embroidery on the innermost of the folds around the neck, the richness
of the _obi_ at the waist, there was the same severity of design
with richness of decoration which characterised the room, where two
paper-paned walls, one of sliding wood and the fourth stained a subdued
brown, enclosed the bare matted space. Against the one solid wall was
built a slightly raised platform of polished black wood, forming with
the two low pillars of wood a wide recess, the _tokonoma_. Within the
_tokonoma_ hung a long silken scroll where pale storks flew across the
moon, a _kakemono_ of price. On the black wood of the platform, which
was raised but a few inches from the ground, were set the two swords
of the _samurai_, a bronze horse of exquisite workmanship, and in the
corner some long branches of white plum-blossom in a vase. In these
four objects (as in the _obi_ and the embroidery of the neck-folds)
lay the entire decoration of the room. And looking, one realised that
great truth, almost unknown to us, but a truism in Japan--the artistic
value of space. In a European drawing-room you often cannot see one
ornament for its fellows: here the bronze horse and the _kakemono_
held the eyes; one looked, and one _saw_; their beauty filled the soul;
next week, next month, they will go back to the store-house, and others
will take their place. I could never forget the curved lines of those
two swords against the polished black floor under the white fragrance
of the plum-blossoms, any more than I could forget the soft half-moon
curves of Miss Hayashi’s _kimono_, white below mauve, as she glided
over the matted floor.
Our lunch, we had come to lunch, opened with tea, pale amber tea
in little round bowls on bronze stands, and sugar chrysanthemums,
rice-paste storks and dolphins, cakes and sweets as perfect in design
and colouring as though they were intended to last for ever. A
rosy-cheeked maid, who bumped her head so vigorously on the floor that
I thought she must get a headache, presented the tea, a bump for each
guest and three as a salutation, while Miss Hayashi, folding squares of
white paper in double triangles with one sweep of her hand, delicately
heaped them full of sugar flowers and fishes, and passed them round,
one to each of us.
Then came a long pause, while we asked all the questions that occurred
to us about _kimono_ and _hakama_, and swords and etiquette; and then
our lunch, a whole lacquered trayful of bowls for each one of us, with
all the courses served together, and all irretrievably and, to us,
inexplicably mixed. I pass the hot soup in a lacquered bowl, and the
hot rice in a china one, but the rest--a golden bream on a pale blue
plate set round with oranges in jelly; slices of pink raw fish, and a
design in brown seaweed and green roots; a deep bowl of pale yellow
custard, its surface ruffled with silver fishes, oriental whitebait,
and its depths filled with bamboo shoots and lily bulbs and other
surprises; and one dish, a triumph of design and colour, where an oval
slab of pounded fish, white as snow, rested against a green mound of
preserved chestnuts, while in front, arranged in a curving crescent
like the tail of a comet, were purple roots, brown ginger, and slices
of a red radish. And all this you eat as you please, a bit here, and a
bit there, now a drink of salt soup, then a mouthful of sweet chestnut;
custard, vegetables, fish, sweets, with relays of rice for bread, and
_saké_ for wine, paper napkins, and withal two penholders to eat with,
and your Japanese dinner is complete.
Having tried everything with the greatest perseverance, and wriggled
our chopsticks until our hands were as tired as our toes, we gave in
and rested from our labours. The little maid, rosier than ever, removed
the trays of food, and brought in bowls of oranges and dried persimmon.
At this moment there was a rustling of screens, and a dear, little old
lady with shaven eyebrows and blackened teeth slid into the room, and
instantly went down on her knees, and putting out her hands bowed her
head right down on to them.
“This is my aunt,” said the professor, “a real old-fashioned
woman--there are not many left nowadays--who blackens her teeth and
shaves her eyebrows.”
The little old lady laughed, and made many polite speeches, asking
after our “honourable healths” and our “august appetites.” At every
word she made another bow, until I felt as if I really must get down on
my knees and hit my forehead against the ground as well. Luckily the
professor, after a moment’s consultation, suggested we should see the
house, and we all got up. The little old lady was on her feet in a
twinkling, but our half-dead limbs sent pins and needles up our legs,
as we stumbled on to them and awkwardly walked away.
