, I signed to the
proprietor that I was ready to retire. The inn boasted only one
sleeping-chamber, a raised platform in one corner of the room carpeted
with grass mats and partitioned off with dirty curtains suspended from
the ceiling. This foul-smelling apartment I was forced to share with a
dozen men and boys, odoriferous and ragged, who chattered like excited
apes for an hour after I had lain down. All night long I was on
exhibition. For when my companions were not striking matches to study my
physical and sartorial make-up, the proprietor outside was raising a
corner of the curtain to display me to a group of gabbling rustics.
Profiting by experience, the police authorities did not set one man the
task of following me all the next day. The first of a relay of spies
overtook me at the outskirts of the village. He was long and lean, and
for ten miles he stalked along several yards behind me, making no
attempt to cultivate my acquaintance. At the first large village he was
relieved by a stocky youth of more sociable disposition, who walked at
my side and offered to “set ’em up” in a roadside saki shop at least
once in every mile. As often I halted to watch some native craftsman. In
one tiny hamlet a dozen women and girls, all naked above the waist line,
were weaving reed mats in an open hovel. Far from objecting to my
curiosity, they invited us to enter and placed ragged cushions for our
accommodation. Before we were seated the head of the establishment began
to chatter. She was well past middle age and of the form of a
well-stuffed grain sack,—just the type of human that can talk for an
unlimited period without anything to talk about. The Japanese word for
“yes” along the shores of the Inland Sea is “ha.” It was the only reply
which my companion found opportunity to interject into the conversation,
and for a full half-hour he sat crosslegged on his cushion, observing at
regular intervals and with funereal countenance:—“ha!—ha! ha! ha!—ha!
ha!—ha!”
A few miles beyond he retired in favor of a much older man whose
penchant was to be taciturn and stealthy in the discharge of his duty.
Anxiously he strove to impress upon me that he was traveling in my
direction by merest chance. If I halted, he marched past me with an
expression of total self-absorption and slipped into some hiding-place a
few yards down the highway until I went on. There was relief from the
monotony of tramping in concocting schemes to shake him off, but every
such attempt failed. If I slipped into a shop to run out the back door,
the howling of the pursuing multitude betrayed me; if I dashed suddenly
off into a wayside forest, I succeeded in rousing the spy to feminine
shrieks of dismay, but before I could cover a mile he was again at my
heels. In the afternoon I abandoned the road and darted away up a
mountain path. At the summit I came upon a temple and a deep blue lake
framed in tangled forests. This time, apparently, I had outwitted my
shadower. I threw off my clothes and plunged in for a swim. When I
regained the bank, the spy, panting and dripping with perspiration, lay
on his back in a shady thicket beside my garments.
It was nearly sunset and the fourth lap in the police relay when a man
pushed his way through a village mob that surrounded me and greeted me
in a jargon that bore some resemblance to my native tongue. I sat down
by a shop door to rest, and for a half-hour the fellow plied me with
questions in near-English, with a sullen scowl and an arrogant manner
that said as plainly as words that he had a decidedly low opinion of
white men. His comprehension of my remarks was by no means complete; his
interpretation of them to the gaping throng was probably even less
lucid. About all he seemed to gather was that I was traveling on foot,
from which he concluded that I was penniless.
I rose to depart and he caught me by an arm.
“So you tramp?” he cried. “One time me go States. Many time see tramp.
In States tramp many time hungry. Not in Japan. Jap man all good; give
plenty. Wait. I make you present.”
Having found his people the least lovable and by far the most selfish on
the globe, I awaited the proposed benefaction with great curiosity. The
fellow turned and harangued the gathering at great length. His hearers
crowded up to give me congratulatory slaps on the back. I expected to
have at least a ticket to my own land forced upon me. Having published
his generosity to the four winds, the charitable fellow set the
cavalcade in motion and marched down the street at my side.
“Jap man ver’ good,” he reiterated, while his admirers beamed upon me.
“You damn tramp. No business in Japan, but ver’ hungry. Me give you
this.”
He opened his hand and displayed a copper sen.
Being covetous of the half-cent as a souvenir of Japanese generosity, I
stretched out a hand for it. The philanthropist snatched his own away.
“Not give money to damn tramp!” he cried. “Wait for shop. Me buy you two
rice cakes.”
Rice cakes being valueless as souvenirs, I rejected the kind offer and
left the cavalcade to chatter their astonishment.
The village was long. A half-mile beyond I stopped at a shop and ordered
supper, the price of which amounted to six cents. A great hubbub soon
arose in the street outside, and, before the meal was served, my
would-be benefactor, red-eyed with rage, fought his way into the booth.
“Why you tell you have no money?” he bellowed.
I denied having made any such statement.
