truth, to justice, to charity, more intense and real than that
of the man who is faithful to them out of the sheer spirit of
loyalty, unstimulated and unsupported by any faith which can be
called theological.”
DOWDEN, “Shakspeare, his Mind and Art.”
I
TOKYO
Tokyo is a city of one million five hundred thousand souls, and in its
heart of hearts stands the Palace of the Son of Heaven.
The city through its girdle of brown streets works hard, its wharfs
and factories, its shops and warehouses are dense with human life
and resonant with human labour. The low brown streets so thick with
flimsy paper houses stretch for ten miles along the plain. In them the
children play, the _kuruma_ pass quickly, the heavy laden hand-carts of
the coolies push and jostle, but the heart of this great capital lies
still.
From circumference to centre as you come, through street on street
of houses, wharves and shops, the magic of the city grows. First the
streets space out and out, then the houses dwindle as the trees and
gardens grow, greener, wilder, stiller, till the heart of Tokyo’s city
is a moated park of peace.
Up nine steep hills the city spreads, and sea and river, and the wide
green rice-fields lap it round, while far away across the land, above
the level blue of sky great Fuji rises peerless in the midmost heaven.
Engirdled by the thronged and busy streets the nine tall hills peaceful
with well-kept houses and secluded gardens, make a crescent round the
moated park. For in this strange city whose centre is a palace and a
peaceful walled-in pleasaunce the “suburbs” lie within and not without
the town.
And through the town and over street and roadway, in the gardens and
the courtyards the gaunt beaked crows flap coal-black wings as they
sail past, and their cynical “Haw, haw” is sarcastic with an utter
disbelief. With stately swoop, black wings outspread, they drift past
the ear of the newcomer confident with a three weeks’ visit that he
understands the East, and in the midst of his cocksureness they drop
their cold, sarcastic “Haw.”
Brown and so crowded are the streets, bewildering with their jostle of
blue-clad men and women, their open stalls, their unmade roads of earth
stretching flat between the houses on each side, where man-drawn carts,
and _kuruma_, passengers, and children get in each other’s way. The
white uniformed policeman, sword on thigh, stands, a bronze statue, at
each busy corner, and to him even the criminal is polite. And down the
streets and through and through the town, cut straight or winding, the
brown canals, valleys of black mud, or slow streams of dark water, run
to the river and the sea. And thousands upon thousands, too, seem the
bridges, some flat and narrow as gangways, most arched in a crescent
curve, and the brown canals run from the sea and from the river far
within the town.
On one of them, at high tide, a steamer like the ark of Noah plies. It
seems to go indifferently stern or bow foremost, and is no larger than
a big-sized rowing boat. The one landing-stage to which I traced it
was like a pasteboard on two rolling-pins, and stood as the threshold
to the back door of a house. A European picture hung above the
entrance, bright with greens and blues and reds and yellows, where this
resplendent steamer floating amid green waves, showed at alternate
windows a head, male, Japanese, dressed “foreign”; a head, female,
Japanese, dressed Japanese. A policeman and a soldier both in uniform
balanced on the deck at either end. The ark’s ports of call, as its
starting-place and destination, remained a mystery. At low tide the
canal was an inch of water between two banks of mud, and only at high
tide could this toy ark float at all.
* * * * *
One long, straight street, broken into sections at the bridges, and
then reset at different angles, runs from end to end of Tokyo, runs
from Shimbashi to Ueno, from the “Mercantile Marine Store,” which
sells dried fishes, to the Parcels Office of that delicious “Internal
Railway,” otherwise unknown to fame. This is the main street of the
town, here is the Ginza, with its red brick sidewalks, its shop-boys
who speak English, even its plate glass windows. Here, too, is the
goldsmith who advertises:
“RINGS, BRONCHITIS, AND OTHER JEWELRY.
BEST KINDS ONLY KEPT IN STOCK”;
And the residence of that mysterious baker who keeps:
“BEARDS, VINE CAKES AND SLOR FOR SALE.”