The sliding paper wall of our room hid another absolutely bare, no
_tokonoma_ here, only a poem painted on a long narrow board fastened
against the door-post, and in the further wall, shut off by sliding
screens, a large cupboard, full of the household linen, which means the
silk-wadded quilts or _futon_, on and under which one sleeps. Sliding
aside the door-panel we found ourselves on another three-foot-wide
platform, looking out through more paper-paned walls into another
garden. This house was just a long series of rooms with a platform and
a garden on each side, and a little square bunch of rooms at one end.
In one of these we cuddled down under a silk quilt thrown over a square
hole in the middle of the room, and felt the heat coming up from the
glowing charcoal sunk in a sort of pit beneath the floor.
Then we peeped into the bathroom, containing a high wooden wash-tub
with a stove-pipe running down one end. The wash-tub is filled with
cold water, and lighted charcoal put down the stove-pipe, and in a few
minutes the water is hot, and you get in, and the longer you stay the
hotter grows the water, until having boiled yourself in the approved
Japanese way you step out and wipe yourself dry with a yard of white
cotton adorned with blue storks.
Then we invaded the kitchen, bare of everything like the other
rooms, and with only a two-fold brazier to cook over; one brazier
has permanently fixed above it a coppered wooden tub, dedicated to
rice-boiling, the other brazier cooked everything else. That was
all. Wooden pots, pans and dippers were hung up inside the sliding
cupboards, or were washing in the yard outside. A tiny shrine, like a
mantelshelf over the sliding door, held minute gods in a dim light; a
paper-framed bamboo lantern, like an afternoon-tea cake-table, with
shelves between the legs for plates, stood in a corner. This is the
_andon_, and inside the paper panes a floating wick in a saucer of oil
burns all night.
Our advent into these regions was attended with much excitement
punctuated with peals of laughter, it striking the dear old lady as
irresistibly funny, that it was all funny to us.
In the midst of our hilarity came the summons of the _kurumaya_, and
out we had to go, take our boots from the friendly company of the
wooden _gheta_, and laden with mysterious boxes neatly tied with red
and white strings, and bunches of plum-blossom, say stiff English
“Good-byes,” while the little old lady, the rosy-cheeked maid, and the
rest of the household bowed us graceful Japanese _sayonara_ and _mata
irasshai_ (Come again).
The _kuruma_ curved out through the tiny snow-covered garden set with
dark shrubs, the paper-paned walls shut with a soft thud; the picture
was gone, but the memory of it will remain with me always.
II
IN A CLOISONNÉ FACTORY
Nagoya is a manufacturing town with a quarter of a million of
inhabitants. It is full of porcelain and fan factories, cloisonné works
and cotton mills. It is the centre of the celebrated potteries of Seto,
and is famous for its embroideries and its silks. It is bigger than
Nottingham or Hull, and is almost as large as Dublin. Nagoya is both
Staffordshire and Bradford--and yet a city clean and still. A town of
sunny streets and pure fresh air, whose sky is blue and clear, whose
trees are green. Its 250,000 inhabitants are mostly factory hands--and
there is neither dirt nor din. The golden dolphins on its castle’s roof
are three hundred years old, and they glitter in the sunshine like
new-fired gold.
* * * * *
On the edge of the growing rice-fields the porcelain factory lies.
Its doors are open to the sun; and in the corner of the low, white
room, where the workmen sit cross-legged like Buddhas, each beside his
potter’s wheel, a yellow vase of purple iris stands.
The room is still and fresh and clean. The whirr of the turning wheel
is soft as the drowsing of a bee. There is no hurry as there is no
idleness. And each worker, as he moulds his clay, looks towards the
purple iris in the yellow vase.
The cloisonné works are built in the heart of the city, in the middle
of a busy street, where blue-clad coolies continually load and unload
the wide coster-barrows which are the waggons of Japan. The hum of
working life is in the air, and the wide road which stretches without
division of pavement across from side to side, is thronged. Business
men in grey _kimono_ and foreign hats go out and in; the loaded
barrows drawn by the blue-clad coolies pass up and down; fast-running
_kurumaya_ steer in and out among the foot-passengers and the traffic.