“But you walk by the feet!” he screamed. “Me going to give you one sen
because you not starve. You run way and buy dinner like rich man. You
damn tramp, try be thief—”
I rose and kicked him into the street. His physical courage was on a par
with his philanthropy. But his bellowing of my alleged perfidy aroused
great anger in the gathering, and I was all but mobbed when I left the
shop.
The half-mountainous scenery, the rampant curiosity of villagers, and
the spy relay continued for two days more, at the end of which I turned
in at the Sailors’ Home of Kobe. Among the cosmopolitan beachcombers who
spun their yarns in the back yard of the institution was one victim of
the Wanderlust whose misfortunes are rarely equaled even in the vagabond
world. He was a youth of twenty, son of an Italian father and a Japanese
mother. In early childhood—his mother having died—he had returned with
his father to Naples. Ten years later a tavern brawl left him an orphan;
utterly so, for never had he heard a hint of the existence of parental
relatives.
Driven from the garret that had been his home, he joined the waifs that
prowl among the garbage heaps of the Italian metropolis until he had
grown large enough to ship as a _mozzo_ on a coasting steamer. With the
end of his apprenticeship came a longing to visit the land of his birth.
He joined the crew of an East-Indiaman and “jumped her” in Kobe.
In the long interim, however, he had utterly forgotten the language of
his childhood. English would have served him well enough, but unlike
most seamen he had picked up barely a word of that tongue. His Italian
was fluent, but it was Neapolitan Italian, and it is doubtful if there
were a dozen men in all Japan who understood that dialect. A man
suddenly struck deaf and dumb could not have found himself in sadder
straits. There were European residents in the suburban villas of Kobe,
there were generous tourists in her shops and hotels; but it was useless
to tell them hard-luck tales in a language they could not understand.
The Italian consul drove him off with wrathful words, indignant at the
attempted imposition of a masquerading Jap. The Japanese were even less
inclined to give succor to one who, in features a fellow countryman,
aped the white man in garb and refused to speak the native tongue.
Under the weight of his calamities, the half-breed—tainted, perhaps,
with the fatalism of the East—had degenerated into a groveling,
cadaverous wretch, who cowered by day in a corner of the yard of the
Home and crawled away by night into noisome hiding places. From time to
time he contrived to get arrested, but the police were cruelly lenient
and soon drove him forth again into a world that denied him even prison
fare.
I had not been an hour in the Home when a servant summoned me to the
office. The superintendent and two police officers awaited me.
“Say, Franck,” began the former, “I hope that story you told me was on
the level? The cops have it you’re a Russian.”
“You came last night? You walked from Hiroshima?” demanded one of the
officers.
“Right you are,” I answered.
“This is the one,” he continued, turning to the superintendent, “The
police followed him from Hiroshima. He is a Russian, they telegraph me.”
“Nonsense!” said the manager; “He’s an American.”
“How can that be?” queried the second officer. “He wears even a Russian
uniform.”
A light broke in upon me. No wonder I had been so popular with the
police for four days past.
“Russian nothing,” I answered. “This is an American uniform from the
Philippines.”
“Just the kind the Russians wear,” objected the officer, stretching out
a hand to feel the texture of my jacket. “How, Mr. Manager, do you know
he is an American?”
“By his talk, of course,” replied the superintendent.
“But _you_ are an _Englishman_,” retorted the detective.
“Just the reason I can tell an American,” responded the manager.
“Here! Look these over,” I put in, producing my papers.
The officers, however, were unreasonably skeptical and not only
discussed the documents at great length but insisted on inscribing in
their notebooks a very detailed account of my movements since entering
the country. It was all too evident that they did not believe that I
traveled on foot by choice; and as long as I remained in Kobe I was
conscious of being shadowed each time I left the Home.
On my third day in the city I rose early and passed out along the
highway to the eastward. The police, evidently, had been caught napping,
for no spy overtook me, and by noonday I was wandering through the maze
of streets and canals of Osaka. My presence in that city was soon known,
however, for an interpreter sought me out in the early evening at the
inn to which I had retired. As if his quizzing were not sufficient, a
second officer aroused me at dawn and not only put me through the usual
catechism but followed at my heels until I had entered the precincts of
the railway station. There two officers dragged me into their booth and
subjected me to a cross-examination the length of which caused me to
miss the second train I had hoped to catch.
Luckily the service was frequent. I purchased a ticket to Kyoto and
boarded the ten o’clock express. Barely had I settled down in my seat,
however, when two officers dashed into the car.
“The police captain say you come police station!” cried one of them,
catching me by the arm. “Captain like speak you.”
“The captain be blowed!” I answered, pushing him away.
“You come! Captain say not go with this train!” shouted the officer.
His companion came to his assistance and the pair laid hands on me. I
braced my knees against the back of the next seat and let them pull. In
the Western world we hear much of _jiu-jitsu_ and the physical prowess
of the Japanese. As for her policemen, and this was but one of many a
personal encounter they forced upon me, it was never my misfortune to
meet one with more strength than a schoolgirl. For fully five minutes
the pair tugged and yanked at my arms and legs; but not once during that
time was I in the least danger of being dragged from my seat.