And down it from end to end runs Tokyo’s main tramway. With the river
on the east, the moated park upon the west, north and south the broad
street runs, and the park of Shiba lies at one end and the park of
Ueno at the other. Shiba, where the tombstones of the dead _shōgun_
lie in their sumptuous lacquered temples; Ueno, where the lacquered
temples stand bullet-pierced, for the soldiers of the _shōgun_ and
the soldiers of the emperor fought their last fight here before the
great _Tenshisama_ came back to his own again. Once the closed gardens
of Buddhistic monasteries, both parks now are open to the town,
bicycles ride through them, nursemaids, their babies on their backs,
loiter in them, little girls play classic games of bones, boys catch
grasshoppers, while beneath the trees the low red blanketed tables of
the _chaya_ offer ¼_d._ teas.
The Park of Shiba is green and quiet, smaller than Ueno, for its
temples hold so large a space. It is a forest growing in the heart of a
town. Ueno is lighter, brighter, fuller of flowers and festivals, with
long avenues of cherry-trees, and a lake where the lotus flowers grow
thickly.
And over the lake and the temples, over the cherry-trees and the
tea-stalls, over the city below and the playing children within, the
big bronze bell of Ueno sends forth its great booming note--that note
which is outside our music, deeper, more liquid, which comes with its
low, booming sway, just when daylight turns to darkness. Cast of bronze
and silver, rung by a wooden beam that strikes a boss outside, the
note of the great bell comes swaying as though the air were water. And
slowly over the city the bell booms, trembling, and he who hears it
sits still and thinks; sits lost and dreams of the song of the seven
spheres.
* * * * *
When Ueno’s avenues of cherry-trees are pink with flowers, when the
stalls beneath the trees are full of flower hairpins, then Tokyo
through its gardens and its roadways blushes too, for the whole
city is planted thick with cherry-trees. Not only on the river bank,
where the long two-mile avenue of Mukojima is a perpetual _fête_, but
everywhere, in private gardens and in public streets, the delicate,
pale pink blossoms on their brown leafless branches catch the sunshine
and the showers, and fall as little rosy clouds from heaven on to the
ground beneath. For Tokyo is a city holding the country in its lap. Not
an artificial bedded-out country, stiff as a Versailles park, but the
real wayward country, though tended with a loving, understanding care.
And Tokyo is a city brimful of flowers. Between the cherry-trees of
April and the chrysanthemums of November most of the flowers can be
seen within the city in temple courts or nursery gardens or public
parks. The lake of the lotus at Ueno is famous through Japan, and in
the temple of Kameido grow the age-old wistarias.
Trained on horizontal trellis work, their long pale tassels hang down
towards the water, stirring with each breeze. The trailing clusters
of the flowers grow four feet long sometimes, and droop towards the
surface of the lake in thick swaying pendants of pure colour. Behind
these living curtains, in a twilight of pale mauve or soft white light,
on the edge of the pond whose shape spells “heart,” sometimes afloat on
the pond itself, the tables of the _chaya_ stand, and those who make
holiday because the flowers are blooming, all Tokyo, sit and look,
drinking wee bowls of pale green tea, or writing poems to the flowers.
On the waters of this lake of the letter “heart” float the pale mauve
petals and the petals of pure white, which fall and drift and sink,
and fall and drift and sink, until the waters are hidden with flower
flakes and the wistaria is over and gone.
Kameido lies on the far bank of the Sumidagawa, in a network of poor
streets, for the left bank of the river, like the big island at its
mouth, is denser with yards and factories than is the right. The
streets are narrower, fuller of children and the noise of hammers and
of wheels. Yet in this poor wage-working quarter the festivals of the
plum-blossoms, the wistaria, and the peony are held.
In all Japan there is no other flower _fête_ which in the least
resembles a horticultural show except that of _Botan_, the tree-peony.
For when the peony blooms, the little trees, large as dwarf
rose-bushes, are placed on tiers inside a matted tent. There the
resemblance ends. These plants are set each in a framework of space,
and the colours are grouped and blended with the thought and the
instinct of an artist.
The flowers of the peony are as large as the largest chrysanthemum,
larger than ours, but their petals are rich, made of satin where ours
are of cotton, delicate, fragile, and sheeny. The colouring is soft and
subdued, and the faint sweet scent which comes from them is like the
dream of a rose. The colours are simple, white warming to cream, paling
to snow, and all the tints of pale reds, deep reds, and crimsons.