And the occasional collision is followed by mutual bows and polite
_Gomen nasai_ (“I beg your honourable pardon”), on the part of either
coolie or _kurumaya_.
Nagoya factories and cotton mills are hard at work.
The gateway of the cloisonné works leads down a wooden passage into
a tiny court, a garden set round with the workshops of the factory.
And such a garden. It is not larger than the front lawn of a suburban
villa, but the skill of a Japanese gardener has planted a whole
mountain side with forests of pine and bamboo, has spanned with an
arching bridge the stone-grey stream at the mountain’s foot. From
inside the tiny matted rooms, no bigger than bathing-boxes, which shut
in three sides of the garden, the illusion is complete. And the shade
and coolness of the real trees and water, of the imaginary forest
and stream, brings a sense of calmness and repose, of quiet peace
and beauty, to all the many workers of the factory. It is a living
landscape growing unspoiled in the heart of a workshop in the centre of
a manufacturing city.
Each on his mat in the clean, bare, matted rooms the workmen sit, the
rice-paper _shōji_ pushed open to the mountain stream, and the forest
of pine and bamboo. In the first room sit workers outlining the design
on the bare metal vase with metal wires, silver wires on silver vases,
copper wires on copper vases. And each design is different, and many of
the men are old. In the second room the bare metal vases are getting
a coat of coloured paste, and now the design stands out rough as a
cave-man’s drawing. Here the workers are younger, while boys fill in
the body of the vase. In the third and fourth rooms the matted floor at
the back is replaced by a large hearthstone, and a round earthen oven;
in this the vases are baked, passed back to the men and boys to recoat
with the coloured paste, and then rebaked, recoated and rebaked many
times, until at last the vase is handed over to the workers in the last
rooms. It has lost all trace of design by now; the metal wires are no
longer visible; the colours have bubbled over in all directions, the
vase is an unmeaning mosaic of a thousand shades. Then the workmen,
sitting on their heels on the kneeling-cushions in their clean, bare,
matted rooms, tiny as bathing-boxes, polish, polish, polish, sometimes
for a whole year, until the worker’s hand wears down the hard smooth
surface and the design shows through clean and true once more. The
workmen here are grey and old.
But the oldest of all sat by himself in a little room just opposite the
arching bridge which crossed the mountain stream. He wore a pair of
quaint horn spectacles, and his face was the face of an Eastern sage.
He sat with his tools before him fixing silver wires on to a silver
vase, with a certainty and a rapidity beyond his fellows; and all that
is most beautiful and most difficult in the cloisonné works of Nagoya
comes from his hands. The old man pushed back his horn spectacles as
I stopped before the open _shōji_, and his eyes rested on the still
picture of the garden with a smile.
I, too, turned to look at the row of tiny paper rooms stretching out
like arms on either hand, at the living landscape lying in their midst,
at the blue sky above, and at the old face beneath the horn spectacles.
I did not wonder at the peace which lay upon it, nor at the exquisite
beauty of the finished vase standing on the matting beside him. For the
garden was still as a cloister, though the cloister was a workshop for
cloisonné ware in the manufacturing town of Nagoya.
III
FLOWER ARRANGEMENT
We sat opposite each other on the matting, and she laughed. The polite,
audible smile of the Japanese. All around us lay cut branches of fir;
and on the long wooden footstool they call a table stood a shallow
bronze dish and a wonderful cleft stick of bamboo.
She was a little bent old lady, with the courtly politeness of a
thousand Grandisons refined to a subtle essence, and she gave lessons
in flower arrangement. The close-cropped grey hair gathered into a
slide behind told its own tale of widowhood, and the withered careworn
face its story of work and want.
The _shōji_ were shut, and the light through the rice-paper panes
sent a warmed white light into the room that knew no colour, a light
as though one sat inside a luminous mist, or in the heart of the
plum-blossoms. A passionless, lifeless light which was simply light.
And the little old lady laughed again.
“There is much to learn,” I said, stopping to watch her bending the
warmed fir branches over the _hibachi_ always to the exact curve, never
too near or too far, and mine snapped at the first touch.
She handed me another branch in place of the one I had broken, and
watched while I wedged it into the cleft bamboo stick with little chips
of wood.