The pair held the trump card, however, for they forbade the express to
move while I remained on board. I took pity on my fellow passengers,
therefore, and, pushing the pair aside, followed them into the station.
In the first-class waiting-room they arranged a Morris chair for my
accommodation, brought me several English newspapers and a packet of
cigarettes, and, requesting me to remain until they returned, hurried
away. There were several policemen in the square outside, however, who
peered in upon me from time to time.
I had been reading nearly an hour when another interpreter stepped into
the room.
“The police captain have sent me,” he announced, with a conciliatory
smile, “to say that you are not the man which he think and that you can
go when you are care to.”
I caught the fourth train and reached Kyoto in the early afternoon—and
was immediately arrested. In short, not a day passed during the rest of
my stay in the country, except in the open ports, that I was not taken
into custody several times. Every officer to clap eyes on my khaki-clad
figure was sure to demand my surrender, convinced that to his eagle eye
his country owed its preservation. It was never difficult to shake off a
pair of officers, a few slaps always sufficed; but, unlike other
Orientals, they did not run away. They dogged my footsteps into temples
and bazaars, through shrieking slum sections, down alleyways reeking
with refuse, until an interpreter came to establish my nationality.
[Illustration: Japanese canal-boats and coolies of Kioto]
I spent a day in Kyoto and could have spent many more with pleasure. At
the station next morning four yen more than sufficed for a ticket to
Tokyo, with unlimited stop-overs. At Maibara a squad of Russian
prisoners, garbed in Arctic cloaks and fur caps, huddled in a sweltering
group on the platform. As long as the train halted not the hint of a
jeer rose from the surrounding multitude, and the townspeople came in
continual procession to offer the stolid fellows baskets of fruit,
packets of tobacco, and all manner of delicacies. I left the train at
Nagoya, third city of the kingdom, in which the chief point of interest
is a great castle, at that season the residence of hundreds of Russian
prisoners.
Among the few guests at the inn to which I turned at nightfall was an
invalided sergeant, nearly recovered from two bullet wounds received in
Manchuria. A paper panel separated his room from my own. We pushed it
aside and shared a double-sized chamber. From the moment of our meeting
the sergeant was certain that I was a Russian. Gestures of protest and
innumerable repetitions of the word “Americajín” did not alter his
conviction in the least. Too well he knew the czar’s uniform and the
cast of features of the “Moosky!”
We conversed almost uninterruptedly for three hours, during which time
barely a word passed our lips. Certainly the sergeant must have been an
actor in his preliminary days, for there was no thought nor opinion so
complex that he could not express it clearly and concisely in pantomime.
Rendered into English his gestures and grimaces ran as follows:—
“Well, you _are_ a nervy fellow, yes, indeed! I suppose you’re only an
escaped prisoner; but you’ll be shot as a spy the moment you’re found
out. You’re not a Russian? Nonsense! Don’t spring any such yarns on me.
I’ve seen too many of you fellows. You may fool these unsophisticated
stay-at-homes, but I know you as I should know my own father. So would
any of the boys who have been to the front. Oh, come, stop it! It’s no
use telling _me_ you’re an American. Tell that to the civilians and the
policemen, the blockheads. It’s a mighty fine joke on them. But we’re
alone now; let’s be honest. You needn’t be in the least afraid of me.
I’m on, but I wouldn’t peach for the world. But I’m afraid your scheme
won’t work. There is not another man besides myself in Nagoya who would
keep your secret. The first schoolboy or old woman to find you out will
run his legs off to tell the police. You can bank on that. A year ago,
before I’d seen the world, I was as big a tattle-tale as the rest; but I
take a more cosmopolitan view of life since I got these scars, and I can
sympathize with a man now even if his skin _is_ white.”
The police interpreter came at this point to take my deposition, and the
sergeant preserved a noncommittal gravity during the interview, though
he winked twice or thrice as the policeman bent over his notebook. When
the visitor was gone, the soldier took up the story of his army life. It
was a gesticulatory epic, rich in detail, amusing in incident. From the
parting with his parents he carried me along with him through the
training camp of recruits, across the Sea of Japan on a crowded
transport, into the winter-bound bivouac in Manchuria, on cruel forced
marches to the northward, into many a raging battle, to the day when he
fell helpless in the bottom of a trench. His musket stood in a corner of
the room. He used it often in the story and took great delight in
assuring me that it had sent many of what he considered my
fellow-countrymen to their final reckoning. He imitated their death
throes with striking realism, rolling about the floor with twitching
limbs and distorted features, choking and gasping as a man does in the
last struggle. In comedy he was as effective as in tragedy. His
caricature of a Russian at his prayers was a histrionic masterpiece; his
knowledge of the “Moosky” service as exact as that of a patriarch.