The matting which covers them is of pale yellow, but somehow the
light, as it comes through it, touched perhaps by the flowers, is the
light of a dream--as sunlight without heat, as moonlight warmed and
living, a light that shimmers, holding colour fast within, yet fast
asleep. To-day the light in that peony tent at Kameido remains to me
as definite as the flowers, as distinct as the scent, as real and, in
truth, more beautiful. It was as though one saw the radiance of an
unknown, unmade jewel, light but not yet substance.
* * * * *
All this left bank of the river from Fukagawa to Eko-in is full of
workmen and workshops, of small trades and smaller traders, and here
in the month of May in the grounds of the temple raised to the memory
of the hundred thousand citizens killed in the great fire of 1657, the
yearly wrestling contests are held. The _Smō_, tall, broad, powerful
men, many six feet high or more, who dress in large checked _kimono_
and wear their hair in the old-fashioned top-knot, are adored by the
populace who come in thousands to see them.
The little round platform of stamped earth sprinkled with sand, set in
the midst of a huge amphitheatre of faces, shows small as a raft on the
sea, and slight despite its purple trapping. The crowd, a Tokyo crowd
in _kimono_ and foreign head-gear, cap, bowler, and felt hat, sit from
morning until night, day in day out, for the three long weeks of the
wrestling matches.
The wrestlers stand, knees bent, body horizontal, their out stretched
hands almost touching the ground, and grip. And the bout is long
because the grip must be accepted by both of them, and because between
each false grip the two retire slowly to their respective sides and
wash out their mouths with tea. This may be repeated a dozen, twenty
times, but when the real grip comes, then the action can be swift as
lightning; the opponent forced beyond the straw rope which lies upon
the sanded earth of the ring, before one realises that the wrestle has
begun, or pushed down over it with the slow resistless force of flowing
water, or the two may sway about interminably before one is beaten.
Bulk is not the one ideal of the wrestler, the young and strong rely on
their activity; it is only when a man is getting older that he weights
himself with fat, that his bulk and heaviness may prove too great for
his opponent easily to push over. The wrestlers all wear waistbands and
stiff fringes of blue silk, and the rippling of the muscles beneath
their golden brown skin is such a joy as the Greek nation knew at the
time of the Olympiads.
A man with a fan, an average-sized Japanese who hardly comes above
the elbows of some of the wrestlers acts as starter, as umpire, and
as referee, and the sharp s-s-sh of his shutting fan can be heard
distinctly in the silence of the amphitheatre. The judges, four old
tried wrestlers, sit under purple hangings and decide disputed points,
while half the front tier is reserved for the _Smō_ themselves.
But to the non-Japanese it is not the wrestlers but the spectators
who are the centre of interest. Here gathered together within the
amphitheatre, concentrated on one thought, absorbed, therefore natural,
sit samples of all Tokyo. For the _Smō_, like our prize fight of last
century, is beloved by the populace and patronised by the aristocracy.
Every one takes some sort of interest in it, and results are as widely
known as the Derby or a test match. The crowd, a crowd of men and
boys,--for the fathers bring their little sons with them,--knows, as
well as the umpire himself, the forty-eight falls, the twelve lifts,
the twelve throws, the twelve twists, the twelve throws over the
back, alone allowed the Japanese wrestler. The excitement at disputed
points is intense, the whole amphitheatre arguing with its neighbour.
The enthusiasm at a brilliant, a quick, or a well-contested throw
is intoxicating. Spectators will rise in their seats and throw down
presents, tobacco-pouches, purses, hats, or other property, which the
owner redeems next morning in money.
The _Smō_ are the idols of the street boys, and tall, huge,
unintelligent, in gaudy _kimono_ and well-oiled top-knots, they stride
through the Tokyo streets haughty, and sometimes overbearing.
We think of the Japanese as unalterably small, yet here is a class,
bone of their bone, flesh of their flesh, who are huge, strong,
large-framed men, taller than the tall races of the north. They are
another and a living contradiction of the imaginary minisculism of
the nation. If the Japanese desire to produce big things, in war, in
statues, or in men, they take thought, they take care; much thought,
infinite care, and somehow it is done.