“Very much,” she said. “It takes three years of learning for the pupil
and seven for the teacher. And the _Ijin San_ has had four lessons.”
The fifth and last branch being successfully wedged into line, I got on
to my knees to admire the effect, while Arabella, from her camp-stool
in the corner--she considered it lowering to sit on the floor--bridled.
“Oh, the _Japanese_,” she said; “but any European could learn in half a
dozen lessons.”
The little old lady bowed, letting her forehead almost touch the
ground, as she sat on her heels on the kneeling-cushion.
“The august stranger----” she began, when I interrupted.
The contemplation of my five branches of fir, two curving to the left
and three to the right, had not filled me with any satisfaction. They
wobbled. All their curves were wrong, and the five stems, instead of
being hidden one behind the other, so that the illusion of a single
branch growing out of the bronze dish was created and kept, were all
distinctly and decidedly visible.
“It doesn’t look a bit right,” I said; “but what is the matter?”
The task of sticking five branches of fir, already bent to the
prescribed curves for me, into a cleft stick had not seemed difficult,
especially with three lessons behind me, and I had worked hard and been
very confident that morning.
With a thousand apologies the little old lady pulled the bronze dish
towards her, while Arabella cleared her throat.
“In Europe,” she said, in the tone of voice adapted to a kindergarten
class--her Japanese voice, “we do not learn such a simple thing, we do
it naturally. Every European woman can arrange flowers, and they are
flowers” (with a glance at the fir branches in the little old lady’s
hand--she was busy correcting) “not trees.”
The little old lady was putting back the five fir branches into the
cleft stick with the deftest of deft fingers. Arabella unclasped the
brooch at her neck and pulled out what she called a “nosegay.” A bamboo
vase, just a piece of the stem hollowed out, in which the fir had come
from the florist that morning, lay on the floor. She picked it up.
“It should be of glass,” she said forgivingly, “but I will make it do.”
And then with her own hand she proceeded to arrange the Yokohama
nosegay in the slender bamboo stem. There was a bit of spiræa, one fat
red rose, and some miscellaneous leaves, which Arabella referred to
grandiloquently as “green.” These she crammed tightly into the bamboo
stem, and then placed it, with a “who-shall-deny-me” air, upon the
table.
I looked at it. No, it was not a good specimen even of Western flower
arrangement, but in how many buttonholes, on how many tables, had I
seen something like it.
Flower arrangement is taught in the schools in Japan, and every
Japanese girl learns. If she did not, she would not “arrange” anymore
than we should paint or play.
The little old lady had finished, and she pushed the bronze dish along
the table beside the bamboo vase. Then, with many compliments and much
bowing, she thanked the _Ijin San_ for her “august kindness” and her
“honourable condescension.” And the smooth phrases ran on and on, while
I sat back on my heels and looked.
East and West, they stood there before me. At the best, what we aimed
at was a scheme of colour, and at our worst no scheme at all. And what
they strove after was line, whether in fir branches or lily leaves, in
plum-blossom or iris flowers, line, and a coherent whole. Each branch,
each twig, each flower, nay, each curve of the branch, each petal of
the flower, each leaf of the twig, were parts, essential parts of the
whole; for in Japan they draw with flowers and fir branches as we only
draw for “design.” And line is beyond colour as sculpture is beyond
painting.
The sun through the walls of rice-paned _shōji_ spread a warmed white
light through the room, a limpid, liquid light in which there was no
shadow.
The little old lady had been busy tidying up. The room was one clear
sheet of pale yellow matting. On the low empty _tokonoma_ stood the
bronze dish and its pure line drawing in fir. Arabella was offering the
bamboo vase and its mixed contents “as a model,” and the little old
lady bowed to the ground.
Once more I looked at the bronze vase and the pure outlines of the fir
branches, at the bare room perfectly proportioned, at the rice-paned
_shōji_, and the snowflake whiteness of that light which knew no colour
and no shadow struck on my consciousness.
I think I understood. Colour, as colour, in that luminous, shadowless
room, whose beauty was its line and its proportion, would have been not
colour but a blot. Outside the rice-paned _shōji_ lay life and colour
enough. Here was but light and line.