We turned in towards midnight and parted in the morning the best of
friends. From Nagoya the railway turned southward, and, following the
old royal highway along the coast of the main island, gave us frequent
glimpses of the ocean. The country grew less mountainous, often there
were miles of unbroken paddy fields in which uncountable peasant women
wallowed in the inundated mire, clawing with bare hands the mud about
the roots of the rice plants. On the slopes, too steep to be flooded,
long rows of tea bushes stretched from the railway line to the wooded
summits.
I tired of riding at four and dropped off at Numadzu, a village of
fishermen where the inhabitants to this day, I fear, remember me as the
most unobliging of mortals. My host spoke some English. Taking advantage
of his linguistic accomplishment, I requested him to prepare a bath. A
servant placed and filled a tub in the center of the inn courtyard. I
had begun to disrobe when a panel was pushed aside and into the patio
stalked a dozen men and women, the landlord at their head.
“Here!” I protested; “I thought this was a bath room?”
“Sure! Bath room, a’ right,” returned my host. “Go ’head, make bath.”
“Are you crazy?” I demanded. “Drive those women out of here until I have
finished bathing!”
[Illustration: The castle of Nagoya, in which many Russian prisoners
were kept]
[Illustration: Laying out fish to dry along the river in Tokio. Japan
lives principally on fish and rice]
“Why for?” inquired the Jap, while the company squatted along the wall.
I explained my objections and pushed them out one by one. The proprietor
was the last to go.
“Why for you so damn selfish?” he growled. “Why you not make bath if
ladies here? They not hurt you. They come see if you white all over. You
come see ladies make bath they not give damn kick. Damn selfish
American!”
I closed the panels and returned to my tub. But the curiosity of the
unselfish ladies was not so easily overcome. As I ceased my splashing a
moment, a poorly suppressed cough sounded above me, and I looked up to
see the entire party gazing down upon me from an upper balcony. I caught
up a cobblestone and they withdrew; but, though callers innumerable
dropped in during the evening, the proprietor never tired of relating
the story of my unprecedented selfishness.
Two policemen interviewed me on my way to the station next morning, a
third was in waiting when I descended at the village of Gotemba, and a
spy dogged my footsteps during the day’s tramp among the foothills of
Fujiyama. It is the ambition of the Mikado’s government to “keep tab” on
every foreigner from the day of his arrival in the country until his
departure; and local officers strive diligently to supply the
information demanded. But the system is something of a farce. The most
tolerant tourist is apt to tire of being incessantly interviewed and, in
a spirit of retaliation or merely for the sake of variety, to try his
hand at fiction. As for beachcombers, there are few indeed who do not
take delight in weaving “fairy tales” for gullible officials.
In the open ports of Japan I scraped acquaintance with more than a score
of white sailors who had journeyed across the country afoot or “on the
cushions.” They passed for Americans, nearly every man of them, though
three-fourths were Europeans and at least four, to my knowledge,
Russians. But the point of nationality aside, there was not one of them
who told police interpreters the same story twice. The Jap finds great
difficulty in pronouncing the letter “L.” Jocular beachcombers of my
acquaintance swore on their discharge books that they had lain awake
nights to piece together names unpronounceable for the next policeman.
Hence it was that the traveler who announced himself at one station as
“Alfred Leland from Lincolnlane,” assured the officers of the next that
he was “Lolo Lipland Longlock from Los Angeles.” It mattered little what
the wanderer dubbed himself; a police interpreter could not tell an
American from a Zulu name, and though “Lolo Lipland Longlock” spoke only
a half-hundred words of English, the name, alleged nationality, and
“fairy tale” were solemnly inscribed on the records. That was well
enough for the gullible interpreter; but what of the puzzled government
bookkeeper at Tokyo, who poured over volumes of reports from the rural
districts, seeking in vain to find out what had become of “Alfred Leland
of Lincolnlane?”
I reached Yokohama that night and, having deposited my bundle in the
Sailors’ Home, continued next day to Tokyo. Financially I was near the
end of my rope. My daily expenditures in Japan had barely averaged
twenty-five cents; but even at that rate the fortune arising from the
gratitude of the “jungle king” of Kung Chow and the generosity of the
_Fausang’s_ captain had been gradually dissipated. Bankruptcy mattered
little now, however, for Tokyo was the last city in my itinerary. Once
back in Yokohama, it would be strange if I could not soon sign on some
craft homeward bound. I squandered the seven yen that remained,
therefore, in three days of riotous living in the capital; and, on a
morning of late July, wandered out along the highway to the neighboring
port.
[Illustration: An employee of the Tokio-Yokohama interurban, and some
street urchins]
[Illustration: Fishermen along the bay on my tramp from Tokio to
Yokohama]