* * * * *
So Tokyo wrestles, works and plays, and this left bank of the river
toils and lives hard. Across the water Tsukiji, secluded in its
“foreign” residences, dwells genteel, and gossips. The Ginza shops. The
suburbs far within the circle of the streets grow hedged-in gardens and
long avenues of trees, where the houses lie unseen. The schools, the
training colleges, and the university, a cityful of students study, and
boys in cotton _hakama_ and dark-peaked soldiers’ caps walk through the
streets--boys who are passing from the indulged childhood of Japan to
the iron self-control of manhood.
There is apparent in their ways and manners a touch of self-assertiveness,
a touch of almost self-conceit, which at no other time in their own
lives, and at no time at all in any other member of the community, will
ever be observable. It is but a touch, and would pass unseen in any other
land, in any other setting; here it stands out palpable. A little hard
these boys look and very earnest. They will strike work if they think a
teacher is not competent to teach, so bent are they on learning. They
seem to have accepted school as the modern training of the _samurai_,
and to study in that spirit.
The scholarship boys at Government Colleges work harder still and on
the narrowest of means. They can afford so little for their board that
one whole college gave up playing base-ball in its recreation hour
because “it made them too hungry.”
And at the University, where the students matriculate at twenty and
stay till twenty-four and five, for beside their own learning, beside
the ten thousand Chinese symbols and all the philosophy of the East,
they must to-day add the learning of the West, the languages of Europe,
the laws, the sciences, and the arts of another civilisation and of
an alien race, at the University the students live lives of hardest
brainwork and rigidest economy. Many spend their evenings in earning
the money that buys their day. Some deliver newspapers and sleep in
the porches of “foreign” houses. Many die of consumption, brought on
by over-work and under-feeding. Across the river the hammers ring,
the wheels whir round, the hum of a people’s toil sounds in all ears.
Here within the girdle of the streets, between the factories and the
palace is a work doing, silent, less perceptible but harder, higher and
undertaken for that end.
* * * * *
Between the hard work of hand and brain Ginza and Nihon-bashi shop,
and at night the wire-drawn twang of the _samisen_ comes from the
lighted restaurants. Restaurants where each diner or each party
occupies a separate room, and _geisha_ girls are sent for to
entertain the guests, with puns and games, with polite conversations
and endless repartee. They sit on the kneeling cushions throughout
the meal pouring _saké_--and amuse. Then they dance. Posturing and
swaying to an accompaniment of _samisen_ and song they glide over
the matting always graceful, always reserved. The quality of their
dancing rings passionless, dainty, graceful, not cold but controlled.
An air of serenity surrounds them. They are not trained to the duties
of womanhood, but to its heaviest burden--pleasing. The licensed
playthings of the nation, toys to amuse, they reach up to their
limited, low-scaled destiny, through the perpetual sacrifice of self;
and the national self-control encases them, so much their very own that
few perceive it. With very different fates and from very different
motives there is about them, as they dance, something of the charm and
of the aloofness of Andersen’s mermaiden; and if their steps too are as
steps upon a sword, they, too, will smile untroubled.
* * * * *
So the city strives and pleasures, so the city learns and toils. Full
and full of life the streets, quiet and very still the heart. The nine
tall hills from Shiba to Ueno make a crescent round the moat, the brown
streets lie without, the Mikado dwells within. Born as a camp Yedo made
its ruler’s seat its centre, its nobles’ _yashiki_ an enclosing wall;
and then beyond, out of sight and sound, the necessary, unimportant
commonfolk had leave to work and sell. Tokyo to-day is still as Yedo
was. _Yashiki_ are pulled down, their ground is sold, but parliaments
and embassies, nobles’ houses and their gardens, still make a circle
round the palace, a space of suburb and of peace between the city and
its centre.
Over the streets and the roadways, through parks and gardens, the
black-winged crows sail past cynical, unbelieving. The web of brown
canals beneath their high-arched bridges, the broad uncertain river
sometimes slowly, sometimes fiercely, all flow towards the sea. The
land-locked ocean, and the pale green rice-fields ripple round the
streets. From sixty miles across the plain great Fuji looks towards the
capital.
And here in Tokyo’s heart, in _Dai Nippon’s_ heart of hearts, not the
usurping _shōgun_ or general in his camp, but _Tenshisama_, Son of
Heaven, bestower of a western constitution, augustly dwells.