Arabella was removing the white night-socks from her boots, she always
refused to take them off, on the veranda. The little old lady, down on
her knees with her forehead to the ground, was saying sweet Japanese
_sayonara_.
I looked back one last time--and Arabella’s nosegay vanished.
IV
GOD’S MESSENGER
The first fresh heat of summer is here, and outside the city the
rice-fields spread in quivering pools of green. It is the month of the
Iris, _Hana-shōbu_, and along the raised causeway, between the fields,
the miniature hansoms, drawn each by the bent dark figure of the
_kurumaya_, silhouette against the blue sky.
You pay as much as three sen (three farthings) to enter an Iris garden,
and they are an hour’s _’ricksha_ ride from the city, so that the
_fête_ is select. In the covered court of the entrance the _kuruma_
are stabled in long lines under a pale yellow roof of mats, while
the _kurumaya_, their black mushroom hats on their knees, sit on the
slender shafts and smoke their pipes--three whiffs from the metal
thimble in the bamboo stem, and then the sharp _tink_, _tink_, as
the ash is knocked out against the shaft. Inside the garden the blue
tunic of the coolie is absent, three farthings and the long _kuruma_
ride proving prohibitive; but the grey _kimono_ of the classes, Tokyo
shopkeepers for the most part, is everywhere. The gardens are large and
full, but in no sense crowded, for the Japanese, by the very polish of
their politeness, contrive to create a sense of space and repose around
them even in a crowd. But the gardens are full, and the deadened clack
of the wooden _gheta_ on the earthen pathway, as the little _musmé_
carry the “honourable tea” and the “honourable cakes” to the mat-roofed
summer-houses, is incessant.
We do not sit on our heels on the flat cushions on the low matted
table, under the bamboo roofs; we sit _on_ the cushions, with our feet
on the ground, and the little waitress laughs, her polished black
hair shining like a metal mirror in the sunshine. It is so ridiculous
to see the _Ijin San_ sitting on the tables with their legs hanging
uncomfortably down in front of them, when all the world agrees it is
much more natural to sit on your heels with the cleft toes of each
little white _tabi_ sticking up behind like rabbit’s ears. The idea
of getting cramp in such a comfortable position makes little O Haru’s
brown eyes open very wide indeed. I believe she revolves the idea,
inside that metal-polished head of hers, that the _Ijin San’s_ legs are
not made aright, or why do they hide them so? And surely the civilized
boot could only have been invented by people without toes?
The open summer-houses, behind the bamboo bushes, or on the tops of
the miniature hills, are full of family parties, with children in
all stages of age and coiffure, from the shaven baby heads and the
stiff horsehair ribbon bunches of the children, up through the flat
fronts and the first freehand designs of the schoolgirls, to the black
cockscomb fronts and the elaborate polished rolls of the grown-up
daughters. And they are all content to sit in the sunshine, drink tea,
and look at the flowers. They do not want to be for ever restlessly
doing something, not even the children.
In the summer-house over the way a party of bachelors, students from
the University perhaps, are also drinking tea and smoking cigarettes;
one of them is writing a poem. And a _bourgeois_ Sabbath peace is over
the land.
The tap of the tiny tea bowl on the lacquered tray, the deadened clack
of the _musmé’s gheta_ on the pathway, is hushed, for I have left the
summer-house, and am standing close down by the river of flowers.
Iris, the messenger between Gods and men, said the old Greek legend,
Iris, _Hana-shōbu_. And surely this swaying river of lavender-blue
flowers, floating out from the fleckless blue of the summer’s sky, on
into the young green of the rice-fields, is a living message from the
Gods. A message of beauty and peace, and of the holiness that springs
from these. A message which this cultured, courtly, beauty-loving
people alone know how to create--and how to read. For many generations
have lived and died, tenderly caring for God’s Messengers, before these
flowers learned to unfold their petals in a hundred ways, and wear a
thousand hues from pink to purple, from blue to grey, from grey to
black or to the purest white.
The river of exquisite blossom flows on, straight out from the
fleckless blue, on into the delicate green, bearing God’s message of
beauty to man. And these who see it know how to read.
V
THE ART OF THE PEOPLE