II
EAST AND WEST
EAST
The large red building covered all over with Chinese characters--a
white sign on each cardboard square of red--overlooks the canal. It
seems too gaudy and unsubstantial a building for sober work, and yet
all day long multitudes of dark-blue coolies, like Florentine noblemen
run to seed, go in and out. Fantastic key patterns in white are traced
upon the skirts of their blue tunics, while on each back is a large red
circle covered with the hieroglyph of the building. They may earn some
6_d._ a day for twelve long working hours.
From among the pale straw-coloured bales emerge two workmen. There are
patches in their dark-blue hose, and the brown toes stick out through
the blue of their divided socks. Even the blue designs on the white
towels around their heads have faded away with much washing.
Catching sight of one another they bow low. A step nearer, and the
jaunty ends of white towel tied in a knot on the forehead of one man,
touch his knee.
The other, whose towel is tied like a night-cap round his head and
under his chin, bends lower still.
Another step, and the indrawn whistles of politeness grow loud and
shrill.
Another, and the white towels disappear entirely between the blue legs.
Then the night-capped one straightens himself and speaks:
“_Shitsurei de gozaimas ga, chotto hi o kashte kudasai_” (“Although
this is great rudeness on my part,” he says, “would you condescend to
lend me a match.”)
WEST
Between two rows of slovenly houses a long grey street stretches away,
wet and grimy. There is just one break in the grey monotony where the
gin palace stands in all its gilt and plate-glass splendour.
Coming up the street are two workmen. The billycock hats on their heads
have lost their brim, and show more dirty stain than original black. As
they catch sight of one another across the street they pause.
Suddenly one removes the clay pipe from his lips and spits profusely.
The other eyes him, his hands in his pockets; then he too takes the
short pipe from between his lips, and jerking his head in the direction
of the public house, slowly puts out his tongue.
The first billycock replaces his pipe with care, crosses the road, and
with a sanguinary word they both disappear within the doors of the gin
palace.
III
YONÉ’S BABY
It lay on the matted floor, a little brown thing that cried, and Yoné
sat on her heels and looked at it.
Huddled over the brazier in the corner, her skinny hands stretched
out to clutch the warmth from the sticks of glowing charcoal, the old
grandmother dozed and grumbled.
And Yoné did not move. The _Ijin San_ for whom she worked had told
her she ought to take care of her dead daughter’s child and bring it
up; but Yoné’s conscience, the conscience of her race, the inherited
upbringing of her dead fathers, made her instinctively turn towards the
_O Bā San_ in the corner. She could not feed two mouths. Life was hard
for Yoné; and the _O Bā San_ had a good appetite though she was so old.
So Yoné sat on her heels and sullenly listened to the quavering wail
without moving.
“If the gods wanted the child to live, why had they let its mother die?
Why had its father divorced the little wife ‘for temper’ before the
baby was born? It was Fate. And after all the baby was very small and
ugly, a little, cross sickly thing that cried. No, it had much better
die, much better.”
And Yoné got up, and went to get ready the evening rice for the _O Bā
San_. As she did so the shadow of the _Ijin San_ herself fell across
the floor, and her voice, in very English Japanese, asked after the
baby. Yoné was down on her knees in a moment, drawing in her breath
through her teeth in long whistles of politeness.
“The baby was not well, as the _Ijin San_ could see. It did nothing but
cry; and after all what was the use? It had much better die.”
The _Ijin San_ sat down on the little platform, the _shōji_ pushed back
between her and the room, in consternation. After all she had said the
day before, all she had urged, Yoné still clung to that awful idea. The
_Ijin San_ had a shrewd suspicion that the old lady in the corner had
something to do with Yoné’s idea “it was better baby die.” It would
be quite easy for “baby to die” too, and that without much active
doing on Yoné’s part. So she sat there perplexed, the baby cuddled up
in her arms. Moral persuasions she had tried, and appeals to Yoné’s
conscience, her love for her dead daughter, her duty--all in vain. And
she looked down at the queer little atom in its bright red _kimono_,
with the wide flapping sleeves, wondering whether it would look quite
so odd dressed like other babies, her own for instance, and she smiled.
It was a last chance any way.
“Yoné,” she said, holding up the baby. “How would you like to see him
dressed like the _Bot’chan_.”
“Hē,” cried Yoné, turning round, her vanity awake in a moment.
“Well, if you’ll take care of him, I’ll dress him in foreign clothes,
and he’ll look just like the _Bot’chan_.”